Chapter 13

B atteries, vitamins, camping lights. What else? Everything. They needed everything. Antibiotics, tablets for disinfecting the water. Cigarettes, powdered milk, canned meat. I’d walk into stores and pull out a crumpled sheet of paper. Gojko had dictated the list to me, and now I was following his orders. My fear had passed, and I was driven not by courage but by a sense of purpose, insignificant as it may have been.

I’d already prepared a package and sent it through Caritas, but it never arrived. The best packages were ripped apart and plundered. Now the package would come with me, an enormous wheeled suitcase made of stretchy but resistant fabric.

 

The saleswoman in the luggage shop looked nonplussed at the thin, strange woman who sat on the black suitcase to see if the fabric would hold.

“What do you need it for?”

“A cadaver.”

She laughed at the humor as dark as the suitcase. I paid and dragged the suitcase toward home.

There’s a dried-up woman, a sterile woman, ravaged by silence. She’s dragging a big empty suitcase along the sidewalk. Soon the suitcase will swell with all manner of things. Filling that suitcase will be her reason for living in the days to come.

The layers, packed and repacked at night. First the hardest, bulkiest things, then the little objects, the most delicate things, glass bottles of medicine. The suitcase sits and watches me. I’m no longer alone.

Everything I put in there is a hope for life.

Don’t forget sanitary pads. Women can’t get them anymore.

In the pharmacy I stop and skim the pink and purple bundles. Extra-slim pads, absorbent but super flat, the most expensive kind, the ones that don’t show under even the tightest pants. They take up the least space. I arrange the packages in the suitcase, a huge layer of pads. These thin pads should do the trick. How much flow can such hungry women have?

Dad brings things, too. He really seems to see the suitcase as a coffin.

“I’m going to bring him back,” I tell him.

He doesn’t say a word. He obeys my pain, my fury.

The suitcase takes up time, fills entire days. We fight because of it. I told you, I can’t carry bulky things! It won’t hold another fucking thing, can’t you see? And I throw the blankets he’s brought in his face.

It’s as if it were supposed to grow by night, fill up like a big belly, like a shipping container, as if it were supposed to save, feed and dress all of Sarajevo. My eyes glitter when I look at it. I get up at night to check the expiration date on the antibiotics and the energy bars. There’s nothing that isn’t useful or necessary. I look at the suitcase the way a mother looks at her daughter’s trousseau.

How much life is contained by that war?

How much death is contained by this peace?

Life has come back to me from my feet upward, from my sex, my belly.

I go into a UPIM department store to buy a mountain of markers and drawing pads.

“Are you a teacher, ma’am?”

I say, “I’m going to Sarajevo.”

The woman, heavyset and worn out by the routine of her job as a cashier, changes expression and becomes an enormous palpitating mother. Her face flushes in splotches, a sign of her humanity. The stock clerk, who’s got a pierced ear and a junkie’s teeth, helps, too, and so does the manager in his striped tie. They drag things up out of the basement, unsold stationery and clothing.

“Please, ma’am. Take it. Bring it with you.”

The stock clerk is the angriest. He swallows.

“They use the knives we use to take the pits out of olives to take people’s eyes out of their sockets.”

He used to go to Yugoslavia on vacation. He even dated a girl from Split. Paradise, he says.

 

The girls at the gym kick their legs. It’s the newest thing, a plastic step. They step up onto it and back down, sweating.

I’m at the back. I look at the little asses in their thong leotards. I step back down off the plastic step. I’m in shape from running on the treadmill. You have to be in shape to go back to Sarajevo. You have to have what it takes to sidestep death, so that it will take someone older than you, someone who’s not in such good shape.

In the dressing rooms the girls rub lotion on their sculpted bodies and prance around chitchatting about men and diets as they put on makeup and pull up their stockings.

My eyes are heavy. The warmth of the showers and blow dryers makes me sleepy. Goodbye, girls, goodbye. Goodbye, little twits.

