EEG

by Daša Drndic

  I’ve written about Amsterdam.

  In Sarajevo I alternately died and returned to life.

  While I was still at Zagreb Airport, one could have concluded that something in the world, about the world, didn’t add up. Flights for Sarajevo, Athens and Frankfurt were scheduled for roughly the same time. At the gate for Germany the queue was so long and drawn-out that it took several buses to carry the passengers to the aircraft, and that took awhile. The queues for Athens and Sarajevo were short, fewer than thirty people in each. Athens was in turmoil, so it could have been dangerous there, travelers like security, playing it safe. By the time I was traveling, the Sarajevo festival was over and there was still plenty of time before the New Year, when inquisitive Western Europeans go off in search of East-European (Balkan) exoticism and bizarre eccentricities.

  Although I had been to Sarajevo since the end of the war, this time, when I stayed longer, I met people I hadn’t seen for twenty years. I observed faces and tried to guess who had remained in the besieged city and who had left and had now returned. In conversations, twenty years after the war, the war was here, even among those born after apparent peace was established. The Sarajevo director Mladen Ovadija, my friend and former colleague, permanently settled in Toronto, was at that time in Sarajevo. We stood in front of the plaque on Ulica Ferhadija and he said, This is where my friend Mahmut Čikić lost both his legs. He died in Canada. He was an excellent engineer and first-rate mathematician.

  Nedžad Abdija,

  Ismet Ašćerić,

  Ruždija Bektešević,

  Snježana Biloš,

  Predrag Bogdanović,

  Vladimir Bogunović,

  Gordana Čeklić,

  Vasva Čengić,

  Mirsad Fazlagić,

  Emina Karamustafić,

  Mediha Omerović,

  Bahrija Pilav,

  Mila Ruždić,

  Mile Ružić,

  Hatidža Salić,

  Abdulah Sarajlić,

  Sulejman Sarajlić,

  Galib Sinotić,

  Sreten Stamenović,

  Srećko Šiklić,

  Vlatko Tanacković,

  Srećko Tanasković,

  Božica Trajeri-Pataki,

  Tamara Vejzagić-Kostić,

  Jusuf Vladović

  and

  Izudin Zukić.

  Twenty-six citizens of Sarajevo vanished in an instant. This is just one of the numerous lists of civilians killed during the war in Sarajevo.

  On May 27, 1992, in Ulica Vase Miskina, today’s Ferhadija, between numbers 5 and 12, near the former Klas shop, people were queuing for bread. At 9:55 a.m. the Serbian forces aimed three 82-caliber mortar shells at that place, and their bursting action massacred 26 civilians and injured another 108 citizens of Sarajevo. This is where that plaque is, and in the pavement in front of it are the shell holes. Beside Mladen and me, in front of the memorial plaque, a twenty-year-old had stopped and said to the girl he was with, This is where my parents’ friends were killed.

  More than twenty years have passed. In sunny weather I stroll along Ferhadija with its European atmosphere; the cafés are full, people sit outside, there are rows of shops of well-known international brands, there is a book fair in the park, pensioners play chess, and stray dogs are everywhere.

  They lie motionless, lethargic, curled up in the middle of squares and, on those increasingly cold nights, beside the windows of luxuriously illuminated shops or in the entrances to buildings. These homeless creatures, whose population since the war years has been growing, are surprisingly beautiful, their coats glossy. But people say that when they form packs, they can be dangerous and aggressive.

  I read, then, in a newspaper, that according to the most recent census there were 11,168 dogs roaming freely in the streets of Sarajevo. That is the population of a smallish town, Rovinj for instance. I look at those dogs, among which there are some purebreds. I even came across a Tornjak, originally a sheep dog.

  A Tornjak, Canis montanus, is a reliable, generally even-tempered dog, unbribable and distrustful of strangers.

  It is resistant to disease.

  It is modest in terms of food and shelter, and on winter nights it is prone to staying out in the snow, which then covers it.

  The Tornjak’s body is powerful and well proportioned.

  They say that the Tornjak is an exceptionally intelligent dog, it learns quickly, makes good judgments and makes decisions.

