Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  During daylight, she walked for hours along an open four-lane highway where she would be safe. Past dusty cornfields, flat and plain. Men looked at her with anger, knowing she was a foreigner. She wore old clothes for walking. Found paths through the field gardens, greeted women bent double over small patches of earth. No one ever returned her greeting. The women were hostile, suspicious. She returned to the highway, ignored the horns of trucks. She sat at the window and watched the Croatian police below. Wrote long letters to Marion, who wrote back to what she called the land of Godforsake. Marion was her thread, joining her to Canada, to home.

  Geoff brought food to the room. Bottled water. She went into the city and sat in cafés. She walked everywhere. The faces in the city were the same: sullen, silent, grim. Grim described everything, everyone.

  She had spoken to Geoff by telephone the night he’d moved from Sarajevo to Zagreb. He’d been sitting on the steps of the Residency, he said, waiting for his driver to take him to the airport. Branches were snapping off trees above him in the garden. Bullets.

  “Didn’t you think to go inside to wait for the driver?” she said. She’d held her breath in their kitchen, in Canada.

  “No.” His voice was thin. “The bullets were higher; they were over my head.”

  The two of them were invited to dinner in the old city, on one of the wooded hills of Zagreb. The general and his entire staff. The French were polite, tugging sideways at their blue berets when they saw her, shaking hands each time they met in the lobby or the bar. The general jogged each morning, accompanied by his four bodyguards, guns strapped to pouches on their backs. The dinner party was pre-arranged; several days earlier, the bodyguards had driven to the ancient hill to inspect the premises. She said to Geoff, “Isn’t it rather a giveaway, to let people know we’re coming?” But he shook his head, no. This was Zagreb, not Sarajevo, after all. Still, precautions had to be taken.

  They drove into the wooded area on a Saturday night. When they stepped from the Land Rover, she heard Greek music, Theodorakis, from the front of the restaurant, the public part. Their dining room was behind: a private closed veranda, partially screened, up three wooden steps. Separate entrance. She and Geoff were last to arrive. The party, seated around a long narrow table, rose to its feet. Only a few had known she was there, living among them at the hotel. The interpreters were there, too, and office clerks, French and Belgian and Canadian officers, bodyguards and drivers. Eighteen at the table. Several languages spoken. Croatian waiters carried in tray after tray of brandy, slivovitz, red wine. Creamy cottage cheese and plates of ham and dry bread. Before the main course.

  The general laughed and parried. His eyes dark. All conversation centred around him. He was used to command and control. Expected nothing else, nor did anyone, at the table. She spoke to the UN interpreters, learned their backgrounds, asked questions. Several hours had gone by when she noticed two empty chairs at the far end of the table, to her right. Moments later, the general stood, a small man. The table rose to its feet. Armed bodyguards surrounded him; two white cars with black lettering waited at the screen door. The general slipped into his vehicle; the car roared off into the night. The Land Rover followed; more bodyguards. The party was over, instantly.

  “What,” she said to Geoff, “what have we just been a part of?”

  The remaining few drifted towards their own white vehicles, parked along the shoulder. A soft fall night. The air was good here, in the woods. “Why were the chairs empty, at the end of the table?” she asked Geoff. “Two of the bodyguards slipped out,” he said. “Half hour earlier than everyone else. They had to check the general’s car, every inch, above and below, with mirrors, for bombs.”

  She tried to think of home, of her giant shadow legs striding in the sea at sunset, of the undulating lines of migrating cormorants and geese along the shore of Prince Edward Island. If she ever got home, she would give thanks for being, for belonging in that wondrous place.

  After Samobor, she began to talk to Geoff about home, about their children, their family. They drove to Samobor during his first break in more than three months. It was a Sunday in September; he hadn’t had two hours off since June. Because he would have to return to work in the afternoon, he remained in uniform. Samobor was a fifteen-minute drive from the hotel. The front lines had changed since she’d arrived; they were always changing. The southern outskirts of Zagreb had been hit by rockets the week before. She’d been writing to Marion, when the windows in her room began to rattle. Shelling went on most of the afternoon and all night. She and Geoff slept to the sound of guns, not so distant, nine kilometres away. Samobor had been hit. They’d been told it was the most pleasing village in the area: beautiful, ancient, quiet. Narrow streets, woods, castle ruins above the town.

