“How dangerous was it?” I asked.
“Most of the time we waited,” he said. “It was boring but not a usual boredom. There was so much tension.” I thought of how his hands shook each morning as he held his coffee, and now suspected that his nerves were frayed as a result of his wartime experience.
“Snipers fired from both sides. You never knew when there would be an attack.”
“Were you involved in a lot of fighting?” I asked. He drew a breath and told me about his worst day in Dobrinje, a day of deliveries when he had to drive down the front line in a van.
“We drove really fast, and zigzagged to make sure the snipers couldn’t get us,” Senad said. “Our tire burst,” he said. “The driver lost control. We didn’t know if a sniper had hit the tire, if we’d run over something jagged or if the tire was just weak and had blown on its own.” He described how the van flipped and landed on its side, leaving Senad and his friends, who sat in the cargo section in the back, banged up and dazed. That part of the van had no windows.
“We just sat there in the dark,” he said. “So much dust swirled in the air, I couldn’t breathe. I thought I’d suffocate or choke to death.” Senad and his friends heard a click of the ignition, an engine that stalled, curses from the driver. Stuck in a wreck in no man’s land along the front line, they discussed their odds of survival and what to do.
“Either we could sit there and wait for them to open fire, shell us, lob grenades, or we could get out and run,” Senad said.
“It seemed an eternity, but maybe it was only a few minutes. We all agreed. No one wanted to wait for slaughter. We forced a door open. I remember the sun was so bright. We all got out and we ran. Thanks to God that we all made it alive,” he said. He spoke more of life on the front line, friendships formed there, classes missed, a sense of falling behind, lost opportunity.
“When peace came, I was so glad that my family and I lived, but the war cheated me of time,” he said. I hesitated to ask one question because it was intrusive, but asked it anyhow.
“How did it feel the first time you shot someone?”
“Sooosan, I never shot anyone. I always just fired at bushes. If I thought that I had killed someone, I would want to kill myself.” Such destruction in that neighbourhood — I could not believe that a soldier who served there would never have to shoot to kill, even if only in self-defence. I wondered if Senad’s mind was playing tricks on him and suppressing bad memories.
I know mine had. I told Senad how I had recently reread a diary entry about a road trip that Sydney and I had taken the summer before, not long after we arrived in Sarajevo and how shocked I had been to find out that I had completely blocked out one event that I recorded in my diary.
That entry described a trip to Zagreb from Sarajevo — Sydney, a friend and I travelled in the Land Cruiser. The drive was uneventful until we neared Bihač. On our approach, we rounded the beginning of a bend, a long, steep curve down a mountainside, stopped suddenly by half a dozen stationary cars on the road. Sydney and I rolled our windows down. We heard the most terrible wail. We got out of the Land Cruiser and ran down the road toward the person in distress.
“The first aid kit,” I shouted at Sydney, who was tall and long-limbed and already far ahead of me. “I’ll run back to get it.” He stopped. I retrieved the kit from the Land Cruiser and gave it to him. He sprinted down the road; I followed but lagged behind.
I could no longer see Sydney by the time I reached the logs. At first I did not understand their significance, awed by their size, gargantuan pick-up sticks strewn across the road. No traffic could pass. The truck that carried them had skidded across the road and now lay on its side, partially wedged against the steep mountain cliff.
A man in his fifties wailed. I found his anguish harrowing but could not understand the source of it. He stood and had no visible injuries. The man grabbed the logs, held his head and paced back and forth desperately. It was devastating to watch him.
Sydney stood farther down the road by a police officer. He offered him the first aid kit. The police officer shook his head. What I wrote next I did not remember, though words in my diary, my handwriting, must be true.
The man who wailed bent down to pick an object up, a severed leg. He clutched the jean- and shoe-clad leg to his chest and then threw it back onto the ground, where a second severed leg lay. Horrified, I turned away. As I reread the entry in my diary describing this gruesome scene, I felt that I was reading an account of someone else’s recollections and could not accept that I had witnessed this.
I remembered the scene I recorded in the next entry. Sydney approached me, his face blank; his body slightly hunched. He went to the side of the road and crouched down to vomit.
“Don’t go any farther. There’s an ugly sight, a squashed body,” he said.
Our friend, who spoke fluent Croatian, remained near the other cars and spoke with drivers who knew what had happened. When we returned, he told us that the wailing man drove the truck, took the corner quickly and lost control. He and a passenger, his son, jumped from the cab while the truck was still moving. The father landed in bushes, his son was killed, trapped beneath the logs. I said to Senad that it seemed such an unfair fate — to survive the war and then die like that.
He said nothing in reply and just switched the topic of conversation to our workshop in Switzerland. Many of the sessions would focus on digital information. Senad and I would learn techniques to assist with one main focus of our work, transmitting information to Bosnian refugees living in countries like Germany and Norway that would help them decide whether or not to return home. So many refugees remained outside the country and so much of the population in Bosnia was internally displaced.
Louise and her husband Goran had also been affected by the war. Goran retained his family house throughout the war, though their summer house, about a forty-five-minute drive from Sarajevo, housed a family of Serbian refugees, displaced by fighting.
One morning in early June, Louise telephoned. “Guess what?” she said.
I could not guess her news.
“The Serb family at Goran’s place is going home.” Once this family left, Goran could reclaim his summer house. “Why don’t you and Sydney come up for the weekend to help us celebrate?” I accepted the invitation.
Sydney drove. We left the outskirts of Sarajevo, passed a major SFOR base and soon turned onto narrow country roads. As we rounded the bend in one windy lane, we nearly ran into a large moving truck travelling in the opposite direction. Sydney reversed a long distance until he found a gap where he could pull over to let the truck pass. I felt relieved that he was driving, not me.
“Hi,” Louise said with a smile when we finally pulled up to the front door of the country house. “Goran’s in a bad mood. The movers dropped the fridge on his hand.” A few minutes later, we heard footsteps on the stairs. Goran came into the kitchen, nursing his bandaged hand. He was shirtless because of the heat.
“Zdravo [hello],” he said to Sydney, waved at me, then turned toward Louise. As he moved, I saw his back, which shocked me far more than his injured hand. His back was covered in a tangle of thick, welted scars. Goran and Louise discussed the dinner menu, then Goran left. I said nothing but Louise must have sensed my shock and understood the cause.
“The war,” she said.
“What happened?”
“He belonged to the White Swallows.” I told Louise that I had not heard of them.
“They were an elite group of fighters. They tried to hold Mount Igman, key territory,” she said.
“His unit was decimated. He was injured, still conscious, but he couldn’t move. He watched his friends die. Then he just lay there and thought he’d die too.” I pictured the scene as she described how rescuers had found Goran and carried him down the mountain, blood dripping from his body, all gashes and pulp.