From my mother’s movements, I know that fear is both panic and composure. It’s a hot summer’s day, yet she takes off her shorts and pulls on her winter velvet trousers. In the face of male assault, women fear more than just death. The threat is no longer imaginary, but clearly visible through the window. One cannot control fear. I tremble with hysterical laughter when my mother warns us that the soldiers have already entered the village, that we must stay silent when they arrive. Because of my innate boldness, she addresses me especially.

My hands are clenched, but I don’t think about fear. Only of escape. In my child’s mind we all survive. There is no other outcome.

Twenty-five years later, I photograph the remnants of that time. My grandmother’s house, the basement, the apple tree and wooden bench, the railway, the field, and the Bosna River. Crime scenes and escape routes. I collect photos, documents, objects. I record the testimonies of survivors. Witnesses. I am a witness myself. I read mine and my mother’s diaries, our letters – everything that will lead me back to that time, to the day I was forced to grow up.

As a child, I am a believer. I think death means that the souls of the deceased are in heaven, but I don’t think about the souls of those who survived. The morning after the attack is equally horrifying for the survivors. The narrow dusty road is soaked with blood. It is a hot August day. The blood, thickened by heat, lures the flies. Someone has to wash the concrete in front of the house, to take a shovel and scrape off the top layer of bloodied soil and dump it somewhere, soil that should have been buried with the dead. I know that now.

This task was given to our grandfather. In my child’s mind, he is the strongest man in the world, maybe even the scariest. At that time nobody knew that he was the weakest, that he would eventually fall to pieces and commit a crime himself.

The testimonies lead me to an empty garage that, at that time, served as a morgue. I think about how someone had to lay dead bodies on plastic sheets, in several rows, close the garage doors and leave them there overnight. Someone had to take photos of the motionless faces. At the time, we believed that the photos would serve as evidence in a trial that never began, for a crime that no one was ever held accountable. It is likely that they never will be.

The summer smells of tar-soaked railroad ties, warm blackberries, and crushed tomatoes. It is yellow and dusty. Only the forest and the birds are black. I stand on the balcony of my house and call Ivana, my fourteen-year-old cousin, to come and see how I have decorated my room. She waves at me, and says she will come later, she has other things to do right now. It is the last time I see her. She was killed in front of her home on August 16, 1993. On that narrow dusty road.

At that time, we live in a different village across the Bosna River, but that day we return to pick fruits and vegetables from the garden. Everything is already overripe. If it rains, it will rot. We return by nightfall. Back then I didn’t know that daylight is scarier than the night.

In the village across the Bosna River, we live in a house in front of which grows a large weeping willow. Its branches hang down to the ground, and it is dark inside the canopy. The willow tree is my tent. A hiding place. It’s where I read my first book for adults, The Prisoners by Lajos Zilahy. It is the only book that I have, rescued from someone’s home library. The love story of Peter and Miet. Children gather around me as I read aloud. There is no radio, no TV. We discover worlds through books. They listen carefully during the sex scenes; they don’t care for the rest of the story. I keep the book under my pillow in the room where I sleep. The room is small, there is only enough space for the bed and a narrow cabinet. In it I find expired cake decorations; remnants of shredded coconut, dried almond flakes, colourful sprinkles. I chew and swallow. My stomach growls. I read and think about how, one day, I will meet my own Peter, and I will cry when we say goodbye to each other.

As we flee, I realise that there is a wild animal inside me. I run faster than anyone. I leap across the dusty road into dry grass in a single bound, crawling, tearing, scratching my way forward. I crash through the cornfield in front of me, the gravel from the railway scatters beneath my feet. I don’t hesitate, not even at the river. It’s deep and fast even in summer. I take off my shoes, I can’t afford to ruin them, I have no others. Beneath my bare feet moves mud and slimy river weeds. The water rises to my armpits. Just a little further, and we will be safe.

I’ve learned that fear comes with a tightened throat and lungs gasping for air. I can hear my grandmother’s rasping breath as she lowers herself onto the concrete steps in front of the house and begins naming the dead. Liar! I think. She must have lost her mind. My mother gives her sweetened water, but grandmother’s throat is dusty like the road, it cannot be quenched by water.

We don’t go to Ivana’s funeral. The cemetery is on a hill, exposed, visible from the woods like the palm of a hand. To me, she is not dead, just gone. The first proof of her death is a photo from the morgue. It was published by Globus, a Croatian weekly newspaper, in an article about war crimes in Central Bosnia. The entire family is at our house. There are too many people crammed into the room. I sit on the floor. We are all silent. The newspaper passes from hand to hand, wet from sweaty fingers. The children look too. There is no point in hiding anything from us anymore. When I see the photo from the morgue, the wild animal inside me howls. I’m twelve, and I’m scared that we will forget what happened to us.

