The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

4 DEAD SILENCE OF THE CITY

I took my documents, my computer, and with my two dogs I left Zagreb. It was a bright autumn day, Tuesday 17 September, the third day after the war in Croatia had finally reached us, its capital city. It was here – after months and months of dread, guessing, hearing the fighting getting closer and closer, the fear escalating. We thought, for no good reason, that it couldn’t happen, not in Zagreb. Zagreb was somehow different from Vukovar, Osijek, Petrinja or even the ancient cities on the Adriatic coast of Split or Sibenik or Zadar. It is not only a city of almost a million people, but the capital city coordinating the life of the entire republic. We believed its huge organism couldn’t be destroyed so easily, its vital functions blocked, its tissue torn apart; though we saw the bombing of Osijek, we couldn’t have imagined how exposed and vulnerable any city could become.

The previous Sunday had been calm, a little humid. Leaves on the big chestnuts trees along my street were getting a brown rim that looked like rust, a rust hinting at early winter frosts. I invited my friend Sanka to lunch and laughed when she entered my house carrying a little bag with documents, warm clothes, biscuits and a bottle of water, just as the Territorial Defence people had been instructing us to do, in case we had to hide in shelters or cellars during an air-raid. I prepared pasta al bianco, opened a bottle of red Cabernet and just as we were about to eat, we heard the strange, unnerving sound. I remember looking at my fork half way down to the plate, holding it there for a long moment as if something, some unknown force, was stopping me from putting it down. Only then did we hear the air-raid alarm – a long howling sound that until that moment we only knew from TV reports. I knew what we were supposed to do – run to the nearest shelter and hide. Instead, both of us sat at the kitchen table listening to the roar of the MIGs flying low overhead. It was not fear that I felt, or panic. Nothing. There was no trace of emotion in me. Instead, I felt an empty space opening up like a hole in my chest, and with each passing moment my legs grew heavier and heavier, as if they were turning into stone. In my mind, I saw one image, a picture that I’d seen in one of the countless war reports on TV. It was a house without a roof. A camera first showed it from the outside – a newly-painted low building – then entered a bedroom. There were two beds complete with blankets, pillows, sheets and so on, even the curtains were still on the windows with the broken glass. But the roof was missing, as if someone had forgotten to put it there or had simply taken it off like a child’s toy. Only a few remnants of bricks and a fine dust all over the room showed that the roof had in fact once existed – perhaps only a couple of hours before that picture was taken. The picture of this bedroom with two neat beds, helpless and exposed, looked like a picture from my own life: the perversity of war stripping away from us all intimacy. The war was in my mind, in my legs, on the table, in the plate of pasta getting cold.

Numb, Sanka and I sat there waiting. For bombs to fall. Or for the alarm to stop, whatever. At that point, I understood exactly the meaning of destiny. It is when you know that this is it: there is no choice any more, no solution, no escape, and you are not even horrified, not even tempted to resist, but just ready to take whatever the next moment brings. Even if it brings death.

After about an hour, the alarm over, the city sank into darkness. An enormous power, the power of war, turned off the lights in all the city’s windows and streets. That first evening of complete blackout reminded me of a power shortage five or six years ago, when we had to conserve electricity and spent every second or third afternoon with a candle, wrapped in the night as in a soft black velvet shawl. That Sunday night there were still a few cars passing through the empty streets and their headlights looked like the big eyes of wild animals chased by unseen predators. When I looked up at the sky I didn’t see stars. It was dark. And for the first time the thought crossed my mind, that the sky now was the enemy too.

On Monday there were two more air-raid alarms. The first time I was in the middle of the city, near the open market. An old man, seeing people running, asked me if an alarm had gone off, but when I answered yes he continued to walk down the street, with the slow pace of someone who was just curious about all the fuss. I went into the first building, then went downstairs looking for a cellar to hide. The staircase was damp, moss covering a wall near the steps. Old electricity wires and gas pipes were creeping down it like snakes, their black skin peeling off in patches. The air was heavy with the smell of moisture, boiled potatoes and cabbage stew: someone lived there. In a long, damp corridor on the left, I noticed a door ajar.

