I don’t know what the war is, I meant to tell her, but I can see that it is everywhere. It is in a street flooded with blood after twenty people have died in a bread queue in Sarajevo. But it is also in your not understanding it, in my unconscious cruelty towards you, in the fact that you have that yellow certificate and I don’t, in the way it is growing within us and changing our emotions, our relations, our values. We are the war; we carry in us the possibility of the mortal illness that is slowly reducing us to what we never thought possible and I am afraid there is no one else to blame. We all make it possible, we allow it to happen. Our defence is weak, as is our consciousness of it. There are no them and us, there are no grand categories, abstract numbers, black and white truths, simple facts. There is only us – and, yes, we are responsible for each other.
And I also wanted to tell Drazena that she should go out and dance in her high-heeled shoes, if only she could.
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by Slavenka Drakulic
First American Edition 1993
A Dinner at the Harvard Club, Paris—Vukovar, It’s Hard to Kill a Man, My Mother Sits in the Kitchen Smoking Nervously, An Actress Who Lost Her Homeland, If I had a Son, What Ivan Said translated from the Croatian by Maja Soljan
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Manufacturing by The Haddon Craftsmen Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Drakulić, Slavenka, 1949-
Balkan express : fragments from the other side of war / Slavenka Drakulic. – 1st American ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Yugoslavia—History—Civil War, 1991- 2. Drakulic, Slavenka, 1949- . I. Title.
DRI3I3.D73 1993 949.702’4—dc20 92-42505
ISBN 0-393-03496-8
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifh Avenue, New York. N.Y. 10110
W. W Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU