The Way of Muri (3 page)

Meanwhile the cat trotted along the road leading from the burned-out village to the Bosnian capital, a short distance away. Tractors rumbled past him, their exhaust fumes mercilessly
poisoning the sky and the earth. They were loaded with refugees. The women were wailing and the children were crying; the men were covering their ears. Muri wasn’t one to waste time lamenting the past – his heart was beating steadily, his lungs coped easily with the polluted air and his paws obediently carried him onwards.

As dusk fell a Serbian tank lumbered up behind the cat – a mechanical brontosaurus with a flat, round turret. Jolting and swaying, young soldiers in swamp-coloured uniform clung to every part of the tank, even the barrel of the gun. Instead of darting out of the way, the cat flattened his ears and pressed himself into the roadside verge. Suddenly he was scooped up in a fishing net, the kind used to extract large carp from ponds.

The joker who’d caught the cat stuck the pole of the net into the open hatch. A hot stench emanated from the opening, as though it led straight to the underworld. Muri didn’t bother putting up a fight – he’d somehow sensed that the tank was rumbling in the right direction. It didn’t look as though the soldiers intended to skin him alive or burn him with their cigarettes, but then again frightened people in wartime are capable of all kinds of unpredictable behaviour. Once the laughter had died down, the soldiers carried on swilling
raki
from their flasks and joking about women. As their proximity to death increased, so did their crudeness and cynicism. Only the trembling cigarettes in the corners of their mouths betrayed their true despair. Humans are blind to the world around them, but as Muri twisted in his net he could see dark forces already surrounding the soldiers. A flock of demons swooped gleefully down to the tank like punctilious police officers. The cat knew that these foul creatures had been assigned to carry out the Devil’s dirtiest work, marking with their claws those who were destined to die soon. Two of the four soldiers clinging to the outside of the tank were immediately condemned to feed the worms. The doomed men didn’t even feel the touch of the demons’ claws – they had no idea that they’d been singled out in this way, and this ignorance greatly amused their
invisible predators. Left to their own devices the demons would have marked all human foreheads with their claws, but even the Devil has his limits, so his servants were restricted to carrying out his orders. As he watched, Muri was filled with scorn for these wily miscreants. The demons sensed his cold hatred and turned, hissing with fury, to meet his piercing feline glare.

Sarajevo loomed into view. At the sight of so many roofs engulfed in flames, their shattered tiles littering the road, the demons became delirious with joy. They landed on the tank and struck the same foreheads again and again, their loathsome tongues protruding with the effort, for they were allowed to mark the same potential victims as many times as they liked. One of the incorporeal, web-footed assailants even had the insolence to straddle the swaying barrel of the gun. Then the firing began. In an act of unexpected mercy the pole was extricated from the hatch and, turning somersaults, the cat and the net flew to the side of the road.

The city was a scene of apocalyptic carnage. Lime trees and chestnut trees crashed to the ground, their splayed branches releasing whole hosts of elementals. House spirits ran along the collapsing roofs in despair. There was universal panic. Missiles were falling everywhere, the city was spilling its contents, the birds were going crazy… Meanwhile the sky overhead flickered with the glow of fire.

Muri collapsed onto the roadside grass. He wasn’t particularly bothered by what was going on around him, and nobody paid him any attention. The humans were intent on destroying one another; any damage sustained by the trees, birds and animals was merely incidental. The cat headed for the cellar of the nearest house. An old man was sitting on the collapsed porch, alongside a moaning house spirit. He was holding his wrinkled old face in his hands, squeezing large tears out of it as though it were a sponge. Spotting Muri in front of him, he accosted the cat just as he would have accosted any passer-by and began to wail, ‘Where’s my Annutka? My Annutka’s gone! Where’s Borislav?
Gone… Where’s my garden? I planted every single tree in that garden! I nurtured them with these very hands…’

‘Fool!’ the little cat answered scornfully, knowing full well that the human couldn’t hear him. ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’

Naturally, Muri bared his claws when the man tried to stroke him.

