Chapter 14

A fter the rain, the snails come out. They push their slimy boneless bodies out of their shells as they move along. After the rain, the inhabitants of Sarajevo go foraging in the treeless fields amid tangles of iron and fresh mounds of earth. They bend over furtively, excitedly, to pick up the shiny little creatures. It’s been months since they last ate meat. Then it rained, and today the women smile and unpack their treasure in their empty kitchens. The children smile at the sight of the snails climbing up and falling off the table. Like the others, Velida came home with a bag full of snails that she’d gathered secretly, in an isolated park, because she was ashamed for others to see her hunger.

We dip our bread in the pan. A slightly cloying odor fills the kitchen. Snails cooked in Turkish spices, Bosnian vinegar and broth from the humanitarian packages. A delicacy.

Later Velida will blame this too-good food for having restored a happiness they hadn’t felt for a long time, a misleading and harmful happiness.

 

Jovan’s eyes were shiny, and there was a bit of color in his cheeks after months of rough gray skin.

After he finished eating, he lit a cigarette from a package Diego had given him. Drinas that they wrap now in pages taken from books because there’s no more paper. Naturally, they started with books in Cyrillic. Jovan was sorry to see his culture going up in smoke, but how could he refrain from having a cigarette after a real luxury like a plate of snails?

Jovan went out when it was silent again, when Velida resumed chopping nettles and the good smell of the snails had disappeared forever.

He hadn’t been out for months. He dressed to the nines in his wool vest, a wide tie and his old yarmulke on his head. He picked up the bag he’d used as a professor and said he felt good and that he was going out for a walk.

Unreal words in that ghost city, in those houses without lights, without glass, the best furniture sold and the worst pieces chopped to bits for burning.

“Where are you going, Jovan?”

“I’m going to the university.”

Velida didn’t have the courage to stop him. She’d always respected her husband’s wishes, and it hardly seemed the time to treat him as if he were under house arrest. She simply tried to tell him that the university had been shelled like all the other important buildings. Jovan nodded.

“I’m going to go see if there’s anything to be done.”

“It’s dangerous.”

He smiled and came out with an old Yiddish proverb. If a man is fated to drown, he may die in a teaspoon of water.

It was too late when Velida came to knock at my door, when it was already dark and past curfew and Jovan had been gone for hours. She wasn’t crying, but her head trembled more than usual.

She was worried but still courageous. She had done the right thing.

Today, on a mid-November day, after a meal of snails and two glasses of homemade brandy made with rice from the humanitarian aid packages, the elderly Jovan—a Serbian Jew from Sarajevo, a biologist whose field of expertise was freshwater species and who had spent his entire life studying the evolution of oligochaetes and of unicellular flagellate algae—went out to take a look at the wreckage of his city, at the destruction of his species, the peaceful species comprised of the Muslims, Serbs, Croatians and Jews of Sarajevo.

The dark ate away at Velida’s memory-lined face. She had no regrets. If Jovan had felt the need to go, it was right that he had gone.

“We never acted with violence toward one another. We’re a peaceful couple.”

 

Velida nodded when the news came. It was a taxi driver who told her, one of the heroes who crossed the most terrible intersections with their doors open in order to gather up the wounded. He was tall, with a beautiful face ravaged by the fatigue of war. He spread his arms, closed them on his chest like a Muslim and bowed his head.

Jovan was struck down on the Bridge of Unity and Brotherhood as he walked calmly toward the Grbavica snipers. This was what people did when they were too proud or too tired. They decided to die on their feet, to walk toward their own snipers as if toward an angel.

Velida cried deep in her throat, little sips of a boundless sorrow interspersed with brief moments of breathlessness. That’s how she buried fifty years of life with Jovan. I squeezed her hand. That’s all. She was a strong, dignified widow, like a warrior’s wife. There was nothing but that sound, like the gobble of a turkey, coming from the empty kitchen. A few days earlier they’d argued, one of the few times in all their years together. Jovan had insisted Velida sell his microscope, his books and all his laboratory equipment, but she refused to even entertain the idea. She had sold her gold and the few bits of household silver, had burned her shoes and her books to keep the stove going, but she didn’t want to sell Jovan’s things.

