A Death in Sarajevo

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  It hardly seemed that so quiet and peaceful a space could speak to a history of tragedy.

  Esa tried to imagine the Sephardic Jews who’d established their centuries-old presence in Sarajevo gliding over the cobblestone in their robes, urging their community to meet at a place of homecoming. He could feel the weight of exile borne by the old stone walls.

  And Sarajevo was as beautiful as he remembered, a city of austere, resilient grace. Its complex architecture embodied its commingling of cultures and empires. A lunar clock tower perfectly balanced a slender minaret, both of which he could see from where he was standing. When Skender arrived in blue jeans and ski jacket, a cigarette trailing from his hand, the two men embraced and took stock of each other with fond smiles.

  “Why here?” Skender asked him. “Why not the café in front of Ferhadija?”

  Esa smiled, but behind the smile was a sense of being haunted.

  “I wanted to pay my respects,” he said. “I feel the presence of old ghosts.”

  Skender, a lean man with a wiry build and the shadow of a sandy beard to match his hair, was a few years older than Esa, though much more careworn and skittish in his movements.

  “Ghosts.” Skender shook his head. “The city is full of them. Twenty years ago did we imagine Sarajevo would come to life again? Did we guess we would all still be here?” A sweeping gesture of his hand indicated the mosque, the synagogue, and the church. “Yet here we are. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about—an old, familiar ghost. But we can’t talk here, I’m feeling cold. Let’s find something to eat.”

  He led Esa through the old bazaar, the Bascarsija, pausing to scatter food for the stray cats that followed them past the arched entrance to the Gazi Husrev Beg mosque and the small library across from it, until they had lost themselves among the tiny shops that lined both sides of the alley. Down one lane was a tea garden, but Skender dragged Esa inside a café whose benches were covered by heavy wool carpets and ordered them both a traditional Bosnian meal of cevapi—grilled lamb and beef sausages—served with onions, sour cream and bread. They talked of their families and the intervening years since they had seen each other last. When their meal was finished and their supply of stories exhausted, Skender sat back in his chair and lit another cigarette as Turkish coffee was brought to their table and served with fresh baklava.

  “You wanted my help,” Esa reminded his friend. “You said you had a puzzle to solve.”

  Skender nodded. With some consideration, he was trying not to blow smoke in Esa’s face. He pulled a photograph from his outer pocket and slid it across the table.

  “Do you remember when you met her?”

  It was a photograph of an impossibly elegant young woman with dark, vivacious eyes. She was dressed in a slim blue dress and a string of white pearls, and was smiling up at Skender as if he held the whole world in his hands.

  “I do,” Khattak said. “I’m very sorry about Amira, Skender. I know how deeply you must feel her loss.”

  Esa had met Skender’s fiancée on his brief trip to Sarajevo during the war. She was charming, outgoing, and utterly undaunted by the city’s bombardment—he’d found her spellbindingly lovely, and had envied his friend his good fortune in the engagement. Later, he’d written his condolences to Skender, stilted words that failed to express how brightly Amira’s presence had shone in the midst of the grim realities of the war.

  “I had taken a tourist to the Muzej Sarajevo the other day—the war museum. I was killing time while she looked around. The museum has added a new display; it’s called ‘Women and the War.’”

  Esa thought he could tell where this was going. He reached over and patted his friend’s shoulder. “There was a photograph of her apartment block?”

  Amira had been killed in the first year of the war when her building had collapsed, targeted by Serb artillery. Sixteen others had died that day as well.

  “That’s what I always believed. I’ve visited her grave every Friday for the past twenty years, rain or shine. You know that.”

  “Do you have some reason to doubt it now?”

  “You tell me. The reason I went to see the exhibit was that someone sent me this.”

  Skender withdrew a slim volume from his pocket and passed it across to Esa. It was the catalogue of the exhibit with a dog-eared page at the center. Esa’s fingers found the marked page.

