Sarajevo Marlboro

by Miljenko Jergovic

  It was clear to me from the start that the hatred embodied by the mortars and shells was not a product of Sarajevo’s curses, or indeed of anything else I had known in Bosnia. The hatred I encountered was too personal to have produced such a collective evil. Bosnians could hate for a long time, persistently and with gusto, but there was no order in it. Somebody else had to provide the mortars, shells, tanks and planes in order to organize the hatred. I still feel that the sniper pulls the trigger in order to kill somebody who is like himself, somebody he has cursed very often perhaps, but who would otherwise have solved the dispute in a bar-room brawl. With fists or a knife.

  The wartime killings in Bosnia seemed to me technological. They were undertaken with a discipline that was far removed from anything I had encountered. In this country, the rocks are fastened to the ground by ice, and dogs are let off their leads, but until today, nobody was ever attacked by the dogs in a pack. Just by one. For the whole pack to come after you, there has to be something else at stake, something impersonal – a system of government, perhaps, or a circle of hell – to give the crimes an ideological motive and to justify hundreds of empty stories, including the ones about fastened rocks and unfastened dogs.

  At first we believed that we were separate from the evil in lots of ways. I had a head start in that respect, because of the color of my skin. I reckoned if they’d had a choice back then, all the Sarajevans would have become black overnight. Neighbors looked after one another, ate together, gave away their last handful of rice. They believed that they were soon to be redeemed, that the world and God would see what they were like and release them from the suffering.

  Since the war began in Sarajevo, I haven’t come across a single atheist. Those familiar with the liturgy go to church or the mosque. Those who don’t, invent their own language of signs to convey their faith in a higher principle or god. They all carry an amulet in their pocket to help them survive the shelling. Each morning they wake up realizing how tiny and insignificant they are in terms of the cosmos. So they resolve to spend yet another day running with the crowd, hoping to appear more significant in number and thus worthy of salvation.

  Only the robbers are different. At first there were only two kinds of people in Sarajevo – metaphysicians and robbers. The latter believed in a concrete future while the rest of us believed in a promised future, the one we’d promised ourselves upon realizing that we were different from the killers. Each new massacre gave us new hope in our suffering, and a belief that the horror was about to be stopped, if only because it had gone way beyond the boundaries of good taste. Nobody could believe that things would get worse after Mitterrand’s visit. He’d seen the devastation and therefore he understood. And if you understand – you’ll help us. When he left, the robbers put up the prices, and the Chetniks burned the city hall and all the documentary knowledge in it. It was a sign that the truth was not worth very much.

  You remember the despair that followed. At first it was rumored that the Serbs would take the city, and then that they would kill everybody. As soon as we realized that neither event was going to happen, we understood that we had to be – different. The outside world became an object of hatred.

  We only turned to God out of habit, or out of fear that the worst might happen, and so icy relations developed between people. Our next-door neighbor could have starved to death then – we no longer cared. Gloomy people dragged water containers around with them, cut down trees in parks and looked for plausible new choices. Foreign reporters began talking about “the hundred-year hatred” and incomprehensible tribal conflicts, and the Bosnians became less and less interested in convincing them otherwise. The war between the Muslims and the Croats marked the end of moderate warfare, the end of decency. People began to say the kind of things about one another that everybody had previously been saying only about the Serbs. They began to believe they would be saved if they just did the same as the others, that the world and God would offer them a chance to survive. If the rest of the world had failed to acknowledge what was good about the people of Bosnia, let them see what was evil.

  Each day the political situation confirmed the lie about Bosnian hatred, a lie about this country of icy intolerance. But since nobody was interested in the truth, it stopped being used as an argument. If you ever write any sort of history of Bosnia, I doubt that it will even be mentioned. Not even as a footnote. If anybody does mention it, the truth will be as convincing to the Serbs as it is to the Croats and the Muslims. The Chetniks were guilty of crimes, but the others came to believe as a result of suffering that the Serbs were right in their tactics and that therefore they should think and behave in the same way. From now on, anything that happens will just be the reflex of evil, a kind of catharsis, but it will have nothing to do with the way Bosnia and Sarajevo used to be. Or at least not with the way I remember them.

  I’m not telling you any of this as an excuse. I only want you to know the way I’m feeling as I leave Sarajevo, and what I’ll be like in the future. Besides, where I’m going nobody will ask me – a black man – about my Bosnia story, and yet I have to tell somebody. Who except you and Saša would even believe that I’d lived in Sarajevo?

  When Morillon’s ark rose over Bosnia, I watched the country through the window until it vanished. From the sky it looks as though nothing has happened. The borders, fields and villages look just the same. You can even see the burned houses. I thought I could spot haystacks. From above, from an angel’s perspective, it’s easy to see what Bosnia used to be like. It flows gently like a curse into the glittering sea. The sun made my pupils dilate until they hurt and I couldn’t look any more. I remember, on the first spring day many years ago the owner closed his shop on Baščaršija and put up a notice saying, “Closed because of the sun.” Who’d want to work on the first day of spring?

