A man races to escape the fall of Srebrenica in Anttola’s war novel.
For three years, Maka Delić has defended the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica from the army of Serbs seeking to overrun it. Now the town has fallen, the other members of Maka’s unit are dead or scattered, and he is forced to tramp through the Bosnian forest with a motley collection of survivors, dodging Serbian military units and death squads sent to kill anyone unlucky enough to remain in the conflict zone. Maka can see that the cause is lost, and he wants nothing more than to escape and reunite with his wife, Amelia, who was pregnant when she was evacuated at the start of the conflict, and meet the son she has been raising on her own. Maka falls in with a number of comrades, including a radical Serbian contrarian, a teacher who knows how to use a hunting rifle, and a goldsmith toting his gold along with him, though the hellish circumstances on the ground mean that Maka is often separated and on his own again. The narrative also follows Amelia, who is living as a refugee in Munich with their son, Dino, aware that Srebrenica has fallen but unsure of her husband’s fate. Through skirmishes and imprisonment, Maka does whatever he can to survive and make it to his family—but his fate may already have been sealed long ago when he decided not to flee Srebrenica with his wife. Anttola, a veteran of the Bosnian war, captures the horrors of the conflict with surreal precision: “He went down to the bodies and started walking among them, turning over some that lay face down. His shadow stirred up clouds of flies, the buzzing convulsing into a wild drone. The faces of the dead were already swollen and discoloured like winter pumpkins...” The claustrophobia of the tiny war zone, and its displaced population with no safe place to retreat, will undoubtedly remind readers of contemporary conflicts. The impact of these scenes of humanity and inhumanity will be felt long after the book ends.
An affecting and timely novel of war.