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I met Nina yesterday. I wish I hadn't. She was walking across a massive steel
beam - the only remainder of a pretty wooden bridge that resisted fire for two days,
and then burned down. With two canisters of water in her hands, she balanced on that
beam. At the other end I waited to cross to the other side, where long line-ups of
people stood waiting, and where clamour of voices and the smell of chlorinated water
came from. There was no time to move away.
I had a terrible night and I was not ready for talk. Somebody among us working in
the city morgue stole gold jewellery from the corpses they pulled out of the river last
night. That might have been ignored had the boys from the Military Police not come just
before midnight to take away the body of some young sergeant, noticing that a pistol
was missing from his holster. They threatened to shoot us all and maybe they would
have, had they not gone to the morgue director and found the pistol in his hand. He shot
himself in the basement of his house. He shot his wife first. They told us to go home
but nobody wanted to, fearing gossip about the stolen gold. We all felt safer in the
morgue than at our homes. We are all slowly going mad. Nobody is sure any more where
is the borderline of normality.
A shadow of what used to be Nina Rosh was coming towards me. Once a girl to
whose beauty no one was immune Nina filled the boring concerts of the Sarajevo
Philharmonic orchestra with aroused high school boys rather than the enthusiasts of
Mozart. Nina made her middle-aged violoncello professor suddenly divorce his wife and
after a brief bout of drinking, disappear from this city prone to gossip and
exaggeration. This was the same Nina who looks at me from an old photograph out of a
time when we wore our love and youth as a banner.
I barely recognized her.
I believe that the last time I met her was a few days before the war entered the
city through cannon barrels. We bumped into each other at the graveyard gates. Her
young cousin she walked with arm-in-arm could not hide his embarrassment. I could
not either. Only a few locks remained of her long blond hair sticking out from a woollen
cap, and a red blemish ran like paint spilled by an artist from her left ear to the corner
of her lips. It struck me as pretty disgusting. For a few long minutes words kept
pouring out of her, describing some unfinished evens without any connections,and then
her cousin dragged her away and she poured that chaos of words on him alone. On that
occasion she turned only the right side of her face towards me.
* * *
Now she stopped paying attention to that. She embraced me like a ruined house that
leans against the neighbouring building, tiredly, as if struggling not to fall down.
And then a shell whistled above our heads and we scrambled for the first gateway,
instinctively, without surprise and before any fear. Sorrow sets in later, when we hear
the news and the names of those who heard that sound for the last time. The number of
those is growing daily.
We sat down on a stairway. I observed an ant walking across the lapel of her coat.
- I started to smoke at the worst time. I can't stop any more - she said without
trying to hide the trembling hand that held the burning match. Nobody hides that any
more. We all have trembling hands.
- Imagine, I got only half a kilo of tobacco for my mother's wedding ring the other
day.
Those thieves. If I was in the government I would lock them all up. Maybe that's why I
drink. I drink when I have it. I used to get pure alcohol from the hospital while I worked
there but I could not stand blood. Dad says that artists and blood do not go together.
They told me to be ashamed because the wounded need alcohol more, but they drink it
too. They pour it in their tea or sell it. Nobody is stupid- she went on.
Sirens sounded an alarm. They were always too late. Nobody paid attention to them
anyway. Not any more. I watched two kids sitting in a garbage container, picking
through tin cans, searching for scraps of food. Who knows where they came from. The
city was already full of refugees who waited patiently for hours in line-ups at the
humanitarian kitchens, while packs of children freely roamed throughout the city.
Some of them would lie in the morgue for days without anyone claiming the bodies.
We would buried them in common graves.
- I heard that you have a child too - said Nina, taking a break barely long enough to
catch her breath.
- I do - I said. She would not be more interested had I said no.
In the beginning of the war my wife and son took refuge in Italy while I stayed
behind, considering the fighting to be caused by a mere misunderstanding. I received
only a single letter, long time ago, and then I lost track of them. And then yesterday a
foreign reporter brought me a letter. It would have been better if he hadn't. She was
seeking a divorce because she wanted to live in Canada, with some Italian. Our
marriage did not look like much anyway, but I expected at least something more than a
mere formality. She was advising me to sell the apartment, if it was not already
destroyed. My son added a few lines as well. I understood none of them. They were in
Italian.
* * *
Through someone's apartment door a speaker could be heard wrapping up the day's
news. I missed the names of the wounded. I will catch up with the dead ones tonight
anyway. The broadcast ended with the anthem of the city defenders and a
recommendation not to move around the city if not necessary. We walk around dead.
- It is nice to have someone - said Nina, strangely quietly. - My dad is all I have
left. He had a stroke last year, so half of his body is paralyzed. He is confined to a bed.
Didn't you know that?
- No - said I. Even if I did, he was the last man I'd feel even slightly compassionate
about.
