“Who cares?” said Mr. Ivo. “If the war spreads, heaven forbid, I’m well prepared. If it doesn’t, so what? I had a lot of fun digging up my garden. I’ve grown roses for thirty years, surely you don’t expect me to die without getting to know the difference between them and chickens?”
At the beginning of the war Mr. Ivo produced an excellent yield of tomatoes and lettuces, and when the water shortages began, he was able to use the cold clear water from his well. It didn’t take long for the neighbors to imagine that the clucking in Mr. Ivo’s garden was the singing of birds of paradise, an irresistible sound that brings you out of the world of shadows and into the light of day.
“A gentleman is a gentleman, and riff-raff’s riff-raff, whatever happens,” they said. “Until yesterday we watched Mr. Ivo among his roses and thought to ourselves, ‘You see, he’s a gent from Dubrovnik.’ Never mind that today he’s knee-deep in chicken shit — he’s still a gent!”
One day, because the water pipes had been dry for almost a fortnight, and even the drinking fountain at the top of Šepetarovac had dried up, a handful of neighbors carrying buckets knocked on Mr. Ivo’s window for the first time. He agreed to draw water for them and, of course, they spread the good word around the neighborhood. The next day fifty people gathered in front of Mr. Ivo’s house. Nobody was denied a bucket of water — until another fifty, then a hundred, came knocking on Mr. Ivo’s door.
The Gentleman from Dubrovnik had a simple rule: his neighbors were not allowed to help themselves to water, in case they dirtied the well. After a few days, Mr. Ivo hung up a notice on his door: “Dear neighbors,” it read, “the well is open from ten to midday and from four to six in the evening. I am not in a position to serve you at other times.” The next morning a long and surprisingly disciplined queue formed outside Mr. Ivo’s house. He let in three water-carriers at a time. Nobody complained, and there were no raised voices. A code of behavior was observed as in a mosque or a church. The rowdy element was upbraided by Mr. Ivo or by others in the line. “You’ve come to draw water,” they were told. “This isn’t a pub!” And so they were instructed to behave accordingly.
At times of heavy shelling, or on days when the fierce south winds were blowing, the Gentleman from Dubrovnik sometimes became irritable. Usually, on such occasions, people standing in line tried to cheer Mr. Ivo up with quizzical looks, polite questions or tiny gestures. Sometimes it worked, but often Mr. Ivo behaved like a cruel aristocrat. He would shower people with sarcastic comments, unnecessary warnings and even insults. But he never withheld water from any of his neighbors.
Whenever the south winds and the Serb attacks receded, the gentleman became his old self again. He never lost his dignity, even when leaning over the well, or when sweat was dripping off his face, or when he felt a bit weak and had to sit down for ten minutes.
Now and again the main water supply in the city was restored, which meant that Mr. Ivo could breathe a sigh of relief. On days like that, nobody gave the Gentleman from Dubrovnik a second thought, and nobody knocked on his door — which is how it should be: leave the poor man alone to have a rest from his nonstop visitors. Don’t forget that you’ll have to go back there sooner or later, at which time you’ll thank your lucky stars that you don’t have to walk to the city water pump by the brewery, which is often shelled by the Chetniks.
On Christmas Eve Mr. Ivo announced that he wouldn’t be working the next day because it was a holiday, and for that reason he intended to stay at the well until midnight. The following day the water-carriers brought Mr. Ivo lots of presents and cakes and pies, baklavas and jars of yoghurt made from milk powder, not to mention bundles of ground coffee. One young man somehow managed to get hold of a packet of Croatian cigarettes, which especially touched Mr. Ivo.
The day after Christmas was just like any other. At one end of the garden was a long line of men, women and children holding buckets; at the other end was Mr. Ivo staring into the well, whose clear water represented for this particular neighborhood all of the goodness in the world. The Gentleman from Dubrovnik would fill every bucket — and then it was time to climb up Šepetarovac again.
Every day when I drag the water up the hill I remember Christ on his way to Calvary. I wonder if Calvary was uphill all the way, or if it was perhaps uphill only here and there, with flat or even downhill stretches in between, the way my mother used to say it was about a Muslim woman — giving her something else to worry about?
Bosnian Hotpot
“I know what the speed of light is,
but we haven’t learned about the speed of darkness yet.”
Dino from Zenica, twelve years old,
temporarily at school in Zagreb
You should go to Africa maybe, where love never dies; it’s like a fairy tale. You know how the story goes: by chance, two people meet and fall in love, they get married, have children and live happily ever after, or, at any rate, until death finally casts them asunder. This is a cliché most of us believe in from puberty onwards; it doesn’t take account of reality. Young girls read about the cliché in romantic novels. Parents make hopeful plans with a view to their children having fairy-tale lives. But real life isn’t a cliché, and that’s why it almost never works out the way you imagine. But don’t look back in anger or you’ll only end up thinking love is God’s idea of a joke.
Elena was a young ambitious woman from Zagreb. She came to Sarajevo to study for a degree that was unavailable back home, even though she could have taken a dozen similar courses there. At first she hated the way the city tram drivers always made a special detour on Baščaršija in order to buy a pastry. She was driven crazy by the Sarajevans who talked too loud and made spiteful jokes. The pungent smells of the city also bothered her. Nor could she stand the young men who insisted on telling their whole life story to her, only to be crudely familiar the next time she met them. But Sarajevo was a city that didn’t require people to change the habits of a lifetime — it could even put up with people’s contempt — and so Elena quickly grew accustomed to its local oddities. Pretty soon she began to derive pleasure from the way so many people lived on top of one another without making a fuss about their differences. The trivial but immediate quality of this pleasure brought to her mind the atmosphere of a station waiting-room on a platform from which trains depart to heaven and hell.
Zlaja, who was older than Elena, had not yet graduated from the school of journalism. He was the eternal student type, the son of a wealthy and respected Bosnian family. His upbringing smacked of liberal Islam and stuffy Viennese gentility. The local wags used to joke that even the flies in Zlaja’s house were upper class — they buzzed around wearing tailcoats.
As a rule, decadence goes hand in hand with laziness. In this respect, Zlaja was no exception. Always urbane, and with a taste for drink, he spent most of his time in cafés dreaming up endless projects that would guarantee his future. Needless to say, his schemes were always completely unrealistic. The more time he wasted, and the more the situation in Bosnia deteriorated, the more Zlaja yielded to his fantasies. Most bouts followed a similar pattern: after the first drink he would embark on a tall story about a fabulous new business, a sure thing. Around midnight the new business usually merged with other businesses whose success was equally assured; and by sunrise Zlaja had created a giant multinational. His plans ranged from launching a daily newspaper that would sell a hundred thousand copies, to producing a special kind of tea for pregnant women that would predetermine the sex of the unborn child. (If the experiment failed, and the unfortunate parents got a child of the wrong sex, the manufacturers would refund the money.) In any case, according to the law of probability, you were bound to come up trumps fifty per cent of the time, so the product couldn’t fail to bring in lots of dough.