You can come over and have a coffee, said Denis, who had been watching Amir’s face. My mother might talk about old times.
The old lady said: Sometimes they were looking like falling stars coming one after the other. They were actually yellow, like they had some fire following them. But we knew they were bullets and shells. There were four or five coming at once.
She showed him the hole in the bedroom door where a shell had come in and nearly killed Denis in his crib. On the knickknack shelf by the television sat the journalist’s old binoculars.
Those are heavy binoculars over there, said the journalist.
They belonged to a Chetnik, said Denis. He and my father were fighting hand to hand. You can see who won.
They’re not official JNA issue, are they?
Those Serbian bastards could get anything. They ran the army; they had the whole country sewed up.
The journalist had considered writing a followup article about that mixed-ethnic couple who were killed on the Vrbanja Most; he had read about it in the newspaper, probably in 1993. If he remembered correctly, she had been a Serb and he a Muslim.
Actually, that’s just an urban legend, explained the policeman’s son.
I remember them, of course, said the policeman’s wife. Very romantic. Every year they are on the television.
Indeed, the waiter at the sidewalk restaurant where the journalist’s wife liked to feed bread crumbs to the pigeons said that it must now be the anniversary of their deaths, because they had just been on television again. Their names slipped his mind, but one was definitely a Serb and the other a Croat.
The policeman’s son had a friend named Edina who recollected the unfortunate couple slightly. She said: Oh, yes. The Sarajevo Romeo and Juliet. Very popular with the older generation.
The journalist gave it up and went to lie down. He had stepped off a sidewalk wrongly and injured his back, or maybe his side. His sweet wife gave him her pain pills. Closing his eyes, he encouraged her to go out. He could tell that she was restless, while he wasn’t good for much.
Perhaps he should have written about Bald Man. No doubt Amir could have told him things, had he felt like asking. He had prepared himself to inquire into Enko’s death, but just then Denis had said: Bald Man saved the books from the library when nobody else had balls. The Chetniks were shelling, and he took two men…
What happened to him?
He was shot through the heart, maybe during the war. But he lived through that. So he had a heart condition. He died after the war.
No, he didn’t die of a heart attack, said Vesna. He shot himself. But he had a good time in the hospital ward with my grandmother; they used to sing songs together. When you saw him, you wouldn’t believe there was something wrong with him. Mirjana’s family, when they were finally evacuated they left a key with another woman, and Bald Man robbed them; he took even the boiler. So you remember him, too! How many times did you meet him? They say he was very good to his friends and very bad to his enemies.
What do you think about him?
I have nothing to think about him. He was a criminal.
Next morning the journalist and his wife took a stroll down to the Vrbanja Most. They passed the Holiday Inn, which surprised him; he said nothing, for fear of boring his wife. It was hot, and the air was grimy. — I hate this street, said the journalist’s wife. Her back was also aching.
The journalist took another of his wife’s pain pills. Presently his life began to be as pretty as a lemon-haired Serbian girl’s face in sunlight when she leans back and drags on her cigarette.
So she was twenty-five and he was twenty-four, he said, reading the inscription. They’d be forty-three and forty-two now.
But that happened after you were here.
You’re right, darling. How are you managing?
Oh, you know, she said.
So they hailed a taxi. Rolling easily through the Big Park, they passed the monument to the dead children of the war. Then they were on the double highway (directions: Tuzla, Zenica, Mostar, Mount Igman). The journalist knew that somewhere ahead lay the source-spring of the river Bosna where Tito’s bunkers used to be; many Partisans had died there when the temperature was thirty-seven below zero. He remembered that from something he had read years ago, but decided to keep it from his wife in case he had mixed up his facts again. His wife was biting her lip; probably her back hurt.
He remembered the tram tracks between the two lanes of the highway, but nothing else appeared correct. Now they had arrived at the former frontline. He told the driver to stop and wait. He stepped out. His wife took his hand. For the first time ever he was able to survey the enemy positions. Here was the old age home, called “Disneyland” for its multicolored façade, whose construction had been nearly completed when the Serbs occupied it. Considerable sniper fire had originated here. Now the drug addicts used it.
