The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

1 DINNER AT THE HARVARD CLUB

I’m going home, I think as the plane takes off above the Atlantic and, hovering for a brief moment above the slanted picture of Manhattan, dives upwards into the fluffy milky-white clouds. The sky above the clouds is crystal blue and so calm it seems almost indifferent. It would be wonderful to stay up there and coast awhile in the cool expanse of the azure void. I have just lost my link with land, the land beneath me and my own land to which I am about to return.

Only ten days have passed since I left. In these ten days another twelve people have been killed. The accumulating deaths make the wall dividing us from Europe and the world even higher and more formidable, placing us not only on the other side of the border but on the other side of reason too. This is why going back to my country – is it still called Yugoslavia? – this time feels different, more difficult than ever before: the word ‘home’ sticks in my throat, as if I would choke on it if I tried to say it out loud. I know that I’m going to be plunged deep into a black soupy tar, turgid and clammy, into the everyday which nobody understands any more. Already it is tugging at me from afar with long, thin tentacles.

Only last night I was having dinner in the elegant club of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a Victorian building with mahogany-panelled drawing-rooms adorned with crystal chandeliers, thick burgundy-red carpets and mouldings on the ceilings. In this other reality where everything is logical, familiar and open to explanation, life runs smoothly as if governed by a huge, invisible, precise mechanism. After the first course – salad with walnuts and Roquefort dressing – my friends, considerate as they are, asked with concern about the situation. What is really going on? Will Yugoslavia fall apart? Will there be a civil war? ‘You know,’ my American friend, fiftyish, well-educated and well-informed, said apologetically, ‘our press doesn’t cover the events in your country regularly and when, after a month or two, a new article on Yugoslavia is published, the reader has already lost the thread.’ I remembered the article in that morning’s New York Times with a title perplexing in its ignorance: Two Yugoslav factions blame each other for deaths in the conflict. It was another in a whole series of articles which keep on repeating that Zagreb is the capital of Croatia, and Serbia and Croatia are the two largest of the six republics. And of course they published another map of Yugoslavia, not much bigger than a postage stamp, on which the rebel region around Knin appeared to cover nearly half of Croatia.

Silent-footed waiters brought salmon steaks in sauce Provenale with fried onions. We were eating, but somehow absent-mindedly. For a while my friends’ questions seemed to bob in the air above the dinner plates and the tender, pinkish meat. There was nothing else for me to do but reach for a piece of paper from my purse and draw a map, somewhat different from the one in the New York Times, but a map nevertheless, with republics and provinces, with Zagreb and Belgrade, with the Adriatic Sea, Knin and Borovo Selo. I really wanted them to understand this immensely complicated political situation. They wanted to understand, too. We bent our heads over the piece of paper with the roughly sketched contours of a country which was about to disappear; it was vanishing right in front of our very eyes, sensing that its tragedy could no longer be contained in words. I talked until my voice grew faint – the salmon steaks were getting cold and a thin skin was forming on the sauce – while my friends tried to trace the intricate line of causes and consequences, consequences and causes, as if that still mattered or as if knowing could change anything.

The situation seems symbolic: in a rich people’s club, with soft background glissandos on the harp being played by a fragile-looking lady of uncertain age, over coconut ice-cream decorated with raspberries and weak, decaffeinated coffee, my hosts nod their heads over the Balkan tragedy. Of course they understand what it is all about, but their understanding – as well as everybody else’s – reaches only a certain point. So far as some logic of events can be discerned and explained so good; we are still within the realm of reason. But finally there must and does come the question why, which is the hardest to answer because there are hundreds of answers to it, none of them good enough. No graphics, drawings or maps can be of any genuine help, because the burden of the past – symbols, fears, national heroes, mythologies, folksongs, gestures and looks, everything that makes up the irrational and, buried deep in our subconscious, threatens to erupt any day now – simply cannot be explained. I see the interest and concern on the faces of my friends being replaced by weariness and then resignation.

At that moment I can easily imagine the face of a Bush or a Mitterrand, a Kohl or a Major, at first eagerly paying attention to the report given by an expert consultant who comes from this part of the world over the plate of clear bouillon and then perhaps some light plain-cooked white fish, only to shake his head wearily at the end of the dinner, lifting a silver spoon of slightly quivering creme caramel, admitting that he cannot understand, not fully, that madness, the Balkan nightmare. The consultant – a man tied to the war-plagued country by duty or by birth – feels that he is faced with a lack of understanding not only across the table but somehow across time. And while Mitterrand thoughtfully sips his Cointreau and then gently wipes the beads of perspiration on his upper lip with a napkin, the consultant or minister realizes that his thoughts are already somewhere else and that his indifference unmistakably accounts for his exceptional, almost excessive politeness.

Can any of them, any of my benevolent friends and concerned Western politicians, any of those journalists who curse their bad luck for having to report from a country where there is no simple, clear-cut division into good guys and bad, can any of those people understand how it feels to be going back to the unknown: the nausea, the cramp in the stomach, the agonizing sensation of being overwrought, ill, depressed? I only know what to expect in my own home – hysterical ringing of the phone, unpaid bills, friends with whom I can talk about one thing only, because everything else seems inappropriate, because everything personal has been wiped out, and endless news, news, news… Everything else is a frightening uncertainty. When the roads are blocked and railways, shops and cars are being blown up, when Serbs from Slavonia are fleeing across the Danube into Voyvodina on ferries and the Croats may be using the same ferries to flee to this side, when the village of Kijevo in Croatia is isolated and the Federal Army blocked at Listica, all plans and all thoughts about the future (holidays, summer vacations, travel) become pointless. I feel that for all of us the future is being gradually suspended and this seems to be the most dangerous thing. The irrational that dwells in each of us is being unleashed from its chain and nobody can control it any more. Nobody is secure. In what way am I, a Croat, less threatened and in less danger than my acquaintance, a Serbian, who is now moving back to Eastern Bosnia? In no way, because the demons in us have already made people perceive themselves as nothing but parts of the national being. ‘The Serbs must be slaughtered,’ says a twelve-year-old child from my neighbourhood playing with the bread-knife. His mother slaps his face, while the other grown-ups around the table lower their eyes, aware that they are to blame for his words. The boy, of course, is only playing. At the same time, children his age in Belgrade are probably not playing cops and robbers any more – they are also playing at what should be done to Croats. If there is any future at all, I am afraid of the time to come. A time when these boys, if this lasts, might do just that.