It was a January so cold that the water in the central heating pipes froze, so beautiful that it stoked fear, sudden yet justified in the eyes of the citizenry. In the twilit kitchen, unwholesomely permeated by intermittent flashes of light from outside, I stood wrapped in an army jumper, squinting towards the greenish-blue flame. From earliest childhood I’d developed that passion: I’d sneak up to the stove and watch the water boil. At times, though, it was other liquids. Milk carefully decanted from a plastic bag into the pot, soup, possibly yesterday’s, the thin film of fat tremoring on its surface with every move, pasta letters and cooked-to-bits chicken bones floating in it, but in most cases it was nothing but water that was brought to heat in those dishes: the sly substance which, just as you’re about to grab it by the scruff of the neck, turns into steam and vanishes. Water—and this I realised at a time when I still had to pull a chequered kitchen chair up to the stove to see the boil—behaves exactly the same regardless of what is to be dumped into it: fine, hand-ground coffee, heads of beef, eggs or soiled, faeces-laden nappies owned unwillingly, under duress, by my younger brother. Boiling, in practical physical terms, is the transition of liquid into vapour, a radical reduction of its tangibility through a heat-induced frenzy of particles. This lends the process an air of a clean, easy reversibility: it is a parable of a perfect, almost tender death. But not to me. To me, liquid never truly boiled at the boiling point—when it reached, presumably, the temperature of a hundred degrees Celsius at the pressure of 1.013 bar and vanished—but at the moment when, too weak to strangle, it became sly: when it made the egg crack, the milk boil over, the hand withdraw bearing a painful burn. My fascination with boiling, like venous blood, curdled round the subtle yet perfidious, specific violence  of boiling.    

          During that same childhood, as well as later, I mostly shirked from explicit exercises in violence. Partly out of (beauty-deprived) fear, partly out of cowardice, partly due to a shadow of lucidity (which may have been more pronounced back then) hanging over the ego, a lucidity which has since been proclaimed an eclipse of the mind and now, demystified and laid bare, visits the self at times. The odd beating, the occasional (yet highly effective) act of criminal damage, but, admittedly, never: the strangling of cats, the ignition of fireworks in birds’ feathers, the tying of wires round lizards’ necks. Meanwhile, the Yugoslav wars monogrammed violence with a capital V on our underpants and stomped out people and cities, yet I still associate the mundane violence, which does not end in death though it steers towards it, with the idea and the image of boiling, its archetypal destructiveness.  

          To Borges, in his youth at least, knives had much the same meaning. Swords, daggers, general-purpose blades: anything not meant for spreading butter but for stabbing and cutting. Cold weapons, the knife in particular as their iconic representative, have long been accepted as a universal metonymy of violence, yet the half-blind librarian elevated the blade to a complex, meticulously coded symbol, one of the central leitmotifs of his oeuvre. Later in life, using this symbolic structure as a base, he built a reactionary, conservative mythology of “toughness, honour, and courage,” which led to his support for Pinochet and the coup to overthrow Chile’s democratically established socialism, as well as to his sympathy for the Argentine military juntas. His youthful obsession with blades, grown out of everyday life in the dangerous barrios of Buenos Aires in the 1910s and 1920s, his family history of warriorship, and highly idealised, lyrically buttressed motifs from the somewhat broadened “blood and soil” repertoire—which Borges mentions in a 1966 interview for The Paris Review—still morphed into an individual archetype of “violence with a mission,” a destructiveness  in the service of a higher purpose, an idea or force as elusive as honour. 

          The Argentine’s destructiveness is unfathomably far from the altogether undirected, grassroots, raw destructiveness which for years I’d conceived of as boiling, just as my own fascination with blades, I believe, is diametrically opposed to his. Far from any kind of myth, meta-narrative or ordinary intention, my blades were at once driven by the lechery of the steel and a fettered chaotic impulse: a murderous motion cornered, crammed into the impeccable statics of objects. To use the slum argot Borges himself uses, there is, on the one hand, el vaivén—the come-and-go, a word which the knife’s sudden, unexpected motion and flash, the mess of it, inhabits most explicitly. On the other hand there is el fierro: the iron with its much too heavy yet paralysed conscience, its potential which retains most of its value and overtaxed strength in idling and suffocates its mobility with its acquired authority. The knife is can, rather than want. The knife is the asceticism of restraint. The knife—this much is obvious by now—is the beauty of deferral. There remains quite little of the bestial in the knives that are of import to me, and yet a knife is nothing if not a beast.

