I don’t write about war because I want to, but because I have no choice

I’m having a coffee with Liam, who deftly rolls a cigarette, moistens the paper with his saliva, exhales the smoke and then says, “I read a chapter from your novel. Excellent translation. Do you always write horror?” Galway and Rijeka are the 2020 European Capitals of Culture, so I was bound to run into one of the more active members of the Irish art scene sooner or later. Liam is a fingerstyle guitarist, painter, poet and, for the duration of my short stay in Galway, also my host and guide. 

I have no choice, I’m going to have to do my best here, even though I can see that nothing will come of it. Age and interest-wise we have a lot in common, but I can see we’re not going to understand each other, and not because of my limited English or Liam’s strong Irish accent. “That wasn’t a horror story,” I tell him. “That was Balkan reality.” On Liam’s face I read amazement and sadness, but beneath the surface I also sense a barcode reader with which he is trying to detect at least a trace of sarcasm on my part. He cannot find any sarcasm, though, and so, as though speaking only to himself, he mutters, “For fock sake”. The swear word, heartfelt and involuntary, tells me that the trauma of the Balkans will perpetuate itself ad infinitum and that we will never find any solace for it outside the borders of that self-contained region. He does not even realise he is only confirming my theory when he says, “Yes, war trauma is a terrible thing”. We do not understand each other, we cannot understand each other, but even so, I still take on the challenge of trying to explain it all to him. Not for his sake, but for purely selfish reasons, for it brings me relief to talk about it again.

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Archipelago Yugoslavia

1. The “Better life” that never was (Kosovo)
2. Life in the crime scene (Serbia)
3. The apocalyptic clock ticking inside me (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
4. In Slovenia, we dreamed of democracy and woke up under capitalism
5. I don’t write about war because I want to, but because I have no choice (Croatia)

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I can remember the exact moment the trauma began. It was far from being a moment that someone from outside, someone like Liam, would automatically accept. I am not talking here about trauma caused by the experience of war itself. I am talking about the trauma experienced by someone trying to lead a normal life again after war: the trauma inflicted by his own environment. I do also remember the moment when I went to war, of course. We were sitting in the Palach club, drinking beer and listening to rock music.

The TV news was on, protesting Serbs had turned off the drinking water supply to a psychiatric hospital in Vrlica [Northern Dalmatia, editor’s note]. We were all watching TV together and someone said, “They’re crazy, they won’t rest till they’ve got everything they want”. I wasn’t quite sure what they did want, but I knew that someone had to stand up to them. Someone who always resisted at every opportunity, whether appropriately or inappropriately. Someone with the knack of intervening in a brawl and breaking up the fighters without knowing who had started it or why, someone who had stood up to his classmates when they picked on the Roma children or the Albanians in school. Someone like me.

The first indication of the trauma was frustration. We arrived in the combat zone, where the commander informed us we should save the last bullet for ourselves. I found it hilarious, a cliché straight out of a movie. But then it all got going, and it was about something I had encountered before and knew to be anything but harmless. They told us we were there to defend the state borders, democracy, survival, the centuries-old dream and more, some of which didn’t mean much to me. I was as indifferent to this state, both the old one and the one just formed, as I would have been to any other state I’d suddenly been forced to start living in. I came from Rijeka, after all, a city that had switched country nine times in less than a hundred years. I’m sorry, but with the best will in the world, the idea of getting excited at the realisation that you’re living in one of these new states set up by the politicians and their deals is something I can’t begin to relate to. For me, borders are just lines in an atlas – today like this, tomorrow, who knows.

They told us we were there to defend the state borders, democracy, survival, the centuries-old dream and more, some of which didn’t mean much to me. I was as indifferent to this state, both the old one and the one just formed, as I would have been to any other state I’d suddenly been forced to start living in.

The commander’s welcome speech made me think of my Uncle Ivan, who went to war as a 14-year-old in 1942. The Italian soldiers were setting villages on fire, indiscriminately, one after another, and as they were approaching my uncle’s village, he grabbed a pitchfork and, together with others his age and a little older, attacked them. After this successful action, the partisans promptly divided him and the other men from his village into groups, imposed discipline, and then explained to them that their fight for sheer survival had in reality been motivated by the desire to bring down the current system and that their real goal was to build a better world.

My uncle didn’t even know what “class struggle” and “world revolution” meant, he had never heard of Marx or Lenin, let alone socialism. All he cared about was sending the fascists back where they had come from so he could get back to his own way of life. I thought about that while the officer in front of us confidently threw phrases around and became morbidly intoxicated on his own rhetoric, a rhetoric that had disappeared without trace, mind you, when I saw him on TV a decade later, conspicuously silent at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. But at the time in question, as I was standing in front of him, I associated my experience with that of my Uncle Ivan, connected the two dots on the timeline, almost in the same space, and got the distinct feeling that something was not right.

