Sarajevo Marlboro (4 page)

During that war-torn September our apple tree produced riper and tastier fruit than ever before. My mother joked that the last time such delicious apples had been seen was in the Garden of Eden. I climbed the tree, from whose uppermost branch I had a good view of the Chetnik positions on Trebevič. Hanging in the sky, I picked dozens of apples with the enthusiasm of Scrooge McDuck when he's in his vault throwing money in the air. As I reached out for one particularly juicy apple
that was growing only half a yard from Rade's window, I couldn't help spotting him in the back of the room. I froze on the branch but eventually Rade shrank back a few inches. I don't know why but I didn't want him to go.

“How are you, Uncle Rade?”

“Be careful, son, it's high – don't fall . . .”

“How's Auntie Jela?”

“Well, she's hanging on, with her one hand, to what remains of life. The doctors say that she'll be coming out of the hospital soon.”

We talked like this for two long minutes. I held on to the branch with one hand, and gripped my bag full of apples with the other. I was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of nausea that was infinitely worse than anything caused by exploding shells and by guns that have or have not been found in people's houses. It was as though, hanging from the top of the apple tree in front of Rade's window, everything I knew about myself and other people had become meaningless.

Rade continued, “You know, son, when you lose an arm you continue to feel it for a long time. It's something psychological, as though you deceive yourself into thinking you still possess the missing limb. Every day I cook a little something to take to my wife, but there is no life in it. I look at the beans or the thin soup, and then I look at her and I say, ‘Jela!,' but she doesn't respond. Then she says, ‘Rade!,' and I don't respond. D'you understand, son? We're alive just enough to see each other and to conclude that we're not alive any more. That's all. Sometimes
I look at these apples and marvel at the life in them. They don't care about all this. They don't know. I daren't even mention them . . .”

I stretched over to the window and passed him the bag. He looked at me, rather surprised, and then began to shake his head. Suddenly my throat became tight and it was as much as I could do to move my lips. I was paralyzed for half a minute; if the Chetniks had been looking at me they would have been very confused. Rade was trembling like a man who had nothing left. He was reduced to shivering like an unhappy, frightened animal. At last he raised his arm but he still couldn't say anything.

The following day Rade knocked on our door with a hundred apologies for disturbing us. He gave us something wrapped in newspaper and then left in a hurry, so I didn't get a chance to speak to him. The parcel contained a small jar of apple jam.

Soon afterwards Jela came out of hospital. The husband and wife continued to live behind their closed window, and Rade only ventured out to collect the humanitarian aid. One day, standing next to my mother in line, he whispered “Thank you” to her. She turned around just in time to hear him say, once again, that the apples were full of life.

In the next few months a handful of men in uniform came for Rade twice, took him away somewhere and later brought him back again. The neighbors watched these mysterious comings and goings, twitching at lace curtains, sometimes peeking through their keyholes.
Feeling guilty perhaps, they couldn't help reminding one another of the hidden guns. Half a dozen gossips went back to the idea that Rade must have wanted to kill somebody. Others remained silent, as if the mere act of talking about their neighbor was enough to cause pain. The obvious solution would have been to hate Rade, but somehow it wasn't possible.

Nobody knows who killed Rade and Jela. They just disappeared one day without fuss or explanation. Perhaps it's wrong to say what I am going to say, but I only remember two things about poor Rade – his apple jam and the remarkable fact that he never once, not even in the dead of night, reached out of his window to steal an apple.

The War broke out in the year she came of age. She was only just getting used to the slick city streets and to the smell of gasoline and oil and lead. By then she had more or less got the hang of swerving sharply to the right, or sharply to the left, straight on, over the bridge, before the traffic lights turned red. But her early life was spent on the Ravna Romanija mountain with a chap called Miloš, who put her to work on the hardest, dirtiest jobs. When I first saw her she stank of cement and manure and liquor. It was not long after she'd come back from the building site on the premises of a glamorous café, which is nowadays the watering-hole of Chetniks rather than lorry drivers. I agreed a price with Miloš without fuss. He obviously wanted to be rid of her as quickly as possible. In his village the least expensive car was
a Golf, so having a rusty old Beetle around the place was kind of an embarrassment.

