People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks

for the night.

      

      III

      WE STEPPED OUT into the dark city streets, and I shivered. Most of the snow had disappeared during the day, but now the temperature was dropping again, and heavy clouds hid the moon. There were no streetlights working. When I realized that Karaman proposed to walk to the Old City, the feeling of a stone in the gut returned.

      “Are you sure that’s, you know, OK? Why don’t we have my UN escort drive us?”

      He made a slight face, as if he smelled something unappetizing. “Those oversized tanks they drive will not fit in the narrow ways of the Baščaršija,” he said. “And there has been no sniping for over a week now.”

      Great. Tremendous. I let him handle the argy-bargy with the UN Vikings, hoping he wouldn’t be able to convince them to let me go on without an escort. Unfortunately, he was a pretty persuasive fellow—stubborn, anyway—and finally we set off on foot. He had a long-legged stride, and I had to quicken my pace to keep up with him. As we walked, he delivered a kind of countertourism monologue—a guide-from-hell kind of a thing—describing the city’s various shattered structures. “That is the Presidency Building, neo-Renaissance style and the Serbs’ favorite target.” A few blocks farther: “That is the ruins of the Olympic Museum. That was once the post office. This is the cathedral. Neo-Gothic. They had midnight Mass there last Christmas, but they held it at noon because, of course, no one went out at night at that time unless they were suicidal. On its left you see the synagogue and the mosque. On the right the Orthodox church. All the places where none of us go to worship, situated within a very convenient hundred meters of one another.”

      I tried to imagine how I would feel if Sydney were suddenly scarred like this, the landmarks of my childhood damaged or destroyed. Waking up one day and finding that the people in North Sydney had set up barricades on the Harbour Bridge and started shelling the Opera House.

      “I suppose it’s still a bit of a luxury to walk in the city,” I said, “after four years of running from snipers.” He was walking a little bit ahead of me. He stopped suddenly.

      “Yes,” he said. “Quite.” Somehow he poured a whole bucket of sarcasm into that terse reply.

      The wide avenues of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo had gradually given way to the narrow, cobbled footpaths of the Ottoman town, where you could stretch out your arms and almost touch buildings on opposite sides of the way. The buildings were small scale, as if built for halflings, and pressed together so tightly that they reminded me of tipsy friends, holding each other upright on the way home from the pub. Large parts of this area had been out of range of the Serb guns, so the damage here was much less evident than in the modern city. From a minaret, the khoja called the faithful to aksham, the evening prayer. It was a sound I associated with hot places—Cairo, Damascus—not a place where frost crunched underfoot and pockets of unmelted snow gathered in the crotch between the mosque’s dome and its stone palisade. I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims’ vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.

      The khoja of this small mosque was an old man, but his voice carried, unwavering and beautiful on the cold night air. Only a handful of other old men answered; shuffling across the cobbled courtyard, dutifully washing their hands and faces in the icy water of the fountain. I stopped for a moment to watch them. Karaman was ahead of me, but he turned back, and followed my gaze. “There they are,” he said. “The fierce Muslim terrorists of the Serb imagination.”

      The restaurant he had chosen was warm and noisy and full of delicious aromas of grilling meat. A photograph by the door showed the proprietor, in military fatigues, brandishing an immense bazooka. I ordered a plate of cevapcici. He ordered a salad of shaved cabbage and a dish of yogurt.

      “That’s a bit austere,” I said.

      He smiled. “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was a child. That was useful, during the siege, since there wasn’t any meat. Of course, the only greens you could get most of the time were grass clippings. Grass soup, that became my specialty.” He ordered two beers. “Beer, you could get, even during the siege. The brewery was one thing in the city that never closed down.”

      “Aussies would approve of that,” I said.

      “I was thinking about what you said earlier, about the people from this country who migrated to Australia. Actually, we had quite a few Australians visiting the museum library, just before the war.”

      “Oh?” I said absently, sucking on my beer, which was, I have to say, a little soapy.

      “Well dressed, speaking terrible Bosnian. Same peoples came from the United States as well. We averaged about five a day, looking up their family history. At the library we gave them a nickname, after that black man in the American TV show—Kinta Kunte.”

      “Kunta Kinte,” I corrected.

      “Yes, him: we called them the Kunta Kintes because they were searching for their roots. They wanted to look at the official gazettes, 1941 to ’45. Never looking for Partisans in their family tree. They didn’t want to be descendants of leftists. Always it was the nationalist fanatics—Chetniks, Ustashe, the killers of the Second World War. Imagine wanting to be related to such people. I wish I’d known then that they were the storm crows. But we didn’t want to believe that such madness could ever come here.”

      “I’ve always kind of admired Sarajevans for being so surprised by the war,” I said. It had seemed the rational response to me. Who wouldn’t be in a state of denial when your next-door neighbor suddenly starts shooting at you, casually and without remorse, like you’re some kind of unwanted introduced species, the way the farmers at home eradicate rabbits.

      “It’s true,” he said. “Years ago, we watched Lebanon fall apart and said, ‘That’s the Middle East, they’re primitive over there.’ Then we saw Dubrovnik in flames, and we said, ‘We’re different in Sarajevo.’ That’s what we all thought. How could you possibly have an ethnic war here, in this city, when every second person is the product of a mixed marriage? How to have a religious war in a city where no one ever goes to church? For me, the mosque, it’s like a museum, quaint thing to do with grandparents. Picturesque, you know. Once a year, maybe, we’d go and see the zikr, when the dervishes dance, and it was like theater—like, what do you call it? A pantomime. My best friend, Danilo, he’s a Jew, and he’s not even circumcised. There was no mohel here after the war; you had to go to the local barber. Anyway, our parents were all leftists, they thought such things were primitive.…” He trailed off, downing his beer in a couple of swallows and ordering two more.

      “I wanted to ask you about the day you saved the haggadah.”

      He grimaced and looked down at his hands, which were spread out on the speckled Laminex of the café table. His fingers were long and delicate. Funny how I hadn’t noticed that earlier, when I’d been rude to him and worried he might lay an unauthorized paw on my precious parchment.

      “You have to understand. It is as I was just saying. We did not believe in the war. Our leader had said, ‘It takes two sides to have a war, and we will not fight.’ Not here, not in our precious Sarajevo, our idealistic Olympic city. We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death. We know that now. But then, those first few days, we all did things that were a little crazy. Kids, teenagers, they went off to demonstrate against the war, with posters and music, as if they were going to a picnic. Even after the snipers shot a dozen of them, we still didn’t get it. We expected that the international community would put a stop to it. I believed that. I was worried about getting through a few days, that’s all, while the world—how do you say?—got its act together.”

      He was speaking so quietly I could barely hear him over the buzz of laughter