Sarajevo Family Life: Tedium and Despair : Bosnia: Under long Serbian siege, a mother of two struggles to keep household going, as father loses hope.

Five-year-old Alma plays in the dark and cold basement of her apartment building, a safe retreat from the mortar shells that now fall daily on the city’s markets and playgrounds.

Upstairs, Alma’s mother, Ganiba Adilovic, busies herself in the marathon that making coffee has become. She lights a fire in the wood-burning stove, tearing pieces of cardboard to keep the flames alive, then pours water that has been collected in a long line at the city’s brewery.

Alma’s father, Ramiz, on leave from the army because of illness, sits on the living room couch, smoking Drina cigarettes, the national brand, and staring into space.

“He was the great optimist, he kept the family together,” Ganiba says of her husband, shaking her head.

“I have lost the will, and I don’t care anymore,” Ramiz says. “I find I am in a situation with no way out.”

Before the war in Bosnia, the Muslim family was middle-class. She was earning $2,500 a month at her job at a bank, he was a successful electrical engineer. They owned property, had two cars, took regular vacations to the Dalmatian coast.

Now, three years and three months into the siege of Sarajevo, they are like most families here, with no future but with a present of tedium, drudgery and despair.

Sunday, June 18 / The Basement

The shelling has been especially intense the last couple of days, killing patients in their hospital beds and terrifying an already battered city. Even though the sun is shining outside, Alma and her friends play in the basement. Listening to a borrowed Walkman, they shuffle a deck of cards and practice reading the numbers, straining in the faint light that streams in from a papered-over window.

School was canceled weeks ago when the government determined it was no longer safe for children to gather in public. Alma’s 13-year-old brother, Mirsad, fills the time reading a translation of a Zane Grey novel and uses an old textbook to study English with his mother.

Most of Mirsad’s days, however, are filled with the chores of his family’s survival. He helps his mother collect and cut firewood, stand in line for water and hoard the few humanitarian-aid supplies--cans of stew, sacks of flour--that they can find.

The besieging Serbs, in an effort to strangle Sarajevo, cut off electricity, water and gas to the city, and have been blocking most relief convoys that are the staple for tens of thousands of Sarajevans. This forces families to scrounge for the basics, to use rainwater to wash, to make meals from the onions and potatoes grown in patches gone fallow next to the city’s expanding cemeteries.

In another section of his apartment building’s basement, Mirsad has stacked the wood that he and his father gathered in the forests on the front line around Sarajevo during a lull in the fighting earlier this year. A dining room table and a door have been added to the kindling collection.

Ganiba shrugs at the loss of her family furniture. “We just have to stay alive,” she says. “Nothing is of value anymore.”

At 38, Ganiba is a strong and expressive woman who often seems on the verge of tears. She has retained her job at the bank, even though her salary is now just $35 a month. That is the sum total of the Adilovic family income; Ramiz is paid, like most members of the army, with 30 packs of cigarettes a month.

His inability to provide for his family seems to be taking a psychological toll on Ramiz. The war has made him depressed and listless, Ganiba says, and it only adds to the burden she is shouldering. “In war you have to learn everything, how to make and do everything, how to improvise,” she says. “I never used to chop wood! But if your kids want to eat, you have no choice.”

Saturday, June 24 / Food and Water

Today, Ganiba pronounces, is a day for showers.

The water came on for an hour the night before, for the first time in a month. She fills every container in the house, and now the children are bathing. In Alma’s case, this involves squatting on the bathroom floor as her mother pours water over her head and little body. The drain in the floor will take care of the excess water; using the tub would mean having to empty it when it is more useful as a permanent repository for scarce water.

Like the water, every once in a while the electricity comes on unexpectedly and erratically. On one such occasion, electrical power reached the apartment about midnight. Ganiba proceeded to work until dawn, baking bread, cooking lentils and ironing clothes, taking advantage of what in Sarajevo is considered a rare modern-day convenience.

The Adilovices have a comfortable two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment still appointed with lovely Persian carpets, although most of the windows have been cracked or blown out by the shock waves of mortars and rockets that have landed nearby. Outside, the landscape is typical Sarajevo--garbage overflows containers, the shells of rusted, abandoned vehicles litter the streets.

On this Saturday morning, with the showering session complete, Ganiba and Alma go shopping. Serbs shelled the Adilovices’ usual marketplace a couple of days earlier, so Ganiba now walks 20 minutes out of her way to a safer market.

