by Carrie Arcos
All Nadja knew was the human heart contained great depths. Before the war, she would have talked about the deep capacity for love. She’d had no idea how wrong, how naive she had been. Now she knew the heart held a darkness that could swallow up the whole world.
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙
Amir struggled with the transistor radio in his hands, trying to get it to work. It had been broken for a couple of days. When Faris was away at the front, they listened to the radio all the time. It was their only way of knowing what might be happening with him.
It had been almost two months, and there had been no word of Faris. The unspoken worry took up the rest of the space in the basement, making it overcrowded and at times suffocating. Nadja and Dalila looked for every opportunity to escape, even if it meant going for a water run. The fact that it meant putting their lives in danger meant nothing to them. Their lives were always in danger. Simply living was dangerous.
Nadja joined Dalila on the floor next to the stove. They removed their gloves and tried to warm their hands with the little heat there was. Nadja ignored the ache behind her right eye, a light headache, hoping that if she did, it would just go away. She didn’t want to get one of her migraines.
“I’m sorry again about the jug,” Nadja said.
“It’s only water. We can get more later,” Ramiza said, patting Nadja on the shoulder. She poured some from one of the jugs into a large pot and heated it on the stove.
“Want me to make coffee?” Nadja asked, already getting up.
“Sure, love,” Ramiza said.
No one mentioned that the coffee beans were actually lentils. They hadn’t had real coffee for over a month. Nadja used a teaspoon of oil, careful not to go over because she didn’t want to waste it. She fried the lentils, blackening them. Soon the misleading smell of steak filled the small basement space.
Nadja pressed a hand into her stomach. She was hungry. She was always hungry and always thinking about food. And no matter how often she told herself not to think about it, she kept thinking about it. Sometimes she and Dalila would play a game. They would talk about all the food they would eat when the war ended. The feast they would prepare. In the string of limitless hours of boredom, they would pore over the pages of a cookbook Dalila had saved from becoming firewood. Marking and underlining and taking notes. Reading the pictures of food like they were actually consuming them. Sometimes they drew pictures of the food.
When Nadja finished roasting the lentils, she ground them by hand in the small grinder. Then she poured the hot water over the lentils and served the coffee in small cups. Everyone took one. No one said it tasted like muddy water and nothing like coffee.
“Let’s see, what do we have to eat?” Ramiza played along and acted like she was perusing a large cupboard of food. There were only two MRE bars left, along with a bag of beans, some flour and rice. They had been eating beans and rice for months. “Beans? Rice?”
Amir grunted from the couch. He picked up his copy of the Oslobođenje, Sarajevo’s daily newspaper, and read it. Every now and then swearing under his breath, calling politicians kriminalci. Nadja couldn’t help but agree; they were criminals, allowing for the situation to become like this.
Ramiza gave the girls the last of the MRE bars from the Americans. Nadja read the date on hers: 1967. What ingredients could last more than twenty-five years? She didn’t even notice the taste anymore. At least this meant that another week had passed and tomorrow Nadja and Dalila could be on the lookout for a Red Cross truck carrying more food.
“You need a haircut,” Ramiza said to Amir.
“I’ll make an appointment. Dalila, you free tomorrow morning?”
“Let me check my schedule.” Dalila mocked opening a planner. “No, pretty booked. But I can see you now.”
“Good.” He put out his cigarette in the full ashtray that rested on the arm of the couch.
Dalila stood up and got some scissors from a box with first aid equipment. Her father hobbled over to a smaller chair, which he pulled close to the stove. Dalila first combed his hair and then started cutting it dry.
For a few moments there was only the sound of Ramiza preparing beans for a later meal and Dalila’s cutting. Nadja studied Dalila’s technique.
“Maybe I could give it a try?” Nadja said.
“Dad?” Dalila asked.
He answered yes with a flick of his hand.
“Okay, so you do it in sections and then pull it up, but be careful not to cut too much. You want to make it even.”
Nadja copied what she had watched Dalila do many times. She concentrated and tried to cut it as evenly as possible, combing and pulling up just enough hair. Amir’s hair was straight, so it was not difficult to see the lines. When she finished, she stepped back, and Dalila and Ramiza inspected the cut. Dalila noted a section where it was uneven, so Nadja fixed it.
“Want to see, Dad?” Dalila said, hunting for a mirror.
“No, it’s okay,” Amir said, running his hands over his head. “It’s fine. Thank you, Nadja.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You should trim his beard too,” Ramiza said. “He looks like one of those drunk Četniks.” Ramiza spat the word.
“Is that a thing to say to your husband?”
“I always tell the truth.”
“The truth. Now, that’s a shifty companion,” Amir said, and returned to the couch. He picked up the radio and began taking it apart again, trying to understand the nature of the problem.
“Nadja, take some water and bathe,” Ramiza said. “Use a little perfume too.” Then she said what she always said. “We may live like animals, but we don’t have to smell like them all the time.”
