Ghosts by Daylight (29 page)

I forgot sometimes that he was a kid, because he was more like an old man. But he was only nine years old, and he still had it in him to want to play. So he and his brother Mohammed went sledding in the snow by grabbing on to UN trucks that passed and sliding along behind them.

Once in a while, he took me to the basement of the Hotel Europe, which had been bombed to pieces during the summer of 1992. Before the war, during the Hapsburg Empire, it had been the fashionable hotel for the well-heeled doing a Balkan tour. Inside the so-called Golden Visitor’s Book I found a page inscribed in 1907 by ancestors of a Bostonian friend:
Mrs. H. H. H. Hunnewell. Wellesly, USA
.

But more than eighty years later, the place was akin to hell. Luckier refugees found bombed-out rooms and moved their meagre possessions inside, guarding their space jealously. The less fortunate hovered in the basement which was full of water. Nusrat had some friends down there. An older refugee woman had taken in Nusrat and his brother, and tried to guide them.

The war had turned Nusrat savage. I tried to feed him, give him clothes and shoes, and some tenderness, but I was aware always that I was temporary: that I would go, and he would be back on the streets. One day, I sat down with him and a book, but Nusrat had not been to school in a long, long time; not since before the war. He had forgotten how to write his name.

One day, I left for a month to rest. I flew back to London and went to cocktail parties where people always asked the same question: What is it like to get shot at? But I could not enjoy myself in London, even with the marvel of hot water that ran through pipes. I stood under showers for an hour, till my skin rubbed raw from the heat. I ate real food, vegetables and fruit, and went into shops and remembered what it was like to have newspapers and telephones.

But then I thought of Nusrat and my friends inside the siege, and I felt terribly guilty. I bought him clothes for the summer, and vitamins and food. But when I returned in late April, when the water in the river was rushing high, and the spring military offensive was in full flow, and the Serbs were really kicking the shit out of Sarajevo, Nusrat had disappeared.

When I came back I didn’t stay at the Holiday Inn, but in the Hotel Europa. I took an elevator to the basement. The place where Nusrat and I huddled in the cold is now a gym with an elliptical machine and a sauna. There is a pool. The breakfast table was full too – sausages, eggs, bread, and all different kinds of cheeses, imported meats. German businessmen crowd the table, stuffing their plates with rolls and honey. It almost hurts to look at the waste, remembering how the people I loved had hoarded a box of powdered milk, a tin of beef.

And I began my hunt for Nusrat.

No one seems to know where he is. The donkey-faced director, Amir Zelic, is still there, and he sends me a message through Velma, my interpreter: No Nusrat. Apparently, he stayed at the orphanage until five years ago – which would have made him twenty-four when he left – and no one has seen him since. The police have no record of his coming, or going.

But I am sceptical of Amir, because he was involved in a scandal at the orphanage a few years earlier. There was a terrible fire and eight babies perished. No one seems to know the details, but Amir was under investigation, so is wary of talking to the press.

After the war, nuns from Zagreb restored the Dickensian building to a beautiful white convent with hard, glistening wood throughout. It smells of lemon oil. The nuns were neat and clean and took care of children in need. One Sunday morning, I sit with one of the sisters and she tells me that they have tried to scour most of the memories of the war away. She shows me the neat chapel, the fresh flowers.

But on the other side, they moved the wild kids, and Amir was still in charge. People heard about the orphanage during the war, and with donor money, they rebuilt it and the rooms where the children sleep are now clean and light and full of toys. There is a room of babies, smiling, beautiful, fat babies.

The morning I go to meet Amir, two men who guard the door tell me they know Nusrat well.

‘He was here last week,’ they said. ‘He comes sometimes for breakfast.’

But the last time they saw him, Nusrat was in terrible shape. He was homeless, and had taken to begging in the new parking lot in front of the Sao Paola Banka. He spent the night outside, and the men told me they thought he was taking drugs. His brother, Mohammed, who had taken care of him in the orphanage (more or less) had died a few months earlier, from an overdose.

