The war persists even after the war
Bringing about the need to look back.
By Uridije Lajci | 30 September, 2024
It feels strange to think that the first years after the war in Kosovo seem like a closed chapter, almost as if a line was drawn separating us from that past. Yet, I often find myself pulled back into strong emotions, to sadness and bitterness. These might be triggered by a song, a short video, a story, a post from my father’s friends on social media, or my old notebook where I drew the emblem of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). And the memories that echo in my mind, stir me and make me think. I reflect on how, as a post-war child, you feel the persistent and heavy touch of war.
After that, I observe myself from the present, sometimes seeing myself as a five-year-old child, sometimes as an eight-year-old and sometimes a little older. I see our family, a group of people of all ages. I see my grandmother sitting in the center of the room, watching us silently. They have put an IV drip in her hand. She doesn’t know she has cancer. She doesn’t listen to the others when they say, “She got sick because she hasn’t shed a tear for Selman since he was killed.”
Above her head, photographs are on the wall. One of them shows her son, Selman, wearing a KLA uniform. He is standing near an oak tree on the side of a snow-covered mountain road. The photo is dated April 19, 1999, the day he was martyred.
We children play and wander in the narrow living room. We are the youngest members of the family: me, my siblings Dritan, Uran and Jeta, who was born a few years later, along with my uncle Selman’s two children, Drilon and Dielleza. My uncle’s four older children are almost always at school.
In the constant wandering back and forth from the kitchen to the corridor, I see my mother and uncle Selman’s wife rushing to cook, wash, dress us and take care of my grandmother.
My father only shows up after 4:00 p.m. when he comes home from work, and we all hurry to hug him at once. We’re fascinated by the small, slightly dark dimples on his stomach and leg, and often ask him about them. We’re surprised when he tells us that he still has landmine fragments still in his body from when he was wounded as a KLA soldier while bringing weapons from Albania during the war. But he seems unfazed. He always challenges us to sing the national anthem. After the anthem, we recite poems. This is how I remember our childhood routine.
I believe that we all sensed a disconnect between those poems, which spoke about the fight for freedom and my father’s often-quoted phrase, “life is cruel.” Compassionate and tired, still wearing his Kosovo Protection Corps uniform, he led us with his head nodding slowly, affirming every pathos-filled word we recited. Lined up in front of the log cabin, we, his three children, and the two young children of his brother, alongside whom he had fought the day until he was killed, gave our little recital. We bowed slightly at the end as we had been taught and enjoyed the applause. And then we stared in silence at my mother’s and my uncle’s wife’s tearful eyes.
We have always known the reasons. However, the transition from something happy to something so sad was sudden. It was confusing to sing all those good things about the Albanian eagle and bravery, and then to hug chests that trembled with silent breaths.
Maybe those years were confusing for everyone. There was an attempt to live something new, with free action and free speech. But it was a harsh shock to realize that life must go on even though you are not all together like before. We faced one difficulty after another in trying to recover and freedom, unfortunately, no longer seemed as beautiful as it once did.
The need to go back
In September 2003, five years after the end of the war, my uncle Selman’s son Drilon and I were about to start first grade. The day before the first day of school, my father, unable to buy us books and notebooks, was forced to borrow money. And so, we started school with the help of this debt. Throughout our childhood, we often relied on borrowing to put bread on the table.
I vividly remember how the long months felt back then. This was because our monthly income, which came from low post-war salaries or social benefits for the families of the martyrs, was received at the beginning of the month and quickly spent. The latter half of the month was just a long, difficult wait, surviving day by day until next month. In a family of fourteen, with only two members working and ten children to support, making ends meet was nearly impossible. After the war, all we had left was a half-burnt stable and a tent, provided by UNICEF.
This recovery from the past had to be done with the same money that was to support our current needs and prepare us for the future. As a result, Drilon and I often ended up at school with only one textbook for each subject, or sometimes no textbook at all. We often had to explain why in front of our teacher, hoping that the discomfort of not having proper materials would be masked by the responses our family had taught us to give in such situations.
Somehow, we managed to coexist with the three different aspects of our lives — the events of the war, our parents’ experiences as political prisoners of the 80s, our daily lives, school and backyard games with our wishes and plans for the future. Ironically, even our dreams for the future were inseparable from the past, Drilon and Uran both wanted to become soldiers when they grew up.
Anyway, being very young and therefore naive, we managed to fill our days with happy moments, even in the most paradoxical situations. For example, every year on March 8, my uncle’s wife, Nexhmije, would change the plastic flowers on the family photos displayed on the wall — some of the only photos that had survived the war. As part of this ritual, she would accept flowers we had bought her for International Women’s Day with love and kind words, and put them in place of those we had bought her the previous year. Thus, the flowers became symbols of longing or pain, for her martyred husband, for her fatherless children and of course for herself.
The visits to my uncle’s grave during our vacations in the mountains were also paradoxical. My two brothers, my two younger cousins and I were almost the same age. Together with Nana Nexhmije, whom we, like her children, we set out from the mountain hut towards the start of the village, full of joy. Nana, always gentle and always calm, waited for us as we stopped along the way to collect flowers of all kinds and colors. We would squeeze their stems tightly with our fists until each of us had a small but worthy bouquet to place on our uncle’s grave. When we reached the cemetery of martyrs we already knew the routine. We would identify the first grave and carefully place the flowers between the aluminum plate and the wooden board of the grave.
Drilon and Dielleza’s father, our uncle Selman, rested beneath the concrete. Following Nana’s instruction, we observed a minute of silence. During that organized stretch of silence, I couldn’t tell what any of us kids were thinking. But after this intermission, I know that we wandered among the graves, some almost flat on the ground, playing and running, leaving behind our uncle, the silence and the flowers. The walk had fulfilled its purpose, and so we walked the steep road to return to the mountain hut.
When there was no electricity and we lit candles, the adults would talk to each other, reminiscing and occasionally interrupting each other to add a detail. Sometimes, voices would falter with tears, while at other times, there would be bewildered laughter. We children took naps around them — on laps, in corners of the room, or on the floor —- while we let our imaginations roam. I saw my mother and my grandmother, my uncle’s wife Nexhmije and other children in the family walking through the snow of the Rugova mountains. I visualized the moment when my mother lost consciousness and could no longer feed my seven-month-old brother Dritan. I pictured seven-year-old Dardan, who was the last out of my family members to climb the mountains, spending the night in a cave that dripped and echoed with each bombing of the military barracks in Peja. I saw the fights between my uncle and father in Hajlë and the overcrowded buses from Rozhaja to Kruja. I pictured our arrival in Kruja and the phone call confirming my uncle’s death along with other comrades-in-arms. I picture my grandmother, who does not cry, and the pain that has hardened my uncle’s older children.
As a child, I often felt that I had seen these things with my own eyes. Many nights, when I fell asleep, I would be afraid that the Serbian soldiers were coming down from the mountain and my body would freeze under the quilt. Even today, it’s not uncommon for one of us to wake up in the morning and talk about about a dream involving anxiety inducing situations — soldiers chasing, killing, or raping, while we try to defend ourselves or escape.
Much later, I realized that the war continues even after the fighting stops. And it continues for a long time. Today, 25 years later, I feel that carrying those traumas created a need to return, to think, to confess.
Perhaps this reflection is just one example of how war dictates human life, affecting both those who live through it and those who come after.
Feature Image: Uridije Lajci.
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