City of the Prairie
A Companion Essay to Cevapcici Feast Day
By Maryana Lucia Vestic
Cevapcici recipes found here
Outskirts
The crumbling facade of the apartment block stood idle under the pale Bosnian morning. No shadows existed, whether made by the Igman mountain, the remaining scorched birch trees, or the movement of any people. There were no inhabitants. The sound of a howling dog over the distant hills made us realize that the world had not actually ceased to be. There were living trees—distant, unseen. There was movement—the occasional dagger of wood fell from the buildings to the ground, due to decay, and drops of rainwater pooled in uneven corners of a once living room; there were people—displaced, somewhere else. The direct rainfall of the previous night which hit the steep, hard turns of the hills outside Sarajevo gave way to morning fog, but the sun still refused to show its face.
Our tour bus, filled mostly with Germans who smoked cigarettes methodically, had departed early that morning from the Vienna bus station and found its way inland towards the outskirts of Sarajevo. September, 1997; the first day of Autumn. We headed to Koševo Stadium for a concert. I was the only American on the bus, though being a Croatian I felt at least half-accepted. We watched silently as the ruins of modestly constructed homes laid themselves out before us. The three-storied structures, with their square-shaped black holes that were once bombed out windows and their chipped-to-bits tile roofs, squatted underneath a high-rise of even, overcast sky; the former homes did not receive the sky, and did not receive us either.
I hadn’t eaten since my connecting flight from Paris to Austria. The meal was worth forgetting.
City Walls
The bus meandered its way through the streets of Sarajevo, the Balkan Jerusalem as it was known. I saw Sehidska Cemetery, which offered a deceptively picturesque vista of the red-roofed city. The hill was lined with a neat, continuous phalanx of pointed white grave markers. Mostly Muslim Bosnian names were etched above the years of their births and deaths; the majority were under 40 years old. I later spied the empty shell of the National Library. I saw the once magnificent blue, white and yellow arches now whittled down to their crudely shaped core. The building reminded me of the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople where, in 1453, Turks had obliterated centuries of knowledge from the ancient Greek world. Here in Sarajevo, the storehouses of medieval manuscripts had all perished. In my mind, I could witness the shapely windows turned open as the unforgiving flames razed their way through that which was stored within, not to mention through the black iron bars that failed in their attempt to protect the place. I had heard of the cellist of Sarajevo, Vedran Smailović. He had long since left the city, but during the siege he would play his cello in various ruined buildings of Sarajevo, most notably performing Adagio in G Minor while sitting in the middle of the rubble in the now open air National Library. This was all second hand information to me. As we passed by, I wished I could still smell the books, but I only smelled the fire as it grilled meat. The problem is we were nowhere near the smell. I had still only eaten a soft, matted paper box full of fries that did not succeed in being American, French, or anything else.
The damp weather blanketed a city aging, roughly one year post siege. The people were wrapped in jackets worn past their prime—sunset colours mingled in with grey and black wool; the people moved along without making a sound. I was convinced they believed themselves invisible. I would not wake them from their slumber. The soft pace of their steps belied their fright of loud noises, and the chaos which was sure to follow such sounds.
Night
The concert was like any other. During the show, everyone couldn’t help staring up at the sky. Pavarotti showed up; I was quite under dressed for this, but wasn’t the only one. It felt strange to know I wouldn’t be heading anywhere that resembled home afterwards. We were told we could camp inside Koševo stadium. Though truly inside its walls, I experienced a cold that night like no other. I was the dumb American that only brought her light scarf and jacket instead of proper camping gear of any kind, not even a blanket. I felt shame for the intense cold I suffered, cradling my torso with my arms and jutting my knees into my stomach as much as I could. It was as if I were crawling back into a womb—far away from this place. The cement surrounded us on all sides. I recalled the fact that thousands were tortured here by the Serbian army during the war, just a few years back.
