‘Everyone else was afraid of the dead,’ he would tell me later. ‘But I never was. The dead cannot hurt you.’
After he arranged the bodies on slabs, and closed their eyes, he then took out an ordinary notebook and carefully wrote down the names of the dead. This was important. Aliya is a simple man, born in eastern Bosnia, a farmer at heart, but he took his job seriously and he believed that the dead deserved some respect, especially during war. So he wrote down their names, and where the bodies had arrived from, in simple school notebooks. By the end of the war, there was a stack of twenty-eight notebooks, some brown, some green, some bound with yellowing scotch tape.
If the dead had been killed in an attack in the city, he wrote grad. If they had died after being treated in the hospital, he wrote the unit they came from – C3 meant surgery. Soldiers were given names of the front lines where they were killed – Stup, Otes, Zuc – and you could always tell where the fighting was heaviest overnight by how many were killed. There were a few N–Is written down – Nema Imena, person unknown.
Aliya did not fear the corpses, he prepared them for their funerals, but his assistant, Ramzic, was afraid. The poor man drank himself into a stupor just to do his job, and even then, he did not do it well enough, according to Aliya.
‘It was no use having Ramzic around,’ he said. ‘I might as well have worked alone.’ Once, when the electricity worked at Kosevo Hospital – a rare occurrence – the two men had to go to a top floor to collect some bodies. The power went out, and they were stuck for hours. Ramzic stunk of booze.
‘I kept asking him why he did it, why he was drinking himself to death,’ Aliya said. ‘I did the same work and I did not have to drink to do it.’
But Ramzic looked at him woefully. ‘What can I do?’ he said. ‘It’s a war.’
This was a common expression in Sarajevo during the siege. Every possible question, from ‘Why don’t you love me any more?’ to ‘Why are you cheating on your wife?’ was answered with the same response: ‘What we can do? It’s a war.’ It was a refrain repeated over and over by priests, doctors, soldiers, commanders, politicians, aid workers, mothers, teachers. They all said the same thing: ‘What we can do? It’s a war.’
I remember Ramzic well. He was bad-tempered and day by day appeared to grow more nutty. He was certainly always drunk. But he survived. He did not get hit by the snipers that aimed at people running across Marsala Tito Street. He missed all the shells that hit the centre of the city.
But he killed himself a few years after the war, hanged himself with a rope. Aliya is not really sure why, but he reckons the alcohol, the memory of those dead bodies and probably a bad love affair finally got to Ramzic.
Some days at the morgue were worse than others. During the first months of the war, Aliya remembers fifty or sixty people being brought in a day. There were the terrible days of massacres – the bread-line massacre, the water-line massacre, the market massacres – these were days when people went out to get food or supplies and got targeted, deliberately, by Serbs.
There were days when children were brought in, groups of them. Aliya hated those days. That was when the children went outside to play, like one snowy morning, because they could not bear to sit in their apartments any more. You can see the scene: the tired, frightened mother, her children begging her to go outside for some fresh air. So they go, because really, no one but a monster would send an artillery shell into a group of kids building a snowman.
But they did. Aliya was there the day the children came in from Ali Pashe Polje, the kids who were playing in the snow, and died from it. He hated that day.
But the worst day of all was the day he came in and found his son, his beloved son, his oldest son, the boy who could do anything, lying dead on the slab. Ibrahim. Twenty-three years old, about to become a father in three months. A military policeman. Aliya was late to work that day. He remembers he took his breakfast, some bread that tasted like sawdust and some tea, and wandered down the hill from his house, avoiding the usual places that snipers could see.
When he climbed the hill towards Kosevo, and made his way to the morgue, he saw a crowd outside. What’s this? he thought, getting impatient. What do they want? Then he saw people he knew, some of his son’s friends. It’s Ibrahim, he thought, and went into the morgue. He saw his son, dead. He remembers that everything went black. ‘I just passed out,’ he says.
