Mujesira wiped the dog shit off the carpet and rearranged the furniture in her room, giving the place a feminine touch. At least she helped to liven up Ćipo’s dreary routine – or that’s how it looked from the outside. And yet, for some reason, he refused to have anything to do with her. He never spoke to her, for instance, and at the end of a fortnight, when she just happened to ask him the most innocent of questions, he responded very angrily, with a look of hatred in his eyes. Mujesira put up with her landlord the way you put up with boorish men. She didn’t ask for any explanation as other women might have done. She had no idea about Ćipo’s background: where did he come from? Did he own the flat? Did he work? If not, how could he afford to furnish the flat so beautifully and expensively? Late at night, when she was frightened or panicking, she couldn’t help wondering whose side Ćipo was on. Was he one of us or one of them? Could he be a secret sniper or a spy? She couldn’t understand why he guarded even the most trivial details about himself, or why he refused to let her know his real name: it certainly wasn’t Ćipo, because such a name didn’t exist among Serbs, Croats or Muslims. She hoped to inveigle her way into his affections by means of giving him coquettish smiles of performing little acts of kindness, but Ćipo didn’t change at all. He was as bilious as ever.
“Am I in your way?” she asked one morning. “I’ve been here rather a long time. Perhaps it’s time I should move out.”
Ćipo looked at her with contempt and spat sideways. Through clenched teeth he mumbled, “Where would you go, you sad thing?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer before leaving the flat. Mujesira was stunned. She considered various explanations and devised a few sly womanly tricks in order to soften him up, with a view to discovering his true nature, or, at any rate, the one he shows off to his friends, if he had any, or the other men and women in his life. After all, she thought, he must have come from somewhere. He must have a mother and father, a wife and children. But when Ćipo returned to the flat in the afternoon, she didn’t have the nerve to speak up. She was afraid that if she asked the wrong question Ćipo would go mental, and anything could happen then. Who knows? It was not inconceivable that her world might fall apart again, quite unexpectedly and for no obvious reason, as it had done several months before in Foča.
In the hallway Ćipo touched Mujesira by accident as he went past. She froze and almost stumbled, but he just turned and gave her the usual cold stare. One day, while he was out, she sneaked a look at his room. There was a large crucifix on the wall and a few other religious items. So that’s it, she told herself, and for the next week or so she imagined that she knew everything there was to know about Ćipo. He was a Catholic, then. No wonder he hated her. Mind you, the Catholics are preferable to the Orthodox. At least they invite you into their house instead of killing you. So what if they give you nasty looks?
For a long time Ćipo thought about what to do with his Muslim lodger. She struck him as being very beautiful yet foreign. Before the war he would never have met such a doll in the underground cellars that he used to frequent. Yet here she was, in wartime, in his aunt’s flat, like a gift from God, an open invitation to lead a better life. On the one hand, the situation was very promising; on the other, it was kind of disgusting. Somehow the girl from Foča had got under his skin, like an omen prophesying dire and painful calamity. He wanted to touch her, and yet he had begun to feel that even the slightest physical contact would expose him to irreparable loss and drive him over the edge into madness or suicide, or – worse still – into the Jewish cemetery to be gunned down by the Chetnik sniper.
Often, at bedtime, he would stare at the crucifix on the wall and repeat over and over again, “I’m here, God, but I’m no use to myself or to her. Help us!” He liked to think his speech had the makings of a prayer.
Toward the end of summer a mortar fell right outside the front door and blew off Mujesira’s legs. She was dying for two whole days. But even when the doctors gave up the fight to save her life,Ćipo kept repeating in a voice that echoed around the hospital courtyard, “Come back, my Muslim doll!” Everybody watched his despair. They speculated about his relationship with the dying girl, and pretty soon gave him the nickname “Muslim Doll.”
