‘So, do you like Bosnia or Serbia better?’ my colleague asked, laughing. We were gathered around a table outside of a café; a batch of cevap had just finished grilling and we were wrapping the tiny sausages in warm bread.
I laughed back, responding, ‘What kind of a question is that?’
And realized, a split second later, as an expectant pause wore on, that it was the kind of question to which an answer was expected.
So of course replied that both were nice, but in different and incomparable ways – except that the cevap was better in Bosnia. (Something, incidentally, that is not contested by Serbians.)
Nonetheless, it typifies at least one element of my time here so far. Another colleague has been introducing me to the people I am about to interview as, ‘Our colleague from Serbia,’ or, ‘Our colleague from K.’ to the point that one person began speaking to me in Bosnian and then asked, puzzled, ‘Why are we speaking English if you are from K.?’ A lot of people have been asking why I was spending so much time in Serbia?
These questions are posed guardedly, and there is a certain reserve to our interactions that I have not experienced elsewhere. To an extent, it is unclear if this because I have spent a month in Serbia, or because I am working for yet another NGO (there has been so much international involvement in Bosnia that many people are weary of it), or because of some other cultural factor. I am disinclined to believe that it is the latter, simply because I did not encounter this in my last visit to Bosnia.
-------------------
Until this summer, I had spent more time in this country than in Serbia (just five days more, but compared to the two days that had been spent in Belgrade, it was a sizable period), having taken a train alone to Sarajevo last spring upon the conclusion of a study tour in Brussels and Strasbourg. On that trip, I spent three days in Sarajevo and two and a half in Brcko, interviewing various employees of foreign NGOs for a research project.
I had been met at the Sarajevo station late one night by a German girl with shorn, dark red hair, who hustled us to a taxi, which brought us to the apartment that she and her boyfriend occupied. Once inside, we sat in the darkened living room. A massive dog sprawled at her feet. She poured a beer, took a pull from the first of many cigarettes, and described her own first visit to Sarajevo. J. had arrived at the station not knowing anyone, and after making it to a hostel, had met friends of an acquaintance and through them her boyfriend. She took a drink of beer and expressed her dream of writing children’s books. For half of the year, she worked as a waitress in Germany, thereby earning enough to come to Sarajevo for six months to visit her boyfriend and to write her stories.
The boyfriend was in a band that was highly ranked in Bosnia; within moments, people began arriving with instruments, went into an adjoining room and began practicing the same bar of music over and over. The girlfriend of another band member came into the living room and lit a cigarette. The flame briefly illuminated here stringy, coal-black hair, parted in the center of a white scalp and hanging limply about a fleshy, pale face, thin-plucked eyebrows and a pierced chin. In a room lit only by the orange glows of the cigarettes when one of the women inhaled, she began reminiscing about the war. Her mother had died before fighting broke out. Her father took her out of Sarajevo and they fled to Belgrade, where they lived until the war ended. ‘My name is Fatima, and with that name, I lived for four years in Belgrade,’ she said.
While walking to the center of the town the following morning, clutching a map the musician had sketched for me, I noticed the shrapnel scars on the side of the building.
The next night, I stayed with E. and N. They had just been married the previous year, and N. had been fighting some health problems from which he had only recently recovered. E., whose heart-shaped face and spirited blue eyes were framed by golden hair, told me how they had met a few years before.
Theirs was a mixed marriage; N.’s family were Croats, E.’s were Muslims. During the war, he had come to Sarajevo and worked as a journalist, to the disgust of some of his extended family, who wanted him to join the Croat army but, N. said, ‘I did not believe in war.’
E.’s family had been affected by the siege; a piece of shrapnel had flown into her father’s skull and lodged in his brain. Now, she said, ‘There are days when he remembers, and he knows us and who we are, but on some days he does not. We never know what kind of a day it is going to be.’
Both E. and N. worked full-time. She had recently been promoted to a customer service job at a large retail store. He had opened his own business and was working long hours there. He drove E. to her job in the mornings, and brought her back in the evenings. She cooked dinner, sat in the apartment watching American television shows subtitled in Bosnian to practice her English, and waiting for N. to call. Sometimes he would come and they would eat together, but sometimes he would only be back at night after she was asleep, and other times would come to get her from the apartment in the evenings and bring her to his office, so they could at least be together while he worked. It depended on how much work there was that night.
N. said that it was difficult to run a business. He had several international organizations as clients, but was experiencing problems trying to expand to a local customer base, because some in the Muslim and Serb communities were reluctant to do business with a Croat. N. had one colleague. S. was very thin; his sandy hair stood on end and he moved gawkily. He had been a refugee in Sweden, during the war, and had only recently returned. He spoke no English, but expressed general goodwill by singing my name and ruffling my hair in greeting.
