|
I
I would have never guessed that the war had come so close, had I not gotten stuck at a bus terminal of a township in the Bosnian countryside. The bus for Sarajevo was parked at the platform, but the driver was nowhere in sight, even half an hour after we should have departed. Taxicabs with no drivers were parked all around, shops were open with no vendors, and some panhandler had left his cane and a hat full of small change in a hurry.
"The driver is at a meeting, " a fat cashier said, continuing to embroider a flag I have never seen before. " They're all at the meeting, it'll end when it's over, and you can wait in the tavern, " said she, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder. She probably despised anyone who was not at the meeting. Underneath the unfinished flag I could see a hole in her sock .
Once in the tavern , I saw half-empty beer bottles on the tables and I solved the riddle I carried with me ever since childhood . I heard the answer from a tipsy bored Gypsy who sat on his accordion case , in the corner of the establishment , waiting for the patrons to come back. He told me he did not know what the meeting was about , and that he did not give a damn about the flags and their peoples , and he was happy that Gypsies had no state , so they had no reason to worry about it .
He complained that the good times for the Gypsies were long gone , so that he was forced to play in the cafes for small change instead of making good money playing in the open farmers markets . There were no farmers markets left any more and most of Gypsies have moved over to Italy , sensing the coming of the war . I bought him a couple of beers and found out the detail that preoccupied my boyish imagination such a long time ago .
As a boy , I was fascinated by the scene of the great Bosnian bear obediently dancing on his hinds in front of a little Gypsy boy who beat a drum . In my boyish mind , the picture of the powerful bear - The undisputed master of the forest , at whose mention the shepherds' blood froze in their veins - clashed with the picture of the animal obediently up on its hinds and dancing at the first sound of the drum.
My uncle , strong as a bull , heated up by powerful home - brewed brandy and the flaming glances of his fiancee , bet in the tavern that he will wrestle with the bear in the morning . The next morning , when the betting party arrived to pick him up , he was already on the bus to Sarajevo , allegedly due to an urgent business affair that could not wait .
The little Gypsy boy beating his drum looked so poor and unimpressive that he could be forgotten the moment he picked up his coins , had he not had his secret . I can still remember the contemptuous
glance he cast down on me after I offered him my new shoes and my grandfathers ham in exchange for his secret . I did not know at that time that some secrets are not for sale .
And here is his secret . Some crafty and sufficiently crazy hunters had to steal a newborn bear cub and run away with it as fast as they could . They feared the mother bear , who would desperately follow their track until she went mad with pain and slaughtered the first flock of sheep she stumbled upon .
The rest was routine.
They would drill a hole through the cub's nose and drive a ring through it so it would not run away . They would the push the cub onto a sheet of metal , red-hot from the fire burning beneath . As the bear started to hop in the pain , the Gypsies would beat their drums .
Six months of this painful ritual would make the cub start getting up on its hinds understanding that it is less painful to hop on two legs than on four . The beat of the drum would fill its mind as a painful invitation to dance . Teaching it to bow after someone had thrown a coin into the hat was a matter of nuance , taught on the same red-hot metal , at a different drum beat . Moving from one farmers' market to another , the bear would get used to living with the Gypsies, forgetting the forest as the ancient native land it never became acquainted with .
Then authorities banned such an abuse to protect the bears and put wandering Gypsies under control. No village their wagon trains passed through was left unperturbed , because the Gypsies were good merchants - and even better thieves . There was a saying about them . Before you start trading with the Gypsies swallow your wallet , so you can think about the deal until the morning. The bears were just an attraction.
" You have no idea how much I loved my bear ," the Gypsy told me through his tears . " All my children learned how to walk with his help . I left him in the deep forest ten times , and ten times he came back ."
"Imagine, " he added , " the last time I took him to the forest I fired a shot above his head . He stood up and started to dance ." That year the hunters' associations banned the bear hunt because it was embarrassing to shoot an animal walking upright . The hunters were also embarrassed to acknowledge that they were sharing their lunches with the tame forest bears .
At that point a bunch of man burst into the tavern , talking loudly . The gypsy started unpacking his accordion and I ran towards the sound of the bus engine revving at the terminal . I jumped like a bear would jump at the sound of the drum .
Half way to Sarajevo I noticed that my wallet was missing .
" You paid well your secret " I said to my reflection in the bus window . We drove down the road through a thick forest . I kept thinking that it was indeed better not to know some secrets.
I I
At one point in my life I used to make some pocket money working in the Sarajevo Zoo . I suffered then , because other guys at the high school started to shave while I kept telling myself that those few hairs underneath my nose are in fact a mustache . I worked as a guide on the weekends and cleaned the cages on workdays . I was helping Kanada , a Gypsy woman in charge of cleaning five cages : the foxes , wolves , bears , lions , and tigers . I would start with the last three cages , hose in hand , after Kanada locked the animals up in spare cage . I would enter the cages with a gas- mask on my face and a water hose in hand . The terrible stench made my eyes burn . There was a saying that you would wake up after sleeping with a fox only if you were a fox yourself .
