While I Wait: A Journey of Recovery

Olja and I, Sarajevo 1993

“We saw them, they passed the Zetra and the Stadium and they are coming this way,” he informed us, “The Sarajevo police joined by the few local gangs and volunteers are trying to push them back, but they are outnumbered.”

Olja and I looked at each other, knowing the streets leading to the Stadium all too well. We made that same trip on a weekly basis, many times in a group with our friends. In the summer we would play on the running tracks and the soccer fields behind the Stadium and in the winter we ice-skated each weekend- night at the Zetra, the indoor and outdoor skating ring built for the 1984 Olympic games.

“Fifteen minutes tops,” Olja and I said in unison, expertly estimating the time it would take for someone to make the trip at a leisurely pace. Already hearing reports and first- hand accounts of atrocities that included rape and murder in the fallen territories, the new information created a chaos and overall panic within the building. Fear became visceral, a physical manifestation of desperation and hoplesness that could be touched, smelled and tasted.

For some, screaming and crying came naturally, others stood silently, their faces pale and sweaty under the flickering of the candlelight. I stood by the doorway looking at Mama and Olja. The air became thick, almost solid and pressure rose making breathing difficult. My head felt heavy and I began to swim inside my body. I tugged at my arms and legs from the inside, trying to get them to move, to do something. The noise stopped, replaced by the humming sound of  blood pumping in my ears and in my forehead. I stood motionless for a moment, my gaze locking in on my sister. I watched but I saw nothing. I disappeared.

Suddenly, I was jolted from this state of silent panic by Olja who grabbed my hand and was pulling me towards the stairway.

“Fuck this shit,” she yelled dragging me behind her as she began to climb towards our apartment .Following her lead I began to run up-stairs. We ran together, skipping three stairs at the time, a ritual we never gave up on since we were little girls.

“Let go of me, I can run by myself” I said, finally escaping my temporary paralysis. ”Where are we going? We shouldn’t be here! Don’t you hear the grenades?” I frantically yelled after  Olja, who waived me off as she stormed in the house.

“I am not going to sit in the basement like a fucking lamb right before a slaughter. Fuck the war and fuck them. I’lll not let them decide how to kill me. I will do that myself before they can get to me.”

She was screaming now. Red faced and hurried she violently opened the medicine cabinet in the kitchen, shaking out each bottle of pills that she found in a large plastic bag. Her actions spoke of her plan wordlessly. My fourteen year old, tough-as-nails sister was planning for us to kill ourselves.

She pilfered through drawers collecting all of the steak knives, a meat cleaver and a meat tenderizer. “Here, hold this,” she showed the pill bag in my hands,  ”collect what you can find. I think that there is some stuff in the bathroom too.”

Slowly, I took the bag and turned towards the cabinet. I looked at the bottles that she already emptied. There was a bottle of aspirin, some antibiotics, few small bottles of homeopathic calming medicine and a vial of ear-drops. “There is no way this will kills us,” I yelled as I turned around, only to find that she was gone.

I followed the sound of banging and crashing into the bathroom, where Olja stood on the toilet trying to reach for nail-polish remover and a bottle of swabbing alcohol.

“Where is Dad when we need him,” I said, thinking wistfully of his medicine chest that would ensure our quick death.

“Yeah, no shit,” Olja responded. “His blood pressure medicine, the immune-suppressants and god knows what other kidney disease crap he has in there would be so good right now,” she said.

“Alright, let’s see what we can do,” Olja mumbled as she ran towards the hallway with armful of “weapons.” We sat on the cold tiled floor lighted by the flashlight and began to sort through our bounty. We collected all the pills in one bag and began to crush them with the meat tenderizer.

“These pills will just make us ill, but they won’t kill us,” I repeated  to Olja as I watched her crush the pills with short and stubborn jerks of her hand. “That’s fine, we’ll mix the nail-polish remover and alcohol and drink them with that,” she responded.

I began to laugh in panic, realizing that everything was out of our control, even the ability to control our own death. As I laughed and cried, she still spoke of her plan to defend us with knives if dying was a bit slower than anticipated. I watched her, this bony, small framed girl, whose feistiness was legendary in the neighborhood. She was so focused on the task in front of her that she failed to understand the futility and comedy of her endeavor.  I loved her so much in that moment that even the possibility of a gruesome torture and death could not spoil the pristine honesty  of love and devotion, illuminated by her protectiveness.

Tags: Ana Turck, Balkans, Bosnia, Bosnian War, culture, history, Identity, international, Love, National Center for PTSD, Sarajevo, Sarajevo 1992, Siege of Sarajevo, war, women