Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  Of course, there is a difference between Act I and the replay of Act I which is Act II. Not only has one more day gone by. Everything is worse. Lucky no longer can speak, Pozzo is now pathetic and blind, Vladimir has given in to despair. Perhaps I felt that the despair of Act I was enough for the Sarajevo audience, and I wanted to spare them a second time when Godot does not arrive. Maybe I wanted to propose, subliminally, that Act II might be different. For, precisely as Waiting for Godot was so apt an illustration of the feelings of Sarajevans now—bereft, hungry, dejected, waiting for an arbitrary, alien power to save them or take them under its protection—it seemed apt, too, to be staging Waiting for Godot, Act I.

  4

  Alas, alas … /Avaj, avaj …

  —from Lucky’s monologue

  PEOPLE IN SARAJEVO live harrowing lives; this was a harrowing Godot. Ines was flamboyantly theatrical as Pozzo, and Atko was the most heartrending Lucky I have ever seen. Atko, who had ballet training and was a movement teacher at the Academy, quickly mastered the postures and gestures of decrepitude, and responded inventively to my suggestions for Lucky’s dance of freedom. It took longer to work out Lucky’s monologue, which in every production of Godot I’d seen (including the one Beckett himself directed in 1975 at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin) was, to my taste, delivered too fast, as nonsense. I divided this speech into five parts, and we discussed it line by line, as an argument, as a series of images and sounds, as a lament, as a cry. I wanted Atko to deliver Beckett’s aria about divine apathy and indifference, about a heartless, petrifying world, as if it made perfect sense. Which it does, especially in Sarajevo.

  It has always seemed to me that Waiting for Godot is a supremely realistic play, though it is generally acted in something like a minimalist or vaudeville style. The Godot that the Sarajevo actors were by inclination, temperament, previous theatre experience, and present (atrocious) circumstances most able to perform, and the one I chose to direct, was full of anguish, of immense sadness and, toward the end, violence. That the messenger was a strapping adult meant that when he announces the bad news, Vladimir and Estragon could express not only disappointment but rage: manhandling him as they could never have done had the role been played by a small child. (And there are six, not two, of them, and only one of him.) After he escapes, they subside into a long, terrible silence. It was a Chekhovian moment of absolute pathos, as at the end of The Cherry Orchard, when the ancient butler Firs wakes up to find that he’s been left behind in the abandoned house.

  IT FELT, during the mounting of Godot and this second stay in Sarajevo, as if I were going through the replay of a familiar cycle: some of the severest shelling of the city’s center since the beginning of the siege (on one day Sarajevo was hit by nearly four thousand shells); the raising once more of the hopes of American intervention; the outwitting of Clinton (if outwitting is not too strong a term to describe so weak a resolve) by the pro-Serb United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) command, which claimed that intervention would endanger UN troops; the steady increase in despair and disbelief of the Sarajevans; a mock cease-fire (that means just a little shelling and sniping, but since more people ventured out in the street, almost as many were murdered and maimed each day); et cetera, et cetera.

  The cast and I tried to avoid jokes about “waiting for Clinton,” but that was very much what we were doing in late July, when the Serbs took, or seemed to take, Mount Igman, just above the airport. The capture of Mount Igman would allow them to fire shells horizontally into the city, and hope rose again that there would be American air strikes against the Serb gun positions, or at least a lifting of the arms embargo. Although people were afraid to hope, for fear of being disappointed, at the same time no one could believe that Clinton would again speak of intervention and again do nothing. I myself had succumbed to hope again when a journalist friend showed me a dim satellite fax transmission of Senator Biden’s eloquent speech in favor of intervention, twelve single-spaced pages, which he had delivered on the floor of the Senate on July 29. The Holiday Inn, the only still functioning hotel, which is on the western side of the city’s center, four blocks from the nearest Serb snipers, was crowded with journalists waiting for the fall of Sarajevo or the intervention; one of the hotel staff said the place hadn’t been this full since the 1984 Winter Olympics.