 

Dad has become better than me at finding things for the suitcase. He wanders around the market stalls at Porta Portese buying little sets of wrenches, spools of copper wire, transistors, even a night viewing device. The suitcase will burst. I look at it. It’s the last night. Finally, I can go. I’ve finally got a place on a humanitarian flight.

Viola calls me. They’ve discovered a lump in her breast. She cries about her breast and cries because I’m leaving. “You’re my best friend.”

I’ve never been much of a friend to this accident-prone girl. She’s created the whole thing on her own. But tonight I think it’s actually worked. There are people who penetrate you like cancer, though you’re not sure when it happened.

“Are you scared?” I ask.

“Who gives a shit about the lump?” I can’t tell if she’s laughing or crying. “What about you? Are you scared?”

I’m afraid of everything, the trucks on the highway, the crowd at a concert. I’m afraid of lightning. Of course I’m afraid of a war.

Dad comes over with a crate of just-ripening peaches. I refuse to take them, but then we make a last layer before the woolen things.

Armando sits on the suitcase and presses down with his rear end. I pull the zipper closed around him. Now the suitcase is an enormous closed body.

I drag it around the house and make sure I can lift it. I have to be independent. No one will be there to help me get my humanitarian baggage off a luggage carousel.

I keep it beside me during the flight, which seems to go by in a flash, probably because all my fear has come back and now, if only I could, I’d be on my way to New York. The inside of the plane is bare metal. There are a few naked seats attached to the wall. The rest is empty space occupied by boxes and by piles of military cloth. We fly over the sea and then over land.

Something acrid rises in my throat, as if my stomach were fermenting. My arms and head are rigid. My feet press into the vibrating metal. The deafening noise of the engines burns the sky. Now I know. I feel it. It could happen here. We’re inside. We’ve become a target for the men in the woods. Once again I see the TV images of scraps of planes downed by missiles, pieces of cockpits and wings that went crashing down through pine branches in forests as thick as mud. My mouth is completely dry, my tongue inert gray flesh like moldy bread.

There are only three other civilians on the plane, two doctors and Vanda, a volunteer for an independent radio station. They’re on peace missions to this land without peace. Vanda is robust and masculine and disheveled-looking in the way Slavic men sometimes are. She’s the most relaxed one in the group. She’s already been to Sarajevo twice since the beginning of the war. She’s like a big expert mouse that has figured out how to navigate confinement. She’s dressed like a war correspondent from the movies. The pockets covering her vest look like hiding places for hand grenades. She cracks her gum over and over again, little explosions that make me jump.

The smell of Dad’s peaches wafts out of my suitcase. Vanda smiles and cracks her gum. She probably thinks I’m a nut. She asks me if I’m flying back out tonight. She says the intellectuals usually stay for a few hours, just enough time to say they’ve been there, enough time to catch a whiff of the smell of burnt ants.

“Burnt ants?”

“That’s what dead people smell like.”

Maybe she thinks I’m one of those pen-and-ink profiteers. “I’m coming to stay with my husband. He’s a photographer. He’s been in Sarajevo for weeks.”

She asks his name and says she knows him. She saw him at the end of August. “He’s nice. Crazy.”

“Crazy? Why?”

“He was swimming in the Miljacka while they were firing from above.”

I shake my head, but she’s sure. “He’s got curly hair, right, and a beard?”

“No, he doesn’t have a beard.”

“Then it must have been another Diego.”

Another Diego, I think, another Diego, and the plane goes down while I’m thinking this. It makes a spiral landing because it’s wartime, a very abrupt descent. For a moment I get a narrow glimpse of the mountains. Then I feel the landing gear as it touches down.

 

There are three customs desks at the airport and three sets of barricades. Soldiers from warring armies get coffee from the same dispenser, the only one left. I watch the surreal scene, enemies bending to retrieve little cups from the same metal hole. The airport is controlled by the blue helmets who protect the landing strips and guarantee the distribution of humanitarian aid. In fact they’re hand in glove with the Serbian troops. There’s no tension. They all look very tired. Egyptian soldiers, their blue helmets floating on their thin dark faces, drowse on the remains of the seats. We wait a long time for an armor-plated jeep from UNPROFOR, the UN’s “protection forces,” to bring us into the city. Maybe they’re bargaining a bit of truce, because I hear one of the blue helmets talking with a guy wearing a camouflage uniform and a black beret with an eagle.

