The Book of My Lives

by Aleksandar Hemon

  He was incredibly well read. He often quoted Shakespeare in English off the top of his head, which always impressed me; I, too, wanted to have read everything and to be able to quote with ease. He also taught an essay-writing course—the only writing course I’ve ever taken—where we read the classic essayists, beginning with Montaigne, and then tried to produce some lofty-seeming thoughts, coming up with hapless imitations instead. Still, it was flattering that he found it even remotely possible we could write something belonging to the same universe as Montaigne. It made us feel as if we had been personally invited to participate in the fine, gentle business of literature.

  Once, Professor Koljević told us about the book his daughter had begun writing at the age of five. She had titled it “The Book of My Life,” but had written only the first chapter. She planned to wait for more life to accumulate, he told us, before starting Chapter 2. We laughed, still in our early chapters, oblivious to the malignant plots accelerating all around us.

  After I’d graduated, I phoned to thank Professor Koljević for what he’d taught me, for introducing me to the world that could be conquered by reading. Back then, calling him was a brave act for a student ever in awe of his professors, but he was not put out. He invited me for an evening stroll by the Miljacka River, and we discussed literature and life as friends and equals. He put his hand on my shoulder as we walked, his fingers cramped like hooks as he held on, for I was considerably taller than he. It was uncomfortable, but I said nothing. He had, flatteringly, crossed a border, and I did not want to undo the closeness.

  Not long after our stroll, I began working as an editor for Naši dani. At around the same time, Professor Koljević became one of the highest-positioned members of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), a virulently nationalist organization, headed by Karadžić, the talentless poet destined to become the world’s most-wanted war criminal. I attended SDS press conferences and listened to Karadžić’s roaring paranoia and racism, his imposing head looming on our horizon: large, cuboid, topped with an unruly gray mane. And Professor Koljević would be there too, sitting next to Karadžić: small, solemn, and academic, with large jar-bottom glasses, wearing a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, his long fingers crossed loosely in front of his face, as if suspended between a prayer and applause. Afterward, I’d come up to greet him, dutifully, assuming that we still shared a love of books. “Stay out of this,” he’d advise me. “Stick to literature.”

  In 1992, when the Serbian attack on Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo began, I found myself in the United States. Safe in Chicago, I watched Serbian snipers shoot at the knees and ankles of a man trying to escape from a truck that had been hit by a rocket. On the front pages of magazines and newspapers, I saw emaciated prisoners in Serbian camps, and the terrified faces of people running down Sniper Alley. I watched as the Sarajevo library perished in patient, deliberate flames.

  The infernal irony of a poet (bad though he may have been) and a literature professor causing the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books did not escape me. On the news, I sometimes caught a glimpse of Professor Koljević standing beside Karadžić, who was always denying something—what was happening was for him either “self-defense” or it was not happening at all. Occasionally, Professor Koljević talked to reporters himself, mocking the questions about rape camps, or deflecting all accusations of Serbian crimes by framing them as the unfortunate things that take place in every “civil war.” In Marcel Ophüls’s The Troubles We’ve Seen, a documentary about foreign reporters covering the war in Bosnia, Professor Koljević—labeled as “Serbian Shakespearean”—speaks to a BBC reporter, dispensing spin phrases in impeccable English and explaining away the sounds of Serbian shells falling on Sarajevo in the background as a part of the ritual celebration of Orthodox Christmas. “Obviously,” he said, “from the old times, Serbs like to do this.” He smiled as he said that, apparently relishing his own cleverness. “But it is not even Christmas,” the BBC reporter observed.

  I became obsessed with Professor Koljević. I kept trying to identify the first moment when I could have noticed his genocidal proclivities. Racked with guilt, I recalled his lectures and the conversations we’d had, as if picking through ashes—the ashes of my library. I unread books and poems I used to like—from Emily Dickinson to Danilo Kiš, from Frost to Tolstoy—unlearning the way in which he had taught me to read them, because I should’ve known, I should’ve paid attention. I’d been mired in close reading, impressionable and unaware that my favorite teacher was involved in plotting a vast crime. But what’s done cannot be undone.

  Now it seems clear to me that his evil had far more influence on me than his literary vision. I excised and exterminated that precious, youthful part of me that had believed you could retreat from history and hide from evil in the comforts of art. Because of Professor Koljević, perhaps, my writing is infused with testy impatience for bourgeois babbling, regrettably tainted with helpless rage I cannot be rid of.

  Toward the end of the war, Professor Koljević fell out of favor with Karadžić and was demoted from the realms of power. He spent his time drinking heavily, now and then giving an interview to a foreign journalist, ranting about various injustices committed against the Serbian people in general and himself in particular. In 1997, he blew his Shakespeare-laden brains out. He had to shoot twice, his long piano-player finger apparently having trembled on the unwieldy trigger.

