War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  She went everywhere the fighters went, at first following a few feet behind them for safety. That changed the first time they came under fire. The man assigned to protect her froze in place shaking with fear.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. He told her, in a quavering voice, that he couldn’t move his legs. That’s when she’d asked for her own gun. They gave her a small Beretta 7.2 pistol, made in Italy. She kept it close at hand in case she needed to defend herself or her patients. It was a doctor’s right, under international war law, but it earned her strange looks. The sight of a longhaired woman packing a gun in her back pants waist surprised the old-fashioned villagers.

  Ilijaz and Fatima talked about wanting to be together again and how to find a way to do it. For now, while the inhabitants of their own areas needed them, they couldn’t come up with any good options.

  The fighting started early the next morning, July 12. This time Ilijaz refused to stand back. He pushed to the front of the lines and started shooting. He shot and he shot. For the first time, he felt pure hatred in his heart. The past weeks of the war he had insisted to the men from his village that they wouldn’t commit atrocities like the Chetniks did, but at this moment he could have strangled every Serb in the world. Something in him had broken.

  Ilijaz approached a clearing and lay down behind a stone. He saw what he thought was a Serb bunker about 250 yards away. Fury filled him with the urge to destroy it. His father had suffered and died. The men in the bunker were guilty. He stood up tall and strode toward them without a thought of what could happen or a plan in case something went wrong.

  A string of bullets whizzed inches from his legs.

  “Get back!” someone shouted.

  Ilijaz turned around and several of his men grabbed him. They were furious at him for taking such a risk. They told him they needed him alive; they needed him as their doctor. But a doctor’s role was to fix things, stop suffering, solve problems. How could Ilijaz fix the war using only the tools of medicine?

  The locals took casualties, but their offensive succeeded. They pushed back the Chetniks and captured some Serb-held villages. At the end of the day, Serbs’ houses were burning and several dozen had been killed, including some—perhaps many—civilians. The Muslims had chosen a Serb Orthodox holiday for their attack: Petrovdan, St. Peter’s Day, the Patron Saint day of the church in the nearby mining town of Sase. They had also captured and destroyed a village called Zalazje, the loss of which was highly symbolic for the Serbs, who had suffered a massacre of forty persons there during World War II.

  That evening, Ilijaz returned to Fatima, who had spent the day as a doctor with a diversion troop in Sase. Ilijaz and Fatima had little time alone to discuss what had happened over the day or to enjoy each other’s comfort. Within hours Ilijaz left with others from his unit to retrieve the body of a friend killed near Osmaće. As the men walked away from Shpat, they tried to lighten the mood, teasing Ilijaz about Fatima, whose nickname was Fata. “I saw my Fata in Shpata,” laughed Ilijaz’s good friend Naim.

  In battles over the following days, Muslim soldiers from the villages around Srebrenica linked their territories and the injured could finally be evacuated to a central location for treatment. Dr. Džanić reinaugurated Srebrenica Hospital. One by one, the handful of physicians who remained in the area returned to work there. Branka Stanić, a blond Croat general practitioner who lived in Switzerland, had been visiting her family here when the war broke out and trapped her. Avdo Hasanović was an older pediatrician who’d taken over as hospital director just before the war. Chubby Ejub Alić, whom Ilijaz had known since high school, moved back to Srebrenica from Potočari. His sixty-five-year-old father had also died recently. The month after the war started, the village beside Alići had been captured and set alight by Chetniks. Ejub’s parents and sister had run from their house into the forest, as shells, which they judged to be coming from across the Drina in Serbia, exploded around them. Ejub’s father fell to the ground in the wake of a powerful detonation—dead of unknown cause, perhaps a heart attack, with no signs of a mortal injury.

  The family had buried him quickly as grenades fell. Then Ejub’s mother and sister had journeyed to a safer village, finding shelter at the home of an aunt. The news had made its way to Ejub through former neighbors, also displaced from their homes, who’d managed to cross the front lines and reach Srebrenica. They also told Ejub that his beloved wife Mubina’s mother had been shot dead by Chetniks in her home. Ejub had no idea if Mubina and their son were alive.

