Wall of Fire. Pam Stavropoulos

All for now, love for always.

       Lena

       5. Address to a spectator

      A university cafe. It could be anywhere, the world over (many places share a basic similarity, don’t you think? Or do we prefer to avoid such equations?)

      The long serveries. The crowded tables. The muted vibrancy of student life, the buzz of conversation.

      Open books, coffee-stained newspapers. Plates of left-over food, utensils inelegantly splayed.

      This particular university cafe could be in Boston. Or New York.

      Perhaps the one at which Sasha is studying. Geographically remote from the turbulence of where he used to live.

      Maybe that’s him over there by the window. Kind of thin and pensive-looking. He looks the way I would imagine someone to look after reading a letter which has affected them deeply.

      Distant, preoccupied.

      Not really there.

      But then maybe it’s not him. I’ve never seen the guy, after all. Am reading into a completely unknown person what I imagine a possibly different unknown person might be like.

      And even if it is Sasha, why must he be thin and sad looking? Why not robust and cheerful? Seemingly cheerful, that is. Because unless as emotionally detached from his homeland as he is physically distant, a cheerful exterior would have to hide at least some pain.

       Wouldn’t it?

      And why should inner and outer life synchronise? Why should they appear to correlate?

      The lunch break is almost over. While the cafe will not empty until late in the evening, those who have afternoon classes are gathering up their things. In the process of so doing, a girl knocks over a sauce bottle. Its contents spill over a newspaper like a slowly grasping hand.

      Beneath the spreading stain is a photograph of the latest UN negotiating team. With an inset picture of David Owen. The photograph’s caption – barely decipherable now – reads `New Hopes for Ceasefire’.

      More students get up to leave. The boy who could be Sasha among them.

      Yes, there is a sameness to university cafes. Hard to believe, though, the extent of their closure in Bosnia. Like so many of the institutions to which they are (were?) affiliated. Perhaps blown away completely.

      Markets are another universal.

      Open-air markets, with trestle tables and makeshift benches. They are usually lively and often festive.

      But not the Sarajevo market the day of the massacre. Remember the footage of helpless civilians that was beamed around the globe? Of people lying in pools of blood, their arms outstretched beseechingly? Even among the rising tide of atrocities, that one stood out.

      Many who had previously felt little identification with what was going on in the former Yugoslavia were shocked by that image.

      People like Justin (let’s call him that).

      Perhaps Justin is himself a journalist or photographer. Perhaps he is moved to imagine how, in different circumstances, he might have been taking those pictures. Or trying to write about them.

      But professional identity aside, how could he not be shocked by such images?

      How - whatever ill-formed perceptions he might have harboured about the deep-seated animosities `over there’ - could he fail to be moved as a human being?

       Or might he not be?

      At least, more than fleetingly? How necessary is it for the average `non-political’ westerner to preserve the perceptual gap between themselves and the alien `other?’

      Consider Samantha.

      Twenty-four, eclectic interests, socially aware. She is a student of poststructuralism, a child of postmodernism. Focus on `the other’ is her specialty, you might say.

      What, in the sprawling schema within which she operates, could speak to the Sarajevo massacre? How might that event be `deconstructed’?

      As further evidence of the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment project? As chilling illustration of the limits – but also murderous effectiveness - of communitarianism? As indictment of postmodernity itself? Because the universalist liberal values it rejects seem less redundant now than vitally and urgently necessary.

      What can Samantha reach for to address – much less assuage – the existential abyss to which footage of the Sarajevo market massacre surely gives rise? Many outside as well as within Europe were galvanised - after initially being paralysed - by those images. And by the footage of the deliberate incineration of a peasant family in the formerly peaceful town of Ahmici.

      The BBC report which accompanied that footage was understated, which enhanced its devastating impact. The husband and father’s advice to his young family to hide in the cellar, while he would try to head off their assailants on the stairs. His brutal clubbing to death (he yet got it easy). And the remorseless burning alive of his wife and children below. The mother’s clenched, blackened fist afterwards (all we were shown, but enough, enough). And the correspondent’s simple report (what else could he say?) that they had died `in the greatest agony’.

      And which would have been the greater agony for that hapless woman? (can physical and emotional torture be compared?) The pain of the flames as they consumed her defenceless body? Or the incalculable anguish of knowing she could not protect the children she loved from the same fate? Later, in a follow-up to that incident (the appalling inadequacy of language!) UN soldiers, themselves rightly condemned for sins of omission, flagged down a car in the village. Expressed their disgust and disquiet at what had occurred. And were met by an indifference so complete as to rival the horror which had been perpetrated (`What’s that to me? It’s nothing to do with me’).

      The revulsion many all over the world experienced over this and similar acts cannot be denied. But the outrage dissipated (like so much else) in the torpor and inadequacy of responses to it. The fuel vital for concerted government action dissolved before it could cohere. Giving rise to the familiar refrain; `If elected governments fail to act, what can I, the lonely citizen, do?’

      And so a patina of resignation begins to collect over the wound of outrage.

      Leonard Cohen said it years ago in another context: There is only one moment of pain or doubt…but a mouth kisses and a hand soothes the moment away.

       6. Lena

       Remember. Remember.

      Remember the good things, now that memory seems all that is left.

      Like the things of which I remind Sasha in my letters to him (Sasha who I may never see again!) Like crisp winter mornings on the way to class. Those perennial coffees in the Cafe Milena. Family dinners when we were all there, and when there were no arguments (don’t let a sour note intrude. The memories must only be good).

       What else, what else?

      Everything to do with Sasha. But thoughts of him can’t comfort, because they’re suffused with the pain of his absence.

       Sasha who I may never….

       Stop it!

      The point of this journal is not to succumb to the grief that gnaws inside me like a living thing. Although perhaps grief is now the only thing that lives when so much – including hopeseems dead.

       What else, what else?

      There must be so much more.

      Recover the texture of the everyday. The innumerable little acts and rituals. Which, because so ordinary, might be a source of distraction now. But which exactly because they were taken