Sarajevo

We fly down the mountain, the priest at the wheel, and all of us singing old Croatian folk songs and hooting at the priest as he barely misses dogs, cars, curbs and people as we go. We have been drinking and eating and talking since this afternoon, and have smoked so many cigarettes together that the priest had to borrow another pack from the gypsy family that squats in the abandoned house next to his rectory. We are driving back from the countryside to Sarajevo, seige city, city of war.

Since arriving from the Bosnia-Hercegovina city of Mostar four days ago, I have been living with Franciscan nuns in a small abbey-home on Provare street, in the high hills of Sarajavo. My contact, Anita Tulic, Head of the Croatian Information Bureau and one of my drinking partners, made this arrangement for me in a pinch. I am so glad that she did. Each morning at the abbey, the nuns and I have breakfast together, and as I am the only male, and the only guest, I receive an inordinate amount of attention. But no one speaks English. Sisters Maria and Katarin speak French, and so we somehow make our way using that language. I always come a little late. The idea of sitting around with nuns who may still be involved in some sort of devotional exercise worries me. Vous desirez un omelette, Sister Maria asks? Oui, I respond, and all of the other nuns look at me as if I am some strange wondrous bird. Le pain? et une tasse du café? Oui, mais oui, I say. And in no time, nuns are flying here and there, and I have food and drink before me. Through the rough medium of Maria, Katarin, and my paltry French, we manage to laugh our way through breakfast.

I know when it is time for breakfast because the chapel is right next to my room, and I lay in bed while all of the nuns are at mass. As they pray, the song of the Muslim muzza resounds from the minaret that is just outside my window, attached to the mosque. It is an old man who climbs the minaret and sings in Arabic, his voice mingling with the sounds of roosters and hooting owls under cover of the early morning. It is a beautiful, clean world here with the nuns. They are gracious, and ordered, and full of life and goodness. And while not particularly religious myself, living in such a place, I have somehow felt compelled to be a better person—at least in the practical ways of living. I make less noise, brush my teeth as if to make them pearly white, line my shoes up beside my dresser, and pick my dirty clothes up off of the floor. I have even taken, in this kind, clean, and holy world, to doing something I have not done since leaving home after high school. I make my bed.

The world outside is something different. In fact, one of our neighbors on Provare street must be some sort of high official. A few days ago several Jeep Cherokees filled with men in tan shirts, wearing sunglasses, and sporting machine guns drove up the street and stopped two doors up. They got out of their vehicles, brandished guns, and two of them walked up the street while the others walked down past our door, and yet others stood guard by a door and got on their mobile telephones. Then another set of like vehicles with like occupants drove up and the same thing happened, giving little Provare street a total of about a dozen armed men. Then a little balding fellow stepped out of one of the jeeps and went into the house. And just yesterday, a soldier or body guard of thug cut of the same cloth drove up while I was smoking just outside and across from where I am staying with the nuns. That man had a shoulder holster strapped under his unbuttoned shirt, and when he saw me, he immediately walked over and looked me right in the eye. “Yes?” I asked. He then peered through the wooden slats of the shed behind me, and satisfied, walked back up the street and got on his mobile phone. I guess I was deemed a non-threat.

My job here in Sarajevo, as it has been throughout my travels in Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia Hercegovina, is to interview people for a particular university research project. I have interviewed all kinds of people--farmers, students, journalists, parliamentarians, artists, presidential advisors, politicians, and in Bosnia-Hercegovina, have had the great luck of interviewing one of the regions three presidents, and additionally, Communist Secretary General, Hrvoje Istuk, who was appointed to oversee the region by the former Yugoslav dictator Tito. My last stop within Bosnia-Hercegovina is Sarajevo. It is the capital of the region and, as is common knowledge the world over, a city that underwent a seige by Serbians Federal and paramilitary forces for many years. This seige ended in 1995, but just as in the war torn city of Mostar from whence I have come, the damage to the buildings and the people in Sarajevo is of monumental proportion.

Millions of shells fell on Sarajevo. One thousand people were killed by bombs, artillery shells, mortar or sniper fire. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were wounded. Much of the city was reduced to rubble, and all of it remains scarred by war. It is a city full of people crippled in body and spirit, its hills filled with fresh white grave markers. Most people have at least one big gash-like scar somewhere in evidence on their body, where hot metal shrapnel burned in. People without hands and arms are everywhere, and there is even a noticeable population of crippled cats and dogs running around Sarajevo. Even those who have come out of the siege relatively unscathed walk about or sit in cafes smoking, looking for all of the world as if they have been beaten up and badly hurt by a gang. Life must go on, but here, they are barely up to it, and look as if they need to cry, to vomit, or both. Yet they appear to know that neither crying nor vomiting will help. So they continue, frail people in fragile circumstance, dignified by their hurt and vulnerability perhaps, but unable to overcome it.