“I couldn’t take his life away from him.”

So he took it himself. All that remained were his battered armchair and the worn cardigan that had kept him warm during all those nights in the laboratory.

I think he simply wanted to free Velida of the burden of looking after him. Without him she might be able to leave, sell the microscope, save herself. He knew in any case that he was too weak to make it through the winter. His cough seemed to come up out of a crater. He didn’t want to wait for the end sitting down, in the dark of the plastic UNPROFOR sheets. He waited for the rain and the snails. The meal restored some of his strength. With that ephemeral strength he went out to say farewell to what remained of the city where he was born and had lived.

 

There’s an unmistakable smell in the morgue at the Koševo Hospital, acrid and sweet. We pass the body of a girl with jeans and no arms, then a burnt man with black skin pulling away from his bared teeth and the bones of his skull. They gave us masks soaked in disinfectant to block out the smell. Velida doesn’t bother putting hers on. It’s as if all her senses were numb.

Jovan is intact. There’s no doubt it’s him, with the same expression as a few hours ago when we ate the snails. Death hasn’t sullied him. The doctor who accompanies us explains that he was hit in the neck and that the bullet came out beside an ear. He shows us the little blueberry-colored hole. Velida nods. There’s nothing ugly about it. His clothes are in order, too. The doctor moves away and we’re alone with all those dead bodies. I think, It’s flesh that will no longer suffer . I think that after this abyss there’s nothing left. That I should stop suffering now, because that’s what happens in here—you simply stop suffering. You lower your head. Velida bends and kisses Jovan on the lips and for a long while stays glued to her husband’s face, her eyes closed. When she straightens again there are no tears, but her lips look as dark and dead as Jovan’s.

Then I notice the child, the blue child. There’s an empty stretcher beside Jovan’s and then this child’s body with a slightly bluish pallor, like saints in church. He looks perfectly composed. There’s no blood on his face. He’s got the kind of rough-textured, short-cropped hair that’s always tidy. It sits on his head like a fur hat, and it’s so alive it almost seems I can smell his slightly sweaty head beneath it, the smell of a child who’s been playing. He’s a blue lizard, a little saint. He must have died very recently. I step closer to take a better look. There’s no one with him. Velida’s talking to Jovan, bidding him farewell, remembering their best moments. This gives me time to walk around this place that’s more absurd than any reality, this back room of war, where bodies lie heaped together like broken toys. The child is wearing a striped sweater. I look at his slightly opened hand, abandoned as if in sleep. Innocence reclining humbly before death. I look at his fingernails, where it seems his soul has stopped. I should move on because it’s clear that I’ll never save myself from this sight, that once this child has entered me he’ll leave me only when I die. He’ll be the last thing I see and the first thing I look forward to joining up with afterward in the pale blue flight of souls. I’ll look for his fingernails. I don’t wonder where his mother is, why she isn’t here to cry over her child’s dead body. She could be dead, too. Because I’ve become his mother, I touch his hand. I know I shouldn’t do it. But it seems I can. No one’s here to cry over his body, to reclaim it. He hasn’t been dead for long. I wouldn’t be surprised if he jumped up, planted his eyes on me and scurried off quickly like a mouse frightened at finding himself here.

I’ve found the prescription for the powerful men of the world, the ones who sit around peace tables clad in jackets and ties. Put the blue child on the table and make them stay. Make them stay and watch death do its methodical work, watch as it eats away at the child from within. Hand out sandwiches, cigarettes and mineral water and then leave them there while the child empties, while he decomposes to the bone. Leave them there for days, for all the days it takes. This is what I’d do.

And now I know that I’ve become a mother here before this dead child. My pelvic bones have opened. A birth has taken place in this morgue.

