The Book of My Lives

by Aleksandar Hemon

  For weeks before my move to the mountain, I’d be assembling my reading list: from le Carré’s Smiley novels (which for years I reread every summer) to scholarly works on the origins of the Old Testament myths; from anthologies of contemporary American short stories to the Corto Maltese comic books. There was always a particular benefit from reading for ten hours straight: I’d enter a kind of hypersensitive exaltation that allowed me to average four hundred pages a day. The book would become a vast, intricate space in my head, and I couldn’t leave it, not when I ate, not when I hiked, not when I slept—I lived inside it. During the week it took to read War and Peace, Bolkonsky and Natasha showed up in my dreams regularly.

  I was prone to anxiety and depression in my twenties, which I experienced as depletion of my interiority, as a drought of thought and language. The purpose of going to the mountain was to replenish my mind, to reboot the language apparatus, the thought machine. But my reclusion worried my parents, while my friends suspected I was in the process of losing my mind. At night, the only sounds were the lows and bells of roaming cattle, the wind and the branches scratching the roof. Excited birds would bid me good early morning, and I’d start reading as soon as I opened my eyes. I enjoyed my life ascetically simplified: reading, eating, hiking, sleeping. The self-imposed austerity remedied whatever pain I’d carried up to the mountain.

  * * *

  The last time I went to Jahorina to read was in late September 1991. Much of the summer of 1991, I’d spent in Ukraine, witnessing the demise of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence. Over the summer, the war in Croatia had rapidly progressed from incidents to massacres, from skirmishes to the Yugoslav People’s Army’s completely destroying the town of Vukovar. When I returned to Sarajevo at the end of August, the war had already settled in people’s minds: fear, confusion, and drugs reigned. I had no money, so Pedja offered me hack work in a porn magazine he was planning to start, convinced that people would lap it up as distraction from the oncoming disaster. I declined, because I didn’t want bad sex writing (as though there were any other kind) to be the last thing I’d done if I were to be killed in the war. I packed a carful of books and moved up to the cabin to read and write as much as possible before the war consigned everything and all to death and oblivion.

  I stayed in Jahorina through December. My monastic mountain living was now about rudimentary thought protection, for once war got inside my mind, I feared, it would burn and pillage it. I read The Magic Mountain and Kafka’s letters; I wrote stuff full of madness, death, and whimsical wordplay; I listened to Miles Davis, who died that fall, while staring at the embers in our fireplace. On my hikes I conducted imaginary conversations with imaginary partners, not unlike the ones between Castorp and Settembrini in Mann’s novel. I chopped a lot of wood to ease my rising anxiety. Occasionally, I climbed a steep mountain face without any gear or protection. It was a kind of suicidal self-soothing challenge: if I made it all the way to the top without falling, I thought, I could survive the war. One of the daily rituals was watching the nightly news broadcast at 7:30, and the news was never good, always worse.

  * * *

  Years later, in Chicago, I’d struggle to perform exercises that were supposed to help me with managing my anger: upon the advice of my ever-grinning therapist, I’d try to control my breathing while envisioning in detail a place I associated with peace and safety. I’d invariably invoke our cabin in Jahorina and spend long stretches of time recalling the smallest details: the smooth surface of the wooden table my father built without using a single nail; a cluster of old ski passes hanging under the mute cuckoo clock; the indestructible fridge my parents moved to the mountain from our Sarajevo home, whose brand name—Obod Cetinje—was the first thing I read by myself. In the therapy sessions, I remembered how solitary reading cleared my cluttered mind, how the hurt was somehow healed by the ubiquitous smell of pine, by the high-altitude air crispness, by the morning angle of mountain light.

