Stillness of the Sea (15 page)

Ana, I often ask myself what you knew and how much you wanted to know. When did you learn about the charges against your father? Since then, have you looked him in the eyes? Questioned him? Perhaps it’s mistaken to imagine that children, of all people, would want to
know. Why would they want to shatter their cherished belief that their parents won’t betray them?

So, going far away was perhaps the best thing you could do. I understand you. I probably would have done the same. Because it’s utterly unimaginable – my own father. My Dad, who was lying close to me on the lawn and whose heavy breathing I can still hear. Your father, who rocked you on his knee, lectured you and pressed your head to his chest when you couldn’t bear Romeo drawing his sword and cutting Tybalt down.

It’s unimaginably tragic that you’re probably the only one who knows why your father did what he did. You believe that he did it for you. Ana, you taught me about that passage, “I will grind your bones to dust, And with your blood and it, I’ll make a Paste, And of the Paste a Coffin I will rear…” It’s Titus Andronicus, who speaks of the revenge he will take for the violation of his daughter.

Ana, I don’t know what happened, you never said, but I want to know, even if I find it almost unbearable. The mere thought of what might have been done to you is terrible. The whole time, I’ve been thinking about myself far too much, that much seems obvious now, after all these weeks. Have you secretly thought me egocentric?

Do you know what worries me? That I’ve noticed how much my self-made image of your father has been changing. I see him now with the acuteness of hindsight and it disturbs me a great deal, because it reveals the hollowness of one’s certainties and convictions, the weakness of their links to experience. Ana, I fear for you. I need to hold you in my arms.

I sat and waited for you in front of your door. I wanted to tell you that I had been to The Hague and that I intended to go there once more. I’m not sure how long I
sat there, staring at your name on the door. And I saw his name. Earlier, I always saw yours.

Then I heard you come upstairs the way you do, hardly seeming to touch the steps. Do you know, when I think about you I often see you dancing, hair held back by a ribbon, turning in the dance, and I watch the bones of your shoulders stretch your pale skin, your slender arms, you’ve pushed your hair behind your ears and you hold your head high. You dance in your parents’ sitting room and I see you through the window.

You faced me and met my eyes. And I thought, now she’ll disappear into her flat and close the door. But you sat down next to me on the step. There we stayed, for a while, without speaking. Then you said, not looking at me, “Give me a little more time.” And although I wondered if there would ever be enough, I replied, “All the time in the world.”

Aisha was right
, leading two lives must be how it’s done. How else could he explain that people went for evening strolls in the centre of Sarajevo, sat around chatting in the many cafés, watched football games, and laughed as if nothing bad had ever happened there.

He could see the Miljacka from his hotel room and could watch the sluggish brown water flow along its riverbed. There was a free bathing site just below his window, with two bright blue pools where children swam in the mornings, coached by a trainer with a piercing whistle, and where lots of people enjoyed themselves in the afternoon, their jolly shouting reaching his
fourth-floor
room. From up there, he could see the way the river sliced the city in two and five of the bridges linking the embankments. If he looked upwards, between all the buildings, he saw the hillsides covered with white crosses, visible signs of the past. There were whole rows of them in the cemeteries, entire fields of dead who lost their lives during the killing years of 1992 and 1993. He feared them, or rather, the proof that man had played God and interfered with the autonomy of life.

He had studied a grave marked with five white marble plaques, set side by side and each inscribed with the same surname, each with the same date of death. The tragedy involved the five different dates of birth: 23rd March1954; 7th February 1958; 8th July 1981; 12th December 1983; 3rd April 1986. The family was unknown to him, but he could not forget it. How then could those who had known the individuals ever forget? Further upriver where a small path followed the right bank and courting couples sat on seats shaded by beech trees or the stone parapet of the embankment, he observed the pock-marked walls of the houses, with their multitude of small craters, many holes large enough to put your hand inside, some the size of dinner plates. Among the scars of war, there were curtained windows and washing on lines slung between the balconies. How casually they lived with the traces of violence!

He’d been in Sarajevo for three days when, on one of his many walks through the city in the August heat, he’d got to know Alija, who was standing on one of the bridges, looking down on the Miljacka’s rusty, muddy water as its barely discernible current flowed through the city. Apart from two anglers sitting on the riverbank and holding their lines, Alija seemed to be the only one who wasn’t in a hurry.

The traffic on the bridge was piling up. He heard the horns and the screech of tyres. The first thing he noticed about the large, heavily built man near him was his strong hands, perhaps because of the way they gripped the balustrade. The man’s shirtsleeves were rolled up and he wore dark glasses.

“The war began here, on this bridge,” said the man. He’d looked up at man, who now slowly turned to face him.