There was nothing in the place now; it had been scrubbed clean. The inside of the stadium was dark, yet dim bluish light peeked out here and there from a handful of German flashlights. I shuddered and realized the coldness I felt was physical. But, it was not mine. Through my fingertips, I soaked in the anger, the hopelessness. The trauma held my head on the frozen cement floor. At one point, I was convinced I heard screams—muffled, far away screams that forced me to zero in on them. Voices speaking in Bosnian sprang up from the dirt beneath the floor and poked at me repeatedly. I got up to find the bathroom. It was spacious, ancient, industrial, and yet sanitary somehow; one hard bar of light blasted across a counter length mirror. Sports teams had prepped for their Olympic trials here in 1984. Men tortured the bodies of men who were just as human as they were in 1994. In 1997, a dumb American 22-year-old stood holding her hands under the water until she realized that it had no warmth to give. In the shadows, I found my way back and didn’t sleep much at all. It was too late—the ghosts had already seeped inside me. Their screams had diminished to mere whispers, now obscured beneath the German words spoken around me. However, the ghosts told me that I could not have them to myself. They didn’t belong to me.
Dream
I am in Sarajevo. This world moves fluidly through my cells. It runs across my eyes like 24-hour news to the indoctrinated viewers around the world, while the same world watches Sarajevan civilization collapse into the physicality of earth’s primitive core. The longest siege in history feels long indeed, but it is the TV of the future. The city has no water, no electricity, no help; the audience of citizens below in besieged Sarajevo is held together by a confederacy of random acts which, by their happening again and again—day in and day out—usher into being the worst kind of ennui. An old woman bows her torso as she runs home past sniper views; a man similarly dips only his head down, because he is carrying his plastic bags of groceries in his hands back to his dark, cold flat. His neck is bent in a terrible, uncomfortable looking fashion. He runs past blood drying on the pavement. Hours before, men gather in a semicircle—Bosnian civilians, some with guns and others without. In the men’s midst is the same semicircle of fresh blood forming a figure eight next to an open car door. The driver’s lifeless body is the painter of the crimson shape. Brains have burst out all over; a mockery of humankind.
The ghosts, while refusing my appropriation, have allowed me to see first hand as I sleep. I move through time, from the long months of freezing winter to the idle hands of occupied summer, where teenage girls sit in the front seats of bombed out cars. Behind the wheel, they mimic driving to the beach and together sing pop anthems of the 90’s from memory—“All That She Wants” by Ace of Base: “She’s gone tomorrow, boy.” The girls laugh, using only the outer layers of their brains while the deeper ones have gone to sleep, lying in wait until adulthood or the end to the war, whichever comes first. Young men squint into the untrustworthy distance as they try to stave off the fear that has overtaken most of the older men. They beg for a small speck of their boyhoods to remain, as they speak words in a way that young men should not:
“We live in some kind of super modern concentration camp. They are living death. Do you understand me?”
“They are actually not living next to death; they are living death.”
The young man sits under a spray painted wall that reads “Welcome to Sarajevo.”
Beneath it: “Welcome to Hell.”
I can hear the gentle din of instruments floating over from a nearby building. Due to their lack of inhabitants, the buildings are mostly hollowed out, causing air, noise, and music to travel more swiftly than the slow, clunky booms of howitzer fire from the Chetniks. The cumbersome explosions emanating from the city’s surrounding mountains—perfect vantage points for moving targets—continually shock the eardrums of the people into a state of constant terror. I am thankfully invisible in this dream.
I do not move as throngs of citizens crowd past me like lemmings. They are pouring down Sniper Alley dressed in tattered clothes and running on worn down shoes. With dirty hair, starving stomachs, and shell shock spreading over their faces, they are forced to move through the city via the relative safety of dark tunnels. I look up to the sky the moment I hear sniper fire. The people duck, they fall, they bleed. I stand still, wearing a nightgown. In reality, I am huddled in the fetal position with my jacket draped over my torso, shivering on the cement floor of Koševo Stadium. Here, in my clean bare feet, I feel guilty. My soles are warmed by the multitude of leftover footsteps as they try and fail to escape.