One night, while waiting for N. to return, E. and I walked to a corner kiosk, where she bought coffee and dish soap and, excitedly, two small cartons of chocolate mousse for us. A television show about a psychic detective played in the background as E. listed the countries she dreamed of visiting, someday, if there were money. N. had traveled to the United States while working for a company after the war, but he observed that there were still problems, even there. He said that there was nothing special, nothing was different anywhere else, people struggled to make ends meet in every country, and they were better staying in Sarajevo where living was cheaper. E. was not convinced, but they had purchased and were in the process of renovating their apartment, themselves – she had picked out a sea-green and burnt-orange color scheme – and so for the time being were settled.
On my last day in Sarajevo, N. gave me a wrapped bottle of rakija that had been made in someone’s backyard (upon return to the U.S., I would notice several Bosnian gnats floating in it), brought me to the bus station and helped me to get my ticket to Brcko.
Brcko was the town in Bosnia that, at the time of the Dayton Agreement, neither side wanted to give up. It is located at the joining of two rivers, so had a good position for trade. In the end, because it could not be decided which entity it should be a part of, it was determined that it would be internationally administered for a limited period of time, after which arbitration as to its status would occur. The mandate of the international authority, however, was repeatedly extended due to continued problems determining Brcko’s proper status. I arrived at the bus station amid pouring rain, after a six hour journey in which the bus had climbed up mountains and stopped regularly at any building on the side of the road with a sign for pekara (bakery) – the five old men who were the only other passengers would get off, buy food, smoke cigarettes, re-board, and continue arguing. Some horrible crimes were committed in Brcko during the war, confided an acquaintance, and many bodies were dumped into the river after people were killed in a nearby factory. After the war, one of the first actions of the international administrator was to encourage the return of Muslim refugees – he organized an effort that went, block by block, to find the original residents and encourage them to come back. It was one of the more effective such initiatives. Nonetheless, Brcko continued to be split, with Muslims living and working on one side of the river, and most Serbs living and working on the other – this effectively meant that half of the town had signs in Latin lettering, and the other half in Cyrillic. There was still much resentment between the groups, and every now and then Serbs would begin movements to, for instance, re-segregate the schools so that Serb and Muslim children would be educated separately. (I do not know what the current status is.)
-----------------------------------
Do I prefer Bosnia or Serbia? I still cannot think of a good way to answer that question. Both are complicated, intriguing places that I can only dream of some day understanding. Nonetheless, it has been strange and surprising to perceive a difference between my interactions of last year, when I came from the West, and this year, when I came from Serbia.
I laughed back, responding, ‘What kind of a question is that?’
And realized, a split second later, as an expectant pause wore on, that it was the kind of question to which an answer was expected.
So of course replied that both were nice, but in different and incomparable ways – except that the cevap was better in Bosnia. (Something, incidentally, that is not contested by Serbians.)
Nonetheless, it typifies at least one element of my time here so far. Another colleague has been introducing me to the people I am about to interview as, ‘Our colleague from Serbia,’ or, ‘Our colleague from K.’ to the point that one person began speaking to me in Bosnian and then asked, puzzled, ‘Why are we speaking English if you are from K.?’ A lot of people have been asking why I was spending so much time in Serbia?
These questions are posed guardedly, and there is a certain reserve to our interactions that I have not experienced elsewhere. To an extent, it is unclear if this because I have spent a month in Serbia, or because I am working for yet another NGO (there has been so much international involvement in Bosnia that many people are weary of it), or because of some other cultural factor. I am disinclined to believe that it is the latter, simply because I did not encounter this in my last visit to Bosnia.
-------------------
Until this summer, I had spent more time in this country than in Serbia (just five days more, but compared to the two days that had been spent in Belgrade, it was a sizable period), having taken a train alone to Sarajevo last spring upon the conclusion of a study tour in Brussels and Strasbourg. On that trip, I spent three days in Sarajevo and two and a half in Brcko, interviewing various employees of foreign NGOs for a research project.
I had been met at the Sarajevo station late one night by a German girl with shorn, dark red hair, who hustled us to a taxi, which brought us to the apartment that she and her boyfriend occupied. Once inside, we sat in the darkened living room. A massive dog sprawled at her feet. She poured a beer, took a pull from the first of many cigarettes, and described her own first visit to Sarajevo. J. had arrived at the station not knowing anyone, and after making it to a hostel, had met friends of an acquaintance and through them her boyfriend. She took a drink of beer and expressed her dream of writing children’s books. For half of the year, she worked as a waitress in Germany, thereby earning enough to come to Sarajevo for six months to visit her boyfriend and to write her stories.
