Life Detonated

by Murray Moran, Kathleen

  James went to work and I was alone with the children. The days stretched unbearably, with fits of temper from Keith, who tried to sneak out, and antics from Chris who stood at the top of the stairs firing grapes at us.

  Finally, after two days and nights, they found him. He had been gone 30 hours, and was found sitting on the porch of a general store just miles from the prison, tired and freezing. The police officer who found him said he seemed meek, defying the wanted posters bearing his picture labeled armed and dangerous.

  “I have a real problem,” Busic told the officer. “I’m an escaped prisoner.”

  The officer said Busic told him he staged the escape because federal officials had reneged on promises of a parole hearing, and that his wife Julie had been denied parole eligibility for another five years.

  After the police were finally gone, after the stifling presence of their squad cars and their vigilance had lifted, thoughts of the Busics lingered. Why were they denied parole? I wanted to close the chapter on this man, never again allow him into my life, but he did manage to unsettle me. He knows where I live.

  __________

  I should not have been surprised when I got that first letter. Busic had escaped, adding five more years to his sentence. With Juile’s denial of parole, that meant they both would be in prison for at least another five years, and this brought me some small satisfaction Still, there was some electric current running from the Busics to me, like a bomb ticking my name. I stood in my kitchen, sunlight weaving a patchwork on the floor, sorting through mail, when that postmark stopped me cold. Federal Corrections Facility, Dublin, California. Busic, J. Her handwriting was spidery, almost elegant. I could not bring myself to open it. Instead, I put it in the junk drawer and slammed it shut, as if it might burn me.

  While James and the kids ate dinner, I kept glancing at the drawer. Later, after bedtime kisses, I curled up on the sofa in my office and opened the sticky flap. I would like to tell you my story, Julie Busic wrote. Enlighten you with the details of the hijacking. The letter was single-spaced, the words crammed into the legal size pages as though she had too much to say and not enough room to say it.

  Yes, I said to myself, moving to my cluttered desk and pushing aside my schoolwork to spread out the three pages. I want to know. Tell me. And then I will tell you my story, so you may know the harm you’ve done.

  Her words surprised me. She wrote that she knew she had been the cause of so much unjust human suffering.

  You are the one who has suffered most. How can saying how sorry I am ever be enough? Even the fact that I have languished in prison for so many years does not seem enough punishment for me.

  In the letter she swore that she would become a nun, that since my husband had been taken from me, she would do without hers as well. She would live because death would spare her the suffering she had inflicted on me. She said she was reminded every day what she had taken part in. Almost a whole page had been devoted to how good it felt to write to me.

  I looked up from the letter. Time seemed to have slid into a strange never-land I could not fathom. The house was still, the boys and James were sleeping, assured that I was working hard on my schoolwork. Most of my evenings were spent here in my home office. I ran out of space on the shelves James built, and a small mountain of Toni Morrison’s books were on the desk, Maya Angelou on the upholstered chair. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Flannery O’Connor piled on the floor. They seemed to look on as I began to think about answering her letter.

  Writing back to Julie may be a big mistake, I thought, but ultimately, who would better understand what I went through than the person who put me there in the first place? The temptation to write back to her was irresistible. Say whatever you feel, she wrote, and so I sat down at my old Selectric.

  Okay. You want to tell me what happened, go ahead. I’ll listen. Then I’m going to tell you what happened to me because of your arrogance and misguided loyalty, and why I can’t understand, since you were born in Oregon, you became a martyr for another country’s independence and saw fit to encourage a scheme that endangered so many lives.

  After that first sentence the rest came easy.

  I find it appealing to hear of your imprisonment. I make no pretense of forgiveness or condone your part in the crime, but I like the irony of our correspondence and the chance to write what I can’t say to anyone else.

  It was a relief, putting down what I had thought hundreds of times over the years. I wanted to make her suffer and could do it without recrimination. I felt some satisfaction in those words.

  The next morning, I put that letter in the mailbox before I could change my mind. She had it coming to her, so why was I so nervous? The words she had written kept running through my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Set things straight. Unload emotionally. I hope we will be friends. Did she think writing to me would gain forgiveness?

  The only person I told was Gracie, who raised her eyebrows knowingly, red lipstick imprinted on the cigarette between her fingers.

  “Christ,” she said. “What does the blonde bitch want, anyway?”

  We look up at the same stars and

  see such different things.

  — George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

  My Secret

  And that’s how it began with Julie Busic. The arrival of the postman took on a new significance as I imagined a letter in his bag, anticipated the truths she would reveal. What I remember most about those months and years was Julie’s presence in them, how it somehow eclipses so much of what went on.

  Truthfully, Brian’s memory had begun to fade. I made myself believe I had dealt with his death, that I had finished mourning. I couldn’t quite hear his laughter anymore, or remember the feel of his lips. The picture of him on the bookshelf in my office was one of the few that had survived my mother’s efforts to cleanse him from my life. In the photo, he was wearing his police summer blues, standing in front of the fireplace at our neighbor John’s house.

