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Poetry || SubmissionsCivil war chronicle from a border checkpoint. by Alex Gavrilovich“Forgot the ax at home, Ustashi ?” the bearded man asked his colleague across the checkpoint. “May all your family rot in hell, may your bitch give birth to a deformed child, may your country indure as many famines and misfortunes as the number of the years that my people suffered under the tyrany of the Chetniks. No, I did not forget the ax at home. Butchery is your line of work,” barked the haggard man as he spit on the dirt road. They eyed each other, two men in their middle ages.They were reservists of course, since the most dedicated warriors had to be young in order to protect themselves with ignorance from memories of a common past , to be able to perceive each other as adversaries, to be able to pursue the killing with zealotry that did not recognize moral limitations or nagging doubts of the official national ethos. The two men were of similar height, weight and even their features hinted at the fact that their relationship to each other was not as distant as they both insisted. The language that they spoke was umistakably one and the same, although each one added a hundred words to it and subtracted twenty others, atrributing the whole thing to his own people, naming it as part of his patrimony and denouncing the corrupted jargon that the other man spoke. They stood only a fifty metres apart from each other. Their bodies were divided by a wooden barrier. Their minds were divided by oceans and deserts of time, space and history. The history was shared, yet they would have denied that vehemently. “Who's that man, tato?” asked the bearded man's boy , who has just ran from the nearby village to deliver fresh bread, goat cheese, ripe tomatoes and plum brandy to his father. “He is the murderer of you grandparents, Drazhen. Don't look at him, turn your head !” The haggard man's glance fell on the boy and his features softened. The boy smiled while his father turned to answer the communications radio. The border patrol hysterically warned of a marauding fascist gang (mostly Muslims, together with some Ustashi) in the nearby forest. The haggard man smiled back without even thinking twice. The boy reminded him of a friend he used to have when he himself was a boy. A child of his parents' Serbian neghbour. The boy also reminded him that he had a son whom he had not seen in five months. Slowly the pale morning sun shone on his face. He was just a haggard middle aged man, smiling as his eyes became moist. When he looked again at the bearded man he noticed that the powerful anger which he felt since dawn has subsided. He thought that the new emotion which flowed into his consciousness was embarrasment, but he wasn't sure. Embarrasment is not a very common emotion in battlefield conditions. Alex Gavrilovich is a law student in Toronto and can be contacted through mbrainin@sprint.ca Another poem by Alex Gavrilovich at Ariga Today's Situation
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