Twice Born, page 35
The knowledge she gained as a biologist is coming in handy during this famine. She offers me an herbal tea made from fir tree buds.
“It’s delicious.”
She asks me why I’ve returned.
“I want to be with Diego, and he wants to be here.”
Her eyes grow cloudy with emotion.
She, too, has followed Jovan all her life. They still kiss each other on the lips, even now that young people and children are dying all around, even though the fact that the two of them are still alive makes her ashamed of their love.
Plastic sheets have replaced the brocade curtains that used to hang over the windows and the pictures on the walls hang crookedly with no glass left in their frames. Velida and Jovan’s beautiful apartment has shrunk. They carried their beds into the kitchen, the only room with heat. Velida traded her fur coat and her engagement ring with its ruby stone for an old stove on the black market. They dug a hole in the wall for the vent. Nowadays every apartment has a hole to let smoke out through resuscitated chimney flues and makeshift pipes. The city is a huge encampment.
I’m scared to go out. I stay in the kitchen with Velida, where I watch her thin, curved back.
“How will you manage in the winter?”
They’ve already started burning their furniture. Jovan chops things up himself. He cuts the legs off the little table in the living room and smashes the drawers from the bedside tables and the sideboard. Velida cuts the rugs into strips and makes blocks of cloth that burn slowly, like coal.
There are no longer any trees in the parks. In just a short amount of time the city has stripped itself of its greenery. From everywhere comes the noise of saws and of branches being dragged like big brooms through the rubble.
Jovan complains. They cut the linden tree below the apartment. It provided some protection from the snipers. He still has a painting he once made of it, the trunk and the big branch re-created with dots of watercolor.
“Trees are life.”
He’s angry at the profiteers who cut down trees to get rich on the black market.
It’s October and not all that cold yet. Other years it’s snowed as early as August, but this year, God willing, the snow will take its time.
And so life dies. The trees fall one by one. People need wood for the coming winter, and in the meantime they make space for the dead, who are buried everywhere now, in the parks, in the Koševo soccer field, because the cemeteries are overflowing. Everywhere you find those mounds, dark piles of displaced earth.
The animals up in the mountains continue to attack the rubble. A shell fell on a group of children who were playing soccer behind our house in a peaceful area that had already been utterly destroyed. The Chetniks declared that the shell landed there by accident. They said that it was fired by the Bosnian Green Berets, not by them. The dead children didn’t declare a thing. But the soccer ball came right into Velida’s house. It unglued itself from its covering and made its way in. She didn’t find out about the children until that evening. Now she looks at that ball, which she put in the cat’s empty basket, and asks me, “Who am I supposed to give it back to?”
Night never ends now. Diego comes home with rolls of film. He empties his camera and throws them in a corner. He doesn’t tell me anymore what he takes pictures of.
At night, darkness engulfs the apocalypse. There isn’t a trace of life. The sirens blare their alarm, a forgotten voice that no longer serves any purpose. Night after night, Sarajevo dies when the dark descends like a lid over the city. The survivors, like stubborn ants driven by affection and a desire to share their city’s fate, find themselves buried alive in its coffin.
At night all that remains is the wind that comes down from the mountains to wander like a restless spirit around the city.
Diego says this is just a taste of what’s to come. One day the whole world will be like this, burnt on the inside, mortally wounded, nothing but rusted debris, gassy chimneys, black tongues of spent fuel. We’re seeing the end of the world, just like in the comics, like in the sickest and most apocalyptic movies. He smiles. At night hope vanishes and Diego becomes funereal. I look through the dark at his grin, his shiny eyes. He drinks too much, liters and liters of that awful beer. When he gets up to take a piss he bangs into things. When he’s sleeping I touch him to make sure he’s alive. I’m scared of this dark, a real abyss. It’s as if we were buried below the earth in the depths of an underground lake.
From somewhere comes the sound of a spade digging in the earth. At night Sarajevo buries its dead, slides them silently into the ground. Snipers like nothing better than gatherings in open spaces, so Sarajevo must wait for the dark. The living remain silent, their tears nailed to their chests like the boards of the coffins made from old tables and armoire doors.
The only voices audible in the night are the hoarse barkings of the roaming packs of skeletal dogs, family pets made wild by the war, abandoned by their owners, who left or died or are too hungry to spare any food.
Then dawn comes. Sometimes it’s not the mortars that wake you but the birds who come back and sing, and then you think that maybe someday this will really end.
So the survivors can leave the city to have a picnic or gather mushrooms on one of the mountains, Jahorina, Mount Trebević.
So the number one tram can once again go to the waterfalls and fields of Ilidža.
It’s incredible to see so many people materialize at dawn. You wonder where they hid, whether they’re real living people or people who’ve been raised from the dead. No one stays home. It’s time to go out for food, water, black market bargains and ration cards for bread and humanitarian cans. People do their rounds: Caritas, the Protestant organizations and the Jewish Benevolencija, which is the most generous of them all and helps everyone. They help Sarajevo’s Muslims, who years ago helped Jews hide from the Nazis. That’s how the first few hours of the day pass. Death is certain if you stay inside.
