Rose of Sarajevo
Page 23
“Do you really think you can just crash through the barricades?”
“If that’s the only choice we’ve got.”
“Go through the Croatian zone.”
“Yes, but if they don’t make it, they’ll have lost time and traveled over rough roads with the patient for nothing. Anyway, Commander Burhan asked me to fill you in on the situation. He thought that with your connections as a journalist, you might be able to get travel passes and whatever else they need . . . Otherwise, they’ll probably be unable to get through. If you could try and—”
“Please come in,” Nimeta said, cutting him off.
“I’m in a hurry.”
“Come in. I’ve thought of something. Just give me a little time.”
The man reluctantly stepped inside and took a seat. Hana and Raziyanım didn’t say a word. For the first time in her life, Raziyanım forgot to offer a guest refreshments. Nimeta grabbed her coat and stood at the door.
“I’m going to go find those documents. Wait for me,” she said.
“I hope it doesn’t take long,” the man said.
She scampered down the steps and broke into a run along the backstreets. She entered the back door of the Holiday Inn and jogged up to the reception desk, panting and disheveled.
“Can you tell me Stefan Stefanoviç’s room number?”
“He checked out a week ago.”
“Did he leave an address?”
The receptionist looked through the registry. “No, it seems he didn’t.”
Nimeta left the hotel too tired to run but walking as fast as her legs would carry her. She entered a backstreet. The buses had been avoiding the mostly barricaded main streets ever since the war had begun. She flagged down an approaching bus. At the television building, she yelled for the driver to stop and leapt off.
She stormed into the building and rushed up to Sonya. “Quick, find Stefan for me,” she said.
“My God, Nimeta, you look awful. What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later. It’s urgent. A matter of life and death. Find him and send him to my house.”
“But I thought you said you didn’t want him visiting you at home. That your mother—”
“Never mind my mother. This is an emergency. Don’t you understand? If it’s too much trouble, tell me where he is. They said he’d checked out of the hotel.”
“Ivan’s been wondering where you were. You were supposed to come back to work today, Nimeta.”
Nimeta grabbed Sonya by the collar. “Sonya, shut up! Go find Stefan. Now! Do you understand?”
“Okay,” Sonya said. “What should I tell him?”
“Tell him whatever you want. Tell him I’m dying. Tell him I’m taking my last breath . . . Just make sure he comes right away!”
Sonya grabbed the coat hanging on a hook behind her chair and asked, “Where are you going now?”
“I’ve got to get back home so the man there can leave.”
“What man? What are you talking about?”
“Sonya, we’re wasting time. Go. I’ll explain later,” Nimeta said.
She dragged Sonya to the staircase while their bemused coworkers looked on.
Jumping on one of the bicycles in the courtyard, she began pedaling, shouting over her shoulder to the security guard in his hut that she had some urgent business and would bring the bike back that evening. She slipped past the checkpoint barrier without waiting for a response.
When she got home, she found her mother in the kitchen, lined up in front of the window with Hana and the visitor.
“We’ll have to wait,” Nimeta told him.
“For how long?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Until we find the person I’m looking for.”
“I can’t stay here all day. I’ve got other things to do. If you want me to come back in a few hours—”
“I can’t give you an exact time. Just wait for a little while longer. We might find him in a few minutes, or it might take a few hours.”
“I can’t wait. I’ll come back later.”
“Weren’t you the one who said it was an emergency?”
“Yes, but you can’t even tell me how long I’ll need to wait.”
“Just a second,” Nimeta said as she ran to a back room.
She returned carrying a huge rifle, her father’s hunting rifle from years before. Raziyanım, Hana, and the man stared in amazement.
“You’ll wait for as long as it takes. Nobody move.”
The man stood up and started walking toward the door. A bullet whizzed past his right ear and opened a hole in the wall.
“Are you out of your mind?” Raziyanım shouted.
Hana started to cry.
“Stop your blubbering!” Nimeta yelled.
