On the eighth attempt, the convoy did manage to get through, leaving the town behind; it was like somewhere utterly unattainable. The prospect of an unbesieged world stretched out before the Jurišićs. The old people silently stared into space. The daughter showed the grandson an oak, saying, “That’s an oak!” or a pine tree (“That’s a pine tree!”), or a cow, saying, “That’s a cow!” or the sea (“That’s the sea!”). The boy pressed his nose against the window, smearing circles on the glass.
In Split she said to him, “This is Split.”
He asked, “But where’s Sarajevo?”
The old man spoke for the first time. “Sarajevo is where it’s always been,” he said, “but we’re no longer there!”
The old woman began to cry again. The daughter dropped the bags and shouted angrily at him. The boy gave the others a puzzled look and asked for an ice cream.
Most of the things they had packed were useless, or at least the junk was. The Jurišićs laid it out on the floor of the room and wondered why they had brought it with them. The very next day they remembered all the things they should have brought instead. The trinkets they had left in Sarajevo were worth their weight in gold, unlike the trinkets packed in the suitcases. But it was impossible to go back and fetch anything. The familiar world had disappeared, and there was no help, at least not for those who remembered what it was like.
In fact the story about the Jurišićs has a happy ending. They are still alive – yes, all of them – and nothing unusual has befallen the family, not even anything I could use as a punchline. It was only worth putting down on paper because of all the wakeful nights in unfamiliar hotel rooms that bring you closer to home, to your own world. Calmly pay for your hotel room and go to the bar for another coffee. Exchange a few words with the barman and then relax . . . You are not one of those people who are constantly followed from one part of town to the other by a small yellow dog. There is no point in going back and trying to stroke the dog, because it would only run away. In any case, it always comes back when you start walking again.
Blind Man
The real argument only started when Zoran turned up with the scales he’d borrowed in the neighborhood. They placed the contraption in the middle of the dining-room table. At either end is a chair – one for Diana, the other for the boy – and in the corner of the room there is a huge pile of things: shirts, sweaters, shoes, bags, books, cassettes, figurines, sleeping bags, a hockey helmet, a Walkman, a baseball bat, a punctured soccer ball, an illustrated book about the forge at Zenica, a make-up bag, coats, a skiing jacket, a torch, a microphone, two alarm clocks, army cutlery, comics, a box with family photos, combs, sunglasses, towels (beach as well as bathroom), a wooden jewelry box, a red model Ferrari, seven toy soldiers, a briefcase with documents . . .
There is a large sheet of paper and a pencil in front of Diana. The boy, who feels as if he is about to sit a math exam, is cooling his sweaty hands on the veneer of the table. Zoran adjusts the scales.
“Diana,” he begins, “write: a woman’s thick sweater – half a kilo. The Travnik Chronicles and The Journey of Alija Djerzelez – also half a kilo; a man’s coat – five kilos; English dictionary – three and a half kilos; seven vests for the child – 250 grams.”
Three hours later, the weighing is over. The boy is still sitting motionless while Diana adds up the total. She puts the pen down on the paper, remains silent for a few seconds, and then sighs, “One hundred and seventeen kilos and 250 grams.”
Zoran takes an old pair of jeans and throws them into the other corner of the room. He goes for the toy soldiers but the boy yells. Zoran flinches as though he’d just touched a hot stove. Then he reaches for the sleeping bags.
“No!” says Diana. “You don’t know what it’ll be like there.”
“For goodness sake, woman, we’re not going there to sleep in sleeping bags.”
“No, they’ll be waiting for us in Lord Carrington’s villa and they’ll let us sleep in Bill Clinton’s bedroom. Don’t touch my sleeping bag, or the child’s. If you want to go ahead and freeze, that’s ok.”
Zoran sits down in the empty chair. He stretches his arms and puts his hands on his knees. Diana goes over to the pile and picks up The Travnik Chronicles with her left and and the Bible with her right.
“Choose!” she says.