I’m shivering, the urge to rebel is so strong.

I hold the boy’s hand. I look at his entire body, his elbow, the bruises among the fine hair on his calves.

What can there be after a dead child?

Nothing, I believe, but the deaf echo of our selves.

The child is here with his child’s hair, a fur cap that still smells of life. The skin of his eyelids is liquid. Beneath them, his eyes are visible, like grape seeds. His eyes aren’t entirely closed. There’s a glimmer between his lashes, a road, like a dark walkway in the fresh snow. Veiled eyes withdrawing like the eyes of a saint or a martyr. I take his hand. I’m ready to set out with him. Why were you born? I ask him.

Velida comes to my side.

“We can go now.”

Then she notices the child and raises a hand to her mouth. “Whose child is this?” she whispers.

“I don’t know.”

She looks around as if seeking something, someone, the reason for all of this. She, too, is childless. We’re two useless women, two bicycles without chains.

“He’s the child of war,” I say without knowing what I’m saying, what I’m thinking, what I’ve become.

We’re alone among the dead. There’s a blue child I’ll never be able to forget. I shouldn’t have been here today. I shouldn’t have been the one to console him, to hold his hand. It happened by chance.

We head for the exit. The disinfectant-soaked mask protects me from the smell. I mustn’t look back. We cross the dark skeleton of the city.

At night I think about the snails and their slimy little bodies and about the group of children I saw from the window. They laughed as they gathered the manna that came after the rain. I think of Jovan’s red vest and of his chest full of flowing phlegm. I hear the sound of his chest as if from the inside, like in the car hold of a ferry. I think of the somnambulant eyes of the blue child, that narrow and sticky street between his lids. The snail moves across that street as slowly as Jovan, an old man wrapped in a shiny overcoat like the mantle of a snail, accompanying the child across the line of life.

 

Later Diego also goes to the morgue to bid Jovan farewell.

“I put a cigarette in his pocket,” he says. “He can smoke it on his trip.”

I look at his back, his ponytail. He squashed a snail when he came in. It was on the threshold. He felt the shell crumble beneath his foot. He was sorry he killed it. He says everything makes him sorry now, because every life is woven into another. It’s like a labyrinth.

“Did you see the child?”

“What child?”

“The blue child. Next to Jovan.”

He says there was no child when he went. No child.

“The body after Jovan’s. Next to the empty stretcher.”

He shrugs and turns to face me.

“Why? What was it about this child?”

I’d like to tell him everything but I can’t tell him anything.

“He was dead,” I say.

I walk in the mud of my tears, drowning in the slits of those eyes that weren’t entirely closed and that by now have already been buried underground, covered with glue like a squashed snail. I’ll never cry like this again, not even when I’m left all alone. That day I’ll be as strong as a Bosnian widow, as strong as Velida.

She said, when we were standing before the child, “Husbands can die. Children, no.”

And her sorrow retreated, like the snails in the pot.

Maybe that’s what I’ll remember.

But tonight I cry over everything, including what’s to come, what I saw in the black street of those half-closed eyes.

Then I calm down, but I’m no longer myself. I’m the detritus on the beach after a hurricane, a silent field of destruction, from which some random object emerges, an upside-down street sign.

“Do you know who that child looked like? Do you remember Ante?”

Diego starts as if he’d been stung by a weever fish lurking beneath the sand.

“Ante ...”

Yes, Ante. The kid in the torn pants, who always kept to himself, perched on the rocks like a bird, the kid who pretended to know how to swim and almost drowned rather than ask for help.

 

For a few days I’m numb. I remain closed within the blue fire of that vision, nothing but cold matter around me. The thought of that child underground gives me no peace. It hardens like a fossil in rock, a shell. It’s the last step of this stairway that climbs into emptiness. I can’t touch this ground anymore, with its grazing snails and dead bodies. It seems like all the world’s children have died along with the blue child. It’s cold. The cold seizes my bones. The children play a sliding game. I don’t even look at them. They’re like ghosts, creatures lined up for death.

