Only once, years before, had I seen death close up.
My younger brother lies in the mortuary. The slanted rays of the autumn sun fall on the concrete floor by the chrome steel refrigerator with four drawers. Next to it is a stretcher which looks like a makeshift hospital cot. My brother is dressed in a dark blue suit and a white shirt, the same suit he wore at his wedding. I cannot come closer, I cannot see his face, perhaps I don’t want to see it. He is barefoot, only his socks on. Why isn’t he wearing any shoes, I wonder stupidly, as if that question would somehow refute the fact that he is dead. The mortuary smells of disinfectant, the floor is wet, I can see the legs of a woman standing inside as if watching over him. She is wearing black rubber boots. Someone behind me whispers that they must have stolen his shoes, that’s what the folk in the mortuary do, later they sell them to make money. At that point death still has no meaning, I know only that it cannot be grasped, it cannot be understood. One can accept it and go on living with the emptiness, but it is impossible to understand anything beyond the simple and evident fact that someone is gone, that he no longer exists – the fact that my brother was alive only yesterday, I talked to him. He was lying in his hospital bed and talked about boats, how he wanted to go sailing. Yes, I said, when you get well we’ll go sailing together. I was telling this to him as much as to myself, unwilling to admit that death existed, pushing it away with words from him… from myself.
But his death was normal, acceptable, everyday death of a kind which is part of everyone’s life: you have to go on living with it. Death on the photographs from Vukovar is something entirely different, it contains the horror of the intolerable. In the glistening spillage of brains exposed there for everyone to see was something worse than death itself. It was defilement. This was no longer merely a horrible death of two men whose inmost vulnerable being, that deepest core which must never be stripped bare, never touched, now lay on the frost-scorched field. Their smashed skulls cancelled out my own effort to live. The naked brain on the grass is no longer death, horror, war – it eludes any explanation or justification, it makes no sense at all. You ask yourself how it is possible to live in a place where things like that are happening. I know I should have asked myself at this point whether the murdered people were Croats or Serbs and who killed them; perhaps I should have felt rage or a desire for revenge. But as I gazed at the dark gaping hole, at the blood-caked pulp, I only felt an unspeakable revulsion towards humankind. The naked brain is stronger than such questions, it is the evidence that we are all potential criminals, that we don’t know each other really and that from now on, if we survive at all, we shall have to live in mortal fear of each other, forever and ever. The naked brain crushes, obliterates us, pulls us down into the darkness, takes away our right to speak about love, morality, ideas, politics, to speak at all. In the face of the picture of a naked brain all human values are simply reduced to nothing.
Sitting in the bath, I looked at my body as if it was no longer mine; more than that, as if I no longer wanted it to be mine or wanted to be part of it. The feet, the nails, the hands. I knew all of that belonged to me, that it was me, but my perception of my own body was no longer the same. On my wrists and on the insides of my arms there was a bluish mesh of veins. It occurred to me that my skin was so thin as to be almost nonexistent. When finally I reached out for the towel, it felt like an alien body moving mechanically, no longer in my control. No, it was not fear of death, I would have easily recognized that. I was familiar with the sudden wild pulse booming in my head and the anguished cramp in the pit of my stomach that would spread through my body till I was petrified. Here, in the bathroom, I felt my own terrible fragility and impotence. I was overwhelmed by a frantic urge to escape from this strange and unreliable body. Something in me rebelled at the thought that this form could be me, this vessel, the other with which I had just lost contact.
It must have been a momentary death of sorts, a revulsion, a recoiling from the body I could no longer feel as mine. Under my hard stare the vessel was torn apart from its contents and if someone had hit me at that moment I am sure I would have felt no pain. I squeezed the cut on my finger as if trying to prove to myself I was still alive. A drop of blood fell on my knee. I smeared it on my skin, making a hole-shaped stain. This body was no longer mine. It had been taken over by something else, taken over by the war. I had thought that the death of the body was the worst thing that could happen in war; I didn’t know that worse was the separation of self from the body, the numbness of the inner being, extinction before death, pain before pain. Instinctively I licked the wound on my finger. But it didn’t help, the blood continued to ooze.
8
OVERCOME BY NATIONHOOD
It was usually on 29 November, Republic Day, or some other national holiday. I remember that as a child I was standing in a long row of Tito’s Pioneers. Dressed in blue caps decorated with red stars and with red kerchiefs around our necks, we dutifully waved paper Communist Party flags, chanting ‘Long live Comrade Tito! Tito! The party!’ – while black limousines drove by. There was another slogan that we used to shout on such occasions, glancing at our teacher, who would give us a sign to start. ‘Bro-ther-hood! U-ni-ty! Bro-ther-hood! U-ni-ty!’ we yelled with all our might, as if we were casting a spell. These words were like a puzzle to me. What was more natural than to wish a long life to Tito, when not only streets, schools and hospitals but also towns were named after ‘the greatest son of our nation’? But slogans about brotherhood and unity sounded a little too abstract. Little did I know about the hate, rivalry and bloodshed that divided people in the Balkans throughout history. Little did I know about history at all. How could I know, when, according to our textbooks, history began in 1941 anyway.
The problem was that we – all the people, not just the Pioneers – were told to shout slogans and clap our hands but never to question what those words meant. And when I did, it was too late. Brothers started to kill one another, and unity fell apart, as if Yugoslavia were only part of a communist fairy tale. Perhaps it was. Nationalism as we are witnessing it now in the former USSR, former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia is a legacy of that fairy tale. And it is so for at least three reasons: the communist state never allowed development of a civil society; it oppressed ethnic, national and religious beliefs, permitting only class identification; and in the end, communist leaders manipulated these beliefs, playing one nationality against another to keep themselves in power for as long as they could. Even if the price was war.
I have to admit that for me, as for many of my friends born after World War II, being Croat has no special meaning. Not only was I educated to believe that the whole territory of ex- Yugoslavia was my homeland, but because we could travel freely abroad (while people of the Eastern-bloc countries couldn’t), I almost believed that borders, as well as nationalities, existed only in people’s heads. Moreover, the youth culture of 1968 brought us even closer to the world through rock music, demonstrations, movies, books and the English language. We had so much in common with the West that in fact we mentally belonged there.
Some of my foreign friends from that time cannot understand that they and I have less and less in common now. I am living in a country that has had six bloody months of war, and it is hard for them to understand that being Croat has become my destiny. How can I explain to them that in this war I am defined by my nationality, and by it alone? There is another thing that is even harder to explain – the way the awareness of my nationality, because of my past, came to me in a negative way. I had fought against treating nationality as a main criterion by which to judge human beings; I tried to see the people behind the label; I kept open the possibility of dialogue with my friends and colleagues in Serbia even after all telephone lines and roads had been cut off and one-third of Croatia had been occupied and bombed. I resisted coming to terms with the fact that in Croatia it is difficult to be the kind of person who says, ‘Yes, I am Croat, but…’