Ivan had a Croatian flag fluttering on his balcony, and he was by no means the kind of person whom you could just knock on the door and ask them to keep it down a little. At the start of the war he shared a trench and rations with none other than Igor. Now he worked as a police officer in Vešnja and had his own car.
Igor had explained the situation to him and retold the entire Sergio incident, of course with the exception of the part about the thrashing. The two of them immediately went down to reception, where Ivan proceeded to give Sergio a brief lecture:
‘They’re going to have that party! And how! They’ve lost everything!’
‘But the noise …’
‘They can use the TV room! It’s almost directly under my place, and as for the neighbours, I’ll speak to them. They’re going to have that party!’
Sergio put up a struggle, making reference to his responsibilities, and stated that if there were any more complaints he would have to call the police.
Ivan sent him a wan smile:
‘Pull yourself together, man! I am the police. Call whoever you like, and send them to my door. I know all of them. However, I think it would be best if you just keep your trap shut! I’ve had to kill lice and wade through mud so that you could live and work in peace. I’ve had to – for the sake of your fat arse – bury my best friends!’
The TV room was commandeered around nine. The news had long since finished. The oldies had retreated to their fourteen square metres.
Robi switched off the TV. Amar opened a bottle. Samir went to get his ghetto blaster. Igi was the hero of the day. We kept him going with a steady supply of drinks. The girls sang ‘Under the Bridge’ and danced in the middle of the room. Marina sent me a look that I did not pick up on, and at that exact moment the lights went out.
‘Oh, no!’
‘What the hell!’
‘It’s not coming back on!’
‘Of all the nights!’
There was no point in complaining to reception. Even if there had been a normal person behind the counter, they would not have been able to help. It was a holiday, the caretaker was off, and the fuse, or whatever the hell it was, could not be changed until the day after tomorrow.
Then Elvis got an idea. His dad, Huso, who was famous for his legendary words, ‘That’s how it is these days. Now all of you are gypsies too,’ had an old lorry, which the entire family had escaped Bosnia in. The lorry was in an equal state of decay as our former homeland, and so dusty that we never found out what colour it was. According to Huso the vehicle had not been washed since the days the Germans shouted ‘Halt!’ and ‘Hände hoch!’ in these parts.
The old lorry was soon positioned beneath the window of the TV room. Some extensions were unwound and connected inside the driver’s cabin. A speaker was unscrewed and placed in the windowsill. A candle lit up the room, and then the music went off with a bang …
Bottles were opened, sent round the room and emptied. Standing on the imagined dance floor in the middle of the room, their lips pressed together, was Amar and Sanela, the newest couple. Dancing next to them was Samir and Andrea, and Igor and Kača. Damir and Ismar handed Igor a bottle as they passed. As he took a swig, Kača walked up to me and pinched my arm:
‘Marina is waiting for you, you jerk. Talk to her. Go on!’
Midnight approached. The jackets and sweaters came out. In the dim, undecorated TV room, it was getting a little warm, and Marina and I commented on the music and the temperature.
By the time someone put Filthy Theatre on and everyone in the room roared along to ‘Nobody could hide their tears like Marina,’ the two of us were already standing outside in the dark, snogging our heads off, just as a matter of form. Normally I kissed her rather distantly. I did not want her to think that she was special. But on that night it was different. Mister No’s face and images from a party exactly one year earlier pushed their way in between Marina’s cotton sweater and my new Caritas shirt. Almost in desperation I grabbed her and held her tightly for a long time. The images faded. We clung to each other, pressed together, and drifted away like two weightless creatures without a past.
YET ANOTHER WAR
It was the coolest party ever. For days afterwards we hung out in front of the TV room discussing who had said what that night. Who had drunk the most and who had got the most wasted. We could hardly wait till the return of spring and summer. The smell of grilled sardines tantalising our senses. The party season would be opened with a bang, under the open sky, this time with the latest chicks from the beach at our side. Plus more bottles and more batteries, so the party would last even longer than the previous one.
