We were all waiting eagerly to take the state exams and register for middle school, because that was considered a kind of informal initiation into the grown-ups’ paradise. As a junior high-schooler I’d be able to hang out at Gaj and La Mirage and the benches and nobody would look twice. We longed for our first cups of coffee accompanied by cigarettes, for beer and long conversations on those warm nights when you weren’t cold in your short-sleeve shirt even at three in the morning. But alas, we were not fated to have such a lighthearted adolescence. The war started.
It was in the very spring of 1992 that I finished the eighth grade. In the decades-long history of the school, my class was probably the first to go without formal final exams and a public graduation ceremony complete with inexpertly knotted first neckties. By the same token, that was the first year that school in my town didn’t begin in September. The school year 1992–1993 simply did not exist. There were more important things.
So there were no classes—and the famous triangle also perished. The Gaj closed down, and one of the artists’ service organizations, a military unit dedicated to recreation and morale-boosting, moved into the theater building; in the old graveyard alongside the row of benches new graves began sprouting, and an NGO called the Children’s Embassy was quartered in the Café Konak. We were simply abandoned in the streets, at least until dark, up till the curfew that we had at that time and that people who claimed to speak English would call the police hour. They took the night from us, and it’s in the nighttime that the fountains burble. Only the fešte remained to us.
All of wartime Bosnia had the same experience. In the center of the country we called them fešte, fiestas, while to people in Sarajevo they were derneci; in Mostar the Herzegovinians drawled about paaaartis, and in Tuzla I once heard a term for them that I knew only from Andrić’s prose—gide. But the principle was the same in every case: a throng of young people gathers in an apartment, whereupon they drink themselves into unconsciousness. Our social life consisted exclusively of these fešte, and the passage of time was measured by their occurrence.
In the first years of the war I frequently caught myself wasting my time cursing my bad historical and metaphysical luck. Of course I would be the one spending the best years of his life in wartime monotony! The guys my age five or six years earlier spent their time camping at the seashore, screwing Czech girls, crisscrossing Europe, and partying like crazy, while our destiny was to vegetate like a bunch of old men. And this was the kind of mood I was in as I waited for the fešta at Vildana’s place.
Vildana’s party, in an ideal world, would be the hands-down favorite to represent a true fešta, its perfect embodiment and shining paradigm. There were twenty of us in a three-room apartment on the sixth floor, men and women, roughly fifty-fifty. In a porn movie an orgy would have ensued, but in Bosnia, in that spring of 1993, there was just silliness and ennui. People were drinking “bamboos,” the stupidest drink ever, consisting of a mixture of red wine and Coca Cola. You don’t feel it going down your throat but then it kicks you in the head. And in the stomach. At some point a group of four or five of us ended up on the narrow balcony, where we started a drunken conversation complete with armchair philosophizing. It was three or three fifteen in the morning when I was seized by an unshakeable sensation of anxiety. I bolted without saying good-bye. I went all the way out of the building . . . The night was warm. A day or two earlier the rumor had gone around that men who were caught out after curfew were being sent out to Meokrnje to dig trenches. But I wasn’t thinking about that. The night air was intoxicating.
I walked all over the deserted city. There were no streetlights; the only things shining were the stars and the white minarets. Everything was lovely and unreal. I walked around slowly, like a sleepwalker, and then headed, for whatever reason, toward the steps below the Gaj.
This winding flight of broad steps was the place where we usually smoked our weed in the days before the war. I sat down on the cool stone, and the night, drawing to a close, seemed to grow cooler. Everything was quiet and dark, and then from above I suddenly heard—from the building where the club had once been—the soft, familiar chords of a piano. I knew this song. It was by Springsteen. It was the one that starts off from this little germ of melancholic intimacy and progresses by way of loud guitar riffs to an emphatic, hymnal ending. And I was cut to the quick, there in that lonely cool before dawn, by the Boss’s voice as he sang: Show a little faith. There’s magic in the night.