Kanada was just under fifty , dark skinned and tall . She was probably beautiful , before someone left her a big scar across her forehead. People used to say that she was named after her father - a Canadian soldier serving in Italy after the Second World War. Another version of the story was that she never married, because she fell in love with a Canadian tourist and promised to wait for his return.
Whatever the truth may have been, she wore a windbreaker, winters and summers, with a small Canadian flag sown to the back. She was always somber, and the only time a smile would flutter across her face, would be when she was working around the bears. She would enter the cage without a fret, talking gently in her gypsy tongue, and the bears would lie down on their backs and breathe loudly while she scratched them behind their ears.
One evening, after closing time, I saw her lying on the concrete floor, looking at the stars through the cage bars. That would, perhaps not be so unusual, but beside her lied a couple of bears, one on each side. Seeing her unmoving eyes and a bit of her body showing between the bear furs, I ran to the night guard, telling him that Kanada was in the cage, apparently crushed by the bears. He waved his hand in denial continuing to watch television, saying that Kanada was the last person the bears might hurt.
"Didn't you notice," he said, somewhat maliciously, "That she is more of a bear than a human being?"
I got used to such scenes later on. I didn't think it was strange that she christened a newborn bear cub as Son, and that she was the only one mother bear allowed to take her cub and show it to the children. I don't know whether I have ever seen someone pamper a baby as gently as she pampered that bear cub.
Our manager was quite a swine, caring more about the money to be made through ticket sales, the marry-go-round and the pinball machines, than about the animals. He told me Kanada got the job only because the Yugoslav authorities of the time insisted on jobs being created for the Gypsies.
"Kanada," he used to say, "Was the only one among them who lived in a high-rise flat and did not lift up the parquet floors to burn them in the middle of the living room, like all the other Gypsies who were showing the authorities how much they missed the confiscated tents and wagons."
I knew he was telling a half -truth, but I said nothing because by then I was in love with his daughter, Julia. She was my first love. She was the only other person allowed to watch Kanada stare at the stars, surrounded by bears. This gave me a chance to caress her breasts that did not resist my fingers. I did not know then, that she would end up marrying a new night guard, a few years later, and live in a house by the fence of the zoo. I thought she deserved more, back then.
She was the only one I told a secret that seemed as big as the sky. One summer night I took her to the cage and started rhythmically beating on a metal plate with the bears' names on it. Two forest giants appeared, looming mountain-high on their hinds. They clumsily swung about to the rhythm of my beating, apparently not noticing the cub running between them all confused, growling for attention. Their eyes were turned skywards, and nothing else existed for them but the sound and memory.
I have no idea how long I beat on that plate, thinking only of Julia's laughter. The bears must have bowed when the silver bracelet fell off Julia's wrist as we ran towards the tall grass to hide from the searching flashlight of the night guard. The bears retreated deeper into their cage, as if nothing had happened, and the stars remained at the same unreachable pots in the sky. That night Julia started crying, as if she understood more than I could gather. I understood only that my big secret ended up in tears. I used to show the same thing to other girls later on. I made up stories about the long months I spent taming those ferocious forest beasts which attacked me a number of times, by the way.
Then one night, as I beat on the plate, Kanada appeared behind my back, with a terrible expression of disgust and rage on he face. She would have probably strangled me with her bare hands, had my girlfriend not screamed, terrified by the terrible gaze Kanada shot at me. As we were running away, she hit my back with curses. "A day will come for someone to remind you of something you will want to forget," I heard her screaming as I scrambled for the exit.
I never went back to the zoo, even though the manager kept sending me messages saying everything was fine, and that I should pay no attention to Kanada's demand that I should apologize to the bears. The summer had already flown away anyway. I never went back, mostly due to the fear that I might encounter Kanada's gaze. The last I heard about the zoo came from Julia. Some time in the middle of the war I recognized her in a long line of people, waiting at the semi-destroyed bus terminal, desperately believing that the announced bus will arrive and take them out of the city. I was the driver who came to tell them that they are waiting in vain. She was pregnant and still lived in the house by the zoo. The zoo unfortunately found itself in a no-mans-land between the rebels and our army.
She told me the zoo was more, that the animals were either killed by the shells, let loose from the cages, or died of starvation. Only the released nightingales and the parrots, which never flew farther than the next treetop, were left as a reminder of the former animal kingdom that used to exist there.
"The sharpshooters have moved into the cages," she said, "And may god leave them there after they have spent their ammunition."
