Walk it out

I don’t really burden my family with my ghosts, Ger tells me over breakfast. He does, of course, talk to his wife when he needs to, when it’s important, but he spares her from the daily visitations of darkness.

It’s not like I chose the war. The war came to me also, he says. Also. That means, at minimum, that he didn’t run away when the war came. In fact, he stayed many times, first in Kosovo, then in Bosnia, and finally when he took the job offer to reconstruct what actually happened in Srebrenica. It did not occur to him that he should stay out of it.

It drives him mad when people say they can’t do much. So, Ger did more than much.

He spent five years listening to survivors from Srebrenica. He was trying to understand what happened in the town in the last years before the genocide. Reconstruct what the killers did, why and how the UN peacekeepers failed. He wrote a book about the lead-up, the last years before the massacre, but when it came to the microhistory of mass killing, he found he couldn’t work on it. He was missing two chapters, and he would have had his book. That was twenty years ago. Since then, he shelved it. He admits he is always looking for excuses. Something that’s also valuable to work on.

He still wants to finish the book. He went too deep, owes it to too many people he listened to, and he stubbornly believes that speaking up matters in our imperfect democracies.

He calls his whole career a digression. In psychiatric terms, you would call this splitting, he adds. If you've gone through some really hard experiences, you kind of split it off. You isolate that part. And you do something else.

Looking at his last few decades, he is afraid people must be thinking: what has this guy been doing? There is nothing constant in his work. He doesn't have a topic. But he does: Srebrenica is the invisible centre he orbits around. It’s just that he cannot land there again. It’s not the kind of place where you can just return. He tried a few times, but instead of a good writing routine, he landed in dark, lonely places. Sometimes he scared himself.

For twenty-odd years, he has perfected the art of digression. Quite literally. He worked in London for many years. After his classes, he would slip out, sometimes in the middle of the night, and walk until dawn. Sitting, thoughts come, they wash over you. But walking, you lead, and you set the rhythm. His ghosts love a walk, too. It seems to comfort them. Maybe it’s the swaying, the gentle monotony and the soft landing of his feet on concrete. He would shadow deliverymen, interview security guards at vacant construction sites, listen to the silence of second and third homes in hollow, fancy neighbourhoods. He would walk through the liquid wealth of foreign oligarchs that turned London into hub for asset managers, wizards of offshore, bankers high on cocaine and cash.

He always hoped squatters slept in these empty palaces he walked past. After all, before he became an anthropologist of genocide, he used to live in squats for years.

Often, he would walk all night, sometimes fooling himself that if he kept going, he could get all the way to the salt flats and the sea. He would lose himself somewhere in Woolwhich near the old arsenal, where centuries ago, weapons used to be made for other kinds of wars.

London is generous this way. Who could count the number of us, resident aliens and occasional visitors who took to its streets to walk out whatever we brought with us? When we live our normal lives, we work, shop, try to make friends, we need to leave much of it behind. In the shiny new settings of our lives, most people will not have heard about our countries beyond the headlines. We search for common denominators, a common ground. Walking, we find our feet, we re-gain balance.

Ger recalls a marine who fought in Iraq who could not stand the day, so he worked night shifts as a security guard. I recall a drunk nocturnal stroll with my friend who spent years with landless workers in Brazil, witnessing police crackdowns and forced evictions. Or a Ukrainian friend who refused to go fight in the Donbas war. He hated how the war meant that a man, for his country, can be just two things: coward or hero. Rejecting this still meant he was a coward, in his own eyes, and the harsh, fast indifference of London streets was the only thing that calmed his indignance, his shame.

We walk, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes to disappear in the ocean of people, to eat our way through the world. These flavours too, they mostly got here by way of people fleeing from distant crises. London was peopled by the collapse of the British Empire, postcolonial wars, civil wars the world over. By the cold war, and later, by the shock waves of the spectacular disaster the US calls the war on terror. Since my life got tangled into war, since my own country turned on itself, I can’t look at the busy streets of large foreign cities the way I used to.

I see people on the run, people from all walks of life. People who left, escaped, who left behind something, who were smuggled in, let in. Brains that were drained. London is us. We fill these places.

We come from loud collapses of war or failed revolutions, the quiet crises of repression, gendered violence or economic downturn. We congregate in places most of us never imagined as home, maybe not even as better places, as places of refuge.

From the kings of offshore to the engineers who now drive taxis at night, from the illegals to the UN staffers and the US marines who are just here to forget, from the Indian Ugandans to the Italians, from the Punjabi to the Palestinians, the recent arrivals from Hongkong and Ukraine, that sweet story global success and hyperdiversity is, it seems, a war story.

A story of flights and horrors, mixed with little droplets of privilege. Of adventure, curiosity, asset management, good education and international love.

There are so many of us that by now, in a place like London, nobody can undo us. Not with all the alien acts of the world.

I land again. I don’t live here anymore, but whenever I come, this is the place where I can walk it all out. I take the DLR from City Airport, staring at the mushrooming cheaply built, overpriced tower houses. The car sways, the lilt of a hundred languages rocks me into a calm stupor. I have not come to tell any story; when there is so many of us, it is easier not to be consumed by the need. I have not come to stay either. Yet, here I am, it so happens, and it keeps happening so.