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REVISITING SARAJEVO

DIGITAL ESSAY
BY NIKOLA MADŽIROV

I’m traveling by bus towards Sarajevo; the sun is traveling with me. The traffic signs pop up along the roads like signal lights along airport runways, the deer on the deer-crossing signs will one day be archeologic artefacts like the drawings of killed animals on cave walls. When the bus enters each city, it’s like entering a tunnel – the children close their eyes, the old people speak more loudly, the driver slows down. The streetlights come at us, more numerous, more dense, like wasps to an abandoned watermelon. Before I set off for Sarajevo, all my father said to me was: “Take pictures of the pigeons in the Baš-čaršija for me.” He had never set foot there, but that image from the evening TV news whenever there was a report from Sarajevo, brought him back to the safe Yugoslavia. The pigeons aren’t the same, nor is the taste of the ice cream, nor the eyes of the passers-by, nor the souvenirs from China which are cheap, but speak to the high cost of Sarajevo’s history, still, in the eyes of my father, the image of the pigeons on the square which suddenly take flight in the sky, covers all the bombs which fell from the sky.

I thought about what to take with me —the little pillow with an applique of the Olympic mascot Vučko is now outside my material memory. Maybe Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinović or Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović, which I read in the cold room of the stone house I grew up in…I fled from the human coldness into the empty rooms so I could read, I fled from one language to another so I could be read correctly. Refugees take with them the deeds to their family home hoping that one day they will return, but also photographs from the family album, out of fear that they’ll never return. Between the hope and the fear of their own times, the clock of history strikes most loudly. Even though I, too, often want to stop the minutes, fear overtakes me when I see a clock that no longer counts the time, and cities are filled with them. I imagine a map of the city squares with their broken clocks and a lost glove, which suggests the powerlessness of an open hand.

I move through the cities from street to street, like a deliverer of newspapers or supermarket fliers, even though all I have in my hands are my broken lifelines. I came to Sarajevo after a long and difficult battle with Covid, filled with scars on my lungs that resemble scratched lines on a metal army bed. The doctors advised me not to travel by plane, considering that it was perhaps time for me to bring my thoughts back down to earth, knowing that in my borderline consciousness, refracted by my shadow under the hospital bed, bright and darkened worlds calmly intermixed, worlds I had otherwise thought could be merged only by death or war.

I continued my long walks along the Miljacka and its bridges, which will survive as monuments if the river disappears, the way implants inside us will outlive our bodies. Twenty years ago, after my first arrival in Sarajevo with a school excursion in 1991, I stayed in the Hotel Saraj, room number 315, drenched with rain like a forgotten book at a bus stop. The torrential rain had broken up the red soil of the hill and churned it with the river Miljacka, but closest to the horizon of the dark sky there rose gravestones looking like white frozen thunderbolts of war horror. In a single breath I wrote several verses, which I have never had the courage to publish, believing that if I do, I will either destroy the peace of the dead or the pain of all who bow over the missing.

ROOM WITH A VIEW
OF GRAVES

ROOM WITH A VIEW
OF GRAVES

I placed my hands on the window
while the curtain cast its wrinkles across my face,
hiding me from the dead.
The river is red after the rain
like the eyes of God after all wars.
Mother and child
slowly climb towards the graves
without seeing each other’s faces
along the narrow path.
Nothing is frightened by their footsteps
since no pigeons are here.
My lifelines
like cracks
etched along the window.

I placed my hands on the window
while the curtain cast its wrinkles across my face,
hiding me from the dead.
The river is red after the rain
like the eyes of God after all wars.
Mother and child
slowly climb towards the graves
without seeing each other’s faces
along the narrow path.
Nothing is frightened by their footsteps
since no pigeons are here.
My lifelines
like cracks
etched along the window.

I recall Wim Wenders’s words: “Berlin isn’t a city, it’s a site,” words which can immure themselves into the foundation of any city which has gone beyond its physical space and has turned itself into a ritual of living. You have to struggle to be lonely in Sarajevo, because the warm looks of the passers-by and of all those who left the city live above you like a bird that doesn’t fly out of eyeshot of its nest. This time I am avoiding going to museums because I fear their permanence. I move along the streets which preserve the shadows of two great empires, I hear footsteps along the cobblestones, and I foresee the distances. It was time for the Sarajevo film festival, and I was showing the documents of my illness as a sure ticket for entry into the movie theatres. The antibodies help my body safely cross the borders of reality. My nearness to the face of death opened the doors of imaginary cinematic worlds to me. In Sarajevo I spoke with Wenders about the dynamics of spaces and their living witness to the past and the illusory presence of people and their actions.

First, he traces along the horizons of the site, and later, in the depths of the unexplored spaces, he excavates the story. First the place, and then the story. Does a story exist without a place, does there exist bodiless pain, does there exist waking without insomnia? At the end he left me a message: “Poets are essential to make us understand the world.” But I can’t understand killings, even though night and day I was earning high scores for killing in the suffocating videogame parlours filled with children who have not been hugged for a long time. I’ve said many times—I feel helpless in the face of wars, the uniformity of death, the impossibleness of dying lonely. People exchange verses with one another that might become their epitaphs, epitaphs of their cities, their faith in silence. The word war does not have a negative, but peace has unpeace, and poetry is a lover of unpeace, of the internal battles between the languages of fears and the buried memories. In the midst of war, I feel that poetry is like a windmill that only embodies the wind, though wants to redirect it.

