Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  *

  He mishandled the situation, waited three days to call her back, following the unspoken rules. Respected the laws of desirability, performed to a T the mating rituals of all the great primates of his era. She couldn’t have cared less, seemed oblivious to how much time had gone by, to conventions; she could spend an hour on the phone with him describing what she saw outside her bedroom window just as she could leave his calls unanswered for a week or call him up him several times in a row to ask him how to order a car, a meal, some plants; she said yes to everything in a gentle, distracted way that he found far more upsetting than if she had said no to everything. He wanted to grab her shoulders, shake her; she never seemed to be properly awake and it was a dream he seemed unable to escape. In short: she had gone, she’d left. She had wanted to find her mother. She had been bored. She had hated love, had hated what love did to her, a twenty-year-old eating crisps while watching porn, waiting for a man who had his life together. Are you fucking kidding me, Paul thought, it lasted a week, two at the most. You had it all and I – I had fuck-all. But he didn’t say that aloud. She wasn’t who she had been any more either, after all. In the wake of the war in the former Yugoslavia, as in the wake of all other genocides or attempted genocides, the search for the missing had become an entire industry, both a sector of the white economy and a part of the black market, and Amelia had decided to try her own luck in this new Wild West that the post-war Balkans had become.

  4

  She’d had to take two planes to get to what had been the besieged city. From cover to cover, Amelia read the special issue of a popular science magazine – the sort that Paul liked. She read it attentively, page by page, as if performing a ritual of sorts. The magazine’s theme was memory. It transpired that our memories are not stable. That, contrary to what had long been believed, they evolve. We reconstruct them every time they are recalled and each recollection – rather than consolidating them – fragments them. Meanwhile, a memory is never as fragile as when it’s being recalled. Recollection, in fact, is the best moment to modify or erase the memory in question. With electricity, for example. With electric shocks. But if an unexpected disruption occurs – say, an explosion, an attack, or maybe simply a power failure, an inopportunely timed phone call – a memory can be spontaneously weakened. The next time we recollect it, we don’t realise that it’s altered. Forgetting, in fact, is the brain’s lifelong operation. Forgetting is not a defeat but an enzyme. Each remembrance is a counter-effort.

  In conclusion: our lives are invented. The more time passes, the more our lives are invented.

  Which doesn’t bode well for my investigation, Amelia realised. She thought about her mother. And about the search she was now undertaking, that she had imagined might be an adventure but which doubtless would only be a particularly elaborate mourning ritual, a barbaric exercise she would re-enact without realising it. She shut the magazine. Then her eyes. This wouldn’t be in vain, because once these sorts of rites were completed, if they went well, it wouldn’t be unlikely for the initiate to find some sort of presence. Some sort of peace or presence. Maybe those were the same thing. It wouldn’t be any more unlikely for the initiate to die during these rites, she told herself, her eyes still shut, given how incomprehensible, how frequently violent these ceremonies are.

  I won’t draw any shapes on the ground with chalk, Amelia thought next. I won’t drink any foul concoctions, I won’t light any candles, I certainly won’t sacrifice any small animals.

  She contemplated leaving her magazine on the plane, since of course there would be other readers on the flight back, but ended up throwing it out, because its science struck her as malevolent. She didn’t want this shtick about invented memories to contaminate anyone else; it offended her sense of justice and fairness. People couldn’t go verifying everything all the time, they couldn’t go and change the rules of the game once it was underway, otherwise they’d be bound to lose.

  Well, we’re bound to lose, Amelia thought quite clearly. Her entire brain was determined to drown this thought in the more than seventy per cent of its composition that was water, and she forgot it before she had even managed to put it into words – nothing remained of it, except for a vague twinge that she attributed to the plane’s tilting as it landed. She looked at the sky a bit. And then she was in what had been the besieged city.

  Of course, she stayed at the Elisse. It was night when she arrived, she waited at the front desk a minute, imagined that the man soon to appear would be the one she had left – in which case either all would be forgiven or she would have proof, absolute proof, that she was living in hell. But it wasn’t him, it wasn’t Paul.

  She didn’t sleep well.

