Rose of Sarajevo

by Ayşe Kulin

  That night she felt as though she were slipping into sleep not in a hotel room but somewhere by the sea, stretched out on the sand, the waves crashing against the shore, rocking her. A steady stream of stars rained down from the night sky, somewhere on a distant planet. Never before had her heart raced and her blood pulsed quite like that.

  The next morning, when she woke up in Stefan’s bed, weeping tears of shame, regret, and joy, she’d said, “Perhaps that demon whose funeral we attended yesterday captured my soul, Stefan. How else could I have done this?”

  “Our souls have indeed been captured, Nimeta, but not by Ranković.”

  Nimeta was unable to raise her tearful eyes from the floor. Cupping her chin, Stefan had lifted her head until her eyes met his and said, “Darling, it’s love that’s taken us captive.”

  Nimeta had left Stefan and returned to Sarajevo. She’d written her articles and prepared her news bulletins. She’d cooked for her husband and children, and scoured the house from top to bottom, astonishing Milica, who came twice a week to do the cleaning, with her housekeeping skills. She’d taken on extra duties at the television station and hadn’t complained when Burhan was sent away to work on new projects. She’d fully expected to get the better of her heart.

  But Mirsada, her friend and confidant since childhood, had said, “You’re done for. Just one bite of the forbidden fruit and there’s no turning back. You’re in for it, Nimeta.” Somehow, Mirsada had understood what lay in store for her better than Nimeta herself.

  “The meeting’s about to start. Better get a move on. What is it with you this morning, anyway?” Sonya was right up in her face.

  Nimeta scooped up her pen and notebook, and they walked over to Ivan’s office together. An unusually large group had gathered around the conference table.

  “There have been some interesting developments, guys,” Ivan said.

  He picked up the pile of newspapers in front of him and distributed them to his colleagues. As they scanned the newspapers from all the various republics, he coughed lightly, as though to clear his throat, and continued.

  “Even the Belgrade papers are criticizing that damn memorandum, but there hasn’t been a peep from their leader, Milošević. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?”

  “Give it a little time,” Ibo said. “Milošević’s stooge, Dušan Mitević, is going to make a speech to the local party group. I’m sure that Milošević plans to use Mitević as his mouthpiece.”

  “Doesn’t the guy have a mouth of his own?” Sonya asked.

  “Milošević knows how to play his cards close to his chest. Didn’t he rise to his post by dancing to President Stambolić’s tune?”

  They went on to discuss what measures to take if Serbian nationalism morphed into outright racism.

  “I think we’re being naïve,” Mate said. “It’s already happened. They’ve already set it all in motion. Who could stop the Serbs now?”

  “You’ve got friends in Zagreb, Nimeta. Talk to them and find out that what they think,” Ivan said.

  After the meeting, Nimeta called Stefan’s newspaper. For the first time since she’d known him, they spoke not as lovers but colleagues. Sounding grave and worried, he agreed with her that the memorandum signaled disaster. For the first time, he was all business and didn’t mention Burhan’s return or divorce. He didn’t even tell her how much he missed her, how much he wanted to kiss her lips, her neck, her throat. He simply informed her that he would fax the relevant information within the hour and that they would need to speak again the following day. The click of the receiver seemed to shake Nimeta out of a deep three-year sleep; she felt surprised, worried, and a little dejected.

  The journalists waited. Milošević’s stooge, Dušan Mitević, delivered a speech in which he proclaimed the memorandum to be a grave threat to both Yugoslavia and Serbia. A paper reflecting the government’s views published the speech in its entirety. There still hadn’t been a peep from Milošević, and Dušan’s words were incorrectly assumed to be his own. Sensible people everywhere heaved a sigh of relief.

  That night Nimeta gave Burhan a typically subdued welcome, but this time they had a long talk about her day at work. Burhan had heard about the memorandum and was worried. The Croatians in Knin had reacted much more vehemently than the Bosniaks in Bosnia, which had influenced his own reaction.

