"You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets, but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war." - Don DeLillo
"I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood." - Rebecca West
"Was that a bomb?" choruses around the room in English accented from Britain, Sweden, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands. My brain whispers the same in my American inflection, but I already know it's untrue. The explosion is too small to be a bomb of any significance, and the human commotion that followed was shouting rather than screams. But the sound also lacked the treble to be a gunshot and so the dozen of us backpackers race to the windows overlooking the bar in the alley below. We hear glasses shattering and see packs of people fleeing the standing tables they inhabited seconds before, and I start heading for the stairwell to make it to the street, to whatever phrase is Bosnian for "crime scene." All of this happens before the tear gas hits Matt's eyes and questions are replaced by a percussion of coughing. And then "tear gas" choruses around the room in English crippled by choking. And as the chemicals find my throat, my tear ducts as I'm shuttering the windows on that floor and up in my dorm room on the one above, I already know with bloodshooting eyes that this is exactly what I've always wanted.
xxxxxxx
I learned about war from Professors Talley and Slayton. From two-hour lectures at 7am three times a week from Killer Miller. From the would'be fathers drowning in mud in The First Day on the Somme and the baskets of severed heads filmed in "Night and Fog." I studied it as a concept in college, in poetic treatises like War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning or immediately before this trip, in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, a memoir dedicated to its intoxicating proximity. But before all this, back when I was nine years old, it was Sarajevo that was my first introduction to war as reality.
Two years earlier I'd seen the night'glow green pulsing across a Baghdad sky. The initial images of the nascent First Gulf War. But that was warfare as abstract. A removed modernity sanitized for primetime audiences. We saw not the cities blooming with bone and meal of the bombs' aftermath on the ground, but the video game visuals of their launch from a desert nothingness. In Eighty'Eight the Wall was breached, then floodgated in Berlin and tanks crawled through Tiananmen the following year, and I watched them both from a brown carpet in the Rust Belt, years before coming to California. They were groundbreaking, flashbulb memories of history, even for a kindergartner, but not war. War came in Ninety'Two, with the fleeing residents of Sarajevo running through Sniper Alley. My first time seeing its true face without relent. Removed by layers of journalism and censorship, but still the images of people sprinting haplessly, chased by trails of their own blood and blossoming bulletholes. Mortars exploding, chunking off concrete and flesh. The idea that cities, and all the implied advancement they stood for, could plunge into total chaos. Could fail so completely its residents need revert back to the terrifyingly basic task of trying to remain alive. This was the first time I had seen this. My first time trying to digest conflict beyond its existence as a theoretical or the was of history. Blood and pavement, a contrast meaning war still existed, and not as tanks in the desert, but assault rifles laying waste to the urban, to the urbane. Shredding all that noble subtlety of the soft j.
At eight, or even at twelve when the Siege of Sarajevo ended, I didn't understand the complexities involved in what was happening. I grasped it only as a fairy tale for the apocalyptic. Milošević as evil, Bosnia as victim, the grandiose scale of murder as the way to remind the world the barbaric will never leave us. It will just get faster and easier to obtain. Additionally, I was grasping then at the idea that there was no longer any such thing as Yugoslavia. That countries could simply cease to exist. This comprehension would also come later, that nations are constructs of the mind that we buy into without probing. That borders, while often mapped via massacre, are ultimately ethereal, arbitrary if not for the faith we put into them. And that they can fail when enough people cease to play along. When the thousand years of religious and cultural differences anchor heavier than a sixty year old banner. Fractures bandaged in flags are still fractures.
This is how deeply Sarajevo and the exotic poetry of its very syllables has been embedded within me for twenty-one years. A city I was drawn to for all the wrong reasons, even at so young an age. A moving-picture show of the grotesque that indirectly wove me through other points first. To Treblinka and Tuol Sleng. A map's journey traced and sewn through with vein and sinew, finally leading me here. When I felt I was finally ready.