  I had once mentioned to John that I didn’t have any photographs of Brian, and he had enlarged and framed that one for me. Sitting at my desk writing to Julie about the hijacking made him feel real again. These letters brought him back to me. When I looked at the photograph, it no longer felt two-dimensional. I felt like he was beside me.

  In some troubled way, I needed those letters to make sure he was not forgotten. Yes, I was remarried and loved James very much, but deep down the pain was still there. And now it felt as though that pain was something tangible, something I could put in Julie’s lap, make her deal with it.

  Often during those days, when I was driving the boys to sports practice or sitting at the dinner table with James, I found myself writing to Julie in my mind. I can’t imagine what it’s been like to wake up in a prison cell every day, but I’ll bet you thought about what your actions did to me and my children every single one of those days, and I’m glad. I hope you and your husband rot in prison. I hope you never see each other again.

  And she wrote back letters about how abusive, stark and lonely prison was and how much she deserved it.

  It just seems too little that I have been in prison all this time. Yes, I have paid my debt to society, but I still owe you so much, I can’t get this belief out of my mind, and there’s nothing I can do, I can’t bring Brian back, I can’t repair the damage done to your sons. I feel so depressed sometimes that I can’t even think about it. Yes, we have suffered, we have missed out on so much, perhaps I will never have the chance to have children, but still, I feel that it’s not enough, that to really suffer what you have suffered, I would have to lose my husband, that’s the only way I could go through what you have gone through.

  The revenge I felt was like a forbidden fruit I had not been able to taste until now. I told her how much my sons missed out on, not knowing their father. I told her of my own love for Brian, that he had been my hero in ways
she couldn’t even imagine.

  I read her lamentations of how sorry she was, how horrible she felt about what she did to me, about the boys. She spilled forth as though she were trying to open her chest of drawers and show me everything about her life that lay inside. As the boys swam and sailed and played lacrosse and soccer, I thought about it. While I worked with Mary Beth and Susan on our plans for SOS, helping women widowed from similar tragedies, Julie was a presence. And every day I made sure I was the one who got the mail.

  I devoured the letters at the kitchen table, first thing in the morning, or in the afternoons, right after I hurried to retrieve the mail. I read them curled up on the couch late at night. I asked her everything and consumed her life.

  Why would you be with someone like that, anyway? I typed one night in the quiet of my study. How did you even meet him? Days later, the response came that she had met him in Austria. He had been poor, ill-dressed, not someone she would have picked for herself. But he had confidence. And that confidence gave me confidence, she wrote, as though he could achieve anything . . . that tells you why I trusted him when it came to the bomb; it had always been that way.

  She told me she had had no friends when they were together, knew no Americans, he had been her sole source of comfort and support. While they were running from one country to another, she had been dependent on him for everything and surrendered to all his goals because they felt noble, and worthier than hers, though she admitted she wasn’t sure what hers were. When I read his letters to me now, I get so frustrated . . . it seems like he thinks nothing has changed, that I am still his disciple in a way. It sounded from her letters like Busic had hypnotized her, taken her as a kind of prisoner, seduced her into doing his bidding. I had no idea, as I devoured her words, that perhaps she was doing the same to me.

  In one letter I braved the question I had wanted to know the answer to for so long. Why did that bomb really explode? Just days later, when I checked the mail, Julie’s follow-up letter was there among the catalogues and bills. I kept it hidden in my first bureau drawer. The next day after I sent the kids off to school and kissed James goodbye, I slipped it out from where it lay between my lingerie and slips.

  Zvonko would never hurt an innocent person, he took every precaution to ensure that the bomb could never go off accidentally, so when he heard what happened, his first thought was of sabotage, that the Yugoslavs had heard about the bomb and had set it off remotely as the police officers approached it. He was so certain it had been detonated purposely to discredit us, and Croatians in general. He will never understand how it could possibly have gone off.

  When I looked up, a slanted gray rain had started outside, and I felt the expectation I had about knowing the truth sink like a cannonball. I had already heard this sabotage theory; it had floated through the media. I knew it was ridiculous. How could the bomb be accessible to Yugoslav extremists? From the time it was taken from the locker until the time it exploded, it was in Brian’s hands. Why not detonate while it was at Grand Central, where it could do the most damage?

  I looked back down at the letter.

  I never approved of Zvonko’s plans, she wrote. I never thought it was right; I tried to dissuade him and failed.

  But you stayed with him, I wanted to scream at her. You were by his side.

