Too often, stories about war sensationalize the trauma it inflicts—the dead reduced to numbers, the survivors to lists of symptoms. Not so the work of Bosnian writer Nirha Efendić, whose autobiographical novel Buckle, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, offers a compelling vision of what such narratives often omit: the shunning of refugees, the punishments of a post-war economy, the daily psychic grind of living as an undesired and unforeseen survivor. The nature of the narrative is best described by Bosnian author Faruk Šehić, as “. . . a documentary-like, autobiographical work of prose with elements of fiction”—the early chapters narrated by various members of the protagonist Nirha’s family, the later narrated by Nirha alone, following the death of her father and brother in the Srebrenica genocide. The excerpts below are taken from the middle of the novel, following Nirha’s attempts to find her footing after she is finally separated from her father and brother. Of these passages, Elias-Bursać writes: “The challenge in working on this translation was to convey the nuanced sense of the narrator’s grace, strength and gentility as she speaks of such wrenching, tragic subjects.” Read on—
All morning long, Mama and I worked on stitching sturdy yellow cloth for rucksacks. Mama had a Singer sewing machine that my grandfather bought her while she was still in elementary school so she could learn the trade over summer vacation.
Now she was determined to teach me how to sew.
She thought it might come in handy at some point. We knew we had to stuff our whole past into the backpacks, at least the most important parts of it, and set off into the unknown.
This wasn’t easy. There were shells raining down all around us.
My brother had thought he’d head toward Žepa, but he lost his chance through twists of fate and a series of tragic circumstances. We were all in the house that morning, on July 11, 1995, and listened to the many blasts and the sounds of the attack. At noon we saw a throng of people walking, mostly along the main road, toward the UN base in Potočari.
In my rucksack I packed some clothes, a notebook, a pencil and a dictionary. It was a bilingual English-Serbocroatian dictionary published by Sarajevo Svjetlost before the war. My brother had purchased it from a street vendor for 10 DM and signed his name on the first page. I cherish that signature of his—only his hand could shape the letters the way—as my most treasured possession.
The time came when the two of us, Mama and I, chose to leave the house and head toward the UN base. The men would be gathering with a few more members of the family and set off through the forest, but, unwisely, they kept putting this off. They stayed in the house after the two of us left. Father came out to see us off. I remember the moment at the front door. Father hugged me hard and held me for a long time. Our embrace lasted forever. Mama had already started off and came back from the front gate, waiting for him to let me go. He dropped his arms. No words were said. Or I can’t remember any words. In my father’s arms I heard only the thumping of his heart, beating out a pulse of encouragement: Don’t be scared, don’t be scared. . .
At the bridge, a hundred meters below, I ran into my brother. Mama pleaded with him to go with us, that she’d dress him up like a woman, but he brushed this off, insulted, and left. I was angry at him for leaving me with our mother in tears.
I went back a few steps along the old road toward the house again and met Father who was watching us anxiously. I don’t remember what I asked him or he asked me, except that by the expression on his face I saw that the time had come to leave at once and I mustn’t look back. I think he wanted to say: Go, go, go forward. The sky was clear. The sun played with the light on the hot pavement. The sown fields had been scorched, the grass mown, the hay neatly stacked. The occasional bird sang out, and flies buzzed tirelessly as if coming from another reality.
Although the day was hot, Father was wearing a heavy tan twill shirt. Thin, six feet tall, his face gaunt, spare, his cheeks pale, his hair lank. At his lean waist the only thing gleaming on him was the buckle on his belt.
His appearance was at odds with the strength I felt in his arms as we parted.
His brows clashed with the brightness of the day. Only his eyes burned. The river below the house burbled along cheerfully, caring about none of this. The mini-generators on the river had suddenly become superfluous. The bridge stood stubbornly in place; it had withstood the bombardment.
My brother was wearing a red tee shirt. He didn’t want to go with us. He was angry and edgy. A young man with pointless pride. At that moment everything seemed pointless: the house at half mast, the clods of dirt gone gray first from the damp and then from the sun, the sad little rucksacks with their even sadder contents… We proceeded, guided by instinct, seeking the protection of UNPROFOR. We didn’t know that our instinct was in vain. An illusion, plain and simple. Our lives and our choices were almost wholly beyond our control. You could make whatever choice you pleased, but the outcome had already been set for you. We couldn’t know that then! Yes, there were those who didn’t trust UNPROFOR. Some of the men ran off, helter skelter, no goal in mind, by inertia, just to survive. Into the woods, then through the forest. . . Doomsday.