  He was looking at a photograph of a woman in camouflage gear, an automatic rifle slung over her shoulder, her hair tied back by a headband that was decorated with a white lily. She was sitting in the shadow of a bombed-out building, in the midst of a group of female soldiers, looking away from the camera with a half-smile on her face. He recognized Amira at once. He looked up at Skender, faintly shocked.

  “When was this?”

  “Look at the caption.”

  Khattak read it: Amira Sarac, Bluebird Brigade, October 1992.

  “They must have the date wrong. Her building was shelled in May. I visited the memorial at the street corner yesterday.”

  Skender stubbed out his cigarette and flicked it away. He leaned forward across the table, his narrow blue eyes intent.

  “Is that the part that surprises you?”

  Esa closed the book with a frown.

  “I didn’t know women fought in the war. I didn’t know Amira had joined the army.”

  Skender nodded to himself. “Not many people do know—I had to visit the army’s archives to find out for myself. There was an all-female unit called the Bluebird Brigade—it fought on the front lines to defend Sarajevo. And Amira enlisted three days after her apartment block came down.”

  Esa drew an audible breath. “Is she still alive, Skender?”

  But his friend was shaking his head. “Not according to army records. She was killed in the mountains a full year later.”

  “And the grave you’ve been visiting?”

  “It was always just a symbol. We never recovered Amira’s body from the rubble—only those of her family.” He brushed it aside, as if the mourning of two decades was irrelevant. As if it hadn’t left its stamp on his face, his thoughts or his heart. “You’re missing the point, Esa. The point is she didn’t tell me she was going to join the army. She just vanished. She let me think she was dead. She never tried to contact me, she walked away without a word.”

  So this was the puzzle he was being asked to solve.

  Skender took the catalogue back from Esa, flipping through its pages.

  “Someone wanted me to know about Amira’s service in the army. And I want to know why—who sent this to me, so many years later?” There was a catch in his voice. “Do you think you could find out?”

  Esa thought it over. It was a complicated request. Find out who’d sent the catalogue to Skender so long after Amira’s death, and more importantly, discover why Amira had left the fiancé he knew she’d loved. Amira and Skender had been a golden pair, their love encompassing everyone who crossed their path, encouraging their friends and families through the early days of the war.

  “The war affected everyone differently, Skender. Amira wanted to join the war effort in some way, as I remember.”

  “And I would never let her,” Skender answered. “Do you think that was why?”

  “Her family was killed in the attack on the apartment—her mother, her two sisters?”

  A ghastly pallor ran up under Skender’s skin.

  “I dragged them out myself.”

  Esa lowered his voice, wishing now they had chosen the restaurant in front of the modest Ferhadija mosque. He knew the gates were barred, but perhaps the portico of its domes would have soothed his friend—or would have eased the words Esa had to speak.

  “If Amira was in the building at the time of the collapse, or even if she found out afterward, she must have been heartbroken by the killing of her family. She was headstrong, determined—she may have wanted to do something in their memory. And there was still Sarajevo to defend against the siege.”

  Esa
looked around the crowded café, trying to cast his thoughts back to that time. What had it been like for Sarajevo’s residents? Who could he speak to that would know?

  Another thought occurred to him.

  “Skender, you fought in the army yourself. You didn’t hear of the Bluebird Brigade at that time—your paths didn’t cross?”

  Skender buried his face in his hands, his eyes covered by his nicotine-stained fingers.

  “God. After the building collapsed, I asked to be transferred out of Sarajevo. Without Amira, I had nothing to keep me here. I was sent all over, but by the following year I was stuck in Gorazde, where the need for fighters was desperate.”

  Esa needed no further explanation. Everything and everyone he encountered in Sarajevo reminded him of the Bosnians he’d met during the investigation into Christopher Drayton’s death. He hadn’t told Skender about it—he hadn’t needed to. All around the city—all over the country—the memories of the war lingered. Whether in buildings still pockmarked by shelling or in the exhibit on the Bosnian genocide that had sprung up across from the cathedral, it was a war the survivors carried with them. There was no running from it, no shutting it away.

