Rose of Sarajevo (4 page)

On their way home, they bought a newspaper. Fikret was astonished to see that the
Sabah
newspaper was full of the same denunciations that his brother had voiced at the
meyhane
. The next day, after visiting his father’s grave and kissing his mother’s hand, Fikret returned to Belgrade.

His beloved niece Raziye had traveled all the way from Sarajevo to Belgrade to see her uncle and accept any gifts he’d brought her from Istanbul. Upon arriving, she noticed that he was uncharacteristically moody.

“What’s wrong, Uncle? You seem glum,” Raziye said.

Her uncle said nothing at first. When he was finally ready to confide in her, he said in a low, disillusioned voice, “I understand now that I’ve missed out on life. A life wasted due to a youthful mistake. And it’s too late to do anything about it.”

“Uncle, you’re a man of high standing in this country. You shouldn’t have a care in the world—”

“I never plunged into the flowing waters of a city at dawn. I never lambasted the government, either drunk or sober. I’ve missed out on lif
e . . .
It’s passed me by.”

Uncle Fikret would never again be the man whose uproarious laughter could be heard three houses away. Nobody knew what had happened, but they all agreed that he was a changed man after his visit to Istanbul.

Fikret never expressed his disappointment to his family. He watched in silence as Muslim cemeteries were bulldozed and turned into parks and high-rises, without even the courtesy of notifying the families. He never told anyone how aggrieved he was when Tito converted mosques into museums, storehouses, and cowsheds. Nor did he convey his great dismay at the closure of Muslim associations, schools and—worst of all—the Gazi Husrev Bey Charitable Foundation, which had been operating since 1530.

He never pointed out that Tito only began currying favor with Muslims after he became secretary-general of the Non-Aligned Movement, and never mentioned how transparent he found the practice of appointing Yugoslavians with names like Ahmet, Mehmet, and Mustafa to posts in Arab countries. The fervor that had once burned in his heart had turned to ashes in his mouth.

Except for that bout of depression after he got back from Istanbul, Raziyanım witnessed her uncle’s heartbreak on only one occasion. The father of her son-in-law, Burhan, had gotten to chatting with her uncle at a family dinner one day, and the conversation had turned to Tito’s nationalization of private property. The father had said, “I felt so sorry when I became unable to send our relatives in Istanbul their fair share of the income from the property. For years I’d been sending them their portion of the revenues and various provisions, never once neglecting to ship off canisters of Travnik cheese. What did they do? How did they manage to scrape by once those shipments were cut? How can you possibly explain to someone unfamiliar with a regime like ours that Tito seized lands that had been in our family for centuries, and that they no longer belong to us?”

Knowing how fond her uncle was of Tito, Raziyanım braced herself for yet another one of those endless political debates between those who supported Tito to the death and those who loathed him, choosing to ignore his many services to their country.

“Don’t worry about the relatives in Istanbul. If you’re going to feel sorry for anyone, feel sorry for us,” her uncle had replied in a deeply disappointed voice.

Raziyanım was astounded. From her perspective, Istanbul was a city that saddened and crushed loved ones. It was a city that sowed discord.

When she’d seen her daughter falling for that Turkish boy, she’d whisked her straight back to Sarajevo. She wasn’t going to allow her family to be torn apart; she intended to keep it intact. “Unity and Solidarity” was the slogan of Yugoslavia, and it applied just as aptly to her own family.

A year later, Nimeta started university, where she met Burhan and quickly got over her first love. Burhan was a handsome young man from an old Bosniak family, and he’d be an engineer within the next two years. This time Raziyanım had no reason to object.

They married right after Burhan graduated, and for the first few years Nimeta doted on her husband and was happy. After their life had settled into a routine, however, it dawned on Nimeta that she would be occupied with nothing but work, running a household, and raising children until the day she died. She felt as though she were stumbling through a thick, gray fog. And it was as she was fighting for breath in that fog that she met Stefan, who broke through the mist like a ray of light.

Now, plunged into the mist once again, she felt that he’d been nothing more than a Roman candle, flaring up and engulfing her with light, only to fizzle out. The eternal, endless fog was back.

When the children returned from school, Nimeta was still sitting in the straight-backed chair by the phone, staring at the wall and unaware of Bozo rubbing up against her legs.

As Burhan drove his wife to the clinic that evening, it was with a terrible sense of guilt that he opened up to the doctor sitting next to him in the car. He was guilty of neglecting his wife for his work. Having to look after the children on her own while holding down a demanding career had driven her to depression. He was going to organize his work so that he could stay in Sarajevo with his family. He’d been running himself ragged to give them a better life, but he now realized that happiness didn’t necessarily come from earning more money. He’d brought prosperity to his home, but true happiness had slipped through his fingers. Now his wife was depressed, his children were adrift, and he was confused. Each member of the family was unhappy, and he, Burhan, acknowledged his role in that.

What he didn’t know was that as his wife was struggling through her personal hell, his country too was sliding into a hell of its own. As Nimeta recovered in a clinic bed, the groundwork was being laid that would turn Yugoslavia into a bloodbath.