When I came nearer, I saw a murky room with a small window high up under the ceiling. The door opened wide and a young woman with a child in her arms said, ‘Come in, please.’ But I stayed at her doorstep, motionless. Perhaps the fact that the ‘shelter’ was the place where she lived every single day of her life, that the ‘safe place’ deep under ground was in fact her apartment, was what stopped me from entering. I went back up to the street and walked home through the empty city, thinking of her. She didn’t need war to be forced underground, she was there already.

I was in my room when I heard the second air-raid alarm in the late afternoon. I switched off the light and in the semi-darkness I stared at the tiny little flowers painted on Laura Ashley wallpaper. I had bought it in London at the beginning of July when the Yugoslav Federal Army dropped the first bombs on Slovenia. I had been wanting to redecorate my bedroom for ages, but went to buy the paper only after I heard the news about the attack. While looking through different samples in a luxurious shop on King’s Road, I knew that, in a way, it was a stupid, absurd thing to do just at the moment when entire buildings were being burned out and destroyed. At the same time I was aware that I was doing it in spite of the war, perhaps as a symbolic gesture of faith in a future when putting up new wallpaper would make sense. I still had some hope that the war would soon end.

Now three months have passed; the war in Croatia goes on and on, more merciless and cruel with each passing day. No one can stop it gripping the whole country, clutching even Zagreb, I thought, as I looked at the floral pattern, at the charming little red roses. I wanted to hide, but instead I just covered my head with a blanket. There is no place to hide in Zagreb or any other city. The whole city after all was a place people built to be a hiding place. Its vulnerability therefore is a measurement of our own vulnerability, our own fragility. A wave of helplessness overwhelmed me and I plunged into it as into an immense ocean. Outside, darkness clotted in the city, so solid I could almost bite it. But more than absolute darkness, there was a terrible absence of noise, any kind of noise – of voices, cars, barking dogs, trams, life itself. The city was mute as if, at a single stroke, the million inhabitants of Zagreb had been silenced.

That night I didn’t sleep. Alone in the house, in my room, smothered by the heaviness of that unnatural silence, I felt as if I was sentenced to be buried alive: the iron lid of war coming down over me, closer and closer until there was almost no air left to breathe. If only I could have screamed, I knew I would have felt better. But in the dead silence of that night, the shriek caught in my throat. Like so many others, I was suffering together with the city: our trembling pulse was getting weaker and weaker, our nervous system seizing up, our blood circulation slowing, our eyes blinded, our mouths shut. I knew that after that night, seeing the darkness and hearing the silence of Zagreb as it stood in danger of being bombed to death, nothing could ever be the same, for that city or for me.

In the morning, I left. That was not what I’d intended to do. Moreover, it had nothing to do with personal inclination, my will or my reason. My leaving Zagreb was a purely physical thing, a decision brought about at some deeper level so that I was barely aware of it. As if I was merely some agent for it, my body acted on its own. I didn’t think, I just moved around the house with my hands packing, turning off water and electricity, closing windows, locking the door. The movements were mechanical, my voice strange and distant as I explained to my neighbour that I was going away for a few days. She nodded understandingly but we both knew that ‘a few days’ couldn’t have the same, specific meaning any more. As I was leaving, I looked back from the taxi window at the empty road to Ljubljana and in the distance I saw my city getting smaller and smaller on the horizon, almost toy-like. Perhaps this is how they see it – the generals – a toy, an icon on a wide video screen where the bombing is no more than a small bleep from the computer.

In the shameless peace of Ljubljana, only 120 kilometres to the west where the war ended after only ten days, the war in Zagreb and in Croatia seemed remote and unreal like a nightmare, at least for a while. On the Wednesday morning, as I walked across a bridge to the old city, with each step I became increasingly aware of the beauty of its yellow and white façades, its baroque ornaments, its narrow streets paved with cobblestones. Then I heard a church bell. The reality was back, the images of churches and church towers destroyed, burned, shot down with shells – almost sixty of them in towns and villages in Croatia. I saw them falling down slowly, like tall trees, or animals, or human beings. Face to face with the serenity of Ljubljana, the war in Croatia hurt even more.