  SOMETIMES THOUGHT we were not waiting for Godot, or Clinton. We were waiting for our props. There seemed no way to find Lucky’s suitcase and picnic basket, Pozzo’s cigarette holder (to substitute for the pipe) and whip. As for the carrot that Estragon munches slowly, rapturously: until two days before we opened, we had to rehearse with three of the dry rolls I scavenged each morning from the Holiday Inn dining room (rolls were the breakfast offered) to feed the actors and assistants and the all-too-rare stagehand. We could not find any rope for Pozzo until a week after we started on the stage, and Ines got understandably cranky when, after three weeks of rehearsal, she still did not have the right length of rope, a proper whip, a cigarette holder, an atomizer. The bowler hats and the boots for the Estragons materialized only in the last days of rehearsal. And the costumes—whose designs I had suggested and the sketches of which I had approved in the first week—did not come until the day before we opened.

  Some of this was owing to the scarcity of everything in Sarajevo. Some of it, I had to conclude, was typically “southern” (or Balkan) mañana-ism. (“You’ll definitely have the cigarette holder tomorrow,” I was told every morning for three weeks.) But some of the shortages were the result of rivalry between theatres. There had to be props at the closed National Theatre. Why were they not available to us? I discovered, shortly before the opening, that I was not just a visiting member of the Sarajevo “theatre world,” but that there were several theatre clans in Sarajevo and that, being allied with Haris Pašovi’s, I could not count on the goodwill of the others. (It would work the other way around, too. On one occasion, when precious help was offered me by another producer, who on my last visit had become a friend, I was told by Pašovi, who was otherwise reasonable and helpful: “I don’t want you to take anything from that person.”)

  Of course this would be normal behavior anywhere else. Why not in besieged Sarajevo? Theatre in prewar Sarajevo must have had the same feuds, pettiness, and jealousy as in any other European city. I think my assistants, as well as Ognjenka Finci, the set and costume designer, and Pašovi himself, were anxious to shield me from the knowledge that not everybody in Sarajevo was to be trusted. When I began to catch on that some of our difficulties reflected a degree of hostility or even sabotage, one of my assistants said to me sadly: “Now that you know us, you won’t want to come back anymore.”

  SARAJEVO IS NOT only a city that represents an ideal of pluralism; it was regarded by many of its citizens as an ideal place: though not important (not big enough, not rich enough), it was still the best place to be, even if, being ambitious, you had to leave it to make a real career, as people from San Francisco eventually take the plunge and go to Los Angeles or New York. “You can’t imagine what it used to be like here,” Pašovi said to me. “It was paradise.” That kind of idealization produces a very acute disillusionment, so that now almost all the people I know in Sarajevo cannot stop lamenting the city’s moral deterioration: the increasing number of muggings and thefts, the gangsterism, the predatory black marketeers, the banditry of some army units, the absence of civic cooperation. One would think that they could forgive themselves, and their city. For seventeen months it has been a shooting gallery. There is virtually no municipal government; hence, debris from shelling doesn’t get picked up, schooling isn’t organized for small children, et cetera, et cetera. A city under siege must, sooner or later, become a city of rackets.

  But most Sarajevans are pitiless in their condemnation of conditions now, and of many “elements,” as they would call them with pained vagueness, in the city. “Anything good that happens here is a miracle,” one of my friends said to me. And another: “This is a city of bad pe
ople.” When an English photojournalist made us the invaluable gift of nine candles, three were immediately stolen. One day Mirza’s lunch—a chunk of home-baked bread and a pear—was taken from his knapsack while he was on the stage. It could not have been one of the other actors. But it could have been anyone else, say, one of the stagehands or any of the students from the Academy of Drama who wandered in and out of the rehearsals. The discovery of this theft was very depressing to us all.