  “What does your journalist friend in Zagreb have to say about all this?” he asked.

  “Stefan, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ivan spoke to him today. Zagreb’s more alarmed over this than Bosnia.”

  “Sometimes I can’t help feeling like there’s an ill-omened bird gliding over our heads, Nimeta,” Burhan said.

  “That bird took wing three years ago at Ranković’s funeral. Let’s just see when and where it lands.”

  Her husband gave her an odd look over his eyeglasses, or so it seemed to Nimeta.

  When they retired to their room for the night, Burhan held his wife, but he didn’t make love to her. Nimeta lay frozen in her husband’s arms, afraid that if she woke him he would.

  Stefan called the following morning after Burhan and the children had left the house.

  “I couldn’t tell him, Stefan,” Nimeta said. “I can’t tell him that I don’t love him, that I love someone else, and I want a divorce. I’ll never be able to tell him that. Forgive me.”

  “Nimeta, that’s because you love Burhan,” Stefan said.

  “No, Stefan. I’m madly in love with you. I think about you and miss you all the time. You’re the only man I want to make love to.”

  “You’re in love with me, but you love your husband.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s clear you don’t want to hurt him, even to further your own happiness. How do I know? Because not only am I in love with you, Nimeta, I love you. I love you too much to upset you, which is why I keep forgiving you.”

  “Try to understand, Stefan,” Nimeta said. “The next time we meet, I’ll explain it all to you in person. When are you coming to Sarajevo?”

  “Not for a long time. A position’s opened up in London, and I applied for it today.”

  “Are you serious?” she asked. Her voice trembled.

  “I am.”

  “I don’t believe it, Stefan. Are you telling me that I’ll never see you again?”

  “We’ll see each other. But if we meet as lovers, we’re doing it on my terms. You know what I expect.”

  “You’re a man. You’re not attached to anyone. I’m the one who’s in an impossible position. You’re asking me to break up my family.”

  “I can’t share your love, Nimeta.”

  “You’re not! I . . . I . . .”

  “I asked you to make a choice. You’ve made it.”

  “It’s not a choice I wanted to make. I had to. I’ve got obligations.”

  “You get to choose the way you prioritize your obligations.”

  “You’re really going to punish me by going off to London?”

  “I’m not doing it to punish you.”

  “Then why are you going?”

  “To forget you.”

  “Will you be able to forget me? Is this possible?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “Well, I don’t need to try to forget you to know I never could.”

  “I have to try.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the woman I love is unable to share her life with me.”

  “I’m doing everything I can, you know that. I do everything I can to see you every chance I get. I lie and make excuses to my family and friends to create opportunities to see you.”

  “It’s not enough for me, Nimeta. This is no way to live. Either you come with me, or I have to end the relationship.”

  “Do what you want, Stef
an,” Nimeta said dryly.

  When she hung up the phone, she sat motionless, her arms and legs paralyzed. She knew she’d never forget Stefan for as long as she lived. But he evidently thought that he might be able to forget her by putting some distance between them. The man she’d loved for three years believed that a few thousand kilometers would take care of everything.

  Their love had been so intense that she had no idea what she’d do without it or him. As memories of their time together flashed through her mind, tears began streaming down her cheeks. For three years something would catch in her throat every time the phone on her desk rang. What if it was him? If it was, the world would recede. In his voice was birdsong.

  Whenever Stefan made one of his frequent visits to Sarajevo, they’d meet in the bar of the Hotel Evropa. Even if they found themselves surrounded by colleagues, they heard and saw only each other, just as they had on that first day. Stefan had rented a flat in Alipašino Polje, near Nimeta’s office. It was easy for them to meet, since Burhan was so often out of town. Nimeta would stop at Stefan’s for a few hours on her way home from work. There, with him, she was transformed from a mother of two careening toward middle age to a woman of joy and passion. At the touch of Stefan’s hand, her breasts seemed to grow more firm and her curves more rounded.

