DIVERSE EUROPEANS: ordinary people

Given below are the journal entries I kept during the process of photographing the 14 subjects documented in this project. You can see a selection of the photographs by going to the EXHIBITION link.

01. Ms Balta (a project manager)
Upstairs, she sits in a seat by the window: coffee, turkish delight, a glass of water. We talk. She is responsible for the implementation of the new law on gender. "Oh, the women's law," her friend had said. No, not the women's law. A framework for ensuring that men have the chance to become more human by caring for their children, participating in education, looking after their parents as they move towards death, is not a law for women only.
The Corso. Sarajevo on a Sunday morning. Buildings are being reconstructed, the mosques and the churches are bright in the unexpected sunshine. Shops sell hand-made shoes, embroidered slippers, Miss Selfridge fashion. We buy nuts at the nut-shop and walk through the town. I take tourist photos, craft ware and sweets, shop windows, carpets, cash point machines. Ordinary life.
We have lunch at Inat Kuca, the house of the stubborn man. The Hapsburgs wanted to build the Library on land beside the river, and his was the last plot to be bought up. He refused to sell, but gave in at last on condition that his house was moved, brick by brick, to a spot on the other side of the water. It still stands. We eat spirals of spinach pie and drink earthen-ware beakers of yoghurt.

02. Mr Hadžimusic (actor in the Mostar Youth Theatre)
The theatre roof is a swimming pool in the re-built public baths. It leaks. Young people from Britain are rehearsing a dramatised reading of a play by a Bosnian playwrite. The director was trained in Exeter. She is from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He helps organise furniture, props, lends his car keys to the girl with the Jimi Hendrix haircut from somewhere along the Thames estuary - or was it the Wirral? Upstairs we have to negotiate open manholes, doors that seem to lead nowhere, steps not yet fixed to walls. We run the interview between phone calls from mobiles and land-lines.
The next day we drive up and up to the old front line. He shows where he was standing the day the incoming mortar nearly ended his contribution to the defense of Mostar. He had just gone down into the trench to get out of the wind. He wanted to light a cigarette. His friends, one catholic, the other orthodox, both Mostarians like him, thought he was dead. He no longer believes that smoking kills.

03. Mr Imamovic (Mayor of Tuzla)
The city is sinking. The mayor shows a calendar with the city's new salt lake. He shows a cup made of salt. We eat a late lunch in a restaurant with salt in its name. But the city is sinking and the town hall is temporary. Tuzla was built on salt and is sinking into the space that was made when the wealth was extracted.
The city is sinking. But there is new building. The Slovenes are investing so things must be better now. Mercator has come to town. There is a monument to Mozart (the only one outside Austria), and a statue to Martin Luther King, the black man whose motto sustained Tuzla during darker days. Is the city sinking? The mayor is a novelist. Everyone he meets wants to shake his hand. The Dutch have helped build the youth peace centre. There will be cycle routes and jogging paths through the forest. The Swedes or the Danes are paying for the football field and the basket ball pitch.
Forty children are buried on the hillside. One grenade killed seventy. Each tomb bears a colour photograph. How do we forgive? How do we remain human? Is the city sinking?

04. Ms Karacic (school student)
In the old furnaces of the public baths, now a cultural centre, she shows us the Bosnian rooms with musical instruments, the silver cradle, the inlay chairs. She shows us the library, the reading room. I ask her to stand beside her favourite paintings. She shows us a view of Sarajevo with its skyline of minarets and steeples. Her favourite piece is a large portrait. On a yellow ground, a man leans from the frame.
In her school she becomes a little younger. She studies mathematics, physics, computer science. She wants to be an engineer. We move from corridor to classroom and then onto the roof. The same skyline of steeples, towers, minarets. The snow is bright on the roofs of the houses that run up the steep hillside.
At home. Her family is amongst the first three to move into the newly completed apartment block. It is light, clean, well made. The company her engineer father works for built the complex. He now has a desk job, no longer works on site. He lost his leg in the shelling of the city. The family lived in Germany for six years. Now they are in Sarajevo. From her bedroom window you can see the skyline. Towers, minarets, steeples. The hills above are still white with snow.

