Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine's Orange Revolution

by Susan Viets

  In the spring Senad and I travelled to Switzerland for a workshop. We took a taxi together to the Sarajevo airport, past those devastated neighbourhoods swaddled in mine tape.

  “I served there,” Senad said. He had never spoken of his war experiences.

  “It’s hard to believe that anyone ever lived in those houses or walked along those streets,” I replied.

  “Sooosan, what hell.”

  Once we were settled in the departure lounge, Senad talked non-stop. His memories of war had been triggered. A student, not a soldier when the fighting began, he had the disposition of a thoughtful academic, not someone inclined toward the military.

  “My parents, even I, did not think it would be possible for neighbours to turn against neighbours,” he said. “We watched the Serbs gather on the hilltops, we saw the guns pulled into place, but we still didn’t believe they would shoot at us.”

  “And …” I prompted.

  “Even when we heard the first shots, my parents and I still sat in our living room. Then it started to get really bad and we went down to the basement,” he said.

  “After a few weeks, I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t take it any longer, waiting for them to arrive, to smash in the door of our house, to kill us.” Senad decided to leave home and join the fighters.

  “Anything was better than just to sit there, waiting,” he said. I listened as he described the informal militia set up to defend the city, how he walked to join his unit and dodged snipers along the way. I had so many questions but did not want to interrupt this unburdening, so I just stayed quiet.

  He described the area where he fought as one half controlled by Bosniacs, the other half, by Serbs. The front line was a main street that separated the two sides.

  “Sometimes we had to drive along that road to move supplies and people,” Senad said.

  “How dangerous was it?” I asked.

  “Most of the time we waited,” he said. “It was boring but not a usual boredom. There was so much tension.” I thought of how his hands shook each morning as he held his coffee, and now suspected that his nerves were frayed as a result of his wartime experience.

  “Snipers fired from both sides. You never knew when there would be an attack.”

  “Were you involved in a lot of fighting?” I asked. He drew a breath and told me about his worst day in Dobrinje, a day of deliveries when he had to drive down the front line in a van.

  “We drove really fast, and zigzagged to make sure the snipers couldn’t get us,” Senad said. “Our tire burst,” he said. “The driver lost control. We didn’t know if a sniper had hit the tire, if we’d run over something jagged or if the tire was just weak and had blown on its own.” He described how the van flipped and landed on its side, leaving Senad and his friends, who sat in the cargo section in the back, banged up and dazed. That part of the van had no windows.

  “We just sat there in the dark,” he said. “So much dust swirled in the air, I couldn’t breathe. I thought I’d suffocate or choke to death.” Senad and his friends heard a click of the ignition, an engine that stalled, curses from the driver. Stuck in a wreck in no man’s land along the front line, they discussed their odds of survival and what to do.

  “Either we could sit there and wait for them to open fire, shell us, lob grenades, or we could get out and run,” Senad said.

  “It seemed an eternity, but maybe it was only a few minutes. We all agreed. No one wanted to wait for slaughter. We forced a door open. I remember the sun was so bright. We all got out and we ran. Thanks to God that we all made it alive,” he said. He spoke more of life on the front line, friendships formed there, classes missed, a sense of falling behind, lost opportunity.

  “When peace came, I was so glad that my family and I lived, but the war cheated me of time,” he said. I hesitated to ask one question because it was intrusive, but asked it anyhow.

  “How did it feel the first time you shot someone?”

  “Sooosan, I never shot anyone. I always just fired at bushes. If I thought that I had killed someone, I would want to kill myself.” Such destruction in that neighbourhood – I could not believe that a soldier who served there would never have to shoot to kill, even if only in self-defence. I wondered if Senad’s mind was playing tricks on him and suppressing bad memories.

  I know mine had. I told Senad how I had recently reread a diary entry about a road trip that Sydney and I had taken the summer before, not long after we arrived in Sarajevo and how shocked I had been to find out that I had completely blocked out one event that I recorded in my diary.

