Even in the dark I could see his face was shiny like he was running a marathon instead of talking. He said that us men, we don’t talk like the women, or maybe it was just him, he didn’t know. But he wanted to tell me something that he never told Mama.
I’m trying to remember, word for word.
When Baba and Deda Ilić left for Belgrade, I insisted that we stay. I believed that it wouldn’t last, that the bastards could not steal such a city. But I was wrong, and as the months passed, I did the calculations. I knew with each passing day the odds turned against our family a little more. Maybe it would be your mama, or your sister, or you in the hospital with no antiseptic or antibiotics. I was frightened for you as a boy growing up to kill or be killed, and I was frightened for myself. I had trapped our family there because I was nothing more than a school math teacher. Even when the tunnel finally opened, passes out were not for people like us.
So this is what I did. I gave some powerful people some information about someone I’d known for a long time. He wasn’t exactly an innocent man, but I knew his sister, his mother.
For a long time I didn’t want to know about what happened to this man. I didn’t want to know. And then a while back I gave Amina his name and asked her to try to find out what she could. This morning she told me she’d spoken to his sister’s old hairdresser and that he’d been shot through the temple while in line for water. This means I maybe wasn’t responsible for his execution. He was maybe just another victim of those men who hide behind rifle scopes, shooting what’s handy.
Tata was crying but didn’t seem to notice.
But you see, it doesn’t matter. I still did what I did. I paid with a piece of myself, and it has left a scar that will never heal. Soon I will have a new Canadian grandbaby who won’t even speak Bosnian, but for me the scar will remain.
I told him that he was a good man, that he’d saved his kids, and he sighed like I was telling him something too obvious.
I am just a man, Lazar. And I have failed you in many ways. I’ve not paid attention as I should.
I told him that it was okay, that I forgave him, that I was sorry too, and then he said he was going back to school in the new year to study drafting. He said math was a language he knew well and his friend was going to help him.
I told him that was good and that I wanted to go back to school too, which wasn’t true, but it was a good lie and it made him smile.
And now I’m thinking about Amina’s war crimes tribunal, about all the money and people and time it will take to hash over what happened for all those years to my tata’s home, to face it all again so we can remember as much of the truth as we can.
And I think maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s worth it.
4
December 26, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: 2000
I found the pic Mindy took of us when we came in after that slushy snow fight. You’re leaning into me like you want to smell my soggy hair and your eyes are closed because you are the least photogenic person that’s ever lived … and now I feel like I’m going to throw up because maybe Mindy wasn’t wrong. Which is fricking rich, because what kind of straight guy prances around in matching T-shirts to the Spice Girls? I mean, into Elton John, check. Mama’s boy, check. Friends with a fat chick, check. Secret crush on Ivan, check.
Like, what the hell???
I wrote to Ivan, u know. I asked him how his hair was growing back, if he’d found a band in the Emerald City, whether he thought u were a sociopath. He wrote back a nice note, said he missed Winnipeg’s hidden gems like me and then he got all Dungeon-mastery. He said some people are destined to lose their way and it’s not our fault or our responsibility, it’s just their destiny.
And I knew he was right, like always. Everyone fricking says it. Even Amanda-P who believes in forgiveness and redemption.
Except the thing is, with Ivan sometimes I couldn’t catch my breath. CristElle was never like that. I never felt lonely with u, not even when I thought u were dying. And I swear I know kind of how your tata feels now.
I don’t want to fricking move on. I miss the way it was too much, even though I don’t know if it ever was that way to begin with.
I just keep thinking of how we always planned to spend this New Year’s … I’d have my license and we’d drive around to all the nightclubs singing karaoke and winning all the contests so we could afford our first champagne. Holy fricking shit, we were dorks on an epic scale. But the thought of CristElle driving around in Mindy’s old minivan, pouring expensive bubbly into each other’s mouths …
Except I keep imagining u sitting there all frizzy-headed and alone with Mama and Tata Depresso.
There is going to be a new century without CristElle. After 2000 years of bullshit, don’t we deserve better than that?
December 27, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: Hi
Dear Elle … r u there? It’s the day after Boxing Day.
December 27, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: re Hi
I know what day it is.
December 27, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: re Hi
I read all your messages.
December 27, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: re Hi
R u there? Can I come over?
December 27, 1999
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject line: re Hi
What took you so fricking long?
The Tragedy of Sarajevo for Curious Bystanders
by Amina Spaho
WHO ARE THE BALKAN SLAVS?
