Introduction by Aleksandar Hemon

At the spot where Ferhadija, the main pedestrian street in Sarajevo, meets Baščaršija, the Ottoman old town, there is a sign on the pavement that shows a compass needle stretching between E and W, beside the words “Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures”. Presumably this marks the exact spot where East meets West. Swarms of tourists naturally take pictures at the sign, blocking the pedestrian traffic.

If you walk away from the compass and turn into a narrow little side street, you will reach the door of the Old Temple, the Sephardic synagogue, which now houses the Museum of Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A few minutes past there is a Catholic cathedral with a statue of John Paul II outside it, and a Serbian orthodox church in front of which old men play chess with gigantic plastic figures. The spot where three Chetnik shells massacred a bread line in May 1992 is not far; neither is the Eternal Flame, honouring the partisans that liberated the city in 1945.

Just a few steps from the tourist sign is the Ferhadija mosque. Its back sits against Hotel Evropa and its Viennese cafe, while its entrance and beautiful courtyard face the street. Abdulah Sidran is buried in that courtyard. In the summer, the view from the street of the mosque and his grave is blocked by an awning under which tourists and locals might be enjoying sweets and coffee.

Sidran was a war child, born in Sarajevo in 1944, just a few months before the liberators arrived. He spent part of his childhood in Zvornik, a town on the border with Serbia, but returned home for college, just in time for the 1968 protests. He was already writing poetry, and that year he instigated a subversive reading at the grave of Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević, a nineteenth-century Bosnian poet. One poet who might have attended was Radovan Karadžić, later the war commander of the Bosnian Serbs and overseer of the Siege of Sarajevo, presently serving a life sentence for war crimes and genocide. Sidran and Karadžić were close friends, part of a tight and long-lasting group of writers, whose literary discussions in bars and cafes were often fuelled by alcohol. When Sidran got too drunk to walk, Karadžić would drive him home in his Fiat 500.

Since poetry was not an easy way to make a living, Sidran eventually got a job at the state television station as a dramaturge. Later he took up screenwriting, making his name with the scripts for Emir Kusturica’s first two films, Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell?, 1981) and When Father Was Away on Business (Otac na službenom putu, 1985). Both films were set in the Sarajevo of Sidran’s childhood, and were full of eminently quotable lines. They proved extremely successful at home and abroad.

This period is now remembered as a golden age for the city, and for Bosnia at large, not least because of the investment and civic pride related to the 1984 Winter Olympics. Local soccer and basketball clubs were winning; Bosnian bands were the most popular in Yugoslavia. A whole mythology emerged around the Sarajevo urban spirit. The Bosnian sense of humour bloomed. Sidran was crucial to all that. He became a household name all over Yugoslavia. I remember him as a fixture in jokes, such as one in which he accidentally sobered up after a long time and was shocked by how many new buildings had sprung up in Sarajevo. When he strolled down Ferhadija, people greeted him like an old friend.

That golden age ended with blood. Karadžić and his forces tormented the city and the country for four years. Sidran lived through the siege, hanging out with his fellow writers, drinking in dark basements, parsing the past, trying to make sense of his former friends’ betrayals, writing all along. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, he wrote the script for the first Bosnian postwar movie: Ademir Kenović’s The Perfect Circle (Savršeni krug, 1997). Meanwhile, his old friend Kusturica was committing himself to the Serbian nationalist cause.

Sidran continued writing poetry, and also wrote a lot of prose, much of it autobiographical, including the memoir Scraps (Otkup sirove kože, 2011), from which this fluidly translated excerpt is drawn. He stopped drinking, remarried, and moved out of Sarajevo, first to Goražde, then to a small village near Tešanj; he struggled with health problems, and embraced faith. He avoided politicians and refused to play the role of “national writer” that might well have been available to him. He wrote in beautiful, idiomatic Bosnian, like people spoke on the street. His work is deeply integrated in Bosnian experience. Many of us quote his wise and funny lines in our own conversations and reminisces, knowingly or unknowingly.

