Gospic, Croatia: Farming Skulls and Crossbones

by Milan Hecimovic (Canada)

I didn't expect to find Croatia

My consciousness is shattered as the Diocese Church of Gospic-Senj bells thong and vibrate, and a flutter of white wings overtones like radio static. Peering up through a canopy of green leaves hanging from deciduous trees, a flock of doves flaps away into the clear blue sky above. Behind the white church, I push myself up from the cool blades of grass intertwining between my fingers. I walk past the church and notice my neighbour, a middle-aged Slavic man with a tuft of brown hair in a widows peak, approaching me in his bright, red tractor, the machinery whirs and clunks like a 1980’s transformer, as I read the words on the side in my head, “Made in Yugoslavia.” I hail him down. I hoist myself into the worn leather seat next to him and say, “Dobar dan,” which means good day. He happily nods, and the tractor chugs down the street. We stop at a red light adjacent to the police station, and I overhear an officer recalling a story to a friend about the shellings during the war about how the walls of the station crumbled like palenta, or gruel porridge, under the Serbian artillery barrages which set the city on fire and flame. On route to my homestay, I notice that many of the yellow four-story apartment buildings are peppered with bullet holes. After a twenty-minute ride down a dirt road adjacent to rolling green hills bordering dense, mixed, Mediterranean, deciduous forest, the tractor turns one last time and comes to a screeching halt. My homestay co-worker Petar, a 15-year-old Croatian boy from a nearby village, hands me a scythe as I scale down the tractor and ready myself to earn my “free” room, food and our home-made dessert tonight, baklava. After four hours of hard labor under the harvest sun, I wander away from my homestay’s field, no more than ten paces into the bordering dense forest and underbrush, before I hear an ear-splitting scream behind me, “Stani! Nemoj!” Meaning “wait, don’t.” I stammer and turn wildly around, and my eyes gaze at the treeline ten feet away. One poplar stands apart from the rest with emerald leaves and underbrush as tall as an average man. I hardly believe my eyes. A single rusted nail hangs a red and white triangle sign with a skull and cross bones on the tree trunk. The sign reads “Pazi, mine” or, “Caution, mines.” Cymbals immediately crash in my chest, my ears are alarm bells, and my palms sweat profusely. I feel the strain of muscles in my neck like elastic bands about to snap, as my gaze lowers to my feet. My eyes widen again at the sight of three metal prongs ejecting from the dirt, I recognize the PROM-1 from pictures I had seen online, the Yugoslavian anti-personnel mine used in the war 25 years ago. I remembered reading about it in a Wikipedia wormhole. If detonated, the charge springs down and activates the explosive, which shatters the grooved metal body into high-velocity steel fragments deadly lethal at up to 50 meters, and here it was a foot length away. Its cold, silver steel sleeping among rich, brown chernozem dirt, like an archaic, lifeless Terracotta soldier, waiting patiently an eternity to breathe, to kill. “Who would be guilty if I died here today,” I wondered. Seconds melted into light-years, as an old story my father told me welled into my mind’s eye. Fighter planes breaking sound barriers, artillery shells exploding, churning Earth and limb into the air, and the man next to my father telling him, “My son turned three years old today. My only wish is to see him again, and to wish him a happy birthday.” I shook my head side-to-side from my daydream. Over 500 innocent people killed by still active mines since the end of the war and here they are at the forest line just beyond where my new neighbours work in the field every day. I carefully stepped over the mine, my heart beating loud in my ears, and broke through the tree line back into the field, very ready for my “free” baklava dessert.