Speak, Silence

by Kim Echlin

  At least I think this is what Edina said. Her words were indistinct. I had a sensation that the dead were speaking through her, but of this I could not be sure.

  * * *

  —

  I get up to write in the cinnabar chill before dawn. But first I will walk through Sibelius Park to the twenty-four-hour grocery store. A long time ago, a small girl disappeared here and was found a few weeks later, her limbs wrapped and bent and hidden in a freezer. In the empty store I choose an apple from the bins, Red Delicious, which Mam calls Hawkeyes, Golden Delicious, McIntosh, and newer kinds, Fuji and Pink Lady and the Honeycrisp to which I am partial. The sleepy clerk has been awake all night.

  Above her head, a security camera and grainy, grey images of us on a screen. She lifts her chin off her hand and asks, That all?

  Yes, that’s all.

  Then I go home and write.

  I press the words out. To recover is a kind of forgetting. I do not want to forget. The words will not stay in place. Find the correct home in each phrase for each word. The exact common word. The precise formal word. There must be no drama for drama’s sake. There must be only correct telling. There is a correct word for each feeling. Resist the decay of imprecision. Find the simple word and the clear image, planets in a dark universe.

  Only pain resists words. Approach it as a silent supplicant and leave all that you are on a distant shore.

  * * *

  —

  After I finished writing, I stacked the pages on my desk. History changes, like borders. The story changes according to who tells it.

  An unexpected storm blew up. Mam was out gliding and sudden winds took her far away. Her wing caught, they said, on a thousand-year-old tree growing from the rock of the escarpment and the fuselage smashed down and snapped like balsa wood. Her jaw and both arms were broken. I almost lost her.

  While she was recovering, her arms in casts and her jaw wired shut, I sat with her. Each day the same: wake, get up, lift her, pivot her and slide the legs over the bed, then shift to the front and hold her under the armpits, try not to jostle her. Put her on the commode. Wait, wipe and sponge bathe. Change her clothes and strip the sheets and put them in the wash and prepare her liquid breakfast and hold the straw and then hold her from the back the way I did when Biddy was learning to ice-skate, walk with her across the room because she refused a wheelchair. Keep the legs strong. We devised a primitive system of blinking to talk, one blink for yes and two blinks for no.

  On the third day she refused to take the straw. I asked if she wanted a vegetable drink, two blinks, was she in pain, two blinks, did she want the commode, two blinks, did she want to practise walking, two blinks, was she depressed, two blinks, well then what the hell? Her eyes moved and rested on my notebook and pens and I asked if she wanted me to read her what I had written, one blink.

  On the telephone that night, I told Edina about reading aloud.

  Edina asked, Did she like it?

  Who could like such a story. But she likes hearing what I write. We will finish tomorrow.

  Edina laughed, I like my daughter’s work too. Whatever she does. The daughter redeems the mother’s life.

  The next day I read to the end. After the testimony of Merima, Mam cried, and I reached over and dabbed her face.

  Shall I finish?

  One blink.

  At the end of the last page I laid the pages down. She raised her eyebrows and the pupils in her eyes opened to hold me.

  I said to her that I felt the women who witnessed paid a price, one blink, but that still the women lived on, created themselves again, tried to make life.

  Mam’s fatigue overwhelmed her and she closed her eyes and dropped into a deep and natural sleep. The twilight was turning the park purple and green, and through the window I saw Biddy hurrying home with her school books, swift and full of intention, and there we all were, suspended in the moment between night and day.

  * * *

  —

  Jacques Payac was watching footage of the Labrador Highway in winter. He pointed to his computer screen and said, The damned owners think we should include links in our articles—terrible word, links—to movies, as if words do not do a good enough job.

  I laughed and said that they were videos and it was good to see him too and I put a bottle of Scotch on his desk and asked him if he could close up shop for the day. I told him about the end of the trial and the judgment, and he listened like a newsman. He asked what the expert witnesses said about customs of war and how the women withstood the questioning of the defence.

  Then he asked, What is next for these women witnesses? Can they accept that one man stands in for all? Can any of us accept this?

  I said, Their memories of violence are unlike other kinds of memories. What happened to them cannot be made to seem normal in any way and so it cannot be accepted. Only someone who has lived it can know.

  Jacques poured himself a tumbler of Scotch and said, Do you how much a dram is?

  No. Is it the same as a shot?

  He shook his head and said, No, a dram is 3.6 millilitres and a shot is 44.3 millilitres. A dram is only 1.9 percent of a shot.

  He drank down his glass with satisfaction, put it empty on the table and said, I’d rather have nothing than a dram.

  He picked up his pen and placed it in a straight line across the top of his desk and said, They wanted to destroy the women and keep them alive. What happens to the women’s rage? To their pain?

  I had no answer. I did not want to use the word trauma because we all think we know what trauma means but I do not think we do.

  Can a soul be amputated? I said.

  Perhaps, said Jacques. Humans go on living in all kinds of conditions.

  He told me about his own mother who lost her memory, and on the last day of her life she stared out the window of her home of sixty years, unable to feed herself, dress herself or go to the toilet. She said to him, Life is precious at the end.

  I told him I sometimes wondered whether the experiences of these women would be buried again waiting to be dug up by later generations. I wondered if their words would be released into a future or lost to time.

