Ch-10: Fortville

Browder woke up the next day after a deep and long sleep and braced himself for the spiritual descent to Campari. In physical terms, this was rather an ascent into the hills. However, the plans changed suddenly. At morning coffee, his mom and his aunt reluctantly narrated the latest scandal that aunt Melania had caused with them. The two of them looked genuinely distressed telling Browder how when they visited Melania a couple of weeks back, she threw outrageous accusations at them. In Browder’s estimation, she was probably clinically paranoid at this point. She had denounced his family and declared that she doesn’t want to see any of them ever again. The whole distressing story nevertheless made things very simple for Browder: he wasn’t going to Campari.

Browder’s father, suffering from a horrid case of being a nice guy just like his own old man, has been sending remittances to his sister and her descendants all the years he has lived in Canada, often hiding it from his wife. And what her family had to show for it was probably the most run down house in Campari. Now, this says a lot given the popular parsimonious tradition among Bosnian peasants of the twenty-first century of building their houses without facades. Once the weight-supporting bricks and mortar are raised, and the roof, and the indoor space is made fit for habitation, the owners often give up on the luxurious and even snobbish pursuit of covering the exterior walls with merely cosmetic layers of plaster. If ever asked when they intend to complete the construction of their home, an owner may wave off the question and say, “when I end up with money”. In Bosnia this is a period of time in the future that, like the foot of the rainbow, may on rare occasions appear to exist ahead of you, but can never be reached.  

In the old days, no self-respecting family man would dwell in an incomplete house; they may even have spiritual reservations about it and see it is a bad omen. The wars of the nineties however crushed people’s spirits, what with its massacres and its practice of burning houses in enemy villages.

Aunt Melania was in a bad way lately. In addition to her body deteriorating due to extreme diabetes, she had sold the fields she inherited from her late father for a pittance to the Muslims, in whose territory the land was now located. Her son and her two grandsons by him all had terrible bad teeth, and only a few of them in total. They were known for chain smoking, drinking, and gambling, and for adding sugar to their coca cola “to kill the fuzz”. The son’s wife was a humble sort who worked in a food exporting frogs to Italy and France.

In the light of all that, Browder was relieved to have the excuse to skip the visit.  

Aunt Melania’s track record of mayhem goes back to her early youth. She was basically the Yugoslav champion of the sixties’ generation. The Yugoslav society was too patriarchal for free love and hallucinogenic drugs, so instead of becoming hippies, the libertine Yugoslav youths of that generation swerved more towards becoming run-of-the-mill alcoholics, chain smokers, and assholes. Aunt Melania, for her part, became a typist before even completing high school and lived it up in the surrounding towns. Browder’s dad told stories of her frequent arguments with her mom about wearing miniskirts in high school. She soon married a Croat and had two kids, and the Croat then went to work in Germany. Two years later, she divorced him. Attracted to the party life, she left her son and daughter in the village with her parents, while she stayed in the city. Browder’s newlywed mother took care of them as they went to school near their apartment in Fortville. Browder’s mom was another person that’s too nice. Or maybe just oppressed. Browder feared that it may be a gene that runs on both sides of his family.

At some point towards the end of her youth, Melania attempted suicide by drinking some sort of corrosive liquid, Browder never understood which one as a child, but she only managed to lose most of her teeth and had to wear false ones for the rest of her life. Then, when the war broke out, she stayed in Tulsa, Bosnia, on the Muslim side, failing for whatever reason to flee when the conflict broke out. A few years later, she was transferred to Chapelton in a prisoner exchange. Browder’s dad grabbed and lifter her right on the street (Browder had never seen his dad grab and lift anyone), and after there was a party after which he saw his grandpa Browder drunk for the first and last time, that being the second time in his entire life he got drunk. Melania would later tell Browder stories of her oppressive life in Tulsa. Browder learned only many years later that Lazarus, still-living older brother of the late grandpa Browder, was also in Tulsa at time. Milena said she read a lot of books, didn’t go outside, and had difficulties getting food. People around young Browder often said that she was intelligent, and they seemed to imply too intelligent for a woman. Browder figured out that she had probably been attractive back in the day, too.

Things were good only for a short while after Melania’s escape from Tulsa. At some point the word spread that the aunt was hanging late around the kafanas in Chapelton, and when it reached her parents it caused them great shame. Browder’s father was the one to confront her. Browder was not there when it happened. Later overheard from the women’s gossip that it was violent. He remember though that when he returned home that day, the aunt had wide moist eyes and was especially quiet. The TV was playing an old Hollywood movie about Taras Bulba, and Browder distinctly remember that he really loved that movie. 