  Tornjaks bark a lot, but they are calm in the house. Nevertheless, if they judge that there is a threat on the horizon, their transformation is instantaneous and they are ready for battle.

  Genetically, Tornjaks are a resilient breed.

  So, now. There are still discussions about the origin of the Tornjak. Some maintain that their country of origin is Bosnia and Herzegovina, others that the Tornjak is a Croatian mountain dog, whose function since the eleventh century has been to protect flocks from thieves and large predators.

  The first descriptions of Tornjaks date from 1067 and they can be found in the annals of the Bosnian Catholic Church, documents which confirm that this is a very ancient breed, raised for a whole millennium in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Others, in keeping with the Iranian theory of the origin of the Croats, endeavor to prove that Tornjaks came to these parts with the Croats from northern Iran, or rather from ancient Persia. Quarrels about whose dog the Tornjak is, Bosnian and Herzegovinian or Croatian, continue to this day. Just as disagreements are still ongoing about which little national state Ivo Andrić came from.

  Sarajevans say that on winter nights a large Tornjak lies down on a hungry, freezing homeless man and so protects him from the cold. It is not known whether that homeless man is a Bosnian, Croat, Serb, Jew or member of some other nation, because the homeless man does not say, because he has no one to tell, because he has more urgent concerns, and it is not known on what basis this riddle could be solved from the outside.

  I go to Radio-Television Bosnia and Herzegovina to see some old friends. I spend twenty-five minutes in a tram. I look at the buildings. Some have been renovated, some half-patched, pockmarked all over, some are in ruins. And there are graffiti. The most common are graffiti that say: Watch out for bullets, Sabina, I love you, and Why?

  I enter a concrete complex wrapped in the former Socialist age of our shared state, massacred by time. In the huge foyer of the Radio-Television Bosnia and Herzegovina building, which Sarajevans call “The Gray House,” there is a little newspaper kiosk, and on the wall of the kiosk hangs a photograph of Josip Broz Tito. No one gets upset, no one foams at the mouth, nor does anyone exult or pat himself on the back. In that remote kiosk, Tito simply hangs as a reminder, as un-forgetting, he says nothing, he does not give orders, he does not punish, he just hangs, watches and is silent.

  When I used to talk to students about Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, 90 percent of them did not know what a tape recorder looked like, that unwieldy contraption with two wheels through which a tape slid. Then someone asked, Isn’t it that machine from George Clooney’s film Good Night and Good Luck? Where does oblivion begin? In childhood?

  Teams of horses clopped through towns, with meter-tall aluminum churns of milk gleaming and clattering on the carts behind them. Women waited at their doors with pots into which the milk was poured. The streets were full of droppings. The little round balls of manure could be kicked as one walked.

  Classrooms were heated with “queen stoves,” the floors were black, coated with varnish, while homework was written in chalk on little blackboards with golden-yellow wooden frames.

  Rag balls and clay marbles and silk sweets.

  Games of Chetniks/Ustasha and Partisans, then cowboys and Indians.

  Mothers with cold perms.

  Russian films, mostly Stone Flower and The Pike’s Commandment.

&
nbsp; Shoes, capped, to make them last longer.

  Bread-soup and potato stew.

  Kekec biscuits.

  Bobbed hair, then in 1960 Eton crops, like in Godard’s Breathless.

  Apartments without baths because the Russians took them.

  Rest homes for children with TB.

  The “Albus” soap of our childhood.

  Immediately after the Second World War, for laundry, people first used ash, then “live soda,” and only then “Albus” and finally “Plavi Radion” washing powder.

  At the end of the 1960s, we were allowed across the state frontiers. We went to Trieste to buy nylon shirts, navy-blue plastic macs, denims, bell-bottoms and winklepickers. And soap.

  Then, women teachers had moustaches, joined-up eyebrows and sweaty armpits.

  “Rudo” extra-depth orthopedic shoes.

  “Black Cat” perfume.

  Reversible coats.

  Loaves weighing three kilograms.

  Boro and Ramiz, the partisan hero “Pinki” and other little couriers.

  Tito’s collected works.

  The film Walter Defends Sarajevo.