Eighteen years later, I find Aliya and he recognizes me instantly. He is retired and he now lives on a hill above Sarajevo in a house he once built for his son. He tends his cows, because cows are easier than the dead. He is now sixty-four and could have worked a few extra years, but he feels that he has seen enough.
We leave the cows and sheep and go to his house and his wife, whose face is still etched with pain, makes us fresh juniper juice and heavily sugared Bosnian coffee. We sit, and we talk, and he remembers everything; the death of his son, that day, that time.
But something good came of it. His daughter-in-law gave birth to a little boy a few months after Ibrahim was buried. The little boy is now seventeen. He looks just like his father did, and Aliya can sometimes squint his eyes a bit and pretend it is his lost son.
But still, that day that he found his first born child, his boy, lying on a slab in his morgue was the worst day of his life.
My wartime routine rarely varied. Around mid day, I made my way up the hill of Bjelave to the Ljubica Ivezic orphanage. This was a strange and terrible place.
When the war started, everyone had seemed to run away except the donkey-faced director, Amir Zelic. I did not like him, nor he me, but for some reason, he would let me in and allow me to poke around. There were some days he kicked me out, but most of the time he seemed not to care. He asked me for cigarettes and disappeared.
Sometimes Amir was there, sometimes he was not, but no matter what, the children ran completely wild. Not only were they abandoned or orphaned, but many of them were mentally incompetent. When the shelling started, or when it happened at night – particularly terrifying, because there was no electricity so they lay in the dark with the whistle of the shells getting closer – they howled like dogs.
There were some older, truly crazed kids there, and one wintry day, they locked me in a room for a few hours and I had to climb out through a skylight. If you approached them, they wanted cigarettes, money, drugs and food. They shouted: ‘Fuck you, bitch! Welcome to hell! Whore! Fuck you!’
The little ones seemed to get completely lost in the shuffle. They were dirty, smelly and pitiful. If you tried to hold them, they flinched. I never knew, but I am sure, there was terrible abuse going on when no one was looking – which was more or less all the time.
To eat, there was rice and strawberry yoghurt powder twice a day, which Amir would proudly show me. There were rats, and rain poured through the broken windows. The floors were oily and damp and it smelled. The children slept eight or nine to a room on piles of rags or clothes. There were no toilets, and they scratched with dirt and lice and neglect.
One day I found Nusrat Krasnic. He was nine, and looked more like a wild animal than a little boy. He was a Roma child – the Roma make up 5 per cent of the Bosnian population – and had dark, matted hair and rather beautiful eyes. He was skinny as a rail, and dressed in thin cotton clothes in the middle of winter. His boots were passed on by someone who left or died, and they were too big. What I remember the most – and what hurt me the most – was that he wore socks on his hands in the middle of the biting, savage winter.
His mother and father had died during the war, in their house on Sirokaca Street. He had two brothers, and somehow they ended up at the orphanage at the beginning of the war – Amir was not sure how. ‘I can’t keep track of these kids, it’s a war!’ he said gruffly when I tried to get information on his family. Someone said his father might still be alive, and I went back to Sirokaca Street and asked around. No one had seen him. ‘But he’s a gypsy, they move around. Even during war.’
T
his is what we knew: Nusrat’s mother, Ljubica, was killed when a shell crashed through the wall of his kitchen and reduced the entire house to a pile of rubble. Nusrat knew the house was trashed, but at least once a week, he tried to get back. He ran away from the orphanage, and made the dangerous trek, crossing front lines and going too close to snipers to get back home. Once he got pinned down for more than an hour, hiding inside a flowerpot on a bridge as a firefight raged around him.
Nusrat knew things, which he shared with me on long cold wintry days when we walked through the city together. He knew about grenatas – grenades – and what size they were. He knew how to jump on trucks and steal humanitarian aid packages to get extra food, and how to sell it. He knew what sniffing glue was, because the big kids in the orphanage did it. And he knew that somewhere there was some kind of love: at night, he slept wrapped around his dog, Juju.