  *

  When the Elisse hotel chain was established in Sarajevo on the occasion of the 1984 Winter Olympics, the hotel immediately emblematised the country’s openness, its prosperity; if not already present then at least soon to come: the national prospects were sunny and the gold-tinted glass cube gleamed in the dawn of a new era. Ten years later, during the city’s siege, under the international embargo that hit what had been, but no longer could or would be, a single, unified country, the yellow bunker served as general headquarters for the international press, which to a small – very small – degree protected the building from gunfire. Even so, the upper levels were mostly destroyed. The few photos that bore testament to it – often the photos were indeed taken from there – showed something that resembled a futuristic ruin, a pyramid of sorts with glass and steel levels, sometimes smoking since small fires kept breaking out in the rubble of the upper floors. After the war, the cube was restored from top to bottom. Rebuilt, just like the rest of the city, exactly as it was. But exactly as it was meant little; the Elisse hotel might not have changed, but the same could hardly be said of the times and the mores. What had been cutting-edge in the eighties, a promise of the future, was now both outdated and self-obsessed, that is, rather ridiculous, a cumbersome specimen of former visions of the future, like so many places and, even more so, objects (Walkmans, fax machines) which were met with some bemused looks. The Elisse chain belonged to the realm of science-fiction films from the turn of the millennium: a vision of a potential yet abandoned direction. A temporal impasse, an evolutionary dead end, an avant-garde that had become kitsch. Olympic palace, ostentatious bunker, high-class memorial – all these eras were layered atop one another and enclosed within the huge tinted windows that (to all appearances) nothing could mar: huge, perfectly square windows seemingly dipped in gold. What a sight it had to be to behold the end of a world filtered through those panes. Here as elsewhere they blazed at sunset, turning, for a few minutes, this apparently soulless place into a gleaming cube of gold, its edges disappearing in a halo of light. During the war it was the entire city’s favourite sight. And, as Amelia would come to discover, sunset had been the only moment to get some fresh air: the air conditioning had stopped working after the second week of the siege, and so they took advantage of those reflections, which blocked out their silhouettes in the snipers’ sights. The irony was not lost on the experts; for the sake of democratised luxury, all the rooms of the Elisse hotel had a view: as such, all of them were almost equally open to enemy fire. Often people slept in the hallways. Over the course of the siege nearly all the windows were cracked, shattered, or smashed. Only bits remained of the upper floor, but even so at sunset the glass cube still stood as an undeniable reminder of its own existence, its sturdy form reminiscent of certain Aztec step pyramids: filigreed, worn down, but still standing.

  *

  A day or two later, ashamed of her own fear, Amelia ventured out. Solid, reliable information was hard to find, and what she did notice would go on tormenting her thereafter – all the while corresponding, in a vague way, to an unclear, hazy vision of things that had haunted her for a long time, since childhood, in which her contemporaries were swift to see symptoms of mental illness rather than an especially keen knowledge of the world. What she notic
ed: Nadia Dehr multiplying, Nadia Dehr vaporised, Nadia Dehr apparently existing in several states at the same moment. And she wasn’t the only one; this was something that the war seemed to do to people, to who they were. Nadia Dehr wasn’t the only one, it bore mentioning; she hadn’t done anything special. On the contrary, she had more or less adopted the habits and customs of the wartime city, had more or less blended in, so perfectly that the wartime city had ended up swallowing her up, and she had disappeared without leaving any trace – or, rather, by leaving contradictory traces that were swept away like stick drawings in the sand. And so the facts would have to be re-established – later; when there were no longer lives to save. But who would report on the confusion, on what seemed to be confusion but was in fact order, however temporary yet real – who would recall the chaos that made possible these shifting states, these new skies of artillery shells and cluster bombs? In this way the petty criminals, the thugs who became war heroes, took part in the same infernal regime: they were everywhere at once. Normal laws no longer applied; here and now changed their meaning and could be both decisively here and now (the moment a bullet entered one’s leg while running errands, for example; even when hiding behind a makeshift shield – a metal trashcan lid, for example, or a passenger door from a burned-out car) and not at all here and now, the opposite of here and now that would therefore be something like everywhere, all the time, and as such one could be in many places at once, playing many roles at once, a poet and a smuggler, and even in many states at once: wounded and unscathed, clear-headed and insane, and in the most extreme cases, simultaneously alive and dead. The besieged city was an experience at a 1:1 scale. Getting involved was just that; one couldn’t simply be a witness. Everybody had a part to play. Everybody was waging war. Seeing images on television, hundreds or thousands of miles away in another time zone, while chopping vegetables, or decorating a Christmas tree, or talking on the phone: that too, Amelia said, was waging war.