I stretch out a foot to pull the door of the armoire toward me and look at myself in the only piece of mirror that’s still intact. My dark brown roots are growing in. The highlights, yellow as a hen’s feathers, cling to the ends. I think of my hairdresser, his face, his jargon ... light tones, nuances, revitalizing treatment . I’m on the other side of the world. I’m no longer myself, but I don’t care. I spend my time lying on the bed and pushing the tips of my toes against this armoire door and this fragment of mirror that reflects me in pieces. It’s as if everything that happened before this war were part of an isolated prehistory. During the long prewar period, before the blue child, I had pictured myself at the sheep’s side, my hand or my ear to her belly. Together we’d have been two mothers.

“What’s Aska going to do with the baby?” I ask Diego.

“I don’t know. She doesn’t talk about it.”

“I’m afraid.”

His gaze lingers on me.

“It’s pretty late to be afraid.”

 

And winter began. The war had settled in. The Markale flower vendor said, “This year we’re lucky. It hasn’t started snowing yet.”

She stood there, teeth chattering, before her little tree of paper flowers. Her handmade woolen hat seemed to grow bigger and bigger on her evershrinking face, but she never stopped smiling.

There are things I’ll take back with me, things that will save me, like the smile of the flower vendor in Titova Street.

One day I asked her name. Maybe she thought it was a devious question, a journalist’s question. From her surname I could have determined her ethnicity.

“Cvječarka sarajevska ,” she said.

What kind of name is that? I asked Gojko. He laughed at the clever old witch. It’s not a name , he said. Cvječarka means “flower vendor.”

Cvječarka from Sarajevo. Nothing more, nothing less. Neither Serb nor Muslim nor Croatian. Sarajevo flower vendor. That’s it.

Diego takes her picture. He buys bunches of flowers and brings them to me. He surely brings some to the sheep as well.

I’m not jealous. I’m not anything anymore. What surrounds me carries everything away.

Diego tells me about her while we walk, while the color drips off the flowers. He tells me that Aska is very weak, that her family is dead and the child in her womb weighs on her like a rock. But it’s the only living thing she has left.

“So maybe she’ll want to keep it.”

He’ll ask her when the time comes.

“In that case ...”

He shakes his head. It’s a remote possibility. No woman would keep her child under this flood of war.

“And you’ll stay with her and the child, right?”

My head is spinning. I wonder what I’m doing here.

 

The bear is dead now, too. He held out longer than all the rest of the animals in the zoo, for months and months, and then he died. His furry body knelt and then lay down. His mouth slowly opened and stayed that way.

I take Velida to the train station, where passengers board the buses to Croatia. Gojko helped me find a place for her. It wasn’t difficult. It cost three thousand marks, almost all I had left, but she doesn’t know this and I mustn’t ever tell her if I want to remain her friend. I told her that she was on the list of civilians to be evacuated because she was an elderly widow. But it’s not true. No one leaves without paying. Her only luggage is a little dark brown vinyl suitcase held together with a couple of pieces of string. I pick it up. It hardly weighs a thing. I don’t like this half-empty suitcase. It bears no promise of life.

“What do I need?” she asks. “I’m wearing my coat. What else do I need for my new life?”

But she’s got the blackbirds. She keeps them beside her feet in a cage that’s too small, covered with a rag. She’s scared they won’t let her take it on the bus. It’s her only worry. Beneath her short grizzled hair a smile warms her chapped face. But this morning she’s not as pale as usual. It’s freezing cold, and there’s no place to sit. We stand before the remains of what was once the train station, the departure point for Ploče, for trips to the sea. There are other people sitting on their bundles, women clutching children. If they manage to make it past the military checkpoints, they’ll go on to swell the herds of refugees and people in transit with temporary residence permits in their blue passports embossed with the golden lilies of the newborn and already defunct Bosnia. They’ll be processed through refugee centers and take menial jobs and be viewed with suspicion by the citizens of the nations where they’re granted permission to live. Never again will they be themselves. This is the new life.