Yes, the night held magic, and the cracked asphalt lanes of Skolska Street were linked to all the streets and roads from Amsterdam to Vladivostok. The scent of linden flowers clung to the air, the river gurgled noisily, and my anxiety passed. My night was no less magical than any other night, anywhere, from any epoch. I’m running from the cops, just like in the movies, I thought; and I’m listening to Springsteen on a pitch-black night relieved only by light from the stars.
When I got home I fell asleep right away. And at six thirty A.M. I was awakened by the explosion of a shell. Later I was to learn that it hit in the cluster of trees about fifty meters above the steps where I’d been sitting. Crazy shit.
SARAJEVO
Sarajevo, made of mud and snow.
He told his mother he was going to Smederevo to say hello to Milica. The old lady was still happy about that. She was sad when they split up. America doesn’t mean what it used to mean, she said; there’s this Internet thing, and in a year she can follow us. He didn’t have the heart to tell his mother that the departure for America wasn’t actually what had caused Milica and him to break up.
With a backpack on his shoulder, he went down Zeleni Venac. He pulled out his wallet and looked at the bus ticket one more time. On the thick blue paper the word “Centrotrans” was printed in large Cyrillic characters. Underneath that the letters were smaller and fainter: “Belgrade – Serbian Sarajevo – Belgrade.” Three days ago he had asked the women behind the counter if there was any bus that just went to Sarajevo. As many as you want, the woman said, munching on a pita of some sort. I mean to the city itself, he added, and not to Lukavica. Her mouth full, the woman responded that she didn’t deal in tickets for the Federation. Then just give me this one, whatever you have, he said appeasingly. With her grease-covered fingers the woman clacked away at the keyboard and looked him in the eye for the first time. You can get local transportation or a taxi to the city. That’s what everybody does, she said, as she handed him the ticket.
It was cold outside, but too hot in the bus. The vehicle was full, the heating was ratcheted up to the maximum, and the air was heavy and stale. The majority of his fellow travelers were prematurely aged people who were loud and messy. The driver proudly played a cassette of gusle music. Stefan popped his headphones on and turned up the volume on his Walkman.
He hadn’t been in Sarajevo for exactly ten years now. His father had sent him and his mother to Grandma’s in Belgrade in March of 1992, right after the barricades went up. Until things calmed down, as his father said. For the first month or two, they anticipated returning to Sarajevo. Then they waited several months for his father to meet them in Belgrade. They got nothing they waited for.
Bridge. Border. He wasn’t sure, but he thought they had come out over the same bridge ten years ago. At that time there were no border guards, and no one asked him for his documents.
On the other side of the bridge, everything seemed different. Bosnia. Narrow streets, burnt-out houses, dark forests, rough landscapes. He had never seen a more depressing place in his life than the drab little town called Vlasenica. And then just past Vlasenica: Romanija. His ears were hurting already, so he took off his headphones. It was quiet in the bus. There were no conversations.
Now the road turns and goes downhill. They stop briefly at the bus station in Pale. He feels his chest tighten. Lukavica isn’t far off, surely not. A road sign reads:
YOU ARE LEAVING THE REPUBLIKA SRPSK
A—HAVE A NICE TRIP.
It’s already dusk. The bus enters a tunnel. After the tunnel he looks for the Romanija forest, but it’s no longer there. Down below is Sarajevo. Here is Sarajevo, then, the real Sarajevo. An image from out of his dreams: red roofs, violet sunset, white minarets. He calls up to the driver, “Can I get out here?” The bus stops, and he gets out. Here I am above Bistrik, he thinks; here I am above Bistrik. He walks slowly downhill. There isn’t much traffic, and most of it is made up of taxis. He takes out a cigarette, lights it. I’ve never smoked in Sarajevo, he thinks.
Darkness descends onto the city with him. He finds himself in front of the church at Bistrik. He used to love this church because of the color of its façade. It was similar to the outfits worn by the Sarajevo soccer team. Way back when, in primary school, Stefan had been a fan of theirs.
His legs steer him by themselves to Papagajka. In one of the third-floor windows, the window to his room, a light is visible. A lamp is on. He sees a shadow: somebody is walking from the bed toward the table. In a horror film, he thinks, he’d now catch sight of his own face.