APRIL 1987

When the leader of the Serbian communists, Slobodan Milošević, was sent off to Kosovo by his dear friend President Stambolić to pacify yet another incident of Serbian minority unrest, he was already planning to tip the scales in his own favor, but he had no idea of the extent to which destiny was working on his behalf.

Slobodan Milošević and Ivan Stambolić had been close friends ever since they were students at Belgrade Law School. Because Ivan Stambolić had devoted himself to the party throughout his university years, his rise through the ranks went more quickly than Milošević’s. But Stambolić had always looked out for his friend. Milošević even owed his first party assignment to Stambolić. After twenty-five years of sharing a common fate, the two friends were inseparable. By 1987, Milošević was both the leader of the Communist Party and Stambolić’s right-hand man.

Stambolić had visited Kosovo for the first time on April 6, 1986. In Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians comprised 90 percent of the population, the Serbs had collected ten thousand signatures to protest the arrest of the separatist activist Bulatović. Stambolić had been forced to go to Kosovo to try to alleviate the mounting tensions.

A year later, the Serbs were once again up in arms, and an official from Belgrade would have to be dispatched to Kosovo to calm them down. Stambolić assigned the person he most trusted to take on this mission, his good friend Milošević. It never occurred to him that this same friend would then stab him in the back in a bid to emerge as the leader of the Serbs.

But Milošević had his own plans, ambitions, and abettors. His leading disciple was the head of Radio Television Belgrade, Dušan Mitević, who would abuse the power of television to inflame the Serbs and incite the people with false scenarios, rendering them all helpless to prevent Yugoslavia’s dismemberment under the guidance of Milošević.

On April 24, 1987, thousands of Serbs turned out to welcome Milošević at the door to the Cultural Center in Kosovo Polye. The police had taken all the necessary precautions to prevent a riot. Television cameramen, the press corps, and journalists from all of the other republics were leaning out from the balconies and windows of apartments in the vicinity.

Nimeta had gone back to work three or four months earlier. She’d been discharged after two months in the clinic but had stayed home for a while after that. Ivan had sent her some writing assignments and translations that she could handle at home. By the new year, she was back at her desk in the office. At first they’d been reluctant to send her on assignments outside the city, but she appeared to have made a full recovery and would gradually have to resume the responsibilities of her profession.

Stefan was in London when he heard of her illness. He’d sent flowers and a card, clearly reluctant to further upset the woman whose life he’d sent into such turmoil.

In order to look after the children while his wife was in the clinic, Burhan had stayed home and sent a fellow engineer to take his place at the construction site in Knin. Raziyanım had come to live with them and stayed on even after Nimeta was discharged from the clinic, determined to guard against Nimeta’s unsavory friends and drinking habit.

Nimeta hadn’t objected, even though she knew that her mother would be constantly sticking her nose into her business. She had no intention of succumbing to another affair of the heart. In any case, Stefan was in London, and other than a call or two to wish her a speedy recovery, they weren’t speaking. She assumed it was over and that she would never see Stefan again. Nor would she think about him. And yet, as Nimeta set off for Kosovo with a cameraman, a little voice kept telling her that she would run into Stefan there.

There was no sign of him among the journalists from Zagreb arriving at the hotel, and she didn’t dare ask anyone. In this overwhelmingly Albanian province, tens of thousands of Serbs had appeared out of nowhere, gathering in front of the cultural center where Milošević was scheduled to make a speech. It was as though they’d been lowered from the sky in baskets. The Serbs pressed against the door of the center, and police officers armed with truncheons tried to force them back in an attempt to protect Milošević from the boisterous crowd. There simply wasn’t enough room inside for a crowd of this size. As the police called for calm on their megaphones, stones began raining down on them from a truck parked in the street. While the officers attempted to respond to both the Serbs and the hail of stones, people began chanting, “Killers! Killers!” The doors to the center had been secured, and the members of the media were jammed into the lobby of the building, where they could hear the uproar outside but had no idea what was going on.

After looking on for a time from his perch on the balcony above, Milošević came down and made the speech that would change the course of his life. At the first glimpse of him, the Serbs who had been chanting, “Killers! Killers!” at the police and government began chanting, “Slobo! Slobo!”

The president had dispatched Milošević to Kosovo not to further inflame the Serbs but to placate them. Furthermore, there were no incidents of Serbs being beaten or anything of the sort. But Milošević already understood how far the winds of Kosovo Serbian nationalism could take him if properly harnessed. Ultimately, it didn’t matter that the words leaving Milošević’s mouth were a fabrication. It only mattered that they were designed to inflame.

Nimeta was among the journalists packed into the lobby so tightly that they were in danger of suffocating. It was the speech being delivered by Milošević, however, that left them breathless and stunned. They could easily see where fiery rhetoric of this kind would take the already enraged Serbs.

Ironically, even as Milošević was assuring the Serbs that “on these lands nobody can dare to mistreat you,” each and every Kosovo policeman on duty that day was being pummeled, stoned, and abused by Serbs.

