by Nicol Ljubic
He watched the television news and saw people running in the streets of Sarajevo, heard the shooting and wondered if it was for real, because it sounded so different in films. He saw some people left lying in the street until others came along, hauled them into a car and drove off at speed with the doors hanging open. He saw clouds of smoke rising towards the hilltops and, up there, the large artillery barrels rotating. He saw sobbing children who clung to their mothers’ skirts and emaciated men behind barbed-wire fences. In one sequence, soldiers were toasting each other before it cut to weeping women. He watched a bridge collapse on itself and a priest sprinkling a tank with holy water. All these images stayed in his memory and yet there were other things that mattered more to him.
He could never have told her anything about this. He could not admit to her that no one had spoken about the war at school, or that friends of his parents had moaned about how the war had stopped their holiday trips to Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast. When they spoke of how often they had gone there, what a lovely time they used to have and how nice the people were, he had heard his mother say, “It’s too, too bad” and leave it at that, though what she had meant was unclear. His father had said, “They’ve all gone crazy down there.” How could he tell Ana of this massive indifference?
He wanted to show Ana that he was not indifferent – not to her, nor to what she had experienced. He set about reading books and articles about the war with a will. And he never missed an opportunity to take Ana in his arms and hold her tight.
Hardly a day went past without him seeing Ana. Most of the time, he slept at her place and went from there to the university. He lost contact with his friends. He wanted to be with her whenever he had a chance. Often, he would wait for her outside the door to her seminar room or outside the front door to her apartment block, if she wasn’t in when he called. Sometimes one of the people who shared her stairway would let him in and then he would sit on the step opposite the door to her flat, intrigued that so many people could pass the nameplate next to her doorbell without any idea of the wonderful woman who lived behind that door. Every time he pressed the bell next to her name, his heart was in his mouth. He liked her surname, because, like her first name, it was a palindrome, or almost. Only the last letter disturbed the harmony, that “c”, which is pronounced “itch”. Šimić. Like her first name, her surname suited her. Both had a pleasing symmetry about them.
Every day, he longed to see her again. And she felt just the same. When he waited for her at the university, she sometimes played a trick on him. She would pretend not to recognise him, walk straight past and then whirl about, put her arms around his neck and press her lips to his ear, saying, “There you are, at last.”
He had read once that happiness differed from normality by three to five heartbeats a minute – as if it were so easy to prove: simply place a couple of fingers on a pulse and count. Five extra beats define the condition of happiness. But she was made differently. He felt sure that her heart beat more slowly, maybe five to ten beats less per minute, when she was near him and at peace. At first, he used to joke about it and put it down to his soporific aura, until he realised that no one else had been able to give her what she longed for: a feeling of calmness. She called it “anaesthesia”. She often wanted it. When she leaned against his chest and soon dozed off, he took pleasure in his good fortune.
His friends said that they barely recognised him, that he had somehow stepped out of his usual self, like a jacket worn inside out. They wanted to meet the woman who had caused the change. Her name was Ana. Ana, with one “n”. She was a Serb, he explained. “A Serb?” And he would say “Yes”, and reflect on what Ana had told him about this. At some point, she had started to deny her nationality. Now, if someone asked where she came from, she would reply “Slovenia”, because she was fed up with the question and didn’t want to talk about the war, or anything to do with Karadžić, Mladić and the rest of them.
When their relationship was in its fourth week, his best friend invited them for an evening meal to celebrate the end of his trial period as university lecturer. He asked five other friends, moved the kitchen table to the sitting room, covered it with a white sheet and surrounded it with all the chairs he owned.
At first, they spoke about work and mutual friends. Ana couldn’t really join in and he wasn’t sure that she was enjoying herself. He tried to pull her into the conversation by telling everyone that, during the vacation, she had worked as an intern at a market research company, but stopped after two weeks because all she did was check newspaper articles and make coffee. One of the guests asked her what she would like to do once her studies were finished. And Ana replied that she wasn’t sure yet and that, at first, she would probably have to return to Belgrade.
Belgrade was a trigger. “Have you seen the photos of Karadžić?” asked his friend’s girlfriend. “I never thought they’d get him in the end. A faith healer! Honestly, you don’t get more cynical than that.”
He saw Ana briefly close her eyes.
Someone wanted to know how a man like Karadžić could possibly live in peace in Belgrade, travel by bus, give lectures on alternative medicine and have a favourite corner bar where, once in a while, he would play folksongs on the one-string fiddle. A false name, a pair of glasses, a long white beard and his hair tied back in a pigtail had clearly added up to complete camouflage. He looked like a Pope in the photographs. “The entire world was chasing after him and, all the time, he was doling out business cards with his mobile phone number on them! It’s unbelievable!” exclaimed one of the guests. “He seems to have been quite a hero to the Serbs,” said another guest. “There were street protests after he was arrested and people turned out in their hundreds, even the politicians.”
