We’re All Bastards: 20 Years after the Siege of Sarajevo
“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them”.
— Mary Ann Evans
Should you forget about past problems in order to move on? Erase the memories, block everything out? Or face them, no matter how difficult or painful, in the knowledge that the deeper you go the more horror you might see?
We were travelling from Croatia to Bosnia in 2013 and had an unexpected stop at a border town, where a second bus was to take us the rest of the way; if it had a name, it didn’t register.
It felt like the meeting of modern life and an older time that, while recognisable, was unfamiliar, a fading life meeting its future reincarnation. Though new roads were being laid, the tarmac still wet and steaming, the railroad wouldn’t have been out of place in a western.
What was the road covering? What may be covered later? Was there wisdom in the ground that should be taught and remembered? I had no way of knowing. We spoke to no one, could not speak the language.
Soon the bus arrived, and we left that nameless, growing thing behind.
The journey took us along winding mountain paths that ran along the course of a river. The colours, mainly greens and blues, were bright and vivid. As the mountains became hills, clusters of white, pointed stones dotted the landscape. We arrived at Mostar as it was beginning to rain. We began walking when a man struck up a conversation. He spoke Bosnian and German and we neither of them, though this did not seem to matter. I smiled and nodded but eventually began talking as well, as it seemed the normal thing to do. So we spoke: fragments of words caught decaying on my part, perhaps on his; hints given from names and ideas of history.
He pointed to his right and I heard, “Srebrenica...siebentausend, achttausend...”. He pulled a sleeve up to his elbow to show a white band on his wrist and made a sawing action. He pointed to his back with his thumb, closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head.
He smiled often as we were talking, which made me sometimes uneasy, but as he touched my shoulder to say goodbye the feeling went away.
Mostar is a popular day trip from Croatia so there are more tourists here than in other places in Bosnia.
The mixture of Russian-made consumer goods, local crafts and old guns and ammunition being sold was disarming, as if this had always been their only use, but at the same time seeing a child with a toy gun caught my attention more that it might have elsewhere.
Later we went to see the bronze statue of Bruce Lee, made to try and bring the different communities together using the locals’ shared love of kung fu films. It was vandalised soon after it was unveiled but now stood unadvertised in a small park, cleaned, a weapon in one hand and the other open and spread as if to stop something.
With these stark and opposing images we made our way to Sarajevo.
Neither of us was prepared for what we saw. I’d seen pictures of the city but thought that after 20 years the only signs of the siege would be memorials. There were mortar gouges on the taller buildings still standing. I could see straight through what was a brightly painted retirement home, its metal skeleton exposing the sky beyond. Individual apartments that had long been gutted by fire gaped next to neighbours that had been luckier, their washing drying on lines.
Sitting on the bus all of this flitted by like half-finished thoughts, recognised but not fully realised, possible but not real.
We met our friend, a Sarajevan, and soon we were on an informal tour, asking questions, having things pointed out. It would have been much the same as any other except for me the sense of death was still there.
Many places have dark pasts, and recent ones at that, but I had never been anywhere that seemingly still held on to it and it was overwhelming. The air felt heavy and everywhere I looked reminders hung from everything and everyone. I wanted to leave. I thought that perhaps it was contagious, that I would take something unwanted with me.
The children’s fountain, the rim bombarded with the imprints of tiny hands and feet and surrounding two ghostly figures, lies next to stones listing the young dead.
Name after name given on plaques and markers, the words still unfamiliar but the reason they were there clear.
Deadly mortar strikes not paved over but instead the erratic shrapnel splash filled red.
Are memorials necessary when so much else seems to scream about what had happened?
Lingering damage, disrepair. Stories, memories, convictions.
I thought about the kid in Mostar with the plastic rifle and wondered if his imaginary enemies looked the same as the real ones 20 years earlier; the drive to see the ski jump used in the 1986 Winter Olympics, the podium pockmarked with plaster to fill firing squads’ holes; the drunk in the market telling us about the shell that landed there killing 68 people at once, a bottle of liquor lolling in his pocket, perhaps the only way to put it all behind him; the police tank that we were told not to photograph, waved away as if there were still something to hide.
After the initial shock, I began to accept the reminders and analyse them; everything took on meaning. It takes over and you assume everything is to do with the war, everything is bad because of it. Of course this is true in some cases, perhaps many, but even then it takes away people’s personalities, their agency, as if they only are doing and will do anything in the shadow of conflict; they are sorry and broken and should be pitied and excused.
But soon the everyday filtered through, the same as it ever was, and I understood that people can remember the past but do not have to give into it.
One evening we were invited to a barbeque. After eating too many veal sausages, we played a game in which each player had to think of a word or phrase that best matched an abstract picture in their hand of cards. Towards the end of the game someone chose the Kingdom of Bosnia as their idea; their card was a golden crown. Someone said, “Everyone will make jokes”, and we laughed. The conversation shifted to what Bosnia now meant, and opened with, “Whatever it is, it will be a sad story”.
Our friend told a story about his cousins, a brother and sister, whose parents had been executed and the bodies unrecovered; later they were told that that there was a chance they could identified. The sister had emigrated to the United States and didn’t want to go back to Sarajevo, tried to forget. Maybe she did. The brother returned, collected what was left and took it to Sweden to find out. Most people can only imagine what this can do to someone, how long it would take to recover, if they did at all. Maybe he hasn’t.
But in some way a part of it was finished. He had not forgotten.
My travelling companion and I were sitting in our room on his last night talking about all of the things we had seen. We kept telling ourselves that it was still strange to think we were in this place—an indistinct televised war zone from our childhood. It seemed so removed from our lives until then, though really it isn’t far away. He spoke to me of his father who he had gone to see in hospital at the end of his life. They were not close but he felt that spending that time was important. I had the impression that there were things that had been left unsaid, the kind of things that sometimes only make sense later on.
But in some way a part of it was finished. He had not forgotten.
One of my first photographs of Bosnia came into my mind: a message not to forget, even before the memory had formed.
An echo before the sound.