Sarajevo
Held together with superglue, and prayers.
On the flight to Sarajevo, a man with two bags of crisps sat next to me.
After a brief negotiation, a woman behind us swapped to sit next to him on the other side. She took one of the bags of crisps and placed a pot of hummus on the tray table between them.
I looked out the window. It was a Ryanair plane so the wings appeared to be held together with superglue and prayers. Cracks around the window edges had been mended—clumsily—so the joins were still visible.
You know how I feel about flying, and that’s in cushy transatlantic jobbies. This was not a cushy transatlantic jobbie. I looked at the exits.
There are only three flights a week between London and Sarajevo. If I didn’t take this one, the next wasn’t for another two days. Joel’s conference ended tomorrow and we had plans to stay on for the weekend to see the sights.
Clearly, I was not getting off this plane.
The man and woman next to me chattered and ate crisps. They laughed and laughed, in a language I didn’t understand. His wife, I thought, but found out later it’s his niece. So glad I didn’t ask.
We took off (I still can’t talk about it) and, eventually, the drinks trolley rolled past so I could procure my customary airbound medicinal gin.
My next-seat neighbours ordered a beer each.
The man’s beer went everywhere when he opened it. I mean: everywhere. On him, on me, on the seats, the window, in my gin. I was reasonably cool about it (at 30,000 feet, just happy to still be alive) so I think they decided I was a good egg for not being a dick.
He went off to the loo to clean himself up and I was nose-deep in my gin when she engaged me in conversation. She apologised for the spray and joked that her hummus tasted like Birra Moretti now.
She had a strong London accent, with only the faintest whisper of the Balkans.
Is it my first time to Sarajevo? She smiled at me.
People don’t usually do this, engage me in conversation (it’s my resting bitch face)—but Bosnians, I learned, are friendly. It takes a lot more than a resting bitch face to deter them.
Her name was Amina1 and she told me she’s lived in London since she was 11. She couldn’t speak English at first.
“But,” she shrugged, “I learned quickly.”
I thought back to moving to Ireland from the States when I was 11: how hard it was in the same language. Doing it in a different language? Unthinkable.
When he came back from the loo, her uncle told me his name is Mohammed.
“But not what you’re thinking! I’m named after Mohammed Ali because he won a fight the night I was born. So my dad named me after him. My grandmother, his mother, was so surprised. We aren’t even religious, she said, why Mohammed??”
He laughed and took a pull on his beer. I felt sad because I imagined he tells this story to reassure strangers he isn’t a strict Muslim; that he assumes they would treat him differently if he was named after a prophet, instead of a boxer.
They are Bosnian but live in London, visiting Sarajevo for a family wedding. She’s got a hair appointment booked straight away when we land and is worried she’ll miss it (we were delayed leaving London).
When the plane judders in pocketed air, I said this is why I needed that gin.
She laughed.
“We noticed! When you got it, we were like, wow, she’s really downing that thing.”
—
After we landed at Sarajevo airport, they refused to let me get in one of the taxis—“They will charge you double.”—and we walked to Mohammed’s sister’s house on the edge of the runway.
I’d never heard of walking home from an airport before—but this is Sarajevo: the houses next to the runway have a black fame. Adjacent to the UN-controlled airport, they took some of the heaviest fire during the siege.
I sat out front while they called me a taxi.
Mohammed told me the war broke out when he was 16. It happened so suddenly, he said.
“One of my friends was Serbian,” he explained, “but then he disappeared. Their family left and didn’t come back, not even after the war. Everyone left. The planes came, military planes, and they took the Serbian families away. They must have known what would happen. All the Serbian families left.”
Their old family house was right next to the airport. He showed me a picture of it after the war. It was a shell.
“There was no food in the city. The Serbians were in the hills at either end of the runway, you know, shooting anyone who tried to run across to get to the Bosnian-held side.” He indicated a large green mound across the runway. “If you made it there you were ok, there was food from Mostar.” He took a drink. “My father was killed on the runway. He got shot by a sniper trying to get across for food. My mother ate … what do you call them? The yellow flowers?”
Dandelions, I said.
“Dandelions, yes. She made them into a salad. She survived the war, she died just a few years ago. This was her house.”
I admired the climbing roses. They were hers, he said. The branches were as wide around as my forearm: venerable.
Did those roses survive the war? I wondered.
