by Sheri Fink
Ilijaz picked up the phone to call Fatima again and plead for her to leave Bratunac. The line was dead.
4
EJUB
THAT SAME DAY, Ilijaz’s colleague, Dr. Ejub Alić, left his home in Srebrenica and went to stay with his best friend in the neighboring, mainly Muslim village of Potočari. The house lay at the foot of a mountain called Budak near the main road between Srebrenica and Bratunac. A few hundred paces up the road stood a red Partisan star symbolizing Bratstvo-Jedinstvo—Brotherhood and Unity—the slogan of Yugoslavia.
The two men drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes, and talked for hours. They discussed their wives and families, whom they had sent out of the region for safety.
Like his younger colleague Ilijaz, Ejub also hailed from the eastern edge of Bosnia in the mountains that overlook the River Drina, from an even tinier, more backward village. The family Alić had settled there and multiplied, and one day the family grew as numerous as a village, and so people called the village Alići.
Ejub was born there in 1959, in the days when women still went to the wells to fetch water. His family subsisted on the vegetables they grew and the sheep they raised, plus income his father earned by constructing houses in neighboring Serbia. Although they lived in plain view of the giant Perućac hydroelectric power plant, which sat on the opposite bank of the Drina River in Serbia, electric wires had yet to stretch to Alići.
One year when autumn came, Ejub’s mother took to her spinning wheel, spun wool from their sheep, knitted a book bag, and sent the boy to school. He walked the four and a half miles barefoot.
For a boy from a village with one clock and one battery-powered radio, the schoolhouse brimmed with treasures awaiting discovery. Books, and the joys of reading. The mysteries of science. Even the fact that teachers wore shoes and some children had colorful, plastic book bags impressed Ejub.
But to his illiterate mother and self-taught father, Ejub’s schooling came second to his household chores. Ejub’s father frequently kept him at home to work the land. On those days, Ejub cried and begged to be let go.
As he grew older, he found ways to earn money for the bus fare that bought him a bumpy ride up the winding dirt road to the library in Srebrenica. He brought home books to read at night under the light of an oil lamp, until his worried father restricted his dreamy son’s reading time.
From books Ejub learned about science and space and the race to put a man on the moon. As a youngster, he visited the mosque with other village boys and memorized mysterious words of Muslim prayer. But as he grew, he realized that evolution, geology, and biology made sense to him in a way the prayers did not. He believed in science. The logic of science seemed to preclude the logic of religion, so at age twelve he forsook religion and declared himself an atheist.
He loved not only science, but also literature, and made up poems to fill the boring hours of field work. He recognized each member of his flock of sheep and noted their personalities as if they were characters in a book, hanging bells on the “unsheepish” ones so he could hear them if they tried to run away.
Once a year, Ejub received a pair of “Alpinaks,” laced rubber foot coverings for working in the fields. Despite the fact they were his only purchased possession, he was as careless with them as a wealthy boy would be.
“Tie your Alpinaks!” his father admonished him repeatedly.
One morning Ejub brought the sheep out to graze after a big rain. He stuffed his feet into the rubbers, leaving their laces untied.
Each time he lifted a foot, the soggy earth held on to the rubber sole for a moment before letting go. A few times the mud held so tightly that the boy’s foot lifted clear out of his Alpinak and he had hop back to scoop it onto his toes.
The heavy rains had made it an especially fine day for jumping across swollen streams. Ejub came to a swift one. He backed up a few steps to give himself a running start and then took a giant leap. One loose shoe slipped from his foot. He landed and spun around to see the stream carrying it away. He reached for it, but its black form disappeared in the current.
Ejub limped away wearing his one remaining rubber shoe, and wondered how he could return home to face his father. He cast about for answers to the question, “How could you be so careless?” But the excuses he conjured failed to convince even himself. As much as he feared being punished, he regretted even more the loss of something so valuable, something the family could barely afford.
