A Fortunate Life (61 page)

Tuesday 10 Ju
ne 2003

It took us a good two hours to drive to Visegrad [in eastern Bosnia],
with much lightning and rain as we passed over Romanija mountain.
But we burst into the Drina valley in glorious sunshine, having followed
the old Austrian railway line that runs down through the tight little gorge
from Rogatica. Here the road skirts the Drina, plunging through cliffs in
a series of dramatic tunnels…. Then sharply left and dizzily up the
mountain rampart, skirting along the edge of a steep slope, with the
Drina thousands of feet below us as we climbed and climbed. Finally we
arrived at the little hamlet of Rogrohica, with barely half a dozen houses,
all but one of them burnt out.

We stopped by one blackened and roofless ruin, alongside which was
placed an extremely decrepit and disintegrating tent with the faded letters
‘UNHCR’ still clearly visible. This was the home of our hosts, Ahmed
and sebi
ŝa Setkić, who had lived in this tent on this spot, fierce Bosnian
winter and boiling summer alike, for the last two years.

Ahmed, brown as a berry with a nose as sharp as a hawk’s and eyes to
match
,
is seventy-seven and sebi
ŝ
a sevent-four
.
They have lived here
since the war, eking out a living by growing vegetables, chiefly potatoes,
paprika and onions on the little patch of land by their house and waiting
for a foreign donation to help them rebuild their burnt-out home.

We sat round a rough table outside the tent and chatted, as I idly
watched some clouds beginning to gather in the distance and silently mar
velled at the Drina sparkling in the sunlight thousands of feet below us
and the tumbling cliffs pouring down the mountains into the valley below.
This is where the Emperor Diocletian in the third century drew the line to
separate the Eastern and the Western Roman Empires.

Ahmed’s life story, as he told it to me in the slanting sunlight on his
little patch of land on the mountainside, was just a modern version of the
fate of so many particles of human dust caught up in the conflicts
spawned by this great fault line down the march of the centuries.

A Muslim, he had been born in this house, as had his father and his
grandfather before him. His grandfather had lived to a hundred and
twenty-five, and his father to over a hundred. The land round here and
the special air of the Drina valley, was the best in Bosnia, he said.
*
Everybody here lived to a ripe old age – unless they were killed in the
mindless storms of war which, generation after generation, swept over
them for unknowable reasons in far-away places.

Then, their lot was not peace and the quiet enjoyment of simple lives,
but burnt houses and blood and the swift exodus to the hidden, tradi
tional places in the caves and forests where father, and grandfather too,
had hidden before. And then always the sly return when the madness had
passed and the back-breaking job of rebuilding their houses, reclearing
their land and replanting their crops.

It had happened to Ahmed three times in his seventy-seven years. First
the Germans burnt his house in 1941, then the Partisans in 1943. Then,
in 1992, Arkan came.
†
He had been the worst. He killed everything, father,
son, mother, daughter, sheep, cats, dogs – nothing was left alive.

As Ahmed told his story, a small crowd of his neighbours materialised
around us. One, Ŝemso from a neighbouring village, showed me the wound
in his jaw where he had taken a bullet fleeing from Arkan’s troops as they
had swept through the mountains to his village.

Ahmed told us many had died. Every house had been burnt. He had
stayed behind with his son to try and defend their homes. They had held
Arkan up for a couple of days, but his troops had heavy weapons, and the
villagers only had only hunting rifles. In the end they had been forced to
flee. He and his family had spent the war years in besieged Sarajevo.

But three years after the war ended he decided to try and return. At
first they had just come back for the weekend, braving hostility from the
local Serbs. Then, two years ago, they had received a tent from UNHCR,
which they had put up alongside their burnt-out house and come back for
good – except if the winter got really bad, when they returned to Sarajevo
to stay with relatives until the better weather came.

At about 6 o’clock the skies suddenly opened, and it started to rain
fiercely. We took shelter in a nearby empty house. Soon the rain changed
to hailstones, which got progressively larger and larger until they were the
size of a gob-stopper marbles, dancing in wild profusion on the grass and
rattling cacophonously off the corrugated roof of a nearby shed. We
watched as showers of unripe plums were knocked off the trees and
Ahmed’s vegetables took a severe battering. After about twenty minutes it
stopped, and we wandered out to inspect the damage.

To my horror I saw that the hailstones had gone right through the rot
ten fabric of Ahmed’s tent, in which Jane and I were to spend the night.
The tent now looked as though a host of shotguns had been fired at it, and
there were large puddles of mud where we were to sleep.

Ahmed and I decided to go off for a walk while the ground dried, pick
ing our way along the mountainside on an old track, until we came to an
ancient graveyard of
stećaks
*
positioned on a prominent saddle overlook
ing the Drina valley. Ahmed told me that he thought that the
stećaks
were left by the Romans, but I told him that historians believe them to be
from the time of the Bogomils, who were originally heretic Christians who
had come to Bosnia in the thirteenth century.

He told me that there are other, older graves nearby and pointed out a
collection of broken stone sarcophagi poking out of the ground about fifty
metres away. These appeared, to my uneducated eye, to be much older,
perhaps even Neolithic.

We then wandered back along the track, chatting about history, the ancient
settlement of this land, of life, of war, of our children, of women and of plum
harvests and the countryside. By the time we got back to the tent, a large fire
had been lit and the
sać
†
was steaming away on the fire, smelling delicious.

We all sat down under the gathering twilight, drank beer, ate lamb
and chatted by the glow of the fire until it grew dark, and the stars came
out, and the moon shone in a watery sky above us.

At around ten o’clock everyone started to drift off home.

It had been agreed that Jane and I should sleep in the tent, so Ahmed
Sebiŝa went off to a neighbouring house, which had recently been
rebuilt, while we settled down for the night.

Before we went to bed Ahmed told us to watch out for snakes. When
they first moved back they had lived in a nearby stable and had been
constantly plagued by snakes. Several had come in each night, and they
used to hear them hissing and fighting with Ahmed’s dog (a stocky little
terrier of uncertain breeding, but courageous as a lion. Ahmed said he
had been out seeing off a wild boar which had come to forage in Ahmed’s
vegetables the previous night). Neither of these stories was especially con
ducive to settling down for a good night’s sleep.

Nevertheless, dog tired, we fell asleep fairly quickly, lulled by the
sounds of the night and the drip of the wet canvas above us.

The next morning we were up at 5.30 and washed at a tap fed from a
nearby mountain stream. Everything damp and musty. This morning the
clouds were lying in the valley below covering the Drina. But as the sun
came up these gradually cleared to reveal an astonishing view down the
valley, of the Drina sparkling in the early morning sunshine below us.

In due course we all gathered around the embers of last night’s fire, which Ahmet fanned into a roaring flame again and on which he soon had a pot of strong Bosnian coffee bubbling away, waiting for us. We all sat down, some ten of us, to a breakfast of cold lamb, kajmak
*
pura
†
and boiled eggs before saying our farewells and returning down the valley.