Escape from Sarajevo-Part 24: Innocence Lost

TWO

We were jolted from sleep by a groaning sound accompanied by a hollow banging in the walls. Olja rushed in and urgently announced that water had come to the city. For some reason the Serbs had seen fit to open the spigots. Later they would point to it as a benevolent act despite “Muslim” provocations in the mountains. The UN would claim credit for brokering and agreement that benefited the suffering civilians in the city. More likely it was for Serb-held Grbavica, which derived its gas, electricity and water from the same lines that ran through the city.

In the darkness we feverishly refilled every container, every bottle, pot and pan, as well as the bathtub. Dishes were washed, laundry done by hand and floor scrubbed. Simply the sound of the toilet flushing seemed like a magical reconnection with the world. If it wasn’t a matter of survival it all might have seemed quite comical, but there was no telling when or if water would come again. By mid morning the water had stopped again. Turning the faucets brought a sad rush of air through the pipes. We all expected that the Serbs would turn the water off eventually, but it was still devastating when it happened.

That afternoon electricity came to the neighborhood for the first time in almost a month. Without warning light flickered on, the washing machine in the bathroom shuddered to life and the television came on. In the war room a Metallica tape Olja was listening to blaringly loud when the electricity was last on roared to life. It was a simple luxury and it brought renewed life to the building.  Kids laughed and played in the street, something rarely heard in Sarajevo during the war. Vacuums buzzed noisily in flats. People savored the moment by turning everything on until the whole city seemed to ring with a cacophony of noise. Even the fighting around the city stopped, but those few moments of peace would come at a bitter price.

The Serbs understood how entertainment-starved most Sarajevans were. They knew how the besieged craved any small connection to the world outside. From their television transmitter in Pale the Serbs ran a pirated American film, HOME ALONE 2. It was predictable that every working television in the city would be tuned to the movie. The Serbs could rely on the ultimate captive audience. Ana and Olja curled up on the couch together, while I caught up in my journal at the table. But there was nothing gracious or humanitarian about the electricity or the movie. It was a sinister trick, a weapon of terror from the thugs in the hills. A news bulletin interrupted the film. It was from the Serbian leadership. The girls gasped with fright and called for Renata, who was in the war room feeding the baby. She rushed in as Radovan Karadzich appeared on the steps of his headquarters. Rather than his usual suit and tie Karadzich wore a combat uniform. Renata mentioned his haircut and Ana gave a nervous laugh. There was a running joke that every time Karadzich got a haircut the city was attacked.

“I prayed this day would never come,” Karadzich began. He was surrounded by his generals and aides. “If the Muslims want total war then they shall have total war!” With that he announced the full mobilization of every Serbian male between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five.

I listened closely to Karadzich. There was a calculated cruelty to his voice. His particular brand of evil lay hidden behind a time tested, highly managed image. I had heard him before. I had heard his kind in the Rwandan killing fields, in those who had perpetrated the holocaust, and even in my own country. They were all the same, weaving half-truths and innuendo with perverted histories so perfectly that they often came to believe their own lies. Seductive generalizations mixed with fear and the hardships of war to feed the sense of persecution Serbs had been fed over generations. He cultivated their sense of victimization and appealed to selfish natures in order to turn neighbor against neighbor for his profit. He claimed that he never personally ordered the rape and slaughter of more than a hundred thousand innocent Muslims. That may well be true, but he encouraged them by his notable silence in not condemning the actual perpetrators of crimes he benefited from. Orders were not handed down with the stroke of a pen, but with a wink and a nod, which in many ways was far more sinister.

The instant Karadzich was finished the television went blank and the power went out all over the city. Alert sirens wailed in the city center to warn of an impending attack. Ana’s eyes darted about the dark room, and she had the look of a caged animal. Olja was already gathering things should we need to take cover in the basement: water, food, blankets. There were voices in the hall. Some neighbors weren’t waiting for the shelling to begin. They were already moving to the basement.

“I can’t go back down there,” Ana said. “We spent six months in that damn place. I would rather die.”

It was no secret that the Serbs had been sneaking heavy weapons back around the city in violation of the NATO ultimatum after the market massacre. The city was deathly still that night as everyone braced for hell on earth. The silence was painful, like stifled a scream, like a cry with someone sitting on your chest. Indeed the silence was almost worse than the shelling. Ana and I went out to have a look around the city. We paused near the place she had her first romantic kiss at fifteen with a boy she could hardly remember any longer. Below us the soccer stadium and city cemetery stretched along the valley floor.

“You must leave the city soon.” Ana held me tight. “It won’t be safe for you. Trust me, if the Serbs attack the city many people here will turn their anger against you because your country prevents us from having guns to defend ourselves properly.”

“And what about you, Ana. Will you blame me too?”

She looked at me for a long moment, struggling with the words. “I love you. That will never change, but we won’t be able to protect you. Besides, you will be one more mouth to feed, and we can’t even feed ourselves.”

