Wounded people

Bureaucratic harassment, a notary hurriedly reading the outrageously boring text of the contract. Signatures. And that is it. I give the keys to the apartment where I grew up to the buyer. He drives me to Zvornik. Two men from Bosnia are traveling and chatting. I'm already used to it. Wherever we meet - between Oslo and Istanbul - after a few polite sentences, the conversation slips into the nineties.

"It is for us to die who dies..."

In April 1992, F. was in Zvornik, among the Muslim defenders of Kula Grad, when Serbian paramilitary units, supported by artillery from the Prekodrina hills, occupied the town.

"And then he says that Serbia did not take part, and that the cannons from the Serbian side killed him".

He was wounded, they managed to get him to Tuzla. Telephone connections were cut, the front line was walking through Sprečanski polje, behind it Bosniak enclaves were formed in Podrinje, surrounded by Serbian pipes. There, in the surroundings were his. They thought he was dead.

After half a year, the wounds healed, he returned to the front lines.

"You know where the Serbs screwed up? When they started killing whoever they could get their hands on. Bošnja understood - we are dying... Well, better then with a rifle in hand".

Once it opened, F. could not stop. It's as if he wasn't talking about the past, from which we are separated by almost three decades. For him, what he was talking about was happening now - if not on that warm September afternoon, then yesterday or the day before. I saw it in Bosnia. For a mother whose son was taken and killed, and does not know where he is buried, he is neither dead nor alive. For her, time does not exist, only pain, cocooned in trauma.

For F., the trauma became part of the identity.

He watched as Serbian soldiers set fire to his house. A few Bosniaks remained on the hill above the village. They had five or six bullets each, surrounded by superior Serbian forces. They could shoot, hit a few people with canisters of gasoline in their hands, but that would be the end of them. F. would not have defended the house, but he would have died in vain. They were swallowing tears of helplessness, their eyes were pinched by the smoke of burning, their past, their pre-war life was burning in the valley.

I wonder, if I had experienced it, would I have narrated it to him as calmly as he did to me.

Shaking hands with Kadijević

Then F. talked about the pre-war signs that did not bode well. He says that he was in the Yugoslav navy at the end of the eighties. His superior officer tried to recruit him to stay and intern. Probably working as an informant. He refused. On one occasion, he was introduced to General Veljko Kadijević on board the Galeb.

He says that that officer, a Serb from Podrinja, told him that there were lists of "enemies", that his father was on one of them. He doesn't know if he was provoking him, checking him or warning him. But he says that his father, who later died in the war, did not want to believe it.

Then he told me about the fallen Serbian soldier, over whom one of his units climbed up and grabbed his head. "They almost killed us from the side, and you feel sorry for Vlah", they turned to the Muslim fighter who showed an excess of empathy. He said that the dead man was his friend - in the Yugoslav army. They served together. He thinks he is from Kragujevac. They found an identity card, issued in Kragujevac.

"I saved 600 crates"

F. doesn't let me catch my breath, without transitioning the story of the new episode. On one occasion they were sent to the repeater on Majevica. "They say that there is a free way up the mountain, and that night we lost three people in the fighting with the Serbian guards." Then he adds that their wartime commander let them hear a "big man" in the military hierarchy on a "Motorola", a hand-held radio, telling someone on the other end of the line that the offensive of the Army of BiH must succeed, and that he had prepared 600 boxes for his fighters . People looked at each other and without saying a word returned back through the night to their starting positions.

"Prepare a box for your child," said F. as if he had a cynical commander in front of him at that very moment. And then came that moment that must come when you talk to Bosniaks from Podrinje: "Back in 1994, our commander told us that Podrinje was sold."

Lucky for me - our trip only lasted as far as the Drina. Who knows what other war memories would come out of this man's soul. He says that the people of Podrinj need two lives, because they lost everything once, and after the war in a new area, everything from the beginning. "If only I knew, what life would be like if there was no war. That we stayed our own way".

Under the Zvornik bridge

I got off at the bus station in Zvornik. The next bus to Belgrade had to wait two hours. F. called his friend the taxi driver. He will drop me off to Loznica for 20 euros, there are frequent buses to Belgrade.

We waited 15 minutes. We spent that time in silence, which pleased me. It was as if F. understood that I had to chew and swallow his war, his life broken into two halves.

I spent that time in silent conversation with the Zvornik iron bridge. Every time I would see it, reconciled to human negligence, rusting above the Drina, one end stuck in Serbia, the other in Bosnia, I would feel a bittersweet pang of regret for something that is impossible to name. It served small-border traffic. The last time I crossed it was at the beginning of November 2017. It was cold, the border guards barely let me cross from Serbia to the Bosnian side, because that city crossing only serves people who live on the banks of the Drina - little cross-border pedestrian traffic. I told the uniformed men that my mother might be dying. They let me through. And she really died, two days after my last crossing of the Zvornik bridge. Her apartment in the Bosnian village, 28 kilometers west of the bridge, became her mausoleum. At first, my sister and I were hesitant to sell. Then buyers appeared, but the pandemic drove them away. Until today. When I handed over the keys to F. It's a special kind of nostalgia. It was as if the mother had just now finally died.

