The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

3 A BITTER CAPPUCCINO

I’m sitting in a cafe on Duke Jelacic Square in Zagreb. It is a pleasant, warm mid-July afternoon and a waiter is cranking out the yellow awning to protect us from the sun. The bamboo chair has a soft, pink cushion, the tablecloth is neat and my cappuccino a little bitter, the way I like it. In the concrete vases edging the cafe they have planted roses – this year, I think – while the sun gleams on the marble pavement as if it was just another Thursday, another perfectly ordinary summer day. Perhaps a month ago I would even have said that it was. But events over the last three weeks in Slovenia have changed our lives and our whole perception of reality. Suddenly I recognize signs, scenes and signals of that changed reality all around me that I hadn’t noticed before – or had noticed, but pretended they didn’t matter – and they are telling me we are at war.

On the front page of a newspaper lying next to my cappuccino, there is a note from the Red Cross. It’s short and impersonal, giving information on the dead, wounded or captured in Slovenia: 39 Federal Army soldiers, 4 territorial defence soldiers, 4 policemen, 10 civilians and 10 foreign citizens, all dead; 308 wounded and 2539 prisoners of war. As I read it over and over, this list of nameless, faceless people summed up together in numbers, it feels like a final sentence, proof that what we are living and experiencing now is something different, unprecedented. More than pictures of tanks pounding through cars and barricades, or of the frightened faces of young soldiers lost in action, the anonymity of this number means that war has been declared. All last year war was a distant rumour, something one managed to obscure or ignore – something happening to other people, to people in Knin or Slavonia on the outskirts of the republic, but never to us in the centre, in Zagreb. We were busy with our private lives, with love, careers, a new car. War was threatening us, but not directly, as if we were somehow protected by that flickering TV screen which gave us a feeling of detachment – we might just as well have been in Paris or Budapest. For a long time we have been able to fend off the ghost of war; now it comes back to haunt us, spreading all over the screen of our lives, leaving no space for privacy, for future, for anything but itself.

Not far from the cafe I notice people gathering around a taxi to listen to the news. The volume is turned up high, the small group listens in silence to news of the latest manoeuvres of the Yugoslav Federal Army as the speaker’s voice echoes across the half-empty square. For these people, as for me, war is not only a state of affairs, but a process of gradual realization. First one has to get used to the idea of it. The idea then has to become part of everyday life. Then rules can change, rules of behaviour, of language, of expectations. The speaker first reads an army communique, then a declaration (one of many) of the Croatian President, Franjo Tudjman, about the need to defend ourselves. In this type of discourse, there is no room for dialogue any more, but only for opposing sides to issue warnings, threats, conditions…

I remember with vivid clarity the details of the last few days. In a grocery store, I overheard a woman reading a long shopping list to a salesman: 16 litres of oil, 20 kilos of flour, 20 kilos of sugar, 10 kilos of salt, canned beans, rice… Are these measurements an indication of how long this war is going to last? And how would I know what to put on such a list, how to compose it? The assistant loaded the provisions into cardboard boxes, then took them to the woman’s car. Later on, he tells me that the other day they sold three truck loads full of flour. ‘It all started when Slovenia was occupied,’ he says. With a pretence at normality, I buy bread, fruit, milk, the usual things. I don’t want to be part of this hysteria, I think. But once at home, I call my mother to ask whether she remembers anything about stocking up for the War? What should I buy? She hesitates a little, not because she doesn’t remember – she does – but because such a precise question confronts her with the new reality of our lives. Then she recites: oil, flour, salt, candles, potatoes, bacon, sausages, pasta, rice, tea, coffee, soap… ‘But I don’t have a place to store it,’ I tell her in despair. ‘You have to make room, store it in your bedroom,’ she says, as if it is normal by now to keep potatoes where you sleep. ‘And don’t forget salt!’ she adds, in a tone of voice that makes me think that salt is likely sometime to save my life, even if I don’t at the moment understand exactly how. Last year, when a friend told me that she found some salt in her cellar that her grandma had stocked there during the last war, I hooted in disbelief. Now I wouldn’t laugh.

There is still an impulse to ignore the war, to lead your own life. I see it in my friends planning to go to the coast (but roads are dangerous, last night a train was shot at, and airports might close at any moment). On the other hand, as my daughter pauses a little before packing her suitcase for a holiday in Canada, ‘Shall I take only summer things? Perhaps, some light autumn clothes, too?’ she asks me, as if not sure how long it will be before she comes back. In her question, I recognize war creeping in between us, because the real question behind her words is: am I coming back? But this question is unspoken, because we are not able to face the fact that we might not see each other for a long time. Instead, she writes out instructions for me about what I have to see to for her at the University where she is a student of archeology. But while she is packing, I notice at the bottom of her suitcase a little shabby grey dog, her favourite toy. I hold my breath for a moment, pretending not to see it. How does one recognize the beginning of it all, I wondered not long ago. Now I see the answer in a tiny padded dog packed away among my daughter’s belongings: the war is here, now.

A few weeks later, returning from a short visit to London, I hear a girl next to me, no older than twelve, say to her friend as the aeroplane flies over Croatia: ‘If we were forced to land in Zagreb, I would have to lie about my Serbian nationality, or those Croats would kill me on the spot.’ We are all trapped. The two girls are at war, too: and even if hostilities were to cease instantly, how long would it take for these girls not to be afraid of landing in Zagreb?

The other night in Zagreb Ana called me from Berlin where she managed to escape while Ljubljana was bombed, telling me that her five-year-old daughter, hearing the sound of a distant aeroplane, asked her: ‘Are they going to bomb us here too?’ How long will it take Ana’s little daughter to forget the sound of a military airplane attack.

While I wait at a tram stop near my house in Zagreb, an ordinary-looking man, a civilian in a light summer suit, opens his jacket for a moment and I can see that he has a pistol tucked in his belt. The tram comes and we get on. But I have this uneasy feeling that my future is in his hands and there is no way to step down off the tram any more.