Every time she goes out Velida says, “I’m going.” She pauses, then says, “I’m going to meet my shell.”
Every so often someone falls. A woman waiting in line for water. A rabbit.
You mustn’t stop to look, mustn’t allow your eyes time to see, to feel affection. This is the thing you have to learn, how not to give the dead time to reveal themselves, to become real. You have to move forward without distinguishing between a body and a sandbag, leave it all behind, indistinct, distance yourself from what’s real, look only at your own path without giving the dead a name, an overcoat, a hair color. Leave them, learn to move past them at a distance, pretend you didn’t see them. Pretend they aren’t there.
Because if you stop, if you let yourself slide back, then inevitably you’ll slow down.
But children are curious. They stretch their necks to look as their mothers pull them along. Children move toward death like squirrels toward picnic leftovers.
Yet this city where people continue to die emanates a hidden force like sap rising up from the heart of the forest.
Gojko came to get me so I could hug Sebina once again. She reminded me of a turtle with her dry, triangular face and her mouth like a curled piece of straw. I hugged her. We stood on the threshold of that incredibly tidy apartment. I felt her head against my stomach.
“Why are you still here, Bijeli Biber?”
She doesn’t want to leave on a convoy full of lonely children.
Some of her friends have left. They send letters and all of them seem sadder than her. She says her room is still there and that, all things considered, it’s not so bad. Gojko comes almost every day and they have the things they need, although she’s getting really sick of rice and macaroni.
“And then there’s this awful smell!” She laughs.
You find the smell of canned mackerel from the humanitarian aid packages in every house and in every burp that comes out of the mouths of people as lucky as they are.
She tells me that she’s used now to the alarms and the cellar. Her mouth is covered with the chocolate I brought her.
She doesn’t go to practice anymore. The gym has been converted into a dormitory for refugees. Now her voice grows muddy after all her enthusiasm. But she doesn’t cry, she simply frowns again and shrugs. She does a handstand, leaning against the wall, then walks on her hands, her hair touching the floor. Her skirt falls down like a limp lily. I look at her spotted legs, the knobs of her knees, the little veins visible beneath her skin, her flowered underpants. She descends into a backbend, her back curving like a contortionist’s.
“Don’t hurt yourself ...”
She spreads her legs in a perfect split. It’s a little show just for me. I clap. Her smile remains, along with the solitary noise of my hands one against the other.
I ask about the bag hanging off the doorknob. She says it holds their documents, the papers for the house, their birth certificates and blood types and Mirna’s driving license along with their money and their jewels and her father’s watch, everything ready in case a shell hits the building and they have to run.
She coughs, then uses her asthma inhaler. She laughs and says it tastes bad. “Like a stinkbug.”
“Since when have you had asthma?”
Since she started staying home alone. Her throat closes on her. She’s anxious about Mirna and scared she won’t come back. She paces up and down in her shoes that light up the dark hallway.
“They still work!”
“Of course. They recharge themselves.”
News of the dead reaches her, but from a distance, because Mirna protects her by keeping her in the house. But Sebina knows that it’s possible to die while you’re out walking. She warns me to be careful. “Because they don’t know you’re Italian. They’ll think you’re from Sarajevo and they’ll shoot at you.”
I go out with Diego. I wear the bulletproof vest he never wears. We walk silently through the rubble along with the others. They don’t run. They’re composed, their eyes just a bit wider than the eyes of the inhabitants of a peacetime city. With their dirty hair and slept-in clothes, the men are more disheveled, but you see some, in jacket and tie, who look like professors or managers. Where are they going? Schools and offices are closed. They cross the dust in their loafers. Their black briefcases must be full of documents or readings to hand out in class. They walk carefully through this metaphysical landscape, almost in slow motion. There’s something unnatural about the calm of this minefield. The people make a strange impression, like silhouettes in a theater set. They’re stiff with fear. The part of them that runs is their eyes, which move warily, like real eyes looking out of a cardboard cutout. There are signs at the intersections now: PAZI SNIPER! Beware of snipers.
Everyone is thin. There’s not a single overweight person left. I’ll have to tell the girls back at the gym. Cellulite? Come to Sarajevo, where there’s nothing to eat and you walk all day long. The months of the siege can be counted in the sad strips of white growth on the heads of women who can no longer dye their hair. But young women manage somehow to hold on to their elegance as they walk along with their haggard faces perfectly made up.
It’s a sign of resistance, a thumbing of the nose at the animals up above, that everyone goes out, obstinately calm, in high heels and lipstick through the passageways opened up by the war, on the obligatory journeys between sandbag trenches and heaps of iron beams.
We reach the beer factory. Diego photographs the long water lines, the uncovered pipe punctuated by little mouths where people fill their containers.
Wheels. There are things people never used to count because there were so many of them, like anywhere else in the world. But now ... wheels. Everyone talks about wheels. Everyone asks you whether or not you have an old one.
Točak ... Točak.
With wheels you can drag along the things you manage to scavenge—water containers, pieces of wood, pieces of machinery.