I forgot sometimes that he was a kid, because he was more like an old man. But he was only nine years old, and he still had it in him to want to play. So he and his brother Mohammed went sledding in the snow by grabbing on to UN trucks that passed and sliding along behind them.
Once in a while, he took me to the basement of the Hotel Europe, which had been bombed to pieces during the summer of 1992. Before the war, during the Hapsburg Empire, it had been the fashionable hotel for the well-heeled doing a Balkan tour. Inside the so-called Golden Visitor’s Book I found a page inscribed in 1907 by ancestors of a Bostonian friend: Mrs. H. H. H. Hunnewell. Wellesly, USA.
But more than eighty years later, the place was akin to hell. Luckier refugees found bombed-out rooms and moved their meagre possessions inside, guarding their space jealously. The less fortunate hovered in the basement which was full of water. Nusrat had some friends down there. An older refugee woman had taken in Nusrat and his brother, and tried to guide them.
The war had turned Nusrat savage. I tried to feed him, give him clothes and shoes, and some tenderness, but I was aware always that I was temporary: that I would go, and he would be back on the streets. One day, I sat down with him and a book, but Nusrat had not been to school in a long, long time; not since before the war. He had forgotten how to write his name.
One day, I left for a month to rest. I flew back to London and went to cocktail parties where people always asked the same question: What is it like to get shot at? But I could not enjoy myself in London, even with the marvel of hot water that ran through pipes. I stood under showers for an hour, till my skin rubbed raw from the heat. I ate real food, vegetables and fruit, and went into shops and remembered what it was like to have newspapers and telephones.
But then I thought of Nusrat and my friends inside the siege, and I felt terribly guilty. I bought him clothes for the summer, and vitamins and food. But when I returned in late April, when the water in the river was rushing high, and the spring military offensive was in full flow, and the Serbs were really kicking the shit out of Sarajevo, Nusrat had disappeared.
When I came back I didn’t stay at the Holiday Inn, but in the Hotel Europa. I took an elevator to the basement. The place where Nusrat and I huddled in the cold is now a gym with an elliptical machine and a sauna. There is a pool. The breakfast table was full too – sausages, eggs, bread, and all different kinds of cheeses, imported meats. German businessmen crowd the table, stuffing their plates with rolls and honey. It almost hurts to look at the waste, remembering how the people I loved had hoarded a box of powdered milk, a tin of beef.
And I began my hunt for Nusrat.
No one seems to know where he is. The donkey-faced director, Amir Zelic, is still there, and he sends me a message through Velma, my interpreter: No Nusrat. Apparently, he stayed at the orphanage until five years ago – which would have made him twenty-four when he left – and no one has seen him since. The police have no record of his coming, or going.
But I am sceptical of Amir, because he was involved in a scandal at the orphanage a few years earlier. There was a terrible fire and eight babies perished. No one seems to know the details, but Amir was under investigation, so is wary of talking to the press.
After the war, nuns from Zagreb restored the Dickensian building to a beautiful white convent with hard, glistening wood throughout. It smells of lemon oil. The nuns were neat and clean and took care of children in need. One Sunday morning, I sit with one of the sisters and she tells me that they have tried to scour most of the memories of the war away. She shows me the neat chapel, the fresh flowers.
But on the other side, they moved the wild kids, and Amir was still in charge. People heard about the orphanage during the war, and with donor money, they rebuilt it and the rooms where the children sleep are now clean and light and full of toys. There is a room of babies, smiling, beautiful, fat babies.
The morning I go to meet Amir, two men who guard the door tell me they know Nusrat well.
‘He was here last week,’ they said. ‘He comes sometimes for breakfast.’
But the last time they saw him, Nusrat was in terrible shape. He was homeless, and had taken to begging in the new parking lot in front of the Sao Paola Banka. He spent the night outside, and the men told me they thought he was taking drugs. His brother, Mohammed, who had taken care of him in the orphanage (more or less) had died a few months earlier, from an overdose.
