power. He spent his time drinking heavily, now and then giving an interview to a foreign journalist, ranting about various injustices committed against the Serbian people in general and himself in particular. In 1997, he blew his Shakespeare-laden brains out. He had to shoot twice, his long piano-player finger apparently having trembled on the unwieldy trigger.
THE LIVES OF A FLANEUR
In the spring of 1997, I flew from Chicago, where I was living, to Sarajevo, where I was born. This was my first return to Sarajevo since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended a year and a half before. I’d left a few months before the siege of the city started. I had no family there (my parents and my sister now lived in Canada), except for teta-Jozefina, whom I thought of as my grandmother. When my parents had moved to Sarajevo after graduating from college in 1963, they’d rented a room in the apartment of Jozefina and her husband, Martin, in the part of town called Marin dvor. In that rented room I was conceived, and it was where I lived for the first two years of my life. Teta-Jozefina and č ika-Martin, who had two teenage children at the time, treated me as their own grandchild—to this day, my mother believes that they spoiled me for life. For a couple of years after we’d moved out to a different part of Sarajevo, I had to be taken back to Marin dvor to visit them every single day. And until the war shattered our common life, we spent each Christmas at teta-Jozefina and č ika-Martin’s. Every year, we followed the same ritual: the same elaborately caloric dishes crowding the big table, the same tongue-burning Herzegovinian wine, the same people telling the same jokes and stories, including the one featuring the toddler version of me running up and down the hallway butt-naked before my nightly bath.
Č ika-Martin died of a stroke toward the end of the siege, so in 1997 teta-Jozefina was living alone. I stayed with her upon my return, in the room (and, possibly, the very bed) where I’d commenced my exhaustingly messy existence. Its walls were pockmarked by shrapnel and bullets—the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband’s heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn’t move so carelessly in their own apartment.
In my first few days back in Sarajevo, I did little but listen to teta-Jozefina’s harrowing and humbling stories of the siege, including a detailed rendition of her husband’s death (where he had sat, what he had said, how he had slumped), and wander around the city. I was trying to reconcile the new Sarajevo with the 1992 version I’d left for America. It wasn’t easy for me to comprehend how the siege had transformed the city, because the transformation wasn’t as simple as one thing becoming another. Everything was fantastically different from what I’d known and everything was fantastically the same as before. Our old room (and, possibly, bed) was the same; the buildings stood in the same places; the bridges crossed the river at the same points; the streets followed the same obscure yet familiar logic; the layout of the city was unaltered. But the room had been marred by siege scars; the buildings had been mutilated by shells and shrapnel showers, or reduced to crumbling walls; the river had been the front line, so some of the bridges were destroyed and much in their vicinity was leveled; the streets were fractured by mortar-shell marks—lines radiating from a little crater at the point of impact—which an art group had filled out with red paint and which the people of Sarajevo now, incredibly, called “roses.”
I revisited all my favorite
THE LIVES OF A FLANEUR
In the spring of 1997, I flew from Chicago, where I was living, to Sarajevo, where I was born. This was my first return to Sarajevo since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended a year and a half before. I’d left a few months before the siege of the city started. I had no family there (my parents and my sister now lived in Canada), except for teta-Jozefina, whom I thought of as my grandmother. When my parents had moved to Sarajevo after graduating from college in 1963, they’d rented a room in the apartment of Jozefina and her husband, Martin, in the part of town called Marin dvor. In that rented room I was conceived, and it was where I lived for the first two years of my life. Teta-Jozefina and č ika-Martin, who had two teenage children at the time, treated me as their own grandchild—to this day, my mother believes that they spoiled me for life. For a couple of years after we’d moved out to a different part of Sarajevo, I had to be taken back to Marin dvor to visit them every single day. And until the war shattered our common life, we spent each Christmas at teta-Jozefina and č ika-Martin’s. Every year, we followed the same ritual: the same elaborately caloric dishes crowding the big table, the same tongue-burning Herzegovinian wine, the same people telling the same jokes and stories, including the one featuring the toddler version of me running up and down the hallway butt-naked before my nightly bath.
Č ika-Martin died of a stroke toward the end of the siege, so in 1997 teta-Jozefina was living alone. I stayed with her upon my return, in the room (and, possibly, the very bed) where I’d commenced my exhaustingly messy existence. Its walls were pockmarked by shrapnel and bullets—the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband’s heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn’t move so carelessly in their own apartment.
In my first few days back in Sarajevo, I did little but listen to teta-Jozefina’s harrowing and humbling stories of the siege, including a detailed rendition of her husband’s death (where he had sat, what he had said, how he had slumped), and wander around the city. I was trying to reconcile the new Sarajevo with the 1992 version I’d left for America. It wasn’t easy for me to comprehend how the siege had transformed the city, because the transformation wasn’t as simple as one thing becoming another. Everything was fantastically different from what I’d known and everything was fantastically the same as before. Our old room (and, possibly, bed) was the same; the buildings stood in the same places; the bridges crossed the river at the same points; the streets followed the same obscure yet familiar logic; the layout of the city was unaltered. But the room had been marred by siege scars; the buildings had been mutilated by shells and shrapnel showers, or reduced to crumbling walls; the river had been the front line, so some of the bridges were destroyed and much in their vicinity was leveled; the streets were fractured by mortar-shell marks—lines radiating from a little crater at the point of impact—which an art group had filled out with red paint and which the people of Sarajevo now, incredibly, called “roses.”
I revisited all my favorite
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