Diego takes a picture of an old man dragging a baby carriage that holds the roots of a tree, a big dirty wooden baby that will be useful when winter comes.
Your day is what you catch, in the lowlands, in the mud of the rubble as the snipers try to catch you.
“Did you know that mothers are their favorite targets?”
No, I didn’t.
“The snipers like to see the desperate, wide-open mouths of crying children.”
Diego takes pictures of the children who have never stopped playing. They hide inside unstable buildings, below the cement slabs of collapsing ceilings. He kneels down to talk to them. He rummages through his pockets and gives them what he finds there. Frequently he lets them attack him, lets them put their hands on his face, in his hair. He carries them on his shoulders and doesn’t even get angry when they touch his camera lenses.
He takes my picture, as well, with the crater of the library in the background.
He says, “Stand there.”
I wonder if he still loves me or if I’m just a ghost from the life he lived before. He moves his head constantly, looking all around. Who is he looking for?
The Beg’s mosque is among the ruined buildings. At sunset Diego takes pictures of the faithful who kneel on their rugs to pray before heaps of rubble. In Titova Street people stop to read and lower their heads before a typewritten list of the dead that someone hangs each night.
We step into a kafana, a rugged room with tables grouped together far from the street. There’s nothing on the counter but a few pieces of dark cake, but they serve strong Nescafé frappé with a bit of foam; it almost seems like Italian espresso. The air is full of Drina smoke and the shouts of drunken men in homemade military uniforms, militiamen from a ragtag army, combat heroes and former scoundrels promoted to the rank of local commander. A motionless woman sits with one elbow on the table, her face resting awkwardly in the palm of one hand. The gesture drags her features downward, dilates her nostrils, shows her dark teeth, closes one of her eyes. She doesn’t seem to notice any of what’s happening around her. Maybe she’s come here to recover from something frightening.
Maybe she’s been disfigured by sorrow.
Bewildered women. Old men still as statues. We drink our Nescafé. For the umpteenth time I ask Diego what point there is in staying. “Why are we here?”
Why this absurdity, this punishment?
He doesn’t answer. He licks up the last drop of his coffee. His tongue is white, dirty like mine. “I didn’t ask you to come.”
And in our room, later on, when we have nothing to eat because we didn’t think about it earlier, and our stomachs are green and sour, Diego’s voice comes to me through the dark. “Go back to Italy, my love.”
It’s raining. The sky is melting, disintegrating. There was thunder and lightning all night long, nature’s blasts mingling with those of human malice. I lie awake a long time listening to the contest in the sky. It’s as if God had become angry and unleashed his fury into the sky, wetting the mouths of the cannons, the mortars and the antiaircraft guns aimed at the ground, the gashes of the trenches. There can’t be anything much but mud up in the mountains. Maybe the trees up in the woods won’t be able to hold back this flood and the earth will slide down into the valley like sludge, dragging along orchards and the houses of the sanjakbegs.
The rain targets the plastic sheets on the windows and from now on there’s this horrible noise. It’s cold. The season is changing quickly. These walls, cracked to the ceiling, no longer protect us. There’s a smell of dirty clothes and of damp. Diego is curled up beneath the covers, his head under the sheets, his feet naked and yellow. There’s no more gas left in the camping stove. It went out with one last blue puff, a flame that lasted a very short time, just like a spent soul. I go down to the communal kitchen to look for some coffee. Velida is in line, her legs wet to the knees, an enameled pitcher in her hand. She jumps with a start and drops the pitcher.
“It was just thunder,” I tell her.
I bend and pick up the pitcher, which is chipped now in two places so that its iron soul shows through.
“One more broken thing.” She smiles.
She smells strange, too. The smell of the citizens of Sarajevo. It’s not just because water’s scarce, because today there’s rainwater to wash with. It’s the fatigue and the panic oozing from people’s bodies, a before-death smell like the one terrified animals let off in self-defense. These are upended bodies, the upset stomachs of people who eat grass and don’t sleep and leave their homes with the certainty of death.
It rains on the little line in the courtyard. Women in slippers, trembling soups.
“Look what bad shape we’re in.”
This morning Velida can cry because it’s raining so hard no one will see her tears. A woman shoves us in the line and Velida steps aside to let her pass. Then she gives the woman her milk ration as well. Who knows where the provisioner managed to find real milk. It’s been months since anyone’s had a glimpse of it. I get angry and tell Velida she’s too thin to be so generous. But she doesn’t want to turn into an animal. She refuses to take part in this struggle between desperate people.
“She has children,” she says. “All I have is Death.”
She raises her head. Her wet hair sticks to her scalp like clumps of drenched wool.
“I can see him. I managed to keep him at bay until recently, but now he’s here. I’ve let Death in. He sits in the kitchen with me. He watches me and keeps me company. He asks me to dance.”
I go back upstairs with some coffee. Diego is ready to go out. He’s wearing a lightweight red raincoat with a rip in the back.
“Where are you going?”
He can’t stand being closed up in here. He doesn’t mind the rain. In fact, he likes it.
He fixes the raincoat with two pieces of white medical tape from the shoe box that contains our medicine kit.
