Today Jasna is thirty. She is a widow; her husband died three years ago, electrocuted on a job. She cannot bear children; she tried for several years and the doctors told her to give up. Meanwhile, we keep looking for Nusrat.
Every day, my interpreter Velma and her boyfriend drive to the parking lot late at night to look for Nusrat. But they never find him.
I can’t forget you, Nusrat, I think. If I forget you, then it seems so much has been in vain. Instead, I go to see the man who knows best about memory: Aliya, and his book of the dead.
We meet again early on a Friday morning, the Muslim day of prayer and first day of the weekend, in a cemetery past the tunnel where one of the few Bosnian tanks used to hide, draped in camouflage. He’s waiting for me, squinting in the sunlight, wearing city clothes rather than his farming clothes: a neat pair of corduroys, a brown sweater, and a checked shirt. He takes me inside the office of the cemetery.
There are twenty-four books of the dead, and we begin at the beginning: July 1992, his first day at work, when he took over the job at the morgue. His hands, big and calloused, used to dealing with the skin of his cows rather than the skin of the dead, open the first book. He sits down, with great and heavy exhaustion, and sighs. He opens the book, which already, only fifteen years after the war, seems very old.
The books are neat and orderly. He goes through them one by one, telling me about the things he remembers.
‘This was my neighbour . . .’ he points to one name. At another line, he drops his head. ‘This was a young girl.’
Finally, he gets to a page in October 1992. He takes out his handkerchief. He wipes his eyes. He runs his big, calloused, farmer’s hands over the page. His eyes blur. ‘And this is my son.’
I have always been close to the dead. Perhaps it is because I have lost so many people I love. Like Aliya, I am not afraid of the dead. I dream of them all, with alarming frequency. Once in a dream, my father was wearing wrinkled pyjamas. This was unusual, because he was an impeccably groomed man. He was wandering the streets, in his pyjamas, looking lost. Maybe it’s all a mistake that he is dead.
‘You’re dead, Daddy,’ I said. ‘Go away.’
He looked hurt. ‘Who told you I’m dead? I’m just in the next room.’
I have often thought we are connected to the dead, like the bridges that span the River Miljaka, like the bridge on which Prince Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, commencing the Great War. I think sometimes we never lose the dead. I believe strongly we must never forget them. During the war, I used to read the Anne Sexton poem, ‘The Truth the Dead Know’, over and over, as if it had a clue to the insanity that was killing the city of Sarajevo. I loved her poem, how she referred to the dead without shoes, in their stone boats. I understood her description of the remoteness, the heaviness, of death.
I am losing my memory, as the war fades further away from me.
I ask my friend, Louie, to help me remember.
I love Louie. He was a soldier, my friend, a tall, thin Serb from Sarajevo who fought on the Bosnian side. He was never a comforter – he was too gruff for that – but he was someone I knew I could trust with my life. He says, ‘No one ever touched you during the war because of me.’
When I would feel totally alienated sometimes out of fear or loneliness or desperation, he would take me to strange places with strange people – gangsters, probably – where they had a bottle of whisky. Then we would smoke and drink, and he would say, ‘Feel better? Now go home.’ He would drive me home and walk me to my door.
When I see him now, he is so much, much older. He shakes. He drinks a lot. He is so sad, a sadness that I know you cannot wash away with years. What is it you saw? Did you taste fear in your mouth like metal, and what did you smell? Those first days of war when you and your friends tried to hold off the tanks with Kalashnikovs, when you gathered at a factory out near the airport, a small virtually helpless band of kids trying to fight off Goliath, what did you think?
So Louie and I return on my last day in the new Sarajevo to all the places of the dead. To the front lines where he fought, eighteen years ago, He has never been back, and at some moments while we stare silently at the buildings where he crouched with a gun, at the factory where the battle raged for more than twenty-four hours, I am thinking perhaps it was not a good idea to bring him back.
‘My nerves,’ he says to me. ‘Now you wonder why I shake so much?’
We stand on a railway bridge in Otes, a suburb of Sarajevo, and he looks like he will cry. ‘We had no guns,’ he says, ‘we had only rifles that cost 100 DM and we tried to take the guns from the dead soldiers . . .’ We look down at a muddy, polluted creek.
