Zagreb and Memory

It’s hot up here on the tenth floor. In the afternoon, the sun hangs over the low mountains along the Slovenian border so that our small flat fills with strong heat and light until well into the evening. During these summer days there are usually a few boys taking shots on a net at one end of a concrete soccer court below us. Sometimes girls shoot baskets at the other end.

We have been in the Croatian capital of Zagreb for just over a week now. Our flat is in a large, dirty concrete apartment building in a working-class suburb – part of complex of three or four such buildings. The flat belongs to the parents of our friend S., but during the summers her parents don’t stay in the city. From our window we can see suburbs of small plain houses with terra-cotta roofs. Many of these houses were built illegally during Communist times and as a result they have a temporary quality to them: Mostly unplastered, unfinished, dull and blank, many are nevertheless dilapidated and in need of repair.

Farther away and scattered like islands there are other complexes like ours. To the south, we can see a few suburbs of more pleasant, condominium-style buildings put up just before the war. Behind us, invisible, is the centre of Zagreb with its shabby Austro-Hungarian administrative palaces and on a small rise of land, a medieval district being restored with the assistance of large international loans.

Before the wars of the 1990’s, S.’s parents lived and worked in a small town in Bosnia. Both were successful professionals. At that time, Bosnia was a republic of the former Yugoslavia. When the war began, our friend’s parents decided to stay in Bosnia even though as ethnic Croats their position was risky. Under new nationalist leaderships, Serb and Croat forces were beginning their war to divide Bosnia and thousands of refugees of all ethnicities were on the move. But S.’s parents believed they were Yugoslavs, and theirs was a country where people of different nationalities had lived with each other in peace.

The situation changed quickly. Neighbours came one evening and set fire to the house, taking what they wanted and leaving the rest to burn. S.’s mother fled to Zagreb, which would escape the war nearly unscathed. Her father remained, taking shelter in what was left of the family home. But the war in Bosnia was getting worse and staying hidden in the village wasn’t safe. After many months he was rescued by a NATO soldier and made his way to Zagreb. S. tells us she remembers going back to the village many years later and seeing children riding bicycles that had belonged to her and her brother.

After the war, attempts were made to resettle those who had been displaced and give compensation to those who lost property and more. For a variety of reasons, S.’s parents never received anything. They returned to their village in Bosnia to clean up what remained of their house. Some neighbours came to greet them and spoke of how terrible the war had been. Others didn’t. Now, each summer S.’s parents go back to the village in Bosnia and continue to repair the house. Only one room is habitable.

This is a city that still bears the traces of terrible conflict, but not in ways you would expect. Most of the fighting took place in Bosnia as Serb, Croat and then Bosniak forces confronted each other in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s demise. Zagreb sustained little physical damage during the war. Instead the after-effects of the war here are psychological, emotional; almost atmospheric. At one end of the soccer pitch beside our building complex is another apartment building. But this building is near derelict; leaking pipes have rotted away the plaster in many places, exposing bricks that have turned green with thick algae. Trees and grasses grow on the roof. S. tells us that before the war the building was a dormitory for Bosniak industrial workers who spent part of the year in Zagreb. When the war began the workers left and the building was used as a shelter for Bosnian Croats displaced by fighting. Now the building is nearly empty; at night it is completely dark except for one or two lighted windows. We don’t know who these people are or what their story might be: Bosniaks, Croat refugees, or someone else.

It is difficult for me to escape the sense of darkness war brought to this region. It is a darkness that persists in plain sight, in wide squares and sunny boulevards as well as in shadows and musty dilapidation. There is a contradiction between the catastrophe of the war and the present-day surface of life in Zagreb that makes me uneasy. I have never lived in a country torn apart by war so I cannot understand how people here carry on a normal life. I am from a country that is convinced its wars were just, so I cannot imagine how a people can remember its own culpability in such a terrible conflict. I keep looking for signs that point to the enormity of what happened here, but what I find always appears to be obscured, ignored or forgotten. What I fail to see is that people here have little choice but to accommodate themselves to the abnormality of post-war Croatia. What I fail to see is that forgetting both works and doesn’t work at the same time. Time passes and lives change; terrible events are both repressed and simply overlaid with layers of other, more mundane things. But what happened still reverberates. What happened here still lies just under the surface of things.