Ammiel Alcalay
May 2003
One: Unavoidable Detail of Biography
The Excursion
You want to bury your head in the pillow. Anything else is just torture. Yet the snugness of your bed soon vanishes like a dream. The sleep world disappears and you bump your head against your mother’s bony shoulder. As you glance out of the corner of an eye you see the steps of the bus dancing under your feet. This optical illusion of neat geometrical figures sends you right back to sleep. Ten minutes later you wake up again with a sick feeling in your stomach, but now it’s too late. You’re already on the bus surrounded by the clerks and typists of the Public Accounts Department on an excursion to Jajce. Your mother is the only member of staff who has brought a child with her — because you have to see the waterfalls, or so she insists, and she won’t take no for an answer, even though your stomach is threatening to erupt and right now your head feels more like a cesspool than a waterfall. Will it never clear up? You hear sounds amid the din, the rhythm of the bus, its thick window knocking. Through the glass you notice things — people, scenes, aspects — that will become, much later, ten years on perhaps, the more or less familiar images of your homeland. Such things you will describe with fervor and exaggeration to strangers from other countries.
Outside the window it’s a rainy day. The overflowing Bosna rushes under the bridge. Not the best weather for an outing, perhaps. Nevertheless the middle-aged employees gossip happily and ogle the blonde secretaries who have packed roast chicken and other snacks into their oversized beach bags, as well as make-up and combs, packets of Panadol, suntan lotion and those mysterious little objects that, as you will soon discover, come in handy once a month — but always, it seems, in the course of day-trips or celebrations.
You look out of the window and see a Fiat overtaking the bus. Inside the tiny vehicle are four young men who, as seen from your lofty vantage, look like happy dwarfs enjoying the rain. It’s obvious they want to race everyone they meet in this shiny, wet world. But you seem to be the only person watching them. The attention of the other passengers is drawn to other things, understandably perhaps, because it’s the middle of the week and they’ve got a day off, so they intend to make the most of it. Take old Džemo, for instance, who has brought an army hip-flask and is now passing it round. The toothless fool offers you a drink as a joke. At first you think it’s just water inside the flask, but then you catch a whiff of the alcohol, its sharp smell not unlike the liquid that nurses use to wipe your shoulder before they give you a jab. You can’t stop the heaving in your guts, until finally you throw up, covering the seat in front of you in a bitter, yellowy-green substance whose unpleasant smell stays in your nostrils for a very long time.
The bus slows down and comes to a halt in the middle of the road. The driver gets out, followed by the rest of the passengers. Your mother tells you not to move an inch, but you’d rather not stay in the bus on your own, so for once you disobey her and join the crowd that has gathered at the roadside, crawling between the legs of the onlookers in order to catch a glimpse of the mangled Fiat, a hand hanging out of the window. Angrily, you mother covers your eyes with her hand, and for that reason you don’t see anything else until she puts you back in your seat on the bus. The pale passengers also clamber back on board and return to their seats, but nobody utters a word, except perhaps for one of the blonde secretaries, who complains that seeing the car wreck has ruined the trip. But how? You don’t ask because you know it will sound like a stupid question. The young men in the Fiat are dead, but it seems as if you’re the only person who is unaffected by this. Why be sad now? After all, it’s not as if anybody knew the crash victims. And then Džemo starts telling stories about the many accidents he has witnessed and the hundreds of others he has merely heard about. To listen to Džemo, you’d think no journey in the history of the world had ever ended without a crumpled Fiat lying at the side of the road. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a disaster after all, if your own bus or car or whatever were to become the object of morbid scrutiny by palefaced onlookers, in whose midst an unknown woman, somebody else’s mother, would hastily cover her young child’s eyes. Just imagine the thrill of being at the center of such a drama. You don’t know why the idea of being the focus of other people’s attention makes you so excited, but you no longer feel sick. Instead you feel a kind of ecstasy as pleasure floods through your body and your tiny penis stirs in your pants. Suddenly you’re wide awake and having a wonderful time. You quiz your mother and wave your legs in the air. Then you ask Džemo for the hip-flask, which gets a big laugh from everybody on the bus. In other words, you’re the life and soul of the party, and you couldn’t be happier even if you’d died in a car crash.
Jajce is made of giant Lego, as if a mighty pair of hands had assembled the bricks after reading the instructions on the back of a toy packet. Nothing is real, except the waterfall perhaps, which is massive and terrifying. You spend the visit at a restaurant sitting outside on a terrace sheltered from the rain. Džemo tells a story about a lovesick young girl who jumped from the top of the waterfall on account of her boyfriend. As soon as he found out what had happened he climbed up and jumped off the waterfall too. Only it turned out that the girl had somehow miraculously survived her terrifying leap and so, making an appearance in Jajce the following day, she asked people if they had seen her boyfriend and they told her about his suicide. The poor girl’s despair was so great that she went and jumped off the waterfall again, killing herself this time.
Nobody believes Džemo’s story about the star-crossed lovers. You ask him why the young man had not turned up alive and kicking after his jump. You simply can not understand how a woman, a member of the frailer sex, as it were, could survive an ordeal like that, while a strong young man perished. You challenge Džemo to jump off the waterfall in order to see which of you survive. He declines.
Džemo refers to the labyrinth under Jajce. Once inside its network of corridors, he says, you can never get out again. Apparently it’s where they throw schoolboys who smoke in the toilets. How terrifying! You have never smoked a cigarette, but what if somebody jumped to the wrong conclusion and threw you into the underground dungeon anyway? Wouldn’t it be horrible to spend the rest of your life wandering in darkness?
You visit a museum with portraits of national heroes. This is where Comrade Tito made Yugoslavia. You ask Džemo if Tito also made Jajce. The old man replies, “Yes and no — which is to say, he didn’t, but he might as well have.” You can’t understand Džemo’s answer. Comrade Tito, you imagine, was the only person in the world strong enough to assemble the Lego bricks above the waterfall. Džemo’s “he didn’t, but he might as well have” stinks, just like his hip-flask.
You eat a meal in the restaurant. You have shish-kebab, but in the bus on the way home you throw up. Never mind, you’d enjoyed eating it.
It is already dark outside; but no Fiat overtakes the bus, which doesn’t stop — and nobody dies. Džemo doesn’t talk of accidents any more. He talks about something else, probably equally untrue. Or perhaps it is true just for a moment before you close your eyes and fall asleep only to wake up when the sky is red, like a burning roof over the lights of Sarajevo.