by Kim Echlin
Also by Kim Echlin
Under the Visible Life
The Disappeared
Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity
Inanna
Dagmar’s Daughter
Elephant Winter
Speak, Silence
KIM ECHLIN
Hamish Hamilton
an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
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First published 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Kim Echlin
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Published by Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, copyright © 1990 and used with permission cleared with Copyright Clearance Centre. Excerpt from Mehmedalija “Mak” Dizdar, “Calypso”, adapted from the English translation copyright © 2006 by Keith Doubt and Luisa Lang Owen, and used with permission from the Dizdar Estate. Excerpt from Calling the Ghosts: a Story About Rape, War and Women, quote by Jadranka Cigelj. Directed by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic with executive producer Julia Ormond, distributed by Women Make Movies. www.wmm.com.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Speak, silence / Kim Echlin.
Names: Echlin, Kim, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200233718 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200233793 | ISBN 9780735240612 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735240629 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8559.C45 S64 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
Book design by Kate Sinclair
Cover design by Kate Sinclair
Cover images: (leaves) Alpine Buckthorn from Traité des Arbres et Arbustes que l’on cultive en France en pleine terre (1801-1819) by Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Original from the New York Public Library. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel; (flowers) from Iconographie du genre camellia: No. 194 (1839-1843), published by Abbé Laurent Berlèse. Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland in honour of Mrs. William G. Mather / The Cleveland Museum of Art.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Kim Echlin
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note on the Novel
Toronto, Sarajevo
Paris
Toronto, Sarajevo
Sarajevo
Foča, Sarajevo
Sarajevo, Foča, Toronto
The Hague
Sarajevo, Toronto
Acknowledgements
for the women who testified
for Nicole Winstanley
…he sat down and lit a cigarette, and he said that he could perhaps do more, much more, but that I was about the same age as his daughter, and so he wouldn’t do anything more for the moment.
—protected witness
A Note on the Novel
In 2000 a landmark trial took place in The Hague. The Foča case was in response to the thousands of rapes that took place during the Yugoslav wars (1992 to 1999) in centres set up as rape camps.
Prosecutors needed six years to prepare for the trial. An international team of women lawyers and researchers travelled around the world to find women witnesses, now war refugees, who dared to testify. The trial lasted for nine months.
The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was born out of Nuremberg’s remnant hope for enduring international justice. Judges were appointed from fifty-two nations. Nine hundred people from around the globe worked in the courts. The ICTY was established in 1993 to contest violations of international humanitarian law. Many trials took place during the wars.
The Foča trial in 2000 asked us to agree that never again would a woman’s body be used as a theatre of war. But always we say never again. To this day women are systematically raped as part of terror and war.
Important new jurisprudence came out of the Foča trial. The perpetrators were found guilty, not only of rape but of a crime against humanity. For the first time in 5,000 years of recorded history women were not spoils of war. Rape in war was no longer a crime against individual women but a crime against all of us.
Speak, Silence is an imaginative response, in fiction, to changing consciousness. Let us reimagine our humanity together.
—KE
Toronto, Sarajevo
They are still shooting, said Jacques Payac.
I’m going, I said. The borders are open.
I run a travel magazine, he said.
I will write a travel piece.
About war?
About film.
When the hell are you going to settle down?
Why should I settle down?
What are you hoping for?
I only want to know. To tell.
* * *
—
I had watched the war on television in Toronto for years. I watched life in a city under siege, saw people from a bread line bleeding on the ground. The cameras pulled back and I saw smoke and fire from apartment towers. My name is Gota Dobson. I saw these images on the same screen that I watched Looney Tunes with my only child. Intolerable shame. To watch old women in good leather shoes hurrying over rubble along the edges of buildings. To watch boys and girls playing on tanks. To watch people falling like broken clay pigeons in skeet practice. To change the channel. To live in the unattended moment. To be where I was not.
There was the Time cover of a crowd of prisoners behind wire fences, their ribs like empty cages, with a caption in red: Must It Go On? The war did not abate and the news remained clear and constant and the world struggled to rouse itself.
People knew. Still it went on. Year after year I watched. When Biddy was asleep at night and my work was put away for another day, I watched.
To know is not enough.
* * *
—
So I went to Sarajevo to write about the film festival when they were still fighting outside the city. They ran the projectors off car batteries. Someone asked, Why are you holding a film festival in the middle of a war? The director answered, Why are they holding a war in the middle of a film festival?
