Speak, Silence

by Kim Echlin

  —

  I was afraid to go to Foča alone. Kosmos said, I will introduce you to Mak. He drives tourists everywhere. He drives for the UN. He drives politicians. He drives everyone.

  You come, I said.

  I am writing my play, Kosmos said. I like Sarajevo. Go see Mak.

  * * *

  —

  Mak was rangy with powerful forearms. He had lost most of the hearing in his right ear during the war. He was sixty-three but moved like a man twenty years younger. During the war he was on the front line around the city. When he could get gas, he left the fighting and drove his beat-up beige Zastava through the darkness to fill water containers at a hidden artesian well. The water ran in a trickle and he waited and dozed like a young wolf alert even in sleep.

  He said, Across the line, a lot of them were poor farmers. Part-time fighting. Sometimes we stopped to trade cigarettes and ammunition with them. Then we went back and shouted insults and fired.

  Mak drove me first to the Širokača and Hambina Carina Cemetery in Bistrik to see his brother’s name in stone. I did not ask to go but he took me there. I traced my fingers over the carved names and Mak said, He died the third day of the war. I went crazy, I ran in front of bullets. Then I said to myself, If I die who will bring water to my two sons?

  Mak’s war is the emptiness in his right ear and his brother’s tombstone. He drives foreign war crimes units who tell him about his own battles with their detailed maps and lists of names. He has memorized the foreigners’ war, burial grounds along the roads, in the mountains, outside every town, their body counts, their estimates made by comparing shifting earth and lists of missing. He has chiselled the history of their war inside his skull. His sorrow he keeps elsewhere. I asked him to take me to Foča, but after the cemetery he took me to the tunnel near the airport.

  He said, It got gold medal for architecture. I would give it golden bullet.

  Why?

  Why not a few inches higher? They make it so low, like for dwarfs.

  Mak liked to talk. He said, Better to have a good time together than sit like stones, why be quiet like boring? Men got a pack of cigarettes a day to dig the tunnel. The scaffolds were two metres high and when it rained the water was up to the waist. On the Butmir side we came out and this old farm woman gave us a cup of water. Angel with two teeth.

  He laughed. He had told his stories so many times they were fables. He said, Someone falls in the tunnel or too tired to go on and no way to pass. Just wait. I was stuck in there many times.

  He drove me to a bunker where he’d fought snipers on the hill above the city. It was a hot day and we hiked through the fragrant grasses where sheep grazed. We might have been going on a picnic. I did not even recognize this small grass-covered depression in the ground as a bunker. He asked why I wanted to go to Foča. He had never been.

  I told him about Edina and about the trial and the rapes.

  He looked away, down into the city. He said, People know about this but do not say. I drive everywhere and first time anyone wants to go there.

  I thought, Everyone has secrets after war. Mak’s do not include rape. I do not think he could drive me if they did.

  * * *

  —

  The way to Foča is a winding road through narrow mountain passes. Mak lit cigarettes, sipped water, worked the gearshift. He pointed out massacre sites that looked like pretty mountain meadows. He showed me barns and sports fields and ditches where people had been slaughtered. I admired a vista and Mak pointed, Thirty-three there.

  Do you have to spoil every view?

  He shrugged. I can be quiet. You want?

  I told him I wanted to know.

  The river Drina curves and widens and narrows through the summer heat. Everywhere were gullies where men had killed each other and women had huddled under leaves, holding their breath, hoping not to be heard. When the boots stopped, there were shots and unzipping. After a hairpin curve, Mak pointed to a hill below the road. He said, Seven hundred buried there.

  What does your name mean?

  Mak? It means poppy.

  The flower?

  My mother named me for the poet Mak Dizdar.

  Do you know his poetry?

  Everyone knows it. I know only the love poetry.

  Tell me a poem.

  Mak lit another cigarette on the curve, said, You want too much, translating poetry while I am driving.

  Ahead, hanging by two back feet over the road, a dead goat.

  For the restaurant, Mak said. To show they have fresh meat. You eat goat?

  The poem?

  He shifted his cigarette to his left hand, reached for his water bottle, took a sip. A soldier’s habit, dampen the lips and tongue, don’t take too much, there may be need later. He was watching the sharp turns for trucks. He said, This is from “Calypso”.

  I cry

  Because your love makes a slave of me

  Because of love not strong enough to free me

  You cry

  He looked across at me and said, Why quiet? Not good? Not good for getting a girl?

  He liked flirting. He liked the energy.

  I said, Excellent for getting women. How do you say I love you in Bosnian?

  Volim te. Want to know it in French?

  I know it. Je t’aime.

  In Chinese, Wo ai ni, Indonesian is Aku cinta kamu. What language you like?

  Italian.

  We looked across the enduring mountains and he said, This is a country of angels. And devils. Next village we stop for a break, then Foča.

  His hands kept us from flying off the cliff on this switchback road. Hands that had dragged dying soldiers into bunkers and carried water and food home to his family under shelling and lifted up the front right corner of his brother’s coffin. Fingers that had pulled triggers and the pins of grenades. Hands that had released a still-living man hidden between other men’s dead bodies. He gave him some water and then the man died.

