ONE:
Unavoidable Detail of Biography
The Excursion
You want to bury your head in the pillow. Anything else is just torture. Yet the snugness of your bed soon vanishes like a dream. The sleep world disappears and you bump your head against your mother’s bony shoulder. As you glance out of the corner of an eye you see the steps of the bus dancing under your feet. This optical illusion of neat geometrical figures sends you right back to sleep. Ten minutes later you wake up again with a sick feeling in your stomach, but now it’s too late. You’re already on the bus surrounded by the clerks and typists of the Public Accounts Department on an excursion to Jajce. Your mother is the only member of staff who has brought a child with her – because you have to see the waterfalls, or so she insists, and she won’t take no for an answer, even though your stomach is threatening to erupt and right now your head feels more like a cesspool than a waterfall. Will it never clear up? You hear sounds amid the din, the rhythm of the bus, its thick window knocking. Through the glass you notice things – people, scenes, aspects – that will become, much later, ten years on perhaps, the more or less familiar images of your homeland. Such things you will describe with fervor and exaggeration to strangers from other countries.
Outside the window it’s a rainy day. The overflowing Bosna rushes under the bridge. Not the best weather for an outing, perhaps. Nevertheless the middle-aged employees gossip happily and ogle the blonde secretaries who have packed roast chicken and other snacks into their oversized beach bags, as well as make-up and combs, packets of Panadol, suntan lotion and those mysterious little objects that, as you will soon discover, come in handy once a month – but always, it seems, in the course of day-trips or celebrations.
You look out of the window and see a Fiat overtaking the bus. Inside the tiny vehicle are four young men who, as seen from your lofty vantage, look like happy dwarfs enjoying the rain. It’s obvious they want to race everyone they meet in this shiny, wet world. But you seem to be the only person watching them. The attention of the other passengers is drawn to other things, understandably perhaps, because it’s the middle of the week and they’ve got a day off, so they intend to make the most of it. Take old Džemo, for instance, who has brought an army hip-flask and is now passing it round. The toothless fool offers you a drink as a joke. At first you think it’s just water inside the flask, but then you catch a whiff of the alcohol, its sharp smell not unlike the liquid that nurses use to wipe your shoulder before they give you a jab. You can’t stop the heaving in your guts, until finally you throw up, covering the seat in front of you in a bitter, yellowy-green substance whose unpleasant smell stays in your nostrils for a very long time.
The bus slows down and comes to a halt in the middle of the road. The driver gets out, followed by the rest of the passengers. Your mother tells you not to move an inch, but you’d rather not stay in the bus on your own, so for once you disobey her and join the crowd that has gathered at the roadside, crawling between the legs of the onlookers in order to catch a glimpse of the mangled Fiat, a hand hanging out of the window. Angrily, you mother covers your eyes with her hand, and for that reason you don’t see anything else until she puts you back in your seat on the bus. The pale passengers also clamber back on board and return to their seats, but nobody utters a word, except perhaps for one of the blonde secretaries, who complains that seeing the car wreck has ruined the trip. But how? You don’t ask because you know it will sound like a stupid question. The young men in the Fiat are dead, but it seems as if you’re the only person who is unaffected by this. Why be sad now? After all, it’s not as if anybody knew the crash victims. And then Džemo starts telling stories about the many accidents he has witnessed and the hundreds of others he has merely heard about. To listen to Džemo, you’d think no journey in the history of the world had ever ended without a crumpled Fiat lying at the side of the road. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a disaster after all, if your own bus or car or whatever were to become the object of morbid scrutiny by palefaced onlookers, in whose midst an unknown woman, somebody else’s mother, would hastily cover her young child’s eyes. Just imagine the thrill of being at the center of such a drama. You don’t know why the idea of being the focus of other people’s attention makes you so excited, but you no longer feel sick. Instead you feel a kind of ecstasy as pleasure floods through your body and your tiny penis stirs in your pants. Suddenly you’re wide awake and having a wonderful time. You quiz your mother and wave your legs in the air. Then you ask Džemo for the hip-flask, which gets a big laugh from everybody on the bus. In other words, you’re the life and soul of the party, and you couldn’t be happier even if you’d died in a car crash.
