Ghosts by Daylight (28 page)

I began to think of all I had lost, and all I had left behind, and I decided I must try to find – if he wanted to be found – Nusrat.

Long before Luca, long before I ever thought I could hold an infant in my arms, let alone become a mother, I had met Nusrat. He came into my life at a particularly insane time.

By the winter of 1993, I was beginning to go a little crazy, along with the 300,000 inhabitants of Sarajevo. The war that everyone thought would be over in a few weeks was dragging on in the brutal Balkan winter. The American flags that some families had hung from their frozen windows when a rumour went around the city that the Americans were coming to save them were beginning to look like a little tattered, a little sad.

My friend Mario, a poet who had been caught in several artillery attacks, but survived, saw a woman’s shoe full of blood in the snow one day. He rarely talked, but that day, he told me sombrely, ‘You can kill a life without killing anyone . . . you can take a city, but you don’t snipe people, you don’t butcher people, you don’t burn down villages.’

My friend Gordana saw a dog running with a human hand in its mouth. My friend Aida said, ‘We are all falling down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole.’ She remembers that first day of war in May 1992: she was walking down the street in her high heels and ponytail on her way to work when a tank came up behind her. As she crouched behind a trash can to take cover, she realized she was entering a new place from which she would probably never return.

Me too; I fell down a hole, a rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland’s, and never returned.

My room on the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn on Sniper’s Alley had plastic windows that came from UNHCR humanitarian aid packets. On one side of the ugly, communist-era room was my flak jacket and my helmet, on my shrapnel-chipped ‘desk’ was a battery-operated Tandy, a high street precursor to a laptop.

Physically, I was deteriorating. I had grown accustomed to not washing and I wore the same clothes several days in a row. I did not care. Oddly enough, even though no one washed in those days, no one seemed to smell. Once a week, I bribed the men who guarded the hotel kitchen with a few packs of Marlboro Lights for a pot of hot water, and with that, I would set aside an hour to laboriously wash my hair and my body. One night, in a fit of despair, I had chopped off my long thick hair with a pair of borrowed manicure scissors. I did not want to be pretty.

My view out the plastic window was of a wasted, gutted city of burned-out buildings and metal canisters that were used to deter the snipers. It was so cold that my skin peeled off in dry patches when I took off my layers of clothes. I was living on a diet of chocolate bars, whisky and cigarettes I had brought in from Kiseljak, the Las Vegas-style frontier town which was the last stop before besieged Sarajevo.

To this day, I cannot forget that cold. The large, cavernous Soviet-style unheated rooms where we would interview doctors or politicians; the freezing cold houses where people sat huddled and frightened around an oil stove; the ugly interior of the lobby of the Holiday Inn, where one afternoon I came back to see journalists abseiling down from the roof with ropes.

I shivered when I woke in my sleeping bag, I shivered when I climbed out and slipped into the same clothes that I had left on the floor the night before, and I shivered climbing back into the bag at night, to read by candlelight. Bizarrely, maids came every day to make up the beds – that is, to pat down the sleeping bags, and to move around the dust. There was not much they could do without water. The toilets did not flush and no water came out of the taps.

I was mentally fried. Every day people came to me with some kind of request: get me out of here, smuggle a package to my sister, take my child to Germany, and give me some money for firewood. The worst was the knowledge that I could leave whenever I wanted to, and they could not.

To compensate for the madness, I had some little routines that kept me sane, like someone stricken with obsessive compulsive disorder. One was to visit the morgue, every day. I usually did this in the morning, when Aliya Hadzic, a pleasant Muslim man in his early fifties who ran the morgue, would still be in a talkative mood. By the time I arrived, Aliya would have counted the dead who came in overnight from the front lines and the hospitals, closed their eyes, tried to straighten their limbs, or if there were no limbs, he would try to piece together the ravages of an artillery or sniper attack.

‘Everyone else was afraid of the dead,’ he would tell me later. ‘But I never was. The dead cannot hurt you.’

