We’re about to leave the little island in Croatia not far from the border with Montenegro to make our way to Belgrade. There are peacocks everywhere on this island, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, towing their long blue and green tails behind them. In some places on the forest paths we can’t get past the males who have unfurled their immense plumage to form a quivering fan. My daughter looks small beside them, even though she’s grown tall now. In the distance you can hear the screams of other peacocks, like abandoned babies, plaintive, rasping, agitated. When you come close they caw, vibrate their feathers and rattle. When I sit in the sun their long blue and green trains slide over my bare legs.
All the time the shrieks in the distance. Infants. Cicadas. Gaza is 2,000 kilometres from here. Like a ghost in the throat, nausea each morning, political resignation that feels as though it is slowly turning into a disease, strange symptoms, sensations, nightmares. It is almost exactly as far away, or as near, from here to Gaza as it is to the border of Ukraine, the country that my country is supporting with weapons, money, grand words. The strong feeling of an era coming to an end, or that these are the last days of something, or that the last days have already been.
In the middle of the island there’s a salt lake, where more peacocks stand and stare, like mini philosophers, while we swim in and out of the saltwater caves. Wherever I go I take Omar El Akkad’s red book, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This. It has warped with the water and the ink has run. Like an amulet, or a bible, the immense and somehow lingering grief and rage flowing through it is with me everywhere. He writes about this being the weightless time, when genocide still goes on, news “can no longer be called new,” but before the history books arrive. He writes of Gaza as a country held captive in a language that says: “Yes, this is tragic, but necessary.”
We swim in the lake for a while and then we go back to the sea. I float on the surface while she jumps from the highest rocks and I watch as gravity pulls her into the water. In a few days it will be thirty years since the Srebrenica massacre. She’s fifteen now. When she was a year old we spent six months living in Berlin. I was giving a course at the university on alienation and destruction in literature. We used to push her older brother and her through the snow from one playpark to another in a giant pram. When spring arrived—it was the Arab Spring—we started going to Berlin Zoo. The polar bears paced around psychotically on their rock.
We read a chapter from Dubravka Ugrešić’s Ministry of Pain each week on the course I ran in Berlin. The story centres on Tanja, a nanny and literature scholar in exile in Amsterdam after the war in former Yugoslavia, who has to give a course in Yugoslav literature. Since the country whose literature she is supposed to teach no longer exists, other than as phantom pains in her students, she creates a kind of dream faculty with the exiled Yugoslavs who attend her course. Instead of lectures and tests she establishes a Ministry of Pain, a mental S&M club and memory laboratory to salvage the wreckage of remembrance from the Titanic they call the old country.
Where we are now they say you sleep like a “slaughtered child” if you sleep deeply.The theme becomes Yugonostalgia and the aim of the course to survive the deep sense of loss and all the humiliations of the new country, such as the eternal wait for “papers.” Their collective memories are kept in one of those cheap jumble-sale bags: a plastic bag with red, blue and white stripes, a kind of parody of the Yugoslav flag. I asked my students in Berlin to go out and each buy a bag like that. It was a fantastic sight with fifty examples of “the cheapest bag in the world” on the rows of seats in the university. I asked them to find different things in the novel and in the city of Berlin that were to do with exile. They went around Berlin with those bags, which by the end of term were bursting.
I look out for the bags here in Croatia, but I can’t see them anywhere. I was at high school when the war broke out in the Balkans, and the whole time I felt I missed that war, it passed me by. I remember thinking: I’m missing this, and then I kept on missing it. Peace negotiations were going on at the time between Israel and Palestine, so far away, as far away as it is now. Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize after that and was on television every day. We always miss the most important thing, as Marguerite Duras wrote.
The peacocks coo and rattle and now she’s asleep next to me in the sun, gently twitching, somewhere deep inside herself. Where we are now they say you sleep like a “slaughtered child” if you sleep deeply. In Ministry of Pain Ugrešić compares this deadly metaphor with others that are more peaceful, like the English “sleeping like a lamb” or the Swedish “sleep like a baby.” She writes that it’s obvious there would be war in a country with such violent metaphors. Ugrešić was born here, in what is now Croatia, but further north, in Kutina. She was called a witch, because she hated nationalism and refused to call herself Croat or Serb or anything else connected with nations. Maybe she really was a witch; she did indeed have special powers and a literary force that was unique.