Seconds Out
The tram drivers always rang the bell as they went around the corner by the Medical Institute. Perhaps it was just to warn anything that was coming the other way, or perhaps it was the memory of an earlier accident, or perhaps they were just superstitious. Nobody paid much attention to the ringing trams: the occupants of a neighboring block of apartments had stopped registering the noise long ago; it was like the ticking of a grandfather clock. Nor were the cats on the wall of the army warehouse roused from their summer naps. So the years went by and the sound of the tram bells continued to be heard over the flat land that stretched all the way to Marijindvor and the stop at the junction of Titova and Tvrtkova.
The noise didn’t bother the regulars at the Kvarner, a tiny bar in which a handful of relics induced cirrhosis of the liver by drinking large bottles of Sarajevsko or Nikšićko beer and Badel’s brandy. One day, Meho the Paratrooper showed up in the Kvarner with an old pal from his days in military service, a retired boxer known as Mišo the Heart from the Slavija club in Banja Luka. As with any newcomer, the regulars welcomed Mišo the Heart with two unspoken questions: how much money does he have in his pocket, and will he disrupt the atmosphere of the Kvarner? Because real drinkers seldom get into fights or smash things up. They prefer silence, peace and contemplation. Any sudden movement can provoke hard drinkers. Even a curse uttered too loudly is enough to make them grab a bottle and start breaking the furniture. That’s why the tabloid press always gives the wrong account of drunken punch-ups. All a drunk really wants to do is protect his constitutional right to have one more for the road.
About five minutes after Mišo the Heart walked into the Kvarner, the first tram went past the Medical Institute and rang its bell. Seconds out! Instinctively, Mišo put his fists up like a boxer right in front of Velija the Footballer, who, no less instinctively, grabbed hold of an ashtray and whacked the boxer in the face. Meho the Paratrooper jumped up to defend his old comrade. Mirso the Ballbearing fell off his chair in surprise. Lojze the Professor exclaimed, “Crucifix and cruciality!” Zoka the Barman dropped a glass.
Then Mišo stood up and grabbed Velija the Footballer by the arm. “Sorry, pal,” he mumbled. “It was an accident.”
Velija looked at Mišo doubtfully for a moment. “That’s all right,” he said. “It can happen.”
To make things better, Meho the Paratrooper bought a round of drinks for everybody. However, before the drinks were poured, another tram came around the corner ringing its bell.
Mišo the Heart glanced anxiously at Meho the Paratrooper. “Hey – let’s get out of here,” he said. “These trams really fuck me up.”
“We can’t leave yet,” replied his friend. “Don’t you remember, I’ve just ordered more drinks?”
Mišo the Heart shuffled nervously in his chair as Zoka the Barman doled out the beers. A few sips later, yet another tram could be heard – seconds out! Once again Mišo the Heart put up his hands like a boxer. Everybody in the bar was watching, and they all laughed, even Velija the Footballer, who apparently hadn’t laughed since the cup match in 1951 when he poked out the eye of Pandurović from Poleter FC in the heat of the moment. It was obvious that everybody liked the washed-out boxer who had nothing left in the world except the memory of a bell. Just for that, Mišo was bought another beer.
The next day he turned up at the Kvarner by himself. The regulars greeted him with looks of delight. Velija the Footballer clapped him on the shoulder. Zoka the Barman, who was wiping the glasses, called out, “Hey you, Heart-Attack, seen any more trams lately?”
Mišo the Heart looked at the barman with mock horror and ordered a beer. When the first tram passed by, Mišo was ready for the bell, and so he just raised his middle finger, but the next one caught him by
surprise. The more beer he drank the faster and more confident his reactions became. The regulars, who had deduced as much, kept on buying Mišo beers. His reflexes became part of the daily routine. Only Lojze the Professor doubted that a person could fail to get used to the trams within a few months.
It hardly mattered in the end. As far as the Kvarner regulars were concerned, Mišo the Heart was like the cuckoo in a clock announcing each hour. On days when he didn’t show up at the bar, the others felt a kind of emptiness; it was as if they were missing out on something vital and important. Time slipped through your fingers when Mišo wasn’t around. Beer lost its flavor. You couldn’t even get drunk on brandy. Empty pockets and impermanence, not to mention the coming threat of war, these were the only certainties. And yet when Mišo the Heart turned up again the next day, his pals awaited the first tram with a sense of unbridled joy and optimism.
