Sarajevo, ruins near the Vrbanja bridge - Wikipedia commons
May, 1993, Sarajevo
I had thought it would be cold in the chill wind of
Sarajevo's Bogomil cemetery, but I didn't feel a thing. Standing quite alone
amidst the pockmarked once-fine tombstones, I looked down at the fresh grave,
bereft of flowers because not even weeds survived long here. A surprising
mixture of emotions coursed through me: anger, hate, despair, and great
sadness: all these manifestations of humanity racked me as I looked upon her
name carved in the simple wooden cross. But most of all I experienced an
abiding love, for what we had shared and been to each other.
When only eight, we had watched the 1984 Winter Olympics,
enjoying the bequest to our school by a Bosnian philanthropist.
Marta was Bosnian; I'm Rihad, a Croatian Muslim. We played
in the streets, oblivious of our country's tragic future. Boy and girl, in
love, the same the world over.
We were book-lovers, and enjoyed reading to each other from
the world's classics. Our favourites were Dickens, Cervantes, Hasek, Kumicic,
Bozic, Virgil, Popa and Shakespeare.
We both liked history at school. Marta and I grew up with
this sense of a new order emerging, throwing off the shackles of the
doctrinaire past. Our future seemed so full of promise, so bright.
We had hoped that one day Sarajevo's name would no longer be
linked with the start of the first world war - the assassination of the arch-duke
Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his consort: the place, Princip Bridge, is
marked by the student assassin's footprints in the pavement; now, there are so
many assassins around, it would be pointless to mark their footprints.
Our two families were close. Inevitably, we married - about
a year before the fighting broke out - and honeymooned in the once-beautiful
old walled city of Dubrovnik, a city founded thirteen hundred years ago by -
irony of ironies! - refugees fleeing the destruction of their Greco-Roman city.
Here, too, as early as the fourteenth century, an old people's home was built
and slavery was abolished. An enlightened place, then, where we spent blissful
days and nights.
Marta and I strolled Dubrovnik's old narrow steep streets,
with their shadows, overhanging lanterns and flowers, and gazed at the
seemingly immutable old Sveta Klara convent where Europe's first orphanage was
founded in 1432.
We prayed in the small Renaissance chapel of Sveti Spas and
visited the monastery's library of old manuscripts and pictures; here, we
viewed a painting of the city before the great earthquake of 1667, not
appreciating an equally devastating future awaiting us and this city. The
statue of the city's patron saint, Sveti Blasius, held a model of the city in
his hand - ‘until,’ Sanala, an evacuated friend said, ‘it was blown off...’
Sometimes we made love in the wheat-fields, breathing in the
fragrance of oleander, camellias, orange trees and each other. At Dubrovnik we
felt invincible in our love.
We had no idea how it all went so very very wrong. Greedy
men in power grasping more land and power, perhaps. Whatever their reasons,
they seem totally inadequate to explain the horrors inflicted.
With growing unease on our return to the village, Marta and
I watched the newsreels until the fighting was too close.
Then, our families packed their most precious belongings and
fled with so many others into Sarajevo.
For the first few weeks, the city could support us; but the
flow of frightened refugees continued to fill the city's streets. Food became
scarce, and the black market flourished.
Electricity interruptions were commonplace.
Then the siege began.
Street fighting started as various factions formed, even
neighbour against neighbour, some groups composed of looters - sadly, there are
always those who will profit from the misfortune of others.
Now, the city's survivors scrabble in the wreckage of a
once-proud and beautiful city. Everything about this civil war is prefaced with
once-, it seems. The people walk as if drugged, lacking sleep, sanitation and
even hope.
We earnestly hoped the European Community would help us,
that they would enforce a 'cessation of hostilities' - euphemistic jargon for
'stop the killing'.
Through the countless worthless cease-fires, we never gave
up hope that one day we would be rescued. The humanitarian convoys bolstered
our repeatedly dashed hopes. We could see the shame and frustration in the
young UN soldiers' faces. They were simply feeding us until the inevitable end.
Marta and I had been foraging for wood and food - the rest
of our family were too ill or too scared to venture out. Returning, we had
pockets crammed with grass and an armful of books each.
Marta's red-rimmed eyes still managed tears, even after
shedding so many, at the thought of burning books to survive: we had to
sterilise the water retrieved from the drains. The Miljacka River was the only
moving thing that could enter and leave Sarajevo with impunity; but tackling
its muddy banks was often too dangerous.
When we turned the corner and saw the devastation of our
friend's home, we were shaken. A mortar bomb had destroyed our families,
huddled together, Moslem and Bosnian, in a friend's cellar.
I find it difficult to relive those awful moments of
realisation, when those you love dear are gone, snatched from you before their
time, by the will of some military man.
Of course the fact the perpetrators were Serbian is of less
relevance than the fact that people of any kind could commit these acts. There
are no victors in a war, this is a universal axiom, yet the people who direct
their military men seem to ignore this truth. And the innocent suffer; it's
always the innocent!
