At the precipice of a hill on the outskirts of town sits a dark and smoky room. In the colossal shadow of the mosque across the street, the room seems Lilliputian, stuffed with haze and breathless afternoon sunlight. The men in the room — and there are only men, save for a female reporter — cluster around a table, where cards are falling, slip-slap, slip-slap, into mysterious and intricate patterns.

A man with a coarse suggestion of stubble and a slow grin circles the room with a grandiose and practiced air. He pours Turkish coffee into porcelain teacups, empties the loaded ashtrays, sweeps away vacant beer bottles and replaces them with full ones, sweating with frost. He appears out of place, alien. He’s the only man in the room with two working legs.

Every Tuesday and Thursday during practice season, a sitting volleyball team meets here, in this clubhouse of sorts. They are called “Fantomi” — the phantoms. They play cards, chain-smoke, and eventually head across the street to the mosque, where they practice in a basement-level gym. The slow-grinning man helps those in wheelchairs descend the short staircase to the pavement; those with prosthetic legs lend their hands too. There aren’t any elevators or wheelchair ramps here. Then it’s down another long set of stairs to the gym, where these men — some with only half-bodies — become both graceful and vicious, athletes exulting in near-superhuman feats.

This Tuesday, Nihad Radonja isn’t practicing with the rest of Fantomi. Coach Sevro Numanovic has temporarily suspended him for — well, he prefers not to say what for. Radonja, like most of his teammates, lost his legs during the war that consumed Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995. Widespread disabilities were caused in large part by the millions of landmines laid down on Bosnian soil, turning more than 10,000 soldiers and civilians into landmine victims. Radonja, like his teammates, comes to practice religiously, sweats buckets, plays like he means it. Like his teammates, Radonja wants nothing more than to kick ass on the volleyball court. You can tell it’s killing him not to play this week.

Relegated to the corner by his unnamed transgression, Radonja catapults himself out of his wheelchair like a bow-legged pelican lifting its massive wings into flight, dons a blue #4 jersey (respectfully turning his back to the lady) and lopes to the sidelines, where he begins batting — rather, slamming — a ball against the wall by himself.

Meanwhile, Radonja’s teammates in good standing with Coach Numanovic are immersed in various pre-game endeavors. Two men with one leg between them slap a ball back and forth; when they lose it, a wispy, boyish young man in a green #12 shirt limps around to retrieve it. His left leg ends abruptly at the ankle, rounded into a bulbous knob tied up in athletic tape. A few players stretch prone on the waxy floor, their shortened limbs splayed like sunning starfish. Coach Numanovic, in all his Buddha-belly glory, surveys the scene from his wheelchair, gnarling wooly eyebrows. He doesn’t look pleased: he’s going to give them one hell of a practice.

Searing anniversaries

In recent years, Bosnia has become a formidable presence in the sport of sitting volleyball, with over 30 clubs nationwide. The country took the gold at the 2004 Special Olympics in Athens, defeating four-time champion Iran; Fantomi won the European Cup that same year. Sitting volleyball, which was introduced in Holland in 1956 and became a Paralympic competition in 1980, is played in much the same way as standing volleyball (six players to a side, five sets of one game each, a two-point lead required to win), but on a smaller court with a lower net. At all times, the players must maintain direct contact between their pelvis and the ground. The action is fast and most of it happens 45 inches above the floor.

Tonight, Fantomi splits in two to scrimmage in preparation for the World Club Sitting Volleyball Championships one month away pitting Fantomi against former rival Iran as well as Hungary, Russia, Germany, and Croatia. But something more than competitive pride draws the players back to the gym twice a week: the camaraderie forged by loss.

“If we were not doing sport and training, we would stay closed in the house,” explains Ismet Godinjak, who, like most of his teammates, spoke through a translator. “We would be introverts. But now, we have a good time together. The main reason is to gather together and not think about what happened.”

