by Kim Echlin
She said, The happiest years were when you and your brother were young. The happiness did diminish with time. We shared less that was new and more that was habit. But we kept trying. Started dancing.
Why did you get married?
I wanted children. After the war, people were glad to be alive. I lost my first love and I wanted to get on with life. But I wonder now why I thought my autonomy was worth less than his.
I had to remind myself that she was not betraying my father. She was only telling her own story.
She said, They told women to make room for the men, to give up their jobs for the men coming home. We thought it was the right thing. It was good for your father.
She looked into the darkness and said, At least young women don’t have to get stuck in that image anymore.
But he was my beloved father. I had thought he was perfect.
* * *
—
I told Biddy about Kosmos as soon as she could talk and I showed her the only picture I had of the two of us, standing in front of his motorcycle near the Bastille. We called him Tata. I told her we would find him someday. I embellished the stories because what I had was thin. I could not tell her that we had spent as much time as we could in bed. I told her that we had lived in Paris together, that we had watched the sunrise over Notre-Dame and walked along the Seine. I told her he loved music, especially Ravel, and I had some recordings I could give her, and that he worked in theatre. She wanted more. I told her about my little room overlooking the rooftops and that he loved the balcony. I told her about the churches we visited and the Place des Vosges. I had to tell her more about Paris than about him because that was all I had. I told her someday we would visit his country. He loved the bridges in his country and on them were stone couches where people met each other suspended over fast-running mountain rivers and they listened to the water below.
She said, I would like to sit on a stone couch. And then she asked, Why don’t we know where he is?
I don’t know.
She had no father and no image of a father. She liked to look for faces in the bark of the tree where her swing hung. Mam showed her an abandoned nest hidden high in the leaves. When Biddy got older she liked to sit alone on the front porch and look at the stars. My curiosity about Biddy is fathomless. I felt sorry that she had no father like mine who loved me. She only had Mam and me. There is no perfect in a family.
A child is loaned to us and when the time is right the child is reclaimed by the world. And yet, mother and child are inside each other forever. A mother receives wisdom if she is willing to submit, if she is willing to love ferociously and then shake her child free.
I learned one kind of love from Mam and another from Biddy. I learned that I only felt right when my daughter and my mother felt right. We were wrapped around and through each other like the roots and branches of a wild banyan tree holding together an abandoned home for the compassionate god.
* * *
—
The war went on and on. The world slowly roused itself like an old and weary dog. It stretched stiffly from its front legs up to the back, and then it shook, tried to take a step, to do something, to resist the thick urge for vengeance. Silence breaks people. There would be a negotiated end. They were writing indictments in The Hague and bringing in criminals and witnesses. My brother, with his retentive memory and a keen allegiance to fairness, had left practice to become a judge, and we often talked about the new court. He liked to visit on Sunday evenings to see Biddy. After she was in bed we watched the news and he asked, I wonder if your guy went back there.
I do too, I said. If they sentence people in The Hague, where will they incarcerate them?
My brother had visited prisons. When he started out as a judge he said he needed to feel what he would be condemning others to.
He answered, I suppose each country agrees to let them use their prisons.
Do you think they can really make an international understanding?
If everyone agrees. It’s logical.
Law changes. Which means it is sometimes wrong.
You always say that, he said. It’s imperfect. It’s what we have.
We must not make a scarecrow of the law, I said.
What are you talking about?
It should change. When it stays the same, the birds use it as a perch.
Nice image, he said.
Not mine, I said. And spoken from a position of power.
I like quotes to start my judgments, he said. I might use that.
Je t’en prie, I said.
My brother’s mind did not linger on a single strand. He liked to work on lots of threads at the same time. He was taking everything in. He watched baseball and read newspapers and looked through law books at the same time. He nodded toward the television and said, Those war criminals will not only be in prison but in exile.
After my brother left that night, I felt restless. I was tired of being alone. I wondered if I had fooled myself. For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night. But I could no more deny my love than the sky can deny its stars. I could not make it make sense, but I was fine. Most of the time.
The next morning I was leaving for New York for three days and I worried aloud to Mam about leaving Biddy whenever I travelled for work and about feeling restless and needing to write about things I cared about.
Mam said, Gota, you’ve had it all.
Mam was rarely impatient and this stopped me. I said, I’m sorry.
She said, Work. Biddy’s fine.
I said, I worry about being away.
Mam asked, Aren’t I doing a good enough job?
I didn’t mean that.
Biddy is doing what she is supposed to be doing.
What is that?
Learning not to need you.
But I still need you.
I know. I need you too. This is the strangeness of love.