I met him in person only once, before the war, when I stopped by the Writers’ House, where he was then a regular, to see Semezdin Mehmedinović, a mutual friend. Sidran, inebriated, was convinced that I was the conductor of the Sarajevo Philharmonic, whose last name was Homen. He cornered me, demanding that I explain how conducting worked, which I couldn’t. Years later, I wrote a story called “The Conductor”, which ends with the narrator, resembling me, holding in his arms an old, drunk poet, resembling Sidran, trying to keep him from the oncoming cold.

Impatience plagues the fingers and the soul alike. It is time to tell the story of my mother’s branch of the family tree: the naive and easygoing Jukićs, whose roots stretch over central and eastern Bosnia, connecting Tuzla with Višegrad. Next to Tuzla is Lukavac, and next to Lukavac is Puračić, a quiet village whose centre, when you look from the hills, forms a circle, like a proper little čaršija, as if it were trying not to be a village.

Puračić was the home of my mother Behija’s father, Omer Jukić, a trainmaster for the Railway of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He was quick to correct anyone who referred to him as an enginemaster. “The trainmaster is in charge of the whole train, while the enginemaster only takes care of the engine!” I don’t know what form of schooling, if any, preceded this career. But in our family, Omer Jukić was remembered as an educated man, with a practical knowledge of German and independent political views.

Trainmaster Jukić and “his” rails wound through and between, up and down the Bosnian hillocks. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to find a sound life partner. He didn’t have to go far: near Višegrad was Međeđa, and near Međeđa was a village named Zahići, and in Zahići was Hafa, a Zahić, with slight but strong Podrinje bones and a sharp, flickering Podrinje tongue. Omer had 10 children (a nice round number!) with her, raising them in Višegrad and then Sarajevo.

First came my mother, Behija, who was born in 1920. There followed, in order of birth: Redžep, Mubera, Remza, Husein, Smail, Ismet, Zekija, Bahrudin and Bakir. Of these, the first three showed their faces on this Earth only long enough to be named. No one among the living remembers how they died. These tiny children were buried in Sarajevo’s Muslim cemeteries, where their graves were covered in grass within a year or two. You can stop by these green patches on the path to say a prayer for their young souls, or to recite the Fatiha.

I have often, in these melancholic years, felt confusion overtake me while looking through our archive of family photos. For instance, I once saw a photograph of my mother leading two boys by the hand down a street. I asked her, “Is this me and Ekrem?” She laughed. “That’s me as a young girl, and these are my brothers, Smail and Husein.” Of course, in a family of 10 children, the eldest may well look like the mother of the youngest.

The children only had good memories of their father, trainmaster Omer Jukić. They repeated one sentiment in particular into our children’s ears, until it was stored there: through his constant travels, he never once forgot to bring a little something back for everyone at home – in addition to the usual bounty: “full bags of nuts and the rest”.

No one in the family recalled an important event that took place in his life in 1929, not long after the 6 January Dictatorship was declared. A handful of lines in a book on Bosniak cultural history did record it, however. It was around the time the JMO (Yugoslavia Muslim Organisation) tried to establish a new Muslim cultural-educational society – the Narodna Uzdanica – to rival the existing pro-Serbian organization, Gajret, which had been under the protection of the royal house of Karađorđević since 1923. (The board of directors included names that are still relevant today: Ismet Gavrankapetanović, Edhem Bičakčić… ) This was a dangerous undertaking. It would be beneficial for today’s smart alecks, who give their associations names in foreign languages, to consider the following: “While drafting its bylaws, the founding committee took the position that the new association should be given a national name, and by so doing, break with the previous practice among Bosniaks of giving associations and various other organisations Arabic or Turkish names… ”

Experience tells me that you only waste your breath trying to talk sense into a Bosniak loon. Anything that is accomplished is done so with a rod and a whip; the rest – forget it! Now, 80 years later, only a political expert could understand the calculations that led trainmaster Jukić, a staunch Gajretee and Višegrad resident, to enroll 13 of “his” railway employees in Narodna Uzdanica. In the subsequent police report, dated 18 September, the commissioner recommended that “the aforementioned Omer Jukić should, in addition to being criminally punished, be moved to a feeder railway line in Serbia”.

