Rose of Sarajevo

by Ayşe Kulin

  “May God bless you with abundance, sir,” Husrev Agha said, before working up his courage to ask a question. “You mentioned that you were leaving these parts. Are you considering moving to Istanbul?”

  “I’m thinking about it, Husrev Agha. This place will go downhill once it’s under the administration of the giaours. Half of my family has already migrated. I wish for my children to be born in Muslim lands. My elders have often told me of the cruelties they suffered under the unbelievers.”

  “I myself feel the same way. I’m thinking it’s best to take my family and leave. But how are we to earn our daily bread in a strange land?”

  “You’re a skilled artist, Husrev Agha,” Salih Zeki said. “They say Stamboul is a much larger city than this one. I haven’t seen it myself, but that is what I’ve heard. Fear not. You’ll be able to make a living wherever you go. It is we who must fear migration. Unless these lands and properties are registered to us, how are we to subsist in a strange country? Unlike you, we have no craft or trade.”

  “Mercy me, sir,” Husrev Agha said respectfully, “how can gentlemen be engaged in trade?”

  “We may not be granted lands to administer, but we have made up our minds. Those among our relatives who have already migrated do not regret their decision. My nephew Fehim Bey is the deputy for Bosnia in the first parliament. They’ve sent word that they await us. If you too decide one day to migrate to Stamboul, Husrev Agha, look for either Fehim Bey, who lives in the district of Rami, or senate member Halilbasıc Rıdvan Bey. They’ll know where we are.”

  Husrev Agha was in high spirits when he left the manor. He’d stuck the purse in his waistcloth and made his final decision. It augured well that even the esteemed Kulinović Salih Zeki was prepared to leave behind his villages and vast properties and move to Stamboul. He would broach the subject with his wife tonight. They would have to begin to make preparations immediately. They must set out without delay. Without even realizing it, he broke out into a folk song. With the hot sun on his back, he felt the urge to stretch like a cat. For the first time in days, he felt at ease.

  He walked along with a sense of inner peace. He didn’t yet know that his son-in-law would be against migrating, and that he would have to leave his beloved grandson Memo behind. He didn’t know that the decision to migrate meant that his daughter would be separated from her child, never to be reunited.

  Raziyanım had grown up listening to this tale of the grandmother who had abandoned her son and moved to Istanbul. She had grown to hate this woman, who’d died in Istanbul and deprived her son of a mother’s warmth and love.

  Istanbul meant the separation of children from their mothers.

  Memo, the boy Faika left behind when she moved to Istanbul with her family, grew up unloved. With only dim memories of his absent mother, he developed an antipathy toward the female sex. He didn’t marry until he was well into his fifties, and only then to ensure a male heir. What a mockery it was when his young wife placed their twin girls in his arms. A cruel twist of fate had decreed that he would dandle two girls on his knees at an age when his contemporaries were playing with their grandchildren. He never grew to love the girls and departed this world a peeved, distant figure for them.

  Istanbul meant fathers who didn’t love their daughters.

  Fortunately, the twins had a young and jolly maternal uncle who doted on them. Taking them under his wing, he acted as a surrogate father to the girls. This much-loved uncle’s own family had been torn apart by Istanbul, and he found himself alone . . .

  Years later, Raziye’s twin sister had run off to Istanbul as a bride, pledging that they would meet at least once a year. The sister was terribly homesick and missed her twin. Then she fell ill.

  By the time Raziye got to Istanbul, it was too late. Clutching a bouquet of violets and a handful of soil brought from Sarajevo, she’d knelt in front of the marble slab and run her fingers over the inscription of her sister’s name. She’d watered the soil, tears streaming like rain down her cheeks.

  Istanbul meant broken families and yearning for one’s sister.

  Back home in Bosnia, the troubles were never ending. As the globe was ravaged by World War II, the Bosniaks once again endured some of the worst suffering in the Balkans.

  The Bosniaks hadn’t started the war, nor had they taken sides. They reached for their weapons only to defend their homeland and their lives. Though they’d initially thought that the invading forces comprised the only enemy, they soon found their enemies multiplying. Their own neighbors turned on them. There seemed to be no end to the trials and tribulations of the Bosniaks.

