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Zeljko Tomic : Sokolac
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115 |
05.10.2004 |
Slavko SukaAuthor: Željko Tomic, Canada
Dedicated to Slavko Suka
Sometimes, just for a moment, you meet somebody who makes an impression on you, which hunts you for the rest of your life.
Such case was the time when I met Slavko Šuka.
It was during the last war, when I was sent on a hill called the Major’s Grave.
I shared the same trench with Slavko.
He was an intelligent man, whose optimism impressed the other solders.
His quick-witted stores, followed by loud laughter of the other men were endless!
In those somber times, only a few people had a radio, but everybody was interested what was happening in the country.
That was why we would send Slavko to a nearby trench to listen to the 6 o’clock news.
When Slavko would come back from his “assignment”, he would start talking, and his talk could last for a couple hours at the time.
Slavko talked to us by his loud, distinctive voice, but his sentences had the power of Shakespeare.
When all the news were retold, Slavko would continue retelling the news, knowing we all needed some fun more than the only meal we had that day.
Slavko would talk, and talk, and talk… While he was speaking, the dark would fall over the old beech woods.
Looking back, his stories were the only spark of light in the midst of endless darkness.
After the war had ended I left the country.
A few years ago, while I was visiting my old town, somebody told me Slavko had died.
The tiny glimmer of light on the war days disappeared from the face of the Earth at the moment I heard my dear friend Slavko had passed away.
Somehow, I felt a part of me died too.
I don’t know if Slavko’s chiming voice is still making birds near the Major’s Grave stream airborne, but sometimes, while the night is falling over the Rocky Mountains I get a feeling I hear Slavko’s voice.
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Zeljko Tomic : Sokolac
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160 |
08.10.2004 |
Zoran Rundicby Željko Tomic
Dedicated to Zoran Rundic, Vrapci, Bosnia and 10.
000 Serbs killed by Muslims in Sarajevo
I stopped to rest for a while.
I was forty years old, so climbing up the steep hill was not an easy task for me any more.
The ground was rocky and hard to traverse.
I turned around.
Behind me was a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains on three sides.
A small river winds its way along the valley floor.
The river was deep and beautiful, disappearing behind the hills on the other side of the valley.
I took a deep breath and made myself walking again.
I didn’t come here to enjoy the countryside, I came to visit my friend’s grave, who was killed ten years ago during the civil war in Bosnia.
Zoran, that was his name, had been my playmate from childhood.
At that time I thought we would be the best friends forever, but his father got a new job and Zoran moved to Sarajevo, forty kilometers far from our home town Sokolac.
It took me several years to realize I was wrong to blame Zoran for braking our friendship.
The gate was open, so I passed through into the graveyard.
The graveyard had a small hill at the canter, with an old apple tree on the top.
It was a modest, family graveyard with gravestones of different ages, shapes and sizes, surrounded by a barbed wire fence.
I walked straight to a white marble cross, the most beautiful in the graveyard.
Then I saw the picture.
It seemed to me the picture imprinted into the cold marble was taken the same night ten years ago, when that extraordinarily handsome fellow popped up in my life again.
My fiancé, Svjetlana, wanted us to go on a double date with her girlfriend, Aida Muhovic.
As soon as I saw his big brown eyes filled with something between love and loss, they reminded me on the young boy who used to stroll with me uncut grass fields and misty woods.
The same boy who disappeared from my life 23 years ago!
I sat on a marble bench next to his grave.
I touched the cold gravestone, like I was trying to check if Zoran lied there.
But the stone was cold.
I felt the same frizzing, lifeless coldness that brought into me the war that broke out when I was on the top of my happiness.
Zoran decided to stay in Sarajevo.
He didn’t want to abandon Aida, his Muslim girlfriend.
Zoran had no idea what nationalism and hatred was.
Alija Kapo, a Muslim man from the village Stjenice, near Rogatica, targeted Zoran only because he was a Serb.
He came by, and beat him up.
Zoran couldn’t run away.
