by Kim Echlin
Edina began, Do you know the old fairy tales? There was once a golden time in our small villages in the mountains when people listened to stories of djinn and witches and evil lords and angels who sit on the left and right shoulders.
In those days, Edina said, my mother kept a small shop where she sold tinned and dry goods, soaps and stamps and pens, and listened to the gossip of our town. She grew up on a small farm with goats near the main road to the village, and my grandmother still lived there alone after her husband’s passing. My father was a woodworker who built furniture during the days and whittled wooden birds in the evenings. I had no brothers or sisters and I played on a bend in the river with friends from the Lepa Brena apartment where we all lived. My mother’s shop was nearby and across the road was the Women’s Anti-Fascist Club. We used to play ringe-ringe-raja, falling with great drama to the sidewalks from the imaginary smell of Uncle Paja’s rotten egg in front of the old women. We could not imagine how these stiff creatures with swollen ankles and varicose veins had ever been revolutionaries. Over the river was a restaurant with a wide open-air balcony where our family gathered with our neighbours to celebrate birthdays and holidays, Kurban Bayram and Christmas Eve and Prvi Maj. On Sundays we walked to my grandmother’s farm past tall sweet-smelling haystacks packed loosely, like soft mountains, to help my grandmother churn butter and stir and press her famous goat cheeses.
As I grew older I went on hikes with my friends to the woods of Buk Bijela and along the road to Trebinje throwing pebbles and counting the roofs by their shapes. Serb farmers preferred the flattened line to the full triangle on the roofs of their Moslem neighbours. It was a relaxed life, with lots of visiting and coffee. During festivals, the women put on aprons and embroidered blouses for the kolo dance. We all knew it, though we young people laughed at it. We played soccer and I sang in the choir and I acted in plays at the Partizan Sports Hall. Once we even took our play to the neighbouring village of Miljevina near the railway hotel. I knew girls from many households, the Karamans, the Bogdanovićes, the Lazićes. Our families had lived there for generations.
In high school I used to sneak into the second-floor classrooms with my friends by running across the cement bridge over the gully, then up the fifteen steps to the back door. I smoked my first cigarette in the forest behind, and many of the girls had their first kisses there too. Not me. Ivan took me for a long walk along the river and he held my hand and he said, This river is our destiny and the history of our blood.
I liked how he wanted to talk like a poet and a soldier, and I knew he was gathering his courage to kiss me. I had chosen him already and I wanted to go with him to study at the university. More than anything else I wanted to become a lawyer ever since I saw the American program about the lawyer in a wheelchair called Ironside. My mother who did not complete high school was happy I would do more. When it was time for me to leave for the city, my father gave me his own old copy of The Damned Yard because he had always loved those stories. He embraced me and said, Do not look where the harvest is plentiful but where people are kind.
My parents approved of Ivan Pašić. In the evenings when I studied, he sat with my father and tinkered with radios and clocks. Our two families invited each other to our homes, and at Christmas, Ivo made sure that I was served the secret coin in the česnica cake and on the first day of Muharram, I served him and his parents my mother’s lamb ćevapi. I think that my parents hoped that Ivan would protect me in the city though they said nothing of this. Girls were freer than when they were young. I remember the night before we left on the bus, my father whittled a falcon from a piece of wood and he gave it to Ivan and said, I wish that my daughter might have someone to watch over her with vision as sharp as this wonderful mountain bird.
Ivo blushed.
The bus from Foča to town took about three hours, a journey of light and dark through tunnels carved into the mountains along the old Austro-Hungarian railway. There is a jutting orange rock that everyone from Foča looks for on the way to and from our small village. They call it Stari čovjek, Old Man. I used to look for him each time I returned from Sarajevo because when I saw him, I was almost home.
I loved my new life in the city and in law school and I thought of myself as one of the “new primitives.” I listened to Patti Smith and Talking Heads and Sonic Youth and Idoli and I went to Kusturica’s films with flying brides and gypsies. Ivan and I met Kosmos at an art show and became friends. He used to perform outside at the People’s Theatre with his collective and he would walk down the steps into the crowd to deliver his lines to me. He was always crazy and hanging around me and I used to laugh at him and tell him if he wanted to be friends with me he had to be friends with Ivan too. We went to the same openings and poetry readings and on warm evenings made the long walk from the university to the terrace of the Bijela Tabija restaurant before the moon disappeared.
A student was arrested for walking naked down the street and calling his performance “Balls on Asphalt.” Ivan helped make a performance of John Cage’s 4′33″ with twelve radios and lots of screeching and static. At the performance, Kosmos was drunk and called Ivan Radio-man, and I felt jealousy between them so I took both their hands and said, Let’s dance.
When the dancing was over, Ivan wanted to be alone with me and we took the cable car up to the Vidikovac café to sit side by side on the patio overlooking the city.
It looks like a toy village, he used to say. And we are living miniature lives inside it. Are you happy?
Always at the end of each day, no matter where we had been, we found each other.