  Yours, M. L.

  I understand the pathos of this letter, perhaps because its author will remain unknown to me. Letters are probably the last means by which you can talk about such things. Everything else that has been written about Sarajevo is just an attempt to create a framework for a new existence or to find the least painful way of dividing up life: the one that has already happened and should be forgotten and the one that’s coming, in which people will live comfortably and happily until death, as in a fairy tale.

  The Saxophonist

  Oh! I felt so good when I pinched the saxophonist’s girlfriend right from under his nose. We knew each other vaguely. I spotted her in the Belgrade taverna. She was by herself – I suppose she was waiting for somebody – I approached her, sat down, looked at her rather flirtatiously, sold her my blue-eyed gaze, plus lots of sweet nothings, blew her a kiss and then quickly became her boyfriend. Although I’m fat and sluggish, without movie-star appeal, I left the sax player for dead. He was tall and lanky, rather striking, but he didn’t communicate well and was always utterly silent except when he was playing the saxophone. He was a fixture in the Sarajevo clubs. He made young girls weak at the knees and was the unspoken fancy of all the marriageable types. But, you see, he valued words too highly, or perhaps he was afraid of language. In any case, he never managed to whisper the right words into the right ear to convey his particular appeal.

  Very much in love, she and I walked up and down the promenade. Mind you, I’d politely say hello to him, and he would respond civilly, but she always felt a bit embarrassed. She wanted us to avoid certain streets and places, to hide away somewhere we wouldn’t bump into him. I always agreed, with dignity and understanding. I spoke highly of the saxophonist, though not without irony and the odd jibe at his inability to communicate. And just so she wouldn’t accuse me of being jealous, I confessed to being absolutely devastated that I couldn’t play the saxophone.

  In the difficult and uncertain times that followed, I presented a solid front. My words hit home like a sniper’s bullets. I spoke without a grain of doubt about the beauty of sacrifice, or the unarmed storming of the Chetniks, even before those Serb maraud
ers came upon the scene. I wanted to appear noble in her eyes, not only in terms of the rumpus of prewar years, but also in comparison to her former lover and his saxophone. In the days of party meetings, of clear but still-distant threats, the saxophonist became less relevant. I had succeeded in defeating him at the very beginning. Now I felt that I wanted to renew my victory every day. I told her about how I met the state president. I divulged information that would become common knowledge a week later, and all because I wanted to make the sax player and his jazz rhythms insignificant.

  I entered the war despising his saxophone. The guy was a Serb, after all, and when the time came, I really expected him to vanish from the city and reappear in Pale, with or without the saxophone. It would prove that she had made the right choice and that the good guys in this movie didn’t have to be handsome, or the bad guys ugly. But the sax player didn’t leave. Often I would bump into him in town and greet him more heartily than ever, because it was necessary to show that even in desperate times one was sensible enough to distinguish between those who fired guns and those who played music.

  Then came fifteen days of shelling so destructive and severe that I was unable to leave the cellar. When I finally surfaced the saxophonist was no longer in evidence. After a while I stopped thinking about him, probably because my ex-girlfriend also left town. I became my number-one priority. In the respite from the shelling, I naturally continued to open my big mouth, to discuss the rights and wrongs of the situation in a thundering voice, inviting others to follow my example. I began to yell a lot, my soul full of fear, and wondered it somebody up there – not the gods, you understand, but the Chetniks manning the big guns – were listening to my ramblings. If so, would they get so fed up with me one day that they would just take aim and shoot me down in mid-sentence?

  As soon as the fear became unbearable and there was nobody left to listen to my tirades, I decided to escape. I wanted to disappear from a city that no longer resembled the place in which I had seduced my ex-girlfriend in the Belgrade taverna. I went abroad with a thousand excuses on my lips an many other explanations in my head. I arrived in a quiet, peaceful country populated by other women and their jazz-playing boyfriends, in order to begin the story all over again.

  Some time later I obtained a copy of a newspaper from Sarajevo and discovered on the back page that the saxophonist had been killed while defending the city. It’s not surprising that he died: being tall and having soft fingers, he wasn’t made to hold a gun. I, who convinced everybody of my importance, have a fat, ugly and crooked index finger just like in an advertisement for machine-guns. But I knew how to talk, and the sax player didn’t. Nothing can help him now. He lost two battles: one for the female heart and the other for his life. It is clear now that he was always the superior individual, with nobler feelings, stronger and braver. He just couldn’t put it into words.

  Saxophonists don’t make history – they make music. But perhaps, after so much talk and fighting, unspoken words do create a silence in whose gentleness the survivors of good and bad can sleep easy.