The buses finally arrive at sundown, when no one any longer believes they’ll come. There’s loud applause and laughter from cavity-filled mouths. Velida climbs aboard and puts the cage on her knees. She nods goodbye through the glass and closes her eyes to let me know everything is okay. “I’ll write.”

In the end I told her about Aska. She already knew. She’d seen her with Diego.

“Where?”

“At the old Turkish baths.”

They were walking hand in hand. She was struck by how young and lost they looked. They were like sleepwalkers.

She squeezed my hand and pulled me to her for a last embrace. “Don’t be like me,” she said. “Don’t bow down to Death. You’ve got to fight, Gemma. Seize life.”

Mothers are crying all around us. One of the two buses is entirely full of children. Their lone escort, a burly man with a peach-colored tie, is busy collecting passports.

One day, in my Roman living room, where I sit reading about how hundreds of the children who were evacuated from Sarajevo disappeared into thin air, the man’s tie and that bus full of children will come to mind. The missing children may have been adopted illegally or maybe something much worse, something so bad you want to say, What the fuck are you waiting for, God? Shut it all down. Take away the sun. Hurl down from the sky an asteroid as black as the hearts of the tie-wearing poachers. Make everything dark. Forever. Wipe out the good, too, because evil dwells in its pockets. Do it this instant. Now. Because right now someone’s about to catch a child. Save the last one. Shut it all down, God, and show no mercy. We don’t deserve a witness.

 

Overnight, frigid air comes down to the valley from the gorges between the mountains and paralyzes what remains of life. The temperature plummets below zero. Stiff blankets weigh on people’s bodies like cold metal capes. Cold seeps from all sides into the wounded buildings. Ice covers the plastic sheets on the windows. You get ice burns if you touch them. In the foggy dawn the death counts now include people who’ve succumbed to exposure, mummies veiled in ice like cookies covered with frosting. Winter gardens endure, the plants huddled stiffly beneath taped-together plastic bags.

The snipers of Grbavica, Trebević and Poljine do shorter shifts because of the cold. They can’t distinguish the flesh of their hands from the metal of their rifles.

Snow falls, devouring the sky. The city is closed in the silence of its footsteps. The mouths of the waterspouts ice over. Children slake their thirst with snow that eats away at their soft tissues.

Overnight the snow covers the rubble and clings to the black buildings. At first it seems to clean everything up, but afterward, when it’s already been shoveled by hand into dirty walls, with broken minarets sticking out here and there, the city looks even bleaker and more desolate. Life stiffens with the cold. Skeletal figures, their backs hunched, drag along sleds and crooked baby carriages full of scraps.

The first shelling of the day leaves blood on the snow.

I hardly ever see Gojko. He’s holed up in the bunker at the radio station, where he puts people in touch with their relatives captive in the occupied neighborhoods. Refugees call from radio stations in Croatia and Slovenia to get news of family members who’ve stayed behind and are living through the siege. Gojko still finds the strength to smile. They’re like voices from beyond the grave, he says. He’s become adept at capturing distant sounds, connections interrupted countless times, voices that emerge through a forest of other voices, sobs and noises like the rumblings of the earth.

“One day I’ll speak with the dead,” he says. “When this is all over, I’ll be a medium.”

Once in a while we manage to meet for a soapy-tasting beer in one of the underground clubs that have reopened as life has started to reorganize itself beneath the shadow of war. Kids want to get drunk and fall in love and laugh.

That’s how I meet up again with Ana and Mladjo. Zoran, it turns out, was captured by one of the paramilitary groups. He died digging trenches on Žuć hill. They laugh, because Zoran was an intellectual, allergic to manual labor like a cat to water, and it’s funny to imagine him wielding a spade in mud up to his knees.

“And besides,” Ana says, “tears drown the dead. Laughter keeps them alive.”

She’s wearing a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans and a black T-shirt, and she’s become even more beautiful, though her teeth are darker.