The sun rose higher in the sky and other children joined Ejub and his flock. They came to another part of the river and pushed a tree trunk across to dam it so the sheep could wade without being carried away. Ejub lay on his stomach on the edge of the river and stuck his hand in deep to test the current. His fingers brushed something. He touched it—something rubber. His shoe! There it was, two miles or so from where he’d dropped it. He picked it up, spilled out the water, and tied it tightly to his foot.
It amazed him that something he had thought was lost forever had returned to him. Luck had saved him this time from his carelessness. He told no one of the incident, but remembered it.
Finishing primary school meant the prospect of a future spent, like his parents and several of his older sisters, working in the fields. The village had no high school. Ejub lobbied his parents to let him pursue higher education in the city of Bijeljina, more than sixty miles away. They agreed, and he went to live with his married sister there in the mid-1970s. Ejub studied hard, read widely, and planned to become a writer. A young romantic, he especially loved Bosnian author Meša Selimović, who wrote stories of souls, half-empty, who found one another and joined to form whole beings. Ejub found his spirituality in literature.
While Ejub was gone, his parents modernized along with the industrializing region. He returned home to find them enjoying electricity and a record player. Ejub’s father, who had once gone to prison for refusing to send his four daughters to high school, now warmed to the idea of Ejub going to college. Even the village imam had daughters and sons at the university. Ejub’s father decided he wanted Ejub to become the first local villager to earn the title of doctor.
What did Ejub know about medicine? He grew up watching women treat illnesses with plum brandy, honey, and jam. The village healer pulled teeth without anesthesia, many women gave birth at home, and people went to the hospital only to die.
But medicine would bring him a good income and a healthy dose of respect. His first love, writing, never would. Ejub applied to Tuzla medical school. He was admitted, performed well, and graduated in 1986, taking a job as a general practitioner in Srebrenica. He was so accustomed to being thought of as a hick that when the “city people” first called him doctor, he assumed they were mocking him.
Srebrenica, buried in a valley, oppressed him. In the mountain’s shadows, rather than their heights, he felt as if he was living under siege, and he escaped to the hills whenever his schedule permitted. Years passed without the time to write poems. Medical training kept him too busy even to date. He found himself still single at age twenty-nine, an unusual status for a pleasant-looking, affable young man with a solid profession.
To earn some extra money over the New Year’s holiday in 1988, Ejub worked duty shifts at the health clinic of a mine in the town of Sase, four miles northeast of Srebrenica along winding country roads. One afternoon, he took a coffee break with a friend, who brought along a woman named Mubina. She had manicured nails and a neat hairstyle and looked nothing like an uneducated village woman. She had plenty to say, too, and Ejub liked her instantly. Falling in love, he decided, was like seeing a pair of shoes on a shelf and knowing immediately they are the ones you want.
Mubina gave substance to the abstract ideas that drew Ejub to literature. He told her about Meša Selimović’s ideas of half-empty souls searching to be filled. Poems poured from him again. And from these and the songs he wrote her, Mubina learned Ejub was not, as she had assumed, yet married. The two wed in six months. A year later they had a son, Denis.
Ejub’s world settled into nearly perfect balance. Mubina and Denis inspired him and gave his life meaning. Medicine paid the bills and quenched his thirst for security.
A committee at the Srebrenica clinic determined that the town needed a children’s specialist. They offered Ejub a stipend to study pediatrics in the city of Zvornik, a half-hour drive northwest from Srebrenica on a picturesque road that clung to the mountains rising over the Drina.
Ejub worked there for several months without trouble. But during the icy winter of 1992, he noticed that Serb physicians in Zvornik stopped talking when he entered the room. Things grew so uncomfortable that Ejub stopped traveling every day to the hospital, choosing instead to stay in Srebrenica with Mubina and two-year-old Denis. He watched the news and told Mubina that war was coming. She did not believe him.