The cat spent the night in a demolished church, painstakingly washing and grooming his fur. The resident spirits flitted about the cross, which had fallen into the smashed cupola and was now dangling in mid-air, held up only by its cross-piece. The icons had gone up in smoke, as had everything else; the charred gates to the iconostasis were all that remained. Traumatised by recent events, the spirits were conversing in quiet, sorrowful voices. They couldn’t stop trembling and crying. There was no peace, even at night.

Besides the elementals two Croatian prisoners were also sheltering in the damaged church, one of whom was quite young. Like all peasants, they smelled of bread and sheep’s wool. The humans were unable to hear the hundreds of thousands of ethereal groans inside and outside the church. As far as they were concerned, absolute silence had descended on the world around them. The men standing guard outside the church, who had hidden them here and ordered them to lie still, had long since forgotten about them and disappeared into the night. The prisoners could simply have got up and left, but neither of them was to know this. So they carried on lying obediently on the bricks, terrified to move for fear of incurring the wrath of their non-existent guards.

‘Oh God!’ groaned the young man. ‘My legs have gone numb. I’m just going to turn over…’

‘Silence!’ hissed the older man, in a terrified whisper. ‘They told us not to move. Don’t you understand what is expected of us? We’re not allowed to make even the slightest movement.’

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ complained the youth.

‘I said no,’ whispered the older man, beseechingly. ‘Just lie there, for God’s sake, or they’ll kill us. Just breathe, and don’t do that any more than you have to!’

‘But it’s completely quiet out there. Maybe, maybe…’ The youth’s voice cracked with the inconceivable boldness of his thoughts. ‘Maybe they’ve left their post for a little while? We might as well turn over while we can…’

‘No,’ answered the older man. ‘They’re just hiding in the silence, those Muslims. I know they are. They’re still out there, watching with their sharp eyes, and listening. If they hear anything, we’re sure to die… and it will be a quick, terrible death.’

‘Won’t they kill us anyway?’

‘If we lie as still as mice, at least we might live to see the dawn.’

They both fell silent. The angelic spirits and other elementals that were spending the night in the church sighed in sympathy.

‘Death will take them in the morning if they stay there like that,’ agreed the spirits. ‘They’re honest peasants, and there’s no doubt they’ll go to Heaven, but it would be better if they could live a little longer!’

The prisoners lay trembling on the bricks, oblivious to the sighs and whispers all around them.

The spirits turned to the cat. ‘What are you smirking at?’ they demanded.

‘All they have to do is stand up,’ answered Muri, stretching lazily. ‘They just have to walk ten or fifteen paces and look outside. They’ve only got themselves to blame!’

The morning sun threw the smashed cupola into sharp relief. A moment later its rays fell on the wall opposite the low windows, and the roar of gunfire started up again. The spirits, who had curled up wherever they could find a spot, began chattering simultaneously and scurrying about like insects. The prisoners kept their noses pressed into the fragments of brick.

Muri left the church and headed towards a house that had just been demolished by a missile and was therefore no longer a target. The cat ran along the warm boards of the collapsed roof, which lay in a heap in front of the house, then deftly jumped onto the dusty windowsill and lay there like a miniature sphinx. There was no point trying to leave the city for the time being so he remained there, a witness to the war. He took it all in – the scraps of lead and iron flying through the air, the soldiers and civilians running about in every direction and the vast hordes of divine and demonic creatures swooping and colliding overhead.

What was happening in the sky was truly an impressive sight to behold. All over the city, the souls of those who had been blown up or shot were floating upwards. Christian souls, writhed in bluish smoke, were seized immediately by angels and held aloft as they were carried into the clouds; dead Muslims were met by peris, which shone with an equally blinding light. Although these maidens twittered frivolously, in contrast to the solemn angels, they handled every trembling soul competently, supporting them in their slender girlish hands. They had divided the sky up between them – the peris ascended in the east, in the luxuriant glow of the dawn, whereas the angels gathering the Orthodox and Catholic souls favoured the west. The war was generating as much activity in the air as on the ground. Entire flocks of demons also contributed to the spectacle, gnashing their teeth, snapping their wings and generally creating pandemonium.

