Many Years of Nowhere Behind Us

Photo by Josefine Granding Larsson via Flickr

A friend once described the experience of being a refugee as being in a space shuttle losing one engine after another, catapulted into the infinite darkness of the universe. You and I share that experience: of losing ground and surviving in a vast empty space. It is that common vector which draws me to your books, especially in moments near death — that great darkness, la gran eskuridad, as you call it, “the void into which we were spilled, alive, to die.”

In the summer of 2019, I read your book, My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You, which tells the story of your parents’ flight from the Bosnian war of 1992-1995. I read it beside my husband’s bed in a local Florida hospital. The war had erased thousands of lives and made millions of people into refugees, including your parents, my mother, many of those we love. My husband, an American, was cheered by the stories of your parents’ life in North America, by the humor and the kindness with which you narrated their struggle to transform the space they found themselves in. He recognized my mother in your parents’ excessive thriftiness, their unease when ordering food in restaurants, their preoccupation with personal and global catastrophes. I, by contrast, related to the void that structured their existence.

There is a paragraph in My Parents in which you describe your mom’s exile from Sarajevo as a loss of the “comfortable feeling that everyone around her had access to the same referential field.” I had seen that same loss eat away at my mother after she left Bosnia, too. In Sarajevo, my mother did not have only a career or properties, things that could be replaced. She had her seamstress who made additional pockets on all her pants, her photocopier for endless streams of government documents, her miniature bottles of rose petal scent purchased at the entrance of the Gazi Husref-Bey’s mosque. Like your parents, she came to appreciate her life in America, but the new home was never a substitute for these missing spatial and social coordinates. Like your mom, my mother felt that in exile she lost “everything that had constituted her as a person…Overnight, she became a nobody… a nothing.”

After three decades in the United States, my mother has returned to Sarajevo, determined to die at home: in her neighborhood, in her own language, buried next to her husband. And so it is that I am reading your new novel, The World and All That It Holds, in Sarajevo, by my mother’s bedside, in the shadow of la gran eskuridad. Your book helps me understand both my mother’s zest for life and her death drive.

The main characters in your novel are also refugees. They could be friends we grew up with on the hillsides of Sarajevo, sledding together in Bjelave or playing by the synagogue in Mejtaš. I recognize the dybbuks that haunt Rafael Pinto, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo who “is always on his way home, but never makes it there.” You might have played soccer with boys like Osman Karišik, a street-smart orphan of Sarajevo’s čaršija and a very handsome storyteller, who captures Rafael’s heart on the battlefields of Ukraine in the Great War. Along with Rahela, their daughter, they too were catapulted into the great void by the world’s endless wars, their lives nothing but reiterative encounters with la gran eskuridad. The violence pushed them from Sarajevo to the fields of Galicia, and from the deserts of Tajikistan to the opium dens of Shanghai. Like all refugees, the novel’s narrator tells us, they kept “moving forward because they had nowhere else to go.”

Many years of nowhere behind us, my mother and I are back in our old Sarajevo apartment, a 1970s socialist high-rise with paper-thin walls and neighbors who bring food daily. The apartment was devastated during the war and never renovated. It is emptied of all the things that were once ours but still replete with memories of my father as he lay on his deathbed, just months before the war started in 1992. My mother is bedridden yet feels sovereign in this space. She needs to talk to ease the pain of death. As she recounts stories of unrequited loves among her friends, I realize that her love for Sarajevo exceeds her love for me or for her own life.

I respond by telling her about your novel, about the depth of Osman’s and Rafael’s love for each other: how they both survived the Brusilov Offensive in the Great War as Bosnian conscripts in the Austro-Hungarian army, how they longed after Sarajevo but knew that their relationship would have been impossible to either hide or reveal in the city of their youth, how Rafael fought with his demons and succumbed to addictions, how Rahela found a sleazy American womanizer to take her away from her father, how Osman saved their lives by joining the Soviet Cheka but even more so by telling his tales from and about Sarajevo. My mother listens but seems less interested in the plot than in the emotions that the characters carry and evoke. She is enamored with Osman, worried about Pinto, and anguished by uncertainty of their destination and improbability of their return to home.