Blade One. Father  

Like Borges, like in cheap films about valour which conceals and obscures a complete absence of humanity, the magic of the blade infected me through the male line, starting with the first man I remember: my paternal grandfather. I’m not sure if it was him—a high-ranking navy officer, battleship captain, retired for medical reasons a year before I was born—who procured the blade. I remember: during an excessively cold winter in the ’80s, in our ground-floor flat in Split, almost ritualistically, somewhat ceremoniously, he presented it to me. A foldable hunting knife with a blade whose length well exceeded the breadth of my four thin fingers, with a bone saw, a security lock and a handle made of deer antler, possibly bovine bone surrogate. Folded, it was doubly enclosed—it rested, silent, in a tightly stitched brown leather sheath with belt-slits on its black-dyed back. Designed with a specific practical purpose in mind, it was not the kind of knife which is carried at the ready or drawn lightly, accidentally. It is the only one among all the subsequent blades which I associate primarily with my father.

          My father, a military lawyer, senior captain in the Yugoslav People’s Army, worked in the town of Knin at the time, I suppose the worst place in the country to be doing anything at all at the end of the eighth decade of the century. But he lived near us, borrowed Borges’s collected works (the 1985 edition) from the garrison library, visited us often, and, even more importantly, in a way perhaps decisively  for my acceptance of the imposed parent-child relationship, he had a knife almost identical to mine. I spent long hours observing both blades in the yellow beam of a torch, hidden in my usual spot, in the darkness under the dining table. I looked at the knives without touching them, unsheathed, unfolded, laid out in their subdued sheen on the hysterical pattern of the rug: unfamiliar fauna lost in the familiar yet incomprehensible force of flora. Above all, they differed in one possibly crucial anthropometric fact: Father’s fingers were significantly thicker than mine. This, even under the laws of an occupying force, and only if the laws were stretched, just barely allowed his blade to be classified as a weapon. During my childhood in an as yet mostly safe and care-free society, the knife didn’t seek after blood: the fuller—strategically swaged into the blade to facilitate drainage—was to remain dry, and the blood, tamed with difficulty, to resume circulation in its proper place.

          The knife with the antler handle thus served as a sigil of sorts, a family totem of masculinity, a direct link to Father. Only when laid out one next to the other did the knives, grotesquely different in their almost absolute sameness, make full sense. Moreover, during spells marked by a complete lack of enemies (just as during periods when the enemy was everyone), the blade with the antler handle served as an implement of the abovementioned undirected destructiveness, but only in its consequence, in the tangible truth of boiling.

          Unbridled as it was, the knife was never involved in street displays of power, the skirmishes between the Partisans and the Germans in the crowns of wind-blasted nettle trees. In order to be effective, the weapons used—handguns, assault rifles and submachine guns whittled out of light wood—had to remain abstract, on the edge of iconic recognisability. And yet, dull and lightly rusted, that knife, which still lies in a forgotten desk drawer, did once turn against its owner. One unexpectedly cold morning, the safety failed and allowed me to see my own flesh for the first time—on the index finger of my right hand it opened a gash which bled not only blood but an entire childhood. In parallel, the country whose culture and political idea had a decisive influence on my upbringing somehow disappeared from the map, leaving behind the still visible scar of deeply impressed contours of a trampled identity, the blueprint of utter ruin.  