  A mistake. There were no signs of shelling, but the people were angry. Youths began to circle. An old man turned and shouted at Geoff. They had left their vehicle on the main road, in the centre of town, along a meandering canal.

  The people hated the UN. They knew nothing of those who’d been helped, those who’d been saved. Each party angry because the UN would not take its side. So far, Zagreb had stayed out of the physical war. Samobor had never been touched. Until the rockets. She felt something rising inside her, a state of readiness, she was not certain what. She asked Geoff; he felt it too. Hate all around them. Hate and anger that could turn at any moment.

  Flick, she thought. Flick, and we are into chaos. They returned to their vehicle, aware of each careful step. They left the village and went back to the dreary hotel. She knew then, that she was going to leave. She’d been in Croatia for months, and now she wanted to go home.

  A small jet was returning to Canada, a visiting commander. They were offered seats, and they accepted. Geoff would take his leave. He would never be able to use up all that was owed him, but he would, at least, take leave. He now had a broken rib. MASH had x-rayed him after a jeep accident during his last trip to the front lines. The rib had snapped in two, would hopefully mend on its own. I will, she wrote to their children, get him out of here, but it might not be in one piece.

  The dreams of flying began again. Nightmares lined up, ready to assume their place. Geoff told her that she had too much imagination, as if this were some extra affliction she carried. It was true that she could imagine anything. At the hotel, the navigator told them they’d fly first to Italy, staying overnight; then, to Iceland, then Halifax. The more luggage they carried, the more often they’d have to stop to refuel. She began to dream about Iceland, about drifting over open water, the engine chugging its last before the plane could reach Newfoundland. They were to depart in two days. She had never crossed the Atlantic in an eight-seater plane.

  They flew to Ancona first, on the coast of Italy, and spent the night. She saw Geoff smile, heard him laugh for the first time in months. Flowers bloomed in Ancona. Voices lifted in ordinary tones, which she thought of as celebratory. She realized she’d lost the sound of normal conversation. She felt as if she were rejoining life after a long time in a darkened tunnel.

  When they left Iceland, last chance to refuel before Canada, her thoughts, chasing one another, broke to pieces. She did not want to have to call up her angels. The night before, in Ancona, after a long walk on the beach, a long wonderful meal, she’d dreamed this tiny plane. Inter-city trains had roared below their hotel, between gardens and beach, close enough to keep her awake most of the night. She had heard the co-pilot say, before she’d boarded in Italy, “Oh, haven’t the brakes been fixed?” and knew this had been intended as a joke. She was not able to laugh. They were on the military side of the airport and, while waiting to board, she had been free to wander through the cluster of canvas tents set up like a small village, boardwalks linking one to another.

  Burned and blistered children had been arriving on stretchers, IVs dangling above them. Sarajevo to Ancona. A few were getting out. A country here, a country there, accepting them. She’d talked to some of the Canadian s
oldiers working there. To them, Bosnia was a place of bloody war, unseen, which sent out its children on stretchers, innocent and wounded. That was their portion, their reality. At the end of the working day, these Canadian men and women slept in clean hotel beds and drank cappuccino and ate good meals. They loaded tons of flour, stacked like sandbags, and worked in tents lined with maps and makeshift comforts.

  Everyone’s reality differed. There was no use breaking anything down to its simplest parts. She’d heard Geoff laugh, the old remembered, unrestrained laugh that released the tightened lines of his face. He’d laughed only once, but it was a beginning, after Sarajevo. If death came at you unexpectedly, she thought, okay. But not from guns behind buildings, from snipers high on dope or slivovitz. Murderers who were not even your enemies. Who did not know the expressions your face was capable of, or the shape of your fingers, or the colour of your eyes.

