Not long after our stroll, I began working as an editor for Naši dani. At around the same time, Professor Koljević became one of the highest-positioned members of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), a virulently nationalist organization, headed by Karadžić, the talentless poet destined to become the world’s most-wanted war criminal. I attended SDS press conferences and listened to Karadžić’s roaring paranoia and racism, his imposing head looming on our horizon: large, cuboid, topped with an unruly gray mane. And Professor Koljević would be there too, sitting next to Karadžić: small, solemn, and academic, with large jar-bottom glasses, wearing a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, his long fingers crossed loosely in front of his face, as if suspended between a prayer and applause. Afterward, I’d come up to greet him, dutifully, assuming that we still shared a love of books. “Stay out of this,” he’d advise me. “Stick to literature.”
In 1992, when the Serbian attack on Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo began, I found myself in the United States. Safe in Chicago, I watched Serbian snipers shoot at the knees and ankles of a man trying to escape from a truck that had been hit by a rocket. On the front pages of magazines and newspapers, I saw emaciated prisoners in Serbian camps, and the terrified faces of people running down Sniper Alley. I watched as the Sarajevo library perished in patient, deliberate flames.
The infernal irony of a poet (bad though he may have been) and a literature professor causing the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books did not escape me. On the news, I sometimes caught a glimpse of Professor Koljević standing beside Karadžić, who was always denying something — what was happening was for him either “self-defense” or it was not happening at all. Occasionally, Professor Koljević talked to reporters himself, mocking the questions about rape camps, or deflecting all accusations of Serbian crimes by framing them as the unfortunate things that take place in every “civil war.” In Marcel Ophüls’s The Troubles We’ve Seen, a documentary about foreign reporters covering the war in Bosnia, Professor Koljević—labeled as “Serbian Shakespearean”—speaks to a BBC reporter, dispensing spin phrases in impeccable English and explaining away the sounds of Serbian shells falling on Sarajevo in the background as a part of the ritual celebration of Orthodox Christmas. “Obviously,” he said, “from the old times, Serbs like to do this.” He smiled as he said that, apparently relishing his own cleverness. “But it is not even Christmas,” the BBC reporter observed.
I became obsessed with Professor Koljević. I kept trying to identify the first moment when I could have noticed his genocidal proclivities. Racked with guilt, I recalled his lectures and the conversations we’d had, as if picking through ashes — the ashes of my library. I unread books and poems I used to like — from Emily Dickinson to Danilo Kiš, from Frost to Tolstoy—unlearning the way in which he had taught me to read them, because I should’ve known, I should’ve paid attention. I’d been mired in close reading, impressionable and unaware that my favorite teacher was involved in plotting a vast crime. But what’s done cannot be undone.
Now it seems clear to me that his evil had far more influence on me than his literary vision. I excised and exterminated that precious, youthful part of me that had believed you could retreat from history and hide from evil in the comforts of art. Because of Professor Koljević, perhaps, my writing is infused with testy impatience for bourgeois babbling, regrettably tainted with helpless rage I cannot be rid of.
Toward the end of the war, Professor Koljević fell out of favor with Karadžić and was demoted from the realms of power. He spent his time drinking heavily, now and then giving an interview to a foreign journalist, ranting about various injustices committed against the Serbian people in general and himself in particular. In 1997, he blew his Shakespeare-laden brains out. He had to shoot twice, his long piano-player finger apparently having trembled on the unwieldy trigger.
THE LIVES OF A FLANEUR
In the spring of 1997, I flew from Chicago, where I was living, to Sarajevo, where I was born. This was my first return to Sarajevo since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended a year and a half before. I’d left a few months before the siege of the city started. I had no family there (my parents and my sister now lived in Canada), except for teta-Jozefina, whom I thought of as my grandmother. When my parents had moved to Sarajevo after graduating from college in 1963, they’d rented a room in the apartment of Jozefina and her husband, Martin, in the part of town called Marin dvor. In that rented room I was conceived, and it was where I lived for the first two years of my life. Teta-Jozefina and čika-Martin, who had two teenage children at the time, treated me as their own grandchild — to this day, my mother believes that they spoiled me for life. For a couple of years after we’d moved out to a different part of Sarajevo, I had to be taken back to Marin dvor to visit them every single day. And until the war shattered our common life, we spent each Christmas at teta-Jozefina and čika-Martin’s. Every year, we followed the same rituaclass="underline" the same elaborately caloric dishes crowding the big table, the same tongue-burning Herzegovinian wine, the same people telling the same jokes and stories, including the one featuring the toddler version of me running up and down the hallway butt-naked before my nightly bath.
Čika-Martin died of a stroke toward the end of the siege, so in 1997 teta-Jozefina was living alone. I stayed with her upon my return, in the room (and, possibly, the very bed) where I’d commenced my exhaustingly messy existence. Its walls were pockmarked by shrapnel and bullets — the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband’s heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn’t move so carelessly in their own apartment.
In my first few days back in Sarajevo, I did little but listen to teta-Jozefina’s harrowing and humbling stories of the siege, including a detailed rendition of her husband’s death (where he had sat, what he had said, how he had slumped), and wander around the city. I was trying to reconcile the new Sarajevo with the 1992 version I’d left for America. It wasn’t easy for me to comprehend how the siege had transformed the city, because the transformation wasn’t as simple as one thing becoming another. Everything was fantastically different from what I’d known and everything was fantastically the same as before. Our old room (and, possibly, bed) was the same; the buildings stood in the same places; the bridges crossed the river at the same points; the streets followed the same obscure yet familiar logic; the layout of the city was unaltered. But the room had been marred by siege scars; the buildings had been mutilated by shells and shrapnel showers, or reduced to crumbling walls; the river had been the front line, so some of the bridges were destroyed and much in their vicinity was leveled; the streets were fractured by mortar-shell marks — lines radiating from a little crater at the point of impact — which an art group had filled out with red paint and which the people of Sarajevo now, incredibly, called “roses.”