  And speaking of parts to play, Sarajevo became a stage of sorts. Cameras from all over the globe were trained on the city, journalists rushed there, activist intellectuals came for a stint there; they were framed in the cross hairs of cameras rather than snipers’ rifles. It was one of the paradoxes of the besieged city: everybody rushed there and yet everybody also wanted to flee. For those who had suitable travel documents, the porous borders verged on the dramatic and the obscene; the obscene and the sinister; and more than once Amelia, in her search, heard about those Westerners who came for a bit of war tourism, some who would even pay whatever it took to go into the mountains or perch on the roofs to live the sniper experience, take part in manhunts, gun down civilians in their own streets or even through their own windows – and Paul, shuddering, saw symptoms of mental illness there, but whether the mental illness was Amelia’s or the world’s he was in no position to decide; it all seemed to him like a myth, as dark and cruel as any legend, but maybe his mind and his body, his physical self, just refused to accept such depravity. He simply blocked out such an unsettling prospect, while Amelia had no way or wish to resist it.

  And speaking of theatre: Amelia’s future husband told her about a part he had played, as a child, during the war, in a performance directed by someone he thought had to be Nadia Dehr, even if she no longer used that name – or even any name – at the time. A play that had left behind no trace, no relic, apart from the memories of the children who had become arguably troubled adults and vaguely recalled having played trees, trees descending upon us, that was one of the lines he (the husband) remembered, not entirely sure whether, in the play that Nadia had directed with the children, it had been a threat or a promise. In any case, he had been this camouflaged child walking amongst the others towards the stage, towards the centre of the stage (which wasn’t a stage but the basement meeting room of the Elisse hotel, and he remembered the football games he’d played there far better than those rehearsals, chaotic scenes that, going by his memory, only happened during power cuts – which might simply have been a way to endure those outages; in the darkness they had candles, he was sure he remembered that; but not always). But maybe he remembered wrong; as that, specifically, was what he was always doing, as a child, during the war: looking at the mountains around him and wondering whether they might descend upon the city. Whether the cabins, the trees, the flurries of snow would descend upon the city, whether the enemy army, or the guns of the enemy army, would. This is what he – we can call him Paul – remembered as an adult; is more or less what he remembered of Nadia Dehr. Before trying to find my mother and failing, Amelia said, I didn’t realise just how relative everything is. Just how easily anyone can be both alive and dead.

  So: the Serbian army was shelling the city, which was resisting. How? With what? The epicentre of international impotence, the world capital of the black market. Like a huge stage, and in this way everyone was guilty: those who conspired, of conspiring; those who survived, of surviving; those who looked on, of looking on; those who knew, of knowing; those who did not know, of not knowing. The most gruesome mass crimes were carried out without any witnesses, outside the city. Ethnic cleansing, torture, those things that Nadia Dehr had written about, with which she had filled a box. Had she seen them? There were ways to get in and out of the besieged city, unwritten laws decided how porous the borders were or weren’t. Planes that didn’t show up on screens. A tunnel in the mountain. Then she disappeared, we lost all trace of her, said Amelia, the way we lost all trace of the war profiteer who people say – and I have no reason to doubt them – held court at the Elisse hotel, at the bar of the Elisse hotel, and speculated on cigarettes and medicines and then vanished one day; and who people say (or maybe my mother just wrote it) woke up, his mouth dry, his head pounding, outside the city, in the forest, on the front lines; who people say woke up amongst the foot soldiers, the cannon fodder, the sixteen- or eighteen-year-old boys sent out to defend the city and who fell dead, and he barely had the time to realise what had happened to him before he was hit by a bullet. The besieged city might be the world capital of the black market but there was no question that a fundamental sense of justice held sway there – a wartime justice.

