The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  And if one considers what plays were produced in Sarajevo before the siege began—as opposed to the movies shown, almost entirely the big Hollywood successes (the small cinémathèque was on the verge of closing just before the war, for lack of an audience, I was told)—there was nothing odd or gloomy for the Sarajevan audience in the choice of Waiting for Godot. The other productions currently in rehearsal or performance in Sarajevo are Alcestis (about the inevitability of death and the meaning of sacrifice); Ajax (about a warrior’s madness and suicide); and In Agony, the first play of the Croatian Miroslav Krleza, who is, with the Bosnian Ivo Andric, one of the two internationally celebrated writers of the first half of the century from former Yugoslavia (the play’s title speaks for itself). Compared with these, Waiting for Godot may have been the “lightest” entertainment of all.

  Indeed, the question is not why there is any cultural activity in Sarajevo now after seventeen months of siege, but why there isn’t more. Outside a boarded-up movie theater next to the Chamber Theater is a sun-bleached poster for The Silence of the Lambs with a diagonal strip across it that says DANAS (today), which was April 6, 1992, the day movie-going stopped. Since the war began, all of the movie theaters in Sarajevo have stayed shut, even if not all have been severely damaged by shelling. A building in which people gather so predictably would be too tempting a target for the Serb guns; anyway, there is no electricity to run a projector. There are no concerts, except for those given by a lone string quartet that rehearses every morning and performs very occasionally in a small room seating forty people, which also doubles as an art gallery. (It’s in the same building on Marshal Tito Street that houses the Chamber Theater.) There is only one active space for painting and photography—the Obala Gallery, whose exhibits sometimes stay up only one day and never more than a week.

  No one I talked to in Sarajevo disputes the sparseness of cultural life in this city where, after all, between 300,000 and 400,000 inhabitants still live. The majority of the city’s intellectuals and creative people, including most of the faculty of the University of Sarajevo, fled at the beginning of the war, before the city was completely encircled. Besides, many Sarajevans are reluctant to leave their apartments except when it is absolutely necessary, to collect water and their UNHCR rations; though no one is safe anywhere, they have more to fear when they are in the street. And beyond fear, there is depression—most Sarajevans are very depressed—which produces lethargy, exhaustion, apathy.

  Moreover, Belgrade was the cultural capital of former Yugoslavia, and I have the impression that in Sarajevo the visual arts were derivative; that ballet, opera, and musical life were routine. Only film and theater were distinguished, so it is not surprising that these continue in Sarajevo under siege. A film production company, SAGA, makes both documentary and fiction films, and there are the two functioning theaters.

  In fact, the audience for theater expects to see a play like Waiting for Godot. What my production of Godot signifies to them, apart from the fact that an eccentric American writer and part-time director volunteered to work in the theater as an expression of solidarity with the city (a fact inflated by the local press and radio as evidence that the rest of the world “does care”—when I knew, to my indignation and shame, that I represented nobody but myself), is that this is a great European play and that they are members of European culture. For all their attachment to American popular culture, which is as intense here as anywhere else, it is the high culture of Europe that represents for them their ideal, their passport to a European identity. People had told me again and again on my earlier visit in April: We’re part of Europe. We’re the people in former Yugoslavia who stand for European values: secularism, religious tolerance, and multi-ethnicity. How can the rest of Europe let this happen to us? When I replied that Europe is and always has been as much a place of barbarism as a place of civilization, they didn’t want to hear. Now, a few months later, no one would dispute such a statement.

  People in Sarajevo know themselves to be terminally weak: waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they aren’t going to be saved. They are humiliated by their disappointment, by their fear, and by the indignities of daily life—for instance, by having to spend a good part of each day seeing to it that their toilets flush, so that their bathrooms don’t become cesspools. That is how they use most of the water they queue for in public spaces, at great risk to their lives. This sense of humiliation may be even greater than their fear.

  Putting on a play means so much to the local theater professionals in Sarajevo because it allows them to be normal, that is, to do what they did before the war; to be not just haulers of water or passive recipients of “humanitarian aid.” Indeed, the lucky people in Sarajevo are those who can carry on with their professional work. It is not a question of money, since Sarajevo has only a black-market economy whose currency is German marks; and many are living on their savings, which were always in deutsche marks, or on remittances from abroad. (To get an idea of the city’s economy, consider that a skilled professional—say, a surgeon at the city’s main hospital or a television journalist—earns three deutsche marks a month; while cigarettes—a local version of Marlboros—cost ten deutsche marks a pack.) The actors and I, of course, were not on salary. Other theater people would sit in on rehearsals not only because they wanted to watch our work, but because they were glad to have, once again, a theater to go to every day.

  Far from it being frivolous to put on a play—this play or any other—it is a serious expression of normality. “Isn’t putting on a play like fiddling while Rome burns?” a journalist asked one of the actors. “Just asking a provocative question,” the journalist explained to me when I reproached her, worried that the actor might have been offended. He was not. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

  2.