  Although many people want to leave, and will leave when they can, a surprising number say that their lives are not unbearable. “We can live this life forever,” said one of my friends from my April visit, Hrvoje Batini, a local journalist. “I can live this life a hundred years,” a new friend, Zehra Kreho—the dramaturge of the National Theatre—said to me one evening. (Both are in their late thirties.) Sometimes I felt the same way.

  Of course, it was different for me. “I haven’t taken a bath in sixteen months,” a middle-aged matron said to me. “Do you know how that feels?” I don’t; I only know what it’s like not to take a bath for six weeks. I was elated, full of energy, because of the challenge of the work I was doing, because of the valor and enthusiasm of everyone I worked with—but I could not ever forget how hard it has been for each of them, and how hopeless the future looks for their city. What made my lesser hardships and the danger relatively easy to bear, apart from the fact that I could leave and they couldn’t, was that I was totally concentrated on them and on Beckett’s play.

  5

  UNTIL A WEEK before it opened, I did not think the play would be very good. I feared that the choreography and emotional design I had constructed for the two-level stage and the nine actors in five roles were too complicated for them to master in so short a time; or simply that I had not been as demanding as I should have been. Two of my assistants, as well as Pašovi, told me that I was being too amicable, too “maternal,” and that I should throw a tantrum now and then and, in particular, threaten to replace the actors who had not yet learned all their lines. But I went on, hoping that it would be not too bad; then suddenly, in the last week, they turned a corner, it all came together, and at our dress rehearsal it seemed to me the production was, after all, affecting, continually interesting, well made, and that this was an effort which did honor to Beckett’s play.

  I was also surprised by the amount of attention from the international press that Godot was getting. I had told few people that I was going back to Saravejo to direct Waiting for Godot, intending perhaps to write something about it later. I forgot that I would be living in a journalists’ dormitory. The day after I arrived I was fielding requests in the Holiday Inn lobby and in the dining room for interviews; and the next day; and the next. I said there was nothing to tell, that I was still auditioning; then that the actors were simply reading the play aloud at a table; then that we’d just begun on the stage, there was hardly any light, there was nothing to see.

  But when I mentioned to Pašovi the journalists’ requests and my desire to keep the actors free from such distractions, I learned that he had scheduled a press conference for me and that he wanted me to admit journalists to rehearsals, give interviews, and get the maximum amount of publicity not just for the play but for an enterprise of which I had not altogether taken in that I was a part: the Sarajevo International Festival of Theatre and Film, directed by Haris Pašovi, whose second production, following his Alcestis, was my Godot. When I apologized to the actors for the interruptions to come, I found that they, too, wanted the journalists to be there. All the friends I consulted in the city told me that the story of the production would be “good for Sarajevo.”

  And so I obediently changed my policy of no interviews to giving access to anybody who wanted it. This was easy, not only because it was what the actors and Pašovi wanted, but because I never saw anything that was printed or televised (even the journalists at the Holiday Inn never saw their stories until they left Sarajevo). I regretted, though, that the rush of interviews in the first two weeks meant that most of the stories were done before the actors had learned their lines, and my conception of the play began to work.

  The point is, of course, that any cultural activity in Sarajevo is a sideshow for correspondents and journalists who have come to cover a war. To protest the sincerity of one’s motives reinforces suspicion, if there is suspicion to begin with. The best thing is not to speak at all, which was my original intention. To speak at all of what one is doing seems—perhaps, whatever one’s intentions, becomes—a form of self-promotion. But this is just what the contemporary media culture expects. My political opinions—I would go on about what I regard as the infamous role now being played by UNPROFOR, railing against “the Serb-UN siege of Sarajevo”—were invariably cut out. You want it to be about them, and it turns out—in media land—to be about you.

  If it were only a matter of my own discomfort about some of the foreign coverage of my work in Sarajevo, none of this would be worth mentioning. But it illustrates something of the way such long-running stories as the one in Bosnia are transmitted and being reacted to.