Twenty years ago this news might have even gladdened me. Now I don't care. It doesn't
even hurt to remember him the way he was in those days.
- Young man - he addressed me condescendingly, the first time we met in front of
his door - the next time it comes to your mind to come to us, and I believe that it will
not, I suppose that you will pay a visit to the barber first, and put on something
befitting this decent home.
I thought there was too much pleasure in the way he observed my suddenly red and
sweaty face to notice the sadness on Nina's face. I never managed to tell him that
Nina and I loved each other for a long time and that this was a hard fact he should not
be ignoring.
Now I think that he did not hate only me. He hated the very natural way in which my
generation negated his generation's values and their blind dedication to the principles
born after a long gone war. He belonged to those who never stopped cashing in their
patriotism again and again. Once a poor rural shepherd, now a wealthy former partisan,
he struggled with all his might not to have that shepherd in himself recognized once
again. That is why he chose a future for his only daughter that I did not belong to. So,
while we fought over Nina - him with his authority, me withmy love - she just kept on
crying.
Balancing between obedience to him and her own life, she discovered sorrow. Him
and I may have even enjoyed that emotional tug of war. She did not. He would burst into
our highschool during our breaks just to prevent me from seeing her even for a brief
while - but then I knew the porter of the theater who would secretly let me into her
dressing room. He managed to discover the very last ally who helped me to arrange our
secret meetings - his own wife who subsequently wore a black eye for a while - but
then I knew their mailman who would show up at their door precisely when her
father would step out. He brought me the news that Nina's professor of violoncello
keeps hanging around the house ever longer and that her father regularly left at that
time.
That old garbage used all the means at his disposal to keep me away. I tried to
figure out ways of endearing myself to him, but it would all end up in a fantasy that he
may suddenly die.Letters and brief encounters were an insufficient compensation for
the brush fire that I carried within me.
* * *
Curses were coming from across the river. There was no water again. Those who
were cursing were the ones whose turn it was to get their share of water. That
happened often, recently. People were dispersing like a disgraced army, dragging their
empty canisters away. Some kept waiting, while others put their canisters underneath
the eaves troughs to collect rain. A shell whistled past again. Mothers could be heard
nearby calling out for their children, checking if they were in the shelter. Nina stopped
talking for an instant, just enough to light a new cigarette. Her fingers played with a
thread on her coat, the lingering memory of a button. An ant crawled across her neck.
She did not feel it. Two weeks ago, when I decided to stop smoking I left one cigarette
in my pocket. I felt it there at that moment. Two weeks here are like a lifetime.
- I watched you once on television - she said, busy winding the little thread on her
little finger
- I mean, while we still had electricity. I did not understand a single word you said.
As if you were trying to make a house of words to hide in.
- You have such a house of your own too. You have your violoncello.
- That is not my house. That is just an instrument. She stared at my face from up
close, surprised that I did not understand her the way I should, and then she examined
the left half of my face, the one I always instinctively try to hide from my
interlocutors.
- I did not know that you have such a big scar.
- One could make a decent face out of our two halves - I said. She apparently did
not hear me.
- You know, when I was in the hospital, there was a guy there who wanted to cut my
hair and another one who kept scratching my face - She spoke without a break while
fixated on my scar. I lit a cigarette just to hide away from her gaze. The scar that cut
across the middle of my cheek almost all the way to my chin started to sting. I knew I
was imagining it. Scars don't sting, they ache.
* * *
Nina went to the madhouse directly from the concert, at a time when jealousy kept
nibbling at me because of the gossip surrounding the sudden divorce of her professor.
That was a painful time. I used to spend my days by the telephone expecting her to call
me, but she called ever less frequently. Postcards from her tours were all there was.
I was at that concert. The conductor repeated the beginning after Nina started
playing some popular tune. The audience rewarded that mischief with a long applause,
the first time. The next time nobody laughed any more. Nina rested her violoncello on
the chair, stood up and started to sing some crude little song with swearwords. There
was a nauseating silence. Her father jumped out of his front row seat and carried her
off the stage. She could be heard begging him to finish her song. I ran to her
dressing room. Through a semi-open door I heard slaps and her father screaming.
- Pull yourself together. Pull yourself together. You must not do this to me, you
must not - he shouted into the painful grimace that remained of Nina's face. She was
already drifting far away.
And then he saw me standing in the doorway. A hatred one could feel with a hand
flashed in his face. His hand reached into his jacket, probably looking for a place where
he used to carry a pistol, and then his foot kicked the door with such a force and furor
that I flew through the door of the dressing room across the corridor and crashed on
top of a pile of music stands. The last I heard was someone shrieking.
And then I saw a doctor hovering above me, explaining that I had a devilish luck.
Half my face wrapped in bandages, they took me home. I had a headache for days after. I
sat in a room by the telephone under the watchful eye of my mother who would leave
me only occasionally to go see the lawyer and plan the charges. In the end she gave up.