Tension came up with the spring flowers that festooned Srebrenica’s terraces. Back at the Srebrenica clinic, the Serb and Muslim medical staff remained respectful to one another, but Ejub noticed that Muslim physicians who had never been religious were greeting one another with the Islamic salutation, sabahajrulah. When fighting broke out in other parts of Bosnia, Ejub repeatedly told Mubina she should leave Srebrenica for a little while with Denis. If “something” started here, if war spread to Srebrenica, it would be even more difficult to survive with a young child. Besides, he assured her, it would only be for a little while.
“I don’t want to go,” Mubina said over and over again. “I don’t want to leave you.”
April 15, 1992, was a cold, sunny Wednesday. Ejub stayed inside while Mubina bundled up Denis and took him out for a walk. She returned in a panic. Two Muslims had been found dead on the road leading south out of Srebrenica the previous night. People were swarming out of town. It looked to Mubina as if everyone in their building was leaving, and she told Ejub she was ready to go. He realized he had never really believed she would act on his advice.
“Let’s go together,” Mubina begged him as they packed up her belongings.
“No,” Ejub told her. He had recently bought some land in Potočari and was in debt. He could not afford to abandon their possessions and would stay to protect their apartment. He felt too proud to just give up his home. And he was also too curious. He wanted to see for himself what would happen.
“It won’t be that long,” he told her. “We’ll be together again soon.”
Like the short storms that come in April, he thought, this soon will pass.
Ejub took Mubina and Denis to the small, concrete Srebrenica bus station. Dozens of people scurried between the station and its curved driveway, adding to the air of chaos and panic. Mubina and Denis boarded a bus for Bosnia’s second largest city, Tuzla, where Ejub had a few family members. Ejub counted out the expensive fare in Yugoslav dinars, handing it to the conductor.
He stood outside and looked at Mubina through the windows. Tears fell down her round cheeks. Little Denis did not cry. Perhaps he was too young to understand. Ejub stared into Mubina’s eyes as the bus began to pull away. He started to wave. He waved and waved until the sight of the bus dangled at the edge of his vision and then slipped entirely away, untying their fates.
Ejub stayed at the bus station to smoke a few cigarettes with a friend whose wife had also left, and then he went home to sleep. Loneliness overcame him. Two days later, April 17, 1992, he went to spend the night at his best friend’s house in Potočari.
Sometime in the night, the sound of explosions and his friend yelling, “Get up! Get up!” awakened him. He scrambled around the house, looking for a safe spot to hide. Artillery fire seemed to be coming from the mountain above. The two men created a kind of bunker inside the house by piling rocks left over from a construction project.
Hands trembling, they smoked cigarette after cigarette, not even finishing one before stubbing it out and lighting another. By the end of the morning, dozens of half-smoked butts lay wasted on the floor like dead bodies strewn across a battlefield.
5
WAR
THE AFTERNOON OF APRIL 17, Dr. Ilijaz Pilav, the skinny general practitioner whose father was ailing in his birth village of Gladovići, waited in vain at the empty health center for his replacement. With no patients to treat and no way to reach his girlfriend, Fatima, he’d had little to do but wander outside and scan Srebrenica for activity. He caught sight of two men in military uniforms as they disappeared between houses across the street. He watched buses packed with nervous faces rumble out of town, and this at last forced a question: “What am I still doing here?”
But what choices did he have? The rumors that Vojislav šešelj’s Serb paramilitary had entered Bratunac convinced him not to go back home, not even to find Fatima and warn her to escape. He heard about a bus leaving late in the afternoon and heading southeast on the main road that ran out of Srebrenica. Afraid this bus would be the last, he took it toward his family’s village.
The next morning, April 18, he awoke to snow. He stood at the window of his parents’ house and watched the flakes blanket the ground and build up a pillow that smothered the buds on the tree branches. It seemed as if all the snow that ever existed was falling on the village. He felt paralyzed—cut off from the world.
For days he rested quietly in Gladovići, believing “the stupidity” would last at most one month. Then he heard that other Serbian paramilitary forces led by Željko Ražnjatović, “Arkan,” famous for his brutality in Croatia, had occupied Srebrenica. Ilijaz heard they were killing people and looting and burning houses. Maybe the stupidity would last much longer than one month. He grew impatient to organize some response.