* * *
—
Every night we saw more news stories about massacres and about refugees struggling along roads toward borders and one night the camera rested on a woman holding a child’s lifeless body. I could not say, Oh that is only something happening far away because of war. I felt those images in my skin. I could not say I did not know. To turn away is to accept. To remain silent is to accept. Now they were opening the borders, inviting us to the besieged city. What was I going to do? Write about corkscrews with rabbit ears?
Sarajevo
Kosmos had dropped me at Edina’s office to join her first meeting with Karla Vogel-Babić, the lead prosecutor from The Hague. Edina led us upstairs, unlocked a door into a main office, led us down a hallway to a waiting room, and then she unlocked a second door into her own office, a small room with a worn couch and two low chairs around a table, bookcases on three walls, a row of file cabinets on the fourth wall, no window. Edina moved behind her cluttered desk and gestured us to sit.
Karla greeted Edina in Croatian, then said in her brisk and formal English, I am German, and my husband is from Croatia. Before the war we went every year to visit his family. I grew up in Hamburg. My city was destroyed. I joined the court in The Hague when it opened. We are very pleased to meet you. I understand you are a lawyer.
Edina nodded.
Karla introduced their interpreter Lise Favre-Rastoder, Swiss-Montenegrin, a huge woman with a comfortable smile, and Sue Rupasinghe, American–Sri Lankan, her co-counsel.
Edina introduced me, Gota Dobson. A friend.
Karla said, We are grateful to you for allowing us to see your files in order to build this case. Our preliminary investigations are leading us to many women who now live abroad. The statements you have gathered are from women who live throughout the region? We need to put all this together and to strategize.
Edina nodded.
&nb
sp; Karla said, You know this trial will not be easy for the witnesses.
I know.
Edina pointed to the file cabinets and said, I will not endanger even one woman. They have been through enough. At the beginning I myself struggled over whether to stay silent or to speak. But I could not accept the morality of staying silent.
She fleetingly covered her face with her hands.
It is not good, she said, to close yourself up and to lock things inside. But with this trial there will be much pain.
She came around from behind her desk and sat across from Lise.
Karla said, There will be emotional needs. We can make arrangements for counselling and childcare and time away from work. The women can travel with someone to support them. This case depends on the women.
Edina answered slowly, Some women’s families do not know. Women ask me if I know what it is like to have sex with a husband when you don’t want it? When he does not know what happened to you? When you feel only pain?
She straightened some files and said, Do not think you are different because you have not been in this war. You can imagine. You know the feeling of sex when you do not want it. Maybe you even know the physical torment. If you ask the women to tell their stories you must not barricade yourselves off as if you do not know.
Our only wisdom is our humility, I thought.
Edina said to Lise, When you interpret you must become the voice of the other.
Lise said, My best work is invisible.
Edina answered, But to me, you are not invisible.
There was a tap at the door and a woman came in with a tray of coffee. Edina said, I will need a photocopier, paper, ink.
She picked up the six files on her desk, handed them to Lise and said, Read these and I will come back in a little while. If the women tell these stories in court they will have to relive that time. It was terrible and many of them have spent years trying to forget.
Lise took the first file on her lap, and Sue and Karla shifted forward to take notes.
Outside her office Edina and I settled on a small couch in the sitting area.
I asked, What do you think?
She said, I have enough files for a thousand trials. Last night I did not sleep.
Without awareness she reached for my hand and held it. She said, At first I did not want to be involved in anything like this. I wanted to be hidden, alone.
I nodded.
She said, In the war, the hardest time was at the beginning when I understood that no one was coming. I have never lost that feeling. This is the first time anyone has come.
She looked down at her hand over mine, took it away as if she had not known it was there.
She said, I sleep in a net of nightmares. I cannot be silent but I do not want to speak.
Then she got up and went downstairs alone.
* * *
—
A few hours later, Karla and Sue and Lise stood when we came back to the office. The files were open on the table and the coffee was gone. I waited by the door looking at paper on every surface. The women’s expressions were grave, lips pulled tight, arms close to their bodies.
Karla asked, How many?
Edina lifted her right palm to the walls of file cabinets in her office. She pointed out the open door to the bank of cabinets along the hall, colour-coded to match the flags on the map of the region.
Karla asked, Do people know?
Edina said, People do not want to know.