All their relatives tried to convince his mother to request that the family’s apartment be returned to them, but she didn’t want to listen. It’s a routine thing, they said. It’s yours, they said. Reclaim it and then sell it right away, they said. An apartment in the city center! they said. Take the money for your child, they said. His mother was usually silent and kept her thoughts to herself. But just once she said: Fuck your apartment. They took my husband.
He won’t ever forget it. Never ever. On the twelfth of November, 1992, he was awakened by his mother’s sobbing. Ðorde is dead, she repeated over and over through her tears; Ðorde is dead.
They took him away, that was all the neighbor said. Fikra. She called from Germany, just after she had arrived there from Sarajevo. They led him away one day, to dig trenches, and he didn’t come back. And the very next day some other people moved in. That’s what she said.
His grandmother was still hoping he was alive, and Stefan was still hoping he was alive, but his mother just cried. Over the following months, the story gradually became clear. A detachment of soldiers took Ðorde,, Stefan’s father, away. Fikra had said it was to dig trenches, but his mother kept repeating, amid her nearly hysterical sobbing, that they’d led him off to the slaughter, to the slaughter.
His body was never found. Father’s name remains on the list of missing persons. His mother seemed to reconcile herself to this. She told him once, not long ago, how the two of them, before Stefan was born, took a trip to Skopje. Along the side of the road somewhere in Serbia, she remembered, they had seen stones. Ðorde explained to me, she said, that these were wayside grave markers, memorials, put up by families for soldiers who’d perished abroad. My Ðorde wasn’t a soldier, she said, but I want to put up one of those for him. That’s what she said.
For a time Stefan hated Sarajevo. He hated it with a passion, the same way he had loved it in his childhood, and to the same degree that he had yearned for it during his first eight months as a refugee. He didn’t hate Muslims. He couldn’t hate them—footballers Husref Musemić and Safet Susić were his idols. He just hated Sarajevo. He didn’t hate the football team, nor his school and his friends, nor his memories, nor the nearly twelve years he spent there. He only hated the city. Let the whole thing be razed, he thought. Let all of Sarajevo go up in flames. That kind of hatred, though, did not last long. It was painful for him even to think about Sarajevo. He said to himself, I will not think about Sarajevo anymore. Then the city came back to him over and over, but he repudiated it, and these thoughts faded. He was preoccupied with chess, preoccupied with mathematics, and, ultimately, with Milica too. Then his mother got a green card for America in that immigration lottery, and since he still hadn’t turned twenty-one, he had the right to go with her.
He wouldn’t have come here if it hadn’t been for the song. He wouldn’t have lied to his mother. He could have told her: I’m going to say good-bye to the city. But he’d barely had the strength to admit to himself that his dreams were still rooted in Sarajevo. In these dreams he saw his Belgrade friends, the Belgrade streets, and the boy who’d grown up in Belgrade—himself, Stefan as he now was. And there was Milica. But the setting was always Sarajevo. How could he tell her: on account of the song . . .
He heard it three months ago on the radio. For the first time—he would have sworn that he was hearing it for the first time. He’d never been a rocker; techno was his music. He found it on the radio by accident, but he then immediately went and bought the cassette.
The group was called EKV, “Ekaterina Velika,” a Belgrade band. They weren’t a Sarajevo group, so that’s probably why the song hit home. Sarajevo, made of mud and snow, went the song, and that view from the bus in March, 1992, suddenly came alive for him again. He sees his father standing in the dirty snow on the platform, standing and waving to his wife and son while the bus moves in reverse. Stefan waves at him and sees him for the final time.
It’s midnight. Stefan is in Marin Dvor, going toward Pofalići. From there he’ll take a cab to Lukavica. The bus will be heading back to Belgrade tomorrow morning. Snow starts to fall. Wipe the frost from my eyes and brow, goes the song. Leave me, goes the song. Stefan walks along slowly, smoking and looking at the few windows that are lit up. He can hear the bells ringing.
Let my eyes see, one more time
Let my ears hear, just one more time
Sarajevo.
