3 stories ("Nina", "Minefield", "Another bear") from the stories collection "Yesterdays People" published by BIBLIOASIS

NinaMinefieldAnother Bear ......................................................................................................................................................................................... Nina 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 with my 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 to the 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. Illustration: Oleg Lipchenko Top ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... Minefield In the beginning of the war they called us "Wolves," and we were terribly proud of that - no less proud than we were enraged at being called "Pensioners" later on,  as someone from the City Headquarters nickamed us. There were ten of us, protecting a fifty meters wide ravine, up on top of the Black Hill, and we  were doing it perfectly well - especially if we take into account that we  held a real weapon for the first time in our lives. We were all volunteers,  and many had picked up a gun more out of curiosity than because of a real  feeling that we were defending the city from the crazed and armed Peasants  who were getting ready for this war longer than we ever thought about war as such. Everything appeared like in the movies, at first - until the day a student who  liked to be called Rambo tried to figure out how to use bow and arrow to launch a hand grenade. We were scraping bits and pieces of his head off  the bunker wall and the nearby trees. It sounds stupid to say this, I know,  but we were grateful for his death, because it forced the rest of us to grow up  real fast after Rambo got blown to pieces.  After that incident we left the movies as the (only) source of our prewar  knowledge about war to movie actors, while we started feeling the weight  of the rifle in our hands and the heat of the helmet on our heads.  Buried into the muddy trenches deep in the bush, we were forced to grow up  like some gentle city plants stuck in the desert. In the beginning, we used to jump every time an owl would hoot; later on,  we payed no attention to the howling of the hungry wolves in the mountains. The only things that still kept reminding us of the city and its life-style were empty face-cream boxes we used to keep our booze money. The enemy tried to break through our line twice: once we gave them  such a thrashing that they left behind two dead soldiers, some weapons and an overturned armoured personnel carrier. Those two dead boys,  whose pockets contained nothing but some unused postal stamps and a  couple of porn magazines, were accredited to me - and I did not deny it - even though I was quite sure I never fired in the direction of the  place where we found them. We traded those two dead bodies with them, later on, for a live cow. We put the corpses on a sled and they pulled it over from the  opposite direction; at the same time and speed we dragged over to our side a skinny and terrified cow. The cow died before  the dawn because they, that garbage, had poisoned it before giving it to us  - and she was later counted as the last casualty in the Defence of the Black Hill. We were bothered by having been duped much more than we cared about  having to drag the dead cow far away from our trenches to bury it. The next morning we attacked them out of sheer revenge, and the only  outcome was that we used up much of our ammunition and succeeded in siphoning about fifty litres of diesel oil from their overturned carrier. We made a deal with them again - to send us a carton of cigarettes for a  canister of oil: cigarettes arrived, and they pulled away a rope with the  oil canister we had pissed in as much as we could, saving the oil for our lamps.  Then they cursed our mothers from their trenches, threatening to shoot  our families once they break into the city, and we reciprocated with an  even measure, promising them public hangings at the city square, because we had found out that our cigarettes had arrived wet. They probably pissed on them. After that, we stopped trading and attacking each others.  It also appeared that our respective headquarters had forgotten all about us.  We listened to the news on our transistor radios, cheering like we used to do at the soccer games whenever we heard that Ours have defeated the  Peasants at some front or another; the peasants across the battlefield would  give us a full measure of the same thing back, shooting at the trees above  our heads whenever the fortunes of war would favour their side.  They were doing it to us more often than we did it to them. As the time passed, there was ever less shooting and our war soon  assumed the form of verbal combat. We would throw the empty  bottles of brandy at them, pretending to remember their sisters and wives  as the cheap prostitutes that could be bought for a pair of nylon stockings,  and they would throw in our direction bare sheep bones  and blown up condoms tied to stones, with our flag scribbled on them.  The fifty odd metres of space between us soon became a garbage dump,  thanks to the zeal with which we kept inventing new spites. The bags of shit that kept piling up in the battlefield between us were  thrown from both sides with quite some regularity: we finally had to  ban this because they stank to both sides, especially in mid summer,  but the arsenal of verbal obscenities continued to grow. As we could  not see each other, each side nicknamed the other by the character of people's  voices: so, the most vocal on their side were Ass, Cock, Cretin and Guts;  the most prominent nicknames on our side, perhaps because of the number of tricks played were Bastard, Vulture, Turd and myself, known as Sickness,  probably because of my endless coughing caused by too much smoking. As time went by no one reacted to the cursing of mothers and sisters any more:  that was something that mainly younger and denser soldiers revelled in.  The passage of time elevated originality to the position of the main criterion that would indicate who could be the potential victim. We knew even who can easily be insulted in certain ways and how  intelligent are individuals on the other side. They knew just as well who had the weakest nerves among us. We would cheer up when Cock would start shouting from their side, an obviously stupid and nervous little peasant who could never take  an insult without blowing up. Once we unnerved him so much that he  opened fire against our positions, and then we heard Guts screaming  at him that he will send him off to some real battle lines where he could shoot to his heart's content, without making trouble for everybody  else, like here. The man who ticked him off was our Vulture. - Little Coooock, listen up, let me tell you something. - What do you want Vulture? If you are hungry, go to the toilet. - I am not kidding, I think your mother was right. - What are you trying to say? - Well, the last time I was humping your mother, she says `get a condom,  you'll make me a cretin', and judging by you, I guess she was right. After that, all obscenities went to the account of Cock's mother,  and it took us ten days to realize that he was either forbidden to talk  back or he left for some other battlefield. The weakest point on our side was Turd, a pimpled, pretty stupid guy  from the countryside who came to Sarajevo a couple of years before the war,  quickly married quite a pretty daughter from a well-off Muslim family and as quickly opened a burek shop.  After having sent his wife away to Germany,  he was evading military recruitment for six months, hiding in his shop: they found him only  after the city was left without electricity so the reserves  of meat in his fridges started to reek. His neighbours would not forgive him  for never once thinking of their hunger while  sitting surrounded by mounds of food.  Those from the city had sent him to me, not knowing what to do with him  down there, and I would send him to the city every three days - both in order  to get provisions and because I knew that no one would make up and portray our victories and heroisms more fabulously than him. We regularly fed such  kind of information to our Headquarters. When I was not sending him to fetch provisions, I would send him to replenish  the ammunition reserves we kept wasting in futile shooting at rabbits and pheasants.  Besides, all of us preferred to have him practice his quite theatrical religious  ceremonies at the mosque, rather than in a cramped bunker where we played cards.  