On the sixth of April 1992, a notice was pinned to the window of the Kvarner announcing the death of Lojze the Professor, and there was also news of the first shells to be dropped on Jarčedole. That day the regulars talked more than they drank. With a clear head, Edo the Engineer, Velija the Footballer, Meho the Paratrooper, Mirso the Ballbearing and Stevo the Thief analyzed the political situation. Que sera, sera, it was decided. But Mato the Villain observed that Lojze the Professor would probably be the last of the boozers to die from cirrhosis in the traditional way. The others shrugged their shoulders.
Just then Mišo the Heart walked through the door. He sat down at his usual table and lit a cigarette. “This match will last a hundred and one rounds,” he said through clenched teeth. “Geddit? I won’t be KO’d by trams or upper-cuts or your piss-taking. This is what’ll kill me!”
He beat the left side of his chest three times and looked meaningfully at everybody present.
“Mišo isn’t mad,” he went on. “And the heart doesn’t have biceps without reason. I know what you all think when I come down here. If you let me in the door again, it won’t be Mišo the Heart any more, but Mišo the Chetnik. Fuck you all! It’s only just occurred to you where you are and what’s going on, but while the soldiers were sharpening their knives, you fought to buy me drinks. Now it will be Mišo’s fault that you didn’t catch the last train out of here. Go on, smash my head – so you won’t have to think about it later. And fuck you all!”
Mišo the Heart covered his face with his hands. The others were silent. Then Zoka the Barman mumbled awkwardly, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mišo, I’m a Serb too.”
When he didn’t respond, Velija the Footballer stood up and was about to say something to Mišo, whom he’d already patted on the shoulder. But it was too late – the boxer jumped at Velija and delivered an almighty punch, the likes of which Bosnia had never seen before. Unsurprisingly, Velija the Footballer collapsed in a heap on the floor.
“Please, Mišo, don’t,” pleaded Meho the Paratrooper, on the verge of tears. “It’s a dreadful shame.”
“What is, you baboon?” Mišo replied.
“If you don’t know, what’s the point in my telling you? But think of the trams – and think of the rest of us. It’s a great shame when you talk like this.”
Mišo the Heart looked alarmed, as if he really had suffered a heart attack. He fell back into his chair, white as a sheet, with an utterly vacant expression on his face. The incident was over in a couple of minutes. It wasn’t even long enough for a tram to go by.
Zoka the Barman poured brandy into a glass and took it over to Mišo’s table. For a while nobody else moved and the bar-room was as quiet as a grave. Mišo began to wipe away his tears – and then a crowd of people gathered round his chair. But nobody could think of anything to say. Outside, in the distance, you could hear machine-gun fire and the sound of explosions. Suddenly you noticed that the trams were passing by without ringing the bell. It was as though each soul in the room was passing from one body to another and changing into something that was painful and unrecognizable.
That night the regulars parted without a word. The following day a shell exploded in front of the Kvarner, breaking its window. The local hooligans climbed into the bar and ran amok, destroying the place and stealing the booze. Most of Zoka’s customers never even came back to see what was left of the Kvarner. Perhaps they moved on to other bars or ended up in another story.
The ex-boxer from Slavija in Banja Luka was shot on the bridge by the First High School. Some witnesses claim the bullet went straight through Mišo’s heart. Others say he was struck in the head. The daily newspapers wrote about yet another well-respected athlete who had been cut down by the enemy’s hand. And that’s all, folks, except to add that most of the trams in the depot were hit by incendiary bombs and are now burned-out wrecks.
Slobodan
It was 1944 – and the future was uncertain. Bogdan and Mira spent the nights having long and painful discussions until it was finally decided to terminate the pregnancy. By pulling strings, Bogdan managed to get an appointment with a German doctor who performed abortions in secret for the rich women of Sarajevo. The operation went ahead as planned, but Mira’s belly continued to grow. By the time the couple realized that the fetus had escaped the scalpel’s blade, it was too late. Months of anxiety ensued: would the baby survive? Or would it be abnormal? Would it have two arms and two legs – and two heads?