It was already dark by the time we drove back from the Romanija, through Pale and the tunnels on the outskirts of Sarajevo. Emblazoned in neon lights on one of the concrete flyovers was the legend, “Tito's crossing the Romanija . . .” I was always confused by the three dots. I had a feeling they meant something rude. But my Nazi frau ignored the revolutionary message as she grumbled noisily but in rhythm like a Buddhist nun.

I found a parking space in front of my house. I should say that I live in a rather steep neighborhood unsuitable for cars, but it has an excellent view of the hills around Sarajevo, which are dotted with white Turkish tombstones. It was the first time in her life that she was ever tidy and clean. Squeezed in between all those Mazdas, Hondas and Toyotas, she resembled an architectural model from the golden age of romantic futurism. My neighbor Salko observed that we made a perfect couple – me with my big head and stocky body, her with those gentle curves. Other people reckoned that I could have done better and they said she wouldn't last more than three days.

I bought her the cheapest car stereo I could find – it was the sort of junk nobody would steal – and I played our tune again and again, partly to block out the noise of the engine and partly because I wanted to have a continuous wall of noise in the background. Somewhere on the road to Kakanj, Nick Cave's icy melancholy pulsed in time with
the flawless Nazi machine, evoking more clearly perhaps than intellectual concepts, painful ideologies and climactic histories the importance of believing in a harmonious view of the world that is unaffected by revolutions and apocalypses. After the beheading of Marie Antoinette, for example, the people of France discovered Baroque. After Lenin killed the Romanovs, a baby's pram rolled down the Odessa Steps of Eisenstein's cinematography. After Hitler, I discovered my own rhythm in four beats to the bar and a 1300cc engine.

Now and again her gas supply would be blocked and she would suddenly cut out. I remember her clutch gave up on one occasion. Also, she guzzled huge quantities of gasoline, as you'd expect, and she did have a tendency to get dirty very quickly – but she never had any serious breakdowns. In any case, still having a grip on my imagination, I only drove her around town for pleasure, so these flaws seemed rather trivial. It wasn't as if I needed the car to escape anywhere or make a getaway.

On the second of May you could hear the thunder crashing on all sides. The bombardment started about midday. After going for a quick spin around town and leaving the car in the parking lot, I drank my last prewar Coca-Cola and then ended up in a cellar somewhere. The shelling continued beyond nightfall. I sat in the dark belly of a building and spoke to a bunch of people I'd only just met. It was a crowd of accidental passersby – a woman on her way home from the market, young children on roller-skates, that sort of thing. I guess the shelling
sounded even more terrifying in the darkness. Is that why I became so worried that it wouldn't leave anything in its wake? I couldn't help wondering about the first casualty – would it be my house or my Beetle? Of course I wanted both to survive, but it was as if I was obliged by the persistent booming to make an impossible choice. Having stayed awake all night turning the dilemma over and over in my mind, I finally opted to save my home. I think I already had a picture of the Beetle as a dark metal skeleton, but I'm not sure. Perhaps I just imagined that conjuring up such an image would somehow protect my building.

It was already daylight when the shelling came to an end. The sun was dazzling. Glass crunched underfoot. The city was empty and shattered. I noticed that the traffic lights were no longer working as I made my way to the parking lot, where I found my Beetle among the wrecked and burned-out cars. She was covered in dust with a slight shrapnel wound, but I drove her home, opened the courtyard gates and parked the car inside. The war has really started now, I thought. It's over – no more driving for you.