  * * *

  Toward the end of my stay in the fall of ’91, our Irish setter, Mek, kept me company. Still a puppy, he would be up with the birds in the morning and lick my cheeks and forehead, covering them with a thick coating of saliva. I’d let him out to do whatever puppies do at the crack of dawn, while I went back to bed to read, or continue a dream rife with literary characters. One morning, after I’d let him out, the sounds of shooting startled me while I was immersed in a book. When I looked outside, I saw a military police unit, identifiable by their white belts. They were shooting blanks at imaginary enemies, wearing gas masks, charging uphill past the cabin. In their midst was Mek, who in his puppy idiocy was running, prancing, and barking at them. A blank from close range could obviously kill him, so, book in hand, I ran after the charging MP unit in my pajamas, hopelessly summoning Mek to heel. He didn’t heed my calls and I caught up only when the unit stopped for a breather. They took off their gas masks and panted, sweat pouring down their faces, while I incoherently apologized for some perceived fault of mine. They said nothing, too exhausted and invested in their war rehearsal. As I stumbled downhill in my slippers, dragging Mek by the collar, they assumed new combat positions. For all I knew they might have pointed their guns at me.

  Another morning, in early December, I sat despondent and cold, drinking tepid tea, too tired to start a fire. Mek placed his head in my lap for petting. I gazed into the bleak fog outside and wondered what would happen to all of us. My mind was so defeated by the unstoppable advance of war that there was no longer a book to read or a story to write that could possibly help it ever recover. At the very moment I reached the deepest recess of despair, the phone rang—or at least that is how my memory has edited that particular scene—and a woman from the American Cultural Center told me that I had been invited to visit the United States for a month under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. I’d had an interview with the head of the Cultural Center earlier that summer, but had expected nothing from it and pretty much forgot all about it. Indeed, I thought for a long moment that it was a prank call of some sort, but when she told me I needed to stop by the center to work out the details of my visit, I promised her I would. I hung up the phone and started building the fire. The following day, I left the mountain.

  LET THERE BE WHAT CANNOT BE

  On October 14, 1991, Radovan Karadžić spoke at a session of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Parliament, which had been debating a referendum on independence from the Yugoslavia crippled by the secession of Slovenia and Croatia earlier that year. Karadžić was there to warn the parliament against following the Slovenes and Croats down “the highway of hell and suffering.”

  I was in Jahorina at that time, placating myself with reading and writing. I turned on the nightly news to watch him thunder at the frazzled members of the parliament: “Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here.” Throughout his tirade, in a manner familiar to me from the press conferences I had attended, he clutched the lectern edges, as though about to hurl it at his feeble audience. But then he let go of it to stab the air with his forefinger at the word annihilation. The Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, a Muslim, was visibly distressed.

  You can easily find a grainy YouTube clip of Karadžić’s ranting. The Internet and television can convert just about anything into benign banality, but his performance is still bloodcurdling. Karadžić was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which had already acquired control of the parts of Bosnia with a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the parliament, nor did he hold any elective office. He was there simply because he could. His very presence rendered the parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the parliament represented. And he knew it and liked it.

  Tranquilized by the weeks o
f therapeutic reading (Kafka, Mann), I could not initially comprehend what Karadžić meant by “annihilation.” I groped for a milder, less terrifying interpretation—perhaps he meant “historical irrelevance”? I could settle for historical irrelevance, whatever it meant. What he was saying was well outside the scope of my humanist imagination, prone to reveries and fears; his words extended far beyond the habits of normalcy I desperately clung to as war loomed over what Sarajevans called “common life.”

  The parliament eventually decided a referendum was the way to go. It took place in February 1992; the Serbs boycotted it while the majority of Bosnians voted for independence. Throughout March, there were barricades on the streets of Sarajevo, much shooting in the mountains around it. In April, Karadžić’s snipers aimed at a peaceful antiwar demonstration in front of the parliament building, and two women were killed. On May 2, Sarajevo was cut off from the rest of the world and the longest siege in modern history began. By the end of the summer, nearly every front page in the universe had published a picture from a Serbian death camp. By that time, I understood that Karadžić had wagged the stick of genocide at the Bosnian Muslims in his address to the hapless Bosnian Parliament, while the unappetizing carrot was their bare survival. “Don’t make me do it,” he was essentially saying. “For I will be perfectly at home in the hell I create for you.”

