What I saw in Sarajevo
In June, during the first heady days of the World Cup, I visited Bosnia with my sister-in-law.
Holes
I bought pastries from these Team Bosnia fans
We are in a Sarajevo cab, tootling along Sniper Alley, and our cab driver is promising to get us back in time for the game.
Who do we want to win? he wants to know, and, Bosnia, of course, we say.
Team Bosnia, he cries, like trumpets on horseback, and slaps his thigh, a hammer on cement.
We pass Markale Market, where in 1995 scores of grandmothers selling lemons and tomatoes died in a bloody pile of kerchiefs, cardboard boxes, and squashed eggplants, the mortar hole filled now with blood-red resin to mark the spot, to be tread by Spanish tourists in sunhats and madras shorts. Sarajevo Roses, the holes are called, and the city is filled with them, filled with holes.
But in the passenger seat before us, the cab driver’s wife lights a cigarette anyway, and cranks down the window with a good-humored sigh because it’s hot as Bosnian coffee and she has a smoke and a laugh like she had this morning, standing in sweat pants before the stove when her husband the cab driver came out of the bathroom in his underwear, rubbing the thin grey hair on top of his head with a towel until it stood up like grave grass that needs mowing.
After all, the sun still rises every morning in Sarajevo, ablaze in a sky of Adriatic blue, new babies are born, old ladies eat mashed peas and kids play football with ghosts in parking lots, young adults do remote work for startups with EU headquarters, and Team Bosnia qualifies for the World Cup.
Squint up into the stabbing sun, where someone holding a cat waves from an apartment block window to a friend below: the bullet came from there, our driver says; he saw a woman with a shopping bag under one arm and a child under the other blown off her feet, shattered like a clay pigeon. Like the sniper didn’t have a mother, like he’d never been someone’s son.
The girl with the cat disappears and the open window flutters blue and yellow with football banners, like ghosts who wouldn’t miss the World Cup for all the Turkish Delight in Bosnia, the same ghosts who dug a tunnel under the UN-held airport for a pack of cigarettes a day before dying.
Because the big game is tonight, we pass a man wearing a Bosnian flag like a superhero cape, he waves at our driver, a friend of his; we pass another who signals from a sidewalk seat where he suckles a hookah like a giant breast; these men are my age, but they remember the siege of Sarajevo. They remember three and a half years without clean water, electricity, or mercy; I don’t.
A group of Bosnians erected a statue of Bruce Lee in a Mostar park, saying: for all the vendettas and scars, if there’s one thing we can all get behind, it’s Bruce Lee.
A great idea, until neighbors confronted neighbors: You faced him at us like a karate chop, they said.
So Bruce was pivoted to face neutral ground, but the statue was hacked to pieces anyway, leaving an empty plinth, another sad hole, like Bosnia needed one, when cement chunks still dangle from apartment buildings; when every stone in one graveyard reads 1993, how then can Bosnia get behind even Bruce Lee?
This is why we travel, friends. Not for the pistachio ice cream, although that is worth ten hours in economy class, but for the cab driver and his wife hurrying home for the game, and the old men with hookah pipes, and the ladies who roll out memories like philo dough—because they remember the names of those who won’t make it home tonight for the big game.
They remember, and I don’t.
