A Fork in the Road Read online

  Thank heavens, there was much else to do. Even a walk through the winding streets, past the endless cemeteries of Christians and Muslims killed in the slaughterhouse of the Balkan war, brought unimagined riches to light: the dramatic contrasts between small, colourful potholed backstreets with makeshift stalls and small shops selling all manner of arts and crafts to the swarming crowds.

  There were special people and events that, in the end, defined for us what Sarajevo is really about. This included meeting with my good friend Rastko Garić whom I’d first met some years earlier in Split and who had travelled all the way to spend time with us and discuss the two of my books he was now translating into Croatian. It was Rastko who took us into the backstreets and to a small, tucked-away eating place where he encouraged the owner to unveil his treasures to us and helped us to look more deeply into the strange and sad society in which we now found ourselves. Halfway through the meal the chef arrived at our makeshift table: he had learned that we came from South Africa and wished us to know that he’d visited Johannesburg in 1975 with a soccer team. What he wanted to know was, ‘Are you still treating red peoples apart, or are it better now?’

  There was also the brilliant film maker Éric Valli who came to meet us in the résidence and whose animated conversation, eloquent hands and all-seeing eyes lent new meaning to the place. His beautiful film Himalaya made me think of what he might have achieved had he ever been able to fulfil his dream and make a film of An Instant in the Wind.

  And there was a man whose name I do not know, who also sharpened the lines of the image Sarajevo evokes in my mind. He was a medical doctor, middle-aged but appearing much older as if he were carrying too much of the weight of the world on his shoulders. After Antjie Krog had spoken at the conference on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the importance of telling our own stories, he made a brief contribution from the floor. During the war, he explained, he had been commissioned to help deal with the crisis, working day and night to dispose of the dead and comfort the living; the circumstances were almost unbearable. Like his colleagues, he was taxed to the utmost. It was not the physical suffering that became too much to bear, but the devastation of one’s very notion of ‘humanity’. ‘There were so many stories,’ he said in his broken English. ‘Too many. I could not cope with it all. Even now I cannot sleep at night. I see all those faces. I feel I am bursting with all the stories I must tell. But there is no one to tell them to. Nobody wants to listen. And that is the worst.’ He broke down and burst into tears. It was one of the most terrible things I’ve ever had to grapple with: the notion of a society, a nation, with too many stories – and no one to tell them to. And it brought with it a wholly different perspective on the real atrocity of war.

  But if Sarajevo acquired, for us, a specific human face, it was above all that of the remarkable young Serbian woman, Boba, whose beautiful features framed in dark hair revealed the light and darkness she had experienced in this city: how can we ever think about Sarajevo again without hearing her telling about her wartime experience when she had to keep count of the innumerable corpses day after day, in order to make sure the numbers would not be distorted by either side, and how the place became a city of the dead – men, women, children, all now sadly laid to rest in their separate cemeteries.

  What she told about her own life in the midst of death, brought back a remarkable lecture, ‘On the Dark Side of Twilight’, I’d heard in 2001 when I was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was given by Branka Arsic from Serbia, and dealt with ‘the dark, unarticulated, evil forces in the Balkans’, and most fascinatingly with the legendary figure of ‘the Kosovo Maiden’ who appeared on the battlefield after the decisive battle between Ottoman Turks and Serbs in the thirteenth century. According to Arsic, this battle, lost by Serbia, meant the end of Serbian literature and Serbian history for 600 years, causing Serbs to exist, from then on, only as spectres in the world: it is no accident, proposed the speaker, that Bram Stoker should have situated his vampire in the Balkans. The nameless maiden appeared on the field littered with the dead, the living, and the half-dead, in search of the body of her slain lover; but he was not to be found, and she could not turn herself into an Antigone because it was impossible to distinguish between the living and the dead, and consequently to decide who could be buried. It ends most inconclusively – and, for a legend, most maddeningly – because she simply disappears in a cloud. Since then, it would seem, this tragic country has been condemned to exist between life and death, between to-be and not-to-be; and Boba’s observations lent terrible substance to it.

  But she did not speak only about the dark aspects of her experience. She also told us about the picnics she and her friends had organised right in the middle of the war: dressing themselves in clothes of the boldest colours, shiny reds and shimmering greens and deep blues and outrageous yellows, and then walking openly up the torn hillsides to have their meal in the resplendent sun, exposed to all the eyes of the city and to the bullets of any sniper, simply to affirm life in the face of death, and to defy the forces of evil that were trying so desperately to destroy all the signs of human presence and beauty. I could not help but remind myself of the late seventies, when Breyten was in prison and his sister Rachel would ask for permission to visit him for Christmas: and then she would open the basket she had taken to Pollsmoor with her, and take out the many lengths of material she had brought along, the boldest reds and greens and purples and yellows she could find, and wrap herself in these from head to toe, as if she were a living, human Christmas tree: no conversation was necessary, simply standing there like a feast of colour, was enough: because she knew that, as a painter, finding himself in prison where the only tones he was allowed to see were grey and dun and khaki, nothing in the world could bring him so much joy, and reassure him so much about the vibrant signs of life, than colour, life-affirming colour.

