by Peter Barry
‘We are forced to live under a Muslim government that does not want to remain part of the Yugoslav federation … ’
‘That’s not so surprising when the Yugoslav federation is Serbian dominated.’
‘So what?’ He turned and scowled at me. He obviously didn’t like to be contradicted. ‘It has worked well for a long time, so why change things? Why do they suddenly want to become an independent state?’ He declared that when the Muslim majority voted for independence for Bosnia, and the country was recognised by both the US and the European community, the Serbs were forced into a corner. His conclusion, which scarcely surprised me, was that the war was the fault of the Bosnian Muslims. It could have been avoided; it was not what the Serbs had wanted. ‘We want to live amongst our own people, that is all.’
He made it all sound so reasonable – doubtless as reasonable as the arguments of those on the opposing side. Before I knew it he had moved on to the battle of Kosovo in the fourteenth century. Doubtless he thought he was educating me. He insisted that although the Ottoman Empire conquered the Serbs, there were twice as many Turks as Serbs at the start of the battle, and twice as many Turkish dead as Serbian dead at the end. And that just about sums this place up, I thought: we were defeated, yes, but we killed twice as many of the enemy, so we really won. When I pointed out to Nikola that it was a defeat nevertheless, he snorted with rage and looked ready to kill me also. It’s over five hundred years later, but he was still upset by the defeat. The Serbs, I’d already learnt, have memories like elephants. A few minutes later he left us, looking even less happy than when he’d arrived.
‘Watch him,’ said Santo. ‘He does not like you.’
‘You think?’ I asked innocently. We both laughed.
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I never spoke to the kids at school if I could help it, and they soon learnt not to speak to me. They left me alone, I left them alone, and most of the time we had nothing to do with each other. I ate my sandwich in the playground at lunchtime only if I could get the bench in the corner, beneath one of the plane trees, to myself. If I was there first, before the kids came out for their break, they didn’t sit with me. It was a kind of unspoken agreement.
There was a patch of muddy grass and a large expanse of concrete in front of me. At the end of the playground there was a six-foot-high white brick wall, with a six-foot-high fence on top of that. They didn’t want the kids to escape, that was for sure. Behind this wall was a laneway. It ran between the school and some playing fields, and it was where, after school hours, kids would smoke, fight, touch each other up, plan rebellions against the adult world, cover the lane-side of the wall with graffiti, and do drugs. There was no access from the playground to the laneway; the only entrance to the whole school was at the front of the building, the two sides of the grounds lined with semis keeping their respectable backs to whatever was going on among the shouting hordes of young people across the road.
I’d sit on the bench and listen to the kids – though I never made it obvious. I wanted to discover if their dreams were any different to mine when I was a kid. They were: they had bigger dreams. With every generation, the dreams get bigger, or that’s the way it seems to me. During the Second World War, my mother told me, all anyone dreamt of was peace, an end to the bombing. After the war they dreamt of having work, a job, that was their dream. ‘In those days we didn’t ask for a lot,’ was how she put it. But my generation, we wanted more than peace. We’d only ever known peace, and it was pretty meaningless. We wanted material things, and to be able to enjoy ourselves. Everyone I knew wanted the same stuff – the house, the flash appliances, the car – especially women, but it left me cold.
Work we never worried about. There were more jobs than there were people, and if you didn’t like your job, you walked out and took another one down the road. Not like now, when you have to go on bended knee to get yourself the most menial of jobs. I started out as a teacher, went through teacher training and everything, but never took it up. One or two of us at the college dropped out, disgusted with the way the Conservatives, as with everything else, were forcing people out of the public sector and into the private one, running the system down, paying teachers less than they were worth, and allowing school facilities to rot. I became a janitor instead, because I didn’t want to work in a rotten system and be paid a pittance for what I considered to be a vocation rather than a career, and because I didn’t want my life’s work to go totally unappreciated. Anyway, it gave me time to write. That was my dream, to be a writer.
