spots in the city center, then roamed the narrow streets high up in the hills, beyond which lay a verdant world of unmapped minefields. I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the smell of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted unlike what I remembered from before the war—it was like burnt corn now. As a Bosnian in Chicago, I’d experienced one form of displacement, but this was another: I was displaced in a place that had been mine. In Sarajevo, everything around me was familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.
One day I was strolling, aimlessly and anxiously, down the street whose prewar name had been Ulica JNA (The Yugoslav People’s Army Street) and now was Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva (The Defenders of Sarajevo Street). As I walked past what had been called, in the heady times of socialism—which now seemed positively prehistoric—the Workers’ University (Radni č ki univerzitet), something made me turn and look over my shoulder into its cavernous entranceway. The turn was not of my own volition: it was my body that spun my head back, while my mind went on for a few steps. Impeding impatient pedestrian traffic, I stood puzzled before the late Workers’ University until I realized what had made me look back: the Workers’ University used to house a movie theater (it had shut down a couple of years before the war), and whenever I’d walked by in those days, I’d looked at the display cases where the posters and show times were exhibited. From the lightless shafts of corporal memory, my body had recalled the action of turning to see what was playing. It had been trained to react to urban stimulation in the form of a new movie poster, and it still remembered, the fucker, the way it remembered how to swim when thrown into deep water. Following that involuntary revolution, my mind was flooded with a banal, if Proustian, memory: once upon a time in Sarajevo, at the Workers’ University, I’d watched Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America , and now I recalled the pungent smell of the disinfectant that was used to clean the floors of the cinema; I recalled peeling myself off the sticky fake-leather seats; I recalled the rattle of the parting curtain.
* * *
I’d left Sarajevo for America on January 24, 1992. I had no way of knowing at the time that I’d return to my hometown only as an irreversibly displaced visitor. I was twenty-seven (and a half) and had never lived anywhere else, nor had any desire to do so. I’d spent the few years before the trip working as a journalist in what was known, in socialist, peacetime Yugoslavia, as the “youth press” ( omladinska š tampa ), generally less constrained than the mainstream press, reared in the pressure chamber of Tito’s one-party state. My last paid job was for Na š i dani , where I edited the culture pages. (Before the war, the domain of culture seemed to offer a haven from the increasingly hateful world of politics. Now, when I hear the word culture , I pull out the quote commonly attributed to Hermann Göring: “When I hear the word culture , I reach for my revolver.”) I wrote film reviews but was far better known for my column “Sarajevo Republika.” The name was intended as an allusion to the Mediterranean Renaissance city-states—Dubrovnik or Venice—as well as to the slogan “ Kosovo republika ,” which had been sprayed on Kosovo walls by the “irredentists,” who demanded that Kosovo be given the status of a republic in the federal Yugoslavia; given full sovereignty, that is, in place of its status as an “autonomous province” of Serbia. In other words, I was a militant Sarajevan. I set out in my column to assert Sarajevo’s uniqueness, the inherent
One day I was strolling, aimlessly and anxiously, down the street whose prewar name had been Ulica JNA (The Yugoslav People’s Army Street) and now was Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva (The Defenders of Sarajevo Street). As I walked past what had been called, in the heady times of socialism—which now seemed positively prehistoric—the Workers’ University (Radni č ki univerzitet), something made me turn and look over my shoulder into its cavernous entranceway. The turn was not of my own volition: it was my body that spun my head back, while my mind went on for a few steps. Impeding impatient pedestrian traffic, I stood puzzled before the late Workers’ University until I realized what had made me look back: the Workers’ University used to house a movie theater (it had shut down a couple of years before the war), and whenever I’d walked by in those days, I’d looked at the display cases where the posters and show times were exhibited. From the lightless shafts of corporal memory, my body had recalled the action of turning to see what was playing. It had been trained to react to urban stimulation in the form of a new movie poster, and it still remembered, the fucker, the way it remembered how to swim when thrown into deep water. Following that involuntary revolution, my mind was flooded with a banal, if Proustian, memory: once upon a time in Sarajevo, at the Workers’ University, I’d watched Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America , and now I recalled the pungent smell of the disinfectant that was used to clean the floors of the cinema; I recalled peeling myself off the sticky fake-leather seats; I recalled the rattle of the parting curtain.
* * *
I’d left Sarajevo for America on January 24, 1992. I had no way of knowing at the time that I’d return to my hometown only as an irreversibly displaced visitor. I was twenty-seven (and a half) and had never lived anywhere else, nor had any desire to do so. I’d spent the few years before the trip working as a journalist in what was known, in socialist, peacetime Yugoslavia, as the “youth press” ( omladinska š tampa ), generally less constrained than the mainstream press, reared in the pressure chamber of Tito’s one-party state. My last paid job was for Na š i dani , where I edited the culture pages. (Before the war, the domain of culture seemed to offer a haven from the increasingly hateful world of politics. Now, when I hear the word culture , I pull out the quote commonly attributed to Hermann Göring: “When I hear the word culture , I reach for my revolver.”) I wrote film reviews but was far better known for my column “Sarajevo Republika.” The name was intended as an allusion to the Mediterranean Renaissance city-states—Dubrovnik or Venice—as well as to the slogan “ Kosovo republika ,” which had been sprayed on Kosovo walls by the “irredentists,” who demanded that Kosovo be given the status of a republic in the federal Yugoslavia; given full sovereignty, that is, in place of its status as an “autonomous province” of Serbia. In other words, I was a militant Sarajevan. I set out in my column to assert Sarajevo’s uniqueness, the inherent
Similar Books
