Chapter 12
Yelena was stranded somewhere in the twilight between sleep and reality. Memories swirled in her mind, giving her a little vertigo. She knew Keith would never find her, nor rescue her. She had to take action in her hands, but what could she do with one grenade?
Yelena knew the kidnappers snuck her out of Bosnia. She saw the healthy orange trees growing in the courtyard with their dark shiny green leafs and the luscious orange fruit dangling from the branches. The orange trees would never survive the harsh Bosnian winters. She knew she was somewhere farther south, possibly as far south as Greece.
Then dreams of her father entered her mind. She hadn’t thought of him in years…
As a little girl, he enlisted in the Serbian Army. She only remembered he was very big man, and he was a mechanic before the Bosnian War.
Yelena remembered running up to him, when he came home from work one day. The sun was shining; the sky was a deep blue, and birds were chirping as they perched in the trees. She ran to him with her outstretched hands as she saw him walking up to the apartment building.
Her father reached down to her and lifted her up to the sky. Yelena tried so hard to reach and grab the sun, but before Yelena could grab the sun, her father wrapped her in his arms. Then he lowered her to the ground and tickled her belly.
Then the Bosnian War started, and her father enlisted in the Serbian military or the Yugoslavian military depending whom you ask.
Yelena and her mother were stranded in Bosnian country, in the remote town of Tuzla. Its population had doubled over night as the refugees fled the war zones, somberly trekking there to escape the war’s atrocities, with only the shirts on their backs.
Every day, Yelena sat on the couch with her mother's loving hands wrapped around, and they would listen to the radio. They listened for news about her father and the War, hoping it would end soon, and he would return.
He sent letters home at least once a week. Her mother read the letters so often, they became worn, and started to tear along the folded creases. To this very day, her mother kept those letters, hiding them inside the pages of the thick family Bible. Then the letters stopped coming, and Yelena and her mother became worried.
Yelena learned her father died on January 14, 1994. The Serbian military conquered and captured most of the Bosnian cities except the cities around Tuzla. Tuzla was the last stronghold. The Serbian Army made its push to Tuzla, but it had to conquer Olovo, Bosnia.
The Bosnian army fought back bravely and stopped the Serbs at Olovo, Bosnia, a tiny town with 3,000 residents, sandwiched between Tuzla and Sarajevo. That place became the final resting spot for Yelena's father, where the army buried him in a grave along the mountainside with thousands of other soldiers.
After the Bosnian War had ended in 1995, her mother and Yelena took their first trip to Olovo on a Spring day. As the bus traveled around the mountainous roads, a cold rain fell to the ground. From the bus windows, she saw trees returning to life, and valleys of the Balkan Mountains were brimming with flowers and the fragrance of reincarnated life.
As the bus traversed the long, winding mountain road down to the valley to the center of Olovo, Yelena saw the vestiges of a nasty war, and she shivered at the city’s destruction. She saw Olovo had three towering apartment buildings in the center of town that stood 20 stories tall. Soldiers shot out every window in the apartment building along with every window in or near the city. Every building wall was covered with pockmarks from the flying bullets. Here and there, a mortar blasted a gaping hole into a building while bullet shell casings and cigarette butts littered the ground everywhere as soldiers on each side tried to massacre the other side. Thousands of soldiers lost their lives for the Siege of Olovo.
Yelena and her mother walked to the end of town in a long procession. Her mother clenched her hand tightly as they walked and walked.
All Bosnians and Serbs were paying homage to their dead relatives that spring. The procession walked slowly, quietly, under the soft drizzle of cold rain. They approached a pass between two tall mountains.
Yelena looked up at the sky. Rain clouds were floating dark cotton balls, hiding the mountain peaks from view. Then she saw the two cemeteries. The Serbian cemetery started from the pass and went up the Southern mountain, while the Bosnian cemetery went up the Northern Mountain.
Then the procession divided into two lines: Bosnians and Serbs. Even in death, the Serbs and Bosnians refused to mix their races. Survivors buried the two races separately from each other as each race floated to their separate Heaven and to their separate God.
Yelena saw row after row of white crosses that marked the Serbian graves. Each cross had the buried soldier's dog tags draped around it. Some crosses were replaced with carved marble tombstones while other spots were bare as families exhumed the remains and reburied their relatives closer to home.
Yelena and her mother walked up the mountain in silence. They felt a cold rain pelting the ground and heard the weeps from the kneeling sobbing mourners. Occasionally, a mourner would cry out in despair.
Yelena and her mother continued walking along every row. Her mother read every name off the soldier's dog tags as they traversed row after row.
Yelena glanced upward to see how far the cemetery stretched up the mountainside, but she couldn't. A thick wall of fog shrouded the upper portion of the cemetery.
Halfway up the mountain, Yelena and her mother found his grave. Her mother started sobbing loudly while her tears sprinkled the ground along with the raindrops. Yelena quickly joined her as she recognized her father's name on the dog tags, Slobodan Backovich.
Her father shared the first name of Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Yugoslavia and Serbia who triggered the wave of Serbian Nationalism, and sparked the Bosnian War. Yelena knew her father’s name, Slobodan, means a 'free man' in all Balkan languages.
Since that time, Yelena's mother scraped and saved every penny she could save, because she wanted to replace that white cross with a beautifully carved marble tombstone.
Every spring when Yelena was young, Yelena and her mother would make the sojourn to Olovo to mourn the death of her father. As Yelena became older, the trips became less frequent. Then they altogether stopped when Yelena turned 20 years old...
Then Yelena awakened with a stir. She quickly sat up on the bed and remembered every little detail of her dream. She hadn’t dreamt of her father in years, and she remembered every minute detail of the cold, rainy, spring day when she first saw her father's grave.
Yelena cried out, “Dad! I may be coming home to see you. If I do, please wait for me. I miss you very much.”
Then she fell asleep. Her dreams turned dark and ominous as she ran in the dark while something kept chasing her. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t escape from that thing that was behind her.
Searching for Stolen Love Page 22
