Even from Chicago, I could guess at the magnitude of my hometown’s transformation. The street that connected my neighborhood (Socijalno) with downtown was rechristened Sniper Alley. The Željo stadium, where I’d eavesdropped on the pensioners, was now controlled by the Serbs, its wooden stands burned down. The little bakery in Kovači that produced the best somun (leavened pita bread) in town, and therefore in the world, was also burned down. The Museum of the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, housed in a beautiful Austro-Hungarian building of no strategic value whatsoever, was shelled (and is still a ruin). The pseudo-Moorish National Library was shelled; along with its hundreds of thousands of books, it burned down.
In December 1994, I briefly volunteered at the International Human Rights Law Institute of DePaul University’s College of Law, where evidence of possible war crimes in Bosnia was being collected. By then, I’d quit canvassing and enrolled in graduate school at Northwestern, and I desperately needed another job, so I showed up at the institute’s downtown office, hoping that they would give me one. There was no way for my prospective employers to know who I was or had been — I could easily have been a spy — so they offered me what they thought were simple volunteer tasks. At first, I did some data input for the concentration-camp database, where every testimony or mention of a camp was filed. But eventually I was given a stack of photos of destroyed and damaged buildings in Sarajevo, as yet unidentified, and asked to note their locations. Many of the buildings photographed were roofless, hole-ridden, or burned, their windows blown out. There were few people in those pictures, but what I was doing felt very much like identifying corpses. Now and then I could recall the street or even the exact address; sometimes the buildings were so familiar they seemed unreal. There was, for example, the building at the corner of Danijela Ozme and Kralja Tomislava, across from which I used to wait for Renata, my high school girlfriend, to come down from Džidžikovac. Back then, there was a supermarket on the ground floor of the building, where I’d buy candy or cigarettes when she was late, which was always. I’d known that building for years. It had stood in its place solid, indelible. I’d never devoted any thought to it until I saw its picture in Chicago. In the photograph, the building was hollow, disemboweled by a shell, which had evidently fallen through the roof and dropped down a few floors. The supermarket now existed only in the flooded storage space of my memory.
There were also buildings that I recognized but could not exactly place. And then there were the ones that were wholly unknown to me — I couldn’t even figure out what part of town they might have been in. I have learned since then that you don’t need to know every part of a city to own the whole of it, but in that office in downtown Chicago it terrified me to think that there was some part of Sarajevo I didn’t know and probably never would, as it was now disintegrating, like a cardboard stage set, in the rain of shells. If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind. Converting Chicago into my personal space became not just metaphysically essential but psychiatrically urgent as well.
* * *
In the spring of 1993, after a year or so of living in Ukrainian Village, I moved to a lakeside neighborhood called Edgewater, on Chicago’s North Side. I rented a tiny studio in a building called Artists in Residence, in which various lonely and not exactly successful artists resided. The AiR provided a loose sense of community within the city’s anonymity; it offered a rehearsal space for musicians, dancers, and actors, as well as a public computer for those of us who harbored writerly hopes. The building manager’s implausibly appropriate name was Art.
Back then, Edgewater was where one went to acquire cheap — and bad — heroin. I’d been warned that it was a rough neighborhood, but what I saw there were varieties of despair that exactly matched my own. One day I stood on Winthrop Avenue looking up at the top of a building on whose ledge a young woman sat deliberating whether to kill herself, while a couple of guys down on the street kept shouting, “Jump!” They did so out of sheer asshole malice, of course, but at the time their suggestion seemed to me a reasonable resolution to the continuous problem we call life.
I was still working as a canvasser for Greenpeace, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, already becoming far too familiar with many of them. But every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own, where I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic, comforting practices. Before sleep, I’d listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I’d watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. I’d occasionally splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the drooling residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select company of those who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theater. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and I offered to resign, would crack the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.
Little by little, people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Over time, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a movie theater and a coffee shop with a steady set of colorful characters — which were, as I’d learned in Sarajevo, the necessary knots in any personal urban network. I discovered that the process of transforming an American city into a space you could call your own required starting in a particular neighborhood. Soon I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local. It was there that I understood what Nelson Algren meant when he wrote that loving Chicago was like loving a woman with a broken nose — I fell in love with the broken noses of Edgewater. On the AiR’s ancient communal Mac, I typed my first attempts at stories in English.
Therefore it was of utmost significance that Edgewater turned out to be the neighborhood where shiploads of Bosnians escaping the war ended up in the spring of 1994. I experienced a shock of recognition one day when I looked out my window and saw a family strolling down the street — where few ever walked, except in pursuit of heroin — in an unmistakably Bosnian formation: the eldest male member leading the way, at a slow, aimless pace, hands on their butts, all of them slouching, as though burdened by a weighty load of worries. Before long, the neighborhood was dense with Bosnians. Contrary to the local customs, they took evening walks, the anxiety of displacement clear in their step; in large, silent groups, they drank coffee at a lakeside Turkish café (thereby converting it into a proper kafana), a dark cloud of war trauma and cigarette smoke hovering over them; their children played on the street, oblivious to the drug business conducted on the corner. I could monitor them now from my window, from the kafana, on the street. It was as if they had come looking for me in Edgewater.