TRANSLATED FROM BOSNIAN BY JOHN K. COX
[ICELAND]
GERÐUR KRISTNÝ
The Ice People
I never figured out how Olga knew that girl. She wasn’t from our neighborhood. One possible explanation was that their parents knew each other. Olga’s mom and dad were commies who were famous for buying their daughter liquor and who didn’t seem to care that she refused to be confirmed. On a wall in their home was a poster honoring the proletariat, those people who sustain the bourgeoisie who in turn support the elites who in turn validate the aristocracy who in turn sponsor the royal courts who ultimately prop up the emperor. Most likely our visit to this girl was instilled with the values of communism, which, as everyone knows, springs from the notion that there really is no such thing as class and, consequently, nobody should be above cheering someone else up by visiting them. Following this line of thinking, the elite shouldn’t be above dropping in on the bourgeoisie, who in turn would have a cup of coffee with the working class.
We three used to hang out—Olga, Steina, and I. Our get-togethers were a great diversion from the typical weekend routines. We met regularly at one another’s homes to eat candy, trade candy, and talk about candy. Whether it was better to drink Tab or Fresca with this or that kind of candy or whether it was better to consume cream cake or chocolate malted balls with soda. Once all the ingredients began foaming strangely inside our mouths, we often wondered whether it wouldn’t have been a better idea to simply eat Mars bars. And later we’d contemplate whether a person got more for their money if she bought the assortment bag.
Most of the time, we hung out at Steina’s house. Her parents weren’t commies, and they had just finished building a house up in Ártúnsholt. It would never have occurred to them to buy liquor for their kids. They never had time to do something like that. They owned a business and were always working. My dad and mom were even less likely to buy me liquor, even if I wanted them to, because they were dead set against it. They talked regularly about how this or that person was an unbelievable drunk. All the same, there was never a shortage of liquor in our home, so in all likelihood someone was going to the liquor store. Dad used to have a drink at night. The first couple of mouthfuls made him so happy that he’d sing while watching the fishing report. By the time the nature programs began, he’d have a heavy frown, and finally, when the spotted leopard hooked its claws into an antelope, Dad would
start an argument. Then Mom would announce that it was time for everyone to go to bed. She wished me goodnight, but he wouldn’t. He didn’t seem to notice me as he leaned against the wall, looming over me as I made my way to my bedroom. It was like he was a specter in a darkened passageway and I was an invisible, tattered spirit.
My parents’ bedroom was next to mine and I would sit in front of the television late into the night so I wouldn’t have to listen to them through the wall. He quibbled and hissed. She whimpered. One night I started a garage band in my mind. The band was made up of happy boys who practiced in the storage area in the garage. They were all great friends of mine and sometimes we just jammed together. I played keyboards. The band was nothing without me and sometimes I felt that I wasn’t anything without them either. When I knew the guys in the band were out in the garage, I felt that life was tolerable. My friends cared about me. They would intervene if my parents’ arguing got out of hand.
But there we were, daughters of communists, homebuilders, and teetotalers, setting off to find a girl that Olga didn’t even know very well. In any case, we were unable to get Olga to give us any more information as we fought our way through a blizzard—like the three wise men trying to find the baby Jesus. “She gets teased a lot at school,” Olga finally said and sniffed. “She actually doesn’t have any friends.”
No friends! That was like not having any arms but still having to carry on. I always had friends—they weren’t always interesting but they were friends just the same. We three—Steina and Olga and me—had been in class together since we were six years old but our friendship didn’t really start up until last winter, when we were in seventh grade. Both of them played handball in the winters and soccer in the summers. I had no interest in sports and wasted most of my time coming up with songs on my keyboard, songs that I forgot immediately. It was good to be able to shut out my home life with headphones and imagine that the boys were waiting for me in the garage just to hear my latest composition. Sometimes I removed one of my headphones so I could listen absentmindedly to my dad’s and mom’s voices and come up with a song to accompany them. I let the bass mumble and curse, the volume rising and then suddenly falling into a stunning silence—until it all began again.
Best European Fiction 2012 Page 20
