Kraljevo main square // © John Bills
Who are you?
A big question to start, but is there such a thing as a small question? That could be considered one, I guess. Still, who are you? Who do you think you are? How much distance do you think lies between who you think you are and who you are? More than you want to believe, I imagine.
I like to think I’m brave. I like to think that in a moment of crisis, I could keep my wits about me and help people to safety, using whatever scraps of intelligence I could muster to make the best of a perilous situation. I sit on planes and remain utterly motionless during turbulence, because I figure that if someone looks at me and sees an image of calm, they might calm down a little themselves. If he isn’t worried, why am I worried? Sure, I’d be shitting myself inside, but nobody knows your insides. Nobody will ever know your insides. Conviction is half the battle, and all that jazz.
The journey to Kraljevo reminded me of home. The bus didn’t climb into the mountains, it didn’t lumber from stop to stop. It certainly wasn’t express pace, but it seemed cognitively aware that it had a job to do and little else. I arrived at the bus station and was immediately accosted by a Chinese man, a lost tourist who was having some trouble at the ticket window. He asked me if I spoke English, which I obviously do, but he didn’t seem to click that it was the only language I spoke. He was trying to find out how long the bus journey to Novi Pazar would take, a question with multiple answers, but it was up to me to ask the beleaguered woman behind the window. The time had come to see just how vrlo dobro my Serbian was. Luckily for me, the middle-aged blonde on the other side of this discussion had already seen the funny side of it all, so she smiled when I told her that I spoke only a little Serbian. It was a smile that said “here we go, you couldn’t write this shit,” but between us we managed to work out that the journey would take between two and a half and three hours. The Chinese man then had more questions, but a queue had formed, and it was in his best interests to make do with the information he had. I told him he should buy his ticket when boarding the bus, but when I left the station, he was still trying to buy a ticket for a journey that would take place days later.
A tough day at the office in Kraljevo // © John Bills
Still, my mood was good, and I made the short journey to the city’s main square. The monument at the heart of the plaza came into view, and my good feeling grew a little more optimistic, but that optimism was soon to die. I could see a lot of people around the square, but everyone seemed to be staring towards the centre without venturing any closer than the perimeter. My travel curiosity overruled my innate cowardice, and I continued towards the square to see what was gaining all this attention. To my surprise, a mass of heavily armed policemen formed a ring around the square, which itself was full of police, army and militia. It was intimidating, but this wasn’t the first time I’d seen police in Serbia. Still, there was a disconcertingly large number of them. Despite my apprehension, I found the cafe in question and ordered a coffee.
Before the waiter returned with my coffee, I noticed something just a little disconcerting out of the corner of my eye. There was a man in a dull blue t-shirt, but neither his gender, his age, nor his choice of shirt was the reason he was detected. He was wearing a balaclava, itself distressing in its own way, but he also happened to be carrying a gun. I’m not a gun expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I know enough about firearms to know that they aren’t exactly friendly. Nobody else in the cafe seemed particularly worried about the presence of this anonymous gun-toting man, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something very troubling was about to happen. The worst possible thoughts ran through my mind, and I drew my rucksack closer, as if that would be of any use. Should I run away? Getting out of the cafe and back to safety seemed like the obvious choice, but my legs weren’t about to help me with that. Besides, if I got up and began to run, I would surely attract the man’s attention, and he’d be able to shoot me down with all the interest of a zebra swatting flies with its tail.
My inability to make a decision soon proved irrelevant, as shots were fired on the square. The number of armed men almost instantaneously quadrupled, and Trg srpskih ratnika (Serbian Warriors Square, basically) became shrouded in smoke and the sounds of apparent warfare. I panicked, but the panic manifested itself only internally. Nobody will ever know your insides. I couldn’t move, resigned to the fact that whatever was happening would happen, and my only hope was to stay still and be as anonymous as possible. The gunfire continued, and a group of armed men moved towards the cafe in which I was sitting, their previous disparity replaced by an organised formation of uniformed weapons headed by a battering ram and purpose. I began to wish I’d been stabbed by the friendly taxi driver in Kragujevac and his screwdriver.
But nobody else seemed to be alarmed by the situation. Quite the contrary, in fact. Men, women and children were all watching the scene unfold, many going so far as to film the entire thing on their mobile phones. Some were even clapping along to the chaos. The fear in the air came from me alone, an intimidated tourist faced with a violent situation that seemed nothing more than the norm for the people of Kraljevo. Was I overreacting? All that time spent daydreaming about responding to such situations had gone out of the window, and the calm of my ideas had been obliterated by the fear of the present and my desperate desire to neither shit myself nor die.
