May 1994
Stefan stood in the stairwell of the building where his cousins lived and took out a thick chisel-tip marker. Someone had made a mistake on the wall. They’d spelled his name with a ‘phe’ instead of a ‘fa’. He blacked out the three letters and wrote the two above, so now the message read, correctly:
DON’T GIVE HIM YOUR MONEY, STEPHEFAN LOVES THE REFUGEE LIFE
When he considered it further, he realised that the author of this message (who, if he had to guess, was one of the second-floor kids) probably did not understand much about causal relationships. Ultimately, though, he had to agree with them: he didn’t expect money from anyone, and he did on the whole enjoy his life much more now than he had before he’d been relocated. He accepted these two clauses without much further deliberation.
And below that, in a different hand:
GO HOME AND FIGHT FOR YOUR COUNTRY INSTEAD OF COMING TO OURS
To which Stefan thought, jebeš to. (He knew his mother would approve, curse word or no). He was too young to be a soldier anyway, which is part of why he now stood in a rusty hallway in Darwin, Australia, contemplating the musings of common vandals.
He was also too young to work full-time and be a tax payer, which the next bit of wall helpfully suggested. He had re-entered school in the middle of the year, and while he was a full year older than most of his classmates, he still needed to graduate before he could get a job. Because of the age gap – made more pronounced by the way he towered over other students and even some of the staff – his teachers took particular care in expressing their worry for Stefan’s prospects. It manifested in the looming question of what he would do when he finished secondary school, a question not quite asked out loud, but palpable in their careful evasion of topics like higher education, work, or the future. University seemed out of the question; he was already taking extra English just to be able to understand his homework. So then what?
Whenever presented with the opportunity, Stefan would announce that he was going to be a rock star. His specific words were usually, “I will be like Nirvana, with musician,” and he waited until his listener filled in the blanks: “You mean Kurt Cobain?”, “You want to be in a band?”, etc. Once the language barrier was overcome, it would sometimes get him a laugh or two. It irritated him when people responded seriously to this proclamation, asking how he’d manage, telling him he’d better brush up on his English, practice his scales, but it grated on him even more when they were too eager to accept it as nothing but a joke. In any case, it wasn’t true; Stefan, like many fourteen-year-olds, had only the vaguest outline of a direction in life and no idea how to follow it.
On his way up to the top of the building, he spotted a couple of other new messages; they were not addressed to him or about him, but he stopped to read them anyway. He needed as much practice reading as he could get, and there were words on these walls that he suspected he wouldn’t be able to find in a school book. The stairwell, from the ground floor up, was a mess of words. (Nobody went into the basement, mostly because there were rumours that it was home to a recluse who stole the eyes of any children who strayed below. Stefan had his doubts, but he avoided the basement nonetheless.) Many of the lines on the walls were song lyrics – Can You Feel the Love Tonight? written in flowing permanent ink, with Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm scraped beneath it.
As soon as he got to his cousins’ place, he asked them about all the words that he couldn’t find in his pocket dictionary. Unfortunately, the cousins were rarely helpful, and it seemed that today he would learn nothing of use. He asked about his mother, too, but they had no news. Aleksandra had been going to doctors for several months now, and nobody could tell what was wrong with her. The hospital staff thought maybe it was a form of psychosomatic ache from PTSD or other stress-related disorders, though she insisted the only thing wrong with her was the excruciating, chronic abdominal pain. They had run a few tests, but the tests gave no answers. They gave her ibuprofen for the pain, but it didn’t seem to help at all, and because she kept coming back, they agreed to help her manage the discomfort until they found the source of it. She had been in hospital for two days now, and it didn’t seem as though she would be leaving anytime soon.
The cousins offered Stefan a lukewarm glass of strawberry squash as consolation and asked him how he’d done at school that day.
September 1996
Stefan had gotten hold of a sacred item. It was a copy of a CD – Bajaga i Instruktori, their 1993 album Muzika na struju. One of the kids in the neighborhood, Luka, had received a package from “back home,” and word had spread quickly. Everybody wanted a part of it. The bidding began soon enough. One packet of Smoki went for $10, single pieces of Bronhi candy went for $1 each, Kiki for $2. The kid dealt out his treasures like an Anglo-Saxon king to his loyal thanes, except he had better profit margins.
Muzika na struju had a particularly high asking price. In addition to $12, it required a trade: Bajaga’s Muzika for Placebo’s self-titled debut album. It took Stefan two weeks to get the money and Placebo but he got there before anyone else, so the CD went to him.