In law school I learned a new word, privatnost. It was an unfamiliar idea. At home we knew all our neighbours and we were each other’s kum and I told Ivo everything. In the city we explored together, wandered through alleys and plucked young sloe berries from between the thorns, walked on the boulevard and ate crescent moon–shaped doughnuts.
One night Ivo said, Let’s stop at the mosque.
He often had these whims and I was comfortable with him and with cupped hands we drank at the fountain as we had many times before.
Then Ivan said, I want to quench my thirst with you forever.
I did not laugh at him because I saw in his eyes that he was trying to say something important to him and I took his damp hands and asked, What is it, Ivan?
It is nothing.
But it is something.
I want to marry you.
Oh, this thing, I thought, that has been bothering him since we were children. First I felt it on the sidewalk outside Lepa Brena when we tossed stones, and then I felt it under the bridge by the Drina. I had already given myself to him. My friends used to laugh at me and say, You don’t even want to look around? How will you know? But I knew and I said to him, I want to marry you too.
Always he was worried about something, studies, his parents, the sinister rumblings of politicians, things I paid no attention to.
* * *
—
We took the bus to Foča, and with our parents and a few old neighbours, we had a ceremony at the town hall. I asked our neighbour’s little daughter, Hana Begović, to hand a flower to each guest. After the certificates were signed, everyone had dinner in the restaurant near Lepa Brena, and while we danced, I told him, Volim te.
Then he said, We will be married again tomorrow with our friends in the city. We will be married every day of our life together.
Kosmos was waiting for us at the bus stop in the city with a borrowed green car covered with red paper roses. He opened the door and said to Ivan, Off to the hanging.
He drove us up to the abandoned bobsled track where our friends were waiting with music playing on cheap speakers and champagne and šljivovica and cans of spray paint. They’d been spraying poetry on the cement walls and handed us paint cans. Ivan sprayed a big heart and put our names inside. I wrote underneath, Zauvijek, to tell him that we would be to
gether always.
One boy was already drunk and he shouted, He who heeds the first word of his wife must listen forever to the second, and his girlfriend punched his arm and he pretended to fall over and someone put a traditional folk dance on the cassette player and everyone scoffed at something so old-fashioned, but we all knew the simple peasant steps and danced along the length of the bobsled track. At sunset, Kosmos called to the men, Time for akšamluk!
I told them, No men’s drink time on my wedding day, and my friends said, No drinks without wives or we’ll leave you and have our own drinks.
Then the men complained, But you won’t marry us!
Kosmos pulled Ivo and me away to his decorated car and he drove us to the elegant Osmice hotel along the mountain ridge where none of us had ever stayed. He stopped at the front doors and said, Tonight I leave for Paris. When I am finished my play I will come back and hold your babies. There’s a room in there for you. Happy wedding night, a gift from your friends. Go, enjoy. There is only one first time. May you have it over and over.
And then he sang for us a popular song, “Volim Te Budalo Mala,” and he took his strangled heart away.
* * *
—
It was sometimes painful for me to hear Edina tell such intimate stories about Kosmos. I knew so little about him. Nothing of his youth. Nothing of who he was before he was an expatriate in Paris. Never could I love him with the familiar tenderness that Edina must have felt for Ivan, who she had seen grow from a boy into a man. But I loved Kosmos. And he loved Edina.
Each of us loved the wrong person.
* * *
—
War creeps up. Loudspeakers. Broadcasts. Hate your neighbour. On the radio, hate mixed in with local reports. Weather. Hate. Community news. Hate. Music. Hate. Some lives are worth less than others. People shrugged. Propaganda, they said. As if words no longer mattered, said Edina. At first no one believed what was happening.
She said that Ivan’s friend Danilo went home to visit, got conscripted and could not come back. Young men began to hide in apartments. She said that rumours were moving through the city like grass snakes. The taste of gunpowder. Beatings. On the radio, exhortations of malice. These things can happen anywhere. Hate-voices were mixing into the air like the cries of birds and church bells and calls to prayer. Militia set up barricades around the parliament buildings and sniper positions were organized and thousands of city people went into the streets to face down the occupiers.
She said, Ivan asked me to stay home with Merima, but I said, No, I am coming. Our daughter was fourteen and we had always raised her together. On a cool early-spring evening when we should have been going for a stroll up the mountain, our little family joined a large crowd to push back the soldiers. There was sniping from unseen places. We heard that trainloads of people with the possessions they could carry were leaving the city. Ivan wanted me to leave too. I was annoyed with him. I had a job too, a life there too. But Ivan said he had already bought bus tickets for us to go back to Foča in the morning, just for a few days, until we saw what would happen, please, keep our daughter safe. Go, find our parents, he said, and he would come as soon as he got our money from the bank. I remember the warmth of his hands. I could never resist him. And so, the next morning, I took a bus out of the city.
It was the last bus.
In hours, the roads were blockaded and we were trapped. Soon they were burning Trošanj and Mješaja.
Ivo telephoned and said to me, I am joining as a radio operator so I can find you. I will come to you. I am coming to you, Edina.