“Can they go now? Okay?”

“. . . Slobodan? Free?”

The Serb nods. Why on earth, I wonder, is a UN official asking a soldier from the aggressor forces for permission to pass? But there’s no time for astonishment. This airport has already become a joke, a gangrenous foot at the bottom of the suffering body of the city. If this is the door to the world, there’s no hope for the mice.

Heads bowed and without looking around, we climb into the jeep. We pass the first checkpoint, mountains of sandbags and piles of metal, railway ties uprooted and set atop each other. Faces in ski masks, Kalashnikovs clutched tight. The driver yells.

“Keep your head down!”

The jeep is making its way along sniper alley. It skids to avoid rubble in the street. I see the Oslobodjenje building through the only crack of light. There’s nothing left, just the elevator structure, like a popsicle stick after the popsicle’s melted.

 

We sped down the ramp that led to the underground entrance of the Holiday Inn, a dark belly protected by sheets of UNPROFOR plastic and full to bursting with journalists and television crews, and then we were in the immense lobby. Seedy figures sidled up to ask me if I wanted to buy a bulletproof vest, if I needed a car, if I wanted to change money, if I wanted to buy information. A guy with fresh stitches on his naked leg clutched a bomb fragment under his arm as he went around in search of someone who would buy his story. I waited in that casbah. There were no vacancies, not among the rooms on the safe side. The only free rooms faced Grbavica. I worried that I’d fall asleep, that someone would take my suitcase. I dragged it to the room that served as a restaurant, where I sat at a long common table full of journalists talking and laughing in loud voices and ate a hot, flavorless meal that seemed delicious.

“Here you need to laugh!” A German cameraman was winking at me.

We went together to the couches in the lobby. He bought me a beer and started explaining the best way to move about the besieged city. He seemed pretty excited. They’d spent the day filming the trenches along the Žuć. He put a hand on my leg and asked me if I wanted to sleep in his room. He smiled, an idiotic expression on his red face. He seemed to take it as a given that I would want to share his bed. After all, it was wartime. I heard an explosion. A few minutes later there was another one, closer by. I recognized the hiss of mortar shells.

I looked up at the long spiral gallery ringed by the rooms. I thought of the time Diego and I looked at ourselves in the reflection of the empty, glittering lobby.

I couldn’t remember ever having seen a prostitute in Sarajevo. Now I saw girls in miniskirts sitting on barstools in the company of foreign journalists. A man sitting near me set a pistol on his table as if it were a pack of cigarettes while another guy with a black leather jacket counted a wad of deutschmarks. They were talking about betting and about a place in Marijin Dvor where dogfights were held.

If there’s a feeling I remember from those hours, from that prelude, it’s a greasy sensation, things flickering before me and then floating away like oil on water.

A hand settles so hard upon my shoulder that it’s almost a blow. Gojko kneels at my side and hugs me tight without looking at me.

“Beautiful woman.”

We leave through the back. Now he’s dragging my suitcase.

“And Diego?”

“He’s waiting for you.”

He still has his Golf, though now it’s covered with dents and riddled with holes. The mismatched doors came from other cars. There’s no glass in the windows.

“This is one of the latest Sarajevo city models,” he says with a laugh. It seems a miracle that he can still laugh.

It’s dawn. We race along in his futuristic car toward a future that may be just like this, the jumbled remains of what came before. The sky is ice, a gloomy blue just beginning to light up from within. I look out at a landscape of fallen and impaled objects. Buildings black as chimneys, tangles of metal, skeletons of cars and trams, the harsh social-realist façades that now look like burnt cardboard. We’re trying to get to the Baščaršija. Gojko travels through rubble and along fortuitous passageways, streets I’ve never seen before. At unprotected intersections he presses the accelerator to the floor and pushes my head down, a possessive gesture. He wants to save my life, but he may be enjoying it a bit, too, playing it up. He yells, letting out an animal groan. All things considered, he’s still himself, a Bosnian blowhard in this divided city.

