Sarajevo Marlboro Read online

  Miljenko Jergović

  Sarajevo Marlboro

  Translated by Stela Tomasević

  Introduction by Ammiel Alcalay

  archipelago books

  Copyright © 2004 Archipelago Books

  Second Printing

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Sarajevski Marlboro first published in Croatia by Durieux, 1994

  Copyright © 1994, Durieux

  This translation first published in the UK by Penguin Books, 1997

  Translation copyright © Stela Tomašević, 1997

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jergović, Miljenko, 1966-

  [Sarajevski Marlboro. English]

  Sarajevo Marlboro: a short story collection / by Miljenko Jergović; translated from Bosnian by Stela Tomašević ; with an introduction by Ammiel Alcalay.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-9357-4473-3

  1. Yugoslav War, 1991-1995—Bosnia and Hercegovina—Fiction.

  I. Tomašević, Stela. II. Title.

  PG1419.2.E74S2713 2003

  891.8'2354—dc21 2003013678

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Book design by David Bullen Design

  Contents

  Introduction: Everyday History

  by Ammiel Alcalay

  One: Unavoidable Detail of Biography

  The Excursion

  Two: A Reconstruction of Events

  Cactus

  Theft

  Beetle

  A Ring

  Mr. Ivo

  Bosnian Hotpot

  Muslim Doll

  Seconds Out

  Slobodan

  Trout

  Beard

  Chico the Seducer

  The Communist

  The Gravedigger

  The Condor

  The Gardener

  Awakening

  Duke

  A Diagnosis

  The Colony

  Declension

  The Photograph

  Journey

  Blind Man

  The Bell

  The Letter

  The Saxophonist

  Three: Who will be the Witness

  The Library

  Everyday History

  by Ammiel Alcalay

  The circuitous routes traveled by literary texts across various borders, checkpoints, blockades and holding pens should finally, once and for all, lay to rest the romantic notion that such texts announce themselves and arrive simply by virtue of their inherent qualities as literature. Nothing could be farther from the truth: like any commodity, literary texts gain access through channels and furrows that are prepared by other means. Fashion, chance encounters, fortuitous circumstances, surrogate functions, political alliances and cataclysmic events such as war or genocide are much more certain and constant catalysts than judgment based on actual literary history or cultural importance. The texts that manage to sneak through the policing of our monolingual borders still only provide a mere taste – fragmented, out of context – of what such works might represent in their own cultures, languages, as well as historical and political contexts. One novel or book of poems by a single writer, removed from the cluster of other writers and artists from which it has emerged, unbuttressed by correspondence, biographies or critical studies – such a work of translation in America too often functions as a means of reinforcing the assumptions behind our uniquely military/industrial/new critical approach to the work of art as an object of contemplation rather than a call to arms, a cry for justice, an act of solidarity or a witness to history. The writer remains an individual, chosen by authorities as representative of a period or style, rather than one of many emerging from a densely textured and pluralistic scene. To fully contextualize the work of a writer like Miljenko Jergović in the Sarajevo of the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, would take the kind of grounding that American scholars have only lately begun providing for our own scenes of the 1950s and 1960s, following the trajectories of little magazines, the relationships between performance spaces, galleries, visual artists, musicians and filmmakers, as well as a broad and specific account of social and political history.

  The story of America’s relationship to a country like Yugoslavia, or the country that once was Yugoslavia, and the instrumental uses its successor states have been put to in more recent political debate, might begin to provide a context for considering the magnitude of our distance from the subject. While the US-led NATO attack on Yugoslavia has become the rubicon liberals need to cross in order to announce their support of “just” wars, the actual history and circumstances of American and European acquiescence in the genocidal attack against Bosnia is no longer pronounced anywhere. Like documents ordered under the Freedom of Information Act that are censored differently for each separate request, such disappearance represents only one layer of historical amnesia. In the 1970s, Yugoslavia represented the non-aligned movement, the third way between the Eastern block and the West. The works of Milovan Djilas circulated widely among left-leaning American intellectuals, while Yugoslavia’s geopolitical role in the world remained largely unexamined. Oddly enough, many coming of age in Yugoslavia in the late 1960s and 1970s who were not involved in the turbulent debates and nationalist politics of those years, succumbed, in a kind of intellectual surrender, to the illusion of stability created by Tito. Fed by heroic imagery of the partisans, stable to the point of amnesia, and possessed with an urbane irony regarding “truths” of any kind, this generation grew up curiously uninformed by a political consciousness. It is almost as if only the pomp, ceremony and cynical opportunism of the Non-Aligned Movement, with none of the real hope for change it engendered, had come to rest in the unconscious ideology of a whole generation.