‘He seems very ashamed of his life now,’ one of the men told me. ‘We tell him to come, have a shower, have a meal, but he only shows up once in a while.’

‘When he is really desperate,’ says the other man. They take my cell phone number and promise to call me if Nusrat comes back, and they tell me where to go to look for him.

Oh, Nusrat, I failed you
, I thought quietly while waiting for Amir. When he came down the stairs, he recognized me, and I him, immediately.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.

‘Long time,’ I answered.

‘Fifteen years,’ he said, rubbing his girth. He had gotten fatter but otherwise looked the same. He called for hibiscus tea, coffee. A plate of biscuits appeared. He said he had gotten divorced. ‘Who knows why? The war did terrible things to all of us.’

‘And Nusrat?’ I asked.

Amir nodded. Nusrat came in from time to time, he said, but he never stayed the night. He had been at the home until he was in his early twenties. The death of his brother had been a blow.

Was he also taking drugs?

Amir shrugged. ‘Most likely. I tried to get him a job a while back, and he failed all the drug tests.’

I remembered the skinny kid who showed me how to hook a hand over the back of the UN trucks and slide, slide, slide.

‘What can you do?’ he said, and I froze, thinking he was going to say, ‘It’s a war.’ Instead he said, ‘We could not save all of them.’ We went up to see the babies, but Amir was in a rush. He would not let me hold any of them, even though they were all so very beautiful.

One day, during the war, Nusrat showed me a secret room in the orphanage, a room that was magically heated with oil heaters, and where there were several women in clean clothes. Inside this room, there were also tiny babies.

We snuck inside, Nusrat and me, when the ladies were not there, and I held these babies. I sat in a chair, and inexperienced with children, shifted the infants from one shoulder to the next. Nusrat sat on the floor grinning. And that became another of our rituals: waiting until the ladies went to do something else, sneaking inside and holding the babies. They were warm and smelled clean. I began to feel something I had never felt before: maternal.

But one day we got caught, and the big woman in a white dress with those strange Eastern European clogs they wear in Bosnia kicked us out. She locked the door behind her, and told me if she caught me again near that room, she would tell Amir and he would ban me from the premises.

Later that day, Nusrat told me a secret. Those were the babies of the Muslim women who were touched. Meaning raped. The women who had been held in rape camps in Foca and other places east of Sarajevo, and raped and raped and raped, until they became pregnant. An attempt, someone once told me, to wipe out their gene pool. And this is partially where that terrible phrase – ethnic cleansing – came from.

I found one of those rape babies when she was eight. Marina. She was so beautiful, like an angel. I kept staring at her perfect, tiny, lovely face, unable to imagine that such a child could come from an act so violent. She went to school and had no idea her father was one of perhaps a dozen men who held her mother in a sports hall in Foca and raped her and raped her and raped her.

While Marina was playful and sweet and was told her father was a war hero killed during a battle, her mother was not so joyful. She was a train wreck of a human being, more a shell of a body wearing a tracksuit than a an actual person. Her soul seemed to have been squeezed from her.

She shook and cried, she was full of shame and rage, and she took tranquillizers to sleep and pills to fuel her up during the day. She rarely ate. And yet she still tried to protect her daughter, a child she had once wanted to abort because of the seed that had made her. But at the last minute, she realized the baby was half hers. We went for a pizza and sat silently. Marina told me she liked cartoons: because it was not the real world.

One early spring day after I see Amir, I go to see Jasna. Jasna was in that hall with Marina’s mother those awful days in the summer of 1992 in Foca, but she did not have a baby. She did not have a baby because when she was raped, over and over, nine times by her count, she was only twelve years old and did not yet have her period.

Her mother was raped alongside her on one of the occasions. Neither mother nor daughter could help the other. The little girl screamed at the pain of losing her virginity to a soldier three times her age, and her mother was powerless to help her. Afterwards, when they brought them back to the sports hall, they did not look at each other, and they never talked about it.