He pulls into the courtyard at top speed. The arches have collapsed. The grass is tall and yellowish. The outside wall of the building has been eaten away by gunshot, but inside it’s intact, just darker and dirtier. The stone slabs on the stairs shake as I run. Diego.

He’s standing there in the middle of a little garden of candles he’s kept burning for me. I hug him and feel something, a hardness I’ve never felt before. His bones feel like steel. I look at his face. He’s thin. His lips are dark. A long beard I’ve never seen before covers his face to the eyes. I have trouble touching him, recognizing him. His face is like the buildings outside.

I smile and tell him he’s a little bit smelly. But he took a shower, he says. With a watering can, Sarajevo-style.

He reminds me of a captive animal, one of the dead baboons at the zoo.

I take his hand and we isolate ourselves in a corner. The house is dark, the windows shielded. There are long cracks in the walls.

“How do you manage to live here?”

He’s gripping my hand, his face buried inside it. He’s smelling me, rubbing against me, grasping everything he’s missed about me.

He stares at me, but his eyes are strange swamps. All of a sudden I think he’s not here, that it’s not me he’s looking for but something that no longer exists.

“My love.”

We touch each other like two people who’ve been brought back to life.

He gives me a bunch of paper flowers.

The old woman who looks like a witch and sells flowers in the Markale Market doesn’t have real flowers to sell anymore, so she’s created these little ones from pieces of paper that she curls up and colors. They’re beautiful and sad. As I look at them I think that Diego resembles them, that he shares their longing for color, for good smells, for life.

He’s hungry. I open my suitcase, my treasure chest. He bites into a peach. The juice drips down his chin.

Then the others materialize, Ana, Mladjo, along with faces I’ve never seen before, people whose houses have been destroyed, refugees from occupied neighborhoods. I pull my bits and pieces out of the suitcase. They hug me tight, as if we’d always known each other. Hvala, Gemma, hvala . And people will arrive throughout the day because of the suitcase full of things to distribute. Today the apartment is like the Benevolencija. We celebrate by opening the tins of meat and pickled vegetables and cutting into the Parmesan. Gojko opens a bottle of rakija from his little personal reserve.

I pull back the plastic from one of the windows and peer out. The city, a prisoner of the dark, is like an exhausted mine reduced to nothing but empty holes and abandoned alleyways. The dark soothes as it erases. All I can see is the light-colored stump of a truncated minaret.

Where are all the sounds, the tolling of the church bells, the lament of the muezzin? Where are the smells, the dusty odor of dreggy coffee, the violent aroma of spices and ćevapčići? Where is all the smog from the cars? Where is life?

There was no longer any privacy. In that house, just like everywhere else in Sarajevo, everyone slept together on mattresses piled in the hallway, far from the windows and the parts of the house most vulnerable to blasts from mortars and cannons.

I was the only one who started at every explosion. The others were apparently used to the noise, or else they’d gone deaf. I saw their eyes in rows by the dark light of homemade candles, pieces of rope floating in bowls of water with a layer of oil on top. They were all smoking the cigarettes I’d brought, the gift everyone seemed to appreciate the most, because it’s hard not to eat, but not smoking is horrible. They’d taken to smoking anything they could, tea leaves and chamomile and straw from woven chair seats. Ana had hidden a few packets of sanitary pads in her Turkish canvas bag and now she held it to her belly as if it were a pillow. I looked at those strange eyes like the eyes of animals peering out from the dark and at the mouths that drew in on the tubes of tobacco and made them glow.

They were the same eyes as Diego’s, haunted, frozen, mute. They all seemed to be looking into the same pit of water, a murky mirror reflecting nothing.

“How are you?”

“Oh, fine.”