The boyfriend was in a band that was highly ranked in Bosnia; within moments, people began arriving with instruments, went into an adjoining room and began practicing the same bar of music over and over. The girlfriend of another band member came into the living room and lit a cigarette. The flame briefly illuminated here stringy, coal-black hair, parted in the center of a white scalp and hanging limply about a fleshy, pale face, thin-plucked eyebrows and a pierced chin. In a room lit only by the orange glows of the cigarettes when one of the women inhaled, she began reminiscing about the war. Her mother had died before fighting broke out. Her father took her out of Sarajevo and they fled to Belgrade, where they lived until the war ended. ‘My name is Fatima, and with that name, I lived for four years in Belgrade,’ she said.
While walking to the center of the town the following morning, clutching a map the musician had sketched for me, I noticed the shrapnel scars on the side of the building.
The next night, I stayed with E. and N. They had just been married the previous year, and N. had been fighting some health problems from which he had only recently recovered. E., whose heart-shaped face and spirited blue eyes were framed by golden hair, told me how they had met a few years before.
Theirs was a mixed marriage; N.’s family were Croats, E.’s were Muslims. During the war, he had come to Sarajevo and worked as a journalist, to the disgust of some of his extended family, who wanted him to join the Croat army but, N. said, ‘I did not believe in war.’
E.’s family had been affected by the siege; a piece of shrapnel had flown into her father’s skull and lodged in his brain. Now, she said, ‘There are days when he remembers, and he knows us and who we are, but on some days he does not. We never know what kind of a day it is going to be.’
Both E. and N. worked full-time. She had recently been promoted to a customer service job at a large retail store. He had opened his own business and was working long hours there. He drove E. to her job in the mornings, and brought her back in the evenings. She cooked dinner, sat in the apartment watching American television shows subtitled in Bosnian to practice her English, and waiting for N. to call. Sometimes he would come and they would eat together, but sometimes he would only be back at night after she was asleep, and other times would come to get her from the apartment in the evenings and bring her to his office, so they could at least be together while he worked. It depended on how much work there was that night.
N. said that it was difficult to run a business. He had several international organizations as clients, but was experiencing problems trying to expand to a local customer base, because some in the Muslim and Serb communities were reluctant to do business with a Croat. N. had one colleague. S. was very thin; his sandy hair stood on end and he moved gawkily. He had been a refugee in Sweden, during the war, and had only recently returned. He spoke no English, but expressed general goodwill by singing my name and ruffling my hair in greeting.
One night, while waiting for N. to return, E. and I walked to a corner kiosk, where she bought coffee and dish soap and, excitedly, two small cartons of chocolate mousse for us. A television show about a psychic detective played in the background as E. listed the countries she dreamed of visiting, someday, if there were money. N. had traveled to the United States while working for a company after the war, but he observed that there were still problems, even there. He said that there was nothing special, nothing was different anywhere else, people struggled to make ends meet in every country, and they were better staying in Sarajevo where living was cheaper. E. was not convinced, but they had purchased and were in the process of renovating their apartment, themselves – she had picked out a sea-green and burnt-orange color scheme – and so for the time being were settled.
On my last day in Sarajevo, N. gave me a wrapped bottle of rakija that had been made in someone’s backyard (upon return to the U.S., I would notice several Bosnian gnats floating in it), brought me to the bus station and helped me to get my ticket to Brcko.
Brcko was the town in Bosnia that, at the time of the Dayton Agreement, neither side wanted to give up. It is located at the joining of two rivers, so had a good position for trade. In the end, because it could not be decided which entity it should be a part of, it was determined that it would be internationally administered for a limited period of time, after which arbitration as to its status would occur. The mandate of the international authority, however, was repeatedly extended due to continued problems determining Brcko’s proper status. I arrived at the bus station amid pouring rain, after a six hour journey in which the bus had climbed up mountains and stopped regularly at any building on the side of the road with a sign for pekara (bakery) – the five old men who were the only other passengers would get off, buy food, smoke cigarettes, re-board, and continue arguing. Some horrible crimes were committed in Brcko during the war, confided an acquaintance, and many bodies were dumped into the river after people were killed in a nearby factory. After the war, one of the first actions of the international administrator was to encourage the return of Muslim refugees – he organized an effort that went, block by block, to find the original residents and encourage them to come back. It was one of the more effective such initiatives. Nonetheless, Brcko continued to be split, with Muslims living and working on one side of the river, and most Serbs living and working on the other – this effectively meant that half of the town had signs in Latin lettering, and the other half in Cyrillic. There was still much resentment between the groups, and every now and then Serbs would begin movements to, for instance, re-segregate the schools so that Serb and Muslim children would be educated separately. (I do not know what the current status is.)
-----------------------------------
Do I prefer Bosnia or Serbia? I still cannot think of a good way to answer that question. Both are complicated, intriguing places that I can only dream of some day understanding. Nonetheless, it has been strange and surprising to perceive a difference between my interactions of last year, when I came from the West, and this year, when I came from Serbia.
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