After he arranged the bodies on slabs, and closed their eyes, he then took out an ordinary notebook and carefully wrote down the names of the dead. This was important. Aliya is a simple man, born in eastern Bosnia, a farmer at heart, but he took his job seriously and he believed that the dead deserved some respect, especially during war. So he wrote down their names, and where the bodies had arrived from, in simple school notebooks. By the end of the war, there was a stack of twenty-eight notebooks, some brown, some green, some bound with yellowing scotch tape.

If the dead had been killed in an attack in the city, he wrote
grad
. If they had died after being treated in the hospital, he wrote the unit they came from –
C3
meant surgery. Soldiers were given names of the front lines where they were killed – Stup, Otes, Zuc – and you could always tell where the fighting was heaviest overnight by how many were killed. There were a few N–Is written down –
Nema Imena
, person unknown.

Aliya did not fear the corpses, he prepared them for their funerals, but his assistant, Ramzic, was afraid. The poor man drank himself into a stupor just to do his job, and even then, he did not do it well enough, according to Aliya.

‘It was no use having Ramzic around,’ he said. ‘I might as well have worked alone.’ Once, when the electricity worked at Kosevo Hospital – a rare occurrence – the two men had to go to a top floor to collect some bodies. The power went out, and they were stuck for hours. Ramzic stunk of booze.

‘I kept asking him why he did it, why he was drinking himself to death,’ Aliya said. ‘I did the same work and I did not have to drink to do it.’

But Ramzic looked at him woefully. ‘What can I do?’ he said. ‘It’s a war.’

This was a common expression in Sarajevo during the siege. Every possible question, from ‘Why don’t you love me any more?’ to ‘Why are you cheating on your wife?’ was answered with the same response: ‘What we can do? It’s a war.’ It was a refrain repeated over and over by priests, doctors, soldiers, commanders, politicians, aid workers, mothers, teachers. They all said the same thing: ‘What we can do? It’s a war.’

I remember Ramzic well. He was bad-tempered and day by day appeared to grow more nutty. He was certainly always drunk. But he survived. He did not get hit by the snipers that aimed at people running across Marsala Tito Street. He missed all the shells that hit the centre of the city.

But he killed himself a few years after the war, hanged himself with a rope. Aliya is not really sure why, but he reckons the alcohol, the memory of those dead bodies and probably a bad love affair finally got to Ramzic.

Some days at the morgue were worse than others. During the first months of the war, Aliya remembers fifty or sixty people being brought in a day. There were the terrible days of massacres – the bread-line massacre, the water-line massacre, the market massacres – these were days when people went out to get food or supplies and got targeted, deliberately, by Serbs.

There were days when children were brought in, groups of them. Aliya hated those days. That was when the children went outside to play, like one snowy morning, because they could not bear to sit in their apartments any more. You can see the scene: the tired, frightened mother, her children begging her to go outside for some fresh air. So they go, because really, no one but a monster would send an artillery shell into a group of kids building a snowman.

But they did. Aliya was there the day the children came in from Ali Pashe Polje, the kids who were playing in the snow, and died from it. He hated that day.

But the worst day of all was the day he came in and found his son, his beloved son, his oldest son, the boy who could do anything, lying dead on the slab. Ibrahim. Twenty-three years old, about to become a father in three months. A military policeman. Aliya was late to work that day. He remembers he took his breakfast, some bread that tasted like sawdust and some tea, and wandered down the hill from his house, avoiding the usual places that snipers could see.

When he climbed the hill towards Kosevo, and made his way to the morgue, he saw a crowd outside.
What’s this?
he thought, getting impatient.
What do they want?
Then he saw people he knew, some of his son’s friends.
It’s Ibrahim
, he thought, and went into the morgue. He saw his son, dead. He remembers that everything went black. ‘I just passed out,’ he says.