Muslim army didn’t want Serbs to leave Sarajevo, so the city was sealed from the inside.
I wish I knew if Zoran was different when Alija Kapo took him to the city garbage depot and killed him over there.
However, I am sure at the moment he died he didn’t hate his fiancé Aida for being a Muslim.
For seven years Zoran was buried by the garbage depot in an unmarked grave.
After the Dayton agreement, his remains were found and identified by UN peacekeepers.
His family was able to give him a decent funeral.
Although his killer’s name is well known, he was never punished.
The graveyard was silent, yet comfortable because the wind that was playing absently with the old apple tree leaves, made me feel Zoran’s soul was surfing around the place.
I crossed myself, pronounced the name of God, bent over and kissed the gravestone.
Before I walked out of the graveyard, without looking back, I told Zoran I did marry Svjetlana and I got with her a beautiful, redhead daughter Marija, who was seven years old at the time.
Unfortunately, I had no courage to tell Zoran that Aida got married to a Muslim man, and gave birth to three kids.
The hill was steep, there was a long walk for me to the point where I came from.
Besides, the dark was falling down.
Every time dark comes over Bosnia I get a feeling, I will never see the Sun again.
Alija Kapo was never charged for this crime.
He lives now in suburb of Sarajevo called Buljakov Potok.
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Zeljko Tomic : Sokolac
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9912 |
16.06.2006 |
People on the RoadAuthor: Željko Tomic, Sokolac © Copyright Željko Tomic
This story is one of my first English writings.
I wrote it on February 27, 1996, on the day when Serbian people had to leave Sarajevo as a result of the Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia.
The snow is covering the road very high and only tracks of a vehicle that went by a long time ago, remind the locals that vehicles used to travel along the road which goes through former Bosnia.
A woman steps on the road.
She looks on both sides of the road, and there is no living thing in sight.
The white strip covered by the snow is empty as far as the eye could see.
She has lived for fifty-five years next to the road and watched people who used to travel in beautiful cars, happy and busy.
Now the road is empty.
She stands there for a few minutes, like she is waiting for somebody.
In spite of being very cold, she isn’t dressed warmly enough.
She got used living in the freezing mountain climate, so it looks like she doesn’t care about the harsh weather conditions and hostile climate.
She is a highlander, who has never been sick.
Suddenly, the woman sees something.
Someone is slowly approaching the place where she is.
It took for a while to realize it is a silhouette of a very old man.
In his hand, he is holding a frozen rope.
On the other end of the rope, there is a cow.
The animal is walking slowly through the snow.
Very often, the old man turns back his head, like he is checking on the cow.
An old woman is walking twenty meters behind them, trying to catch up the small group.
The entire company looks tired, and sad.
All those difficult years of their lives left marks on their faces.
Instead of greeting with “Good afternoon! ” like it is a habit in the countryside, the old man turns toward woman by the side of the road and said:
“I had three sons who died in the war.
My family lived in one place for two hundred years, but some crazy politicians made me leave my hearthstone, and abandon my bed, where I could die in piece.
How can I now visit my sons' graves? I wanted to dig out their graves and bring their remains with me.
However, I didn’t have money to pay for for a truck, so I burned my house because I didn’t want to leave it to the Muslim phanatics who killed my sons.
I have nothing in this world, except the woman and the cow.
I have no destination.
I am a dead man! ”
At the moment, the old woman catches up with her husband, and they continue their walk to nowhere.
The woman is concerned about the old couple.
For a while she will think about them, but in recent days she has heard so many tragic stories like this one, so when a new traveler pops up on the road she will pay attention toward them and forget about the old couple.
It might be her only son, who has gone far away.
For a moment she looks at the winter sky.
An American fighter jet was drawing a long white line on the clear horizon.
Even though a plane like that one dropped a bomb on her neighbor’s house just a week ago, she doesn’t hate them.
They are coming from the place where her son lives.
She hopes the passenger planes will be scratching the sky soon.
One of them could bring her son to visit her.
Canada isn’t far away for the planes, is it?
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