I did not fight for a land I do not love; rather, I do not love the land for which I fought.

My feeling that something wasn’t right intensified as the fog lifted. After a stay in hospital, I did not leave my home for a whole year. During that time one person after another from my battle unit would drop by and tell me not to worry, they would do everything they possibly could to get me a better pension. But I wasn’t worried, for I didn’t want the pension. I just wanted my old routine back, my life. But these people thought they were doing me a favour, and carried on talking about how they could top up my existing invalidity pension, how they would retrospectively document that I had been wounded in the course of a military action that had taken place after my discharge from the army, for they knew the right people and wouldn’t leave a friend in the lurch. I thought they must think very highly of me if they were willing to lie, just to make my life easier after the war. 

But the more I resisted, the more vehemently they insisted, and eventually their insistence segued into aggression. Then, at last, the scales fell from my eyes. They weren’t doing it for me, they were doing it for themselves. A new group of claimants had been set up, and its success would depend to a large degree on how many members it had. They were demanding privileges and hero status and everything that went with it. As soon as I realised that, I took my leave of these people for ever and in their eyes I was no longer the long-haired youth in the punky leather jacket who had fought for sheer survival, but someone who hated his country. But the truth is different: I did not fight for a land I do not love, rather, I do not love the land for which I fought. 

I owe this leap in my thinking entirely to the deviants who sought to exploit the war as a start-up platform for their own advancement; the clique that persuaded first themselves, then everyone around them, that their participation in the war had made them special; that they should have monuments erected to them in their own lifetimes, and privileges too. And among them there was also a special caste, those who had positively yearned for the chaos, relished the outbreak of violence, and enriched themselves on the suffering of others. It is because of these people that anyone who fought in the war but still managed to preserve their humanity is now deeply ashamed to even mention their involvement. For normal people, these people constitute a greater trauma than the war itself. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who cannot understand that.

But these people aren’t even the worst thing in our picture book of Balkan horrors. The worst thing is that they fit perfectly into today’s system. Competence is not valued in this state; instead, political activism with a national slant is what counts, at every level. If this were only true of our top politicians, that would be wonderful because it would mean that the pyramid was working well at its lower levels. But the opposite is the case. All aspects of the state, both those of vital importance and those at lower levels, are run by wholly incompetent yes-men. Societies and sports clubs are managed more rigorously than the state itself. Societies and clubs pursue clearly formulated objectives agreed by the members as a whole, while the politicians treat the state like a cash machine from which they can withdraw limitless amounts of money, while the little people form a queue and wait for one of these politicians to accidentally drop a coin. For them, the hardworking, decent people, there is no profit to be had from this cash machine. Moreover, the arrogance of the politicians is utterly shameless.

There was also a special caste, those who had positively yearned for the chaos, relished the outbreak of violence, and enriched themselves on the suffering of others. It is because of these people that anyone who fought in the war but still managed to preserve their humanity is now deeply ashamed to even mention their involvement. For normal people, these people constitute a greater trauma than the war itself. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who cannot understand that.

With every action, every statement, they give the impression of mocking the people, as if one were to beat up a dying person or make fun of the disabled. I have long been allergic to those who mock others. In my view, it’s quite simple: I believe the majority has a duty to protect the minority, regardless of whether this minority is defined by nationality, social position or sexual orientation. But in this country precisely the opposite happens, and this is a trauma that has endured in Croatia far longer than the war.

For ten years I could not sleep.

Liam listens to all this in a pub in Galway, nods eagerly and is probably wondering if I am just using him to spur my own imagination and try out some future dialogue in some future novel, or whether something really did happen, and continues to happen, in Europe, only a short distance from his own country, that is beyond his comprehension.   

“Have you killed?” he asks, but then bites his lip and adds apologetically that you’re not supposed to ask former soldiers that, and I look at him and think of friends who took their own lives even though they never fired a single shot in the war. I tell him about them. Those who didn’t commit suicide swallowed prescription drugs with alcohol and in this way were able to find refuge in a temporary comfort zone, for a while at least, only to waste away there soon after. I’ve seen close-up where that leads and have resolved to learn from their mistakes. I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since the war, always seeking a way of sorting myself out again. It wasn’t easy, especially at night. For ten years I could not sleep. And it’s not that I didn’t want to. Every night I would get into my pyjamas and lie down in bed with that intention, but once there, my brain would overheat, to the point of madness. I would read boring articles or watch night-time TV, anything to exhaust myself, but exhaustion alone did not suffice. About ten minutes’ sleep every two hours was my maximum. 