  Oblivious to this mental and political terrain, some of the more adventurous foreigners might have traversed the Adriatic coast and crossed a mountain range or two, in search of the folklore that, less than 20 years later, would provide the background music to genocide. American readers would have heard of Ivo Andrić, winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature, and maybe even read his Bridge on the River Drina, a text that would be misquoted most egregiously by well-meaning souls supporting Bosnia during the war of the 1990s. In another era, as the mortar in the Berlin wall began to be chipped away, Danilo Kiš would be championed as a dissident, a writer placed in the kind of potentially precarious and very public position some of our more prominent intellectuals kind of wished upon themselves, without really knowing what such a stance might entail. The films of Dušan Makavejev and later Emir Kusturica, without having much or, indeed, any relationship to each other, would blend, in the western viewer’s mind, into a drunken Balkan melange of mayhem, satire and sex – exotic indeed, but still apparently accessible. From 1981 to 1989, the same period that saw the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the first Palestinian uprising, close to 600,000 Kosovars – half the adult population – were arrested, interrogated, interned or reprimanded by Serbian authorities; the future president of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegović, was put on trial (in 1983), along with 13 others, and charged with “hostile and counter-revolutionary acts derived from Muslim nationalism,” despite the fact that, as the historian Noel Malcolm notes, the Yugoslav state’s deeper fear seemed to derive from Izetbegović’s then unequivocal advocacy of “We
stern-style parliamentary democracy.”

  During this turbulent period, journalism and literature played an enormous role. On the one hand, people whose mouths had been shut during Tito’s reign began rewriting the history of Yugoslavia through articles and interviews in widely circulated magazines; on the other hand, the Serbian Academy of Letters, its novelists and poets in particular, began manufacturing apocalyptic narratives and imagery to accompany Milošević’s very conscious designs to create the Greater Serbia. As a translator in those years, I found it impossible to interest editors in literature from Bosnia. It was only after the war, when Bosnia became “known,” that projects I had attempted to initiate could be carried out. But as Bosnia became known, the implications of European and American acquiescence in the cantonization (along ethnic and religious lines), of the democratically elected, multinational and pluralistic state government of Bosnia-Herzegovina, were completely internalized and made to seem like a logical outcome of the actions of people very unlike “us.” These experiences, and many others to follow, taught me a lot about our own structures of thought, and the domestic borders we inherit and police.

  Given my own involvement in Middle Eastern politics and culture – another region dominated by mythological projections – I intuited certain similarities and patterns to this willful ignorance and reticence. This was embodied by what the Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek has called “postmodern” racism, a climate in which “Apartheid is legitimized as the ultimate form of anti-racism, as an endeavor to prevent racial tensions and conflicts.” Žižek goes on to write: “In former Yugoslavia, we are lost not because of our primitive dreams and myths preventing us from speaking the enlightened language of Europe, but because we pay in flesh the price for being the stuff the Other’s dreams are made of. . . . Far from being the Other of Europe, former Yugoslavia was rather Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed reverse. . . . Against today’s journalistic commonplace about the Balkans as the madhouse of thriving nationalisms where rational rules of behavior are suspended, one must point out again and again that the moves of every political agent in former Yugoslavia, reprehensible as they may be, are totally rational within the goals they want to attain – the only exception, the only truly irrational factor in it, is the gaze of the West, babbling about archaic ethnic passions.” (Why Bosnia? eds. Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz)

  This is the political and public world that Miljenko Jergović found himself an inhabitant of – born in Sarajevo in 1966, Jergović’s literary career began early. Poet, prose writer, novelist, and journalist, Jergović represented a very different approach to writing and public engagement than had been the case in Tito’s time. The Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović, six years older than Jergović and an editor at one of Sarajevo’s most important literary journals, describes the cultural scene of the 1980s there in the following terms: “There was a great interest in comic book art, rock music and film, that’s what me and my generation educated ourselves on. The same sources motivated artists, musicians, writers, photographers and performers – and this produced a common aesthetic.” One of the unique features of this common aesthetic, and one that has perhaps made facets of the culture of this period difficult to transfer out of its milieu, is the fact that it was produced right at the cusp of the full global assault of mass culture and consolidation of media outlets and access. At the same time, there is an operative intuition in this aesthetic pointing to precisely what may be coming up ahead. Because of this, the work emerging from Sarajevo during this period operates under its own conditions, without adhering to any dominant aesthetic practice or ideology coming from Europe or America. The war, if anything, heightened these conditions, at least for its duration.