The man hesitated for a moment. Then he slowly sat back down.
“What’s your name?” Nimeta asked him.
“Nusret.”
“You’re not leaving here unless you kill me first,” she said. “It’s either you or me: one of us dies. Or we wait here together. Do I make myself clear, Nusret?”
Nimeta pulled the nearest chair closer and sat down, the rifle trained on Nusret.
“Perhaps I’d better go to another room . . .” Raziyanım began.
“Nobody move,” Nimeta said.
An hour later she was still sitting on the chair with the rifle pointed at Nusret. There was a knock on the door at around two.
“Go open the door, Hana,” Nimeta said.
Hana darted out of her grandmother’s arms and over to the door. Stefan and Sonya had arrived together.
When Sonya saw the scene in the living room, she wondered briefly whether Nimeta had lost her mind.
“Nimeta, it’ll be all right, dear. Everything’s okay,” she said in soothing tones.
“Stop talking nonsense,” Nimeta snapped. “Nothing’s okay.” Then she turned to the man and said, “They say patience is a virtue. Thank you for waiting, Nusret.”
“What are you doing here?” Raziyanım asked Stefan.
“Shut up, Mother!” Nimeta said.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Nusret said.
Nimeta finally lowered the rifle and pointed to the hallway with her chin.
As the man trotted off, Stefan asked, “Who’s he? Has he done something to you?”
“Stefan, I need you to do something for me,” Nimeta said. “I’m begging you: save my son.”
“Fiko?” Stefan asked, stunned.
“Fiko’s hurt. He’s got to get to a hospital right away. The Serbs have barricaded the roads, and the ambulance can’t get past. You’ve got both a Croatian and a Serbian ID. Find a way to get Fiko into the city through the Croatian zone. But hurry. He’s seriously wounded.”
“Where is he now?” Stefan asked as Nusret was coming back from the bathroom.
“Nusret will take you to him,” Nimeta said. “Hurry.”
“I’ve got to stop by the place I’m staying,” Stefan said. “Come on, Nusret. Let’s go.”
“Take me with you. I want to come too,” Nimeta said. “Wait just a sec.”
“We won’t be able to bring you back,” Nusret said. “And it’ll be easier if there are only two of us. Don’t make us waste any more time. I’m late as it is.”
“I’m coming too.”
The man pulled a gun out of his back pocket and said, “Look, I could have neutralized you if I’d wanted to. I understood how upset you were, so I sat and waited. But now you need to listen to me: you’re not coming. Don’t make me have to stop you.”
As the two men were walking out the door, Nimeta grabbed Stefan’s hands. She brought his hands to her lips and kissed them.
“God bless you, Stefan,” she said. “God bless you.”
After Stefan and Nusret l
eft, Nimeta went to her mother’s room, picked up the Koran on the nightstand, went over to the window, and lifted her eyes to the heavens.
“Allah, save my son,” she pleaded.
She placed the Koran on the window ledge, rested her right hand on top of it, and said, “Allah, I swear to you on the holy book that if you bring my son safely back to me, I’ll never see Stefan again. No matter what, I promise I’ll never see him again.”
TREBEVIĆ, MARCH 1993
Having checked every last road, track, and pass and tried everything he could to get closer to the city, Burhan returned to the spot where he’d dropped off Nusret. They’d agreed that if he failed to find a way through, he’d wait at this spot for Nusret to come back.
Burhan was confident that Nimeta would leave no stone unturned to get Fiko passage through the Croatian zone. He knew he was running out of time. If they didn’t come up with a solution, his son would lose his leg and maybe even his life.
He’d considered slinging Fiko over his shoulder and trekking through the forest down to the city but decided he’d be needlessly risking both their lives. The only answer was to wait a while longer. If Nimeta managed to work miracles, wonderful; if not, they’d crash through the barricades, prepared to risk death, knowing that to wait any longer would mean certain death for Fiko in any case. Crashing through the barricades was a last resort for when they had nothing to lose. Until then, he simply had to wait, calm and full of hope, praying and trying not to panic.
