Logavina Street by Barbara Demick

Author:Barbara Demick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64412-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

9

AWAKENING

THE MORTAR SHELL that ripped through the market on February 5, 1994, struck at the soul of Sarajevo. Everybody knew somebody who worked at the market or someone who shopped at the market.

It had been a sunny Saturday, the kind of rare winter day that practically begged the unwary to leave the relative safety of their homes. War or not, it was impossible to stay inside all the time. The shell struck at 12:37 P.M., when the market was jam-packed. Suddenly, there was a crash. A whirlpool of metal shards. The bustling street scene was reduced to the rawest elements of human life: flesh and blood.

From the foot of Logavina Street, it is roughly four hundred yards down Maršala Tita to the market square. On Logavina, they heard only a distant, dull thud. It was an anomaly that a mortar shell makes less noise exploding in the middle of a crowd than if it lands harmlessly on empty pavement. But news of the calamity traveled up the street quickly.

Jela and Zijo Džino were in their downstairs kitchen—the safest room of the house. The electricity was off, so Zijo hooked up the television to the car battery and tuned in to the scene on the market square. It was all there—indistinguishable body parts amid the potatoes and onions, the severed head, the puddles of bright crimson, the wails of the wounded. BiH Television showed the sort of explicit footage routinely expurgated from American television.

Jela put on her reading glasses and peered closely at the television to seek out familiar faces in the on-screen carnage. The authorities did not release the identities of the victims until nightfall. Jela and Zijo listened quietly, their hearts pounding as the television announcer read each of the names.

“That was the worst part,” Jela said the next day. “My heart still can’t stop pounding. I feel so sorry for everybody.”

None of their close friends or relatives were among the dead and wounded. However, the mortar shell had claimed two victims from the neighborhood. One was a merchant who owned a glove shop downtown. The other was the wife of the popular leader of the Islamic prayer house at the top of Logavina. The woman had told her husband she was going to buy groceries and would be gone for thirty minutes.

The day after the shelling, the city was in a collective state of shock. Sarajevans telephoned one another, asking if everybody in their families was okay and if they knew anybody killed.

They swapped anecdotes of their own brushes with near death. Almost everyone on the street had a tale to tell. Delila Lačević had wanted to buy cigarettes at the market but was delayed—as it happened, showing me around the neighborhood. Nermin Džino was supposed to meet his girlfriend at the market square at 12:30. He was hurrying down Logavina Street at the moment of the blast, thinking that his girlfriend would be angry he was late. Luckily, she was late, too.

“She’s okay,” he said, shaken, the next day.

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