My friend in Paris who moved there when she was ten years old, at the end of the Algerian war, told me that her teacher had asked her why, even after years of living in France, she walked down a street zig-zag. This is how you walk to avoid a bullet, she explained to her teacher. And this is what the generation of children who survived a war in Croatia will do, walk zig-zag and run to hide in cellars at the sound of an aeroplane.
But the worst are images, because they don’t go away, they stay in your mind and you wake up in the middle of the night sticky with sweat, screaming. Strangely enough, watching it day after day the war teaches you to get used to blood, you are forced to cope with it. After a certain point (which comes very quickly) you realize that people are dying in great numbers and bodies simply pile up like an abstract number on the surface of your mind. In order to survive, you become cruel. You are touched only if you knew the person who died, because in order to comprehend the reality of death you need to identify it, to get acquainted with its face, to personalize it. Otherwise, you feel the pain but it is vague and diffuse, as if you are wearing metal armour that is too tight.
What one cannot escape are images of innocence: children’s faces, a puppy wandering among the charred remains of village houses, a lying dead newborn kitten in a muddy field with its little head strangely twisted, a lost shoe on a sidewalk. On Christmas Day the television reported a particularly fierce attack on the town of Karlovac, some forty kilometres from Zagreb. First the camera showed a distant view of it, with clouds of smoke and dust rising above the rooftops. Then the camera closed in on a street of half-ruined houses and of soldiers picking up a wounded person – so far, it was a fairly average war report unlikely to change the rhythm of one’s pulse. Only when the camera zoomed in on a little house with two smouldering black holes for windows, did I feel as if I’d been punched in the stomach. It was a particularly fine day and the burned shell of the house stood outlined against a deep blue winter sky. A little further on, in front of the house, was a clothes line with a man’s freshly washed white shirt and women’s underwear on it. I could imagine a woman, only a short time ago, standing outside hanging it there. As she returned to the house a bomb fell and everything was over in an instant. The house was in ruins, the people inside had probably been killed. Yet, the shirt and underwear were dangling in a light wind, as if the woman would return at any moment to collect it – clean, dry, smelling of the north wind and distant snow-capped mountains. This was a picture of death itself.
It is January 1992 and by now I know there is no way back. Both borders, the Slovenian and the Serbian one, have taught me my new reality, the fact that I am about to live in a new, a different country with a different shape and a different name: shaped like the core of an apple, and its name incurably associated with blood. However, on the eve of independence (I heard on the news that the European Community is going to recognize Croatia tomorrow, 19 January 1992) I feel ambiguous. I feel robbed of my past, my childhood, my education, my memories and sentiments, as if my whole life has been wrong, one big mistake, a lie and nothing else. I’m a loser, indeed we are all losers at the moment. The Croatian ‘new democracy’ hasn’t brought us anything yet but promises to believe in. The cost is high: renunciation of the whole past and sacrifice of the present.
Croatia has proved two things to the world. First, that the process of self-determination cannot be stopped, and it will be remembered for that. The second lesson, I’m afraid, is that self-determination has no price, and if it has no price it means that a human life has no value. People didn’t vote to lose their sons in the struggle for independence, but the independence stinks of death. A sweet, poignant smell of burned soil and rotten flesh saturates the air. It is rising from the battlefield, from roads and hospital rooms, from half-empty cities and deserted villages, from army camps and ditches, from the people themselves. One can sense it even in Zagreb. Going into the post-office or boarding a tram one smells this distinct, familiar odour as if all of us, alive and dead, were marked by it forever.
Then, again, this ambiguity has its positive aspects: in it there lies a hope for the war’s end. There is a new kind of pride, too. Two years ago, if you mentioned that you came from Croatia (which you probably wouldn’t mention anyway, because you knew it wouldn’t make sense to a foreigner) people would look at you in bewilderment repeating the unknown name with a question mark, as if it were a country on another planet, not in Central Europe.
I hope I will love my new country. I know it is a strange thing to say at this moment of celebration. The presumption is just the opposite: that Croatia is getting its independence simply because millions of people loved it enough to fight and to shed their blood for it practically to the death. But it is not only physically a new country, it is politically a different state and no one knows exactly what life will look like here once the war is over – it could turn into a democracy or a dictatorship, there are no guarantees for either.
When he was elected president, John F. Kennedy in his famous inaugural address to the nation, said: ‘Don’t ask what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ To my mind the citizens of Croatia have to ask themselves a very different question. Having already done everything possible for their country, they have the right to ask: ‘What will our new country do for us, its citizens? Will the sacrifice of all these lives be worthwhile?’
10
IT’S HARD TO KILL A MAN
Sisak is a small town less than sixty kilometres from Zagreb. This is the starting point of the front line. A little to the south, across the Sava, is the last southeastern stronghold of the Croatian army. A few days ago the Federal Army shelled the oil refinery, the hospital suffered several direct hits, the church was damaged. From where I’m sitting, near the door, I can see the street and in the street, right in front of the cafe, a hole made by a rifle grenade. It’s a wonder that the cafe is open at all, I think, for the first time physically aware that the war is close by. A woman is washing up some glasses at the counter. She is wiping them slowly, absent-mindedly, gazing through the window at some frost-bitten pigeons on the pavement across the road. The cafe is almost empty except for a few men in uniform. They stand leaning with their elbows on the counter and drinking beer. The barmaid and I are the only women in the room; the windows are blacked out with paper and the whole place is permeated with the dull smell of weariness. The front seems to begin at the very table where I’m sitting, as if the war is a sort of mythical animal which you can never properly glimpse, though you feel its scent and the traces of its presence all around you: in the woman’s movements, in her look, in the way the uniformed men lean on the counter, tilt the bottles to their lips and then wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands and leave abruptly; in the air of uncertainty which at this moment, for no particular reason, becomes quite palpable.