by Sheri Fink
Now that his friend Dževad has recovered enough from his injuries to replace him, Ejub is on the verge of deciding to take his chances and try to make it through the woods to Bosnian government–held territory. He aches to see his family and longs to reunite with them.
Back in April 1992, soon after he put his wife, Mubina, and son, Denis, on the bus to Tuzla, Ejub lost track of them in the current of war, much as the precious, store-bought shoe of his childhood had swirled out of sight in a rain-swollen river. Almost as soon as they were gone he realized that what was important in life was not the experience of roaming careless and free on his land, nor the desire for financial security represented by the deed to his apartment, nor the curiosity to see what would happen—none of those things that kept him here in Srebrenica when he sent his family away were truly important. Mubina and Denis were.
He heard rumors his wife had died in Tuzla, but he knew in his heart they couldn’t be true. Months after the war started, he reached a relative there who told him, via ham radio, that his wife and son had boarded a bus bound for the city of Bijeljina soon after the start of the war, seeking a place to stay with relatives. Within days of their departure, Chetniks took control of Bijeljina, and nobody had seen or heard from them since.
For a year, Ejub didn’t know for sure whether his wife and son were dead or alive. One day in the spring of 1993, right around the time of Srebrenica’s ceasefire and demilitarization, his best friend handed him a note on the street. When he saw his wife’s handwriting, a shock ripped through Ejub, then disbelief. It was a measure of his resignation that he first assumed that somebody had copied his wife’s handwriting as a prank.
On one side of the paper were numbered lines with his wife’s and his own vital information: name, sex, address, father’s name, and birth date. The other side had twenty-two dotted lines filled with the news that she and Denis—nicknamed “Deno”—were all right in Bijeljina, that he shouldn’t worry, that she wanted to know, how was he? Facing the other way, and separated by a perforation, was a nearly identical form entitled, “Response to Message,” left blank for his reply.
The note was made of exquisitely thin paper. Ejub soon discovered that Red Cross messages were excellent for rolling tobacco. He didn’t smoke his wife’s letter, of course. Instead, he wrote back, and then over the following weeks and months and years of war wrote and wrote again, cramming the lines of each half sheet with more than 400 words in tiny cursive.
The first letter convinced him that Mubina was alive, but he wondered how she was being treated as a Muslim in Serb-held Bijeljina. Was she a hostage? He wanted to hear her voice. With the address he had, he was able to reach her by ham radio, disguising himself as “radio amateur Kemo” to hide his identity, which he thought could endanger her. The conversation was confusing; she hadn’t figured out who he was.
“How is Ejub?” she had asked, not recognizing his voice.
“Ejub is doing fine,” he’d answered.
When the surgeon Mad Max, Ejub’s old friend from medical school, left Srebrenica to return to Tuzla in the summer of 1993, Ejub asked him to help get his wife out of Serb-held Bijeljina. He also gave him some poems written on pages of a datebook in the dark days of 1992 and sent along a “real” letter, dated July 26, 1993, that wouldn’t have to pass through Red Cross censors.
“Please know that I’m yours and I’m only yours,” he wrote. “I say that to everyone. Here, morale is zero. So many horrible things are going on. That’s why I’m happy that I have you. Please stay the same as you always were. Morally pure and physically strong. No matter what. Because life without moral purity is no life at all. Take care of Deno. I will try to send you some money. Spend it all. Don’t save it. You can ask for help from Dr. Dževad… Write to me what you need. And if helicopters are still flying over there, I will send it to you. I cannot go over there. Here, it’s like we’re in a big concentration camp… Write to me about Deno. He probably forgot me already. Is he talking? Is he good? Does he listen to you?…”
Mad Max managed to help Ejub’s wife get to Tuzla. Ejub still worried, though, and used his connections to send more messages than his allotted two per twice-weekly Red Cross pickup, stuffing them full of fatherly wisdom, medical advice, anxious admonitions that she remain “pure,” and overwrought pledges of his fidelity.