Jajce is made of giant Lego, as if a mighty pair of hands had assembled the bricks after reading the instructions on the back of a toy packet. Nothing is real, except the waterfall perhaps, which is massive and terrifying. You spend the visit at a restaurant sitting outside on a terrace sheltered from the rain. Džemo tells a story about a lovesick young girl who jumped from the top of the waterfall on account of her boyfriend. As soon as he found out what had happened he climbed up and jumped off the waterfall too. Only it turned out that the girl had somehow miraculously survived her terrifying leap and so, making an appearance in Jajce the following day, she asked people if they had seen her boyfriend and they told her about his suicide. The poor girl’s despair was so great that she went and jumped off the waterfall again, killing herself this time.
Nobody believes Džemo’s story about the star-crossed lovers. You ask him why the young man had not turned up alive and kicking after his jump. You simply can not understand how a woman, a member of the frailer sex, as it were, could survive an ordeal like that, while a strong young man perished. You challenge Džemo to jump off the waterfall in order to see which of you survive. He declines.
Džemo refers to the labyrinth under Jajce. Once inside its network of corridors, he says, you can never get out again. Apparently it’s where they throw schoolboys who smoke in the toilets. How terrifying! You have never smoked a cigarette, but what if somebody jumped to the wrong conclusion and threw you into the underground dungeon anyway? Wouldn’t it be horrible to spend the rest of your life wandering in darkness?
You visit a museum with portraits of national heroes. This is where Comrade Tito made Yugoslavia. You ask Džemo if Tito also made Jajce. The old man replies, “Yes and no – which is to say, he didn’t, but he might as well have.” You can’t understand Džemo’s answer. Comrade Tito, you imagine, was the only person in the world strong enough to assemble the Lego bricks above the waterfall. Džemo’s “he didn’t, but he might as well have” stinks, just like his hip-flask.
You eat a meal in the restaurant. You have shish-kebab, but in the bus on the way home you throw up. Never mind, you’d enjoyed eating it.
It is already dark outside; but no Fiat overtakes the bus, which doesn’t stop – and nobody dies. Džemo doesn’t talk of accidents any more. He talks about something else, probably equally untrue. Or perhaps it is true just for a moment before you close your eyes and fall asleep only to wake up when the sky is red, like a burning roof over the lights of Sarajevo.
TWO:
A Reconstruction of Events
Cactus
She was always afraid of missing the beautiful and important things in life. She traveled a lot, but more often she panicked because she was stuck at home. For some reason she always imagined that real happiness and pleasure lay elsewhere. As a result she was forever thinking up new ways of stopping time and grasping that crystal moment when life becomes a dream or a fairy tale.
Suddenly, at the end of December 1990, she told me she longed to spend New Year’s Eve on the island of Hvar with a bunch of people I didn’t know. In her enthusiasm she managed to present her longing in terms of it being just a good idea. I was somewhat taken aback, but my objections only made her depressed, so I finally accepted the plan as if it were a joint one. We got together at Marijindvor
the day before New Year’s Eve. It was early in the morning; the trams were not yet running. I was introduced to some rather decadent men and women in evening dress, which I tend to associate with late nights and drunken parties. A dozen of us, plus a load of suitcases and a more or less hyperactive boxer dog, squeezed into three cars. The convoy set off, with two VW Golfs in front and a wreck of a Citroën 2cv following behind. In the old banger were the two of us, a bald engineering student, his ugly fat girlfriend and the boxer dog. The car seemed to be held together by the sort of brown tape used to wrap parcels. Not surprisingly there was an icy draft blowing from all sides and our feet almost sank through the floor. As we crawled agonizingly along the road toward the south, the fat girl talked about French perfumes and the dog kept farting noisily. On each occasion I smiled fondly at my girlfriend and made some lighthearted remark, trying as hard as I could to make her think I was enjoying myself. The 2cv inched up the Ivan mountain at about ten miles per hour until Konjic, where it spluttered a couple of times and then finally came to a standstill. The flatulent dog broke wind once again and started to bark excitedly. We got out of the car and waited for the others who were in the Volkswagens to come to our rescue. Then we began to discuss strategy or, at any rate, how to redistribute the extra passengers among the two vehicles that were still on the road. Who was going to go where? It was impossible to decide. No matter which combination of humans, suitcases and flatulent animals was proposed, my girlfriend and I always ended up being the odd ones out. And so when at last it had been decided who would continue the journey by train and who by car, I put my hand on her shoulder and whispered, “Why don’t we just go back?”