  Better not to die thirsty, said Mak. Better not to die alone.

  Hands that kill. Hands that make love. Sunlit rapids over smooth river stones.

  * * *

  —

  In Foča we drove to the high school and to Partizan Sports Hall and we saw the rubble of the old mosque and we stopped at the Ribarski restaurant where women had been sold and traded like fish. A man reeking of violence strode directly to Mak and reached out for a handshake and Mak squeezed the bones hard and pulled him close like a mastiff looking for the neck. The man said something in a low, harsh voice and walked away.

  Mak said to me, I don’t know him.

  Did he tell you to get out of town?

  Mak shrugged it off and said, Why say things to a stranger only standing, looking in at a few empty tables? No use. Now we go to find your Karaman’s house.

  * * *

  —

  We drove to the train station in Miljevina and up to the farmhouses looking down on the little town. We drove back and forth along a narrow road, trying to match the two-storey house in my photo. Mak pulled over, studied the photo, the line of the mountain ridge below the new tree growth, the iron gate on the steep driveway leading into the house. He said that we could match the pattern on the gate if it was still there, distinctive, three rectangles side by side like art deco. Back and forth we drove along the road. Maybe they tore the house down. Mak pointed to a jag in the mountain ridge and pointed to it on the photo. Suddenly he spotted the gate, partially hidden by hedges at the bottom of a steep drive. He turned on the empty farm road and parked the car facing back toward the main road. He got out, scanned the steep bank of woods above us.

  Are we okay?

  Of course. I make valet parking for you.

  Why so careful?

  I crossed the road and walked down the track to the gate. I touch
ed the ironwork, the heavy lock, and I studied the house, small windows on the second floor, a door on the valley side, not much yard, a bit of wild mint, rock, no paths to the village, all access only from above.

  Nowhere to escape. Even if a woman could crawl out a window or open a door there was nothing but a steep drop. What did it feel like, the first drive down this isolated road, sitting between soldiers you knew were going to rape you? What did it feel like trapped in that house, looking out windows?

  I heard boots on gravel. Up on the road, a stranger was crossing toward Mak, and I hurried back up the drive.

  When the man was in touching distance he spit at Mak’s feet. Mak straightened to his full height, not stooped as when he talked with me. He shifted in front of me and the man spit again, at my feet, his eyes hard on mine and if I had been alone I would have been very, very afraid. I did not move, like an animal taking stock. In this moment I decided. To stay. To risk being wrong. To risk being right. After an unnatural pause, the man moved on down the empty road, kicking stones.

  Let’s go, said Mak.

  * * *

  —

  Over time I learned the women’s stories. I learned how the lawyers had reviewed with Merima her first statement, given eight years before. The young woman told me a little about her counselling and how she had put the war aside in order to survive. To learn German. To go to school. To become someone not destroyed. She did not want to remember who she had been before Vienna.

  Yet to testify, she had to remember. She had to speak.

  Merima told her counsellor who was old with stern wrinkles between gentle eyes that she did not know if she had the strength for a trial. But she wanted to please her mother.

  The counsellor said, You do not have to go.

  Merima said, I do not want to be a victim.

  The counsellor said, The shame is his, not yours.

  Merima wondered what people wear to court, how long she would be away from university.

  The counsellor said, A person must be loyal to who they are, no matter what happens.

  Merima chose her best jeans and a white T-shirt and jacket in the style of Austrian students. Her grandmother could not travel alone and so she would take her. She told her professors she had appointments. She was twenty-two years old, and she had to dig up the fourteen-year-old she had locked down in silence. A young Austrian man was interested in her and she had told him nothing about her past or about the trials. She wondered if she might ever feel anything for a man.

  She had decided to go to please her mother. She had decided to go because to remain silent would be her own soul’s suicide. How much more did she have to suffer?

  * * *

  —

  East, light of the world. Death, in a world turned over.

  On my last trip with Mak we travelled east. He said, I want you to see Srebrenica.

  Through the mountains again, past simple farms and barns, then the large battery factory warehouse made into a barracks. Mak led me through empty rooms at the back, past pornographic graffiti in Dutch and English, to barns, to massacre sites. The memorial at Potočari was a wide white-capped sea of grave markers, rows of green-covered coffins awaiting burial and marble walls of carved names.

  People squatted, some with hands covering eyes, others with hands palms up to the sky, in ancient postures of grief. Craftsmen were still engraving name after name. People were still collecting and identifying, bone by bone, arranging memory.

  Even Mak was quiet on the drive home. I dozed and awakened as the wild mountain road disappeared into the tunnel on the east side of Sarajevo. I opened my eyes in darkness and abruptly we emerged from the tunnel into the city, as if we had passed through a curtain into a fairy-tale kingdom. Out of a nightmare and into a dream.

