Shells, Like Thunder (Sinisa Jancan - Baton Rouge, LA)

(From his book: Silence in the Quiet of Peace)

I remember being small, like a fish inside a bowl. The
world outside was inaccessible; for all I knew it was
just a vast land of nothingness. No rivers or lakes. No
mountains or hills. No life outside of my tiny bowl. That i
what it feels like to be a child living in a war-torn country.

Treading outside of my bowl meant certain death. If it was
not from the shelling or the snipers, it was from land mines
or collapsing infrastructure.

During my infancy I did not know how the war came to
be, and I was not mired in politics, either, so I had to assume
that my parents always knew what was best. I did not know
that my country was desperately vying to break free from
communist rule. I did not know the difference between
Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks. I did not know what “ethnic
cleansing” meant. I did not know that while my parents
struggled to keep me and my siblings alive, many parents in
concentration camps were being provided weapons and
forced to kill their own kin (many took their own lives
instead). I did not even know what a war crime was. I did
not know.

But I knew the difference between the sound of thunder
and the sound of grenades falling. I knew when the power
went out because of a storm, and I knew when the power
went out because they took it. They took everything: Lights.
Water. Shelter. Food. Hope.

Hope was like a cold breeze of agony passing through
the air, carrying with it my peoples’ howls of despair. When
our power went out so did the refrigerators and the freezers.
Milk spoiled. Meat rotted. Fruits and vegetables decayed.
Clean water became a luxury, and a great equalizer.
When it rained, it meant we got water. It was meticu-
lously collected from gutters and wherever else it could
collect. Sometimes it was boiled. Sometimes it was ingested
immediately. Always, it was satisfying. Water sustained our
lives but carried commensurate risk.

The UN deployed several convoys that provided clean
drinking water to the people of Sarajevo. Sometimes, chil-
dren would be sent to fetch water from these convoys out of
sheer necessity. Sometimes, they would return home with a
bucket full for their surviving family. Sometimes, they
would be killed by a sniper or have limbs torn off by
grenades. Sometimes, the only trace of their existence
would be the tattered and broken bucket that survived the
grenade while their blood was swept away by the rain into a
nearby canal or collected into the fissures left behind by the
grenades.

“KIŠA,” my father exclaimed as rain began to fall. It was the
first time I remembered rain. The power had been gone for

some time and it was a relatively dark, silent night. Our
shadows danced on the walls, brought to life by the flames
from a lantern, which I learned to proficiently use by the
time I was 5. When we did not have oil for the lantern, we
had to resort to using candles or sit in complete darkness.
We heard the unmistakable sound of a grenade deto-
nating—so much like the thunder during this rain—then
watched in fear as lives disappeared in the cadence of the
rumble. We knew we had to turn our lights down or risk
becoming targets, despite many of the grenades and mortars
being launched at random targets.

There’s a moment, just after the detonation, that takes
your breath away. It’s like the heavens themselves freeze for
just that single moment in time. The entire world takes a
deep breath and holds it in as your blood freezes like a lake
in winter— a chill running down your spine, down your
shoulders and into your arms, working its way to your
hands and lower part of your body. Breathing is just as
uncomfortable as the pins and needles you feel in your
fingertips that dare not even flinch for fear of being seen by
this ancient force that takes lives in a single exhale of that
held breath. For those who survive this force, their minds
are poisoned, haunted by it for the rest of their lives. They
will never forget the sound of grenades, or the sound of
thunder that so perfectly complements the serenade of a
man-made killer.

Somewhere in the distance someone was calling out for
help, but their cries would go unanswered, on this night,
anyway. In a perfect world, an ambulance would be en route
to assist the injured, but in our fishbowl there was just us
and we had to fend for ourselves.
In the pitch dark, the victims were slipping away,
succumbing to their wounds and not even a bed of stars
above to guide them to the afterlife. The best they could
hope for was a quick death.