My grandfather somehow escaped the punishment. If there had been any investigation or hearing, he must have said something like: “I wanted nothing more than to fill their ‘Uzdanica’ with ‘our own people’.” He quietly relocated to Sarajevo with his family – if not immediately after his reprimand, then certainly before the assassination of King Alexander I in Marseille in 1934.

Family memories of Višegrad must have been evocative and dense. Behija Jukić Sidran never forgot one particular day in 1930, when His Eminence Varnava, the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, toured the Orthodox monastery in Dobrun. Behija, then aged 10, had the honour of presenting him gifts of handmade embroidery on behalf of the town’s female Muslim children. She would never forget the Patriarch’s smile, or the way he patted her uncovered head.

Some 100 kilometres and 24 years downstream, in beautiful Zvornik, on the river Drina, Behija’s 10-year-old son, Abdulah, would present the Pioneer Youth pin “on behalf of our dear comrade Tito” to the president of canton Zvornik, comrade Nikola Andrić. Can anyone explain this circuitous path from Varnava to Tito?

The folly of history! Mister Happenstance doesn’t exist! Coincidences don’t exist! There is only humankind’s inability to connect and understand things across space and time. A philosopher once said: coincidence is nothing but the suit that clothes necessity.

As for the event involving trainmaster Jukić in Višegrad in 1929, it culminates 15 years later, in December 1944. How? The previous year, he had decided to retire from the railways and take refuge in the countryside with his family. They left Sarajevo for Hadžići, where, thanks to his knowledge of German, he managed to set himself up with a job in municipal services.

No one knows whether his heart, newly surrounded by Ustaše, still secretly beat in rhythm with Gajret, or whether it was pure human compassion. All the same, Omer let prisoners (communists and Serbs, Serbs and communists!) escape from the jail that had been set up in the municipal building’s basement, in a manner and with a frequency that was hard to cover up for long. A common war story.

He was subsequently shot by a Ustaše operative during a festive Christmas dinner. The bullet, fired under the table, perforated his loins and lower stomach. One fellow guest pulled the tablecloth off, another laid his body on the tabletop, a third made a futile call to a doctor, and a fourth got through to his children. By dawn, Omer Jukić, trainmaster from Puračić, loving father and loyal Gajretee, had died with his eyes still open.

After Omer Jukić took his final breath, Hafa was left with seven children, until the spring of 1945, when German soldiers, who were soon to flee Sarajevo, killed her son Ismet. His back was turned to the troops when they gave him an order, to which he didn’t respond. He continued on his way before pausing in his step, bending over at the waist, collapsing to his knees and falling face down in the dust – all without understanding what had happened. He hadn’t heard their shots; he couldn’t have heard a thing, because he had lost his hearing one summer before the war, when a ritual swim with the boys at Bembaša was cut short by a cold, nightmarish rain, causing him to suffer severe inflammation of the brain. After going deaf, he learned to read lips, and grew used to silence.

How could the Krauts have known, in their panic, that the young man with his back to them was completely deaf? “Halt! Halt! Halt! Halt!” And halt Ismet did, forever. Does he have a grave in Binježevo, or has it become one with the grassy path?

Barely out of boyhood, in order to lighten the load for his family, Uncle Husein left to live on his own, staying at a boys’ boarding school run by Yugoslav State Railways. He led a quiet life under a railwayman’s cap as a train dispatcher, sitting at a desk in Bihać or Busovača or Kakanj. With his wife, Saima – from the village of Putiš, near Busovača – he raised two bright sons, who he encouraged to attend college. The younger one, Nedim, who wrote poems in his adolescence, graduated with a degree in economics and went on to run a successful private company. The first, Omer (named after his grandfather, presumably), rather eccentric and ruthless, studied mechanical engineering and got a doctorate. We reunited at family funerals.