In Sarajevo I met with my dear friends —Mile, Semezdin, Faruk, Asmir, Saida, Bjanka —we drank coffee warmed by the August sun … With Dževad our meeting was left for “someday” and in “some city”, while Ferida bought me a ticket for the Damir Imamović concert in the courtyard of the Botanical Garden. Above it floated the expansive planetary melancholy of sevdalinka songs, while all the battles of the plant roots were taking place silently, underground. Which are the roots of the one who leaves and returns, how great is the sorrow of the one who celebrates liberation from a previous war in the middle of a new one?

I barely slept that night. It was the same all the other nights as I became accustomed to the mechanical movements of the fan in the apartment and drowned in the silence of the piano behind which the loud vacuum cleaner was hiding. In the deafness of the dawn, I struggled to hear the graffiti on the renovated walls, to hear the cleaners’ victory over a night which was as heavy as the metal shutters.

I wasn’t writing, I was breathing. I wanted to witness a new wakening, to pass between two empty containers so I could witness the emptiness of all beginnings. Sarajevo was my first trip with the new scars on my lungs, which I felt like newly drawn maps of cities near seas coloured with traces of boats which arrive and depart. As small children, on the beaches we built cities of sand, and those cities had no names, nor streets, but still we dreamt of living in them. Of those cities nothing remains. All I have are the words of my grandmother who told me that a rolling stone gathers no moss. As I was falling asleep, I felt as if my whole body was being wrapped in moss. And the war was sleeping.

Dear Monique,

Rivers in atlases are harmless. There, they do not overflow, and they do not transport bodies during war. They just timidly touch the vacillating state borders. Volcanoes in atlases sleep even when they’re active, they rise like gravestones above the cities whose buildings are built on the foundations of oblivion. The language of nature has no metaphors, but every depth and every eruption in nature is dangerous, just as in poetry. I am writing to you from Sarajevo, whose river has carried the same quiet for centuries, and the bridges that are the scars of its patience. They say that the best medicine for all fatal illness and memory is patience.

I’ve always thought that patience is not passivity, nor a lateness of the essence just as quiet is not a dark shadow of the words. The silence expands the space, it drives me to wake amid the noise coming from the hospitals, the squares filled with protestors, with tourists and fountains, with coins that are now worthless. It permits me to hear the steps of my son even when he is sleeping, to protect the patient beating of time on the wall clock or in my chest. That’s how I approach each new city I enter - with silence in front of each street sign as a kind of archetypal verbal experience of urban space. In the street names I seek something familiar, just as I seek in the face of each unknown passerby a familiar loneliness. Contemporary cities, unlike ancient ones, have more gates than sides of the world, just as we own more keys than doors they unlock. With each departure, the number of the keys of the doors I cannot open increases. While I’m writing to you, I see images of people who, with emptiness in their hands and in their eyes, fearfully leave their homes. Fleeing from what is known is far more dangerous and more painful than the unknown. The world teaches us of distances and of the closeness of the pain which we shape according to historical cyclicality, so we can accept it more easily. At times I think the poetic perception of time is like a deep scar on the selective memory of history. Is it possible in fleeing to recognize a beginning and not desolation? Do the most beautiful trees grow above graves with no name on the tombstone? What letter did the slain soldier keep in his pocket before the rain turned the words into little lakes? History is not going to ask these questions because it exists to provide different answers to the same reality, the same present. I empathize with all those who, in fleeing broken walls, must construct a home and cannot place their body inside the tent of everyday rituals.

As a child I dreamt of growing up quickly so I could reach the door handle when snow started to fall, and my grandfather dreamt of bending down to caress me. Between these stages of growth and collapse I am building my home of vulnerable reality which I will leave hesitantly. A person can leave several times but can return only once.

Yours Nikola,
August 2021 Sarajevo

Originally published in manuskripte 233 (2021)

Translated by Christina Kramer.

Nikola Madžirov (poet, essayist, translator) was born in 1973 in Strumica to a family of Balkan Wars refugees. His poems are translated into more than forty languages and have garnered numerous accolades, including the Hubert Burda Prize for his collection Premesten kamen (2007). The German edition was published in Hanser Verlag’s prestigious Lyrik Kabinett series. Madžirov has translated Louise Glück, Marko Pogačar, Ana Ristović and many others. As an essayist he has contributed to countless international magazines. He is one of the coordinators of the Berlin-based international poetry network Lyrikline and editor of Stremež, one of the longest running Macedonian-language literary magazines. American jazz composer Oliver Lake as well as Michael League and Becca Stevens have composed music based on his poems. Residencies have led Madžirov to a myriad of places, including Iowa City, Paris, and Berlin.

Photos by: © Nikola Madžirov
Photo of Nikola Madžirov: © Dirk Skiba

Project Manager: Barbara Anderlič
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