Sarajevo Marlboro (7 page)

“We can't leave yet,” replied his friend. “Don't you remember, I've just ordered more drinks?”

Mišo the Heart shuffled nervously in his chair as Zoka the Barman doled out the beers. A few sips later, yet another tram could be heard – seconds out! Once again Mišo the Heart put up his hands like a boxer. Everybody in the bar was watching, and they all laughed, even Velija the Footballer, who apparently hadn't laughed since the cup match in 1951 when he poked out the eye of Pandurović from Poleter FC in the heat of the moment. It was obvious that everybody liked the washed-out boxer who had nothing left in the world except the memory of a bell. Just for that, Mišo was bought another beer.

The next day he turned up at the Kvarner by himself. The regulars greeted him with looks of delight. Velija the Footballer clapped him on the shoulder. Zoka the Barman, who was wiping the glasses, called out, “Hey you, Heart-Attack, seen any more trams lately?”

Mišo the Heart looked at the barman with mock horror and ordered a beer. When the first tram passed by, Mišo was ready for the
bell, and so he just raised his middle finger, but the next one caught him by surprise. The more beer he drank the faster and more confident his reactions became. The regulars, who had deduced as much, kept on buying Mišo beers. His reflexes became part of the daily routine. Only Lojze the Professor doubted that a person could fail to get used to the trams within a few months.

It hardly mattered in the end. As far as the Kvarner regulars were concerned, Mišo the Heart was like the cuckoo in a clock announcing each hour. On days when he didn't show up at the bar, the others felt a kind of emptiness; it was as if they were missing out on something vital and important. Time slipped through your fingers when Mišo wasn't around. Beer lost its flavor. You couldn't even get drunk on brandy. Empty pockets and impermanence, not to mention the coming threat of war, these were the only certainties. And yet when Mišo the Heart turned up again the next day, his pals awaited the first tram with a sense of unbridled joy and optimism.

On the sixth of April 1992, a notice was pinned to the window of the Kvarner announcing the death of Lojze the Professor, and there was also news of the first shells to be dropped on Jarčedole. That day the regulars talked more than they drank. With a clear head, Edo the Engineer, Velija the Footballer, Meho the Paratrooper, Mirso the Ballbearing and Stevo the Thief analyzed the political situation.
Que sera, sera,
it was decided. But Mato the Villain observed that Lojze the Professor would probably be the last of the boozers to die from cirrhosis in the traditional way. The others shrugged their shoulders.

Just then MiÅ¡o the Heart walked through the door. He sat down at his usual table and lit a cigarette. “This match will last a hundred and one rounds,” he said through clenched teeth. “Geddit? I won't be KO'd by trams or upper-cuts or your piss-taking. This is what'll kill me!”

He beat the left side of his chest three times and looked meaningfully at everybody present.

“MiÅ¡o isn't mad,” he went on. “And the heart doesn't have biceps without reason. I know what you all think when I come down here. If you let me in the door again, it won't be MiÅ¡o the Heart any more, but MiÅ¡o the Chetnik. Fuck you all! It's only just occurred to you where you are and what's going on, but while the soldiers were sharpening their knives, you fought to buy me drinks. Now it will be MiÅ¡o's fault that you didn't catch the last train out of here. Go on, smash my head – so you won't have to think about it later. And fuck you all!”

MiÅ¡o the Heart covered his face with his hands. The others were silent. Then Zoka the Barman mumbled awkwardly, “Oh, for fuck's sake, MiÅ¡o, I'm a Serb too.”

When he didn't respond, Velija the Footballer stood up and was about to say something to Mišo, whom he'd already patted on the shoulder. But it was too late – the boxer jumped at Velija and delivered an almighty punch, the likes of which Bosnia had never seen before. Unsurprisingly, Velija the Footballer collapsed in a heap on the floor.

“Please, MiÅ¡o, don't,” pleaded Meho the Paratrooper, on the verge of tears. “It's a dreadful shame.”

“What is, you baboon?” MiÅ¡o replied.

“If you don't know, what's the point in my telling you? But think of the trams – and think of the rest of us. It's a great shame when you talk like this.”

