- Hijra ’92
anyway, those days they cracked down1on our people damn hard.Hasan’s kid was killed right before his eyeswhen they brought him to the camp to identify his dad.
but they really took offense with mebecause I was a doctor, a bachelor, I had studied abroad.plus my parents worked in Germanyand I owned three motorcycles: a Yamaha dt175, a Laverda 750s
and that old Zündapp with a passenger sidecarthat I called “the Kraut!” but as soon as the busstopped at the gates I realized if I passed that guardpost—it was all over for me!
maybe some lucky fellow would stand a chance, but not me!that’s why I waited to be the last in line, lingeringfor a while on the other side of the bus, pretending to tie my shoelaceand when I saw the last man walking through
and those heavy iron gates closing behind him,I slowly stood up, and with my hands in the pocketsof my leather Avirex pilot jacket,started walking slowly down the road.
I remember it as clearly as if it had happened today.I even whistled so they wouldn’t figure me out, [End Page 88] that tune by Denis & Denis:“I’ll be your computer program!”2
God knows why that song came to mebecause as local pop goes, I always preferred Atomsko Sklonište3and that crippled singer of theirsbecause somehow they sounded honest and raw;
so there I was, walking like that for a whilelight as a feather, though my feet were as heavyas a two-ton refrigerator truck!and then, coming upon the first bend, I dashed
into a cornfield where I spent the next five days.what did I eat? the bark off treesmunching it like the Partisans did—ha ha—only there weren’tany trees in sight, let alone a Partisan.
so I stumbled one morning onto the asphalt roadand collapsed. luckily, a bunch of international humanitarianscame by and picked me up and then—onward to Zagreb! Via Zagabria! and there
long lines at counters, huge crowds and pissing rainfor a good seven days. as for the bikes—they never found them;one remained in the garage at my aunt’s and the other twoare still rotting beneath the tarpaulin in the barn.
Damir Šodan was born in Split, Croatia. He is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Drugom stranom (Different Drum). His work has been featured in the American Poetry Review, as well as in anthologies such as New European Poets (Graywolf P) and The World Record (Bloodaxe). He has translated Raymond Carver, Leonard Cohen, Charles Bukowski, Charles Simic, Richard Brautigan, and Denis Johnson into Croatian and works as a translator for the United Nations in The Hague, Netherlands, where he has lived for many years.
Footnotes
1. This poem is based on the story told by a man who through an act of desperate bravery escaped from a Serbian concentration camp for Muslims in northwestern Bosnia in 1992.
2. Denis & Denis was a popular 1980s electropop duo in the former Yugoslavia.
3. Atomsko Sklonište (Atomic Shelter) was a 1970s Croatian hard rock band in Yugoslavia known for their strong antiwar lyrics. [End Page 89]