by Sally J. Pla
Amar Divjak is thirty-two years old. A Bosnian war orphan who came to the US with his sister, Amar lived with many different foster families, mainly in the St. Louis area, before becoming an American citizen. A brilliant student, he rejected a full scholarship to Washington University in order to join the military. He has requested to be stationed here in order to be near his younger sister, who has had a history of depression and emotional difficulties.
When I first met him, Amar talked about how his sister refuses to see him. After their difficult past, she cannot accept his choice of a military career. He shipped out on his third tour to Afghanistan not long after this interview. And so, after a war-filled childhood, with a troubled sister and so much war in his life, the first question I felt I had to ask Amar was: Why go back? Why keep fighting?
There is an embedded video. Ludmila clicks. Her white knuckles are so close to her lost brother’s frozen face on the screen. We strain to look with her.
The video starts with the blurred-out, bad-pixel image of a soldier in fatigues. Then it comes in focus, and we finally get to see Amar’s face for the first time. Even though I know, of course, he was real, it’s sort of surprising to see the actual person. Something about Ludmila’s stories made me think of him as being from long in the past.
He is sitting in a metal folding chair. He’s got shaved, stubbly hair, and he’s got one of those camouflage shirts with his name embroidered in black on the pocket. He’s very thin, with dark, wide eyes.
I startle a little when I hear my dad’s voice start up. “Amar, this is going to be, what, your third tour? Just for the record. Why do you keep re-upping?”
It’s so weird to hear my dad speak in normal conversation again. It’s like someone punched me in the stomach, to hear it.
I look at Davis, the twins. Everyone is just fixated on the laptop. Ludmila looks pale.
On the screen, Amar is silent for a few moments, leaning forward in his chair. Ludmila leans forward to meet him. She quickly fumbles to turn up the volume, her hand shaky. On the screen, Amar crosses his legs and lights a cigarette, like he’s waiting for her to do it. Their faces look alike somehow, sister and brother.
It’s really weird to watch this and know that Amar, the man on the screen, is dead. Being on the screen like this, it is kind of like being alive-and-dead. Amar makes me think of those extinct birds, preserved in a drawer.
“It’s a job I can do,” Amar says, his eyes slits against his cigarette smoke. “And I need to put money aside for family reasons.”
My dad says, “Tell me about your sister.”
“She had a hard time in some of those foster homes. I couldn’t take care of her the way I wanted to, the way I promised I would, because after we came to the States, we got split up. I was sent to a military boarding school for only boys. Ludmila got shifted through many different families. Some good. Some not so good. I’d write to her all the time, call her, try to make sure she was doing all right, make sure she was safe.
“But it was hard to keep my promise. I was in military school all the way through high school. I hated it. Bullies. Pranks. I got into a lot of fights. After that, what else was I going to do, if I didn’t just keep fighting?
“Mila ran away many times. She dropped out of high school, dropped out of college twice. And she’s so smart! She wants to do something to help people, but she can’t hold it together. I don’t know if she ever will. And she won’t talk to me, you see. She won’t forgive me for being a soldier. After all we’ve been through, after the war, she says, why would I keep fighting?” He drags on his cigarette. “Well, why wouldn’t I?” Amar shrugs.
There’s a small click and pause, but then the camera keeps going.
Amar exhales, leans back, then leans forward again, elbows on knees. “Okay, Robert, so. My sister lives not far from you in San Diego. So I want to ask you a favor.” His dark eyes stare wide at the camera, at my dad, when he says this. “We’re shipping out together soon, right? But I’ll be deployed for nine months, while you’re back in two weeks. Would you do me a favor? Would you check on her for me? Call her, like a dad, like an uncle would. Make sure she’s okay?”
He stands up and digs a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Her name’s Ludmila. We haven’t talked in years, but I know she still loves me. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be mad. I know that’s weird. Anyhow, here’s her address.” Amar holds out a piece of paper. “She’s all alone in the world. Would you reach out?”
The video goes black.
33
Mariana and Karim look at Ludmila. Joel and Jake and Davis and I look at Ludmila. The only sound in the tiny house is of little kids throwing Lego blocks around in the other room, and Tiberius licking Cheerios up off the floor in the corner.