But my words reached him as if from a distance, like an echo. He raised a hand and passed his fingers over my mouth as if to gauge its thickness. He buried his fingertips in my lips as if they were some warm but unattainable substance.

He leaned against the wall and played guitar in the dark.

Then we lay down on one of those mattresses. Diego settled in with a single gesture, closing in on himself like a fetus, and already he was breathing the changed breath of sleep. It felt like he’d wedged himself into that sleep just to separate himself from me. Maybe he’d simply had too much to drink, like the others. I was the only person awake in that darkness full of the breathing of so many people. I got up to move a jar full of cigarette butts. A few plastic containers for fetching water sat in a corner alongside a heap of everyone’s shoes. The windows were covered with those plastic sheets that fluttered and let in the cold. Soon it would be winter. Why were we there, lying on the ground with these people? That’s what I wondered as I looked at Diego’s back.

At dawn I was awakened by the dull sound of what seemed to be a mortar explosion. It rained upon me through the torpor of the sleep that had taken so long to come. I found it difficult to move. No one else was there. Everyone had disappeared except for Gojko, who was fiddling around with a transistor.

“Where’s Diego?”

“He didn’t want to wake you.”

We ate some of the cookies I’d brought.

“Do you know if he sees Aska?”

He didn’t answer me and he didn’t look at me.

“Is she gone? Is she alive?”

“She’s still in Sarajevo.”

“Tell me where they meet.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what Diego does. I hardly ever see him.”

He was devouring the cookies. His beard was full of crumbs.

“I’ve never trusted you.”

“Oh, well.”

 

Now, by daylight, I noticed that Gojko’s gaze was dirtier than before, stained by months of war. His youth had disappeared. He dragged around a burden of disillusion and acrimony. There was something ruined about his sense of humor, as well. It smelled of burnt ants like everything else. I thought that I, too, would grow old all of a sudden.

Diego came back after a few hours. He’d gone almost two kilometers away to fetch water. His arms were stiff from bearing the weight of the water tanks.

“So you can take a bath.”

We shut ourselves in the bathroom. I looked at the grayed ceramic of the tub, full of yellow lines, and at the faucet that no longer let out a single drop.

We put the water in a basin. I undressed, and for the first time I found it difficult to be naked in front of him. It was as if there were no longer any intimacy. Diego avoided looking at me. He busied himself with the water, running it over his hands as if he were looking for something, a distant glimmer, a passageway.

“Look at me,” I said.

He raised his eyes slowly, with difficulty. I was naked. A dead plant with no bark, white wood cut off from its roots.

“What’s wrong?”

“You’re beautiful.”

“What’s wrong?”

He reached out an arm and touched my stomach, my belly button, and I felt repulsed by his hand.

He touched me the same way he’d looked at me, with the same distance, as if I were a mannequin.

I burrowed into myself like an egg.

He undressed and settled next to me in that tub without water. He dipped a sponge in the basin and washed my back. I turned to look at him. I looked at the yellowish bones beneath his fine, dry skin, the inert sex surrounded by pubic hair like a dark nest. He looked like an old man.

“Why are you here?” I asked him.

“I’m where I have to be.”

 

The next morning I wake at dawn like the others. Diego is crouching over the suitcase, filling his backpack.

“Who are you bringing that stuff to?”

To some families he knows, he says, old people who can’t get around, widows with children.

I dress after he leaves and follow him as far as the Cumurija Bridge.

I see the city by day. There’s not a single building intact. The domes of the mosques look like old metal covers of cooking pans lost in the rubble. The shutters of the Baščaršija are closed. In the stores all the shelves have been uprooted. A bird falls on me, a tired bird who probably no longer even has a branch to rest upon.

 

Rolls of film. Rolls of film lined up next to each other on the table in this miserable room that has become our prison. Rolls of film like cartridges, like cartridge cases. Like black eggs. I make up a game to help pass the time. I pile the rolls of film into acrobatic constructions. Then I lie on the bed and wait. After every blast there’s a tremor that moves across the floor and walls and climbs up the table. The canisters of film fall to the floor and roll around.

