excerpted from the print magazine…
First Act
Even seven years after I left my hometown Sarajevo to become one of the marbles
in the great world mosaic of emigrants, I still feel guilty about living somewhere
other than Bosnia.
Yes, I know I am not the only one who chose to move from the insecurity of a war
at home to the big world of possibilities. I am not the only one who followed
the instinct to escape and forget. I am just one of the three million Bosnians
living abroad since the war.
By the way, Goran, I say to myself, don‘t forget that every fifth inhabitant
of the Earth carries a passport different from that of his or her country of origin.
But these facts still don‘t alleviate the feeling of being a traitor that
must reside in every emigrant. “Once you experience ten days? delay
in the arrival of the present you sent to your father for his birthday,?
my friend, the sculptor Sasha Bukvic, tells me, “you can‘t feel otherwise
than as a traitor.” Or when the telephone is the only connection with your
previous life, your family and relatives still living in the country you were
born in.
But if that is the only burden carried from your previous life, then you can consider
yourself a happy person.
Since new wars replace old ones so fast, the fear of forgetting recent history
is one of the most justified fears we face. The lesson we learned at school was
that Historia est magistra vitae — history is a great teacher. Even I have
some doubt in that Latin sentence, whether because we are bad pupils or history
is in fact a bad teacher. Because of my doubt, I have a need to repeat some of
the facts that shouldn‘t be forgotten.
Not one day passes that I don‘t remember the victims of grenades and sniper
bullets that were fired by the Serbian Army from its position surrounding Sarajevo.
For four years they treated the civilians as clay pigeons. I can describe the
black statistics of war by recalling just the first year:
My mother died. She couldn‘t stand another war fifty years after she survived
WWII. My brother was badly wounded by a sniper bullet. He died five years later
because he never fully recovered. The architect Brankica was killed by a grenade
just after her husband died, leaving two seven-year-old kids. Edo, a sixteen-year-old
technician, was shot by a sniper while washing his favourite Rolling Stones T-shirt
on his terrace. Our neighbour, father of three daughters, was shot while tying
his shoelaces on the street. Admira and her six-month-old baby were killed by
a grenade that flew into her house while she was feeding the child. These were
some of the civilians I knew, not to mention the soldiers whom I did not know.
And the horror stories that came with refugees from small Bosnian towns about
slaughtered families and entire villages in flame. For us, who knew nothing about
war, it seemed that even our darkest imagination was nothing in comparison with
reality.
Living through that period without any running water or electricity, with the
telephone line cut off and surviving on food from UN humanitarian aid programs,
we learned that human life is cheap.
I was a Serb endangered by other Serbs, since I had children with a Muslim wife,
and rejected Serbian nationalistic euphoria, believing instead in a multireligious
Bosnia.
But every time I think about the horror of those days, strangely, I can‘t
help but smile. If war hadn‘t happened, I wouldn‘t have learned what
precious neighbours I had. We all became specialists in categories we never dreamed
of and we shared our knowledge. Since my first duty in the morning was to collect
water in plastic canisters at the public wells provided by the UN (which took
me at least a few hours), I would bring the water to my neighbour Krkalic, who
was too old to go himself. His sister taught me how to make a meal for four people
using just one small can of meat. Another neighbour, Velo, taught me how to connect
my radio transistor to the dead telephone wires and make it work without using
batteries. I made him a little woodstove using an empty tin can. It was not enough
for cooking meals but it could make tea or coffee. I wouldn‘t have discovered
my mason?s skills if a grenade hadn‘t destroyed the entire wall of
my first-floor neighbour?s apartment. He, in turn, wouldn‘t have discovered
his skill to wrap perfectly in plastic foil my windows broken by bullets?