The kids were different. Their dreams were almost too big to be contained by the walls and fences that ran around the playground. They were mega. You could interpret their dreams from the way the kids dressed. Even though many of them came from poor backgrounds, they were dressed in Nikes, Adidas or Reeboks. They had all the gear their heroes wore. Around the basketball hoop I saw miniature Charles Barkleys, Scottie Pippens and Shaquille O’Neals. They even imitated the stars’ movements: the swagger across the court, the cool, unsmiling look, and the high fives every time they scored. It was uncanny. That’s what most of them wanted to do: they didn’t have time for this studying lark, they were in too much of a hurry to get across to the US of A and play for the NBA. This was true of the kids who were only four foot nothing, who’d never be allowed to even step onto an NBA court. In their dreams they not only dreamt of being the next Shaquille O’Neal, they saw themselves as being at least six foot seven. Size obviously came with the dream.
They believed all that. And if they weren’t going to be basketball players, then there were two other avenues open to them. They could be either a film star or a rock star. (Girls were a little different; they dreamt of being supermodels, even the fat, spotty ones.) But they weren’t dreaming all of this, that was the strange thing: to the kids this was more like reality. This is what’ll happen, they told themselves, this is what I’m going to do with my life. You could see it in their eyes, the faith. Like Teresa of Avila, they had visions.
‘I’m going to play for the Lakers,’ said one small kid, drumming the basketball on the ground.
‘The Lakers suck,’ said his friend. ‘I’m playing for the Knicks or the Bulls.’ They sounded like it was all agreed, and they were going home later that day to pack their kit and head off to the airport.
I heard one kid say he was going to play for Manchester United, another that he wanted to be a rock star and trash hotels, another that she’d be bigger than Naomi Campbell, another that he was going to star alongside Arnie in an action movie. Sitting in the playground, I heard it all. All of the kids spoke seriously, thoughtfully, as if they’d weighed up all the possible avenues of success, and these were the ones they’d now chosen. They never considered failure, nor were they content to look at the possibility of being on a lower rung of the ladder, of simply being a model, joining a local band, or playing in some amateur basketball team. No, they had to be up there with Naomi, Mick or Shaq.
I’m all for people having dreams, but these kids were dreaming way out of their league. They were fooling themselves. They were doomed to failure. They weren’t going anywhere, except straight down the road to the unemployment exchange. Then they were heading back to the abusive wife and the snotty-nosed, screaming kids, the refrigerator full of beer and crap fast food, and the debt collector banging on their front door every day.
Martin Luther King had a dream, but these kids had dreams that would dwarf anything he ever had. His dreams would never have got a look in at my playground. When I was at school I had my dream too, but it was a realistic one, or so I thought – and that’s what made me different to today’s kids. I wanted to be a writer. Not a writer of best sellers or literary masterpieces, just a published writer. My mother was the one who did my dreaming for me most of my life, certainly early on when she had the same dreams as I did, before she got suckered in by my father.
‘How’s that book of yours coming along?’ she asked when I visited home last summer. She
’s always been good like that, remembering things about people, looking as if she was taking an interest in their lives. Maybe she’s genuine, I don’t know. There’s certainly a part of her that still hopes I’m going to make something of my life, although I suspect it’s in a field other than writing.
I told her I’d finished it.
‘Will someone publish it, do you think?’
‘I expect so. That’s the only reason I’ve written it.’
‘That’s wonderful.’
The way she carefully put down the dish she was holding and turned to look at me, surprise on her face, made me elaborate a little. I didn’t want to disappoint. ‘There are one or two publishers interested.’ It seemed a reasonable embellishment.
‘That’s wonderful news, Milan.’ She was such a book lover, she probably had a soft spot for authors too, or that’s what I told myself.
‘There could be a bidding war, you know.’ Sometimes I can’t help myself. She looked puzzled, so I elaborated. ‘It’s like an auction. Publishers bid against each other to obtain the rights to your book.’
‘I always knew you’d be a success.’ And she picked up another dish to dry.
No, you didn’t, I thought.
Of course my father couldn’t stay out of it. I should have known he’d be listening. He butted in from behind his newspaper. ‘He hasn’t done it yet. Don’t count your chickens.’