After that Melania found a man for a while and lived with him in an apartment in Srebrenica. Browder visited them once, remembering the drive from Chapelton to Srebrenica as the first time he ever drove up into the mountains, and how the mountains were beautiful. This must have been very shortly after the massacre.

The conversation in Chapelton dwelled for a while on Lazarus, the great-granduncle Browder had never met. He in fact still lives in Tulsa and is around ninety years old and going strong. The man fought with the Partisans in WWII and liked to show his guests pictures and documents confirming his involvement and exemplary service in the war. A nice guy like the rest of his family, he has an unmarried son still living with him.

Grandma however seemed to suggest that the guy wasn’t really into the latest Serbian cause, because he was influenced (“brainwashed”) by the Muslim authorities in Tulsa during the latest war. Browder thought he must have been influenced; in the middle of the war a Serbian projectile killed several dozen youth at a major city square. Many Serb nationalists claim that Muslims did it to themselves, to antagonize the West against the Serbs, as they claim with the bombing of a famous wet market in Sarajevo. In America, meanwhile, some people claim the queen is a lizard. 

It was still a sunny morning and Browder once again decided to take a stroll through the town. He now saw the town in daylight and realized that in the middle, Chapelton looked quite charming. It was small, but tightly packed, giving it a feel of urbanity beyond its size. The run down and disorganized highway side of the city, which he saw first arriving to the bus station, was the ugliest part of it.

 It was a grand trip down the memory lane. He walked by his old apartment building and looked inquisitively at its first-floor balcony, wondering what strange family lives there now. He walked through the playgrounds of his childhood, and then took a pedestrian crossing along the highway to stroll along the bank of the Drina river. He watched the green and fast water glide under the steep hills on the Serbian side and under the old steel bridge that he used to cross every day on his way to school. He walked south towards the sun and enjoyed the light piercing almost painfully through the dry, fresh air. Upon the Bosnian hill he saw the fifteen-century ramparts climbing from the highway steeply to the top, where there was a trussed bell tower now, a symbol of the town to the Serbs. It was built by Cursed Hellen, the Greek wife of George Brankovic, a Serbian prince in the aftermath of the Battle of Kosovo. He then climbed back across the flood banks into town, then walked up the hills into the old gypsy village, where he went sledding as a child. He passed the old hospital and an old Villa. They were abandoned and decrepit even twenty-five years ago. Today, they were half collapsed. He then walked by the old socialist department store that was now successfully converted into a modern shopping mall. Finally, he returned to his grandma’s. 

At midday Browder walked with his aunt to her apartment. Aunt Bianca’s apartment was cozy and modern, with a beautiful view of a children’s park in the centre of the town. It was a pleasant change from the eighties’ furniture and broken plumbing at grandma’s. Browder’s middle school was to the right of the park, and it was freshly painted today. In his student days its plaster was peeling. On one wall they had a nationalist mural, a portrait and a quote belonging to some Swiss dude who once wrote a whole book of romantic but incredibly patronizing advice to the Serb people. The Serb people, who on the whole do not appear to feel patronized, like to quote the guy as though he is some adoptive modern Moses of the Serbs.

Aunt Bianca handed Browder the keys and offered him to stay there while she worked the second shift. He could shower there or escape a boring guest. When she went to her work at the customs office, Browder slumped onto the sofa and began to remember. 

Bianca married Browder’s uncle Vanya, his mom’s elder brother, shortly before the war. He was killed by a projectile while she was pregnant with their child. The son was named Vanya too and he now drives taxi in Vienna.

The death came in the fall of 1992, the first year of the war. A piece of shrapnel cut his jugular artery. He was rushed to the military hospital in Belgrade where he spent two days in coma and then died. Browder still remembered the night when he got the news. He knew that Vanya was on the verge of death for couple of days, and in the middle of one night he was awakened by his mother’s cries on the phone and understood the bad news. He remembered his mom being devastated, but he doesn’t remember exactly how she grieved. He was affected deeply as a seven-year-old. Children that age cannot mourn, as they don’t quite grasp mortality, but he remembered being nevertheless very saddened, and most of all being confounded by the finality of it. Uncle Vanya would not be coming back, ever. It stumped him intellectually, so to speak, but also it was crushingly sad. It petrified him to think at the time that it is within the realm of possibility that one of his parents, at some point, might also not be coming back, ever. All that made him cry. 

