The Book of My Lives (7 page)

I don’t know where Herr Kauders might be now. Perhaps he is pulling the strings of fact and fiction, of untruth and truth, somehow making me write stories that I foolishly believe I imagine and invent. Perhaps one of these days I am going to get a letter signed A.K. (as he liked to sign his letters), telling me that the whole fucking charade is over, that the time of reckoning has come.

LIFE DURING WARTIME

In February 1991 I took an editorial position with the Sarajevo magazine
Na
š
i dani
(Our Days), and instantly left my parents’ home, where I was still embarrassingly lodging at the age of twenty-seven. With Davor and Pedja, two friends who also got jobs with the magazine, I rented a three-bedroom apartment in the old neighborhood Kova
č
i. I had a full-time job and lived on my own—a major, adult accomplishment in a sadly socialist society where people grew old living with their parents, perpetually underemployed.

My previous and limited working experience had been in radio, where, apart from very short and baffling fiction, I wrote opinionated pieces on film, literature, and general stupidity. Hence I became the culture editor of
Na
š
i dani
, and I somehow managed to negotiate thirteen pages for culture (whatever that was) out of the magazine’s forty-eight. Convinced that the previous generation of journalists was tainted by the idiocy of comfortable communism, I refused to publish in my pages any writing by anyone older than twenty-seven, which required frequently fighting off the rest of the editorial team, still forgiving to some press veterans. I also wrote short, acerbic pieces for the satiric two-page spread and a column called “Sarajevo Republika,” which I conceived of as “militantly urban.” I was constantly high with being young and radical, reveling in the space of fuck-you-ness I carved out for myself.

The rest of the editorial team also came from radio, where we had shared contempt for the old socialist regime as well as for the politics of rabid nationalism, which was busy at the time dismantling the sorry remnants of Communist Yugoslavia. Our employer was the Liberal Party, which came out of what in the previous system was called the Association of Socialist Youth. (I wrote, for a fee, the culture part of the Liberal Party’s platform.) We were hired, after the previous editorial team was fired in its entirety, for reasons I cannot really remember; I’d like to think that it was because our employer wanted a radical break—
Na
š
i dani
had a forty-year history of publishing, largely marked by obedience to whatever was supposed to define socialist youth.

We had to learn quickly how to produce a biweekly magazine with a punch of immediacy. Alas, we soon had a chance: one of our first issues was largely devoted to (and supportive of) anti-Milo
š
evi
ć
demonstrations taking place in Belgrade, which he eventually crushed with the help of the Yugoslav People’s Army’s tanks. The blood of two young students was the first spilled by the army; we knew the flow would not stop there. By the spring, war was in full swing in Croatia. Reports of atrocities started coming in; we published photos of decapitated corpses and an interview with Vojislav
Š
e
š
elj, a Serbian militia leader (now on trial in The Hague), who had famously promised to gouge Croatian eyes with rusty spoons. Somehow regular spoons were not bad enough.

At the onset of war, however, such things could still be treated as horrifying exceptions. One could indulge in thinking that a few bad apples had gone nuts, particularly since the Yugoslav/Serbian and Croatian authorities kept promising that everything would soon return to normal. But we soon broke a story on the army trucks transporting weapons (the cargo listed as “bananas”) to the parts of Bosnia where Serbs constituted the majority. We covered the increasingly belligerent Bosnian parliament sessions and attended press conferences at which Radovan Karad
ž
i
ć
(now on trial in The Hague), flanked by my former professor, pounded the table with his shovel-like fist, while making barely veiled threats of violence and war.

The more we knew about it, the less we wanted to know. The structure of our lives relied on the routine continuation of what we stubbornly perceived as normalcy. Hence, convinced that we were merely trying to live a normal life, we embarked upon a passionate pursuit of hedonistic oblivion. There was partying and drinking every night, often into the wee hours. We also danced a lot; indeed, I published an editorial in the cultural section, written by Gu
š
a, arguing that it was everybody’s urgent duty to dance more if we wanted to stop the oncoming catastrophe.