All of us felt him like scabies. Moreover, he was pathologically jealous, leaving the bunker when we would start telling idle tales about wives and their lovers which we enjoyed as a universal theme.  He would not say a word to any of us for two days straight just because of the way  we commented on a photograph of his wife, saying she was a "good piece." Turd left an impression that God had made him out of some leftovers.  Worse than that was the fact that in those endless shouting matches,  when we desperately tried  to stick it to the other side, his score was catastrophic.  His repertoire went  no further than cursing their mothers and families, and even when he managed  to figure out something smarter than that someone from the opposite camp would drop a lid on him so bad that everyone in our trench felt ashamed for him. One could get away with bad jokes for the first three months or so,  but half a year of verbal warfare demanded at least some originality; without it, there was no way of escaping humiliation. On one occasion  Turd almost got killed because of his stupidity. He crossed voices with Guts,  a deep resonant voice sounding as if it was coming from a cave - a witty joker  whose jabs at our expense would feel like shots, so in spite of the contempt we felt for him as an enemy, we also held a degree of respect for his sonorous voice. Once we listened to the radio news that killed our last hope that the war could  come to an end any time soon, when Turd started howling across the field  - out of sheer neurosis, I suppose - that they were murderers and robbers,  and that only savages of their ilk could tear down mosques. - That is no good, we do not like to touch other people's faith either - arrived  the pretty conciliatory voice of Guts from the other side. - Why then do you keep tearing them down? - Turd was foaming by then. - We figured out something better. We are producing blow-up mosques,  like balloons, so the next time we open fire, you can quickly deflate it and  transfer it someplace else. Out of his mind with blind ragem Turd jumped out of the trench with his gun in his hands, and had we not grabbed his legs and  pulled him back in, the machine-gun fire that burst across the leaves above our heads would have cut him down for sure. And then it was Autumn. We were still growling at each other pretty happy for not being in  the city below, from where we could hear shells exploding. We opened  fire a couple of times at the female underwear one of them raised up  on a stick, claiming that they are his souvenir of Turd's wife - and then there was silence for some ten days. They were not responding to  out provocations, nor was there any smell of cooking coming from  their trenches. And then one night they retreated to their reserve positions, leaving us their old trenches and the mine field in between  their old and new positions. I informed the Headquarters about the conquest of fifty od  metres of space, but instead of any congratulations an order  arrived for me to stay behind with two soldiers only. All others were  to be sent back to the Headquarters, because the mine field between us  and the enemy meant that both sides will function as no more than  sentries from then on. I did not relish the fact of being thrown away  into a deep retirement in spite of being one of the most experienced  fighters, but I neither begrudged the fact that Winter was coming and we had plenty of firewood until Spring. Nobody waited for me  in the city anyway, and I owed nothing to anyone. The other guys  were drawing lots from a hat to decide who will stay. Turd's luck unfortunately decided that he would stay there with me,  having drawn a note saying "bush," which he took as a sign of bad luck.  My other soldier would be Lamb, a student of medicine to whom nothing made any difference any more, ever since he  buried both his father and mother within seven days, in the  early days of the war. The others got packed up and left, shouting back that they will  regularly comfort our girlfriends at night and that they will send  us a manual with directions about how to use the shower and  blow drier. We really stank like skunks indeed: although I washed my socks and underwear daily, I could smell the stench  of my freshly washed socks drying by the fire five metres away. And then, finally, smoke rose up from the other side of the  field and everything went on as before, with a notable difference:  they also were apparently halved and the only known voice that remained came from Guts - the other two obviously belonged  to some kids in puberty who were just mutating. They were  shouting across what they just had for dinner, making up steaks  with french fries, even though we could smell the burnt kidney  beans they ate; we made up stories of having octopus salad,  even though canned meat was the only food we tasted in months.  I would fire a bullet in the air on our side of the  bush from time to time, shouting that I have just killed a deer  - but our cauldron kept smelling of kidney  beans and disgusting canned food. That is when it happened. Cleaning some garbage they left in their former trenches, Turd ran into a bundle of documents and started reading.  Those were applications for divorce  that lawyers from some foreign lands were sending by couriers to the besieged city. I knew the whole storu: after the first year of war  it was whispered all around like  some kind of a public secret. And then two soldiers  blew their heads off and ten more tried to  escape from the city barracks to reach the countries that  divorce applications were coming from.  The Military Authorities shut all  those papers into a safe, declaring the whole  issue to be a piece of the  enemy war propaganda: an item in psychological warfare intended to weaken our military morale.  I had no one who could use the law stating  that long period of separation is a sufficient cause for divorce, so I  used the Headquarters' official release on the whole issue to roll my tobacco. Turd had read too many of such documents we found,  so I could not tell him lies about the special war - which was a story for little children to begin with. He was burning with fire as I struggled to wrestl the documents from him,  to send them to the Headquarters. - Look at this whore - he screamed in trance, showing me a piece of paper.  - Her husband lost both legs putting out the fire in their house, so she would have a place to come back to with their child  - and now she wants to divorce him... - Don't scream - I said. - Those fools across will hear you... - How could I stop screaming - screw their harlot mothers: we are dying here so that they would have a place to come back to, while they warm up beds  for the Germans and Italians. He was screaming so loud that I grabbed him by the neck trying to shut him up.  He tore my rank insignia from my shirt. I could hardly care less:  I was half decommissioned anyway.  The next day he apologised and for  the next two days he kept busy using a tin can to throw  mud out of our trench, made a roof out of leaves  and talked to no one. I did not dare to send him to the city for provisions so  I went there myself,  not so much because of the food, but because  I wanted to ask the  Headquarters to get him off my back and to send me  somebody normal. The Commander had a meeting, his deputy slept drunk on top of the  battlefield map, while the secretary plugged her nose,  gave me a bar of soap  and directed me to where the showers were. I found two drunken boys there,  quarrelling about how many of them  humped the secretary last night and whether she was better from the back or from the front. Having noticed that I am having a shower without  taking off my uniform,  I went to collect our rations of food and ammunition,  bought a carton of brandy and started making my way back to the mountain.  It appeared to me that up there exists at least some kind of some order. I watched the Moon waving in the half empty bottle of brandy.  Once upon a time, long time ago, my mother told me that one  could die for looking at the Moon for too long.  If that was so, I would have been dead long time ago.  