  And the first thing he would have to do, if he was going to help his friend, was to find out more about the Bluebird Brigade.

  “Do you know where Amira is buried, then? Do the archives say?”

  A faint look of relief came into Skender’s eyes at the realization that Esa intended to help him.

  “Yes,” he said. “At the war cemetery. I’ll take you there now, if you’re ready. Do you have the right shoes? It’s a bit of a climb.”

  Esa welcomed the exercise and the bite of cold air against his face after the smoke and heat of the tiny café. Long-forgotten memories stirred—Amira, always with a ready smile and a quip on her lips, even in the midst of the siege. He’d left Amira and Skender and the others behind, and hadn’t been able to return. They hadn’t blamed him, caught up in a struggle for survival, but he’d felt his abandonment keenly.

  And instead of continuing his studies with the law, he’d turned to law enforcement and the police—thinking there, at least, he could effect change. There, at least, his voice could be heard.

  And then looking at the gravestones that marked the steep rise of the hill, white spears against a barren, snow-covered ground, he felt ashamed of having allowed himself such an easy retreat into despair. What had happened with Drayton, what had happened in Algonquin may have shaken him—but these weren’t tragedies. And the Bosnian war wasn’t Esa’s tragedy. He had no right to claim it.

  Not with Skender nervous and hopeful at his side.

  The Kovaci cemetery was still and deserted, a path of gravestones that climbed a green hill marked by a narrow creek bed through which melting snow trickled down. The cemetery was tended in the main, its crimson roses not yet in flower, but Khattak almost preferred the broken stones that lined the creek and the wild profusion of greenery at its edge.

  Skender led him away from the domed memorial that shielded the grave of Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia’s president during the siege of Sarajevo. A fresh wreath of marigolds had been planted at his tombstone, and Khattak read its Arabic inscription.

  Climbing higher still, Skender found a narrow white marker that was slightly askew. Here, Amira Sarac’s name was inscribed, along with the true date of her death in 1993.

  “What we call Bosnia is not a piece of earth in the Balkans,” Skender said. “For many of us, Bosnia is an idea.” He was staring down the hillside at a skyline populated by minarets and crosses, the gentle peal of church bells sounding against the call to prayer. “It’s the belief that people of different religions, nations, and cultural traditions can live together.”

  “That describes Sarajevo perfectly.”

  Skender shrugged off Esa’s praise. “Izetbegovic said it. He believed in the idea of Bosnia until the very end. Did you know more than a hundred and fifty thousand people attended his funeral?”

  Esa nodded. As he looked down the hill at the thousands of Sarajevo’s war dead, he knew Amira would have been there had she lived to witness it. He said a swift prayer for Amira, observing the date on her grave marker closely.

  “She lived almost ten months after you thought her dead. In all that time you didn’t hear from her?”

  Skender lit another cigarette, a compulsive act that seemed to keep him grounded.

  “To tell you the truth, I thought I saw her everywhere at first. If a woman was running down Sniper Alley, at a funeral in the rain, brushing back her hair the way she did—you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “And nobody could laugh like Amira did—she found humor in everything. Even in your humble attempt to rescue the people of Sarajevo.”

  His smile became sharp-edged, sardonic, as he cast a sly glance at Esa.

  Esa had the grace to blush. “I was young. I had no idea what I was doing, but I wanted to be doing something. I wasn’t anything like the others—they had medical or administrative skills. I was just a pair of hands and eyes, wanting to act as witness. Amira soon set me straight.”

  He found himself smiling at the memory of Amira’s teasing, playful manner. He’d been enthralled by her vibrant optimism; her gentle mockery had made him feel singled out for her attention.

  “She didn’t mean to laugh at you, Esa. She thought you were very brave.”

