Three for Kartal

"And how then to re-embark to besieged Sarajevo thirty years later, how to evoke the emotions that boiled then? How to rewrite Sarajevo Marlboro and is it even possible, is it feasible and rational that a writer should try to do this once again? The answers to these questions should be negative, but if the writer is bold and impertinent enough, imaginative enough, then he will try this experiment. Miljenko Jergović is all that and he just did it with his latest collection of stories Three for Kartal, subtitled Sarajevo Marlboro Remastered. The author himself says in the endnote, “What kind of book would Sarajevo Marlboro have been if I had truly waited for time to pass and if had written it twice the age I was? I wrote those stories when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. Today I’m fifty-five, fifty-six. Apart from the fact that every cell in my body that remembered the war is now long dead, I am more distant from the city I was born and lived through the war and the siege than I ever was. Between me and that time there is a grown, mature man, exactly the age I was in the middle of that war. That man is me, just like that man before was also me.” Reading and editing Three for Kartal I felt the same excitement and joy that I felt when I was reading the first Marlboro stories. These stories are, naturally, quite different because Jergović describes other people, other events, other imagination of the same time, the besieged and shell-shocked Sarajevo in which these events are re-enacted, just like the title of the second and central part in both books says. However, these events are deeply ingrained in the author’s memory, he manages to re-enter those times and awaken in the readers the emotions they had when they first read his stories. Jergović chooses small events, individual destinies and fashions them into a world where he and his family are part of those events, where their own fears and longings convolute with those of their fellow citizens with whom he used to share the destiny of sharp-shooter bullets and missiles that landed day in and day out. These new stories are neither the obverse nor the reverse of the previous ones; rather, these are retold fates of other people, which shared the impossibility of fleeing, the horrors and beauties of atrocities, the fatelessness instilled in the genetic code of every individual from one of the last cities where three religions had coexisted equally and without fear. And just like Thessaloniki perished in the winds of the Great War, so did Sarajevo, the one Jergović writes about, the one he imagines in many of his books, perish in the four-year siege. Sarajevo Marlboro and Three for Kartalare possible readings of these destinies, but these readings, whether we read both books together or separately, demonstrate that both then and now we are looking at an author of immense empathy, who scratches deep under the surface of his characters and their desires, hopes, fears to build strong personalities we trust and can identify with, although we would not walk in their shoes and live what they live – but this is precisely what the strength and the power of literature are all about.

And whilst Jergović closed the final part of the first book, titling both books the same, after Nick Cave’s lines “Who will be the witness”, with the words “Gently stroke your books, foreigner, and remember they are ashes,” speaking of private libraries and his book reading, he closes Three for Kartal with the story Vases, about two Art Nouveau vases, perhaps the most valuable asset his family of railroad workers and engineers, of migrants, kept for over a century, and which survived all the wars but not the second earthquake in Petrinja on 28 December 2020, and what they mean to him. The sentence at the very end of the story says: “I’d speak of that emptiness if I could.” And Miljenko Jergović most certainly can, because his books, including this one, fill the voids and describe the fates that would otherwise be left untold." - Seid Serdarević