Who knows if anyone will ever see all the images imprinted upon the celluloid closed inside these dented little cases? They’re the perfect pastime for time that never passes. By three in the afternoon we’re already shut up in the house. There’s no point risking your life after the black market closes and all the water containers have been filled.

It already seems as if I’d never left.

We’re back in our old rented room. When she first saw me, Velida touched me as if I were a miracle, glass still intact in its frame. The months have eaten away at her. She’s like one of her blackbirds now. Her head is in perpetual motion, a desolate commentary. I bring her the provisions I’d set aside. When Jovan saw the flashlight I’d brought, he shut his mouth tight to hold back his sobs. It’s the thing he’s missed the most, a swath of light to illuminate the too-dark nights.

The old biologist no longer leaves the house. He spends the entire day in a sheltered corner beside the birdcage. The blackbirds are still alive. The cat with the broken tail is dead. It left the house one day, took a few steps and never came back.

Jovan and Velida look forward every day to peace, though they no longer believe in it. They look at the white armored vehicles of the UN stationed below their windows, doing nothing, useless as pedal carts chained together in an empty park.

I ask Velida for a broom and a rag to clean the floor in our room. Her head shakes the entire time.

“Are you sure you want to stay here with us?”

“Yes.”

“You’d be safer in the hotel for foreigners.”

There’s no getting rid of this thick gray layer of dust as hard as cement.

Velida touches her chest and says that this dust, made up of things that have fallen, has penetrated them and rests like glue on their lungs.

“It’s the dust of the buildings where we lived, our library in the old Vijećnica, the university where we taught, the houses where we were born.”

In the kitchen there are green layers of leaves on every shelf. Velida says that nettles make an excellent pita filling.

“Everyone in Sarajevo eats nettles now,” she says with a smile. Maybe, with such a healthy macrobiotic diet, they’ll survive the bombs.

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 sanjakbeg s.

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.

He goes off with that white cross on his back. I tell him he looks like a perfect target. He shrugs and smiles. Until quite recently I would have thrown myself upon him to keep him from leaving, but I don’t have the energy anymore. He’s become a fatalist like the Sarajevans. Destiny is like your heart, he says. It’s inside you from the start, so there’s no sense in taking another route.

Imbecile.

I follow him without bothering to put on the bulletproof vest because it’s too heavy, because today I, too, am letting down my guard. I’m tired, and tiredness makes one reckless.

And just maybe, with all this rain, the rifles might be wet and the snipers’ vision might be blurred. Maybe it’s easier to get past them in the rain.

I follow him through the dripping trenches and deserted entryways, between slabs of walls uprooted by shells and perched in a new, ghostly balance. The inner structure of the walls is bared—the weft, the powder. It’s an obscene, internal gaze, intimacy exposed to public view in the public sorrow.

But no one looks anymore. You have to move on.

Eyes pass cadavers without stopping, without turning. War itself resides in these footsteps that press on and in these tired eyes that will not be sidetracked.

It’s raining. I walk behind my husband. Every so often I lose him. Then I find him again. I’m hungry.

Diego’s got that white cross on his red plastic back. He steps into the covered market. Solitary people move about aimlessly. They seem crazy, walking as they do, heads hanging low like animals behind an electric fence, like patients in a mental hospital. Every so often one of them trembles as if he or she had crossed the boundary into something that doesn’t kill but gives a shock and wears away at the nervous system. There’s nothing to buy, only miserable objects to swap: a copper coffeepot, a bottle of grappa, a jar of plum preserves, a Bic lighter.

Diego bends over, picks something up and pulls out some money.

All around there’s nothing but water, pouring down violently as if tossed by the bucketful.

Diego photographs the people walking around mutely in that watery frame, moribund fish floating to the top.