  Esa squeezed his friend’s shoulder.

  “She took pity on a clumsy youth who couldn’t take his eyes from her. She was kindness itself to me.”

  They began the descent to the city center together, and Esa apprised Skender of his plans. He would pay a visit to the coroner to see if he could find out more.

  “They say she was killed during the construction of the tunnel.”

  The Sarajevo war tunnel had saved the city during the siege, allowing food, medical supplies, and weapons into the encircled city.

  “I thought you said the Bluebirds fought in the mountains.”

  “In the Zuc area. I don’t know exactly where.”

  Skender’s cigarette described a falling, golden arc through the air.

  “It’s hard to get straight answers out of anyone. No one talks to you, no one is willing to look back. Except the person who mailed me the book.”

  Esa considered this.

  “Have you made any personal enemies, Skender? During the war, or after?”

  “Everyone has enemies in this country. It’s a question of what you choose to forget.”

  Khattak thought of Drayton. No one had forgotten the Butcher of Srebrenica.

  “There’s another possibility. Are any members of the Bluebird Brigade still alive? Could you track down someone who served with Amira?”

  Skender stopped before the Sebilj fountain at the end of the old bazaar. He was out of breath from the long climb down and from his overdependence on cigarettes. He kicked out at the pigeons scattered around the Ottoman-style wooden structure. Its unassuming dome had oxidized to a pale and lovely green.

  “I don’t think so, no. They wouldn’t talk to me—no one helps anyone here.”

  Esa didn’t think this was true, but he could see that the war and these new discoveries about Amira had touched his friend with bitterness.

  “Then find me some names and I’ll talk to them.” He paused. “Skender, grief takes people in different ways. It could simply be that Amira walked away from her old life because her losses were too great. Enlisting in the Bluebird Brigade may have had nothing to do with you or with what you meant to her.”

  A light snow began to fall and Skender turned his face up to it before venturing an answer.

  “Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. But I have to tell you, it doesn’t make sense. Amira loved me. She would have come back to me in time. She wasn’t a girl to break her promises.”

  Esa thought it too painful a reminder to point out that perhaps Amira had tried to find Skender. Once Skender had transferred out of Saraje
vo, communication would have been next to impossible.

  When he’d left Skender at the fountain, Khattak wandered through the streets of the old town until he found the path to the river, passing by the National Library. Its restoration was magnificent. He hadn’t stayed in Sarajevo long enough to see it burn, but all around he caught echoes of the war: memorial plaques at the edges of buildings, the marks of artillery fire on otherwise pristine facades. Graffiti that covered the lower half of Austro-Hungarian buildings. And cemeteries where he least expected to find them.

  Ivana Frankel, the medical examiner, wasn’t at her office, so he took a chance and crossed back over the Miljacka River to the University of Sarajevo. With a few false starts, he found his way to the Department of Pathology where she worked. A stylish woman in her fifties with wavy gray hair that framed her face, she was making her way through a stack of lab reports, pausing now and again to make corrections.

  Behind her, a framed photograph on the wall dominated the room. It was in black and white and showed a woman with a classic hourglass figure, superbly dressed and gloved, strolling at her leisure through Sniper Alley while Bosnian soldiers patrolled the streets in the foreground. She embodied elegance with her artfully curled hair, chic elbow bag, and sleek black nylons. Her magnetic eyes were snapping with life. Khattak looked back at the woman at the desk, who was now staring at him in turn.

  The charismatic black eyes were the same. He smiled and introduced himself, and she invited him to take a seat. She spoke English in a charming, husky voice, frequently interrupted by coughing. Only her hands gave some sign of her profession: blunt-fingered and strong with the nails clipped short.

  Khattak explained his errand, and Ivana Frankel’s eyes lit up.

  “The Bluebirds, the Bluebirds. The stuff of romance and legend.” She gestured expansively at the photograph on the wall. “I suppose you think I’m rather vain.”