Belgrade. A city where 320,000 people were living their lives peacefully, is now covered in smoke. A strange silence, otherwise broken only by the distant sounds of the bombers, hovers over the city. I am walking down the street, and it is hard to look around.
The grey, half-fallen buildings covered in dark clouds of smoke. It looks like an incomplete masterpiece of a painter. Like the armless statue of the Venus of De Milo. Incomplete yet glorious.
Glory. Isn’t that what wars are all about in the end?
Bombs rained like little droplets of fire from the sky a while ago. The sky was filled with the mechanical birds that dropped the rocks of devastation on this city. All because a man wanted his revenge. Revenge for his ego being hurt. It is as simple as that.
An act of revenge that he felt may uphold his glory. Things we do keep our legacy.
Legacy. Isn’t that what life and death are all about in the end?
One man’s death is another man’s victory. Who can question the morality of that when humanity leaves the sanctums of truth. All that is left is the mourning wind. The snowflakes fall as if to burn out the fires of hell, but even the waters of Sava and Danube cannot extinguish it.
The deed is done.
Strangely I don’t feel cold, and it is bothering me. My bare feet do not hurt as I walk on the road covered with snow and ditches where the bombs fell. I continue to walk until I see my burnt house. Smoke is rising skywards as I move towards it. The door is unlocked, knocking aimlessly, struggling against its hinges, at the mercy of the blowing winds. There is a body lying in the doorway, and I can see two other bodies by the bomb shelter entrance. I slowly walk towards the body in the doorway. It is armless, but I can recognize my own body. It is startling. I pause, my feet suddenly feeling heavy as tons of rocks.
Armless just like Venus was. Incomplete, but… not as glorious. It is just another body.
Somewhere in Berlin. I can hear someone saying “People die in wars. It is an inconvenient necessity”. A sip of vodka. A pondering head rests back on the armchair.
“Hmm, what next?”
Ah, Belgrade.
NOTE: The city of Belgrade was bombed during two campaigns in World War II, the first undertaken by the Luftwaffe in 1941, and the latter by Allied air forces in 1944. Operation Punishment was the code name for the German bombing of Belgrade during the invasion of Yugoslavia. The Luftwaffe(German Airforce) bombed the city on April 6 (Palm Sunday) without a declaration of war, continuing bombing until April 10. More than 500 bombing sorties were flown against Belgrade in three waves. After four days of what the Germans code-named Operation Punishment, some 24,000 corpses were recovered from the ruins. Untold numbers were never found.