  THE LIVES OF A FLANEUR

  In the spring of 1997, I flew from Chicago, where I was living, to Sarajevo, where I was born. This was my first return to Sarajevo since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended a year and a half before. I’d left a few months before the siege of the city started. I had no family there (my parents and my sister now lived in Canada), except for teta-Jozefina, whom I thought of as my grandmother. When my parents had moved to Sarajevo after graduating from college in 1963, they’d rented a room in the apartment of Jozefina and her husband, Martin, in the part of town called Marin dvor. In that rented room I was conceived, and it was where I lived for the first two years of my life. Teta-Jozefina and čika-Martin, who had two teenage children at the time, treated me as their own grandchild—to this day, my mother believes that they spoiled me for life. For a couple of years after we’d moved out to a different part of Sarajevo, I had to be taken back to Marin dvor to visit them every single day. And until the war shattered our common life, we spent each Christmas at teta-Jozefina and čika-Martin’s. Every year, we followed the same ritual: the same elaborately caloric dishes crowding the big table, the same tongue-burning Herzegovinian wine, the same people telling the same jokes and stories, including the one featuring the toddler version of me running up and down the hallway butt-naked before my nightly bath.

  Čika-Martin died of a stroke toward the end of the siege, so in 1997 teta-Jozefina was living alone. I stayed with her upon my return, in the room (and, possibly, the very bed) where I’d commenced my exhaustingly messy existence. Its walls were pockmarked by shrapnel and bullets—the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband’s heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn’t move so carelessly in their own apartment.

  In my first few days back in Sarajevo, I did little but listen to teta-Jozefina’s harrowing and humbling stories of the siege, including a detailed rendition of her husband’s death (where he had sat, what he had said, how he had slumped), and wander around the city. I was trying to reconcile the new Sarajevo with the 1992 version I’d left for America. It wasn’t easy for me to comprehend how the siege had transformed the city, because the transformation wasn’t as simple as one thing becoming another. Everything was fantastically different from what I’d known and ev
erything was fantastically the same as before. Our old room (and, possibly, bed) was the same; the buildings stood in the same places; the bridges crossed the river at the same points; the streets followed the same obscure yet familiar logic; the layout of the city was unaltered. But the room had been marred by siege scars; the buildings had been mutilated by shells and shrapnel showers, or reduced to crumbling walls; the river had been the front line, so some of the bridges were destroyed and much in their vicinity was leveled; the streets were fractured by mortar-shell marks—lines radiating from a little crater at the point of impact—which an art group had filled out with red paint and which the people of Sarajevo now, incredibly, called “roses.”

  I revisited all my favorite spots in the city center, then roamed the narrow streets high up in the hills, beyond which lay a verdant world of unmapped minefields. I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the smell of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted unlike what I remembered from before the war—it was like burnt corn now. As a Bosnian in Chicago, I’d experienced one form of displacement, but this was another: I was displaced in a place that had been mine. In Sarajevo, everything around me was familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.

  One day I was strolling, aimlessly and anxiously, down the street whose prewar name had been Ulica JNA (The Yugoslav People’s Army Street) and now was Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva (The Defenders of Sarajevo Street). As I walked past what had been called, in the heady times of socialism—which now seemed positively prehistoric—the Workers’ University (Radnički univerzitet), something made me turn and look over my shoulder into its cavernous entranceway. The turn was not of my own volition: it was my body that spun my head back, while my mind went on for a few steps. Impeding impatient pedestrian traffic, I stood puzzled before the late Workers’ University until I realized what had made me look back: the Workers’ University used to house a movie theater (it had shut down a couple of years before the war), and whenever I’d walked by in those days, I’d looked at the display cases where the posters and show times were exhibited. From the lightless shafts of corporal memory, my body had recalled the action of turning to see what was playing. It had been trained to react to urban stimulation in the form of a new movie poster, and it still remembered, the fucker, the way it remembered how to swim when thrown into deep water. Following that involuntary revolution, my mind was flooded with a banal, if Proustian, memory: once upon a time in Sarajevo, at the Workers’ University, I’d watched Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America, and now I recalled the pungent smell of the disinfectant that was used to clean the floors of the cinema; I recalled peeling myself off the sticky fake-leather seats; I recalled the rattle of the parting curtain.

  * * *

  I’d left Sarajevo for America on January 24, 1992. I had no way of knowing at the time that I’d return to my hometown only as an irreversibly displaced visitor. I was twenty-seven (and a half) and had never lived anywhere else, nor had any desire to do so. I’d spent the few years before the trip working as a journalist in what was known, in socialist, peacetime Yugoslavia, as the “youth press” (omladinska štampa), generally less constrained than the mainstream press, reared in the pressure chamber of Tito’s one-party state. My last paid job was for Naši dani, where I edited the culture pages. (Before the war, the domain of culture seemed to offer a haven from the increasingly hateful world of politics. Now, when I hear the word culture, I pull out the quote commonly attributed to Hermann Göring: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.”) I wrote film reviews but was far better known for my column “Sarajevo Republika.” The name was intended as an allusion to the Mediterranean Renaissance city-states—Dubrovnik or Venice—as well as to the slogan “Kosovo republika,” which had been sprayed on Kosovo walls by the “irredentists,” who demanded that Kosovo be given the status of a republic in the federal Yugoslavia; given full sovereignty, that is, in place of its status as an “autonomous province” of Serbia. In other words, I was a militant Sarajevan. I set out in my column to assert Sarajevo’s uniqueness, the inherent sovereignty of its spirit, reproducing and extolling its urban mythology in a prose arrogantly thick with abstruse Sarajevo slang. The first column I ever published was about an aščinica—a traditional Bosnian storefront restaurant, serving cooked (as opposed to grilled) food—which had been run by a local family, the Hadžibajrićs, for a hundred and fifty years or so. One of the urban legends about the Hadžibajrićs claimed that, back in the seventies, during the shooting of the movie The Battle of Sutjeska, a state-produced Second World War spectacle, starring Richard Burton as Tito, a Yugoslav People’s Army helicopter was frequently deployed to the set deep in the mountains of eastern Bosnia, to transport the Hadžibajrićs’ buredžici (meat pies in sour cream) for Elizabeth Taylor’s gastronomic enjoyment. To this day, many of us are proud of the possibility that some of the fat in Purple Eyes’s ass came from Sarajevo.