  That entry described a trip to Zagreb from Sarajevo – Sydney, a friend and I travelled in the Land Cruiser. The drive was uneventful until we neared Bihač. On our approach, we rounded the beginning of a bend, a long, steep curve down a mountainside, stopped suddenly by half a dozen stationary cars on the road. Sydney and I rolled our windows down. We heard the most terrible wail. We got out of the Land Cruiser and ran down the road toward the person in distress.

  “The first aid kit,” I shouted at Sydney, who was tall and long-limbed and already far ahead of me. “I’ll run back to get it.” He stopped. I retrieved the kit from the Land Cruiser and gave it to him. He sprinted down the road; I followed but lagged behind.

  I could no longer see Sydney by the time I reached the logs. At first I did not understand their significance, awed by their size, gargantuan pick-up sticks strewn across the road. No traffic could pass. The truck that carried them had skidded across the road and now lay on its side, partially wedged against the steep mountain cliff.

  A man in his fifties wailed. I found his anguish harrowing but could not understand the source of it. He stood and had no visible injuries. The man grabbed the logs, held his head and paced back and forth desperately. It was devastating to watch him.

  Sydney stood farther down the road by a police officer. He offered him the first aid kit. The police officer shook his head. What I wrote next I did not remember, though words in my diary, my handwriting, must be true.

  The man who wailed bent down to pick an object up, a severed leg. He clutched the jean- and shoe-clad leg to his chest and then threw it back onto the ground, where a second severed leg lay. Horrified, I turned away. As I reread the entry in my diary describing this gruesome scene, I felt that I was reading an account of someone else’s recollections and could not accept that I had witnessed this.

  I remembered the scene I recorded in the next entry. Sydney approached me, his face blank; his body slightly hunched. He went to the side of the road and crouched down to vomit.

  “Don’t go any farther. There’s an ugly sight, a squashed body,” he said.

  Our friend, who spoke fluent Croatian, remained near the other cars and spoke with drivers who knew what had happened. When we returned, he told us that the wailing man drove the truck, took the corner quickly and lost control. He and a passenger, his son, jumped from the cab while the truck was still moving. The father landed in bushes, his son was killed, trapped beneath the logs. I said to Senad that it seemed such an unfair fate – to survive the war and then die like that.

  He said nothing in reply and just switched the topic of conversation to our workshop in Switzerland. Many of the sessions would focus on digital information. Senad and I would learn techniques to assist with one main focus of our work, transmitting information to Bosnian refugees living in countries like Germany and Norway that would help them decide whether or not to return home. So many refugees remained outside the country and so much of the population in Bosnia was internally displaced.

  Louise and her husband Goran had also been affected by the war. Goran retained his family house throughout the war, though their summer house, about a forty-five-minute drive from Sarajevo, housed a family of Serbian refugees, displaced by fighting.

  One morning in early June, Louise telephoned. “Guess what?” she said.

  I could not guess her news.

  “The Serb family at Goran’s place is going ho
me.” Once this family left, Goran could reclaim his summer house. “Why don’t you and Sydney come up for the weekend to help us celebrate?” I accepted the invitation.

  Sydney drove. We left the outskirts of Sarajevo, passed a major SFOR base and soon turned onto narrow country roads. As we rounded the bend in one windy lane, we nearly ran into a large moving truck travelling in the opposite direction. Sydney reversed a long distance until he found a gap where he could pull over to let the truck pass. I felt relieved that he was driving, not me.

  “Hi,” Louise said with a smile when we finally pulled up to the front door of the country house. “Goran’s in a bad mood. The movers dropped the fridge on his hand.” A few minutes later, we heard footsteps on the stairs. Goran came into the kitchen, nursing his bandaged hand. He was shirtless because of the heat.

  “Zdravo [hello],” he said to Sydney, waved at me, then turned toward Louise. As he moved, I saw his back, which shocked me far more than his injured hand. His back was covered in a tangle of thick, welted scars. Goran and Louise discussed the dinner menu, then Goran left. I said nothing but Louise must have sensed my shock and understood the cause.