  At first Ilijaz did not join the other doctors. His was the hottest front line, the closest to Serbia, and if it fell, the whole region would be endangered. For now, he believed the military needed him—not just medically, but in terms of morale. He would not leave his men.

  But by the end of July the front lines stabilized, reason overcame emotion, and pleas for Ilijaz to come to Srebrenica and work as a doctor swayed him. He was a young general practitioner with very little experience. In the past months, he’d used a saw and scalpel to amputate a man’s leg, only to watch him die. He’d walked four miles to tend to a woman who’d been in labor for two days, only to watch her hemorrhage and die. And a twenty-year-old who had come to him with a tiny abdominal shrapnel wound began to vomit blood and then died. He could do little for his patients without proper equipment and the ability to consult his colleagues and his books. As part of a medical team of doctors and nurses in a true health facility, he could do more and perhaps shake the sense of impotence that dogged him. He decided to join the war hospital.

  PART TWO

  THE BLOOD OF WARRIORS

  The city lies ablaze like a rough lump of incense

  Wherein the haze of our awareness twists.

  The city implodes in latent emptiness.

  A stone’s crimson death

  Bespeaks the house’s blood-soaked tide. Plague!

  —Dr. Radovan Karadźić “Sarajevo,” 1971

  8

  WAR OPERATIONS

  ONLY FOUR MONTHS HAVE PASSED Since the start of the war, but the hospital Ilijaz finds in Srebrenica is not the one he left. The only familiar features are four of the five doctors at work and the three-story, rectangular building itself, with its stone and mortar foundation, whitewashed exterior, and top floor covered in coffee-colored tiles. Inside, most of the nurses and technicians are different. Even the patients are different. The long, narrow hallways that used to echo with the cries of women in childbirth are now filled with the moans of the injured and dying.

  The beds are full and most of the roughly seventy patients lying six or more to a room are young men, but some are women, children, the elderly, and even babies. Almost all suffer from injuries caused by shell fragments, mines, or bullets. There’s simply no room for those with illnesses. Using what few supplies they have and what knowledge they can muster, Ilijaz, Fatima, and their four colleagues struggle to keep them alive in a town without any shops, electricity, or—because so many of its original residents fled and so many villagers were displaced here—many familiar faces.

  The day Ilijaz arrives, authorities provide him and Fatima an apartment to share in the center of town, where they will live together as a couple for the first time. The place is more disaster zone than love nest. It looks, through its already open door, as if a bomb has exploded inside. They labor for two days to clean it, carefully packing away the clothing, documents, and photographs of the elderly Serb couple who left them behind. One day, they assume, the couple will return.

  August 5, 1992, is a warm, sunny day a few days after their arrival. People are already out on the main street as Ilijaz and Fatima walk to the hospital in the early morning. A blond-haired, blue-eyed soldier peeks out from under a wide-brimmed hat to greet them. They stop to chat with the cheerful twenty-two-year-old, a drummer for a popular local band. He, along with other former musicians, schoolteachers, policemen, and truck drivers, is on his way to the front line.

  Ilijaz and Fatima s
pend the day at the hospital. Around 5 P.M., unbelievable news arrives. A surgeon and his escorts are on their way to Srebrenica and have radioed from the edge of their territory, less than ten miles away. To Ilijaz it seems too good to be true.

  The most elite of Srebrenica’s ragtag bands of soldiers depart to fetch them in a truck powered with precious fuel. Soldiers have kept a few vehicles running on transformer oil and even cooking oil, on which they sputter along smelling like pancakes. Meanwhile, more than a thousand people gather outside the hospital in rapturous anticipation. The area has been sealed off from the rest of Bosnia for months now. Even the most powerful of Srebrenica’s rival commanders, Naser Orić, feels like a “marble trapped inside a ball.” If a surgeon succeeds in reaching them from Tuzla, Srebrenica will no longer feel so isolated.

  Nobody can wait to meet the man who risked his life to help them, people who aren’t his kin. He is to be lionized and welcomed as a dear guest in a culture that values hospitality. Whoever he is, he is already larger than life.

