The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

13 IF I HAD A SON

A young boy is sitting across from me in a deep red plush armchair and drinking Coke. Although it is only eleven in the morning, on the first floor of the City Cafe in Zagreb a pianist in a black tuxedo is softly playing an evergreen tune. The arched windows look out on the sunlit facades around the square. It is early spring when the air is still cool and moist and there is a smell of snow.The boy gazes through the window for a while, then at the piano player and finally looks straight at me. This is not for me, I don’t belong here, he says. Calmly, as if stating a simple, perfectly obvious fact. For a brief moment I am puzzled. He is wearing Levi’s and a denim jacket, his hair falls over his forehead in spiky strands, he has two silver earrings in his ears – in fact, he looks like any other boy of his age who has nothing else to do but hang out in a cafe in the morning and play football in the afternoon. But it is not his appearance that stands as a barrier between him and the world around him – the soft hum of voices, the laughter of the waitress in the cafe where all the sounds from the outside are muffled – it is something else. Ivan came here from the war, from Vukovar. His father was taken prisoner (at least he hopes so, that would mean he is still alive), his house was burned down and his mother and five younger brothers and sisters are refugees. And I am a journalist puzzled by his calm, almost light voice, his calm hands on the table, his composure and, most of all, his age.

Rather than looking forward to our next meeting, I have been anxious about it. I met him two days ago. When the door of the apartment opened, I found myself in a hallway, face to face with a young boy no taller than me. His lean, narrow face still had no need for shaving. ‘Is your brother at home?’ I asked; I knew that the eldest brother was nineteen. One of the commanders of the Vukovar defence had told me that he and his brother had been among the twenty-six resistance fighters who were the last to retreat from Vukovar on the night of 18/ 19 November when the city fell. After that the Yugoslav army closed the city for twenty-four hours. They say that thousands of people simply disappeared during that time. The boys walked for three days and three nights in the rain through the enemy positions, through the cornfields, through mud, across the river, for forty-six kilometres to Vinkovci. Of some 160, most of them boys of the same age, these twenty-six were all that remained after five months of fighting. They also told me that the Croatian army soldiers applauded them when finally one morning they entered the city of Vinkovci. It was still raining. All the boys, these warriors coming into the city all caked with mud, were crying, all of them…

The boy in a grey Diesel sweatshirt who opened the door for me shrugged his shoulders and, pushing his chewing gum into the corner of his mouth, said, I’m the eldest. I must have made such a face the boy began to laugh. I know, I look fifteen, he said, while we went into the room in which there was nothing but a long table and a dozen chairs. Instead of a rug, a blanket was spread on the floor. This apartment had been given to them by the Croatian army headquarters; it used to belong to a Federal Army officer who moved out – in fact, fled from Croatia. The apartment had two bedrooms for the eight of them, nine, if the father returns. Ivan sat down, placed his hands on the table and looked at me in expectation.

I knew he was waiting for me to ask him questions, but I was at a loss for words. I didn’t know what to ask him, caught by surprise. His face was so unbearably young that it undid me in a way. This is a story that cannot be written, I thought, not the story of this child who has lost his friends, his house, his father, even the war itself. Watching him across the table, in that empty room, perhaps for the first time I began to doubt the power of words; words, I felt, are nothing but a fragile shell, a thin wrapping which cannot protect us from reality, the sound of a stone falling into a well. Up to then I had never questioned writing, even in a time of war. It seemed to have purpose, justification, there was a way to write about war and about death. But now there was something else besides words, a silence in which you could listen to another human being.

