‘Tell me about your family?’ Marija asked. ‘Did you marry Tamara? Such a nice girl that Tamara.’ She was referring to another wonderful translator I had worked with during the war, a language student from Croatia called Tamara Levak. Momentarily disappointed to learn we had only ever been friends, Marija then clucked over the photographs of my children that I keep in my wallet. ‘Just like you, just like Marinko,’ she said, pointing at the grinning face of my blond six-year-old son, Kit. Marinko was Marija’s youngest child, a fair-haired boy who in the 1990s had just been old enough to be pressed into service as a soldier by the Bosnian Croat forces. Back then Marija would weep whenever his name came up, mumbling tearfully that I reminded her of Marinko, who was off serving in the trenches.
‘He survived the war,’ she beamed, when I asked after him. ‘He works as a policeman now in Sarajevo. Special police. He guards the American Embassy.’
Before leaving I asked about her weaving, and reminded her of the beautiful kilim she sold me all those years ago. ‘That was a fine piece,’ she said. ‘All that wool was from our sheep. I combed it and spun it and dyed it. And then I did all the weaving. It must have taken me years.’ Bosnia’s knotted ethnic history meant there was nothing odd in a Catholic farmer’s wife meticulously creating a rug using designs and techniques from the Orient. ‘But the young ones today, they do not want to learn the old skills,’ she continued. ‘In the end I became too old, my fingers could not do the work. So I gave the loom to my sister-in-law. That’s her in the photo over there.’ As she pointed, her sleeve moved and I caught a glimpse of a blue blemish on the skin at the back of her hand. It was a tiny tattoo, something I remembered her showing to me one winter’s night in 1993, an inky echo of this land’s turbulent heritage. To deter Ottoman lords from stealing their young women, a tradition developed here among Bosnian Croats of tattooing the girls, deliberately giving them blemishes, in the hope this meant they would not be whisked away under droit de seigneur.
As Arnie and I stood up to leave, Drago became animated once more. ‘Now one more for the road,’ he said, slopping brandy around rather than into our shot glasses. I stood up and took in the house properly. It was utterly unchanged from the wartime years: the same furniture arranged around the same wood-burning stove; the same hob where Drago would kindly warm me a pan of water to wash with before dawn; the smell of the same unrefined detergent; thick blankets folded on the same sofas that doubled as beds in winter when everyone gathered around the stove.
My time with Arnie was coming to an end. I would continue on to Sarajevo while he would spend a day with his father, who still lives in Vitez, before heading back to London. Before reaching his old home he spoke to me with emotion that he had never previously expressed.
‘I could never come back and live here,’ he said. I was a little shocked; I hadn’t expected this. ‘I mean, it’s beautiful and everything. Beyond beautiful. Just think about all we saw on our hike. But I would worry about people like Zdravko, the hotelier back in Glamoč.’
Now I was confused. What had Zdravko done to threaten us? He could not have been friendlier. But that turned out to be precisely Arnie’s point.
‘You saw how kind he was to us, right? He could not have done more. He opened up the little hotel, he took us around town, he made sure we had food and drink. He did everything possible to help.’
I was still baffled. ‘So how do you get from that to saying you could never come back here to live?’
‘It’s because the good and the bad live so close by each other – the light and the dark, the love and the loathing,’ he replied. ‘The Zdravko we got to know is exactly the sort of man I was brought up next door to. My family are Bosnian Muslim, but back when I was growing up that did not mean anything, because we were all communists, right? We weren’t green, we were red. All one nation, all Yugoslavs. There were some from our community who went to the mosque, but for most of us it was more important to be Yugoslav. Being Muslim was part of our yesterdays, our history. We had no greater say over it than we do over the genes that give us blond hair or brown eyes. Being Muslim was no longer part of my today. We had more important things to worry about than religion – things like family, school and getting a job.
‘Where we lived in Vitez, if you were able to save money and build your own house, you did so up on the hill. The view was great, it was cool in the summer and you were above the freezing mists that come down in the winter. You could look out over the valley and down beneath you were the workers’ apartment blocks. If you moved up the hill, it meant you had made it.