Blade Two. Grandfather

In those times of tacit digging up of hatchets, especially during the country fair season in a town halfway between Livno and Duvno in Bosnia, spring’s first winds could sweep in dancing bears. Before Kupres Plain was ploughed up by artillery shells and divided into garden beds of tank pits, there was a little house there which Grandfather had built on a plot he shared with two army officers. I remember: a grass snake, its throat slit, writhing in its own blood in the stream’s clear rapids, its patterned skin stretched on a willow stick. I remember: shepherd’s whistles, foxes and horses, a hotel with an A-frame roof on the invisible chapitels of the sky; I remember: a ski-lift, cow dung, ferns and pansies, wild strawberries, fields of ox-eye daisies, ferns, elephant’s ears, going to fetch milk, its warm foam, the clatter of the buckets, the Gypsies, Atos, supposedly the biggest dog in Split; I remember chess, dominoes, trowels, the tool shed and the winter garden, carnations in various colours; I remember the road to Kukavica Lake and the road to Mt Stožer, the track disappearing in the low-lying forest, the bare slopes of the hills, the pastures, a yew longbow and hazelnut arrows; I remember hunters, horned vipers, relatives, the wound on my left hand I cut open one afternoon with a hacksaw, mowers, the clank of the blades and the scrape of the scythe stones, I remember: wires, rakes, water boiling in a cauldron over a fire, crickets, Midsummer bonfires, the strident smell of the sheaves, the haystacks, and how spring came, how the snow thawed, how the rivers swelled, how lush the green was, I remember: some other bits and bobs.

          The spirit of an animal broken by the tragedy of music, furious bursts of accordion fire, the conductor’s baton beating the stiff air: all this was more likely to be found in the town of Bugojno. One had to dress up for the occasion and take the road along the side of which we used to pick elderberries, let the beams of our headlights break the darkness in the bowels of a hill whose slopes flashed a great big sign, erected amid the white rock, that read TITO. There, on the other side of TITO, on a sweltering fair Sunday, I was presented with my second knife. It was chosen for me at a stall by Grandfather: elegant, almost stern in its absolute simplicity, it later seemed perfidious to me even on the outside, like an inauspicious sign—a blade that is drawn lightly and portends a vernal blossoming of blood. A black plastic handle swallowed up a slightly curved, short blade honed to extremity, suited, at any rate, for the infliction of stabbing wounds. Everything about that small object clearly suggested flash, motion and repetition. In all its splendour, el vaivén came into my possession. That knife, obtained one late, characteristically searing spring towards the end of my first year at school and our last year in Kupres, very much did seek blood, and moreover: it yearned for blood and transferred its unbearable urge onto hands, wrists, hearts.

          I was picked up in front of the school, as there was no time to waste, although it seemed there was, for all of us, an unfathomable lot of it. On the classroom wall hung a portrait of the man inscribed into the hill, the Marshall counting our errors. I was still soundlessly mouthing, like a mantra, the Pioneer Pledge which I’d never get the opportunity to recite properly and make performative, as our car, a yellow Zastava 750, as asthmatic as Grandfather, wheezed heavily and hovered over the town of Solin. In the meantime, everything was the way I remembered: the grass snakes, the whistles, the dung still warm from the body, and the knife with the antler handle rested in its sheath awaiting a sharpening of arrow tips. The unbridled destructiveness, the well-kept truth of boiling, had furtively abandoned my light body and, without my noticing, it was taking over the world around me, boiling over its sticky brim.

          We cut our spring holidays short that year, never again to see the house that was never again to be seen by anyone. The smell of strawberries teased the nostrils to the point of insanity, mules licked salt, scorpion grasses rushed to blossom. Tanks could already be seen on Kupres Plain, and ravens flew low above the hills, prompted by a sudden absence of eagles. Dusty serpentine roads snaked down towards Split, a flag I’d never seen before fluttered above the Fort of Klis. My Slovene aunt, over a tinned lunch meat sandwich, laconically said: that’s your flag now, that thing with the squares. I did not, of course, grasp the magnitude of that symbolic death co-occurring with the death of the symbol, the fact that from that moment on, no flag or anything a flag represents would ever be mine. I was returning to the city of my childhood, heavy and doubly armed, a new blade restless in my trouser pocket. That same steel, the same unbridled destructiveness which I’d finally got rid of when it decanted from me into the blade, were the metal and the pogrom of the destroyers and the MiGs, the opportunistic artillery of the lowlifes nearly all of us had turned into overnight on the strength of an equation that was as simple as it was revolting.