“What are you still doing here?” she asks.

Mladjo takes me to see his latest project. We walk to an Austro-Hungarian building that formerly housed an elementary school. The interior has been completely destroyed, but the façade is still intact. He sprayed polyurethane foam on the wall that stands alone like a canvas hanging in a void. Then he sculpted a class on it, an immense gathering of strange children. I see a lot of faces I know: Ana, Gojko, Zoran with his pitted face. Mladjo included everyone he knows from Sarajevo, all his friends, the living and the dead.

 

What do I remember of that last month? Sebina in a red Santa Claus hat that an Irish cameraman gave to Gojko. She and her mother were on their way to a party at a cousin’s house. Mirna wore lipstick and a tidy hairstyle and carried a tray of sweets. When we went past the Zemaljski Muzej, she glanced at the old Bogumil stećci, riddled with holes. Sebina didn’t seem to notice the desecration. She was busy jumping between the sandbags in the trenches. She was happy because her teacher had managed to organize a little class in his apartment, which meant she wouldn’t miss the school year.

It’s hard to say in which part of our bodies love originates before it drips into our bellies. The war was dripping through the very crevices where love had once passed and taken root in my gut. That night, the light of tracer bullets was the only thing to cross the dark. I thought about that growing belly, swollen and white like the Bogumil sarcophagi I’d seen that morning, their floral symbolism disfigured by gunshot. It’s the symbol they want to kill, the symbol , Gojko said. I knew now that Aska’s belly was Sarajevo.

 

Diego puts his tongue between his teeth and produces a whistling sound like the noise of the shells. He’s stopped bothering to send his rolls of film back with journalists bound for Italy. The wind and cold have cut little slits in the green plastic window covering. Like the snipers with their gun barrels, Diego sticks his camera through the holes. He takes up his position and chooses a target, a passerby. But he often shoots without even loading his camera. If I tell him so, he shrugs.

“It’s all the same,” he says. “It doesn’t make a fucking difference.”

We no longer talk about afterward. We let the hours pass, encysted in the present. We’re like all the other prisoners in this valley. There’s no guarantee we’ll make it to tomorrow. This precariousness doesn’t bother me. It’s like walking on waves. If only he were here with me. Instead, we hide from one another, and this siege is ours, a rigid curtain that protects us from ourselves. At night it’s forbidden to move about the city with flashlights but often Diego gets up from bed and goes out. His beard has grown so long it covers his neck. His eyes hurt. He’s agitated and says he can’t sleep. He wanders in a daze among the bones of this devoured city as if he were penetrating the body of death itself.

I touch his thin chest. He shoves aside the proffered bulletproof vest. It’s too heavy. His back has become rigid and adult. There’s no more time for silliness, for amorous duets.

What I miss more than anything else is the mindless abandon of afterward, when Diego would push my hair away from the nape of my neck and spend hours kissing me in that hollow between the neck bones where hair starts growing and where, he said, he could still smell the odor of my birth.

I no longer look ahead to resurrection day and to the plane that will carry us away. Maybe we’ll simply never go back. Maybe we’ll die together in this city where we met, where we made love for the first time in Gojko’s mother’s bed beside an empty cradle. I should have heeded that sign. It was our destiny.

 

We never talk about Aska. She moves about in the background. Her neighborhood, on the outskirts, is in worse shape than others, but she doesn’t want to leave it, and it’s easy enough to forget about her except that Diego hollers her name at night, howls like a wounded dog and sits up in bed. That’s why he can’t sleep—he’s scared she’ll be hit, that she’ll die along with their child. There. I’ve said it. Their child. And I’d like to have Jovan’s courage, to go toward that sniper with arms spread wide like an angel’s. But this isn’t my city. It’s not my tomb. I bury myself in the cold blanket. We’re like fish buried in a frozen lake, fish blinded by the depths. We brush past each other without meeting.