With the peacocks murmuring beside me I scroll through courses in Public International Law that I studied long ago. I’ve never thought of going back since I finished my degree in 1998. It’s as though I believe something around me would become clearer if I repeated some of those courses.
“But why do you want to do a course?”
She has woken up and is looking down at my phone.
“I don’t know. Because I feel confused. It feels as though truth and untruth have swapped places.”
“I wouldn’t do a course if I were you.”
“What would you do?”
“How would I know? I’m only fifteen.”
“Whenever you want something you always say you’re sixteen.”
This you know without four and a half years in a law faculty, this you know regardless of what the Swedish government says about waiting for the ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague: the Genocide Convention didn’t come into existence for us to be able to establish, in hindsight, many years later, in a court, that a crime against humanity has been committed, in the same way that we don’t let a murder happen before our eyes without ringing the police, with the thought, “Oh well, the court can settle the facts of the matter later on.” In the same way that today we don’t feel it was enough that the crime against humanity in the Third Reich was adjudicated in Nuremberg after the end of the war, or that Milošević was finally handed over to the Tribunal in The Hague.
There is no accurate death toll in Gaza. Perhaps there never will be.Omar El Akkad writes about it in his red book: that one of the features of the Western notion of liberal democracy is the historical and false assumption of incontrovertible moral opposition to violence and oppression when it takes place. Years later narratives about colonization or slavery or the crazy suffragettes always centre on the light and the justice these people fought for. “While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization.”
Afterwards these acts become heroic deeds in our great story about the meaning of freedom and resistance here in the West, the foundation of our self-image. I message a friend from my days at the Law faculty in Uppsala to tell him how I’ve been searching online for courses; we used to stand around in the park below the university library after Ove Bring’s lectures in Public International Law during that last spring before we swirled out into the world. My friend replies that unfortunately the subject is probably affiliated more closely with legal history now and therefore part of those courses, because the conventions of international law don’t seem to apply anymore. The subject appears to have been blown away by time, just like Yugoslav literature was when Tanja was supposed to be teaching it.
There is no accurate death toll in Gaza. Perhaps there never will be. Many of the authorities that count the dead and injured are gone, destroyed, bombed, and death caused by starvation and lack of care isn’t counted in the official figures. Omar El Akkad writes that words only exist in hindsight; time washes over and around them like water down a riverbed. Later, when they open the mass graves with all the innocent people who have been killed, “it will not be so controversial to state plainly what is plainly known. But for now we argue, in this part of the world, the part not reduced to rubble, about how words make us feel.”
Occupation. Genocide. Displacement.
Children who sleep on their parents’ graves. Parents who bury body parts.
It’s forbidden to stay overnight on the island since it’s a nature reserve. So each evening we take a boat back to the mainland. On the other side a local bus goes to Mostar. My daughter keeps taking photos of a bus with “Babin Kuk” on the front. (In Swedish the word “kuk” means “dick”.) It’s fun travelling with her; she wants to jump onto every bus and tram, ride to the end of the line and see what happens.
I can’t recall all the things the students collected in their bags in Berlin, but I remember some of the things Roland the Walrus at Berlin Zoo had in his stomach in another novel by Ugrešić, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. A water pistol, a pair of sunglasses, a parachute, a doll, a box of matches, a sewing kit. What does a human need? What do they have left in Gaza?
People say that the future comes first to Belgrade. That’s where Europe’s future can be viewed through a kaleidoscope.People in war quickly become strangers to us, just as war destroys all that they have. They become part of the rocky landscapes around them, part of the bombs, the blood, the many graves. Ugrešić writes that Rilke once said the story of a shattered life can only be told in bits and pieces. All the trains to Belgrade go via Zagreb, so we take a plane there. We fly over the mountains and the invisible border and we land in the heat. We see the Serbian flag flying everywhere along the motorway from the airport, like a parade route or some kind of celebration. There’s nothing to celebrate, but everything is in the balance here.
Students have been occupying the university since December after the roof canopy of a recently renovated railway station collapsed and killed sixteen people. There are mass demonstrations, smoke bombs in parliament, violence against demonstrators. Aleksandar Vučić, who has been in power for thirteen years, was a minister in Milošević’s government and is a right-wing nationalist. The students have no leader—their only demand is for a new election to be called.
