Sarajevo Marlboro (14 page)

Salih F. used to draw obediently whenever it was time for his drawing practice, but at the end of a session he would go back to watching television and munching grapes. Predictably the doctors sat up late at night analyzing his drawings. He used a brown wooden pencil to draw a hut, a green one for the grass and a yellow one for the sun. He drew eyes and a mouth on the sun; it was a copy, he said, of a picture he had seen as a child. Sometimes he had to explain to the doctors the nature of a particular drawing. The men in white coats used to smile as they listened to his explanations. But sometimes they asked follow-up questions that were too confusing for the interpreter to translate.

The day finally came when a decision had to be made about the future of Salih F. The doctors had prepared only one question. “What would you do,” they said, “if you caught the murderers of your wife and daughters?” Salih F. replied that such a thing was unlikely to happen. By now the Chetniks responsible were far away, across many borders and barbed-wire fences and lines of battle. But the doctors insisted, assuring him that many things were possible even if they seemed unlikely at first. And so, recognizing that his questioners were
like small children, and that it was necessary for them only to imagine a situation in order to make it a reality, Salih F. replied, “I would kill them,” adding, “or I would give them a pen and paper and tell them, as you tell me, to DRAW!”

The doctors' faces lit up. They took their pens and papers and pronounced Salih F. insane.

Down there the devils multiply . . .

Djordje Balašević

The Colony was built by the Austro-Hungarians a few years after they came to Bosnia. The bungalows were laid out in two rows with military precision. In the tiny gardens only wild marigolds grew – and the odd lettuce perhaps. In front of every house there was a little wooden table and two or three stools. In the summer evenings the smell of coffee and
rakija
wafted everywhere; both drinks were served in Turkish cups with a gold star and crescent moon in the bottom. Even the shrieks of playing children couldn't disturb the peace. For almost a hundred years the miners and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren
have lived here, descendants of those who had left other parts of the empire and turned up one morning with their cardboard suitcases at the Kakanj railway station. They set up home in the Colony and lived lives without hopes and expectations, perhaps, but with a kind of inner peace that sometimes creates the illusion of happiness. And the pattern of life was upset only on those black days – which did occur, however, with demonic regularity, about every four years or so – when the siren blasted the news that some of the miners had not returned from the pits alive.

On the other side of town was a Catholic church – and nearby a mosque. As if by some tradition, the Orthodox people didn't live in the Colony, nor did they go down the mines. Communism barely affected the lives of the miners. The pits were too dark to foster any rethinking of ideological views. Decades passed, and the organized diplomatic tours avoided the Colony. The inhabitants weren't affected by the passage of time or by other worldly fashions. And so they continued to be ignorant of such things as traffic pollution, neon lights and synthesized muzak. Only the thick layers of dust, which turned into mud during the autumn, and the increasingly dirty façades suggested that life was about to change – or perhaps it was just returning full circle: the young folk looked back to a period when their grandfathers roamed up and down Bosnia looking for mines, but they also looked forward to the day in the not too distant future when the pits and the Colony would cease to exist.

As soon as war broke out, nobody went down the mines any more. People carrying weapons and flags marched through Kakanj. Some of the inhabitants left, never to return. Others wasted a lot of time in bars, cursing too loudly. In other words, fear entered the Colony – mostly fear of other people, of strangers, of spies, of messengers bringing bad news, but also fear of the night. At daybreak somebody would start shooting, and of course there would be a response from the hills. With the dawn chorus many frightened and tired faces would look out of the houses. Now, every night was like those nights in the past when the siren broke the news of a mining accident.

On such a morning Rudo L. packed his things in a case, locked the front door and the gate, left the keys with his neighbor and, without much explanation, set off toward Vareš on foot. When he reached the church he crossed himself and swore that he would never tell anybody what had happened that night, in his thoughts or his dreams, to induce him to leave Kakanj. Vows seldom have any rational basis. Often they are just ridiculous and pointless, but they can seriously burden a person. Sometimes a vow ends up costing a life. But as the folk in this part of the country are obstinate by nature and thus, in an odd way, rather devout, they seldom break their vows. All around Bosnia people cautiously tell one another stories about horrors that befall those who break their promises. The commitment of a Bosnian who has made a vow can be glimpsed in his face or read in his eyes. It often makes you want to question him or to put temptation in his way or to subject him
to other kinds of torture. His persistence makes him appear unstable in other people's eyes.

When the people in Vareš asked Rudo L. what had occurred that night to make him leave, he refused to say, and so everybody concluded that it must have been something terrible. But as the imagination is always provoked by secrecy, the questioning just intensified; it became more probing and more organized, until it was taken up by those in authority. The police questioned Rudo L. for days, but he stubbornly remained silent. He didn't even attempt to lie, but nevertheless objected repeatedly to the idea that he was suffering from amnesia as a result of the horrors he had witnessed. Rudo L. no longer knew which was worse: being pressured to break a vow or perhaps being certified insane. In any case, he regretted ever having left Kakanj. Yet it was too late to return. He didn't worry that he would probably be killed if he ever went back. He was more disturbed by the idea that, in a manner of speaking, his return would be tantamount to breaking his vow. Such a move would only revive the horrors that played on his mind the morning he left the Colony.