Much of the money earned working for
Na
š
i dani
I dropped into slot machines, so rigged as to preclude even a statistical probability of winning, because gambling results in a particularly intense oblivion. A more pleasurable means of denial was getting stoned and watching Vincente Minnelli’s
Gigi
, often bellowing along: “Gigi, am I a fool without a mind / or have I really been too blind…” Pedja and I would occasionally get drunk in the afternoon and then croon along with Dean Martin, one of the great leaders of the international hedonist movement. We spent one splendid spring Saturday in our garden, eating spit-roasted lamb and smoking superb hashish (which, along with many other intoxicants, became widely available because the minister of the interior was controlling drug traffic). It made us ravenous, the hashish, so we ate lamb and smoked until we were so high we would’ve floated away, like balloons, toward the distant war-free landscapes, had we not been ballasted with enormous amounts of meat.

Those happy days before everything collapsed, when anything at all went far in inducing lifesaving oblivion! We did it all: staying up all night to close and lay out an issue of the magazine, subsisting on coffee and cigarettes and trance; consuming pornography and writing poetry; participating in passionate soccer-related discussions and endless, manic debates prompted by questions like: “Would you fuck a horse for a million deutschmarks?” or “Does the grandmaster Anatoly Karpov own a superfast speedboat?”

Then there was rampant, ecstatic promiscuity. A few exchanged glances, sometimes in the presence of the boyfriend or girlfriend, were sufficient to arrange intercourse. The whole institution of dating seemed indefinitely suspended; it was no longer necessary to go out before hopping into bed. Indeed, there was no need for bed: building hallways, benches in parks, backseats of cars, bathtubs, and floors were just fine. We reveled in
Titanic
sex; there was no need for comfort or time for relationships on the sinking ship. It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm. I’m afraid we are not taking advantage of the great opportunities provided to us by this particular moment in human history.

By midsummer it became hard to maintain the precarious state of hysterical oblivion. A dealer we had used as a source for a story on drug traffic in Sarajevo went back home to Croatia for a visit and ended up forcibly conscripted, then called us, somehow, from the trenches, leaving a frenzied message: “You cannot imagine what is happening here!” We could hear shooting in the background. He didn’t leave a number where we could reach him on the front line, and I doubt we would have called him back if he had. Then Pedja was dispatched to report from the Croatian front, only to be arrested and tortured by the Croatian forces. After his release was negotiated, he returned all beaten up, appearing, aged, at our door. He couldn’t sleep at night and moped around our place for days, his eyes glassy, his brain irresponsive to Dean Martin, his bruises changing color from deep blue to shallow yellow. Finally, annoyed, I sat him down, pushed a tape recorder into his face, and made him tell me about his experience in the Croatian war zone: his stupidly boarding a bus full of Croatian volunteers; the beating that ensued; the detention and the so-called interrogation; the humiliatingly stupid good cop, bad cop routine (the good cop liked the Pet Shop Boys); the squeezed testicles and kidney punching; the taste of the gun in his mouth; et cetera. When he finished, I turned off the recorder, ritually handed over to him the ninety-minute tape, and said: “Now put it away and let’s move on.” I deemed myself wise back then.

But there was nowhere to go. In July, I quit the editing job and went for a few weeks to Ukraine, just in time for the August putsch, the collapse of the USSR, and the subsequent Ukrainian independence. When I came back to Sarajevo in early September, the magazine had been shut down; Pedja and Davor had moved us all out of the Kova
č
i apartment and back to our respective parents’ homes, as we had no more money to pay the rent. The city was deflated, the euphoria exhausted. One night, I went to the Olympic Museum café, where we used to hang out a lot, and I watched glassy-eyed people stare into the terrible distance, barely talking to one another, some of them drugged to the brim, some of them naturally paralyzed, all of them terrified with what was now undeniable: it was all over. The war had arrived and now we were all waiting to see who would live, who would kill, and who would die.

