The Way of Muri Read Online Free Page A

putting up a fight – he’d somehow sensed that the tank was rumbling in the right direction. It didn’t look as though the soldiers intended to skin him alive or burn him with their cigarettes, but then again frightened people in wartime are capable of all kinds of unpredictable behaviour. Once the laughter had died down, the soldiers carried on swilling
raki
from their flasks and joking about women. As their proximity to death increased, so did their crudeness and cynicism. Only the trembling cigarettes in the corners of their mouths betrayed their true despair. Humans are blind to the world around them, but as Muri twisted in his net he could see dark forces already surrounding the soldiers. A flock of demons swooped gleefully down to the tank like punctilious police officers. The cat knew that these foul creatures had been assigned to carry out the Devil’s dirtiest work, marking with their claws those who were destined to die soon. Two of the four soldiers clinging to the outside of the tank were immediately condemned to feed the worms. The doomed men didn’t even feel the touch of the demons’ claws – they had no idea that they’d been singled out in this way, and this ignorance greatly amused theirinvisible predators. Left to their own devices the demons would have marked all human foreheads with their claws, but even the Devil has his limits, so his servants were restricted to carrying out his orders. As he watched, Muri was filled with scorn for these wily miscreants. The demons sensed his cold hatred and turned, hissing with fury, to meet his piercing feline glare.
    Sarajevo loomed into view. At the sight of so many roofs engulfed in flames, their shattered tiles littering the road, the demons became delirious with joy. They landed on the tank and struck the same foreheads again and again, their loathsome tongues protruding with the effort, for they were allowed to mark the same potential victims as many times as they liked. One of the incorporeal, web-footed assailants even had the insolence to straddle the swaying barrel of the gun. Then the firing began. In an act of unexpected mercy the pole was extricated from the hatch and, turning somersaults, the cat and the net flew to the side of the road.
    The city was a scene of apocalyptic carnage. Lime trees and chestnut trees crashed to the ground, their splayed branches releasing whole hosts of elementals. House spirits ran along the collapsing roofs in despair. There was universal panic. Missiles were falling everywhere, the city was spilling its contents, the birds were going crazy… Meanwhile the sky overhead flickered with the glow of fire.
    Muri collapsed onto the roadside grass. He wasn’t particularly bothered by what was going on around him, and nobody paid him any attention. The humans were intent on destroying one another; any damage sustained by the trees, birds and animals was merely incidental. The cat headed for the cellar of the nearest house. An old man was sitting on the collapsed porch, alongside a moaning house spirit. He was holding his wrinkled old face in his hands, squeezing large tears out of it as though it were a sponge. Spotting Muri in front of him, he accosted the cat just as he would have accosted any passer-by and began to wail, ‘Where’s my Annutka? My Annutka’s gone! Where’s Borislav?Gone… Where’s my garden? I planted every single tree in that garden! I nurtured them with these very hands…’
    ‘Fool!’ the little cat answered scornfully, knowing full well that the human couldn’t hear him. ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’
    Naturally, Muri bared his claws when the man tried to stroke him.

    The cat spent the night in a demolished church, painstakingly washing and grooming his fur. The resident spirits flitted about the cross, which had fallen into the smashed cupola and was now dangling in mid-air, held up only by its cross-piece. The icons had gone up in smoke, as had everything else; the charred