Today Jasna is thirty. She is a widow; her husband died three years ago, electrocuted on a job. She cannot bear children; she tried for several years and the doctors told her to give up. Meanwhile, we keep looking for Nusrat.

Every day, my interpreter Velma and her boyfriend drive to the parking lot late at night to look for Nusrat. But they never find him.

I can’t forget you, Nusrat
, I think.
If I forget you, then it seems so much has been in vain
. Instead, I go to see the man who knows best about memory: Aliya, and his book of the dead.

We meet again early on a Friday morning, the Muslim day of prayer and first day of the weekend, in a cemetery past the tunnel where one of the few Bosnian tanks used to hide, draped in camouflage. He’s waiting for me, squinting in the sunlight, wearing city clothes rather than his farming clothes: a neat pair of corduroys, a brown sweater, and a checked shirt. He takes me inside the office of the cemetery.

There are twenty-four books of the dead, and we begin at the beginning: July 1992, his first day at work, when he took over the job at the morgue. His hands, big and calloused, used to dealing with the skin of his cows rather than the skin of the dead, open the first book. He sits down, with great and heavy exhaustion, and sighs. He opens the book, which already, only fifteen years after the war, seems very old.

The books are neat and orderly. He goes through them one by one, telling me about the things he remembers.

‘This was my neighbour . . .’ he points to one name. At another line, he drops his head. ‘This was a young girl.’

Finally, he gets to a page in October 1992. He takes out his handkerchief. He wipes his eyes. He runs his big, calloused, farmer’s hands over the page. His eyes blur. ‘And this is my son.’

I have always been close to the dead. Perhaps it is because I have lost so many people I love. Like Aliya, I am not afraid of the dead. I dream of them all, with alarming frequency. Once in a dream, my father was wearing wrinkled pyjamas. This was unusual, because he was an impeccably groomed man. He was wandering the streets, in his pyjamas, looking lost. Maybe it’s all a mistake that he is dead.

‘You’re dead, Daddy,’ I said. ‘Go away.’

He looked hurt. ‘Who told you I’m dead? I’m just in the next room.’

I have often thought we are connected to the dead, like the bridges that span the River Miljaka, like the bridge on which Prince Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, commencing the Great War. I think sometimes we never lose the dead. I believe strongly we must never forget them. During the war, I used to read the Anne Sexton poem, ‘The Truth the Dead Know’, over and over, as if it had a clue to the insanity that was killing the city of Sarajevo. I loved her poem, how she referred to the dead without shoes, in their stone boats. I understood her description of the remoteness, the heaviness, of death.

I am losing my memory, as the war fades further away from me.

I ask my friend, Louie, to help me remember.

I love Louie. He was a soldier, my friend, a tall, thin Serb from Sarajevo who fought on the Bosnian side. He was never a comforter – he was too gruff for that – but he was someone I knew I could trust with my life. He says, ‘No one ever touched you during the war because of me.’

When I would feel totally alienated sometimes out of fear or loneliness or desperation, he would take me to strange places with strange people – gangsters, probably – where they had a bottle of whisky. Then we would smoke and drink, and he would say, ‘Feel better? Now go home.’ He would drive me home and walk me to my door.

When I see him now, he is so much, much older. He shakes. He drinks a lot. He is so sad, a sadness that I know you cannot wash away with years. What is it you saw? Did you taste fear in your mouth like metal, and what did you smell? Those first days of war when you and your friends tried to hold off the tanks with Kalashnikovs, when you gathered at a factory out near the airport, a small virtually helpless band of kids trying to fight off Goliath, what did you think?

So Louie and I return on my last day in the new Sarajevo to all the places of the dead. To the front lines where he fought, eighteen years ago, He has never been back, and at some moments while we stare silently at the buildings where he crouched with a gun, at the factory where the battle raged for more than twenty-four hours, I am thinking perhaps it was not a good idea to bring him back.