  The columns that followed were about the philosophy of Sarajevo’s baroque slang; about the myriad time-wasting strategies I believed were essential for urban-mythology (re)production, and which I executed daily in innumerable kafanas; about bingo venues, frequented by habitual losers, bottom-feeders, and young urbanites in pursuit of coolness credentials. One of the columns was about the main pedestrian thoroughfare in the heart of the city—Vase Miskina Street (known as Ferhadija since the fluttering fall of socialism)—which stretched from downtown to the old town. I referred to it as the city artery, because many Sarajevans promenaded along it at least twice a day, keeping the urban circulation going. If you spent enough time drinking coffee at one of the many kafanas along Vase Miskina, the whole city would eventually parade past you. In the early nineties, street peddlers stationed themselves along the street, pushing the penny-cheap detritus of the wrecked workers’ state: sewing-machine needles, screwdrivers, and Russian–Serbo-Croat dictionaries. These days, it is all Third World–capitalism junk: pirated DVDs, made-in-China plastic toys, herbal remedies and miraculous sexual enhancers.

  Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing details and generating ideas. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I’m prone to reimagining my young self as one of Baudelaire’s flaneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering in the city was the main means of communication with it. Sarajevo was—and still is—a small town, viscous with stories and history, brimming with people I knew and loved, all of whom I could monitor from a well-chosen kafana perch or by patrolling the streets. As I surveyed the estuaries of Vase Miskina or the obscure, narrow streets creeping up the hills, complete paragraphs flooded my brain; not infrequently, and mysteriously, a simple lust would possess my body. The city laid itself down for me; wandering stimulated my body as well as my mind. It probably didn’t hurt that my daily caffeine intake bordered on stroke-inducing—what wine and opium must’ve been for Baudelaire, coffee and cigarettes were for me.

  As I would in 1997, I entered buildings just to smell their hallways. I studied the edges of stone stairs blunted by the many soles that had rubbed against them over the past century or two. I spent time at the Željo soccer stadium, deserted on a gameless day, eavesdropping on the pensioners—the retirees who were lifelong season-ticket holders—as they strolled within its walls in nostalgic circles, discussing the heartrending losses and unlikely victories of the past. I returned to places I’d known my whole life so that I could experience them differently and capture details that had been blurred by excessive familiarity. I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority. Physically and metaphysically,
I was placed. If my friends spotted me on a side street looking up at the high friezes typical of Austro-Hungarian architecture, or lingering on a lonely park bench, watching dogs fetch and couples make out—the kind of behavior that might have seemed worrisome—they just assumed that I was working on a column. Most likely, I was.

  Despite my grand plans, I ended up writing only six or seven “Sarajevo Republika” columns before Naši dani ran its course out of money. The magazine’s dissolution was inconspicuous within the ongoing dissolution of Yugoslavia. In the summer of 1991, incidents in the neighboring Croatia developed into a full-fledged fast-spreading war while rumors persisted that the army was secretly transferring troops and weapons to the parts of Bosnia with a majority Serb population. Oslobodjenje, the Sarajevo daily paper, got hold of a military plan outlining troop redeployment in Bosnia and Herzegovina that clearly suggested the imminence of war, even though the army firmly denied the plan.

  The army spokespeople weren’t the only ones denying the blatant likelihood of war—the urbanites of Sarajevo were also intent on ignoring the obvious, if for different reasons. In the summer of 1991 parties, sex, and drugs were abundant; the laughter was hysterical; the streets seemed packed day and night. In the seductive glow of inevitable catastrophe, the city appeared more beautiful than ever. By early September, however, the complicated operations of denial were hopelessly winding down. When I wandered the city, I found myself speculating with troubling frequency as to which buildings would provide good sniper positions. Even as I envisioned myself ducking under fire, I took those visions to be simply paranoid symptoms of the stress induced by the ubiquitous warmongering politics. I understand now that I was imagining incidents, as it was hard for me to imagine war in all its force, much the way a young person can imagine the symptoms of an illness but find it hard to imagine death: life seems so continuously, intensely, and undeniably present.