I did not know Arkan was living in the Grand Hotel. Not until after I had checked in one evening (the choice was between a room with heat and one with a phone) did I learn of the paramilitary leader's decision to turn the seedy hotel into his base of operations. Kosovo's newly elected parliament deputy was already making his mark on Pri±tinë. He had opened a gas station to sell his smuggled petroleum, he was looking into banking opportunities, he was said to be preparing for his next campaign of terror, this time against Albanians, who had boycotted the election. To his specialties of murder and mayhem Arkan was adding politics, and now the President of the Serbian Unity Party was ensconced at the Grand - where I had taken a heated room, which, as it turned out, was not only unheated but also had no hot water. By then it was too late to move. Besides, I was hungry.
At this hour the dining room was nearly empty, unlike the bar, which was popular with the JNA and secret police. The Grand was a good place for them to unwind (the maintenance of a police state is a huge responsibility), since the target of their oppression avoided it. Indeed, what was once an Albanian establishment was now an instrument of those plotting the Albanians' persecution. It is worth recalling the steps by which Milo±eviæ instituted apartheid in Kosovo: the revocation of the province's constitutional autonomy (twenty-two Albanians and two policemen were killed during two days of protests against the new constitution); the purging of Albanians from every position of influence in the province - political, educational, cultural, journalistic; the imposition of martial law. Note the logical fallacy: Milo±eviæ was waging wars in Croatia and Bosnia on behalf of ethnic rights, yet his claim to Kosovo was based on historical rights. What was once Serbian, et cetera, et cetera.
A curious history, which for Serbian nationalists begins and ends on Kosovo Polje - Blackbird's Field. The decline of the medieval Serbian kingdom may be traced to the sudden death, in 1355, of Tsar Stefan Du±an, perhaps a victim of poisoning. Du±an, Serbia's greatest leader, was at once a patricide and a skilled politician who expanded his empire until it stretched from the Sava to the Gulf of Corinth and from the Bulgarian border to the Adriatic. He subdued the Bulgarians by marrying the tsar's sister, fended off the Hungarians, conquered Macedonia, and then proclaimed himself tsar of the Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Albanians. His son, Uro±, however, was no match for the forces arrayed against him - Serbian noblemen contending for the throne, Ottomans marching on the border - and when he died, without an heir, in 1371, it was too late for the claimants to the throne to form an effective front against the Turks. True, at the Battle of Kosovo, Lazar teamed up with Vuk Brankoviæ Tvrtko of Bosnia, but they could not withstand the fighting machine of Sultan Murad, who only the month before had taken the fortress at Ni±. Both sides suffered heavy losses - Murad himself died at the hands of a Serbian knight, Lazar was captured and beheaded, most of the Serbian noblemen were killed or went into exile. But it fell to the conquered Serbs to fashion poetry from the bloodshed. In some versions of the Kosovo epic the defeat is blamed on Brankoviæ's supposed treachery, in other versions the crucial event is Lazar's decision to sacrifice earthly glory for the heavenly kingdom. In either case, as Vasko Popa wrote, "The blackbird dries his blood-drenched wings/ At the fire of red peonies" - still a common flower on Blackbird's Field. And this "image of disaster of the Battle of Kosovo," according to the critic Svetozar Koljeviæ, "has lived for centuries in Serbian literary and oral traditions with the elusive vividness of a hallucination."
It was in the name of this history that Serbian authorities were attempting to strip Albanians of their jobs, culture, and language. They looked askance at the foreign press, too. A Frenchwoman stopped by my table to say that in the Grand journalists' notebooks had a habit of disappearing from their rooms. I called for my bill and hurried upstairs, recalling an EC military monitor's warning.
"Kosovo," he said, "is a massacre waiting to happen."
To find the headquarters of LDK, the Democratic League of Kosova (the Albanian spelling), I was advised to write out its initials on a piece of paper and show them to a cab driver. An Albanian would happily drive me there; a Serb might deliver me to the police. As it happened, my cab driver was the same Serb who had taken me from the bus station to the Grand. The good news was, I had tipped him well (he was suffering from emphysema, I felt sorry for him); the bad news, he could only read Cyrillic. Another driver, offering to help, spat on the ground once he had deciphered my handwriting. He muttered something to my driver, who gave me an ugly look, and off we went. It was impossible to know if he preferred hard currency to escorting me to jail, for all he did was wheeze as we bounced and skidded over a stretch of mud behind the soccer stadium--the road had disappeared - before abruptly switching off the engine in front of a small Quonset hut, which housed the Albanian PEN Center and the Kosova Writers Association. Next door was Pri±tinë's central police station.