He walked back home, disc in hand, complete with a cracked CD case and a flimsy bit of paper that served as the album cover. In the stairwell, he checked for new graffiti but found only the old quotations and arguments (last year, someone had inscribed a lyric from Bajaga’s older album, Jahači magle: “Dane protekle brišem gumicom,” – “I wipe away days gone by with an eraser” – and looking at it now, he would bet it had been Luka).
Upon entering the flat, he tried to brush past his mother in the corridor, but she caught him by the elbow first, asking, “Kud’ ćeš?” and telling him to slow down. He tried to hide the CD behind his back but could not make the gesture look inconspicuous, and finally had to show her what he’d gotten, explain how he’d paid for it, and finally, sheepishly admit that he’d intended to give it to her as a birthday gift, which made her tear up like he worried she might. He remembered his parents playing the Belgrade band on repeat in the 80’s. He had begun to miss the music, too.
The conversation continued along these lines:
“I’m your mother, I’m supposed to be giving you things, not the other way around.”
“It’s nothing, it’s just a CD.”
“But you shouldn’t –”
It went on, until they compromised by agreeing that the CD belonged to him, but that she could listen to it any time she wanted to. They played it in the living room, then, and agreed that it wasn’t their best – their best being Jahači magle – but that they’d still take Bajaga over Backstreet Boys, even if the latter was far more ubiquitous.
December 1996
Aleksandra’s illness finally received a diagnosis: polycystic kidney disease. The ibuprofen she had been taking on and off for two years filtered through the kidneys, causing complications. She was hospitalised again following a seizure. Her doctors began to suspect she might not be exaggerating her pain.
December 1998
The heat crept in on the early morning. Stefan leaned over the edge of the balcony to get as much of the cooler air in his lungs as he could before it turned into stifling humidity. It had been a long time since he’d breathed the crisp, fresh air he’d always associated with this time of year.
One of the cousins, Toma, stepped onto the balcony, coffee in hand, and looked out over the other residential buildings whose windows reflected a bright light despite the low angle of the sun. Stefan looked out as well. He’d heard that Darwin, Australia had been rebuilt several times, and to him the large spaces between each building seemed empty, as if there were supposed to be smaller buildings between them but they hadn’t been put in yet. He’d gotten used to the palm trees and the insects, and even to some extent the warm December rain, but the low, wide architecture of the place still seemed foreign to him. After some time, Toma elbowed him and headed back inside, setting his mug down on the kitchen table as he passed through. Time to go. Stefan hesitated to follow but didn’t argue. On his way down the stairs, he found a new inscription on one of the walls, probably by one of the teenagers: enjoy the silence.
The demolition site was in a nearby neighbourhood, the ruined building shaped much like the one they’d just walked out of. They joined the rest of the crew, some of them also Eastern European by name or origin, including a few Bosnians who refused to talk to Stefan or his cousin. Some of the others didn’t seem to mind or otherwise preferred to keep to themselves entirely. They all set about work quickly and quietly, carrying on from where they’d finished the day before.
As the summer after school had begun, so had Stefan’s summer job. Marko, the other cousin, had been told to stay home for a while after injuring his wrist clearing rubble, which meant that somebody needed to step in and fill the role. Stefan had turned eighteen three weeks ago, and as a birthday present, he’d gotten his first real job courtesy of the cousins.
He knew that between Marko’s injury and his mother’s medical expenses, with her stays in the hospital and having to be put on dialysis, they needed the money. But he didn’t expect the monotony of construction work; every day passed more or less the same. He’d wake up early in the morning, go to the balcony, and wait for Toma to come fetch him. He came home tired every day. It was worse than school, which Stefan had long regarded as a waste of time, as far as he was concerned.
He could speak English well enough by now, but that didn’t make reading or writing it much easier. He passed his classes with unexceptional marks, and his teachers had given up trying to motivate him to do better. Many of his old classmates were going on to internships, universities, office jobs. What use would his certificate be to him? As far as he knew, he could very well be working on this site for the rest of his life, chipping away at walls and building them up again, to the alien design of some Darwinian architect.