Zoran gets up, angrily snatching the books. The boy starts to cry, knocks his chair over and then shuts himself in the bathroom. With all the shouting it’s difficult to make out the words. The argument is no longer about particular things and how much they weigh. It is clear that the man and the woman are reproaching each other for all the dirty looks and all the shit they’ve given each other during the last five years. By dawn they have calmed down. Hoarse and sweaty, with mechanical movements and a sort of numbness in their eyes, they start removing sweaters, books and shirts. The boy doesn’t come out of the bathroom, and they don’t give him a second thought until they start weighing things again. Zoran finds the boy asleep on the tiled floor. He takes him in his arms and gently carries him to bed. The grown-ups put the things into the bags without a word and check for the last time – sixty-six kilos, the exact amount they are allowed to take with them. It is already daylight when they go to bed. They don’t even look back at the pile of rejected things.
The boy is the first to leave the house, carrying two bags and with his hockey helmet hanging down his back like a cowboy hat. He is followed by Zoran and Diana with the cases. She gives the keys back to the landlord.
“The flat is clean, we’re going, there are some things in the living room, so if you want anything, help yourself. You can throw the rest away.”
The neighbors watch her go in silence. The landlord gives her a limp handshake. Diana responds in kind.
At the bus station the bus that will take the Bosnian refugees from Sarajevo to Vienna Airport stands apart as if it is being hidden. The diplomats from the American embassy call out names and write them down. Relatives and friends stand to one side and cry. A blond young man with a strong foreign accent keeps on repeating in an official tone of voice that the ones who are traveling should not mix with those staying behind. Three young men laugh and wave to a young woman who replies with a walking stick. One of them shouts, “Don’t cry, people, America is a big country!” Everyone laughs and, pleased with the reaction, the young man repeats his announcement.
An old Muslim woman with a scarf gets out of a taxi. She is followed by a younger woman who takes the arm of a man with bandages over his eyes. He is wearing dark glasses, and his clumsy movements suggest that he has only recently become blind. Two huge characters come up to him and hug him and kiss him on both cheeks. A rumor circulates that the blind man was the military commander of the last Bosnian town to be massacred. The crowd of onlookers makes way for the blind man and his friend. They go straight past the Americans and join the group of people who are waiting to leave. The blind man is saying something. He laughs, shakes hands and gives the traditional two kisses.
After saying a few goodbyes, the sorrow merges with boredom. Those about to leave and the people seeing them off begin to exchange almost perfunctory smiles. A joker begins to sing. “To hell with America and all its gold too, / Why do I need your picture when I haven’t got you . . .” There is no reaction, however.
At last the driver shows up, waving to the Americans, who begin to call out names. One by one the Bosnians climb on to the bus, sit down in their designated seats and glance back toward the farewell committee. People thought of the many things they’d forgotten to say to their relatives and friends. Each of them started mouthing words indecipherably through the window, or pulling faces and silently calling out to the others. When all the passengers had boarded the bus, the driver started up the engine. But then immediately he got out of the bus again and waddled over to the station as if he had no intention of driving anywhere.
Fifteen minutes later he came back, shook hands with each of the Americans and climbed
back on to the bus. The hydraulics made a farting noise and the door closed. The passengers stopped miming or lip-reading in mid-sentence and the bus moved off. The people left in the bus station waved, and as the bus went past they all turned. The young woman turned to the blind man, who, like a mechanical doll, waved toward the invisible sound of the engine, a sound that stank of gasoline and old fishing boats.
The farewell party broke up in silence. An old man with a beret was the last person to speak. “Well, I’ll be damned if I understand this,” he exclaimed. “Mejra’s taken twenty-two kilos of things with her from Sarajevo, and now, once again, she’s allowed to take twenty-two kilos with her to America. But those twenty-two kilos were fifty this morning. If they make her leave America, she’ll have to divide things in two again. In the end she’ll be left with nothing, but even so it’ll weigh twenty-two kilos. That’s how it goes.”
The Bell
Billie Holiday drank too much and lived in cigarette smoke for too long. That’s why she looked unhappy and gaunt. She sang as though she was sorrow itself, and that’s why people liked her. Later on, black and white girls appeared in her image. They were just as gaunt but their lungs didn’t belt out jazz in the same way. Nevertheless they readily absorbed the music. It consumed them the way they consumed alcohol. Sad and lonely, they’d end up in a doorway vomiting to the syncopated rhythm of the boogie-woogie. The only difference between Billie Holiday and her imitators was that her sorrow was authentic while theirs was inferred. The jazz singer created the things that were rejected by the girls’ bodies.
