by Kim Echlin
Justice is a long-feathered, cragged old mountain bird. Under its stiff wings lice crawl, laying and hatching in the worn cycle of revenge and fear. In the ancient first language, the priestess prayed to her goddess and she was tossed by war, torn by thorns, and exiled. No home, no temple, she was left with nothing but her song under the light of planets. Verdicts do not undo waiting.
He knocked and I let him in. Of course. Now we were alone, not the tender and curious young strangers who first met in an unheated room in Paris, but two people who had not seen each other for many years.
He said, Our daughter must be eleven now.
You know about her?
I got the letter you sent to London.
You never answered.
He looked down.
Why?
His back was to the window. Over his shoulder I saw distant lights, people awakening across the valley.
He asked, Have you told her about me?
We sat facing each other on two single beds.
Of course. Since she was little. I told her there was a war. I said someday we would find you. Anyway, it was easier to raise her without you.
Goat.
I had no choice.
No.
Are you with Edina?
She only lets me be her friend. War destroyed everything.
How destroyed?
She lost everything. Her husband. Her father. Friends. Her life.
You still love her.
She does not love me. She has never loved me.
He reached for my hand.
I said, We have been up all night.
We used to like all night.
The warm flesh of his palm on the back of my hand.
I said, I still like all night.
I wanted to know things about him and I wanted to touch him as if we had never been apart. I wanted truth but I did not want pain. I could not have truth without pain.
I wanted him but I was also angry. I wanted this moment but I did not trust it.
I asked, Have you had many lovers?
He looked into my eyes with a little humour and with great gentleness and he said, It has been eleven years. Not many. Have you?
Yes, I said. But I wanted to say, I had a child. Ours.
He wanted to coax us back toward warmth, and he touched my leg and asked, Is this okay?
I said, I don’t know if we should make love.
We have a daughter together, he said.
Always the way he spoke made me laugh. Time out of mind, a lover’s brain.
I stood, pulled the curtain across the window, and now we were unhurried because something had been decided and he looked on the bed at the crumpled paper she had given me and he said, She wrote her number for you?
I came back and stood behind him and put my arms around him and said, Yes she did. I will lock the door.
And after I hung up the sign outside, Ne ometaj, I asked, Shall I call her?
He did not answer but took off my clothes, and I took off his, and we made love and I remembered the hungry joy of our months in Paris. But he had betrayed me and there had not yet been time for understanding or forgiveness though my body had already forgiven him because a body knows only what it feels in every moment. We were not in a yellow-lit city of love where neither of us belonged but in his war-forlorn country. We made love haunted by our past and by Edina, and by her dead beloved husband too, each of us loving the wrong one. We were tattered things, and foolish and lost. And there was also a child. A mother must reckon with the life she creates. And so, with the measure we used, our story would be measured to us.
After, we talked about London, about Toronto, about Biddy. Then we made love again, and this time it was deep and slow, and with our bodies we told each other the truth.
* * *
—
People knew what was happening to the women in that war. But there was never a magazine cover of a woman looking into a camera with clothes ripped, breasts cut, blood running down the insides of her thighs. There was no cover for this kind of victim of war. The places where women were locked up were called not prison camps but motels and schools and recreation centres. Women who survived that war were not called heroes. They were hidden.
Rise, unhappy woman, cries Hecuba, all gone. No longer queen but coin. Spoils of war.
Epics sing battle in words so lovely they shimmer over stench and pain. I think of the poor boy Harpalion, the spear’s hideous wound between his genitals and navel, at the right buttock, under the bone, into the bladder, the boy gasping out his life, lying like a worm extended along the ground, dark blood drenching the earth, the boy-corpse lifted into a chariot and brought in sorrow to his father.
No poet has tenderly described insult to the vagina and womb and bowels of a woman. No poet makes a word-monument to a woman fighting naked, biting and kicking, beaten to silence, and nine months later, naked again, legs open again, giving birth to a child whose life began in rape. A woman’s war is not redeemed for the ages by art.
Her suffering is meant to stir honour in the speeches of generals, Let no man hurry to sail for home until he has raped a faithful Trojan wife, payment for the shock of war. Her brave battle has no voice at all.
We embalm her in silent shame.
* * *
—
Kosmos was gone when I awoke in the late afternoon and I thought, This is complicated.
Our love was storm-tossed. Seeing him again was a sip of cool water.
I telephoned the number Edina had given me and she asked, Do you play chess?
Her office building was in a residential part of the city, apartments over barren main-floor rooms behind locked doors. Locks everywhere. I knocked and knocked and finally a young woman came out and let me in and we walked up some stairs and Edina was in an office with an elderly woman. I turned the pages of magazines in a language I could not read. After Edina walked with the old woman to the door, she came back to me and said, You came.
Yes. Will you show me your work?
Did you sleep with him?
Yes.
He sleeps with anyone.
She was pulling a file out of a drawer and she said, I knew him before the war.