The city remained tense, like a beaten child. The tension and fear played upon everyone, and caused them to retreat into themselves. I felt farther away from Ana than ever, and could find no way to bridge the distance. We went to bed that way, our bodies touching beneath the blankets, but not really feeling each other. We held to one another for animal warmth, while our souls bled cold.

In the morning I went again to UNPROFOR, but it was hopeless.  I thought about Ana’s warning the night before and wondered what I would say to her when I got home. There was a commotion of Kranjchevica near the Holiday Inn. A handful of Bosnian soldiers fought to quell an angry crowd. It seems that a drunken Russian soldier had tried to rape a young girl in an abandoned building. Hearing her screams a crowd beat the Russian half to death. As I came upon the scene one of the soldiers, a guy who recognized me all those nights leaving Ana’s after curfew, ushered me back along the street.

“Very bad scene,” he said. “Foreigners aren’t too popular here right now.” He led me back along the street until I was safely away.

It was late in the afternoon when I returned home to Ana’s. The setting sun painted the valley a melancholic hue. To the west fat gray snow clouds fell upon the mountains. I turned away and nodded to a policeman on the hill below Ana’s building. He called to me, demanding identification. I had seen those guys a thousand times and laughed at the suggestion, believing it was all a joke. He wasn’t laughing though. With the bloody offensives and heavy fighting the search for deserters took on a whole new urgency. Squads went door to door and hunted them in the streets. I frowned and waved my passport and continued on my way. Suddenly he grabbed me and spun me around.

“Hey!” I protested as he snatched the passport from my fingers.

“Journalist?” he demanded.

“No,” I replied indignant.

“UNPROFOR?”

“American citizen.” He was unimpressed and took his time copying down all the pertinent information before flipping the passport snidely to me. With that he tapped his temple as if to say he was keeping an eye on me. Sarajevo was running out of bodies to fight the war. All that separated me from anyone else in the city was that tiny passport, and I had already seen how quickly that could disappear. It wasn’t out of the question that if I remained in Sarajevo much longer I might find myself on the frontline.

Ana didn’t take any of the news very well. She grew pale when I told her about the policeman downstairs.

“You have to get out of here now,” she said. Renata agreed. “I will talk to my friend and see what he can do.”

Sarajevo awoke the following morning to the thunder of artillery and the rattle of automatic fire. It started near the zoo and spread like wildfire along the northern edge of the city. In Dobrinja and Butmir Serb shells pounded the tunnel entrance, attempting to disrupt resupply to the city. On Treskavica to the south the Bosnians threw wave after wave of men at the Serbian trenches on the rocky crest. Crossing open ground strewn with bodies and body parts Bosnian soldiers discovered many of their Serb counterparts had been chained together to prevent them from deserting. In the city center old men and others not fit for service prepared to meet the expected Serbian assault in the streets, just as they had done the first days of the war.

Ana and I bickered most of the day, driven by the fighting around the city. It weighed on her more each day that I was still there. It all finally boiled over.

“Bill, I don’t think you understand the danger you are in!”

“You tell me everyday, I said angrily, “but what can I do that I’m not already doing? I’ll get out, it’s just going to take some time.”

“It’s not only that. Its…there’s an ocean between us, between your world and mine. When I think about it I’m afraid you and I won’t work.”

“Do you want a divorce? Will that solve the problem?”

“I didn’t say that, just there is so much of this war you don’t understand”

“Ana, I’m in this damned war too. I’m stuck here like the rest of you, but you throw up this wall and I can’t get through.”

“But when you leave you have some place to go. You have a home in America. That is what makes us difference.”

“No!” she erupted, staving off tears. “America is not my home. I don’t know anything about it. I have no friends there. Maybe your family will hate me, or think that I tricked you somehow so that I could come to America. Maybe no one will like your immigrant wife.”

“Is that what you’re worried about, that no one will like you in America?”

“I hate this distance between us.”

“This isn’t about distance, Ana.” Tears filled her eyes now. I tried to hold her but she pulled away, unable to look at me.

“The second year of the war,” she began, “I was with some friends near my dad’s apartment. Suddenly there was a mortar attack on the neighborhood. I hid in a hallway until it was safe to go out again. There were two dead people on the street. Around the corner there were two more, torn to pieces. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, were dead people until it seemed I was running from the dead more than the Chetniks. Then I stepped in someone’s brain and saw that it was a young girl like me?”

“What does that have to do with me, Ana?”

“I don’t want to you to see what I have seen. I know how it will destroy you inside, how it will rot your soul like a cancer as it has in mine. I can’t see the good in people anymore. I see only cruelty and butchery, like we have come full circle in our evolution.” She touched my face. “I love you innocence, and I miss mine so much. I can feel that part of me missing, as if it was a hand or a leg that was gone. I fear that will happen to you and you will be someone much different to me.”

Ana fell into my arms and wept. Our lives would be forever haunted by the war, but there was solace in knowing it would be a smaller and smaller part with each passing year. For the moment it was enough to make it through an hour or a day. As night fell Ana cried herself to sleep in my arms. I held her tight thankful to have made it through another day.