Note: This story contains depictions of sexual violence. 

About six kilometres away from Sarajevo lies the little town of Vogošća, by the river of the same name and surrounded by rolling hills and sleepy suburbs. It is an utterly boring place. It had been a manufacturing hub for Swedish and German cars before the war, and was the most prosperous municipality in the former Yugoslavia. Our father loved the wilderness around Sarajevo, and every weekend we would head out to explore. One day, one of his old orthopedist colleagues told him about a great delicacy: the brain omelette from Kod Sonje, in Vogošća. We thought it sounded disgusting, but Tata had a thing for offal, and made us eat it, too. It was good for our brain health, he said. Somehow he got it into his head to buy the colleague’s family home, an ancient stone house perched up on a ridge overlooking Vogošća. He dreamed of retiring out there, far from the chaos of the city, and as close as possible to Mother Nature.

Before the war, the restaurant was called, inexplicably, the Kon-Tiki. Half of the facade was lime-white, and the other planked in dark wood. The Serb forces were headquartered there during the war, and the place became what was euphemistically referred to as a women’s prison—a brothel for the Serbian soldiers. The cover was a litre of rakija and half a kilo of coffee. Countless Bosnian women were raped, tortured, and murdered in that place, the most anywhere during the war. The repellent Serb fighter Borislav Herak, during his hearing at The Hague, confessed to personally killing six young women there after they had been brutally raped. I asked the taxi driver to drive around town before taking me back to the restaurant.

An acrid morning mist billowed through the crumbling grey streets with their depressing Soviet-era buildings as the neighbourhood stirred awake—the school buses and newspaper stands, the melancholy silhouettes that seemed to bear the weight of the world on their shoulders. We passed ageless passersby who vanished behind the heavy steel doors of homes still riddled with traces of the war. The only thing that even alluded to beauty was a statue in the centre of the town, of a woman reclining like a mermaid, her head and body leaning to one side. I remembered a bronze, in Trieste, of two girls knitting and chatting in front of the Adriatic. They were looking in opposite directions—like Sanela and I. We were twins, but so different, to the great concern of our family, who worried about the inevitable collision course of our teenage years. But life had other plans: we didn’t make it through adolescence together at all.

The macabre restaurant had reopened after the war, doing what it could to claw back its former glory, with the famous brain omelette on the menu once more. The owner had come back in 1996. She had spent the war sheltering in Croatia, but everyone around here stared at her as if she were a criminal. Yet her own son, they said, had been thrown in jail for having tried to stop the women’s agony. In some places, dark water wears away at all the broken lives.

At first, everyone said the siege would last a few days at most, so in spite of our incensed pre-teen resistance, Tata sent us away to the new country house in Vogošća. We were supposed to stay there with our aunt Sunčica for maybe ten days, just until things in the capital got back to normal. We hated that house, and my memories of that night at the end of our first week there are blurry and halting. What keeps coming back is the image of the three of us, Sunčica, Sanela and I, curled up in the big bed in my parents’ room, our bodies wrapped around each other as two drunk soldiers beat down the door, calling us Muslim whores, screaming that they would purify us by giving us Serbian babies. They escorted an older man into the room. He didn’t speak our language. The soldiers nodded in our direction, asking the stranger which one he liked better. Finally, the man picked our aunt, and took Sunčica by the hand. One of the others called out that she should behave if she wanted us to live. Sanela and I huddled against each other, shaking. The younger of the two soldiers brought us into the hallway and made us look through the keyhole. “See, that’s what you have to do. Don’t resist. Do what you’re told. Lie down on your back and open your legs, like your nice aunt.” We could hear Sunčica’s voice as the white-haired man sawed away, back and forth. “Please don’t hurt my nieces,” she said, in English. “I won’t,” he replied, “but others may.” ⁂

Translated from Dans les murs, 2021, published by VLB éditeur. Printed with the permission of the publisher.

Maya Ombasic is a Montreal-based author and philosophy professor originally from Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is the author of several books, including the novel Dans les murs and the essay collection Femmes philosophes (Éditions Fides, 2023).