Ludmila sits like a statue with tears streaming down her face.
“Wow,” Davis whispers.
“Oh my God, Mila, honey,” says Mariana in a very soft voice. “To see his face like that. Wow. I’m so sorry.”
Ludmila stands up, sits down, takes off her smudgy glasses, and puts her hands over her eyes.
“Typical Amar. Always such a take-charge big shot,” says Ludmila. She pushes her wild pink strands of hair up off her forehead with shaky fingers.
“So . . . did our dad ever reach out to you?” Davis asks. Her eyes are very wide.
Ludmila says, “He emailed me only once, just before he left, to introduce himself.”
She takes a deep breath. “When I found out what happened, of course I came to the hospital. Robert was my last link to Amar, my last link to family. I was grieving so much; it was all just too hard to explain why I was there.”
“But that’s why you helped us,” Davis says.
Ludmila peers at us through her thick glasses. “That’s why I started to help you, yes. Because you connected me to Amar. Because your father had reached out and tried to be kind.” She sniffles. “But now? We have spent so much time together now that you feel like my own family. Even this crazy-looking dog.” Tiberius is scratching at her knees with his tiny black toenails. He’s licked up the last of the Cheerios. She lifts him into her lap, where he scrambles around to face the table and lick more crumbs.
I say, “When we were in Wyoming going up the mountain, I thought the reason you came to help us was because you were going to sell us to a cult.”
Everyone laughs way too loud at that. It wasn’t really that funny.
34
There are things I could show you that would help you soar through life like a bird on freer wings. If you could only sit where I sit, you would go forth renewed, convinced this difficult and often tragic world holds infinite powers of life regeneration.
—Tiberius Shaw, PhD
There’s a lot to think about as we cruise along the highway. Ludmila lost her dad, then her grandfather, then her mom, then her brother, and had to go to a whole other country and learn the language and move around between a whole bunch of foster families. No wonder she had a rough time growing up. And Amar wanted to take care of her, but he got stuck in a tough military school, far away.
Once, Davis told me amar meant “to love” in Spanish. Maybe his name should have meant “to fight.”
I think about how part of Amar’s job was to drive Dad. Does Ludmila blame Dad? Because if Amar hadn’t been his driver, maybe he’d be alive.
The car is silent. Even Tiberius is quiet, a warm, sleepy lump in his blanket-nest at my feet. Indiana passes in a blur of cornfields, soy fields, cornfields, soy fields. We are all lost in thought.
Davis breaks our silence.
“I can’t stop thinking about it, Ludmila. How lucky you are, that you had a brother like that,” she says softly.
Ludmila says, “Look around you, little girl. I had one brother; you have three! Someday you’ll realize how lucky you are.”
Davis rolls her eyes. “These three?”
“Hey!” Joel and Jake say at the same time.
Davis turns to them and s
miles. “Still,” she says, “I can’t stop thinking about your story, Ludmila. You know ours. You still haven’t finished telling us yours.”
Ludmila breathes in, then exhales slowly. “Are you sure you want to hear? It’s not pretty.”
We are all incredibly quiet. The only sound is the hum of the road, the small rattle of Old Bessie’s loose parts, and then, because we’ve all nodded yes: Ludmila’s deep, husky voice, with its strong accent.
“Sarajevo.” Ludmila announces quietly. “Imagine us, hungry and tired and fearful, in our apartment building, waiting out the siege. Imagine. This is the moment that my mother goes into labor.
“Her pains started in early morning. I remember lifting up a corner flap of cardboard, just a small triangle, off the front room window to look out, even though I wasn’t allowed to do that; outside the glass, all was black. The city was silent all around us. There was a feeling of being in a giant, dark closet. The trees in the park across the street had been cut down for firewood, so no birds were around to chirp at us, or greet the sun. No songs, that day, not even birdsong.
“Many people already had abandoned the city, gotten out. In our apartment building, only a handful of us were left, including old Mrs. Zelinka, on the floor above.