  “The war,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “He belonged to the White Swallows.” I told Louise that I had not heard of them.

  “They were an elite group of fighters. They tried to hold Mount Igman, key territory,” she said.

  “His unit was decimated. He was injured, still conscious, but he couldn’t move. He watched his friends die. Then he just lay there and thought he’d die too.” I pictured the scene as she described how rescuers had found Goran and carried him down the mountain, blood dripping from his body, all gashes and pulp.

  “You’ll never believe who operated on him and saved his life.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “His brother. He was the surgeon on duty that night.”

  Our topic of conversation changed as quickly as it had started. My mind raced to catch up, still dwelling on the battle scene, the aftermath. I wondered how Goran coped with all this. I could only relate through stories from World War II, but that was the past, the stuff of history books, not the present. Current events had so affected the lives of friends here.

  The door opened again. A tall man holding an axe hobbled into the kitchen.

  Louise introduced Sydney and me to Goran’s friend Zoran. He had just chopped firewood and wondered if Louise and Goran wanted some.

  “How perfect!” Louise said to him. “We’ll use it for our barbecue tonight. Come join us.” Zoran thanked Louise but said that he already had plans. He limped away. We heard the thud of wood as it landed on the verandah and the patter of rain on the rooftop.

  “What happened to Zoran’s foot?” I asked Louise.

  “Half of it was blown off by a mine.”

  “That’s terrible.” Louise had warned of mine-infested land by Goran’s country house. “Did it happen here?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, when he was with his unit just toward the end of the war and he was really lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “His unit walked through a field. No one knew it was mined. When they marched back, Zoran stepped on a mine at the edge of the field. He fell forward into a clear area. If he had fallen back, his injuries would have been much worse.”

  As we washed mushrooms and peppers, Louise told Sydney and me more about Zoran. He could not find a comfortable prosthesis. With no clinic in Sarajevo, Zoran had to order models from Germany and various other countries, but none fit properly.

  “What a bad time, such pain,” Louise said. “Everything chafed.” Then Zoran found an American doctor online. They corresponded. The doctor sent him another model, which still didn’t quite fit right. But Zoran was skilled with his hands and modified this prosthesis, in consultation with the doctor, for a snug fit and minimal discomfort.

  Through the window we saw the rain stop, the sky dramatic now, half dark with thunderclouds, half brilliant blue.

  “Let’s pick some plums while we have the chance,” Louise said. Sydney, meat cleaver in hand, stayed behind in the kitchen. Louise and I stepped out the front door and walked down to the orchard, hung heavy with purple fruit. Louise turned up the bottom of her T-shirt, held it in one hand, stretched high and picked fruit with the other, the plums nestled in a pile in her makeshift basket. I copied her.

  As we moved down the orchard rows, a reminder from Louise: “It’s fine to walk here, but some of the fields are mined.”

  In the house, we transferred our harvest to a basket. Sydney’s pile of meat grew taller, a wooden bowl brimmed with salad, bright peppers lined a tray, ready for the barbecue. As the sun fell lower in the sky, mist rose up. We heard the dog bark and saw him amble up the road with Goran, who clutched a bottle. When he entered the kitchen, he held the bottle high, like a trophy.

  “Šljivovica,” he said. “The neighbours make it. They have the best plums.” He’d already sampled the brew.

  “We can watch the sun set from the balcony,” Louise said. “The view over the hills is beautiful. Let’s go up.” Goran led us through empty rooms. Furniture lay in a jumbled pile in one room, untouched since the movers had arrived that morning. A boom box stood by the balcony. Louise put on a CD. I recognized it as ambient electronica but did not know the group.

  “Fabulous,” Sydney said. “I have this one.”

  Goran found chairs. We sampled the šlivovica, then toasted the summer house, Goran and Louise, and the fragile peace. I stood up for a better view. Louise and Sydney joined me. I commented on the bucolic scene stretched out below, green rolling hills dotted with small houses, earth churned up in one field on a hillside.