Mišo the Heart looked alarmed, as if he really had suffered a heart attack. He fell back into his chair, white as a sheet, with an utterly vacant expression on his face. The incident was over in a couple of minutes. It wasn't even long enough for a tram to go by.

Zoka the Barman poured brandy into a glass and took it over to Mišo's table. For a while nobody else moved and the bar-room was as quiet as a grave. Mišo began to wipe away his tears – and then a crowd of people gathered round his chair. But nobody could think of anything to say. Outside, in the distance, you could hear machine-gun fire and the sound of explosions. Suddenly you noticed that the trams were passing by without ringing the bell. It was as though each soul in the room was passing from one body to another and changing into something that was painful and unrecognizable.

That night the regulars parted without a word. The following day a shell exploded in front of the Kvarner, breaking its window. The local hooligans climbed into the bar and ran amok, destroying the place and stealing the booze. Most of Zoka's customers never even came back to see what was left of the Kvarner. Perhaps they moved on to other bars or ended up in another story.

The ex-boxer from Slavija in Banja Luka was shot on the bridge by the First High School. Some witnesses claim the bullet went straight
through Mišo's heart. Others say he was struck in the head. The daily newspapers wrote about yet another well-respected athlete who had been cut down by the enemy's hand. And that's all, folks, except to add that most of the trams in the depot were hit by incendiary bombs and are now burned-out wrecks.

It was 1944 – and the future was uncertain. Bogdan and Mira spent the nights having long and painful discussions until it was finally decided to terminate the pregnancy. By pulling strings, Bogdan managed to get an appointment with a German doctor who performed abortions in secret for the rich women of Sarajevo. The operation went ahead as planned, but Mira's belly continued to grow. By the time the couple realized that the fetus had escaped the scalpel's blade, it was too late. Months of anxiety ensued: would the baby survive? Or would it be abnormal? Would it have two arms and two legs – and two heads?

On the day that Sarajevo was liberated Mira gave birth to a boy whom the couple named Slobodan, which means “Free.” As the last German units withdrew from the city, abandoning their weapons and
their self-esteem, the newborn baby started to cry like any other infant. Mira gleefully changed his first dirty diaper as a story about the parish priest who had been lynched in the street was doing the rounds. The boy smiled for the first time the day the last Chetniks were captured in Vučija Luka and led in handcuffs through the city. It seemed that Bogdan and Mira's anxieties had proved to be unfounded. Perhaps God had intended the birth of Slobodan to herald a more prosperous age in which comradely hugs and outstretched arms would no longer be used to hide the fist of fear.

As the first wave of proletarian labor camps were being set up, it became clear that something was in fact wrong with the boy. He picked up some things more easily than other children of the same age, but other things he failed to understand. To begin with, he would cry inconsolably for a long time, or withdraw into his shell for days and just stare at the corner of his room. As he always came around in the end, his parents were able to convince themselves that his tantrum had just been a passing phase, one of many peculiar childhood illnesses whose real cause is unknown but which sooner or later vanish without any trace.

On the first day at school Slobodan had a nervous breakdown. He sat on his desk and howled, gripping the top of his chair until his fingers broke. “Sleep heals everything,” his mother observed, but the infant woke up in a similar mood the next day and the day after that. He responded warmly to any kindness but fiercely resisted his parents'
attempts to send him back to school. The very idea provoked a series of long monotonous wails that only died down when poor exhausted Slobodan fell into a sweaty sleep. The rest of the time he would only talk about subjects that interested him at that moment. Anything else he reacted to with a look of bewilderment or silence. For days, whenever Bogdan tried to teach his son how to do up his shoelaces, Slobodan fumbled clumsily with his fingers or tied false knots. He just couldn't master the three simple moves. And yet he was able to remember any conversation that had taken place in the family, and often took great pride in recalling, word for word, everything that had been said over the Sunday lunch table the previous weekend. Also, he could tell you whose godfather had stepped on a sea urchin in Promajna last year, and which of the neighbors had been discovered with stockpiles of flour in 1946. As he grew up, the boy served as a kind of
aide-mémoire
to his parents, utterly incapable as he was of doing anything but repeat conversations with unnerving accuracy in a slightly raised and monotonous voice.

