Wall of Fire. Pam Stavropoulos

Which is not conveyed in letters to Sasha. But which is likewise difficult to do in the face of prior horrors of which it is impossible to speak to anyone.

      Anna’s rape and death.

      The first she described to me. The second I witnessed.

      Anna was psychologically shattered by the assault by her neighbour. Which was worse, she said, than if at the hands of an unknown conscript. So much worse that I wondered, as I saw her killed by a bomb fragment in front of my eyes, whether she had actually been spared.

       To think like that at such a moment!

      Yet think it I did. We had accompanied each other many times on our desperate forays for food. Dodging snipers as we had avoided angry birds in mating season. It was a while before she told me what had happened to her.

      Details which were like acid on her tongue. Which I am now compelled to register by writing down.

      But why? Why must I do this when no one will read it? And when I already know? Am I using the memory of my friend and her anguish as distraction from my own, which is so much less in comparison? And not for the first time I resist the thought that actual death might be a release for many of us as it had surely been for her. Because perhaps it is the only reprieve from this nightmare.

      Anna. My friend Anna. Whose violation and death are but one lonely statistic in this morass of destruction. How I am able to recount her experience, rather than why, is the more challenging question. Her pupils had dilated. And her skin had turned ashen as she told me of her rape. Of how, while searching for firewood at dusk only a few metres from her home, she had been seized by Vitaly and forced to submit to him.

      It had been rapid and clinical (`like animals’, she said in a voice calm with despair). A man she knew not only as an adult, but with whom she had played when they were children. The fact of prior personal ties was the worst violation.

      Not a word had been spoken. There was no eye contact. Her predominant reaction at the time had been incredulity. But she was sure, she said, that he felt no shame or remorse. That in the likely event their paths crossed in the future, his manner would be exactly the same as it had been before the assault. He would attempt the same bland remarks they had always exchanged. It was, she said as her voice faltered, as if the war had furnished the welcome pretext - and even legitimacy - for what dared not be acted upon before.

      And isn’t it a fact that incidents of violence against women have increased as a result of this war? Even as the elevation of ethnicity has eclipsed that of gender. Even as men and boys are being slaughtered with impunity. Even as we are all suffering.

      Atrocities are now routinized; both carefully targeted and casually indiscriminate. Like the collapse of the `safe haven’ of Srebrenica. The massacre in which peacekeepers did not intervene. The audacity with which it was taken – it was a larger version of Anna’s rape. With similar, though also different, dimensions of betrayal.

       `Safe haven!’

      The shameful lack of action by the UN. When it was they who had endorsed its `safety’. The `disappearance’ of the men and boys.

      Mother had friends in Srebrenica who are now childless and husbandless. We haven’t had confirmation of the names of all those who were killed. But how could we have, when so many have been lost? And how, even were it possible to get a message to the town, could a message possibly be framed? All that is happening is made worse by the inability to reach out to one another.

      Friendship, rock-solid before, can scarcely withstand the allegiances which now render it secondary. And even treasonous. We are becoming estranged from each other. We are becoming estranged from ourselves.

      I remember a long ago visit from one of Mother’s friends and her family. It is not a clear memory. But I vaguely recall her young son who may well have been killed in the massacre. Actually, it’s his jacket I remember. Which must have been distinctive for me to recall it at all. A dense pattern, an unusual mustard colour.

       Safe haven!

      The decimation of language. That, too, seems like outright theft. And, strangely, a violation akin to the others. I wouldn’t have thought so before (what are words compared with bodies?) But I know my error now. `Normal’ life has become untenable, `natural’ emotions distorted. The familiar reassurance of words is itself denied; inverted. We are robbed and bereft of all structures and supports.

      Except, of course, those imposed by collective identity on the basis of ethnicity. Which is to say, to the perception of ethnic identity. Which now not only threatens but obliterates all other kinds.

      So it is also decreasingly possible to view the pain of others as remote from ourselves. And that means both a heightened awareness and a dull withdrawal. For how can we nurture hope for ourselves and those close to us in the enormity of such loss? We try, of course. But direct personal knowledge of those for whom there is no longer any hope renders even selfless feelings selfish. And renders us guilty.

      We have had to accommodate death. And in this way have become complicit with it. In the strangest and yet most logical paradox of all, death lives in us as well as grief. And so, after all, is alive. Is more alive, in some ways, than life.

      Yet there is, after all, a stranger paradox.

      The staging during the siege of Sarajevo, city of death and vivid life, of the play `Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett. It was directed by American writer, film maker and activist Susan Sontag, who visited for that purpose.

      Which is to say because, rather than despite, the siege.

      Could anything be more bizarre? And yet, perhaps, more surreally appropriate?

       7. Dominic

      For some reason (I am still grasping at reason) my anxieties have crystallised into the figure of a lone skier. A skier such as delighted us at those long ago Winter Olympics.

      Only it is not delight that he (or is it she?) inspires now. It is terror. Or rather, the intimation of terror. Which seems immeasurably worse.

      This skier is remote and resplendent. Encased in the armour of invulnerability.

      And has somehow become fused in my mind with the figure of a sniper.

      Skier or sniper; it is increasingly difficult to tell them apart. They are indistinguishable.

      Inscrutable behind dark glasses, the figure is lithe in a black snowsuit. S/he radiates self-containment.

      And hostility.

      Without warning, the ski pole becomes a slimline shotgun, both lethal and elegant. Silhouetted against the skyline, the figure pauses momentarily as if for maximum effect.

      And then executes a leap.

      Into the void, into infinity. Leaving nothing but absence in its wake.

       Part 2 Sydney 1995