A few years before the war  I worked in an observatory, spending more time on  the Moon than on Earth. Reaching our trenche some time before dawn I saw Lamb running  towards me and I knew right away that something ghastly must  have transpired. An instant later I saw what happened: in the middle of the mine field sat a wailing Turd, surrounded by a  heap of papers. I howled that he was an idiot, that he should  get back right away before he got killed and that I will have  him Court Martialled - but he just kept wailing:  "Which way should I return?" - What do you mean which way, idiot, the same way  you got there - I screamed. - I don't remember - he said and continued to wail. That is when Lamb finally explained to me what happened. After I left, Guts started calling Turd and describing the sexual pleasures women tend to indulge in when they are  far away from their husbands.  Guts told Turd how they often preferred to give themselves to  lawyers who could not only work their divorces out, but would also manage to wring the property away from  their former husbands  in order to share it with the divorced women  - and so on, all in that sense.  Turd responded with curses, of course.  The other side loved the whoile exchange,  obviously having great fun - and then Guts shouted it was a pity that  he does not know Turd's name because  he had a whole bunch of divorce  applications on him, so if Turd was interested, let him read them  himself - and then he flung a whole  bunch of papers into the mine field. I need no more explanations. The wind that used to bring from  their side the odour of stinky socks or of whatever they were cooking, brought a couple of thrown papers straight into out trench, and those  were apparently real divorce applications. Of course, Lamb could not remember when was it that this fool  of a Turd covered half the distance between the two trenches, ending up in the middle of a mine field. It was all just the same  to him anyway. He understood what was going on only after he  heard Turd howling like a wolf and when they  started shotting from the other side.  He saw what I saw: there was Turd  in the middle of the mine field, howling and clutching documents in one hand,  while propping himself against the  sign that said "Mine Field" with his  other arm which bled profusely. Lamb told me they fired a few shots , meant to scare Turd more than anything else, but they obviously found it more interesting to joke at his expense than to finish him off. Judging by the flashes of photo cameras  I could suppose that this scene  will be seen in many more trenches and other places. I cursed the war and trenches,  and fools and Lamb who was  cowering in the corner of our trench as if he was guilty of something, accepting my insults as something he deserved and expected. I tried to pull myself together and to figure out some solution,  but the way things looked to me,  I could count on God's help alone. Then I fell asleep. I don't know how long I fought the nightmares, but I woke up  spooked by the silence. My head was aching and an ugly nausea settled into my stomach. Lamb sat by the extinguished fire, doodling  something in the ashes with a stick, in the middle of the mine field sat Turd, not wailing any more, just whimpering, like a frozen dog.  On the other side of the field were the Peasants,  apparently tired of joking.  I tried to figure something out but my brain apparently worked badly:  all I felt was pure rage and a nauseating silence around me. - Guts, why don't you kill him? - I shouted.  - Be a man and spare him this misery. - Why don't you kill him? - Guts responded. - He's your soldier.  We don't need him one way or another. - The man will bleed to death. If you have any soul left, let me at  least throw him some bandages - I continued. - I am better than you think. - Can we make a deal? - I went on without any comprehension  about what I was getting into. - Don't shoot, I will come out unarmed. - Do as you please. No one will fire a shot from this side. - Can I be sure about that? - If my word is good enough, you can - came the  message from the other side. As I packed some bandages into a bag I cursed myself and my  stupidity that pushed me into trusting a man who has been firing his gun at me for months, trying to kill me. I thought I deserved  to become a free target and that I must have been born dumb,  if this was the only idea I managed to figure out. From the depth of out trench the eyes of Lamb kept staring  straight at me: if he had said anything at all, I would have given up. He did not. I told him not to touch his rifle and if they end up  shooting me down he was under orders to leave the position, go to the Headquarters and tell them about the meritorious death of two stupids. Then I took a swig of brandy and jumped  out of the trench. I walked slowly towards the mine field, feeling only nausea in my stomach and appearing bigger  to myself than I was. I wished my mother had given me birth as a dwarf. It felt as if my steps were becomin shorter, while the field that witnessed so many bullets and insults flying to and fro grew increasingly enormous and menacing. A pair of blood-shot eyeballs, heavy black bags under his eyes  and a muddy uniform - that was all that remained of Turd.  He looked straight ahead and he would not answer me at first,  when I asked him where he was hit. - In my heart - he finally uttered, not looking up. He was close to the brink of madness. I threw him some cigarettes and bandages: they fell right by his side, but he paid no attention.  I stood there nervously for another instant, nausea dancing in my  stomach. And then, suddenly, from the other side appeared Guts.  I was surprised how much he did not resemble my images of him.  I pictured a husky peasant, closer to ploughing the field than leafing  through a book - but he was tall, skinny and bearded, resembling myself (with my weight not far off that of a  concentration camp inmate), rather than my image of himself. - I imagined you as a soldier, not so scrawny  - he said, with a poorly concealed smile. - I was totally wrong about you too - I said, assessing the  fastest route to scramble back to our trench. - You know what, I want to tell you that no one is glad because  of what happened to this wretch.  Even though he would not fall on my conscience,  I have sent a boy to the Headquarters, to find the blueprint of the mine field, or the one who put them down.  So much from us.  As to you, don't shoot any more,  some of you might get hurt - he said and laughed aloud.  That was his favourite joke  and we had heard it at least a hundred times before.  He also threw a pack of  cigarettes to Turd and we took off to our respective sides. I dropped into the trench and grabbed a bottle of brandy.  My legs hurt as if I had just walked several kilometres.  Lamb would not raise his head even when I pushed the bottle into his hand. He looked like an endlessly ashamed child.  With darkness, sleet started falling.  I checked on Turd with my flashlight and  those from the other side did the same. He stared at the ground in front of himself and smoked. We drank, not so much out of craving, but rather from the need to forget that terrible nausea that  sat in our stomachs not letting us fall asleep. Around midnight we could hear Turd singing.  It sounded like a prayer at first, but later on we recognized a combination of our and Arab words which,  taken together, probably meant nothing or something only he knew. Now it sounded like a child's lament, then as a prayer,  and then like plain wailing. He would stop briefly, just to light another cigarette, and then he went back to it again, in a raspy voice that made our hairs stand on end.  Just before dawn he lost his voice, so I went out to check on him. The tracks in the snow told me that someone from their side must have checked on him as well. His face was blue and he did not raise  his eyes when I begged him to unpack the bandages and at least wrap them around the bloody sleeve of his trench coat. I watched that miserable figure that drove me to rage for months.  Now it awakened in me some strange feeling of guilt,  perhaps among other things because every word I could think of as potentially meaningful sounded stupid and hollow, when squared with the fact that there was  no way for me to help him. Guts appeared from the other side, shouting that they have not found  the soldier nor the blueprint of the mine field yet, but that there is a chance that his boy might find the man at some other Headquarters. - Doesn't anybody among you know the pattern? - I tried to feel  the terrain suspiciously. - When they laid it down they gave all of us a leave - answered  Guts quite nervously, his crumpled face convincing me that he was wide awake until the morning. As I was about to leave,  I heard him explain to Turd that those documents that dragged him  into the mine field were actually forgeries printed by his Headquarters  as a part and parcel of the special war, and that if he would have  known this could happen he would have never  made jokes about the issue.  