The Book of the Dead

And no one came to save these people, not for a long, long time.

Once upon a time, in the city on the river, 11,000 people were killed, 1,598 of them children. Some 19,000 people were injured and the damages were nearly always horrific: gunshot wounds, amputations and paralysis.

There were so many stories. The young teenage swimmer who lost her breast. The boys who loved soccer who lost feet, legs. The girl who became Miss Sarajevo dyeing her hair with lye. And there was an eight-month-old baby, Kemal. During the shelling, his mother threw her body over his in an attempt to protect her infant. She died instantly, and Kemal had such a grave wound that his right leg had to be amputated at the knee. Kemal’s grandmother found the tangle of blood and bones and flesh in a field and the baby was eventually evacuated to Italy, separated from his family for five years.

There was nowhere that was safe, because living in Sarajevo was like being in a doll’s house with a giant perched above it, holding great boulders that he would drop on the house, squashing the people, just for fun. Some people decided to defy it, to stay inside for the entire siege, not to leave their reinforced apartments. But even they were not safe: one day, a stray bullet would fly through the window as they were trying to wash dishes with a few cups of water that they had stood in line for hours to get. And then they were dead.

Of course, life also continued during these thousand days, because it had to. While people went slowly mad during the siege, people also fell in love, made love, and made babies.

‘I felt healthy as an ox during the siege, my sex life was fantastic,’ a good friend told me later. ‘I never got sick during the siege. My adrenalin was pumping too high, my immune system was perfect.’

Children were born and baptized. I held my baby godson in my arms at the Catholic cathedral one December morning and he screamed and screamed as water was poured on his head, and afterwards we celebrated with rice, bread, cake and chocolate bars bought on the black market. People married, people wrote poetry, people drank and smoked a lot, and a very few lucky ones died of natural causes. Those who stayed put throughout the siege were bound together by a terrible solidarity: they had survived.

And so I returned, many years after the war was finally ended by a schizophrenic peace accord – fifteen years later to be exact. But the city on the river is not the same. There are new people who made money overseas and arrived after the war, picking at the bones of the city’s skeleton, building ugly blue-glassed high-rise buildings and shopping centres.

There are refugees from eastern Bosnia who can never return home because their villages were burned down and the new inhabitants are the men and women who did it, who raped their wives and daughters and killed their husbands. There are foreign diplomats and their wives. There are people running glitzy hotels, boutiques, casinos, and more mosques than I thought possible, built by foreign money.