Burhan opened the door to the ambulance. The cool air would do Fiko good. He lifted his son’s head a little higher and made sure that the wounded leg, which was wrapped in layer upon layer of parkas, was as high as possible. He’d recently given Fiko an injection of morphine and an antihemorrhagic provided by the doctor. When his son grew thirsty, he gave him sips of water.
Raif, who was pacing in circles around the ambulance, watched his brother-in-law with respect and admiration. Raif had always considered Burhan to be overly serious and a bit of a workaholic, but in the mountains he’d discovered new sides of Burhan’s character. For one thing, he was stoic to a degree seen in few people; it was as though he had prepared himself in advance for every eventuality. He never seemed surprised, overjoyed, or distraught, and he never fell to pieces. Coolheaded and farsighted, he had an ability to analyze a situation and ready himself for every outcome, which had earned him a great deal of respect among his fellow soldiers. As Raif had gotten to know his brother-in-law better, he came to understand why their command post had enjoyed greater success than those on other mountains.
Burhan hadn’t even panicked when Fiko was wounded. He’d gone into the tent, rested his head on his hands, and spent about five minutes weighing their options. After speaking first to the doctor and then to his son, he’d learned that Fiko would rather die than have his leg amputated.
“But he’s still a boy,” Raif had said. “How can you make a decision based on what he says? Thousands of boys his age have lost arms and legs in this war. It doesn’t matter if he’s missing his leg as long as he stays alive.”
“I’m not letting him decide. I wanted to find out how important it was to him to keep his leg,” Burhan had replied. “He could have said, ‘Cut my leg off right away and save me.’ But he didn’t.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“First, we’ll try to save his leg. For as long as we can. If we fail, he’ll lose it.”
“Will they amputate it here?”
“That’s the problem, Raif. An operation in these conditions could well lead to septicemia. I’m going to do everything I can to get him to a hospital.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Good,” Burhan had said.
Nusret drove the ambulance. When they’d spotted the barricades, they’d turned back and decided to let the driver, a commando intimately familiar with the mountain paths, strike out on his own to get word to Nimeta.
Now they were waiting.
His head resting on his father’s lap, Fiko gazed down at the Miljacka River, which the rays of the rising sun had tinted red.
“Look over there, Dad,” he said. “The Miljacka’s turned red.”
“The Bosniaks say that the Miljacka turns that color every dawn in memory of the blood they have shed over the centuries.”
“I’ve never heard that.”
Burhan caressed his son’s head. “It’s an old saying. As old as Kulin. You’ve never heard it because your generation wasn’t supposed to take up arms. We thought you’d learn about warfare only in history books. We didn’t expect Bosniak blood to flow again. We were wrong.”
Like a fiery serpent, the Miljacka twisted and turned through the valley on the way to the Bosna River. Meanwhile, Fiko, his father, and his uncle waited to be rescued . . . patiently. Bosniaks were well practiced in waiting.
TREBEVIĆ, MARCH 1993
Peering through his binoculars way down to the very bottom of the steep hillside, Burhan spotted what looked like a cloud of dust.
“Please, God,” he prayed to himself, “may it be Nusret. May Nimeta have found a way out.”
As the approaching cloud of dust grew thicker, Burhan grew more hopeful. The safe conduct passes, identity cards, travel papers that would save his son’s life—whatever it was that Nimeta had somehow found—were getting closer with every passing second. He wanted to believe it more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life.
He’d been cradling his son’s head in his lap for many hours already. As the effect of the morphine had begun wearing off, Burhan had desperately tried to find a way to distract his son from the pain in his wounded leg. As they’d begun talking about the bloodred Miljacka River and the saying about the river crying tears of blood for the Bosniaks, Fiko had said he’d never heard the saying.
“It’s as old as Kulin,” Burhan had told his son.