He could be my son, I thought and could not stop thinking of it while I watched him make coffee, bring cups and rummage in the kitchen cupboard for biscuits. His hair was still wet from his morning shower, he must have got up just before I came, I thought, while he told me how his father had disappeared and for the last three months they had had no news of him as his name was not on any of the prisoner-of-war lists, about his fifteen-year-old friend who was a prisoner in a Serbian camp for a month and the beatings he got there, but he never stopped playing tricks on Federal Army officers, like pouring water into their boots. He laughed and I laughed with him, I laughed at his laughter, the joy that suddenly burst from him. He told me that they heard about their house recently from their neighbours. They had seen the house being robbed (two colour TV sets, video recorder, his hi-fi set, the new, not yet completely paid- for furniture, the freezer, the fridge, carpets), they took everything, Ivan was saying, as if ticking off items from a list in his hand and then they burned it down. That’s the way they do it, he explained, they load everything on to trucks and then they set the house on fire. But the house doesn’t matter, he said, as if trying to cheer me up, a house can easily be built anew. He wasn’t quite sure how to continue his story, I still did not ask him anything. The more talkative and open he became, the more I withdrew. I felt guilty. Not because the war did not scar me as much as it did him, one quickly learns that in war there is no justice and no equality, but because of the war itself, because this kid was forced to talk about war, he could speak of nothing else but the war, it was his life now. On the other hand, was this not precisely what I wanted, an authentic story, the smell and the taste of war? Was this not why I was sitting opposite him? In his voice I seemed to sense a slight detachment; his tone, it seemed to me, was the tone of a man making an anecdote of the war for my benefit because I could not begin to understand war on his level. It was as if he was far away and all I heard was merely a faint echo of his voice. By telling me things he thought I wanted to hear he may have been defending himself from me, from my intrusive tape recorder, from my presence. It was that tone which cast me back into the role of reporter, as if telling me, this is what you wanted, isn’t it, I know perfectly well that this is what you wanted to hear. No, but no, I screamed inwardly not daring to say it out loud, not any more, not now when I’ve met you. I don’t want to hear that story. I want us to talk about girls, school, music – just not about war, anything else but war. Trying in a way to defend myself from him, I simply refused to grasp the fact that the boy sitting here was not merely an ordinary high-school graduate who could be my son. I was afraid of his words, I was afraid of hearing what it was like to be growing up in Vukovar during those five months, in the worst place in the whole world. Tell me, what would you like best now, I asked him. That was the only thing I could utter, as if I really wanted him to stop talking, stop returning to where I did not want to follow. This was not a question he expected, I could see that he had to think about it. I’d like to walk by the river and then go to a disco. I’d like everything to be as it used to be, he said and looked at me.

He could be my son, he is four years younger than my daughter, I thought, again disturbed by his youth, and looked down at my hands, at the floor. I should not have thought of that because from the moment this thought crossed my mind again I could no longer listen to him and I could no longer speak. The words jammed in my throat, I felt I was going to suffocate. Quickly, I stood up and said good-bye. Ivan walked me to the door. We arranged another meeting in two days’ time. Two days, I thought, that would give me time enough to muster the strength to face him again. After all, he is not really my son, the worst part of the war is over and Ivan is alive.

And now, in the cafe, I sit and watch him and it seems even worse. His presence makes me feel ill, like a kind of flu. Why did we meet again anyway? Because he was so kind? Because I insisted? But I no longer insist, it doesn’t really matter any more, I have already given up on this story, this assignment. I’m trying hard to keep my cool, but I’m nervous nevertheless. He was born in 1972, I think, watching him light a cigarette. He must have started smoking only recently, in the war, yes, that must be it. There are no tell-tale yellow stains on his fingers. I could almost laugh. If this was someone else, I would tell him, you fool, quit smoking, smoking’s bad for you… I know how the generation born in 1972 grew up, reared on Humana instant milk formula and Fructal baby food. Already there were disposable nappies and baby clothes boutiques, collapsible baby carriages from Germany and dummies from Italy. Later came battery-operated cars – that was a generation that already had too many toys – and colour TV, pinball machines, video games, walkmans, Jeans, Sneakers, Rock concerts, Madonna, MTV. It was like that in Vukovar, too. In this imitation of a Viennese Sezession cafe, his life unfolds before my eyes in a perfectly logical sequence that I can follow year by year as if watching my own family video. Until six or seven months ago, because that’s where the movie ends. Here the thread that used to connect our lives unravels and splits.

