Beyond the Balkans
John Xiros CooperThe winter in the Balkans is cold and grey. In these last days of September 1995 there are only the faintest anticipations of the chill to come. Slađana and I are boarding the rickety old bus that will take us away from the Balkan winter. We are beginning our long journey to far off, unimaginable Vancouver in Canada. What awaits us there we do not know. We only know that it can't be worse than what we're leaving behind. We hope the distant Pacific coast, on an unfamiliar continent, will give us a new beginning. International economic and commercial sanctions against Yugoslavia ended flights from Belgrade Airport some time ago, so we are travelling on this old bus to Budapest in order to catch a gleaming Malev jet at Ferhedji Airport for Zurich and the flight west. Slađana and I were married in Belgrade just before our departure. I was living and working in the capital after leaving Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. She remained in our home town with her family. She was my great love before the civil war started, but the war separated us for almost three years. Despite the whirlwind of war, she was able with great difficulty to come to Belgrade and we realized our old plan to marry. The two of us had very different war experiences. In this we were not unique. Everybody's experience of war is particular and personal and this has been the case for the whole population of the formerYugoslavia. We have all been changed by the events that for outsiders were often no more than short segments on the nightly news, or detached discussions among so-called 'experts'. For us, these events were the living, and often deadly, reality. Perhaps you will say I am exaggerating if I tell you that, as a result, we are no longer who we were. It is no exaggeration. All of us have been changed by war. Slađana and I even more because we have gone away. Perhaps in some societies the matter of personal identity is not bound so fiercely to the land. But it is so in the Balkans. Family, community, the very landscape and history of our particular place are powerful forces which shape our individual identities and we, as individuals, cannot be so easily disentangled from our instinctive sense of being there. It is how the peoples of the Balkans have resisted the oppression of foreign empires for centuries. For someone born and raised in the Balkans, the question of personal identity is not an intellectual abstraction, but a concrete synthesis of temperament, culture, geography, and education. Four years after our flight from the wreckage, I find myself, now and then, surprised still by what seems at times a new person, an orphan self. I am surprised by the stranger in my body, or the face which looks out from the mirror every morning. The rattling bus is full of refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina. We have all experienced the difficult years. Our world is destroyed. So, going to Canada is like a new birth. But, each birth is difficult and uncertain. Many of us are young. But I think we look older than our years. We have survived, and survival, in the situation of our homeland, comes at a high price. As we roar down the highway, darkness descends on the rich grain fields of Vojvodina in northern Serbia and Yugoslavia. Most passengers have fallen asleep, while others are wakeful and silent. Are they thinking about their lives and the years that have been destroyed by madness and war? Or are they simply trying to forget? The sound of the bus engine disturbs the silence. The lights of Belgrade have finally disappeared in the night. Belgrade, my Belgrade. A fragment of my heart stays there, another in Mostar, my place of birth, and a third I bring with me to a new land. I moved to Belgrade from Mostar because of the civil war in Bosnia. The war ended in 1995 with partition and a foreign presence, but peace is still uncertain, the truce uneasy, and in many small ways, the war continues to take new victims. As I lean back in my seat, the memories of the last five years crowd back as words and images and, of course, as conflicting emotions. **** Our lives and experiences become our memories. Memory is our only contact with our past. It gives us, in the present, a sense of continuity. For many people, memory is a refuge from the present and the past is often idealized, so that their wish for a different reality becomes nostalgia for an idealized past.