Yours Ever (41 page)

Just before his execution on January 23, 1945, unshackled from secrecy and half measures, he writes from his most authentic self. “All the texts we love are in my heart and in your heart,” he says in a final paragraph. The letters, taken out of the beehives after his captors themselves went to trial, remained Freya von Moltke’s “greatest treasure” for the next six decades.

IN THE EARLY 1990S
, like a long-dormant tubercular germ, war reactivated itself in the Balkans. In Sarajevo it broke out so suddenly that its Bosnian combatants found themselves lacking insignia, let alone armaments: “Men confront the [Serbian] nationalists’ banners with anything—the Yugoslavian flag, photographs of Marshall Tito—they have been able to lay their hands on,” wrote one student to her former professor. “Not out of nostalgia or any desire to return to the old ways but only because there are no new icons.”

The besieged citizens of Sarajevo, who would capture the imagination of Westerners without measurably denting their indifference, never developed colors or a uniform. Their iconography, such as it became, was the debris of a dying city: broken glass, fallen wires, rats and bloodstains running on the sidewalk. A whole sophisticated population was shot and shelled into beggary, forced to chop up pianos for fuel. Dodging snipers and their own disbelief, lest that distract them from the business of survival, the city’s letter writers succeeded in describing their charnel house with a nuance never caught on miles of outsiders’ videotape, that flat news medium whose peculiar achievement can be to make everything feel like everything else.

Letters from Sarajevo
was assembled by the Italian journalist Anna
Cataldi, who first served as a courier for some of the material she later anthologized. As she explained in 1993: “Cast like bread upon the waters, entrusted to anybody, even a complete stranger, who is able to leave the besieged city, stuffed into haversacks or into the pockets of chance travellers, and posted ‘outside’ to uncertain destinations (refugees’ addresses tend to have only short-term validity), many letters are lost.”

Writing to those who have fled across the Adriatic, Sarajevans will say that in return they would rather have a fax than a parcel, though a real letter, bearing scents and fingerprints, is even better: “I can’t believe it, but your handwriting, your own beautiful handwriting, is here in my hands at this very moment! I have read your letter a thousand times at least. To touch something so fresh, smelling of the warm sea …” A group of mail-bearing Italian pacifists materialize more like angels than postmen: “When they started to produce letters from their rucksacks it never crossed my mind that there would be one for us too. We were so delighted, more than you can imagine. To us these pacifists seemed like supernatural beings that had descended from another planet to our incredibly gloomy, devastated city.”

Circumstances impose a strange new set of epistolary conventions. One mother’s jammed typewriter, like the young V.S. Naipaul’s, will bat out only capital letters, which look more appropriate than accidental as they remain on the page: “
THE SCHOOLS HERE ARE NOT GOING TO REOPEN SO I HOPE YOU WILL GO TO SCHOOL THERE AND THAT YOU WILL LEARN ITALIAN … I AM GOING TO FIND OUT ABOUT SENDING YOU TO AMERICA
.” Papa Zoran, Grandpa Nijaz, Mama Emira and brother Orhan all put their signatures to one letter, not just to add intimacy but also to let the girl who may or may not receive it “know beyond any doubt that we are all still alive.” The old postcard envoi—“Wish you were here”—is now inverted: “I’m thinking about you, etc. etc. and I’m glad you’re not here today. Because it would be daft to have a birthday party when the Chetniks [Serbian fighters] might start blazing away at any moment and wreck everything.”

The siege also inverts people; one cannot predict who will or
won’t rise to each grisly occasion: “I have had good experiences too in this war. I have met some wonderful people and some have become personal friends. Some of my former friends I never want to see again.” There are a thousand instant ways to be resourceful: “Asja and I very often see your husband. He’s well, he’s as handsome as ever, but feels lost without you. A few days ago he went to see Asja and said he couldn’t remember your face. Asja reacted very swiftly and dug up one of your photos from somewhere and showed it to him.”