  What I would come to know about Julie was that she could anticipate my penchant for finding the truth. From 2,500 miles away, she knew how to answer it. In the next line she wrote:

  I felt I had a duty to stand by him, come what may, because I believed, as he did, that he would soon be killed by the Yugoslav secret police, and he wanted to make one desperate attempt to bring the Croatian situation to the public before he was killed . . . many of his friends and relatives had already been murdered in Europe for their political views, and he was told by many that he was on the top of their list as well. He thought if he could get the truth to the public that our government could bring pressure on the Yugoslavs. I was in the position of not knowing what else he could possibly do, other than such a desperate act, and I therefore chose to be at his side.

  The phone on the bedside table rang, but I ignored it and kept reading.

  I also felt that I could be a calming influence on everybody on the plane, that I could help maintain a calm atmosphere, which I did. But I never condoned it, never believed it was right. I just didn’t know what else could be done to maintain my husband’s safety. The situation was just an impossible one.

  And how ridiculous for the police to warn you when Zvonko escaped, as though he would want to harm you for any reason, had picked your family out and was intent on preying on all the members until there were no more.

  She made everything seem so reasonable. She was so pragmatic. And yet some warning bell went off inside me: Was this compelling woman my ally or horribly disturbed?

  Still, I answered this letter, and I waited for the next. The synergistic ways our lives merged, the odd coincidences were, in some way I didn’t want to look at, titillating.

  __________

  In the late 60s when Julie began her new life in Vienna with this depraved, terrifying man, Brian and I had been planning our future. We were twenty-one and intended to wait a few years before we married so we could save money, prepare for a family. But driving home from the Bronx to Brooklyn one night, he fell asleep at the wheel, drove his Volkswagen into a guardrail and was taken away by ambulance with a concussion and broken ribs. We were married three months later.

  In 1970, eight bomb blasts rocked New York City within a few months. A revolutionary group, The Weather Underground, declared war on the United States Government. Their weapon: bombs. The New York City bomb squad could not keep up with the multitude of cases, and two young men were recruited from the rank and file of the police department, Brian Murray and Charlie Wells, both military munitions men.

  In another underground operation in Vienna, a group of Croatians declared a war of their own. They would no longer stay silent while the Yugoslav government persecuted their families. Julie went along with Busic to these covert meetings.

  Busic had been expelled from his homeland for having plotted to start a civil war and was in Vienna on a work visa. He had a mission: tell the world about the atrocities the Serbs perpetrated against the Croats. In her letters, Julie repeated again and again how much the radical ideas thrilled her. She wanted them to be co-conspirators, make a difference. It didn’t matter that Croatia was a country she had never visited, didn’t speak the language and knew little about its government. Being with Busic gave her the significance she craved. She found herself constantly acquiescing to his power, one higher and more dignified than hers, one she could not resist, until she was no longer Julie Schultz from Gearhart, but the lover of a political radical, infamous in his country.

  Anxious to prove herself worthy of her new lover, she flew to Croatia after Busic assured her that as an American, she could enter the country as a visitor and discreetly drop flyers from Zagreb’s only skyscraper. The flyers were in Croatian, signed by Croatian Revolutionary Youth, and called for an uprising against President Tito who, Busic told her, had taken their language and their freedom. Julie admitted that she did not know the author, nor the full impact the dissemination of the information would have on the citizens of Zagreb, but she accepted this mission as a sufferer for their cause.

  I pictured a young blonde, backpack filled with anti-government literature, stepping up to the parapet and sending reams of paper cartwheeling to the ground while passersby cheered the message. I imagined Julie’s exhilaration, her flushed cheeks and rapid heartbeat at having been the source of the chaos.

  Busic told her she would be able to slip out of the country unnoticed after the deed was done, but instead she was thrown in prison and shared a cell with gypsies and whores, a hole in the ground for a toilet.

  Why didn’t she leave Busic after she had gotten out of the Yugoslav pri
son? I asked. She wrote back that she had fallen deeply in love. She said that if Brian had been in the IRA, she believed I would have followed him for similar reasons. Of course, neither of us today would do any such thing, she said. But years ago Zvonko’s love was just too important to me. I could not bear to lose it.

  I wrote her back that I understood the need for change in nations where citizens were oppressed and agreed with much of it, but I had two children, went to work every day, and had been married to a man who had volunteered to fight for his country. We went to church and prayed for peace.

  __________

  “Gracie, listen to this.” James and the boys were at a Yankees game. Gracie was on the sofa doing her nails while I read the most recent letter. “Julie’s been in prison before.”

  “I’m not surprised.” She blew on her nails. “Anyone crazy enough to hijack a plane,” she said, “isn’t afraid of prison.”

  I sat back in the chair. Outside the breeze had picked up, and in the half-light of dusk, I saw the sheets I had pinned on the line billowing like sails. Gracie spent eighteen months in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. I remembered waiting for her letters, the script a map to her life there. Because she was soft-spoken, freckled face, red haired, and slight, she had been targeted by prisoners and guards alike and had written she was terrified for her life.