How We Were All Forced To Became Magicians
HOW WE WERE ALL FORCED TO BECOME MAGICIANS
Every day during that summer of 1992 I would go to the Academy of the Performing Arts to bake bread at dusk before it gets too dark. It was very dangerous to go outside and become an open target (it was not particularly safe indoors either but, in comparison, this was somehow always forgotten). There were a thousand and one reasons why we had to go out and pretty much all of us spent a couple of hours a day outside in the streets. This was no easy task. Everyone created their own, personal rules for protection from the events that were entirely unpredictable, irrational, and random, referred to officially as “Non-Selective Shelling of the City,” which was actually more or less constant. When there was a sort of a cease fire and “the guns fell silent”, the possibility that the shelling would start up again was hanging in each and every second above our heads. The mortar shells in particular, falling directly from the sky out of nowhere and hitting anywhere and at any time. Anytime, anywhere - this was the only real rule of all the killing and destruction. The snipers would shoot all day long from all the surrounding hills, anti-aircraft machine guns would pepper any part of the City they saw fit, again with no rationality or regularity, there was always the occasional bullet or tank shell, sometimes a rain of projectiles from multiple rocket launcher.
As the time went by and the pattern repeated itself, people were getting used to the unpredictable situations, finding a sort of order in the chaos, constructing their own, private, eccentric defense mechanisms. Later, as the war progressed and that first summer passed, as initial confusion gave way to a general familiarity with the situation, you could sometimes see a person on the street who, regardless of what was happening around him, would stroll at ease, as though promenading, calmly and collectedly - even across those bridges or crossroads which were deemed the most “open, the most dangerous places,” in that illusory gradation of risk. “The Sarajevo people have reconciled themselves to dying,” was the interpretation by some, meaning that certain citizens had voluntarily accepted the possibility of death and that it made no difference to them whether they were killed or continued to walk the earth. But I don't think that this was quite accurate; reconciliation to something doesn't necessarily mean its acceptance; it’s rather a matter of understanding. You can only be reconciled to something or someone you know very well, like a friend or a former lover.
People would simply find rules for themselves in this situation which could not be expressed in words or described in any way, yet these rules were universally understood. I remember an old man who used to go out every morning and walk at the slowest, feeblest pace, to the market or the park. On one occasion shots began ringing out all around him; a youngster began to run, and the old man sneered at him: “Run, run, you young fool. D' you think you're faster than a bullet?” Yes, we learned to distinguish the hardly visible dividing line between existence and that the “other side”, to discover the secret map of safe ways to navigate our own city, according to which the shortest is not necessarily the quickest. We learned to sense death in the air, often long before it actually arrives; we learned the strange metaphysics involved in recognizing the right moment to cross an open space - since, in fact, there is no point in waiting, you just have to choose the right moment.
One learns to read the hidden omens in the apparently most ordinary things (the order in which a few pebbles lie upon the ground, the angle at which a door stands open, the direction from which a pigeon flies and its choice of which branch to land upon). Put simply, many learned to see (as Castaneda puts it), or entered deeply into the art of what the ancient Greeks called entelechy, or acquired knowledge of a secret science (in Rudolph Steiner's phrase) - although, of course they had no idea that they had done this, and when they spoke of it at all, would call it luck (“imagine - I stopped to tie my shoelace, and a mortar fell and killed three people right where I would have been”), or fate (“I was literally two paces ahead my own death”), or impulse (“on an impulse I turned the corner by the department store, though I was actually headed for Marijin Dvor”), or instinct (“I simply knew that something was going to happen, so I ran outside and brought my kid in”). In this way many Sarajevans became metaphysicians (even though many of them had probably never even heard the word), or more simply, wizards – magi trained in that subtlest of all arts, that balancing on the narrow tightrope between life and death. Naturally, without intending or desiring to do so - by force of circumstance, as some like to say. And what was in question were not merely necessary (and sometimes “unnecessary”) venturing out into the open, and the presence of Death which breathed down our necks constantly; but the many other things which were in agreement with the ancient disciplines of occult practices: isolation, as in some Tibetan monastery, a reduction of intake as in the strictest ascetic tradition. There was no electricity, so night after night we kept vigil in total darkness, looking only “into” ourselves. All life was reduced to the four basic elements (fire, water, earth and air) in which the material word lost all meaning. Time lost all indicators of process or charge (in Sarajevo only the seasons changed), and was reduced to single, completely empty moment of pure existence.