In ordinary times, even a vivid personality may emerge only slowly from the letters it writes, not adding up to much until a reader nears the bottom of a thick, calm bundle. Sharpened by danger and privation, the Sarajevans make immediate, full-blown appearances in their outgoing mail. Lada, a teenager who complains that the lack of electricity is keeping her from the discos she used to frequent, survives on a rhetorical drumbeat of scatology and contempt. She’s determined—in the almost comic translation of her bravado—to “bugger” and “stuff” all the “shit” she’s being forced to live and see, including a CNN report about the city’s starving zoo animals.

Pavle, a Bosnian fighter, sounds like Yeats’s lofty, uncommitted Irish Airman (“I shoot at people I do not hate”), tying back his own long hair with one of his wife’s ribbons and waiting for her letters. Writing to her is the central act of his day: “Yesterday I kept thinking that something was missing and couldn’t imagine what it was until I remembered I hadn’t written to you.” He can be as gently fatalistic as Sullivan Ballou—“My darling, should they force me to my knees, should they prove themselves stronger than me, then know this, when I am no more, that I have loved you with a pure and honest love, an enormous love”—but more often an angry wildness animates him, a determination to survive and eventually forget. In the meantime, he does not spare her the details of all the blood and mud and shelling around him.

Cataldi’s volume contains letters of despair and farewell and final communications that read like suicide notes, even though the victims were more nearly murdered. A father, one day before his death,
writes his daughters: “Don’t be angry with your papa because he has become so
EMPTY
. Completely
EMPTY
.” A mother, her weight down to forty-eight kilograms [105 pounds], asks a son to forgive any “word or deed” of hers that ever hurt him. But even more remarkable are the letters displaying faith in the temporariness of all the carnage and want, letters that observe the birds “nesting in the holes made by the grenades!” Pavle, while mindful of the trees cut down from all the parks, sees how “weeds and shrubs are sprouting everywhere.”

These private letters resonate with a power that the volume’s “open” ones—to newspapers, to the president of the United States—failed to carry. For years, Sarajevo remained, in one recurring image, “the largest concentration camp in the world.” The city’s letters bear witness to the way, as Tatjana Sekulic told her old professor, the besiegers “lied to us, robbed us, destroyed our homes, forced us to die of starvation, refused to allow us to work, wounded and killed us, and all this to make us believe that we hate each other.”

POLITICAL OPTIMISTS
assure us that the new communications technology is on its way to making the totalitarian state obsolete. Dictators won’t be able to keep news from coming in or going out as they used to, not when a handful of keystrokes can start a digital prairie fire, and the chimes of incoming e-mail raise a louder, more energy-efficient, alarm than Paul Revere. But we are not there yet, and in many corners of the world the jailhouse letter and fearfully circulated petition remain the principal means of pushing against tyrannies still in place.

As the siege of Sarajevo began, Wei Jingsheng was entering his fourteenth year of imprisonment in China’s gulag of “reform through labor” camps, the
laogai
. Like Lech Walesa an electrician by trade (the Beijing Zoo instead of a shipyard), Wei had been arrested in 1979 for his part in the poster-plastering Democracy Wall movement. Two years later, the prison authorities allowed him to write his first letter. They soon became a frequent addressee.

Wei approaches his jailers with a sly, Socratic logic: “I feel that even in prisons today, all actions should be explained. Saying there is ‘no need to explain’ to those who don’t understand your reasons,
and explaining things only to those who do, is a bit unreasonable in itself, wouldn’t you say?” Self-mockery (“an ignorant young guy like myself”) and gentle sarcasm are his preferred rhetorical modes, but in moments of more acute suffering he cannot stifle a cri de coeur: “I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that you don’t seem to care whether I live or die!” Still in his early thirties, he has loose teeth, heart disease, arthritis, periodontitis and a bad stomach. The authorities torture him with so many noises and interruptions that one of his letters to them takes ten days to write. “Why,” he wonders, “can’t I at least be treated like an ordinary political prisoner?” His bewilderment makes him ponder a mystery they are too dulled to see: “What hatred do these people feel toward me that makes them treat me so harshly? I am at an absolute loss to understand and don’t know if even you know the reasons why or not.”

