The Devil Couldn't Break Me

by Laura Aslan

  But as a result, poor Agi (and his family) suffered, as various managers of surgeries and practices dispensed with his services blaming budgets and cuts or a shortage of patients, which was never the case. My father knew exactly why he was unemployed so often, politics he would say, not cuts or budgets but politics. And although Agi became angry occasionally, not once can I recollect him complaining or sulking. He would busy himself with some job in the house. in particular the garden, which he loved and move on, searching for a new position in the job he adored. Helping others was always my father’s first consideration in everything he did whether it was in a Doctor’s surgery or in the middle of a street during a protest march.

  He was the strong silent type but not in a cold way and he had big dark eyes that would pull you in like a magnet. The ladies would likely describe him as handsome, with thick dark hair and a rich olive skin and when he decided to tell me a funny story he would have me laughing until the tears ran down my cheeks. He never talked too much when in the company of others, especially strangers, but from an early age I realised that when he did have something to say it was always worth listening to and the tone of his voice was, and still is, like music to my ears. He was my true hero, the man I looked up to above all others and although we didn’t have much I felt like the luckiest little girl in the world to have him as my father.

  So when he announced one day that we were moving house, to his brother’s place in a town called Veliki Trnovac, in Serbia, my mother helped him pack our meagre possessions and we were driven the short distance to our new village passing the towns of Bujkovci, Tabanovce and Nesalce and Uncle Demir met us and greeted us with a big smile at the entrance of his large farm. I was once asked to describe Uncle Demir and without hesitation I answered ‘John Wayne.’ He needs no other introduction, a big strong bear of a man with a permanent smile and yet a slight air of mystery.

  Those early months were full of happy memories and I discovered that father and my uncle were building us a house, our own house just a few hundred metres away from his in the middle of town. I was so excited at the prospect of having a new house and a bedroom of my own.

  I was about five or six years old at this time and life was a joy as I played with my cousins and the other children in the village and upon returning home, was showered with love by my two sets of parents, Nani and Agi and my Uncle Demir, who I called Uncle Axhi and Auntie Naxhia who I called Xhixhi. I always had the impression that Auntie Naxhia was very proud of me and never wasted an opportunity to show me off in town or to take me shopping to buy me clothes or the latest shoes. She was totally different to my mother who even to this day reminds me of a very young Elizabeth Taylor. Nani had beautiful dark hair, brown eyes with natural long eyelashes; she was outgoing and had a smile that would warm up any room she walked into. Auntie Naxhia was almost the opposite, she always covered herself when she went out and whereas Nani always took a pride in her appearance and her figure, Auntie Naxhia was always at her most comfortable pottering around the kitchen, cooking and baking. It was the perfect combination, I had two wonderful Nani’s and life couldn’t have been better especially when my mother got a job as a teacher at the local school. Now we had a little more money too, and there would be treats and special days out and an occasional visit to an elegant restaurant.

  I didn’t sense it at the time but there was a simmering tension in the house. There was nothing sinister, I think it was just a case of too many adults in one house and my uncle and auntie needed their privacy. So we moved into what was an unfinished house with no windows and no doors and still my father had no work despite his qualifications so he was unable to afford the critical repairs and refurbishment. At this time I think I first started to realise that life in general wasn’t altogether fair. I had friends with doctor fathers and they lived in nice (finished) houses and their fathers had cars and worked more hours than was healthy for them. I remember questioning Agi about this but he never really gave me a straight answer. Even as a small girl I sensed that some of the people in town and the surrounding area treated us differently, but nevertheless we got on with life as was my parents way and as always they made me feel I was the centre of the world. I helped Nani carry the water (we had no running water) from a well on the outskirts of town when she finished teaching. I looked forward to this daily task, treating it as a big game. We walked to the well holding hands and talked about Nani’s day at school and Agi, and what new work he was doing in the house, then we filled the plastic Jerry cans, turned around and headed back home. They were so heavy and we had to stop to rest our arms every fifty metres. It was hard work especially when there was ice on the ground and on one occasion I slipped and fell into an open drain and plunged head first into a metre of icy water. Nani scooped me up and wrapped me in her big warm coat and carried me all the way home.

  It was mid-winter and times were hard. I remember the extreme cold and because we had no heating and no doors or windows, the wind that whistled through the house seemed to cut me in two. We slept on the floor too as there was no money for real beds until much later. It didn’t matter much as I thought bedtime was great fun. Nani had made huge home-made quilts which were stuffed with old rags, clothing and small pieces of sponge and rolled away in the corner of the room during the day. At nights Agi would lay them flat on the floor and I had the job to punch out the lumps and try and make the quilts one big, flat, soft mattress, a job that I took great pride in. Looking back on those times, I realise that it must have been hard for my parents and yet Nani and Agi always had a smile or a laugh and a joke and even in those circumstances I always had a positive outlook on life and knew that things would almost certainly change. And change they did as Agi announced several weeks later he’d finally found a position in a medical practice in another village.