Nadja grabbed a change of clothes out of a small suitcase from her section of the room. She took the plastic bowl of water Ramiza handed her. She climbed up the stairs, opened the door, noting the chill right away, walked around to the front of the house and opened the front door. She passed the living room with a large Turkish rug in the center and only a chair. A small kitchen with a table and a heklanje spread across it, the fine lace now more yellow than white, like the plastic yellow flowers in the vase in the middle. The bathroom was down the hall. She went inside and shut the door behind her.
Setting the bowl down in the sink, Nadja first dipped a toothbrush into the water and brushed her teeth with a little bit of baking soda. She removed her Walkman, coat, sweater and shirt, and stood naked from the waist up in front of the mirror. Her body shook. She knew she was skinny, but seeing her ribs peek out shocked her. In only a year and a half, she had lost any womanly curves she’d had and now looked like a photo of a girl suffering from anorexia that she had seen in a class at school.
Thinking of school made her think of her old teachers and friends, which made her think of home and her family and . . . She gripped the sides of the sink. The wave of emotion came on suddenly, like a mortar attack. The memory itself like bombs dropping from the sky. But there was nowhere for her to run and hide. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, pushing away the feelings. Driving them back with the numbness she wore like a potkošulja underneath her clothes. It didn’t last long, maybe a minute, but she was afraid if she indulged the feelings any longer, she would go mad from them.
She would be like the woman who lost her son in the shelling three weeks ago. He had been playing with his friends outside in a small patch of grass, stiff from frost. The day was beautifully clear. Nadja remembered because she had moved a sandbag to the side and stared up at the sky from the window. She watched the kids, a little jealous that they seemed so happy. One moment the boy kicked a ball. The next moment his body flew through the air like he was a stuffed animal. Adults collected his body and rushed the parts to the hospital. The woman never left his side. Nadja had overheard Amir tell Ramiza that the woman was being force-fed. He also said maybe they s
houldn’t waste precious resources on her. Because she had no will to live, she was like one already dead.
Nadja shook her head free of such thoughts. She looked at her green eyes in the mirror. She was not dead. No, she was not dead. But the dead clung to her. They lived inside of her.
With a blue washcloth from a doorless cupboard, she took a tiny bit of soap, dipped it into the water and rubbed soap on the wet cloth. She washed her face and neck. Her arms and armpits. Her stomach and breasts. Doing it quickly because it was so cold. Not cold enough for her to freeze to death, but enough for her skin to burn.
After bathing the top half of her body, Nadja rinsed the cloth in the water, wringing out the dirty water in the sink. She wet her short brown hair so that it was a little damp and washed it over the tub. Careful to use as little water as possible, she rinsed the soap from her hair as best she could.
Once her hair was clean, Nadja put on a clean long-sleeve shirt and sweater. She then removed her jeans and the long underwear she wore underneath and began to wash the lower part of her body.
When she was finished, she put on a pair of jeans that were a faded light denim and seemed two sizes too big for her, although they were the size she wore last year, or maybe it was even more recently than that. Nadja couldn’t recall. Time was no longer measured for her in such clear increments. How long had she been in Sarajevo? It could have been days. It could have been three lifetimes.
Nadja belted the jeans tight at the waist so they wouldn’t fall down. She piled on two sweaters and a coat—the last of her clean clothes. She placed her dirty clothes in a hamper in the bathroom. Tomorrow she and Dalila would wash them with Ramiza and hang them on the line at the side of the house.
Nadja grimaced at her reflection. Ghost girl. That’s who she was now.
In a small basket on the bathroom sink was a bunch of makeup. She applied some blush, which accented her cheekbones, making them angular and sharp, as if she were constantly pursing her lips together. She added black liner to the bottom and top of her lids before applying mascara. She also dabbed a small amount of perfume behind her ears.
She brushed out her wet hair, noticing that she was losing more of it in the brush than usual. She wondered if she would have bald patches like the girl down the street. Maybe she should shave it again. Or maybe she’d have Dalila cut it for her, since it had grown out and was now a little past her jawline. Nadja would have loved to style it, but the blow dryer and curling iron were useless. The water and electricity had been off for months, and there was no telling when they would be turned back on again. Maybe Amir would be able to siphon the electricity away from the nearby hospital again soon, but Nadja doubted she could convince him to do it for something trivial like her hair.
Nadja left the bathroom, taking only the empty plastic bowl with her. Instead of going back to the basement, she went to the living room, bare except for the piano.
Not long after Nadja had arrived to Dalila’s family, they’d had to move from their own home over on the opposite side of Sarajevo. Because of all the bombing, it was getting too dangerous not to have a basement of their own. At first, they spent every night sleeping in the basement of a school with a bunch of other families and individuals. When more refugees from the east, as well as other parts of the country, started pouring in and it became too crowded, Amir found this abandoned home. The original family must have left when the war started.
Dalila’s family and Nadja moved in, happy to discover that most of the belongings were still there. Clothes, cooking supplies, books, tools in a shed, and a baby grand piano.