  * * *

  —

  I was walking with Edina through the narrow streets of the old market when a crowd of drunken young men approached us from behind. Before I knew where she went, Edina disappeared into a shadowed corner like a scrap of paper. The men passed and she stepped out and we said nothing. It was a sultry evening and many people were out. We strolled and turned into the courtyard of the Baščaršija mosque. We sipped cold water from the stone fountain and Edina reached into her purse and showed me a black-and-white photograph.

  In the photo she is young and slim with clear skin and a broad smile. She is leaning against a young man. His arms are wrapped around her and her hands are crossed over his. She looks easily into the camera lens, a young woman loved.

  Edina traced her finger over the photo as if the skin on the young man’s face was still warm. She said, Look what I lost.

  What happened to him?

  She put the photo back in her bag and said, I only wanted you to see him. Do not ask. I love a ghost.

  * * *

  —

  While I waited for the beginning of the trial I worked a lot for Jacques Payac. I took on freelance work. I edited, wrote advertising copy and saved money. I worked early in the morning and was home every day for Biddy after school and all through the evenings. I spent as much time as I could with her. She was fifteen and she wanted to know I was there but did not much want to be with me. Mostly I listened to her moving above me in her room. One night I slipped into her bedroom to talk and she was sitting between two cheval mirrors and I asked her what she was doing and she said, I am trying to figure out infinity.

  I said, During the trial I will come back and forth but I will be away longer than other times.

  Mam told me.

  She did?

  Biddy shook her head as if I were the child. She said, Where you’re going is the place my father comes from, isn’t it?

  No, the trials are in The Hague, but they are about the war in his country.

  She looked down the line of mirrors at the endlessly repeating girl.

  She said, I want to know him. Try to find him.

  You will meet him very soon.

  She felt something in my voice and she kept looking into the mirrors and said to her infinite reflection, You found him, didn’t you?

  She knew, of course. Children watch and know. Biddy was becoming as separate from me as I was from Mam. What else did I not know about her? I told her that I had found him and that in a small way he was involved in the trial, and that when it was over we would go to him together.

  When?

  As soon as the trial is over.

  Why did he leave us?

  He was never really with us. And later there was war.

  The long line of girls in the mirror were all nodding at the same time.

  I said, Biddy, tell me what you are doing in school. I’ve been away too much.

  I’m okay, she said. I’m used to it.

  She liked astrophysics. She told me that Mam said she could learn to fly. She said she wanted to go to Chile, to the star observatory in the Atacama Desert. She said that when she was older she wanted to work there.

  I did not tell her the only thing I knew about the Atacama Desert which was that below the great dry skies, the women of Calama walked day after day searching for the bones of the disappeared of Chile. After seventeen years of searching they had found the mass grave of their loved ones. I did not want to distract my daughter’s eyes from looking up.

  I realized that I had been listening to Biddy in the mother-way of many streams at the same time. I had missed things. My second heart was outside me now. She had been waiting too long to meet Kosmos. My silence had made her another casualty of war.

  * * *

  —

  Jacques Payac’s stump was getting itchier with age. He said the amputation had never taken root in his mind, that he often felt he could still get up and run for a plane, across a battlefield, through a hotel lobby. He put his cigarette butt in a tin can and asked, What’s happening with the trial?


  I gave him a bottle of slivovitz and told him about the indictments, and that they only managed to bring in one man, Žarko Dragić. Jacques rubbed the part of his leg where the prosthesis joined.

  No matter what I do, he said, there is inevitable withering of the limb. I add socks. The most dangerous part of writing is listening. Most people do not understand this. Hearing testimony means never ever being able to forget. Beatings. Breasts slammed by men in a drawer. Cigarette burns. You will hear detail after detail. Once you have heard you cannot unhear. The women will have to begin their forgetting all over again.

  Maybe they don’t want to forget anymore.

  Maybe. Or others don’t want them to.

  I said, I need you to help me publish it.

  Young man, I run a travel magazine.

  I did not speak.

  Finally he said, Don’t you have any other friends?

  No, I said.

  The Hague

  I arrived in The Hague and took the tram from the train station to my new apartment on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the sea on Gevers Deynootweg. There were seven tram stops from there to the courts—Kurhaus, Scheveningseweg, Badhuiskade, Keizerstraat, Duinstraat, Frankenslag, and finally Congresgebouw—seven doors to the underworld. My balcony jutted into the sea winds. I unpacked two suitcases, one of books and another of clothes.

  The tribunal’s grey administrative building at 1 Churchillplein, once home to Aegon Insurance, was reflected in a large, shallow pool in front of the building. In the pool were three stark, sky-bound sculptures. High fences and long, curving drives limited any uncontrolled movement around the outside of the building. Inside were heavy metal doors and locked basement storage rooms. Much wealth had once been created in this place from insurance promises to buffer us against the things we fear and cannot escape—accidents and sickness and death. The building was now renovated not for unwelcome events in the future but to serve justice for events in the past. There were courtrooms, witness rooms, cells, a large library, evidence vaults and offices, all tightly monitored behind ballistic glass and locked doors.