Read Online One Day In Budapest by J.F. Penn - Free Book Online Page B

Bosnia and Herzegovina. Spring 1995.

    “Come on, Zol. Seriously, you’re always so slow. You can’t do anything for it now, let’s just leave.”  
    Zoltan didn’t look up from the body he was examining, this one just a boy with a gunshot through his forehead. He was used to the taunts of his friend, the dismissive attitude to the people they were there to protect. The child’s arms were curled around himself as if he had tried to find comfort in the moments before death. Zoltan found himself silently reciting the opening words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayers for the dead, even though the boy was probably Muslim in this part of town. Finally he rose.  
    László was smoking a cigarette, his body relaxed. He lifted his face to the sun, caught in a brief sunbeam, and reveled in its warmth. There were no dark shadows under his indigo eyes, only the movie star looks that made him the envy of the other soldiers. Zoltan didn’t know how László managed to shrug off the deadening weight of sadness that he found engulfed him every day.  
    They both worked as part of the peacekeeping force, seconded from the Magyar Honvédség, the Hungarian army, to help the Dutch United Nations team. But Zoltan knew that there was no way of keeping the brittle peace for long and he felt the palpable tension in the air. These people hated each other and there had always been violence in this region. It was a tribal place, united only by the fake lines drawn on maps that were as fragile as the paper they were inked on. Thousands of Christian Serbs, Jews and Gypsies had been sent to camps from here under the Nazis and after the war, Yugoslavia had been created. Now, it had broken down, as Muslim nationalists demanded a centralized independent Bosnia, Serbian nationalists wanted to stay near Belgrade-dominated Yugoslavia, and Croats wanted an independent Croatian state.
    “Do you even give a shit about this place, Laz?” Zoltan asked as he stole the cigarette from his friend’s fingers.  
    “Of course not,” László said. “This land should be ours anyway. After all, Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a hundred years ago. Maybe if they all kill each other, it will be ours again.”
    Seeing the fanatical look in László ’s eyes, Zoltan sighed and shook his head. His friend had always been an extreme patriot, harking back to the old days of Hungarian glory. They had been the best of friends once, when their fathers had been business partners in a chain of Jewish shops in Budapest and they had played war games amongst the sacks of goods while the adults talked and drank together. László ’s mother wasn’t Jewish, which technically meant that he wasn’t either, but that hadn’t been important to the boys back then.  
    A rattle of bullets startled the men and they flattened themselves against a wall. This area was known to be raided by Serb incursions and the sound had been close. Behind a nearby fence, Zoltan could hear the harsh laughter of a group of men, and then a woman’s cry. He instinctively raised his gun and stepped forward quietly. László reached out to hold his arm.  
    “Don’t,” he said quietly. “It’s not your fight.”  
    “Then what the fuck are we doing here?” Zoltan whispered, his rage rising at the impotence of the peacekeepers to stop any kind of violence. It didn’t matter to him which group was inflicting the pain, only that the suffering of the innocents would stop. This dirty war was marked by systematic rape as a weapon, mainly by the Serbs against the Bosniaks. Zoltan had heard them boasting of the ‘little Chetniks’ they would leave behind in the wake of abused women.  
    The woman screamed again, but the noise was cut short by shouting voices and the sound of a fist slamming into flesh. Zoltan pulled his arm away from László , stepping forward through the rubble of the streets to peer around the edge of the fence. There were six men, wearing the uniform