A view of the central square in Kraljevo // © John Bills
The shooting continued, and the SWAT team barged its way into the hotel, guns aimed at strangely calm targets. The man in the balaclava was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t bring me any solace. The fear had subsided a little, but that was more because my body had grown tired of it than of any increased courage as the situation unfolded. And then, almost as quickly as it had begun, the shots ended. A couple of strays rang out across the square, but whatever the hell had been happening was over. I had survived, at least in a physical sense. I tried to light a cigarette, but my hand was shaking too much to make any use of the small grey BIC lighter between my thumbs and fingers. I downed my coffee, which had gone cold in all the excitement.
As the situation continued to settle down, the waiter walked over to me with a rueful look in his eyes. I tried desperately to hide my shaking from the affable man, but he had obviously detected it from afar and came over to tell me what was going on. “I’m sorry about that. The police were having a demonstration, to show what they are capable of, to show how strong they are. It happened yesterday as well. It is horrible, I don’t understand why they have to do it. I’m sorry.”
So that explained it.
I returned to the square in the evening, but I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling. The faint sound of military intervention could still be heard, as the rat-a-tat of gunfire continued somewhere off in the distance. Helicopters flew low through the sky, men hanging out of the sides where the doors were missing. I looked up at these birds of death with greater trepidation, but still, children played in the square as though this were reason to celebrate. Ashamed of my feeble reaction to what amounted to nothing, I ploughed on towards the riverside, passing the theatre and a music school dedicated to Stevan Mokranjac, the so-called father of Serbian music. I made it to the river's edge just in time to see a parade of armoured vehicles speed past, carrying an air of sinister determination. Whatever was going on hadn’t finished, so I decided to turn back. Sometimes, it is important to accept one’s wetness.
That explains it // © John Bills
That wetness was still biting at me, so I made a beeline once more for the cafe with the view. It was a lot easier to find without armed militiamen swarming all over the place, and I soon found myself in a slow-moving lift heading to the fourth floor. In the elevator was a sign, a translated piece of paper that sought to put visitors’ fears at ease. It read as follows: “Dear guests and visitors, these days the Serbian Army and Police have a common action in the city. They want to shoot some documentary film. Please do not worry about Your safety. Thank you for your understanding.” It didn’t really provide me with any comfort, and the view from the cafe didn’t console me enough to justify staying out.
How had this happened so quickly? My mind turned to the great travel writers and the capers described in their books. I thought of Ryszard Kapuściński and his struggles in Angola in Another Day of Life. The great Pole was widely regarded as one of travel’s great storytellers, and he had frequently faced uncertainty and death during his journeys. Had he been afraid? Absolutely, but he presumably faced his fate with a certainty and calm that later imbued his writing. And here I was, shitting my pants about a simulation of something. I either needed to grow up or get out. The inspirational phrase “get better or get lost” had never felt more pertinent. I made a promise to mature, but decided to get drunk first instead. Who are you?
Dartboards in a bar in Kraljevo // © John Bills
Maybe all of this is unnecessary. For starters, you don’t know how Kapuściński felt during his travels. Maybe he was absolutely fine, but maybe he was shitting and shivering like the rest of us. You don’t know, and you can never know. All you know is what he wrote, and even that comes with a caveat. As a poster on a wall in an important room once said, be gentle with yourself.
And who gives a right royal shit about being brave? There’s something unsettling about it all. We celebrate soldiers running towards gunfire, firefighters entering burning buildings, journalists reporting from war zones, and all the rest. Every day, kids all across the world are either told to be brave or commended for being so. I’m not denigrating it, obviously, but what if you don’t have to be brave all the time? Bravery is, in its most basic form, the ability to act despite the very sensible desire to not get hurt. Fear is the reason we got here, an evolutionary gift that kept our ancestors alive long enough for us to sit around admiring people who apparently don’t have enough of it.
Maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Yes, the soldier and firefighter are brave, but it isn’t as if there is an option. That’s what they signed up for, and all that jazz. Bravery isn’t always dramatic. It takes bravery to fall in love, to ask for help, to start again, and to support someone else. It takes bravery to be vulnerable. If you can’t find a way, I will. That takes bravery. Sure, it doesn’t take running towards a hail of bullets, but I’d argue it’s a more vital form of bravery to aspire to. And anyway, you don’t get to decide who you are. That’s up to other people.