He checked with his sister. She shook her head.
“No, she planted them after the war. But,” she pointed next door, “those grapevines, they survived the war. At first, there was just one little green shoot.” She held thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “That was all that was left.”
Today, the grapevines cover the trellis and hang down into the garden.
“They’re red grapes,” she told me, “with a thick skin. You have to suck out the fruit,” she mimed, “and spit out the pits.”
In school, Mohammed told me, in the old Yugoslavia, they could choose German or Russian to learn as a foreign language.
“Mostly, the Bosnians chose German and the Serbs chose Russian. They wanted to be with Russia,” he explained, “because they are Orthodox, the same religion.”
You see, he went on, Belgrade was the capital of the old Yugoslavia—and Belgrade is in Serbia. So, after Yugoslavia broke up, Serbia had the old capital, with the whole standing Yugoslavian army and all the weapons.
“Because of that,” he shrugged, “they went a little crazy. A little power-hungry.”
He and his older sister and her baby (he gestured at Amina, who was heading off to the hair salon) left on the bus to Slovenia in April 1992.
“At that time, just before the siege, it was still ok to get through the border.” He thought for a moment. “A week later, no.”
Four days in Sarajevo wasn’t enough to draw any kind of conclusions.
On the first day, Joel was still in his conference so I rode the tram alone. Past the airport, the tram skirted diggers and newly-constructed blocks of flats. An old seven-storey concrete shell of a block lurked in dense foliage. Every room was burned out, windows gaping, covered in graffiti and blast craters.
A little boy sat with his mother on a bench, enthusiastically pointing at the tram. She bent her head and tended to his chatter.
A hotel called Banana City advertised rooms for 15 euro a night.
The buildings along the Miljacka river as we neared Baščaršija2 got fancier, more ornate. Bullet holes peppered every older block.
The tram stopped at the Latin Bridge, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand (heir to the Hapsburg throne) and his wife Sophie, were assassinated in 1914. Their deaths tripped the slow fuse of treaties that started WWI.
Before they married, Sophie had been lady-in-waiting to a powerful Archduchess. When Franz Ferdinand kept visiting the Archduchess, everyone assumed it was to flirt with her famously gorgeous daughter—until they discovered a picture of the lady-in-waiting in his locket.
She had no royal connections; it was not looked on as a favourable match. He must have loved her a lot, I thought. When they died together by this bridge, they had been married 14 years.
A friend from Sarajevo told me no one can agree, is Gavrilo3 a nationalist hero—who resisted foreign Hapsburg imperialism—or not? Should there be a memorial for the murdered couple or not?
The compromise today is that there is no monument for the Archduke and his wife—but you can ogle their car, take a picture in front of it, where they died.
The spot where Gavrilo stood to kill them is marked with two concrete shoe prints.
At midday, I heard church bells and then the muezzin call to prayer. A friend told me all the mosques in Serb-controlled areas were destroyed.
In Sarajevo, he said, the Bosnians didn’t even think about destroying the Orthodox churches.
I stepped from Andar coffee shop a little later, radiating caffeine and sugar syrup. They sell traditional Bosnian coffee (thimble-size and equal parts sugar to coffee). The owner’s grandfather ran a handmade shoe shop there since the 1930s. The place is lined with old wooden cobbler’s models and antique leather shoes.
The wood-burning smell of food and smoke reminded me of Burma.4 This far end of Baščaršija felt more like Asia than Europe. Come to think of it, Bosnia is kind of like the Burma of Europe, I decided. A war-torn pariah state where everyone is determined to be gentle and friendly to foreigners, if not to each other.
Everything was unfamiliar and Google Maps was no help, nothing corresponded to its online identity. A grocery store was shuttered and shelves empty. A pharmacy had neither toothpaste nor deodorant. And what could Kock Ice be?
I walked around central Sarajevo in the rain dreaming of hot beef stew. This kind of hope is so often dashed I find, when travelling: you’ll pay through the nose for a meal of startling mediocrity.
But not this time. This time, I conjured it. Circling the cathedral in the rain, just up a hill, I manifested my dream beef stew: less than a tenner, thick with paprika and marbled beef chunks soft enough to eat with a spoon. Rain drummed on the roof, above wooden beams. Everyone in the place seemed to be a close member of the proprietor’s family.
Speaking of families, after lunch I went to a small war museum run by a family who survived the siege.
