Slavenka Drakulić - The Balkan Express - Fragments from the Other Side of War

In the morning, I left. That was not what I’d intended to do. Moreover, it had nothing to do with personal inclination, my will or my reason. My leaving Zagreb was a purely physical thing, a decision brought about at some deeper level so that I was barely aware of it. As if I was merely some agent for it, my body acted on its own. I didn’t think, I just moved around the house with my hands packing, turning off water and electricity, closing windows, locking the door. The movements were mechanical, my voice strange and distant as I explained to my neighbour that I was going away for a few days. She nodded understandingly but we both knew that ‘a few days’ couldn’t have the same, specific meaning any more. As I was leaving, I looked back from the taxi window at the empty road to Ljubljana and in the distance I saw my city getting smaller and smaller on the horizon, almost toy-like. Perhaps this is how they see it – the generals – a toy, an icon on a wide video screen where the bombing is no more than a small bleep from the computer.

In the shameless peace of Ljubljana, only 120 kilometres to the west where the war ended after only ten days, the war in Zagreb and in Croatia seemed remote and unreal like a nightmare, at least for a while. On the Wednesday morning, as I walked across a bridge to the old city, with each step I became increasingly aware of the beauty of its yellow and white façades, its baroque ornaments, its narrow streets paved with cobblestones. Then I heard a church bell. The reality was back, the images of churches and church towers destroyed, burned, shot down with shells – almost sixty of them in towns and villages in Croatia. I saw them falling down slowly, like tall trees, or animals, or human beings. Face to face with the serenity of Ljubljana, the war in Croatia hurt even more.

When I entered the tiny apartment on the outskirts of Ljubljana vacated by my friend who had fled to France, at first I felt relieved. The window overlooked a quiet green river, late yellow roses were in bloom in a neighbouring garden and on a wooden table near the entrance someone had left a few green apples. That night I could listen to something that I hadn’t heard for a long time, the serene silence of a dormant city sleeping without fear. This is another city, another state, not Zagreb, not Croatia, I kept thinking as if I needed to convince myself that I could relax now, take a deep breath at last. I had left Zagreb temporarily, to give myself a break from the growing feeling of panic, of being caught in a trap. At the same time, I knew perfectly well that I might never go back. The country was at war and I wouldn’t be the first one to leave home for a few days only to lose it all and have nothing to go back to.

But for a long time I had refused to leave my home, even to consider such a possibility. For months and months, ever since January, I could hear its noise coming closer and closer, but nonetheless I still chose to ignore it. I know these symptoms of denial by heart now: first you don’t believe it, then you don’t understand why, then you think it is still far away, then you see war all around you but refuse to recognize it and connect it with your own life. In the end it grabs you by the throat, turning you into an animal that jumps at every piercing sound, into an apathetic being trudging from one side of the room to the other, into the street and to the office where you can do nothing but wait for something to happen, to hit you at last. You learn to breathe in death, death becomes your every second word, your dreams are impregnated by dismembered bodies, you even begin to picture your own end. In the morning you don’t recognize your face in the mirror, the sickly grey colour of the skin, dark circles under the eyes and the pupils unable to focus on any one thing for longer than a second. The war is grinning at you from your own face.

The first week in Ljubljana I felt like a guest in a better-class hotel in a familiar nearby city. I had taken a few books that I was determined to read finally after having postponed reading them so many times; there were some people I knew and could sit and talk with. Nonetheless, I was a little uneasy with the language. Of course, Slovenians and Croats understand each other, so it was not a problem of understanding but of something else, of a particular context. I was disturbed by the look people give me when I started to speak in Croatian. In the post-office, in a shop buying bread and milk, at a kiosk buying a Croatian newspaper I constantly had the odd feeling that whoever I addressed was looking down at me as if I was begging, telling me without a word that I was not only a foreigner now – but a very special kind of foreigner. That week on the Ljubljana news I heard that there were 8000 refugees from Croatia in Slovenia, and it was only the beginning. To the people of Ljubljana, I was clearly one of them. Yet my perception of my position was still stubbornly different. It took me some time to realize that I was no guest. There was only one thing that distinguished me from the ordinary holiday-maker, I thought, the fact that I was glued to the TV screen and radio broadcasts – the uneasiness, the hesitation and hunger all at once while I listened or shuffled through the pages of the paper, the dryness in my mouth while I read descriptions of the mounting toll of destruction, and the sudden changes of mood depending on what I had read that day. I was a news addict and that symptom alone would have been enough to brand me an exile. Except that during my first week in Ljubljana I wasn’t aware that it was a symptom. I thought that what distinguished me from the rest of them was the fact that I planned to go back home soon. I didn’t know that this too is typical.

My first weekend began well. It was a warm blue day, Indian summer. I went to the open market as I would have done in Zagreb on Saturday mornings, trying to maintain the routine of everyday life, because I know it helps. Piles of red pepper, the smell of ripe melons, fragrant honey in small glass jars offered for sale by local peasants, green heads of lettuce, the pungent odour of fish, all gave me a feeling that I was at home there, picking up pears, tasting grapes, touching reality with my hands as if I were privileged, or as if that touch had the power to make me feel alive, present, there.

Returning to the apartment I remembered that I needed to have my shoes repaired, but I didn’t know where to find a shoemender, I hadn’t passed one. I will have to ask, I thought, seeing that by then I had a new kind of need already and I was not prepared for that. This was not the need of an ordinary visitor, but of a person trying to adapt to a city as one gets used to someone else’s coat or shoes as protection from the cold even if they are not comfortable enough. Or as if I had to learn to walk again, only this time forgetting churches and monuments and seeking out instead shoemenders, pharmacies, libraries, discount stores. Perhaps then I realized that I would have to start establishing my life there, or go back home. Soon.

It was on Sunday morning when I finally understood what it would mean to become an exile. I was not yet fully awake when the smell of coffee entered the apartment and gently stirred my nostrils. It was the smell of freshly brewed coffee made in an espresso machine, strong and short, the Italian way. This was just as I used to make it on lazy Sunday mornings, drinking it wrapped in an old pullover over pyjamas while tufts of a milky smog still hung on the hortensias in the garden. Then I heard voices, the voice of a small child asking something and a woman’s voice, answering quietly and patiently. Someone turned on a radio, there were more voices, the window above me opened and I saw hands hanging out wet socks, towels and sheets on a clothes line. A penetrating smell of roasted meat and chocolate cake, a sound of cartoons and children laughing. I looked around ‘my’ apartment: except there was not one thing there that was mine. Only a suitcase not yet emptied and my winter coat hanging in the closet with my friend’s summer clothes (she took winter clothes with her too), which I had put there hesitatingly, hoping I wouldn’t be there in time to wear it because I’d leave before winter, definitely I would. This was not my home, there were no pictures and posters on the walls which I had put there, no books I had bought. There were no dusty book shelves that I was promising myself I’d clean as soon as I had time, nor my daughter occupying the bathroom so I’d have to quarrel with her to let me in. There was no nervous phone ringing together with the sound of a washing machine and a student radio station weaving a fabric of sounds into which I can sink comfortably, because I know it, it is the sound of my own life.