Striking a balance between her right leg and the prosthesis on her left, Emina Uzicanin, a five-year-old medical refugee from Sarajevo, stared blankly at an electrical switch on a table in front of her. Flanked by her older sister, their mother, and various other adults, she was poised to light a towering Christmas tree in the lobby of Chicago’s Swissotel. A small audience watched as a photographer, battery packs dangling from her Chanel fanny pack, fired a burst of flashes at the child. Pop, pop, pop-pop. Emina flinched, then flicked the switch.
It wasn’t. Before Emina could come to America, Kovacevic battled UN bureaucrats and made two harrowing trips to Sarajevo. His wife was warned that he would not leave that city alive.
In the early 1970s Vladimir landed a residency at a Milwaukee hospital. Miroslav’s wife, Visnja, then a chemical engineer, taunted her husband, saying he couldn’t get a job in the United States if he tried. “It was more of a joke. At that time, I didn’t speak a word of English. But I said to Visnja, ‘Let me prove you darling wrong.’” Within six months Kovacevic had landed a pediatric internship at South Baltimore General Hospital, now called Harbor Hospital Center. “If you know Miro, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do,” says Visnja. “He always took big challenges in anything. In every step in our life. He was never mediocre. He always had very defined ideas–‘That’s what I’m going to do’–and there was no obstacle.”
Kovacevic used to smoke about a pack of Rothmans a day. He turned to acupuncture last month to help him quit. When not puffing, the wiry doctor fidgets, shakes his legs, and rips the paper off his Rothmans boxes. As if fashioning a cigarette, he rolls the paper into a very thin tube, licks it, and sticks it in his mouth. Then he jumps up and brews himself a demitasse of espresso, sweetened with a half teaspoon of sugar.
Kovacevic found something in Africa he could not bring back. “There is about 30 seconds time that it’s almost like eternity. It’s the time from the moment the sun touches the horizon at sundown and stays there for 30 seconds and just drops. It’s not the picture. It is the sound. For these 30 seconds it’s absolute silence. It’s a deafening silence. At that moment it’s so beautiful. It’s worth experiencing it over and over again. It’s a timeless time. It is that quick peek into the God, heaven, into something beyond us. That’s the only thing I can really recall to be something extraordinary.” After that divine interlude, all hell breaks loose. “The animals go berserk,” he says.
