One day the authorities in Vareš put him in the back of a truck full of people from Kakanj and told him to go to Croatia. The policeman gave him a cynical smile and remarked that “They have superior methods over there,” and that they would inevitably force him to divulge what he had been through. He was afraid of being harassed at Serb checkpoints, or being stopped and threatened or searched, but he was even more afraid when he stepped off the lorry in Čapljina and was approached by a television reporter who stuck a microphone under his nose and turned a spotlight on him. He asked the very same question that had come up again and again in Vareˇs, but on this occasion it was asked in such a confident voice that Rudo L. imagined the reporter already knew the answer. But who is privy to a vow? The person who makes it, the Lord, and perhaps the devil, too. Who cares if the reporter knew the secret? Rudo L. made up his mind to to surrender his soul to the journalist. He told him that the Chetniks had stopped the lorry on the way to Croatia, and the disappointed reporter immediately vanished. Rudo L. interpreted the episode as a divine omen, a reward for his silence.
The next day he saw the sea for the first time and took his first boat trip. The water was deeper than any water Rudo L. had ever imagined, and the boat was larger and more crowded than anything he had seen on tv. Rudo L. couldn’t understand why the boat didn’t sink and how it floated gently on the surface like a walnut shell. It was a sign – real tangible proof – that miracles exist and that a long time ago St. Francis really did walk on water, unsinkably like a boat packed with hundreds of people. Even though he was a long way from the Colony, Rudo L. was a happy man again.
His daughter met him in Rijeka, and he told her, if only by way of a sign or a hint, something of what he’d been through and what temptations he had endured. Her eyes filled with tears as she listened to him. She didn’t ask him why he’d left Kakanj, but he told her anyway that he had made a vow.
It was a coincidence that not very far from Rijeka was a mining town called Labin. Perhaps it had a colony too – or perhaps not. It wasn’t as though Rudo L. needed to know anyway. He was ninety years old, and it was too late, even for a Bosnian, to pretend to be alive.
Declension
Hypnotized by the rhythm, the young boy had been declining the Latin word terra for the last fifteen minutes. He gently swayed in the middle of the room, happy and vacant, and just as handsome as a Buddhist monk.
His stepfather was chain-smoking cigarettes and rewinding the videotape of a massacre he had filmed in central Bosnia. The speededup images of suffering and tears played on your nerves, dispelling the memory of emotion. He had to think of a commentary in a hurry in order to dispatch the report to the United States the next day. Briefly he thought it would be a good idea just to record the sound of the boy declining terra, terra, terram, terrae . . . and blood.
“Dino, why don’t you go and study in your room?”
“Can’t you see, Zoka, that I’m doing my Latin?”
“Can’t you go to your room and do something else?”
“I’ve done everything else.”
“Hey, kid, unless you push off to your room to study, I’ll play you a video of Tudjman’s speech in Sisak.”
The boy looked at his stepfather with dismay. He stopped in the middle of a particular declension and went to his room. The stepfather switched the video off, lit another cigarette and exhaled the smoke happily. He enjoyed the silence under the white ceiling, attempting to be here, in Zagreb, if only for a moment, what he used to be in Zenica. A successful man, that is, and full of himself.
After ten minutes the boy came back into the room. He closed the door after him but didn’t take another step, like somebody who had come into a rather daunting office. He remained silent.
Calmly at first, and then with irritation, the stepfather looked him straight in the eye.
“Zoka, are there any horrible pictures in this speech?”
The stepfather scratched his head and laughed, then he got up. He spent a long time fixing his tie in front of the mirror.
“Zoka, do we need anything from the shops?”
“I don’t know . . . No, we don’t . . . Ask your mom.”
“Do you need any beer?”
Another look, as in westerns, right in the eye.
“What is it that you want, Dino?”
“You know, Zoka, I’m very grateful to you. You bought me shoes, and everything. I mean, I have a pretty good idea of your financial situation, and so on. But of course I’m still young, I don’t understand everything, so . . .”
“Yes, Dino, and –?”
“You’re going out now, aren’t you, Zoka?”
“So?”
“I’d like to watch the cartoons on the satellite channel.”
The stepfather put his jacket on and arranged his greased-back hair in front of the mirror. He went out in his slippers. Leaning on the doorway, he put his shoes on. Then he swayed like an old drunkard and pushed against the walls with his thumbs. The boy laughed. The other winked knowingly and went downstairs.
The following day. The boy goes to church with his best friend. A mass is being held, the hall is filled with black and pious figures. The boys sit down in an empty pew and open their mouths in time to the prayer. Play-back, of course, amateurish and inexperienced. The words are becoming more and more complicated and confused, and the boys can no longer follow the rhythm as they lip-sync. Toward the end of mass, the priest approaches the boys and takes them to his room. He asks their names. They timidly tell him what they are called and pull their sleeves over their sweaty hands. As if they were guilty. The priest smiles and asks them where they’re from. From Zenica and Prijedor.