The gentle music sails on the night wind at me; it is coming from an old state-run television building near the bright yellow Holiday Inn, a building where, the previous day, I noticed small clusters of machine gun bullet wounds across its walls. I move instantly into the TV building where, in the blank conference rooms, I see the Sarajevo Symphonic Orchestra practicing while the crash and boom of mortar fire adds the odd staccato note for dramatic emphasis. They are practicing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 Eroica—horns, violins, but they play it softly. They are also in a dream and do not want to wake up the Serb snipers, instead forcing them to shoot at sounds. The music quietly transcends the political rhetoric and its intent to kill. With each note, the symphony emerges as victor.
Suddenly, cheers overtake the rather civilized symphonic gathering. Applause in the middle of this madness? I follow the sounds through additional darkened tunnels; a skinny teenager lures me in. She dresses me in the proper gear to get into whatever secret show is going on behind the dusty, velvet curtain: bathing suit—bikini cut, black heels, and colorful makeup that she piles on me with a desperate sort of glee.
“You have to have lots of makeup,” she suggests in a Bosnian accent, speaking much like my Croatian relatives, except that her tongue is stuck in harder consonants overall. I let her do it, but she still explains, “the more makeup we have on, the less they will want to shoot us, yeah?”
My eyesight shaped by electric blue shadow sees perfectly. The curtain moves back and I am led onto the stage. Other women—teenage girls really—all line up under a giant banner reading “Miss Opkoljenog Sarajeva” (Miss Besieged Sarajevo), defiant in their sly smiles. I can’t read any fear on their faces. In their reaction to fanaticism, they don a sash and celebrate in surrealist glory with a beauty contest. The attackers show their ugliness through acts of terror and the victims retaliate with an act of beauty. I remain at their side during these last moments of light sleep that I have left on the floor of the stadium. Inela Nogić, a striking, 17-year-old blonde with glistening eyes and a wide, toothy smile, is the winner. Everyone is ecstatic that someone has won, and no one has lost. She raises her victory flowers above her head triumphantly as the girls in the back carry the banner that spans the length of the whole stage.
“DON’T LET THEM KILL US.”
I can no longer tell who is smiling and who is crying. Suddenly, the night surrenders in silence. I wake up, thankful for the light. My stomach is empty; my eyes are hungry.
Morning
A space heater was on. Three Bosnian women sat on the benches outside Koševo Stadium wearing leather jackets as the mountain wind beat their faces into folds. Their faces were not old; the wind was just that powerful in its administrations. They had cigarettes for breakfast. The tiny heater was not enough to bring any real warmth into the opaque white-grey fog of morning. They didn’t look cold. Each of the women’s hair was a different shade of “Balkan red”–the very unnatural, bright auburn color that many women in Sarajevo liked to dye their hair. It never looked right against their olive skin. I also had the same problem when I tried it somewhat recently. Since my dark hair had grown in again, I was happy to have long hair. It was the only thing that kept me warm that morning before our tour bus was scheduled to leave for Vienna at 10am.
“Where can we get breakfast?”, my blond German companion asked. She had been my Tower of Babel during our short stay in Sarajevo. She was one of the busload of Germans that I came to town with, but she was the only one who admitted to speaking English. I’m sure many others did, but she said so.
The redheads, with none of the glory I expected from them as the Balkan witches of Sarajevan Macbeth, told her we should walk past the square to the market. There was always a man there selling grilled meats, Ćevapcici. I stayed silent throughout, as I thought about how American I felt–but, I wasn’t. I was a Croatian with family just a few hours away in seaside Split who I could go visit if I had been driving the bus full of Germans. My Croatian father had visited Sarajevo in his youth. I could curse these women to high heaven in the right language from using the elaborate and vicious swears that my maternal Croatian grandfather would shout at the television growing up, but I otherwise couldn’t form much more than “Kako si” (How are you?), “Hvȧla” (thank you), and “Molim” (please). Our root languages of Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian were one, but the off-shoots and cultural accents were many. I kept my mouth shut.