I could not tell whether he was comforting Turd or apologizing,  but whatever it was it sounded unusual. Finally he said something his Command would have his head for  - quite unlikely for someone  whose voice we used to hate for months, imagining the kinds of death  we would have him die if we could just lay our hands on him. - I am not asking you to forgive me - he said. -By the time worms  will be eating us all under the ground, everything will be forgiven  to everyone. Had anybody asked me, this war would have never happened.  I was pushed into it no less than you.  Here, watch, we are wearing the  same uniforms and only our flags are different. If this mine field was not here between us I would not know how to  distinguish your soldiers from mine... Maybe he would have said something else, but then he noticed me  as I stopped half way to our side, listening. So, he just threw Turd another pack of cigarettes and went back to their trench.  Turd never raised his head as Guts spoke. The hand he could not feel  any more clutched a bloody piece of paper, one of those that appeared  more important to him than the mine field. I thought we were all going mad. Left in the bush for months, scrawny, drowsy, with one single wish - to survive - we were increasingly  resembling ghosts.  It had been a long time since I opened one of the  few books I took with me as I left home.  I opened them only when I needed some paper to roll a cigarette, or when I used their pages  as toilet paper. My favourite writers were gradually becoming  reduced to covers. We pleaded with Turd for some time, asking him to sell us his prayer book, but he refused to even hear about it. That book now lied on the piece of canvas he left behind,  covered with a fine layer of snow, ignored by everyone. We met again around noon, when the sun started to melt the first  light covers of snow here and there. He called out for me from a distant corner of the field, far away from Turd, so I knew he was about to give me some bad news. The news were bad: the man  who planted the mines was shot, executed by their firing squad seven days earlier - for some nasty subversion on their side - and  with him went the blueprints of all the mine fields he had laid. What was even worse, Guts had received a direct order to end this  farce because some foreign journalists  got their hands on the picture  of a soldier in a mine field.  That meant that he was expected to send a dispatch  informing his Headquarters that the case is closed by tomorrow evening at the latest. We both knew what that meant. - Talk him into running for it - he said -  and let him have whatever God  grants him. If he makes it out,  a weight will be lifted from our minds as well, because none of my men wants to shoot him  and you should not count on me.  If he refuses to run, you kill him, he's yours. I cursed their mine field and he cursed the kind of army whose  soldiers run into mine fields. Turd would not react to my calls again.  Surrounded with cigarette butts,  he stared at the cigarette burning between his fingers, mumbling something unintelligible. Half of his uniform was soaked in blood. I kept telling him to try to pull himself together, take his chances and  dash back to our line; I said it would be best to do it now, while it  was still daylight, so we could take him to the city hospital right away;  I told him that the mines were obviously planted by one of their quacks, and that it was logical to expect that the guy must have made all kinds of mistakes - or else Turd would have never made it to the middle of the  field. I felt pretty stupid talking to a wall, and my words were coming back to me hollow and senseless, because the essence of what I was doing  - and that I could not utter - was that I was talking him into a suicide. I wanted to throw him a pack of cigarettes, but there were several  unopened packs lying around him, so I gave up. I returned to the trench  with the same nausea I felt when I left it.  Lamb sat in a corner of the trench  and sobbed. It has been a long time since we cooked something and our  monthly ration of brandy was down. I told Lamb that I am going off to chop some wood, took a fresh  bottle of brandy and went to the mountain meadow below our trenches where I used to go whenever I had no idea what to do with my time. I would lie down, stretch my body and listen to birds chirrup, or watch  the squirrels frolic in the high branches of the tall trees. A foolhardy rabbit almost jumped into my lap, but I had no will to shoot. I allowed the sun that penetrated my trench coat like tenderness and retreated from it like vapour, to intoxicate me. Fantasizing about  a special helicopter unit arriving, extracting Turd from the mine field  and taking off with Turd on board, waiving his hand at us from the sky - I fell asleep. I dreamt about Turd's bloody hand crawling underneath  my pillow, and me running and hiding from it in the most unlikely places: a morgue, a graveyard,  on top of a skyscraper... And then I woke  up to a gun shot. It was getting dark when I jumped into the trench and Lamb was  so drunk that it took me a couple of minutes to bring him to hi s senses, only to hear that he knows nothing, and that he had also  heard a shot. I snapped at him that he was really making himself  very useful, while he stared through me with an almost otherworldly  drug addict kind of a gaze. A flashlight cut through the darkness from the other side, circling around the spot where Turd should  have been, so I directed my own beam of light in that direction.  Turd was lying by the sign marking the mine field, his head bloody,  a cigarette burning low in the corner of his mouth. I watched that  stretched body and felt nothing - or just that bitterness of tobacco  in a dry throat and a nausea that settled in my guts ever since this whole mess had started. There was some sense of relief, perhaps,  tiny as a particle of sand. - Good shot boys - I cried out - Straight in the head.  Congratulations. - Don't be a fool - came the well known resounding  voice from across the field - Nobody fired a shot from here. - And who blew that guys head off - I asked bitterly - Would it be a squirrel? - Ask him, let him tell you - wind brought back Guts' voice,  raspy and drowsy - See how to get him out of there as soon as possible, or we'll have some wolves and vultures on our backs pretty soon. I did not believe their story about no shots having been fired  from their side. Turd did not like weapons. On several occasions  he had trouble finding his own gun, so it struck me as unbelievable  that he would carry a pistol without me knowing. Fuck it, said I  to myself, and left to check it out, my flashlight in my hand. Turd was lying with his eyes open skywards, and his pale sunken  face appeared as if he had been dead for quite a while. The obviously fresh steaming blood that kept pouring out of the  hole in his head testified that he could have not been not dead  for very long. On top of his trench coat riddled with cigarette burns,  there lied a pistol indeed, one of those small things  we called "a lady's gun"  - a gun we saw as an insult to real pistols. - Fuck it - said Guts from the other side. - I feel sorry for him.  God help him, but perhaps this is for the best.  Now you can tell your people he died in combat. - Something like that - said I, lighting half a cigarette.  I inhaled the smoke desperately, like a drowning man breathes the air. - Let's pull him out tomorrow. We can talk about the price. - I don't deal in corpses - Guts snapped back quite angrily,  telling me that I must be stupid if I don't understand that they  would have preferred this never happenning. I told him I was not stupid and added something dumb about having been born a  smart baby but someone obviously mixing me up at the maternity  ward. Suddenly, Guts burst out laughing: he held his belly with both  hands and laughed. An instant later I heard myself laughing with him. We must have been a ghostly sight as we laughed with our flashlights  resting upon a dead man. No one is normal in war. Perhaps I used to  be normal, way back when. I used to take off to the bush to cry my  woes out, in the beginning, I was too shy to do that later on. They advised us to make metal hooks, tie them to a rope, try to  snag Turd like a fish and then drag him out to our side without  looking out from our trench, so that the exploding mines would  not blast out heads off. Lamb finally lit a fire, we took the handles off  some water buckets, softened them in the fire and made a few hooks.  