I revisited all my favorite spots in the city center, then roamed the narrow streets high up in the hills, beyond which lay a verdant world of unmapped minefields. I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the smell of hard life and sewage — during the siege, people had taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted unlike what I remembered from before the war — it was like burnt corn now. As a Bosnian in Chicago, I’d experienced one form of displacement, but this was another: I was displaced in a place that had been mine. In Sarajevo, everything around me was familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.
One day I was strolling, aimlessly and anxiously, down the street whose prewar name had been Ulica JNA (The Yugoslav People’s Army Street) and now was Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva (The Defenders of Sarajevo Street). As I walked past what had been called, in the heady times of socialism — which now seemed positively prehistoric — the Workers’ University (Radnički univerzitet), something made me turn and look over my shoulder into its cavernous entranceway. The turn was not of my own volition: it was my body that spun my head back, while my mind went on for a few steps. Impeding impatient pedestrian traffic, I stood puzzled before the late Workers’ University until I realized what had made me look back: the Workers’ University used to house a movie theater (it had shut down a couple of years before the war), and whenever I’d walked by in those days, I’d looked at the display cases where the posters and show times were exhibited. From the lightless shafts of corporal memory, my body had recalled the action of turning to see what was playing. It had been trained to react to urban stimulation in the form of a new movie poster, and it still remembered, the fucker, the way it remembered how to swim when thrown into deep water. Following that involuntary revolution, my mind was flooded with a banal, if Proustian, memory: once upon a time in Sarajevo, at the Workers’ University, I’d watched Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America, and now I recalled the pungent smell of the disinfectant that was used to clean the floors of the cinema; I recalled peeling myself off the sticky fake-leather seats; I recalled the rattle of the parting curtain.
* * *
I’d left Sarajevo for America on January 24, 1992. I had no way of knowing at the time that I’d return to my hometown only as an irreversibly displaced visitor. I was twenty-seven (and a half) and had never lived anywhere else, nor had any desire to do so. I’d spent the few years before the trip working as a journalist in what was known, in socialist, peacetime Yugoslavia, as the “youth press” (omladinska štampa), generally less constrained than the mainstream press, reared in the pressure chamber of Tito’s one-party state. My last paid job was for Naši dani, where I edited the culture pages. (Before the war, the domain of culture seemed to offer a haven from the increasingly hateful world of politics. Now, when I hear the word culture, I pull out the quote commonly attributed to Hermann Göring: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.”) I wrote film reviews but was far better known for my column “Sarajevo Republika.” The name was intended as an allusion to the Mediterranean Renaissance city-states — Dubrovnik or Venice — as well as to the slogan “Kosovo republika,” which had been sprayed on Kosovo walls by the “irredentists,” who demanded that Kosovo be given the status of a republic in the federal Yugoslavia; given full sovereignty, that is, in place of its status as an “autonomous province” of Serbia. In other words, I was a militant Sarajevan. I set out in my column to assert Sarajevo’s uniqueness, the inherent sovereignty of its spirit, reproducing and extolling its urban mythology in a prose arrogantly thick with abstruse Sarajevo slang. The first column I ever published was about an aščinica—a traditional Bosnian storefront restaurant, serving cooked (as opposed to grilled) food — which had been run by a local family, the Hadžibajrićs, for a hundred and fifty years or so. One of the urban legends about the Hadžibajrićs claimed that, back in the seventies, during the shooting of the movie The Battle of Sutjeska, a state-produced Second World War spectacle, starring Richard Burton as Tito, a Yugoslav People’s Army helicopter was frequently deployed to the set deep in the mountains of eastern Bosnia, to transport the Hadžibajrićs’ buredžici (meat pies in sour cream) for Elizabeth Taylor’s gastronomic enjoyment. To this day, many of us are proud of the possibility that some of the fat in Purple Eyes’s ass came from Sarajevo.
The columns that followed were about the philosophy of Sarajevo’s baroque slang; about the myriad time-wasting strategies I believed were essential for urban-mythology (re)production, and which I executed daily in innumerable kafanas; about bingo venues, frequented by habitual losers, bottom-feeders, and young urbanites in pursuit of coolness credentials. One of the columns was about the main pedestrian thoroughfare in the heart of the city — Vase Miskina Street (known as Ferhadija since the fluttering fall of socialism) — which stretched from downtown to the old town. I referred to it as the city artery, because many Sarajevans promenaded along it at least twice a day, keeping the urban circulation going. If you spent enough time drinking coffee at one of the many kafanas along Vase Miskina, the whole city would eventually parade past you. In the early nineties, street peddlers stationed themselves along the street, pushing the penny-cheap detritus of the wrecked workers’ state: sewing-machine needles, screwdrivers, and Russian — Serbo-Croat dictionaries. These days, it is all Third World — capitalism junk: pirated DVDs, made-in-China plastic toys, herbal remedies and miraculous sexual enhancers.
Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing details and generating ideas. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I’m prone to reimagining my young self as one of Baudelaire’s flaneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering in the city was the main means of communication with it. Sarajevo was — and still is — a small town, viscous with stories and history, brimming with people I knew and loved, all of whom I could monitor from a well-chosen kafana perch or by patrolling the streets. As I surveyed the estuaries of Vase Miskina or the obscure, narrow streets creeping up the hills, complete paragraphs flooded my brain; not infrequently, and mysteriously, a simple lust would possess my body. The city laid itself down for me; wandering stimulated my body as well as my mind. It probably didn’t hurt that my daily caffeine intake bordered on stroke-inducing — what wine and opium must’ve been for Baudelaire, coffee and cigarettes were for me.
As I would in 1997, I entered buildings just to smell their hallways. I studied the edges of stone stairs blunted by the many soles that had rubbed against them over the past century or two. I spent time at the Željo soccer stadium, deserted on a gameless day, eavesdropping on the pensioners — the retirees who were lifelong season-ticket holders — as they strolled within its walls in nostalgic circles, discussing the heartrending losses and unlikely victories of the past. I returned to places I’d known my whole life so that I could experience them differently and capture details that had been blurred by excessive familiarity. I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority. Physically and metaphysically, I was placed. If my friends spotted me on a side street looking up at the high friezes typical of Austro-Hungarian architecture, or lingering on a lonely park bench, watching dogs fetch and couples make out — the kind of behavior that might have seemed worrisome — they just assumed that I was working on a column. Most likely, I was.