What happened was the war, which claimed an estimated 200,000 people and left tens of thousands of Bosnians disabled. According to the Bosnia and Herzegovina Mine Action Centre (BHMAC), the number of communities affected by mines plus the level of impact on the population make Bosnia the most mine-affected country in the world. As of May 2004, there were still 18,319 minefields in the country, containing an estimated 260,751 anti-personnel mines, 51,447 anti-vehicle mines, and 3,635 unexploded explosive ordnances. Injuries sustained from stepping on these devices are horribly disfiguring.

With the exception of one young man with a birth defect, all of Fantomi’s members were disabled in the war. With unequivocal clarity, all remember the exact date they lost their limbs. For Godinjak, that date was June 8, 1994. He was in the woods, scouting the front lines, when he stepped on a mine. His friends carried him to the hospital, where his left leg was cut off below the knee. By that point, Godinjak says, “it was usual to see amputees and injured people, so it was not shocking when it happened to me. I saw women and children killed; many of my friends were killed. So I did not consider it a big tragedy.” He developed gangrene and the amputation had to be repeated three times.

Godinjak is one of the taller players on the team, and his disability is not readily apparent until he takes off his pants and unhooks his prosthetic leg. Once crouched on the floor, he maneuvers towards the center of the court by using the support of his right leg and the sinewy muscles of his arms. It looks like a dance, a surreal underwater choreography in which six feet of man are collapsed and rearranged. He says that being on the court makes him feel normal again.

“When you play sports, it lets you know that you are normal,” he explains. “In time, you must learn to accept yourself with your physical injury. You accept the fact that you are not different.” Godinjak plays out this resoluteness on the court, vehemently ka-WHACKing his palm against the ball, the warm salt of his sweat and breath soaking the air as the game heats up.

According to Danijel Hopic of Sarajevo’s Handicap International, an organization that works with landmine victims, playing sports can shatter perceptions — both community-wide and self-imposed — that serious, body-altering disabilities, such as those sustained by many Bosnians in the war, are permanently inhibiting. “When a person becomes disabled, he feels a gap within himself. He sees no sense in his life,” Hopic says. “But with sports, the environment can be adapted to the person’s disability. Society imposes standards on people with disabilities, but sports defy the rules. Sports are crashing those standards down.”

Ground rules

Another thing sitting volleyball is crashing down is the lingering animosity between Bosnia’s ethnic groups who fought aggressively against one another in the war. While Bosnians can be dismissive of lingering tensions between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, such antagonism isn’t extinct. Much like the racist attitudes that persisted in the United States after the elimination of segregation against blacks, people in Bosnia often talk grandly of unity while harboring staid convictions against opposing ethnic groups. In response to a description of Fantomi as a “Muslim team,” Radonja quixotically replied, “here in Bosnia, we have no ethnicities, only good people and bad people.”

But the reality is that many sitting volleyball players likely fought against each other on the battlefield. Usually, however, members of rival teams (which are not formed by ethnicity but by location) talk about obliterating each other on the court with only a playful malice. They are bound by their collective trauma, and now by a sport that has eradicated even the slightest inclination to wallow.

Dzevad Hamzie, a member of Fantomi rival team SPID (Sportsko Invalida Drustvo, another Sarajevo-based club), confirms this unity across ethnic lines. “Being a member of a group that has the same problem as you, being hurt in the war, we had that understanding between each other,” he says. “No one feels sorry for each other because we do not need it. There is no need for sorrow or pity.” Hopic says this competitive motivation is what makes sports so healing: “It makes [the disabled] want to prove themselves, to fight to show everybody that they can do it. If I accept you as my opponent, I validate you as worthy to be my opponent. The cooperation of the team means that we are all equal, no one needs to help each other, you do not need to help me, and I can help you.”

Hamzie is another tall, lanky player who walks without a trace of a limp — you don’t know his left foot is missing until he folds his pant leg upward. He speaks through exhaled cigarette smoke about August 13, 1995, one month before the war ended, the day that he lost his foot by stepping on a mine. After more than 100 days in the hospital, he spent a year learning how to walk again. He began attending volleyball practices in 1996, after he saw a local television documentary about the sport. Public transportation was still down, so Hamzie had to walk for more than an hour to the center of the city for practice — now, he can do the walk in 20 minutes. “When you are practicing all the time,” he boasts proudly, “you do not need to go to the doctor.”