Years later, I begin writing the story about that summer of fear, death, loss, but also of love. While I’m trying to find and collect material for my novel, I go to that village across the Bosna River. I take my camera everywhere. I walk along the battered road. It’s late summer again. The weeping willow tree has been cut down, and the house renovated. It’s not the same anymore, there is no point in taking photos. An old man is tending to the front lawn. Should I go up to him, tell him that we once lived here. I walk towards the fence then change my mind. I’m not sure it would mean anything to him. I continue down the road to the house where Ivana used to live. It began decaying before it was even finished. I take photos from a distance. I still remember the smell of dust, kitchen grease, and mice. The house is a dark blot in the middle of a blooming meadow.

wenty days after the attack, I learn that a wild animal lives inside our grandfather too. He kills a man, out of rage. They occasionally let him out of prison on the weekends. His thick, unruly hair is now cut short, his glittering eyes visible. He has a rifle, for sure, and he will kill us all. I think. I run inside the house; afraid he will chase me.

I tried to find documents from the trial, to reach more witnesses. I find almost nothing, and nobody from the village wants to talk about it. They know I’m a writer, that anything they say will end up in my book. My grandfather remains an enigma. Both, in life, and in the story.

We returned to the village across the Bosna River in the winter of 1993. It’s safe now, but we are still afraid. We live in soot and cold. Inside, the walls are black from the flame and smoke of the oil lamps, and outside we choke on coal smoke from the chimneys. Winter is black, like a burnt forest, like birds.

We only heat one room in the house, and life happens around the stove. I’ve learned how to make candy from melted sugar and my fingers now smell like caramel. We taste our first candy in a long time. We go to Ivana’s grave and leave some for her under the wooden cross, next to a bouquet of evergreen branches decorated with Christmas ornaments. Somebody takes a photo of us children, standing beside her grave. Small, serious faces. I can remember heavy snowflakes.

At that time, I read even more. On my shelves there are collected works of Ivo Andrić, Marija Jurić Zagorka, and Russian classics. By the stove, I develop an addiction to escaping into fictional worlds, and all I can think about is how to leave this place. I’ll be Countess Nera. Anna Karenina.

My bedroom is freezing. To reach it, I have to pass the dark hallway, past the staircase under which the wolf lives. I no longer run in fear with my eyes closed. I’m no longer afraid of the dark, or the wolf. Only of the forest in broad daylight.

Under my pillow I still hide books.

And keep running, running…

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Before the Feast is set in Fürstenfelde, a small village in the former GDR, on the day before its annual feast. Why did you decide to set your story there? Do you know the area well? And is this central European location and scenery important to your writing?

I had a mosaic kind of tale in mind which was based on a really small village in the Bosnian mountains, a place where the ancestors of my family lived for centuries. The village is on the verge of disappearing; only about 20 people live there today. I wanted to write the stories of those still remaining, the legends of the region, its beauty and horrors, in order to keep something, anything alive and save it from being forgotten.

Soon I realized that this kind of approach was more of a documentary project than a fictional one. I continued the research but stopped the writing.

The topics of decay, disappearance, life and death in remote areas didn’t cease to interest me even after my work in that village was done. And so I created my own village, in which I could write fictional prose as much as I liked, and placed it in Germany’s northeast where many problematic issues of German and European societies are visible – unemployment of the youth, a strong right-wing movement, the loneliness of old people and so on.

I didn’t have a very deep knowledge of the region, which is why I spent a lot of time in Uckermark and did research, talked to people, read and learned. It is a region with a literary tradition of its own, but not much has been written in recent times.

I found that many stories from ‘my’ ancestors’ village were very similar in their core to stories I was being told or researched in Uckermark. There is something beautiful in the fact that such different cultural landscapes share similar motives and story-telling devices, which in the end means that Europe is nothing more than a village itself. A big and angry one, eerie and manifold, but in the end just a village.

You thank the people of Furstenberg, Furstenfelde and Furstenwalde at the end of your novel. How much is the book based on real local history?

I actually never went to those places (except Fürstenwerder). The thank-you note is itself fiction, since everybody is always trying to find the ‘real’ in fiction.

There is a bit of local history revolving around the end of World War II which I took as the background for one story; also bits of GDR history are relevant. But there is much more invented history and even pieces from Bosnia which I used and transferred to Germany without changing too many parameters.

The book was never meant to be a fictional mirror of history. It even plays with the fact that history is always different depending on who is writing it. The winners, the losers, the historians, the authors of fictions.

In the novel the local historical archive is mysteriously broken into and stories escape, allowing myths and memories flow through the village during the night. Why this fascination with collective memory and the past?