  In pursuit of the dream of a Greater Serbia, a paramilitary Chetnik organization slaughtered Bosniaks in 1942. A year later, they had killed nine thousand elderly Muslims and children.

  Next, the Bosniaks found themselves battling with the fascist Croats known as the Ustaše, resulting in more wounded, more dead, more extinguished hearths, famine, misery and poverty. In a desperate bid to save their lives, they joined Hitler’s 13th SS Division. In order to stay alive, the Bosniaks fought with the Germans against the partisans, with the Croatians against the Serbs, with the Serbs against the Croatians, with the Chetniks against the Ustaše, with the Ustaše against the Chetniks, and with the partisans against all the others. Unable to ingratiate themselves to anyone, they always suffered the highest fatalities. By the time Sarajevo was liberated in April 1945, seventy-five thousand Muslims had died in the Balkans, a figure greater than that of either the Croatian or Serb casualties.

  Thanks to a relative who’d fought in the 13th SS Division, Raziye’s maternal uncle was granted special permission by the Germans to flee to Istanbul with his family. He wanted to educate his sons in a country that wasn’t at war. He wanted to live without fear, work hard, and spend his money on pleasure.

  On the morning of the day they were to depart for Istanbul, he asked his wife to prepare an early breakfast. Then he tapped on the bedroom doors of their sleeping sons—first the elder, who’d turned eighteen the previous day, then the younger. He went into the kitchen and brewed some tea, calling out to his older son, who was still in bed. When the boy still failed to appear, he went back up to his bedroom and this time banged quite hard on the door. There was still no response. When he opened the door and turned on the light, he found a letter lying on a bed that hadn’t been slept in. With shaking hands, he read:

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I can’t go with you. I’m following my ideals by going up to the mountains. Don’t worry about me, wait for me, or try to find me. By the time you read this letter, I’ll be in the mountains. If we succeed in our cause, I’ll find you wherever you are. Forgive me.

  Your devoted son,

  Fikret

  The morning stillness was shattered by the heartrending scream of a mother.

  Fikret had joined Tito’s forces. When the revolution was successful, he’d stayed in the army, been promoted, and become a highly respected officer in the Yugoslavian armed forces. Years later, he’d traveled to Turkey in an official capacity. His brother, who’d been a boy of twelve when the family left Yugoslavia, had graduated from the military academy in Harbiye by then and was now a handsome staff officer in the Turkish armed forces. He’d been granted leave to see his big brother and had come to Istanbul for that reason. Reunited for the first time after so many years, the two brothers strolled the length of Beyoğlu arm in arm, one in Yugoslavian uniform, the other a Turkish one. Then they’d paid their mother a visit, changed into civilian clothes, and returned to Beyoğlu, where they’d gone to a tavern in the Balık Pazarı.

  Speaking half Bosnian and half Turkish, with the odd bit of German and English when necessary, they’d gradually caught up with each other. Raki was knocked back, and Rumeli folk songs and sevdalinka sung. As they went from tipsy to outright drunk, Hikmet began loudly criticizing the Turkish government. Growing increasingly
vehement, he uttered a string of denunciations and curses. Terrified, Fikret tried to silence his brother. He quickly paid the bill and propelled his brother out of the tavern. They hailed a cab and continued on to Kumkapı, in whose tavern they watched dancing girls and listened to the saz. Just as dawn was breaking, they stopped in Arnavutköy for a bowl of tripe soup and, as the sun cleared the horizon, a glass of tea in the Çınaraltı tea garden in Emirgân. But it was only after Hikmet stripped, plunged into the waters of the Bosphorus in the chill of morning, was caught up in a strong current, and mercifully returned to shore by clutching the line of a small sailing boat that he finally sobered up.

  On their way home, they bought a newspaper. Fikret was astonished to see that the Sabah newspaper was full of the same denunciations that his brother had voiced at the meyhane. The next day, after visiting his father’s grave and kissing his mother’s hand, Fikret returned to Belgrade.