05. Ms Kulašin (Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sport)
Elegant with her blonde hair and her long green jacket, she sits in front of the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Children's pictures on the wall. Two desks close together, two computers back to back.
She sits beside her beautiful sons on the sofa. Sun streams through the window. We are high above the town. She made the flat from the fragments her life had become. The room is clean and light and beautiful. Her sons play rock guitar, one the doctor to be, the other the musician. She is well now with her small bedroom, her single bed.
The young men are self aware, intelligent, beautiful, long hair swept back from wide foreheads. They shine in the sun filled living room. They shine as the walk through the town. Friends greet them and the traffic stops. They show us the cartoons in the internet café, the stage in the theatre upstairs, the young men making music. Vocals, lead guitar, bass guitar, drums. We could be anywhere. We are in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

06. Mr Levajac (retired teacher)
Nine in the morning. Before coffee we are invited to clean out the plumbing with country-distilled slivovitz. How can you refuse?
A kitchen lit with early sun and his friend's pastels. Nude figures, flowers, the steady gaze of those who are themselves closely observed. Representations of the beauty he attempts to catch in writing. He wants to make a sentence that is uniquely his own. He is proud of his work.
He talks of the present. He talks of the settlement he resents, the guilt he feels is shared. He does not accept an account of the war that says there were victims and aggressors. He says that things have not finished yet. But he writes about beauty.

07. Fra Ivo Markovic (Franciscan monk / a manager of an inter-faith choir)
There is not enough time in the day. There are so many demands. This is not said, but you can feel the pressure from the mobile phone, the large watch ticking off seconds. He is a monk, so has no immediate family to worry about, but then everyone is family.
There is not enough money to complete the building, but there are so many organisations now working in it. The seminary was an international students' house under communism, but was returned to the Franciscans after the war. The land must have value, as must the building, but it is more holes than wall at the moment: staircases that lead nowhere, doors that open into thin air. Yet there is heat and light in the office: the UN peace award presented by Kofi Anan, the photocopier, the music library. He runs the choir from here, muslim, catholic, orthodox and jewish voices. Bosnian harmonies.
In the evening we listen to the choir. So many faces, so many different songs.

08. Ms Mekic (student)
She has that model walk - hips in advance of shoulders. Back straight, head held just so. She speaks English that comes from across the Atlantic, says it's too much. Her brother takes the armchair, leans back, is cool, talks about beautiful girls. But she is two minutes older than him.
The flat is as hot as only central European flats can be on a sunny February morning. Coats off, boots off, jacket off as soon as you get through the door. The sofa and arm chairs are where they should be. The glass fronted sideboard, the cut glass, the small cups for the coffee. In Bosnia you give the guest the cake. You do not ask if they want it. Baklava, the pulp sweet with nuts and honey. Coffee, thick, black.
They are twenty two. They have come through war and the ending of war. They live in Tuzla. They want to travel and work and come back to Tuzla. She will be a journalist, he is a basket ball star already. The sun streams through the window.
In the studio theatre under the hotel, their older brother is rehearsing a new production. The theatre is two years old, built in a former strip club. We meet their father - an economist working for the city council. Amela, my mentor and interpreter knows everyone. People shake hands, we drink more coffee. The basket ball player says Bosnia can help other Europeans learn how to relax, enjoy more time with their friends and family. That should be Bosnia's gift to the new Europe.

09. Mr Miljevic (President of Employer’s Confederation)
The office is new. Light wood, plants, good colours. Young people sit in front of flat screen computers, smoke, drink coffee. He is late because he has had to talk to the minister.
He is polite, considerate, willing to mollify. Our mood shifts and we are happy to sit down with him, glad that he has made time. He is a big man, big hands, a bull's profile. He talks intelligently and with commitment about the work that he is doing and the problems they face in Republika Srpska. So many displaced people with little education, so many people who find it easier to blame someone else than to take responsibility for their own futures.
He loves paintings. His office is brightened by a small number of masterpieces. The corridors are a gallery of work from the art academy in Banja Luka. The company buys a piece from each graduate. He buys for himself. He lives in a 75 m2 flat. Each month he and his wife arrange a new exhibition.

