Talking on Credit

When the war broke out I was in Brussels as the Sarajevo daily "Oslobodjenje" correspondent from the European Union. Four years later, I returned to my home-town on business, to stay there for only 24 hours. The easy, morally comfortable formula which I found in the summer of 1992, when it became clear that the conflicts would last longer than Lord Carrington had thought at first, became worn out a long time ago. (It is a civil, fratricidal war; if I do not have to fight on the side of my people, I should be damned if I do so on the opposite side. Even if I did so only by propaganda weapons.)

The first stop on my way back to Sarajevo was Brcko, the town which, they say, will be the cause and place of the next war. In the village of Omerbegovaca, where - carefully guarded by IFOR - some forty Muslim and Croat families are rebuilding their destroyed houses within the Serb territory of the demarcation zone, I met a talkative, revengeful worker who told me: "Are you Serbian? Do go to Sarajevo, no one will do you any harm, we are not Chetniks." He added: "We shall never forgive them (Serbs). We won't even count the people killed in battles, it was a war. But we shall not forgive them for the civilians, the women, children and old people. If they kept the memory of Kosovo for five hundred years, we shall keep the memory of this for ten thousand years."

In Sarajevo I meet my old friends - a magic in which there are no conflicting sides, like before the war, when we blamed it all on "them" (the authorities, regime, leaders, nationalist parties). We accomplish the magic by not weighing anyone's guilt and by not talking about "them," but only about the people we loved or did not love. Before the war we thought alike, so now we go on talking on credit. They meet me with enormous trust, so I dig into my war personality to see if there is anything they should know about me which was not published in VREME with my signature. I point to the differences between the newly formed Belgrade and Sarajevo sensibilities. On my return to Belgrade, I read the newspapers I brought back and I find a scene in Avdo Sidran's poem entitled "Former Buddies": I dream/ that sitting in my house/ are two former buddies/ We are counting the dead known and unknown/ scolding Serb fascism/ Telling/ what kind of a story I don't know yet/ When one of them/ the friend of my life said/ We should be more careful/ when judging the Chetniks/ I throw them out of the house/ both/ with two words only/ Get out/ Get out/Get out.

Only, in my dream of Sarajevo, the girl-friend of my life, royally generous, sits till dawn listening to my dreams and doubts and goes to work in the morning concerned whether the next day would be all right for me and whether someone might hurt me. She watches me carefully when, as if joking, she tells me about an old friend of ours who told her not to let him know when this Chetnik arrives. I dare not tell anyone that the city does not look as devastated as I expected it to be. I recognize it by instinct, it is not strange. Like in the first Hollywood films, the sounds, images, impressions go by at a speed twice as fast as normal, while my capability to absorb the impressions is the same as it used to be. In the main streets, about the same concentration of "rednecks" exist as in our other towns. As a refugee, I learned to hate the chauvinist idea that all that is evil has come from somewhere else: people want to believe in this in every town I have seen since the war broke out. I recognize the people, buildings, street corners. It is warm, I can smell the lime tree. I know this is no longer my home, but I feel at home.

Including the house itself. The wall of my bedroom was struck by the first grenade which on 2 May 1992 hit the building in 15 Albanska Street (now called Dolina), two blocks away from Holiday Inn, somewhere half way between St. Joseph church and Magrbija mosque. The grenade enormously enlarged the window opening, but the neighbors Vahida and Fevzija found some kind of a war refuge in my apartment after theirs had been completely destroyed. Our first post-war encounter was extremely warm. Neither I nor they have any pretentions concerning "my" apartment. Their apartment will soon be restored and they will be glad to leave mine. While they were tenants "chez Smajlovic," they were at the same time the most caring guests and the best hosts. They have a stove in which books burned so well during the four Sarajevo winters. They burned their things and saved my books. They did not burn the History of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, or Lenin or Kardelj, let alone Hagel or an Encyclopedia. I am ashamed because of this while packing several novels to take back to Belgrade. There are no new tenants in my building. This makes it special.

Friends and acquaintances from the Serbian Civil Council are happy to meet every "Serbian ear" that returns to the city, even if on business. I am afraid they might read in my short stay more than is really written in it. I have only two scheduled business appointments in Sarajevo, with Michael Steiner and Sejfudin Tokic. I do not know the position of the Serbs in Sarajevo and I cannot testify whether they are harassed, but I read in the Sarajevo press that they are. I also read sharp criticism.

I hear jokes upon my arrival at Pale. They laugh at their own troubles. A soldier of the Bosnian Serb army recalls what he went through during the war, winters in trenches, poor meals, enemy offensives and says: "Thank God, common sense has remained. Thank dear God, I am sane, touch wood... Woman, see if someone is knocking at the door."