Sarajevo Marlboro (17 page)

My dear friend,

I left without saying goodbye. It was the only way to go at the time. I am writing this so that we don't create a void between us and in case you think that something occurred suddenly to ruin our friendship. I never mentioned my leaving because it would have been rude. You might have thought that I valued my own life more than you did yours, or that I felt I was a more worthy human specimen, or at least one deserving to find salvation in General Morillon's ark. I left because I was afraid and because I had the choice. This is the naked and banal truth that I have to tell you from the start. I didn't come to say goodbye because I didn't have the courage.

Fifteen years ago I came to Sarajevo, where I was noticeably different because of the color of my skin. You already know that. I was one of the many students from non-aligned countries who regarded Bosnia as the gateway to the white world that invented the rules of the game and thus bulked large in our dreams of Eldorado. This was not London, Paris or New York; it was less bright than our dreams, but in essence it was a sort of Disneyland, where mice, dogs, cats, ducks and horses all took part in the same story. The black
man was greeted by the whites without hatred or love. It was only when Sasa and I got drunk and became argumentative that he would curse my “black mother.” Yes – my mother was black, although he seldom displayed much interest in her. In other cities, for example, nobody ever cursed my black mother, but nor did they share a bottle of beer with me. The same curse, with variations, was also directed at other people who were not black. At Serbs, Croats, short or fat or tall people, hunchbacks, those with a limp, Albanians, the devout – it was a particular joy to curse another person's god – pastry chefs, bakers, soldiers . . . They were harsh curses that always referred to the obvious, to things that were immediately apparent as a defect, but which really shouldn't have been regarded as a defect so much as a trait. The effects of the curse didn't last long, and anybody who spent any length of time in Sarajevo quickly grew accustomed to the impoliteness – but not until they grasped that each curse meant, “I can see you're like this or that – but I don't really mind.” Nevertheless your otherness was always used against you. I didn't really enjoy the Sarajevo curses, but they probably explain why I spent my whole life – you see, I really can't tell if it's over yet – in that city.

It was clear to me from the start that the hatred embodied by the mortars and shells was not a product of Sarajevo's curses, or indeed of anything else I had known in Bosnia. The hatred I encountered was too personal to have produced such a collective evil. Bosnians could hate for a long time, persistently and with gusto, but there was no order in it. Somebody else had to provide the mortars, shells, tanks and planes in order to organize the hatred. I still feel that the sniper pulls the trigger in order to kill somebody who is like
himself, somebody he has cursed very often perhaps, but who would otherwise have solved the dispute in a bar-room brawl. With fists or a knife.

The wartime killings in Bosnia seemed to me technological. They were undertaken with a discipline that was far removed from anything I had encountered. In this country, the rocks are fastened to the ground by ice, and dogs are let off their leads, but until today, nobody was ever attacked by the dogs in a pack. Just by one. For the whole pack to come after you, there has to be something else at stake, something impersonal – a system of government, perhaps, or a circle of hell – to give the crimes an ideological motive and to justify hundreds of empty stories, including the ones about fastened rocks and unfastened dogs.

At first we believed that we were separate from the evil in lots of ways. I had a head start in that respect, because of the color of my skin. I reckoned if they'd had a choice back then, all the Sarajevans would have become black overnight. Neighbors looked after one another, ate together, gave away their last handful of rice. They believed that they were soon to be redeemed, that the world and God would see what they were like and release them from the suffering.

Since the war began in Sarajevo, I haven't come across a single atheist. Those familiar with the liturgy go to church or the mosque. Those who don't, invent their own language of signs to convey their faith in a higher principle or god. They all carry an amulet in their pocket to help them survive the shelling. Each morning they wake up realizing how tiny and insignificant they are in terms of the cosmos. So they resolve to spend yet another day running with
the crowd, hoping to appear more significant in number and thus worthy of salvation.

Only the robbers are different. At first there were only two kinds of people in Sarajevo – metaphysicians and robbers. The latter believed in a concrete future while the rest of us believed in a promised future, the one we'd promised ourselves upon realizing that we were different from the killers. Each new massacre gave us new hope in our suffering, and a belief that the horror was about to be stopped, if only because it had gone way beyond the boundaries of good taste. Nobody could believe that things would get worse after Mitterrand's visit. He'd seen the devastation and therefore he understood. And if you understand – you'll help us. When he left, the robbers put up the prices, and the Chetniks burned the city hall and all the documentary knowledge in it. It was a sign that the truth was not worth very much.

You remember the despair that followed. At first it was rumored that the Serbs would take the city, and then that they would kill everybody. As soon as we realized that neither event was going to happen, we understood that we had to be – different. The outside world became an object of hatred.

We only turned to God out of habit, or out of fear that the worst might happen, and so icy relations developed between people. Our next-door neighbor could have starved to death then – we no longer cared. Gloomy people dragged water containers around with them, cut down trees in parks and looked for plausible new choices. Foreign reporters began talking about “the hundred-year hatred” and incomprehensible tribal conflicts, and the Bosnians became less and less interested in convincing them otherwise. The war between
the Muslims and the Croats marked the end of moderate warfare, the end of decency. People began to say the kind of things about one another that everybody had previously been saying only about the Serbs. They began to believe they would be saved if they just did the same as the others, that the world and God would offer them a chance to survive. If the rest of the world had failed to acknowledge what was good about the people of Bosnia, let them see what was evil.