Zagreb, October 1995
After he and I saw each other that one last time by the bridge, I changed addresses a lot. In Tuzla I stayed only briefly—a town, and high school I never grew to like because of the physics class, especially the physics teacher—so Mama and I decided to move on. Getting out of Tuzla at the time was treacherous, but if you avoided the area controlled by Serbian forces it was possible; a truce had been signed by then with the Croats.
It took us a full thirty-six hours to travel from Tuzla to Zagreb because of the zig-zag route we had to follow to avoid their territories. We made it first to Split, and only then to Zagreb.
While still in Tuzla, in September at the beginning of the school year, I ran into a few who’d survived Srebrenica, who showed up in my classes at the Tuzla Meša Selimović gymnasium.
We understood each other without a word, but none of us at that moment were able to take in anything or think about the subjects we were learning. The first days went by in a blur. I believe the teachers, too, needed time to acclimate to us. I still recall the words of one of them:
“You are here, now, at the finest school in Tuzla, so don’t think this is a humanitarian organization.”
Today I don’t recall that any of them offered us extra tutoring, let alone conversations with the school psychologist. There must have been a psychologist on staff, that school must have had one. On another occasion, a teacher whose face I can’t remember, asked us:
“What sort of students are you?”
After a few moments of silence—and there were five or six of us there along with some thirty young Tuzlans—I drummed up the courage to say:
“We’ll show you who we are.”
She glanced at me, skeptical, but still I saw a flash of respect in the gazes we were exposed to.
I don’t blame anyone. Nobody knew how to handle this. And now we are at a loss for how to handle refugees, migrants. But they could have shown us the most basic humanity. Everyone can summon that within them when they choose to. I could bring up sadder memories, but still I believe that they couldn’t comprehend what we’d been through. Instead, they saw us as if we were a huge ballast weighing down upon the beleagured Tuzla community.
This time I was a coward: I did not remain at the Tuzla gymnasium to prove myself. I don’t think that having to prove oneself is right; you break yourself but the people around you see only what they care to see. Every step forward matters in the shaping of your personality. It was when my work was graded with a plus sign after I successfully completed a math problem on the blackboard in front of the class that I finally decided I’d leave, go anywhere. The plus sign was meant to serve as a prize or incentive, and no doubt I would have received a failing grade had I not known how to solve the problem. But when a local Tuzla girl solved a problem like mine just with different digits, she was given not a plus sign but an A.
Clearly we were being faced with prejudice, with the assumption that we would never be able to accomplish anything with our lives, especially not here, and we were expected to vegetate like plants and be held apart as if we had the plague.
There were plenty of other examples which led me to conclude that we would not have an easy time of it, even if we were every bit as capable as the others, even if there had been no trauma, even if we’d had money and a roof over our heads and were not tormented by such terrible pain. . .
Ah, you’re overdoing this, he’d tell me, that’s what he always said when I thought I could boast of a minor success, and he had no patience for hearing me out which I complained: Crybaby. . . His teasing, his response to my concerns, made me tougher, and that’s why I miss him so much now. I made the right decision: I left.
But everything in Tuzla wasn’t bad. I remember one particularly nice girl. Maja Ibrišimović. Oddly, I ran into her, of all people, ten years later in Sarajevo and then again after that—beautiful and daring, with an open-hearted, well-meaning gaze, successful in her career and confident in her life.
Those first days of school in Tuzla she offered me support and understanding, or maybe it’s just that at the time this seemed so huge for me. She was the only one with a sense of grace, unlike most of the other girls. She was mature for her age, I don’t know what she’d been through in life, we never spoke about her life, but the cusp of our shared experience of the world formed a place where we found each other. I loved Maja and love her today, though I don’t know where she is or what she’s doing. I was drawn to everyone who reminded me of her.
But I shouldn’t be preoccupied with culprits and wounds, not while I’m thinking of him, not when I want to tell him about all the things that have happened to me in the course of this time without him, my father, so he’d see it all and know of it right away. The weight of unspoken words was my burden to bear. This is the burden for all of us to bear who survived the genocide. Something in the world changed irrevocably, the harmony of living shifted because those who’d been killed and disappeared were missing. It’s as if you’re walking down a road and look into the woods and see that the forest has thinned. As if some of the trees have been erased from existence.
The weight of unspoken words was our breakfast, lunch and dinner.
