Graves from Sarajevo to Ground Zero

It’s midnight in Sarajevo, and Smilya and I have stumbled out of a nightclub into a cemetery. Hundreds of white stones, some crosses, some just stone markers, stare up at us in the moonlight.

The names on the stones are Marko and Drago and Mirza, and all of them died between the years 1991 and 1993. Naturally, I come up with little fictions for each stone. This one was a teacher; that one played the oboe. I try to imagine how they died. By taking each stone individually, I can pretend that I understand somehow.

It is easy to stumble into a graveyard in Sarajevo. The city was under siege for four years, and during the war, bodies couldn’t be taken to the graveyards in the outlying hills. So just about every park in the city, almost every bit of grass, has white stones peeking out in random formations. Smilya tells me they had to convert one of the city’s main soccer fields, right in the center of town, because there wasn’t anyplace else to bury people. She shows it to me without apparent emotion. Children now play in these same parks, and young people stroll through talking on their cell phones. They willfully ignore the signs of the recent war and the dead beneath them. Death is everywhere, so it is forgotten. Graves are like park benches in Sarajevo.

In a way, bodies are the ultimate disposable items in cities. Buildings are built to withstand earthquakes. Each season of violent weather sees windswept power lines restrung and cracked roads patched. But bodies fall off as chaff long before the bridges they crossed and the traffic lights that guided their way.

Cities are built with regard to a certain culture, and years later, they house a different one. It is the inevitable march of one generation over another that is so obvious in cities–more obvious than in other places because the changes happen more rapidly. Usually, the bodies of the dead are swept away to other places, invisible.

In Manhattan, where I’m from, bodies haven’t been buried legally since the 1850s. There are small graveyards walled in among the buildings, but they feel more like little shrines, or outdoor museums, than reminders of death. For death, you have to hit the outer boroughs.

In Queens and Brooklyn there are graveyards. Some are right beside the Long Island Expressway, stretching over abandoned industrial landscapes, the stones packed together tightly, almost on top of each other with giant smokestacks peering out behind them. There is so little grass between the stones that, from certain angles, they look like uninterrupted concrete, like a large sidewalk.

When I was young, I used to marvel at how people spent all their lives living more or less on top of each other in skyscraper condominiums in Manhattan, and then, when they died, they were still more or less on top of each other, only now in Queens, away from day-to-day sight. Some years ago, the Department of Transportation put up barriers on the side of the L.I.E., apparently to shield commuters from having to see the graves. I guess it was depressing.

My family bought a plot of ground in Queens sometime in the ‘60s, and there seems to be space there for many more of us. My grandfather is there, and my grandmother, and our weird Uncle Jack whom nobody knew much about. There is space for my father and my mother and my sisters and me. The patch of real estate is not valuable enough for the living, but enough for us when we’ve passed.

In post-9/11 New York, a new culture of mourning has developed. Almost immediately after the event, even before the smell of burning asbestos and death left lower Manhattan, the vendors appeared with their “9/11” baseball caps, t-shirts, and memorial picture books. Firefighters and police solemnly claimed Ground Zero as their own on behalf of their fallen brothers and sisters. In its appeals to vacationers and its plans for redevelopment, death became part of the city’s draw, like some macabre tourist attraction. It wasn’t long before the double-decker tour buses made Ground Zero one of their main attractions.

For the rest of us, Ground Zero has now become a similar kind of abstraction, a symbol. When we pass by it, we try to conjure emotion, but it’s hard to think of it as more than problem for architects, a memory of the skyline, just as the graves in Sarajevo have ceased to represent real people.

Smilya and I make a beeline among the monuments to get back to a paved street. On the other side of the field is a raised highway and a dark, crumbling tunnel. Beyond that is Smilya’s apartment building, a Communist-style, concrete-slab structure pocked with shell eruptions and crevices she tells me are bulletholes.

That night, once we are inside, she remarks with a shiver that during the war she often wondered if her family would end up in one of these massive graveyards in the center of the city.

I often wonder the same thing, only about a different place.