‘He seems very ashamed of his life now,’ one of the men told me. ‘We tell him to come, have a shower, have a meal, but he only shows up once in a while.’
‘When he is really desperate,’ says the other man. They take my cell phone number and promise to call me if Nusrat comes back, and they tell me where to go to look for him.
Oh, Nusrat, I failed you, I thought quietly while waiting for Amir. When he came down the stairs, he recognized me, and I him, immediately.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.
‘Long time,’ I answered.
‘Fifteen years,’ he said, rubbing his girth. He had gotten fatter but otherwise looked the same. He called for hibiscus tea, coffee. A plate of biscuits appeared. He said he had gotten divorced. ‘Who knows why? The war did terrible things to all of us.’
‘And Nusrat?’ I asked.
Amir nodded. Nusrat came in from time to time, he said, but he never stayed the night. He had been at the home until he was in his early twenties. The death of his brother had been a blow.
Was he also taking drugs?
Amir shrugged. ‘Most likely. I tried to get him a job a while back, and he failed all the drug tests.’
I remembered the skinny kid who showed me how to hook a hand over the back of the UN trucks and slide, slide, slide.
‘What can you do?’ he said, and I froze, thinking he was going to say, ‘It’s a war.’ Instead he said, ‘We could not save all of them.’ We went up to see the babies, but Amir was in a rush. He would not let me hold any of them, even though they were all so very beautiful.
One day, during the war, Nusrat showed me a secret room in the orphanage, a room that was magically heated with oil heaters, and where there were several women in clean clothes. Inside this room, there were also tiny babies.
We snuck inside, Nusrat and me, when the ladies were not there, and I held these babies. I sat in a chair, and inexperienced with children, shifted the infants from one shoulder to the next. Nusrat sat on the floor grinning. And that became another of our rituals: waiting until the ladies went to do something else, sneaking inside and holding the babies. They were warm and smelled clean. I began to feel something I had never felt before: maternal.
But one day we got caught, and the big woman in a white dress with those strange Eastern European clogs they wear in Bosnia kicked us out. She locked the door behind her, and told me if she caught me again near that room, she would tell Amir and he would ban me from the premises.
Later that day, Nusrat told me a secret. Those were the babies of the Muslim women who were touched. Meaning raped. The women who had been held in rape camps in Foca and other places east of Sarajevo, and raped and raped and raped, u
ntil they became pregnant. An attempt, someone once told me, to wipe out their gene pool. And this is partially where that terrible phrase – ethnic cleansing – came from.
I found one of those rape babies when she was eight. Marina. She was so beautiful, like an angel. I kept staring at her perfect, tiny, lovely face, unable to imagine that such a child could come from an act so violent. She went to school and had no idea her father was one of perhaps a dozen men who held her mother in a sports hall in Foca and raped her and raped her and raped her.
While Marina was playful and sweet and was told her father was a war hero killed during a battle, her mother was not so joyful. She was a train wreck of a human being, more a shell of a body wearing a tracksuit than a an actual person. Her soul seemed to have been squeezed from her.
She shook and cried, she was full of shame and rage, and she took tranquillizers to sleep and pills to fuel her up during the day. She rarely ate. And yet she still tried to protect her daughter, a child she had once wanted to abort because of the seed that had made her. But at the last minute, she realized the baby was half hers. We went for a pizza and sat silently. Marina told me she liked cartoons: because it was not the real world.
One early spring day after I see Amir, I go to see Jasna. Jasna was in that hall with Marina’s mother those awful days in the summer of 1992 in Foca, but she did not have a baby. She did not have a baby because when she was raped, over and over, nine times by her count, she was only twelve years old and did not yet have her period.
Her mother was raped alongside her on one of the occasions. Neither mother nor daughter could help the other. The little girl screamed at the pain of losing her virginity to a soldier three times her age, and her mother was powerless to help her. Afterwards, when they brought them back to the sports hall, they did not look at each other, and they never talked about it.
Ghosts by Daylight Page 21