The Serbs were the ones who primarily did this to the people of Sarajevo. During their war of aggression in Bosnia-Hercegovina they held all of the high ground around the city. It is a city built in a small valley surrounded by high mountains, with a river running through it. Very picturesque. For years, regular and paramilitary Serb troops fired down upon the city during the week, but action always picked up on weekend. Serbs came from Belgrade for the weekend to shoot at the people and the city. For these weekend warriors, Sarajevoans say, coming to Sarajevo was like coming on Safari. Mr X, the editor of the Croatian Word newspaper during the seige, remembers looking through binoculars and seeing a Serbian woman actually sunbathing next to her artillery pieces. Every once in a while, she would get up, fire another round into the city, apply more lotion, adjust her sunglasses, then lay back down in the sun. Groups of Serbs came and took vacation photos of one another launching rockets, firing anti-aircraft missiles and small arms into the main squares. Then it was back to Belgrade to work or school. Life can be so busy sometimes.

Snipers were perhaps most responsible for the psychic trauma that still grips the citizens of Sarajevo five years after the cease-fire. They seemed to have loved their work, and were very good at it. My translator Anna’s mother was killed one block off of the main square by snipers. She was the head of the Sarajevo Emergency Room, and as Anna thought, had accepted the fact that she would die during the seige, but remained committed to her work. She has been rated number one academically in the region during elementary school, and graduated at the top of her class from medical school at the university. “It took a very good shot” to kill her, Anna said, because she was riding in the passenger seat of a fast ambulance returning to the hospital with a patient. The sniper only had a chance shot when the ambulance drove into the open part of an intersection between high buildings. Such talent, to make such a shot. Like her mother, Anna will never leave Sarajevo. “My place is this city, these people,” she said. “I belong here forever, even if all of the world here turns into barbarians.”

Mr X remembers when a sniper killed his secretary. For the most part, there was no electricity or running water for years in Sarajevo, so people had to go and get water from wells or from places around the city where there was water. “Think of the minds of these snipers,” Mr X said. “They look through their scopes, and can see everyone. They can see their faces, the buttons on their shirts. One of these snipers one day scanned the line of those who had no choice but to risk their lives for water, and he or she saw the prettiest, the liveliest, the most extraordinary person waiting in that line, so decided to put a bullet in her head.” For weeks afterwards, Mr X remembers, he was sort of crazy, and used to drink in the dark in his apartment. This apartment had actually been owned by a famous actress who had left Sarajevo when it was possible to do so. Before leaving she had gone sort of crazy, and had written incoherent ramblings allover the walls of her apartment. Drunk one night, Mr X lit a propane torch and began reading her writings, and in retrospect, he suggests, he was then probably just as crazy as she had been while writing.

For those who wanted to leave Sarajevo alive, there were only two routes out. One was through the 800 meter-long tunnel made under the airport airstrip. It was a small, muddy tunnel, with rats and a very bad smell. Not anyone could get through it. People with lung problems, for example, could not make it, or people who were claustrophobic, since the tunnel was not tall enough for anyone to stand up inside of it. Besides, only special people got to use the tunnel—embassy personnel like Mr X, or military officials. Anyone else who wanted out had to have a lot of money, and had to cut a deal with those running the black markets. “Black marketeers were always working with the Serbs,” according to Zeljko Ivanokovic, novelist and member of the Sarajevo Shadow Government during the seige. As a result, cease-fires were conveniently arranged for the smuggling of arms, people, food. “It took us a while to realize how many people were lining their pockets from the war,” Ivankovic said. “But it soon became clear that everyone who could make some kind of profit from the war was indeed doing so. That is mostly what war is all about anyway, isn’t it?” he asked.

Most people, however, had no choice but to stay. For children, this meant growing up in basements or in apartment hallways, never watching television or hearing radio and oftentimes, just living in the complete dark. Anna’s daughter Una remembers going to school. “The rule was you could never go where you could see a hill,” she said “because of those snipers. But that was not always possible, so really we had to sometimes run and jump in little holes and things like that.” If the shelling was bad, the children stayed in the basement at school as long as necessary. “It was crazy,” Una adds,” always being in basements. We children would sometimes go out anyway. There was a garden behind our housing complex, for example, where there were all of these apple trees. Before the war, those apple trees never had a chance to make apples, because we kids would always eat them while they were still young and green. But during the war those trees were full of big apples, and well, we just couldn’t stand it anymore. So we used to sneak out and pick them as fast as possible, then get back in. But one day our parents found apple cores in the basement, so they bolted all the doors shut.” At university, Una wants to study ecological issues, then go to Africa to work with wild cats. “Those wild lions can’t be so bad,” she says, laughing.

So after the crazy drive into town, the drinks, smokes, and songs, we ended up in a bar, where for no apparent reason whatsoever, I collapsed against the wall in the bathroom, stupefied, unable to process any more the mix of violence, suffering, laughter, and hope that makes up the daily life of those living in Sarajevo. Perhaps human beings need the clean categories into which we so often parcel the many dimensions of life, of the human condition, so as to keep some safe from others. If this is so, then I am left to wonder what will become of these people of Sarajavo, who have lived with all of their emotions, hopes, dreams, and horrors, mixed up altogether for so long. Will it make them strong, as human beings? If my own mild encounter with their world serves as any indictor, then perhaps not.