by Susan Viets
I often saw demining crews and wondered what sort of person would choose this career and how crews accomplished their task with haphazard wartime front lines and few records to indicate where mines lay. For a while I did not worry. I took shortcuts and strolled across the lawn in front of a building where a friend worked. One day when I arrived, yellow tape fenced off the lawn. A crew worked behind the tape to extract a mine. As the months passed, statisticians compiled data. Mines had killed or injured about fifty to eighty people each month in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
On weekends, Sydney and I often crossed into Republika Srpska and walked with friends in the mountains above Pale, a town about fifteen kilometres southeast of Sarajevo; the terrain had been challenging enough for use in the 1984 winter Olympics. As we ascended in the Land Cruiser early one Sunday from Sarajevo, mountain mist drifted across the road. It dulled all bright colours to a hazy, near uniform grey. We parked at the foot of the narrow stony road we would follow and saw the silhouettes of friends who had already arrived but not the mountains. They were shrouded in fog. Rocks covered part of the trail or spilled onto it from slopes nearby.
As the sun rose and the air warmed, the fog dissipated. I lagged behind with Gertrude, a new friend from Switzerland. Long shadows that stretched across straw-coloured grass and white rocks were our only company. When we paused during our conversation, we heard the crunch of gravel under our boots. The air was fresh, the sky a hopeful blue. I loved this peace and near solitude.
“We should move a bit faster now. I think we’ve fallen quite far behind,” Gertrude said. I did not want to, but sensing her unease, I picked up my pace. We marched up the slope and soon saw others in the group. Their red, yellow and green jackets stood out like traffic lights. Close enough now, we relaxed our pace and drifted back into conversation.
Sometime later when we paused and noticed our surroundings again, we realized that Gertrude’s friend Hans, who led the group, had veered off the path onto the scrubby hills and that we had followed. I stood still, imagining a mine under my feet. Then I ran.
“Wait,” Gertrude shouted, but I did not stop until I reached Hans.
“We should get back onto the path. There could be mines,” I said.
He laughed and said that he wanted to reach a bunker in the hills that had served as a military headquarters during the war. Then he walked away. The others followed. I did too, full of rage at myself for not going back but mostly rage directed at Hans, whose judgment I did not respect. If I was due for a brush with disaster, I did not want it to be that day, in the company of someone whom I now despised. As I trailed behind, silent and sullen at first, this dark mood passed as did my fear. I appreciated the barren beauty of the landscape and that first sense of freedom that came from walking again after so long across an open hillside, no pavement in sight. I had only been here for three months but realized much had changed already. For many years I had relied on my own judgment. Now, in Sarajevo, I learned to obey rules, even when I did not want to. But it felt good to take a risk again.
Near the end of August, not long after our walk in the hills above Pale, I drove to an event in Brčko, a city in a volatile, independent region of the country that linked the western and eastern parts of Republika Srpska, in northern Bosnia. I travelled with an American photographer named Louise. She would photograph the handover of vehicles from one of the international organizations to a local aid group. I was to participate in the ceremony. We meandered through the countryside, up steep hills covered in dense coniferous forests, the scent of pine wafting in when we rolled the windows down, along the banks of rushing rivers, whitecaps frothy, pools deep and aqua blue in more tranquil waters. It was always shocking when we rounded a bend and drove past the carcasses of burned-out houses in villages along the way. I diligently made radio contact with headquarters at each designated checkpoint. The farther into the countryside we travelled, the more troublesome this became. Soon we heard nothing but crackles. About halfway to Brčko we stopped near a bridge and persisted until finally a faint response came back.
“I’ll move forward to a new position and try again in a minute,” I shouted down the receiver. We climbed back into the Land Cruiser and rolled forward to an open space, where we hoped reception would improve. I heard a message with our call number and answered back. It was a colleague en route to the same event.
“Don’t go to Brčko if you can’t make it there by two o’clock,” she shouted.
“What! Why not? The ceremony doesn’t begin until three-thirty” I shouted back.