  The only trouble was that it was several kilometres away in the mountains and by now the snow was nearly a metre deep and we had no car and he had to walk to work. I cried a lot waiting for him to return each evening especially when it was snowing hard because I remembered one of my friends mothers saying that the snow was always worse in the mountains and I convinced myself that he would fall down and never be found.

  It was around this time that I first went to school and discovered I was a Muslim. I knew this already of course but it really hit home when I started receiving religious instruction from the Imam and the other teachers. The town of Veliki Trnovac was mostly Muslim but my early memories of practising our faith prior to school was an odd visit to the Mosque with my parents for religious festivals such as Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr. Agi didn’t go to the mosque on a regular basis nor did he pray five times a day. I always got the impression he thought it was all rather time consuming and although he believed in God and stuck to the cultural traditions, when others trooped off to the mosque for prayers, Agi was always busy with other things. I wouldn’t describe my mother as over religious either, for example she never covered herself up or dressed the way some of the other Muslim women did, she was more comfortable applying her make-up and following the latest western fashions, a typical glamorous Turkish woman.

  I loved school and studied hard and of course mother was one of the teachers. I embraced Islam and loved the religious teachings of the Quran. My first memories were of love and peace and goodwill to others and to always show respect for the elderly. It was all very spiritual and pleasantly comforting to me.

  When I was a little older some of the children were learning the Quran in Arabic. I was very competitive and wanted to do likewise. When I got home I told my father what I wanted to do and he looked at me curiously and asked why. I had no other answer than to tell him I felt that it was the right thing to do. He shrugged his shoulders and said if I really wanted to learn the Quran in Arabic he wouldn’t stand in my way. That was always my father’s way, live and let live, say what you want to say in the language of your choosing. And so I started classes and eventually became th
e Imam’s assistant.

  With Nani at the school I learned quickly. I absorbed the Quran studies like a sponge and enjoyed it immensely. I was near the top of the class in most subjects and was determined to be one of the best students in this new study too. I’d sit on the porch outside studying until it got too dark to see my books and then I’d lie down on a mat and watch the stars for hours. The stars and the vastness of the universe always fascinated me and I’d try to comprehend how all the stars and planets came into being. One of my teachers said that one star was the equivalent of a grain of sand on the beach and most stars that we could see were dead because the light from them took so long to reach us. Shooting stars were dying stars and I’d get a real thrill on the odd occasion I’d see one. Now and again I would see the vapour trail from a far off aeroplane and I’d wonder where it was going and which airport it had taken off from. I was at peace with the world lying on a padded mat watching the stars and sometimes I’d relax so much I’d fall asleep and Agi would have to carry me to bed.

  But the bad news never seemed to be far away however and Nani lost her job. I remember her telling my father that she’d been asked to leave to make way for someone else. I couldn’t understand this, everyone loved my mother, she was undoubtedly one of the more popular teachers in the school and many of my friends were devastated when she told them she wouldn’t be teaching them again. When I asked Agi why she was no longer at the school he said something about politics and stormed out of the house. I also noticed at that time that things were changing and certain children were calling other children names and in some cases physically assaulting them. What was happening? School was such a wonderful place to be so why were these people trying to spoil it?

  Even as a small girl I was more than aware that things were changing. The atmosphere in Veliki Trnovac had changed too and although I found it difficult to describe why, it was no longer the place I’d grown up in and there was a distinctive mistrust of people but especially authority and while I had never had a bad experience with a policeman or a soldier, whenever I saw one I wanted to turn around and run in the other direction.

  I also sensed a change in my parents and walked in on many discussions where they suddenly stopped talking and I knew something wasn’t right because this wasn’t my parent’s way. My parents were always so open with me and even at ten or eleven years old I was made to feel like an adult and very much part of anything that went on. I knew about the politics at Nani’s old school and the problems in Agi’s medical practice. They shared everything with me but this was so very different, not like them at all. I would lie awake in bed for many hours wondering why they were being so secretive.

  I know now that they were only trying to protect me, and slowly, through the medium of television, it all started to become clear. The television news was always on in our house and the main topic of conversation and the reports and live television pictures were to do with the unrest sweeping the whole of Yugoslavia. It was around this time that Slobodan Milošević rose to become president of Serbia and federal president of Yugoslavia and for some reason, I can’t explain why, whenever his picture came on television the image disturbed me and when they televised a speech he was making I had a strange desire to walk out of the room and do something else. His head reminded me of a large pig.

  In one speech he said it was necessary to deter Albanian separatist unrest in the province of Kosovo. I was more than concerned because Kosovo was not that far away. It was clear from the television news that animosity between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo was deepening by the day and in the spring of 1987 Milošević was driven into Kosovo to address a crowd of Serb. As he talked to the leadership inside the local cultural hall, demonstrators outside clashed with the local Kosovo-Albanian police force. It was clear to me even at that young age that there were many agitators on both sides and that they were spoiling for a fight.