Rexhep Ismajli called the main room in the hut the only free fifty square meters in Kosova. Among the copiers and facsimile machines were writers drinking coffee and human rights workers documenting Serbian abuses. Ismajli, a social linguist and translator of French at Pri±tinë University until the Serbian authorities had dismissed him and more than 800 of his Albanian colleagues, was the Vice President of LDK. He made a point of showing me around the Albanians' only public building. The tour took less than a minute. First, a bookcase of Albanian works, then portraits of three tutelary spirits: a sculpture of Naïm Frashëri, the Muslim apostle-poet of Albanian nationalism; a painting of Gjergj Fishta, the Franciscan priest and Albania's national poet; and a photograph of F.S. Noli, the Harvard-educated Orthodox bishop, translator of Cervantes and Shakespeare, and first freely elected president in the Balkans, who ruled for only six months. Because Serbs and Greeks were afraid of democracy, Ismajli explained, neglecting to add that Noli was overthrown by his own countryman, King Zog, albeit with Yugoslav support. Ismajli pointed at the ceiling.
"Of course it's bugged," he said.
But he did not mince words. The reunification of Albanians in Kosova, western Macedonia, and Albania was inevitable, he said, because Greater Albania was a valid political idea as well as a cultural fact, notwithstanding eighty years of division. War in Kosova would thus be international in scope (Greece and Bulgaria might also join in), and any Serbian provocation, of which there were countless daily instances, could lead to war. It was up to Clinton to stop Milo±eviæ. There was no telling how long the LDK leadership could counsel patience to its membership. But what choice did they have? There were hundreds of Albanian villages the JNA could overrun without fear of harming Serbs; but convincing Albanians to hold out for peaceful change was becoming ever more difficult, since they were now required to hand over their guns to the authorities (some villagers were buying hunting rifles to give to the police in order to avoid arrest) even as the JNA was arming the Serbs.
Then came the history lesson, obligatory in the Balkans. What Ismajli emphasized, though, was a tradition of tolerance instead of grievance - four religions living side by side, Sephardic Jews having migrated into the region after their expulsion from Spain. Albanians were the oldest Balkan people, and the religious diversity of this ancient crossroads, between East and West, Byzantium and Rome, had of necessity fostered tolerance. It was not unlike Sarajevo, with this difference: the war in Bosnia was an internal affair. If fighting broke out in Kosova the tragedy would be much greater.
"It's not a classic war," said the beautiful young architect. "Just every day there's a beating, a killing."
She was the prettiest of my Albanian acquaintances to give the lie to the ethnic joke that they could not learn languages. The language Albanians refused to learn, I realized in LDK headquarters, listening to people speak English, French, and German, was Serbian. Albanian is a Romance language, distinct from the Slavic tongues, and Albanian Kosovoans had the same interests - cultural and political - in using their own language as their Slavic countrymen: language is identity. The architect, who had never been allowed to work at her profession, looked up.
"Something is happening," she murmured.
The man in the doorway, a dental surgeon on "forced holiday," had in tow three students just released from jail. Their crime was studying with him, in Albanian, the construction of bridges and crowns; two fellow students were still in custody. What happened was this: when they had gone to the surgeon's house to get their fall semester grades, his Serbian neighbor had called the authorities. The police arrested the students and beat them on their hands. But they did not betray their teacher.
"It was my fault," he said. "I shouldn't have had so many come at the same time."
Of course, he should have been able to teach them at the university. Meantime, he worked in the parallel system of schools, hospitals, cultural institutions, and media the Albanians had established just to survive. You had to admire their tenacity. One dental student, for example, who was rubbing his bruised hands, had already fled from Sarajevo. He commuted 90 kilometers a day to attend the surgeon's lectures. No wonder he had done poorly on his exams. And now this.
"He's seen everything," said the surgeon. "He has so much to think about!"
