The New York Review Abroad (44 page)

Sometimes I felt the same way. Of course it was different for me. “I haven’t taken a bath in sixteen months,” a middle-aged matron said to me. “Do you know how that feels?” And of course I don’t; I only know what it’s like not to take a bath for a month. I was elated, full of energy, because of the challenge of the work I was doing, because of the valor and enthusiasm of everyone I worked with—while I could not ever forget how hard it has been for each of them, and how hopeless the future looks for their city. What made my lesser hardships and the danger relatively easy to bear, apart from the fact that I can leave and they can’t, was that I was totally concentrated on them and on Beckett’s play.

5.

Until about a week before it opened, I did not think the play would be very good. I feared that the choreography and emotional design I
had constructed for the two-level stage and the nine actors in five roles were too complicated for them to master in so short a time; or, simply, that I had not been as demanding as I should have been. Two of my assistants, as well as Pasovic, told me that I was being too amicable, too “maternal,” and that I should throw a tantrum now and then and, in particular, threaten to replace the actors who had not yet learned all their lines. But I went on, hoping that it would be not too bad; then, suddenly, in the last week, they turned a corner, it all came together, and at our dress rehearsal it seemed to me the production was; after all, affecting, continually interesting, well-made, and that this was an effort which did honor to Beckett’s play.

I was also surprised by the amount of attention from the international press that
Godot
was getting. I had told few people that I was going to Sarajevo to direct
Waiting for Godot
, intending perhaps to write something about it later. I forgot that I would be living in a journalists’ dormitory. The day after I arrived there were a dozen requests in the Holiday Inn lobby and in the dining room for interviews; and the next day; and the next. I said there was nothing to tell, I was still auditioning; and after that, the actors were simply reading the play aloud at a table; and after that, I said, we’ve just begun on the stage, there’s hardly any light, there’s nothing to see.

But when after a week I mentioned the journalists’ requests to Pasovic, and my desire to keep the actors free from such distractions, I learned that he had scheduled a press conference for me and that he wanted me to admit journalists to rehearsals, give interviews, and get the maximum amount of publicity not just for the play but for an enterprise of which I had not altogether taken in that I was a part: the Sarajevo International Festival of Theater and Film, directed by Haris Pasovic, whose second production, following his
Alcestis
, was my
Godot
. When I apologized to the actors for the interruptions to come, I found that they too wanted the journalists to be there. All the
friends I consulted in the city told me that the story of the production would be “good for Sarajevo.”

Television, print, and radio journalism are an important part of this war. When, in April, I heard the French intellectual André Glucksmann, on his twenty-four-hour trip to Sarajevo, explain to the people of Sarajevo who had come to his press conference, that “war is now a media event,” and “wars are won or lost on TV,” I thought to myself: try telling that to all the people here who have lost their arms and legs. But there is a sense in which Glucksmann’s indecent statement was on the mark. It’s not that war has completely changed its nature, and is only or principally a media event, but that the media’s coverage is a principal object of attention, and the very fact of media attention, sometimes becomes the main story.

While I was in Sarajevo, for example, my best friend among the journalists at the Holiday Inn, the BBC’
S
admirable Alan Little, visited one of the city’s hospitals and was shown a semiconscious five-year-old girl with severe head injuries, whose mother had been killed by the same mortar shell. The doctor said she would die in a few days if she could not be airlifted out to a hospital where she could be given a brain scan and sophisticated treatment. Moved by the child’s plight, Alan began to talk about her in his reports. For days nothing happened. Then other journalists picked up the story, and the case of “Little Irma” became the front-page story day after day in the British tabloids and virtually the only Bosnia story on the TV news. John Major, eager to be seen as doing something, sent a plane to take the girl to London.

Then came the backlash. Alan, unaware at first that the story had become so big, then delighted because it meant that the pressure would help to bring the child out, was dismayed by the attacks on a “media circus” that was exploiting a child’s suffering. It was morally
obscene, the critics said, to concentrate on one child when thousands of children and adults, including many amputees and paraplegics, languish in the understaffed, undersupplied hospitals of Sarajevo and are not allowed to be transported out, thanks to the UN (but that is another story). That it
was
a good thing to do—that to try to save the life of one child is better than doing nothing at all should have been obvious, and in fact others were brought out as a result. But a story that needed to be told about the wretched hospitals of Sarajevo degenerated into a controversy over what the press did.