The Bell was a bar in a cellar dating back to Austro-Hungary. It was vaulted with lots of arches and laid out in the shape of the letter L. The sound of rusty trumpets blasted out from the middle of the room. It was the sort of jazz decreed by the architecture, and it was unlikely to be much improved by the use of loudspeakers or by the landlord’s attempts to enhance the acoustics by adjusting the treble or the bass. You always had the impression that two different types of music were being played simultaneously at opposite ends of the bar. At one end the customers stared emptily in front of them, inebriated by the sound or by the beer, and with heroin shadows in their eyes. At the other end people were laughing happily, out of range of the music and protected from any sensation.
The barman was called Sem. At least he used that nickname when he was drying glasses, pouring drinks and smiling benevolently at the customers. Otherwise it was Semezdin – but this name was too long and provoked more comments than was desirable in a place like The Bell. The landlord was called Vedran. He was dark, with a moustache and unshaven like a Mexican. He always had a different girl in tow. This is the life! was his motto, especially if you could spend it listening to music in The Bell. The rotten jazz mixed with beer and with the grass in your lungs and the sound of the muezzin became a way of avoiding reality, of floating over the streets of Sarajevo and the muddy yellow waters of the Miljacka. Vedran seduced his girlfriends by telling stories he didn’t believe. Not that he expected the women to believe them either. Each date ended with a big wet kiss, and heads would turn to watch the embrace, but none of his love affairs ever produced anything out of the ordinary. Of course Sem used to smile knowingly to himself, because Vedrans come and go but you can’t do without a barman.
Some time before dawn, when everybody had drunk too much and the barman was measuring the level in each bottle with scientific precision, a girl would be sitting at the bar, sipping an espresso. Her ruffled hair would be the only sign that she had been crying. The last guests would be putting their coats on, Vedran would have left already, and out of the corner of his eye Sem would be looking for someone to give him a lift home.
The girl crying would only prolong the illusion. But since a level of intolerance had already been reached, and by now everyone was thoroughly sick of jazz, the stragglers only despised her, if she didn’t actually annoy them. She was useful as a warning sign not to cross the borderline, reminding you that it would soon be time to go back to reality, to abandon the enchanted stupor and return to the mundane but also sustainable rhythm of ordinary life. To justify her tears would have been similar to becoming a druggy, an unhinged pleasure-seeker flying off to strange places where misguided people actually believe that an illusion can serve as a modus operandi in life. Billie Holiday is ok as long as she doesn’t become your only option.
That’s why you have to go home, into the fog and the snow, and back to your warm beds.
One day The Bell came face to face with reality. The guests packed their student bags and went back to their places of birth. They hoped that it would be easier to survive there. In Doboj, Teslić, Banja Luka, Mostar, Čapljina . . . Vedran watched from his bedroom window the Cyclopean barrel of a sniper’s gun just staring back at him. He got scared, took his current girlfriend by the hand and escaped to a safer part of town. The records, tapes and record-player were destroyed in a fire. You see, jazz burns as easily as folk music, punk or anything by The Doors. He sat up home in an abandoned cellar, with just the one girl who shivered in his arms like a sparrow – or like Edith Piaf – while the shells fell everywhere.
The local criminals wearing combat uniform plundered The Bell, while the neighbors smashed up the bar and used the wood to stoke their stoves during the first days of winter. The bar turned into an empty cellar devoid of illusion. One day Sem took a handful of foreign journalists around the place; by then it was a cold and empty hole. They looked at one another, probably not believing that it had ever been a jazz club. After all, what could these unfortunate, hungry and poor Bosnians possibly know about jazz, about the roof gardens of Manhattan where a lonely person drowns his sorrows in a dark liquid. It’s just sad that Billie Holiday died a long time ago.