At the Jewish cemetery, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting, where the men fought from headstone to headstone, someone has built a new house. A sparkling Architectural Digest house that leans out over the city heights, with a view of Sarajevo below. It must belong to someone who was not here during the war of course – if he was, he would not live here, amongst so many dead, so many lingering dead.
Then we go to Dobrinja. It was a wild place, a suburb cut off from the rest of the city for most of the war, where the fighting was always intense. I remember days of shelling, of sitting with people screaming from fear and pain, of running across fields of snow with soldiers urging me to run faster, run faster, reporter, run faster . . .
In Dobrinja – where transporters opened up on the civilians on 4 May 1992 and a loudspeaker urged the people to take hand luggage and leave (not many of the population of 45,000 did), Louie fought hand to hand. He was what they call a defender of the city.
But when we go back, there is a terrible moment when neither of us can remember anything. We go back to the main street – now called Branilaca Dobrinje – Defenders of Dobrinja – but we can’t recognize anything.
Instead of a wasted, grey outlay of communist-style buildings eaten away by tank shells and dead faces, and people running from snipers, there are pizza parlours, a playground, gold shops, gangs of beautiful teenagers smoking cigarettes, a sports hall and dogs rolling in the early spring sun.
‘My God,’ Louie says. There are tears in his eyes. ‘I can’t . . . remember anything. I can’t see where we were . . .’ He climbs out of his car and lights a cigarette. He is growing agitated. He is shaking again. He stares at the buildings, looking a little desperate.
I can’t remember either. I can’t recognize where we once stood. But wait – isn’t that the building I sprinted from with a soldier who was taking me to the front line, holding my hand as we ran? No, it can’t be. And isn’t that basement the old Bosnian army headquarters? The room where I saw that ancient woman who was dying of the cold? The place where the children were killed . . . the snow banks, the trenches, the sandbags used as defences, the metal canisters . . .
Everything has changed. Everything and nothing.
‘Let’s go,’ Louie says quietly. ‘I don’t want to remember anyway.’
A few months later, I finally found Nusrat. We met in a café not far from the Holiday Inn, and I fought back tears as this little boy emerged, now a man, carrying two plastic sacks, everything he owned inside them.
He was homeless. He lived on the streets. His brother, Mohammed, was dead, perhaps of an overdose. And Nusrat himself had suffered brutally in the aftermath of the war: he had stayed in the orphanage until he was twenty-four, then married a girl he met inside it. They had a child. The child was one of the infants killed in the fire.
He looked away, tears stinging his dark eyes, and I remembered how pained I was when he was a little boy, orphaned, and wearing socks on his hands instead of mittens.
You can’t save the world, Bruno had always told me when I came back from assignments, gutted and wasted from helplessness, the intensity of pain other people lived through. You can’t save people. You’ve got to grow a thicker skin.
But Nusrat could have been saved, I was sure of it. Somehow he seemed to epitomize every lost boy I had ever encount
ered in my life: my brothers, my husband. And now, in the café, he ordered a tea, but politely declined food. He said he slept outdoors most nights, and begged in a parking lot outside a bank. His war memories, like mine, were getting dimmer.
I went to other places in my life, but I never fell in love with a place again like I did with Sarajevo, the same way I will never love anyone again, I am sure, the way I love Bruno.
Both were linked to me for ever. The city on the river captivated me, held me, haunted me, the same way he did. I did try to exorcize them both. Sarajevo was easier. One day, in a fit of madness, I burned every single notebook I had used to report the siege, page by page, in a fire in a friend’s garden. As the pages went up in smoke, I hoped, I thought, I was burning the worst of the memories from myself. My tattoo of my worst pain.
But I did not. I never could. Once upon a time, a long long time ago, in a city on the river, during the month of May when there was nothing to eat but cherries that fell from the trees, I met a soldier.
He was very young – twenty-one – and very beautiful, and when he ran along the front lines near the river, he loped, like a wolf. He was fast, a sprinter, and before the war he was a student of journalism and politics. His eyesight was perfect, and so they gave him a gun and made him a sniper.
We loved each other. It was not the kind of love where you run away together and get married and have children and live happily after. It was the kind of unconsummated love between two people who had fallen through the rabbit hole and had gone mad with war, drunk with war. We lived together, as comrades, in an apartment on a front line so vicious that we heard the shells crashing and throbbing, and sometimes it was so insane that I thought I heard him laughing and laughing. But later he told me he was crying.