Some time after midnight we ran out of rope so I asked them if they  had any, and they threw us a bag with rope and a few packs of cigarettes.  I told them we had something for them as well and threw  a bottle of brandy  from the edge of the mine field. Someone on their side yelled and cursed  my mother, because the bottle apparently caught him pissing, but judging by the merry cheers  coming from their trench later in the night, it appeared that all was forgiven. On of them shouted that I should practice assassination attempts of that kind more often. Later on, one of their  younger guards told some stupid joke, and we all agreed it was stupid  and that if that guy gets killed it will be for telling bad jokes,  not from the bullet. It was as if an invisible weight was lifted from our backs. Even  the languid Lamb livened up, telling me how they pulled his brother  from a frozen lake in a similar way: he went to fish at a hole in the ice  his father blasted open with dynamite. I did not ask whether his brother  was pulled out alive. That question belonged to another ambience.  It was enough that he had spoken up, so I could stop feeling alone  and avoid asking myself questions that will hurt me much less later  on than at that moment. We fell asleep with ropes in our hands  without an agreement about who will stand guard and when.  It started to snow. And that is when it happened. At the crack of dawn we were startled by a deep growl. I jumped up,  peaked from our trench and stopped frozen by the sight that made every  hair on my head stand on end.  In the middle of the mine field, a huge grey  bear was struggling to drag Turd's body away. He had dragged him a few metres already, and now he rested. He kept groaning with effort.  By the tracks left in the snow, I could see that he walked through the field at least a couple of times before trying to drag the corpse away . A realization instantaneously struck my mind: no mine had exploded.  That in turn woke up the nausea that always attacked me stealthily,  by surprise - and then I freaked out. I grabbed my machine-gun, jumped out of the trench and started  shooting at the bear like a madman. I could almost see every bullet  that hit him. He tried to run to the other side of the field as I changed  my clip, but they also opened fire from over there.  Beside me, Lamb screamed and fired,  completely out of his mind. We fired at the bear  like in a trance, as if we were desperately  pouring out all the bitterness,  misfortune and rage that settled within us since who knows when. I don't know how long the shooting went on. All I know is that the  bear finally rose up on his hinds as if trying to climb to the sky, showing us his enormous, bloody figure; he let out a voice sounding  like a moan, then dropped dead on top of the sign  marking the mine field.  With smoking guns in our hands, engulfed by a gunpowder mist,  we stood and silently watched as life gushed  out from the forest giant with his ever shorter breaths. We stood facing each other. We could shoot at them. They could shoot at us, too. They took their helmets off and crossed themselves as  I entered what we knew as the mine field and  dragged Turd's corpse to the trench. He felt very light. I could hear Lambs teeth chatter as he followed  the bloody trail left in the snow as I carried Turd's body away. Before wrapping him up in a piece of canvas I had trouble opening his stiff hand that still firmly clutched a piece of paper. It was a  divorce application - and it was not from his wife. I stared at that crumpled piece of paper soaked in blood, and I could think nothing.  In this piece of canvas lied a real corpse of a real man who lost his life in a fake mine field, running after a forged document.  I asked myself whether we were two real armies or whether we  were just poor actors in a bad drama, putting an effort in because somebody kept watching us from the side. And yet, we lost ourselves in our reality play, so much so that we even forgot  our own names, calling each other by the nicknames we never  chose - names given to us by our enemies. It would have been  so good if Turd could stand up and wipe off his make-up, so  we could take down the props, sigh in relief and go home,  where jam-filled doughnuts smell so sweet and children are  lazily getting ready to take off for school. Turd never moved:  not when I threw the bloody paper into the fire, nor when I tied his hands and legs with a rope, or when I moaned with pain that ripped through my intestines. I had to pay some peasant - who immediately informed me  that he is a patriot but not a fool - to take Turd's body back  to the city tied on the back of his horse. I also sent a letter  to the Headquarters, describing the recent events. A young  captain arrived with twenty odd soldiers before the nightfall,  carrying an order for me to pack up my things and report to the Headquarters with Lamb right away. I wanted to tell him  what happened, but he turned his back on me. We never said goodbye as I was leaving. Back at the Headquarters, my own captain kept cursing m e and calling me a traitor, even though there was a time when  he naively thought I was close to earning a gold medal, or so he said. He threatened to have me shot by a firing squad, to have me locked up in prison for having collaborated with  the enemy forces, and so on, all in that style. He bought me a drink in the end, informing me I was transferred to the  Headquarters guards. Turd's case ended up in a file  marked with "Heroic Death." I could not care less. I just wished to tell him how it all happened, but he would not listen. He said he had burnt the report I wrote about the events at the Black Hill, and then he walked out  of the Cantina. Lamb and I went on drinking until dawn and  then went our separate ways. I heard later on that he stood guard the night when the arsenal blew up. He was put in  a file marked "Disappeared." Speaking about the Black Hill, I heard only that our guys  pulled back to our old positions, not because of the enemy's advance but because the bear's corpse started rotting. It was the  suffocating stench that drove them off, nothing more. Then I ran away from the war, dreaming about waking up  one day without a pain in my guts. I gradually started to forget it all until I saw Guts, just the  other day, here in Toronto. I was coming back from the doctor who had examined me  for the umpteenth time, convincing me once again that there  is nothing in my stomach and that nothing hurts me. I was on my way home, when I saw a man sleeping underneath  a maple tree: I recognized Guts right away. He was sleeping  with some crutches resting bu the side of his empty trouser  legs. By the crutches was a little cardboard box where someone  scribbled "Please help a victim of war." On top of his belly wavered an empty wine bottle,  and beside him squirrels insolently  kept taking away pieces of a sandwich he  had not managed to finish. He was breathing hard, sounding as if he was moaning. I sat down, waiting for him to wake up. I wanted to ask him whether he was the one who threw that  little lady's gun to Turd and whether he ever suspected that the  mine field between us was fake,  so I decided to wait until he woke up.  I wanted to ask him if he ever met Turd in his dreams, because he never left my dreams. So I sat there waiting, while he whined in his sleep. Then I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of brandy to share with Guts when he woke up. When I returned he was gone. There was no trace of him, not even the grass pressed down where he slept. It was as if someone had left only the stage props,  kicking the actor out of the rehearsal, sending him back home to  learn his lines until the end and not to mess it all up with improvisations. That nausea was back in my stomach once again, attacking  stealthily  as usual, when I least expected it. I opened the bottle, leaned against that maple tree  and started to drink.  It feels like I am still sitting there. Illustration: Oleg Lipchenko Translated by Slobodan Drakulic with Patrizia Albanese Top ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... Another Bear 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 grandfather?s 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-man?s-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. 