‘But if there are several publishers interested … ‘
‘Two. He said two.’
‘But two publishers, don’t you think that’s a good sign?’
I wouldn’t have bothered. I’m used to him and his buckets of cold water. He’s been doing that to me all my life.
‘From what I’ve heard, they’re bastards, the lot of them.’ My father continued to demolish my mother’s dreams, her dreams for me. ‘Anyway, how can someone write about life when they’ve never experienced it? What’s he ever done with his life? You tell me what he’s going to write about – cleaning out the school toilets? Polishing the school corridors? Locking the school gates at night? What’s he done that will interest anyone?’
‘It’s a good book, it deserves to be published.’
‘Maybe it does, but I’d have thought you’d be a sight better off with a real job. You’re not going to keep a girl like Bridgette being a janitor.’
He was spot on there. I was certainly right not to tell them about Bridgette and I splitting up when it happened a few months later. I often wondered why he didn’t make a pass at her himself, he fancied her so much. (And, yes, I’m sure she’d be only too keen to go out with a village newsagent.)
But I believed what I’d been saying to my parents then, and I believe it now. I invested everything in that book, including three years of my life. It deserved to be published, of that there was no doubt in my mind.
‘One of the publishers is even talking about film rights.’ I don’t know why, but I always lay it on thick when I’m with my parents: they bring it out in me. I suppose it makes me feel good encouraging them – or my mother at least – to believe there’s some hope.
‘That’s wonderful. How exciting. Would that mean you’d go to Hollywood?’
‘I’d definitely like to write the screenplay. I’ve no desire to hand control over to someone else.’
‘But would you know how to do it?’
‘Easy. Writing the book, that’s the hard part. Anyone can write a screenplay once they’ve got an idea.’
My mother doesn’t seem to understand my desire to write, despite the fact she reads so much and loves books so much. Once she did. But now I feel as though she’s betrayed the dreams we shared, like she’s given up on me. All she’s keen on now is for me to settle to something she perceives as a proper job – oh yes, and marry Bridgette and have a family. ‘Your father never held down a job for long. I blame all the upsets he’s had in his life. He has a good brain, only he’s never done anything with it. I wish I had half his education.’ Now she thinks she sees me going the same way.
Neither of them really understands what I want to do, what I want to be. I’m separate from them, outside of them, beyond their comprehension. Even though writing has always been what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world, they couldn’t grasp that. It was completely alien to them.
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The apartment in which I’m now writing this is in a block of six in the suburb of Grbavica. It’s the same room Santo brought me to the day after I arrived in camp. ‘It is a good place to start,’ he said, as if he were dropping me off at some department in a company headquarters on my first day at work. It’s also the apartment from which I failed to shoot that publisher’s reader.
Grbavica was seized by the Serbs at the very beginning of the war, in May 1992. The suburb penetrates the belly of the town like the nodule on a piece from a jigsaw puzzle, stretching down from the steep lower slopes of Mount Trebevic to the south bank of the river. It’s the only part of Sarajevo they’ve managed to capture, and it’s scarcely a good advertisement for Serb rule. It’s a shell, a ruin, a mass of twisted, tortured, tilted steel and concrete. The only glass is underfoot. Any surface that’s still vertical is pitted with shrapnel and bullet holes. Personal belongings – crockery, books, children’s toys, articles of clothing, smashed furniture – lie scattered in the streets. Garbage spills out of ripped bags, the pulped, liquefied, stinking mess licked and picked at by both skeletal dogs and humans. Great mounds of masonry block many of the roads. At night there are bursts of manic laughter, screams, shouts, gunfire, running footsteps and smashing bottles. People flit from doorway to doorway like ghosts. Tanks rumble in the distance. I wonder briefly which is the more desirable suburb: Grbavica or across the river in the city. The six apartment blocks are down by the river. Three run east-west, and lie directly one behind the other. I’m in the front building, on the twelfth and top floor, facing the Miljacka River. The centre of the city lies at about two o’clock to my position, across the reddish, tumbling waters of the narrow river. The buildings are ordinary, what I would call Eastern European trash. Behind them are many more apartment blocks, more of the same, but with fewer floors. That’s their only redeeming feature: fewer floors. They’re concrete rectangles, like dominoes lying on their sides, with flat roofs and row upon row of small windows. The walls are dotted with gaping holes as if someone had come along with a sledgehammer and added a few extra windows. It’s a dangerous place to hang around, yet some families still skulk in the basements of the rear apartments, which are linked together by fetid, rubble-strewn, almost pitch-black corridors. These are the troglodytes of war, wrapped in rags, huddled over candles or kerosene stoves, shrinking back into the shadows whenever a sniper passes by on his way to a new eyrie.