  Postwar poverty turned us into potential members of Mensa. Our eyes were huge. We learned to see the hidden, to read the unwritten, to hear the unsaid. Life became half reality, half myth.

  So, while I waited for Miralem Ovčina, editor in chief of the Drama program, and while I strolled through what was now clearly a senselessly spacious and dark foyer, flashes of my past (my youth) erupted, sizzling and crackling. A man approached me and asked, Didn’t you work here once? Might you be Dževad?

  When I was leaving Belgrade, a long-term colleague told me, The shape of your face is not at all Serbian. You should leave, she said.

  In Rijeka people said, How did you come by that Serbian accent?

  At the launch of one of my books in London people asked me, Are you Jewish?

  In other words, my face could have been either a Muslim face or a Jewish face, whatever that meant, and, for Croats, also Serbian. Like the face of that homeless man the Tornjak protects on winter nights.

  Whatever, however they look, whoever they belong to, there are faces to be remembered. Because of what those faces say. Or don’t say.

  For instance, the face of Hasan Nuhanović is a face to remember. Hasan Nuhanović studied mechanical engineering in Sarajevo. His fourth year of studies was interrupted by the war. Hasan Nuhanović survived the suffering in the Podrinje area, after which he fled with his family to Srebrenica, where in July 1995 he began to work for the United Nations as an interpreter. He witnessed the appalling events in which Mladić’s forces killed his brother, his mother and his father. He wrote several dozen articles and texts about the murders in Srebrenica. He published a documentary book Under the UN Flag: The International Community and the Srebrenica Genocide, followed by a novel, The Escape: Road to Srebrenica. The events in this book refer on the whole to 1992, when the genocide began in that east Bosnian town, brought to an ignominious end in 1995.

  The novel The Escape covers the event in which, in 1992, more than a hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims found themselves in the region of Srebrenica, Vlasenica, Cerska, Nova Kasaba, Konjević Polje, Žepa and Han Pijesak. With no pathos, with no sentimentality, through his literary gift for details and his metaphorical and symbolic images and dialogues, which slip from so-called realistic prose into a nightmare world of the surreal and the magical, then back to reality, Hasan Nuhanović can without hesitation be included among the writers of what may be called Yugoslav literature of the camps. The dead speak, the living speak, those who have yet to come speak.

  Then, says Hasan Nuhanović, we didn’t know that we had become refugees. But not any kind of refugees. We had not come to a secure place, or to a third country. We left in order to hide in the mountains of eastern Bosnia. To hide from the war. As though one can hide from war in a forest. War, along with fear, reaches you in an instant. It penetrates walls, it moves over mountains, through rivers. It enters the human mind, human hearts, human souls. It settles there and will not leave.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell and translated by Gajo Petrović, was last published in 1987 by the well-known Sarajevo publisher Veselin Masleša, founded in long-ago 1950. Veselin Masleša, whose publications educated the intelligentsia of the whole of Yugoslavia, is no more; Veselin Masleša disappeared in the war, but its publications resurface here and there, when they are needed and where they are needed.

  In the 7th Thesis of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein affirms that what can be said at all, can be said clearly; or else If something cannot be talked about, one must keep silent. But, as the colleague who shares my surname, the Brazilian-Hungarian writer and critic Zsófia Bán says, Seen from the perspective of cultural history, this position represents one of the main sources of cultural neurosis. If we consider, or rather, if a culture considers that we must keep silent about something, it implies that we know precisely what we are not to speak about. Wittgenstein says, For an answer that cannot be articulated, the question cannot be articulated either. There is no enigma. If a question can be posed at all, then it is possible also to answer it.

  While Jaspers affirms, There is no question that should not be posed.

  Wherever I went in Sarajevo I came across new graveyards, and the names of those who, in the course of the four-year siege, were killed by members of the Army of Republika Srpska, the Yugoslav National Army, and paramilitary groups. The graveyards are in parks, right next to houses, on former children’s playgrounds, or in stadiums, and there are lists of names on squares, on shops, on memorials, on plaques, in broad streets and in alleyways where there are never any crowds. The names on these signs range from one to a thousand. And in between, among these memorials, life revolves. Everyday, modern European life.

