The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

7 PARIS—VUKOVAR

It was just before Christmas 1991. I was staying in Paris for a few days and at first I felt as distant from the war as it was possible to be. For two days I neither read the newspapers nor watched the news on television. Still believing it could be done, I tried to immerse myself in a different life, at least temporarily, in order to forget the life I had left behind. But my consciousness was already deeply divided, like a case of permanent double vision and there was no way to change it. Seen like that, Paris looked different, too. I walked down brightly lit streets (the brightness of lights at night that suddenly hurts your eyes) and I could hardly feel my own weight. It seemed to me I was almost floating, not touching the pavement, not touching reality; as if between me and Paris there stretched an invisible wire fence through which I could see everything but touch and taste nothing – the wire that could not be removed from my field of vision and that kept me imprisoned in the world from which I had just arrived. And in that world things, words and time are arranged in a different way. Anything at all would take me back: the bitterness of my coffee, a sort of reluctance to move, a glimpse of shoes in a shop window and then instantly a feeling of futility, remoteness, not belonging. In a Europe ablaze with bright lights getting ready for Christmas I was separated from Paris by a thin line of blood: that and the fact that I could see it, while Paris stubbornly refused to.

Only two years have passed since the Christmas of 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall, Vaclav Havel, the death of Ceausescu, the day when I first went to midnight mass with my mother. But I can hardly remember any of that. Between then and now there is nothing, just whiteness, absence. Memories seem to have been blotted out by the burden of the present and everything that has taken place in the meantime appears tiny, distant, too trivial to be remembered. I sit in Marija’s kitchen while outside a milky fog smothers everything that is not the war. Marija tells me her war story, about her mother who no longer goes to the basement of the old people’s home when the air-raid sirens are sounded in Zagreb, how she can no longer live in Belgrade, about her son who abandoned his studies in Belgrade and came to Paris to avoid being drafted for the war against Croatia. Now she is looking for a job. Her husband keeps the TV on all the time, switching from CNN to Sky News to French news broadcasts. His spare time is spent in trying to catch as many programmes as possible, reading all the newspapers he can get hold of, both Serbian and Croatian, in an attempt to uncover the truth behind the propaganda. Then at night he tosses in his bed unable to sleep. Vukovar has already fallen, Dubrovnik is still under siege, without water and electricity. The phone keeps ringing and it seems that with each new call the number of the dead is rising dizzily. Even in this large Parisian apartment with its period furniture, thick carpets that muffle the sound of footsteps and mirrors in elaborate gilt frames, the war permeates our skin, our hair, our lungs like dust. Even those who have been living here for years cannot detach themselves completely, be truly here. The war is a seed, then a seedling and then a plant growing in each of us.

It was late in the evening of the third day when I finally reached for the newspapers. Marija said, Please don’t take this one, please don’t, but the magazine had already opened by itself in the centre, on a page with a photograph in colour. Behind a house two people were lying on the ground. A man in a red sweater was lying on his side, his shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbow and one hand thrown over his head as if trying to defend himself from a blow. Next to him lay a woman wearing a blue housecoat with a flowery pattern. She was spread out face down, her hair tangled and her face pressed against the frozen earth. Right next to her head was a crumpled yellow package of Digo instant yeast. She must have dropped it when she fell, as if walking the short distance from the house to the field she had been kneading the empty package in her hand; perhaps only a moment earlier she had added the yeast to the flour to make bread. She did not know she was going to die, no, certainly not. Death caught her in the middle of an unfinished chore. I could not keep my eyes off that package; I was riveted to it as if this was the most important detail in the picture. Or perhaps I did not wish to see the whole picture. Finally I allowed my eyes to slide to the left, to the head of the man in the red sweater. Although the photograph was large enough and in focus, at first I thought that what I saw on his face in profile was a large stain of clotted blood. Subconsciously, I may have refused to understand what I saw as well as the meaning of the scene: the man with his hand thrown above his head was missing almost the entire right side of his head. I closed my eyes, but the picture did not disappear. When I opened them again, the vague stain turned into a gaping skull. I put the magazine aside, then picked it up again and looked at the photograph for a while. I felt death seep into me, flood over me, drag me down and engulf me.