The priest puts his hand in a drawer and pulls out pencils, notebooks and sweets. He pats them on the shoulder. They feel uncomfortable.
“You know what, you two really don’t have to go to church, to mass and such things. When you’re not well, when you’re sad or when you get frightened you can just say to yourself, ‘God, help me,’ and everything will be all right.”
The boys leave the church in silence. They don’t speak until they get home but they part with a few words to show that everything is, as it were, normal.
At home the stepfather tries to explain that not everyone has to go to classes of religious instruction because not everyone has the same beliefs. Of course, the stepfather is, like the priest, a Catholic. The boy, or course, isn’t. He tells him that a girl at school, for whom he has a soft spot, often corrects his pronunciation. The stepfather opens his arms, laughs and says that women are like that. The boy goes to his room, saying that he has to study more Latin.
He locks himself in the room. The stepfather and mother knock on the door. He tells them he’s got important things to do. He stays in his room for two whole hours. He emerges ready to go out, with a hockey helmet on his head. He’s going to make a snowman. The stepfather and mother go into his room. They try to smell his secret. They look under the bed. They flick through the boy’s notebooks. But they can’t find anything. Disappointed, they look at each other. The mother puts away various things that have been scattered around the room. The stepfather talks some pedagogical nonsense.
Later. The mother found some pages that had been torn out of a notebook. The boy was writing to his grandfather in Zenica. If it had been anybody else’s son, the sentences would have looked stupid and banal. As it was, they were perfect to cry over. The mother told the stepfather about the contents of the letters. He nodded and later told his friends about them. He translated the words for American editors, and they replied that they were wonderful and moving. The mother returned the boy’s letters to where she had found them. She didn’t say anything. She was just a bit more affectionate toward him from then on.
The boy made a snowman in the courtyard out of the remaining snow. He carved out the president’s face. He didn’t make a nose out of a carrot, because he thought that was stupid. Nobody had a carrot on their face. Especially not the president.
The Photograph
Our idea of love is not letting other people steal your woman.
Duško Trifunović
I don’t know what it’s like anywhere else, but in Europe it’s like this: Rick is unhappy because Ilse loves Laszlo. He knows that she loves him too, and yet she remains faithful to Laszlo. Rick wishes she’d be faithful to him instead – because it’s not enough to know that she loves him. No doubt you have heard and read the same story, with a few variations, a thousand times. The key to true love is faithfulness. You don’t need to think about it much – it is taken for granted. Mind you, if it wasn’t for faithfulness, there probably wouldn’t be any unhappiness in love. Nor any happiness either.
Senka and Mašo were often cited in the neighborhood as love’s young dream. She was unable to have any children, but he didn’t hold that against her as other Balkan husbands might have done. Senka worked in the Post Office and Mašo was a plumber. She always used to refer to him as “my Mašo”, and he to her as “my Senka.” Their story would not have been of any interest if the war had not broken out. We don’t usually find stories about long and happy relationships very interesting.
As soon as the shelling began Mašo joined the Territorial Army. Senka was not very pleased about this, but she realized that there was no other way of preserving their one-bedroom Eden. The very thought of leaving town scared her. A different place would mean different circumstances; it would be a story involving different characters.
One day a strange man in uniform with muddy boots knocked on the door. He hugged Senka and whispered to her that Mašo had been killed. He left a paper bag with Mašo’s possessions on the table – a hanky, the case for his spectacles and his wallet. After the first few days of mourning, which are usually more ceremonious than sorrowful, and which demand a certain presence of mind to avoid the compassionate gazers who thrive on any sign of tears, Senka took out all the things that had been returned to her instead of Mašo. She touched each object in turn and finally opened the wallet. Inside she found fifty Deutschmarks – an amount that any cautious man perhaps would always carry with him – and odd scraps of paper with phone numbers and notes about plumbing. In the little plastic window was a photograph of Senka. The only purpose of the plastic window is to give a glimpse of your intimate life to strangers at supermarket checkouts. But the wallet also had a secret invisible compartment. Senka peeked into it and found a photograph of an unknown woman. On the back was written, “Always yours, Mirsada.” The handwriting was flowery with many loops. The next day Senka told the whole neighborhood what those “bastards from the brigade had done to her.” Angrily, then bitterly and in the end tearfully, she showed the incriminating photograph to the women, who tut-tutted and shook their heads. They consoled her as she was leaving their houses and then immediately began to gossip about her. On the whole, everyone, except of course Senka, was pleased to discover that Mašo hadn’t been a saint. They secretly considered her pitiful for having revealed so publicly her shame, which she didn’t even acknowledge.
When, a fortnight or so later, the boys from the brigade came with a parcel for the wife of a dead comrade, she refused to open the door to them. She shouted at them through the door, making various threats and curses. When Senka declined the army handout, most of the neighbors just assumed that she had gone mad already. They pulled at the soldiers’ sleeves, trying to get them to leave the parcel, so that they could pass it on to Senka when she calmed down.