"What has never been can never be," Vuk Karad¾iæ wrote. "One land only but two masters." It was true: power sharing was not in the political lexicon of either the Albanians or the Serbs, thanks in no small measure to Karad¾iæ's work on the Kosovo epic, sung by guslars, at the heart of Serbian nationalism. The Serbs had won this war of poetries. "The Downfall of the Kingdom of Serbia," for example, tells the story of Lazarus, the Serbian prince who on the eve of the Battle of Kosovo has a remarkable dream. A grey falcon flies from Jerusalem, with a swallow in its beak. But the falcon turns into Elijah, and the swallow becomes a letter from the Holy Mother spelling out the choice the prince must make between a heavenly and an earthly kingdom. Here are the poem's concluding lines:
And Lazarus chose heaven,
not the earth,
And tailored there
a church at Kosovo -
O not of stone
but out of silk and velvet -
And he summoned there
the Patriarch of Serbia,
Summoned there
the lordly twelve high bishops:
And he gathered up his forces,
had them
Take with him
the saving bread and wine.
As soon as Lazarus
has given out
His orders,
then across the level plain
Of Kosovo
pour all the Turks.
Lazarus's church of silk and velvet, a lovely metaphor for Kosovo's Orthodox shrines and monsteries, had given way to a darker figure--the black-and-blue fatigues and flak jackets of the soldiers patrolling the streets of Pri±tinë. And the Turks? It was another seventy years before they conquered Serbia. In Kosovo, they built bridges and mosques (most Albanians were Muslims); recruited Albanians to serve in the Sultan's army; made Turkish the official language. They gave Serbian poets a powerful theme. And Serbs had only two names for Albanians - separatist terrorists and Turks.
"Just as we are not and do not want to be Turks, so we shall oppose with all our might anyone who would like to turn us into Slavs or Austrians or Greeks, we want to be Albanians." This memorandum from the Albanian League in Prizren to the British delegation to the 1878 Congress of Berlin garnered little support in diplomatic circles. Bismarck for one did not believe that Albanians were a distinct nationality, and while the Great Powers could no longer ignore a people their own historians and poets regarded as direct descendants of the Ilyrians they did not hesitate to divide up most of the Albanian lands among Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Five hundred years of Ottoman rule were ending, even as the Porte's last Muslim subjects were developing a national consciousness. They codified their language, created a poetry, and in the First Balkan War declared independence - only to be occupied by Serbia. One month later, when the Great Powers granted Albania autonomy (ceding vast tracts of land to Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece), Montenegro laid siege to Shkodër, et cetera, et cetera. In short, occupation and partition are the watchwords of Albanian history. Yet Greater Albania is easier to envision, at least from a cartographer's perspective, than Greater Serbia: only borders separate Kosovo Albanians from their brethren in Albania and western Macedonia.
Ah, but borders are drawn in blood.
Serbs, Montenegrans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Italians, Austrians, all fought over Albanian lands in the Great War. And no one was happy with the decision at Versailles to restore Albania's 1913 borders. The Serbian dynasty enlisted none other than Ivo Andriæ to sort out its Albanian policy. In a secret memorandum, dated 1939 and finally published in Croatia in 1977, the Nobel laureate advocated partitioning Albania, assimilating Catholic and Orthodox Albanians, and deporting the Muslims to Turkey - a hateful document which reinforces Charles Simic's observation that it is time to dismantle "the myth of the critical independence of the intellectuals."
"Ali Podrimja is not from here," the beautiful young architect told me when Kosova's greatest poet arrived at LDK headquarters. "He's from the cosmos."
As it happened, the poet was on his way to the Vienna Human Rights Conference. One circle was closing for me: it was Podrimja who had read at the publishing party my Slovenian friends had taken me to in Carinthia. He spoke warmly of Toma¾ ©alamun, recalling an Albanian poetry night in Ljubljana, in 1988, disrupted by bomb threats - called in by Serbs wary of Slovenian-Albanian ties. Kosovo was indeed Slovenia's dark twin. Slovenian nationalists had used the Albanian cause in their own independence drive; Kosovo had lost its autonomy. Slovenia's population was declining; Kosovo had the highest birth rate in Europe; Slovenian poets had international reputations; Kosovo Albanians were almost unknown; and so on. Twice that night in Ljubljana the poets had to move to a new location. A two-hour event stretched into six. ©alamun was inspired by the danger.