10. Dr Mladina (paediatrician)
Intensive care. Sick children lie on their sides, small feet in woollen socks, cotton pyjamas. The beds are tiny. But then so are the children.
She has tears in her eyes, returning from telling parents their child has died. She says it is not professional to become so engaged, but how do you stop caring too much? Intensive care.
Her husband is a paediatric surgeon. He has a diamond ear-ring, large hands - another big Balkan man. He is Croat. She is Serb. They stayed throughout the siege of Tuzla. The young specialist group of surgeons and nurses we meet is the third team he has trained in ten years. People do not stay. Maybe this group will.
But mothers stay. They sit close beside the beds, close to their children. Snoopy is in amongst the toys left by children, waiting for children in intensive care.
Everyone smiles for the camera. The Doctor drives the car her daughter in Austria bought for her. She leaves the ward of dying and recovering children to have her hair cut, to drink coffee in the bookshop run by her friend, the publisher.
In the flat she shows us a painting made by a friend. She shows us a piece of shrapnel. Its massive frame held the broken metal, stopped its lethal random passage through their living room. Fired from the hillside to spoil the Bajram festivities, the grenade burst through the window of a Serb doctor and her Croat husband. Their Bosniak neighbours took them out of the dust-filled flat and offered intensive care.

11. Mrs Prošic (retired primary school teacher)
Look at her hands, look how they hold the long handle on the coffee pot. See how they pour precisely into the small cups. She does not pass the cakes but leaves them on the table for the guests to help themselves. Coffee, small salty caraway scones, slivovitz. Sunlight comes from behind the snowy trees, down through the lace of the curtains. Her face is beautiful in the sunlight.
When she talks of the son lost, the husband lost, the daughter losing her way, her eyes fill with tears. The cliché is allowable because it is true. Her eyes fill with tears. In the frameless photograph propped on the sideboard rescued from the bombed out house she is beautiful. Her partisan husband holds her close. Her face was beautiful in that sunlight too.
She lives in one room in the house that had been home to a family. Her Muslim lodgers were also displaced in the war. Christian, she has a sense of fellow feeling. She plans the collection of wood for next winter, ways of making this source of funds, that small pension stretch a little further. Each week she buys a lottery ticket and plans a different future.
And she says that once you have lost everything it is surprising how little you need. She points at her heart and says there is much here. She points at her head - here a little. She smiles. In the sunlight she is beautiful. Later, in the coffee shop in the supermarket she joins us for chocolate and drinks cappuccino.

12. Ms Prce / Mr Antunovic (tennis coach / customs officer)
Their dog really doesn't like us. It’s a pity because she's a pretty little bitch - clean white hair and a cartoon face. The apartment was her grandmother's, now left to them. Across the road was a park. It became an improvised cemetery during the bombardment, crosses and muslim headstones mingled. Inside the flat it's light and colourful.
Their choices. They made or chose everything. Above the sofa there are two empty white canvases. They will be painted at an appropriate time.
He works in the customs office, deals with papers, attempts to work honestly, without corruption. What else can he do if he is to live in the country he hopes for?
She would have been a tennis professional. Since the war she has trained to coach children. She gives lessons to the future stars and competent amateurs. She is studying law now, trying to pass her exams rather than buy a good result. What else can she do if she is to be live in the country she hopes for? What else can they do?
The children hit yellow balls over a white net. The clay court is deep red, the sky the most intense of blues. There is snow on the mountains.

13. Ms Rajic (manager of a cultural NGO)
Blue walls and purple cassette recorders stacked on shelves in the tiny office. She sits on a high chair, bright blonde hair tucked behind her ears. Her young Italian colleague speaks better Serbian than English.
She is another modern, intelligent, well-educated European. A citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina who needs a visa to travel to the east, to travel west. A visa to travel anywhere apart from Croatia. She was born after the earthquake which destroyed the original school building where they have their office, born before the war. She was born in Banja Luka. Now her mother lives in Serbia. Her father lives in Croatia.
The library is in chaos for the moment, but will be in good order very soon. The stacks of Italian donations (including translations of Catherine Cookson novels) are waiting to be labelled and arranged. Everything will be in good order very soon.

14. Mr and Mrs Zuka (Legislative Office’s Secretary and mechanical engineer)
The need to speak is so urgent. The words come before the question, flow over and around the question. The question opened the gates, words flowed through the gap, tumbling and broken, smooth and certain as glass.
He wants to be heard. He knows who he is, where he is. But he has been unable to influence the world beyond his own house, his own family and friends. He exercises his profession honestly, cares for those near to him, honours traditions that made him who he is. She interprets the law, makes cakes, brings up their sons to be men. She promises that this year she will learn to ski.
In the mountains the snowboarders move with nonchalance down the frozen tracks. Children line up on the nursery slopes. Half of Travnik seems to be out on the slopes. Aprés-ski there will be meat, bread, cakes, coffee, beer, slivovitz. On the wall by the fire a great bearskin is stretched in flight. In the valley we buy white cheese, smoked cheese, a wooden spoon.