“I’m sending you a photograph taken in November,” he wrote last January. “I’m not happy, even if I’m smiling, and we were fooling around, and they suggested that one foreign girl stand beside me. I said, ‘No, get away,’ and that’s how my posture was. Please don’t ever doubt me.”
“My dear,” he wrote a few months later, “here love has become very cheap, almost worth nothing, and people who I never would have expected are doing the most stupid things… I love you with the same devotion and warmth as two years ago.”
It was as if what he’d seen in these times—not only the active fighting, but the way that people trapped in Srebrenica behaved toward one another—had nearly destroyed Ejub’s faith in humanity. Only his belief in his and his wife’s love and faithfulness sustained him and saved him from utter despair. As an atheist, he had no God to rely on. The ugliness he saw led him to read his favorite author, Meša Selimović, with a new understanding of one of the main characters, wise Mula Ibrahim, who became convinced that war is human fate, a way to “let out the evil blood of the masses and divert the accumulated discontent from itself… If there weren’t wars, we’d massacre each other.”
“People are evil children,” said the wise Mula, “evil in action, children in mind. And it’ll never be any different.”
Ejub came up with his own version of the quote and sent it to Mubina.
“Ljudi su zli, ljudi su dobrad.” “People are evil, people are scum,” he wrote, days after witnessing a particularly evil event occur in Srebrenica. A Serb man was captured and taken to the hospital after wandering drunk into Srebrenica territory. Ejub, on duty, stitched a large gash in his forehead, congratulating himself on an unexpectedly fine result. He put the man in a private room and removed the door handle to prevent anyone from disturbing him, giving it to the nurse on duty.
The man, it turned out, was the father of the police chief in Bratunac, the Serb-held town on the northern side of the enclave’s border where Ilijaz and Fatima lived before the war. Red Cross representatives jumped into action, mediating negotiations to exchange the man for a Muslim being held in Bratunac.
The patient was still in the hospital the next time Ejub had overnight duty. Ejub worked until the wee hours of the morning and finally made it to the bed in the second-story doctors’ room. As he drifted off to sleep at about 2 A.M., he heard a gunshot. By the time he made it downstairs, the Serb was dead.
A young local man had pushed his way past the hospital guard, Ejub was told, and threatened to shoot the nurse on duty unless she gave him the doorknob. Then he went into the Serb patient’s hospital room and killed him. Ejub was sure that if he’d been present, he would have stood up to the gunman and probably been killed in the process.
Yes, people were evil, the people shooting on Srebrenica and then, after being victimized, even the victims themselves. In some ways this was even more disheartening. He’s heard that the people inside this strange, closed society, this sadistic sociology experiment called Srebrenica, have turned on Serbs who chose to stay here, killing an old nurse named Rada whom he liked and tried to protect. But mostly he’s watched them turn on one another. In their fight for power, they seem to have forgotten that they are all in the enclave, that the enclave is enclosed, that on the heights of the enclave the guns and mortars perch, and, close by, are their enemies, waiting.
* * *
ONCE, USING A VIDEOTAPE brought in by an American and a camera attached to a car battery, Ejub made a brief recording for Mubina. He showed her the homemade generator he had patched together using a motor, wire, and an old spinning wheel, unused for a decade or two, that his mother had somehow seen fit
to bury in the yard in Alići for safekeeping and then unearth and carry all the way to Srebrenica.
His mother especially liked to use this generator to run the radio. At news time she would turn the crank just as she had done years before to spin wool for his clothing and schoolbook satchels. The generator reminded Ejub of a respirator—at fifteen to twenty cranks a minute, it kept a radio alive, just as a respirator, at fifteen to twenty breaths a minute, kept a person alive. Ejub’s silly observations about wartime conditions always brought a smile to the people around him.
He turned the camera on his apartment, too, which had belonged to a Serb doctor who’d left at the start of the war. It was larger than his and Mubina’s small, one-room apartment. He moved here when his mother and sister joined him in Srebrenica after the Chetniks took Alići, not long after the shelling attack during which his father died. The house where Ejub grew up was burnt to the ground. The tiny village built by generations of the family Alić was destroyed.