Many years later we meet in the new, spanking clean Hotel Europa. He is not a boy. He has an MBA and works in a bank. After the war, he spent years abroad, trying to forget. He is a father, I am a mother. He wants to live in Dubai, get rich.
When we hug each other, it is the touching of two strange survivors. We always tell each other we love the other. On 11 September 2001, he found me somehow, and rang me on my cell phone – I was in Paris getting a visa to go to Afghanistan – and said: ‘I love you’. What he meant, I guess, was that his country had been destroyed and now mine was too.
We both never forgot Sarajevo.
‘That war broke my heart,’ I once told him.
‘That war broke my everything,’ he responded. ‘The only good thing that happened is that I met you.’
On my last day in Sarajevo, I tell my friend about Nusrat.
He lights a cigarette and tells me maybe there are times for remembering, and maybe there are times for forgetting, and this is a time for forgetting.
Later, I ask him what happened to this city, because perhaps it was some clue about what happened to me.
Long long ago, in a place far away . . . why did the people rip each other to pieces? And why was it so linked to my own life?
He listens to me patiently. ‘You should let it go,’ he says finally. ‘Let it all go. Just try to live a happy life, as happy as you can possibly be. We are not as broken as you think,’ he says.
He gets up to take his long, handsome coat. He cups my face in his hands. He kisses me goodbye. He goes through the door of the Hotel Europa, into the new world, perhaps even more frightening than the comfortable world of the war, and I know he is, like me, forgetting and remembering.
Acknowledgements:
Thank you:
Luca and Bruno, without whom there would be no story, no light.
To William Callahan at Inkwell Management, who first read this book, and with the eye of a master, helped me structure and build it.
To Alba Arikha and Susannah Hunnewell, who gave me the confidence to be a better mother, who did not laugh at my fears, who sat with me for hours in emergency rooms and cafés, who told me how to cut babies’ nails and drink gin martinis.
Wendell Steavenson, who listened, and cooked, and listened and cooked, and cooked and listened.
To Anna Seassau and Catherine Rubin, who patiently taught me how to be a Parisian Mama, and who always laid a plate for me and Luca at their kitchen tables.
For Raquel Ramos Bundalian and Leisl Montero, Luca’s beloved nannies. For my parents-in-law Marie-Louise and the late Philippe Girodon, who always treated me like a real daughter. For Adam Phillips, for the patient, painful unravelling.
And for my mother, Kathryn Buccino di Giovanni, who finally became my dearest friend and confidante when I became a mother.
This book took six years to write. Any other editor or agent would have lost confidence in me long ago. So eternal thanks to Kim Witherspoon, David Godwin, David Forrer Ash Green and Alexandra Pringle, for waiting.
To Julia Reed, who believed and believed.
And for Cindy and Oswaldo Fumei, who brought me to Lamu, gave me a bed in front of the Indian Ocean and a library in Corsica, and allowed me the peace and quiet to finish this book.
And to L. R., thank you.
Author’s Note
It is difficult to write about members of your family, people you love the most in the world, when they are still living. So I would like to say that all the important characters in this book – Bruno Girodon, my mother, Ariane Quentier and others – read it before it was published and gave me their blessing. It was especially difficult for Bruno, who is the most private of individuals, to read the story of his crash and burn but his eventual triumph and sobriety. It is just one more example of his courage. He said, even if he did not agree with ways I had described events: ‘I would not dream of changing a word. This is your story to tell and you must tell it.’
Bruno always said to me when I was under some bombing raid, and he wanted to reassure me: ‘The best journalist is the one who gets out alive to tell the story.’ To tell this story, I had to live it, often with pain, to the end.
Janine di Giovanni
Paris, March 2011
A Note on the Author
Janine di Giovanni is contributing editor for Vanity Fair and writes for many American, British and French publications. A former senior foreign correspondent for The Times, she has reported more than a dozen conflicts and has won Granada Television’s ‘Foreign Correspondent of the Year’ award, the National Magazine Award and two Amnesty International Media Awards. She is the author of four books, Against the Stranger, The Quick and the Dead, Madness Visible and The Place at the End of the World. In 2010, she was the President of the Jury of the Prix Bayeux for War Correspondents. Janine di Giovanni lives in Paris.
By the Same Author
Against the Stranger
The Quick and the Dead
The Place at the End of the World
Madness Visible
First published in Great Britain 2011
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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