1
The Vampire
After my parents were killed, we were taken in by the old couple down the street. They were Serbs and had never had children of their own so it was natural for them to take us in. Even more natural for them because they were kind and generous people and they had known my parents well. Cvijeta, the wife, had cried and cried when they buried my parents up on the hillside. She had wailed and bemoaned how sad it was. My mother had often dropped in for coffee on her way home from work.
Obrad, Cvijeta’s husband, had been more stoic, but you could see how it had affected him. My father had been somewhat of a prodigy to Obrad (although out of work most of my life) who had taken him under his wing and gotten him odd jobs around the town. They had been so good to my parents and so kind to me and my little brother. And now they had taken us in to their home.
My name is Ajsa and at the time of this tale I was but eleven years old and my brother, Jusuf, was seven. Cvijeta always told me how I was old beyond my years in those days. I sobbed when my parents were buried but it was even more shocking to see Cvijeta’s reaction, as she fell and clawed at the freshly dug loam at their funeral. My brother Jusuf simply stopped speaking. He had been so gregarious up until that point, and then... Silence. We had been lucky and the war had hardly touched us or our street, until, little by little, people had started dying. And then one day my parents went across the River Miljacka to the brewery to fetch water for us from a distribution point there and they had never come back. We never got to see their bodies. We simply stayed at home in the basement all day waiting, and then night had come and the electricity had gone off and we both got scared, me and Jusuf. So hand in hand we wandered down the street with the stars shining overhead and knocked on the door of Cvijeta and Obrad’s house. They were greatly distressed to see us outside and hurried us in. When they asked where our parents were and we told them that they’d gone for water in the morning and had still not returned, Obrad, after exchanging a leaden glance with his wife, pulled on his coat and went for the door. A few hours later he came back to find me and Jusuf at the kitchen table playing cards with Cvijeta anxiously watching on. Obrad had walked to the brewery and confirmed his worst fears after speaking to some witnesses. He’d then gone on to the hospital. It had been a perilous journey for him that night, with no few grenades and mortar shells falling all around. At the hospital he identified the bodies of my parents. They’d been shot by a sniper as they carried the heavy plastic water jug between them. Obrad never told us that at the time. His look said a thousand words when he came into the kitchen, however. That’s when Cvijeta first started crying and that’s when Jusuf stopped speaking. He retreated inside himself like a hermit crab into its shell.
Months had passed since then and January was drawing towards its conclusion. Sarajevo was a changed place. It was a city of ghosts, the dead walking and the living cowering underground. After me and Jusuf had moved in with our new foster parents, our old house, where we’d been born, took a direct hit from a mortar shell. The whole roof fell in and all of our parents’ things were covered in dust. That made me a little angry, as if it wasn’t enough to kill them you had to ruin their things too?
We could never go up to their grave either, unless it was foggy or night time, because if the snipers saw you, they would shoot, even if you were just a little girl or boy. It wasn’t strange to us though; it was our life. Our school had already been closed and some of the kids had gone missing. We didn’t see them playing on the streets anymore anyway.
At Cvijeta and Obrad’s house we were all forced to move to the basement. They had a nice big house, handed down by Obrad’s father. It had three large bedrooms, two bathrooms and a grand dining room where a beautiful carved cabinet had once held hot plates and bottles of alcohol. I remember having lunch there for my birthday once, my parents giggling and tipsy with wine. Now, all the windows were smashed and the outside walls were all cut and scarred. There was a big hole in the garden where a grenade had landed and everything was covered in grime. We lived in the basement now.
Obrad had brought down two canvas camp beds from the attic for him and his wife, and for me and my brother their old double mattress was laid next to the stove with lots of blankets piled on top of it. We shared this and were glad of it on the colder nights, hugging each other for warmth. Obrad and Cvijeta were often cold, the roundness disappearing from their faces and their clothes hanging off them. Obrad said it reminded him of the war, the old war, when he was younger. He didn’t say specifically what he was reminded of. I suppose it was a little of everything.
We spent our lives in that basement. Obrad would burn old furniture or rubbish in the stove and Cvijeta would do her best to cook something with the rations from the ‘Blue Hats’ in town. They would load up our plates and eat only a little themselves. My favourite was a cake made from powdered milk and old biscuits. The biscuits really were old! They were American and the expiry date read 1967! But somehow Cvijeta coaxed them into something delicious and comforting and she smiled as she watched us eat. Obrad would buy American cigarettes, though he didn’t smoke, and sometimes chocolate from what he called the ‘black market’ and he would always smile slyly as he opened up his jacket and plonked these treasures on the table. “And my change!” He would giggle childishly, placing a ping-pong ball amongst the goods. He said money was meaningless now and with the cigarettes he could get us better food from the markets. Whenever I think of those markets, I think of empty shelves, disgruntled queues and pots of margarine selling for hundreds of Marks. As I said, it was our life now and we simply kept on with it.
It was scary sometimes when the bombs landed close and the whole house shook. Cvijeta and Obrad would anxiously look at the ceiling as if the whole house would cave in. The lights would flicker and go out and the concussive booms would punch at our eardrums. We were so defenceless and they kept shooting! I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t give us a chance.