"she was 17"

Then D. appeared in his unmarked taxi, whom F. told me, without me even asking, that he was a Serb. As thin, light-eyed and wiry as F. was, his friend D. was chubby, burly and mustachioed. A bit like Stanlio and Olio, I thought. He apologizes for being a little late, he was at his daughter's grave, the anniversary. I shake hands with F. and already D. is driving me towards the Karakaj border crossing.

D. has a good-natured, slightly cloudy look. His words with softened vowels take me back to my student years in Sarajevo. I ask him if he isn't somewhere near Sarajevo. He confirms with his head and says dryly: Hadžići.

I couldn't stand it - I asked him about his daughter.

"She died in 1992. In Hadžići, in our kitchen, a sniper found her."

I am silent for a while. I imagine the girl the bullet is traveling towards. I imagine the barrel it was fired from. I imagine the aiming eye. And that's the human eye, right?

"At the beginning of the war, I didn't sleep for a month because of fear. I tell the woman to take the children and go to Valjevo, they are there. They didn't want to leave me. And there, the sniper. She was 17. She didn't die right away. They drove her to Pale. I prayed he would pull through. I don't know where she died, on the road or in the hospital".

"You look at everything, you harden"

Silence again. Only his pity hums on the asphalt. Some maniac overtakes the truck, D. brakes, we narrowly avoid the scissors. He curses fatly. It makes us want to talk again.

He was in the war, a driver on the Praga, a light self-propelled anti-aircraft gun. He was wounded twice. At the beginning he got a beardless gunner on his armored vehicle. On the first day, the boy was shot and died in his arms.

"I cried like a child," he said and added: "After you see everything, you harden."

He didn't strike me as someone who had hardened. His face was an unhealthy, ruddy color. I would say that he is a sad man, used to talking in a nonchalant voice.

"I didn't tell you, when I was burying my daughter, I saw that there was no necklace or earring. I don't know who stole it, the ones in the ambulance or the ones in the hospital".

I was shaking. The robbery of a seventeen-year-old girl, who hasn't even cooled down yet, is certainly something that not even God, no matter how you call him or invoke him, has the right to forgive.

His dead didn't end there. His brother died as a soldier. He pushed through the war until the end of 1993. Then, after his second wounding, he found a rear position through a connection.

I ask him what he remembers most clearly from that time.

"Igman. That's where we fought with Yuki. We captured a few of them once. We had losses. These were Sarajevo criminals, there were Serbs and Croats as well. You catch their barrel, the hot one, you separate him for shooting. We exchanged the ones with cold pipes".

And that's where I get stressed again. How far Geneva was from those war events in Bosnia, how little each convention was worth, even the Geneva one.

"I'm sorry I didn't burn my house down"

D. and all his people became refugees by the Dayton Agreement - they were moved to Podrinje. He dug up his daughter's remains and buried them here, next to the Drina. "I'm sorry I didn't set fire to my house on my way out. "Sometimes I dream about her," he says.

In Podrinje, after the war, he worked with companies he founded and then closed. Then he got back behind the wheel. As long as the heart lasts. "Mine died young, from the heart. I have already made a living". He shows me the broken capillaries on the back of my hand.

He believes that criminals and instigators are in power. "Whoever wants war, surely there will be war in his house". F. said almost the same thing half an hour ago. Nevertheless, D., a Serb from Hadžić, just like F., a Bosniak from Podrinje, has a clear idea of ​​who "we" are and who "they" are. Today's people are politely called Bosniaks and Serbs. But in war stories, the opponents unforgivingly become "Bali" and "Chetniks".

The war is frozen in mythical time, it didn't take place decades ago, but moments ago. War is a bitter, indestructible sediment in their souls. In the political pre-election laboratories, they turn it into a permanent trauma. Into an open wound surrounded by identity threads of stories about our righteousness and their crimes.

I don't have the key anymore

We arrive in Loznica. I say goodbye to D. and I'm already following him with my eyes as he drives in the direction of the blue Bosnian hills. I can't get the stories of the aging warriors out of my head. This trip kept me trapped in the bloody circle of their fates. These are people from my ruined world. Perhaps Željko Grahovac was right when he noted about what I am writing a long time ago: "He no longer lives in a world that has been destroyed - but the destruction of his former world still lives in him." Yes. This devastation lives in almost everyone from this country, from which I leave sad for the umpteenth time, this time without my mother's key in my pocket.