July 1999
Marko’s wrist had healed a few months ago, and between him, Toma, and Stefan, they were able to earn enough money to buy a computer, a clunky thing with a million wires and a box that gurgled and cut off the phone line whenever it hooked up to the internet. Stefan fell in love with it immediately. He quickly discovered file-sharing software in the form of Napster and began downloading music he would leave blaring through the speakers all day on the weekends. At first, he looked for the stuff he listened to on the radio, then searched for music that had been popular decades ago – Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and the like – and finally it occurred to him to try and find music he’d listened to back home. He typed in “Bajaga” but the search returned nothing. Same with “Idoli,” “Prljavo Kazalište,” “EKV” – nothing, nothing, nothing. The only thing he found was Bosnia’s 1999 Eurovision entry, “Putnici,” which was impossible to download because the only person who owned it seemed to always be offline, so the file never finished transferring.
He told his mum about the computer when he went to visit her in hospital for the first time. He hadn’t been allowed to go before, but as her condition stabilised somewhat, the doctors lifted the restrictions on visiting. He went once a week. Some days she could barely speak, but others she was almost like her old self. He told her he’d play her all the music on the computer when she came back home. She said she couldn’t wait to hear it.
While they’d initially found Stefan’s fascination with the computer amusing, Marko and Toma got annoyed when they discovered they were not able to use the phone while Stefan was online. They barred him from using the computer for more than one hour a day and told him to go outside instead.
Stefan had nothing to do outside anymore. The kids in the neighbourhood had moved on. They no longer hung around in front of the buildings, or in the stairwells, or on the monkey bars in the playground behind the grocery store. He didn’t have any friends left from school because he’d hardly made any to begin with, and nobody from work was near the same age as him, so he’d never developed more than a casual acquaintanceship with any of them.
“Why don’t you go hang out with that kid Luka?” Toma asked. Stefan hadn’t seen Luka around in months, and assumed he’d probably just gone to university or something like that. Unlike Stefan, Luka was Australian-born, and he had the privilege of speaking fluent English, which he’d used to his advantage often to win any disputes he and Stefan would get into in those first years in Darwin.
Still, Stefan had nothing better to do now that he couldn’t use the computer, so he walked down the block to where the other flats were – where Luka lived – and he pressed the buttons at the entrance until the door buzzed open and took the stairs to the third floor. On the way up, he looked for any writing on the walls, but they’d been freshly repainted. In one corner on the second floor he did manage to find a tiny pencil sketch of an A with a circle around it. He smiled.
An unfamiliar face opened Luka’s door when he knocked. Apparently, Luka’s family had moved back to Bosnia and put their flat up for rent. The man who now lived there gave Stefan Luka’s dad’s email address, in case he wanted to contact them.
The next day, Stefan spent fifteen minutes drafting an email, unsure of how to address him, since he’d never much spoken to either of the parents. He never got a reply, but a week later he received an email from Luka:
Stefane, brate, how ya going?
As you know, I’m in Bosnia now. Place looks like shit. I’m starting to see why you moved. Anyway, I enrolled in the Ekonomski Fakultet and I barely understand a word any of the professors say. Everybody here speaks some sort of bullshit dialect. I love it. Is this what you felt like coming to Australia? Probably not, I at least speak the language somewhat. You should come back to Sarajevo sometime, maybe tell me what ‘ofirno’ means. Everybody’s saying it, and I just sort of nod and pretend I know what they’re going on about.
What’s new in Darwin?
Luka
So Luka had enrolled in university. Stefan didn’t think institutions like the University of Sarajevo and the Faculty of Economics would already be up and running, but it had been a few years since the war ended. They needed to start sometime.
If Luka was going to university, that meant he was hanging out with people his own age who spoke his language. Well, maybe not Luka’s language – Luka’s language was clearly English, at least for now, although Stefan believed it would probably be a matter of months before Luka got comfortable with Serbo-Croatian too.
Stefan typed out a reply to Luka’s email in the most textbook Serbo-Croatian he could muster. He had to admit, his grammar had started to slip in his years in Australia. The last time he’d been in a Bosnian school was early in 1992, and since then he’d only spoken the language, never used it in writing. Nobody corrected him when he messed up his conjugations at home. Still, he liked the thought of tripping Luka up a little, the way Luka used to do to him, so he chose words he thought he might not know.
A week later came Luka’s reply, also in perfectly grammatical Serbo-Croatian, with English words thrown in for flavour. Upon seeing this, Stefan shut down the computer without reading through the rest of it. It took him two weeks to email back.