Then I began to write. Stories about ordinary people leading ordinary lives, nothing exciting, but it enabled me to get some rest. I never even dreamt of writing about the war. I’d drawn a line under the war, I had nothing more to say about it. But every time I thought I had found my peace, I would look up, look around me and see a slime pit – in the moral, intellectual and every other sense. Behind my back a warped reality was playing out. The war continued to be an issue, mostly as an excuse for criminal machinations. To comprehend the futility of this return to the past, one needs only to remember that 1990 lies as far in the past as 2050 lies in the future, and it is becoming ever clearer that this country was not created in order to have a future, but in order that the future would belong to the thieves and their families. My frustration grew to the point where it became unbearable, to the point where I realised it was time for me to tell my own version of the war. Tell it or write it.

I have become a writer, a recognised writer, albeit more through the fault of others rather than my own merit. I was forced to write about the war because people here have been going on about it incessantly for thirty years, constantly digging up the bones of all those I buried inside myself long ago.

I ended up writing two novels about the war or rather, against it. I also gifted it a volume of poetry in which every poem begins with the symbol of the three crosses with which believers are blessed before the reading of the Gospel, when they want to bring their thoughts, words and hearts into alignment. In my Gospel, however, there is no good news after the bullet, and no sentence begins with a capital letter for there is nothing about war that deserves to be magnified or glorified. These days it is this war writing for which I am best known as an author. Even if my name doesn’t mean much to someone, the mention of the title of my novel usually provokes an “Oh yes, I’ve heard of that”. The name of the work has overtaken the name of the author, and that is exactly what every author strives for. It is natural that it should be so, for you are a servant of the word, you think the word is better than you are yourself, you approach it with humility and before you write it down, you thank it. You kiss its hand and say, “Thank you for choosing me”. 

And yet my success does not make me happy. I never wanted that. Yes, I wanted to write: for me, as with so many others, writing has always slumbered somewhere deep within me, just waiting for an activation code to stir it into life. In my case it goes back to Year 4 at school when, asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I replied, “A writer”. And that’s what happened, I have become a writer, a recognised writer, albeit more through the fault of others rather than my own merit.  I was forced to write about the war because people here have been going on about it incessantly for thirty years, constantly digging up the bones of all those I buried inside myself long ago.

And yet I would so love to write about other things, about travel, about the search, about the things the soul is drawn to. But it is impossible. Whenever I try to write, out they come, like predators to water, out they come with their never-changing, grunted mantras – war, post-war, crisis. They give speeches for us from their golden courts, proclaiming how hard it is and how much we need to economise because we did have the war, you know … as if they had deliberately decided to torment me in this way. The military juntas in South America used similar methods. Day after day, month after month, prisoners were played the same political speech. In the end they banged their heads against the wall or bit their wrists to stop the torture. 

I get the impression that today’s politicians are torturing the minority that has remained normal in the same way. They never stop talking about the war and, having listened to them year after year, I resolve, not to bash my head against the wall, but to reach for my pen. Instead of biting through my own veins, I punch myself in the solar plexus, retreat inside myself and then, when I have thoroughly nauseated myself, come out again via my throat. But this time, instead of peering down from my balcony and wondering if it is high enough, as I have on two previous occasions, I decide to find paper and pencil and spill my guts out in writing. I don’t write about war because I want to, but because I have no choice, and if I’m going to do it at all, then I’m not going to hold back.

I understand and accept that for many people the war is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to them. I find it positively embarrassing to admit it in front of such people, but I am just not one of them. She who is always waiting has said “Yes”. There is nothing that can compare to that. No one could ever wait as she has. She waited for my return from the Yugoslav People’s Army. Then she waited for my return from the war. Then she waited for my return from the clinic. She waited for me to complete my rehabilitation. And then for me to become myself again, the same man who, she says, when she saw him at a party, made her go weak at the knees. She may have waited for this last development, but it has never happened. 

That man got stuck somewhere, in late puberty, somewhere towards the end of a summer that was supposed to go on for ever. In his place another man has returned, and in place of the endless summer we were never destined to have, it is what we have now that will last for ever. But … let it last. I still feel victorious. Truth, peace, non-violence and justice remain right at the top of my list of priorities. The fact I feel overwhelmed by the collective primitivism here, where I live, is no reason to complain. Though I don’t say that to Liam, for there are some thoughts it is better to keep to oneself. And in any case, I already know what he would say, although I am not sure I could bear to hear it a second time: “For fock sake”.

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This article is part of the Archipelago Yugoslavia project by Traduki. It is published in collaboration with the S. Fischer Stiftung.

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