We’d better not go in, he told his wife. I don’t know if it’s still mined.
He photographed an arched window with a black tree growing through it, the wall-tiles pitted and pocked. (He still used a film camera, of course; why should he put away what had always worked for him?) Seeing the hateful place ruined and abandoned gave him pleasure. He said nothing about that to his wife. Weeds, rose hips, young walnut trees and blackberries strained up toward the blackened concrete cells, some of whose highest honeycombs were floored with grass. There was a tunnel like a grave-shaft which passed right through the gutted edifice and into the summer greenness by the highway.
I’m getting worried about how much the taxi will cost, he admitted. So they got back in and rolled toward Centar, passing a smashed apartment building, with Mojmilo on the right. Now they drew near the tall white skyscrapers of Centar, wondering whether it would rain, for clouds already pressed over them like crumpled bedsheets.
Up there, he said, that meadow there with the new houses, I think that’s where we had to run. I had my bulletproof vest on, and it was so heavy I fell down…
His wife took his hand.
Actually, he said, that might not have been the place.
Next morning they took a brisk walk from their hotel up into the hills. Once their backs began to ache as usual, they sat down against the ancient rock wall in the shade of the four walnut trees by the Yellow Bastion, with heavy, fragrant clusters of white elderflowers bowing the branches down below them, and then, far down through the greenness, a hoard of those other white flowers called tombstones, rising delicately and distinctly from the grass.
THE LEADER
There is no life on the earth without the dead in the earth.
They had been friends of a sort, perhaps more so in his parents’ mind than in either of theirs. Had they never seen each other again, the insignificance of their accidental association would have been plainer, although as it turned out he rarely thought about his childhood; and when his acquaintances mentioned school reunions he produced his supposition of a smile, enduring the subject warily because his boredom resembled withered branches over a hole. He knew that others were different; sometimes he wondered whether they had made real friends when they were young, or even been happy; or whether (which would have rendered his own situation relatively enviable) they were simply in the market for false memories of joy. From what little he recalled, his high school classmates, even Ivan, had longed to get away and enter the shining world where they could dwell apart from the elders whom they were already becoming. He could barely recollect the place he had fled, so deeply had he despised it; therefore he felt unable to deduce how far, if at all, he had gone, which gratified him since it ought to be best to forget what one runs from: Amir watching silently while he interviewed fighters beneath the thudding and booming of shells along the frontline, and the morning when there were six new bullet-holes in Enko’s mother’s kitchen, and Enko’s contempt for him (the natural feeling of the crucified for the free man who climbs on and off the cross), those he remembered better than his two or three dull school years with Ivan, who had likewise, so he’d supposed at the time, looked down on him, or at best askance; Ivan’s mother’s opinion of him he never learned, although the last time he met her she must have been far from pleased; as for Ivan’s father, he had died long ago. The journalist (if we allow him to call himself such) could not recall the house where Ivan had lived with his mother, brother and sister, so perhaps Ivan had never invited him over; but, after all, we live so hemmed in by our memories that we scarcely realize how few they are. For instance, he could hardly bring to mind the beardless version of Ivan’s face. He had invited Ivan to his home once or twice. Ivan, two years older, possessed older friends; besides, Ivan had been born in that town, while his own family had moved so many times that he could not say where he was from, which might have been the real reason he felt lonely in those days, although he naturally never considered that, and therefore believed his presence to be distasteful to others, which rendered it so. His nature was impressionable — a fine quality in youth, when one stands a chance of adapting to one’s dreams; an excellent characteristic in a journalist; but a liability in those later years whose captive will manage best through stolid stupidity. Anyhow, he passed much of his childhood either by reading and dreaming alone or by watching others, wishing that they liked him. To him Ivan appeared to be laughing unfailingly, charming his true friends. — Ivan’s such a nice boy, said his mother. Not knowing how to make the world admire him the way it did Ivan, he withdrew into his room.