To soothe my mother, I repeat Osman’s stories, which connect the novel’s protagonists to the city they lost. There is a story about a poor hamal who reports to his wife about the deaths of Sarajevo’s rich and important men — all strangled by the sultan’s executioners with a silken cord; his wife responds, “Thank good Allah you are a nothing and a nobody.” There is a story about Nasrudin Hodža, who was elated to discover he could save money by teaching his donkey to eat a bit less every day, and just as he thought he succeeded, the donkey starved to death. There is a story about a bride who is given diamonds and gold when she departs from Sarajevo to follow her husband, for that much she would lose by leaving the city – and another who is given but a handkerchief when she marries into Sarajevo, for “her gift was a lifetime in the city.” And then there is a story about a local Sarajevo hero, Alija Đerzelez, who earned his incredible strength not through battle but as a reward for his kindness, when he made shade for a fairy’s daughter.

My mother smiles at Osman’s tales, many of which my father used to tell at dinnertime. They are lullabies for children and fables for adults in this corner of the world where — as the common Bosnian saying, repeated by the narrator, goes — even “God had said good night and never came back in the morning.” She wonders aloud if Americans could ever understand literature stitched of Bosnian folktales without happy endings. I hesitate but concur. Osman’s tales do not resemble feats of great masculinity in Manichean battles with la gran eskuridad that propel Hollywood action movies. Instead, they are tales of futility and perseverance in the face of almost certain defeat. Little people, we have always been taught in Bosnia, know their place in history. They harbor fantasies of being spared its whims by being nobodies, by being nothing. They keep moving because they have nowhere else to go. They live because they are afraid to die. Riding in a teplushka, a train full of Russian prisoners of war and dead corpses, and watching over sick Osman, Rafael Pinto recalled the way his mother, Manuči, used to drown mice. The mice would scrape the walls of the bucket but could not escape it, much as “a wise man spent his life searching for a way to live without perishing, and just as he found it, he perished.”

Through Osman’s tales, a portrait of Sarajevo — its neighborhoods, its scents, its street noises, its larger-than-life denizens — emerges like a candle that never stops burning. In Osman’s whispers and kisses, I see armies setting the city on fire and hear melancholy music of Bosnian sevdah and Sefaradim’s Ladino songs. There is no one who, after reading this novel, would not understand Osman and Rafael’s desire to return to Sarajevo; no one who would not wish to rest their head on Osman’s chest as the only possible home in the world. Ultimately, it is Sarajevo, even in absence, that anchors our world and all that it holds.

Perhaps because the angst of survival is so familiar to me, I find as much solace in the perpetual proximity to death in the novel as I do in the rhythm of your writing. Death is always present on the novel’s pages. It is visceral and embodied. It fills the world with its stench. Limbs and brains and guts litter the war-torn landscapes as if to ensure that no one should ever expect death to be easy, to be a solution. I hold onto the frequent refrains in the novel; their repetition offers a lifeline. The choruses somehow console without reassuring, much like Kaddish during Shabbat prayers. Written in Bosnian, Ottoman, Ladino, Yiddish, they echo the linguistic dexterity of refugees and the polyphony of our Sarajevo. “Weep for the mourners, not for the soul that has already gone home,” runs one of these refrains.

My mother and I are saying our goodbyes. She is being cared for by a succession of Bosnian war widows, all single mothers. As they massage my mother’s frail body with kindness and with mehlems, I wonder who will, one day, take care of theirs. The children they raised are looking for work in European capitals. Bosnia is emptying out again. Great powers are squabbling over its carcass. On the fields of Ukraine some new young lives are being crushed. “Weep for the soul that cannot go home and not for the mourners hiding in a wall.” Sabur, mila, the women tell me. Be patient, dear. Endure. Allah, The Almighty, is watching us.

I will take you home, said Rahela to her father, Rafael Pinto, in Shanghai. Andemos al Sarajevo.

Andemos, I hear my mother responding, as she steps into la gran eskuridad.