How lockdown awakened my memories of Bosnia and the war

In the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown I found myself in Brussels. As days went by, I was gradually drawn to spending more time online talking to friends holed up many countries away, in my native Sarajevo. I yearned to communicate in my mother tongue with those who felt similarly fractured and would not require much explanation as to why this experience was reminiscent of 1994.

1994 is a year etched in the memories of all of those whose lives were shattered by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with no end in sight. It was when I felt the most desolate. I recall memories of feeling wrapped in the grey, snow-speckled blanket of despair that hung over Sarajevo and the rest of the country. I felt displaced and futureless. 

So we talked online - we who knew a thing or two about feeling trapped. Sometimes we would send each other sappy folk songs with over-the-top, flamboyant accordion intros that usually accompanied nights spent drinking in rundown Bosnian kafanas, only half-embarrassed by our affection for gaudy local music. On other nights, we punctured long, deep conversations with silly Star Wars gifs. 

On one of these evenings that lazily melted into a period of darkness, a friend asked me: “What is your most prized possession? If your house caught fire tonight, what would you save?” 

I knew the answer right away. The image of my father’s broad, black leather wallet with a single clasp – the kind most Yugoslav parents kept their checkbooks in – immediately came to mind. The wallet that was stored away at the bottom of a black cardboard box in my closet, obscured by a pile of documents. In it, 30-odd photographs of my childhood self with family members, all dated circa 1989.

Some were duplicates. Some were throwaways, where somebody attempted to photograph what must have been a magnificent sunset, the camera held unsteadily. The picture had turned out too blurry. Most of them would probably end up in our summer holiday album, marking one of the rare times my father wasn’t too busy with work and both parents were there with their 5-year-old. 

The beach in Makarska, a seaside town, is instantly recognisable. There I was, butt naked, clawing onto my father’s shoulders as he tried to read his newspaper. 

In another one, my mother and I posed next to my inflatable dinghy, my mother’s arms clasped firmly around the tiny, frail body of a sickly child who spent too much time at the doctor’s office. It will do wonders for his lungs, the doctor used to say. My mother took this to heart so we regularly set out, as if on a pilgrimage, to nearby coastal towns where sea-salt-laden air mixed with the scent of pine trees.

These thirty or so images were the only recorded memory of my life prior to the 1992-1995 war that tore through my country and our lives. Heeding the advice of a neighbour, who told him to save at least one personal item, my father had grabbed his black wallet with the photographs as he frantically left our apartment in Grbavica at the onset of the war. He hoped, like most, that the madness would be temporary. The trademark optimism of his generation in Sarajevo mingled with the gloom of the war, and he told himself things would soon return to normal. As if by magic people inflicting violence on their neighbours would suddenly snap out of it. They did not.

When we returned to our home in 1996, the rest of the photos – hundreds, if not thousands of them – were nowhere to be found. The person who commandeered our apartment for the duration of the war decided to strip us of all our worldly possessions. Our furniture, our books, our window shades, even our bathtub and our wooden floors were taken out when they left. 

We considered ourselves lucky – my parents and I survived. My mother half contemplated contacting the person who occupied our apartment to ask them to return the photos. My father said no. It took me decades to realise what he instinctively understood. The photos were not stolen. After all, who steals remnants of other people’s memories? They were intentionally thrown away, buried, left to disintegrate. The message being: you three have been erased, good luck proving that you are real.

That evening in Brussels, I exchanged a few more messages, bode my friends good night and went to retrieve the wallet. I spent the next hour or so frantically flipping through the photos, reliving every gesture, analysing the angles the pictures were taken from, and examining every item of clothing in them. Our smiles were those of people who knew no pain, no trauma and could not predict the horrors they would experience. They were the faces of those who seemed certain the ground they stood on would not fall away beneath them.

For me, the lockdown rehashed memories of injuries past that had never properly healed. That night I felt hallucinatory in the way that someone displaced not only in space, but also in time – a nowhere person – might feel. It was not long before I decided I wanted to return to Sarajevo. If I just went back to the place I felt rooted in, maybe that would mean I was real. 

The pandemic, with seemingly no end in sight, has shaken us all to the core and made all of us feel lonely and unsure. The sudden appearance of a virus causing so much death and suffering made me feel cornered; it pushed me perilously close to the brink of feeling I could be subjected to erasure once more. 

The return to Sarajevo, in my mind, would mean taking a casual walk down a particular street in the Old Town, with its familiar scents and sounds of footsteps against the cobblestones. That would be the answer my anxiety craved.

So I went. 20 hours, three flights and two car rides later, I walked the empty streets of my hometown at 4 am, the wheels of my suitcase witnesses to my presence. That night – or was it morning – reminded me of what it was like to be a person who chose to be genuine, who survived although there was no magic trick to protect oneself in the face of nationalism-fueled hatred. It reminded me of a time when we felt there was no cure, just like for the virus now, and that we’d edged ever so much closer to disappearing.