At first I thought it was incredible that both my house and my car had survived the madness of that day and night of bombing. But as time went by, I began to realize that in fact nothing had been saved; it was just that the final moment of separation had been postponed. The delay was helpful in terms of getting ready and coming to understand that nothing was left for me in Sarajevo apart from the murdered and
maimed citizens, the demolished buildings, my forgotten childhood and perhaps a sackful of human flesh that lives off its nostalgia for other forgettable things until it comes face to face with what really matters, at which point it shivers like an engine before cutting out.

The doctor announced that my grandmother would die in the middle of the night. She was losing her battle for life, but we knew that anyway – it was the note of medical precision in his voice, or, at any rate, the utter denial of hope, that was so confusing. How could we prepare for her death? How could we get used to the idea before the awful moment when the telephone rings after midnight and another unfamiliar voice full of bureaucratic sympathy informs you that half an hour ago, while you were sleeping, a human soul much loved by you expired in the Oncological Ward of the Kosevo hospital?

Every night my mother went to the hospital, where she stayed until the early hours of the morning. On her return she didn't say very much. She just shook her head a few times and went to bed. It was the
summer of 1986, and the World Cup was being staged in Mexico. My grandmother's long-drawn-out death throes began as the soccer teams were playing the various group matches prior to the knock-out phase but continued during the quarter-final matches which were broadcast live on tv throughout the night. With only soccer players and commentators to keep me company, I waited for my mother to return from the hospital each night. As soon as she came through the door I would switch the television off and scrutinize her in the few minutes it took her to say goodnight and go upstairs. Then I would sleep until midday.

The whole city seemed to be relaxing in sidewalk cafés. Tired of winter and spring flu, everybody soaked up the mild weather before the heatwave. I used to drink my coffee on the sunny side of a street full of cars going south. I discussed the previous night's matches with my friends or found other ways of killing time until nightfall, when the familiar cycle of waiting for death and watching late-night soccer games from Mexico would begin all over again.

During the first semi-final my mother came back unexpectedly from the hospital and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. Of course I turned down the volume on the tv – the Germans were silently celebrating a goal – but neither of us said a word. So this is it, I thought – The End. Nevertheless we went to bed earlier than usual because we knew that in the morning, according to custom, the house would be full of family and friends who had come to ease our pain with hugs of comfort and funeral presents.

In the pantry I neatly arranged the bottles of whisky, packets of coffee and sugar cubes. I welcomed dozens of familiar and unfamiliar faces and said a lot of goodbyes. I was polite, if a little cold, in response to the expressions of concern, hardly able to wait for the ordeal to end.

The next day we were told that my grandmother could not be admitted to the mortuary because she was still wearing her wedding ring. Apparently some families had complained in the past because – or so they claimed – certain valuables belonging to their dead relatives had been stolen. A new code of practice had been introduced as a safeguard, and henceforth items of jewelry had to be removed from the deceased before the body was transferred to the mortuary. My mother went to the hospital and sorted the problem out.

“We'll slide it back on her finger before the funeral,” she said, absent-mindedly putting grandma's ring on the bedside table. I don't think she remembered where she'd left it until several days later.

It was a quiet funeral without melodrama or tears. On a small bronze plaque nailed to the black coffin were inscribed the facts of grandma's life, her christened name and her family name, year of birth, time of death, the sixth of June 1986. But nobody displayed much interest in those details. In the future perhaps, a long time after we're dead and forgotten, I like to think a team of archeologists will dig up the remains of our society – like they did in Pompeii – and, coming across grandmother's plaque, regard it as something utterly fascinating.

After the funeral our house seemed emptier than before. No doubt the other mourners returned to wherever they lived, while my mother told us the familiar stories about grandma's life – it was mostly for her own sake – and I switched on the tv in order to see the World Cup final. The rest of the cycle was over and now it was time for me to say farewell to the soccer tournament. On the other side of the world a huge stadium burst into life in an orgy of excitement. I could not really identify with the supporters' noisy enthusiasm, but perhaps that is why it appealed to me. In the absence of my own feelings, it was possible to be happy watching a spectacle that made me forget about reality, just as it is sometimes possible during orgasm, for example, to pretend that nothing else in life matters.