Goran Simic Interview for CBC Radio

Posted by "Words At Large" on October 16

 

(photo: Luna Simic) Goran Simic was born in Bosnia and has published many volumes of poetry, drama and short fiction. His work has been translated into nine languages and been published and performed in several European countries. One of the most prominent writers of the former Yugoslavia, Simic and his family were trapped in the siege of Sarajevo. In 1995 they were able to settle in Canada as a result of a PEN Freedom to Write Award and he became a resident at the University of Toronto's Massey College as part of their writer-in-exile program. PEN's Writers in Exile Committee supported Simic's integration into the Canadian writing world, and he and poet Fraser Sutherland collaborated on a short-run collection of poetry called Peace and War, as well as a theatrical piece. In 2003, Brick Books published Simic's first full collection of poems in Canada, Immigrant Blues , translated by Amela Simic. He continues to write and give readings.

Can you describe the situation (or circumstances) that led you to make the decision to come to Canada?

I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody remembers collapse of Yugoslavia 15 years ago, division of Bosnia forced by elected national parties and then, three years long siege of my hometown Sarajevo, the horror which lasted longer than any nightmare. Simply, because the wars succeed each another so quickly now that we’re in danger to forgetting them as new ones come along. So, as politically engaged writer who kept idea of multi-religious and multinational Bosnia alive, naturally I was named as ideological traitor from those who have the same national background as me. I lived with my children in the city which at the end of war resembled more of ashtray than of once respected city who used to host Winter Olympic Games in 1984. At the end of war I drove red line and find just 11,000 people killed during the siege, two new graves (my mother and brother), destroyed family house and my bookshop, tired of spending more time in graveyard than on desk. I knew it’s time to go, and to follow natural instinct which say, “It’s better to be wounded than dead”, the moment I saw my little family resemble walking skeletons. And personally, most decisive moment was when I realize that I am not afraid to die anymore. I left the city as writer who lost battle but not war, with my children and few bags of books including my own to remember who I am.
Thanks to late Susan Sontag I was settled with family in Italy for one year and after that PEN Canada did the best to make Canada my destination. Twenty years ago if someone predicted that I will settle in Canada I would call him lunatic.
               
What was your life as a writer like in the former Yugoslavia?

I live in Toronto almost 12 years and I am afraid that I have the same syndrome of romanticizing the past as most exiled writer has that need. But the truth is that ex-Yugoslavia resembled, a little, Canada being home for different nationalities living together for hundreds of years. As professional writer I enjoyed social and health security, society didn’t measure writer by how much money they earn but by what is final product, state politics was left oriented but with back door opened to “mild capitalism” and political system was suspicious of anyone dare to change masses point of view. But as the writer I can’t complain running literary magazine, having my own bookshop and easily having a lot of readings over the border of Yugoslavia. One of the reasons why I stayed so long in Sarajevo lay in the fact that I didn’t want to believe illness of destruction, or fate of Yugoslavia will ever come to Bosnia. I was wrong. And I don’t hide it. You can read it in my poetry.

You were one of the most prominent writers of the former Yugoslavia. When you moved to Canada you had to start almost anew as a poet and writer. Can you describe what this transition was like?

I read biography of great Canadian poet Gwendolyn McEwan and while reading one thing in her life just hit me as a metaphor of my survival as a writer: Once she was penniless and went to the nearest bank to borrow some money but she was told by clerk that she has to bring something to prove to the bank that she is eligible for loan and what she did was something that I would do. She went home and come back to the same clerk with her ten published books and what she got from clerk was rejection: it’s worthless. I can find myself in that moment when she was told that she spent whole life writing something worthless. I had the same feeling coming here with my books published somewhere else. The sense that nobody really cares who you are was challenging.
Since I arrived to Toronto I was attending more celebration speeches than voices who can offer me a job just to survive. It was really painful moment in which I realized that nobody expected poet to come but future carpenter, mechanic or someone who can contribute to society by paying taxes. The only job I could find in that time was position of manual labourer in Holt Renfrew wear house, just next to airport. It’s painful period, not because description of my job was that company needed just strong arms but not my brain, but because the time remaining to my writing after I arrive home wasn’t enough. The funniest thing was that once my selected poems was published in Holland I took the flight on Thursday to have a book launch in Anwerpen next day just to get back to work on Monday to behave the way my job description was. At the end it wasn’t that bad experience ‘til I was told that executives don’t like my article published in “Globe and Mail” arguing with the way big companies laid off simple workers before Christmas holidays, just to avoid paying them salary for Christmas break.
But anyway, my major concern was that me as exiled writer had concern that the speed I was learning English is appropriate to the speed I am forgetting the language I came with. Plus, over that, as a writer I was
dealing with issue of dictionaries of English Language which became my Bible in sense that I followed belief that if you jump in the river don’t pretend you are not swimmer. Will I ever be able to learn English properly? I have doubt. But I have a need to express myself in the language I live with for such a long time that I feel oblige even just to try. I did experiment with some of my poems and it worked and sounded good, and after that I wrote entire opera libretto in English and it sounds good, and now I can’t stop myself thinking about to write new poetry book in English. Language is like a glue: once you get into it you can’t get rid of it.