Most people in southeastern Europe (otherwise known as the Balkans) have a common Slav ancestry. They probably look and sound pretty much the same to you.
BUT — and this is IMPORTANT — they have lived largely different histories.
Since about the mid-1400s:
• Serbians have had ties with Orthodox Christianity and the rule of Russia.
• Croatians have had ties with Catholicism and the rule of Austria and Hungary.
• Bosnians have had ties with all of the above, plus with Islam, from when the Ottoman Turks took over for a while.
Thanks to these differences in geography, politics and religion, most of Balkan history has been filled with CLASHES AND HOSTILITY.
Except in Bosnia’s capital city, Sarajevo.
Tucked in a beautiful mountain valley, Sarajevo became the place for all Slavs and their rulers — Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim — to live and trade and make their mark. In the 1500s, even Jews were welcomed when places like Spain and Portugal didn’t want them.
WHAT ABOUT YUGOSLAVIA? DIDN’T ALL THE BALKANS JUST GET ALONG THEN?
It’s true. After World War Two, the Balkan peoples were exhausted from all the death and destruction. They tried to overcome their centuries-old clashes.
They created one large united nation known as Yugoslavia and proclaimed Belgrade, in Serbia, its capital, led by Tito, Yugoslavia’s savvy statesman and beloved leader. Tito held the Slavs together with an iron fist and Communism, an unquestioning belief in industrious team work and endless human progress.
Yugoslavia became part of the mighty Soviet Communist bloc, where differences like how or who you chose to worship, or what you could call your own, or where you felt rooted, were officially meaningless.
For fifty years, talking publicly about how Yugoslavs differed was forbidden!
YET YUGOSLAVIA LASTED ONLY 50 YEARS!
Unfortunately, Yugoslavia was bound to fail, because it turns out that how or who you choose to worship, or what you can call your own, or where you feel rooted means QUITE A BIT to most of us.
So by 1990, all the Communist bloc governments began to fall one by one.
The dying union of Yugoslavia left its young people without jobs or a future to believe in. And the age-old differences and conflicts began bubbling to the surface again like lava.
Serbs in Belgrade, who still ruled the Yugoslav Army, decided this was finally their chance to grab all the power and all the land they thought they deserved.
They went on the attack. And here’s the thing. ONCE PEOPLE ARE AT WAR WITH EACH OTHER, NOTHING MATTERS BUT THEIR DIFFERENCES.
Which means havens of mixed culture like Sarajevo must be destroyed.
In 1992, Serb fighters moved into the mountains. They surrounded the citizens of Sarajevo and held the entire city under siege.
Their goal? To starve, maim and kill as many as those citizens as possible so that they would abandon their uniquely glorious city.
WHERE WAS THE REST OF THE WORLD DURING ALL THIS?
The United Nations and its alliance of Western democracies hemmed and hawed. They preferred not to get their well-manicured hands dirty in a civil war, no matter how one-sided. No matter that the JERUSALEM OF EUROPE, with its many mosques, cathedrals, onion domes and synagogues, was turning to rubble, its people dying in a rain of shrapnel and bullets.
FINALLY, with at least 10,000 already dead and 50,000 wounded, half of them CIVILIANS and CHILDREN, the world stepped up. In the fall of 1995, NATO and the UN launched Operation Deliberate Force, an air campaign that lasted less than a single month and brought the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare to an end.
Now it is a new century and Sarajevo’s Bosnian War dead lie in the surrounding slopes, circling the valley.
I will not get into the fate of war criminals like the politicians Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, or General Ratko Mladić. You can look them up and decide for yourself if the punishments fit the crimes or, if like the historic sanctum of Sarajevo, true justice is perhaps too much to expect in this life.
Acknowledgements
With endless gratitude to my editor, Shelley Tanaka, whose careful reading and patient wisdom always made it better.
And to Dzevad Karahasan, for his sad and beautiful book, Sarajevo, Exodus of a City (Kodansha, 1994).
About the Author
Brenda Hasiuk has published adult short stories in the Malahat Review, New Quarterly and Prism. She has previously written two YA novels, Where the Rocks Say Your Name (shortlisted for the McNally-Robinson Book of the Year and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction) and Your Constant Star (praised by Kirkus for its “authentic teen characters, closely observed settings and moving plot”).
Brenda lives in Winnipeg, where she is on the board of Rossbrook House, an inner-city drop-in center for at-risk youth, and she heads up Project Reunite, a grassroots group working to support, settle and reunite Syrian refugee families.
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