At the onset of war, however, such things could still be treated as horrifying exceptions. One could indulge in thinking that a few bad apples had gone nuts, particularly since the Yugoslav/Serbian and Croatian authorities kept promising that everything would soon return to normal. But we soon broke a story on the army trucks transporting weapons (the cargo listed as “bananas”) to the parts of Bosnia where Serbs constituted the majority. We covered the increasingly belligerent Bosnian parliament sessions and attended press conferences at which Radovan Karadžić (now on trial in The Hague), flanked by my former professor, pounded the table with his shovel-like fist, while making barely veiled threats of violence and war.
The more we knew about it, the less we wanted to know. The structure of our lives relied on the routine continuation of what we stubbornly perceived as normalcy. Hence, convinced that we were merely trying to live a normal life, we embarked upon a passionate pursuit of hedonistic oblivion. There was partying and drinking every night, often into the wee hours. We also danced a lot; indeed, I published an editorial in the cultural section, written by Guša, arguing that it was everybody’s urgent duty to dance more if we wanted to stop the oncoming catastrophe.
Much of the money earned working for Naši dani I dropped into slot machines, so rigged as to preclude even a statistical probability of winning, because gambling results in a particularly intense oblivion. A more pleasurable means of denial was getting stoned and watching Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi, often bellowing along: “Gigi, am I a fool without a mind / or have I really been too blind…” Pedja and I would occasionally get drunk in the afternoon and then croon along with Dean Martin, one of the great leaders of the international hedonist movement. We spent one splendid spring Saturday in our garden, eating spit-roasted lamb and smoking superb hashish (which, along with many other intoxicants, became widely available because the minister of the interior was controlling drug traffic). It made us ravenous, the hashish, so we ate lamb and smoked until we were so high we would’ve floated away, like balloons, toward the distant war-free landscapes, had we not been ballasted with enormous amounts of meat.
Those happy days before everything collapsed, when anything at all went far in inducing lifesaving oblivion! We did it alclass="underline" staying up all night to close and lay out an issue of the magazine, subsisting on coffee and cigarettes and trance; consuming pornography and writing poetry; participating in passionate soccer-related discussions and endless, manic debates prompted by questions like: “Would you fuck a horse for a million deutschmarks?” or “Does the grandmaster Anatoly Karpov own a superfast speedboat?”
Then there was rampant, ecstatic promiscuity. A few exchanged glances, sometimes in the presence of the boyfriend or girlfriend, were sufficient to arrange intercourse. The whole institution of dating seemed indefinitely suspended; it was no longer necessary to go out before hopping into bed. Indeed, there was no need for bed: building hallways, benches in parks, backseats of cars, bathtubs, and floors were just fine. We reveled in Titanic sex; there was no need for comfort or time for relationships on the sinking ship. It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm. I’m afraid we are not taking advantage of the great opportunities provided to us by this particular moment in human history.
By midsummer it became hard to maintain the precarious state of hysterical oblivion. A dealer we had used as a source for a story on drug traffic in Sarajevo went back home to Croatia for a visit and ended up forcibly conscripted, then called us, somehow, from the trenches, leaving a frenzied message: “You cannot imagine what is happening here!” We could hear shooting in the background. He didn’t leave a number where we could reach him on the front line, and I doubt we would have called him back if he had. Then Pedja was dispatched to report from the Croatian front, only to be arrested and tortured by the Croatian forces. After his release was negotiated, he returned all beaten up, appearing, aged, at our door. He couldn’t sleep at night and moped around our place for days, his eyes glassy, his brain irresponsive to Dean Martin, his bruises changing color from deep blue to shallow yellow. Finally, annoyed, I sat him down, pushed a tape recorder into his face, and made him tell me about his experience in the Croatian war zone: his stupidly boarding a bus full of Croatian volunteers; the beating that ensued; the detention and the so-called interrogation; the humiliatingly stupid good cop, bad cop routine (the good cop liked the Pet Shop Boys); the squeezed testicles and kidney punching; the taste of the gun in his mouth; et cetera. When he finished, I turned off the recorder, ritually handed over to him the ninety-minute tape, and said: “Now put it away and let’s move on.” I deemed myself wise back then.
But there was nowhere to go. In July, I quit the editing job and went for a few weeks to Ukraine, just in time for the August putsch, the collapse of the USSR, and the subsequent Ukrainian independence. When I came back to Sarajevo in early September, the magazine had been shut down; Pedja and Davor had moved us all out of the Kovači apartment and back to our respective parents’ homes, as we had no more money to pay the rent. The city was deflated, the euphoria exhausted. One night, I went to the Olympic Museum café, where we used to hang out a lot, and I watched glassy-eyed people stare into the terrible distance, barely talking to one another, some of them drugged to the brim, some of them naturally paralyzed, all of them terrified with what was now undeniable: it was all over. The war had arrived and now we were all waiting to see who would live, who would kill, and who would die.
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
My family used to have a cabin on the mountain called Jahorina, twenty miles from Sarajevo. Jahorina was a ski resort, and back in our teenagehood, Kristina and I spent our entire monthlong winter breaks skiing and partying, our parents coming up only on weekends to deliver food and clean clothes and assess the damage. While in the winter the mountain was full of skiers, tourists, and friends, it was mostly depopulated in the summer. On weekends, there would be a few other cabin owners who, like my parents, escaped from the city heat to tinker with woodwork. Kristina and I avoided going to the mountain in the summer, despite our parents’ insistence that Jahorina was heaven, as compared with the hell of Sarajevo. We much preferred idling and simmering in the parentless cauldron of the city.
But sometime in the late eighties, I started going up to the mountain in the summer. I’d pack my little Fićo (the Yugoslav replica of the Fiat 500) with books and music and move to Jahorina for a month at a time. I was in my mid-twenties, still living with my parents, which, apart from problems pertinent to my personal sovereignty and privacy, made reading with sustained attention fairly difficult — my parents constantly demanded participation in family activities and devised elaborate chores. In the Jahorina cabin, on the other hand, I could be fully in charge of my own time, which I regimented like a monk, reading eight to ten hours a day. I’d step out of my monastic devotion only to attend to the needs of my foolish body, which besides food and coffee, demanded some physical exertion. Hence I chopped firewood and occasionally went for long hikes farther up the mountain, above the tree line, toward harsh, barren landscapes and peaks from which the poignant expanse of Bosnia could be seen. I eschewed other people and went on foot to the solitary supermarket, a couple of miles away, only when I needed more cigarettes or wine.