  I started auditioning actors the day after I arrived, one role already cast in my head. I remembered, at a meeting with theater people in April, a stout older woman wearing a large broad-brimmed black hat, who sat silently, imperiously, in a corner of the room. A few days later when I saw her in Pasovic’s Grad, I learned that she was the senior actor of the pre-siege Sarajevo theater, and, when I decided to direct Godot, I immediately thought of her as Pozzo. Pasovic concluded that I would cast only women (he told me that an all-woman Godot had been done in Belgrade some years ago). But that wasn’t my intention. I wanted the casting to be gender-blind, confident that this is one of the few plays where it makes sense, since the characters are representative, even allegorical figures. If Everyman (like the pronoun “he”) really does stand for everybody—as women are always being told—then Everyman doesn’t have to be played by a man. I was not making the statement that a woman can also be a tyrant—which Pasovic then decided I meant by casting Ines Fancovic in the role—but rather that a woman can play the role of a tyrant. In contrast, Admir (“Atko”) Glamocak, the actor I cast as Lucky, a gaunt, lithe man of thirty whom I’d admired as Death in Alcestis, fit perfectly the traditional conception of Pozzo’s slave.

  Three other roles were left: Vladimir and Estragon, the pair of forlorn tramps, and Godot’s messenger, a small boy. It was troubling that there were more good actors available than parts, since I knew how much it meant to the actors I auditioned to be in the play. Three seemed particularly gifted: Velibor Topic, who also plays Death in Alcestis; Izudin (“Izo”) Bajrovic, who is Alcestis’s Hercules; and Nada Djurevska, who has the lead in the Krleza play.

  Then it occurred to me I could have three pairs of Vladimir and Estragon and put them all on the stage at once. Velibor and Izo seemed to me likely to make the most powerful, fluent couple; there was no reason not to use what Beckett envisaged, two men, at the center; but they would be flanked on the left side of the stage by two women and on the right by a woman and a man—three variations on the theme of the couple.

  Since no child actors were available and I dreaded using a nonprofessional, I decided to make the messenger an adult: the boyish-lo
oking Mirza Halilovic, a talented actor who happened to speak the best English of anyone in the cast. Of the other eight actors, three knew no English at all. It was a great help to have Mirza as my interpreter, so I could communicate with everyone at the same time.

  By the second day of rehearsal, I had begun to divide up and apportion the text, like a musical score, among the three pairs of Vladimir and Estragon. I had once before worked in a foreign language, when I directed Pirandello’s As You Desire Me at the Teatro Stabile in Turin. But I knew some Italian, while my Serbo-Croatian (or “the mother tongue,” as people in Sarajevo call it, the words “Serbo-Croatian” being hard to utter now) was limited when I arrived to “Please,” “Hello,” “Thank you,” and “Not now.” I had brought with me an English-Serbo-Croatian dictionary, paperback copies of the play in English, and an enlarged photocopy of the text into which I copied in pencil the “Bosnian” translation, line by line, as soon as I received it. I also copied the English text line by line into the Bosnian script. In about ten days I managed to learn by heart the words of Beckett’s play in the language in which my actors were speaking it.

  The population of Sarajevo is so mixed, and there are so many intermarriages, that it would be hard to assemble any kind of group in which all three “ethnic” groups are not represented—and I never inquired what anyone was. It was by chance that I eventually learned that Velibor Topic (Estragon I) had a Muslim mother and a Serb father, though his name does not reveal that; while Ines Fancovic (Pozzo) had to be Croatian, since Ines is a Croat name, and she was born and grew up in the coastal town of Split and came to Sarajevo thirty years ago. Both parents of Milijana Zirojevic (Estragon II) are Serb, while Irena Mulamuhic (Estragon III) must have had at least a Muslim father. I never learned the ethnic origins of all the actors. They knew them and took them for granted because they are colleagues—they’ve acted in many plays together—and friends.

  The propaganda of the aggressors holds that this war is caused by ageold hatreds; that it is a civil war or a war of secession, with Milosevic trying to save the union; that in crushing the Bosnians, whom Serb propaganda often refers to as the Turks, the Serbs are saving Europe from Muslim fundamentalism. Perhaps I should not have been surprised to be asked if I saw many women in Sarajevo who are veiled, or who wear the chador; one can’t underestimate the extent to which the prevailing stereotypes about Muslims have shaped “Western” reactions to the Serb aggression in Bosnia.

  In fact, the proportion of religiously observant people in Sarajevo is about the same as it is among the native-born in London or Paris or Berlin or Venice. In the prewar city, it was no odder for a “Muslim” to marry a Serb or a Croat than for someone from New York to marry someone from Massachusetts or California. Sixty percent of the marriages in Sarajevo in the year before the Serb attack took place between people from different religious backgrounds—a strong index of secularism. The Sarajevans of Muslim origin come from families that converted to Islam when Bosnia became a province of the Ottoman Empire, and they look the same as their southern Slav neighbors, spouses, and compatriots, since they are, in fact, descendants of Christian southern Slavs.

  What Muslim faith existed throughout this century was already a diluted version of the moderate, Sunni faith brought by the Turks, with nothing of what could be called fundamentalism. When I asked friends who in their families are or were religiously observant, they invariably said: my grandparents. If they were under thirty-five, they usually said: my great-grandparents. Of the nine actors in Godot the only one with religious leanings was Nada, who is the disciple of an Indian guru; as her farewell present she gave me a copy of the Penguin edition of The Teachings of Shiva.

  3.

  Pozzo: “There is no denying it is still day.”

  (They all look up at the sky.)

  “Good.”

  (They stop looking at the sky.)

  We rehearsed in the dark. The bare proscenium stage was lit usually by only three or four candles, supplemented by the four flashlights I’d brought with me. When I asked for additional candles, I was told there weren’t any; later I was told that they were being saved for our performances. In fact, I never learned who doled out the candles; they were simply in place on the floor when I arrived each morning at the theater, having walked through alleys and courtyards to reach the stage door, the only usable entrance, at the rear of the free-standing modern building. The theater’s façade, lobby, cloakroom, and bar had been wrecked by shelling more than a year ago and the debris still had not been cleared away.

  Actors in Sarajevo, Pasovic had explained to me with comradely regret, expect to work only four hours a day. “We have many bad habits here left over from the bad old socialist days.” But that was not my experience; after a bumpy start—during the first week everyone seemed preoccupied by other performances and rehearsals or obligations at home—I could not have asked for actors more zealous, more eager. The main obstacle, apart from the siege lighting, was the fatigue of the malnourished actors, many of whom, before they arrived for rehearsal at ten, had for several hours been queuing for water and then lugging heavy plastic containers up eight or ten flights of stairs. Some of them had to walk two hours to get to the theater, and, of course, would have to follow the same dangerous route at the end of the day.

  The only actor who seemed to have normal stamina was the oldest member of the cast, Ines Fancovic, who is sixty-eight. Still a stout woman, she has lost more than sixty pounds since the beginning of the siege, and this may have accounted for her remarkable energy. The other actors were visibly underweight and tired easily. Lucky must stand motionless through most of his long scene but never sets down the heavy bag he carries. Atko, who plays him (and now weighs no more than one hundred pounds) asked me to excuse him if he occasionally rested his empty suitcase on the floor throughout the rehearsal period. Whenever I halted the run-through for a few minutes to change a movement or a line reading, all the actors, with the exception of Ines, would instantly lie down on the stage.

  Another symptom of fatigue: the actors were slower to memorize their lines than any I have ever worked with. Ten days before the opening they still needed to consult their scripts, and were not word-perfect until the day before the dress rehearsal. This might have been less of a problem had it not been too dark for them to read the scripts they held in their hands. An actor crossing the stage while saying some lines, who then forgot them, was obliged to make a detour to the nearest candle and peer at his or her script. (A script was loose pages, since binders and paper clips are virtually unobtainable in Sarajevo. The play had been typed once in Pasovic’s office on a little manual typewriter whose ribbon looked as if it had been in use since the beginning of the siege. I was given the original and the actors the nine carbon copies, the last five of which would have been hard to read in any light.)

  Not only could they not read their scripts; unless standing face to face, they could barely see one another. Lacking the normal peripheral vision that anybody has in daylight or when there is electric light, they could not do something as simple as put on or take off their bowler hats at the same time. And they appeared to me for a long time, to my despair, mostly as silhouettes. At the moment early in Act I when Vladimir “smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly”—in my version, three Vladimirs—I couldn’t see a single one of those false smiles from my stool some ten feet in front of them, my flashlight lying across my scripts. Gradually, my night vision improved.

  Of course, it was not just fatigue that made the actors slower to learn their lines and their movements and to be, often, inattentive and forgetful. It was distraction, and fear. Each time we heard the noise of a shell exploding, there was not only relief that the theater had not been hit. The actors had to be wondering where it was landing. Only the youngest in my cast, Velibor, and the oldest, Ines, lived alone. The others left wives and husbands, parents and children at home when they came to the theater each day, and several of them lived very c
lose to the front lines, near Grbavica, a part of the city taken by the Serbs last year, or in Alipasino Polje, which is near the Serb-held airport.

  On July 30, at two o’clock in the afternoon, Nada, who was often late during the first two weeks of rehearsal, arrived with the news that at eleven that morning Zlajko Sparavolo, a wellknown older actor who specialized in Shakespearean roles, had been killed, along with two neighbors, when a shell landed outside his front door. The actors left the stage and went silently to an adjacent room. I followed them and the first to speak told me that this news was particularly upsetting to everyone because, up till then, no actor had been killed. (I had heard earlier about two actors who had each lost a leg to the shelling; and I knew Nermin Tulic, the actor who last year had lost both legs at the hip and now was the administrative director of the Youth Theater.) When I asked the actors if they felt up to continuing the rehearsal, all but one, Izo, said yes. But after working for another hour, some of the actors found they couldn’t continue. That was the only day that rehearsals stopped early.