Free Stillness of the Sea by Nicol Ljubic Page A

her belly once more rose and fell to its old rhythm.
    “They shot at the town,” she said and her voice was clear again, at least clearer than before. “There was a war on. Many fled.”
    “I’ve never known,” he said, “anyone else of my own age who has experienced war, who has had to flee in wartime. In this country, fleeing was something our older people had to do.”
    She straightened up, leaned against the wall and pushed his hand away.
    “I often ask myself where we would be without the war. Would outsiders, strangers, even know where Bosnia is on the map if it hadn’t been for Gavrilo Princip and that war? I often feel that war defines all of us – Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. Who did what? Who has experienced what and where? Where does the guilt lie? Given the same time and place, I could easily have been born a Bosnian. I would be the same woman, but you would see me differently, because you would perceive me as a victim. But because I’m a Serb, everyone thinks of me as a potential culprit, even though they know nothing about my life. And meantime they all forget that there were victims among the perpetrators and that some ofthe victims would have turned into perpetrators, given half a chance.”
    She pauses for a moment.
    “You couldn’t know, but I’m in Berlin because of a grant they gave me as a descendant of a victim of the Nazis during the Second World War. My grandmother was held in Jasenovac, the largest of the Holocaust camps in the Balkans, and was deported to Leipzig where she was assigned to a forced labour squad in a hotel. Of course I thought about all that before coming to Germany. But it never occurred to me to get involved with the history of the German people, even after I met you. I wanted to know more about your background, because I hoped to understand you better. Everyone seems to think you can’t mention Serbia without saying something about the Battle of Kosovo. But who cares? It happened more than six hundred years ago. What are these wars to us? When they shot at my home town, I was eleven years old. And you weren’t even born when the Nazis were killing millions of people. Your grandfather might’ve been one of them – I don’t know. Or maybe he helped Jews to hide. I’ve no idea. Whatever he did, it’s got nothing to do with you.”
    He was astonished at where this conversation was leading. He had wanted to know about her life, back in the town where she had grown up and which she had left so abruptly. He had wanted to know what she had gone through because he sensed that she was still living with it. But she was giving the whole thing a political dimension, which seemed unfair and wrong in their situation, alone with each other and together in bed. Above all, it wasn’t justified, given the reason for his question, which was that he cared for her very much. The vehemence of her argument made him angry.
    “Now you’re making things hard for us,” he said. “Of course your views would be affected if you were to find out my grandfather was a Nazi. Your grandmother was held in a concentration camp – surely you can’t tell me it wouldn’t matter one bit if you were shacked up with the grandson of a Nazi?”
    “Come on, you can’t inherit guilt. You can still be a wonderful human being, even if your father killed someone. Maybe just because of it, you’d do all you could to be different. My grandmother never talked to me about what happened to her during the war, but my mother did. What if I had never heard any of it? My knowing couldn’t have been important to my granny, otherwise she would have said something. She didn’t, not even when I started learning German at school. So, in your opinion, was it my duty to ask her? To push her into telling me things she’d rather not speak about? What’s the result of someone not knowing anything about particular events in the past, or of not wanting to know or not wanting other people to know? Would that person’s