Vladimir Arsenijević meets me at the airport. He’s the director of the literary festival Krokodil, where I’m one of the guests. A week ago the festival was moved because of expected protests: the festival can’t guarantee the authors’ safety. It’s only when we drive past the government building and parliament that I understand how explosive the situation is. Ultra-nationalists loyal to the regime have erected tents in a massive camp around the government buildings to protect the president from the demonstrators. White tents and barricades all over. Here and there a man sits outside a tent or stands watching. They have been living here for months. People say that the future comes first to Belgrade. That’s where Europe’s future can be viewed through a kaleidoscope.
That evening I meet Anja Susa, who is a stage director working in both Belgrade and Stockholm. Last spring she put on Ernst Toller’s Hinkemann at the Dramaten in Stockholm, about a soldier returning from the war who tries to find his place again back home and finally discovers that the only place left for him is in the circus. Anja says she will never get used to showing her passport when she visits her summer house in Croatia; to her it will always be her country.
For her son, born after the war, the summer house will always be in a foreign country. In the evenings everyone gathers by the river where the Danube and the Sava meet. The Danube flows down from Budapest, coming from its source not too far from Strasbourg, where I was living when I was young. My best friend lived above the restaurant where Churchill and Schuman thought up the EU. The restaurant was called the Crocodile, just like the festival here. They sat at a table in there and drafted the coal and steel union. All arms come from coal and steel and integrated industries would stop Europe’s most quarrelsome countries waging war on one another. Every time I walked past the Crocodile on my way to see her, I thought I could glimpse those two bald-headed gentlemen sitting somewhere in the dark at the back.
After my interviews in the morning my daughter wants to travel on a tram or a bus, so we board one of the old trams and ride to the terminus. All public transport here is free, but the timetables are a little haphazard. It’s the day before the protests and all national trains and buses have suddenly been suspended everywhere. The government blames bomb threats, but people say it’s to stop them travelling to the protests.
Vladimir, the festival director, is stressed. I’m not aware yet, but the regime has cut off the festival’s electricity, and during the night they’ve had to go out and buy generators. Usually the electricity would come from the state-owned national museum next door. We spend the whole afternoon on sun loungers under the plane trees talking to Mima Simić, who has just been interviewing me on the stage. She has a wife in Belgrade, one in Seattle and one in Berlin. I tell her things I haven’t told anyone else—and I thought it was just me who was good at getting people to talk. She spends the whole time travelling between these sometimes very irate women. Ten years ago she appeared on the television programme Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
“No one in Croatia was open about having a girlfriend at that time and I spent ages trying to think of a place where I could talk about mine. I had no access to publicity back then and everybody watched that programme every night.”
When she did go on, as luck would have it she won a lot of money and the two of them appeared together on the cover of a glossy magazine. People still come up to her today, ten years later, and thank her for talking about her girlfriend on TV. My translator Svetlana Tot arrives several hours late because there are no trains or buses running. She’s hitched from Novi Sad, where the railway station collapsed in December.
Since the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999 the ministry of defence, Milošević’s old headquarters, has remained in ruins; like a wound on the city’s landscape, a monument to the war. Now the Trump family (Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner) is going to build a luxury hotel and apartment complex on the site of the ruin. The citizens of Belgrade want to keep it as it is, as a museum of Serbia’s history. The future always comes to Belgrade first. It’s like looking at the world through a tiny pair of binoculars.
In the evening my daughter and I lie on the steps of the national museum next to the festival, waiting for my turn to go on stage. It will soon be midnight, long after I should have gone on, but there aren’t really any fixed times here. I take a photo of her lying with her eyes shut, sleeping like a . . . like herself, like a child who doesn’t believe that bombs could fall out of the sky. However long this world keeps going, there will never be anyone else like her in it. There’s a breathless mood in the air that quivers and quakes at the protests to come. The festival director rushes back and forth, talking on the phone. Later that night we each sit with a hamburger in the static light of Eastern Europe’s first McDonald’s. The future comes to Belgrade first.
My Swedish publisher thinks I should keep my daughter away from the city ahead of the demonstrations, but I have interviews to do and she’s curious. At a lunch in the embassy Milena Berić from the festival tells us that the regime tried to close it down because the previous evening one writer had spoken about the genocide in Srebrenica. It’s impossible to get a taxi after the lunch; the protests won’t start for another few hours, but the streets are already filled with crowds of people.