My God, how tangled all of this is! If only I could live as if nothing had happened but such a thing would only be possible if only, indeed, nothing had happened. . .
“Oh, come on, enough with the complaining,” he’d say, “let’s see what happened, why don’t you move on already?”
Fine, I’ll try.
After arriving in Zagreb, I sniffed the smell of freedom for the first time but also felt Zagreb was a strange, foreign place. Leaving Tuzla brought none of the relief I’d hoped for, and what’s more, there were new challenges to face—more daunting than ever.
(. . .)
Zagreb, February 1996
I woke up in a strange bed, in a strange place, flooded by the breadth of the space in which my loneliness resonated with something that only be called homelessness.
I was angry at myself for having to wake up.
Why was I dreaming again, unending dreams? Could I at least sleep through the rest of my life? Was this me reading a letter, watching a play or a film? Or had I lived my past life in scenes where the me was missing? Phantom-like, I was missing my own self. In vain I looked around, a wasteland, I could make no sense of what was going on with me.
Mama left, and I stayed on in Zagreb.
Everything had to coalesce in a few resolute moments. Mama decided to leave me in a school that would largely determine the spiritual path of my life going forward.
I was too weak to bear the weight of separation and had there been no people to encourage me, I probably would have chosen a rather different path. Unruly, wandering, I survived.
I started attending school. Soon I realized that only a very few of the students I met at school were from Zagreb. Most of them were refugees from various parts of Bosnia. This helped my proccess of adapting to the new environment.
This was a hard time and I probably wouldn’t survive it now if I had to go through it again. I had no psychotherapeutic sessions to help in my recovery. I had to fight for myself alone. To overcome the physical pain, to bear myself with dignity under the pitying glances of the people around me and struggle with my inner suffering at the same time.
When did I first begin to laugh? When did I first catch myself jotting down pearls of wisdom from my classes? When was I first able to retain something I’d read with comprehension? When did I first begin to pay attention to the people around me, to start going out?
Life began, somehow, to roll along. I loved a few of my teachers, while others, of course, I didn’t love. I owe gratitude to everyone from whom I acquired knowledge. After high school, I was offered scholarships to study abroad. I chose not to and instead felt clear that the moment had come for me to return to Bosnia.
I had a decent scholarship but it didn’t cover my living expenses.
Zagreb is an expensive city, the rents are far higher than they are in Sarajevo, and food costs much more. Mama wasn’t able to send me any money right away. I couldn’t register as a refugee. That autumn Croatia was no longer welcoming displaced people from Bosnia.
As part of a methods course we attended at the madrasa we were required to perform gasula, the ritual washing and preparing of the dead, at least once in the course of our schooling.
The religious cleansing of the deceased paid well, and there were more dead bodies than there were madrasa students. Many were reluctant to do it or found clever ways to evade the obligation, while for others this became a source of additional funding, and for some, it was their sole source of support.
I was not physically strong and found that the most difficult part was lifting the body from the coffin and laying it out on the tenešir, the bench on which we washed the body. Dead bodies are much heavier than one might think. Like the big hindquarter of a cow hanging in a butcher shop, that’s how I think of it, though I’ve never, myself, lifted such a thing in a butcher shop.
Well I certainly saw all sorts of death!
At night I dreamed I was running away; my hands stank from the plastic gloves, thick ones, pink or yellow, I was often loath to put them on.
To my surprise, I saw that many bodies were not ugly and the deaths were not gruesome.
Some of them went with a smile. Some gray-haired grandmothers reminded me of the characters from Russian folktales, based on the mental image I’d created when I read the tales.
I imagined my own body without a soul. A meaningless vestige that everyone steers clear of because it reeks, soulless. Nobody needs it and all would prefer to look away or be done with it as quickly as possible, because, because…
I was afraid I’d see a death more chilling than these civil deaths. That I’d come across a body unlike ordinary bodies. Each time a coffin was first opened I was afraid I’d catch sight of what I so yearned to see. Yet again, I hoped I’d never see that particular body.
Translated from the Bosnian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Nirha Efendić is a folklorist, literary historian, curator of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a survivor of Srebrenica genocide. She has written several studies in the field of ethnology and folklore, and dozens of works that have been translated into European languages. She is a recipient of the AMUS (Association of Composers-Music Creators) Vlado Milošević award for her contribution to musicology in her country.
Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating writing by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s. ALTA’s National Translation Award was given to her translation of Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer (Gec i Majer; Harvill, 2004) in 2006. After several years of working at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, she wrote the book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug of War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.