Not to be outdone by Milošević, other attendees at the rally delivered speeches, demanding that the autonomous status of Kosovo be revoked immediately, and leveled accusations against their Albanian leaders. A dramatic appeal for help was made to Belgrade by the ethnic Serbs speaking at the cultural center, and Serbs were said to be in mortal danger from their neighbors of Albanian descent. Even as the journalists on the ground floor of the cultural center fought for a glimpse through the windows of the events taking place outside, they had already heard enough to know that something momentous had happened.

“This has gotten completely out of hand, Nimeta,” Mate said. “Let’s try to go up to the next floor and get some footage from the balcony.”

“What? I can’t hear you!” Nimeta shouted.

“Let’s go up one floor. I want to shoot from the balcony.”

“You go first. I’ll follow.”

Nimeta pushed her way through the crowd toward the stairs but couldn’t see Mate anywhere. Thinking that perhaps he’d taken the elevator, she pressed on. By the time she reached the stairs, she felt as though she’d been torn to pieces. The stairwell was relatively empty, and she took advantage of the reprieve to catch her breath. Someone came running down the stairs. Thinking it might be Mate, she craned her neck for a better view and found herself unable to breathe once again.

“Nimeta!”

“Stefan! What are you doing here?”

“I’m a journalist, aren’t I?”

“I thought you were in London.”

“I came back two months ago.”

“Two months ago?” The hurt in Nimeta’s voice was clear.

“I didn’t call you because—”

“You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“I’m not explaining, I’m just saying I didn’t call you because—”

“Stefan, I’m not interested in why.”

“Aren’t we friends, Nimeta?”

“We’ll always be friends.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Stefan said. “Are you all right now? Have you completely recovered?”

“Recovered from what? Are you asking about the alcohol, the insomnia, or the depression?”

“Was I so bad for you, Nimeta?”

“Don’t worry about it, Stefan. Anything good comes with a steep price tag. I no longer have a drinking problem. I’m not depressed, and if I have trouble sleeping, I take a pill.”

“I’m so happy you’re healthy again. Is your husband okay?”

“He’s fine.”

“And Hana?”

“She’s fine too.”

“How’s Fiko?”

“Fiko’s fin
e . . .
so is my mother. Mirsada, Ivan, and Sonya are all fine too. Even Bozo’s fine. Bozo’s our cat, remember?”

Stefan hesitated as they descended the stairs, uncertain for a moment what to say next.

“Do you want to go get something to eat after this horrible demonstration is over?”

“How can you ask me that? Weren’t you the one who didn’t want to see me?”

“A friendly drink in memory of old time
s . . .
”

“We’d better not, Stefan. The happiness of everyone at home, including the cat, depends on my staying away from you.”

Stefan stopped two steps down and looked up at Nimeta. He reached out his arms and pulled her toward him. He rested his head against her stomach, and they remained like that for a moment.

Then he slowly said, “I understand. Good-bye, Nimeta.”

He raced down the stairs and was gone.

Nimeta sank down on the step, too weak to continue climbing them.
Whenever these damn Serbs go on a rampage, a storm also breaks out inside me
, she thought to herself. The wound in her heart started seeping blood again.

A week later, as she was preparing the following day’s program in the newsroom, Milos called over to her from his desk. “Nimeta, your call’s been mistakenly put through to me. They’re calling from Zagreb.”

Nimeta went weak at the knees. Struggling to control her voice, she asked, “Who is it?”

“I have no idea. I’ve put it through to you.”

Nimeta let the phone ring a few times as she composed herself. Then she reached over and picked up.

“Hello.”

“Nimeta, it’s me, Stefan.”

The quaver in her voice got the best of her. “Ah, how are you, Stefan?”

“I wanted to share some information with you.”

“What information?”

“It’s about Milošević’s speech in Kosovo.”

Nimeta sat upright on her chair. “I’m listening.”

“I don’t want to bother you, but I thought you’d want to hear this.”

“Go on.”

“That speech we all thought he’d ad-libbe
d . . .
Everything had been planned four or five days before, Nimeta, from the crowd and the truck full of stones to the assaults on the police force. The whole thing was carefully orchestrated ahead of time, Nimeta.”

“Wh
o . . .
who planned it?”

“Milošević, of course. Who do you think benefited most from the events of that day? I just wanted to let you know. You can use this information any way you choose. If they ask for a source, say it’s from Belgrade. I can vouch that it’s trustworthy.”

“Thanks, Stefan,” Nimeta said. “I’ll talk to Ivan.”

“Good-bye. If I come across anything else juicy, I’ll let you know,” Stefan said.

After she hung up, Nimeta felt a twinge of disappointment. He’d addressed her as he would any colleague. She lit a cigarette and waited until she’d smoked it all. Then she went to Ivan’s office.

“A reporter friend of mine just passed on some information from Belgrade that he heard on the grapevine,” she said to Ivan.

“What is it? And why’d he tell you?” Ivan asked.

“I’ll tell you what he said. As for why, let’s just say he owes me one,” Nimeta replied.