Without batting an eye, the little cat stayed where he was and waited for night to fall. Eventually the warriors and their victims were exhausted. The cannons had overheated to such an extent that they refused to spit out any more missiles. Smoke was coming from the tank engines, and even the Kalashnikovs begged for mercy. Apart from the snipers’ rifles, which knew no rest, everything seemed to cry, ‘Enough!’ The generals were obliged to obey. The angels and peris finished their work and
simultaneously took wing, back to their stratospheric domains, and yet another hopeless night came crashing down over the unfortunate city. The spirits collapsed listlessly onto the remaining trees and roofs. The people had collapsed some time before them. Now the only sign of life was the exhaust fumes coming from the armoured troop carriers that had managed to escape destruction.

A fluffy female cat found Muri on the windowsill and decided to introduce herself. Muri jumped up to meet her. They spent a long time walking up and down the boards, sniffing each other and rubbing their heads together.

Trembling with desire, the female cat knew that this handsome striped stranger was here to stay. She calmed down only once a new litter of offspring had been conceived. Then, her wise eyes half-closed with contentment, she began to speak.

‘You’re staying with me now, Tiger. Where else are you going to go? We can live splendidly in the streets of this city for the rest of the summer. There are already plenty of mice and rats here, and believe me, in the current circumstances they’re bound to multiply! People have left cellars full of food and grain. As far as the dogs are concerned, there’s enough human flesh lying in the streets to keep them fed morning, noon and night – and while this carnage continues, it’s in no danger of running out!’

‘Surely you understand what my blanket means to me, don’t you?’ Muri replied. ‘You must know how important it is for me to visit my garden every morning then to come back to my bowl of milk…’

‘I know, I know,’ the female cat answered sadly. She had already sensed his yearning and the strength of his resolve.

‘So why are you trying to convince me to stay? Your rats and dogs mean nothing to me.’

And with that, Muri set off into the night.

The streets were full of corpses that remained where they had fallen. Dogs – those contemptible scavengers, the hyenas of war
– tore voraciously into the human flesh, gulping it down. These dogs were frightened of every noise at night – whenever they heard anything they would drool nervously, and their teeth would chatter with fear. Even the silent padding of feline paws terrified them, and the slightest rustle was enough to send them running to hide in the first sheltered corner they could find. The rumble of an engine was enough to scare these cowardly marauders off for good. An old lorry appeared as the scornful cat was hurrying down the street. Its sides were folded back and it was loaded with bleeding human remains: torsos, arms, legs and heads. The driver’s job was very simple –whenever his headlights fell on yet another body, he would climb out and use special hooks to drag the remains to the lorry and toss them into the back. The lorry drove past Muri, and the cat noticed that the mysterious driver was enormous – a real-life Hercules. The giant twirled his moustache and began singing in Serbian:

‘Now there’s a great song!’ Muri exclaimed approvingly, following this Slavic Charon with his eyes.

After asking a few spirits he met whether there were any neighbourhoods left in Sarajevo that hadn’t yet been ravaged by the war, the cat heard that there were houses still standing in the Jewish quarter, on the southern outskirts of the city. He began heading in that direction, and sure enough, some distance from the centre, he came to a district of large, detached houses that appeared to have suffered no damage.

‘Don’t bother making yourself comfortable!’ squeaked a tiny spirit as it flew over the cat. ‘This will all be destroyed tomorrow. So if you thought you’d be safe out here, you’d better think again!’

This feeling seemed to be shared by others. Despite the imaginary calm, many house spirits were already sitting on the porches of their houses, trembling, whimpering and mournfully lamenting their fate. It was obvious that up to this point their lives here had been quite privileged. The houses were two or even three storeys high, with attics and garages too. Muri sniffed and looked around before heading for one of the smaller houses. An ancient house spirit sat on the porch, already grieving for his former life.