  She stepped inside her house. Her house during the past year, their house now. Left the luggage in the living room, was not interested in opening suitcases or hanging clothes. She knew there was a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. Good champagne. Dry, the way she liked it. Geoff walked from room to room, every room, upstairs and down, examining as if he had not believed anything would be here when he returned. He lifted a dish, opened a cupboard door, peered into framed photographs of the children. It was late, they’d been travelling fifteen hours. They drank champagne and hauled out the sheets and made the bed.

  It was then that she began to tell him all that she had imagined before they left and all that she had imagined during flight. The sounds she’d heard, the expressions she’d watched, her head filled with details she’d been afraid, until now, to release. He began to laugh, great shaking laughter. She began to cry. Her sobs defeated him. Then, they both laughed and cried together.

  “Why,” he said, “why are you crying like this?”

  “Because I’ve earned the right,” she said. “Because I’ve earned the right to cry this hard.”

  In the Name of Love

  1993: It was her birthday, and Jule was sitting on a hard-backed chair in a hotel room in Croatia, eating a fried-fish sandwich. The fish was cold but it was the best she could do. She propped her feet on the desk and leaned back, trying for comfort. As she bit into the sandwich, she wondered what Carl was eating in Bosnia. Not the sardines. Ten months ago, when she was at home in Canada, she had included a tin of sardines in a care package—knowing that Carl was stopped at checkpoints on Bosnian roads, or stuck inside an armoured personnel carrier, or in a bunker while shelling went on for days. He had not eaten the sardines, but had tucked them into his shoulder bag, just in case. “I’m saving them for an emergency,” he told her. But emergencies had come and gone. The reason he hadn’t eaten them—she was sure of this—was because they’d been a gift from her. This was what war broke down to: an endearment between two people became symbolized by a tin of mustard-flavoured sardines.

  Jule switched on the TV. If she wanted to know Carl’s whereabouts, she watched CNN. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of him in Sarajevo behind the warring leaders who, surrounded by bodyguards, strutted in and out of the peace talks. Or she saw him in the same frame as a visiting Cabinet minister from Canada who sat before a microphone, being prompted from behind.

  Carl entered the room at that moment, double-locked the door and slipped the chain. He removed his jacket and bulletproof vest and set them in the corner.

  “I’ve been keeping track,” she said, by way of greeting. “Six hundred and four years ago, the Battle of Kosovo. And seventy-five days. Do you think we’ll ever get out?”

  The windowpanes rattled in answer. Karlovac had been shelled by the Serbs the night before, and the night before that. Alone at the window on the third floor, she’d watched flashes light up the southern sky. When she’d first arrived from Canada, the front line had been fifteen miles away. Now rocket attacks were occurring five miles from the hotel.

  Carl stood behind her chair and leaned forward to rest his chin against her hair. She could tell by the gesture the extent of his fatigue. But he pushed away the fatigue and lifted a bottle of champagne from his duffel bag. He grinned, and set two plastic cups on the dresser. “My French colleagues came through,” he said. “Happy Birthday, dear wife.”

  They clicked plastic and drank.

  “How did you manage? I wasn’t expecting you so soon,” she said. She drained the plastic cup.

  “I told the warring parties it was your birthday.”

  “Seriously.”

  “It was deemed safe to fly out before dark so I grabbed the one available seat.” He pulled a chair nearer the dresser, and sat down.

  She shifted her own chair close, seeing the lines of weariness on his face. “Did you come in from the coast?”

  “I did,” he said. “We were in a Russian jet, a 24-seater. It was not a luxury plane.”

  “Was there any peace today?” She was sorry as soon as she’d asked. The question was a bitter joke.

  “It was gruelling,” he said. “An all-day session—with aides and bodyguards and interpreters and UN people. At the end of the day, the leaders and their entourages poured out of the sandbagged building to greet the media, and a shell lobbed in. If it hadn’t been so horrible, it might have been funny. The timing was astonishing. What was more astonishing was that no one was hurt. There were a few black remarks over that.”

