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PARTISAN REVIEW
understandable that a man thinking those thoughts does not sleep well.
I would lie next to an open window, in the room I was born in, while
the murmur of Miljacka altered with the rustling of the leaves in the
early fall wind.
Whoever spends the night awake in bed in Sarajevo can hear the
voices of the Sarajevan night. Heavily and surely beats the clock on the
Catholic cathedral: two past midnight. More than a minute goes by
(exactly seventy-five seconds, I counted) and only then can a somewhat
weaker but piercing sound of the clock from the Orthodox church be
heard, and it chimes its own two hours past midnight. A little after it,
the tower clock on the Bey's mosque strikes the hour in a hoarse, far–
away voice, and that strikes eleven, the ghostly Turkish hour, according
to the strange calculations of far away, alien parts of the world! The
Jews do not have a clock that would sound their hour,
so
God only
knows what time it is for them now, what time it is according to
Sephardic reckoning or the Ashkenazy.
So
even at night, while everyone
is asleep, the division keeps vigil in the counting of the late, small hours,
and separates these sleeping people who, awake, share joy and sorrow,
feast and fast according to four different, mutually feuding calendars,
and send all their wishes and prayers to one heaven in four different
church languages. And that difference is sometimes in plain sight and
open, at other times invisible and deceitful, always similar to hatred,
often completely identical with it.
This uniquely Bosnian hatred should be studied and eradicated as
some wicked and deeply rooted illness. And I believe that foreign scien–
tists would come to Bosnia to study hatred, as if studying leprosy, if
hatred would only be accepted as a separate classified subject of study,
as leprosy is.
I thought about studying this hatred myself and, by analyzing it and
bringing it to the light of day, to contribute to its demise. Perhaps that
was my duty, because, even though a foreigner by birth, it was in Bosnia
that I first saw, as it is said, "the light of day." But after my first
attempts and lengthy contemplation, I realized that I had neither the
ability nor the strength to do it. I would be required, just like everyone
else, to pick a side, to be hated and to hate. And I neither wanted that,
nor was able to do it. Perhaps, if that was the way it had to be, I could
have accepted falling victim to hatred, but to live in hatred and with
hatred, to take part in it, that I could not do . And in a country such as
Bosnia of today, the one who does not know how to hate or, what is
even better and
more
difficult, the one who consciously refuses to hate,
is always somewhat of a stranger and an outcast, and often a martyr.