  I would be about fourteen at that time and that was when I really started to sit up and take notice. Not that I could avoid it, as it was becoming a daily occurrence. It started with protests and occasionally sticks and stones but it wasn’t long before people began to pick up the guns. The newsmen and journalists then started to talk about massacres and ethnic cleansing and the name of Srebrenica was on everyone’s lips, where it was claimed over 8000 Bosniak men and young boys had been slaughtered. It was the worst war crime committed since the Second World War they said. It seemed like the whole world was fighting but in reality they were just the countries and autonomous regions around Veliki Trnovac and as luck would have it our beautiful town was right on the border. The Bosnian Croats were fighting as were the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Serbs, Croatians, Croatian Serbs, Kosovans, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbians, Slovenians, Vojvodinans and even NATO had become involved with peacekeepers on the ground and targeted bombing from the air. There were mercenaries and bandits and criminal gangs involved and of course religion inevitably reared its head with Muslims fighting Christians, as has been the trend for sixteen hundred years. Watching the news night after night, I tried to understand who was fighting who and why, but it all appeared so complicated. Wars were normally fought between two sides but this was totally different, total chaos.

  And yet it still seemed so far away. Television makes things seem so close as it brings the drama right into your living room. I wondered how far Srebrenica was. I took out a European map and found it and charted a course of exactly where it was. It was only six centimetres away but I breathed a sigh of relief as I realised it was in fact, over 400 kilometres away. I reassured myself in bed that night that the soldiers who had committed that atrocity would never make it this far.

  A few months later everything would change and suddenly the war seemed a lot closer to home. I was in the local coffee bar and picked up a newspaper that someone had left. There were more tensions in the Kosovo region and the Kosovo Liberation Army had been formed, an ethnic-Albanian paramilitary organisation who were now demanding the separation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia.

  For the first few years The KLA remained fairly passive, but in early 1996 they undertook a series of attacks against police stations and Yugoslav government offices, saying that they had killed civilians as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign. Serbian authorities denounced the KLA as a terrorist organisation and increased the number of security forces in the region. This had the counter-productive effect of boosting the credibility of the KLA among the general Kosovo Albanian population. The cafés and bars were alive with tall tales coming from Kosovo and I’m sad to say that I sat and listened to most of the gossip. My friends told me what they’d overheard their parents say and one person claimed that The KLA were abducting and murdering Serbs and ethnic Albanians considered collaborators with the state.

  The more I listened the more I feared the KLA. It seemed they would stop at nothing to achieve their goal but some of the rumours spread about them were ridiculous beyond belief. One young student called Arsal, claimed to know all about them and said they purchased their arms through drug running and the sale of body parts from the murders of its enemies. We couldn’t help but laugh at Arsal. He was such a great storyteller. We nicknamed him Arsal the exaggerator.

  ***

  My cousin’s fiancé was a beautiful boy, his name was Nasijet and he was only eighteen with gorgeous black, wavy hair. He had been at university in Pristina, which was only an hour’s drive away and most of the students from Veliki Trnovac studied there as it was the nearest university town. Because of the Kosovan unrest, the Serbian Army had introduced a curfew. No one knows why Nasijet was out after dark but without asking him any questions they mercilessly cut him to pieces in a hail of bullets. He was eighteen, he was far too young to die and my cousin Rejhan was inconsolable. Everyone gathered at Rejhan’s house - it was the first time I’d experienced the chill of death. I stood and cried with everyone else, with Rejhan and her mother Shejnaz and the rest of the family. Rejhan’s fat
her, Sali, was in Germany working and at that point in time was in the air on an aeroplane on the way home. Nasijet’s killing really hit home and the fear of uncertainty coursed through my body. It was all so very surreal and we even watched as the incident was reported on TV. The reporter stood where he had been gunned down and it was all too much for poor Rejhan who collapsed in a heap on the floor when the reporter walked slowly towards where the body had been found and pointed out the blood stained road. A few hours later his broken body was brought from Pristina and we prepared for the funeral the following day.

  It was the most horrible day and one that took an awful lot of energy to get through. I hadn’t slept well the night before thinking about Rejhan. I wondered how she was going to cope. Nasijet and Rejhan were deeply in love and enjoyed a more western courtship and engagement. Most of their friends would not have that opportunity and instead their marriages would be arranged for them. Rejhan and Nasijet were different, they had fallen in love and both sets of parents hadn’t stood in their way and allowed them to plan their long life together. I don’t think I ever saw them without a smile on their face.

  Everyone wanted to be like Nasijet and Rejhan.

  It was autumn but quite warm for that time of year and yet I was chilled to the bone as I shivered and shook despite being wrapped up in a thick woollen cardigan. I stood in the main street of the town waiting for the funeral procession to arrive. I had been there for about twenty minutes and as the time approached more and more people poured into town. I had never witnessed so many people in one place, familiar faces but strangers too, men and women from outlying villages as well as the local people. It seemed that everyone had heard of Nasijet’s death and wanted to pay their respects. By the time the procession came into view the narrow street was dark with people, it was as if God had turned off the lights.