  SALZBURG: A STATE OF MIND

  THERE HAVE BEEN so many travels over the years, like favourite books opened and savoured and returned to; so many unforgettable moments, each of which has trapped within it, like a piece of amber enclosing an insect, an essence of my experience of the world. I can close my eyes and call them up. The mound of Tolstoy’s grave covered in dark green moss among the lyrical birch trees in the forest on the Yasnaya Polyana estate, an embodiment of perhaps his most memorable story, ‘How much earth does a man need?’ Or Ibsen’s grave, a simple slab bearing the writer’s name under a soundless, endless drift of leaves in an autumnal Oslo (Rilke: Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie vom Weit …). A leisurely voyage in the Trollfjord along the west coast of Norway, from fjord to fjord, past the bright reds and greens and yellows of the houses of Bergen to the darker seclusion of Ålesund or Trondheim in their deep havens to the spare magic of the island of Lofoten and up to the northern edge of the world at Nordkapp and Kirkenes. Or the severe extremes of Iceland, where everything in the visible and everyday world has a counterpart, underground and invisible, where hidden and unexpected entrances open from our world into the other – here, via a bole of a tree, there the mouth of a cave, elsewhere a rock formation with weird crevices. In almost shocking contrast, the ferocious sun-scorched plains and mountain ranges of Mexico. To wake up in our room in the Hotel Catedral and see the plumes of smoke from the magic mountain of Popocatépetl and his consort, the Sleeping Lady, Iztaccihuatl, or to drag oneself up the endless brown stairs of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacan, or stare in awe at the staggered sides of the Mayan temple of Nohoch Mul in its dark forest, its name – Water Stirred by Wind – as enthralling as its architecture. Otherwise, I return to a scene of dust and sun, of quick little lizards and a flickering of bright red and green colibris, sunbirds, in the foliage of bougainvilleas in Bamako, Mali, where I lean on a parapet overlooking the sluggish meandering of the broad Niger which one can follow all the way inland to the dream palaces and temples and libraries of another mythical place, Timbuktoo, with its ancient scrolls
and books dating back to a time when this country boasted more splendour than most of its contemporary empires in Europe. Yet another shift in the mind, and there are white and blue houses on a steep slope of Santorini overlooking the wine-dark sea, or the crumbling, ageless, sunlit columns of the Parthenon. From there, it is but a wink to the luminous brown walls of Dubrovnik, and a wedding in progress on the town square, where suddenly the festivities are interrupted just as the bride – visibly pregnant – in pale green and the swaggering and swarthy groom are preparing to mount the stairs to the church: a sultry young woman comes round the corner, embraces the groom and starts kissing him voraciously. The father-in-law gives a few menacing steps in their direction. The bride collapses in tears. The stranger drapes herself around the groom’s neck; and then, very suddenly, the two of them start running, round the corner of the church, and off in the direction of the city wall. Then back again to the most distant north, at Kakslauttanen in Finland, beyond the Arctic Circle, a midsummer night amid stunted oak trees hundreds of years old, under a pale and muted light in which a dull red fireball drifts soundlessly along the horizon without ever dipping behind it, while unbelievably cold dark streams rush along the white pebbles on their beds down the curve of the earth. Another memory flip, and I am in Jerusalem, from where I travel to many other Old Testament places familiar from my violent childhood, the once-walled Jericho and Megido, the biblical Armageddon, with its remains of God knows how many cities layered like a palimpsest of ruins on top of one another, from floating weightless on the Dead Sea to gasping in the thin clear air of Mount Sinai, from the barren brown heights of Masada and the caves of the Scrolls at Qumran, which I later saw in the magnificent Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, on a day of unbelievable white heat to the fertile valley of the Jordan – entering the world of the essential mythology that had shaped and informed my childhood and seeing it transformed into reality. Conversations chiselled into my mind, with Rabbi Moshe Semer, and the fearless author David Grossman, anticipating another meeting, in Norway, in 2002, with Amos Oz. But the watershed experience of that day spent in Israel was a visit to the Palestinian university of Birzeit. I’d read much about the conflict in the Middle East; in Salzburg and elsewhere I’d had long and passionate encounters with Palestinian writers. I had an unforgettable discussion with Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi when she visited Cape Town years earlier. On several occasions before his untimely death I’d also shared the deep wisdom and gentle humanity of Edward Saïd. But this immersion into the terrible reality of that tragic place, the land and its people, shook me as few other experiences in my life have done. It was like a rediscovery of the evil heart of apartheid. The way in which Palestinians, among them some of the finest people I have ever come to know, are subjected to one of the cruellest reigns of oppression in the world, and the web of hypocrisy and lies that, on the Israeli side, attempts to obscure and distort the truth. During this visit a particularly shocking event occurred when the small house of an old Palestinian man was flattened by the bulldozers of the Israeli army because he had dared to erect a tank on his own roof to collect the pitiful raindrops that fell on it. I saw the network of modern tarmac roads constructed for use by Israelis and the wretched little side roads to which Palestinians were confined; saw the olive groves – in many cases the sole means of subsistence of Palestinian farmers – uprooted and demolished by Israelis; saw the proliferation of new Israeli settlements deep inside Palestinian territory, established in contravention of all laws and agreements, merely to enforce Israeli presence and power in a territory not their own. I had seen this before, in the context of the oppression of blacks by whites in South Africa. I had heard all the pious excuses and explanations. And when I think back today, I cannot banish from my memory the terrible remains of Dachau and Auschwitz: for although Israel has never embarked on a genocide on the scale of the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing this country is inflicting on Palestine amounts, morally, to a slow and minor-key copy of these camps of death. I fail to understand how a people that has staggered from the terrors of the Holocaust could subsequently proceed to do unto others what had been done to them.