  Television, print, and radio-journalism are an important part of this war. When, in April, I heard the French intellectual André Glucksmann, on his twenty-four-hour trip to Sarajevo, explain to the local journalists who attended his press conference that “war is now a media event,” and “wars are won or lost on TV,” I thought to myself, Try telling that to all the people here who have lost their arms and legs. But there is a sense in which Glucksmann’s indecent statement was on the mark. It’s not that war has completely changed its nature, and is only or principally a media event, but that the media’s coverage is a principal object of attention, and the very fact of media attention sometimes becomes the main story.

  An example. My best friend among the journalists at the Holiday Inn, the BBC’s admirable Alan Little, visited one of the city’s hospitals and was shown a semi-conscious five-year-old girl with severe head injuries from a mortar shell that had killed her mother. The doctor said she would die if she was not airlifted to a hospital where she could be given a brain scan and sophisticated treatment. Moved by the child’s plight, Alan began to talk about her in his reports. For days nothing happened. Then other journalists picked up the story, and the case of “Little Irma” became the front-page story day after day in the British tabloids and virtually the only Bosnia story on the TV news. John Major, eager to be seen as doing something, sent a plane to take the girl to London.

  Then came the backlash. Alan, unaware at first that the story had become so big, then delighted because it meant that the pressure would help to bring the child out, was dismayed by the attacks on a “media circus” that was exploiting a child’s suffering. It was morally obscene, the critics said, to concentrate on one child when thousands of children and adults, including many amputees and paraplegics, languish in the understaffed, undersupplied hospitals of Sarajevo and are not allowed to be transported out, thanks to the UN (but that is another story). That it was a good thing to do—that to try to save the life of one child is better than doing nothing at all—should have been obvious, and in fact others were brought out as a result. But a story that needed to be told about the wretched hospitals of Sarajevo degenerated into a controversy over what the press did.

  THIS IS THE FIRST European genocide in our century to be tracked by the world press and documented nightly on TV. There were no reporters in 1915 sending daily stories to the world press from Armenia, and no foreign camera crews in Dachau and Auschwitz. Until the Bosnian genocide, one might have thought--this was indeed the conviction of many of the best reporters there, like Roy Guttman of Newsday and John Burns of The New York Times—that if the story could be gotten out, the world would do something. The coverage of the genocide in Bosnia has ended that illusion.

  Newspaper and radio reporting and, above all, TV coverage have shown the war in Bosnia in extraordinary detail, but in the absence of a will to intervene by those few people in the world who make pol
itical and military decisions, the war becomes another remote disaster; the people suffering and being murdered there become disaster “victims.” Suffering is visibly present, and can be seen in close-up; and no doubt many people feel sympathy for the victims. What cannot be recorded is an absence—the absence of any political will to end this suffering: more exactly, the decision not to intervene in Bosnia, primarily Europe’s responsibility, which has its origins in the traditional pro-Serb slant of the Quai d’Orsay and the British Foreign Office. It is being implemented by the UN occupation of Sarajevo, which is largely a French operation.

  I do not believe the standard argument made by critics of television that watching terrible events on the small screen distances them as much as it makes them real. It is the continuing coverage of the war in the absence of action to stop it that makes us mere spectators. Not television but our politicians have made history come to seem like re-runs. We get tired of watching the same show. If it seems unreal, it is because it’s both so appalling and apparently so unstoppable.

  Even people in Sarajevo sometimes say it seems to them unreal. They are in a state of shock, which does not diminish, which takes the form of a rhetorical incredulity (“How could this happen? I still can’t believe this is happening”). They are genuinely astonished by the Serb atrocities, and by the starkness and sheer unfamiliarity of the lives they are now obliged to lead. “We’re living in the Middle Ages,” someone said to me. “This is science fiction,” another friend said.

  People ask me if Sarajevo ever seemed to me unreal while I was there. The truth is, since I’ve started going to Sarajevo—this winter I hope to direct The Cherry Orchard with Nada as Madame Ranevsky and Velibor as Lopakhin—it seems the most real place in the world.