In the spring of 1997, I flew from Chicago, where I was living, to Sarajevo, where I was born and grew up. This was my first return to Sarajevo since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended, a year and a half earlier. I’d left in 1992, a few months before the siege of the city began. I had no family there anymore (my parents and my sister now lived in Canada), except for Teta Jozefina, whom I considered to be my grandmother. When my parents had moved to Sarajevo after graduating from college in Belgrade, in 1963, they’d rented a room in an apartment that belonged to Jozefina and her husband, Martin, in the part of town called Marin Dvor. In that rented room I was conceived, and it was where I lived for the first two years of my life. Teta Jozefina and Čika Martin, who had two teen-age children at the time, treated me like their own grandchild—to this day, my mother believes that they spoiled me for life. For a couple of years after we moved out, to a different part of Sarajevo, I had to be taken back to Marin Dvor to visit them almost every day. And until the war shattered our common life we spent every Christmas at Teta Jozefina and Čika Martin’s, following the same ritual: the same elaborately caloric dishes crowding the big table, the same tongue-burning Herzegovinian wine, the same people telling the same jokes and stories, including the one that featured the toddler me running buck naked up and down the hallway before my nightly bath.

I wanted from Chicago what I had got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul. Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

Čika Martin died of a stroke toward the end of the siege, so when I went back in 1997 Teta Jozefina was living alone. I stayed with her, in the room (and, possibly, the very bed) where I had commenced my messy existence. Its walls had been pockmarked by shrapnel and bullets—the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary all around her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man, because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband’s heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn’t move so carelessly in their own apartment.

In my first few days back in Sarajevo, I did little but listen to my grandmother’s harrowing and humbling stories of the siege, which included a detailed rendition of her husband’s death (where he had sat, what he had said, how he had slumped), and wander around the city. I was trying to reconcile the new Sarajevo with the version I’d left behind in 1992. It was not easy for me to comprehend how the siege had transformed the city, because the transformation was not as simple as one thing becoming another. Everything was fantastically different from what I’d known and everything was fantastically the same as before. The buildings were in the same places; the bridges crossed the river at the same points; the streets followed the same obscure yet familiar logic; the layout of the city was unaltered. But the buildings had been mutilated by shells and shrapnel showers, or reduced to crumbling walls; some of the bridges had been destroyed and almost everything in their vicinity was levelled, because the river was the front line; the streets were pocked with mortar-shell marks—lines radiating from each little crater, which an art group had filled with a red substance and which the people of Sarajevo now, incredibly, called “roses.” The map of the city that I carried in my head had to be fundamentally emended.

I revisited all my favorite spots in the city center, then roamed the narrow streets high up in the hills, beyond which lay a verdant world of unmapped minefields. I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.

One day I was strolling, aimlessly and anxiously, down the street whose prewar name had been Ulica J.N.A. (the Yugoslav People’s Army Street) and now was Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva (the Defenders of Sarajevo Street). As I passed what had been called, in the times of socialism—which now seemed positively prehistoric—the Workers University, something made me turn and look over my shoulder into its cavernous entranceway. The turn was not of my own volition: it was my body that turned my head back, while my mind continued forward for a few steps. Impeding impatient pedestrian traffic, I stood there puzzled until I realized what had made me look back: the Workers University used to house a movie theatre (it had shut down a couple of years before the war), and whenever I’d walked by in those days I’d stopped to look at the display cases where the movie posters and showtimes were exhibited. From the lightless shafts of corporal memory, my body had recalled the action of turning to see what was playing. It had been trained to seek out stimulation in the form of a new movie poster, and it still remembered, the fucker, the way it remembered how to swim when thrown into deep water. Following that involuntary turn, my mind was flooded with a Proustian, if banal, memory: once upon a time in Sarajevo, at the Workers University, I had watched Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America,” and I recalled the acrid smell of the disinfectant that was used to clean the floors of the cinema; I recalled having to peel myself off the sticky fake-leather seats; I recalled the rattle of the parting curtain.

I had left Sarajevo on January 24, 1992. I was twenty-seven (and a half) and had never lived anywhere else, or had any desire to do so. I had spent the few years before that working as a journalist in what was known, in socialist, peacetime Yugoslavia, as “the youth press,” which was generally less constrained than the established, mainstream press, reared in the pressure chamber of Tito’s one-party state. Though most of my friends in the field were defiant muckrakers, my beat was what was endearingly called “culture.” (Before the war, the domain of “culture” seemed to offer a haven from the increasingly hateful world of politics. Now, when I hear the word “culture,” I pull out the quote usually attributed to Hermann Göring: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.”)