The wake and the funeral he also remembered. All of this was his first encounter with death. His mom and grandma cried inconsolably at the wake held in his grandparents’ house, trying over and over to explain to themselves what happened. His grandma was especially loud and uninhibited. He didn’t remember much what his aunt, Vanya’s pregnant wife did, as he barely knew her at the time. 

Browder’s grandma never got over her son’s death, and often said that she never will. Even before Vanya’s death she was a rather indignant woman, having been married to an alcoholic who made her suffer over the years. But after Vanya died, whenever she talked about injustice in the world, and she often did, she never referenced her abuse by her husband, but always the death of her son. (She referenced the abuse by her husband to make her point how hard she had it compared to today’s spoiled youth). “Woe to those who are no more, as our people say”, she would quote to Browder, leaving him to try to decipher the proverb. Sometime later, he concluded that it refers to the underprivileged state in which the deceased leaves his or her dependants.

The men at Vanya’s wake were much more reserved with their grief. They included uncle Brian the other brother, Variag, the father and Browder’s maternal grandfather, Browder’s dad, and other friends and relatives. Uncle Brian told young Browder that he should appreciate his own brother because only once you lose one do you truly understand how valuable a brother is. His dad characteristically said nothing of import, maybe mentioning something about “life”.

The undertakers made a small glass window on the coffin for the wake, and Browder was free to look through it. Closely underneath the glass pane, sure enough it was uncle Vanya, dressed neatly in uniform and his head turned to the side. He looked on quietly, but the mother of the deceased would bend over that window only to break down in sorrow and wailing every time. People generally let her get it out of her system for a while before gently taking her to the side to console her.

Then there was the funeral. Browder has never heard or experienced anything nearly as harrowing as the wailing of Serbian women. He had no idea how they do it or where it comes from. As it’s surely something one doesn’t practice, it’s amazing how they can generate such powerful emotional outpour so spontaneously. Wailing involves basically crying, but also singing in a specific tune, sad and repetitive, same one used by all mourning women of the nation, calling the name of the deceased, asking him questions about how they are going to live without him, why he left so early, what his children are going to do, why they couldn’t have gone instead of him, and similar. The lyrics are improvised. It’s brutal, raw, uninhibited sorrow. Browder heard wailing many times after at numerous funerals throughout the war, and was always struck, but that first one left the deepest impression. Westerners, guessed Browder, would find wailing unbearably crass. At least from watching the movies, their funerals have an entirely different vibe.

Before the coffin was lowered, it was opened for the attendants to approach the deceased and kiss him on the forehead. The closer the family members, the longer they took to say the final goodbye. His body was well dressed and surrounded by presents that included stuff like apples, liquor, nice shirts, and even grooming items like aftershave. Browder remembered people approaching the grave to throw a handful of earth onto it, climbing up and down the rather steep slope of the crowded and fresh war cemetery, and then men shovelling.

Over the next few years, he would sometimes on Sundays have to accompany relatives to visit the grave, where they lit candles, ate, and cried. He would also come back to that graveyard for other funerals, including those of his grandfather, several fallen dads of friends and relatives, and at least a couple of sons. 

In his life, Vanya was known for his élan. He was entrepreneurial and liked to take care of others. Such traits were especially impressive for his time and place, sharply contrasting the pervading apathy, idiocy, and selfishness. In the pre-war years Vanya travelled anywhere to earn his dough, working in the hospitality industry on the Dalmatian coast and even spending some time in Libya. It appears that his work among Croats in Dalmatia first awakened him to the nationalist struggle. Later, he opened a café in Chapelton and became well-known in town for his people skills. He was not a nice guy, however. If being a nice guy is bad for social ascent elsewhere, it is especially bad in the Balkans. Vanya had a rough edge and was known to rub up against tough guys. A couple of years before the war he challenged a delinquent to a fight during an outdoor party. As he told it, the guy threw a dagger at him while he was taking his shirt off for the fight, stabbing him a couple of centimetres from the heart. Browder remembered visiting uncle Vanya in the hospital in Tulsa later, bandaged up but cheerful.

When the war broke out Vanya joined the more adventurous military and paramilitary units of the early Bosnian war. These were generally volunteer armies of young men, commanded by charismatic leaders, who took the initiative to attack Muslim-controlled or merely Muslim-populated towns and take them over, loot what they conquered, and for some of them, commit atrocities. They would then hand over the city to the conventional Serb army. These various units were celebrated in various popular songs to boost everyone’s morale, and generally enjoyed the respect of the populace. Needless to say, no one was particularly eager to relate to the populace the darker aspects of these units’ liberation efforts. Vanya was with the Red Berets, a relatively less controversial clique commanded by Kapetan Dragan, an Australian entrepreneur of Serb descent turned warlord who many years later would make international headlines regarding his extradition and trial. His units fought in the Battle of Chapelton.