In the mid-1950s, Bogdan died of heartbreak and the unforgiving memory of that night in the autumn of 1944 when he agreed to let Mira resolve all the uncertainties of life by having an abortion. His widow continued to bring up Slobodan on her own, and the boy soon grew to be over six feet tall, though he never became any more independent and was still unable to look after himself. To this day, many inhabitants of Sarajevo remember Mira as a smart old lady, always
immaculately groomed, with an intelligent and attractive face. But wherever she went she was followed at a distance of three paces by her gigantic son, whose appearance was no less immaculate and polished than his mother's. In other words, he was fine as long as he didn't open his mouth. But the minute he started talking it became apparent that Slobodan was very strange. For instance, he had already sprouted a few grey hairs when he came to the attention of Meho the Shoemaker, who looked over the rim of his spectacles and commented, “That young man comes with his own sell-by date. I bet he won't outlive his mother.”

During the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984, Mira quietly and gracefully departed this world. Soon afterwards her poor distraught son began to stop passersby in the street in order to ask irrelevant questions about their family trees. As a rule, people were happy to cooperate with this idiotic stranger and tried to answer his questions patiently. They would tell Slobodan everything, and he would commit the information to memory, filing away personal details inside his head only to regurgitate the miscellaneous data at the next encounter. Slobodan had total recall when it came to other people's faces. For instance, he would never mix up a family from the region of Lika, say, with its counterpart in Podrinje. Nobody understood better than Slobodan the frustrations suffered by the city's matriarchs when their daughters got engaged to unbelievers, and nobody was more tactful in extending his condolences.

Slobodan was exemplary in most respects, but he used to get very irritated if somebody addressed him by a nickname such as Boban, Sloba or Boba. Often he would stand in the middle of the road, clench his fists with childish anger and howl at the culprit, “Slobodan! Slobodan! Slobodan!” In a flash the neighborhood rogues pinpointed his weak spot, and as a result poor Slobodan was taunted endlessly. He became the local idiot. Small children ran after him in the street. Idle young men standing under the café awnings with bottles of beer in their hands poked fun at Slobodan mercilessly, until perhaps an older and respected member of the community decided to chase the rowdy layabouts away – and to take Slobodan home.

In the end Slobodan came to resemble any other madman dressed in rags and always hungry. Nobody really knows how he managed to survive after his mother's death. Did the neighbors feed him? Or was he intelligent enough to scavenge for a crust of bread in the rubbish bins?

One of the first CNN bulletins from Sarajevo contained footage of Slobodan wandering aimlessly through the city as dozens of shells exploded on all sides. The camera followed him for about seventy yards, no doubt because the journalists were expecting to capture the moment when the Serb onslaught destroyed an innocent life in Sarajevo. Slobodan very casually sauntered over to the cameraman and gave him a warm smile. You half-expected him to launch into a series of questions about family trees, but he didn't stop. He just went on his
way as the shells continued to fall. That night the reporter, with some disappointment, informed viewers that there were insanely brave people living in Sarajevo.

At night only the sky glows. It lights up houses, skyscrapers and telegraph poles, illuminating the branches of trees and casting the long shadows of a few passersby – a generous sky that protects us from darkness. A young man stands on the roof, smoking a cigarette and hoping to see the landscape. His choked-up view of the city makes it hard to imagine the waterfront or the neon sparkle of a leaping fish, not to mention the voices of water fairies, a time-honored curse (“May your mother have to dredge up your corpse from the bottom of the lake!”), a shout from the other bank, the sound of a distant folk song amid the echo of breaking glasses from a bar twenty miles away.

Fifteen years ago he had escaped from his own part of the country – it was the only lake district in Bosnia – and settled in a city whose
light and dark were to become more important to him than anything in his old life. At first he was comforted by the distant sounds – the hoot of a train leaving the station half a dozen miles away, the noisy rhythm of machines in the sock factory, the rattle of late-night trams, the shimmering light over Mounts Igman and Bjelašnica, the frozen grind of the first snow, the ice crunching underfoot, the sound of axes hacking away at the snowdrift in front of the garage door. Soon the noises began to fade away and his impressions of the lake became unreliable, almost fake. In spite of himself, he grew accustomed to the other world that was separated from the world of his childhood by a distance of only fifty miles and yet was utterly different.