Chapter Five
Both Buco and Tica fell from the Red High-rise. Neither wanted to kill himself. They both fell on the concrete in front of Taib’s window, from the so-called “B” side of the building.
Tica (Davor Miljević) fell from the seventh floor, and Buco (Vlado Djurić) from the sixth floor.
They both fell in the same place. About ten centimetres away, literally in the same place. At a distance of ten years. Tica fell from seventh floor in 1993 and Buco from the sixth in 2003. Balcony above balcony.
Both were workmen’s children. Buco’s old man was a clerk in the mine Administration, and Tica’s was a master operator of Caterpillar excavators.
Before the war, Buco was a bus conductor, Tica tried something in Belgrade and eventually returned to Prijedor.
During some alcoholic adventure, his best friend hit him with a car and he was in a coma for weeks in Banja Luka.
He went out into war. Barely alive, never sober.
No army needed him, no one called him.
He dragged himself around the building, drunk, severely disabled and whispering. Tica fell from the seventh floor. Tica. I never understood why they called him that, it probably doesn’t matter today.
Was it from a “bird”[1] – I do not know, but Davor couldn’t understand the war, couldn’t understand so many and so senseless killings, he, who’ll die so meaninglessly.
He was Icarus, he was drunk, at dawn instead towards the toilet he turned towards the balcony, he wanted to urinate, like Meštar in Cyclop by Marinković. He simply rolled over the railing. And he fell. At Taib’s, under the window. He was dead on the spot. Tica, the sparrow from the seventh floor, the good boy with a broken neck.
Buco was painting the railing. On the sixth floor, 2003.
Buco always joked that as a boy he fell from a building in Ljubija. No one believed he was alive. And he got up, just broke his arm. Go on, don’t believe me, I’ve fallen from a building, this is the way Buco played with words.
Until he fell from the building. But from a much taller building. From the Red High-rise. (Red from paint, red from bricks).
Painting the balcony railing he was sitting on a beer crate.
At one point he got up and bent over, wanting to reach the outside with the brush. Then, without a sound, he fell on the concrete, from the sixth floor, onto the same place where Tica had fallen.
So they fell under Taib’s window, in the same place, within ten centimetres, in ten years, two pools of blood, two bowls.
In that place, before the war, the boys played mini goals soccer.
Bajramović, Sejfin, an excavator operator from Omarska, was the goalkeeper, and from that place they shot penalties at his goal.
Тranlated to English: Zorica Teofilova
[1] Bird – Ptica (translator’s note.)