THE MOMENT THE WAR BEGAN FOR ME

THE MOMENT THE WAR BEGAN FOR ME

Like all the ones before, it smelled of the blossoms of my cherry tree, which I used to watch through my bedroom window, waving to it with my tiny hands when I was little and lonely. April in Sarajevo, the year nineteen ninety-two.

As if through a haze of memory, I saw myself gazing at the world that stretched beyond our courtyard. A peeled spot on the trunk witnessed our harmless childhood mischief, when we tried to cut it with a small kitchen knife we had stolen from the kitchen while the adults were drinking coffee. We were barely nine years old when it got that scar from us. It was our shared notch on time, a scar we inflicted upon it without knowing what scars truly meant. Nevertheless, even forced into damage like that, it patiently endured our games. It remained silent and gave its sweet, red fruit to us children every subsequent year, without resentment, without reproach, and without revenge.

The blossom scent spread across the Sarajevo field that distant ninety-two, powerfully and luxuriously, as if nature itself wished to drown out whatever was brewing behind its lush beauty. It awakened the pulses of girls' hearts, waking up the pavements with the coquettish sound of women's high heels that echoed down Titova, Vase Miskina, Fuada Midžića...

The city pulsed with laughter from the first summer gardens, the screech of morning trams cutting through the sharp morning freshness at Skenderija, and that specific smell of Pino Silvestre from the faces of young men. They were boys who had just started to shave, whose faces were still childishly soft, yet proudly scented with that April spring, conifer, and citrus from the cult green bottle shaped like a pinecone. That scent was our unofficial symbol of a boy's transition into a man, a ticket into the adult world—a world we believed was waiting for us with open arms.

Awakened Sarajevo smelled of an occasional spring shower, of wet asphalt evaporating under a generous sun, and of life! Everything, down to the very last pore of this city, smelled of pure, unadulterated life. Sarajevo was budding, and me along with it. Inside my soul, a trembling phantom of youth’s love was deeply imprinted—the kind that is not spoken aloud, but carried beneath one's shirt like the most precious ornament.

In the evening shadows, beneath the canopies and beside the Miljacka river, one could discern the closely pressed heads of those who naively swore eternal love. I watched them joyfully intertwining their fingers as they walked, tightly and feverishly, while a gentle breath of that first, purest, untouched love descended upon their eyelashes. Everything seemed unbreakable. Everlasting.

That year nineteen ninety-two was supposed to be remembered, by all the laws of youth and God, for longing and secrets, for whispers in the ear in front of closed doors, for laughter that turned into giggling without a reason, and for enrolling in college. I was preparing my books, making notes, dreaming of grand amphitheaters, of midterms, of growing up and becoming someone important in this city that had watched over me through all the stages of my growing up. I dreamed of a life that was clear, planned, and beautiful like an April morning.

How the smell of gunpowder and salty tears replaced the scent of cherry blossom, and how a black cloud of thick, greasy smoke—coming not from factory chimneys, but from someone's burned memories—stained the clean mornings, even now, after so many years and so many sleepless nights, I do not know how to explain. It is a question a person asks when everything is over and there are no answers, because in madness, there is no logic. The wedding and the music were cut short by a bullet and the death of Nikola Gardović. That is how it all began...

From that moment on, time was split into a "before" and an "after." The streets were suddenly flooded with camouflage uniforms. The utter, total carelessness toward the beauty of early spring by uniformed young men and older men alike, and the coldness of their evil stares, stretched an unspeakable canvas of pain inside my soul. I looked at them in disbelief: those very same, almost beardless young men who, just yesterday, used to spread the scent of conifer and citrus from the green bottle through the city, were now spreading the breath of death, cold steel, and spent bullet casings. How that, too, happened—what dark alchemy transformed those boys into strangers to a girl's heart—even now, I do not know how to explain. Spring bloomed in its full splendor, beautiful and luxurious, while they passed by that beauty blind and mute, carrying a frost in their eyes that froze everything it touched.

And then, one of those spring mornings brought the powerful blast of a shell. Shards of window glass scattered across the carpet. Before my eyes stood the image of a broken kaleidoscope that I had tried to piece back together as a little girl, crying, gathering the colorful bits of glass and pushing them back into the tube. I cried back then, just as I cried that spring of ninety-two, realizing that my world was breaking into thousands of sharp, unconnectable fragments piercing me straight in the heart.

I look through the shattered glass, and my cherry tree, split in half, is trying to stay upright, as if nothing is wrong, as if defying the very darkness that rushed from the hills. She knew how many red, juicy fruits she used to give us all those years, and how submissive and gentle she was even when we, as insolent children, climbed her, tearing at her branches and breaking her tender leaves, treading upon her trunk.

Equally loyal and silent, she never betrayed us children to our parents when we caused some mischief. She endured our harshness with maternal love, turning every injury of ours into a new, even sweeter fruit. She bore fruit and kept bearing, year after year, just as she was supposed to do that year, with all her being. Cut short in her bloom. Killed! Like some princess with pink, curly hair, beautiful and yet disfigured and broken. Once again, she was silent. Even then, in her last breath, she betrayed no one. She did not emit a sound, she did not accuse, she did not seek vengeance. She simply collapsed onto the ground, next to her own scattered pink blossoms that covered the cold cobblestones. A wartime gunshot carried her away on that spring morning, burying her beneath her own blooms.

That someone she did not betray shot into all the days of my childhood that I had shared with her. Through the shattered window, where the prints of a small, lonely girl remained, the pain and death of the cherry tree stretched out. The moment my cherry tree and I parted, the war began for me, and for her—the war was carved deep into her trunk! On many nights, I heard her weeping with her scattered, red blossoms.

If only I could embrace her one more time, to tell her how much I have grown and everything I have been through while waiting for her pink blossoms, which by now would have seen many summers. I am sure that then, in those silent, deaf nights, she would answer me with the familiar, gentle rustle of her leaves. She would tell me how time does not erase love; she would whisper to me of the days when we were both whole, unmarred by this world. With that green, invisible voice, she would console me, telling me that no notch of hatred can sever the roots of our childhood. She would tell me that all my tears are actually just drops of spring rain eager to nourish some new blossoms, out there where there are no gunshots. And as the wind passes through the crowns of foreign, unknown gardens, I close my eyes and listen. I listen to her whispering to me through that distant rustling that she never truly left, but only sleeps in a quiet shelter of my soul, guarding that little, lonely girl from every new frost.

Can you tell me in which city I can find my cherry tree of pink, velvet blossoms? The little, lonely girl needs her. She is still standing there, in front of some new window, waiting for someone to piece her kaleidoscope back together and bring the scent of cherry blossoms back to the clean, peaceful mornings of Sarajevo.