Caught with the Pants Down

Have you ever peed in the middle of somebody's living room? This would be one way of starting this record. It's a record of a few seconds that elapsed a long time ago but got stuck in my mind in a sort of a permanent present, where they replay from time to time. In the last few years I have come up with many such "few seconds" and "records" (some of them blogged in this little space I inhabit virtually), and I am glad, I want them playing and replaying until I have looked at them long enough.


But I'll start in a more explanatory way. I'll start with the year 2000, which was my second year in Canada, and the second year in my Ph.D. programme, when a professor of mine asked me if I would agree to be a guest in one of his undergraduate classes on the war novel. They had just read the translation of Vladimir Arsenijevic's U potpalublju, and all I'd have to do was come to class and talk. Maybe answer some questions. Describe how it was to live there and then. I explained that I spent the war years in the 90s in Belgrade, where I went to university, and only visited Bosnia a few times to see my parents, but he still insisted that I come. And I accepted, realizing at that same moment that I was accepting something much bigger, something that went beyond me and my grasp, and that instantly squatted down on me heavily and gloomily -- I was accepting to represent, in the space of that one class, everyone and everything involved in the sad business of that war; I was accepting to be responsible -- even if it was only temporary -- for what millions of people felt and thought and experienced at that time. And this quite knocked the wind out of me, like a punch in the stomach.


There I was, for years fumbling around in the deliberate darkness of sentimental inscapes, and now I would have to turn on all the lights, open all the windows, and admit visitors. And make it all make sense.


What did those 40-odd students in the course on the war novel expect to hear? I thought about this for days. I compiled lists of the war-related paraphernalia I could recall. I constantly surprised myself with new memories coming up for air from unsuspected depths. But -- all those bread lines, learning to live without news from home for days on end, spitting and sweating soldiers with frowning machine-guns, wobbly pontoon bridges swaying under the buses like playground swings, silence-tearing bursts of gunfire in the hills that activated the animal in you and made you dive headfirst under the desk -- all this is merely cartoonish stuff once its kairotic moment has passed, no matter how visceral and real it was.


The "real stuff," as it was becoming clear to me, was something completely different, something that happened on the margins, as it were, but that came to symbolize there and then. It's a marginal episode, from -- literally -- the margins of a road, and this is what I told the class a few days later. And in the silence that followed before they asked me anything, I knew they got it.


"The few seconds" I told them about took place in the early 90s and were preceded by several long hours of a bus ride from Belgrade in Serbia towards the capital of Republika Srpska, Banja Luka, in the Serbian part of the partitioned Bosnia, which was then home and where my parents lived. Belgrade, where there was no physical war, was itself a madhouse haunted by anticipated monsters of imminent danger threatening to invade from the west; crossing the River Drina and entering Bosnia was positively a change for the worse. It equaled leaving the madhouse with its symbolic attempt to preserve sanity, for the veritable recreation of madness running loose.


Whereas in the olden times this trip from Belgrade to Banja Luka took 4 hours along Highway of Brotherhood and Unity that runs on the northern, Croatian, bank of the River Sava, it now took 10 hours since the Highway was closed and the traffic between Serbia and Republika Srpska in Bosnia was diverted to narrow village roads south of the river, inside Bosnia. With all the check points, where all the passengers had to show their IDs every time (and there was always some unfortunate whose papers were not satisfactory and who further delayed the process), the trip seemed never-ending. This new, winding route followed the narrow strip in northern Bosnia, better known as "the Corridor," which was relatively safe for traffic as it was in a non-combat zone. It did, however, come within a few kilometers of the front lines in some places and here you could occasionally see a diverging road with a board warning passers-by in big letters that those going beyond that point were doing so at their own risk as they were entering a military zone. Here and there you could also see boards warning parents not to let their children play in the designated fields as they were mine-infested (according to UNDP - The United Nations Development Programme - there were an estimated 670 000 land mines in 10 000 locations in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2004, more than ten years after this story took place).


The road passed by a few bigger towns, but mostly it was small settlements that emerged from the landscape on the sides. Some of them showed few traces of war, but some -- particularly the small clusters of houses intermittently dotting the way -- were reduced to phantom houses. Abandoned and partially or totally bent out of shape, with gaping holes for windows, they stood there dully, lifelessly. One of the worst ghost areas was around Derventa, about two hours before the bus finally reached Banja Luka. Empty, silent, catatonic houses loomed up from around the bend as we passed them in the bus, exhibiting wounds of varying gravity: some were pockmarked with bullet-holes, some crippled by mortar shells, and some missed entire walls or roofs. Once I saw the remnants of a house whose entire upper floor was gone except for one thin wall of what used to be a bathroom, with a white bathtub dangling sadly, naked under the sky. It made me think of a cartoon (but characters in cartoons never get hurt, even if you blow them up).



With a couple of hours to go before our final destination, and no roadside restaurants around, the bus driver decided to stop here for a short break. The girl sitting next to me -- also going back home for a visit -- and I wanted to stretch our legs outside and look for a place to pee. We turned this way and that way, but there was nothing else in sight except half-destroyed abandoned houses, paralyzed under some irreversible spell. As we stepped in the direction of one of them, the driver, who was smoking a cigarette and talking to someone, yelled after us to watch out for land mines. We stopped still, but not really having an option, tiptoed gingerly into the nearest shelter -- the remains of what must have been a big house once. The other girl stayed inside the entrance, and I passed into the next chamber, probably the main room, now with bare walls and floors full of rubble.



Worried about mines, not wanting to be late for the bus, I quickly and nervously undid my pants and crouched. And there and then, as I was crouching and feeling the warm urine leave my body and seep through the concrete underneath, I became intensely aware of what I was doing: I was peeing in the middle of somebody's living room. I was peeing into what used to be the heart of someone's home. I was a stranger, soiling the debris of their presence for no good reason. Who were these people, were they alive, where were they now? How ludicrous. How unacceptable. How.... everything. I walked back to the bus as if in slow-motion, like an astronaut who stepped for the first time onto the new planet she had only been studying in books before.




That was and is the closest I can come to describing how it felt then and there. I don't remember what the 40-odd students listening to me asked me afterwards, the questions and answers were less important -- they were just attempts to rationalize and explain, and by definition fell sadly short of getting at the "real stuff." It was in the short respite between the end of my story and the beginning of their thinking that I think they got it, thanking me silently for letting them catch me with my pants down.