On the day that Sarajevo was liberated Mira gave birth to a boy whom the couple named Slobodan, which means “Free.” As the last German units withdrew from the city, abandoning their weapons and their self-esteem, the newborn baby started to cry like any other infant. Mira gleefully changed his first dirty diaper as a story about the parish priest who had been lynched in the street was doing the rounds. The boy smiled for the first time the day the last Chetniks were captured in Vučija Luka and led in handcuffs through the city. It seemed that Bogdan and Mira’s anxieties had proved to be unfounded. Perhaps God had intended the birth of Slobodan to herald a more prosperous age in which comradely hugs and outstretched arms would no longer be used to hide the fist of fear.
As the first wave of proletarian labor camps were being set up, it became clear that something was in fact wrong with the boy. He picked up some things more easily than other children of the same age, but other things he failed to understand. To begin with, he would cry inconsolably for a long time, or withdraw into his shell for days and just stare at the corner of his room. As he always came around in the end, his parents were able to convince themselves that his tantrum had just been a passing phase, one of many peculiar childhood illnesses whose real cause is unknown but which sooner or later vanish without any trace.
On the first day at school Slobodan had a nervous breakdown. He sat on his desk and howled, gripping the top of his chair until his fingers broke. “Sleep heals everything,” his mother observed, but the infant woke up in a similar mood the next day and the day after that. He responded warmly to any kindness but fiercely resisted his parents’ attempts to send him back to school. The very idea provoked a series of long monotonous wails that only died down when poor exhausted Slobodan fell into a sweaty sleep. The rest of the time he would only talk about subjects that interested him at that moment. Anything else he reacted to with a look of bewilderment or silence. For days, whenever Bogdan tried to teach his son how to do up his shoelaces, Slobodan fumbled clumsily with his fingers or tied false knots. He just couldn’t master the three simple moves. And yet he was able to remember any conversation that had taken place in the family, and often took great pride in recalling, word for word, everything that had been said over the Sunday lunch table the previous weekend. Also, he could tell you whose godfather had stepped on a sea urchin in Promajna last year, and which of the neighbors had been discovered with stockpiles of flour in 1946. As he grew up, the boy served as a kind of aide-mémoire to his parents, utterly incapable as he was of doing anything but repeat conversations with unnerving accuracy in a slightly raised and monotonous voice.
In the mid-1950s, Bogdan died of
heartbreak and the unforgiving memory of that night in the autumn of 1944 when he agreed to let Mira resolve all the uncertainties of life by having an abortion. His widow continued to bring up Slobodan on her own, and the boy soon grew to be over six feet tall, though he never became any more independent and was still unable to look after himself. To this day, many inhabitants of Sarajevo remember Mira as a smart old lady, always immaculately groomed, with an intelligent and attractive face. But wherever she went she was followed at a distance of three paces by her gigantic son, whose appearance was no less immaculate and polished than his mother’s. In other words, he was fine as long as he didn’t open his mouth. But the minute he started talking it became apparent that Slobodan was very strange. For instance, he had already sprouted a few grey hairs when he came to the attention of Meho the Shoemaker, who looked over the rim of his spectacles and commented, “That young man comes with his own sell-by date. I bet he won’t outlive his mother.”
During the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984, Mira quietly and gracefully departed this world. Soon afterwards her poor distraught son began to stop passersby in the street in order to ask irrelevant questions about their family trees. As a rule, people were happy to cooperate with this idiotic stranger and tried to answer his questions patiently. They would tell Slobodan everything, and he would commit the information to memory, filing away personal details inside his head only to regurgitate the miscellaneous data at the next encounter. Slobodan had total recall when it came to other people’s faces. For instance, he would never mix up a family from the region of Lika, say, with its counterpart in Podrinje. Nobody understood better than Slobodan the frustrations suffered by the city’s matriarchs when their daughters got engaged to unbelievers, and nobody was more tactful in extending his condolences.
Sarajevo Marlboro Page 5