“It’s starting early. Just turn back if you can’t make it by two.”
Louise and I consulted and decided we would continue. I pressed on the accelerator and did not slow down until half an hour later when we passed a long convoy of SFOR vehicles, mostly very large, pulled onto the shoulder of the road. As we approached the last one, we saw many men in uniform, who stood in an orderly line that stretched along the edge of the road in front of the vehicles. Their backs faced passing traffic as they answered the call of nature in unison, obedient to mine rules that kept them all on the asphalt.
We arrived in Brčko fifteen minutes after the event ended. I slumped over the wheel, tired and frustrated at this failure, irritated at the change in plan and bizarre speed of it all. I had attended similar events and none had proceeded like this. Just as we wondered what to do, a convoy of cars from the event drove past. A colleague recognized us and stopped the convoy. Delighted to find a photographer on board, he took us all back to the event site for a photo shoot. Then everyone else boarded cars and left Brčko immediately. We promised that we would too after we ate lunch.
The city felt strangely deserted. Many shops and restaurants had closed even though it was only mid-afternoon. We found one place open near the local UN office. As we ate, we noticed stalls where vendors sold CDs.
“It’s my birthday,” Louise said.
“Well, I know just the present for you.”
We paid the bill and crossed over to the CD stalls. As we browsed, a blue truck nearly as long as the UN office parked directly in front of us. It shielded the building and blocked our access to the street.
“This is a little strange,” Louise said.
“Weird. We’re totally boxed in. This isn’t great for me. I’m claustrophobic.”
Louise selected her present, a CD titled “Girl Power.” I bought it, then we walked to the end of the truck. In the open back, we saw concrete barricades piled inside.
I heard the crackle of the radio, the call number for our Land Cruiser and ran to answer it, but the dispatcher couldn’t hear me call back.
“We’d better go,” I said to Louise.
“I wonder what’s going on?”
“I’d like to find out, but you know how it is – an order’s an order. We were supposed to be gone by two.”
At the junction that led to a big market, the Arizona, near Brčko, we heard the radio crackle again. I pulled into the market and radioed back.
“Have you left Brčko?” the dispatcher asked.
“Yes, we’re on our way back. What’s going on?” I received no information, just call-in instructions for the next designated checkpoint.
“How about a quick look around since we’re here?” I asked Louise. I had heard about the Arizona, set up for free trade but better known as a smuggling centre. We got out and wandered around the stalls – tabletops that teemed with cigarette cartons, CDs or liquor, makeshift canvas awnings that looked like sides of dismantled tents held up by warped wooden poles. The whole place had the ramshackle yet permanent look of a squatters’ camp. I suspected the arms that I had heard were for sale lay under sacks at the back. This strangely deserted place gave me the shivers. I wanted to leave. We reached Tuzla before dark, where we celebrated Louise’s birthday and spent the night with colleagues.
The next morning we heard that SFOR had deployed troops across the northeast. A local Serb leader tried to take over police stations and a
television transmitter. Hundreds of SFOR Soldiers now patrolled the streets. In Brčko, shooting incidents occurred. All that tension made sense now.
At 9:30 a.m. we left for Sarajevo. SFOR helicopters circled overhead. We passed SFOR tanks on the road. They travelled toward Republika Srpska. As we drove south, this commotion receded. We wound our way along curvy mountain roads, veered onto the wrong side when our lane became blocked by boulders that had fallen from the steep mountainsides above and held our breath that we would not collide with oncoming traffic as we rounded a sharp bend, still forced onto the wrong side of the road. When we arrived in Sarajevo, I dropped Louise at her house and then drove to the office.
That evening I tuned into the BBC news to discover there was more trouble in Brčko. SFOR had used tear gas to disperse a crowd of about a thousand, one American soldier had been injured, and SFOR had evacuated unarmed UN police. A BBC reporter described an attack by a crowd on a bridge that led from Brčko into Croatia. One person had grabbed her microphone; a woman in the crowd had whacked the reporter across her legs with a wooden board. Then others joined in. Soldiers dragged the reporter to safety in a SFOR house. I thought of all the planks of wood in Grozny and Moldova, remembered my own microphone from radio days and felt grateful for the orders that had gotten me out of Brčko in time.