  Now I have little doubt that, regardless of the outcome of the parliamentary session, Karadžić would have gladly sped in his motorcade down the hell-and-suffering highway. What I didn’t see then is clear to me now: the possibility of war not happening was already completely foreclosed. The annihilation machine was happily revving, everything was in place for the genocide operations, the purpose of which was not only the destruction and displacement of Bosnian Muslims but also the unification of the ethnically pure lands into a Greater Serbia. Why had he staged that performance before the parliament, since peace was never an option? Why did he bother?

  I have spent time trying to comprehend how everything I had known and loved came violently apart; I have been busy obsessively parsing the details of the catastrophe to understand how it could have taken place. After Karadžić’s arrest, I watched the YouTube clip, trying to figure out why he had bothered. Now I know: the point of that performance was the performance itself. It was not meant for the beleaguered Bosnian Parliament but for the patriotic Serbs watching the broadcast, for those ready to embark upon an epic project that would take sacrifice, murder, and ethnic cleansing to be completed. Karadžić was showing his people that he was as tough and determined a leader as need be, yet neither unwise nor unreasonable. He was indicating that war would not be a rash decision on his part, while capable of recognizing that genocide might be inescapable. If there was a difficult job to be done, he was going to do it unflinchingly and ruthlessly. He was the leader who was going to lead his people through the hell of murder to the land where honor and salvation awaited them.

  The model for Karadžić’s role was provided by Petar Petrović Njegoš’s epic poem The Mountain Wreath (Gorski vijenac). Just like everyone else, I was forced to study it in school as it was part of the socialist cannon, easy to interpret within the framework of “freedom,” widely available in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Set at the end of the seventeenth century and published in 1847, it is deeply embedded in the tradition of Serbian epic poetry; a foundational text of Serbian cultural nationalism, it always bored me to tears. Its central character is Vladika Danilo, the bishop and sovereign of Montenegro, the only Serbian territory unconquered at the time by the powerful and all-encroaching Ottoman Empire. Vladika Danilo thinks he has a major problem: some Montenegrin Serbs have converted to Islam. For him, they are the fifth column of the Turks, a people who could never be trusted, a permanent threat to the freedom and sovereignty of the Serbian people.

  Wise leader that he is, Vladika Danilo summons a council to help him find the solution. He listens to the advice of various bloodthirsty warriors: “Without suffering no song is sung,” one of them says, decasyllabically. “Without suffering no saber is forged.” He receives a delegation of Muslims pleading for peace and coexistence and all that; they are offered a chance to keep their heads on their shoulders by converting back to “the faith of their forefathers.” He speaks of freedom and the difficult decisions required to protect it: “The wolf is entitled to a sheep / Much like a tyrant to a feeble man. / But to stomp the neck of tyranny / To lead it to the righteous knowledge / That is man’s most sacred duty.”

  In lines familiar to nearly every Serbian child and adult, Vladika Danilo eventually recognizes that the total, ruthless extermination of the Muslims is the only way: “Let there be endless struggle,” he says. “Let there be what cannot be.” He will lead his people through the hell of murder and onward to honor and salvation: “On the grave flowers will grow / For a distant future generation.”

  Karadžić, who grew up in the part of Bosnia where mail is delivered by wolves (as we used to say in Sarajevo), was intimately familiar with Serbian epic poetry. A skillful player of the gusle, a single-string fiddle (for which no real skill is required) used to accompany the oral performance of epic poems, he understood his role in the blazing light cast by Vladika Danilo. He recognized himself in the martyrdom of leadership; he believed that he was the one to finish the job that Vladika Danilo started. He was to be the hero in an epic poem that would be sung by a distant future generation.

