Bulletin
By Jason Smith
Bulletin
Jason Smith
Copyright 2012 by Jason Smith
Smashwords Edition
The right of Jason Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
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Cover by James Cox
Bulletin
Contents
The Siege
Ending the Century as it Began
A lone shell thuds in sync with the bang of a typewriter’s carriage as it is swung from left to right. 13th April 1992. Hammering down those first characters plasterwork cascades off the top of a window frame to the tiled floor.
Several bullets abandoned by a fleeing sniper, roll my way.
I cough away the dust as Alexis marches in, scanning Sarajevo and the encircling mountains from our hotel room on the fifteenth floor.
‘Thank God the war’s back on. Our agency rejected the last dispatch,’ he says.
I carefully wipe the settled dust from one of my lenses. Looking through it, once again it swallows the room within its complex optics.
‘Not enough gore, they said. Ceasefires have never been good for business,’ I only half hear what Alexis says because his face is pushed up against the back of his camera.
Silence grows until it is pierced by crossfire. We check our camera bags for spare batteries and film. The firing does not disturb us. We are used to it now.
The typing stops, in walks Zahra, who slips on a bullet.
‘Damn snipers. The siege in Dubrinya is intensifying. It’s worth covering. Are either of you keen?’
I stare out of the window.
Alexis stands up. ‘I can go alone but I’ll need the hard car.’
‘You really think that Volkswagen’s bullet proof?’
By now, Alexis’ halfway down the corridor. The banging is him striking the lift button. Zahra and I stare in the direction of Sarajevo Airport. She circles it with her index finger on part of the window that is not shattered. A trail of typewriter ink, like a path shovelled through snow drags down to the sill as it mixes with the condensation.
‘That mortar we just heard, it has struck the main terminal.’ Zahra says, marking it on a map before slipping it into my camera bag.
We walk down the corridor. The lift doors jolt across before we are able to get there. However, a steel toecap stops it from completely closing.
‘You taking the lift?’ Alexis asks us.
‘Always the stairs, see you at eight,’ I say.
‘Come on, being in here for twenty seconds will help you appreciate what it’s like for your subjects inside your camera. It’ll help your art.’
What rubbish, I think.
Outside, last night’s snow blankets cars. I lift my Leica-backed telephoto to eye level. First thing in the morning, it is like lifting a lead drainpipe. Over to the west, a commercial plane is being flown with military urgency as it navigates the siege-ridden airport, like a ground-bird whose nest has been pillaged.
When I arrived into Sarajevo airport, women and children were being packed into the back of a Hercules. Their eyes seemed hounded by impending homelessness. They were blanketed but still cold and paled by the south European winter.
I remember a thin haired old woman donating her blanket to a confused little boy. His first flight not a family holiday but a civic emergency. And a teenage girl; I can still picture her. She had a mark across her face.
Alexis was going on about the outgoing cargo planes crammed with civilians, being like Vietnam but that was lost on Zahra and I, who were no older than the teenage girl when that war was raging.
As I walk across Sarajevo, a hymn sung in the Partisan Cemetery replaces the silence, then the crackle of gunfire.
I increase my pace and turn away from the plumes of smoke that provided the bearings for the airport.
The mourners are out of view.
It is as if the unseen dead are singing the words. The last funeral I attended was my mother’s, a few months before I first took up photography.
Trees once framed the graveyard but they have been chiselled down to stumps. Sap has bled, staining the snow where once it would have circulated to the branches.
Electricity and gas have been cut off for months so the residents have been forced to strip the city of wood to keep warm, to keep alive.
The singing stops abruptly.
The cellist drops a semitone before lifting his bow.
I walk through the cemetery gates following the last resounding note over the lee of the burial grounds.
All the time, I am locating the mourners through the, blinkered, narrowed and juddering image that has become my world and theirs. How would I have reacted if someone had photographed me at my family’s funeral, I wonder. The agency will like these photos though. I can tell.
With the district of Hrastovi in the background, two high-ranking Bosnian officers are among the congregation. They talk intensely whilst a soldier studies the Eastern Mountains through field-binoculars.
A coffin rests next to a mound of soil. Tree roots protrude into the air from its top. They remind me of the city’s disconnected electricity. Steam is rising from a bucket, too. I figure that warmed water was used to soften the earth for digging.
I traverse from one grave to the next using the headstones to steady the image. Suddenly, a lone bullet from the hillside strikes the neighbouring grave.