‘Well, after many years’ saving and saving, we finally had enough to build a house up on the hill and move away from our tiny flat down with all the others. Everything we had went into this new house. For its day, it was seriously cool. I mean I had a bedroom all of my own, after living in a small flat, all of us on top of each other. Can you imagine what a big deal that was, for a teenager?
‘Our neighbours, mostly Bosnian Croats, were fine. I mean they were just neighbours: some friendly, some strange, some nosy – just normal. Basically they were fundamentally good people. People like Zdravko.
‘And then all this shit comes along in the 1990s. Suddenly it matters if you were a Muslim or a Croat. That stuff had been parked for years, for decades. Those people who said, “These people have always hated each other” were just being lazy. In my own life I saw people from different communities work together, live together, get married even. There was nothing inevitable about what happened in the 1990s. It was just that a few – the extremists, the elite, the greedy – saw nationalism as a way to grab what they wanted.
‘When it all erupted we were in the shit, as there were so many Bosnian Croats around us. We were stuck out there all alone, the only Muslims on the hill. I can remember the day the bad guys came to our door – it was April 1993. I mean these people were our neighbours, right? People my mother and father had known for years. My mum went to answer the door and I was standing behind her. I had my dad’s old army pistol in my hand, but I did not know what to do with it. We were scared shitless.
‘Suddenly they shot through the door. Right there, into our house – the house we had built, that one my family had saved for, had sacrificed so much for. I mean, you English and your houses, they are your castles, right? The bloody bullet-hole is still there in the doorframe after all these years. We cannot bring ourselves to fix it. We need to be reminded. Thank God nobody was hit, but the message was clear and we had to move out quick; our lives changed for ever.
‘And the point is this: I know the people who did it and they are no different from Zdravko. He is kind and he is generous and he is helpful. We saw that for ourselves. But I know in my heart that, when it comes down to it here, ethnicity can be toxic – it can count more than whether it is in your nature to be kind and generous.
‘What will you do when the shit really hits the fan? It’s the question that would always be on my mind if I came to live here again. That’s why I cannot come back.’
We had worked together for years during the war, but never had Arnie opened up to me like this. Our relationship had always had a degree of stratification to it. I was the foreign correspondent, the employer with the Deutschmarks in my pocket, and he was the polyglot, the local gatekeeper, the employee, seeking to earn those Deutschmarks. When he turned up as a teenager at the UN base outside Vitez, I had known nothing about his background and he had volunteered nothing. I naively thought he had chosen to come and work with people like me. I had no idea that there was little sense of volition. He had come – at considerable personal risk – because he had to, because if he didn’t his family would go hungry, they would freeze in the winter, their lives would falter.
His words moved me. Learning not to love is so difficult. A brother who falls out with a brother has to learn something totally unnatural: he must learn not to love. I know this to be a difficult, heartbreaking pain. For Arnie, being forced to learn not to love his ho
me had been just as traumatic – a lonely journey of cutting links that were part of his essence. It is a journey that countless Bosnians have been forced to take by the events of the 1990s, fleeing their country in search of a new home they can try to love. Andrić, the novelist, wrote a fictional letter from a person leaving Bosnia, trying to explain to a friend his decision to go. Although written in the 1940s and influenced by the ethnic violence encouraged by Nazi occupation, to my mind it captures the raw feelings of the many Bosnians, like Arnie, driven away by the trauma of the 1990s war:
Bosnia is a wonderful country, fascinating, with nothing ordinary in the habitat or people. And just as there are mineral riches under the earth in Bosnia, so undoubtedly are Bosnians rich in hidden moral values. But, you see, there’s one thing that the people of Bosnia, at least people of your kind, must realise and never lose sight of – Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear . . . The fatal characteristic of this hatred is that the Bosnian man is unaware of the hatred that lives in him, shrinks from analyzing it and hates everyone who tries to do so. And yet it’s a fact that in Bosnia there are more people ready in fits of this subconscious hatred to kill and be killed, for different reasons, and under different pretexts, than in other lands.