They sent emails back and forth for a while, Stefan telling him what was happening in Darwin (nothing of significance) and Luka replying with his own accounts of daily (and nightly) life in Sarajevo. Sometimes Luka would offer news as to what buildings had started being renovated or rebuilt, and this Stefan would relay to his mother on his weekly hospital visits. They agreed that when the whole city was restored and when she was no longer in hospital, they would go back to Sarajevo and see it the way they’d once remembered it.
It never happened. His mother’s condition deteriorated over the months. She died at four a.m. one Tuesday morning, as the machines around her kept quietly whirring.
April 2000
The emails from Luka kept coming about once a month, and mostly consisted of Luka’s accounts of his adventures in higher education. Stefan didn’t have much to say about his own life. He’d been working continuously for the construction company, except for one stint where he’d pulled a muscle in his leg and had to sit out for two weeks.
He was saving up. He had made up his mind to go back to Bosnia, maybe go to university, hopefully find a job there. He had no reason to stay in Darwin anymore. The cousins certainly didn’t need him.
He’d found among his mother’s possessions letters she’d written and received from relatives in Sarajevo. The last letter was dated 20th May, 1999, and it was from her sister, Vera. Stefan thought she might want to hear from him as well.
For the next year or so, Stefan lived carefully. He tried not to spend too much on food he didn’t need, he paid his share of the rent and bills, and he stored the rest away in a savings account. He didn’t devote much time to anything else. The CDs he owned were scratched and unlistenable. Napster had shut down in 2001, before anybody from back home had had the chance to upload anything to it. The corridors and stairwells in his building had all been repainted, the messages once written in permanent ink finally wiped away.
July 2001
Sarajevo International Airport sat at the edge of the eastern side of the city. After twenty-three hours of flying, broken up only by a two-hour stopover in Istanbul, Stefan had made it. The fresh air served as a pleasant reminder of that, as he descended the steps of the plane and walked onto the bus.
He caught a taxi at the airport and gave the driver an address: Porodice Ribar 45. As they drove through town, the driver asked him questions – where he was from, what he was doing in Sarajevo, how long he planned to stay – but Stefan mostly ignored him, offering noncommittal answers while keeping his eyes toward the city.
He understood what Luka had meant when he said it looked bad; a lot of the damage done during the siege still remained. Many of the buildings had holes in them. Parts of the city were grimy and run-down, the bits of exposed metal on some buildings rusted, the paint chipped or blown off entirely. But Stefan remembered the barricades, the piles of rubble, the shattered windows and broken bridges in 1994. The city had become recognisable again, more like how Stefan had known it before the war.
They arrived at the address, and for the first time in his life Stefan paid using Bosnian convertible marks.
His aunt waited for him in the park in front of the yellow building where she lived. When she hugged him, she held on for a good while longer than she had to.
“You’re so tall now,” she said, reaching up to smooth down his hair. “Come on, let me show you around the flat.”
There wasn’t much to show; the flat was a small one-bedroom, not unlike the place where he and his parents lived before the war. The bed he would sleep in was a pull-out sofa in the living room. He talked with his aunt for several hours at the round dining room table in the kitchen, and she poured him a glass of iced tea and gave him a slice of bread and cream cheese. She treated him like a child, but he didn’t mind. It was how older relatives acted around here. The cousins had been in Australia so long, they’d unlearnt this behaviour, but here Stefan could experience it, observe it, take it in and store it away in his memory. He slept well that night, in the comparatively cool Bosnian summer air.
The next day, he went to the Faculty of Economics. Luka and Stefan had agreed to meet there, and Stefan thought it might be a good opportunity to see what it would take to enrol in one of the departments in the University of Sarajevo.
He met Luka at a café close to the campus. He was with a group of friends, whom he introduced to Stefan, and vice-versa.
“Stefan?” one of them asked as he shook his hand, “What’s your last name?”
“Todorović.”
“Todorović. I see.” Stefan realised his mistake too late. A person named Stefan might be a Serb or perhaps the son of a mixed marriage, depending on the surname, but Todorović was undeniably Serbian. Luka, presumably, had an easier time in the capital, being a Marić. Luka’s friend spoke again.
“So, Todorović, where are you from originally?”
Luka answered before Stefan could get around to it. “He’s from Australia, the same town I’m from.”
“Actually, I’m originally from here, but I’ve been living in Australia for a few years.” Luka grimaced at this correction. Luka’s friend, however, looked pleased, smiling almost smugly.