Cvijeta would try and distract us in these moments. She would bustle around lighting the improvised lamps, tin cans filled with vegetable oil with little glowing wicks guttering inside. She would get out her make-up and little hand mirror and make herself look so fancy and sophisticated, then she would let me put on a little lipstick and look at myself in the mirror too and she would smile brilliantly. Obrad would be reading his car magazines on his camp bed and Jusuf would watch on silently from the corner, his patched leather football in his lap. Thump, thump; went the shells.
Nothing much happened in our little world and we heard less and less from people outside. Obrad grew irritable when they ran out of coffee so Cvijeta would fry chick peas until they were black and then grind them in the tall coffee mill into a fine powder. She made ‘coffee’ with this and I think it made Obrad happy just to hold onto a mug with the hot, black, fluid inside.
Soon though Jusuf began to go further into his quiet despair. I don’t think he ever fully understood that mum and dad were not going to come home. He would sit and stare at the wall. Obrad would try and tell jokes and Cvijeta would squeeze him with huge warm hugs, yet still he mired in his melancholy, and who would blame him? I tried to be strong for him, however, and I would read him stories from our old books until he slept. They were fairy-tails mostly, though his favourites had always been the stories of Sinbad the Sailor and this particular book he always pressed into my hands. Our mother had often read this one to him.
I read it to him late one night, making a tent of our blankets. We could hear Cvijeta and Obrad gently snoring on the other side of the room. A piece of damp wood popped inside the stove and we read using the glow of a wind-up torch Obrad had given us so that we wouldn’t be scared when the sporadic electricity went out. I came to the story where Sinbad and his crew are washed up on a mysterious island. They are taken in by a benevolent king and he puts on a huge feast for the exhausted seamen. Later, however, it transpires that the island is populated by cannibals, and the king is only feeding the sailors so that he can fatten them up and eat them later. Sinbad learns of the plot and manages to escape. The book was beautifully illustrated, some of the pictures had Persian inscriptions around the edges. Jusuf would trace his fingers over the slightly raised inscriptions and examine the drawings in finite detail. This particular evening, as he wrested the book into his own lap, I dosed off, the warmth of the nearby stove lulling me into sleep.
I don’t know what woke me up. Perhaps it was a distant bomb blast, or a somnolent cry from one of my foster parents, they often called out in their sleep. Whatever woke me snapped my eyes wide. The torch was flickering, its dynamo charge faltering at last.
I could only have dozed off for a moment. There was a distinct coldness on the bed next to me. I stirred in my little cave of blankets and feeling around realised that Jusuf was indeed absent from the mattress. I threw off the blankets and squinted through the cold gloom of the basement. There were Cvijeta and Obrad upon their camp-beds, dead to the world, the potbellied stove cumbersome and radiating heat. I could see the lumpen water containers in the corner and a heap of clothes on the folding table by the wall. On the bed next to me, illuminated by the dying light of the torch, was the copy of The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. There was a vivid illustration of an enormous fish about to swallow Sinbad’s little ship. Jusuf was gone.
My heart was racing and I wanted to yell and cry out. I couldn’t cope without Jusuf. As much as I liked to believe that I was his supporter and ‘rock’ in this dreadful war it was as much him that supported me. I wasn’t sure that I could physically live without him. In his big brown eyes I saw my mother and, in his hands, and smile, my father. My eyes welled with tears.
Standing up I pulled on my huge woollen jumper that hung almost to my knees. I slipped on my old running shoes that I used to wear for sports at school and as quietly as possible, tiptoed to the door, determined not to wake Cvijeta or Obrad. The basement stairs creaked a little as I padded up them and at the top the house was as if frozen in time. There were all the old familiar rooms and walls. The pictures hanging in shadow and the Orthodox Icons propped on the sideboard. The front door was open and an alarming but brilliant moonlight flooded in. My heartbeat pounded in my ears as loud as kettle drums as I made my way to front door, praying that my little brother had not gone outside. For a time I stood motionless in the hallway, trying to focus, trying to listen. The house was completely silent. I knew Jusuf was nowhere inside. I sensed his absence. It seemed all the blood was rushing to my stomach and swirling there. Bile was bubbling into my throat. Then, suddenly and shockingly, there was a loud and echoing crack from the street outside. It sounded as though someone had smashed two building bricks together. It reverberated and dissipated. A whining screech resounded afterwards, like a growling, screeching cat. During war you become familiar with all the specific noises that different weapons make. We knew of incoming shells and whether or not they were grenades or the lumpen 120mm mortar bombs that so ripped everything to shreds. This particular sound, which I had just heard, was unmistakably the report of a high calibre rifle, and the screeching whir that followed it was the ricocheting bullet skyrocketing through the air.
I rushed to the front door and gingerly poked my head outside. My hands were shaking and all of the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end. The brightness of the moon was terrible.
Down the hill to the left was the street. All broken and beaten, the houses misshapen and acned by shrapnel. Looming in the distance was mount Trebevic, black as coal with the moon, a perfect disc, hanging malignantly above. On my right the street steadily rose upwards. Flats and houses, smashed telegraph poles, a bullet riddled VW Jetta and near the top, my old home, where me and Jusuf had lived with our parents.