I sat in the chair in front of her desk and said, When I met him in Paris, years ago, he told me about you on the first day. He only thinks of you.
She said, I will show you our work and what we are doing.
I opened the file she had given me but I could not read it and I asked, What is it about?
About what happened in the war.
She took me to a map on the wall with many coloured flags marking all the regions where she had interviewed women. I did not know what I was looking at, and she said, I am building cases to prosecute.
I asked, What happened to them?
She said, What happens to women in war.
Outside the office door, two volunteers were laughing.
I wondered, What did each flag mean? How many women?
Edina said, Let’s go for coffee.
I suggested the Zlatna Ribica. I liked the decorations, the manual typewriters with broken keys and hand-coloured orientalist Victorian prints in small frames. I told her that in Paris I had been employed in a shop where I water-coloured and framed black-and-white prints cut from books, repainting history to decorate sitting rooms. And I wanted to see the foreign money under glass on the tables and the crystal and silver and costume jewellery hanging from hooks and the mirrors in ornate frames.
She said, There will be trials in The Hague.
For the women too?
They say, yes. It is a shock every time a woman tells. Do you know what it is to have blank sleep?
I did not.
Let’s play chess, she said.
In that first ga
me she stopped me from castling and my king never found safe haven. The game was over in twenty moves. She was good and I had not played since I had lived at home, when my father was still alive and we set up the board on Sunday afternoons. I can still feel the slant of warm sunshine over his companionable play. Edina played aggressively and with great concentration, controlled the centre of the board. My style was dishevelled, and I upset the expected order because I had not studied the game. Still, I enjoyed playing with her and we began to know each other without words, through our wooden men and their movement through each other’s territory. At one point I did something unconventional—irrational, really—and she studied it and realized I had no plan and she glanced up through her hair at me and said, You are only a wood pusher. I said, No, not at all, and near the end of the game, when it became clear she would win, she joked, You are poisoning me with these bad moves. In this world she was sovereign and good-humoured and at the end of our game she swept all the pieces into a box and then she relaxed.
What is your daughter’s name? she asked.
Biddy.
How old?
Almost twelve.
Does she like school?
Yes. Science.
Who takes care of her when you are away?
My mother.
She told me that her mother too had helped with her daughter, Merima, after the war. She said that Merima had to learn a new language and was now at university. She said that her daughter would never come back, so she had to travel to see her in Vienna. She said, I missed a lot with her because of the war.
The golden light at the bar flickered with a power surge.
I asked, What happened to your husband?
Gone.
In the thin light her skin looked eaten.
She asked, Isn’t Kosmos waiting for you?
Probably.
Edina lit another cigarette and said, Let’s play again. Timed game. You must try this time.
I asked, What does zlatna ribica mean?
She set up her pieces and gave me white and said, It means goldfish. If you catch a goldfish you get three wishes. Maybe you will catch one and wish for help with your game.
I had to smile. I opened with e4, and she moved so quickly I had difficulty following and I had to take time to consider, to try to understand what was happening. She was crushing me, and quickly she took my second bishop and I was working hard but she could see an amateur’s patterns ahead. I struggled to keep up. She said, Tomorrow I meet for the first time lawyers from The Hague. They want to build a case. They will look at my files. Would you like to come?
* * *
—
Kosmos was asleep on my bed, eyebrows up. In Paris I had often found him waiting for me like this in my room. His body, at rest, vulnerable.
He stirred, said, Come to bed?
His touch was careful, fingers turning the pages of an old and brittle photo album. Was this what he remembered? Was this? What had happened since we had held each other, untroubled strangers, in Paris? I think we were trying to figure out if we loved each other. Our bodies did. With touch we asked each other, What happened to you? A baby. What happened to you? A war. Who are you now? How long is love? How short?
Love out of time. Eleven years apart. We told each other what had happened since the day he disappeared. He wanted to know everything about Biddy. He wanted to know how I lived, about my writing, about why I had to come to Sarajevo. He told me about his job managing a small theatre. There was little work in his city and less for artists. I asked if he had had girlfriends, perhaps a wife. He laughed and said marriage was not in his destiny, and I felt his mask slipping and I wanted to be alone with him for a thousand days so we could tell each other everything. I thought, We cannot tell eleven years in a single day.
We fell asleep again and when my alarm went off after only a few hours he said, You are going to her meeting. She told me she would ask you.
Does she tell you everything?
Mostly, he said.
He reached for my hand, pretending to pull me back to bed, and he said, I like you here.
I said, So do I. But I won’t stay long. I need to get back to our daughter.
He got up and pulled on his pants and T-shirt and drove me through the awakening streets to Edina’s office and I saw a small group of well-dressed women carrying bags and briefcases.
Kosmos said, There they are. I’ll see you later.
I said, Thanks for the ride.