My understanding of Arnie was changed for ever by what he said. I came to see him as belonging to the quiet majority in Bosnia: those who did not give in to the toxicity of ethnic nationalism, but who were nevertheless its victim. In him there was no sense of self-pity, more an honest commitment to go in search of what is good, sustainable and lasting. Often he repeated that he did not want ‘to make a fuss’, to complain about what his family had been through, because the suffering of those who had died had been so much greater. Yet he was a man in search of a home. The same fault lines Arnie described were there in the early twentieth century when Princip journeyed through this land away from his own, insular Bosnian Serb community, and yet I was still unclear how he responded to them. Did he belong to the few identified by Arnie who exploited nationalism for their own ends, or did he withstand the toxicity and work for something higher?
Leaving Arnie and carrying on alone to Sarajevo felt sad, but strangely appropriate. After passing by Vitez on the train in 1907, Princip was dropped in Sarajevo by his father and had to make his way by himself. So, after hugging my friend farewell at the bus station in Vitez, a short walk from his family home, the one with the bullet-hole from 1993 still in the doorframe, I continued on my journey. On the outskirts of town I saw a poster advertising a local sporting event, a Bosnian bullfight or korida. Unlike Spanish bullfighting, which involves man against beast, this Balkan version pits beast against beast in a sort of push-of-war. Two animals compete at a time, locking horns and then seeking to muscle each other out of the way. The winner is the one that dominates the other, although both animals inevitably end up drained of strength. I can think of no better symbol for the occasionally brutish, thick-headed, nobody-really-wins-we-all-lose clashes between the people of this region.
With the bus now barrelling along the highway towards Sarajevo, the avalanche of memory threatened to bury me: road bridges that I remembered having been primed with explosives; the turning to the village where I found three girls with their throats cut; signboards with place names still so charged that my stomach tightened when I read them. I decided to get off the bus a few miles outside the city in the small town of Hadžići, where Princip’s older brother, Jovo, had once lived and worked as a woodsman. It lies at the bottom of the massif of Mount Igman, one of the most fought-over pieces of territory in the war of the 1990s and a place where I had once felt more crazily alive than at any time in my entire life. Walking over the mountain into Sarajevo felt like the most appropriate way to reacquaint myself properly with the city.
It was a perfect summer morning. A nectarine bought from a roadside stall was so ripe it had me half-sucking, half-chewing, the juice running off my chin, as I looked for the road that zigzagged its way up the mountain. I began the climb, the tap of my hazel stick on tarmac lonely without the accompaniment of Arnie’s. A car stopped almost immediately and the driver offered me a lift, warning that the way ahead was steep. I declined, keen to explore this mountain at leisure, free of the tension that I had known back in the 1990s.
Mount Igman was the saviour of Sarajevo in the war, the reason the besieged city never fully fell. For years the mountain provided the city’s solitary lifeline to the outside world. The geography of Sarajevo back then was brutally straightforward, with the city surrounded by hostile Bosnian Serb forces on all sides except for the airport, with its mile or so of tarmac runway, which was in the hands of UN peacekeepers. Mount Igman overlooks the airport, so if Bosnian Muslim forces could hold the mountain, they could maybe reach the airport and perhaps connect to the city beyond. The UN force’s precarious neutrality meant that it could not allow combatants to transit the aerodrome, so instead a tunnel was dug by hand right under the tarmac – a fact that was kept secret for years from outsiders, including the many journalists like me who occasionally drove over the mountain to get into Sarajevo. Hostility to foreign reporters meant that we were rarely allowed through the Bosnian Serb checkpoints ringing the city, so we either flew in on UN flights or drove over Mount Igman where, as non-combatant reporters, we were allowed safe passage across the runway by UN guards.
For the Bosnian citizens of Sarajevo the tunnel provided the city’s umbilical cord. Food, ammunition and fuel were all dragged through it into the city, along with troops deploying to and fro as fighting shifted between frontlines. As the seasons passed, plans for the tunnel became more ambitious, and by the end of the war electricity cables and phone lines ran through it, all of which had to be strung across the open vastness of Mount Igman. It was an incredible story of survival through ingenuity and determination, but it came at a high price, with near-constant combat along active and bloody frontlines that ranged right around much of the mountain. For the Bosnian Muslim forces the loss of Mount Igman was simply not an option.