We had tasted blood. Forgotten everything that 1992 had taught us. That the rest of the world existed, and that you should always bear that in mind. Either we did not understand, or we did not want to understand, that you really had to rein in your expectations; we did not live in Beverly Hills, but on the Balkini peninsula, where everything good was short-lived.
The idiots were queuing up to spoil the party.
Over the course of the winter, a fragile alliance between Bosnian Croatians and Bosnian Muslims creaked big time. There had long been disagreements and sporadic clashes, but from the outset of 1993 there was talk of certain war. Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims no longer fought Bosnian Serbs, but also one another.
The radio and TV buzzed with information, misinformation, official denials and appeals. It was not easy to figure out what was actually going on. In order to know the truth, or at least get a sense of it, you had to read as many newspapers as possible, listen to as many radio stations as possible and spend hours flicking through the TV channels. Then place all the conflicting statements side by side and try to make heads or tails of the bloody and filthy mess.
Such demanding mental activity was something very few had the nerves for. Newspapers cost money, the only thing to listen to was Radio Sarajevo and Radio Free Europe, on top of the unavoidable Radio Zagreb, while the one TV station was the Croatian channel, HTV. Every single night President Dr Franjo Tudjman would appear on the screen. If not his entire body in motion, then at least a freeze-frame close-up.
The glass windows of the TV room steamed up. People pretended to be clever, debated tactics, made proposals. Everyone and their dog had an opinion on what ought to be done, how the government ought to react. Everyone and their dog was president for the evening. Brief sentences and phrases like ‘That won’t do, now listen here’ were all the rage. The belief that your side was telling the truth was strong and heartfelt, especially when they said that the other side was lying.
We kept our distance from the TV room. For the most part we met in the ground floor of D2, in Damir and Samir’s room. In the corridor, the old women gathered, eternally moaning and complaining about the noise we made. They had no comprehension of our daily requirement to lock the door and let ourselves be carried away by the meandering notes of Slash’s masterful solos, by Hetfield’s deep, dark riffs and by Morrison’s lyrics, words we still understood too few of.
In room 210 of building D1, it was more difficult to avoid all that nonsense. Dad listened to Radio Free Europe every night at seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve o’clock. Transmitted from Prague. Mutli-ethnic editorials.
It did not make for a good night’s sleep.
I dreamt about the war, our friends and neighbours – about a certain Kerim, who directly after his return from the YPA described various drills to me and showed me how to march. He told me about an officer who one time, during an alarm in the middle of the night, all keyed up, whispered: ‘The enemy is here. Close by. In the woods.’ With a barely visible finger he pointed towards a barely visible woods. It was as dark as the inside of an owl’s arse, it was two thirty in the morning, and the moon was hidden behind the clouds. There was not a soul within a radius of five kilometres – friends or enemies.
Three years later Kerim was killed by a shell from the very same YPA with whom he had done his military servi
ce, never having taken the drills, alarms and brainwashing presentations seriously. Aided by eyewitness descriptions, I dreamt about him a number of times. His face was slashed, his right hand was resting on his left rib. Standing over him, next to me, was Krešimir Tomič, my history teacher from Vešnja, whispering in my ear:
‘Forward march!’
I woke up and turned in the bed, determined to put my fingers in my ears the next time Dad went to adjust the black dial on the radio, summoning waves filled with counts of the dead and the missing, the wounded and the raped, the displaced and the persecuted. I did that for one or two nights, but it did not help much. On a purely physiological level, there are limits to how far you can stick your finger in your ear. However little you wanted to hear, you still heard. However little you wanted to feel, you felt. However much you stayed away from the TV room and turned a blind eye to the ugliness and the unsavouriness, the ugliness and unsavouriness did not turn a blind eye to you. It approached by degrees, growing in strength, both in image and in sound. Metallica’s hardest songs suddenly seemed pathetic and weak – like they were played on a harp or a ukulele, accompanied by countless tubas and trumpets.