How ironic it was for him to have given up the very apartment that was one of his major reasons for staying in Srebrenica at the start of the war. Now he had something even bigger. The problem was—it was in Srebrenica, and Mubina and Denis weren’t here! That showed exactly how much possessions were worth fighting for.
Ejub walked outside and filmed Srebrenica, showing its raw woodpiles, the smoke drifting out of its windows and tomatoes and corn growing on its balconies, and its people, idle or walking aimlessly along the main street. His wife’s sister, who worked in the kitchen of the U.N. battalion in Srebrenica, found a soldier willing to carry the tape out of the enclave. Mubina wrote to tell him that she had received it. She cried for days, watching it again and again.
Ejub awaited each Red Cross message delivery with great anticipation and not infrequently great disappointment. He felt that he lived from message to message that he received from Mubina. Sometimes the letters came in a great batch after weeks or months of delay.
“Yesterday I received three letters from July 25, four from August 9… two letters from August 16, one letter from August 10, and one each from the 19th, 20th and 21st,” he wrote in September 1994. “All together 13… My dear, in May I sent you six letters. In June, the same, in July, eight, and in August, none. I was waiting for your reply. My soul could not take it. Oh, my dear, how I miss you. To see you in a dress, soft and thin, and to hug you and to hold you like before while you make coffee for the two of us. My dear, I feel so much better since I received your messages yesterday. I wish you were here. In these difficult and gray days, just for a moment. Just for a day. Alone, but with your messages, through memories, I live with you. Memories of you, of your soft dress, our apartment, give me strength to endure all of this and to put an end to this most difficult time in my life.”
Ejub has anticipated that end for some time now. “I’m very hopeful about these new political agreements,” he wrote her nearly a year ago, around the time that Dr. Neak left and yet another peace plan was introduced. “If they don’t come true, and if this prolongs, I will come to you even if it costs me my life.”
A few months later the peace effort failed. A former patient offered to guide him to Tuzla. Ejub struggled with whether to accept. He hoped that physician replacements would come from Tuzla and at least make the decision to leave his patients and colleagues easier. Before he managed to make up his mind, winter arrived and the snow on the mountains, which lasted well into this spring of 1995, rendered the trip impossible. After Dževad and Fatima were injured, Ejub found himself staying into summer, too.
* * *
HIS LONGING TO REUNITE with his wife and son is his main reason to leave Srebrenica, but there is one other. Ejub is on the verge of feeling that he can no longer function as a doctor. The demands of the long lines of patients who push their way into his office outstrip his ability to deal with them. Sometimes 150 patients a day wait to see him. He has always taken pride in doing what he considers a thorough job, performing focused physical exams, rather than just prescribing medication based on symptoms. For years he dealt easily with knots of clamorous, illiterate villagers jostling each other in the clinic hallways, barging through the doors of his consultation room without permission, pulling on his arm whenever he passed demanding, “Doctor, what should I do?” Even when his patients became too unruly, he couldn’t bring himself to shout. He would simply leave the clinic, telling them gently, “When you make some order, please call me back.” Things would be perfectly calm when he returned.
Here in Srebrenica, the townspeople, ill and well, swarm around him everywhere he goes, and he begins to mind the demands they make, inches from his face, for prescriptions of aid—blankets, juice, food, and sleeping bags. One of Ejub’s standard jokes is about his desire to jump into the “collector,” the small, polluted stream that runs, partly covered, through town, and swim home underground to escape those he refers to as “the illiterate people.” Still, he never blows up at his patients. He just feels alternately tired, numb, nervous, and annoyed. Mostly tired.
* * *
SO FOR EJUB, the decision to leave becomes not if, but when. He hatches a plan with a former patient who has offered to guide him, and tells few about it.
Ejub spends the night before his planned departure with a few friends, drinking to dissipate the anxiety over whether he’ll survive, whether he’ll see his family again, whether he’ll lose a leg to a mine in the mountains. On June 8, his day off, he strolls around town as if nothing unusual is afoot, bumping into Ilijaz outside the old police station, and telling him he is going to go drinking with friends.