“It’s so important you’re not afraid. This is all we have. This is our only chance. Our only moment to change anything.”I do the last interview of the day behind a display window that faces onto the main avenue in the city centre. There are more and more people on the other side of the glass, the sound like a sea’s roar outside. My daughter stands by the wall of glass looking out, and I wonder how we’re going to get back to the hotel. All the books I’ve written feel obsolete, irrelevant. The journalist’s eyes dart from side to side. The last time there were protests the regime employed sound cannons, a type of acoustic weapon that disperses crowds in a second and causes long-lasting psychological damage. After a while I break off the interview, something I’ve never done before, but no one in the room can focus on what’s being said. Another writer present, Marija Ratković, says:
“It’s so important you’re not afraid. This is all we have. This is our only chance. Our only moment to change anything.”
When we come out there are so many people I can scarcely recognise the streets we’ve been walking around for days. We walk past the government building on our way to the hotel; I wasn’t afraid before, but I am now. The men who have been there in tents for months are standing side by side with police officers in helmets and carrying shields. They look like Nazis in their uniform clothing. Music at nightmare volume is being pumped out of the building, chilling industrial chords.
Our hotel is locked and there are guards now. We sit in our large window all evening looking out. The heart of the demonstrations is in Slavija Square, a few blocks away, but the dozen or so blocks surrounding it are packed. Every now and then we go outside and have a look. People are standing absolutely still, in silence, staring straight into midair. My daughter wants to keep walking further away from the hotel; I want to stay close. A man we meet in the street says: “I just do what the students say now. That’s what I’ve decided, to follow this force. Young people, they know.”
Hearing his words makes my young companion happy, but we do as I said all the same. There are no innocent people anywhere, but every child is innocent. The riots start later that night. The sound of scare bombs comes nearer and nearer. We follow the clashes on Reuters and CNN. No one is allowed to leave the hotel now. The rioting reaches our street after midnight. We sit in our window long into the night listening to the sounds of explosions and shouts.
I still take Omar El Akkad’s red book with me everywhere, holding it tight as if it can save my soul. It can’t.Every evening when we returned from the peacock island, Lokrum, in Croatia we were careful not to take anything with us. Some monks who were once forced off the island put a curse on it and everyone who ever took anything away from it. We threw away all our sweet wrappers and bottles and left the stones and shells and peacock feathers on the beach before we jumped in the boat. It’s been six weeks since we were there. The students have continued to occupy the university in Belgrade and now they’re occupying other parts of the city and some of the roads too. Many people are still in prison following the demonstrations. Aleksandar Vučić says that the opposition will kill him if he stands down; Civil Rights Defenders, Amnesty International and the EU Commission are calling for the regime to investigate the reports of brutal violence against peaceful demonstrators that have circulated across the world, to respect fundamental freedoms and to release all the students in prison. The battle is between nationalists and democrats, here as everywhere else today.
In Stockholm demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza still take place every Saturday. This Saturday I find myself behind an elderly woman shuffling slowly forward with her walking frame in the heat. I think of Marija, the writer in Belgrade: “It’s so important that you’re not afraid. This is the only moment we have to change anything.”
I still take Omar El Akkad’s red book with me everywhere, holding it tight as if it can save my soul. It can’t. In all those dark years of Omar El Akkad’s childhood, when he peered through the censor’s black ink in Egypt and Qatar, as a new arrival in Canada, on journeys to war zones as a foreign correspondent, even during interviews in Guantanamo Bay, he always believed that the ugly cracks in liberal democracy in the West could be fixed. During the wars on terror when he saw hundreds of thousands of people who looked like him and had the same religion as him being killed, he still believed it was something that could be fixed, a core that could be saved. Right until the autumn of 2023, until the slaughter began:
There’s half an acre of wildwood behind our house in Oregon, full of blackberry brambles, mostly impassible. Sometime during the fourth or fifth or hundredth month of genocide, I find myself stomping a small path into the forest. A quiet place, where I can be alone. I’m alone all day when I write, but it’s here I bear witness to the dead. I don’t know why, I feel the need to walk to a different place to mourn them. Somewhere beautiful. I don’t usually weep like this. The last time I wept was in 2010 when we buried my father. Weeping isn’t a catharsis, it’s more like a disease.
One day everyone will always have been against this.
*
This piece was translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner. Bragan-Turner is a literary translator from Swedish based in the UK. Her translations have been shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize and the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger and longlisted for the Booker International Prize, the Dublin Literary Award and the National Translation Award in Prose.