Balcony doors were opened, but not just to let in the early spring sun. Ĉavoglave and Here Comes the Dawn thundered away in the opposite direction. Here and there a greeting was absent. Here and there a collectively directed comment burst out –‘Go back to Bosnia and laugh that loudly there!’ – while other, more precise retorts were delivered directly to someone in person: ‘You Muslim piece of shit!’
The latter was dispatched by a giant wearing a CDC uniform, his arm around his cousin Zdenko from D1, who stopped in front of Samir and I:
‘Hey, you there! You with the hair! What are you? A hippie? A junkie? What’s your name?’
‘Samir,’ the person in question replied. ‘And yours?’
The guy held out his hand and squeezed.
Samir bent onto one knee in pain.
‘Rambo. That’s my name. And tomorrow I’m going to shave off all your hair, you Muslim piece of shit! You’re firing shells over our heads in Mostar, and we’re feeding you here!’
Samir stuttered out something along the lines of ‘I have nothing to do with that,’ and the impatient Zdenko exclaimed:
‘Come on, Ante. Hurry up! Leave the kids alone.’
They swayed off in the direction of a car parked by the Muscle Market. They were drunk, to put it mildly.
For the next week, Samir was looking over his shoulder, expecting to bump into Ante again. He was unbelievably stressed. Luckily for him it turned out the guy was a deserter. Both he and Zdenko had bolted. But how could anyone have known that in the moment he squeezed Samir’s hand? And what would have happened if Samir had returned the favour and called a Croat in uniform a piece of shit?
Luckily I do not know, but I know what happened immediately after the Ante incident.
I stood in front of the open TV room listening to the TV with one ear, which sounded the attack at full blast, and with the other I listened to Igor and his hazy theory that all girls were subconsciously attracted to men in uniform.
Then Sanela appeared by the entrance to D2 and said:
‘Damir and Samir are leaving.’
‘Leaving? Where are they going?’
‘Sweden.’
‘Shut up!’
‘That must be a joke!’
‘No, it’s not. They’re leaving on Saturday. I just spoke to them.’
‘Did you?’
I could not believe it. I would not believe it!
I asked Sanela where they were, and hurried into D2.
Igor followed me, his flip flops smacking the ground.
We knocked on the door.
The door handle was vibrating. There was music playing inside.
‘Come in!’
I opened the door.
Samir stood in the middle of the room, bare-chested, with a tube of toothpaste in one hand. His hair was down.
He just shrugged.
In fact it had been on the cards for some time. None of us saw them. Their parents had always been worried about the two of them. They feared them being mobilised. Samir had told his parents about the Ante incident and about the thrashing Damir got from Sergio in place of a New Year’s greetings. That did not exactly comfort them. Returning home was out of the question. The war in Bosnia, and particularly in Herzegovina, was nowhere near ending. On the contrary, it was clearly just beginning.
Sweden beckoned, and they packed their things.
Nothing was the same anymore. We no longer lit fires on the beach and we no longer sat in a circle around it. Sanela’s words had divided us into two camps: those who stayed and those who left. Amar and I, disciples of the twins, had let our hair grow out and addressed each other with the familiar ‘bro,’ now walked around with no purpose. We were very aware of the fact that without them, nothing would be the same, while they kept silent and avoided any discussion about their imminent journey.
The night before leaving, they held a farewell party in their room on the ground floor of D2. It felt like a funeral. We sat on the floor and had a few brief, superficial conversations. Riders on the Storm drifted lazily through the smoke-filled room. It was Damir’s favourite song, and we played it over and over again.