Each day the political situation confirmed the lie about Bosnian hatred, a lie about this country of icy intolerance. But since nobody was interested in the truth, it stopped being used as an argument. If you ever write any sort of history of Bosnia, I doubt that it will even be mentioned. Not even as a footnote. If anybody does mention it, the truth will be as convincing to the Serbs as it is to the Croats and the Muslims. The Chetniks were guilty of crimes, but the others came to believe as a result of suffering that the Serbs were right in their tactics and that therefore they should think and behave in the same way. From now on, anything that happens will just be the reflex of evil, a kind of catharsis, but it will have nothing to do with the way Bosnia and Sarajevo used to be. Or at least not with the way I remember them.

I'm not telling you any of this as an excuse. I only want you to know the way I'm feeling as I leave Sarajevo, and what I'll be like in the future. Besides, where I'm going nobody will ask me – a black man – about my Bosnia story, and yet I have to tell somebody. Who except you and Saša would even believe that I'd lived in Sarajevo?

When Morillon's ark rose over Bosnia, I watched the country through the
window until it vanished. From the sky it looks as though nothing has happened. The borders, fields and villages look just the same. You can even see the burned houses. I thought I could spot haystacks. From above, from an angel's perspective, it's easy to see what Bosnia used to be like. It flows gently like a curse into the glittering sea. The sun made my pupils dilate until they hurt and I couldn't look any more. I remember, on the first spring day many years ago the owner closed his shop on BaščarÅ¡ija and put up a notice saying, “Closed because of the sun.” Who'd want to work on the first day of spring?

Yours, M. L.

I understand the pathos of this letter, perhaps because its author will remain unknown to me. Letters are probably the last means by which you can talk about such things. Everything else that has been written about Sarajevo is just an attempt to create a framework for a new existence or to find the least painful way of dividing up life: the one that has already happened and should be forgotten and the one that's coming, in which people will live comfortably and happily until death, as in a fairy tale.

Oh! I felt so good when I pinched the saxophonist's girlfriend right from under his nose. We knew each other vaguely. I spotted her in the Belgrade taverna. She was by herself – I suppose she was waiting for somebody – I approached her, sat down, looked at her rather flirtatiously, sold her my blue-eyed gaze, plus lots of sweet nothings, blew her a kiss and then quickly became her boyfriend. Although I'm fat and sluggish, without movie-star appeal, I left the sax player for dead. He was tall and lanky, rather striking, but he didn't communicate well and was always utterly silent except when he was playing the saxophone. He was a fixture in the Sarajevo clubs. He made young girls weak at the knees and was the unspoken fancy of all the marriageable types. But, you see, he valued words too highly, or perhaps he was
afraid of language. In any case, he never managed to whisper the right words into the right ear to convey his particular appeal.

Very much in love, she and I walked up and down the promenade. Mind you, I'd politely say hello to him, and he would respond civilly, but she always felt a bit embarrassed. She wanted us to avoid certain streets and places, to hide away somewhere we wouldn't bump into him. I always agreed, with dignity and understanding. I spoke highly of the saxophonist, though not without irony and the odd jibe at his inability to communicate. And just so she wouldn't accuse me of being jealous, I confessed to being absolutely devastated that I couldn't play the saxophone.

In the difficult and uncertain times that followed, I presented a solid front. My words hit home like a sniper's bullets. I spoke without a grain of doubt about the beauty of sacrifice, or the unarmed storming of the Chetniks, even before those Serb marauders came upon the scene. I wanted to appear noble in her eyes, not only in terms of the rumpus of prewar years, but also in comparison to her former lover and his saxophone. In the days of party meetings, of clear but still-distant threats, the saxophonist became less relevant. I had succeeded in defeating him at the very beginning. Now I felt that I wanted to renew my victory every day. I told her about how I met the state president. I divulged information that would become common knowledge a week later, and all because I wanted to make the sax player and his jazz rhythms insignificant.

I entered the war despising his saxophone. The guy was a Serb, after all, and when the time came, I really expected him to vanish from the city and reappear in Pale, with or without the saxophone. It would prove that she had made the right choice and that the good guys in this movie didn't have to be handsome, or the bad guys ugly. But the sax player didn't leave. Often I would bump into him in town and greet him more heartily than ever, because it was necessary to show that even in desperate times one was sensible enough to distinguish between those who fired guns and those who played music.

Then came fifteen days of shelling so destructive and severe that I was unable to leave the cellar. When I finally surfaced the saxophonist was no longer in evidence. After a while I stopped thinking about him, probably because my ex-girlfriend also left town. I became my number-one priority. In the respite from the shelling, I naturally continued to open my big mouth, to discuss the rights and wrongs of the situation in a thundering voice, inviting others to follow my example. I began to yell a lot, my soul full of fear, and wondered it somebody up there – not the gods, you understand, but the Chetniks manning the big guns – were listening to my ramblings. If so, would they get so fed up with me one day that they would just take aim and shoot me down in mid-sentence?

As soon as the fear became unbearable and there was nobody left to listen to my tirades, I decided to escape. I wanted to disappear from a city that no longer resembled the place in which I had seduced my
ex-girlfriend in the Belgrade taverna. I went abroad with a thousand excuses on my lips an many other explanations in my head. I arrived in a quiet, peaceful country populated by other women and their jazz-playing boyfriends, in order to begin the story all over again.

Some time later I obtained a copy of a newspaper from Sarajevo and discovered on the back page that the saxophonist had been killed while defending the city. It's not surprising that he died: being tall and having soft fingers, he wasn't made to hold a gun. I, who convinced everybody of my importance, have a fat, ugly and crooked index finger just like in an advertisement for machine-guns. But I knew how to talk, and the sax player didn't. Nothing can help him now. He lost two battles: one for the female heart and the other for his life. It is clear now that he was always the superior individual, with nobler feelings, stronger and braver. He just couldn't put it into words.