Paris
I met Kosmos in a bookshop called Shakespeare and Company at 37 rue de la Bûcherie. I was twenty years old. The bookshop’s small rooms were piled to the ceilings with books, and above an inner doorway I read the hand-painted words BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE. George Whitman, owner of the shop, wore a paisley jacket. He was slender of face with piercing eyes and white hair. He sat reading and smoking.
I asked George, Can I stay here?
He reached under the counter and handed me a long metal file and pointed to a bicycle locked with a rusty chain to a post outside. The day was hot, sun bouncing off the yellow buildings. I filed and looked across the river at the great medieval church with its carved mandalas and gargoyles. George left and hours later returned with more books wrapped in a newspaper. At twilight I finally heard the exquisite click of a rusted chain. I unwrapped it from around the bicycle, gathered it over my arm and took it back into the shop where George sat on his perch surveying the world like a wandering falcon. I handed him his file and the old chain, and he looked at me as if he were trying to know something.
You can stay as long as you like, he said.
Where do I sleep?
He did not answer, only glanced upward as if at a ghost passing before returning to his book.
I stepped on a low stair on which was written LIVE FOR HUMANITY and pulled the shop around me like a worn quilt; tatty armchairs, kitchen on the second floor, narrow staircases where people fell down drunk, doorways crowded with spirits. Stacks of books. On the walls were black-and-white photos of writers whose androgynous faces showed the torment and wonder of a life conjured by words.
I was awoken that night by fireworks in the sky over Notre-Dame, yellow and red and blue explosions of metal salts. In the bookshop refuge I read, and with a borrowed black pen I wrote on my backpack a twice-translated line by Basho—possessed by the spirits of wanderlust—and wondered what it looked like and sounded like in Japanese. I felt agreeably alone in the world, walking on cobblestone during the days and falling asleep among other wanderers at night.
* * *
—
I went to Paris because I wanted to be far from home. I was finished university and writing articles for Canadian Forum and waiting tables and trying to figure out how I wanted to live. Then, one night, my father was dancing with my mother and in the middle of “Sally Goodin” the electrical signals in his heart failed and he lost all feeling in his toes and fingers and his occipital cortex went black. Her hand was the last thing he must have seen as his long legs buckled. He crumpled toward the floor and in three minutes, the time it takes to boil an egg, my father was dead. I went home to be with Mam. She sat day after day at the kitchen table and said there was nothing to do but to accept the deaths of the men she loved. We buried his ashes together and my brother went back to work and Mam said she was going to learn to fly.
My brother was lucky. He was absorbed in his first year practising law. But I had no heart for my former life. I felt a new urgency to be in the world and I did not want to stay home with Mam. She told me secrets as if she had taken off a heavy coat in her grief. She drove to the airfield in the morning and when she came home she put on a messy half-open kimono and sat at the table and talked.
She said, I have ridden in an ambulance with my husband’s dead body. I have organized a cremation with a mort
ician who forced me to sit near him so he could tell me his troubles. I planned the words, ashes to ashes and joyful, joyful, melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the dark of doubt away. I am the widow who has buried her husband’s ashes in a velvet bag. I have mailed death certificates to strangers and paid death taxes and organized papers for banks and government departments. This is the business of death.
I wanted to hear my father’s gentle voice again. I wanted life not to have stopped.
She said, The men I love die.
I did not want her to be complicated in this way. I did not want her lostness or her sorrow.
Why, I asked, do you keep talking about men?
When I was still a teenager, she said, I went to do war work. There was no money for more school for me. I was sent to Fifteen Wing, the air force base on the prairie, and I learned to repair fuselages. I worked underneath on my back on a dolly with a long, curved needle. I liked the other girls and we played softball at night and we had purpose and we were away from home. I really wanted to learn to fly and I used to help the young pilots study and I learned everything they did. I could have been a girl pilot but that was for rich girls.
Mam poured us another cup of tea. We did not drink it. She looked out the kitchen window toward a cardinal’s cheer-eet, cheer-eet, and then she said, At Fifteen Wing, when you fixed a plane you had to test-fly in it to prove you hadn’t sabotaged it. A pilot called Jack Eastmund liked me and came looking for me and he said, Where is Jean? I don’t think she’s been up in that plane she fixed.
We fell in love on that first flight and I let him touch my hand as he flew us over the prairie. We had five months on the base together before he shipped out to France. I was afraid of getting pregnant and somehow I managed not to. I don’t know how and I was always worried about that. We planned to open a flight school together after the war, and he wrote to his parents about me, and I told the girls I was going to finally learn to fly and I was in love. It was war and it was a romantic time. But then the thousand-bomber raids. He wrote about flying four hundred knots and the wings are supposed to drop off at three hundred but they didn’t. He said he could change directions in six seconds. Mostly he wrote how much he loved me and he kept telling me to hang on, he was coming home. I wrote, Be careful, come back to me, I’m planning our flight school, I’m thinking of you. But on a fogged-in night, my gentle, handsome Jack Eastmund never came back.