  Nimeta had gone to Zagreb twice on business, and once, during a national holiday, she’d claimed to have work there. They were more carefree in Zagreb, where nobody knew her. Nimeta had reveled in being able to go out for candlelit dinners and stroll hand in hand in the streets and parks.

  After a while, though, their relationship had begun to hit some road bumps. They weren’t spending enough time together for Stefan. Although Nimeta felt the same way, Stefan made an issue of it. Finally, he’d forced her to make a choice, dismissing her protestations about not being able to abandon her children. “You don’t have to leave them behind,” he’d said. “I’ll move to Sarajevo. My work allows me that flexibility.”

  For the first time in her life, Nimeta had rebelled that day. She could be stubborn and capricious, and demanding of her husband in particular, but she’d always been reluctant to do anything that would create turmoil in her orderly life, even back when she had been an impetuous teenager.

  In the early 1970s, she and her family had gone to Istanbul to visit relatives her parents hadn’t seen for years. Nimeta was about fifteen or sixteen at the time, a willowy, fair-skinned girl with wheat-colored hair. Istanbul had so enchanted her and her family that they returned several times a year after that, always staying in the summer house of their relatives in Erenköy.

  Even today she still treasured her memories of those wonderful holidays spent giggling and cavorting with cousins in the cafés on Bağdat Avenue, eating ice cream, meeting local boys at the open-air summer cinemas, renting rowboats at the seaside . . . During one of those summers, she’d flirted with a boy who lived next door. Back in Bosnia, she found herself counting the days until summer and started learning Turkish to better decipher the letters she received from her first love.

  Near the end of one summer, not long before her family planned to return to Bosnia, the family next door had paid a visit to ask her parents for her hand. Her father had looked favorably on the proposal, but her mother, Raziyanım, had not.

  “You said you were going to send her to university,” she’d said to her husband.

  “Istanbul has universities.”

  “She doesn’t even know proper Turkish,” said Raziyanım.

  “She’ll learn.”

  “But Nimeta’s my only daughter.”

  “All the more reason to make sure she has the best of everything.”

  “What’s so good about that boy?”

  “He has a degree, he’s well mannered, and he’s handsome.”

  “Sarajevo’s swarming with handsome, well-mannered boys with degrees.”

  “That’s true, but who can predict what’ll happen to Sarajevo when Tito dies. Istanbul is Turkish and has been Ottoman for five centuries. She can put down roots and feel secure in her future. Don’t be selfish.”

  “If we’re going to marry her off to a Turk, then we might as well pack our things and move to Istanbul ourselves,” Raziyanım said.

  Nimeta was as in love as only an eighteen-year-old who has given away her heart for the first time can be. Even so, she was unable to rebel against her mother. She’d cried during the entire hastily arranged trip home, not once looking at her mother’s face. She’d kept the roses he’d given her that day, dried and hidden away. Months passed before she smiled at anyone in her family. They didn’t return to Istanbul, not the following year, nor ever again.

  Raziyanım had her reasons for disliking Istanbul.

  The end of the sultans’ four-hundred-year reign in the Balkans had led to an exodus of Ottoman administrators and their families. Bosniaks have been migrating ever since. Every time the winds of war began to blow—and they raged through the Balkans all too often—Bosniaks gathered up their worldly possessions and set off for strange lands.

  Istanbul had come to mean separation for mothers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, fiancés and loved ones. It meant lost homes and lands. These journeys along a road of no return meant unrelenting homesickness in a foreign land. Each person leaving Bosnia for Istanbul carried with him an abiding sense of loss and pain.

  Istanbul was the city of flight. A place of last resort. It was to Istanbul that those who had lost all hope were swept on a flood of tears.

  * * *

  1Love songs.

