The Balkan Wheel
George Gaio Mano
Author Bio
George Gaio Mano is an itinerant writer and ESL professor. Born in Gary, Indiana, “the murder capital of the US,” to parents from Eastern Europe, he has since lived in many other cities in the US, Europe, and Asia, and taught some of the world’s best and worst students, only a few of whom have tried to kill him. His only published fiction so far, a short story called “Shapur the Poet,” about a boy in 17th century Persia who becomes the apprentice of a vagrant who styles himself “the Poet of the Grand Bazaar,” found its way onto the pages of the literature section of a newspaper in Bangladesh, making him an official Bangladeshi author. The current work, The Balkan Wheel, the story of the break-up of Yugoslavia, was inspired by eight visits to Yugoslavia and its successor states and was written on three continents over a five-year period. Its mixture of fictional narrative and historical fact is reminiscent of the novels of Leon Uris, an author much admired by Mano. Since completing The Balkan Wheel, Mano has m
oved his research and writing focus from the Balkans to Persia and Central Asia. The Balkan Wheel is Mano’s first published novel.
Description
Winter 1944 in the Dalmatian foothills, a Chetnik guerrilla captain named Markovich orders two soldiers to destroy a Croatian village. When they refuse, he ties them to a bridge and takes off to do the task himself. The two soldiers escape and return to their camp. There, they learn that Markovich has not returned. In fact, they learn that he was a Partisan officer pretending to be a Chetnik, trying to trick them into committing an atrocity.
Spring 1983, the American born-and-raised son of one of the Chetnik soldiers, Luke, makes his first trip to Yugoslavia, taking the Diocletian Express. He is accompanied by Nedjad, a half-Muslim, half-Croatian teenager, whose aunt and uncle come from the same area as Luke’s father. Luke is a keen observer and he learns from the behavior of Nedjad’s aunt and uncle and a waiter in a restaurant that the image of a harmonious, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia is a myth.
A few years later, Yugoslavia begins to fall apart. Inflation is running a thousand percent and young people can’t find jobs. Luke is in Belgrade when the Serbs are protesting against the Miloshevich regime. He gets caught up in the police riot and meets a beautiful Serbian girl.
In 1990 war breaks out. Luke becomes a lawyer and takes a job in Belgrade delivering private aid to parts of Bosnia where public aid is forbidden by international sanctions. In Sarajevo to coordinate with another charity worker, he sees a famous TV reporter having dinner with some Bosniak officials. An hour later on the street, he sees the same TV reporter waiting on a corner. He starts to approach her, but just as he does, an explosion goes off in the market across the street. It looked to him like she was waiting for the explosion.
Meanwhile, Luke’s cousin Zoran becomes an officer in the Bosnian Serb Army and is accused of war crimes. Luke takes a bus across war-torn Bosnia to see him. Traveling at night to avoid sniper fire and rocket grenades, the bus weaves from side to side over the heavily cratered road. Somehow he makes it to the village only to find out from Zoran’s father that Zoran is in a camp near Sarajevo called Papucha.
Last stop: the camp of the Bosnian Serb Army in the village of Papucha. Zoran is preparing his unit to attack a village. Luke tries to talk him out of it, but Zoran says the press has already accused him of war crimes, so he might as well do what they say he did. Luke can’t reason with him, so he goes to talk with the commanding officer, a man named Markovich. Surprisingly, Luke recognizes the commanding officer; he was one of the Bosniak men who had dined with the reporter in Sarajevo; now, he’s pretending to be a Serbian officer. Markovich tells Luke that the attack on the village is his idea. Luke stops being an observer. He acts quickly and kills Markovich, preventing the attack from going forward.
Book excerpt
The moonlight glistened on Dushan’s long brown hair. A shot ricocheted off a tree just above his head. He dove to the ground. Other rifle fire whistled through the air, dropping twigs and snow coverage, and carving pocks in the tree bark.
A few seconds later the shooting stopped.
He lifted his head, wiped the snow and soil from his face, and looked around. A few dark patches of trees and rocks dotted the rolling, white carpet ahead. In one of those nearby dark patches, Dushan saw his commander, Voivoda Djuich, duck into position behind a crag. To his right he saw some of his compatriots settle into a dry creek bed. To his left others were scurrying from tree to tree and rock to rock hoping to position themselves close to the enemy.
The group in the creek bed began shooting in the direction of the enemy and quickly drew return fire. Dushan got back on his feet and sprinted to the next tree, pressing his side against the cold bark. In his unpinned hand, he held a cold, heavy, World-War-I vintage Mauser.
He looked back at the five men who were following him. They hugged the ground, but their heads were raised and their desperate eyes fixed on his face. He gave them a nod.
He ran in a crouch up to another tree. The men got up and scampered up to positions behind bushes and tree stumps. Finally, all of them gathered behind some crags jutting out from a ledge.
From here he could make out the enemy. They were down the hill from him a short jog. He counted twenty of them, Ustashas, crouching behind a stone wall about waist high. They were still firing on Dushan’s buddies in the creek bed.
Behind that enemy group, Dushan could see another Ustasha guarding their back; and another to their left, watching their flank. Their castle, the building they were protecting, was an old, rundown, sheep-farmer’s stone hut with a slate roof. Dushan had seen many such huts here in Lika. Most likely, a shepherd from a nearby village slept in the hut when his sheep grazed up here in the hills. The stone wall they were crouching behind was probably intended to pen in the sheep.
The Ustashas continued to concentrate their fire on the men in the creek bed. They had yet to discover Dushan’s new position and that of the others.
A group of Dushan’s compatriots maneuvered to the side of the hut and fired, killing the two men standing guard behind the line. Some of the other Ustashas reacted to this unexpected gunfire, broke ranks, and moved into new positions. Others panicked and began to fire wildly into the black of night.
Djuich’s strategy was working. He stepped up onto a boulder and faced Dushan and the other men. “Are you ready, men?”
Djuich’s huge torso and long beard were silhouetted against the moonlit sky like Moses on Mount Sinai. He extended his arms