“My mother, she stood moaning, doubled over, in the cold, dark kitchen. ‘Go upstairs,’ Mama told us. ‘I want you two to go stay with Mrs. Zelinka until I come back. I need to go to the maternity hospital.’
“But Amar held me back. He didn’t like old Mrs. Zelinka, who was cranky, and smelled like garlic and cats. So we only pretended to go upstairs. On the landing, Amar said, ‘We are going to secretly follow Mama. We are going to protect her.’
“We stayed two blocks back, but there was no fear of being spotted. Mama was too absorbed in her pains, and in waddling as swiftly as she could through the empty, dangerous streets. Every so often she would stop and hold on to the side of the building, to catch her breath. She was so intent, she never looked back to spot us.
“Once, a big, gruff man with a rifle stopped her, and our hearts stopped with her—but Mama said something to him, Lord knows what, and he let her pass. We waited until he turned down a side street, then ran as fast as we could to catch up. I remember the feeling of my feet flying, driven by fear that we’d lose track of her.
“At the maternity hospital, we waited outside as they took Mama in. Amar had it all figured out. ‘They’ll take Mama upstairs,’ he said, ‘and then we will sneak into the waiting room.’ My heart was pounding like a drum through it all.
“We stayed outside for what felt like hours. We peeped in the clinic doorway once, then leaped away quickly. Mama was still in that waiting room, waiting to sign in! No way we could go in there yet. The room was full of nervous mothers and families. If we kept hanging around, Mama would spot us—and she would be furious. An orderly at the door had already been giving us looks.
“Amar had idea. ‘My friend’s family runs a café a few streets over. Let’s find it, and wait there for a while.’ And so we wandered off, a separation we thought would last only a short while.
“But of course, it lasted forever.”
Ludmila stops for a moment. We wait. We are all on the edge of our seats. I lift Tiberius onto my lap and start stroking him, soothing him, even though he is perfectly fine and doesn’t need it.
“Amar and I, we wandered off, looking for the café, you see,” Ludmila goes on. “And that’s when the first shell hit. Big explosion. Noise. Heat. Fear. We ran back. Amar pulled me along. From the end of the block, we could see that the hospital was on fire! It was chaos, a nightmare. People screaming for help.”
Ludmila’s voice cuts out. She takes a giant, deep breath. Then she takes her hands off the steering wheel and shouts, to no one in particular, “Who bombs a maternity hospital?”
We just shake our heads.
“Amar, though, he was strong. He grabbed me and held me back, there on the sidewalk, looking down the street at this disaster. ‘Stop crying!’ he said. ‘We need to go back there and help!’
“And so we did. I don’t know how we did it, but we helped people out of the building. Amar carried out a squalling little newborn baby, wrapped in a smoking, scorched blanket. The baby was safe and healthy. A nurse told me to take care of it, in a little garden down the street.
“Ambulances and fire trucks and sirens and noise filled every corner of the air. And still, the sound of snipers, of shots echoing off buildings. Those beautiful, pockmarked, crumbling stone buildings.
“I remember I wanted to just curl in a ball and go to sleep, but I had to hold that little baby. Other people came in and out. People were burned. The nurses worked nonstop. It felt like hours, like days passed, with me standing there, holding that baby.
“And then, Amar came over and yelled at me to run. The fire was spreading; we weren’t safe.
“At that point a nurse took the baby from me. We all ran and ran, ran until my side was on fire; my breath fire, everything fire, burning from my insides to the streets themselves, to the whole world.”
Ludmila stops talking.
We are seeing signs to Cleveland. The outside, real, normal world comes back into focus. Highway. Greenery. Sunshine. Trees. Calm. The fiery streets of Sarajevo fade. Ludmila’s story has seemed so real.
“Go on,” Davis whispers. “Go on! What happened next?”
I am not sure I want to know. But Ludmila goes on.
“Well, so. I was running, being dragged along by Amar, when it started to dawn on me, what he already knew, about Mama. Of all the ladies who’d been saved, well. Our mama had never come out the hospital door. She was most certainly gone.