A couple of years ago, with a bad heart, I dragged myself to the Vlakovo cemetery to bury Ismet, the son of my second uncle, the late Smail. Breathless and sweaty, holding a hand to my chest, I told Omer I would rather not continue on to the grave, but rather sit somewhere until the burial was over.

“My chest hurts!”

“It’s not your chest.”

“Then what is it?”

“Indignation, that’s what!”

I thought long and hard about that. I realised Omer was right. I was gripped with indignation because I was late through no fault of my own, but because of the incomprehensible congestion on the “western access road”. You head out an hour early, just 10 kilometres from the city centre, and you still arrive late! There isn’t a single politician I excluded from my curses. Out of indignation.

Uncle Husein died prematurely, at the age of 62, on New Year’s Eve 1984, in Sarajevo. There was no question of burying him in Kakanj – where his family lived, and indeed where he’d spent his life. No one said it, though we doubtless all thought it: he left Kakanj to die in Sarajevo, and there he would be buried. I composed a poem about him titled “Zeljezničar” (“Railway Worker”):

His life he gave
to Yugoslav Railways
my uncle
Husein Jukić
Busovača six
Bihać twelve
Kakanj twenty-two
sombre years
Then in Sarajevo
among his own
on his brother’s shoulder
he never sees the dawn
of nineteen eighty-five.

He always put on a stern face, and was said to be ruthless, but that is not how I remember him at all. I presume he reserved his strictness for his wife and sons. In Busovača, he occasionally gave me rides on his bicycle. I would sit on the top tube. I don’t know how, but I once managed to get my foot snared in the greasy chain. I screamed, first from pain, and again from fear, when I saw blood.

“Piss on it!” he prompted me. “Piss on it!” Nature’s disinfectant.

Uncle Smail was the softest of the four Jukić brothers. He was a quiet man who occasionally wore a smile under his black mustache. For several years he was troubled by high blood sugar. His wife often caught him sneaking sweets out of the credenza at night. Diabetes eventually visited most of the male Jukić offspring, who had to learn to live with it, including this writer – if it isn’t already irretrievably late for him.

I don’t remember Uncle Smail this way, but if someone told me he was a slipper-wearing, hen-pecked pushover – a papučar – who ceded the household levers and cranks to my aunt Behka, I would take that at face value. All his life he worked as a bookkeeper in a wholesale company, somewhere in Skenderija, around Podtekija. A satchel to work, a satchel from work.

After they moved from Bistrik to Grbavica, a stone’s throw from the entrance to the Željo stadium, the family gathered on his balcony every other Sunday during football season. Because the field’s eastern half wasn’t entirely visible, free kicks from that side passed us by. But who looks a gift horse in the mouth?

It’s always nice to be given an apartment, even in Grbavica. But in those years at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century – in Sarajevo, and particularly in Grbavica – children displayed unusually fierce delinquent behaviour. Five on one, trampling the target underfoot! Surprise blows to the head, a headbutt to the nose! Metal knuckledusters and metal shoehorns sharpened into lethal weapons! Overnight, fairness dropped dead, honour croaked, decency bit the dust.

Smail and Behka had no problems with their clever daughter, Senada. But it proved impossible to shelter their sons from this newly terrible environment. Ismet and Senad, two young volcanoes ready to explode onto the world. It took many years for them to scramble out of their semi-criminal Grbavica half-world.

Smail died long ago, Behka a while after him, Ismet as of yesterday. He fought on the frontline, on Heroes’ Square, through the three-and-a-half-year Četnik siege of Sarajevo. But the bullets didn’t care for him. His heart eventually stopped.

Uncle Bahro left Sarajevo for Vogošća as soon as he finished his apprenticeship to work as a lathe operator; the manufacturing company Pretis was desperate for skilled craftsmen. He married Aunt Safija and was quickly given an apartment. He came to love Vogošća, returning to Sarajevo only when he had to.

It was said that he could read a machine forwards and back, and that he could make a replacement for any defective part with his lathe. (When the siege began, we prayed that the Četniks would spare him because they needed someone well-versed in the machines and other equipment at Pretis!)

