DOCTOR-TROL
Doctor-Trol is Sarajevan. Classical gymnasium followed by Kosevo Medical Faculty, then specialisation in Orthopaedics in Paris. Later, further specialisation in Paediatric Orthopaedics at VMA in Belgrade.
Homeland Yugoslavia! First Mays, kids' hands waving Yu-flags, red bands round the necks, songs for the Army guarding their dreams, military service, becoming men, blossoms of tulips.
Doctor-Trol has his nation, his party, His populus. All born in Bosnia and Herzegovina in not very best way, comes to this most tender doctor in the world to beautify their limbs: legs or arms, to be adjusted, stretched, measured to the ideal human measure. Herzegovinian kid population is his most frequent clientele. There, it is reported, luxation is endemic.
The war is on. Yougoslav People Army is angry. Instead of looking after them, it is now rumbling through children's dreams. Instead with cannonballs, it feeds now its cannons with its guys.
Sarajevo is occupied. Doctor-Trol, on Dobrinja, cut off from his Kosevo hospital. First, they dragged him on Pale, and although under threat, he refuses to treat canoness & sniper shooters. They bring him back to Dobrinja. A fellow-doctor, the nationality of those from Pale, makes him enter through a secret path to the multi-national city, for the guards of which he has passwords.
Shells are shelling, sirens are howling, everyone is running to save himself, or to save others - already injured. All cars in the city are now ambulances, all people who find themselves near massacres are now paramedics, but all cannot be the doctors. And from all doctors, only one can be doctor-Trol.
He is the one who, among the kid population and parents, became most famous for the fact that, in times of peace, he used first to perform some abracadabra, a magic mental preparation. And only when the baby and a bit bigger would stop crying, he would, after having beautify with his most professional operations and other miraculous methods their sick extremities, make them laugh, laugh!
Here they are now back on his operating table. Perhaps the very same clientele, now only turned older. But here are, their limbs full of shrapnel, bloody, hanging, shattered, here are the clotted mass of fragments, around whose beauty, symmetry, health... Doctor-Trol worked so hard other day. And lo, he should now cut them down, chop up, amputate the very same limbs, in order to save at least what is left of these future men: a human, or just child’s torso.
He kept amputating their limbs during the day, but by night, in his nightmares, as curled at his couch in his doctor room at the department that he never deserts, he was sewing them back. (Thus at least, this doctor confessed to the writer of "The War Rhymes", to dream night after night).
No, doctor-Trol is not reconciled. He could not stand the void where there were limbs, he could not watch the helplessness of these torsos bonking in wheelchairs through the ghostly Department of Orthopaedics Clinic of which he is the boss. He asks, demands, shouts for help. French humanitarians come. Doctor-Trol helps with the boarding of these delicate trees withe the cut off branches in the transporters, which will then take them to the Sarajevo airport, from there by humanitarian planes to Paris, where there will be made for them the artificial legs, and arms, and ... Can they be made, the artificial memories ?!
Doctor-Trol he does not want to continue to think, he does not want to see further, he can not look to the future, a new contingent of the smashed limbs, Bosnian pot of blood, crying, bones, skin, despair... hope, is already on his operating table.
Policy is a bad girl. It says: doctor-Abracadabra has to fight a bit at the war-front. He must taste the war. Hic! But he will, from the front line to Mostar. Western one. What to do? Wherever to, he reflects for himself, a good soul, just close to the small Herzegovinian endemics. The war did not stop their births, nor kids keep coming into the world only with the healthy limbs. They are still being born with dislocated, or shorter limbs, and he…. Well his Sarajevo war-skill to cut them down in order to save at least a corpse, did not annul his older skill to beautify them, to extend them, to make them symmetrical, to heal them. Let the whole world do whatever fight, he will do the battle of his own:
