Speak, Silence

by Kim Echlin

  But today, when Judge Banda read the court’s carefully written decision aloud to the world, she would also read it to an individual man. She would say to him, You were a courageous soldier and your men indisputably held you in high esteem. By your natural authority you could easily have put an end to these women’s suffering. Your active participation in this nightmarish sexual exploitation is therefore even more repugnant. You thrived in the dark atmosphere of dehumanizing others.

  How does a judge feel on the morning of a judgment? Today’s judgment would irrevocably change a single man’s life. He would go to a foreign prison far from home. He had behaved as thousands did during the war but this man, today, would be condemned to spend the next twenty-eight years of his life in prison.

  Today Judge Gladys Banda would get out of bed, eat breakfast, put on her coat, wish her family a good day, close the door of her apartment and come to the court. Today the law would change. And a man’s life. And perhaps the women’s lives. Of this she could not be sure. In what way did she clear her mind? Did she take a coffee on the way? Did she pray?

  * * *

  —

  I telephoned Kosmos and Edina and asked if they were going to watch the judgment. Kosmos said, Yes. The actors want their stage back, so it is our last day here. They want to even throw out our chairs. I told them to go away for a few more hours and the director complained and I said, Poserem ti se u ruku, pa nosi.

  I was laughing but I did not know what it meant.

  What did you say?

  I can’t translate, said Kosmos. But he shouted to people behind him, Sisaj mi pitona, and to me, I told them to suck my you-know-what.

  Python? I said. Always he made me laugh.

  Then he said, I brought vodka for Edina to drink.

  I said, I wish I was with you both.

  Yes, he said. I am mixing it with tomato juice and Tabasco.

  A Bloody Mary, I said.

  Yes, he said. I learned this uncivilized drink from a Canadian actor in London. But I do it my own way.

  How?

  I have the bullet that shot my grandfather’s shoulder in his war. I open it and put a few grains of gunpowder into the drink. This makes it a Bloody Bosnian.

  Tell Edina I am thinking of her, I said.

  * * *

  —

  Through the glass, I watched Dragić’s jaw clench and unclench as he stood to hear the verdict. First he had to wait for the interpretation. When the sentence reached him, he shook his head. Wronged.

  Mataruga leaned in, no doubt to tell him they would appeal. I watched the man absorb, with shock, with anger, what had really taken place in the last eight months. He was going to prison. He knew that others from the detention centre were imprisoned in Norway and Sweden and Germany and Italy. I had heard that Dragić had had death threats from men he had named in his old unit. He could not even go home safely. I watched the white knuckles of his clasped hands and the disbelief in his shoulders.

  * * *

  —

  Afterwards Edina would not pick up the telephone. Kosmos said they smoked and drank their gunpowder vodka.

  Kosmos told me that when he said You won and got up to hug Edina she moved away from him. So he unplugged the television and wound the extension cord around his open hand and his elbow and asked her, What now?

  Work. You?

  Kosmos said, I told her I will write my play about bridges.

  * * *

  —

  It was the women witnesses who won this case. They refused to back down and they refused to remain silent and they refused to hide. They transmuted the word victim into hero. I am in awe of their strength. They spoke. For themselves, and for us. The whole world cannot stand trial. But we can all be responsible. A human is human through others.

  Sarajevo, Toronto

  I flew to Sarajevo.

  Edina slept a lot, woke up, played chess with me and slept again. Said she needed to work. Said they needed trials here now. Said thousands of men who had committed the same terrible crimes sat in cafés drinking coffee.

  She said, It was a letdown. Was it not a letdown?

  I said, You changed the law.

  I found Kosmos in the theatre and we made love in the projection booth while the movie was playing. I said, Aren’t you afraid someone will hear us?

  No, he said.

  During the last reel as we rested on his mattress on the floor watching the flickering light, he spoke about his family. He said, I lost them all. My brother. What do trials do?

  We listened to the ticka-ticka of the projector. He was alone lying in my arms that day. We were amphibious creatures at the bottom of the sea looking up through fathoms of water, his dear voice describing all the ocean’s loved and lost.

  He said, Now you will not be in Europe so often.

  I will still visit and you can come to Toronto.

  He said, I waited for a long time to come back to my fucked-up city and I like it here. Maybe one trip to Toronto before we all die.

  I said, You need to come.

  Then I laughed, I will buy a burial plot for three, for you and Edina and me.

  He said, We will always be together.

  Where shall I buy the plot? I asked. No one dies where they are born.

  I want to, he said.

  I said, She loved Ivan. We need a plot for him too.

  He’s buried already, said Kosmos. You too are becoming end-of-the-earth crazy.

  Are you sure you don’t want to come home with me?

  I am sure.

  What about our daughter?

  Bring her here. I will show her the kapia on the bridge over the river Drina.

  She will love you.

  I know, he said.

  She needs to know you.

  She is almost grown up, he said.

  She still needs you. So her pain does not go into the next generation.

  * * *

  —

  I saw Mak with his two sons and their girlfriends in a café in the old town and he called over loudly and I waved to him but did not want to join him. He got up anyway and came over and said, You no good? What is happening?

  And I said, It is nothing. It is only the trial. But it is over now.

  I loved the stoop in Mak’s shoulders and how he leaned his ear toward me. With one arm he hugged me and said, War is never over. When I am dying I will cry out about the war. I have seen old soldiers do this. Put aside sadness. What is that word in English meaning do something to make past better?

  A trial?

  No, more like spiritual.

  Redeem?

  Yes. Live, he said. Redeem.

  * * *

  —

  I slept at Edina’s apartment, brought in food and wine and cigarettes.

  She said, A trial changes a person. Have you written anything yet?

  I’m working on it.

  You have been thinking about this for a long time.

  I know.

  She said, Your writing is like the bridge in Jablanica. Do you know it?

  No.

  Never mind. Let’s play.

  We set up the board but after only a dozen moves she said, You still play like a chess tourist.

  I laughed, Can’t help it. I get distracted.

  You should study more.

  I know.

  I pretended to be upset. Through her window I could see the mountain and the first grey in the blackness and the stars fading, only Venus still bright and low. I wanted to sleep. But she poured us a glass of slivovitz and said, There is something I want to tell you.

  She was wrapped in an old blanket. Her cigarettes were on the frayed arm of her chair. Then she stood and walked over to a drawer and took out the old photo of her and Ivo. She touched his face with her
finger and she began to talk as if she were alone with him.

  * * *

  —

  I remember your mother’s small herb garden, Ivo, and the smell of thyme and mint. I remember you in the doorway of our old apartment. This is where I first saw you after the war, after so long not knowing if you were alive or dead. I hurried to you and there you were, and you cannot imagine the moment of peace I felt in your arms again. The first night we sat at the kitchen table together, I let you put your hands over mine, touch me, and you began to talk, how I loved your voice, it was a shock to be together. You told me how you used radios to intercept messages, fastened aerials on stop signs, looked for me through the airwaves, you were always good at making things work, always I had watched your hands fixing things, engines, bicycles, the lights in my mother’s store, the shingles on my father’s shop, always I loved watching you fix things. You were useful in the war, got intelligence, listened to military orders, recorded enemy movement through burned villages and Ivo, you told me how you fell asleep one night and the next day you worried there had been a transmission and you had missed the order and you were starting to go crazy, hearing the things you were hearing, afraid even one more death would be your fault.

  Our first night together we were shy though always we have been best friends, telling each other everything, and you hesitated when I began to tell you about Foča. You told me it was you who found the man who bought me and drove me to Tuzla. The night he came to Karaman’s I was so terrified, I thought he was taking me away to kill me. It was bad, you said. Yes. There are no decent words. Merima? Oh Ivo. I had always told you everything, but I could not say more. I fell asleep in your arms but there was not even a kiss, and did you want to kiss me, make love to me, would it have healed you? There were so many more things to say and in the night you woke with nightmares, the arm under my neck jerked and my head was tossed to the side and you were not awake and you shouted in your sleep, and then you seemed to be adjusting a headset and you listened and said, Five hundred pieces, finish the job off. Ivan, wake up, you’re dreaming, and still you could not see me and you were shouting, Shut up, the emission is still coming through, listen, the job is done. I was crying from across the room, Ivan, wake up and when you finally woke up you sat on the bed and you said, I am sorry, I am so sorry. Never had I seen you cry and it was breaking me and how much more could I be broken?

  How destroyed we were.

  I still love the image of you so beautiful and tall in our doorway the night you found me again.

  In the daytime you listened to the news and I said, Ivo, we need to get water, turn off the news. Everyone was trying to repair the places they lived and you were good at electricity. It had been a surprise to see stop lights and the lights in kiosks when I first arrived in Vienna. We had lived in darkness for a long time. We went out to find food and fresh water and we began to meet those who survived and to learn who died. I was afraid of the night, your country of horror, you were so strong, what if you hurt me when you were asleep and I was not strong enough to get away, always, before the war, when we saw each other after being apart we made love, and still we had not made love. I said to you, Ivo, let’s try, and I pretended I felt no pain but it burned like hot glass, and after, you lifted yourself gently from me. You said, I heard your name on their walkie-talkies, I thought I would go crazy, I thought Merima was dead.

  I said, You did the best you could.

  But your eyes were ashamed and turned away and you said, I am death.

  I pleaded with you, However painful life is, it is better than death. Death is nothingness.

  You said, Your will to live is insane. Why cling to a life that’s finished?

  I said, What about our daughter? Tomorrow can we go to her. We will start over in Vienna. What about me? I want to live.

  I turned to check that the door was open if I had to run away. I had come to this.

  You said, Don’t you have enough courage to see you have no future?

  You looked out the window and when you turned, your eyes were absent. You said, The generals have destroyed me. I want them murdered by their own flesh and blood. I want them gorged upon.

  I was so afraid I might do something, move, make a noise to startle your soul, like pulling the pin on a grenade. I never knew when I might disturb your darkness. It felt like living with a wild animal. You said, There are not enough generals to kill.

  I said to you, Do not say this. We can imagine a future.

  But you left to walk the streets. I believed that you would come back from the half-dead place. It takes time. I wanted you but my body was always in pain and I did not know what to do. I wanted you, Ivo, I wanted you, even with the nightmares that bled into our days. Sweet Ivo, the generals accomplished their purpose, they destroyed us and they left us alive.

  You said when you came home, You are not safe from me in our bed. And I do not know what to do.

  I fixed a second sleeping place on the couch near the door. I remembered when we had lived cheerfully in a messy nest of books and papers and cassette tapes and magazines. I said, Ivo, let’s go to Vienna, to our daughter. She is waiting to see you.

  You said, Soon.

  Our home was littered with things we could not speak of. We did not speak of people who had disappeared, your parents, my father, our school friends, the woman who ran the post office, the tobacconist. I told you about old Zedro, the doorman at my law school. The day before Merima and I took the bus to Foča the radio broadcasts were blaring hatred and there were demonstrations. Everyone said it meant nothing, it was only politicians and protests. I was running up the steps into the law building where Zedro sat in the office behind the glass window. He turned off his radio and he said to me, I am not capable of hurting someone’s child or setting fire to a friend’s house. I would rather die than do the things they are broadcasting. I laughed at him. I said, It’s just propaganda. Enjoy your coffee. The next day, when I was waiting for the bus, I heard he had hanged himself. Men were moving trucks of munitions, moving their families away, but our own president was still saying there would not be war.

  Ivo, I wanted not to think.

  Ivo, what happened to you, gentle, sweet Ivo? We were supposed to travel to Vienna but you went drinking with some men and stayed out late, and I fell asleep and our neighbour pounded on the door in the middle of the night and she was distraught. She said, Come, see.

  Why were you down there, all alone, your drunken friends gone and where did you get that goat, that poor little goat? You had tied it on a fence, legs splayed, a rope around the neck, the poor thing screaming for its life and you were stabbing it with a kitchen knife, and you were groaning, and you cursed it, and you cut out its tongue and shouted, Escort of the dead, take me. I ran down and screamed from across the lot, Ivan! But I stayed far away I was so frightened. Then the bleating stopped and, no need to describe, the goat was gone. You sat on the cement, exhausted, and I said, Ivan, come in, but you would not, you got up and disappeared into the streets and I locked our door against you. At noon you appeared again. Now you were dressed up in borrowed clean clothes, even your hair was cut and you looked so much like how you once were—only your eyes were bloodshot. You said, Come walk up the mountain with me, I am sorry for last night. I am sorry.

  Always we had loved to walk up the mountain together. It was a pretty day and we sat for a while on the bombed-out foundation of the Osmice hotel and we looked at our city below and you said, Do you not still love our home? Let’s walk along the bobsled track.

  The track was much destroyed in the war. We found the wall where I had spray-painted beneath your heart Forever. I put my arm around your waist.

  You stepped away from me and said, Edina, I cannot go on, and you put your hand in your pocket and pulled out a grenade and you said, Come with me.

  I could not look away from your finger on the ring. All I could think about was o
ur daughter and I was watching you hook your index finger around the ring, and you said, I’ll count to ten.

  I knew grenades, ten was not enough, and I ran, I had to make thirty feet and in a moment I do not understand, counting as far as six, I jumped over the bobsled track and fell, in slow motion. Please, please, no land mine on the ground where I fall. These thoughts passed clearly through my head in those six seconds and I remember only silence in the falling, then the click, then darkness. I do not remember the landing or the explosion but I remember the falling and I smelled forest and I saw a bit of sunlight on a pine needle.

  She put the photograph back in the drawer.

  * * *

  —

  Edina said, When I woke up, I heard hospital sounds, nurses laughing in a hallway. Kosmos was sitting beside my bed and my first thought was, I am alive.

  Anything else was remnant.

  She said, Kosmos cried and he said, That crazy bastard. How could he do that? Why the hell do we blow ourselves up?

  Edina said, I told him to stop talking and to go write something only in swearing.

  He said, I will call it I Hope Your Cow Dies.

  I was alive in the thin world of the living.

  I told Kosmos to leave me alone but he said, One who loves once, loves always. He said, When you are better we will bury Ivan together.

  I said, How will I tell Merima? There is nothing to bury.

  But there was. We buried Ivan, limbs, his head, in the Širokača and Hambina Carina graveyard in Bistrik so he could be in a high place looking down over the valley.

  Now he is another fleck of soldier-dust.

  I miss Ivo, she said. Even his enemies will weep when they know what happened to him. I still hear his voice, Oh god, put me gently to rest without struggle. Let me perish, tell my old father, tell my mother who raised me, tell my beloved. Anything left untold, I myself will tell to the dead in the underworld.