"I would love to have my reading blown up," the Slovenian poet announced.
Podrimja was accustomed to such threats. At this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, during a symposium on the Balkan War, the poet had just begun to read when twenty policemen swarmed in around him. Don't be afraid, said one policeman. Unruffled, Podrimja asked him to go have a coffee with him. The policeman's reply astonished the poet: I want to hear your poem about the Berlin Wall. And when Podrimja, stopping in Ljubljana on his way home to Pri±tinë, told this story to ©alamun, the Slovenian poet said, You're a lucky man. You will have a long life. No one can hurt you.
Podrimja was not convinced of that. His faith was in Albanian poetry, which he described in some of the same terms that Slovenians used to praise their own poetry. "It takes the side of a people who are not conquerors," he said. "It is against violence, because its source is not only in our struggle for Albanian existence but also for universal existence."
And then he was gone, but not before leaving me with a copy of the poem that the German policeman admired, which Rexhep Ismajli and I immediately translated:
Fates
I tiptoe through the Berlin Wall
with a rose in my hand
I'm afraid of hurting
the fallen souls
When I wanted to go through the Albanian Wall
my feet my head were soaked in blood
Over hills and fields
a woman dressed in black
looks for my grave
And my body
wakes up every day among you
civilization's terrible torso
Doesn't it bother you
the way my torso
accuses
J.J's hand, when I shook it, was as soft as a sponge. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and he had shuffled into LDK headquarters with the stiff bearing of an old man, though he was not much more than thirty. The doctor with him explained that J.J. had spent the last twenty-four hours in police custody - for selling video cassettes of Albanian folk singers. Hard to see the crime in that. His family company was licensed to sell them, and he had come to Pri±tinë yesterday, from his home in a nearby village, to check on his business. But when he arrived at his office his brother was out and the only customer was an undercover policeman waiting to beat him. Two uniformed policemen came to take him to a Serbian café. There, in the water closet, one policemen (both were drunk) showed him a bullet, put it in his revolver, and said, Do you see? He cocked the revolver and stuck it in J.J.'s mouth. Now you will learn who the Serbian police are, he said, shoving it down his throat. Then I will kill you. The other policeman started to hit him, and then the first one used his revolver to strike him on his head, his back, his legs - everywhere. They tortured him for four hours. Then they adopted a new strategy, threatening to shoot him if he did not lead them to his brother. But his brother was nowhere to be found, so they went to the police station, where the beating resumed until a civil inspector arrived. Did the police beat you? the civil inspector asked. Until they were tired, J.J. said. What shall we do with him? the civil inspector asked the policemen. You know what you can do, they said. What they did was take his money and release him, promising to kill him in ten days. That was why J.J. would only tell me his initials. And your brother? I said. In hiding, he said. Will you leave the country? I said. Who will give me a visa? he said. Besides, he was the sole provider for his parents, his brothers, his wife and son. Do you want to see what they did to him? said the doctor. I nodded. J.J. slowly pulled his shirt over his head. His entire upper back was a solid bruise the color of the sky at sunset, shot through with lines of black and blue; more bruises and welts covered his calves, thighs, and buttocks. And his hand, said the doctor, lifting J.J.'s swollen right hand, it's probably broken. We haven't been able to X-ray it yet. Why, I wondered, did he shake my hand?
We're lucky in one way, said the former tour guide. Our president is a nice, calm writer who has kept our people calm. And we're lucky in a special way: whatever the Serbs do is wrong. That's why we're patient. It's unnatural to keep doing something wrong. If someone tells you you're drunk, you'd better believe it. And the whole world is telling them they're drunk, but they don't realize it yet. They call this the cradle of their civilization. I say, Let's turn to the encyclopedia. It's not the churches they want, it's the minerals - the lead, copper, gold, silver. But the mines are closed down. What I want is to drive to Albania one day, have a swim in the Adriatic, then a nice dinner, a cognac, and drive back. We're the same people as them. We just haven't seen them for fifty years.