Unexpectedly she didn’t look at me in a reproachful way. She merely shrugged and heaved a weary sigh.
I said, “Who’ll tell them?”
“You do it. After all, you’re the man.”
“It’ll sound better coming from you. They’re your friends. Besides, if I say it they’ll only get the wrong idea and think we’re annoyed about something.”
I was right, of course, and in the end she made the announcement. She just said that we were going back to Sarajevo. It’s funny, I always had the knack of entrusting unpleasant tasks (and pleasant ones!) to somebody else.
We had to wait another two and a half hours before the train was ready to depart, and so we huddled together in the cold and empty hotel lounge, watching each other and swapping playful embraces.
“What a pity!” I lied.
She blamed herself for ruining my New Year’s celebration, but with my kisses and with other masculine trickery I somehow managed to convince her that nothing had been ruined.
“I’m sorry about the presents.”
I always like receiving gifts, so I insisted that we perform the ritual in Konjic. At first she resisted because the circumstances did not seem festive enough. She was still hoping for that crystal moment. But I’ve already told you about my powers of persuasion.
She carefully opened her backpack and even more carefully pulled out a box displaying the logo of a well-known brand of cognac.
“Open it!” she said.
The box was light so it obviously didn’t contain a bottle. That would have been a dumb kind of present anyway. Inside the box was a mysterious object wrapped beautifully in white paper. She gestured with her hand and so I unwrapped the gift, only to reveal a common garden pot holding a tiny cactus about the size of a newborn baby’s thumb.
I had never told her that I hated indoor plants, mostly because they demand attention and routine. You have to think about them all the time and I can’t even think about other people, let alone plants. I remember that when grandmother died all the plants in my room withered. I felt sad even though I hated them.
I smiled and kissed my girlfriend, uttering a few sentimental words. As soon as I had convinced her that I was sincere, I gave her my presents, a bottle of Chanel No. 5 (which, of course, I’d bought thinking of Marilyn) and a collection of essays by Susan Sontag about photography. I had to give her the perfume as well because she was always suspicious of my taste in literature, no doubt believing, and perhaps justly, that I was usually thinking of myself, instead of her, when I recommended a book.
I placed the cactus in a reasonably sunlit corner of my room, next to the icon of St. Vlach and a pebble with a hole in the middle which I keep because they say it brings good luck. A few months later the war in Croatia broke out; the film about Segelj, the conflicts at Plitvice, Borovo Selo . . .
I watered the cactus regularly at five-day intervals and was careful not to move it. Perhaps I remembered something that my grandmother told me a long time ago. She said that you should never move a cactus. It has to stay in one place – and only one place – not that it really matters what kind of place it is, or even whether it’s the best place available, just as long as it belongs there. In other words, I really looked after that cactus, which is to say, it kind of surprised me that I didn’t harm it in any way.
Instead of dying, as you’d expect of your average cute plant that is brought out by shopkeepers for special occasions, the cactus began to grow, spreading its spikes, which were soft like a baby hedgehog’s, getting fatter and tilting at the sun. The heliotrope was no longer the size of an infant’s thumb, and so whenever my girlfriend came to visit me in my room, she was pleased to see that the cactus had not suffered from my usual negligence.
“It’s beginning to look like you!” she said.
“The cactus?”
“Well, not like you exactly, but like a part of your anatomy.”
I must admit that such a comparison had not occurred to me. But from that moment onwards I couldn’t help seeing things from her point of view. The cactus became a pleasurable detail in our lives, the sort of detail that makes a love affair worth remembering.
In the days when Vukovar was being destroyed, I felt something like icy breath down my neck. Life became a very serious matter, different from anything that I had known before. I felt that any mistake could prove fatal, although I didn’t know how or why.
