Known for his white shirts and his tennis shoes with crocodiles,
no one was playing tennis back then.
He made a killing in the war —
folk tales about angels in Mostar, butchers in Sarajevo.
There’s no book more tedious than Aesop’s Fables.
I got to know him a little;
off the record he said:
truth be told, I love disaster,
a bed with a mosquito net,
a good panorama of the city,
the windows rattle while I write stories
for people who find this place mysterious, exotic.
I’m making a film that will win an award for special effects,
I wake in the morning to roosters crowing;
from the river to the yard below my window,
always the same girl, weeping and washing.
They’ve poured concrete into the grave
where her parents are buried.
She brings clothes from the laundry.
Truth be told, I feel alive in your country.
In Paris, I’m dead. Sometimes life is reversed like that,
I don’t know how to explain it.
She sells flowers in the evening,
coming through the restaurant, the general says:
Our little match-girl! Where does she get them?
O unequal destroyer,
come to my room tonight,
bring a poppy or a rose —
whatever’s in bloom on the hill by the lookout.
Truth be told, disaster gives me a hard on.
He lights another cigarette before telling me
about Madame Caviar who’s working
in the arse end of ulica Kulovica —
Little Hangover Street he calls it.
In a city where snipers are blazing
from sun-up to sun-down she’s directing
Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot.
Sarajevo is a natural amphitheatre,
thousands of Didis and Gogos,
like broken ribs in reinforced concrete.
I’m wrapping my picture now,
the last days were hell.
I was hitching a ride with the UN
when we came under fire. Not good.
I was stuck for a week.
I had to ring François for a military jet.
Do you think that’s why people hate you?
What was I supposed to do? He owes me big time.
I helped him save face in the Balkans.
I’ve done so much for France.
He looks like an actor in a hotel room,
Captain Willard on his way to kill Kurtz,
better still — a Republican fighting fascists in Spain;
he smokes another cigarette —
Europe must never forget!
But Europe has Alzheimer’s Disease.
On the day he checked out of the Holiday Inn,
Madame Caviar moved back in.
It’s the exclusion principle, two stars
can’t occupy the same state at the same time.
When she heard he was coming to town,
she moved across the city to the Panorama.
The sniping was vicious — Greenwich Village
as bad as Sarajevo. I’ve been chasing that bitch
for twenty-five years; only now have I caught her.
All his life he refused state honours,
but he made an exception for the people of Bosnia —
decorated and fawned over.
Even Madame Caviar showed up for the ceremony.
If memory serves, she gave a speech in his honour.
With artists like these, who needs a war?
And one more thing:
why does the phrase public intellectual
always remind me of a pissoir by the Seine?
Laurence O’Dwyer | The Chicken Tycoon
Contents | Mudlark No. 75 (2023)