One day the authorities in VareÅ¡ put him in the back of a truck full of people from Kakanj and told him to go to Croatia. The policeman gave him a cynical smile and remarked that “They have superior methods over there,” and that they would inevitably force him to divulge what he had been through. He was afraid of being harassed at Serb checkpoints, or being stopped and threatened or searched, but he
was even more afraid when he stepped off the lorry in Čapljina and was approached by a television reporter who stuck a microphone under his nose and turned a spotlight on him. He asked the very same question that had come up again and again in Vareˇs, but on this occasion it was asked in such a confident voice that Rudo L. imagined the reporter already knew the answer. But who is privy to a vow? The person who makes it, the Lord, and perhaps the devil, too. Who cares if the reporter knew the secret? Rudo L. made up his mind to to surrender his soul to the journalist. He told him that the Chetniks had stopped the lorry on the way to Croatia, and the disappointed reporter immediately vanished. Rudo L. interpreted the episode as a divine omen, a reward for his silence.

The next day he saw the sea for the first time and took his first boat trip. The water was deeper than any water Rudo L. had ever imagined, and the boat was larger and more crowded than anything he had seen on tv. Rudo L. couldn't understand why the boat didn't sink and how it floated gently on the surface like a walnut shell. It was a sign – real tangible proof – that miracles exist and that a long time ago St. Francis really did walk on water, unsinkably like a boat packed with hundreds of people. Even though he was a long way from the Colony, Rudo L. was a happy man again.

His daughter met him in Rijeka, and he told her, if only by way of a sign or a hint, something of what he'd been through and what temptations he had endured. Her eyes filled with tears as she listened to
him. She didn't ask him why he'd left Kakanj, but he told her anyway that he had made a vow.

It was a coincidence that not very far from Rijeka was a mining town called Labin. Perhaps it had a colony too – or perhaps not. It wasn't as though Rudo L. needed to know anyway. He was ninety years old, and it was too late, even for a Bosnian, to pretend to be alive.

Hypnotized by the rhythm, the young boy had been declining the Latin word
terra
for the last fifteen minutes. He gently swayed in the middle of the room, happy and vacant, and just as handsome as a Buddhist monk.

His stepfather was chain-smoking cigarettes and rewinding the videotape of a massacre he had filmed in central Bosnia. The speededup images of suffering and tears played on your nerves, dispelling the memory of emotion. He had to think of a commentary in a hurry in order to dispatch the report to the United States the next day. Briefly he thought it would be a good idea just to record the sound of the boy declining
terra, terra, terram, terrae
. . . and blood.

“Dino, why don't you go and study in your room?”

“Can't you see, Zoka, that I'm doing my Latin?”

“Can't you go to your room and do something else?”

“I've done everything else.”

“Hey, kid, unless you push off to your room to study, I'll play you a video of Tudjman's speech in Sisak.”

The boy looked at his stepfather with dismay. He stopped in the middle of a particular declension and went to his room. The stepfather switched the video off, lit another cigarette and exhaled the smoke happily. He enjoyed the silence under the white ceiling, attempting to be here, in Zagreb, if only for a moment, what he used to be in Zenica. A successful man, that is, and full of himself.

After ten minutes the boy came back into the room. He closed the door after him but didn't take another step, like somebody who had come into a rather daunting office. He remained silent.

Calmly at first, and then with irritation, the stepfather looked him straight in the eye.

“Zoka, are there any horrible pictures in this speech?”

The stepfather scratched his head and laughed, then he got up. He spent a long time fixing his tie in front of the mirror.

“Zoka, do we need anything from the shops?”

“I don't know . . . No, we don't . . . Ask your mom.”

“Do you need any beer?”

Another look, as in westerns, right in the eye.

“What is it that you want, Dino?”

“You know, Zoka, I'm very grateful to you. You bought me shoes, and everything. I mean, I have a pretty good idea of your financial situation, and so on. But of course I'm still young, I don't understand everything, so . . .”

“Yes, Dino, and –?”

“You're going out now, aren't you, Zoka?”

“So?”

“I'd like to watch the cartoons on the satellite channel.”

The stepfather put his jacket on and arranged his greased-back hair in front of the mirror. He went out in his slippers. Leaning on the doorway, he put his shoes on. Then he swayed like an old drunkard and pushed against the walls with his thumbs. The boy laughed. The other winked knowingly and went downstairs.

The following day.
The boy goes to church with his best friend. A mass is being held, the hall is filled with black and pious figures. The boys sit down in an empty pew and open their mouths in time to the prayer. Play-back, of course, amateurish and inexperienced. The words are becoming more and more complicated and confused, and the boys can no longer follow the rhythm as they lip-sync. Toward the end of mass, the priest approaches the boys and takes them to his room. He asks their names. They timidly tell him what they are called and pull their sleeves over their sweaty hands. As if they were guilty. The priest smiles and asks them where they're from. From Zenica and Prijedor.

The priest puts his hand in a drawer and pulls out pencils, notebooks and sweets. He pats them on the shoulder. They feel uncomfortable.

“You know what, you two really don't have to go to church, to mass and such things. When you're not well, when you're sad or when you get frightened you can just say to yourself, ‘God, help me,' and everything will be all right.”

The boys leave the church in silence. They don't speak until they get home but they part with a few words to show that everything is, as it were, normal.

At home the stepfather tries to explain that not everyone has to go to classes of religious instruction because not everyone has the same beliefs. Of course, the stepfather is, like the priest, a Catholic. The boy, or course, isn't. He tells him that a girl at school, for whom he has a soft spot, often corrects his pronunciation. The stepfather opens his arms, laughs and says that women are like that. The boy goes to his room, saying that he has to study more Latin.

He locks himself in the room. The stepfather and mother knock on the door. He tells them he's got important things to do. He stays in his room for two whole hours. He emerges ready to go out, with a hockey helmet on his head. He's going to make a snowman. The stepfather and mother go into his room. They try to smell his secret. They look under the bed. They flick through the boy's notebooks. But they can't find anything. Disappointed, they look at each other. The mother puts away various things that have been scattered around the room. The stepfather talks some pedagogical nonsense.