Sometime after midnight, by the wall beneath the window, Kača and Damir kissed. For weeks they had been seen walking together on the beach. For weeks he had hesitated, knowing that he would be leaving soon. That night, with everything already lost and nothing to be broken, she seized the opportunity and made the first move. For the rest of the night, the rest of us in the room, the old women in the corridor, tomorrow, which would separate them for good, none of those things existed. The only thing that existed was a dim, smoke-filled room in one of the army’s former holiday camps by the sea, a long-endured hunger and any crumb that you could snap up.
The next day we stood gathered at the bus station in Vešnja and bid a lengthy farewell. Samir cried. We swapped cassettes and small mementos to remember each other by. Promised we would write. Comforted each other.
‘We’re going to meet again,’ Damir whispered when at long last he gave me a hug.
He boarded the chugging bus and then he was gone.
Two weeks later I experienced a total déjà vu on the terrace between D1 and D2. Sanela walked towards me and wrapped her arms around my neck:
‘Amar and Ismar are leaving!’
‘Where are they going?’
‘Sweden.’
An almost identical storyline followed: depression, the final collective swigs of beer, embraces, tears and waving goodbye at a sunny bus station in Vešnja.
As he boarded the bus, Amar shoved a piece of plastic into my hand. A cassette tape. He raised his double thumb in the air, smiled and said:
‘Primo quality!’
I turned the cover and looked down: Metallica. Compilation. First song: ‘Am I Evil?’
Amar was gone.
After Amar and Ismar’s departure, things happened quickly. There were no farewell parties, waving from the platform or proper bouts of depression. Bosnian friends my age continued to disappear.
Elvis and his family, whose lorry and accumulator saved our New Year’s Eve, travelled to Italy via some illegal routes. Sanela, who grieved over Amar like he was dead, moved away to stay with her mum and some distant relations in Split. Her dad was fighting Croatians in the eastern part of Mostar, and everyone in the camp knew it.
Cassette 4
SOLO PASSAGES
GOLDSMITH’S TREASURE
Within weeks of Amar’s departure I felt like dropping out of technical school. The teachers were smart-arses, just like Fabio had said. I was growing more and more uncomfortable in my chair. I wanted to get away.
Our history teacher, Krešmir Tomić, a self-declared member of Tudjman’s CDC, was a nuisance. We memorised important dates and royal lineages. Occasionally he drew parallels to current histor
ic events. To help us to understand the Middle Ages better. We discovered that the struggle for Croatian independence began long before President Dr Franjo Tudjman was in charge of the most recent battle.
One time, as he told us about previous attempts to unite the country, a small discussion ensued. For centuries Vešnja had been subjugated to Venice and later to Italy. In the front row, Jurišić commented just for a laugh that things had probably been better under the Italians than they were under those ruling from Zagreb now. Tomić was seething. He wiped the floor with this fifteen-year-old local patriot, using such vociferous arguments you would think that the opinion of this pimply-faced boy had decisive importance for the fate of the homeland. Jurišić clammed up – what else could he do – but that did not save him from Tomić’s snide remarks for the rest of the semester.
‘Traitor,’ Tomić used to say to him on a regular basis, ‘it’s your turn at the blackboard!’
Old Lugarić was funny at least. He taught maths.
‘And then? It’s easy. Add the two figures together, multiply by such and such, divide by four, in parentheses …’
We looked at him listlessly. He was red in the face and always looked like he had just got out of bed. One of us was sent to the newsagent, and while we sat wrestling with equations and vectors, Lugarić sat behind his desk reading the paper. Ten minutes before the bell rang, he picked out three boys, listened to their solutions and told them to write the maths and the results up on the board. Always the same three – Blažević, Ivanković and Horvat – because they were the only three who always had the correct results. And Lugarić knew it. The rest of us just stared ahead, doomed to get a fail grade.
Were it not for young Tijana Rožac, whom we had for Croatian, my trip down would have been complete. Once, in the middle of describing the scene where Hector departs with Andromache before the decisive battle, she spotted Fabio’s white T-shirt and read: PUNK’S NOT DEAD. She stopped in the middle of a sentence, smiled and said:
Ukulele Jam Page 10