  Indeed, while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karadžić frequented a bar called Mad House—Luda kuća. Mad House offered weekly gusle-accompanied performances of Serbian epic poetry; wartime pictures of him and General Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serbs’ military leader (now on trial in The Hague), proudly hung on the walls. A local newspaper claimed that, on at least one occasion, Karadžić performed an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, undertaking feats of extermination. Consider the horrible postmodernism of the situation: an undercover war criminal narrating his own crimes in decasyllabic verse, erasing his personality so that he could assert it more forcefully and heroically.

  The tragic, heartbreaking irony of it all is that Karadžić played out his historical, pseudoheroic role in less than ten years. In the flash of his infernal pan hundreds of thousands died, millions (including my family) were displaced, untold numbers of people paid in pain for his induction into the pantheon of Serbian epic poetry. After his arrest in the grotesque guise of a spiritual quack, one can imagine him singing of himself as a wise sage for his prison mates in The Hague.

  If you’re a writer, it is hard not to see a kind of Shakespeare-for-Idiots lesson in the story of Radovan Karadžić: his true and only home was the hell he created for others. Before he became the leader of the Bosnian Serbs and after he was forced out by the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević (who was Karadžić’s supporter until he exhausted his usefulness), Karadžić was a prosaic nobody. A mediocre psychiatrist, a minor poet, and a petty embezzler before the war, at the time of his arrest he was a full-fledged charlatan with a clump of hair tied on his forehead to attract cosmic energy. It was only during the war, performing on a blood-soaked stage, that he could fully develop his inhuman potential. He was what he was because what could not happen did in the end happen.

  DOG LIVES

  When I was a kid, I brought home many a mangy puppy I’d found on the streets. I’d arrange sofa cushions into a soft bed, then go to school and leave my would-be pet to enjoy its new life, hoping that, when the puppy felt sufficiently at home, it’d be ready to commit to a lifelong friendship with me. But when my parents returned home from work, they’d find our house an unreal mess: the puppy had chewed up the cushions and peed on the floor. Quickly would my lifelong-friend candidate be evicted onto the brutal streets of Sarajevo.

  Both of my parents were born into poor peasant households, dependent on the toil of farm animals, where the notion of having a pet could not exist. Hence I’d find myself passionately arguing with
Mother and Father for my right to own a dog. My family was not a democratic institution and I was sternly made to understand that my obligations to the family exceeded all other duties and passions. As for rights, there was no family charter guaranteeing anything to me other than food, shelter, education, and love. The final, rusty nail in the coffin for my pet-owning hopes was my mother’s hard-to-counter argument that, since I never really cleaned up after myself, I most certainly would not clean up after a dog.

  But my sister, Kristina, was (and still is) a strong-headed force of nature. While I often found myself fighting for my right to discuss my right to have rights, my determined sister had a different and a much more efficient approach. She wasted no time debating her rights with our parents; she simply acted as though she axiomatically possessed them and exercised them as she saw fit.

  She first brought in a Siamese cat, which died from a form of peritonitis so rare that we donated his little corpse to a researcher at a vet school. The next cat was a piebald country girl, which we let out of the apartment onto the street, until she was run over by a car. Our heartbroken mother absolutely forbade any new pets entering our home; she could not, she said, handle the loss.

  Kristina, having long asserted her unimpeachable right to do whatever she felt like, completely ignored the prohibition. In the spring of 1991, she recruited her new boyfriend to drive with her to Novi Sad, a town in northern Serbia a couple of hundred miles away from Sarajevo, where she’d somehow tracked down a breeder. With the money she’d saved from her modeling gigs, she bought a gorgeous, blazingly auburn Irish setter puppy and brought him home. Father was shocked—dogs in the city were self-evidently useless, a resplendent Irish setter even more so—and unconvincingly demanded that she return him to the breeder immediately; naturally, she ignored him. Mother offered some predictable rhetorical resistance to yet another creature she’d worry about excessively, but it was clear she had fallen in love with the dog on the spot. Within a day or two he chewed up someone’s shoe and was instantly forgiven. We named him Mek.