But the old-timers in Gladovići urged calm.
We’ve seen war in these parts before, they said. Many an army passed through here during World War II, and only one village was burned. Keep quiet. They will leave us alone.
In the mornings, Ilijaz and a few friends hiked up the nearby hill, Kalina, to give themselves a view of the single paved road that wound southeast from Srebrenica toward the Bosnian border town of Skelani and ultimately across a bridge to Serbia. From the hilltop, they watched Serb military patrols pass back and forth and saw tendrils of smoke—first white, then dark—rise and bloom like flowers over the graves of Bosnian Muslim villages to the southeast. They witnessed lines of villagers stumbling into Gladovići, bent beneath hastily packed bundles of possessions, searching for refuge from the Serb nationalist soldiers they called Chetniks.
In the village, Ilijaz’s profession gave him an inherent authority. People trusted him. They asked for his help and advice. Feeling he should make use of his influence, he began to organize a defense. To evade the scrutiny of the pacifist village elders, he recruited men with whispers and met with them by night.
If this was war, Ilijaz thought, that implied there were two armies—not just one. If a center of resistance existed nearby, Ilijaz guessed it would be in Osmaće, population 1,000, the biggest village in the area with the most police reserve weapons and, according to rumor, the bravest men. The Muslim village had “resisted” both Serb nationalist Chetniks and Yugoslav Partisans during World War II and was said to have continued fighting after Berlin surrendered. Ilijaz sent runners to check if Osmaće had organized a defensive force. They returned with disappointing news. The men of Osmaće were no more organized than the men of Gladovići.
On May 6, Ilijaz climbed Kalina hill with several of his neighbors. They looked down and watched a military truck moving slowly along the Srebrenica-Skelani road. The idea of ambushing enemy vehicles had tantalized the men for days. Using the element of surprise to their advantage—that was a way the weak could fight the strong. Standing on the hilltop with Ilijaz, the sight of the truck so excited one of the men that he agitated for an immediate attack. That would be suicidal, Ilijaz told him.
But an ambush would indeed show the Chetniks that the villagers planned to stand their ground and resist attack. Perhaps the villagers could even manage to capture a few automatic weapons to add to thei
r pitiful arsenal of old hunting rifles.
The men schemed and plotted and planned for an action the following day. Then Ilijaz returned to his family in Gladovići. He could have sworn his brother, Hamid, was eyeing him suspiciously. Never mind. Ilijaz would keep his military plans a secret. He wouldn’t expose Hamid—ten years older, with a wife and family—to danger.
That night he lay in bed, unable to sleep. At 3 A.M. he rose as planned and stepped into a black jogging suit. To avoid waking his family, he crept down the hallway in the dark. But there, startling him at the doorway, stood his ill father.
“Good luck, son,” was all he said.
Around fifteen young men from Gladovići gathered in a thin copse of trees near the main road. They included Ilijaz’s cousin—a medical technician named Sulejman Pilav—and Ilijaz’s good friend and neighbor šefik Mandžic, a kind, confident man in his late twenties who specialized in constructing minarets.
Ilijaz might have been a doctor, but this morning the equipment he carried with him to work was a “Kragljevska” automatic gun given to him by a former policeman. He took a certain pride in that, what with most of the others carrying hunting rifles or, at best, the ubiquitous Eastern European warhorse, the Kalashnikov. Ilijaz’s weapon had a longer range and was more likely, in the right hands, to hit its target.
Like so many military actions, this one was destined to enter history in many different versions. This much is clear: Ilijaz and his men set an ambush on the Srebrenica-Skelani road somewhere in the vicinity of Kalina. Others from neighboring villages, particularly Osmaće, organized attacks nearby.
The groups shot at trucks and they shot at cars, killing a number of Serbs. Ilijaz and his men insisted they killed only soldiers who returned fire—indeed two attackers from Osmaće also died. But Serbs in the area told a different story, that seven Serb civilians, including two women, were killed.