He had of course followed the newscasts, too. When he read about the case in the paper, he excitedly phoned Ana to ask if she had heard the news. “Yes, I have,” she said. “Didn’t you live in Novi Beograd?” he asked her. “Yes,” she said. “Me and half a million other people.” It had been a short conversation, which left him with the impression that he was more excited about the capture of Karadžić than she was. He couldn’t understand why she had seemed so indifferent on the phone. She might have said “At last!” or, even “Thank God!” But that night, when they were in bed together watching the news on TV, she didn’t say another word, so he told himself he’d better not ask her anything more about it. Instead, he pulled her a little closer.
“It’s interesting,” said the girlfriend of one of the guests. “I mean, I’d like to know what kind of people turn out in the streets to support a mass murderer.” While she spoke, her eyes were fixed on Ana. He asked if there was any more wine and wanted to know where his friend had bought the wine, because it really was good. But it didn’t work. “Aren’t you pleased that they’ve got him now?” asked the man who was sitting next to Ana. She put her glass down. She took so long to reply that the circle of friends around the table stilled and went quiet. “You believe that it’s all over now,” she said. “But it’s not over. And it won’t be over even when they tick the last name off their list.”
When they walked home together, he asked her what she had meant, but she told him that she’d said enough for today.
The third witness states that Višegrad was never so clean as it was during the months of war. The people looked after their town. Normal waste collections stopped, of course, but ordinary people took over all the jobs. Everyone cleaned the pavement outside his or her own house or business, and teams of citizens were formed to tidy up in front of public places like the post office, the banks and the parks. Cleaning up became quite popular and before long the town had improved beyond recognition. Every day, between nine and ten in the morning, they all turned out to tidy the place up.
The small, plump, round-faced man informs the court of this good citizenship and goes on to point out that his own neighbourhood had been especially filthy, because it had been the area worst affected by the flood of m
uddy water from the dam. Broken tree trunks and branches were scattered everywhere, but they cleared it all up.
And they had Zlatko Šimić to thank for this. He was the one who persuaded people that something had to be done and organised the street cleaning. On the first day, men drove around the town in a car with a loudspeaker. The message was that everyone was to meet up and then, in front of them all, Šimić put forward the idea of cleaning the town. People trusted him; he was a university professor after all. They knew him and were happy to be given a task. Everyone could see the results. It was quite the talk of the town. For one thing, many of the shop windows had been broken and the pavements were covered with broken glass. The shops had been owned by Muslims and since most of them were not around any more, no one had tidied up.
The witness is one of Šimić’s neighbours. He looks rather lost standing there in his oversized suit and tie. He is clearly trying hard not to say something wrong. His first response to each question is a brief pause, and he often looks at Šimić before speaking.
Mr Bloom, the public prosecutor, rises to examine the witness.
“Do you believe that the Muslims who helped you clean up were afraid?”
A few moments of complete quiet.
“I don’t understand what you mean. Afraid? Afraid of what?”
“You have just told us that several of the Muslim-owned shops had been abandoned. We have heard other witnesses assert that everyone knew of Muslims being killed and that it was also well known that houses belonging to Muslims had been set on fire. Would you agree that the Muslims who were still in the town might have been afraid?”
He looks at Šimić and then at Mr Bloom.
“Yes, of course I would. It’s natural that anyone who has seen a neighbour’s house burn or maybe a person being killed or raped would be afraid. Anyone would be scared in a situation like that. I was frightened myself.”
“But you have suggested that Muslims willingly helped you to clean up.”
“That’s not the same thing. It’s a different kind of feeling, when you worry about your house looking tidy and when you fear for the future. What I mean is, they’re two separate things. Cleaning up around your house is one thing and thinking about how they might come for you in the night and kill you or take you away, well, that’s another.”
“What you’re saying, in other words, is that people who fear being killed during the night might also worry about the cleanliness of their home?”
“People always like their place to look good, surely.”
Silently, Mr Bloom looks around the room, as if he wanted to make sure that everyone in the room has taken this sentence on board.
“I have one more question. Is it true that Herr Šimić in his role as … let’s call him ‘commander’ of a small army of cleaners, wore a red ribbon around his right upper arm?”
“As far as I remember, yes.”
“Please describe this ribbon”
“It was tied around his arm. It was broad and made from a kind of red cloth.”
“In your view, might some people have taken this ribbon to be the sign of the Red Cross?”
“I don’t think so. There was no cross on it.”
“Thank you.”
She told him that she couldn’t understand why he took so little interest in his origins. “Your family comes from Karlovac, there is Slav blood in your veins and you have a Slav surname, but you can’t speak the language and know nothing about our country. Why do you deny it? All that is part of you, isn’t it?”
He didn’t know why Ana had been struck by this on that particular day; perhaps it was because he hadn’t known anything about a famous Serb singer called Ceca and had displayed such amazement at the music she listened to, a kind of folk pop called Turbo-Folk. She even knew the lyrics and sang along while she washed dishes in the kitchen or sorted the pile of clothes in her room. For him it was as weird as someone of her age humming along to German popular songs from a bygone era.
