Forgive me for this long, confused and maybe pathetic letter, but I had to write it. Stay well, all my love is with you.
18
HIGH-HEELED SHOES
‘Have you seen this before?’ Drazena asked me, holding a yellow piece of paper in her hand, the certificate that she was a refugee from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
‘It took me two weeks to get it. Not because of the red tape – the procedure at the Office for Refugees is very simple even if it takes you half a day waiting in what seems to be an endless queue. But I wasn’t able to pull myself together and go and collect it because I couldn’t accept that I am a refugee, that this time it is happening to me and not to someone else. You see, even now I hesitate to show this certificate to a bus driver when I go into town. In fact, I befriended him just to avoid that, to avoid having to admit that this is my status in the world.’
Drazena is a journalist from Sarajevo who came to Zagreb in mid-April, on the last day when it was possible to leave the city by normal means of transport before the Serbian army surrounded it, the night before they destroyed the bridge over the River Sava to the Croatian side. ‘I didn’t mean to leave the city, I had this crazy idea that nothing could happen to me. To the others, yes, but not to me. But then something happened to make me change my mind,’ she continued.
‘I’d just picked up my daughter Ivana from her kindergarten and as I walked across the street near my house, on the opposite side I noticed this woman. She was ordinary looking, blonde, middle-aged and overweight. She was carrying two plastic bags with some food. It was a late afternoon and I imagined she was heading home from her job in the city. When she was about to cross the street a grenade hit her directly from somewhere above. First she was lifted in the air – for a moment it looked as if she was flying – then she landed at my feet. She lay there motionless with blood coming from what seemed to me like a thousand little holes all over her body. I looked at my daughter. She stood there, with her eyes wide open with horror. She didn’t look at me, she didn’t move or say anything and when I took her in my arms, she was rigid, as if frozen. The next day we left.’
For more than a month Drazena has been staying with mutual friends of ours. In their small two-bedroom apartment they’ve given her and Ivana their child’s room. But she will have to leave soon – perhaps to go to another friend’s apartment. They told me that when Drazena came she expected to go back to Sarajevo within a couple of days, after leaving Ivana with her grandfather on the island of Pag. But two or three days into her stay in Zagreb she heard in a radio broadcast that the building where she lived had been heavily hit by a bomb. For the whole of the week following she just cried and took tranquillizers and nothing could get her out of this terrible state of despair.
I remembered her apartment: it was on the sixth floor of a skyscraper where she lived with her father (her mother died of cancer several years ago) because she couldn’t afford to live on her own. When I visited her in the spring of 1991 she took me to Bascarsija, the oldest part of the city where they make the best cevapcici. ‘Where in the world could you get such fresh- made cevapcici in the middle of the night?’ she laughed. Now Bascarsija was almost entirely destroyed, Sarajevo burned down and Drazena is sitting out in my garden. Behind the wall Zagreb is buzzing, the air is sweet with the smell of a nearby linden tree and an orange climbing rose bush has just begun blooming. It is hard to grasp her words as facts, I think as I look at her: the fact that she has lost her apartment, her job and God knows how many friends. She is telling me how she went to Pag where her father has a summer house to leave Ivana. She is wearing jeans and sneakers, her black curly hair tied in a pony-tail. With her dark tan and black eyes she looks like a mulatto beauty. Looking at her I am trying to detect a trace of recent change on her face and it strikes me as odd that I am unable to see any, as if it were only once I could see pain painted all over her face that I could actually believe her story.
On Pag there is no electricity and the water supply is restricted. Her father doesn’t get a pension. Living in a house that he built years ago to benefit from tourism, without any chance now of renting it for a third season in a row, he depends entirely on her ability to make money as a reporter. Because they literally live on fish he catches during the day, she went to Caritas, the Catholic humanitarian organization, for help. They gave her some pasta, flour, rice, sugar and a bar of soap.
‘But I foolishly didn’t bring anything in which to carry things, so I just took all the supplies in my hands and, of course, I dropped them. Right there, in the middle of the room I dropped all the food – pasta, rice, flour, all mixed up. Other women waiting in line started to scream at me, but I was totally unprepared, no one warned me I should bring a shopping bag or a box or something. And you know what, instead of crying, I burst into laughter.’
She is laughing again, but her words are not registering. I am still looking for something in her face, some traces of war. Finally I realize: she is wearing make-up. This is what is confusing about her, making her situation even more surreal, I think. She has the same face as when I saw her last time but it’s as if her make-up is bridging the time, the war, her tragedy itself. This is what fails to fit into the picture of a refugee. However I say nothing.
A few days later she came back, this time to pick up some clothes that I’d prepared for her because she’d left Sarajevo with only one suitcase stuffed with Ivana’s clothes. This time my daughter was about too, so she took her to her room to give her a few things. When she came out Drazena was wearing a pair of black patent high-heeled shoes, the kind you’d wear to a party. In fact, she looked exactly as if she were going to leave for a party at any moment. ‘Why did you give her those shoes?’ I asked Rujana, surprise rising from my voice like hot steam. She looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Mother, how could you be so insensitive? What do you mean, how could you say such a thing about your friend?’ she said. ‘What is so terrible, what did I do?’ I replied, trying to defend myself, already sensing that there was more to it than I realized, I just thought that because she’ll be moving a lot from one apartment to another she would need practical things, not fancy stuff like that,’ I said, in a matter-of fact tone of voice. ‘Oh, but you are wrong,’ she jumped. ‘She needs precisely that fancy stuff, as you call it. Because even if she has lost everything, she needs to feel like a normal person, even more so now. Why do you expect her to wear sneakers all the time?’
Indeed, why did I think that a pair of high-heeled shoes were no longer appropriate for Drazena, why did I react in that way, I asked myself while my daughter left the kitchen in a fury. Perhaps because to me Drazena doesn’t fit into the refugee category at all. The truth is that every time the word refugee is pronounced, in my mind it recalls pictures of women covered with black scarves and poorly dressed, their faces wrinkled, their ankles swollen, dirt under their nails. One can see them wandering through the city in groups with that particular look of lost persons. Some of them beg in restaurants or at street corners or just sit in the main square. Who are these people, I asked myself, realizing at the same time what a strange question it was, a question poised between the cliche established for us by the media and the fact that they are no different from us, only less lucky. These are people who escaped slaughter by the Serbians, I could hear my tiny inner voice answering. But I could also hear the other voice, the voice of suspicion, of fear, even anger: They are just sitting smoking, doing nothing. Waiting. Waiting for what? For us to feed them. They could work, there are plenty of jobs around, houses to be repaired or working the land. But no, it’s easy to say that our city wasn’t shelled and our homes burned down, as if the war were only that, as if we didn’t have enough suffering of our own. Just the other day in a tram I heard a woman saying, ‘This city stinks of refugees.’ She said it in a loud voice, while two people, obviously refugees, were standing right beside her. The papers report that in hotels down on the Adriatic coast refugees have torn apart rooms, furniture, wallpaper, taps, lamps, everything, shouting: ‘If we don’t have anything, you won’t either!’