Although the prevalence of landmines during the war made amputees a common sight on the streets of Sarajevo, the process of normalizing these injuries and accommodating the disabled back into the community has been difficult. Many public places — including the gym in which Fantomi practices — are still not wheelchair accessible. In fact, this lag in public perception of the handicapped is paradoxical: As international nonprofits maintain less of a presence in Bosnia due to the improvement of the political climate, local nonprofits are becoming more essential to the integration of the disabled — the very places where cultural misperceptions of disability may persist. “We as a society still see the disabled as a burden,” Hopic says. “Their families need to carry them places, they always need someone with them.” Hopic sees the difficulty of being without any aid, playing with only the ground for a prop, as freeing: “But once they are released [onto] on the ground, everything on [that] ground becomes the ground rules.”

All of the sitting volleyball players talk about the emotional uplift brought on by a good game. Delalic Sabahudin, SPID’s captain, says that “doing a sport like this is like having a job: You travel, you meet people. Those who do not are passive … depressed. This sport makes you very involved. Home is only for sleeping.”

Sabahudin, too, talks of the day a grenade blew off his left leg — December 5, 1992 — and how playing sports enabled his rehabilitation, both physically and psychologically. “There is the aspect of gathering and hanging out, the training. It makes you forget one part of your disability. It does not make it disappear, but one part of it can be accepted,” he says. “There is a very large difference between people who do sports and who do not. Those who do not are psychologically unstable, they cannot deal with their problems, they are closed to society, they are introverted. They mostly stay at home, which also becomes an economical issue. Asking the state to pay for your injuries is like waiting for nothing. But sport lets you figure out how to solve existential problems.”

Worth less or more?

As for the men of Fantomi, their practice session is winding down, but Coach Numanovic relentlessly works them till the end. He glides down from his wheelchair to join the team, battling it out amid pools of sweat gleaming on the waxed floor. The guys are tired, but no less tenacious in their efforts. To catch their breath, they recline backward onto their arms, but they don’t rest very often. During set-ups, there is a hushed, expectant silence, punctuated by panting breath.

Godinjak makes his way back to the sidelines to gulp water and check on his elementary school-aged son, who has accompanied him to practice tonight. The boy has been playing with the exiled Radonja in the corner and retrieving wayward balls from his dad’s game, pitching them back to the servers with a serious look. He watches his father and tries to imitate his particularly stellar plays. Godinjak knows his son looks up to him, which is a reason why he brings him to these practices. “You can be a model for all people, not just injured people. It does not have to mean you are worth less than other people,” he says. In a country where the official unemployment rate is 44 percent, Godinjak, with full-time office work, is indeed better off than many. “Doing this gave me a totally normal existence,” he says, “I have a home, family, a job. I have earned more than many people I know who are not injured, who were worried about me and how I would deal and go through life.”

Now night is falling and it’s time for Fantomi to abandon the court. Most of the men head back to the clubhouse, back to the cigarettes and card games. But Radonja, fired up with untamed energy after an evening on the sidelines, offers the lady a ride home. Two of his teammates help him to his car; one lifts him out of his wheelchair and into the driver’s seat, the other collapses the chair and secures it in the trunk.

As he speeds down the mountain through chilled layers of air, windows cranked down, radio cranked up, Radonja talks about the main reason Fantomi has been so successful. “It’s because we have heart,” he says simply. He drops his guest safely at her residence and bids goodbye, vanishing into the night.

Three months later, in the world championships last September, the Bosnian team, which in 2004 had stolen what would have been its fifth consecutive Paralympic gold medal from Iran, lost to this archrival. In November, Fantomi made a comeback to win the Euro League gold.

Erin Marie Daly