“Oh, so you weren’t here during the war? I guess that makes sense. So, when will you be going back to Australia?”
Stefan told him he doesn’t plan on going back. The guy laughed.
“If you didn’t stay through the war, you’re not going to stay after the war either. Everybody leaves. It takes a certain kind of person to stay. Do you know what I mean?”
Not sure how to respond, Stefan kept quiet.
The encounter with Luka and his friends remained awkward throughout, and Stefan never did learn what the entry requirements for the university were.
In the next few weeks, he set out on various journeys within the country to see relatives and revisit areas he now only had vague, but fond, memories of. He started within the city, but everywhere he went, everyone he would talk to asked him where he came from, how long he’d lived in Sarajevo. He flipped through the job listings in the local newspapers. Upon hearing his full name, employers would tell him the position’s been taken.
Sarajevo seemed smaller than he remembered it. He treaded up and down the main road, Tito’s street; the entire city was built around that one long stretch of asphalt that connected the old town to the newer residential areas, and all traffic between those two points passed directly through it. The dry summer air began to irritate him. The grimy, ruined walls on either side of Tito’s street seemed to stretch taller than they were, the tiny alleyways between them offering little reprieve. He found, unexpectedly, that he wanted to get out of the city.
Vera told him that his father’s side of the family lived in Trebinje, and that seemed a good enough excuse to leave. He had a hard time tracking down the address because it wasn’t in Trebinje proper, but somewhere in the outlying farmland. He asked around for anyone who knew where the Todorović family lived until a distant neighbour pointed out the place.
The Trebinje side of the family consisted of two grandparents and an uncle he’d seen only a few times before. They all sat down in the living room, on a couch covered with a thick, scratchy woollen blanket. Stefan’s grandfather spent twenty minutes describing the resemblance between him and his father, while his uncle stoically sipped his coffee. They asked about his experiences in Sarajevo and he told them of his disappointment.
“At least you got a nice break from work,” said his grandma, which prompted a lengthy discussion about the virtues and difficulties of farm work. (“It never ends,” said his grandpa. “You think, maybe in the winter you can relax, but that is actually when you need to be the most careful….”) Stefan took a cue from his uncle and avoided weighing in on the conversation after that. For the next several hours, his grandparents talked about the farm and the good old days, mentioning people Stefan had never met and retelling stories he’d never heard.
He spent one night on the farm, sleeping on the wool blanket in the living room, but said his goodbyes early in the morning and left for the bus station that would take him back to the airport.
November 2001
Disappointed but not surprised that Stefan had gone back to Darwin, Luka kept up correspondence nonetheless. Stefan found over time that Luka’s writing, in both English and Bosnian – for that was, Stefan learned, what the language was now called – had developed a certain stylistic quality. Luka’s letters reminded Stefan of his favourite song lyrics, and he sifted through them, breaking down the words to find the commonalities between them. He realised, eventually, that it wasn’t the specific words he was using, but a certain tone he took on that seemed both sincere and sardonic at the same time. It was a trademark of bands like Bijelo Dugme and, especially, Riblja Čorba. Luka had adopted this style as his own, and for some reason this irritated Stefan.
He bought a notepad and tried to emulate the style himself, in the form of a song, but the attempts left him frustrated and embarrassed. He ripped the pages out, threw them away, and stashed the notepad in the junk drawer.
January 2002
Another attempt to write in the notepad. Same results. This would not do. He gave the notepad to Toma, who used it as a phonebook. Marko found one of the crumpled balls of paper Stefan had thrown away, smoothed it out, laughed, and then suggested Stefan learn to read before he tries becoming the next Bajaga, or Vasko Popa, or whatever he was going for. At first, Stefan tried to forget this encounter altogether, but after his mortification subsided, he began to see a sliver of possibility.
March 2003
Stefan walked back home from the Senior College, the night air cooling the sweat on his back. He repeated lines in his head, memorising the order of the words and where to put the articles. When he came in through the main entrance, he did not go upstairs, but rather down into the basement. He moved a mouldy table that had been left there to rot, and then took out a marker and wrote the words out on one of the walls. They had been lyrics he’d heard on the bus radio, some twee pop song that had a really good beat. He stepped back to admire the work around him. A litany of phrases, all song fragments in English and Bosnian, stood there on the walls. He had drawn lines between some of them, translations and word equivalents. He had measured out the metres in syllables and stresses. It was a start.
Ana Kosic 