But a count was well kept in Sarajevo, every day: three, five, ten, twenty-five… The news gave us the horrendous count every evening in bulletins to which, sad to say, we all became accustomed and indifferent, despite the fact that people are certainly not numbers. And speaking of numbers - they hurled so many shells at us, so much ordnance it was enough to kill every single one of us a hundred times over. They should have killed us all, but they didn't.
And me? I had an angel on my shoulder.
GOD IN THE SKY ABOVE SARAJEVO
He wasn't exactly sitting on my shoulder, but he was there, right behind my ear, on the nape of my neck where I couldn't see him. When I needed to, I heard his voice, my sense of security gave me the idea that he was always there and was looking after me. I would sometimes try to speak to the Almighty himself, but overall it was easier to communicate with his deputy.
It was around the Whitsuntide in Sarajevo in 1992 and, just as with occurrence of the yellow snow - many didn't even notice it (why did the Almighty manifest Himself at precisely the moment when everyone had to take shelter in the basements?), and those who did notice did not pay any attention to it. People would generally believe the news from the radio, pressing their ears to the sets praying to finally hear a piece of good news. There were no good news, however, and every new announcement was worse and more devastating than the previous one, until finally all the announcements began to repeat themselves in a vicious cycle.
My child needed milk, so in the middle of the turmoil I had to run upstairs to the apartment. In a rush, I poured some milk into the pot, heated it, and drained it off into the bottle. I was drawn to the window, and peaked through the curtain. The building was high up so most of City was visible. It was a weird and a shocking feeling to see the bombardment from above (almost as if on a movie screen); it looked magical and marvelous at the same time: the red-lit night sky, the glare of fires, the flashes of exploding shells, the light of illuminated bullets like comets, the rockets leaving traces behind and bursting like the fireworks into a thousand colors, the marker shells descending on parachutes shedding a warm-yellow light. Fuck it, I could have even have enjoyed the beauty of it all were it not my City that was burning, were those houses not our houses, were people not burning inside them, were they not breathing their last breath seeing their own arms and legs chopped off and thrown around the rooms, were those not our children in the basement, and was that not my own child's fear that I saw in his eyes. I thought of that general up there in the mountain, fucking bastard, in charge of all this - sitting in some folding chair and gleefully orchestrating the fire. Like a movie director, fuck him, who has fulfilled all his dreams - may his own movie fuck him, may he be hoist with his own petard. Yes, the Devil himself was manifesting his magnificent and magnetic beauty. Yes, fuck it, and maybe I too could succumb to the ghastly fascination of the evil that was taking place all around me; and maybe I would deliriously have continued with my pornographic-aesthetics “fuckings” had I not, God be thanked, raised my eyes - much higher that the paths of the rockets and shells straight up, to the stars (it was May, and the heaven was absolutely clear), where, despite everything, the universe still survived. I saw the moon, full of light, radiant; and right beside it, high above Hum hill and all Sarajevo, a tiny solitary cloud, a cloud in the shape of Divine Creature holding out a hand palm-upwards. I could hear that Tija had also come upstairs, he was stirring some snack for his daughter, and my aunt was searching around for a potential cigarette. I called them to come quickly to the window, held back the curtain.
“Look! It's God Himself!”
“Uh, uh”, said Tija, and made off downstairs while the porridge was still warm.
Translated by Aida Krneta
After a number of different editions and translations in various European languages the Yellow Snow / The Print of the Dragon's Paw will appear soon as an eBook in English edition.
This is an extract from that translation.
The novel is now available in Dutch, German, Slovenian and Bosnian in eBook version, as well as in Polish, Greek, Dutch and German in hard copy.