They were respectful of the personal items. The family photos left on the wall were removed from the wood frames and kept in a pile in the large bedroom on the second floor. The empty frames were one of the first things they used for firewood. Nadja was glad when Ramiza removed all the photos from the wall. She couldn’t bear them looking at her, especially the three children. It was easier to use their things, sleep in their beds, without their watchful gaze.
Now, in the second winter of the siege, most of what could be easily burned had long since fed the small makeshift stove Amir built for Ramiza. The family had spared the piano when they discovered that Nadja played.
Nadja walked over to the beautiful instrument. She trailed her hand across the keys before sitting down on the bench. She shook out her hands and blew into them, trying to warm them up. Then she put her headphones back on and started quietly playing a slow melody that turned into something more complicated. It wasn’t a piece she had learned by sight or by study, but one that came to her now. She played by ear and by note, but she enjoyed playing more when she could just create and follow the music wherever it took her. Today it took her to images of mountains of varying shades of green.
When the song ended, someone clapped behind her. She turned sharply in her seat, ready to run or attack.
A young man in a faded green military jacket stood in the living room. By habit, Nadja eyed the door and the windows, planning her escape route. But a moment later, she recognized him and let a whisper escape her lips. “Faris.”
Dalila’s brother looked similar to when Nadja had last seen him two months ago, though a dirtier, more tired version. His sandy brown hair now fell to his neck, and he had a new scar above his left eye.
“Sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Amir and Ramiza will be so happy you’re back!” She started to get up.
“Just a sec. Can you play some more?”
“But don’t you want—”
“A few more minutes’ waiting won’t bother them.”
He sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall next to the piano, laying his rifle next to him. He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes.
Nadja resumed, and when she finished the song, Faris asked for one more.
“It’s cold,” she said, her breath a steady fog in front of her.
“It’s always cold,” said Faris.
She played again, something in a minor key, something almost haunting. Or maybe it was just the acoustics of the empty home. The notes echoed throughout the rooms, chasing old ghosts.
As the last note sounded, Faris held out his cigarette to Nadja. She took a puff and handed it back to him.
“I should have learned to play,” he said.
“It’s not too late.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“How was the front?”
“Oh, the same. They fire. We fire. We are not so far from them, so sometimes at night they call out to us, insult our mothers, tell us to surrender. We tell them to fuck off. Yesterday, one of them called my name. He and I went to the same school. He asked about this guy we both knew. I told him Skander died a month ago. He yelled, ‘Too bad.’ And then the bullets started flying.” Faris stared off like he was still somewhere on the front.
“We have water. You should wash,” Nadja said, taking in the creases in his neck that were dark, lined with dirt.
“Yes. I must smell.”
“We all smell,” she said. The truth was she was getting used to the smell.
After . . . after she left Višegrad and before she came to live with them, Nadja had survived in cramped quarters with other refugees from different parts of eastern Bosnia, until she was smuggled into Sarajevo. She thought she’d never want to smell again. She never knew human beings could smell worse than animals. There were smells she knew she’d never forget, like blood. And fear. Fear smelled like sweat and urine and ugly. The worst kind of ugly. Sometimes she’d smell cooking from one of the cafés that was still open and remember her mother. Nadja had wondered then if she could do something to get rid of her sense of smell.
“Do you know smell is actually the first thing that attracts us to each other? I always thought it was legs or, you know . . .” Faris chuckled.
Nadja played a D chord, but in
her mind, she buried her face in Marko’s neck, nuzzling, searching for his smell. What was that cologne he wore? And again, she wondered, wished that there was a part of her brain she could stick a knife in to drive out the sense—and the memory.
“A sniper almost got me today,” she said. Changing the subject to redirect her thoughts.
“Where?”
“Coming back from getting water.”
Faris nodded and finished his cigarette, putting it out on the wooden floor. “Fucking snipers.”
Nadja stood up and held out her hand. Faris grabbed it, and she pulled him to his feet. They walked outside and then down the stairs to the basement and were met with cries of “Faris!”
Dalila ran right to him. He picked her up in a big bear hug. Ramiza was next, followed by Amir, who smacked him a couple of times on the back before giving him a hard embrace.
Ramiza offered him a cup of lentil coffee.
“Mom, throw that away.” Faris produced a sack of coffee beans from under his coat.
“Oh! Where’d you get this?”
“Someone handed it to me when I was walking home, thanking me for my service.”
“As they should,” she said. She wiped her tears and immediately rinsed out the grinder, then started measuring the new beans.
“Most of the time, it is a cup of tea, coffee, something hot. Today, a whole bag of beans. I’ve also got some other things.”
Faris emptied his pockets on the couch next to Amir—a few packs of cigarettes wrapped in white. “A little less than last month. Compliments of BiH.” On the other side of the wrapping, Nadja knew, would be some kind of text, an advertisement for shoes or the label to a box of detergent, maybe even a clipping for a movie. It was always a surprise.
The smell of real coffee soon cut through everything else. Nadja breathed it deeply, smiling despite herself. Thankful now for the sense. Was there anything better than the smell of strong coffee?
