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You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. — LEON TROTSKY
It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.
He’ll never know that an arbitrary fraction of a millimeter in her aim one way or another will make the difference between feeling the sun on his face ten minutes from now and looking down to see an unbelievable hole in his chest feeling all he was or could have become drain out of him, and then, in his final moments, inhaling more pain than he knew the world could hold.
He isn’t sure what it will be like to live without remembering how life used to be, what it was like to live in a beautiful city.
But the bread Dragan brings home makes him indispensable, and the roof they put over his head traps him there.
There are about twenty people waiting at the intersection to cross. Some step out and begin to run as though there’s a rain-cloud over this part of the street and they don’t want to get any wetter than necessary. It almost seems routine to these people. Or at least that’s how it looks to Dragan. There are others who hover for a second and then run as fast as they can until they reach the other side. They make this brief frenetic dash and then keep walking as though nothing has happened.
But that was before the war. If they were to speak now they would both be reminded only of how much has been lost, how things are no longer what they once were. And even though there’s nowhere in the city Dragan could look that wouldn’t tell him this same message, it’s somehow more painful to see it in another human being, someone you once knew.
He’s safe while he has the water jugs, as no one is yet bold enough to interrupt this vital civilian mission. But he doesn’t know how long this will last, how long it will be before there’s a knock on his door and he ends up with a gun in his hands.
Anyone who didn’t convert their savings at the beginning of the war almost immediately became bankrupt. Not
A nearby merchant’s storeroom caught fire, and the fire quickly reached the Stone Inn, where there was a large army store of barrels of methyl alcohol. Some of the barrels exploded, and the fire spread west, engulfing much of the old town. Firefighters emptied the remaining barrels into the river, not taking into account that alcohol is lighter than water. When they put their pumps into the Miljacka the water they drew wasn’t water at all but fire itself. By the time they realized their mistake it was too late, and much of the city was destroyed.
“A pessimist says, ‘Oh dear, things can’t possibly get any worse.’ And an optimist says, ‘Don’t be so sad. Things can always get worse.’”
She hopes that the girls, and the rest of the city, hate the men on the hills for the same reason she does. Because they made her hate. They started a war, saying that the people of Sarajevo hated each other, and the people fought back, saying they didn’t, that they were a city without hatred. But then the men on the hills started to kill and mutilate and destroy. And little by little they got what they wanted, a victory as clear as it would be if they could drive their tanks through the town. They made her, and people like her, hate them.
As he pulls the body of the hatless man the final few steps to safety he waits to feel some sort of pain, waits to feel the wetness of bleeding. It doesn’t come. He sits down on the ground, breathing hard, sweating. He looks across the street and sees the cameraman staring at him, his mouth open. His camera is in his hands, but not on his shoulder. It hasn’t captured him, or the body of the hatless man. Good, he thinks. I will not live in a city where dead bodies lie abandoned in the streets, and you will not tell the world I do.
Because civilization isn’t a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, re-created daily. It vanishes far more quickly than he ever would have thought possible.
The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still held the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that.
At four o’clock in the afternoon on May 27, 1992, during the Siege of Sarajevo, several mortar shells struck a group of people waiting to buy bread behind the market on Vase Miskina. Twenty-two people were killed and at least seventy were wounded. For the next twenty-two days Vedran Smailović, a renowned local cellist, played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor at the site in honor of the dead.
The Siege of Sarajevo, the longest city siege in the history of modern warfare, stretched from April 5, 1992, to February 29, 1996. The United Nations estimates that approximately 10,000 people were killed and 56,000 wounded. An average of 329 shells hit the city each day, with a one-day high of 3,777 on July 22, 1993. In a city of roughly half a million people, 10,000 apartments were destroyed, and 100,000 were damaged. Twenty-three percent of all buildings were seriously damaged, and a further 64 percent partially. As of October 2007 the leaders of the Bosnian Serb Army, Radovan Karadžić and
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