31. THE KEY

ALL THROUGH MARCH, Mersiha and Hajrudin were anxious, waiting to hear if the bank loan for their restaurant had been approved.

But on a rainy April afternoon, Hajrudin, sitting on his living room couch, leaned back and smiled. Often when facing uncertainty, he thinks back to 1992, when he was a 22-year-old engineering student taking a semester off to work in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia.

“War starts—and you don’t know what’s going to be,” he said. “You lose everything, and then sometimes you gain again.”

Ellen DeGeneres was on the wide-screen TV, the sound muted. There was a large pie from Jonny’s Pizza on the coffee table. Hajrudin and Mersiha each took a slice, put it on a white plate—and he began talking about when the world darkened.

“We were all living together,” he said, referring to Bosnia’s villages and cities, which were a mix of ethnicities and religions. “Not side by side—I don’t like side by side! But together, like relatives.”

Yet he knew that in Croatia, just across the western border, ethnic war had begun: Croatia had recently declared independence from Yugoslavia, and forces loyal to the newly declared state were fighting against Serbian control.

“You’re hearing the news,” he said. “But you still think bad things aren’t going to happen.”

Hajrudin had already served a year in the Yugoslav People’s Army, which was required of all young men after high school. His aunt, a doctor, was paying for his college education. His mother, Razija, could not afford the tuition; his father had died at 39, and she had struggled to raise him and his four siblings.

On a late Friday afternoon, Hajrudin boarded a bus for Donji Vakuf, the small town where his family lived; he went home every other weekend. The bus was packed with about 50 people—all men, except for one woman. They were workers and students: Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs. An outsider could not have identified anyone’s ethnicity, Hajrudin said: “We were all Slavs—we looked the same.”

After a half hour, the bus pulled over at a checkpoint. It was usually manned by the Yugoslav People’s Army, or the police force. But this time, a Croat soldier boarded, asking to see national ID cards. Croat soldiers surrounded the bus.

The soldier—looking for Serbs—was identifying people through the names on their ID cards.

Then he ordered everybody off the bus.

As they stood clumped together, the soldier said, “Serbs have to stay. Bosnians can keep going.” Everybody knew that the Serbs would be arrested.

But the riders refused to be separated; the Bosnians would not board the bus. For five hours, they argued with the soldiers.

Finally, “they let us all go off together,” Hajrudin said.

The Serbs were grateful to their fellow riders. “Thank you! God bless you!” they kept saying. And the bus continued into the darkness, past the small town of Travnik, “Mersiha’s town,” Hajrudin said, smiling at his wife, who was uncharacteristically quiet.

Finishing his slice of pizza, Hajrudin carefully wiped the coffee table, then brought his plate into the kitchen. Mersiha took another slice.

The bus climbed a steep mountain, he said, returning to the living room. The Serbs—who controlled the mountain—had set up a checkpoint. As the bus neared it, the Serbian riders broke into a nationalistic song, “March on the Drina.” It gave Hajrudin—and the other non-Serbs—chills.

Sing, sing Drina, tell the generations

how we bravely fought.

The front sang, the battle was fought

near cold water.

Blood was flowing,

blood was streaming

by the Drina for freedom!

“It’s supposed to make people feel scared,” Hajrudin said. The song commemorates the World War I Battle of Cer, in which the Serbian Army pushed thousands of Austro-Hungarian soldiers from villages they had taken; panicking, many soldiers drowned in the Drina River.

“It means the Serbs are coming. And when they come to your town—it’s going to be slaughter. No one will survive.”

“It’s sung with pride,” he added, “but not good pride.”

At the checkpoint, the soldiers heard the loud singing—How we bravely fought . . . near cold water—and simply waved the bus on.

But as it pulled away, the Serbian riders kept singing. More and more aggressively. Everyone else felt cowed.

“They were saying, ‘Now you’re in our territory—let us show you who’s in charge,’ ” Hajrudin said.

But then the bus finally reached Donji Vakuf, the last stop. The town had a Bosnian mayor. More than half its residents were Bosnians.

Some of the Serbs fell silent. But a hard-core group raised their voices.

“We were naïve!” Mersiha broke in, jumping up to put away the pizza box. “People changed overnight. Overnight!”

In Donji Vakuf, Hajrudin noticed that some friends he had grown up with were no longer around. “Where is Jovan? Where is Sinisa?” he asked.

Young men had been disappearing one by one, he was told: Some Bosnians had slipped into the woods to join paramilitary groups. Some Serbs had run off to join the Serbian Army.

“But I was still 100 percent sure the Yugoslav People’s Army would prevent war,” Hajrudin said. And so he returned to Belgrade Sunday night. For the next two weeks, he concentrated on his job as an apprentice welder. But during his next visit home, his cousins took him aside.

