War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [65]
He kissed the cross. He knelt and kissed the dirt on the grave. He removed his brown wool hat and stood in silence.
“I would like to take him in my arms one more time, and kiss him and hold him,” he said.
Ljesić lit the candles in front of his son’s grave. He watched the flames flicker in the cold wind that whipped down from the barren, brown hills around him. On a weathered wooden bench he laid out two loaves of bread, a shaker of salt, smoked pork, a bottle of brandy, and a shot glass. The two grave diggers next to him, wearing blue work shirts over worn sweaters, ate the bread with salt and a piece of meat. They quickly downed the alcohol.
When the graveside mourning ritual was completed, Ljesić nodded for the men to begin hacking through the frigid earth until they reached the remains of his youngest child.
“I took a handful of tranquilizers before I came,” he said.
“You don’t know these Muslim fanatics,” Ljesić said. “They have no morality. They would dig up my son and take his bones and burn them.”
Cemetery officials were drawing up plans to unearth the some 1,000 dead who had been killed in the war and move all the bodies to a new cemetery in Sokolac, outside of Pale, the headquarters of the Bosnian Serbs.
“We only have three workers,” said Jovo Kuljanin, the director of the cemetery, “so people often have to dig up their own graves. We don’t have any hearses; people have to arrange for their own transportation. And everyone who wants a metal coffin must pay $140 for it. We can’t provide one.”
Ljesić, who had last visited the grave on January 9, his son’s birthday, was unable to pay for a metal coffin. Instead he brought plastic sheeting, handed out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to cover windows. In the pocket of his black suit he carried nails to pound the coffin back together. He had paid Srdjan Manojlovic $70 to carry the coffin to Sokolac in his 1987 red Yugoslav Zastava van.
The war had shattered Ljesić’s life. His two daughters left Bosnia—one for Germany and the other for France. His wife, whom he had not been able to contact for three years, was cut off from him in Muslim-held Sarajevo. His home, on the outskirts of the city, had been blasted into rubble. He had lost his job and lived alone in a small apartment in Doboj. Yet, even as he dug up the body of his son, he could not face the perfidiousness of what he had once supported. He knew it was rotten. He knew it was a waste. He was in deep despair, but always the Muslim enemy loomed above him, ready to violate the dead, his dead. No matter how horrible his own war was, no matter how corrupt and brutal his own leaders were, the cause could be justified if only by a negative, by the fear of the other.
“My wife does not know I am here today,” he said. “She was not allowed by the Muslims to come to our son’s funeral. She has never visited his grave. It would kill her to see this now.”
Milivoje Matić, a burly man in a brown coat, stopped to take a shot of brandy and express his condolences to Ljesić. He listened patiently to the story of how the boy was killed. Matić told the story of his brother, Slobodan, who he said had been tortured to death in a Muslim jail in Sarajevo.
He then went to work a few feet away, swinging a pickax over his head to dig up his brother’s grave.
Small beads of sweat collected on his forehead.
“His children called and asked me to get the body,” he said breathlessly. “They asked me to dig him up.”
When the coffin containing the remains of Ljesić’s son was uncovered, the grave diggers brought in a small backhoe to lift it out of the ground. As it was hoisted up, the dilapidated brown-painted wooden box spewed water into the hole.
Ljesić removed