In 1991, I worked at the biweekly Naši Dani, writing film reviews and a column called “Sarajevo Republika.” I considered myself militantly urban, a fanatical Sarajevan. (The title of my column was an allusion to the Mediterranean Renaissance city-states—Dubrovnik and Venice—as well as to the slogan “Kosovo Republika_,_” which had been sprayed on the walls of Kosovo by “the irredentists,” who wanted Kosovo to be given the status of a sovereign republic in the Federal Yugoslavia, rather than being classified as an “autonomous province” of Serbia.) In my column, I set out to prove Sarajevo’s uniqueness, the inherent sovereignty of its spirit, by reproducing and extolling its mythology in prose that was arrogantly thick with abstruse Sarajevo slang. The first column I ever published was about an aščcinica—a traditional Bosnian storefront restaurant that served prepared (as opposed to grilled) food—which had been run by a local family, the Hadžibajrićs, for a hundred and fifty years or so. One of the urban legends about Hadžibajrić’s claimed that, back in the seventies, during the filming of the movie “The Battle of Sutjeska”—a state-produced Second World War spectacle, in which Richard Burton played Tito—a Yugoslav People’s Army helicopter was frequently deployed to transport Hadžibajrić’s buredžici (meat pies in sour cream) to the set, deep in the mountains of eastern Bosnia, for Elizabeth Taylor’s gastronomic enjoyment. To this day, many of us are still proud of the possibility that some of the fat in Purple Eyes’ ass might have come from Sarajevo.

Other columns covered other subjects: the philosophy of Sarajevo’s baroque slang; the myriad time-wasting strategies that I believed were essential for urban-mythology (re)production, and which I executed daily in innumerable kafanas (a kafana is a coffee shop, bar, restaurant, or any other place where you can spend a lot of time doing nothing, while consuming coffee or alcohol); and Sarajevo’s bingo venues, which were frequented by habitual losers, bottom-feeders, and young urbanites in pursuit of coolness credentials. One of the columns was about Vase Miskina Street (now known as Ferhadija), the main pedestrian thoroughfare in the heart of the city, which stretched from downtown to the old town. I referred to it as the city’s “artery,” because, if you spent enough time drinking coffee at one of its many kafanas, the whole city would eventually circulate past you. In the early nineties, street peddlers stationed themselves along Vase Miskina, pushing the penny-cheap detritus of the wrecked workers’ state: sewing-machine needles, screwdrivers, and Russian/Serbo-Croat dictionaries. (These days, it’s all Third World-capitalism junk: made-in-China plastic toys, miraculous herbal remedies, pirated DVDs.)

Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing impressions and details and generating ideas for my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I am prone to reimagining my younger self as one of Baudelaire’s flâneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city. Sarajevo was a small town, viscous with stories and history, brimming with people I knew and loved, all of whom I could monitor from a well-chosen kafana perch or while patrolling the streets. As I surveyed the estuaries of Vase Miskina or the obscure, narrow streets in the hills, complete paragraphs flooded my brain; not infrequently, and mysteriously, a simple lust would possess my body. The city laid itself down for me; wandering stimulated my body as well as my mind. It probably didn’t hurt that my daily caffeine and nicotine intake bordered on stroke-inducing—what wine and opium must have been for Baudelaire, coffee and cigarettes were for me.

As I would when I came back in 1997, I entered buildings just to smell their hallways. I studied the edges of stone stairs rounded by the many soles that had rubbed against them in the past century or two. I spent gameless days at the Željo soccer stadium, eavesdropping on the pensioners—the retirees who were lifelong season-ticket holders—as they strolled in circles within its walls, discussing the heartrending losses and unlikely victories of the past. I returned to places I had known my whole life in order to capture details that had been blurred by excessive familiarity. I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphysically, I was placed. If my friends spotted me on a side street looking up at the friezes typical of Austro-Hungarian architecture, or lingering on a lonely park bench, watching dogs fetch and couples make out—the kinds of behavior that might have seemed worrisome in someone else—they just assumed that I was working on a column. And I probably was.

Despite my grand plans, I ended up writing only six or seven “Sarajevo Republika” columns before Naši Dani ran out of money. The magazine’s dissolution was inconspicuous within the ongoing dissolution of Yugoslavia. In the summer of 1991, incidents in neighboring Croatia developed into a full-fledged, fast-spreading war. There were persistent rumors that the Yugoslav People’s Army, controlled by the Serbs and happily engaged in Croatia, was secretly transferring troops and weapons to the parts of Bosnia with a majority Serb population. Indeed, Oslobodjenje, the Sarajevo daily paper, got hold of a military plan outlining a troop redeployment in Bosnia and Herzegovina that clearly suggested the imminence of war, even though the Army firmly denied the plan.