  THREE:

  Who will be the Witness?

  The Library

  You hear the whistle over your head. It’s followed by the odd moment of suspense, and then below, somewhere in the city, there’s an explosion. You can always see the spot clearly from your window. At first there’s a tall, thin column of dust which turns to smoke and flames. You wait a few minutes to work out what sort of building it is. If the fire is slow and lazy, it means that the burning flat belongs to some poor people. If it bursts into a huge, blue fireball, then it’s somebody’s nicely decorated attic with panelled walls burning. If it burns unremittingly, then the flames must be coming from the apartment of a wealthy shop-owner, full of massive antique furniture. But if the flame suddenly shoots up, wild and uncontrollable, like the hair of Farrah Fawcett, and disappears even more rapidly, allowing the wind to spread paper ash over the city, that means somebody’s private library has just burned down. As you witnessed many such vigorous fires over the months and years of shelling, you got to feel that the foundations of Sarajevo must have been made out of books. And even if they weren’t, you’d like to say, as you stroke the bound volumes on your shelves, that the city still contains many books that have not yet been destroyed.

  In any private library most of the books have not been read. No doubt you bought this one or that one because of its cover or the author’s name, or simply because the smell of the paper appealed to you. You pick up such a book often in the early days, open it, read a few lines and then put it back. After a while you forget about the book, or else you look at it from a distance with mild disgust. You have often wanted to take it to the nearest public library and give it to somebody, just to get rid of the thing in some way, but you were never able to do so. It will always remind you of your tendency to hoard useless things, and will soon transform itself, in a painful burning moment, into a host of other memories. All those unnecessary and unread books will prove to be a burden when it’s time to leave them behind. You may almost come to understand the fire’s rapture as it engulfs similar books around the city.

  There are a few books which you have not opened since childhood. They remind you of a time when you still hadn’t learned to scan the pages, to read from the top left-hand corner to the bottom right. These are probably the only books you have really enjoyed in your life. All the best children’s stories had an unhappy ending which didn’t teach you anything, except that sadness is a place where fiction becomes more important than reality. In John Huston’s film The Dead, a woman bursts into tears and is unable to say why. As you watched the film, you thought that this was in fact the way life is – and you too felt like crying.

  There are even fewer books that you imagined you’d always carry with you. When you read one for the first time, you’d try and postpone the ending. Later on, you found them exciting in both content and appearance. But you will have to leave them behind, just like all the others, with the bitter conviction that not only in this city, but also in the world at large, a book’s natural state of aggregation is fire, smoke and ash. Somebody in the future may find this pathetic, but for you, especially when you end up in other cities where bookshops still exist, Farrah Fawcett’s flaming hair will always be the plain truth. The only thing that burns better, more beautifully and more thoroughly than a book is a manuscript.

  With the illusion of a private library also vanishes the illusion of a bibliotheca, or civilization of books. Its very name, which is just a Greek word, like any other, but which is, for you, tied to the name of the Holy Scriptures, was enough to make you a believer. But, as they burned, disappearing irrevocably one after the other, you stopped believing that there was any purpose in a book’s existence. Or perhaps the only one to have worked out their purpose was the Sarajevan author and bibliophile who, instead of using expensive firewood, warmed his fingers last winter on the flames of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Cervantes . . . As a result of so many deliberate and accidental fires, a new kind of person has been created, a person who has come bitterly to understand how things go and who, as a result, would coolly watch flames rising from the Louvre and not even reach out for a glass of water. There’s no point in not letting a fire swallow up things that human indifference has already destroyed. The beauty of Paris or London is only an alibi for the criminals who have allowed Warsaw, Dresden, Vukovar and Sarajevo to disappear. But even if they hadn’t ceased to exist, they would have become places inhabited by people who even in peacetime were ready to evacuate, who were prepared to abandon their books.

  In this world, as it is, there is one basic rule; Zuko Džumhur mentioned it when he was thinking about Bosnia, and it relates to the two suitcases that you always have packed in the hall. All your possessions and all your memories have to fit into them. Everything outside is already lost. There is no point in looking for reasons or meanings or excuses. They are just a burden, like memories. There is nothing left but to return t
he books you have borrowed in the past, trying to avoid or overlook the ones you were given as presents, and the others you’ve made a note about to send to friends who live elsewhere, so that those books would not be engulfed in flames – or, at any rate, not until the day the world returns to the condition it was a few million years ago.

  You can never list or recall the private libraries that have burned down in Sarajevo. And why should you? But the fate of the Sarajevo University Library, its famous city hall, whose books took a whole night and day to go up in flames, will be remembered as the fire to end all fires, a last mythical celebration of ash and dust. It happened, after a whistle and an explosion, almost exactly a year ago. Perhaps the same date you’re reading this. Gently stroke your books, dear stranger, and remember they are dust.