  Reminder:

  The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days.

  In the course of the siege 470,000 shells fell on the city, on average 330 shells a day.

  In Sarajevo, 11,541 people were killed, of whom 1,601 were children. Those children have their own memorial, their names, their square.

  In addition to his own active wartime journey, the architect Mirza Fočo also writes about his work on the restoration of monuments of international cultural heritage, which include the Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo. After the one in Prague, this cemetery is the second largest in Europe, and it is situated on a dangerous mudslide site. Presumably seeing it as some kind of no-man’s-land, in this last war the Serbian forces covered it with mines. The Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo has a long and rich story, but I won’t go into that now. Not to destroy the flow of the narrative, not to stray too far from the theme. What is the flow of my narrative? What is its theme?

  Mirza Fočo comes from a well-known Sarajevo partisan family. I ask him whether any of the Sarajevans he knows who crossed onto the side of the aggressor have any regrets, whether any had apologized. One, said Mirza. And he no longer sleeps.

  In Toronto, in 1995, I made a radio documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Company about people who had fled Bosnia and Herzegovina. In that documentary, the engineer M. B. talked about leaving Sarajevo through the famous tunnel dug under the airport runway. A journalist from Canadian state radio, camped in a completely different world, in a completely different time, asked, Does the tunnel have a lift?

  What do you mean “a lift”! the engineer M. B. said in exasperation. It’s a hole. It’s like going through hell. It’s narrow, it’s low, water sometimes reaches your knees. It had been raining, and the ground inside is clay, and clay is slippery. I had old shoes on my feet, completely worn out. I kept falling into mud and water. I was carrying two bags. They contained all my belongings. Photographs, documents and diplomas. I set out at four in the afternoon and the following day, around eight in
the evening, I left Bosnia.

  Today twenty meters of the tunnel from Dobrinja to Butmir have been restored, and from the house of the Kolar family, which still stands on the Butmir side, riddled with shell-holes, I imagined that military, civilian and humanitarian path through hell toward freedom. The Dobrinja-Butmir tunnel, or rather the city-airport tunnel, is about 800 meters long, one meter wide and a meter and a half high. It was designed by experts, and built by members of the civil defense force and miners from Miljevina and central Bosnia — in catastrophic conditions, with incomprehensible obstacles, using superhuman efforts, in three shifts. Twenty-eight hundred cubic meters of earth was dug out of it, around 170 cubic meters of wooden material was built into it, and about 45 tons of metal. Three months later, in July 1993, accompanied by constant shelling from Serbian positions, people began to move in both directions — out of the city and into the city. An average of four thousand people passed through the tunnel each day. Twelve tons of military material and many tons of food and medicine were transferred through it.

  Along with the original section of the war tunnel, known as the “Tunnel of Salvation,” in the Kolars’ house there is also a memorial room with photographs and in the cellar an exhibition of items associated with activities in the tunnel — clothes, shoes, trolleys, and later, rails to transport the wounded, children, old people and weapons, rucksacks, and also a film about the shelling of Sarajevo and the building of the tunnel. Visitors sit on military crates, watch and weep.

  There is another memorial marking the streets of Sarajevo: Sarajevo roses. Sarajevo roses are the imprints of shells in the asphalt, later filled with red paint. There are large ones, a meter in diameter, there are small ones, hardly visible. There are a lot of them, so simply stepping through the streets of Sarajevo makes forgetting impossible. But individual streets are being dug up, new ones are being constructed, and the imprints are disappearing, so many steps tread over others that the red color is fading. Sarajevo roses in the asphalt, a homage to the dead. But who are the dead? If these red flowers do fade, then disappear, perhaps it would be possible to press into the asphalt beside them small, bright, brass letters, spelling the names, along with the date of birth and death of each individual, so that the steps of walkers would involuntarily polish all those lives over which they would pause, over which they would bow and so pay their respects. The way all over Europe passersby are obliged to stop by Demnig’s stone stumbling blocks. Because every name carries a story, and history remembers the names of the perpetrators, not the victims.