  “That’s great, I guess they’re farming again,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Louise asked.

  “There, on the hillside, that dug-up earth. Farmers must be planting crops.”

  “Oh, that’s not a field,” Louise said. “It’s a mass grave, an exhumation.” I listened, horrified, as she told me – her tone, matter-of-fact – that Serbs had marched Bosniacs who lived in the area over the ridge, shot some – possibly one hundred – and dumped their bodies in that grave. I wondered what wartime nightmares Louise and Goran had experienced that rendered a mass grave commonplace and accepted as an unremarkable part of the landscape.

  I wanted to move away. It felt indecent to gaze at a grave like that. We went downstairs, the air on the ground-floor verandah redolent with the smoky smell of meat that roasted. Goran stood over the barbecue; flames leaped up through the grill, bright orange in the dark. He tended kebabs and peppers, turned them regularly, fat sizzled as it hit the fire. Sydney poured more slivovic, then wine. We toasted Goran’s neighbours, his newly reclaimed house. His dog joined us. He soon lay tucked under the table, ready for scraps to fall. Music wafted down from the balcony. Platters that spilled over with meat and vegetables filled the table. Slowly the fire died down.

  Sydney left the table, slid away in the dark. A few minutes later, he returned to his seat and calmly said, “I’ve chopped my thumb off.” Louise and I both thought that Sydney meant that he had cut his thumb. Louise handed him a roll of army gauze, which she still had in her pocket from Goran’s accident earlier in the day. I could not see Sydney for lack of light but wondered at his tone of voice. I walked over to his chair.

  “I’ve got to find my thumb,” he muttered. By now his hand was well bandaged. I told him not to stand. He said that he had accidentally cut part of his thumb off while chopping wood at the side of the house. I ran around there; the dog followed, sniffing the ground. He was a Doberman, the one breed that I feared. I pushed the dog away, still a race between us for the thumb.

  Louise arrived with a flashlight and held the dog back. I found the thumb. The dog strained under Louise’s grip. She shone the flashlight my way and I felt pleased to see that I held only a small bit of thumb – about half the nail but fortunately cut on a diagonal so that less thu
mb behind it was gone. Louise held a teacup with cold water. We did not know what to do but put the thumb bit in it.

  We returned to the verandah. Sydney sat on a sofa, his head bent low. He said that he felt ill. Louise ran to the kitchen for a bowl; I rushed over to the Land Cruiser so that I could reverse it and face the right direction for the road so that it was ready to depart for the hospital. It was dark and the clearing where the Land Cruiser stood was very small, with a ridge nearby. Unfamiliar with the terrain and hardly able to see, I manoeuvred the Land Cruiser so that it hung over the ridge. I stopped, worried that I might plunge down into the field below, where Louise had warned me not to walk. I shouted. Goran ran out of the house. He directed me back onto flat ground. I shook as we bundled Sydney on board and left for Sarajevo. Sydney sat quietly in the back.

  “My thumb throbs,” he said.

  “Just scream,” Louise told him. “That’s the best way to manage pain.”

  “It’s not in my nature,” Sydney replied. I could see in the rear-view mirror that he sat quietly, hunched forwards, head bowed. I headed for the hospital on the SFOR base.

  When we arrived at the base gate, Louise rolled down her window and shouted, “Can somebody help us here? We have an emergency.” The guard, startled, I think, by Louise’s take-charge attitude, opened the barrier and waved us through.

  We saw Jeeps and soldiers everywhere and heard helicopters that hovered in the darkness somewhere nearby. Medical personnel ran from a building, and surrounded the Land Cruiser.

  “Can he walk?” one man asked us. Sydney mumbled that he could. Medics led us into an emergency room. A tall, broad-shouldered German doctor, who spoke flawless English, tended to Sydney immediately. The doctor told us the thumb bit could not be reattached.