Most all of its buildings are still besieged, like I witnessed them then. The bullet hole constellations are usually brightest on the south sides of the buildings, the ones facing the former strongholds of Serbian gunmen in the surrounding hills. In decline are the Sarajevo Roses, the sidewalk indentations made from mortar shells and their fragmented blast debris, later filled with red resin as dotted memorials throughout the city center. How little chance those on the ground stood is articulated in the expansive spread of their death petals. That spin'art pattern of violence draped all along the city's main street, Zmaja od Bosne, the Sniper Alley I'd watched people die in nineteen years before. A pair of Roses fade outside the new glass Parliament Building, which replaced the one ignited and gutted by tank'fire during the Siege. Above the dead red petals, a cluster of crisp blue and yellow Bosnian flags snap in the breeze. Maybe not enough to heal fractures, but seeming to work on amputees. On an adolescent country relieved to be separated from the older one it knew. Just down and across from Parliament is the Holiday Inn, the historic headquarters for the journalists covering the Siege on the city. Every news report I watched then, and most of the words I've read on it more recently, were relayed by people camped inside. Its conditions more hovel than hotel as the blockade and the fighting drew on. They stayed doubled, tripled up in rooms on the north side of the building, empty ones to the south shielding them from the brunt of the Serbian onslaught. As it stands today, the distinctive outside was repaired but never remodeled, still trapped in a timewarp to the more optimistic Seventies. A banana yellow topped by an uneven brown the color of carpets in the Rust Belt fading from memory.
That optimism of the late Seventies, of the early Eighties, was seemingly well'placed, as is most optimism without the benefit of hindsight. Eight years before the Siege started and Sarajevo was the capital of the fracturing world, it was center of something more hopeful. The Winter Olympic Games of 1984. The first Olympics of my life, even if at six months I was totally unaware of their existence. Which is what makes Sarajevo more than unfortunate, but impressively tragic. Its fall Shakespearean. In order to drown it, one first had to reach above to grasp it from a pedestal. Our abstractions and exaltations are just as mortal as were are too.
Twenty-nine years after Olympians sped down the bobsled track on Trebević Mountain on their way to various medals, I walked down it with six other backpackers, pushing thin branches of heavy overgrowth aside. Most of the track is bombed out, in both the graffiti and warfare senses of the phrase. On the turns, where the track clamshells over to keep the riders from flying off course, the largest works are displayed. The traditional term is masterpieces, but they're aesthetically not, just chunky letters in backgrounds of six or seven colors. They're usually sprayed in the hope for some sort of immortality, but if that's the intent this isn't a very promising venue for it. In the time between the bobsleds and the spray cans was of course the guns. Because those clamshell turns have a better use than canvas, at least to snipers. Facing north, back towards Sarajevo, back towards Sniper Alley and the too many other vulnerable areas of that Bosnian valley, the assassins here could focus and fire through holes in the track with total protection. That's what became of the first Olympics of my lifetime.
And back down in the east of the city, near the Baščaršija, the old bazaar echoing the Mediterranean markets of centuries more Ottoman, is a stone undamaged by fighting. It was masoned there after the Siege, replacing an older one inscribed solely in ruby Cyrillic. That initial plaque was cemented above another one indented with the assassin's footprints, mock-ups of where Gavrilo Princip stood facing the procession along the Miljacka River that marched the Archduke closer. The red'writ one then, and the bilingual greyscale one now, state the rudimentary basics of that June night in 1914. A simple pronouncement of the deaths of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, while omitting the editorial that they certainly had it coming. The diminutive assassin was nineteen, the Miljacka and the Latin Bridge spanning it both equally tiny. In front of the stone, on that bank, the reflective visitor is awed by history, not only its gravitas but its cruelty, in allowing such negligible components to catalyze a World War that would kill over sixteen million people. Because eighty years before Sarajevo would introduce me to warfare, it would do the same to the once-optimistic modern world.
xxxxxxx
The tear gas canister was the second to hit the same bar that summer, according to the girl from Colorado who'd been staying at our hostel for two months. Some personal dispute with the owner was the rumor going around. The effects on me were minimal past the first ten or twenty seconds, briefer even than the communal confusion of those first instants. Shorter still was the surprise, which here in the Sarajevo I remembered and the one I was finally coming to know, was never really there at all.
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