Later, in the ruins, we listened to the car radio hooked up
to an old battery. Soldier of Happiness is the most popular song: ‘I don't like
bullets, You can kill my summer but my spring will survive. If a bullet should
shoot me, please don't cry.’
We cried over our lost friends and family. Alagic the
sublime pianist died from shrapnel wounds, Sanala of the shining eyes and
tender heart from gangrene; and Alan, Muhamed and Rosa were mortared as they
tended wounded children. Good loving people with talents to share, to bring
happiness into other lives, all gone.
Afterwards, we burned our books in the roofless kitchen, and
heated water and grass. We shared the grass soup. We shared everything we
could.
When we had finished, our stomachs still rumbled.
Marta looked wan, cupping the chipped mug in her thin hands,
her dark hair straggly and her brown eyes lacking the old lustre. My heart
ached, though I wondered what state I presented to her: no better, I felt sure.
We didn't speak much now. As one, we stood up. The meagre
fire spat sparks - the cover of Thomas Paine's
The Rights of Man crinkled and curled in the embers, then it was
gone, blackened beyond recognition, like our homeland.
Gripping our cherished copy of Shakespeare to my chest, I
held Marta's hand and we strode over the rubble and across the street.
Often in the last few weeks we had spoken about the poor
demented souls who had had enough, who decided to commit suicide by simply
strolling outside in broad daylight, down streets once tree-lined and bustling
with life, echoing with the sounds of leather- and copper-ware vendors, of
sellers of filigree work and linen cloth sewn with fine gold and silver thread;
streets vibrant with the songs of birds and the discord of vehicles.
The Begova Dzamija mosque is silent now, its forecourt's
covered fountain is dry and no worshippers perform their ritual washing. Water
is a luxury, to be hoarded.
Everywhere you look, there are buckets, guarded by old men
and children, under drain-spouts, ready to catch any rain.
Instead of the city's usual sounds there is the staccato report
of automatic weapons, the crump of mortar shells, and the crying and moaning of
an abandoned people.
As we boldly walked the wide street of Obala Marsala Tita
that runs alongside the municipal park now stripped of its bark and firewood, I
quoted from the Serbian poet, Vasco Popa, his words resembling so many menacing
signals of despair in a seemingly empty universe,
‘We danced the sun dance,
Around the lime in the midst of the heart.’
And Marta looked up and smiled, adding,
‘The miserable have no other medicine but only hope; I have
hope to live.’
She was ever hopeful, ever cheerful, and I ached with love
for her and dismissed the rest of the quotation from
Measure for measure - ‘...and am prepared to die.’
At that blessed moment of togetherness we kissed amidst the
rubble. The bullet-scored smoke-blackened buildings shimmered, transformed into
waves of wheat, the debris-strewn cracked paving-slabs became warm earth under
our feet, our bodies revelled in the heat of a glorious summer sun, and the
fragrance of oleander was in the air: we were shot by a sniper. A single bullet
- we even shared that - killed us both.
The picture of us lying in each other's embrace was sent
round the world, courtesy of satellite technology. For a day and a night, we
lay there, and my lonely ethereal self hovered watchful over us, waiting for
someone to defy the snipers and retrieve our earthly vessels, to accord them
some last ritual of remembrance and thanks for our all too brief lives.
Eventually, two brave UN soldiers dodged bullets to carry us
into shelter. That evening, under cover of darkness, we were buried.
As I gaze down at Marta's cross, I smile. She must have been
uncertain about her incorporeal state, for only now has she been able to take
on her old form. The stresses and privations of the last year have washed away
from her features: she rises from the mound of fresh soil smiling and
beautiful.
I take her hands in mine and kiss her.
As one, floating a little above the cemetery, we turn and
stare at the orange halo over our strife-torn city. We feel sad, not only for
the dead and dying, the bereaved and injured; we feel sorrow for all the men -
and some women - responsible for death and destruction throughout the world.
Perhaps if they too had enjoyed love like ours they would not commit such
heinous crimes. They cannot comprehend that whatever they do, they cannot
vanquish love.
I hold Marta tenderly and feel tears.
We laugh, not appreciating until now that ghosts could cry.
There are many ghosts crying in this once-beautiful land.
And Marta remembers another quotation, from Virgil, ‘Love
conquers all things: let us too give in to Love.’
***
Dedicated to Bosko
Brckic, Admira Ismic, little Marza and all the other dead, wounded, maimed, and
bereaved in former Yugoslavia – and indeed in all war-torn lands…
Wikipedia commons
This is the Suada and Olga bridge (previously Vrbanja bridge) of Sarajevo, named after Suada Dilberovic and Olga Sucic, the first victims shot a the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo.
***
Obviously, this is a fictional treatment inspired by a
real event. The real victims were left on the Vrbanja bridge for eight days for
fear of snipers. They were reburied in 1996.
Previously
published in The New Coastal Press,
2010, and in the now out-of-print collection, When the Flowers are in Bloom (2011).
Copyright Nik
Morton, 2014.
My short story
collection Spanish Eye,
featuring Leon Cazador, private eye in 22 cases is published by
Crooked Cat Publishing and can be obtained from
