Serbia E-Mail Offers Window on Broken World

I’m sitting at my desk, and my e-mail flashes a couple of times. It’s another message from the Serbian stranger I have come to know so well.

Today’s topic: What to tell her child about the NATO bombings of the city where they live.

“I have no idea when or how it will be over,” she writes. “My daughter keeps asking me that question, and the only thing I could do was tell her about the 100 Years War between England and France.”

There are other questions too. “Mummy,” the little girl asks, “will it be raining or airplaning tonight?” (The bombing stops in bad weather.)

“Will there be strawberries? Will there be spring and summer this year? . . . Will there be strawberries and summer if they bomb us?”

“Will I ever get to school now that it’s the war?” Her mother adds that the child’s school was “severely damaged. She saw the pictures on TV and cried bitterly.”

“Mummy, they say they want to hurt [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic. How shall we let them know that we don’t love him, none of us from our family?”

Most nights when the bombing starts, they head to the basement to wait out the raids. But one night, when the girl was ill with fever and diarrhea, they stayed in the apartment.

“I put her on the floor,” the mother wrote, “far from the window, half under the big bed, covered her with three fluffy blankets, over the head, and the three of us, she, her teddy bear and I, pretended we were three bears in a bear den with the storm outside. We were very happy to be safe, warm and together.”

*

My Serbian e-mail comes from a woman who took a course from my cousin, a college professor, several years ago. They stayed in touch when the class was over. On the 29th day of the NATO air attacks on Serbia, my cousin began forwarding her e-mails--a virtual diary of life during wartime--to me.

I have never met this woman, and until the day after Milosevic accepted a tentative peace agreement to end this war, I had no direct contact with her. But I always knew we had a lot in common. We are about the same age, both college-educated, middle-class. We live with our husbands in apartments in big cities; we juggle housework and time for our children with our white-collar jobs in a computerized world.

But now she lives in a bomb zone where electricity comes and goes, and sleeps in a basement. And I live in the country leading the attacks.

“I have never lived without electricity,” she wrote May 4. “I feel totally unfit to survive; nothing has taught me how to make fire, how to survive in a countryside, how to cook, wash, clean, wash myself and my kid without electricity, how to live without a fridge, how to do agricultural work. What is next? Water? Already in high-rise buildings there is no water.”

Sometimes her e-mail arrives days after it is written because of the power outages. When power is restored, she writes, “the voltage is very low and changeable, and in the next days there are frequent minor power failures. You can’t switch on the oven, the water heater or the washing machine. The moment it gets completely restored, they throw the bombs again, so several more days of the same.”

There is no tone of voice in e-mail, but capital letters do the trick.

“I AM ABSOLUTELY DESPERATE,” she says. “ . . . A pro-Western, spoilt sort of civilized creature, with no useful skills, such as myself, is not worthy to survive.”

Personal Perspective Jarring

Until I got these e-mails, all I knew about this war was that Albanians were being driven out of Kosovo, just as Europe’s Jews were driven from their homes by the Nazis. I understood that NATO was bombing Serbia to punish Milosevic. I believed the targets were military, except for a few mistakes.

In a news story, I read that NATO has dropped more than 10,000 bombs and missiles on Serbia. On the Internet, I read that Serbia is about the size of Maine.

In her e-mail, I read that schools have been destroyed, along with railroad stations, factories and the homes of people she knows. A residential area that was bombed “is a poor one,” she says, “with working people who saved all their lives for their small but solidly built houses with little gardens and garages with old Yugos [cars] in them. Is any Albanian going to be better off now that these people have been left homeless?”

I read in the paper that the anti-Milosevic movement is weak; I know she is part of it. That puts her in danger, and that is why I do not name her here.

“Today, at the office, I couldn’t help myself and spoke loudly against the war, M[ilosevic], M.’s wife, in my despair,” she writes. “Considering some of my colleagues, who say they don’t mind this kind of life at all . . . I might as well end up in jail.

“What have I, personally, ever done to deserve this? I have always been against M.’s politics, for 10 years I demonstrated against him. . . . I have always thought Albanians deserve to live in Kosovo as anyone else. . . . So why am I exposed to this kind of suffering. If your regime is really after M., or against his regime, the only thing they achieved is [to] fix him forever. Repression is now stronger than ever, hatred towards the West is getting terrible.”

In another message, she says that her countrymen now refer to NATO as the “New Albanian Terrorist Organization.”

“The cynicism of NATO and Western politicians is incredible,” she says. “They can’t hate Milosevic more than I do, but now, thanks to them, I can’t even say that. And what harm have they done to him? He seems to be more powerful here than ever and every sign of other thinking is treated as high treason.”

