The Book of the Dead

By the winter of 1993, I was beginning to go a little crazy, along with the 300,000 inhabitants of Sarajevo. The war that everyone thought would be over in a few weeks was dragging on in the brutal Balkan winter. The American flags that some families had hung from their frozen windows when a rumour went around the city that the Americans were coming to save them were beginning to look a little tattered and sad. Perhaps even a little mocking. Everyone was beginning to think the world had forgotten them.

My friend Mario, a poet, who had been caught in several artillery attacks, but survived, saw a woman’s shoe full of blood in the snow one day. He rarely talked, but that day, he told me sombrely, ‘You can kill a life without killing anyone . . . You can take a city, but you don’t snipe people, you don’t butcher people, you don’t burn down villages.’ He began to sob and I sat next to him in his freezing house knowing he was slowly going insane, but powerless to do anything except offer him another cigarette.

My friend Gordana saw a dog running with a human hand in its mouth. My friend Aida said, ‘We are all falling down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole.’ She remembers that first day of war in May 1992: she was walking down the street in her high heels and ponytail on her way to work when a tank came up behind her. As she crouched behind a trash can to take cover, she realized she was entering a new place from which she would probably never return. A few weeks later, Aida was forced to send her mother and her two­year-old son, Igor, on the last bus leaving Sarajevo for Germany, and they were separated for four years.

‘Down that rabbit hole of the siege was a black-and-white world, and nothing inbetween,’ she remembers. ‘Like Alice’s world. There was a Red Queen and a White Queen. And that is how the madness began . . .’

My home on the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn on Sniper’s Alley had plastic windows that came from UNHCR aid packets. On one side of the ugly, Communist-era room was my flak jacket and my helmet with my blood group taped to it. On my shrapnel-chipped desk was a battery-operated Tandy, a high-street precursor to a laptop, a flashlight, a box of candles, four lighters, a box of chocolates and three bottles of water.

Physically, I was deteriorating. I had grown accustomed to not washing and I wore the same clothes several days in a row. Oddly enough, even though no one washed in those days, no one seemed to smell. Once a week, I bribed the men who guarded the hotel kitchen with a few packs of Marlboro Lights for a pot of hot water, and with that, I would set aside an hour to wash my hair. One night, in a fit of despair, I had chopped off my long thick hair with a pair of borrowed manicure scissors and although I looked odd, it made my life easier.