“It’s not going to be good,” they told him. “Don’t go back.”

A few days later, a neighborhood leader spread the word: Women and children were going to be bussed to a stadium in Split—a large city on the eastern shore of Croatia—for their safety. Hajrudin’s mother immediately gathered her two daughters—the eldest was pregnant—and her youngest son. They each packed a small bag. Her other son—a year younger than Hajrudin—would stay with him.

“My mother was mom and dad, and everything,” Hajrudin said.

Every month, she got a small check from her husband’s pension, and with great care she managed to feed their family. “She’d buy flour first, then oil, then sugar,” Hajrudin said. She put everything in a huge wooden pantry—a spaiz—that she kept locked.

Her children had never glimpsed what was inside.

Before she left, she handed Hajrudin a key.

“Take whatever you need,” she said.

He was stunned. He knew what she was saying: You’re an adult now. Take care of things.

They embraced. “We thought it would be for two weeks,” he said about the separation.

That night, Hajrudin and his brother fell into a deep sleep. But then Hajrudin found himself awake. “I was so curious to see,” he said. And going into the kitchen, he opened the spaiz.

It was a wonderland: There were ten 75-pound bags of flour. Scores of glass jars of plum butter, rose hip jam, roasted peppers and eggplants, and stuffed pickled peppers. There was dried mint and chamomile tea. Long strands of garlic. Sacks of potatoes and onions. And dried beef sausage—sudzuk.

There was enough to live on for six months.

“It’s still haunting me,” Hajrudin said, shaking his head, “how my mom managed.”

Like many struggling Bosnian mothers—including Mersiha’s—she would go to Italy, Turkey, Austria, and Hungary to buy goods cheaply. She would purchase Lacoste T-shirts, Levi’s jeans, and sneakers, which she would then resell in Bosnia. The bus trip to Istanbul took two days; she would spend one day shopping, then return.

Bribes often had to be given at the borders. To fund a trip, his mother would borrow 500 deutsche marks—about $400—from her sister, then pay her back. Levi’s, bought for 60 deutsche marks, could be sold for 100 at home.

She would return, exhausted, carrying two huge bags. “Me and my brother couldn’t carry even one,” Hajrudin recalled. Putting down the bags, she would say, “I need to sleep.”

But after only two hours, she would get up and shower. “We’d make coffee for her,” Hajrudin said. “She’d tell her stories: ‘This driver was so nice, so smart, he negotiated . . .’ ”

Three days after his mother and siblings left, Serbs blew up the bridge that connected the two parts of town. Two people were killed, and many wounded. The windows of shops blew out. Power was cut.

A Serbian checkpoint—cutting off access to the main road—was set up.

Many people thought about fleeing but did not want to abandon their homes. But Hajrudin, his brother, and a few other men decided to try to reach what they called the “free territory”—Bugojno, a large town about eight miles away—controlled by Bosnians and Croats.

It was still daylight when they slipped into the nearby forest. Hajrudin had put on a dark green sweater, thinking it would not be visible. In his pocket, he carried his mother’s cupboard key.

In the Omeragics’ living room it was getting dark, and Elhan, their youngest, came in. “When are you going to be done?” he asked his mother, frustrated. “When is she going to go?” He pointed to me.

“Shush, Elhan, go play,” Mersiha said, sending him off.

Nobody put on a light; the TV was turned to the local news.

“I don’t consider myself brave,” Hajrudin said. “But I don’t consider myself a sissy. My grandfather said, ‘Always be in the middle.’ ”

In the free territory, guns were given to those who signed up to fight the nationalists. The atmosphere was tumultuous; everybody was on their own. His brother stayed on as a firefighter. Hajrudin was sent to defend a nearby town.

They could see snipers and tanks on the surrounding mountains; the townspeople had already made a trench. “We relieved those who were there,” he said. “At first, you feel ‘I have a gun, nobody can hurt me.’ That excitement lasts just a half hour.”

But the Serbs did not attack the new recruits. Instead, they fired on the city, targeting Bosnian mosques and Catholic churches.

“You could hear them cursing,” Hajrudin said. They were drinking Slivovitz, plum brandy. “They’re shooting day and night when they’re drunk.”

Warily, Elhan slipped back into the living room. “Momma!”

“Soon—I’ll be with you soon!”

Elhan made an unhappy sound like a puppy growling, then left.

Hajrudin folded his hands behind his head. “They tried to make you hate them,” he said about the Serbs. Looking at Mersiha, he said, “But even now, we don’t hate.”

“Every family has someone mixed,” Mersiha said emphatically, getting up to go see Elhan. Hajrudin would continue his story the next day. “My uncle married a woman who’s a mix of Serb and Croat. My other uncle married a Croat. These families have kids.”