One room of the museum displayed children’s artwork from the early nineties. I tried to imagine sitting in a UN compound with a group of scared, mute, traumatised children and telling them to draw what they had seen. Did it help?
In Sarajevo, I drank mint tea with sugar cakes in the shape of small hearts. I ate five kinds of baklava, a round sausage roll baked flat under a heap of embers (burek) and small dumplings (klepe) in a light broth. I fingered rugs from Esfahan and admired knitted slippers.
“In poor countries, everyone knits,” said one of Joel’s colleagues.
Up the old Olympic gondola, we walked on a mossy bobsled track, slick with pine needles.
Graffiti presented itself round every bend, an impromptu gallery.
Up a small dirt path, we came upon a ruined fortress on the border between Bosnija and the Republika Srpska.
A hundred and fifty years ago, it was an Austro-Hungarian look-out post; in Tito’s Yugoslavia, an astronomy tower and observatory.
Most recently: a Serb stronghold, destroyed by RPG and light arms fire. It stands still, a house of cards.
The place has the feel of death.
Even Joel, not one to buy into my “sensitivities” was shook. “A lot of people died here.” He pointed at the craters. “Look. There was a massive firefight.”
On the walls of the ruined fortress, the graffiti is deeply disturbing. Swastikas and anarchy symbols. “Sex NOW”, demands one tag. “Tribute to child rape syndicate,” says another.
“In honour of Mayhem,” says the wall.
There are no easy answers in Sarajevo. No easy essays either.
—
On the plane back to London, I needed a lot of hand-holding.
The problem was Joel had definitely had enough.
A loud thump.
“What was that?”
“Turbulence.”
“It didn’t sound like turbulence.”
“You’re right. It was probably the pilot incapacitating his co-pilot, preparatory to overriding the system and crash-landing on the Matterhorn.”
Silence. Joel looked at me without expression over his glasses.
“That’s not funny.”
He closed his eyes and resumed play on the podcast he was listening to.
“Babe? It’s going to be ok, right? Right, babe?”
He removed an AirPod. I repeated the question.
“Probably.”
“What kind of answer is that? Why can’t you just say yes and reassure me?”
“You don’t listen. What’s the point?”
“The point is that you’re not going to make me unstressed by telling me it’s going to be fine. But you will make me MORE stressed if you don’t tell me it’ll be fine. Why can’t you just do that for me?”
He continued to look at me over his glasses. Joel has very expressive eyes. Thoughts blow through them like weather systems.
Today, the weather warning was very clear.
“On a scale of one to ten, how annoying am I?”
“Ten. Maybe ten and a half, when we fly.”
“But you love me anyway, right?”
No answer.
“Babe. Babe. BABE.”
He paused his podcast again.
“What?”
“I love you. You love me too, right?”
“Mmmm.”
“Kiss me. Do you hate me? Am I so annoying?”
Just when I was lost in the deepest pit of misery—a well of despair for the hopeless past, the horror-soaked present—and riddled with a fervid certainty that I am about to die on this hellish airship, next to an unfeeling man who would rather listen to a podcast than tend to his delightful and attractive companion:
“… Jill?”
It was Mohammed and Amina—because of course they too are on the only flight back to London.
The wedding was great! Did we have a good time? What did we do? How about the steak place they recommended, did we make it there? And have I had my airplane gin yet?
—
We’re all just passing through. We all love passing on tips about our hometown, a good meal and meeting a new friend unexpectedly.
Whenever you start to believe that ideas about people—ideas like states and religions and economic systems—are more valuable than the people themselves … well, it’s a slippery slope.
Our beliefs sustain us. They do not define us.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I believe people skew good, not just evil or indifferent.
That thought sustains me, even when it seems foolhardy.
The plane stays aloft, barely.
Humanity tends ineluctably towards friendship and kindness, for the most part.
Perhaps you just have to take the long view—beyond the span of a lifetime, or several—to see it.
Names changed.
Baščaršija. This is an agglomeration of diphthongs that is almost impossible for me to get my mouth around: Bash-char-shee-a.
Gavrilo Princip: assassin and member of the Black Hand, an ultra-nationalist military sect.
Lived in or on the border with Burma from 2010-2015. That’s a later chapter in The Notebooks, stories for another day.
Sublime.
Thank you for this beautiful piece of writing. Thank you.