I saw the Sarajevo roses in the sidewalks, the pockmarks on the walls. The city was alive with the temporary glamour of international film stars gathering in war ruins. Where was the rage? On the streets I heard wry humour and relief. I felt mourning. Exhaustion.
I asked at the Sartr Theatre box office, Do you know a man called Kosmos?
Yes, said the young woman.
Does he have another name?
She thought for a moment and said, Everyone calls him Kosmos.
I left an envelope for him. Inside was a note in which I told him I would meet him that night at the Kino Bosna. I had not seen him for eleven years.
* * *
/> —
The announcement of a new court in The Hague had spread quickly around the globe. They would need judges, litigators, researchers, interpreters. They would write a new set of rules and procedures. They wanted to bring order into that lawless place, the border.
In Hamburg, Karla Vogel-Babić applied to be a prosecutor. She was married to a man from the region. Her specialty was international white-collar crime but she was tired of the greed. When she was a child she had lost her home in the rubble of her war-flattened city. She knew the smell of decomposing corpses. She wanted to be part of this new thing, a world court. A woman has no country and wants no country. Borders shift and crack into something different.
Other women in other places were also deciding to leave their homes to go to The Hague. They too wanted to act. They too felt their home to be the world.
In Lusaka, the deputy chief justice told Judge Gladys Banda that the United Nations was looking for African judges. At first Gladys thought she could not fit in with international lawyers. She had five children but this had never stopped her from doing new work. Her husband encouraged her and she thought, All the new judges will have to learn the new law too. She had learned how to navigate Zambian tradition and British common law. Perhaps there were things she could do.
All over the world, people were weighing the idea of joining the new court. History is now. In the moment of consciousness. New law on the border.
* * *
—
The Kino Bosna café was converted from a cinema, seats replaced with tables and red-checked cloths, and on the walls classic black-and-white photos of old Hollywood stars, Bogart and Hepburn and Monroe. The smoke-filled room was full of young students whose educations had been interrupted, laughing through their war trauma, trying to invent a retro-present in a city besieged for three years, ten months, three weeks and three days. They crowded round a game of chess and mocked missteps, called out things like The chicken has laid a potato. For the young, hope is as natural as violence. They played U2 and Sikter and Protest. They joked, You think one president is difficult? Try three, a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb. But it was not a joke.
Goat?
Kosmos.
He sat at a table with a woman. His hair fell over his left eye, and he moved with that familiar kinetic energy. He was pulling over a chair and saying, What are you doing here? In his eyes the ironic distance and intimate warmth I remembered, and I felt all over again blood pulsing beneath my skin. I loved all over again his lifted eyebrows.
He said, This is Edina, and she looked up, politely, was chain-smoking, did not speak. I wondered if she had no English. Her face was sallow, her bony fingers long, the skin around her lips a dry net of wrinkles. Some of her hair was tucked behind her right ear. She had once been pretty. Her shifting grey-blue eyes were more alive than her flesh, her energy an erect snake waiting to strike.
He was talking fast. He said that he had stayed away from Sarajevo for too long, could I not hear his British accent, was it not fucked up, and was not British English boring, their insults boring, nothing interesting like fuck my python.
He was a little uneasy.
Finally he asked, You?
I said, I have a daughter. I write. I came for the festival.
I thought, I came to see you.
He said, I was working at a small theatre in London, near a church, oranges and lemons, when the war started, and I did not come back. I thought I would go crazy watching the war on television, waiting, like waiting for fucking Godot.
His charming soup of language. But Edina leaned back, detached from his I-wasn’t-here-during-the-war stories.
He said, This festival is only for movie stars, in and out like a quickie. I am living here now. There was nothing for me over there.
I wanted to be alone with him. To ask him what really happened. Now I had seen him again, I wanted to touch him.
I asked Edina, Are you in theatre too?
I am a lawyer. But I do not practise.
Kosmos said, She works with women from the war.
What do you do?
Abruptly Edina rose, walked into the crowded room.
I looked at Kosmos. He said, Sometimes she has to get up and move away. When she feels trapped it is better to move. It is difficult for her to talk about what happened.
But I asked her about her work, I said.
It is the same, said Kosmos. She runs a documentation centre. She takes statements from women about what happened in the war.
I thought, Terrible things happened.
I asked, Does she have family?