Diego says it’s not about Aska. He would have stayed anyway. He can’t leave these people alone. Now that he knows this pain, it’s impossible for him to live anywhere else, at least for the time being. He tried to tear himself away but he couldn’t.

Life is here, among this ice-covered rubble, and he’s never felt it more intensely. Life is Khalia, a little girl who pulls her tiny, rabbitlike brothers and sisters along on a sled, and Izet, the old man who goes every day to the Baščaršija to lean against the dented metal shutter of his shop. Life is the flower vendor selling her bunches of illusion.

Diego never stops saying, Leave. Go home . But I can’t leave without him, without his love, which he now scatters like birdseed through the streets of Sarajevo.

“You don’t need me. You’ll be just fine on your own.”

He spends his days standing in line to fill water containers for elderly and disabled people who’ve been left on their own. He builds stoves, drags wood and shovels snow. He shuttles back and forth between the humanitarian aid distribution centers and the houses of the families he’s adopted. By now they’ve come to count on him. His face is greasy with the handprints of the children he carries in his arms up dark, smelly stairways. Almost all the ablebodied men are fighting, digging trenches. Diego risks his life so the mothers don’t have to. He hardly ever takes photographs anymore. He says he’s not interested, that Sarajevo is full of photographers and reporters, useless people, profiteers. The world’s newspapers have had their fill of mangled dead and dirty children in sweat suits. They need more space for advertisements, panettone and diamonds that are forever.

 

He got it into his head that he’d die in that war, that he’d make up for the peacekeepers who weren’t doing a thing. And yet I sensed behind his sacrifice a disappointment in me, in us. I sensed the arrogance of a wounded boy.

Who did he think he was, this thin, hunched boy in the raincoat with a white tape cross on the back and the red ribbon holding back his hair?

He was everyone’s father. Everyone greeted him by name.

“Zdravo, Diego!”

“Zdravlje, Diego!”

He’d learned the language. There were chilblains on his hands from the cold and from the containers of water he was always dragging around.

“You’ve got stigmata,” I said mockingly.

I’d fallen in love with a boy from Genoa with the hoarse accent of the alleyways and a few bad teeth from when he’d used drugs. He was a reckless son who got into fights at the soccer stadium and then acted the lamb with me.

Now he was an old man with the long beard of a hermit.

I pick up some snow and throw it at him, at the goodness in his eyes.

Bastard. My love.

 

One day a boy in a checked jacket falls to the ground right beside me, and I piss my pants in the snow. Fortunately, he’s not dead. He’d bent over to pick up the cigarette he’d been smoking; the shell fragment grazed his shoulder. His hands were so cold his cigarette slipped from his grasp. That’s what saved him.

Fate was kind. There’s blood and this boy who doesn’t understand what’s happened. He feels no pain and complains only because his cigarette got wet and went out. Then he notices the blood dripping on the snow and looks at me wide-eyed because he thinks it’s my blood, thinks I’m the one who’s been hit. He thinks I’m about to fall dead to the ground and looks at me as if I were a ghost. He looks for the wound. He thinks it may be in my neck and that I’m about to start spitting blood. His eyes are frightening, opaque and foreign as they watch me die. Is this the last time the world will look upon me? I feel the warm urine in the cold. It runs down my leg, the one that’s trembling. This is what it’s like to die without noticing.

Later the boy will say he really didn’t feel anything, just a mild blow as if someone had shouldered past him. Then he looked around him, saw the blood, saw me and really thought for a moment that I was the one who was wounded. Only later did his wound begin to burn.

Today, in the water line, I learned that shell fragments don’t hurt. They penetrate the body without causing pain. The shock works like an anesthetic.

I no longer go out. I hide waiting in the corridor, far from the windows. Life has been reduced to mere survival.

“Did you find anything?”

“I’d love a carrot. Do you remember what a carrot tastes like?”

We could drag ourselves off to the Holiday Inn with the foreign press. We’d hear the murmur of languages we know, see people coming and going, eat warm food served by waiters. But Diego detests that false atmosphere.