Then the lines to Foča were cut.
Our homes were gone. We had been tossed into the air like ashes. Men go to war for honour and come home to forget. But when homes disappear, where do soldiers go? Ivan’s parents were killed by accident the day the soldiers blew up the Aladza mosque. Ivan heard about it during military surveillance. He had to record his radio transmissions in children’s notebooks with colourful covers because there was no paper. On the front of Ivan’s was a smiling elephant with three balloons. His commanders took his information and gave it to the generals to plan how to kill. They ordered soldiers to bomb people to the edge of madness, to report how many packages done away with.
The din in his ears destroyed him. Every day there were orders to wipe out a whole people. One of those people was me. We had loved each other since we were children and he could do nothing to stop any of it, nothing.
Sarajevo, Foča, Toronto
Edina said to me over the telephone, You play white.
Where are you?
Vienna.
I said, e4.
Nf6, she said. They have indictments.
A different opening for her. I asked, Is this the Alekhine Defence?
Yes, she said.
I listened to her blowing out smoke. I asked, Indictments for your trial?
Yes, she said. My mother and daughter are going.
To watch?
To testify. Your move.
d3, I said. To testify?
I heard her light another cigarette and slide a chess piece across the board. She said, d6. I could picture her in her mother’s small, perfectly tidy apartment. She said, Yes. I too will testify. Your move.
Nf3, I said.
e5, she said.
I felt fresh defiance in her voice. I looked at the board and I was trying to grasp what she was saying. If she was going to be a witness, the indictments must be for men who’d held her captive. Her mother and daughter had also been held by him?
I said, I don’t understand.
It is not a difficult move, she said.
I mean about you and your mother and daughter testifying, I said.
We have decided to go on the record, she said. To speak.
I was staring at my pawn.
First they shot my father, she said. When they locked us in the Partizan Sports Hall, I told Merima to hide in the bathroom. Soldiers came in and one yelled, Where is your daughter? I tried not to answer and he was drunk and beating me. I could not raise my head. Then he lifted me by the hair and said, I will kill you. And we will find her anyway.
I must have looked toward the bathroom. I was half-dead. He dropped me and they took her and brought her back the next day.
I heard Edina stand, move away, come back.
She said, They locked me up in some filthy hotel and by the time I was taken back, Merima was gone. Fourteen years old. I did not see her again until after the war. They moved me to Karaman’s house and my mother was kept in town. Once a woman told her they had seen Merima in the Ribarski restaurant, but not that she was there being traded. My mother was evacuated to Tuzla and she did not know if we were alive. Ivo paid a soldier to buy me and get me out in the trunk of a car. I would have died. He could not find Merima. In Vienna I found a few rooms above a café run by a Bosnian couple. I had an operation, my insides were so destroyed, and I got work washing dishes. Then, one miraculous day, Merima appeared. We had not seen each other for almost two years. She was sixteen. She was so thin.
The chess board was a blur.
She said, Your move.
I said, Edina, I did not know.
How could you know.
I am so sorry.
She said, Your move.
I said, g3.
Bg4.
Impossible to play. She had often startled me in the past when she got her bishop out like that. Bg2. Do not turn away.
Nc6. Then she said, Merima picked up German quickly. She accepted counselling. The settlement workers said that she has adapted well. One said to me, Women refugees make a home wherever they are. Your move.
Castle, I said.
Good, she said. Be7.
h3, I said.
She took my knight, Bxf3.
And I took her bishop, Bxf3.
Now her attack. She said, Qd7.
I said, Bg4.
She took my bishop with her knight, Nxg4. She repeated her old joke, I take your wooden sliver.
It was obvious to take her knight. hxg4.
I asked, Does Merima want to go?
No, she said. h5.
I moved, gxh5.
She slid her queen out to Qh3.
I did not see what was coming and continued on the wrong part of the board, played Nc3.
Edina said, My mother also does not want to leave Vienna.
She took the pawn that was blocking the rook, Rxh5.
She said, We will only be two days in The Hague. My mother starts reliving it all. She cries. Talks about my father, how they destroyed our family’s farm of seven generations. And I tell her the soldiers who tortured us still walk the streets freely. Your turn.
Nd5.
She said, Not good. Qh1. Checkmate. My mother says, Merciful god, I want death. She says that she is alone and she can’t learn German and she wants to go home. But she can never go back. There is no place to go back to. Who thinks of old people after a war? Their time is finished.
I listened to her sweep her pieces into a little cloth bag.
This is what I think, said Edina. She is alive in death. She dies every day the moment she awakes. Yesterday she said to me, I saw some pigeons outside my window and I thought, even birds have more hope than I do. You made a couple of mistakes in that game.
Then she hung up.
* * *
—
The next evening, I phoned Edina and told her I was going to Foča.
Why?
To prepare to write about the trial.
Never will I go to Foča, she said. You write. The world forgets us.
Light crushed by darkness. Torment to remember. Torment to forget.
* * *
