Despite my grand plans, I ended up writing only six or seven “Sarajevo Republika” columns before Naši dani ran its course out of money. The magazine’s dissolution was inconspicuous within the ongoing dissolution of Yugoslavia. In the summer of 1991, incidents in the neighboring Croatia developed into a full-fledged fast-spreading war while rumors persisted that the army was secretly transferring troops and weapons to the parts of Bosnia with a majority Serb population. Oslobodjenje, the Sarajevo daily paper, got hold of a military plan outlining troop redeployment in Bosnia and Herzegovina that clearly suggested the imminence of war, even though the army firmly denied the plan.
The army spokespeople weren’t the only ones denying the blatant likelihood of war — the urbanites of Sarajevo were also intent on ignoring the obvious, if for different reasons. In the summer of 1991 parties, sex, and drugs were abundant; the laughter was hysterical; the streets seemed packed day and night. In the seductive glow of inevitable catastrophe, the city appeared more beautiful than ever. By early September, however, the complicated operations of denial were hopelessly winding down. When I wandered the city, I found myself speculating with troubling frequency as to which buildings would provide good sniper positions. Even as I envisioned myself ducking under fire, I took those visions to be simply paranoid symptoms of the stress induced by the ubiquitous warmongering politics. I understand now that I was imagining incidents, as it was hard for me to imagine war in all its force, much the way a young person can imagine the symptoms of an illness but find it hard to imagine death: life seems so continuously, intensely, and undeniably present.
Nowadays in Sarajevo, death is all too easy to imagine and is continuously, undeniably present, but back then the city — a beautiful, immortal thing, an indestructible republic of urban spirit — was fully alive both inside and outside me. Its indelible sensory dimension, its concreteness, seemed to defy the abstractions of war. I have learned since then that war is the most concrete thing there can be, a fantastic reality that levels both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul.
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One day in the early summer of 1991, I went to the American Cultural Center in Sarajevo for the interview that was supposed to determine my suitability for the International Visitors Program, a cultural exchange run by the now defunct United States Information Agency — which I hoped was a spy outfit whose employees went undercover as culture lovers. Even being considered for an invitation to America was flattering, of course, because you had to be deaf, dumb, blind, and comatose to avoid American culture in the Sarajevo of my youth. By the time I graduated from high school, in 1983, my favorite movie of all time was Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. I worshipped Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and Television, and CBGB was to me what Jerusalem must be to a devout believer. I often imitated Holden Caulfield’s diction (in translation) and once manipulated my unwitting father into buying a Bukowski book for my birthday. By the time I graduated from college, in 1990, I could act out with my sister chunks of dialogue (mispronounced) from His Girl Friday. I’d get angry at people who couldn’t recognize the genius of Brian De Palma. I could recite Public Enemy’s angry invectives, and was up to my ears in Sonic Youth and Swans. I piously read American short-story anthologies, available in translation, in which Barth and Barthelme reigned. I hadn’t really read Barth’s famous essay, but I thought that the notion of the literature of exhaustion was very cool. I wrote an essay on Bret Easton Ellis and corporate capitalism.
I met the man in charge of the center, chitted and chatted about this and that (mainly that), and then went home. I didn’t think that my visit to America would ever come to pass, nor had I noticed the man actually evaluating me. Despite my fondness for American culture, I didn’t care all that much. Even if I thought it would be fun to Kerouac about in America for a while, I had no particular desire to leave Sarajevo. I loved my city; I intended to tell stories about it to my children and my grandchildren, to grow old and die there. Around that time, I was having a passionate on-and-off relationship with a young woman who was working hard to get out of Sarajevo and move abroad because, she said, she felt that she didn’t belong there. “It’s not about where you belong, it’s about what belongs to you,” I told her, possibly quoting from some movie or another. I was twenty-seven (and a half) and Sarajevo belonged to me.
I’d pretty much forgotten about my summer chitchat when, in early December, I received a call from the American Cultural Center inviting me for a monthlong visit to the United States. By that time I was exhausted by the onslaught of warmongering, and I accepted the invitation. I thought that being away would provide some relief. I planned to travel around the States for a month, then, before returning to Sarajevo, visit an old friend in Chicago. I landed at O’Hare on March 14, 1992. I remember that day as vast, clear, and sunny. On my way in from the airport I saw for the first time the skyline of Chicago — an enormous, distant, geometrical city, less emerald than dark against the blue firmament.
By this time, the Yugoslav People’s Army’s troops were fully deployed all over Bosnia, following the previously denied plan; Serbian paramilitaries were crazy-busy slaughtering; there were random barricades and shootings on the streets of Sarajevo. In early April, a peaceful demonstration in front of the Bosnian Parliament building was targeted by Karadžić’s snipers. Two women were killed on the Vrbanja Bridge, a hundred yards or so from teta-Jozefina’s apartment, quite conceivably by the same good sniper who later maculated the walls in the room of my conception. On the outskirts of the city, in the hills above, the war was already mature and raging, but in the heart of Sarajevo people still seemed to think that it would somehow stop before it reached them. To my worried inquiries from Chicago, my mother would respond, “There is already less shooting than yesterday”—as though war were a spring shower.
My father, however, advised me to stay away. Nothing good was going to happen at home, he said. I was supposed to fly back from Chicago on May 1, and as things got progressively worse in Sarajevo, I was torn between guilt and fear for my parents’ and friends’ lives, kept awake by worries about my previously unimagined and presently unimaginable future in America. I wrangled with my conscience: if you were the author of a column entitled “Sarajevo Republika” then it was perhaps your duty to go back and defend your city and its spirit from annihilation.
Much of that wrangling I did while incessantly roaming Chicago, as though I could simply walk off my moral anxiety. I’d pick a movie that I wanted to see — both for distraction and out of my old habits as a film reviewer — then locate, with my friend’s help, a theater that was showing it. From Ukrainian Village, the neighborhood where I was staying, I’d take public transportation to buy a ticket a couple of hours before the show and then I’d wander in concentric circles around the movie theater. My first journey was to the Esquire (now no longer a movie venue) on Oak Street, in the affluent Gold Coast neighborhood — the Esquire was my Plymouth Rock. The movie was Michael Apted’s Thunderheart, in which Val Kilmer played an FBI agent of Native American background who pursues a case to a reservation, which somehow forces him to come to terms with his past and heritage. I remember the movie being as bad as it now sounds, though I don’t remember many details. Nor do I remember much of my first Gold Coast roam, because it has become indistinguishable from all the other ones, the way the first day of school is subsumed in the entirety of your educational experience.