The Holy Machine

59

I was walking down a barren valley. The streambed was dry. Crickets rattled in abandoned fields. A column of black smoke spiralled into the blue sky from across the other side of the ridge. There was a smell of oil. And from time to time in the distance came a burst of machine-gun fire.

Then I heard a new sound. I had never heard such a sound before. It was a kind of droning, like the buzzing of flies. When I turned a corner it became much louder and I saw a huddle of people in the distance. I kept walking. No one took any notice of my approach. As I drew nearer I saw that all the figures were women and young girls. They were wailing – that was the source of the strange droning sound – and as they wailed, they were pawing at a pile of rags.

I got closer. No one looked up. No one paid any attention to me at all. All their attention was on the pile of rags.

It wasn’t rags. It was a pile of little boys. Their heads were dangling from their bodies. Every one of them had had his throat cut. The severed necks were black with flies.

No one turned to look at me, but they must have been aware of my presence all the same because indirectly they spoke to me, crying out their story in a kind of incantation.

‘The Muslim soldiers came and circumcised the boys.

‘They said if we became Muslims we needn’t die.’

‘We said we’d be Muslims then.

‘They circumcised the boys.

‘They made us say, “There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet”.

‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet!

‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet!

‘And then the Catholic soldiers came.

‘Oh yes, our boys, the good Catholic boys.

‘We told them we were Catholics too.

‘They laughed. They said they’d heard that before.

‘We recited the catechism.

‘We recited the Hail Mary.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!

‘They laughed. They said they’d fallen for that trick before as well.

‘They lined up all the boys and pulled down their pants.

‘They laughed. “Those are Muslim dicks”, they said.

‘They killed them.

‘They killed them all.

‘Every one of them they killed.’

Machine gun fire rattled in the distance. Blood-bloated flies settled on my skin.

‘How can we please everyone?’ a woman cried.

‘We are Catholics,’ wailed another. ‘We told the soldiers that. We are Catholics. But they went on killing. They said that God would recognize his own.’

Sitting apart from everyone else huddled a young girl of twelve or thirteen. She was shivering violently, as if she was freezing even on this sweltering hot day. She was naked from the waist down. Her thighs were covered in blood…

The wailing mothers fell behind me. Their voices merged together once again into a fly-like drone.

It was the time of the Holy Wars, when the religions turned against one another. It was something that was bound to happen after the Reaction because, to true believers, those who believe in other faiths are a much greater threat than mere unbelievers. Unbelievers, after all, are just sinful people who refuse to hear the word of God. But the adherents of other faiths claim they have heard the word of God! They claim they have heard it saying different things, laying down different rules, dictating different holy books…

Bloody wars broke out in America between different Protestant factions. In Western Europe Catholics and Protestants engaged in medieval massacres. But in the Balkans, where different religions lived so much on top of one another, the struggle was the most merciless and intense. Catholics, Orthodox, Shias, Sunnis, Bektashis – and new and imported religions too that had blossomed in the interstices of the old ones during the ferment of the Reaction: Baptists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists… All of them turned on one another without restraint or mercy.

I wandered through it seemingly unnoticed, as if I was a ghost, as if my life was charmed. I saw burning villages. I saw crosses daubed on walls in blood and crescents incised in human flesh. I saw bloated corpses rotting in the sun in the pockmarked ruins of mosques and churches.

By the quiet shores of Lake Shkodër, lying pure and smooth as a mirror under a pure blue sky, I even heard a crazy-eyed monk from Herzegovina preaching the Manichaean heresies of the Bogomili:

‘God created the spiritual world, but Satanal made the material universe and trapped the spirits in it, like a fisherman with a net. Everything you can see and hear and touch is evil and disgusting and vile. Even that blue lake, even those pretty mountains, they are tricks, evil, obscene tricks, made to ensnare you, made to confuse you and hide you from what you really are…’

Then some Illyrian aircraft came overhead, with our own emblem, the black-and-white eye, staring down coldly at the irrationality beneath.

It seemed to me that this was more than a war between different human factions. It was a war which Lucy too had fought, a war about the nature of existence itself, a war between body and spirit, appearance and essence: implacable enemies, yet so utterly entangled with one another that the boundaries could not be clearly distinguished, and everything turned out to be the opposite of what it seemed.

Everyone struggled to get to the bottom of things. Everyone also struggled at all costs to cling to the surface. Dervishes walked on burning coals, statues wept tears of blood, children saw visions of the Mother of God, bleeding penitents wore crowns of thorns. Books were burned, demons were nailed to gibbets, villages were razed to the ground…

Mind and body, body and soul – how could the battle end? How could peace ever be found, when the real combatants were irreconcilable, yet were both present in every faction and every army, chained eternally together?