We organized many events for children or the elderly affected by war. Our office helped arrange a picnic for pensioners from Goražde, a city so badly damaged that it looked as though fighters had extracted vengeance from the buildings as well as the people. Shells had blown the roofs off many houses. Birds nested in holes in the walls. Almost no structure remained intact. Our organization financed mobile teams to patch houses, but some were so badly destroyed that they remained beyond repair. A lot of people relied on charity for a place to live. For many, this picnic was their first trip to the countryside in six years.
I drove five kilometres to the picnic site, past more destruction, over a bridge and down a riverbank; most of the countryside was mined. A windy road, little more than a muddy bog, led to the site, which was situated on a safe patch of land.
I worked with colleagues. We stretched a long blanket out in a clearing by the riverbank. Men sliced lamb on a tree stump. We placed it on plates with cheese, bread and vegetables. “This’ll be the first meat for them in a long time,” a colleague from Goražde said.
Soon more colleagues arrived with pensioners. We helped them down to the blanket. They ringed the edge of it and grew excited by all the food. Some people did not have strong enough teeth to chew the meat, no matter how finely we cut it. When they had finished their meals, the pensioners lingered in the warm summer sun, watched bathers splash in the river, made new friends, gossiped and marvelled at the beauty of the countryside. My throat felt tight – it took so little to make them happy. One man described how grenades had blown up members of his family. A son survived. He lived in Sarajevo and could not afford the bus fare to visit Goražde. When we had to go, no one wanted to leave.
I drove three picnickers home, a couple and a single woman. The couple lived in a house, damaged but still habitable; the woman, in a refugee centre located in the front wing of the local elementary school. When we reached the centre, a little girl in a crumpled, dusty dress, her face smeared with dirt, approached us. A beggar, I thought at first, but the woman whom I had driven home introduced me to seven-year-old Alicia and told me that she lived in the centre with her mute mother. Alicia was so excited to meet a foreigner that she insisted on giving me a tour. It was hard not to feel depressed as I walked through the doors.
Alicia and her mother lived in the gymnasium with the other refugees. Each had a single wooden bed; twenty-three ringed the gymnasium wall. Ragged bundles of belongings stacked on top of one another stood alongside the beds. Beside, on the floor, lay plates of leftover macaroni. An old man, still in bed, beckoned me over.
I introduced myself.
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said. “May I make a request through you?” he asked.
“Certainly,” I said.
“Now this is a request, not a complaint,” he insisted. “We’re grateful for the food, but potatoes and macaroni day after day, it’s a bit monotonous. Could we have something different to eat?” Alicia tugged my hand. She wanted to continue the tour. I told the man I would inquire on his behalf.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked Alicia as she skipped along beside me across the gymnasium floor.
“Five years,” she said. So she moved here as a toddler. She had really known no other home.
She showed me a classroom that looked like a dormitory. I smelled fresh paint. I asked a workman about the gym accommodation.
“Temporary,” he said, “just till we’ve painted here. This one’s for the men.”
“Come see where my mother and I sleep,” Alicia said. She hopped toward the classroom next door. I followed her into a cluttered hallway. Shards of glass lay scattered across the floor. In the bathroom, I tested the faucet. Only cold water trickled out, the basin was ringed with grime, the floor coated in dirt. Everything was scaled to a child’s size. Elderly residents had to stoop down to use basins designed for people about four feet tall.
Not all the elderly were as vulnerable. Soon after I had toured the refugee centre, Louise and I visited a beneficiary whose house had been repaired by one of the mobile teams. We travelled from Sarajevo through villages, along secondary roads. These deteriorated into trails and two kilometres from our destination became impassable ruts. Louise and I parked the Land Cruiser, loaded provisions for the woman we would visit into backpacks and hiked a trail up the mountain through pine forest, fallen needles underfoot, all sounds hushed. Soon we reached a small house in a clearing. We stopped for directions, and as we made inquiries, a small woman with the shrivelled face of an apple doll appeared. I guessed that she was in her late seventies.