She told me the unbelievable story about the way Kanada and the bears met their end. During those first six months of the war, when nobody could sleep at night because of the howling of the animals starving in their cages, Kanada was the only one who dared to go and feed them. Every night, she would fill the bags full of food and crawl through the tall grass to the cages. Sometimes she made three trips a night, and the neighbors knew which animal kind has been fed , once their howling stopped. She said the rebel snipers hidden behind the monkey cages wasted more bullets on her than on the Bosnian soldiers holding positions around the cages with boars. Kanada made only one mistake, when she rose up to scratch her Son through the bars. The bullet went straight to her heart, yet she managed to crawl to the cage and open its door. She died there.
"What happened after she died could only be called the bear suicide," said Julia. "Having seen Kanada lying dead in a pool of blood with her eyes gazing skywards, the two bears stood up on their hinds and kept smashing their heads against the bars until they crushed their skulls and died,"
"Imagine," she said before leaving, "while the bears were smashing their heads against the bars, the little bear, Son, rose on his hinds and started a funny dance. The way Gypsy bears used to dance in the country markets."
Three years later I left the besieged Sarajevo and gave myself a word that I will continue my life as if that war had never happened. I would take a job as a city bus driver and smile at the people as if I had never driven the dead and wounded. The bus siren will not remind me of the war alarm sirens and I will never run to the shelter again. I will have in my apartment only a small pocket mirror that cannot accommodate a whole face, so I will not be able to see the deep shrapnel scar across my forehead, nor will I care how much hair I may have after the war. I took with me only an album with some pre-war photographs. Only one wartime photo accidentally got in there: it shows Vera and me burning books in a kitchen stove. I took the photograph out of the album and flung it out of the bus window. Like this, it will feel as if Vera was not killed.
I sat at the bus terminal in a small Southern Italian town whose name I can hardly remember. Across the street, the blue summer sky bathed in the laundromat window. The window said they cleaned clothes in two hours, but when I dumped the little clothes I managed to take with me on the counter, the owner told me that it would take four hours after all. He charged me in advance.
"You have just time enough to see a football game," said the black-eyed Chinese man. "Our guys are playing against Rome today and no man should miss that." I liked the way he used the words our guys and how he incautiously exempted himself from the company of men.
I will go to see the game, I told myself, and I will be with our guys. I will buy myself a team flag and become one of our guys having fun. I will curse the referee, I will whistle at every fault made by the opposing team, I will sing our team's anthem and scream out loud when we score a goal. I will be a fan who goes to drink with other fans afterwards, commenting on the match at the top of our lungs. I will be just a fan among other fans.
I waited patiently in the long lineup for tickets, I bought a flag, I smuggled a bottle of brandy in the leg of my pants, and I sat at the place where our flags were most numerous. A man waving one of the biggest flags did not hide his disdain at me sitting among them, so he hollered something my way. I could not understand anything, so I took out the brandy bottle and offered him a drink. He laughed and drank out of the bottle. Later on they all laughed and patted me on the shoulders, and a guy covered in hundreds of tattoos gave me a fan scarf. I jumped off my seat when those in front of me jumped up and I whistled when they whistled. I could barely see one corner of the field, largely hidden by the huge flag in front of me, so I had no need to ask what was the colour of our team's uniforms.
That was not the same football stadium where we used to bury the dead. That stadium does not exist anymore, I kept telling myself. I don't think I have ever seen such a beautiful red sun setting behind the stadium walls. It was not even close to the colour of blood flowing down the sewers after the rain.
When the bottle was half empty, all our flags suddenly went down, and I could see the sorrow in the eyes of those who were singing around me until a moment ago. The opposing team scored a goal. Different flags went up some hundred meters away, and the people who were silent an instant ago, were jumping up and down now, showing us their middle fingers. Perhaps they would have calmed down had our guys not started throwing bottles at them, but then they started throwing firecrackers our way. As the first one exploded near me, that old nausea I brought back from the war returned, so I dove between the seats, the flag covering my head. I kept telling myself that those are not shells and that the war was long over for me, but my body shook terribly, just like it did the day they were bandaging my head in a blood-soaked street.
When I finally got back up on my feet that refused to lift me up for who knows how long, our guys were still standing around me, but the magic had left their faces. Some looked at me with a snicker, others gazed seriously, with reproach, while the eyes of some others blamed me for the goal. The tattooed fellow took back his scarf, showing with disgust how wet it was with sweat. I wanted to tell them something, but instead of my own voice I could let out only a growl, like the growl one could hear beneath the Gypsy tents a long time ago.
I left the stadium having forgotten the flag, which for a moment appeared as a ticket to the world I used to live in long ago. I went back to the Laundromat, listening to the renewed chants and songs of the fans. When I looked at the Laundromat shop window I did not see myself in its reflection. There, on the bench sat a man who moved his finger across a map spread over his knees, a strange man searching on the map for a place and a country in which the New Year's Eves are so deserted that even a wild bear could pass through the city without being noticed.
Translated by Slobodan Drakulic and Patrizia Albanese.
|