The Paradox Of Loss

Whole Earth, Summer, 2001 by Jasmina Tesanovic

My relative Rada came to Belgrade from the mountains of Montenegro, to look after my father, a widower. Before that time, Rada cared for her sheep, children, and grandchildren--a huge, healthy, emotional, and intelligent woman who loves nature, and, as she puts it, all other living creatures.

Then she entered my father's apartment, a technological pyramid built by an engineer hypochondriac for an asthmatic, disabled doctor (his wife, my mother) who hated people and germs. Rada suffered a severe identity crisis. Windows didn't open, air came through special filters. No sunlight, but an artificial system of buttons that shed light by schedule.

Nature was banned in the name of survival. Rada settled down with the TV and, after a few days of watching it intensively, she started crying. I asked her, Do you want to go back home? No, no, she answered firmly, I dream of sheep every night and I sleep well. It's that news that makes me cry. I never knew there was so much evil going on in the world.

Rada's paradoxical loss is an example of a Serbian proverb: If you have nothing, you'll have nothing to lose. Much like that CNN postmodern view, that makes us screen heroes or primitive aborigines, who live or suffer like movie stars, but only for one day. The problem with these new wars and new losses (when they are not onscreen) is that they are not at all exciting. They are rather boring and very alienating: you find you have no true enemy, no real causes, not even a definite loss, except for your own life ... an unimportant detail in the global game of survival.

I remember a refugee camp in Macedonia, in the middle of the bombings of Yugoslavia and the huge Kosovo refugee crisis: one million living under one roof called the sky.... After surviving the state terror in Serbia, the ethnic cleansing and shelling, an uncertain trip to nowhere among armies that wanted them dead, or out, and armies protecting them.... After the survivors took their first deep breaths and found they had some food, drink, and medicine--their real problem was how to spend the day: nowhere to go, nothing to do.

I visited a refugee camp of war victims fresh from Bosnia, people deeply traumatized by torture, the loss of homes and loved ones, in a well-kept camp near Budapest, in 1995. I was interviewing a rape victim among tears and hysterical laughter, when all of a sudden, composing herself, she asked me: Now wouldn't you like a tin of really good Italian sardines? I'm sure you haven't had them for some time. And a true Italian coffee?

I was really happy to taste those goods. When I offered her money, she said, Keep it for yourself, cash means nothing to me here, we have it all for free and we have nowhere to go. I will also give you some shoes for your daughter.... She was delighted to help me with sardines and shoes, since she knew very well that we in Serbia were living on the black market of humanitarian aid.... Her own loss was complete.

During the NATO bombings, after the customary alarms, we gathered and watched the sky instead of our TVs. During daylight, however, out of our wits with boredom, everybody in Belgrade was painting the walls, the facades, rebuilding the flats, furniture.... A worker came to help me adapt my flat for bombing conditions. That is: move the furniture out of the way, so you won't trip over it when the lights are blown out. Place all the beds in one room, so the family can share the fear and, perhaps, the eventual death. Take care of heavy objects that might fall and crush you during a detonation.

This guy asked me shyly for a glass of water. I gave it to him and he said, Thank you thank you so much, please can I have another one. Sure, I said ... and he asked for another, and another ... until I realized that he came from the part of Belgrade that had been without water for days.

So I said, Well, take a shower please; I will give you some bottles to carry. But he said, No, I bring home the money, my wife brings the water, while the children find the bread. But if I drink enough, I will be OK for a day or two.

This shows that workers are the first to firmly respond to the needs of a new economic and social organization. My own family life was not so well organized, since we are some kind of late-hippie clan with spoiled, loud, Serbian children who grew up in cozy isolation. Personally, what cracked my nervous system was the fact that nobody wanted to accept the change in the rules. The new rules of life during wartime were simple enough. Buy candles during daylight, before you need them. Cruise for cigarettes, bread, bottled water before dark, before you get hungry, thirsty, and crave a smoke. But nobody unplugged our fridge, computers, and TV before the power surges of the detonations. Nobody wanted to hunt in the dark for our missing household articles.

I was cruising the Net with my laptop and batteries, writing my war diary, to be sent off into the world on a regular basis ... assuming, that is, that the electricity or phone lines would work. Light came and went randomly from one neighborhood to another; the same for phone service. While writing my diary and emailing it, I could generally use the same electricity to fry up some meatballs--lunch for my spoiled, uncomprehending family. Power often came in spasms of five minutes or less, not enough time to finish either text or meatballs. A friend's flat might well have electricity, but there was no petrol, no bus, no way to get there on foot before their five magic minutes of light had run out.