Miljenko Jergovic - Sarajevo Marlboro

The boy made a snowman in the courtyard out of the remaining snow. He carved out the president’s face. He didn’t make a nose out of a carrot, because he thought that was stupid. Nobody had a carrot on their face. Especially not the president.

Our idea of love is not letting other people steal your woman.

Duško Trifunović

I don’t know what it’s like anywhere else, but in Europe it’s like this: Rick is unhappy because Ilse loves Laszlo. He knows that she loves him too, and yet she remains faithful to Laszlo. Rick wishes she’d be faithful to him instead — because it’s not enough to know that she loves him. No doubt you have heard and read the same story, with a few variations, a thousand times. The key to true love is faithfulness. You don’t need to think about it much — it is taken for granted. Mind you, if it wasn’t for faithfulness, there probably wouldn’t be any unhappiness in love. Nor any happiness either.

Senka and Mašo were often cited in the neighborhood as love’s young dream. She was unable to have any children, but he didn’t hold that against her as other Balkan husbands might have done. Senka worked in the Post Office and Mašo was a plumber. She always used to refer to him as “my Mašo”, and he to her as “my Senka.” Their story would not have been of any interest if the war had not broken out. We don’t usually find stories about long and happy relationships very interesting.

As soon as the shelling began Mašo joined the Territorial Army. Senka was not very pleased about this, but she realized that there was no other way of preserving their one-bedroom Eden. The very thought of leaving town scared her. A different place would mean different circumstances; it would be a story involving different characters.

One day a strange man in uniform with muddy boots knocked on the door. He hugged Senka and whispered to her that Mašo had been killed. He left a paper bag with Mašo’s possessions on the table — a hanky, the case for his spectacles and his wallet. After the first few days of mourning, which are usually more ceremonious than sorrowful, and which demand a certain presence of mind to avoid the compassionate gazers who thrive on any sign of tears, Senka took out all the things that had been returned to her instead of Mašo. She touched each object in turn and finally opened the wallet. Inside she found fifty Deutschmarks — an amount that any cautious man perhaps would always carry with him — and odd scraps of paper with phone numbers and notes about plumbing. In the little plastic window was a photograph of Senka. The only purpose of the plastic window is to give a glimpse of your intimate life to strangers at supermarket checkouts. But the wallet also had a secret invisible compartment. Senka peeked into it and found a photograph of an unknown woman. On the back was written, “Always yours, Mirsada.” The handwriting was flowery with many loops. The next day Senka told the whole neighborhood what those “bastards from the brigade had done to her.” Angrily, then bitterly and in the end tearfully, she showed the incriminating photograph to the women, who tut-tutted and shook their heads. They consoled her as she was leaving their houses and then immediately began to gossip about her. On the whole, everyone, except of course Senka, was pleased to discover that Mašo hadn’t been a saint. They secretly considered her pitiful for having revealed so publicly her shame, which she didn’t even acknowledge.

When, a fortnight or so later, the boys from the brigade came with a parcel for the wife of a dead comrade, she refused to open the door to them. She shouted at them through the door, making various threats and curses. When Senka declined the army handout, most of the neighbors just assumed that she had gone mad already. They pulled at the soldiers’ sleeves, trying to get them to leave the parcel, so that they could pass it on to Senka when she calmed down.

As time went by, the widespread compassion turned to ridicule. Nobody any longer wanted to hear her story about the inserted photograph, which had gradually acquired a thousand twists. On the other hand, Senka was always trying to come up with a story that would clear Mašo’s name. Each day she added new details. Yesterday’s reasons disappeared in a flash before today’s uncertainties. But the story about love’s young dream always triumphed in the end. Senka believed that she had to sacrifice everything, including her sanity. In this war-stricken town, deprived of hope, Senka had nothing to cling to but her story.

I don’t know what happened after that because I left Sarajevo. But perhaps the ending is not very important. Once again, faithfulness has been confirmed as the axiom of love, as something that is more important than love itself. But in any case, what transcends even the bounds of this story is our need to create a fable, or a context, to make sense of life and thus give it a purpose.

The people who write about the war in Bosnia without any thought of personal gain, or any wish to clamber over the bodies of the living and the dead in order to achieve success — a select few, in other words — are actually quite similar to Senka. Without any profit to themselves or others, they bravely seek to preserve an image of a world that has been shattered. Sometimes their unflinching descriptions or honest reports, not to mention their uncompromising points of view, offend public opinion. It is not unknown for such writings to be condemned as national treason by Orthodox believers. But in fact they are only vain attempts to discover a truth, a reason to exist. At a time when just about everything else has been lost of destroyed, faithfulness is the only thing left to believe in. When the time comes to write the history of Bosnia, only people like Senka will resist its lies.

You wake up in the middle of the night in a room that isn’t yours, with a view of a strange man’s rosy feet and the sound of heavy snoring. At first you can’t work out why you’re there. You shudder before the unfamiliar scene until you wake up completely. Then you remember what brought you there — it wasn’t entirely unpleasant circumstances — but your brain is already working away like a runaway engine and the memory of the night before seems unbearably distant. It is hard to deal with insomnia in a place where nothing belongs to you except your thoughts. The man on the other bed grunts contentedly, without any rhythm or melody, as though he will never stop. The night is long enough and reality is clear enough to let you run through your worst fears before morning — and then you wake up with gray hair. In this kind of situation, and only then, you realize that you are not self-sufficient and that you would be lost without all the various things, big and small, that, in the pause between dreams and journeys, mean life to you. When you’ve experienced a bout of insomnia, and particularly if there is a total stranger lying in the bed next to you, you don’t really want to travel ever again. In the morning you act the part of the distant stranger. You say goodbye coldly without exchanging telephone numbers or addresses. To the others you seem different from last night and from the previous days. You leave behind sober faces, a bungled attempt at friendship and an unclear, cloudy suspicion. Nobody knows, or should know, that you just wanted to return to a familiar world. Unknown places, new people, strange cities are interesting until you see how empty they are.

The Jurišić family cried a lot the night before they had to leave. Granddad, grandma, daughter and grandson. The old man looked at the unpainted ceiling and remembered the cans of paint that had been lying in the attic for two years. He began to sob. The old woman also shed a tear as she put away the coffee pot, thinking that she would never take it out again. The daughter kept on repeating that the most important thing was to stay alive, but the impact of her statement made her whimper. The grandson cried because everybody else was crying and because it seemed to be the thing to do. The convoy had already been postponed seven times, and so it was the eighth time the Jurišić family had woken up to the last morning and said goodbye to their home.