Lamija Begagić – The Morning Doboj Fell

I’d never been there, but I knew a bit about it. Let’s say that for a long time, it existed in one of those childhood stories. Rumor has it that one of my relatives called it Dvoboj – “duel” – and this even made its way into my family’s slang: We’re going to Dvoboj.

We never went to Dvoboj. On maps and in social studies textbooks, though, it was labeled as an important railway hub under its official name: Doboj.

So I knew about it from that ominous loop, where the tracks and lines of the railway, so lively back then, split off. Also from watching so many people pour out of the train right there on our way to visit our aunt in Tuzla. The train would magically empty there and we would finally find seats, take off our shoes, put our feet up, and enjoy the rest of the trip.

We had that one aunt there in Tuzla. We had another in Sarajevo. We would go visit them once a year. Otherwise, we didn’t have anyone outside our hometown Zenica, which was neither a problem nor unusual for us.

Besides, we told ourselves, what could we want anywhere else when we had everything here anyway?

Bojana and Jelena had pretty much their whole family right there. It’s through them that we knew about Doboj. Through their grandfather that they both called Đed, the one they never stopped talking about.

Đed bought us this, Đed taught us that, Đed took us there.

Đed was to them what Deda Hazim would have surely been to me if he had still been alive: all my older relatives who remembered him gushed about how great he was, their eyes filled with emotion and nostalgia. They described their childhoods as if he were that grandpa from Branko Ćopić stories, but unfortunately, he had had no impact on mine.

And even though they loved all their get-togethers with Đed, they rarely saw him, just like me with my faraway aunts. It was only during summer break that they would leave for Doboj and once again place that tiny town on my mind’s personal map, bounded by the chimneys of the Željezara iron works on the one side and the confluence of the Babina and Bosna Rivers on the other side.

In those years, no one went anywhere on the weekends. Those were slow times, when Doboj and Sarajevo were faraway destinations that weren’t worth visiting for just two days, even though they were a mere forty-five miles from Zenica. For us, weekends meant endless freedom, idle hours unburdened by the pressure of planning. The only difference from one weekend to the next was which of us would be the first to go out in front of the building while those of us still in the house watched from the window and rushed their parents through the morning routine, shouting, “Hurry up, what else we gotta do? Look, Jelena’s already outside!”

In no time at all, we were pouring out from every side: from the garage, from the market, even from the tunnel, as we called the passage between two buildings.

It was only during the long summer breaks, when the two of them would leave to visit Đed in Doboj, that we would need a few days to get used to the change, but then we quickly went back to our slow summer routines. When summer was over, though, it always felt too fast: there they were again with their stories about new things Đed had taught them how to do, but we soon got used to them being there again and they reminded us that they belonged there with us, despite missing out on our garage bunkers, bike repairs, and neighborhood ping-pong tournaments.

And, as is fitting with twists and turns, in this slow, lazy story, it also happened when we least expected it, on a budding spring day, early in the morning.

Something had been going on between our parents for days: the basements were being cleaned, my dad was on duty in front of the building, sometimes with Aida’s dad, sometimes with Bojana and Jelena’s, asking how family in other parts of the country were doing, places where things were more difficult. Most of the time, however, they just played card games like rummy and drank coffee from a thermos.

I got dressed to go outside, and Dad worried that I might be cold now and hot later. Everything had become sort of slim and tight on me. There was no music playing in the background as I rummaged through the closet, but the ever-too-tiny living room was filled with the voices of worried radio reporters. The regular programming was interrupted that morning with extraordinary news: Doboj had fallen.

Doboj, fallen.

We had learned in the days and months leading up to that moment that when something falls, it’s never good: it couldn’t be good because my parents were once again either swearing or absentmindedly silent, it couldn’t be good because people were suffering somewhere, and it couldn’t be good because droves of people were coming to town, gyms were filled, some children were growing up on those wooden floors where we used to exercise, and we weren’t going to school and instead were hanging around in the street, which seemed to shrink just like our old-fashioned Yassa tracksuits.

We were too young to know how selfish and unempathetic we were in those moments, but we missed our gym classes and going to school every day. We wanted the chance to get bored, to hate and curse school, not to have this unnatural desire to always want to go there. Soon, we accepted all those homeless children; we knew there was no way it could be good for school to become your home, but then they betrayed us too and moved on because, as we thought back then, evidently you could even go past here, and there were even people who would go those places and who not only didn’t have everything here like we thought everyone did until yesterday, but who no longer had anything anywhere.

By that point, we had learned that when something fell, that meant yet another small ending.

But by that moment, by that spring morning when I picked out my tracksuit, nameless, unknown cities had fallen, but now Doboj had fallen. I’d never been there, but I felt like it was more mine than other places.

Doboj had fallen. Even though I didn’t have anyone in Doboj, in that moment I thought: Things aren’t going to be okay; hopefully at least we can stay together.

Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry, and it no longer mattered which shirt I was going to wear outside; out of breath, I ran to the fifth floor and knocked. A sleepy-eyed Jelena opened the door and looked at me, pale.

“‘She alright!?”

“Who?”

“Đed! Doboj has fallen!”

I no longer remember what she said, but I do remember how much her look calmed me, the ease with which she said something like, “Oh, he’s fine, everyone’s fine.”

Đed was fine. Damir, Adnan, and Alma were also fine, they said, when they came to Zenica from Doboj at the beginning of the summer, as fine as you can be when you’ve put your life in your gym bag and traveled into the unknown: their dad toward Tešanj, their mom with all three children to Zenica. They wouldn’t stay long, they said, though we had already learned not to believe them, but also not to let on the extent to which we knew what they hadn’t yet figured out: they would be staying a long time. Some of them forever.

A few mornings later, there was a strange peace, and then we started going out again. A new summer, new bicycle repair shops in abandoned garages, tournaments in the unused handball stadium, and Damir and Jelena secretly dating, so that no one would notice, so that no one would ever see them, hidden in the stadium bleachers.

In the years that followed, I never wrote about the two of them and those alleged comic book exchanges, and who knows, maybe they even exchanged a few words about Doboj.

I decided to always think of the two of them as still being here with us, even though they were both gone forever. Jelena, along with her sister Bojana and their parents, had left later that summer, first to Doboj, to later end up somewhere in Serbia.

Damir had left with Adnan and Alma for his hometown Doboj at the end of the war: a fresh start.

Not even the excitement of going back to our old school benches could save the upcoming fall. Until the very last moment, no one knew if there would still be schools, so we were left with only the taste of that late summer when half of our friends disappeared from our building one morning, and just a few hours later, the doors of their apartments were plastered with notices like, “Occupied – Disabled War Veterans.”

Everything that came after that fall, everything that fell, everything that was liberated, we faced it all with stoicism, more disinterested, thinking, I guess, that we were big now and that it was courage or wisdom. Today, we know that it was neither of the two and that we should have left before the first nameless city fell and gone to an even more nameless one, and from there, we should have written about those few moments when something meaningful, something beautiful, something big and important was about to happen, but for some people, it never did.