While I watch him light his cigarette with a resolute gesture, slightly frowning as if trying to look older, I again feel horror pierce me like a cold blade: really, what if this were my own son? What would I tell him – not today at this table when the war is almost behind us, but in the early summer of 1991 in Vukovar? What would I have done, if one day he came to me and simply said, ‘Mama, I’m going’? Of course, I wouldn’t ask where he was going, that would have been clear by then, it could mean only one thing, going to fight in the war. I wouldn’t even be surprised, perhaps I would have expected it. With fear, with anguish, but I’d be expecting it. Kids even younger than him are fighting, the kids from our street, the same generation. Some of them are already dead. But I would nevertheless tell him not to go, because this is not his war. This war began when you or I were not even born yet, what on earth makes it our war? Forget it, I’d say, no idea is worth dying for. But it’s not an idea that this is all about, he’d say, I don’t give a damn about ideas, about the state, about independence or democracy. They’re killing my friends, they’re killing them like dogs in the street and then dogs eat them because we can’t get to them to bury them. How can I sit here and pretend that none of this is my business? I understand, but I didn’t bring you into this world to kill or to be killed. Why do you keep talking about death? he’d ask reproachfully, as if it were stupid to speak about death, it couldn’t happen to him, it happens to others. Or as if he were afraid that words had the power to make death happen. You’re right, I’d say, suddenly scared of my own words, but you can’t do that to me, you mustn’t. Go away, somewhere, anywhere, the others are leaving, too. You can’t leave here, there’s no place to go, he’d say and I would know that I had already lost the battle. You’re not responsible for what’s happening; if anyone is to blame, then it’s my generation – we saw what was going on but did nothing to prevent it. It’s a war of politics where nobody cares about casualties, a war started at the very top. Everyone except the politicians is a loser. Mama, listen to me, he’d say – again this word, ‘mama’, which now hurts more bitterly than ever before – I know this is chaos and insanity, but I’m not going to run away. I must stay here and fight, I must defend myself and you. Defend, do you get it, it’s defence and nothing else. The Serbs are kicking us out of our own homes. Does anyone have the right to do that? I don’t care what was happening before I was born, believe me, I don’t care at all. But this now is my business and my future is at stake here. If I leave now, I’ll never be able to come back. That means I’ll be accepting defeat lying down, and I can’t do that. The only defeat is your death, I’d say, numb with fear and powerless to stop him. Then we’d both fall silent. I would, of course, cry. He’d stand there for a while looking at me, I’d think he was hesitating, but at that moment he’d turn around and leave. Although I am not religious, I know that I would spend the rest of my time frantically trying to strike a bargain with God: God, if you exist, take me and spare him, God don’t let anything happen to him and ask what you will of me in return, God let them kill me before him, God, God, God…

Ivan is talking and I am listening and thinking of his mother. He says that at one point she heard that both he and his younger brother had been killed and she bought black clothes for mourning with her last penny. When they called to tell her they were alive, she could not believe it until she saw them with her own eyes. She did not even recognize their voices; for her they were already dead. Then he talks about his room. It is high up in the attic, he laid and varnished the floorboards himself, he painted the walls. When he finally moved in, the room smelled of turpentine, linseed oil, varnish and wall paint for a long time. I ask him what colour he painted the walls. I painted the walls blue, the room was blue and all mine, mine only. Do you like blue? he asks me, as if this is important because it will tell him something about me. I describe the blue of the window shutters on a house in Istria, the turquoise patches on a facade that has peeled off long ago but the colour still shines through. And the blue paint used for boats and fences; he knows about these things, he’s keen on them and for an instant it seems that our two pictures of the world, his and mine, mesh and engage in a single point of blueness. But then suddenly, as if interrupting something before it goes too far, Ivan says: blue is for me the colour of war. Only then do I realize that he has been talking about the house and his room in the past tense. He has been describing a picture of a room that exists only in his memory, like that special shade of blue on its walls that has not paled only in his mind’s eye. And while he is talking, below his tender boyish face there emerges the face of a grown-up man for whom neither his own nor anyone else’s life can have the same meaning as before. I watch him grow old before my eyes and he knows it, but that is his true face, the face of the war.

I feel now that we have both crossed the threshold of nausea. I don’t have to ask him anything else, but I may, I have his silent permission. Now he is talking about the first time he was sick and how he killed a man. What corpses look like and finally, how he cried. He talks just as my son might talk, if I had a son, if he’d gone to war and if he’d stayed alive.