“We ran like crazies. We never stopped. Finally, we spied a rickety old apartment building in a part of town we’d never been, with a half-open alleyway door. We slipped inside—it led down into the cellar. In the dark, quivering and shaking, we thought finally, we could break down and cry; finally, we were alone.
“But strange shadows started moving in the corner of the cellar! I screamed. The shadows got bigger, then changed into the figures of a middle-aged couple. The man wore a clean white shirt and a Jewish yarmulke cap on the back of his head. The woman was shaking almost as much as me, but she had warm, strong arms, and she opened them wide and put them around the two of us, and she hugged us tightly. She put an apple in my hand. I hadn’t had an apple in over a year.”
Ludmila wipes her eyes. “Thank God for them, this couple. They saved us, the Liebowitzes. We lived with them and shared their food for about a month. They were wonderfully kind, helped us write to find our relatives, but nothing, no one responded. They were journalists, working with the foreign media to cover the war. They wrote a news story that appeared all over Europe, about ‘two heroic Muslim kids who helped save babies at the bombed maternity hospital, even after their own mother was killed.’ The story got picked up by the international press, and when the UK started taking refugees out, the Liebowitzes made sure we were on one of the first planes out.
“So. There are a few reasons I am here today. Because Mama didn’t want us at the maternity hospital. Because Amar had a cool head, and knew what to do,” Ludmila says. “And because we chanced upon the door to the Liebowitzes’ cellar. They were so kind.”
Ludmila stares out at the highway, not seeing it at all. She smiles. “That’s what my brother, Amar, said to me, that first night in the cellar, when we knew we’d found safety.
“Amar patted me on the shoulder and he said, ‘See, Mila? There is good everywhere. No matter how bad things are, it is always possible to find a bit of good.’”
35
The beady-eyed black crow drops the oyster he has stolen on the pavement. It doesn’t work, so he tries something completely different: He puts it on the road for a car to run over and crack. How smart he is! How persistent! This bird is strong; he is never afraid to try new approaches.
—Tiberius Shaw, PhD
There are only three
birds left to find, from Dad’s and my original Someday Birds List:
Turkey Vulture
Sandhill Crane
Carolina Parakeet
The farther we get from the Midwest, the chancier it is to spot a sandhill crane. If we had driven through Nebraska, we’d have had a good chance, because they get something like a half a million cranes through there every spring—they even have a whole festival about it, from what I’ve read.
But we’re long past Nebraska.
We spent the night at an Ohio campground, and we’re already headed to Amish country, in Pennsylvania. I don’t care one way or the other about visiting the Amish, but I do know there are lots of woods and fields in Pennsylvania. So I have everyone on the lookout for vultures.
“I don’t know, Charlie,” says Davis. “Aren’t they pretty reclusive? You only see them if there’s carrion around. You know, dead meat.”
“Hey, I got one. Why do vultures like small suitcases?” asks Joel. “Because they like carrion. Get it? Carry-on.”
Davis says, “Tell another joke that bad, and you’ll be the dead meat.”
We’re two hours into Pennsylvania, on I-80, bearing down on Virginia and the East Coast soon enough. With no (1) vultures or (2) sandhill cranes spotted so far. Not to mention, no (3) extinct parakeets. The closer we get to the towns, the harder it’ll be to find Dad’s Someday Birds. And that’s where we’re headed: a typical Amish town, to stop for the night.
When we pull off the highway, we end up stuck behind a horse and buggy. It’s all painted black, and the man driving it has a flat-topped straw hat and a long beard. He’s going really slow, and Ludmila is afraid to pass him, so we just crawl along, clippity clop, until we get to the main street. It’s interesting, going slow, even though Davis is groaning and smacking her head. I like it. It’s more interesting when trees stop being a blur, and turn back into individual trees.
We park, and tumble out of Old Bessie, sighing and stretching. We walk Tiberius up and down a sidewalk, to feel our legs again. We window-shop. There’s a display of Pennsylvania Dutch “hexes,” round disks of colorful designs. It says that the hearts in the designs stand for love, the tulips, for faith, and the birds are called distelfink, or goldfinches, and they are supposed to bring good luck.