  Science progresses, Amelia said. There are thousands of ways to raze a city, thousands of ways to wage war, and they change. They progress; some even claim that they are science, its most direct expression. Whereas the ways to resist – that is, to live in a besieged city – are always the same. You hide. You pray. You seal down windows, keep the rooms poorly lit or not at all, or with candles, with makeshift lamps. You wear several pairs of socks, or all your clothes. You burn books to stay warm, from the least-liked ones to the most beloved ones, from the least important ones to the most necessary ones (a book’s use in wartime bears no relation, of course, to its charm in peacetime). You look (in the eyewitness accounts, it comes back over and over) at the gleaming tails of airborne projectiles. You wonder who could decipher the birth chart of this new life you’re leading, in which all futures are impermanent, shuffled again, negotiated anew each day, each night. You slip into the darkness like cats; you celebrate for no reason; you set up music bands; rock keeps your soul going, that’s the long and short of it – there had never been so many rock musicians or bands in Sarajevo as during the war. You say or think or sing or nod while walking down the road: kill me, kill me if you want, I won’t exist any less, maybe it’ll make me exist even more. A regime, a heretofore unknown intensity of existence, wholly unfamiliar in peacetime. You perform in theatrical productions staged by idealistic, half-insane foreigners; a childhood amongst trees, a childhood as a tree – and afterwards, people forgot everything, pretended to forget everything, what mattered was what came back, what remained and what people refused to talk about ever again; or only did so with great difficulty.

  I’m rediscovering words, Amelia added after some time. It isn’t just a question of language. With you I can say things that I never say. I gave blood. For DNA identification, databases – for the mas
s graves which are still being uncovered nowadays, because someone reported one or a heavy rain, a mudslide uncovered one. Because nothing visible could distinguish Nadia Dehr’s femur or humerus from another woman’s femur or humerus. And that, too, is a black market – a racket – if only you knew. Bribes. False hopes. False hopes were an entire industry during the post-war years I spent in this city. False hopes were a national economy. But if my mother’s there, in one of those anonymous mass graves, it would be the acme of documentary poetry, its greatest triumph: proof not only that one can suffer from someone else’s suffering, but also that one can die from someone else’s death.

  *

  Reconstruction was bewilderingly swift, practically overnight, so to speak. Shrapnel vanished from the walls, bullet holes were plastered over and repainted, and the entire city – from the centre, the historical areas that were also commercial areas, to the periphery – smelled like fresh paint, hot tar, a huge film set. Looking for her mother, Amelia realised that she had come too late, that life’s relentless forward march had erased not only the traces of the siege but also the memories of it inscribed in bullet-riddled, gouged-out surfaces that no longer existed. The more the city became what it had formerly been – and more – the less the people she met seemed to remember Nadia Dehr, who grew less believable, less consistent, who vanished into thin air. Became a myth, a ghost, a hazy memory not of a person, of a flesh-and-blood being, but of a legend, recalled with more or less certainty. Amelia found herself fleeing the reconstruction, taking refuge in the outskirts, in the neighbourhoods where the city still bore the scars of the conflict; but her endeavour was, like fleeing a massive wave or even time itself, doomed to failure. She wasn’t alone, however. Others also had their reasons for not wanting the war to disappear from the city. They had lived through it, grown up within it. The city was their mother. The war was their mother. And this was how she met him. We can call him Paul, if you want, she said to Paul who didn’t want to, not at all, but didn’t say anything. He was young, but not younger than her. He had grown up in the besieged city, he knew how absurdly, impossibly constructed the stories, the rumours, were; at the beginning she relied on him, he was a guide, an interpreter, a machine for going back in time; then she learned to understand him, his obsessions – he wondered if the snipers’ bullets were still buried in the walls, under the layers of primer and plaster and paint, if they were still there like foreign bodies, like pearls, fossils; and which hearts, which heads these projectiles were aimed at even though people presumed they were frozen, because their timescales were no longer human but geological – geologically speaking, nevertheless, it was clear that they were still on their fatal trajectory. Imperceptible but fatal. At night he filled the scars left by mortar shells on the sidewalks and roads with resin, with a red, vivid material that solidified like pools of blood, which always looked freshly poured but was as hard as ice or amber to the touch. This was another idea of memory. Another idea of art. He felt personally insulted, dispossessed, by this intentional, desired-for return to something that they called normality but which remained resolutely foreign to him. Which no longer existed for him, which had been lost in mornings without water, afternoons of mortar rounds, nights in blackouts. He felt as if he had been expelled or immured, like one of those bullets stuck in the walls. His city was the wartime city.