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 Baščaršija 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.
The Saxophonist
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.
Saxophonists don’t make history — they make music. But perhaps, after so much talk and fighting, unspoken words do create a silence in whose gentleness the survivors of good and bad can sleep easy.
Three: Who will be the Witness?
The Library
You hear the whistle over your head. It’s followed by the odd moment of suspense, and then below, somewhere in the city, there’s an explosion. You can always see the spot clearly from your window. At first there’s a tall, thin column of dust which turns to smoke and flames. You wait a few minutes to work out what sort of building it is. If the fire is slow and lazy, it means that the burning flat belongs to some poor people. If it bursts into a huge, blue fireball, then it’s somebody’s nicely decorated attic with panelled walls burning. If it burns unremittingly, then the flames must be coming from the apartment of a wealthy shop-owner, full of massive antique furniture. But if the flame suddenly shoots up, wild and uncontrollable, like the hair of Farrah Fawcett, and disappears even more rapidly, allowing the wind to spread paper ash over the city, that means somebody’s private library has just burned down. As you witnessed many such vigorous fires over the months and years of shelling, you got to feel that the foundations of Sarajevo must have been made out of books. And even if they weren’t, you’d like to say, as you stroke the bound volumes on your shelves, that the city still contains many books that have not yet been destroyed.