“A peaceful anti-war demonstration had come this far, when a group of Serbs started shooting into the crowd from over there,” the stranger continued and gestured at the opposite riverbank. “That’s how the war started.” He held out his hand and added, “I’m called Alija. Is this your first visit to Sarajevo?”

He nodded.

“Where do you come from?”

“Berlin.”

“My wife loves Berlin. Some of her relatives live there.” He laughed. “I remember Berlin all right. Especially Friedrichstraße, she was all over the place, out of one shop and into the next, while I tried to keep up and carry all the bags for her.”

He learnt later that Alija was forty-six years old and had fought in the war. He was a Muslim. Alija spoke about the war with humour, which seemed almost obscene in the context. He said that he and his men had often been crying with laughter during the hours they spent in gun positions banked high with sandbags. For instance, did he know that, a short time before the outbreak of war, the city received a massive delivery of rice from China? Right in the middle of the war, the people of Sarajevo started up Bosnia’s first ever sake brewery. And they ate rice every day. In the end, Alija begged his mother to please think of something else, because he couldn’t stand the sight of any more rice. Then, one day, his mother served up green rice for his midday meal. She had coloured it with grass. There were dozens of anecdotes like that, he said, and what they all did was make the war appear surreal. How could anyone laugh at civil war? Well, Alija managed, at least at times. Perhaps it was his way of keeping terror at bay.

They arranged to meet that evening in a restaurant on the riverside. They sat outside, watching the traffic on the opposite bank. He asked Alija if he had understood what the war was about.

“Some of it, yes. Some things are pretty much inexplicable.”

Alija spoke of one of his Serb friends. They had lived in the same building and grown up together. His friend’s father was in the army and had warned them that something was about to happen, several days before the outbreak of war. Then, suddenly, his friend was nowhere to be seen. Next, he phoned and told Alija to leave the city. When Alija asked where he had gone, the friend told him that they were encamped near the peak of the mountain. From up there, they were shooting at Sarajevo, at his own city. Later, he had called again and Alija asked how he could bring himself to shoot at the city where they had grown up and made friends. To shoot at those like Alija who still lived down there. His friend said that he had to do what he had to do. “Can anyone understand that?” Alija asked. “Try as I may, I never can.”

Alija drank beer and ate šiš kebap, Turkish-style. “Our traditional fare,” he said with a laugh. He pointed at a large building on the other side of the river. The facade had been handsome, with glazed brick arches and decorative pillars, but a gaping tear in the wall exposed the interior. “That’s the City Library,” Alija said. “They were ordered to destroy it. Who gave the order? A professor at the university here, who served as a
high-ranking
officer in the Bosnian Serb forces during the war.”

He couldn’t help thinking of Šimić, who had taught here. Should he ask Alija about him? But he wasn’t sure
what to say when Alija asked him, as he would, why he was so interested in Šimić. They sat in silence, looking out over the river. Folk music drifted across the water from a restaurant at a bend of the Miljacka. A little later, as he poked about in the small earthenware pot his šiš kebap was served in, he asked his question. Alija looked at him quietly for a moment and then replied: “Yes, I’ve heard of him. One of my friends was a student of his.”

They met up with Alija’s friend for lunch the following day. Twenty years earlier, he had spent a couple of terms taking Šimić’s classes. He said that Šimić was very well liked by the students. He was a gentleman. Always courteous, he would hold the door open for students and didn’t rush individual tutorials. Once a month, he would meet up with his students in some bar or other; he loved jazz, and John Coltrane in particular.

They were in Sarajevo’s old quarter, in a Turkish café with a view of the main mosque’s minaret. The seating was on low benches covered with brightly coloured cushions. While Alija stirred his mocha with a tiny spoon, he translated what his friend was saying.

Apparently Šimić usually wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and his sense of humour favoured Harold Pinter, whatever that was supposed to mean. Šimić had written several books about Shakespeare and then, just before the war, another one about his own ideas concerning nationhood. And that book, the friend said, seemed to have nothing to do with the man he had known. Something must have happened to Šimić.

A few days later, Alija got hold of a copy of the book and also translated some passages for him. In one essay about Shakespeare, Šimić argued that every major character would reach a point beyond which life itself
was worth less than the greater purpose around which the play revolved. He went on to single out the heroes of Kosovo as the architects of their own deaths, asking if this should not be seen as the ultimate goal of all heroic figures in tragedy, from Homer to Shakespeare. Was that what he wanted? To be the architect of his own destiny?

Alija’s friend recalled that Šimić had worn a black ribbon for two whole years after the death of his son. “It could be that his son’s death changed him utterly.”