Shrapnel does not quite reach me, thankfully, but an elderly woman whose head is still bowed, is not so fortunate. She reminds me of my grandma.
The sermon is abandoned as the soldiers order everyone to take cover. They take up positions to identify the sniper.
I have three frames left so load a new film whilst the civilians lie on the freezing ground hoping they are shielded.
I am now within thirty yards of the coffin, breathless with my forehead pressed against another headstone. With my eyes so close to the engraving, the inscribed date is unidentifiable until I move back a little.
Nineteen-Fourteen.
I remember school history lessons linking this cataclysmic date with Sarajevo and the start of World War One. Never did I think I would become part of this history. A rain of bullets pierces those thoughts shredding the textbook in my mind, shredding the sense that you look at history but are not part of it.
Turning away from the civilians to find a better position, I notice an old man, raggedly dressed, red faced, not part of the congregation, staring at me. For a moment, I think he looks like my father. He seems almost indifferent to the unfolding bloodbath but obsessed with what I am doing. I turn my back on this stranger to face the congregation again, in need of images not encounters. In just those few seconds, four of the mourners have been injured, two seriously. A gravedigger, shot in the foot uses his shovel as a crutch to take cover.
If only the trees were still here to blind the sniper, felling them has left us exposed. Over-exposed. Our only shields are the graves of the dead, with this thought I connect with them, those who in life are detached from conversation, silenced in respect. I have longed for people to speak about my mother but there is only respectful silence. Was it that that made me take up photography, a suitable world for the silence that precipitated after the funeral? I do not know. Alternatively, did taking photos at that time connect me more with the world? Was that what I needed? What effect it is having on me I still cannot identify, connectivity with or alienation from the world. That I suppose depends if you are seeing or just looking.
One of the women reminds me of Zahra. She will be fitting a new ink ribbon into the typewriter or washing her blackened fingers. What I’d read of hers that morning contextualises what is happening in front of me now.
She had been documenting the events of March. On the 2nd, thousands of Sarajevo’s citizens, let by former Communists in the Social Democratic Party, peacefully marched against the barricade. It is strange that something so recent can qualify so quickly as history. But so much more has happened since then.
I should be concentrating on these photos but all sorts of thoughts enter my mind as I pass from person to person. I am photographing the woman that looks like Zahra again. I’m reminded of the cheque written out to her, Z. Karinski, hanging in time on the notice board in front of her typewriter, posted to a war zone where it cannot be banked.
Talking to her about it, they’d come to the conclusion that the newspaper did it on purpose for from their perspective, it was good business. A few more months and the cheque will be void.
On the 3rd March, if my memory serves me correctly, Bosnia Herzegovina officially declared independence following a Parliamentary referendum held a month earlier. It was that that made the Serbs set up barricades in the city I mentioned, and it was the barricades that the people were marching against.
The barricades are also, why Alexis has been dispatched to Dubrinya. Gunmen are firing at Bosnian police who are trying to dismantle them.
Her role, although imperfect, is to think beyond the images and at least to attempt a causal explanation of events. It’s is my job to bring her evidence of what she reports, and at present I am failing her.
My world is now the viewfinder as I concentrate on the few remaining mourners that have not escaped, who now lie on the ground stunned that their lives are rapidly approaching the state of the deceased, to whom they had come to show their respects.
They plead with the camera, with the negative, with the chemicals that will fix them seemingly forever, in the confines of a photograph.
Every opening of the camera shutter, every beat of their pulse, a fixation of sorts. However, the pleas stay inside the camera, I cannot relate to them. Alexis has insisted that I do not.
If I were to absorb as much emotion as the negative, as if that woman bleeding from the chest was my own sister, I wouldn’t be able to do my job.
Detachment is an occupational hazard.
I can’t leave safe cover to help someone.
Were I to do so, I’d have been killed long ago.
I let the world know what’s going on.
That’s my defence.
A cloud frees the low spring sun.
The films winding back into the cartridge now.
A slower film is fitted, now there is better light and I can relax a little for nature seems to be in my favour, for now at least.
Ending the Century as it Began
I notice more graves dated around Nineteen-Eighteen and shift deeper into the cemetery.
These graves are drawn, literally, into the foreground.
A few frames are fired.
However, time is also an enemy for the whistling of sniper bullets and the fragmenting of stone is counting down the seconds to something, what, I do not know, but something.