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When, a fortnight or so later, the boys from the brigade came with a parcel for the wife of a dead comrade, she refused to open the door to them. She shouted at them through the door, making various threats and curses. When Senka declined the army handout, most of the neighbors just assumed that she had gone mad already. They pulled at the soldiers’ sleeves, trying to get them to leave the parcel, so that they could pass it on to Senka when she calmed down.

As time went by, the widespread compassion turned to ridicule. Nobody any longer wanted to hear her story about the inserted photograph, which had gradually acquired a thousand twists. On the other hand, Senka was always trying to come up with a story that would clear Mašo’s name. Each day she added new details. Yesterday’s reasons disappeared in a flash before today’s uncertainties. But the story about love’s young dream always triumphed in the end. Senka believed that she had to sacrifice everything, including her sanity. In this war-stricken town, deprived of hope, Senka had nothing to cling to but her story.

I don’t know what happened after that because I left Sarajevo. But perhaps the ending is not very important. Once again, faithfulness has been confirmed as the axiom of love, as something that is more important than love itself. But in any case, what transcends even the bounds of this story is our need to create a fable, or a context, to make sense of life and thus give it a purpose.

The people who write about the war in Bosnia without any thought of personal gain, or any wish to clamber over the bodies of the living and the dead in order to achieve success — a select few, in other words — are actually quite similar to Senka. Without any profit to themselves or others, they bravely seek to preserve an image of a world that has been shattered. Sometimes their unflinching descriptions or honest reports, not to mention their uncompromising points of view, offend public opinion. It is not unknown for such writings to be condemned as national treason by Orthodox believers. But in fact they are only vain attempts to discover a truth, a reason to exist. At a time when just about everything else has been lost of destroyed, faithfulness is the only thing left to believe in. When the time comes to write the history of Bosnia, only people like Senka will resist its lies.

Journey

You wake up in the middle of the night in a room that isn’t yours, with a view of a strange man’s rosy feet and the sound of heavy snoring. At first you can’t work out why you’re there. You shudder before the unfamiliar scene until you wake up completely. Then you remember what brought you there — it wasn’t entirely unpleasant circumstances — but your brain is already working away like a runaway engine and the memory of the night before seems unbearably distant. It is hard to deal with insomnia in a place where nothing belongs to you except your thoughts. The man on the other bed grunts contentedly, without any rhythm or melody, as though he will never stop. The night is long enough and reality is clear enough to let you run through your worst fears before morning — and then you wake up with gray hair. In this kind of situation, and only then, you realize that you are not self-sufficient and that you would be lost without all the various things, big and small, that, in the pause between dreams and journeys, mean life to you. When you’ve experienced a bout of insomnia, and particularly if there is a total stranger lying in the bed next to you, you don’t really want to travel ever again. In the morning you act the part of the distant stranger. You say goodbye coldly without exchanging telephone numbers or addresses. To the others you seem different from last night and from the previous days. You leave behind sober faces, a bungled attempt at friendship and an unclear, cloudy suspicion. Nobody knows, or should know, that you just wanted to return to a familiar world. Unknown places, new people, strange cities are interesting until you see how empty they are.

The Jurišić family cried a lot the night before they had to leave. Granddad, grandma, daughter and grandson. The old man looked at the unpainted ceiling and remembered the cans of paint that had been lying in the attic for two years. He began to sob. The old woman also shed a tear as she put away the coffee pot, thinking that she would never take it out again. The daughter kept on repeating that the most important thing was to stay alive, but the impact of her statement made her whimper. The grandson cried because everybody else was crying and because it seemed to be the thing to do. The convoy had already been postponed seven times, and so it was the eighth time the Jurišić family had woken up to the last morning and said goodbye to their home.

Each postponement brought a kind of relief but made the next last night even more difficult to bear. The sort of trivia that means nothing to ordinary people made the Jurišićs emotional. They absorbed dozens of memories and carried them in their souls like a heavy burden — it was much heavier than any suitcases or bags. Every day grandma Jurišić squeezed another little trinket into the cases for the journey: it was the most recent thing to provoke tears. Packed between the coats and shirts and shoes were lids from sugar bowls, spoons, used lighters, instructions for the freezer, useless junk that was only valuable at that particular moment because it was part of what one thinks of as home, the part that isn’t needed on a journey.

The convoys were usually cancelled only after the passengers had gathered at the bus station. As a result, everybody had to drag the suitcases back home, running the gauntlet of neighbors looking out of their windows. But the Jurišić family was always smiling by that time. Only the little boy was unhappy, because yet again the adventure had failed to begin. The old man would open all the windows, as if the family was returning from a long journey, perhaps from its summer vacation, and he’d once again try to fix the permanently broken coffee grinder. The old woman used to complain that the Bosnian government wasn’t helping people to escape from the war zone when even the Chetniks were running convoys. Those no-good politicians were all the same, she’d say. The old man would put the coffee grinder down ceremoniously on the table and say, “Nothing’s the same and nobody’s the same — but you’re still the same old fool.” His wife would be quiet for five minutes and sulk for a little longer, then he’d go over to her, put his arms around her waist like he used to fifty years ago, and tenderly whisper, “We’ll go to the other world like the Omanovićs.” The Omanovićs were the old married couple from downstairs. They had been killed the previous year by a Serb mortar while they were listening to the news on the radio. The old woman would look at her husband and gently push him away, the way you push men away when they come out with silly love talk.

On the eighth attempt, the convoy did manage to get through, leaving the town behind; it was like somewhere utterly unattainable. The prospect of an unbesieged world stretched out before the Jurišićs. The old people silently stared into space. The daughter showed the grandson an oak, saying, “That’s an oak!” or a pine tree (“That’s a pine tree!”), or a cow, saying, “That’s a cow!” or the sea (“That’s the sea!”). The boy pressed his nose against the window, smearing circles on the glass.

In Split she said to him, “This is Split.”

He asked, “But where’s Sarajevo?”

The old man spoke for the first time. “Sarajevo is where it’s always been,” he said, “but we’re no longer there!”