A noiseless blizzard is blowing outside my window. A few cars, figures trudging through the gray snow of Belgrade. Cocooned from the world, I hear only the ambient hum of hotel luxury. Already half-drunk, I open a beer from the mini-bar, flick through the channels on television. Basketball, CNN (blizzards over Croatia and Bosnia), skiing, films dubbed into German and Italian, a couple of scrambled channels, basketball again. You could waste eternity itself doing this and still never watch anything. I float in the bath for half an hour, drink another beer, and resume channel-hopping. This time I linger over what turns out to be a porno movie.
At first I think it is a low-budget romance, but an extended bout of kissing gradually gives way to a love scene, which looms, suddenly, into pubic close-up. I am struck by how like real sex it is, then I realize it’s not like real sex—it is real sex.
As the sex intensifies and escalates, so the nominal plot dissolves—but never entirely disappears. In the closing scene the couple from the first act say an emotional farewell to each other, exactly as in any soap opera: it’s just that here she has to speak her lines while she is writhing on the brink of an orgasm induced by another woman who happens to be lying on the sofa between her legs. Perhaps this is why the leave-taking is so unconvincing: in the porno world people come rather than go.
It may not be pretty but there is something idyllic, paradisiacal, about this world where everyone has wonderful sex with everyone else, regardless of gender or any obligations they are meant to fulfill (even a helicopter pilot manages to have cramped midflight sex in his aptly named cockpit).
The film ends. Slightly stunned by it all, I scroll through the channels again. Basketball, snow over Bosnia and Croatia… It is still snowing here in Serbia, too. Beyond my wide-screen window Belgrade hunkers down, waiting for the blizzard to pass.
Relative to the scale of the slaughter, very few pictures of the British dead survived the First World War. The pictures that have been preserved tend to show isolated or small groups of dead soldiers. They give no sense of death on the scale recorded by John Masefield, for example, who, four months after the Battle of the Somme had ended, wrote of how the dead still “lay three or four deep and the bluebottles made their faces black.”
During the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa took the most famous war photograph of all time, which showed—or purported to—the precise moment of a Republican soldier’s death in action. In his photographs of the Second World War we come across the dead almost casually, in houses and streets. A photograph from December 1944 shows a frozen winter scene with bare trees, cattle, and huts in the background. A GI advances across the photo toward a body lying in the middle of the field. Some way off, beyond the margins of the frame, in the next photograph, there will be another body. Through Capa’s photos, in other words, we follow a trail of bodies. This trail leads, ultimately, to the photos of mass death at the core of our century: naked bodies piled up in concentration camps. Capa, personally, had no intention of photographing the concentration camps because they “were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect.”
Since the concentration camps we have seen hundreds, thousands, of photographs of the dead: from Cambodia, Beirut, Vietnam, Salvador, Sarajevo.
Photographs of the dead are now ten a penny. In recent months a war of escalating explicitness has been under way in the media. A South African boy with his nose shot off, blood pumping through the hole in his face. Muslim women burned in their homes. No news bulletin worthy of its name comes without a warning that some of the images in it might upset some viewers. Introducing a report from Bosnia, Peter Sissons said viewers would find many of the images very disturbing. ITN will retaliate, presumably, with a report that all viewers will find unwatchably terrible.
Not only is ours a time when anyone—from presidents of the United States to nameless peasants—might die on film; this has been the time when, to a degree, people die only on film. I have seen hundreds of bodies on film and never one in real life.
We head off to an art gallery in the center of Belgrade where there is an exhibition of photographs. The ground floor of the gallery has huge windows and from a distance, without my glasses, I see only the glamorous blurs of magazine color.
The exhibition is titled Crimes against Serbs. The pictures are of bodies with their brains splattered out, their throats cut. Strangled with wire, beaten, set on fire, shot. Bodies that have been killed three or four times over. Sometimes the blood is bright red, staining the white snow. Other times everything is turning brown or ghastly gray.
The photos of the dead are juxtaposed with pictures of the victims when they were just old people or mothers or girlfriends. Snaps like the one of you I carry, faded, in my wallet.
The inevitable question: how could people do these things to one another? The answer comes back immediately: with the greatest of ease, without batting an eyelid.
In the basement, as background to the current conflict, photos show the earlier history of atrocities inflicted on the Serbs. These, as befits an issue of history, are in black and white. One, from the camp at Jasenovac, shows a man propped up on one elbow as if he is modeling clothes in a catalog. His head lies on the floor, three feet away.
In the visitors book I transcribe Auden’s lines from “September 1, 1939”:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
We are about to leave when a man in his sixties looks up from the book and says,
“English?”
“Yes.”
“It is difficult for you to understand. It is different for us. They are our people.”
“They’re my people too.”
“You are English.”
“They’re still people.”
Unlike news reports, these photographs do not provoke tears or pity any more than the film I watched a few nights ago induced love. They are too stark for that. But, outside, where the snow is turning to slush, I walk with my hand very gently round your shoulders. Not to harm anyone: simple enough, that hope seems an ambition vast enough to consume a lifetime.
Back at your apartment we make love and doze. We wake to find your period has started, smudging the white sheets.
We lie talking for hours, my hands in your hair. Your eyes. Your Serbian face. These are our last hours together and we try not to sleep again. Drifting on the edge of sleep, I think again of Auden’s poem: “We must love one another or die.” Auden eventually cut this line because, he reasoned, we’re going to die anyway, whether we love one another or not. But he could, it seems, have changed the or to an and.
My name is Milan Pavlovic. I drive the minibus that takes people from Belgrade to Budapest. Since sanctions have closed the airport at Belgrade there is a great need for this: to get anywhere you must fly from Budapest.
The first bus leaves Belgrade at five in the morning and this is the shift I like best. Five is when I pick up the last passenger; the rest are already in the bus by then.
I arrange the schedule and route for picking up my passengers. They are scattered all over the city and sometimes I have to pick up the first one as early as quarter past four. If their apartment is very difficult to find I arrange to meet them at the corner of a street that is well known. People are always waiting. No one is late. On street corners or outside their houses, girlfriends leave their boyfriends, husbands leave wives. They say good-bye, embrace, kiss: they are always the same, those last moments: their eyes are like cameras, trying to store up this memory of the other to keep by them when they are away.
They all think they have had to get up early but I have always been up before them. They are sad to leave their loved ones and never think that every morning I, too, leave my wife in bed. I wake before the alarm goes off and cuddle against her while she snores. Then into the cold. At this time of year the minibus is freezing but by the time I reach the first pick-up—today a boy leaving his girl—it is warm and nice for them.
Next a young man is leaving his family, returning to Israel. Everyone kisses and says good-bye. The mother is crying. Sometimes there are people on their own and I can almost feel their happiness from a distance when they see the lights of the minibus approaching. Once the bus is full we are on our way, crossing the river and leaving the city before even the newsstands or cafés are open, before the sun is out of bed!
The return journey is not the same. I drop people off at their homes but the reunions take place invisibly. I pick people up at an exact time but because no one knows precisely when they will return their families are waiting for them inside. Life, as I see it, is all about farewells rather than reunions. That is why we have songs and photographs. It is parting that makes up our lives.
(for Vesna)
1993