“I don’t deny that it’s part of me,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve never really been in close contact with the culture. It’s hard when you don’t speak the language.”
“Why don’t you just learn it, then?”
He had often been asked that question. Every time he would say well, yes, perhaps he should try to learn Serbo-Croat, but he never did, because it pained him even to think of picking up a new language. At school, he had found French and English hard going. His father, who after forty years still sounded like a foreigner, had always insisted that his son speak German to avoid the problems he had encountered.
His father was always utterly certain that his own future was in Germany and never entertained the idea of going back to where he’d come from. He found nothing attractive about the country he’d been born in and his family had always lived in. The son could never remember his old man listening to Yugoslav music or buying a Yugoslav newspaper, and only heard him use his old language on the phone to one of his sisters.
“I would learn it for your sake,” he said.
“If you don’t want to learn it for yourself,” she insisted, “you mustn’t do it to please me. All I want is to understand why you feel the way you do.”
“It’s probably true that I was never very interested in the Slav part of me.”
Would things have been different if he had spoken her language? Would they have trusted each other in another way, would their relationship have changed?
One evening, Ana cooked for him. She made the stuffed cabbage dish called Sarma. “It’s my father’s favourite,” she said.
It was the first time he saw Ana wearing an apron. Now and then, she consulted a notebook she had placed on the table. Ana’s grandmother had used it to write down her recipes. The book had been handed down to Ana’s mother on her wedding day. “This notebook was one of the few things my mother took with her when we left Višegrad,” Ana told him. He leafed through the pages, as if he could read her memories in it.
Often, if he felt like a distraction, he would play a game which entailed choosing what he should take with him if he had less than a day to leave town for ever. He’d take documents, obviously: things like a passport, a birth certificate and formal references. Some clothes; he never cared much for clothes and the choices seemed easy. Books; now, that was hard. Homo Faber, I’m Not Stiller – would that be enough? The Discovery of Heaven, but that was a volume of some eight hundred pages and the hardback copy was very heavy. What would he do about the notes for his thesis? With them alone his suitcase would be bursting. Did he have any mementoes? Nothing came to mind except for a small stone Ana had given him, a pebble from the Drina. Perhaps some photographs. A couple of CDs. In his mind he would then run through his CD and book collections, ranking the items in an order that changed every time he thought about it. And he wondered how hard it would be for him to leave all the rest of his belongings behind. Surely it would be like losing a part of his life? Worst of all, for him, would be not knowing what would happen next; so he felt the only way to cope when you suddenly have to flee is to avoid thinking about either the present or what lies ahead. But surely that would be impossible.
Ana put the large stew-pot on the table and pulled her apron off. “The real skill is not to leave bits of string in it,” she said. She watched as he lifted a forkful to his mouth. The flavours hit his tongue, the slightly sour chopped meat mixed with raisins and rice inside the cabbage wrapping. It tasted of going visiting as a child.
His father loved that dish and his aunt had cooked Sarma every time they went to see her. As a child, he would listlessly poke about in the stuffing. He didn’t tell Ana that he still disliked the acidic bite of the cabbage.
He no longer hears the courtroom arguments; instead he sees himself and Ana sitting at the table while she flattened cabbage leaves to be stuffed, and he thinks that he might after all belong to her life. Ana might have actually regarded him as a member of her family or, at least, she might have imagined it.
Her grandmother must have followed this recipe when she cooked for Ana’s grandfather, so did her mother, cooking for her father and, now, Ana for him. Was this a sign? She missed her family, she said, and told him how they all used to sit around the table together, her father and mother, her grandparents and her cousins.
She simply couldn’t understand people in Berlin, because no one she had met of her own age felt particularly sad to be away from family life, from parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents. Everyone seemed to prefer getting as far away as possible. Where she came from, things were different. Her grandparents’ house was next door, her uncle and aunt lived nearby and she walked to school with her cousins. She often wondered why people here were so accustomed to being alone.
Ever since that evening, he has wished he could join her family circle. He sensed that she might be someone different there, happier among those who knew who she was and spoke her language. He asked her when she had last been home. She told him: the day she fled the town. “Why haven’t you been back?” “Because I want to keep my memories,” she said. “The lovely memories of my childhood.”
They sat at her kitchen table with their empty plates in front of them. He thought of the small photo on the windowsill of his parents’ bedroom, a framed, sepia image showing his family, all of them gathered around a table in the garden that belonged to his grandparents. Granny and Grandad had been alive at the time, and the brothers had brought their families to see them. Staring at the camera, the family sat on wooden benches around a table covered with a white plastic sheet and laid with plates, glasses and bottles. He was there, perched on one of his grandfather’s knees, while a little girl, one of the cousins he thought, sat on the other. Strange, how this photo seemed familiar and alien at the same time. There he was with his immediate family, but now he is unable to even put a name to all those faces.