He also writes to China’s political leadership, delightedly pointing out how these naked emperors are following Goebbels and ignoring Marx. His best moments have him pretending to feel gratitude and humility:

He congratulates General Secretary Hu Yaobang on a Twelfth Party Congress speech so “full of new ideas and very exciting … [that] it didn’t put everyone to sleep despite its length.” He closes as “Your most devoted hostile element,” and probably even means it, since Hu was a relatively reform-minded chairman. (To the hardliner Jiang Zemin, Wei will sign off in his holy-fool mode: “So much for now! More next time.”) When made to practice “self-criticism,” he does so, wondering what better tactics he might have
employed, when still free, against the people now demanding that he recant. “Our situations are very different,” he tells Deng Xiao ping; “you are at the top of a billion people and I am at the very bottom—but life isn’t easy for either of us. It’s just that I am not the one making your life difficult, while you’re the one making it hard for me.” He doesn’t fail to point out that Deng, who experienced his own suffering under Mao Zedong, ought to know better.

Not long before the June 1989 Beijing massacre, while students still fill Tiananmen Square, Wei addresses Prime Minister Li Peng on the subject of Tibet in the style of a backroom politician: “If you don’t acknowledge people equally or don’t even acknowledge their existence, then who the hell, may I ask, are you planning to negotiate with?” It is unlikely Wei knew very much of the students’ momentary success, but one wonders if what did filter his way helped to raise the rare, and chilling, note he sounds at this point, one more appropriate to a man expecting power than still writhing beneath it: “I don’t know what bastards gave Deng Xiaoping the lousy idea of postponing and thereby intensifying this urgent domestic problem that could basically have been solved quite easily, but they should be shot.”

Year after year he writes to his sisters and brother, embarrassed by his dependence upon them for books and medicine as well as any information they have gleaned about his case. He cannot abide feeling useless nor understand why he’s not permitted to work on the science projects he was planning while still at liberty. He does, after a transfer to an even harsher prison in the country’s dry northwest, get the chance to raise rabbits, with whom he forms a “Get By Club”: “the rabbits just get by; there’s just enough coal to get by; and I just barely get by myself!” Imprisonment changes Wei’s “old aversion for ball-point pens” into “a real love for them;” the ink cartridges in his Parker don’t last long enough to write all the letters required to relieve his boredom, speak to his family and challenge the whims of his political masters.

His letters home may display some nostalgia for his childhood, but even these are tough-minded. He lectures one of his sisters, an aspiring painter, on what she must do to keep from being a second-rate
artist in China’s craven aesthetic climate and asks for no coddling in return. He urges his brother and sisters to invigorate him with their opposition: “If you have any disagreements or find fault with any of my views or arguments, then please write back and challenge me; there’s no need to be polite … If you write back with a vigorous critique, it might help me break out of my apathetic mood.” In fact, it is his lovingly quarrelsome family that he recommends to Deng Xiaoping as a political model for China: “Even I, being the great filial son that I am, have been known to talk back, and on occasion have even had to leave the family to cool off for a night or two … Can a family like this still unite to weather all manner of severe storms? The answer is: Absolutely yes.”

For a brief period in 1993–1994, Wei Jingsheng was freed—perhaps as a sop to the International Olympic Committee, whom China was bidding to host the 2000 summer games. Before agreeing to his own parole, he demanded to see his prison file and found that it included any number of the letters that he had written and that the authorities had never posted. Those letters have now reached the West, and history, destinations Wei knew they were headed for all along, as he reminded his “old friend” Deng Xiao ping just after the Tiananmen Square massacre. What he had written several weeks before it would be his insurance policy with posterity; without such a letter of protest, “I would not only be unable to face the people who raised me and the teachers and parents who sustained me, but I could not face you who have bestowed so much honor upon me. I wouldn’t be what I am today without you.”