Years later, during our rare chess matches, he told me that he regretted completing his engineering degree at the technical school, which he attended part-time while working. “That’s when I frayed my nerves! What good did it do me to formally become a mechanical technician? My Drehbank lathe remained my favourite!” And so dear Uncle Bahrudin became a fisherman. There’s no better salve for the nerves than water, whether it’s a creek, a river or a lake.

Vogošća, April 1992. Uncle Bahro says to his wife Safija and his daughters, Mubera and Almira: “You go on to Sarajevo, I’ll stay in Vogošća. I’m a fisherman, a pensioner, they won’t do anything to me, they know I don’t get involved in politics.”

Later that summer, Fahrija Karkin, who went to the same high school as me, and was then advising the head of the Bosnian army’s military police, Ismet “Ćelo” Bajramović, sent a message via walkie-talkie to Vogošća’s head Četnik, Brane Vlačo, requesting that he pull my uncle out of there. I sat beside Fahrija at headquarters. His face gave nothing away. He told me something contradictio in adjecto, but I heard every unspoken word.

“I can never say that someone is being sought by someone important. They immediately raise the price. Then they want 20 Četnik officers for one of our fighters. Instead I have to approach indirectly. I’ll try with Joja Tintor, too.”

On Ćelo’s order, Fahrija walked over to an enormous metal safe with a ship’s-wheel spinner on its door and took out a bottle of good brandy for me to take home. He admitted to me, 10 years later, at the café Raffaello, that the immediate response that came through on the walkie-talkie was: “Forget about it!”(ie, he’s a dead man). But he had decided it wasn’t something I should hear: “You weren’t ripe for the truth!” I agree. Anyway, in many ways, Fahrija is a smarter man than me. Not that my intellect is particularly difficult to surpass.

For the next eight years, until the start of the new millennium, whenever my Aunt Safija spoke to her dear Bahrudin, her face turned the colour blue. She would sit with a blanket over her lap, staring into space – and speaking into that emptiness, in which she saw and heard her husband. She talked and talked, and occasionally laughed. My dear aunt Safija!

Friday, 11 July 1997. A mass burial at Ugorsko cemetery, near Vogošća, for six murdered Vogošćans whose bodies were uncovered in a mass grave in Vlakovo. What could explain that? Apparently, the Četniks, aware from the get-go that they would eventually “surrender” the area north of Sarajevo “to the Muslims”, hid all evidence of their crimes there. But they did not do the same in the areas west of Sarajevo, which they were sure would remain “theirs” until Judgement Day.

Three or four young hodžas: “Take your positions, everyone, take your positions! Whoever hasn’t performed their ablutions – whoever can’t, doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to – please stand to the side… And you, down there, you shouldn’t have even come… ”

He’s really getting going into his politically charged nonsense now, the packleader with the little black beard. The gathered mourners listen, look at one another. Have we come to a funeral or a political lecture? From the third row, made up of those “down there” – the atheists and members of other faiths – a tall young man with blondish hair stepped forward and bellowed out: “Stop with that talk, hodža! Do your job!”

A better look confirmed that it was him, my ruthless cousin Omer Jukić, from Kakanj. The hodža retorted, cutting the air with his left index finger. Omer barked back once more. Then, from the first row, a skinny young man, unshaven and wearing camouflage, stepped forward as though to break up the quarrel, and said to the hodža: “The man’s right. I was in the trenches, not you. Do your job and leave politics alone!”

I approached Ms Vera, my uncle’s neighbour. A longtime Catholic Vogošćan, she was dabbing her eye with a handkerchief: “Are they trying to drive out those of us with a different faith?”

“It appears so, appears so. Today it’s you, and by tomorrow it will be us too.”

At last, the hodžas proceeded with “their” work, with prayers, though an agonising tension still hung in the air. I shoved my umbrella into the wet ground, mimicking the gestures of those praying around me, while thinking only: Please let this pass without incident!

My tespih is brimming with beads for the names of my dead Jukićs.

Ena Selimović’s English translation of Otkup sirove kože is seeking a publisher.