The Book of the Dead

My view out of the plastic window was of a wasted, gutted city of burnt-out buildings and metal canisters that were used to deter the snipers. It was so cold that my skin peeled off when I took off my layers of clothes. I was living on a diet of chocolate bars I had brought in from Kiseljak – the Las Vegas frontier town that was the last stop before besieged Sarajevo – whisky, vitamins and cigarettes.

To this day, I cannot forget that cold. My internal barometer changed forever. The large, cavernous, Soviet-style unheated rooms where we would interview doctors or politicians; the freezing cold houses where people sat huddled and frightened around an oil stove; the ugly interior of the lobby of the Holiday Inn, where one afternoon I came back to see journalists abseiling down from the roof with ropes. Ice-crusted, breathing out slow breaths of frozen air.

I shivered when I woke in my sleeping bag, I shivered when I climbed out and slipped into the same clothes on the floor, and I shivered climbing back into the bag at night, to read by candlelight. Bizarrely, uniformed maids came every day to make up the beds – that is, to pat down the sleeping bags and to move around the dust. There was not much they could do without water. The toilets did not flush and nothing came out of the taps.

I was mentally fried. Every day people came to me with some kind of request: get me out of here, take a package to my sister, take my child to Germany, give me some money for firewood. There was only so much I could physically do in one day, and when I did not, Catholic guilt preyed on me ferociously.

The worst was the knowledge that I could leave whenever I wanted to, and they could not. My friend Corinne kept reminding me I was not a social worker but a journalist. But for all of us living in that place, that time, it was impossible not to blur the lines.

To compensate, I had little routines that kept me sane, like someone stricken with obsessive-compulsive disorder. One was to visit the morgue, every day. I usually did this in the morning, when Alija Hodzic, a pleasant Muslim man in his early fifties who ran the morgue, was still in a talkative mood. By the time I arrived, Alija would have counted the dead who came in overnight from the front lines and the hospitals, closed their eyes, tried to straighten their limbs, or if there were no limbs, tried to piece together the ravages of an artillery or sniper attack.

‘Everyone else was afraid of the dead,’ he would tell me later. ‘But I never was. The dead cannot hurt you.’

After he arranged the bodies on slabs, and closed their eyes, he would then take out an ordinary notebook and carefully write down the names of the dead. This was important. Alija is a simple man, born in eastern Bosnia, a farmer at heart, but he believed in his job and he believed that the dead deserved some respect, especially during wartime. So he wrote their names, and where the bodies had arrived from, in simple school notebooks. By the end of the war, there was a stack of twenty-four notebooks, some brown, some green, some bound with yellowing Scotch tape.

If the dead had been killed in an attack in the city, he wrote ‘grad’. If they had died after being treated in the hospital, he wrote the unit they came from – ‘C3’ meant surgery. Soldiers were given the names of the front lines where they were killed – Stup, Otes, Zuc – and you could always tell where the fighting was heaviest overnight by how many were killed. There were a few ‘NN’s written down – Nema Imena – person unknown.

Alija did not fear the corpses, he prepared them for their funerals. But his assistant, Ramiz, was afraid. The poor man drank himself into a stupor before, during and after his work simply in order to be able to do his job. Even then, he did not do his job very well.

‘It was no use having Ramiz around,’ Alija said. ‘I might as well have worked alone.’ Once, when there was electricity at the Kosevo Hospital – a rare occurrence – the two men had to go to the top floor to collect some bodies. The power went out, and they were stuck for hours in the small space. Ramiz stank of booze from a binge the night before, or possibly even that morning.

‘I kept asking him why he did it, why he was drinking himself to death,’ Alija says. ‘I did the same work and I did not have to drink to do it.’

But Ramiz looked at him woefully.

‘What can I do?’ he said. ‘It’s a war.’

This was a common expression in Sarajevo during the siege. Every possible question, from ‘Why don’t you love me any more?’ to ‘Why are you cheating on your wife?’ was answered with the same response. ‘What we can do? It’s a war.’ It was a refrain repeated over and over by priests, doctors, soldiers, commanders, politicians, aid workers, mothers, teachers: they all said the same thing: What we can do? It’s a war.