I was nearly crying as I stepped outside. Expecting any moment to hear that brittle crack of the rifle and to feel some hot metal shard rip into my body or split my head apart. The moon so bright! lighting me up like a living doll. I might as well have brought my torch with me. The street was lifeless and lunar. I wondered if my parents had felt pain when they were shot. I thought with dread about Jusuf. I hoped above all else that he was alive. I guessed where he was. Our old house was the natural place to look first.
I kept to the edge of the street and took shelter amongst overgrown vegetation and gardens where I could. I knew the way instinctively and it was not unpleasant to feel the freshness of the air after so many weeks cooped up inside. Still, the overhanging dread of the snipers was crippling and my steps were tentative and juddering. I crouched behind the fence of our old front garden, peering at the house.
It looked deflated. The roof was all caved in at the centre and the walls seemed bulbous and sagged outwards. The grass in the garden was all overgrown and what had once been an apple tree, much loved by me and my brother, was now nothing more than a ragged twisting splinter that poked grimly from the churned soil. The windows of the house looked like the hollow eyes of a skull, ringed with icy glass shards that flashed back the light of the moon. I took a deep breath and counted to ten. I was hardening myself. I needed to be stronger than ever. Our house was on the side of the hill and that lonely garden path, with its cracked flagstones, was so naked and exposed. Like the house I had just departed from, the front door was open. I ran for it.
Once I was inside, I sat panting on the floor of the hallway. It made me sad being inside and I started to cry. It was still my house! It smelled the same, though it was tinged with something dark and chemically. All our old furniture was here, our familiar hiding places. I could hear Jusuf whimpering upstairs.
He was in our old room which we had shared. Sitting on his bed by the window, his knees drawn up and cradled by his arms, he shivered with heaving sobs. He didn’t seem surprised that I was there and barely acknowledged me as I climbed onto the bed next to him and put my arms around him. He seemed so small and fragile; a little life so innocent in all this destruction. Through the window I could see the minaret of the mosque a couple of streets over, from where the local Imam, Memed Bey, had led the call to prayer five times a day. I remembered him as a kindly man with a big white beard. He had died in the first bombing and now the faithful had to use a mosque closer to town, this neighbourhood one being too exposed to the mountains above. I cradled Jusuf and tried to remember the time before all this violence had begun, and I found the memories distant and abstract, I found myself struggling to recall the faces of my parents.
“Come on Jusuf.” I said as boldly as I could, stifling my own tears. “It’s so dangerous here, we have to go home.” He looked at me with his big wet eyes as if to say; ‘we are home’.
I led him by the hand onto the landing and we stood there in the silence. His feet were bare and he shivered a little, though at least the tears had stopped rolling down his cheeks. The stairs descended below us, the banister and its supports making strange, rib-like, shadows on the cracked plaster of the walls. Jusuf tugged my hand, he was making for our parent’s room, or at least what had once been their room.
“No, Jusuf...” I began, but his will was too strong and I relented to being led to the door. He pushed it open with his small hand, it creaked on its hinges, swinging freely and then abruptly stopping where the collapsed ceiling obstructed its path. Half of the room remained, but the rest had collapsed into what had once been our living room below. The outer wall, which used to look over the back of the house where a small patio had always caught the sun, was totally collapsed and only its base and a partial window frame remained below. I could see our old TV down there and an obliterated bookshelf. It was our parent’s bed that so heaped fear into our souls, perfectly arranged as it was, having fallen clean through the floor and onto its feet, the moonlight etching it into vivid form. Jusuf wet himself. I could hear the urine trickling over the floorboards. It was not so much the bed that terrified us. It is what we saw upon it.
A strange and wiry figure, dressed in camouflage army fatigues, was squatting there in the brazen light of the moon. A bullet slammed heavily into the wall close by the figure but it didn’t flinch. He, (or was it an it?) Slurped and sucked at a prone figure laying beneath it on the bed below, long fingers cradling a head, blood dripping audibly onto the dusty sheets. Another bullet skittered through the rubble. The figure was the body of a young woman, and the man... It... seemed to be sucking at her neck. My mouth was open and eyes staring. Jusuf was shaking with fear. A whimper croaked from his throat. The creature below snapped its head around. What a ghastly thing it was. It was totally bald, with taught, oily skin. It had a strong nose and high angular cheeks. Its thin lips were slightly parted and behind them appeared to be a ragged row of pointed teeth, like the teeth of some horrible deep-sea shark. Its eyes were sunken and its pupils seemed tiny, ringed with sickly yellow irises and taught, lashless lids. The whole face and head was a deep burgundy colour, if it was with blood or simply the shade of its skin I don’t know for in that moment, with motions automatic, I picked up my little brother and ran back to the landing. We skittered down the stairs, lucky not to fall, and burst out through the front door. I didn’t look back as I ran and Jusuf buried his head into my shoulder. Panting and wheezing, without a thought about snipers, I ran down the centre of the street and back to Cvijeta and Obrad’s basement.