At the end of April I moved into the cellar. A mortar bomb had struck the crown of the apple tree. My windows were shattered, a piece of shrapnel, no bigger than a grain of rice, smashed the Austrian antique mirror on the dressing table next to the cupboard. The glass cracked in a pattern that was as regular as the lines of longitude and latitude on a map of the world. But the phones were still working and so I tried to tell my girlfriend. She didn’t understand what had happened. She probably thought I’d gone a little soft in the head.
Every five days I would go upstairs to water the cactus. It was now leaning toward the Chetnik positions. I often glanced nervously up at the sun, expecting a bullet at any moment. In the cellar, however, it felt safe and warm, even though it was damp and, let’s say, intimate. There was always a smell of rotting potatoes, and the coal dust made your eyes smart. But I couldn’t have been cosier in the womb.
My girlfriend came to believe that death only happened in Sarajevo. She became increasingly sentimental and almost distant. She asked me if I wanted to emigrate with her to New Zealand. I replied that I was happy in the cellar and that, in any case, New Zealand was a long way away, and I didn’t think I’d be happy Down Under. She never asked about the cactus. I didn’t like to mention it.
People change when they’re alone in the dark. It happens imperceptibly. I heard a story about a man who went to bed as usual one night and by the morning his hair had turned completely grey. Yet he didn’t remember having a nightmare or bad dream. At the time I lived in desperate fear of the cold.
One morning – it was day five – I woke to discover that all the water in the flat had frozen up. Only then did it occur to me that cacti have difficulty withstanding the cold. I took the plant downstairs and placed it in the cellar opposite the stove that we used to stoke with coal dust. Not too close, not too far away. In the precise spot that I reckoned would suit both a cactus and a human being. The next day
it was drooping over the side of the pot. How was it drooping? Well, put it this way, the tip was pointing downwards as if the sun was under the ground. I watered the cactus for the last time but I realized that it was too late. The end was nigh!
The war has taught me how to calm my emotions and nerves artificially. Nowadays, in conversation, whenever somebody raises a topic that I find upsetting, I have a sense of this tiny red light automatically switching on inside me, not unlike the one you press to remove the background noise on a tape. And after that, I don’t feel anything. But when I think about that cactus, the light refuses to come on, and nothing else helps. It’s a minor consequence, like a bitter cyanide capsule. But – do you remember? – many years ago lots of people got upset because they found out horses died standing up. By contrast, I get sad just thinking about the way a cactus dies, like the boy in Goethe’s poem. It’s not important, mind you, except as a warning to avoid detail in life. That’s all.
Theft
In our garden there was an apple tree whose mouth-watering fruits could be seen from the upstairs window of the house next door. Our neighbors, Rade and Jela, used to go to the market to buy apples for their two young daughters – but it was no use. However delicious, other apples were never as tempting as the ones that were visible from the family’s window. Each morning, as soon as Rade and Jela left for work, the girls would jump over the garden fence in order to pick the overripe fruit. Usually I chased them away by throwing mud or stones at them. In other words, I defended my property, but as a matter of principle and not because I was particularly tempted by these or indeed by any other apples. Seeking revenge, the younger girl told my mother that I had got an “F” in math. As a result, my mother paid an unexpected visit to my school and was able to confirm the truth of my enemy’s allegation. She spent the next few days torturing me with quadratic equations. All those x’s and y’s made life intolerable, so I decided to get back at our next-door neighbors in any way I could. Here’s what I did: I found myself a hiding place and spent the whole day waiting for the thieves. Eventually they turned up, as I knew they would, and that’s when I jumped out of the bushes and grabbed my enemy by the hair and began to drag her toward our house. I planned to lock her in the pantry until my mother returned home from work in order to punish her. But the little girl resisted fiercely, screaming and struggling. In the end she escaped, leaving only a handful of hair and a tiny piece of scalp in my hand. I was furious and ran inside, locking the door behind me. A short while later, I heard Rade screaming under the window that he was going to kill me. He must have repeated the threat to my mother, because she responded in kind. Predictably, they spent three or four hours trading insults at the window. My mother called Rade a gangster from Kalinovik. He called her a shameless hussy.
Sarajevo Marlboro Page 2