Eighteen years later, I find Aliya and he recognizes me instantly. He is retired and he now lives on a hill above Sarajevo in a house he once built for his son. He tends his cows, because cows are easier than the dead. He is now sixty-four and could have worked a few extra years, but he feels that he has seen enough.

We leave the cows and sheep and go to his house and his wife, whose face is still etched with pain, makes us fresh juniper juice and heavily sugared Bosnian coffee. We sit, and we talk, and he remembers everything; the death of his son, that day, that time.

But something good came of it. His daughter-in-law gave birth to a little boy a few months after Ibrahim was buried. The little boy is now seventeen. He looks just like his father did, and Aliya can sometimes squint his eyes a bit and pretend it is his lost son.

But still, that day that he found his first born child, his boy, lying on a slab in his morgue was the worst day of his life.

My wartime routine rarely varied. Around mid day, I made my way up the hill of Bjelave to the Ljubica Ivezic orphanage. This was a strange and terrible place.

When the war started, everyone had seemed to run away except the donkey-faced director, Amir Zelic. I did not like him, nor he me, but for some reason, he would let me in and allow me to poke around. There were some days he kicked me out, but most of the time he seemed not to care. He asked me for cigarettes and disappeared.

Sometimes Amir was there, sometimes he was not, but no matter what, the children ran completely wild. Not only were they abandoned or orphaned, but many of them were mentally incompetent. When the shelling started, or when it happened at night – particularly terrifying, because there was no electricity so they lay in the dark with the whistle of the shells getting closer – they howled like dogs.

There were some older, truly crazed kids there, and one wintry day, they locked me in a room for a few hours and I had to climb out through a skylight. If you approached them, they wanted cigarettes, money, drugs and food. They shouted: ‘Fuck you, bitch! Welcome to hell! Whore! Fuck you!’

The little ones seemed to get completely lost in the shuffle. They were dirty, smelly and pitiful. If you tried to hold them, they flinched. I never knew, but I am sure, there was terrible abuse going on when no one was looking – which was more or less all the time.

To eat, there was rice and strawberry yoghurt powder twice a day, which Amir would proudly show me. There were rats, and rain poured through the broken windows. The floors were oily and damp and it smelled. The children slept eight or nine to a room on piles of rags or clothes. There were no toilets, and they scratched with dirt and lice and neglect.

One day I found Nusrat Krasnic. He was nine, and looked more like a wild animal than a little boy. He was a Roma child – the Roma make up 5 per cent of the Bosnian population – and had dark, matted hair and rather beautiful eyes. He was skinny as a rail, and dressed in thin cotton clothes in the middle of winter. His boots were passed on by someone who left or died, and they were too big. What I remember the most – and what hurt me the most – was that he wore socks on his hands in the middle of the biting, savage winter.

His mother and father had died during the war, in their house on Sirokaca Street. He had two brothers, and somehow they ended up at the orphanage at the beginning of the war – Amir was not sure how. ‘I can’t keep track of these kids, it’s a war!’ he said gruffly when I tried to get information on his family. Someone said his father might still be alive, and I went back to Sirokaca Street and asked around. No one had seen him. ‘But he’s a gypsy, they move around. Even during war.’

This is what we knew: Nusrat’s mother, Ljubica, was killed when a shell crashed through the wall of his kitchen and reduced the entire house to a pile of rubble. Nusrat knew the house was trashed, but at least once a week, he tried to get back. He ran away from the orphanage, and made the dangerous trek, crossing front lines and going too close to snipers to get back home. Once he got pinned down for more than an hour, hiding inside a flowerpot on a bridge as a firefight raged around him.

Nusrat knew things, which he shared with me on long cold wintry days when we walked through the city together. He knew about
grenatas
– grenades – and what size they were. He knew how to jump on trucks and steal humanitarian aid packages to get extra food, and how to sell it. He knew what sniffing glue was, because the big kids in the orphanage did it. And he knew that somewhere there was some kind of love: at night, he slept wrapped around his dog, Juju.