If a Bomb Hits the Bridge
By Vule
The grim thought accompanied my father on that chilly April morning in 1999. An absurd wartime thought. The same absurdity that had turned a bus ride into a matter of life and death.
Bus #17, which stops in front of our house and connects central Belgrade to New Belgrade, the concrete communist labyrinth facing the old town. Between the two, the river Sava, and on the Sava, the bridge.
The TV was warning day and night: “They’re going to bomb all the bridges. It’s just a matter of when.”
These words were spreading in all the homes and all the air-raid shelters: “They’re going to hit the bridge, people! These sons of bitches will bomb the bridges!”
It’s been a month since the NATO bombing started over the remains of Yugoslavia, targeting hospitals, the main TV station, and even, for some unknown reason, the Chinese embassy.
Bus #17 took its time approaching at the end of the street, like in old Westerns where the bad guy is entering town for minutes while clocks are moving in slow motion. Go inside kids!
“What the fuck am I doing here?” my father wondered.
He had no choice. None of his usual drivers would take him across the bridge, and he had to go. The absurdity of war. The absurdity that had transformed an aeronautical engineer into a merchant: money in one pocket, merch in the trunk, a crowbar in hand just in case. Socialism was over, welcome to the joys of the “free and unadulterated market!” The shop never closes, whether it rains, whether it’s windy—or whether it bombs.
The door opened hesitantly, like a question mark: “So, are you getting in, cowboy?”
My father spat on the ground and looked toward the sky: “Sons of bitches!”
Apart from the unlucky driver who watched the sky more than the road, there were two other people on the bus: two retirees sitting at the back. Two old communists, chests puffed out as if to say, “We didn’t flee from the Germans in ’41, we won’t hide underground now.”
As my father sat by the first opened window, one of the old men sent him a colluding wink: “Welcome among the braves, Comrade.”
My father turned away, rejecting their complicity for a reason: as the bridge was approaching, he started to tremble.
He didn’t have the luxury of ignorance that protects the fools. The now-former engineer knew all about the planes flying over Belgrade, their speed, their guidance systems, the tonnage of their bombs, and the damage they’d do if they hit the bridge. But the engineer also had a plan. “It’s all about pressure and leverage,” he would always say. If a bomb hits the bridge, he’d huddle as close as possible to that open window. The bus would then start sinking inexorably in the river, and he’d have to keep calm and hold onto his oxygen, mouth pressed against the window until the last moment. Once completely submerged, he’d have to continue to be patient, not giving in to panic, waiting for the external and internal pressure to equalize and release the doors. Once out of the bus, he’d have to swim to the river’s surface. This part of the plan didn’t frighten him. As a child, he used to swim across the Sava. Belgrade was his city, and the Sava his river.
If a bomb hits the bridge, my father will go down like everyone else. From a plane, all Serbs were the same, no nuance, no individuals. They were just “the” Serbs who had to pay for the massacres attributed to them. Looking from an F-16, from Paris, from London, they were the Serbs just as “the” Russians today are all Russians and “the” Ukrainians all Ukrainians. In the case of Serbs, all of them bad, down to the very last one.
Yet, my father had spent eight years opposing the war, resisting the hatred poisoning the minds, defying his colleagues, defying his family, the Party, and even the Army he was member of. Alone against them, yet on the same bus as them, on the same bridge, under the same bombs.
The siren blared, and my father smiled. An absurd wartime thought, perhaps the most absurd of all: despite the fear, despite the injustice, my father approved of the bombs falling on his head.
When he had cursed at the sky, he wasn’t talking to the pilots in their planes. It wasn’t his enemies he resented, no—it was his own people. The “sons of bitches” he defied were all those who were destroying his country, Yugoslavia, from the inside. Up there but not in warplanes but on their dusty thrones, floating above it all, sending the country to hell. The sons of bitches were those arrogant old communists sitting at the back of the bus. The people who refused all compromises, sending teenagers to fight their brothers, choosing death, choosing these bloody sirens wailing over the city.
If a bomb hits the bridge, it will burn them too. Give them hell! A sad little victory in my father’s eyes. An absurd wartime thought of a Yugoslav among “the” Serbs.
The bus was now on the other end of the bridge. No bomb, not today. Just the breeze coming through the open window.
About Vule
Vule is a Yugoblok member.
Featured image generated by Gemini AI.