Her daughter and mother live in Vienna.
Where is her husband? I asked.
Dead.
We watched Edina standing with a small group of people across the room near a chess game. She laughed with them over some absurd chess insult, came back to the table, reached for a cigarette, lit it, and called the waiter to order cakes for us. She flicked her cigarette ashes on the floor. I could see that she had once been a woman who was lively at parties, smoking and calling for food and moving easily through crowded rooms. She took everything in. I hesitated to say anything more, but Kosmos, who was never comfortable with silence, said to her, Maybe Goat could write about your work, help raise money.
Always he had ideas. The waiters began to pile chairs on tables and people moved out through the front doors into the early morning. Still Edina sat. The waiters wiped the bar and mopped the floors around us and Edina drew her hands over her face, which seemed to soothe her. Then she turned to me.
I do not ask for their stories, she said. I beg for them. I document where a woman was taken and what happened to her and who in her family died and where survivors went after the war and how they live. They all need money. The women can’t support themselves.
I nodded.
She said, I want to prosecute.
Her body was intense and strangely vulnerable though she was a tall woman. There was a subtle fierceness in the way she held her back and her eyes were ball lightning.
She said, People have heard about my work. Some women from the international court are coming. But what can they really do? I want prosecution here.
She squashed her last cigarette and twisted the empty package and said, Shit. We are all betrayed. The world forgets us.
Turn aside this fate, you gods.
Kosmos offered her one of his cigarettes and she let him cup her hand while he lit it.
She reached into her bag of files and papers and she pulled out a photocopy of a newspaper photograph of women standing in a room together. She wrote something in the margin, crumpled the paper and handed it to me. She got up and Kosmos stood to follow her.
She said, They just wait for us to die.
* * *
—
I watched them leave and waited to pay the bill. They were out on the sidewalk and Kosmos hurried back, leaned in close and asked, Where are you staying?
I told him to come to my hotel in the old town. Everyone knew it. And then I walked through the narrow streets toward the old bazaar, blood-tainted since the Illyrian wars. The moon was very low and early dawn light was grey over the rough cobbles and there were many doorways and places to hide. Listening to Edina had shredded me like a grater. I looked at the wall of white names carved into red stone in the Markale fresh market. Vendors with dark smudges under their eyes were setting up tables of vegetables and fruit, figs and breads and honey under the names of the dead. Was a memorial a final deletion, so war could be put aside, so trade and life could proceed?
The bar downstairs at the Hotel Art was lit with Ottoman-style lanterns, and behind the mustard columns and stone tiles was enough cheap alcohol to poison an army. Three men were still drinking, heads and necks jutting forward like gargoyle downspouts. I asked for water. And the oldest man stood and handed
me a blue bottle to take up three flights of stairs to my room. I opened the door to a pair of narrow twin beds with wrought-iron headboards and took a long drink of water. Outside, the river, and all across the valley, red rooftops and white buildings, minarets a breath taller than nearby church spires, then the forest on the ridge of the mountain. We are pack animals and live close to each other, even hunters and hunted nestle together in the bowl of the valley. Below my window were stone traces of the market where Venetian traders once bartered in twelve thousand stalls, five centuries old. They held their lovers at night. They prayed. They played with their children. They gossiped about politicians threatening war. They bought and sold the things people want—spices, a bit of cloth, a pot, a carpet. Nothing is more human than trade, worship and war.
I flattened Edina’s ball of paper. Dawn light outside the window was like spring water on young skin. No one would shoot from the hills today. The photocopy was printed in thin ink, grey-toned and pink-lined, like an old fresco. She had written her telephone number across the top. The women in the photo were together waiting. See them. Arms bare. Hair rough-cropped or tied or tangled and falling into their eyes. Hands clasped across their own arms over breasts and rubbing tears from cheeks. See them together waiting, flesh against flesh, waiting women, waiting for bread, for water, for children, for old men. They had once been war-waiting, and they had survived. You would not abuse stone like that. Now they were peace-waiting. Ready to speak.
The photo caption calls them war victims. They make their necessary migration, guided not by winds or magnetic poles but by uncoded weather inside their bodies. They are grief-touching skin to skin, over there, see one woman holding another, and there in that corner, see a young woman squatting to the floor, head dropped between her knees. Flesh once soul-stripped but alive and not silent. They do not seem to be victims to me. See us. Listen to us.