This is the first of the three European genocides of our century to be tracked by the world press, and documented nightly on TV. There were no reporters in 1915 sending daily stories to the world press from Armenia, and no foreign camera crews in Dachau and Auschwitz. Until the Bosnian genocide, one might have thought—this was indeed the conviction of many of the best reporters there, like Roy Guttman of
Newsday
and John Burns of
The New York Times—
that if the story could be gotten out, the world would do something. The coverage of the genocide in Bosnia has ended that illusion.

Newspaper and radio reporting and, above all, TV coverage have shown the war in Bosnia in extraordinary detail, but in the absence of a will to intervene by those few people in the world who make political and military decisions, the war becomes another remote disaster; the people suffering and being murdered there become disaster “victims.” Suffering is visibly present, and can be seen in close-up; and no doubt many people feel sympathy for the victims. What cannot be recorded is an absence—the absence of any political will to end the suffering: more exactly, the decision not to intervene in Bosnia, primarily Europe’s responsibility, which has its origins in the traditional pro-Serb slant of the Quai d’Orsay and the British Foreign
Office. It is being implemented by the UN occupation of Sarajevo, which is largely a French operation.

I do not believe the standard argument made by critics of television that watching terrible events on the small screen distances them as much as it makes them real. It is the continuing coverage of the war in the absence of action to stop it that makes us mere spectators. Not television but our politicians have made history come to seem like re-runs. We get tired of watching the same show. If it seems unreal, it is because it’s both so appalling and apparently so unstoppable.

Even people in Sarajevo sometimes say it seems to them unreal. They are in a state of shock, which does not diminish, which takes the form of a rhetorical incredulity (“How could this happen? I still can’t believe this is happening.”). They are genuinely astonished by the Serb atrocities, and by the starkness and sheer unfamiliarity of the lives they are now obliged to lead. “We’re living in the Middle Ages,” someone said to me. “This is science fiction,” another friend said.

People ask me if Sarajevo ever seemed to me unreal while I was there. The truth is, since I’ve started going to Sarajevo—this winter I plan to return to direct
The Cherry Orchard
with Nada as Madame Ranevsky and Velibor as Lopakhin—it seems the most real place in the world.

Waiting for Godot
opened, with twelve candles on the stage, on August 17. There were two performances that day, one at 2:00 PM and the other at 4:00 PM. In Sarajevo there are only matinees; hardly anybody goes out after dark. Many people were turned away. For the first few performances I was tense with anxiety. But there was a moment, I think it was the third performance, when I began to relax. For the first time I was seeing the play as a spectator. It was time to
stop worrying that Ines would let the rope linking her and Atko sag while she devoured her papier-mâché chicken; that Sejo, the third Vladimir, would forget to keep shifting from foot to foot just before he suddenly rushes off to pee. The play now belonged to the actors, and I knew it was in good hands. And I think it was at the end of that performance—on Wednesday, August 18 at 2:00 PM—during the long tragic silence of the Vladimirs and Estragons which follows the messenger’s announcement that Mr. Godot isn’t coming today, but will surely come tomorrow, that my eyes began to sting with tears. Velibor was crying too. No one in the audience made a sound. The only sounds were those coming from outside the theater: a UN APC thundering down the street and the crack of sniper fire.

—October 21, 1993

Amos Elon

1.

IN DAYTIME, THE
main avenues of Kaliningrad—wide enough to allow ten tanks abreast to pass a reviewing stand—are half deserted. Traffic is sparse. Before the Russians took it over in 1945, this ice-free Baltic seaport was the ancient German city of Königsberg, the historic capital of East Prussia and one of the more attractive towns of the German empire. Recently there has even been talk of Germany taking the city back. But now the barren monotony and inhuman scale of Communist urban planning make Kaliningrad—the phantom of a city without any visible center—possibly one of the ugliest places in the world. Four hundred thousand inhabitants—70 percent transient sailors, fishermen, and members of the Russian armed forces and their dependents—live here in monotonous apartment blocks, crumbling mountain ranges of tar and cement and peeling plaster, gray on gray.

The public squares, as in most cities built by the Soviets after the war, are vast, each large enough to accommodate almost the entire population. Loudspeakers left over from the old Communist public-address system still dangle from their poles. There are no mass rallies nowadays and the loud-speakers are rarely if ever used. But the statue of M.I. Kalinin, a former president of the Soviet Union (he is said to have sent his own wife to the Gulag), is still standing in a vast square outside the railroad station. The city was named for him in 1945 after its capture by the Red Army in fierce street fighting with the Wehrmacht and its annexation by the Soviet Union. A giant statue of Lenin is also still standing on Ploshchad Pobedy (Victory Square)—the former Adolf-Hitler-Platz.