  In the late 1980s, Jergović’s work began appearing in all the newspapers, magazines and literary journals in Sarajevo, and his style ranged freely, mixing personal essays with journalism and journalism with fiction, in ways that were completely new and captivating to an audience that immediately recognized his qualities and energy. His first book, a book of poems called Warsaw Observatory, won two prestigious prizes in 1988; one of them, the Mak Dizdar Award, commemorates Bosnia’s greatest modern poet, and one of the least known major modern European poets of the 20th century. His second book of poems, Is There Someone In Town Tonight Studying Japanese came out in 1990. From 1989 to the beginning of the war in 1992, Jergović wrote as a columnist for the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje, and as the Sarajevo correspondent for Dalmatian Weekly, all the while providing lucid, engaged reporting on the effects and implications of Milošević’s policies. To get some sense of the epic nature of these policies and see how the sensibility of a novelist and poet might be a prerequisite for journalism in such a climate, one has only to remember Milošević’s famous declaration of June 28th, 1989: “Today it is difficult to say what is historically true and what is mythical about the Battle of Kosovo. But today it doesn’t really matter.” It is out of such contempt for historical truth that Miljenko Jergović has molded a writing of the quotidian, a writing of everyday history whose details interrogate myths and lacerate the heart.

  During the first few months of the war in 1992, Jergović wrote for DANI, a weekly magazine that came to characterize the Bosnia of intellectuals who came of age in the 1980s. A third book of poems, Himmel Commando, came out in 1992, along with another wartime classic, Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues; these were some of the last books published by Svjetlost, one of Europe’s leading publishers before the war, under the stewardship of poet, novelist, essayist and historian Ivan Lovrenović, a major intellectual presence who nurtured and supported younger writers. Under the siege, those books were almost impossible to come by and I first encountered both Jergović and Mehmedinović’s work in the Biblioteka “egzil-abc” series. These were published and edited by Josip Osti in Ljubljana, and provided a forum for Bosnian writers and translators, either under siege or in exile, to continue publishing their work. Situated between an immensity of pain and the perverse abundance of resources the mass media had at their disposal, the books themselves were extremely “small” productions: 4 x 6 inches, they ran between twenty and seventy pages, and were printed in editions of between one hundred and two hundred copies.

  When Jergović left Sarajevo in 1993, he went to Zagreb where he continued working as a journalist. It was there that he began publishing the texts that make up Sarajevo Marlboro, as war stories of a kind entirely other than the ones people were used to reading. Published in the UK in 1997, this masterpiece of precision, restraint and unending compassion has had to wait until now for an American publisher. This, unfortunately, is an all too typical story. Following the publication of Sarajevo Marlboro in Zagreb in 1994, Jergović has published nine books, while never ceasing to be an acute observer and critic of Croatian political and cultural life. Clearly, Miljenko Jergović represents a model of writing whose very terms have entirely different meanings in America. As a professional journalist, Jergović measures his professionalism according to an ethical code that considers the unmasking of power a duty; as an extremely popular novelist and prose writer, Jergović still measures his literary horizons along the same lines from which his early work as a poet emerged, the common aesthetic of a now inconceivable Sarajevo.

  While many of the texts in Sarajevo Marlboro could be considered typically Jergović, the incident ending “A Diagnosis” seems to sum up his aesthetic as concisely as possible. Salih F., a man who “saw with his own eyes his wife and two daughters being cut up with an electric saw by the Chetniks,” moves from camp to camp until he is finally taken in to another camp, this time as a refugee and not a prisoner, in the Czech Republic. After fighting with everyone, he ends up in prison where the police conclude that the only real solution would be to send him back to a death camp. But they realize this would be “impossible in practice, because such a move would have contravened the international declaration of human rights.” Finally, a
bureaucrat at the Bosnian Embassy in Prague finds a solution: dispatch Salih F. to a psychiatric hospital and have him declared insane. He is treated like a king, and the psychiatrists are “thrilled to have such an opportunity to study a human guinea pig who had witnessed his next of kin being cut to pieces.” Finally concluding that Salih F. was in a state of shock, the psychiatrists make him take up drawing as a form of therapy. The story ends with this:

  The day finally came when a decision had to be made about the future of Salih F. The doctors had prepared only one question. “What would you do,” they said, “if you caught the murderers of your wife and daughters?” Salih F. replied that such a thing would be unlikely to happen. By now the Chetniks responsible were far away, across many borders and barbed-wire fences and lines of battle. But the doctors insisted, assuring him that many things were possible even if they seemed unlikely at first. And so, recognizing that his questioners were like small children, and that it was necessary for them only to imagine a situation in order to make it a reality, Salih F. replied, “I would kill them,” adding, “or I would give them a pen and paper and tell them, as you tell me, to DRAW!”

  The doctors’ faces lit up. They took their pens and papers and pronounced Salih F. insane.

  Here Kafka moves from the projected world to the real: the very terms of knowledge and justice are interrogated by experience and found more than wanting. The best of Jergović’s work operates at this level and the contradictions faced by the characters inhabiting his prose enact a historical reality that too often falls through the cracks of the blindered vision we have been made to think can apprehend the world. Throughout, with both gentleness and bitter irony, he reminds us that we should “gently stroke” the very objects we cherish most, our books, for instance, so we can remember they are nothing but “dust.”

  Ammiel Alcalay

  May 2003