Since moving to Canada you have published several books of poetry, been shortlisted for awards, and founded Luna Publications. Where do you get your drive and motivation?

This a great country if you want to get lost or to start new life from the beginning. On the other hand it’s terribly difficult to replace your past, beliefs, and continue with your life and profession. Here exists a huge gap between friendliness and politeness…how most people describe Canadian mentality…but you can get lost in that gap easily looking for friendliness. Cactus can survive Northern Pole temperature only in room temperature. Coming here I knew that I will become kind of hybrid writer with roots deep in the past and head in reality and I simply knew that I can’t afford myself to stop because there’s too many things I still have to say which I can’t say in some other forms like delivering pizza or carving. I guess it’s question of how much energy you have personally and how much heart do you have to give. And I am truly thankful to my dear Canadian friends, I would be half of person without them. I always believed that publishing is on my way. This is not about money because as things go only suicidal people jump in restaurant and publishing business, which I experienced both, but that pleasure publishing the voices that you give a chance nobody can measure with money. There is a “mission” in everything man does, little like a bug or big like giraffe, but “mission”.
  
How has PEN Canada assisted you as a writer? What impact has their support had on you?

PEN Canada was my first step and I am really grateful to PEN people working to get me here and it’s huge list of people I should thank. As much as I am grateful to late Susan Sontag who did her best to organize it. If sometimes in future PEN finish the mission and cease to exist it will be a moment that we can say that world is a perfect place. But I am afraid we are fare from that point. I was one of the founders of Bosnian Pen and for me PEN is conscience of the time we live in.

Your writing has been translated into nine languages. How, if at all, does translation change the writer’s intent or meaning?

I have so many problems with nuances lost in translations. Sometimes I feel happy not knowing so many languages but I believe that if writer have strong idea what to say and how to say, there is no bad skilled translator who can make it less valuable. I am sad only if some reader tells me that meaning of some of my writing was twisted in translations, or printing errors. I have so many objections concerning some translations and “versions” but I try not to talk too much about it because I highly respect translators as ambassadors who don’t care about state borders. Pity, here in Canada some cultural institutions, avoiding to finance translations, behave like there is nothing interesting out of Canadian border. I am afraid that America and Europe is more open to introduce and learn from the voices out of English speaking countries.
       
What, if anything, are the differences writing in your native tongue versus writing in English?

Sometimes I dream in English, sometimes in my dreams I speak in my native tongue. And I have the same problem if I can’t remember some word to express myself in my dreams as in reality. Few years ago I did experiment writing some of my poems directly in English, and that poems sounded the way I wanted to hear it. It happened that publisher from Serbia asked me to translate those poems in Serbo-Croatian language (which in fact doesn’t exist officially) and after I did it, it sounded to me so plain and with so little blood in veins that I was almost ashamed. This is a writer’s nightmare. Recently I wrote entire opera libretto in English and I liked the way it sounds in English as in Bosnian as well. Who knows, maybe I am getting better bridging that gap but definitely the worst exile writer’s nightmare is that the progress you do in other language is on the same level as regress you feel in the language you were born with.
           
Why did you decide to become a writer?

Poetry language, I believe was my first language I feel comfortable with in sense expressing myself. As a school kid I wrote poems and publish it in magazines even at that I wanted to become painter. But nobody in my family was big fan of arts. My mother would come to my room in the middle of night to turn down the light because she was afraid that I will lose my sight reading so much. Later on, when I was in my twenties, my father was proud to read my name in newspapers that I was awarded for poetry. Mother, almost illiterate, would spend nights reading my books trying to figure out what I that missing between the poetry lines that she couldn’t comprehend. Sometimes after my twenties my father tried to convince me to get some steady job and to write poetry in my spare time. But it was too late. I was already infected. And I still can’t get rid of that infection. Since then I was infected by other forms like drama, short stores, librettos, as well. No cure for me.
   
What books or authors have most influenced your life?

There is one book I clearly remember was the book I read by myself first time. It was Pale Alone in the World, book for children that influenced me most. It’s about one boy who wake one day alone in the city and without control of parents he could take a freedom to drive streetcar and to eat sweet as much as he wanted. At one moment he realized that he doesn’t enjoy freedom anymore because there is nobody around him that he can share that happiness with. After that I introduced myself to the huge family of world writers learning more than giving. Sometimes I ask myself the same question and still can’t find out who’s writing influence me most: Yates, Brecht, Borges, Popa, Celan…Lennon, Cohen, or Radicevic, Crnjanski, Andric. I would say: everybody. But going to my maturity I learned that I always loved poems more than authors. Even I never separate individual life of authors from their poetry.
      
What advice would you give to writers starting out? Would your advice differ for those who live in countries without as many freedoms of speech? If so, how?

1. Don’t be afraid of who you are. But don’t look at yourself in the moror too long because that person you see is not who you are.
2. Don’t give up. But make balance asking yourself: am I writing just because it’s easiest way to express myself? Only you will know the answer. But have on your mind that if your readers find the answer that only you know, you have to start asking yourself the same question you started with.
3. Who am I to give you advice?