She would go briefly to church and return bringing the smell of frankincense with her.
It was all the same to me.
I heard her telling her favorite proverb to someone on the phone. Only three things
in life could not be hidden: a cough, poverty and love.
* * *
A thick rain was falling outside. I love rain because then they stop shelling the city.
Two soldiers passed down the street dragging a tree trunk tied to a rope. One of them
said something tothe two prostitutes who kept waving from a deserted shop. The city
is full of prostitutes and the army is getting poorer.
Nina did not stop talking. She stared at a wall, lining up sentences that rang through
the empty stairwell. An ant was crawling underneath her hear. She did not notice it.
- We rented a room to some soldier but he started to behave like a boor. He became
so brazen that he once pushed me to play the anthem for him and my dad said that
playing the anthem is the lowest abasement for a musician. He deserved to become a
casualty at the front. Dad would have thrown him out of the apartment, but then that
happened...
- Let's go - I said - they stopped shooting.
- How can I smoke then? You're lucky that you don't smoke.
- I will take your canisters. Mine are empty anyway.
- You are really kind - she said.
- For old time's sake.
- But how will I smoke in the rain?
A soldier came down the stairs. He cursed the war and rain and the enemy. He did
not recognize me. A couple of months ago he came to the morgue. He identified his
sister's body by thering on her finger. He would not take anything she owned but then he
came back in the evening, drunk, with a gun and wanting to shoot me. We barely
managed to restrain him. I just asked him to sign a form as he took the ring.
* * *
It took me two months to find out were Nina was. Her mother finally told me. Her
madness was mentioned only by the way, while the rage of the city fell upon the
professor of violoncello, who spent his days drowning in alcohol. Nobody mentioned me
either. They place Nina in a mountain hospital, far away from the city: put more simply,
she was in a primitive madhouse enclosed within a tall fence. As if they wanted to
hide her from themselves. They would not let mesee her. My name was on the list of the
unwanted and the receptionist quite roughly told me that I would do best to catch the
first bus back to where I came from. Of course, I did not.
I circled the hospital and saw her in a courtyard behind a tall wire fence, walking
and muttering some children's song. Even in those stained hospital pajamas she was
beautiful. When I called her she did not recognize me. I told her that I came to take her
away and that I arranged with a relative in Belgrade to take us in, but she said she
couldn't, because she had to practice a song for the hospital performance.
I kept showing her our photograph, reminding her of our oath that we will never
part, but Nina was far away. She was looking at me as if through a mist, trying to
figure out why I am talking her into not singing at the hospital performance. I could not
stand the fact that Nina was crazy and that I belonged to the world of shadows. She
started to scream when I tried to jump the fence, so the guards came and I ended my
journey with a few slaps across my face and a ride in a police car, taking me back. To
the city.
The policeman who took me home instead to the police station told me before he
left that I wasn't the only one who could not accept things the way they are, and that I
was the easiest case of his day.
- I have become a taxi driver - he told me as I stood there crying, delivering me into
the hands of my mother who trembled in the doorway shot with anxiety. More hard
times.
* * *
I watched Nina walking beside me trying to relight a damp cigarette. She would not
stop talking about her father who does not understand how hard it is to get medicine.
She said she even phoned her old hospital and that it was a shame they turned it into
army barracks. She spoke of her hospital with sorrow, like about her homeland. An ant
was crawling under her lip. I reached out to remove it.
- Don't hurt me, please - she screamed and ran. I have not seen such horror in any
face before and I see horror daily at the morgue. What did she see in the movement of
my hand that reached out for the ant who behaved as if there was no difference
between Nina and a wall?
It appeared to me for a moment that she woke up from a long deep dream and that
brought back the choking question I have been carrying around for years like an empty
wallet. Had she recognized me at that moment? I don't know. It seemed to me that in
her wide open eyes I saw the same Nina I had saved on an old photograph. I dashed after
her, but Nina kept running away. I watched her running down the street drenched in rain
with a soaked crumbling cigarette in her mouth and my two empty canisters in her
hands. Was she running away from my curiosity?
All I wanted is to ask her about the man they recently brought in during an exchange
of the dead. We found no documentation on him, except for a tatoo on his left arm, at
the height of his heart. It read Nina Rosh. They buried him under that name. I put that
name in the book of the dead in an even handwriting that never betrayed the curiosity I
sometimes feel. It is like a sting of a scar.
* * *
I am seeing people off everyday. We who remain are walking around the city like
shadows, and we all fantasize a bit that we will all wake up one day at the place
where our nightmare had begun. One day I will put the name of Nina's father among the
other passers-by and that will remove the last proof that I was that young man smiling
from that photograph. The ant from Nina's face will then disappear as well.
I wonder if a day might come when I will not even believe that I met Nina yesterday.
I wish I had not.
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