As a writer I am fascinated by memory (and its flaws) as a constituent of our present lives. I cannot write honestly about a 90-year-old former soldier without trying to understand his views on war as a young man or his thoughts on the military and his own time spent with a weapon.

Collective memory is a kind of a myth in itself. There is almost never such a thing as complete agreement on how historical events unfolded, because there is always that one person who will say, ‘I don’t believe,’ and, ‘This is how it went,’ no matter how much evidence would prove him wrong.

Even written records are never complete and perhaps not even correct, or they’re forged; in any case, many might say they are not to be trusted. I like the mistrust.

I like the flaws of remembrance and the insecurities of biographies. I am not interested in the past as a moment in time but in the present as a carryover of all the memories and dealings in and with the past.

The village of Furstenfelde is in decline. Is writing about this place your way of keeping it alive?

Not really. Maybe it would be so if it actually existed. While dealing with the past of the village of my ancestors, I realized that I am either a fiction writer, or a journalist or a museum curator, but never all of those things together.

Also – unfortunately? – fiction can’t save much from disappearance. It might provide insight for those who are interested and maybe even create a good story which will forever become a part of the cultural heritage of a place, but only a fantasist would give it actual healing powers.

This novel has a wonderfully rich host of local characters, from an aged painter, a teenage bell-ringer and a suicidal ex-soldier to the vixen who lives in the nearby forest. The reader has a strong feeling that the animals, people and landscape are all connected together. In fact, the book is often narrated by a collective ‘we’. Who are ‘we’ in the story? And why did you decide on this constantly shifting perspective?

In creating a mosaic of a village I kind of wanted the mosaic itself to have a voice which was stronger than its singular pieces. Only a ‘we’ could provide such force.

Also, ‘we’ is very often used in rural contexts, for example in conversations. It provides a sense of unity and agreement, and at the same time it divides ‘us’ (the villagers) from ‘them’ (the outside world), thus creating a strong group feeling which always has more credibility and strength than one single voice.

The ‘we’ in the story is a kind of collective voice of the village itself. I tried to imagine how it would sound if all the people who ever lived in this place merged into one. It would be protective towards the village since it consists of the village, it would be harsh because times were mostly harsh, but it would also be sensible and even poetic because of all the sensible and poetic voices that have lived in Fürstenfelde. And so on: the aim was to create a kind of a choir with singers long dead and some still alive, always singing, because a village is never quiet, not even in its darkest hours.

You arrived in Germany with your parents at the age of 14, having fled the war in former Yugoslavia. You now write your books in German. Beyond the Feast is stylistically very rich with wonderfully surprising changes in tone and timescale. Tibor Fischer in the Independent said that you manage to ‘put a bit of Balkan fun into the Reich’. Do you think that the fact that German is your second language contributes to your linguistic inventiveness? How has your mother tongue affected your writing?

Not much really. I have no idea what Balkan fun actually is, I lived there only for those 14 years and the last one or two were not really fun. People tend to believe that writing has much to do with our biographical upbringing. That might be true for some people but for me writing only has to do with the actual topic I am writing about. For me a good writer of fiction is someone who can adapt to any milieu, setting, person and bring it to life on the page – no matter how far away this milieu, setting and person is from the writer’s background.

So the answer would be: I am linguistically inventive because the language is there to be linguistically reinvented – if, and only if, it works for a story and a character’s way of speech.

How do you feel about your adopted homeland?

It is very hard to think about such a complicated, manifold, unreal construct as a ‘country’ as if it were a hat. Even hats are not really simple. But simpler than ‘Germany’. I’ll try:

I don’t really know how I feel about the very complicated hat Germany. It is colourful. To wear it makes me happy at times, sad at times, angry at times, confused at times. I like to wear it because it doesn’t really fit me or anyone else. Sometimes I must lift it for couple of weeks and put another hat on since it tends to get narrower over time. France is a good alternative hat.

Anthea Bell, who translated both your novels, is a wonderful translator. She has been widely praised for this and for her other translations. How do you work with her and with your other translators?

There are no words to describe the beauty, precision and literary quality of Anthea’s work. May she live and translate forever.

I enjoy working with translators in general. They are the best readers: very focused and critical.

Find out more about Before the Feast, published by Pushkin Press.

Find out more about How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone on English PEN’s World Bookshelf including a free, downloadable reading guide.

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Over a glass of beer, two students are discussing their national identity, ironically. One student is Czech while the other is a Bosnian who has come to Prague to study at the Film Academy.

This is a scene from a novel of mine written some time ago. The key question the novel asks is: ‘What have you given the world apart from that shot in Sarajevo?’

The novel, The Sign of the Rose, was translated some time ago into French (Sous le signe de la Rose) and German (Im Zeichen der Rose), and it has been quoted in the past few weeks by journalists searching for words to evoke the Sarajevo assassination.