At ground level there’s only dust and rubble. Doors have been removed, probably for firewood. The walls are chipped, the paint flaking, and graffiti, spidery black and uninspired, crawls at random across every surface. The rooms have been stripped bare. I sit well back from the windows on an old mattress I found downstairs. I prize it, my only possession, my only shred of domesticity. Why wasn’t it removed, along with everything else? I think someone must have salvaged it for themselves, and then was forced to flee and leave it behind. Maybe they were killed in the street when they went out to get a loaf of bread or a container of water. It’s more than likely.
It’s important I write these notes or observations (call them what you will) as if I’m writing them for me. (But note the ‘you’ in that sentence, sneaking in, unheralded, unwanted. Is it simply a figure of speech, or is it in fact some nameless reader I already have in the back of my mind?) I don’t want to have a reader sitting in front of me, influencing what I write. They’ve spurned me in the past, so why should I bother with them now? When I wrote my last novel I had a reader in front of me. He was a creation, as fictional as my novel, but real nevertheless. He was my ideal audience and, when I was writing I’d ask myself, how will he take this
, what will he make of that piece of news, will such and such be of interest to him? This is normal, I believe. But now I don’t want him. It’s too constraining to have a reader in front of you all the time. It’s like a guard dog, watching your every movement with a critical eye, barking whenever he’s displeased, whining when he wants something he hasn’t received, attacking you should you wander off his favoured path. I want to be free, to write only for myself – if that’s possible. Can putting a word down on a piece of paper ever be just for oneself? I could argue that I’m keeping this journal now in order to remind myself of these incidents in my life later. But if it’s not a strict reminder note – Go to the shops and buy some butter – then surely those words are for someone else? Ultimately.
I notice a certain reluctance on my part to pick up my rifle, my Steyr SSG. Is note taking my excuse, or is it because of the fiasco with the publisher’s reader? Although I came to Sarajevo to be a sniper, I’m already wondering if I can get by with just talking to people and listening. But how long would it be before Santo and the others realised I was a fake? So I dutifully go through the motions, crouching by a window, rifle at the ready, staring across the river at the deserted city, half hoping no one will appear. But this afternoon someone did.
A man walked onto the bridge that crosses the Miljacka River just to the west of the Skenderija sports centre. It’s the bridge where the first person, a female student, was shot dead in the war, in 1992. The bridge has iron railings and narrow pavements on either side, with cobblestones in the centre. On the far bank is a building that appears to have been skinned alive by bullets and mortars, most of the red brickwork, like raw bleeding flesh, now clearly visible. Behind it are the ruins of the Parliament.
This man strolled onto the bridge as if he had all the time in the world. Having spent a couple of days watching people run everywhere, even when they were carrying containers of water or baskets of food, such behaviour struck me as unusual. It was noticeable because it was different. He was so calm and relaxed he could have been taking a stroll in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon. He was probably one of the suicidal ones Santo had told me about, those who stroll along the pavements of Sarajevo as if they’re out shopping in London or Paris. ‘It is up to you if you waste those idiots. I think if they are so keen to die, we should oblige, we should help them on their way. But others say we should not help them, that we should make them suffer. Why kill them if they want to die? They say, let those who want to die, live, and let us concentrate on killing the ones who want to stay alive.’ And he’d slapped me several times on the back, and laughed his machine-gun laugh, and taken another swig from his bottle of Slivovitz.