We found the old man selling ćevapcici. It was the first and only time I’d had it and it was delicious. The grill marks tasted of the forest we had driven through the previous evening. It did not taste of the mines or the bits of bodies that were strewn across the market square less than three-and-a-half years ago. The blackened finger length links of lamb and beef mince sat in rows inside a fluffy, ciabatta like pita bread, which the vendor had taken out of an open plastic bag next to him; yet, it tasted utterly homemade a warmed from his placing it ever so gently onto the grill, and flipping it over all within a matter of seconds. The onions were diced, and raw, yet I smelled onions cooking nearby. That’s what this city was: a contradiction of multiple tastes and forms. It existed in parallel planes of war, and peace, siege and feast. The meat was peppery and spicy, just a touch. A dollop of either souped up sour cream or yoghurt, likely with a little garlic, was nestled in between the lineup of meat links and softened the whole lot of it.
I ate voraciously, and my barren stomach was primed to receive this most welcome meal. The sun began to poke its head somewhere beyond the fog and wind. The ćevapcici man’s face was kind in its countenance—weathered, but still patient. He smiled as he beheld the morning. Before we even started back, all that was left of our meal was the thin greasy paper that we held in our hands, wishing we had ordered another. Some Fanta sealed the deal.
On the way back to the bus, we took a wrong turn and asked for directions. Another young man moved towards us. My interpreter asked him, on my behalf, if he spoke English. He replied: “No English, Deutsch.” I remained practically silent for another 24 hours.
Road
The day was safer in its offering of sunlight than the previous day had been. The sky decided to open up and truly let the sun out of its cage. Our bus moved slowly away from Sarajevo, into a different direction of mountains and weaving roads. My belly was full, satiated. The meal had actually caused my brain to feel joy. I could still smell the meat on the cuff of my jacket if I tried hard enough to.
Before the city left our sight, I looked back at Sarajevo, set in a valley with a cascade of buildings that rose from the cold ground. The light over the city seemed to exist in its own unique shade and texture, acting almost as a shield that protected the place against any further trauma. Sarajevo’s wound was now referred to as post traumatic stress disorder caused by 1,425 days under siege. Spatially, the cemetery was the clearest developing district of the city. The stone, brick and stucco buildings all reflected blue, gold, and white, but due to the tile roofs there were instances of feminine reds: mothers, tomboy girls, beauty queens. The sunlight reflected on the glass windows and showed the city to itself. It had survived, even while 12,000 men and women, and 1,500 children did not—they had, however, been allowed to sleep in Sarajevo’s forgiving earth until the end of time.
The road led us to remembrances of spring as leafy trees still tried to nestle themselves around a few homes, albeit spoiled by the black bullet holes and lack of homeowners who fled what seemed like ages ago. There were no empty TV studios there in which to hide. The cavernous negative spaces would not allow me to take in the beauty as it used to be. It needed me to understand its origin story, and I tried to. Shadows of former seasons followed us through the Bosnian countryside: chopped firewood piled high; unchecked, year-old autumn leaves spread out; hearty, unrelenting wildflowers. At a police checkpoint near the Croatian border, the bus remained still for a time. A deep distance away in the middle of the grasslands was a singular brick wall whose interlocking borders had left it for dead years ago—no adjoining walls, no roof, no home, no people. In the middle of the wall was the frame of a window, but once again—no window, just a light late September breeze that rode the tail of the sun seeming to report, as all Sarajevans who made it through each day during the siege once did, “Ziv sam” (I’m alive.) I stared for the longest time through that idea of a window, wishing myself the same joy that I experienced in the one true meal I had while in Sarajevo.
Our bus had finally crossed the border. The Bosnian earth bundled itself vigilantly and a handful of wildflowers grew at their leisure on both sides of the solitary brick frame, swaying in no particular direction. In the folds of the moving grass was a crumpled up paper wrapper. I knew more meals of joy would return here very soon.
Sources
Burns, John F. “Bosnians in Besieged Sarajevo Look Back on Year of Horror.” The New York Times 6 Apr. 1993, U.S. ed., World sec. The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Web. 2 May 2016.
National Public Radio. The Cellist of Sarajevo Plays in His City Again. Web. 1 May 2016.
Miss Sarajevo. Dir. Bill Carter. Dreamchaser Productions, 1995. TV Short.
Missing Sarajevo. Dir. Maurice Linnane. Dreamchaser Productions, 2002. DVD.
Taylor, Alan. “20 Years Since The Bosnian War.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 13 Apr. 2012. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.