What George Orwell called "the evil atmosphere of war" pervaded Pri±tinë, a dingy, unfinished city. MIG fighter jets buzzed the drab apartment buildings. Soldiers and policemen armed with automatic weapons lined the muddy streets. The poet Eqrem Basha and I, in search of a car, walked toward the distant snow-capped mountains, discussing the relative merits of Ivo Andriæ and my beloved St.-John Perse. Fate had linked the diplomats, awarding them the Nobel Prize for Literature in successive years. Juxtapose the photograph of Andri_ at the signing of the Tripartite Pact, alongside Ribbentrop, with the story of St.-John Perse staring Hitler down at the Munich Conference, and you will have a history of the conflicting political engagements of twentieth century writers. Sadly, this is a parable of talents in which the muse does not necessarily distinguish between the cowardly and courageous. The Bridge on the Drina is a masterpiece, despite the novelist's political sympathies. "Only after Andriæ won the Nobel Prize did we learn he was a fascist," said Eqrem, motioning me quickly into a battered Fiat. "The Serbian project has always been to purify this area, spiritually and ethnically. But the more they tried to assimilate us, the stronger we became." This was because the Albanians had a revolutionary tradition to inspire them and, in the poet-president Ibrahim Rugova, a leader with the moral authority of Vaclav Havel to guide them. It was up to the writers to articulate democratic principles, relying on metaphors to evade the censors, as in Eqrem's poem, "Urban Planning," which we had translated before setting out:
First place the city where it will catch
The sun morning and evening
Then plan for the sewers
To remove the remains
Of assassinations on dark nights
Set the monument to the unknown hero
In the center where he can breathe
Freely when the seasons change
And
Don't put skyscrapers
Where their shadows will fall on people
When you design the streets
They should lead out from the city's heart
So blood will flow
To every limb
If there is no river
Pour the tears of the despairing
If there are no parks
Plant a forest with hair that stands on end
And
Before everything else
Leave room for solar panels
Because the city
From the very first will catch the sun
And the sun was shining when we drove to a nearby village to visit Eqrem's best friend, Agim Çavdarbasha, Kosova's foremost sculptor. Every day the sculptor and his students - he too had been dismissed from the university - walked two kilometers to this studio, which he heated with scraps of leftover wood; he worked in marble and bronze only during the summer. The sculptor had no money, no commissions, and his galleries had been shut down, yet he seemed remarkably content.
"Il travail toujours," marveled Eqrem.
Outside, large abstract pieces, which owed a debt to Henry Moore, took up most of the available space. But it was a series of smaller works that caught my eye - "Cages," which consisted of haunting forms trapped in bars. They were Eqrem's favorites, too.
"The very first sentence of our history books," he sighed, "says we are descendants of Slavs."
Hydajet Hyseni had spent ten years - almost his entire adult life - in prison for "counterrevolutionary activities" - writing and publishing poetry. But the dictates of the recording angel were what he now obeyed, documenting Serbian abuses for the Council on Human Rights and Freedom. There was no shortage of work for the volunteers in this unheated office.
Hydajet, a thin, dark-haired young man, apologized for not speaking English - a prison legacy, said his elderly translator. They made an unlikely pair. The translator was a former banker (the dismissal of all Albanian bankers had created new opportunities for Arkan), the last person you might expect to find working for an "enemy of the people," as the poet was called. Hydajet's problems, the translator explained, dated back to his university days when a friend published some of his poems--without his knowledge. Soon after, the secret police kidnapped him and took him to a house in the woods; at the end of a lengthy interrogation he was ordered to choose between informing on other students or going to prison. He managed to escape, hiding out for the next four years, in Kosovo and abroad, with his friend, Kadri Zeka, until the secret police assassinated Zeka in Stuttgart. That was when Hydajet joined the student movement, writing poems and articles for their publications.
"Propaganda," he said in English.
March 1981. The first demonstration in Pri±tinë was a spontaneous affair--a food fight at the university - which spiraled out of control. Student demands for better food, housing, and working conditions gave way to mass protests in towns and villages across the province - and sharper political focus: the province should be granted republican status. The Serbs' worst nightmare thus became the Albanians' rallying cry. Riot police moved in, and for the first time since World War Two Yugoslavs fired on their own countrymen, killing at least a dozen Albanians and wounding hundreds. Martial law was established; haf of the adult Albanian population was arrested or reprimanded; some died in detention. It was not long before Hydajet was taken into custody and interrogated for four months.