  Jacques Payac said, Violence is with us always. Do not let their words be lost.

  Did I tell you about the evidence vaults where they keep the court records? I asked. Rows and rows of white file boxes on metal shelves in the basements. Below the earth. Orders. Telegrams. Radio transmissions. Scraps of rotting cloth, blindfolds, bindings, guns, ammunition. What do such relics mean?

  Jacques shifted in his chair. Took off his leg.

  I said, Always I have loved being in the world. But their stories. Each woman tells a fragment of that war. The true story and the story of the story must cleave. But there remains shame and silence.

  Jacques said, You cannot write all of it.

  I said, The women are not words transcribed on a page or images in pel and raster. They are flesh-chained and living. They called for help. No one came.

  Jacques balanced his leg against his desk. Leaned back in his chair. He said, No one can undo knowing.

  I thought, Locked in a basement vault full of files is the plea of a child, a flower girl at a wedding, Hana. Her mother’s moan silenced a courtroom. The transcript reads: My daughter wanted to live. No one helped her.

  I said, There is only time’s erasing. The law carves incisions in old scars and makes a record, and still there is no healing.

  Jacques’ stump was bothering him and I watched him massage it. I asked him for more work, said I wasn’t sleeping well, said I needed money, said I needed to settle down.

  He said, Young man, you will not sleep until you write their stories. Get off your ass and put Joe de Pone to work.

  I laughed and said, Don’t talk to me. I already wrote the story.

  He raised his glass.
>
  I asked, Has anyone ever mentioned the disappearance of Joe de Pone’s columns?

  Not a single person. No one misses him.

  Do you think anything makes a difference?

  He said, As opposed to nothing? We have to care enough to imagine each other’s lives.

  I said, Now the law has changed again. But we cannot hold shifting history any better than we can hold water in our hands.

  When the law changes, he said, consciousness changes. Allow but a little consciousness.

  I said, There are more women and more wars. What about them?

  He said, I am thinking of the women you have written about.

  There is no solace, I said. There is only forgetting.

  He said, Not forgetting. The stories are there.

  But it goes on.

  He said, I have not forgotten what two light feet on the ground feel like or the touch of a lover on my leg before there was loss and pain. I have not forgotten the stories you have told me. Memory is caught in time. I respect consciousness. But I love time.

  Jacques leaned forward and said, I search for connections and I do not always find any. I tell you, war is the common thread. This is not hopeful but it is a fact which I cannot ignore. We know what is happening everywhere, but we do not know what to do. The women came to a cold courtroom in a place on the sea and they spoke. There were many languages and many histories in those rooms and people found ways to listen to each other.

  Is that all? I said.

  He poured another glass.

  He said, What else is there?

  I said, The women found words to speak.

  He rubbed his stump. Yes, he said.

  The women’s stories are inscribed inside me, I said. And now they are inscribed inside you.

  In order to expose the crime, you violate the witness.

  —Jadranka Cigelj

  The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected;…the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.

  —Virginia Woolf

  This work of fiction is drawn from events at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The official transcripts of the Foča trial, Kunarac et al. (IT-96-23 & 23/1), are in the public record and available for anyone to read.

  All characters and episodes are invented. All names and identifying numbers of individuals have been changed. The women who testified deserve their privacy and our admiration.

  I am especially indebted to the thought of Jean Améry in At the Mind’s Limits, and to his lived experience and writing about memory, history, torture, resentments and the responsibility to know. On this page, I cite from Améry directly: You don’t want to listen. Listen anyhow. You don’t want to know to where your indifference can again lead you and me at any time? I’ll tell you.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Bakira Hasečić at the Association of Women Victims of War (Udruzenje Žene-Žrtve Rata) for generous discussions with me and for your courageous work of documentation and legal action; thank you to Diana Dicklich (formerly ICTY) and Iain Reid (formerly ICTY) for your expertise, guidance, reading, friendship and laughter over many years; thank you to Salam Hatibović and Skender Hatibović (Sarajevo Funky Tours: Breaking Prejudice) for sharing your stories; thank you to Milica Kostic (formerly Sites of Conscience), Dita Agoli (formerly ICTY), Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff (formerly ICTY) for discussion of international activism and law; to Alma Agic (formerly ICTY) and Azra Kovačević (formerly ICTY) and Maxine Marcus (International prosecutor, Human Rights Watch) for expertise; to Janice Blackburn for law questions; to Alison Harvison Young, Jane Springer, Janet Stewart (formerly ICTY), Ken Gass for reading; to Veronica Van Dam for language questions; to Ellen Elias-Bursac for language and interpretation questions; to Sasha Kulic for chess instruction and reading; to Kate Trotter for expertise; to Alketa Xhafa Mripa for your art installations and listening; thank you to Roxana Spicer for a place to work; to Julia Bennett who first told me the story. Thank you to Shaun Oakey for superb editing, Scott Sellers for finding a place in the world for this book. To Hana El Niwairi for your work and enthusiasm. A profound thank you to Nicole Winstanley for your creativity and loyalty, for your love of words and unwavering dedication to what matters. To my family, Ross, Olivia and Sara, thank you for lively discussion and for always being there.