I clutch at him without dignity or pride.

“I was a monster. A monster. I want to see Aska, beg her forgiveness.”

Diego looks at me as if I were a fountain, an inanimate object spouting water.

“What can I do? Tell me.”

“Call your father. Ask him to send all the money he can get his hands on.”

 

One night he brought back a can of pašteta, a sort of Bosnian pâté that in peacetime turned my stomach. That night, it seemed like the best food on earth. I looked at him, hoping to ask for some sort of clemency or sweetness. I stretched out my hand. He kissed me just to get rid of me, as if he were licking a postage stamp.

We stayed that way for a while. I bent my head to ask for a kiss in that hollow he’d liked so much.

He didn’t even notice. He was looking at some pictures he’d had developed in a little hole behind Titova Street where an old man was still developing film and printing photos on old, opaque paper that he cut with a knife.

“Let me see.”

People posing, cropped at the shoulder level, images without depth like police identification photos.

“What is this stuff?”

“Someone asked me to do it.”

He only works for Sarajevans now, photographs to send to relatives and put on graves.

“Careful.”

“Why?”

“Your hands are dirty.”

It’s true, my hands are greasy with pašteta. But tonight I can’t take it anymore, and all of a sudden, before he can do anything, I scrunch up the pictures, all those miserable posing people, and I feel alive, because anger is all I have left.

I follow him like a sick and dirty shadow.

He plays a pickup game of soccer in the snow with a group of kids in the devastated courtyard. He laughs, jumps, dribbles the ball. Then he stays there, bent over on his legs, exhausted. His breath is white in the cold.

The class picture made out of polyurethane foam is still hanging from Mladjo’s spectral wall. Mladjo, on the other hand, is dead. He was pushing his father’s wheelchair. The sniper picked him off in order to watch the paraplegic alone in the middle of the road, unable to move, unable to do anything for his son.

I follow Diego to the Markale Market. He steps into the crumbling structure. Today it’s full of hanging clothes dripping with snow, stuff from humanitarian packages that’s landed on the black market. He rummages through bunches of rubber boots and used galoshes. I’m at the end of my rope. Everything disgusts me—the smell of damp used things and broken sewers and communal soups boiling in aluminum pans, this mix of mud and snow. I’m afraid of the stray dogs that tear the dead to pieces. I’m afraid of the hollow faces of the living, their legs in their pants as stiff as crutches, their shocked eyes that rustle over the ground as they search like dogs for whatever they can find. There’s nothing in this city anymore. It’s scorched earth. The malnourished bodies can barely stand. They sway along in search of something, anything, that might serve life. Bojan the mime and his girlfriend Dragana do a special skit beneath the portico in the pedestrian street. They pretend to eat an enormous imaginary banquet with such skill it makes your mouth water. They take the people who stop to watch them by the hand and invite them to join in the feast. They serve all their fellow diners soups, mutton legs, pita. They lick their fingers and swallow. People laugh and cry, but in the end everyone’s belly feels fuller.

Diego comes out of the market with a dark furry coat on a hanger, an overcoat made from inside-out skin swollen with fur. He carries it over his shoulder. It looks like the carcass of an animal. He drags it along with him through the snow.

The next time I see Aska she’s wearing the coat. It makes her look gigantic. The buttons stretch over her enormous belly. She’s in front of the Ferhadija Mosque, where she washes herself in the frozen fountain. Diego helps her, holding her up. She rubs her face and neck. Then she takes off her shoes and sticks her feet in the icy water.

She walks barefoot through the snow and stops on what remains of the sofe , the section reserved for women. She bends and kneels. She stays in that position, leaning forward and straining because her stomach makes it impossible for her to reach the ground in total submission to her God.

I go to her side and kneel next to her. Her eyes are motionless fish behind a slab of ice.

“I’ll give you the baby,” she says.

A dark smile crosses her face, which is nothing like the face I remember.

“As long as a sniper doesn’t get there first.”