I’m completely drenched. The ground is covered with mud. I see a bald head that must have blown off a mannequin when it exploded out of a store. Its red lips are shiny with rain, its pretend eyes wide open. I stop to look at the absurd head. It seems so lonely I’m tempted to bend over and pick it up and carry it along with me, set it on the table in a café and talk with it. Diego is crossing the Cumurija Bridge. I’d like to turn back but it seems like there’s no going back. I run behind him, behind that white cross.

He skims the Papagajka building, ugly and gaudy, a parrot knocked to the ground by shells. He moves along without looking back and goes into a building that’s lower than the others, a former school with a line of rooms as black as caves, classrooms with neither door frames nor doors because they’ve been burned in the stoves along with the wood of the desks. There’s a smell of excrement. Diego seems to know the route by heart. An old map of Yugoslavia hangs on a wall along with a bullet-riddled photo of Tito. A man is busy chopping a surviving wooden board into bits. He doesn’t even look at me. I follow in my husband’s footsteps. I hear sounds, the voices of people who may be laughing or may be crying. Every so often I see a curtain or a carpet that’s been nailed up over a doorway to protect some miserable intimacy, mattresses heaped on the floor and makeshift stoves. This must be a shelter for refugees. I smell wood and paint burning together. Diego’s reached his destination. He raises the edge of a plastic sheet and joins a group of people crouched around a weak, smoky fire on the damp tiled floor.

I stay behind and look through the plastic at those poor backs. When I notice, I swallow hard. My breath is like powdered glass. It scratches my throat. Her head is covered so I can’t see her hair. She looks like any one of those worn-out Muslim peasant women who’ve fled their burnt villages. Diego opens his backpack and sits beside her. She leans against his shoulder. She’s been waiting for him. They drink the brandy he’s brought, passing the bottle back and forth and then sharing it with the others.

Then Aska stands. She’s still wearing her warrior combat boots but she’s dressed Muslim-style in Turkish trousers. She and Diego go out onto the street. The rain blows back her veil so that the red of her hair is visible beyond the white crescent of her forehead.

I’m filled with a strange euphoria, a violent joy that splits my head. I move forward in the unreal silence of this rain that devours every other sound. They aren’t really walking together. He’s following her at a slight distance. They look like two lovers who’ve argued.

I follow them along the obligatory trenches between screens of sheet metal and cement blocks. Now they’re out in the open, in one of those unprotected passageways with a sign that says BEWARE OF SNIPERS.

I stop. I feel the fear in my legs, in my gut. The oppressive green of the mountains is visible through the open space. The pine forests look like warriors advancing through the rain. Someone zigzags across and I hear the gunshot. Thankfully, the man makes it safely to the other side. He’s bent over, breathing hard. I stink of fear and sweat inside my wet clothes.

I can’t believe it. Aska is moving forward. I stare in horror as she crosses. She doesn’t run but walks calmly as if this weren’t a cursed intersection in Sarajevo but in Rome or Copenhagen.

Diego has stopped as if he didn’t want to follow her anymore. Then, all of a sudden, he moves out from under cover and runs like a paramedic with that white cross on his back. He tugs at her, pulls her by the arm, yells at her to run, to get away from there. He shields her with his body.

The gunshot never arrives. Maybe the sniper has finished his shift, or maybe he’s also transfixed by the indolent dance of this red-haired sheep.

Now Diego and Aska are safe behind the carcass of a tram. She lights a cigarette. They stay there for I don’t know how long, like drenched animals. She smokes another cigarette. He smokes, too. They don’t seem to say anything to each other. They crouch in silence, their knees at nose level. Then all of a sudden they embrace, as if they’d made up, as if a few moments earlier she’d risked her life on purpose, as if she’d gone so slowly simply to punish him. He’s pulled off her veil. He’s caressing her hair. He rests his forehead in her hair and stays there breathing through that wet mantle.

It’s as if I could smell that hug, the warm smell of a doghouse, of a shelter.

It’s a gesture I recognize from the early days, when he’d left his city and hadn’t yet completely adapted to life in Rome. Defeated by an inner fatigue, he’d rest his forehead against my shoulder. He’d stay there, planted in my bones with the gaze of a child who doesn’t want anyone to see that he’s given up fighting because he needs to be loved.