In the evenings, they would spend time together at a British pub, high up on one of the hills. The pub belonged to one of Alija’s acquaintances. They often sat in the beer garden looking out over the hilly cityscape that rose above the Miljacka. Late in the evening, all they could see were the lights shimmering against the warm night sky, and they would chat in low voices, even though they were outside. Only the children were still noisy, shouting gleefully as they ran around between the tables. He can no longer remember why, but one evening they started to talk about love. Alija asked if he loved someone. He nodded, imagining that Ana was sitting next to him in this company, watching the lights of the city, which seemed to speckle the sky.

In the night air the outline of the mountains could be clearly seen. How fateful the city’s location had proved to be: the mountains had trapped the people in Sarajevo.

He asked Alija if he could imagine falling in love with a Serb woman. “No,” he replied and his friend added: “The relationship wouldn’t stand a chance.” He later learned that the friend and his family had been driven out of Pale.

“There’s something stronger even than love and that’s the memory of the past.”

Did any of this matter to him? Should their memories come between Ana and himself? He stared at the mountains, trying to conjure up images of tanks lined up on the heights, of guns shooting at the city indiscriminately. These were not his images.

The next day, they went for a short tour by car, taking the eastern exit from the city, passing Pale and turning in the direction of Višegrad. They drove past the rich, green meadows of the softly rising hills and up into the mountains. Later, the road was flanked by forests stretching all the way to the horizon on both sides. Houses were a rare sight in these hills. He was reminded of all the times in his childhood his parents had taken him walking in the Bavarian Voralpenland. He hadn’t expected this magnificent hill country.

The road climbed steeply upwards through dense forest. The car windows were open and the shade of the trees cooled the air. After crawling for a while behind a lorry, they reached the top of the pass and began the descent. The view ahead was so unforgettably beautiful that he almost asked Alija to stop for a moment.

They were about to cross a plateau, which seemed utterly untouched, a soft, green expanse as smooth as the surface of a still sea and too wide for him to see where it ended. They drove through a small village, a group of just three or four houses. A girl herded a couple of cows. Elderly people sat on their verandas and watched the cars on the road. Behind the houses, men were out cutting the meadow grass with their scythes. He saw all this and listened as Alija told him of the massacres that had been carried out in these hill villages, of how people had been crowded together in a field and shot. Blood had soaked into this rich soil, but
he couldn’t imagine it. Still, on the way back, he saw the men wielding their scythes in a new light.

The war had not been between Muslims and Serbs, Alija told him. City people had fought the population in the countryside. “Urban versus rural,” he added in English. The farmers had been the first group to take to killing. Slaughter had been part of their lives, so when it was suddenly a matter of killing human beings rather than animals, they adjusted quickly. Easy enough, if you already have blood on your hands. It soon reached biblical proportions.

Alija asked if he knew the story of Abraham. The point, he said, was that Abraham was willing to kill his own son. Those who fought here sacrificed their blood for this land – well, for the Serb nation. But a nation is only an abstract concept which translates as the ground around your home, the place where you’re born, the land providing the harvests that keep you alive, the landscape of your songs and the wild beauty described in your poetry. The people here fought and died willingly for love of their homeland. It was their form of heroism.

Then the landscape changed again, as abruptly as when the plateau had opened up in front of them. From nowhere, steep, bare rock faces emerged on every side and towered high up above them as the road wound its way through gorges. The murmur of flowing water came through the open windows when the road began to follow the course of a stream. Here and there, it widened into small pools. People were out fishing and Alija told him that the streams around those parts were teeming with fish.

It took almost three quarters of an hour on that mountain road before they entered a wide river valley. The river water was an intense green, which seemed to
glow where the sun caught the surface. He breathed in deeply, trying to control his excitement. There it was, the Drina, on the floor of a valley whose gently increasing gradient stretching to the mountains gave it the form of a bathtub.

They followed the river for a while, then parked the car by the roadside and took a path leading down its bank. Someone had cut steps into the ground. Just twenty, maybe thirty metres along, they entered a small wood where the water glinted through the undergrowth. The well trodden path ended at a clearing around a shed. Plastic bottles, tied to tree branches, floated in the water. In front of the shed, a ramp sloped into the Drina. The brown riverbed was clearly visible through the water.

He crouched and immersed his hand, then looked at it as if Drina’s waters would leave traces on his skin. “Did you ever go swimming in the Drina?” he asked Alija.

“As a child. Not since the war. The river is poisoned now.”

During the onward journey, which took them through several tunnels, he couldn’t take his eyes off the river. The plastic rubbish it carried downstream was a disappointment – mainly bottles and bags. At one point, he spotted what he thought was the floating carcass of some animal, maybe the bloated body of a goat or a large dog. It drifted slowly.