"The police tortured me in every way imaginable," he said, opening an album of photographs.
I cannot describe the horror I felt looking at these pictures of beaten, murdered, and mutilated Albanians - teenagers, old men, priests, a woman with her ear cut off - which formed the backdrop to Hydajet's recollections of his year in solitary confinement in a Serbian prison. Then he was placed in a cell with murderers and rapists who were ordered to abuse the Albanians. Yet the Serbian prisoners came to see their folly, even banding together with the Albanians to fight the guards. We found a common language, said the poet, whose hero was Adem Demaæi, the Albanian's Mandela. After twenty-eight years of imprisonment, Demaæi still believed the Albanians' enemy was the Serbian government, not the Serbian people. I would rather kill my own son than someone else, said Demaæi. What Hydajet learned in prison was that the Serbs and Albanians were in the same fix.
"It's all a prison here," he said, closing the album. "You just don't see the bars. I'm convinced the Serbs in Kosova will understand the truth one day. My only fear is that will be too late, and the government will repeat the tragedy of Bosnia. As we say, Arkan didn't come here for fun."
More aggrieved men and women filed into the room. Foreign human rights workers were recording stories, in French and German - of a woman beaten in front of her children, of a man shot for selling cigarettes. The poet gave me copies of several lists of missing and murdered Albanians.
"We are determined to find a peaceful solution," he said, "but the people are beginning to think freedom must be fought for. They say that if we don't fight we'll be the only ones who don't get their land. You must beware of a patient man when he finally becomes angry."
My hands were shaking as I wrote, and I was having trouble catching my breath.
"I hope the next time we meet we can talk about poetry," said Hydajet before we parted.
The banker escorted me back to my hotel, bidding me farewell when we came within eyesight of the building. On your next visit, he said, please stay at my house. It's not much, but at least it's not as dangerous as the Grand. And then he vanished into the crowd.
Shoeshiners were doing a brisk business. A line had formed at a kiosk named McDonald's. On every corner policemen wearing flak jackets were pointing their automatic weapons at passers-by. I went to the National Library, a modernist building enclosed in ornamental bars, like a giant cage. It was surrounded by mud, the front door was locked, several windows were broken. So much for that.
I circled the city, peering into empty stores and closed museums, churches and a Muslim cemetery. At dusk I came to a plaza, in the middle of which stood a tall, white tri-pronged monument. All at once the sky was full of blackbirds, thousands upon thousands of blackbirds circling the white spires, cawing hysterically. It was an ominous scene, which brought to mind a distant Sunday morning in Seattle, when I had awakened from a troubling dream, the effects of which I could not shake off. The sky on that spring day had the greenish tinge of an impending hurricane, though the forecast was for clear weather, and from my front porch I saw nothing to suggest a storm brewing - except for the flock of barn swallows flying furiously up and down the street, zigzagging around the apple trees that lined the parking strip. I was staring at the birds, wondering what was going on, when my neighbor opened his door. Did you hear the news? he cried. Mount St. Helens had erupted.
The cackling blackbirds (reincarnated Serbian warriors, according to local legend) settled on the roofs of the nearby apartment buildings. I did not want to spend another minute here--or in Kosovo, for that matter--but before going I had to learn the name of the monument. Off to one side of the plaza was a handsome young couple, and it was not until I had introduced myself to them that I noticed the man's beard; sewn into his leather jacket was a red patch emblazoned with Greater Serbia insignia. Tempted to beg their pardon and leave, nevertheless I went ahead and asked them what the monument was called. The man answered pleasantly enough.
"What does that mean?" I said.
"Togetherness," he replied.
"The three cultures?" I said. "Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox?"
With a nod of his head he offered to write its name down for me. I opened my notebook, and several loose papers fell out - the lists of missing and murdered Albanians that Hydajet Hyseni had given me. My heart was pounding as I skipped over my Pri±tinë interviews in search of a blank page. When he had written out the name in Cyrillic (which I could not read), I thanked him profusely.
"Another time," he said, meaning, I presume, "Any time."
The blackbirds flew up into the sky again and just as quickly resettled on the roofs. Over a mosque's loudspeaker came the chanting of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. MIG fighter jets buzzed the city. Under the circumstances the Serb's slip of the tongue seemed appropriate.