  His beloved niece Raziye had traveled all the way from Sarajevo to Belgrade to see her uncle and accept any gifts he’d brought her from Istanbul. Upon arriving, she noticed that he was uncharacteristically moody.

  “What’s wrong, Uncle? You seem glum,” Raziye said.

  Her uncle said nothing at first. When he was finally ready to confide in her, he said in a low, disillusioned voice, “I understand now that I’ve missed out on life. A life wasted due to a youthful mistake. And it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  “Uncle, you’re a man of high standing in this country. You shouldn’t have a care in the world—”

  “I never plunged into the flowing waters of a city at dawn. I never lambasted the government, either drunk or sober. I’ve missed out on life . . . It’s passed me by.”

  Uncle Fikret would never again be the man whose uproarious laughter could be heard three houses away. Nobody knew what had happened, but they all agreed that he was a changed man after his visit to Istanbul.

  Fikret never expressed his disappointment to his family. He watched in silence as Muslim cemeteries were bulldozed and turned into parks and high-rises, without even the courtesy of notifying the families. He never told anyone how aggrieved he was when Tito converted mosques into museums, storehouses, and cowsheds. Nor did he convey his great dismay at the closure of Muslim associations, schools and—worst of all—the Gazi Husrev Bey Charitable Foundation, which had been operating since 1530.

  He never pointed out that Tito only began currying favor with Muslims after he became secretary-general of the Non-Aligned Movement, and never mentioned how transparent he found the practice of appointing Yugoslavians with names like Ahmet, Mehmet, and Mustafa to posts in Arab countries. The fervor that had once burned in his heart had turned to ashes in his mouth.

  Except for that bout of depression after he got back from Istanbul, Raziyanım witnessed her uncle’s heartbreak on only one occasion. The father of her son-in-law, Burhan, had gotten to chatting with her uncle at a family dinner one day, and the conversation had turned to Tito’s nationalization of private property. The father had said, “I felt so sorry when I became unable to send our relatives in Istanbul their fair share of the income from the property. For years I’d been sending them their portion of the revenues and various provisions, never once neglecting to ship off canisters of Travnik cheese. What did they do? How did they manage to scrape by once those shipments were cut? How can you possibly explain to someone unfamiliar with a regime like ours that Tito seized lands that had been in our family for centuries, and that they no longer belong to us?”

  Knowing how fond her uncle was of Tito, Raziyanım braced herself for yet another one of those endless political debates between those who supported Tito to the death and those who loathed him, choosing to ignore his many services to their country.

  “Don’t worry about the relatives in Istanbul. If you’re going to feel sorry for anyone, feel sorry for us,” her uncle had replied in a deeply disappointed voice.

  Raziyanım was astounded. From her perspective, Istanbul was a city that saddened and crushed loved ones. It was a city that sowed discord.

  When she’d seen her daughter falling for that Turkish boy, she’d whisked her straight back to Sarajevo. She wasn’t going to allow her family to be torn apart; she intended to keep it intact. “Unity and Solidarity” was the slogan of Yugoslavia, and it applied just as aptly to her own family.

  A year later, Nimeta started university, where she met Burhan and quickly got over her first love. Burhan was a handsome young man from an old Bosniak family, and he’d be an engineer within the next two years. This time Raziyanım had no reason to object.

  They married right after Burhan graduated, and for the first few years Nimeta doted on her husband and was happy. After their life had settled into a routine, however, it dawned on Nimeta that she would be occupied with nothing but work, running a household, and raising children until the day she died. She felt as though she were stumbling through a thick, gray fog. And it was as she was fighting for breath in that fog that she met Stefan, who broke through the mist like a ray of light.

  Now, plunged into the mist once again, she felt that he’d been nothing more than a Roman candle, flaring up and engulfing her with light, only to fizzle out. The eternal, endless fog was back.

  When the children returned from school, Nimeta was still sitting in the straight-backed chair by the phone, staring at the wall and unaware of Bozo rubbing up against her legs.