  The truck rumbles back into town and people spill out of it, tanned and dirty young men in uniforms or civilian clothing and a few women. They jump down from the back of the truck, tired faces scanning the crowd for family members. The truck empties. People mill around, kissing cheeks, clapping hands on backs, and issuing hearty greetings. Others search the new arrivals for a gray-haired stranger, the expected surgeon.

  “Which one is he?” they ask one another.

  The commander calls the crowd to attention and introduces a tall, attractive man with a regal bearing dressed in a green camouflage military uniform. His name is Dr. Nedret Mujkanović. His hair is dark brown.

  “This is a child!” someone snickers, loud enough for him to hear.

  * * *

  THE SURGEON’S ARRIVAL RELIEVES ILIJAZ. He sizes him up, assuming that anyone who would try to make it to Srebrenica without having some sort of family connection must be at least slightly insane. Nedret doesn’t look crazy, though, just somewhat macho and adventuresome and, no doubt, courageous. He also seems hungry for the challenge of his new job. Although Nedret has walked for a week over hills and through forests, picked his way past minefields and run for cover from passing Serb patrols, he eagerly washes up, unpacks the equipment he brought—new surgical tools in plastic wrappers, bandages, gauze, and perfusions—and gets to work.

  In the early evening a few dirt-covered soldiers rush into the hospital carrying an injured man. His left arm and hand hang from a cord of muscle.

  With a shock, Ilijaz recognizes the wounded soldier, the cheerful drummer with the wide-brimmed hat whom he and Fatima had greeted in the morning. The young man recognizes him, too, and Ilijaz searches for a few words of encouragement.

  They bustle into a large room just inside the hospital entrance and place him on a low cot with a black foam covering and white-painted metal legs that serves as an operating table. The medical staff leans over him.

  A large bullet from an anti-aircraft gun known as a PAM or protiv avionski metraljec has caused his injury. The fellow soldiers who carried him six miles from the battlefield do not know first aid, and none thought to fashion a tourniquet out of a bandanna or piece of cloth to tie the upper arm and stanch the bleeding. The young man looks pale. Ilijaz supposes he is on the verge of shock, that his vital organs will soon fail from lack of blood and oxygen.

  Nedret arrives. Ilijaz watches as he examines the patient and gently explains to him that the bullet has almost completely severed his lower arm. Not only that, it has shattered the humerus bone in his upper arm. Nedret has to amputate, but will try to save some of the limb below the shoulder. Perhaps four inches. To Ilijaz, watching, it seems the patient knows his fate and will be grateful for every one of those inches. A typical Bosnian, Ilijaz thinks, he accepts whatever the surgeon tells him.

  Night approaches. Lice in the infested hospital begin to stir and bite, invisible creepy-crawlies scuttling their way over the skin of patients and doctors. With no electricity, the hospital, like the rest of Srebrenica, descends into darkness. Pieces of oil-soaked cotton smolder in coffee cups or medicine bottles, exhaling a smoky light. In the operating room, assistants scurry around the doctors, casting eerie shadows. The doctors feel rather than see their way around the cavernous hospital. Until morning, it will be too dark to remove the bodies of patients who die.

  In the operating room, a single light bulb wavers and flickers, powered by a homemade hydroelectric contraption built on the stream that runs through town. Medical workers hook the patient to an infusion the surgeon brought with him and clean his skin with hydrogen peroxide. An arm is much more sensitive than a leg. The surgeon, expecting an anesthesiologist to follow him here soon, didn’t bring any general anesthetics. They inject a couple of ampoules of local numbing medicine, but this has little effect on the patient’s pain. Ilijaz guesses the medicine sat in the sun too long.

  Nedret begins the amputation, and Ilijaz assists by holding instruments. Every time Nedret cuts, Ilijaz notices the patient wincing in pain. Ilijaz feels like fainting.

  The young man moans but holds still. No nurses are required to restrain him. A few times he asks, “Could you please stop for a moment? I really feel bad.”

  He says please.

  They save the worst part for the end. The surgeon has isolated the nerves and needs to shorten them. He touches one and the patient jumps as if jolted by an electric shock. A nurse and technician have to hold him down now. The doctors talk to him constantly as they work.

