The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

booze? Apparently he thought we were his countrymen, as we were sitting on top of a Serbian tank and singing a Yugoslavian song. Only after the first sip did he realize that we were the enemy, when he spotted the Hrvatska emblems on my uniform. There was this long moment of suspense as he stared at it and we looked at his rifle. Ours were lying on the ground below us, devoid of all ammunition. Then, Andro saved the night by picking up the song again, and the Serbian guy joined in. Together we screamed like a trio of alley cats, all three of us: “Rock me baby! Nije vazno šta je. Rock me baby! Samo neka traje.”
    Eurovision saved my life. Andro saved my life.
    At the end of our bottle, Andro came out with the truth. He was gay. He wanted to kiss me. Andro was a handsome kid. Black hair, fair skin, thick lips. I guess he was a Day 156 type, and the war had already lasted half a year and…Okay, I almost wanted to kiss him. (War either makes you a fascist or a fag.) But I just couldn’t, not for the memory of my Serb-fucking father. But we all got excited, and pants went down. Andro jerked us off, me and the Serb. It was the strangest image I have from that fucking war. The crazy gay boy from Pula jerking us off in the deep Dalmatian night, with a prick in each hand: one Serbian, one Croatian.
    If we had gay nations, there would be less wars.
    I wake up with war shadows fluttering about the bright white room. My dark past tries to balance out my life here in the bright, silent island, where you go to sleep in broad daylight and wake up in screaming sunshine at six in the morning. It’s hard to sleep. I feel like I’m in a hospital. A neon-bright, deadly-silent, no-one-wears-shoes-indoors hospital. Goodmoondoor even walks around his own house wearing only his socks. It’s disgusting.
    And this peaceful land has never seen war. Not in a thousand years. Must be the island thing. No extra dew to fight for.
    Was it necessary for all those people to die just so that we could claim Knin as a Croatian town? I still ask myself that question. Shortly after the war, I drove through it, this insignificant town of fifteen thousand people. The sight of our flag flying above those broken roofs made me sick to my stomach. I actually had to stop the car and puke. I puked on the land that we had claimed, the land I had been willing to give up my life for. Yet we had to do it. We had to. Don’t ask me why. We just fucking had to.
    Every man belongs to a nation, a thing greater than himself. A nation is the sum of our strengths, as well as of our collective stupidity. War makes the former obey the latter.
    I get up and go to the bathroom. It’s so freaky clean. This is where the angels shit. I have a holy hangover. Not only from the beer, but also from all the hallelujahs I said on TV. Goodmoondoor was very happy with my performance. His American colleague didn’t let him down.
    I wonder if they have a TV guard at the US embassy, some pimpled wacko whose job it is to watch all the local programs and check if they contain some blow-Bush or fuck-the-FBI messages. And then, in the middle of the night, he suddenly would have seen me on the screen, the bald round face that matches the America’s Most Wanted poster on the wall beside the TV set. The Croatian clitsucker that killed the FBI agent in Queens last week, posing as the priest they found dead in a JFK bathroom last Tuesday. I’ve been waiting all night long for the SWAT team to show up, waking up every half an hour. At 4.00 AM I called my love, Munita. No answer.
    The holy couple gets up at 7:00. Morning prayer starts at 7:30. Father Friendly has to show up. “Dear God. Save me from my sins.”
    After breakfast they take me sightseeing. There the president lives, there the shopping mall is, there they store the volcano water. Here they make the world famous dairy product called Scare, and the swimming pool over there is one of the world’s best. In fact, they do their best to convince me that their country is the “best in the world.” They go on and on about the longest life, the happiest people, the cleanest air, etc. I really want to tell them that a country devoid of brothels and gun shops can’t even think of claiming such a title, but instead the Friendly one nods his head, slowly but persistently, like a Texas oil drill.
    Goodmoondoor drops his wife off at the TV station to tape her show and we drive on, though he feels the need to explain.
    “I don’t think