  MIGRATION

  In 1878, the Ottomans relinquished their rule of Bosnia, and with their departure the Bosniaks suffered their most heartbreaking separations. The administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina was transferred from the Ottomans to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Ottomans had resigned themselves to the inevitable. Their great empire was fragmenting piece by piece, another chunk of territory wrenched from its bosom at every turn. Without the firing of a single bullet, without a single skirmish, without the shedding of a single drop of martyr’s blood, the province of Bosnia was surrendered to the unbelievers through a few signatures at a conference table. The Ottoman Empire was dissolving.

  Raziyanım’s great-grandfather shed tears of blood, his heart in the clench of a fist of flame. Desperate and torn, he was faced with an impossible choice: either he could spend the rest of his life bowed and dishonored in “the shadow of the cross,” or he could be uprooted from his land and deprived of his home and livelihood, joining the hundreds already making their way to Stamboul, among a sea of bundles, packages, sacks, and pack trains—to a place with no prospects for work or homes.

  Once Husrev Agha had made the decision to leave, he immediately set about creating a turquoise necklace and matching earrings. The client was a man of great esteem. Salih Zeki Bey had glimpsed a necklace painstakingly crafted by Husrev Agha around the neck of his sister and had ordered a similar one for his wife. Husrev Agha knew that he had to fulfill the order before he left. Salih Zeki Bey’s family also had a claim on him. His mother had been reared on a farm in Travnik that belonged to Zeki Bey’s father. They’d given his mother a fine trousseau and assisted her children when they were born. Husrev even owed his shop in Baščaršija market to that family of benefactors. Fehim Bey had not only helped Husrev open the shop but had asked him to craft all the silver objects used later at the family country estate in Travnik and home in Sarajevo. He’d created everything from trays, plates, and jugs right down to the girdle encircling the waist of his benefactor’s daughter, Reside, and the tobacco box in the pocket of his son Salih Zeki.

  Having decided to migrate, Husrev Agha had pushed his apprentice to set the stones in the jewelry as quickly as possible. At last, there it was: a turquoise necklace gleaming sky blue, delicately coiled on the workbench.

  The pendant earrings and necklace wer
e carefully packaged, and a pair of horses stood at the ready to ensure their speedy arrival in Travnik. As luck would have it, however, word arrived that Salih Zeki Bey was in Sarajevo at the family manor in Vratnik. Husrev would therefore be able to rush over with the delivery and still have time left over to meet some of his other orders, return payments for those he couldn’t, and prepare for the journey that lay ahead.

  After a brief wait in the manor’s inner courtyard, he slipped his feet into one of the many pairs of fine, soft goat-leather slippers that lay in rows before the door, and was ushered into the sun-washed selamlık, where male guests were received. He was presented with a chilled glass of morello cherry sherbet and an assortment of rose and mastic lokum sent from Istanbul. He observed that the silver ewer from which the sherbet was poured and the silver platter on which the lokum was arranged were both his handiwork from seventeen years earlier. His chest swelled with pride. In his youth he hadn’t relied on apprentices, preferring to craft his pieces with his own two hands. Now, however, those once-sure hands trembled, and his eyes too were no longer up to the task of high-precision work.

  A few moments later, a tall man with piercing blue eyes dressed in a freshly pressed raw silk shirt and trousers strode through the door. Salih Zeki Bey greeted Husrev Agha with the deference due a man his age and inquired about his health.

  Husrev Agha opened the package and laid the necklace and earrings out on the low, backless couch. Salih Zeki Bey gazed appreciatively at the stones, which were a slightly lighter shade of blue than his own eyes.

  “My wife greatly admired the jewels you crafted for my sister. I wished to present her with a remembrance from Bosnia before we left. I now understand why your work caught Gül Hanım’s eye. God bless your skilled hands, Husrev Agha.”

  “May she wear it on many days of joy, sir,” said Husrev Agha, gazing one last time upon his handiwork.

  Salih Bey signaled wordlessly with his eye and brow to the manservant he’d summoned with a clap of his hands. The manservant returned moments later with a dusty rose-velvet purse. Salih Zeki took the purse and handed it to Husrev Agha.