  “Hold on….” they tell him.

  The young man requests a few moments to breathe and rest. The surgeon waits and then he cuts through the remaining nerves all at once. The patient lurches one more time and then falls silent, exhausted. Ilijaz imagines he has seen the limits of pain a human being can bear.

  The man barely moves as they close his skin with sutures. Normally, contaminated war wounds are left open to drain to avoid infection, and they are closed several days later. Nedret makes the unorthodox choice to close the wound with sutures now and spare the patient another painful procedure.

  Ilijaz returns home late in the evening. Fatima awaits him bursting with news. She has recognized the new surgeon as a former student leader at her medical school, just a few years her senior. The last she’d heard, he had gone on to specialize in pathology, not surgery. She has calculated the years since she lost track of him. Not enough have passed to make him a surgeon.

  9

  NEDRET

  EVIDENCE OF THE MANUAL TALENTS of Nedret Mujkanović and his taste for a challenge emerged early in his youth. Perhaps his drive to outshine others was a way to compensate for having had to grow up in Tuzla, Bosnia’s second-largest city, in a metropolis filled with block apartments and not nearly as picturesque as its more notable sister, the 1984 Olympics host, Sarajevo.

  At twelve, asked to depict the Partisan victory at the World War II Battle of the River Sutjeska on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, Nedret dipped his fingers in tempera and painted a dark forest. He smeared the center of the canvas with dark blue to form the river and added white caps of waves. Above the battlefield, shining through clouds of varying shades of red, the proud color of socialism, he sketched the ethereal face of Sava Kovačević. The hero, killed in battle, had led Yugoslavia’s Serbians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Croatians, and others in an effort to rebuff a major German offensive.

  Nedret, a Muslim, gave not a thought to the fact that Kovačević was an Orthodox Christian. The five-pointed Partisan star shone from his hero’s cap. He wrote the slogan Bratstvo—Jedinstvo, For Brotherhood and Unity, across the bottom of the canvas. Nedret’s painting won the Yugoslav-wide contest of schoolchildren. His father boycotted the ceremony. He told his son not to pursue the arts, and later discouraged his passion for sports. Law and medicine were the only two “secure professions.”

  Tuzla had a medical school but not a law school. After high school graduation, Nedret enrolled and then
departed for mandatory army service, where he spent a year tooling around in trucks as a military driver.

  He returned home a footloose creature. Impatient with medical school’s interminable lectures, he skipped class more often than he attended, traveling to the Adriatic Coast of Croatia, to the banks of the Danube in Serbia, and to Ulm, Germany, where he had an aunt. There he wooed women and bought clothes to sell on the black market. Back home, he poured more energy into the medical school handball team than medical school itself.

  “You need to study!” said his father. “You’re just wandering around! I’ll go after that army for ruining my son.”

  Nedret became a Socialist Youth Party leader, helping organize protests against government officials and earning the reputation of a stylish showoff who cultivated the look of a rock star. But he wore tinted eyeglasses, in part, to protect his blepharitic eyes from painful light, and his high-necked shirts and dramatic scarves covered an ugly childhood scar. An inexperienced surgeon had botched a tracheotomy when young Nedret choked on a dry bean.

  In time Nedret returned to his studies with gusto, receiving top marks in a class taught by the very surgeon who had long ago extracted the bean from his throat. He took the exam in the professor’s office surrounded by honeycombed wall displays filled with dozens of beans, beads, coins, and keys removed from the airways of other youngsters.

  Nedret outscored his peers in the most difficult class, pathology, and gained the admiration of its professor, who invited him to be his assistant and protégé. Nedret agreed, and after graduating from medical school he channeled his artistic skills into careful dissections overseen by his gifted mentor, who had trained in Western Europe and the United States and over time became like a father to Nedret. The daily autopsies he performed as a pathology resident gave Nedret experience in anatomy that outstripped the training of many surgeons. He also learned from the surgeons’ mistakes. “The best place to learn surgery is the autopsy room,” his mentor would say.