  As Burhan drove his wife to the clinic that evening, it was with a terrible sense of guilt that he opened up to the doctor sitting next to him in the car. He was guilty of neglecting his wife for his work. Having to look after the children on her own while holding down a demanding career had driven her to depression. He was going to organize his work so that he could stay in Sarajevo with his family. He’d been running himself ragged to give them a better life, but he now realized that happiness didn’t necessarily come from earning more money. He’d brought prosperity to his home, but true happiness had slipped through his fingers. Now his wife was depressed, his children were adrift, and he was confused. Each member of the family was unhappy, and he, Burhan, acknowledged his role in that.

  What he didn’t know was that as his wife was struggling through her personal hell, his country too was sliding into a hell of its own. As Nimeta recovered in a clinic bed, the groundwork was being laid that would turn Yugoslavia into a bloodbath.

  APRIL 1987

  When the leader of the Serbian communists, Slobodan Milošević, was sent off to Kosovo by his dear friend President Stambolić to pacify yet another incident of Serbian minority unrest, he was already planning to tip the scales in his own favor, but he had no idea of the extent to which destiny was working on his behalf.

  Slobodan Milošević and Ivan Stambolić had been close friends ever since they were students at Belgrade Law School. Because Ivan Stambolić had devoted himself to the party throughout his university years, his rise through the ranks went more quickly than Milošević’s. But Stambolić had always looked out for his friend. Milošević even owed his first party assignment to Stambolić. After twenty-five years of sharing a common fate, the two friends were inseparable. By 1987, Milošević was both the leader of the Communist Party and Stambolić’s right-hand man.

  Stambolić had visited Kosovo for the first time on April 6, 1986. In Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians comprised 90 percent of the population, the Serbs had collected ten thousand signatures to protest the arrest of the separatist activist Bulatović. Stambolić had been forced to go to Kosovo to try to alleviate the mounting tensions.

  A year later, the Serbs were once again up in arms, and an official from Belgrade would have to be dispatched to Kosovo to calm them down. Stambolić assigned the person he most trusted to take on this mission, his good friend Milošević. It never occurred to him that this same friend would then stab him in the back in a bid to emerge as the leader of the Serbs.

  But M
ilošević had his own plans, ambitions, and abettors. His leading disciple was the head of Radio Television Belgrade, Dušan Mitević, who would abuse the power of television to inflame the Serbs and incite the people with false scenarios, rendering them all helpless to prevent Yugoslavia’s dismemberment under the guidance of Milošević.

  On April 24, 1987, thousands of Serbs turned out to welcome Milošević at the door to the Cultural Center in Kosovo Polye. The police had taken all the necessary precautions to prevent a riot. Television cameramen, the press corps, and journalists from all of the other republics were leaning out from the balconies and windows of apartments in the vicinity.

  Nimeta had gone back to work three or four months earlier. She’d been discharged after two months in the clinic but had stayed home for a while after that. Ivan had sent her some writing assignments and translations that she could handle at home. By the new year, she was back at her desk in the office. At first they’d been reluctant to send her on assignments outside the city, but she appeared to have made a full recovery and would gradually have to resume the responsibilities of her profession.

  Stefan was in London when he heard of her illness. He’d sent flowers and a card, clearly reluctant to further upset the woman whose life he’d sent into such turmoil.

  In order to look after the children while his wife was in the clinic, Burhan had stayed home and sent a fellow engineer to take his place at the construction site in Knin. Raziyanım had come to live with them and stayed on even after Nimeta was discharged from the clinic, determined to guard against Nimeta’s unsavory friends and drinking habit.

  Nimeta hadn’t objected, even though she knew that her mother would be constantly sticking her nose into her business. She had no intention of succumbing to another affair of the heart. In any case, Stefan was in London, and other than a call or two to wish her a speedy recovery, they weren’t speaking. She assumed it was over and that she would never see Stefan again. Nor would she think about him. And yet, as Nimeta set off for Kosovo with a cameraman, a little voice kept telling her that she would run into Stefan there.