She adds: “Now there are patriots who give interviews to the media that the lack of electricity is no harm at all. So, NATO, go ahead, destroy everything. I am sure that M. and his camarilla do have everything.”

Stocking Up on Cosmetics

Sometimes she cracks me up. “While every normal woman piles up reserves of food, soaps, etc.,” she writes, “I don’t have more than three cans. My friend bought a few nice and expensive things for cosmetics, saying: ‘If the Americans really come, they will need some translators and communicators. How can you expect to do the job if you don’t look nice?’ ”

Often her e-mails complement something I’ve read, such as when NATO reported hitting a military barracks. “Finally, your guys managed to hit a military object!” she wrote April 26. “ . . . I know for sure that there was a training center there. For dogs! To be used by the army and police, to sniff drugs and such things. . . . I understand that the U.S. public doesn’t give a damn if all the Serbs are annihilated from the face of the earth . . . but perhaps the killed dogs might touch tender hearts.”

But other times the sarcasm gives way to distress, and her window on the world becomes a mirror.

“What I haven’t become accustomed to is the horror, the panic, the pain of the disappointment, of the terrible feeling of loss, of terrible shattering of all that I sort of believed in,” she says at one point. “I did believe in so-called Western civilization, in a relatively decent legal system, in the superiority of the so-called democracy over Russian kind of socialism, which has never been too popular in Yugoslavia.

” . . . Now I feel as if I am back in some socio-realistic film from the late ‘40s, the union with Russia, the red flags, and communist slogans, the dictatorship and the obligatory uniformity of opinion. ‘We are all one party now, we are all S. Milosevic!’ WELL, I AM NOT AND CAN’T ACCEPT TO BE, EVEN IF IT TAKES EMIGRATING TO THE REMOTEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD AND SPENDING THE REST OF MY LIFE AS A STREET CLEANER!”

*

Now I notice news reports from the city where she lives. Two days after NATO bombs hit there, she sends this:

“Asleep? I forgot the meaning of the word. I did not put on my pajamas since the bombing started. As soon as it gets dark--and it gets very, very dark, since all the city’s lights have to be put out and the shutters drawn, and the city looks like a ghost town--I wait for the bombs. I put my daughter to bed, convince her that nothing will happen, put three blankets between her and the window, prepare the shoes, the bag with documents, and I lay fully clothed next her. . . . At dawn, when I think they would not bomb, I go asleep.”

She adds: “I find myself hating NATO, which everybody here popularly calls the Americans, every time the sirens shriek, every time I have to spend the cold night in the cellar, every time I have to keep my daughter in the house for the whole day on a nice spring day.”

It’s too distressing to plan more than two hours ahead, she says, so she busies herself with housework and tries not to think. When she contemplates the future, it looks like this:

“Since there very soon will be no fuel at all, probably all the unemployed women will be sent on ‘voluntary’ working actions in the fields. I already see myself picking corn or doing some other hard agricultural labor which hasn’t been done manually since the last century.”

Her husband and in-laws regard her as a “weakling.” They yell at her, criticize her.

“I cried all the day yesterday, only if I did not have my daughter, I would somehow kill myself,” she writes. “I can’t survive this, neither psychically, nor physically.”

*

One night I dreamed about her, and in my dream, I was her.

As I stumbled through a city on fire, I knew that it was her city. I held my young son to me, but I knew that it was her daughter. We ran from doorway to doorway as chunks of burning buildings fell around us, and I knew that this was her flight.

In my dream I stepped outside myself and saw that I had her face. But I don’t know what she looks like. I don’t even know how to pronounce her name. I only know her secrets and her sorrow.

“I have no words to express my despair,” she said in her last message.

I never e-mailed her back.

I didn’t know what to say.

*

On the 72nd day of the NATO bombing, I check my e-mail obsessively for news from my Serbian e-mailer about the peace plan, but there is nothing. Finally, I get her phone number from my cousin, and on Friday, after three months of reading her e-mail, I hear her voice.

My cousin has told her about me. “What a surprise!” she says with a laugh over the phone, but quickly turns serious.

“I feel a sort of relief that the immediate bombing will stop--OK, we don’t have to spend the night in the shelters. OK, I can go to the market without running when I hear the sound of airplanes,” she says.

“But everything that’s really significant is just terrible--the future just holds more poverty, more oppression, more big words.”

She said she heard explosions Thursday afternoon but nothing since. “Let’s hope this is the end of the actions from your country,” she says. (NATO vows to keep bombing until Serb troops withdraw from Kosovo, however.)

She hears my baby crying in the background, and tells me her daughter is there, playing with a friend.

“It’s good to talk to you at last,” I say, adding tentatively: “Perhaps, someday in the future, we might even be able to meet.”

“Perhaps,” she says after a pause and a small laugh. “Yes, maybe, someday. A long time from now.”