“Here I am,” she said. She introduced herself as Božena and grinned a partially toothless grin. “You missed the turn. Follow me.” At least, this is what I thought she said. She bounded down the path, headscarf flapping, skirt swooshing. We straggled behind, our relative youth put to shame by this geriatric dynamo.
Božena turned onto a barely visible path that branched off from the main trail. We walked a short distance and then reached her house. A colleague from a local organization who spoke both languages had already arrived and translated for us.
“She wants to show you her house,” our colleague said. Božena pointed out restored walls; new glass panes filled the window frames. We saw patches on the roof. All this work had been done by our mobile teams. Božena clasped her hands together as if in prayer.
Now that it had been repaired, her house looked inviting. Fire burned in a cast-iron stove, smoke puffed out the chimney. We complimented Božena on her lovely home. She beamed again and then led us to the garden.
“She says she wants to show you where she slept during the war,” our colleague told us.
“Was there actually fighting here?” I asked. Our colleague translated, waited for a reply and then said, “none here, though you can see the damage from what happened close by. A group of soldiers came once. She was in the forest and heard them before she reached home, so she hid until they left. They took all the food. After that she wouldn’t sleep in the house, because she was afraid they might come back.”
I saw a vegetable patch in the garden and scrubby ground behind. We walked beyond this and through tall grass that concealed a small door in a hillock. Božena opened the door. We peered at a dark space not even big enough for a coffin.
“She slept here?” Božena nodded and mimed how she curled up in a ball to fit inside.
“Even in winter?” Božena nodded vigorously and held up two fingers.
“Through two winters?” More translation and then vigorous nodding. That a woman in her seventies had physically survived such conditions seemed remarkable, but to psychologically survive a
nd emerge cheerful spoke of even greater strength. When I grew old, I wanted to be like that.
The hills that ringed Sarajevo and towns nearby were always a draw. Work often took me into remote mountainous regions. In our free time, Sydney and I also ventured out into them. On most winter weekends we skied near Pale, in Republika Srpska, which was a short drive from Sarajevo and close to paths where we had walked the summer before. Sydney had a job now. Our circle of friends had expanded to include some of his colleagues. We often had their company on the hills. A popular weekend ski spot before the war for Sarajevans, few crossed the line now to ski here again.
We drove up in the Land Cruiser, four-wheel drive engaged, sometimes still sliding backwards and sideways down icy roads near the resort. On those occasions, I pumped on breaks that did not even help slow us down. The Land Cruiser would stop with a gentle thud when we hit a snowbank. Men always appeared from somewhere and helped push us back on the road; we reciprocated when we passed others in the same predicament. There was no automobile association but we could always count on help from strangers. Old World courtesy prevailed even after all the atrocities of war.
Despite economic deprivations, the resort maintained its own dated charm. The dining room had wood panelling and wood chairs. The waitresses were sometimes surly, sometimes not. The restaurant was never full, so we could always linger over lunch. The resort had a pool, which was almost as much an attraction for me as the hills. Sometimes after lunch I stayed indoors for a swim, though it took courage to jump into the pool. A tall windowed wall along one side of the pool deck looked out onto a snowy landscape dotted with pine trees. The pool water was as cold as snow. There was no evidence of any heater that worked, but I loved to swim and after several minutes always managed to take the plunge. My breath was taken away by the iciness of the water, but I always felt happy to swim again.
Sydney preferred the hills. We would ski together in the morning, separate after lunch and then meet at the end of the day, return our tall, thin rental skis, then drive back down into Sarajevo to meet friends for dinner and relax before the work week began again. I missed the freedom of journalism but slowly acclimatized to office life and enjoyed the company of new colleagues, especially on road trips, when there was time for more than office talk and a chance to get to know one another.