That afternoon I cut my finger and when later that night I was running a bath (believing I had already forgotten the photo) the wound split open again and a few drops of blood fell into the water, tinging it pink. Immediately the picture floated into my mind. The bathroom was large, tiled in old-fashioned ceramic tiles with a garland of flowers running along the border. It was warm and quiet in the apartment. The bath was full and I sat in the water. I knew I was safe in this sleeping house in the middle of Paris, that the war could not reach me from the outside, and yet, sitting there in a bath full of hot water, I was shivering, feeling all of a sudden terribly exposed. A tap above the bathroom sink was leaking and its almost inaudible sound suddenly seemed unbearably loud. Now I remembered how I hadn’t folded the magazine and pushed it away, I had turned to the next page as if I could not get enough of death, as if the pictures of it held a weird, morbid attraction, a cathartic quality which would make all other similar pictures that were to follow less horrible. Now I know, I needed to make death bearable, I had to overcome the horror welling up in me. When I turned the page, I saw a larger photograph of the same scene. Next to the older couple – in fact, in front of them in the foreground, there lay a young man in blue worker’s overalls. On top of him lay a girl, maybe only a child. She must have been the last one killed; she had fallen clumsily over the hand of the young man who was already sprawled on the ground. Her head was turned towards the bullet-scarred white wall of the house, theirs perhaps. They looked like a family – mother, father, son, daughter. The four dead bodies lay spread out in the backyard, next to scattered garbage – plastic bags, papers, some cans. The head of the younger man was split in half and from the crack through the matted black hair his brains had spilled out onto the thin grass. The photograph was bluish and the reddish pink of the blood-stained brain shimmered in front of my eyes like molten lava. Stuck to it was a tiny yellow leaf.

Only once, years before, had I seen death close up.

My younger brother lies in the mortuary. The slanted rays of the autumn sun fall on the concrete floor by the chrome steel refrigerator with four drawers. Next to it is a stretcher which looks like a makeshift hospital cot. My brother is dressed in a dark blue suit and a white shirt, the same suit he wore at his wedding. I cannot come closer, I cannot see his face, perhaps I don’t want to see it. He is barefoot, only his socks on. Why isn’t he wearing any shoes, I wonder stupidly, as if that question would somehow refute the fact that he is dead. The mortuary smells of disinfectant, the floor is wet, I can see the legs of a woman standing inside as if watching over him. She is wearing black rubber boots. Someone behind me whispers that they must have stolen his shoes, that’s what the folk in the mortuary do, later they sell them to make money. At that point death still has no meaning, I know only that it cannot be grasped, it cannot be understood. One can accept it and go on living with the emptiness, but it is impossible to understand anything beyond the simple and evident fact that someone is gone, that he no longer exists – the fact that my brother was alive only yesterday, I talked to him. He was lying in his hospital bed and talked about boats, how he wanted to go sailing. Yes, I said, when you get well we’ll go sailing together. I was telling this to him as much as to myself, unwilling to admit that death existed, pushing it away with words from him… from myself.

But his death was normal, acceptable, everyday death of a kind which is part of everyone’s life: you have to go on living with it. Death on the photographs from Vukovar is something entirely different, it contains the horror of the intolerable. In the glistening spillage of brains exposed there for everyone to see was something worse than death itself. It was defilement. This was no longer merely a horrible death of two men whose inmost vulnerable being, that deepest core which must never be stripped bare, never touched, now lay on the frost-scorched field. Their smashed skulls cancelled out my own effort to live. The naked brain on the grass is no longer death, horror, war – it eludes any explanation or justification, it makes no sense at all. You ask yourself how it is possible to live in a place where things like that are happening. I know I should have asked myself at this point whether the murdered people were Croats or Serbs and who killed them; perhaps I should have felt rage or a desire for revenge. But as I gazed at the dark gaping hole, at the blood-caked pulp, I only felt an unspeakable revulsion towards humankind. The naked brain is stronger than such questions, it is the evidence that we are all potential criminals, that we don’t know each other really and that from now on, if we survive at all, we shall have to live in mortal fear of each other, forever and ever. The naked brain crushes, obliterates us, pulls us down into the darkness, takes away our right to speak about love, morality, ideas, politics, to speak at all. In the face of the picture of a naked brain all human values are simply reduced to nothing.

Sitting in the bath, I looked at my body as if it was no longer mine; more than that, as if I no longer wanted it to be mine or wanted to be part of it. The feet, the nails, the hands. I knew all of that belonged to me, that it was me, but my perception of my own body was no longer the same. On my wrists and on the insides of my arms there was a bluish mesh of veins. It occurred to me that my skin was so thin as to be almost nonexistent. When finally I reached out for the towel, it felt like an alien body moving mechanically, no longer in my control. No, it was not fear of death, I would have easily recognized that. I was familiar with the sudden wild pulse booming in my head and the anguished cramp in the pit of my stomach that would spread through my body till I was petrified. Here, in the bathroom, I felt my own terrible fragility and impotence. I was overwhelmed by a frantic urge to escape from this strange and unreliable body. Something in me rebelled at the thought that this form could be me, this vessel, the other with which I had just lost contact.

It must have been a momentary death of sorts, a revulsion, a recoiling from the body I could no longer feel as mine. Under my hard stare the vessel was torn apart from its contents and if someone had hit me at that moment I am sure I would have felt no pain. I squeezed the cut on my finger as if trying to prove to myself I was still alive. A drop of blood fell on my knee. I smeared it on my skin, making a hole-shaped stain. This body was no longer mine. It had been taken over by something else, taken over by the war. I had thought that the death of the body was the worst thing that could happen in war; I didn’t know that worse was the separation of self from the body, the numbness of the inner being, extinction before death, pain before pain. Instinctively I licked the wound on my finger. But it didn’t help, the blood continued to ooze.