  All of this is projected, and focused with laser intensity, on a spectacular confrontation between a young Israeli writer and an incensed and beautiful Palestinian woman at a conference in the Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, where some of the most memorable moments of my life have been passed.

  My first visit to Salzburg, and in many ways still the most unforgettable, came at the very beginning of the nineties when Schloss Leopoldskron brought together, for two full weeks, sixty or seventy writers, academics and readers from thirty-odd countries to discuss the impact of the Fall of the Wall on the world of thought and culture.

  As always, it was the very nature of the schloss as a venue which was vital to much of what happened during that fortnight: the marvellous old building that still bears the theatrical imprint, especially in the library with its secret staircase and the Venetian Room, of Max Reinhardt. It is situated in a small wood at the edge of a lake which over the years I have seen in all four seasons: the foliage turning colour in the first quiverings of autumn, the heavy snows of winter, the budding trees and the returning birds in spring, the full, raging heat of midsummer. From the schloss a mere twenty-minute walk along a narrow green path takes one across the Mönchsberg, just below the high white walls of the Festung, and down the many stairs on the other side, to the Herbert-von-Karajanplatz in the very heart of the town. If you happen to arrive on the hour, all the bells will be ringing, from the deep-throated boom of the cathedral to the glockenspiel in the tower of the Regierungsneugebäude. From there one can wander through the town, from one square to the next, from the throngs of the Getreidegasse with the house where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born, across one of the graceful bridges to the floral excesses of the Mirabell Gardens; one can have a chocolate or a coffee with incomparable patisseries at Tomaselli’s or a meal under the arches of the galleries in the town centre; or linger among the graves – among them the one where Mozart’s sister Nannerl was laid to rest – or, on a sweltering summer’s day, rest on a curved grass bank of the fast-flowing Salzach. And everywhere, on every street corner and on every square, there will be music, mostly Mozart, a veritable Garden of Delight.

  Then back to the schloss, for some of the most stimulating and challenging lectures or discussions or debates one might wish for. And retire, at the end of a hectic day, to the Stube in the basement, where the day’s conversations can be continued. How I remember, from that first conference, the way in which the defences would go down and we would talk about where we all came from, the dangers and darkness of persecution and intrigue, of censorship and samizdat, of state control, and security police raids, and – at least for some of the participants – the memories of friends or parents or siblings or children tortured and murdered, just because they had dared to question or comment or criticise. And then the true miracle: how at the end of a long, exhausting day, we would huddle together to reminisce and reimagine, and how in a new-found brotherhood and sisterhood we would embrace, and tears would flow, and we would all yield to nostalgia and passionate longings – back to the good-bad old days of the very censorship and persecution that had kept us awake at night, and driven some to exile and some to their death.

  What a weird business this was: for not a single one among us would for a moment really want to go back to those nightmare times. And yet, as we now remembered them, there was something in that past which we had known and would never know again, because it could exist only in dire circumstances when not only one’s writing, but one’s thoughts, one’s life was at stake: a camaraderie, a closeness, a sharing and solidarity. Because we were all in it together, and in spite of the complications of our lives, there was a certain simplicity about them: we all had the same enemy, we shared the same fears, and the same hope kept us going.

  Whether one came from South Africa, or Argentina, or the Balkans, from Nigeria or Chile or Banglad
esh, from Cameroon or Egypt or China or East Germany: deep down we came from the same place, the same state of emergency, the same silences. And this discovery, renewed at least every night and often by day, in the improbable splendour of that schloss, brought us together as nothing else could. To some extent the theatricality of the setting created an unworldliness which prompted us to probe more deeply into ourselves, and into each other’s lives. There were some spectacular explosions, among them the one on ‘Literature and Politics’, between the young Israeli and the magnificent Palestinian woman – prompted, we discovered only later, by a misunderstanding of the text the young man had read. Very soon almost everybody in the room was drawn into it. For a while it seemed as if the whole conference would collapse in chaos. But then the ever-diplomatic organiser, Tim Ryback, had the idea of proposing that we adjourn and take a walk around the lake, and we all set out in the falling dusk. The arguments and discussions in the small groups into which we’d splintered, had an intensity difficult to imagine and impossible to describe. But very gradually it became possible to reason and talk again; and by the time we’d completed the long, slow circle around the darkening lake which began to gleam almost eerily, as if illuminated from deep down, we could resume the evening’s programme and grasp more profoundly, and with an all-encompassing sympathy, what divided us, and what in the end we truly shared.