The Letter
I hate to think about where I’ve ended up. It’s a city like many others, full of colors and signs and directions, setting the pace and purpose of everything like a metronome. The city lies about a hundred miles or so from the end of the world; its inhabitants make plans for the future. Cobblers repair shoes for the winter. Tailors make suits that will last a lifetime or from one occasion to the next. Novelists begin work on family sagas in three volumes that will take a dozen years to write. Life pulsates to a regular beat, with minor betrayals and the odd respite, like juggling your check book and the credit cards. People survive in closed circuits. They flicker like neon, and stay alive by means of ritual, from the cradle to the grave; it’s a long way from apocalypse. In fact, they live the sort of life I used to live before the war dissolved everything and upset my routine. Before a kind of fear made it necessary for me to give up other considerations and to escape. Everything I had was left behind, and represents, at least in my imagination, the price of fear. And my home, my books, fridge, video, furniture, the feeling that I have to save up for the future . . . These days I spend money more freely than ever, because I don’t have enough of a stake in this new city to buy anything of value. Just a microwave. Since I’ve got money I eat in expensive restaurants. I leave the change. I don’t even bother to count the smaller notes. I feel like a monk, without any possessions, but with a wealth of choices. I could be somewhere very different in just a moment. Or I could be nowhere, in a world of pure dreams, faith or fatalism. It really doesn’t matter.
People often give me letters that are addressed to strangers because they imagine that I still have a link to Sarajevo. They bring me the envelopes and ask if I could pass them on at the first opportunity. The city I left is no longer visited by postmen or carrier pigeons. The only links are secret and unreliable – and I’m supposed to be one of those links. A little while ago I was given a letter for a man who was already dead. He was killed while he stood in his doorway having a cigarette. At least, that’s what I heard.
I didn’t want to tell the letter-bearer the truth, because I doubt that he would have known what to do with such a piece of information. I put the letter in a drawer, hoping it would just vanish. Each time I opened the
drawer, for whatever reason, I happened to see the letter. As soon as the dead man had become a distant memory, and the idea of him was no longer accompanied by sadness, I decided to open the letter. It was written by a person who was a complete stranger to me, with an unfamiliar name and surname, and as he had nothing to do with my life, I read his letter as if it was a work of literature, cut off from reality like the dead man, another distant memory.
My dear friend,
I left without saying goodbye. It was the only way to go at the time. I am writing this so that we don’t create a void between us and in case you think that something occurred suddenly to ruin our friendship. I never mentioned my leaving because it would have been rude. You might have thought that I valued my own life more than you did yours, or that I felt I was a more worthy human specimen, or at least one deserving to find salvation in General Morillon’s ark. I left because I was afraid and because I had the choice. This is the naked and banal truth that I have to tell you from the start. I didn’t come to say goodbye because I didn’t have the courage.
Fifteen years ago I came to Sarajevo, where I was noticeably different because of the color of my skin. You already know that. I was one of the many students from non-aligned countries who regarded Bosnia as the gateway to the white world that invented the rules of the game and thus bulked large in our dreams of Eldorado. This was not London, Paris or New York; it was less bright than our dreams, but in essence it was a sort of Disneyland, where mice, dogs, cats, ducks and horses all took part in the same story. The black man was greeted by the whites without hatred or love. It was only when Sasa and I got drunk and became argumentative that he would curse my “black mother.” Yes – my mother was black, although he seldom displayed much interest in her. In other cities, for example, nobody ever cursed my black mother, but nor did they share a bottle of beer with me. The same curse, with variations, was also directed at other people who were not black. At Serbs, Croats, short or fat or tall people, hunchbacks, those with a limp, Albanians, the devout – it was a particular joy to curse another person’s god – pastry chefs, bakers, soldiers . . . They were harsh curses that always referred to the obvious, to things that were immediately apparent as a defect, but which really shouldn’t have been regarded as a defect so much as a trait. The effects of the curse didn’t last long, and anybody who spent any length of time in Sarajevo quickly grew accustomed to the impoliteness – but not until they grasped that each curse meant, “I can see you’re like this or that – but I don’t really mind.” Nevertheless your otherness was always used against you. I didn’t really enjoy the Sarajevo curses, but they probably explain why I spent my whole life – you see, I really can’t tell if it’s over yet – in that city.
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