Wednesday, January 31, 2001

'They walk the streets at night . . . just because they can'

By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
SallieS@Juno.com

Editor's note: Paula Kreiner and her husband Ray lived in Sarajevo for much of 1999. She says she is still sorting out her memories of life amid the devastation of 10 years of war, and may never really understand the complex problems of a society that became fragmented along religious and ethnic lines.

When she stepped from a restaurant recently, she had a moment of insight that helped her understand, if only slightly, what soldiers experience when something reminds them of combat. It's been more than a year since she left Bosnia, but she remembered how it was there: "As we exited a coffee shop, we'd hear this horrible clank in unison. It was the slamming of magazines into automatic weapons. It's little things like that a smell, a taste. For the first time I think I understand what the fellows coming back from Vietnam experienced when they had flashbacks."

Kreiner has consented to The Citizen's editing and paraphrasing a small part of the voluminous correspondence she and Ray sent to friends and family during their stay. Except for the first paragraph, written to an elementary school child, the goal is to portray everyday life, and not to try to interpret politics.

A terrible thing happened here just a few years ago. War broke out among the people of the nation known as Yugoslavia after WWII.

It was a nation comprised of many different small countries, and of people of vastly different religious beliefs. After the death of the strong leader Marshal Tito the central government weakened and finally fell.

The former countries that had been pulled together to make up Yugoslavia, among them Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, decided to fight it out to try to control as much land as possible. Along the way, they also decided they wanted all the people in their country to be the same both by heritage and religious belief.

Even if your family had lived next door to people for hundreds of years, and if that family was different from what your leader had decided your new county was going to be, that "different" family was to be killed.

Many people fled to other countries to escape. Many cities were attacked with artillery shells, and consequently there is lots of damage. All this happened here about four years ago, but it is still happening a few hundred miles from here today in Kosovo, and may be starting up again in Croatia.

The damage from the war is massive. It hurts to see buildings, hundreds of years old, blown apart. Then you look at the houses. All I could surmise was the shelling was indiscriminate. Almost every house has something wrong, and many are nothing more than shells.

Most houses are built from a concrete frame, where we use 2x4s, with a wooden roof covered with tiles. Next the "shell" is enclosed with windows and doors, concrete walls are painted, and pine tongue-and-grove flooring is installed.

The outside of the house normally is stucco over the concrete blocks. Although the interiors are beautiful, on the outside lots of stucco is missing from the houses that didn't take direct hits, and many like ours have been rebuilt from the shell up. They are still working on the fourth floor here, and we have no stucco.

The fact that a building is not taxed until its restoration is complete is a disincentive to finish. Our town house is very warm, really hot, and I have turned the thermostat down. The cleaning lady said she was cold, but I think she was worried the clothes wouldn't dry for her to iron. The laundry is hung outside even in the freezing fog.

Across the drive was a line full of baby clothes that hung for three days. I feel sorry for the little one that is going to have to wear them. We are drying ours in the house, in the spare bedroom.

I am enjoying the humidity. The air outside has a mild irritant in it that causes most Americans fits, maybe the constant presence of smoke in the air. You have to guess the weather here, because we get no forecast. I am learning to guess what will happen from TV maps that show where the high and low pressures in this half of the world are located.

Food in the markets is very expensive, but if you eat out, it doesn't cost very much. Go figure. The locals don't seem to like vegetables except as a garnish. The restaurants just don't serve green vegetables; they are for the peasants.

This peasant usually stir-fries herself a fourth of a cabbage for lunch every day. I love the local spinach, but it is sold with roots attached and a small serving takes over an hour to clean and prepare. Never will I look at a box of frozen vegetables in the same way.

Salads are usually several leaves of leaf lettuce with a sliced tomato that is almost green, and slices of carrot and cucumber. Oil and vinegar is the only salad dressing they have, although you see Hellmann's Mayonnaise in all the stores. I wonder what they do with it.

I have tasted two traditional meat dishes here, both made from ground veal. One was like a Swedish meatball with a prune and half a walnut in the center, served with thick gravy that has a touch of tomato paste in it delicious. The other was a meat loaf, made with a flat layer of ground meat with herbs, bread crumbs and egg, on which was placed a layer of bologna and cheese, then rolled up and baked as we do regular meat loaf. When you sliced it, it was most attractive with the lunch meat in the middle.

I have really had a hard time adjusting to the time and to sleeping. There are two roosters behind the house and they crow at all hours of the night and day. If I could move the bed I would, but it is huge and there is no place else it could go.

Both of our bedrooms are on the back of the house. You quickly learn to sleep with one ear open, and Mr. Rooster goes off for early morning practice about 3:30, 4:30 and 5:30 for five-minute sessions. All hell breaks loose at 6:30, and for the life of me I don't know why we set alarm clocks except to confirm he is on time. Of course, If he misses a session, and he rarely does, we just lie awake waiting...

Also there are packs of dogs that roam the streets, sending the tied-up dogs into fits. People keep dogs here for protection, for one of the ways the ethnic cleansing occurred was by bombing the houses of sleeping victims. A barking dog is not quieted even if it barks all night.

In the market we visited today, it was great to see so much stuff, but every stall has identical food (unlike those in Germany where individual vendors offer their specialties). Everyone sells the identical same vegetables, so we bought from one, then another. Today I found fresh mushrooms and spinach, complete with roots.

My Bosnian word for the day is "pola," which means half. At least today I was able to purchase a half kilo of items instead of a kilo. Do you have any idea how many prunes it takes to make a kilo? Half a plastic grocery bag would be a close answer.

Most items cost more than in the U.S., and some lots more, like a bag of soap powder, a little over $9. A can of peaches costs $2.80. I just don't know how people do it on what they have. It rained some while we were at the market, but things are freezing again now at ground level and I don't want to walk back on the ice by myself.

There is a fence across our small street the street in front of our house is really our drive since it dead-ends in the middle of the block with "street" on both sides of the fence. There is a narrow walking path around the fence, and all the water from the melting ice flows though that particular spot. You have to walk about five feet on solid ice, and if you fall down, you will slide until you are back where you started.

I walk to most of the places I go and the ice and mud are horrible. To get down the mountain and on to where Ray's offices are located, about two blocks of my journey is along a muddy narrow path that runs beside a very busy street. The path is so narrow two people can't pass, and the cars seem to fly by, often within inches.

Thursday we went to a wonderful restaurant and to the ballet. The two ballets, "Carmen" and "Bolero," were well done. It was delightful and the tickets cost next to nothing ($4 each for box seats).

As we rode through town after the performance, there were thousands of people, of all ages, all dressed in black, walking up and down the streets in almost total darkness. It was about 9:30 and all the shops were closed. I couldn't figure why they were out on a cold night like that. Later I was told that this is normal. They just wanted to see and be seen, I guess a form of visiting.

We found out later that during the war, no one could go out after dark. That is why they walk the streets at night, just because they can.