  Jule knew all about macabre humour that surfaced during war. She was surrounded by it. The fact of her being in Croatia at all was perhaps the blackest humour of all. Extricate Carl, she’d printed on a notepad the day she’d arrived. She’d placed the note on the bedside table so that there would be no misunderstanding about the reason for her presence. That evening, the note was buried under Carl’s papers. The next morning, she placed it on top again. By nightfall it was buried. No mention of it was ever made, but neither did the note entirely disappear. A hint of the lunacy we are a part of, she thought. And that includes the lunacy between us. I am as much into it now as he.

  “You’re pretty serious on your birthday,” said Carl. “Where’s all that humour you’ve always had?”

  Where, indeed? Most of the time, she felt like throwing her hands in the air and wailing. But she held back, reminding herself, Cry on your birthday, cry all year.

  After Carl left in the morning, Jule went out walking. She’d found a way to stay near the fields and gardens where she could smell fall, smell earth, yet still be in the open. Sometimes she hiked along the side of the road, circling in a wide arc around the nearby customs building, which was built of pink concrete and could be seen for a mile across the plain. There were hills in the distance but Carl had warned her to stay away. What I need, she thought, is a Schutzengel, a guardian angel. But Carl’s need was greater. He’d been transferred to Croatia, yes, but he still travelled in and out of Bosnia, sometimes daily. She tried to invent, to call up a Schutzengel, for Carl.

  She turned away from the highway and crossed the ditch on a plank that led to a path. Two men were working at the edge of the field. When she was within a few feet, they unzipped their trousers and urinated beside the path. She kept on without changing her pace, not wanting to show fear. They were letting her know that they were in charge.

  She thought about an evening the week before when she and Carl had walked together after dinner. A rare evening, because he’d managed to get back to the hotel before dark. They’d taken a service road, and had strayed in a direction she’d never taken alone. It was almost dark when a long sleek car approached and stopped near an abandoned farmhouse, ahead. The headlights went out. A man appeared as if he’d sprung from the ditch, and began to load crates from a wooden cart into the trunk of the car. It was not difficult to see that this was an arms transfer. Carl took her hand and said, “Turn slowly and don’t pause. Keep walking at the same pace until we’re back.”

  All that night she dreamed, but her dreams were of visions she herself had never seen: the b
ig guns, bodies in the streets, buildings crumbling. It was as if Carl’s head had transferred images to hers. She tossed for hours while, beside her, Carl slept a deep and peaceful sleep.

  She continued her walk through paths of dirt and dust. She would be glad when the weather cooled—any day now, a hotel clerk had promised. She reached the blocks of flats, miles of them, which stretched, after another hour’s walk, into the centre of Zagreb. She looked up to the windows as she passed, rarely seeing another person.

  She veered towards open fields again and walked another mile, arriving at a cluster of houses joined by grape arbours and surrounded by pens holding hens and geese. She nodded and spoke to several women and children, but no one returned her greeting. Two uniformed soldiers were working on a military jeep in the hot sun. There was no mistaking the red and white chequered shield, the Sahovnica.

  Jule wondered if she should turn back, but by this time more people, men and women, had come out of their houses and now stood at the fences. The road dwindled to a path, and her heart sank as she saw that she was approaching a dead end. She circled a small grotto and, striding purposefully, returned the way she’d come. There was no other way back. When she passed the gauntlet of hostility a second time, she felt as if she’d been spat upon.

  During her trips into the city, whenever she was alone, Croatian men walked up to her as close as they dared, always approaching from behind. They murmured angry words, unmistakably sexual words. She was forced to keep separate, to watch and listen at her back. Whom did they believe she was? Or was it just an insult to the foreigner?

  One day, she descended from Strossmayer Satellista above the old town, taking the cobbled street that wound through a shrine built beneath an open tower. Women were praying in the outdoor pews. Smoke had blackened the inside arches of the tower, and rivers of melted wax meandered like lava through a sea of candles. When she reached lower town, she crossed two sets of tram tracks and sat in the sun at the foot of Ban Jelacic statue in the main square. Everywhere, she saw Croats in combat uniform. To her they looked like bewildered young men, not the men she read about who committed atrocious acts—acts that were not limited to any one side. She felt a hand touch her neck, and turned, startled. An older woman sat close beside her on the cement wall. Jule shifted over. The woman spoke German in low hurried tones.