I stretched over to the window and passed him the bag. He looked at me, rather surprised, and then began to shake his head. Suddenly my throat became tight and it was as much as I could do to move my lips. I was paralyzed for half a minute; if the Chetniks had been looking at me they would have been very confused. Rade was trembling like a man who had nothing left. He was reduced to shivering like an unhappy, frightened animal. At last he raised his arm but he still couldn’t say anything.
The following day Rade knocked on our door with a hundred apologies for disturbing us. He gave us something wrapped in newspaper and then left in a hurry, so I didn’t get a chance to speak to him. The parcel contained a small jar of apple jam.
Soon afterwards Jela came out of hospital. The husband and wife continued to live behind their closed window, and Rade only ventured out to collect the humanitarian aid. One day, standing next to my mother in line, he whispered “Thank you” to her. She turned around just in time to hear him say, once again, that the apples were full of life.
In the next few months a handful of men in uniform came for Rade twice, took him away somewhere and later brought him back again. The neighbors watched these mysterious comings and goings, twitching at lace curtains, sometimes peeking through their keyholes. Feeling guilty perhaps, they couldn’t help reminding one another of the hidden guns. Half a dozen gossips went back to the idea that Rade must have wanted to kill somebody. Others remained silent, as if the mere act of talking about their neighbor was enough to cause pain. The obvious solution would have been to hate Rade, but somehow it wasn’t possible.
Nobody knows who killed Rade and Jela. They just disappeared one day without fuss or explanation. Perhaps it’s wrong to say what I am going to say, but I only remember two things about poor Rade — his apple jam and the remarkable fact that he never once, not even in the dead of night, reached out of his window to steal an apple.
Beetle
The War broke out in the year she came of age. She was only just getting used to the slick city streets and to the smell of gasoline and oil and lead. By then she had more or less got the hang of swerving sharply to the right, or sharply to the left, straight on, over the bridge, before the traffic lights turned red. But her early life was spent on the Ravna Romanija mountain with a chap called Miloš, who put her to work on the hardest, dirtiest jobs. When I first saw her she stank of cement and manure and liquor. It was not long after she’d come back from the building site on the premises of a glamorous café, which is nowadays the watering-hole of Chetniks rather than lorry drivers. I agreed a price with Miloš without fuss. He obviously wanted to be rid of her as quickly as possible. In his village the least expensive car was a Golf, so having a rusty old Beetle around the place was kind of an embarrassment.
It was already dark by the time we drove back from the Romanija, through Pale and the tunnels on the outskirts of Sarajevo. Emblazoned in neon lights on one of the concrete flyovers was the legend, “Tito’s crossing the Romanija. .” I was always confused by the three dots. I had a feeling they meant something rude. But my Nazi frau ignored the revolutionary message as she grumbled noisily but in rhythm like a Buddhist nun.
I found a parking space in front of my house. I should say that I live in a rather steep neighborhood unsuitable for cars, but it has an excellent view of the hills around Sarajevo, which are dotted with white Turkish tombstones. It was the first time in her life that she was ever tidy and clean. Squeezed in between all those Mazdas, Hondas and Toyotas, she resembled an architectural model from the golden age of romantic futurism. My neighbor Salko observed that we made a perfect couple — me with my big head and stocky body, her with those gentle curves. Other people reckoned that I could have done better and they said she wouldn’t last more than three days.
I bought her the cheapest car stereo I could find — it was the sort of junk nobody would steal — and I played our tune again and again, partly to block out the noise of the engine and partly because I wanted to have a continuous wall of noise in the background. Somewhere on the road to Kakanj, Nick Cave’s icy melancholy pulsed in time with the flawless Nazi machine, evoking more clearly perhaps than intellectual concepts, painful ideologies and climactic histories the importance of believing in a harmonious view of the world that is unaffected by revolutions and apocalypses. After the beheading of Marie Antoinette, for example, the people of France discovered Baroque. After Lenin killed the Romanovs, a baby’s pram rolled down the Odessa Steps of Eisenstein’s cinematography. After Hitler, I discovered my own rhythm in four beats to the bar and a 1300cc engine.
Now and again her gas supply would be blocked and she would suddenly cut out. I remember her clutch gave up on one occasion. Also, she guzzled huge quantities of gasoline, as you’d expect, and she did have a tendency to get dirty very quickly — but she never had any serious breakdowns. In any case, still having a grip on my imagination, I only drove her around town for pleasure, so these flaws seemed rather trivial. It wasn’t as if I needed the car to escape anywhere or make a getaway.
On the second of May you could hear the thunder crashing on all sides. The bombardment started about midday. After going for a quick spin around town and leaving the car in the parking lot, I drank my last prewar Coca-Cola and then ended up in a cellar somewhere. The shelling continued beyond nightfall. I sat in the dark belly of a building and spoke to a bunch of people I’d only just met. It was a crowd of accidental passersby — a woman on her way home from the market, young children on roller-skates, that sort of thing. I guess the shelling sounded even more terrifying in the darkness. Is that why I became so worried that it wouldn’t leave anything in its wake? I couldn’t help wondering about the first casualty — would it be my house or my Beetle? Of course I wanted both to survive, but it was as if I was obliged by the persistent booming to make an impossible choice. Having stayed awake all night turning the dilemma over and over in my mind, I finally opted to save my home. I think I already had a picture of the Beetle as a dark metal skeleton, but I’m not sure. Perhaps I just imagined that conjuring up such an image would somehow protect my building.
It was already daylight when the shelling came to an end. The sun was dazzling. Glass crunched underfoot. The city was empty and shattered. I noticed that the traffic lights were no longer working as I made my way to the parking lot, where I found my Beetle among the wrecked and burned-out cars. She was covered in dust with a slight shrapnel wound, but I drove her home, opened the courtyard gates and parked the car inside. The war has really started now, I thought. It’s over — no more driving for you.
At first I thought it was incredible that both my house and my car had survived the madness of that day and night of bombing. But as time went by, I began to realize that in fact nothing had been saved; it was just that the final moment of separation had been postponed. The delay was helpful in terms of getting ready and coming to understand that nothing was left for me in Sarajevo apart from the murdered and maimed citizens, the demolished buildings, my forgotten childhood and perhaps a sackful of human flesh that lives off its nostalgia for other forgettable things until it comes face to face with what really matters, at which point it shivers like an engine before cutting out.
A Ring
The doctor announced that my grandmother would die in the middle of the night. She was losing her battle for life, but we knew that anyway — it was the note of medical precision in his voice, or, at any rate, the utter denial of hope, that was so confusing. How could we prepare for her death? How could we get used to the idea before the awful moment when the telephone rings after midnight and another unfamiliar voice full of bureaucratic sympathy informs you that half an hour ago, while you were sleeping, a human soul much loved by you expired in the Oncological Ward of the Kosevo hospital?