Sarajevo: A Remembrance of Things Chocolate : Beyond the image of a war-torn city, memories cling of courageous people maintaining a generous civility.

“Will you remember us when you’re gone?”

Dzenita Fakic’s words haunt me still, long after she ventured outside to retrieve water and lost both legs in a shelling attack on Sarajevo. The shy psychology student sat on her hands and looked me straight in the eye, waiting for my answer. But then, as now, I was struck by the fact that in the news, Sarajevo looms only as a city of battered people encircled by a military noose relaxed or tightened according to the political whim of the moment. I remember something more.

To explain this, I must talk about chocolate. More particularly, a chocolate cake that Stojanka Hodzic whipped up using stale bread and cocoa and other items gleaned from humanitarian aid packages. She enhanced its sweetness by sharing it with elan, using the family silver and royal blue cups steaming with a black market treasure--Turkish coffee.

The glass coffee table, the cream-colored carpet and the volumes on the bookshelves added to the surreal aspect--a recollection of a time when sharing did not mean overwhelming sacrifice, when she and her husband Teufik did not have to carry water in 20-liter jugs up the stairs of their apartment block, when they didn’t have to use a jury-rigged conduit to tap into the natural-gas line, a time when the city equated itself more with Squaw Valley than with Beirut.

But now the Hodzic apartment block overlooks a freshly tilled graveyard and a city racked by the contradictions of multistoried buildings with no rooms, apartments with plastic sheeting for windows and people who keep trying to hold on to what is normal in a place where nothing seems to be.

Many people clinging to a remnant of civility refused to leave though they were able to do so. Some, like poet Ferida Durakovic, insisted on remaining with her family, worried that renewed fighting might prevent her from returning to care for them. Her city’s struggle inspires her, and she equates continuing to exist with continuing to write. Her poetry was published before the war, and she gave me one of her books. That would not be so unusual had it not been that most of her copies were destroyed during a shelling. “Don’t worry,” she said, justifying the gift by adding, “Your Library of Congress has a copy of every book ever printed.” Perhaps, she explained, she would borrow her own books when the war was over.

Other Sarajevans, like Vesna Musovic, adapted to losses of a different kind. The telephone operator lost her arm during a mortar blast, but said she felt lucky because she didn’t lose both arms. With one, she could still work on the switchboard, still wash her face in the morning, still write a letter to her family. I walked around the city for weeks, gazing at my hands, wondering whether I would feel so blessed to proclaim my good fortune should one be lost.

Most acts of courage were more simple, more a struggle for the retention of familiarity like the chocolate cake, a good book, a sense of safety and a level of civility contrary to the simplistic analysis that paints Balkan combatants as barbarians bent on ethnic annihilation.

But if the Bosnian War is considered the best example of what horrible things human beings can do to one another, the tenacity of people in Sarajevo also exemplifies the best of what makes us human, the dignity of spirit and the stern resilience of pride that refuses to crumble despite death and anguish. Bosnia truly exemplifies mankind at its worst. But in less-heralded moments, it also exemplifies people working hard to live their best. That much I will not forget.