          And blood did eventually run down that blade, appropriately enough, not my own. On night zero of 1999, on the roof of the former Gusar Paddling Club, drunk on cheap vodka, I grazed the top of the head of the singer in Superhiks, an abysmal street-punk band I was trying to clobber drums for. To top it off, this happened in a fit of residual, now somewhat directed destructiveness, since we’d just removed our flag—that thing with the squares—from the nearby corner shop and ripped it up. The wound was immediately rinsed with the vodka. I folded the knife and, in a fit of intense remorse, hurled it into the night as hard as I could, wishing never to see it again.

Blade Three. Son

Summer dripped down the teeth, ran down the throat, and stuck the tongue to the palate like a stamp from an exotic place, and the war was growing elsewhere. Flooding the adjacent flats and drowning the tenants, it sprinkled the tops of our heads with soggy chips of plaster from the ceiling. There was still a whole year before the Olympic Games in Barcelona, where Croatian athletes would compete officially for the first time under our  flag: the same one later ripped up. Atrocious weather struck the barometer, and not only the barometer; the war made its way under our fingernails, the filthy spirit of the age, its naturalised ideology, a murk still difficult to wash away, the destructive in its most concrete form, utterly devoid of infantile scruples.

          The first and only knife I obtained personally, on my own initiative and at my own expense, perfectly reflected the moment in time; it was its precise analogon. Purchased for the price of a school lunch in one of those everything-costs-a-few-kuna shops that had taken the city by storm, its quality matched its price. The poorly moulded plastic handle impressed its excesses into the palm, while the blade—barely possessed of any features that justify the name—bent and cracked under the slightest tension, and the rubber sheath lost the popping fastener from the safety strap on the way home. The megalomania of its design, however, emulated the epoch’s kitsch; the Rambo combat knife combined with the standard-issue AK-47 bayonet loudly proclaimed its purpose. It was an open-carry knife, intimidating, one that threatened and made good on the threat. The display of power compressed into it, a picture of strength, strength which conceals weakness, of determination which conceals cowardice and unscrupulous interests, was and remains terrifying. Its utter lack of elegance and rigidity—the solidity  a dagger possesses—precluded any comparison even with Borges’s banal yet dangerous notion of the blade responsible for securing order, establishing and defending honour. There was nothing to it except rubbishness, and the false sense of anchoredness which rubbish of every type produces, political rubbish in particular.

          The game in which the knife actually served as a weapon for the first time—as knife-beast rather than its benign emanation—was just as vile as the times and the dagger of them: it was the culmination of that heroic narrative which conceals an absence of humanity. We met at first dusk armed with knives and torches, in the overgrown army hospital grounds, an ill-lit patch framed on three sides by blocks of flats, and on the fourth by neglected vineyards that weeds were overrunning, reducing, purifying and drowning in saltwater. We had to share the hospital grounds with addicts cramping up from smack, with wounded soldiers smoking on the balconies and spitting blood from the windows: for both groups we were too fast, beyond reach. The summer made the jungle greasy and sticky, the southerly wind stuffy and oppressive; bay laurel, henbane, cactuses and other vegetation grew wild and wove a tropical macchia that was both impenetrable and dark. Only one rule applied: the knives, in most cases identical, had to remain sheathed, the slaughter and sacrifice symbolic. At first we waged war, just like in the real world around us, in clearly designated teams, but as the nights progressed and thickened into an oily film of shite, it was every man for himself and all against all. The entire tactical logic of these pre-pubescent guerrilla formations boiled down to perfidy and stealth, conspiracy and ambush, with a view to efficacious slaughter, to piling up useless bodies on the other side. We didn’t play at Croats and Serbs, or Serbs and Muslims, or Croats and the Bosnian Army—everything was still quite abstract and faceless, yet never as reliable as our infantile skirmishes between the Germans and the Partisans: our play now resembled a prearranged massacre under the watchful eye of a mute Dutch Battalion in the sky.   

          A noteworthy detail: I never wanted such a knife. However, no blade already in my possession was fit for the purpose, and so, to avoid being disqualified from the game (possibly: the exercise) right at the beginning, I was forced to reach for the one just described, the acceptable one. I therefore once again did the most disgusting thing that could have been done under the circumstances, an action that may serve as a yardstick of intelligence, and certainly does signify its defeat: I adapted. At the same time, similar acts of adaptation assembled my numerous, quite personal defeats into one more general and broadly calibrated.