I watched the bucket on the windowsill fill up with
water, first slowly, then on and off as the rain passed
through. There wouldn’t be a chance to bathe if the rain did
not intensify, but I was so thirsty that I never noticed how
awful we all smelled being cooped up in the house all day
with no power or water.

There it was again, I noticed, the shelling. Another
neighborhood ravaged at random by them, who took little
heed of us. In my adult years I’d always wonder how many
casualties were children? How many survived? How many
were left without limbs? How many more nights could we
spend in complete darkness? How did it come to this?
“They’ll kill us all,” my mother whispered with bated
breath. She was frightened, almost hysterical. She let out a
gasp with every detonation, her body trembling violently.
She struggled to keep her composure but knew she had to
feign calmness for my brother, twin sister, and myself.
Outside of our bowl awaited men with hearts made of stone
and she knew it was only a matter of time before we had to
face them ourselves.

“Relax,” my father said reassuringly. That was all he
could say. He remained calm in case we had to flee some-
where. Sitting down at the table nearby, I could see him
shuffling around, his leg violently bobbing up and down.

As I leaned in closer to the window, a brilliant flash of
light blinded me, which was followed by a robust roar that
shook the windows and made the already damaged walls
wail—in the faint light you would swear the falling dust
clouds made faces that looked like they were screaming.

“Get away from the window!” My mother screamed,
running to my side to pull me away from the window. “Do
you want to get struck by lightning?” She added quickly. For
the rest of my life, she would admonish me about standing
in the doorway or at the window during a thunderstorm;
when I was older I realized it was never thunder she feared
would strike me down.

My father once said that the greatest folly of mankind is
their own denial; the Bosnians who believed war would
never come to their doorstep suddenly found themselves
like the rest of us—shells and mortars falling all around
them, facing imminent danger while foraging for food and
water, and watching the streets turn to piles of rubble and
ash sprinkled with blood and guts from innocent civilians
whose only malfeasance in this war was being alive. Their
wealth no longer mattered, and, to the Serb forces, neither
did their lives. There was no safeguard against their
onslaught and the only good anyone’s money served was to
keep the fires burning during the unforgiving winter.

My father planned to smuggle us to hide with his
mother, or fleeing somewhere safe, somewhere where our
windows would not be blown out, somewhere where we
could have running water and safe food, somewhere where
there was safety for at least one night, one night where we
could sleep with both eyes shut.

As the rain outside intensified the shelling finally
stopped. Perhaps the aggressors did not want to stand
outside in the rain? Perhaps they were tired too? Or perhaps
they were just waiting to strike when our defenses were
down?

Despite the bloodshed my mother refused to alarm us to
the things going on in the world outside of our fishbowl,
after all, how does a mere child reconcile such events?
When the gravity of our situation settled in, we did not even
have stuffed toys to hold for comfort in the middle of the
night when the fear of agonizing death gripped us. We just
had the cold air passing through our cracked walls.

You could smell something burning in the air. Rubber?
Plastic? Perhaps fabric? The neighborhoods smelled awful,
especially during the colder months. People burned what-
ever they could find to stay warm: clothes, car parts, luggage,
whatever could burn was thrown into the fire. Sometimes I
wondered if burning ourselves alive would be a much easier
way to go? No one wanted to be torn apart by a bomb or
grenade, or have shrapnel rip through them, leaving flesh
barely hanging onto bone and muscle.

When the bucket had been mostly filled to the brim
with rainwater, my father took it from the window and
poured it over into a glass that had been used so many times
without ever being washed. I took a sip of the water and
thanked him sheepishly, trying not to complain about the
almost metallic taste.

As early as I can remember the water was seldom cold,
always lukewarm, or hot. It’s quite amazing the things you
learn to get used to when your survival instinct kicks in. My
siblings and I were mired in war and for many years we
would not know the comfort of having a bed we did not
have to share, or even just having toys to play with. A child-
hood was not written in the stars for us, but there must have
been some joy to come even if all seemed lost? There had to
be! The Universe always finds a way to balance things out,
right?