“Dad, what’s all this about ‘old as Kulin’?” Fiko had said.
Hearing his family name used in this figure of speech had always given him the creeps. It made him feel like one of those tattered bits of hand-embroidered cloth, faded and worn with time, on sale in dusty secondhand shops, or like one of the many useless lengths of fabric laid away in his grandmother’s mothball-scented wooden chests.
Like all children his age, Fiko had studied the official version of history in the post-Tito era. Now, with his head in his father’s lap in an ambulance, his life in danger and his leg throbbing, he found himself suddenly eager to learn the real history of his people.
Inwardly rejoicing at his son’s interest, Burhan began relating the story of the Bosniak people as though he were telling his son a bedtime story.
“Once upon a time, in the sixth or seventh century, no more than ten or so feudal lords shared the lands of Bosnia in peace and harmony. They were the most powerful and independent feudal lords in all of Europe. Unlike in other feudal systems, they retained their lands even when they failed to fulfill their duties to the monarchies to which they’d sworn fealty. And so the years passed. Then, in 1082, when the Hungarian king invaded Bosnia, he appointed an aristocrat named Stefan to be the Ban, or Viceroy, of Bosnia. That is, Stefan was to collect taxes and raise an army on behalf of the kingdom of Hungary. From that point on, the feudal lords began battling each other for the title of ban.
“Three ban made their mark on Bosnia in the Middle Ages. Under the rule of the first one, Ban Kulin, the Bosniaks were liberated from Serbian domination and became fully autonomous for the first time in their history in 1180. Ban Kulin later liberated the Bosnian church and declared the Bogomil sect to be the state religion. Years later, however, he was forced to convert to Catholicism to prevent his people from being burned at the stake by the Pope’s crusaders. When he died a year later, it was said to be of a broken heart.”
“What about the other two ban?”
“The other two i
mportant ban were Kotromanić and Tvrtko. Prince Kotromanić ascended the throne in 1322. During his reign, Hersek became part of Bosnia. He too was a Bogomil, but he was tortured by the crusaders until he converted to Catholicism. Tvrtko came to power in 1358. He extended Bosnian territory as far as the Dalmatian coast and changed his title from ban to king. Still, of the eighteen Bosnian ban and kings, Ban Kulin is the only one whose reign is legendary and still spoken of today as a golden age of peace and prosperity. Bosnians wrote poetry and songs in his honor, and the expression ‘as old as Kulin’ was coined.”
Burhan saw that Fiko’s eyes were shut and decided to stop talking in case he’d fallen asleep. He himself was just nodding off, chin on his chest, when Fiko startled him with the question, “Dad, why did we become Muslims then, when we were already Christian?”
He wet his son’s parched lips with a few drops of water from his canteen and checked the bandages on his leg. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.
“Do you want to sleep for a bit?” he asked his son.
“Dad, why did we become Muslims?” Fiko asked again. “Why did we convert from Christianity to Islam?”
“Do you really want me to explain all that right now?”
As the sun rose higher above the horizon, it was getting hot inside the ambulance, and Burhan’s stomach started churning from the smell of blood. There was still no sign of Nusret. They were in a race against time, and Burhan couldn’t have cared less just then about the Bosnians’ reasons for becoming Muslims. If they’d remained Christians, they might not be stuck here in the ambulance, he even thought to himself. But then again, the Serbian butchers and treacherous Croats would probably just have found another excuse to expel them from their homeland.
“It wouldn’t be accurate to say that the Bosniaks ‘converted,’ Fiko,” Raif said. “The Bogomil sect had a lot in common with Islam in any case. As you know, the Ottoman Empire was established in the lands of Asia Minor known as Anatolia. Even as the Turks were staging incursions, they’d begun trickling into the Balkans as migrants. In a sense, those first settlers from Anatolia were part of the propaganda efforts for the Ottoman conquest. Before sending in the army, they sent dervishes to win over the local people.”