Chapelton came under Serb control in the spring of 1992, the very beginning of the war. Young Browder observed the battle for the city from Little Chapelton, right across the Drina river and therefore, as of 1992, in a different country - Serbia. His dad wasn’t there, it was just women and children. Day and night, they could hear various firearms and artillery, and at night they could see flashes in the city and upon the hills. In late spring, when the battle was over, Browder’s family relocated to the town, taking a cozy apartment in the centre that had belonged to a Muslim doctor. The profession of the previous owner was obvious from the books and documents they found in the place.

A couple of years later, Browder picked up a phone call at his new home, and the caller turned out to be from Switzerland. It was the woman who had lived in the apartment before the war. She asked to talk to Browder’s mother. She asked his mother simply to send her the family photos that they left behind to an address in Switzerland. Browder remembered those photos; he had flipped through them and to be frank, he probably carelessly crumpled or otherwise ruined a few of them. He still remembers that some of the photos showed some happy young people posing on the Old Bridge in Mostar. Browder’s mom readily obliged the request for the photos. What the previous woman of the house didn’t say was that she had hidden several hundred Deutschmarks in an envelope glued inside the two panes of the balcony door. This was left for Browder’s mom to discover by chance the next summer, when she was cleaning the windows. The cash, of course, was not returned.

The spring and summer of 1992 in which Browder’s family moved to Chapelton had been eventful for him, a seven-year-old. The city was mostly abandoned, with Serb families slowly returning to their apartments, or more typically, moving to the city for the first time to take an abandoned Muslim apartment, having in turn abandoned their own in another town in Bosnia. There were exactly zero Muslim families in the city at that time; the very idea of living with Muslims seemed fantastic. In this empty mess, between games of street football, Browder and his new friends roamed freely, entering abandoned, stinking residences and commercial properties to take items they found of interest. The wives in the city did the same, only they were more methodical in their scavenging. Rather than toys, they collected furniture and appliances that would fit into their new homes. And both the women and the children were really only getting sloppy seconds, because the paramilitaries that liberated the city made sure they looted it themselves before letting in the civilians.

Browder had several memories of uncle Vanya in this period. Vanya settled with his wife in an apartment right next door to Browder’s family. Unlike Browder’s father, whose army post was in a neighbouring municipality, Vanya’s barracks were somewhere right outside the town, so that he could sleep at his home most days. At this point the Red Berets of Kapetan Dragan were probably disbanded, and Vanya joined the Drina Eagles, Chapelton’s own special units. He wore fatigues at all times and drank at home or in bars with his friends. Browder remembers how one late night he returned to the building drunk, and when no one responded to his repeated calls on the buzzer, he kicked in the top glass panel of the entrance door and opened the door himself.

All of Browder’s friends knew who he was. He would bring Browder gifts like VCRs and bicycles, second-hand. A contagious fashion trend erupted among boys that summer: military uniforms. After Browder stubbornly nagged his parents for it, it was uncle Vanya who provided a camouflage tarp that he took to the local tailor. After what seemed to be an infinity of visiting to ask if army uniform was ready, the tailor one day produced a beautiful ensemble with gold-colored buttons. Browder wore it with a genuine military belt, military boots, a green beret, various military patches, and even a large Rambo knife with a metal self-sharpening sheath. It smelled like industrial grease and it was also a gift of his uncle.

Several stories connected to Vanya’s demise in the hills above Chapelton circulated in the days surrounding his injury and death. One of the older kids told Browder that a shrapnel ripped open his jaw, while adults said that it was the throat. Browder’s dad would later repeat the story how that morning Vanya had a premonition, even predicting that he would die if he left, but left anyway. Browder especially remembered this narration of his dad, thinking it curious that a professed atheist talked about things like premonitions. Anyhow, the story was that his unit was lining up for review on a meadow when the fateful projectile fell nearby. While Vanya was being rushed in the ambulance, some people said that he angrily fought the medical staff trying to stop the blood rushing out of his throat. He was thirty-two years old.

Many years later, Browder’s younger brother Samuel visited Chapelton for a summer.  Arriving from Canada with the purpose of exploring his illustrious genealogy, by the end of his trip Sammy was disillusioned about a lot of it. He said that Vanya was mortally wounded while having a barbeque with his buddies in the hills, and not a unit review.