It’s hard to resist the imperative of an anniversary. I myself have been led by the centenary of the assassination to leaf through the pages of books I have already read: Zweig, Canetti, Borges, Ehrenburg… I have even read Nabokov, who exhibits an idiosyncratic contempt for the evocation of historical events in literature. But what I have found interesting is that Czesław Miłosz – a writer with an otherwise marked sense of history – does not mention the assassination in his writing about the first days of the Great War. And I have been struck by a page in the book The Labyrinth of the World. Its author, Marguerite Yourcenar, does not mention the name of the dead Crown Prince. Or the assassin. She simply remarks that an Austrian prince was killed in Sarajevo.

Perhaps this wouldn’t have been so strange if Marguerite Yourcenar had held to the principle of nomina sunt odiosa or ‘naming no names’. But she does not. In the same book, she refers to another assassination. This time she mentions the name of the victim, the Swedish king Gustav III. He was killed at a masked ball.

This makes the fact that the Austrian Crown Prince (who was not masked when he was killed…) is not named all the more unusual. But when you consider the whole sentence referring to the assassination, it becomes clear why the wise Marguerite Yourcenar omits the name of the Austrian Crown Prince (reducing him instead to ephemeral anonymity):

An Austrian prince, whose hunting trophies I later saw with revulsion in his castle in Bohemia, was killed in Sarajevo, just like one of the wild animals he was used to hunting in expeditions arranged for him to pursue red deer or bears.

Elsewhere in the book, Marguerite Yourcenar evokes the stormy night when the news of the assassination was carried along telegraph wires. When the news was just spreading, when Gavrilo Princip was in prison and Ferdinand and his wife were in the mortuary, the twelve-year old Margarite Yourcenar happened to be in town. What she remembers of that night is that she returned from the balcony where she’d been, feeling like ‘a straw in the sand’.

In re-reading that phrase, I was reminded of Pascal’s famous words ‘man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed’*. The idea that a person is just ‘a straw in the sand’ resonates with me more than ‘a thinking reed’. That’s how I feel now. Do I owe the feeling to my life experience, which includes one day at the Siege of Sarajevo, and much more besides? Perhaps. But I also owe it to my experience of literature and the role of the writer.

I live in Sarajevo. I went to primary school, secondary school and university in Sarajevo. I attended one of the oldest secondary schools in Sarajevo, in which Gavrilo Princip, who killed Franz Ferdinand, had once been a pupil. Our teachers did not take us to his grave and in history classes I learned as much about Gavrilo Princip as I did about any other historical event. We learned that he belonged to the secret ‘Young Bosnia’ organisation. He killed Franz Ferdinand. That was the trigger (but not the cause) of the First World War.

Almost every day I pass the cemetery with the chapel containing the mortal remains of Gavrilo Princip. To be honest, I would find it hard to describe the chapel. People pass it by as they would any other building in their hometown. All lost in their own problems and thoughts.

I bought my first pair of high-heels as a student from the street corner that Princip had stood at the moment he was about to make history. Footprints were later pressed into the concrete at the spot where he’d stood. Were I to let my mind wander on the theme of the Sarajevo assassination, I could write a story in which I try out my first high-heels by stepping into the footprints of Princip’s feet. But I didn’t do that. Nor did I ever see any citizen of Sarajevo paying any attention to those footprints. Only tourists. Did I ever enter the museum dedicated to the Sarajevo assassination? You know how it is with museums. You visit foreign museums, but your own rarely, or never.

On 7 February 2014, I finally set out to look more closely at the chapel containing Gavrilo Princip’s remains and to take photographs of it. The centenary of the assassination was on my mind. I spent two hours taking photographs and it was only on my way home that I realised that there had been a demonstration in the centre of town. Demands for a change of government, social unrest, etc. Part of the Government building was even on fire.

The unrest lasted into the late evening and became a global news story. That evening I stumbled upon a fiery scene and when I tried to take photographs a policeman grabbed my little camera and trampled on it. All those pictures of the chapel containing Gavrilo Princip’s remains were lost. I regret losing the camera (it cost a lot of money!) but the whole experience felt like a warning to me as a writer. One should write and take photographs for more profound reasons than anniversaries.

And one should talk for more profound reasons than chatting over a glass of beer. That is why, in my book, the character to whom the question is addressed, ‘What have you given the world apart from that shot in Sarajevo?’ gives no reply.

NB. I owe the title of this piece to a story by I. B. Singer. He is one of my favourite authors who writes about the individual in relation to history.

*Blaise Pascal c.1654-1662  Pensées, no.347 (translated by A Krailsheimer)

You can browse for and order books by Marguerite Yourcenar via Foyles.

Death in the Museum of Modern Art, translated by Celia Hawkesworth,  is published  by Istros Books.

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