The Army spokespeople weren’t the only ones denying the blatant likelihood of war. The urbanites of Sarajevo were also intent on ignoring the obvious, if for different reasons. Thus the summer of 1991, the last one before the war in Bosnia, was for many of us a continuous festival of disaster euphoria: the streets were packed day and night; parties, sex, and drugs were abundant; the laughter was hysterical. In the seductive glow of inevitable catastrophe, the city appeared more beautiful than ever. By September, however, the complicated operations of denial were winding down. With troubling frequency, I found myself speculating about which of the buildings around me would provide good sniper positions. Yet, even as I envisioned myself and my fellow-citizens ducking under fire, I took those visions to be simply paranoid manifestations of the stress induced by the ubiquitous warmongering politics. I understand now that I was imagining incidents, as it was hard for me to imagine war in all its force, in much the same way that a young person can imagine the symptoms of an illness but finds it hard to imagine death: life seems so continuously, intensely present.

Nowadays in Sarajevo death is all too easy to imagine and is itself continuously, intensely present, but back then the city was fully alive, both inside me and outside me. Its indelible sensory dimensions, its concreteness, seemed to defy the abstractions of war. I have learned since then that war is the most concrete thing there is, a reality that swallows all, easily overriding any other mode of existence and levelling both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul.

One day in the early summer of 1991, I went to the American Cultural Center in Sarajevo for an interview that was supposed to assess my suitability for the International Visitor Program, a cultural exchange program that was run by the now defunct United States Information Agency—which I hoped was a spy outfit, whose employees went undercover as culture lovers. I met the man in charge of the center, chatted a bit about this and that (mainly that), and then went home. I did not think that my visit to America would ever come to pass, nor had I noticed the man actually evaluating me. I didn’t care all that much. Though I thought it might be fun to Kerouac about in America for a while, I loved my city; I intended to tell stories about it to my children and my grandchildren, to grow old and die there. Around that time, I was having a passionate on-and-off affair with a young woman who was planning to move abroad, because, she said, she felt that she did not belong in Sarajevo. “It is not about where you belong—it is about what belongs to you,” I told her, possibly quoting from some movie. I was twenty-seven (and a half) and Sarajevo belonged to me.

I had pretty much forgotten about my summer chat at the American Cultural Center when, in the late fall, I received a call inviting me to visit the United States. I accepted the invitation. I planned to follow the U.S.I.A.’s monthlong itinerary, and then, before returning to Sarajevo, visit an old friend in Chicago. I landed at O’Hare on March 14, 1992. I remember that day as clear and sunny. On my way in from the airport, I saw for the first time Chicago’s skyline—an enormous, distant, geometrical city, less emerald than dark against the blue firmament.

By this time, the Yugoslav People’s Army was heavily deployed all over Bosnia, following the previously denied plan; Serbian paramilitaries were crazy busy slaughtering; there were random barricades and shootings on the streets of Sarajevo. In early April, a peaceful demonstration in front of the Bosnian Parliament Building was targeted by Serb snipers. In an ensuing series of incidents, two women were killed on the Vrbanja Bridge, a hundred yards or so from Teta Jozefina’s apartment, quite conceivably by the same good sniper who later maculated the walls in the room of my conception. On the outskirts of the city and in the hills above, the war was already mature and raging, but in the heart of Sarajevo people still seemed to think that it would somehow stop before it bit into their flesh. To my anxious inquiries from Chicago, my mother would respond, “There is already less shooting than yesterday”—as though war were a spring rain.

My father, however, advised me to stay away. Nothing good was going to happen at home, he said. I was supposed to fly back from Chicago on May 1st, and as things got progressively worse in Sarajevo I was kept awake by my fear for my parents’ and friends’ lives and by worries about my previously unimagined and currently unimaginable future in America. Daily, I wrangled with my conscience: if you were the author of a column titled “Sarajevo Republika,” then wasn’t it your duty to go back and defend your city and its spirit from annihilation?

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Much of that wrangling I did while incessantly roaming the streets of Chicago, as though I could simply walk off my moral anxiety. I’d pick a movie that I wanted to see—both for distraction and out of my old habits as a film reviewer—then locate, with my friend’s help, a theatre that was showing it. From Ukrainian Village, the neighborhood where I was staying, I’d take public transportation a couple of hours before the movie started, buy a ticket, and then wander in concentric circles around the movie theatre. My first journey was to the Esquire (now no longer a movie venue) on Oak Street, in the affluent Gold Coast neighborhood. The Esquire was my Plymouth Rock. The movie was Michael Apted’s “Thunderheart,” in which Val Kilmer played an F.B.I. agent of Native American background coming to terms with his past and his heritage. I remember the movie being as bad as it sounds, though I don’t remember many details. Nor do I remember much of my first Gold Coast roam, because it has become indistinguishable from all the other ones, the way the first day of school is subsumed in the entirety of your educational experience.