As I walked slowly up the road I passed a number of shrines to Bosnian Muslim soldiers who died in this struggle. The importance of this tiny mountain trail was officially recognised some years after the war when it was renamed Freedom Road. The intensity of the combat was clear from the number of mine-warning signs I walked past, nailed to trees on either side of the road. One shrine from the 1990s lay next to one from the 1940s commemorating partisans who died fighting for the same strategic spot during the Second World War.
I thought of Princip making this same climb as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy on a summer night in 1911. An adolescent, angst-filled essay attributed to him was found long after he died, written on a page of a mountain-lodge guestbook. It was dated 25 June 1911 and signed ‘Princip, Fifth Grade’:
We left Hadžići at sunset when the western sun was blazing in purple splendour, when the numberless rays of the blood-red sun filled the whole sky and when the whole nature was preparing to sleep through the beautiful, dreamy summer evening in the magic peace – that beloved, ideal night of the poet . . . We could go no further. We ate our frugal supper. We built a fire – the best sight I ever saw. No poet has ever described it well enough. Oh, if you could have seen what beautiful and ever-changing scenes were made by the lively red and black, and hellish darkness, the whispering of the tall, black fir trees, and this hideous Night, the protector of hell and its sons; it seemed to me like the whisperings of bedevilled giants and nymphs, as if we were hearing the song of the four sirens and the sad Aeolian harp or divine Orpheus.
I too had been young, aged twenty-seven, and anxious when I crossed Mount Igman after nightfall during the war, an episode so vivid it still comes to me in acute detail. It was June 1995 and the situation inside Sarajevo had worsened dramatically, with the Bosnian Serbs restarting their artillery assault on the city. The fighting had got so bad that for many weeks even the Mount Igman road was closed, adding to the sense of claustrophobia and desperation within the cit
y. I had been ordered to pull out by my editor, but had not been able to leave, part of a growing group of journalists and foreign aid workers going increasingly stir-crazy. At one point I went to investigate reports of a hospital being shelled, arriving in a ward to find the body of a headless male patient who had been lying there. The man had been decapitated by a Bosnian Serb shell smashing through the wall. By this stage my emotional frame was askew, and I remember responding with manic giggles when I saw the victim. He was headless, but completely covered in what looked like pink talcum powder. The explosion had atomized the brick wall, creating a rouge dust that coated absolutely everything in the room: beds, medical equipment, furniture, floor, corpse. My coping mechanism was to find this comic.
One Friday afternoon word went round that the Mount Igman road would be opened for a few hours that evening. Desperate not to miss the chance to get out, I skittered around gathering my gear, begging fuel and loading my Land Rover. Other journalists needed a ride, so just before twilight we set off, with me at the wheel next to two colleagues, a man and a woman, squished into a driving compartment designed for two, creeping across the runway of Sarajevo airport and along the potholed, cratered lanes that led to the mountain trail snaking to safety over Mount Igman. We knew that the Bosnian Serbs could shoot at vehicles on the road – we all remembered the British soldier killed there a year or so earlier at the wheel of a supply truck – but if we timed it right there would be enough light to make it safely across. We were out of luck.
By the time we got to the bottom of the trail, all up-traffic had been stopped. We were told the road was too narrow and too hazardous to allow two-way traffic, so a cyclical one-way system had been imposed: for an hour only upward vehicles were allowed, after which the flow was switched to downward. We had just missed the upward flow, so would have to wait an hour for our turn to go. This meant it would be completely dark by the time we set off – a worry, given that we were not allowed to use lights. To turn on a headlight was to give the Bosnian Serb gunners a target, so all lights had to be disconnected. I had even taken off a panel from underneath the dashboard of the vehicle and removed the fuse, so that my brake lights would not show when my foot touched the brake pedal.