Blade Four. Death

Autumn arrived on schedule, like a steam locomotive towing a coal wagon of death. We left behind: childhood, the Flashes & the Storms, several wars and more than a few dead; a great gurgling quagmire, a murky morass where pigeons reign supreme and shit wherever they please. On the horizon were: the end of primary school, the completion of “peaceful reintegration of the occupied areas,” girls somewhere round the corner, dragged out of their homes, pale in the May light, and then punk rock. I entered: my teenage years, reaching that unlucky number sometimes conspicuously absent from aeroplane seats, train compartments, and forever locked hotel room doors. Following the “little” school trip at the end of year seven—a week-long excursion on which most pupils had their first pint and their last view of Hrvatsko Zagorje—I entered: our flat on the seventh floor of the tallest tower in Split, to face death for the first time, head-on. The fly-bespittled TV screen suffered under the footage of Princess Diana’s funeral, the aroma of stuffed peppers spread from the air duct, and the window panes caught the first droplets of rain when I learnt that, due to complications from severe pneumonia, the retired sixty-seven-year-old battleship captain, the first man I remember, had died: my father’s father, who loved song-birds and had spent decades fattening his own death in them.       

          I was greeted by a box of medals that had glistened on my chest during those early war games, a watch with a strap that still smelt of sweat, and a brief note, because Grandfather, although still in fact young, knew full well where he was headed, and that a document drafted beforehand was the only thing he could reasonably rely on from beyond. I discovered the most important thing on my own somewhat later, however, and took possession of it without asking, when the summer finally withdrew to make way for a more appropriate season, one during which the transitoriness of victory was trounced and routed by the now obvious magnitude of defeat. On a bland afternoon oppressed by the southerly, I opened a nightstand drawer, felt for it with my hand and laid it on the table, folded, cramped in its silence, and stared at it for a long time.    

          Before me was a classic, a thousand times seen, ubiquitous in houses unburdened by the cult and conspiracy of the blade—the Swiss Army Knife, standard model, red plastic Spartan with two blades, a bottle and tin opener, a toothpick, tweezers, awl and a cork screw. The beautiful, refined tool whose appearance was so much at odds with its often-emphasised original purpose, augured an always duplicitous, bourgeois, and at its core always sham, culture of the blade. This carefully honed, precision-assembled device in a way represented an anti-knife, perhaps nothing less than its archetype. Everything about it was strictly controlled, the beast within tamed, almost tender, a thermostat set to switch off the heater automatically well below the boiling point. Thus death, a tangible, close-to-home death, drove my abstract destructiveness into a small lightweight box, a precious blood-red relief valve I keep on me at all times and don’t separate from even as I write this, a valve I open from time to time that leaves deep cuts in the skin, furrows which fetter madness. This doesn’t, of course, entail anything like “the end of the history of knives,” far from it: the dialectics of the blade is, on a personal and universal level, unstoppable. However, with that generic, toned-down weekend-blade which Borges would not have so much as noticed and yet I loved it, I stepped most definitely and irreversibly into the perfidious reality of death, into a time in which no slaughter could be symbolic. It was—perhaps it can be put thus—my first real  blade: it had a specific (anti)existential weight which pinned me down, keeping me, by pressing down like a weight on my forever unready body, planted on this earth.  

          The four blades eventually melded in some strange way into one full year of the blade, its equinox, an always finite yet never final sum—they stood for all the others that had come before and would come after, all those I leave unmentioned here. It’s unlikely, however, that any other will ever mean as much to me, that it will ever, somewhat brazenly, ask for the mercy of being shaped  by the written word. Defeat is forged while it’s still hot, one should grab one’s ruin while it’s fresh. Just as then, autumn—a locomotive now altogether electric—has arrived on schedule, with death crammed into electrical cables that spark as they scratch the atmosphere. Waters come down from the sky and stir dust, straggling flowers blossom, every sticky boiling raindrop is fragrant; to the sky ascend birds with rotten wings, birds carved from the bosom in a single stroke, and suddenly the blade folds. Look: nothing gleams anymore.