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

My family used to have a cabin on the mountain called Jahorina, twenty miles from Sarajevo. Jahorina was a ski resort, and back in our teenagehood, Kristina and I spent our entire monthlong winter breaks skiing and partying, our parents coming up only on weekends to deliver food and clean clothes and assess the damage. While in the winter the mountain was full of skiers, tourists, and friends, it was mostly depopulated in the summer. On weekends, there would be a few other cabin owners who, like my parents, escaped from the city heat to tinker with woodwork. Kristina and I avoided going to the mountain in the summer, despite our parents’ insistence that Jahorina was heaven, as compared with the hell of Sarajevo. We much preferred idling and simmering in the parentless cauldron of the city.

But sometime in the late eighties, I started going up to the mountain in the summer. I’d pack my little Fi
ć
o (the Yugoslav replica of the Fiat 500) with books and music and move to Jahorina for a month at a time. I was in my mid-twenties, still living with my parents, which, apart from problems pertinent to my personal sovereignty and privacy, made reading with sustained attention fairly difficult—my parents constantly demanded participation in family activities and devised elaborate chores. In the Jahorina cabin, on the other hand, I could be fully in charge of my own time, which I regimented like a monk, reading eight to ten hours a day. I’d step out of my monastic devotion only to attend to the needs of my foolish body, which besides food and coffee, demanded some physical exertion. Hence I chopped firewood and occasionally went for long hikes farther up the mountain, above the tree line, toward harsh, barren landscapes and peaks from which the poignant expanse of Bosnia could be seen. I eschewed other people and went on foot to the solitary supermarket, a couple of miles away, only when I needed more cigarettes or wine.

For weeks before my move to the mountain, I’d be assembling my reading list: from le Carré’s Smiley novels (which for years I reread every summer) to scholarly works on the origins of the Old Testament myths; from anthologies of contemporary American short stories to the Corto Maltese comic books. There was always a particular benefit from reading for ten hours straight: I’d enter a kind of hypersensitive exaltation that allowed me to average four hundred pages a day. The book would become a vast, intricate space in my head, and I couldn’t leave it, not when I ate, not when I hiked, not when I slept—I lived inside it. During the week it took to read
War and Peace
, Bolkonsky and Natasha showed up in my dreams regularly.

I was prone to anxiety and depression in my twenties, which I experienced as depletion of my interiority, as a drought of thought and language. The purpose of going to the mountain was to replenish my mind, to reboot the language apparatus, the thought machine. But my reclusion worried my parents, while my friends suspected I was in the process of losing my mind. At night, the only sounds were the lows and bells of roaming cattle, the wind and the branches scratching the roof. Excited birds would bid me good early morning, and I’d start reading as soon as I opened my eyes. I enjoyed my life ascetically simplified: reading, eating, hiking, sleeping. The self-imposed austerity remedied whatever pain I’d carried up to the mountain.

*   *   *

The last time I went to Jahorina to read was in late September 1991. Much of the summer of 1991, I’d spent in Ukraine, witnessing the demise of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence. Over the summer, the war in Croatia had rapidly progressed from incidents to massacres, from skirmishes to the Yugoslav People’s Army’s completely destroying the town of Vukovar. When I returned to Sarajevo at the end of August, the war had already settled in people’s minds: fear, confusion, and drugs reigned. I had no money, so Pedja offered me hack work in a porn magazine he was planning to start, convinced that people would lap it up as distraction from the oncoming disaster. I declined, because I didn’t want bad sex writing (as though there were any other kind) to be the last thing I’d done if I were to be killed in the war. I packed a carful of books and moved up to the cabin to read and write as much as possible before the war consigned everything and all to death and oblivion.

I stayed in Jahorina through December. My monastic mountain living was now about rudimentary thought protection, for once war got inside my mind, I feared, it would burn and pillage it. I read
The Magic Mountain
and Kafka’s letters; I wrote stuff full of madness, death, and whimsical wordplay; I listened to Miles Davis, who died that fall, while staring at the embers in our fireplace. On my hikes I conducted imaginary conversations with imaginary partners, not unlike the ones between Castorp and Settembrini in Mann’s novel. I chopped a lot of wood to ease my rising anxiety. Occasionally, I climbed a steep mountain face without any gear or protection. It was a kind of suicidal self-soothing challenge: if I made it all the way to the top without falling, I thought, I could survive the war. One of the daily rituals was watching the nightly news broadcast at 7:30, and the news was never good, always worse.