Instead, he returns to the apartment and fills a backpack with a variety of high-calorie foods—marmalade, sweets acquired from the Dutch battalion, and some MREs, meals-ready-to-eat, left over from the American airdrops. He packs some important documents, his driver’s license, and, because they’ll be crossing minefields, medical materials suitable in quantity and type to perform an amputation should one be necessary—a scalpel, suture thread, a needle, antibiotics, painkillers, and gauze bandages. He carries a water bottle and a deliberate attitude; what he is doing is risky and dangerous, but he will proceed, come what may.
In the late evening he leaves Srebrenica with a cousin and a friend, wearing a sweatshirt and tennis shoes and carrying a pair of rubber boots. They head southwest toward Žepa, where Ejub will meet his guides. The first leg of their journey has three dangers—mines, Serb forces, and Srebrenica soldiers pursuing them as traitors.
Doubts and questions reel through Ejub’s mind as he crosses the front lines.
What if I stay? Maybe I’ll survive. Maybe I should go back. I can’t go back. Will I see my family again?
The group takes a break on a hillside and talks about “what if ”—What if they meet up with Serb forces? How will they react? What will they do? Ejub says he’d rather kill himself than be captured. His cousin teaches him how to trigger a hand grenade.
Overnight they climb Sušica Mountain. Thirsty, tired, sweating, and nauseated by the cloying smell of wild garlic, they stop for a spot of brandy that Ejub’s cousin thought to bring. Ejub stands on the hilltop amid the trees. The air is garlicky and the Chetniks are all around, but suddenly he feels fantastic. Surrounded by Chetniks, yes, but no longer by patients! No more pleading voices to ambush him with their problems and their “What do I do now, doctor?”
I’d rather face Serb forces tonight than a horde of patients in the halls of the clinic tomorrow.
They reach Žepa, and in the evening, Ejub sets out west toward the main body of Bosnian government territory with a group of thirteen men, a mixture of civilians in T-shirts and sportswear, trying, like Ejub, to rejoin their families, and guides—hunters who know the paths through the forested mountains—who wear military uniforms. The guides and some of the men carry pistols or hunting rifles. Ejub is unarmed. At night they travel through a tall forest on wide timber-hauling paths. Nocturnal birds call with strange warbles, and after a while
in his exhaustion, Ejub can almost imagine they are calling for him… Ey-yoob… Ey-yoob…. He wonders if he is hallucinating.
About 1 or 2 in the morning as they walk, a terrifying shriek fills the air.
“What’s that?” someone asks.
Another howl follows, and then another. Ejub has never heard such anguished cries before, not even in the days when he cut into men and women without anesthesia. He has the prickly sensation of being in a horror movie.
“That’s deer,” one of the guides reassures them, and the other former hunters agree that deer make these sounds when they detect the presence of men.
Overnight they travel about twenty-five miles, and in the morning they find cover in a forest high in the mountains where they lie down and rest. Around noon they hear rifle fire—then the low rumble of old men’s voices interspersed by the barking of dogs. Ejub and his fellow travelers haven’t expected to confront military patrols this far from the front line. Deep in the forest on the weekend, the likelier culprits are hunters. Still, whoever they are, they are certainly Serbs with guns. The voices draw closer, perhaps only 100 yards away. Ejub’s men lie still. Then, with a rustling of underbrush, a large hunting dog appears. He stops and stares at them.
One man feels for a small stone. He lobs it at the dog, which sprints away.
Later, in the shadowy half-light of waxing night, they come to the edge of a major road that stretches between two Serb-held cities: Han Pijesak—the headquarters of the Bosnian Serb military leader, General Mladić—and Sokolac. A guide offers to cross the road first, and he instructs the group that if he makes it, they should follow one by one. When he arrives without incident, most of the other men jet across the road in a nervous pack. Ejub, who abhors selfishness and who has long prided himself for being the kind of man to step aside and let everyone on the bus before him, is left standing alone. He then crosses calmly, secure in the knowledge that at night, any cars will be heralded by headlights.