Scantily stocked vegetable and fruit stands are crowded into an old, converted casino so that shoppers can do their marketing under a roof and, it is hoped, under protection from mortars and snipers.

The markets these days offer little more than the produce that is grown in the area--cherries and strawberries are the only fruit available now, along with onions, a few carrots, lettuce by the leaf.

Ganiba shops very carefully as Alma tugs and eyes the strawberries with particular interest. They buy a pound of lettuce for two deutschemarks, 10 ounces of spinach for one mark, 10 ounces of cherries for three marks and about a pound of strawberries for three marks.

“If I spent 10 deutschemarks every day, it would be 300 deutschemarks”--six times her monthly wage, Ganiba says. “I shop like this about once a week, and it’s enough fruit and vegetables for one or two days. The rest of the time it’s rice, macaroni and beans--all humanitarian aid.”

Back at the apartment, Mirsad and Alma are thrilled to be eating their first cherries of the year. The spinach will go into a crusty pie, a typical Bosnian dish that Ganiba will supplement with mashed potatoes.

“Today is a good lunch,” she says.

Mirsad and Alma are slight, thin children. Mirsad’s features are delicate, Alma has large eyes that peer from behind large wire-rim glasses. They have rosy cheeks, belying what their mother fears is looming malnutrition. She periodically checks their eyes for signs of anemia, and says both children now have bad teeth.

Tuesday, June 27 / Work

It is perhaps remarkable that many people in Sarajevo still get up every morning, get dressed and go to work, walking amid the ruins and through the cross hairs of Serbian snipers. Most have to walk because there is no public transportation; gasoline is scarce, and the Serbs routinely target the trams.

Ganiba walks about 50 minutes to the bank where she works. Ramiz returned to his army unit the day before and will be sleeping in the barracks for the next several weeks.

Ganiba rises around 7 a.m. from the room where she sleeps with both Alma and Mirsad. Since the war began, Ganiba has tended to collect her children around her at night. She lights kindling and cardboard in the stove and pours water from a plastic canister donated by the European Union.

Her kitchen appliances mock themselves. The dishwasher and refrigerator, useless without electricity, merely store pots and pans. She beats an egg in a plastic bowl, then walks to the wood-burning stove that was installed in a spare bedroom when the war made such old-fashioned equipment necessary.

She cooks the egg and Alma emerges, wrapped in a red robe and wearing bright pink slippers. Alma sits on the floor, and her mother serves her breakfast. She warms her hands over the yellow puddle of egg as Ganiba mixes some powdered milk.

Outside, mortars start to explode. “Did you hear that?” Ganiba asks, more to herself than to anyone else. Alma sings the theme from “The Flintstones,” something she saw when there was electricity, when there were cartoons.

A few minutes later she sings a passage from a government song that is played frequently on the radio: “Bosnia, on land covered with blood . . .”

“I feel so sorry about the years they are losing,” Ganiba says of her children. “The only thing we can think about is surviving and avoiding the shells when they fall.”

Struggling both to work and keep a household going, Ganiba feels guilty for leaving her children without supervision. Alma has tantrums and is becoming hard to control. Mirsad simply seems withdrawn, too quiet.

“Alma spends a lot of time on the streets,” Ganiba says. “She hears a lot, and repeats it. She wasn’t like that before.

“I don’t have time to work with the kids. That’s why Alma is a little spoiled, a little unruly. This is not what I wanted to achieve with my kids. I didn’t want Mirsad to have to collect water and cut firewood. His entire life is spent getting things for the house. He does read, but I wish he had some free time for sports. I wish he could study more.”

She is thinking of sending him to Kenya, where her brother works as an engineer. Anywhere, she says, to get him away.

Mirsad was wounded two years ago, when a mortar fell 40 feet from where he rode his bicycle. He still carries shrapnel in his leg, which sometimes hurts and sometimes goes numb.

Ganiba applies typewriter correction fluid to a run in her stockings and puts on a green suit. Alma has put on a white ruffly blouse and combed her hair. There is no time for coffee. Ganiba tells Alma to go to the dentist with Mirsad later this day, but not if the shooting gets too close.

The Adilovic family has lived largely thanks to savings, Ganiba says. They’ve spent about $19,000 in three years, and there isn’t much left. That has Ganiba in a quiet panic, fearful that the thin veil of normalcy she puts on her family’s daily life is about to vanish.

“I don’t want to think about what will happen when we’ve spent all the money,” she says. “I cannot see the end to this.”