Canada hits the jackpot with a poet in exile

By George Murray

The Globe and Mail

Published, May. 16 2011

In troubled times, the movements of poets across political borders are swift and frequent, and can be seen as either a game of chess or a game of chance. If the latter, then Canada has won the metaphorical jackpot in Goran Simić.
Bosnian poet Simić left the war-torn former Yugoslavia for Canada in 1996, arriving with the help of the political activist literary organization PEN, and has since decided to make Toronto his home. Before his arrival, he had made a significant name for himself in his home country, and we have since been treated to several translations of his work from his native tongue, butSunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman represents the first time this master poet is working fully in English.
The ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus said that "men in exile feed on dreams of hope," and Simić is a perfect example of this truth. He is of two languages, two lands and two worlds, and therefore must constantly negotiate the borders between them. This lendsSunrise a very interesting tension.
The poems seesaw between the intimately personal and the universally political, tipping sometimes line to line, between melancholy love poems and profoundly painful reminiscences of the strife-torn country from which the poet came.
For instance, in the extraordinary poemAn Ordinary Man, Simić writes in one stanza:
I've met many people and they all resembled me.Some hid in the breathing bodies that were already corpses,others hid in corpses in whichan attentive ear can catch a breath.
and then in the next:
Sometimes from the window I notice breadcrumbsin the hair of women I once loved.But they are now someone else's womenand that is someone else's bread.
It is the oscillation between the universals of love and intimacy in the second excerpt that allows us in the "warless" West access to the same spirit of the poet that endured the hardships of the first. For a poet working for the first time in a second language, it is amazing how adept Simić is. In fact, in the acknowledgments, he describes the English text ofSunrise as language "learned by listening and reading." If this is the case, then it seems we English-language poets could stand to eavesdrop and read a bit more.
Yes, the difficult-to-read horrors of the Bosnian war loom large in Simić's work, providing a bloody mental thought-scape for his surprisingly hopeful verse (how could they not?), but so too do love, redemption and renewal. This is a poet in exile, now of two lands - Bosnia and Canada - but also of two worlds, inner and outer. So he is also a poet who has become, necessarily, of every land. And we are lucky to have him call Canada home.

George Murray's latest book of poems is Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms.

To be exiled writer (written for Biblioasis)

Goran Simić: To Be Exiled Writer . . . or Not to Be at All

Every time I look at myself in my Canadian mirror and think about my status as an “exiled writer,” I find some kind of comfort in the fact that every fifth citizen of planet Earth carries a passport different from his or her country of origin. It’s been thirteen years since I joined Virgil’s tribe of writers, who recognize one another by their strange English accents. We share the same unique religion, the English dictionary our exile’s Bible. Thirteen years, then, since I came to Canada, choosing physical security over writerly insecurity. Thanks to the human ability to forget recent history as quickly as last year’s snow, when I crossed the border into Canada, I knew that only through literature and memory would I be able to preserve my personal history.

Who now remembers the collapse of that European country of Yugoslavia in the last years of the last century, the country where I was born 55 years ago, a country that no longer exists on any map? How many people can recall the bloody Bosnian war (1992–1995), which took 200,000 lives before it ended in a draw, as if it had only been a bad soccer game? After the daily news – or daily horror – about Baghdad and Gaza, how many television viewers can afford to remember the three year long medieval siege of Sarajevo, which was only terminated five years before the twenty-first century knocked on our door? I was there, witnessing for three years the daily ration of death, destruction, hunger and humiliation. The day I left Sarajevo with my children, all that remained behind me were the ruins of my family house, my looted bookshop and fresh graveyards. The most precious items I carried with me were my books, published in Bosnia, of value only to me, and my precious memories. But again, with my backpack containing photographs from the happy past and my faith in a bright future, I joined the ranks of those exiled writers, was marked by the same burden as those coming from the horrors of Rwanda or Ethiopia or Burma. We have in common at least one other thing: we failed to discover a country in need of writers in the same way as there were countries in search of brick layers or railway workers. We writers are too curious and our writing is shaped to celebrate nuances instead of transparent things. And the truth is never a pleasant companion for those who believe that history starts fresh with each election. From where I sit I think every single country should open their borders to writers first – before the brick layers, railway workers. We can offer so much: a healthy opposition, a historical memory, presence, experience, the denial of intellectual borders.

I haven’t noticed much respect in Canada for my kind of profession. The first wall I bumped into was the fact that my books, published in many different languages, were worth nothing if they’d not been translated into English. At that time my English wasn’t better than a five-year-old Canadian born kid. No institutions, including the Canada Council, would finance translations from languages other than French. I escaped from war torn Bosnia, divided by national borders, only to face more division here, between and «them». I still don’t understand why the average Canadian doesn’t feel a need to introduce new immigrants by the simplest of ways: through literature immigrants grow up. The opposite is letting newcomers continue to live in Canada as if it is only rented land, encouraging them to make their own gated communities, based on the values taken from the country they came from.

It took me years to make myself visible as a writer in Canada. I didn’t – and still do not – complain. Three years under siege in Sarajevo taught me that I should consider myself lucky to see my children growing up happily in Toronto, instead of having my children visiting my grave. The fact that I survived doesn’t make me feel better when compared to those that who didn’t. I don’t consider my recent personal history filled with any more disappointment, pain and failure than that of the average Canadian who has never recovered from his cat dying. But my advantage is that literature doesn’t speak if there is no pain or recognition of that pain which flows between the lines.

While I worked for two years as a simple manual labourer in the Holt Renfrew warehouse next to the airport, I hid from my coworkers my writerly occupation. This was in part because some of them were illiterate, and partly because some of them had suffered through much bigger tragedies than my own. But on our lunch break I would go outside of the dirty warehouse to watch the landing airplanes carrying new immigrants with their fresh hope and expectations, and I imagined stories about them. It was at times painful to use to my poet-rented muscles during the day and then to transform into something else when my shift ended. On one occasion, after taking ten days leave from work, I brought my coworkers a box of Belgian chocolates, and nobody believed that I had been doing readings and signing copies of my selected poems, recently published in Holland. Later I published an article, in The Globe and Mail, criticizing the working conditions in the warehouse: that was the beginning of the end of my long journey within the manual class. Superiors and managers became suspicious about my real motives of renting my sweat for money that could barely cover my monthly expenses. I soon quit and rejoined Virgil’s tribe, as it is where I belong.

I believe that poets must be engaged witnesses of their own time, the way Bertolt Brecht or Anna Ahkamatova were (“In the dark time, will there also be singing – Yes, it will be singing about dark time,” –B. Brecht). I have nothing against the sci-fi landscapes one finds in so many novels; nothing against butterflies flitting between poetry’s lines. But my credo has always been to deal with human souls, with ordinary people and situations I see every day on my way to my desk. I witnessed the horror of war; I’ve seen the sorrow of immigrants. All of it has become deeply tattooed in my poetry. If some future reader between my lines recognizes the nuances of the time in which I’ve lived, and if the beauty of poetry makes him think and love, I will consider my writing mission accomplished. But I am still far from this point.