* * *
—
With our chess pieces we tricked and taunted, challenged and blocked, joked and teased. Through our strategies and missteps, we got to know each other. Edina liked to play and smoke cigarettes and talk at the same time. She did not have to concentrate as much as I did because she was very good. She had learned in a girls’ chess club at school under an unusual teacher who was enthusiastic for both boys and girls to play. She played with three girls in three neighbouring villages by mail until her father complained that her chess postage would soon be more expensive than their groceries. A few times her girls’ club demanded to play the boys and she liked to beat the boys. She told me her parents did not play well—only knew the moves—but they came to her tournaments in the same way they came to her school concerts, and afterwards they met her grandparents for coffee at the Ribarski restaurant. The childhood she described was wrapped in comfortable love. When the war was over, she had no one to play chess with and so she set up a board alone and analyzed games out of old books to pass long, sleepless nights.
I said, Let’s play by telephone when I go back.
Seven hours apart. Late evening for me and the middle of the night for her. Edina liked to play on Saturday nights. She sometimes teased me about not having anything better to do, and I said, I have a child, I like to be home, and sometimes she asked me about Kosmos, why could I not get him to move to Toronto, and did I not miss him?
I always said the same thing: He loves you.
But he likes to sleep with you, she said.
Maybe he would be a terrible husband.
She laughed, Of course he would. But he is the father of your child.
Between us was a thing that could not be resolved. What was it exactly? Kosmos? Her war suffering? My warless life? We were drawn to each other, and we talked about our work and our daughters and mothers and mint gardens and writing and reading and chess.
During those six years of telephone calls, she consulted with the lawyers from The Hague about her files. We battled with our queens and knights and pawns and she told stories of her life, in fragments, each version never quite the same. We told each other the things we worried about and some of the things we loved. One late night she said, I am not afraid to die but I am afraid my life will disappear.
I thought, There is only the lifetime burning in every moment.
I said, Sometimes I think it is your own words that will immortalize you.
Who will hear them?
Someone, I said.
And then, because friendship is there for comfort too, I joked, Are you trying to make me too sleepy to beat you?
You have all eternity to sleep, she said. Let’s play.
* * *
—
When I met her in Vienna with her mother, Esma, and her daughter, Merima, we liked to walk in the Lainzer Tiergarten, and each time made our way to the observation tower. Edina said she enjoyed this country-in-the-city and she imagined that in Canada there were many parks like this. I told her that in some we saw wildlife, elk and moose and bears in more remote places, and that even in my large city I had seen mink on the waterfront and raccoons were everywhere. Edina laughed and told me to stop teasing her and telling her such outrageous stories. She was relaxed in Vienna. Then, as if reading my mind, she said, My nightmares do not care what country I am in. I have them here too. I never escape them.
* * *
—
In Sarajevo, I slept at Edina’s when I wasn’t with Kosmos. He didn’t have a home, only a room in someone’s house, so he had fixed up the projection room at his small theatre for us with a mattress on the floor and some posters. Edina told me his family’s apartment got taken over by others and he had nowhere to come back to. I liked making love with Kosmos under the flickering images of movies playing below.
I said to him, You have never told me about your family.
I had an older brother. I had my first cigarette with him. Let’s go for a drive.
He liked to go up the mountain and look over the city. He liked to walk along the old bobsled track and look into the woods and over the valley. We could not walk through the forest below because it had not yet been demined.
Kosmos said, My brother’s body is still missing. He was fighting to the west. My parents died before him.
After great sadness, silence is not en
ough. But I did not know what to say.
* * *
—
I sometimes travelled by bus with Edina to small towns outside Sarajevo for her fieldwork. She said she wanted dignity for women who had been pushed to the sides. At least, having told their stories to someone, to her, they would not die with a locked box inside them. She told me that before the war she used to watch the news coldly, and she thought little of it when she saw footage of refugees walking with nothing from one place to another. But now when she watched television images of war and migration she could feel their hunger and cold and fear.
At the bus station she warned me about a former soldier in this town who had acquired a white UN van for his personal use. He had mounted a skull on the hood and he drove around drunk threatening people through his open window. She pointed him out to me. The night of the second day, after dinner, as we walked through the dusk toward our little hotel, out of nowhere the white van drove by, honked at us, and the soldier shouted Edina’s name. When he was past us, Edina said, I wonder if that is my father’s skull.
I never got used to her ragged thought. There were things in her life that she could not make normal and when they erupted they tormented her. She preferred to tell jokes or to play chess. She said that when she used to tell Merima stories she always began, Do you know the old fairy tales?
Before the war.
Foča, Sarajevo
The Sarajevo Clock Tower stands beside the tallest minaret in the city, where it has marked lunar time for five centuries since the age of Gazi Husrev-beg. The gilded clock hands set the moment of the coppery call to prayer. They have been reset every three days by the same man for the past sixty years. This man has attended to the ceaseless and uneven turning of earth and moon and sun, and only once during the siege did he fail to climb the tower’s seventy-six steps to set the time for prayers. Time is no healer, and in the clock, storytelling and history have become one.