Aska seems the stronger of the two. She consoles him stiffly, clumsily, almost annoyed by his surrender.

She stands. She’s taller and thinner than I remember. She looks like a black candle. Out of that thinness, her stomach blossoms, a round protuberance like a swelling. It could just be that her body is worn out by the war, the poor food, the nettles and the flour pastes and the indigestible water stained with disinfectant pills, that her stomach is infected with worms. But I know it’s not any of those things. That stomach enters me like a shell. I move backward, disemboweled, like the man in Vase Miskina Street, the glove hanging from a barrier.

I leave them behind and wander around that burnt amusement park. I pick up the mannequin’s head and carry it under my arm.

 

I manage to get back home and slip into bed without even bothering to shut the door. It bangs on its hinges, beating out the time as I wait. Bursts of wind come in, along with rain that gets everything wet. Diego comes back, shakes his wet hair and takes off his raincoat and his jeans. He stands there with his white paws and his gaunt face.

“Now you know why I can’t leave.”

I’m glad for what comes next, the fever and all the rest, the hallucinations, circles in the water, in the mud, in the sky full of red bullets. I see a long line of tombs and all the people I know inside them, everyone in his or her own niche. We talk, smile, pull the lids of our tombs closed and then open them. They slide easily, like the covers of boxes of matches. Velida comes in with one of her herbal teas. Diego hasn’t put his pants back on. He stands there with his bare legs. The candlewick fries in the oil. He doesn’t come near. He rocks his head.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He wanted to take care of it on his own. He didn’t want me to risk my life.

He’s not agitated, he doesn’t cry. He’s nothing. He’s as still as this war.

We’ve been gathering rainwater. There’s a cemetery of water basins in our room. Is it contaminated? Who cares? I want to take a bath. The fever is burning up inside. I immerse myself in freezing water that smells like a pond.

He knew I was following him, he says. He let me follow.

“We couldn’t go on like that.”

He’s calm for the first time in months.

They made love that night and all the nights and the days they were together. It wasn’t just mating. It was hours of love, of absolute sweetness.

Only now when he’s talking about her do his eyes come alive, when he tells me how difficult it was to pull away from her body, from the nape of her neck.

It’s easy to grab on to life when it’s raining shells outside.

And where’s our life?

Far away. Far away. There’s no use lying to ourselves. We walked like the dead through Croatia and Ukraine. We stopped over at the airport in Belgrade and then came back to die in Sarajevo, the city where we were born.

From the table, the mannequin head watches us with its wide, makeup-covered eyes.

We looked for a body to rent, a piece of wood floating in the river that was taking us to our ruin, a piece of wood to bring us to the other side. But he’s not like me. He can’t take advantage of people. He’s a stupid boy who falls in love.

He didn’t know she was pregnant. She never contacted him. He only found out when he came back to Sarajevo.

He looks at the severed head. Maybe it reminds him of Aska. That’s how she lives, too, detached from her body.

She regretted it immediately. She’s angry, depressed. Her family was killed in her village, Sokolac. And now she feels guilty. She believes God’s punished her.

Diego caresses that head, its wide-open eyes shiny with unshed tears.

“Do you love her?”

“How could I not?”

“And me?”

“You’re you.”

 

Who am I? I’m the one in the picture on the press pass. I have to go, have to drag myself to UN Headquarters and get myself a spot on one of those planes that don’t even turn off their engines, just unload boxes of medicines onto the Butmir tarmac and then leave again. But I stay. How could I leave? The rolls of film fall to the floor and no one picks them up. There are photographers stationed all over the place, beside the most dangerous crossings, waiting for walking death, a woman who’s struck down as she runs to reach her family. They’re snipers with film, waiting for the prizewinning shot.

Chilling stories make their way down from the hills. Strange volunteers join the Chetniks on the weekends, people who come from abroad to get their kicks, select marksmen tired of simulations and paper silhouettes.

Sarajevo is a huge open firing range, a hunting reserve.