As time went by, the widespread compassion turned to ridicule. Nobody any longer wanted to hear her story about the inserted photograph, which had gradually acquired a thousand twists. On the other hand, Senka was always trying to come up with a story that would clear Mašo’s name. Each day she added new details. Yesterday’s reasons disappeared in a flash before today’s uncertainties. But the story about love’s young dream always triumphed in the end. Senka believed that she had to sacrifice everything, including her sanity. In this war-stricken town, deprived of hope, Senka had nothing to cling to but her story.
I don’t know what happened after that because I left Sarajevo. But perhaps the ending is not very important. Once again, faithfulness has been confirmed as the axiom of love, as something that is more important than love itself. But in any case, what transcends even the bounds of this story is our need to create a fable, or a context, to make sense of life and thus give it a purpose.
The people who write about the war in Bosnia without any thought of personal gain, or any wish to clamber over the bodies of the living and the dead in order to achieve success – a select few, in other words – are actually quite similar to Senka. Without any profit to themselves or others, they bravely seek to preserve an image of a world that has been shattered. Sometimes their unflinching descriptions or honest reports, not to mention their uncompromising points of view, offend public opinion. It is not unknown for such writings to be condemned as national treason by Orthodox believers. But in fact they are only vain attempts to discover a truth, a reason to exist. At a time when just about everything else has been lost of destroyed, faithfulness is the only thing left to believe in. When the time comes to write the history of Bosnia, only people like Senka will resist its lies.
Journey
You wake up in the middle of the night in a room that isn’t yours, with a view of a strange man’s rosy feet and the sound of heavy snoring. At first you can’t work out why you’re there. You shudder before the unfamiliar scene until you wake up completely. Then you remember what brought you there – it wasn’t entirely unpleasant circumstances – but your brain is already working away like a runaway engine and the memory of the night before seems unbearably distant. It is hard to deal with insomnia in a place where nothing belongs to you except your thoughts. The man on the other bed grunts contentedly, without any rhythm or melody, as though he will never stop. The night is long enough and reality is clear enough to let you run through your worst fears before morning – and then you wake up with gray hair. In this kind of situation, and only then, you realize that you are not self-sufficient and that you would be lost without all the various things, big and small, that, in the pause between dreams and journeys, mean life to you. When you’ve experienced a bout of insomnia, and particularly if there is a total stranger lying in the bed next to you, you don’t really want to travel ever again. In the morning you act the part of the distant stranger. You say goodbye coldly without exchanging telephone numbers or addresses. To the others you seem different from last night and from the previous days. You leave behind sober faces, a bungled attempt at friendship and an unclear, cloudy suspicion. Nobody knows, or should know, that you just wanted to return to a familiar world. Unknown places, new people, strange cities are interesting until you see how empty they are.
The Jurišić family cried a lot the night before they had to leave. Granddad, grandma, daughter and grandson. The old man looked at the unpainted ceiling and remembered the cans of paint that had been lying in the attic for two years. He began to sob. The old woman also shed a tear as she put away the coffee pot, thinking that she would never take it out again. The daughter kept on repeating that the most important thing was to stay alive, but the impact of her statement made her whimper. The grandson cried because everybody else was crying and because it seemed to be the thing to do. The convoy had already been postponed seven times, and so it was the eighth time the Jurišić family had woken up to the last morning and said goodbye to their home.
Each postponement brought a kind of relief but made the next last night even more difficult to bear. The sort of trivia that means nothing to ordinary people made the Jurišićs emotional. They absorbed dozens of memories and carried them in their souls like a heavy burden – it was much heavier than any suitcases or bags. Every day grandma Jurišić squeezed another little trinket into the cases for the journey: it was the most recent thing to provoke tears. Packed between the coats and shirts and shoes were lids from sugar bowls, spoons, used lighters, instru
ctions for the freezer, useless junk that was only valuable at that particular moment because it was part of what one thinks of as home, the part that isn’t needed on a journey.
The convoys were usually cancelled only after the passengers had gathered at the bus station. As a result, everybody had to drag the suitcases back home, running the gauntlet of neighbors looking out of their windows. But the Jurišić family was always smiling by that time. Only the little boy was unhappy, because yet again the adventure had failed to begin. The old man would open all the windows, as if the family was returning from a long journey, perhaps from its summer vacation, and he’d once again try to fix the permanently broken coffee grinder. The old woman used to complain that the Bosnian government wasn’t helping people to escape from the war zone when even the Chetniks were running convoys. Those no-good politicians were all the same, she’d say. The old man would put the coffee grinder down ceremoniously on the table and say, “Nothing’s the same and nobody’s the same – but you’re still the same old fool.” His wife would be quiet for five minutes and sulk for a little longer, then he’d go over to her, put his arms around her waist like he used to fifty years ago, and tenderly whisper, “We’ll go to the other world like the Omanovićs.” The Omanovićs were the old married couple from downstairs. They had been killed the previous year by a Serb mortar while they were listening to the news on the radio. The old woman would look at her husband and gently push him away, the way you push men away when they come out with silly love talk.
Sarajevo Marlboro Page 11