Speak, Silence

by Kim Echlin

  A woman can disappear, like the girls in old fairy tales who disappear into forests. She leaves home behind and goes to a new place. She becomes a creature who escapes a curse or a demon or a wicked stepmother. She hides and is tricked into revealing herself. Glass slippers. Coats of fur. Riddles.

  In the old fairy tales girls escape from one kingdom only to end up in a different and not necessarily better kingdom. A girl gets absorbed into other people’s stories. She doesn’t go home. She carries her home inside her. A woman must make her home wherever she is. This must be her happily-ever-after. Esma and Merima would never go home. The homes they carried inside were now in a foreign place.

  In the gallery, I used coloured tabs in my notebooks to help me remember the details of each woman’s testimony: Who was yellow. What, red. Where, green. When, blue. There was no Why.

  * * *

  —

  Mataruga rose to cross-examine Merima. He asked about places and dates. Over and over she said she did not know.

  The lawyer said, You remember only for the prosecution.

  He opened his hands toward the judges, as if he were helpless and wronged.

  Karla stood for the last time with Merima and asked, Witness, for identification purposes, is there anything characteristic about Mr. Dragić to make clear to the court who he is?

  Yes.

  Karla hoped she would say the scar on his cheek.

  Tell us what that was.

  The eyes. Never will I forget his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Fifty-one more court days from March to November, thirteen more women witnesses for the prosecution, to be followed by expert witnesses for both sides. Military witnesses spoke to the hierarchies of command and to more history. The judges asked witnesses to refrain from beginning with the Ottomans. There were no female military or expert witnesses. The case dragged on. Intricacies of law were combed out, like untangling strand by strand the fine horsehair for the bow of the violin. Which story exactly matched definitions of genocide, crimes against humanity, enslavement?

  I often watched the Dutch guard, Lieven, in court beside Dragić. We had met in a café near the courts and he said he had seen me every day in the gallery. One night we went to my apartment. Expat life is lonely. He was the sort of man who loves a woman’s pleasure as much as his own. I did not analyze it much. Everyone who worked in the courts was transient. Desire is as ungovernable as air. I did not want to spoil my nights with Lieven by thinking too much about them. Lieven guarded the accused, watched him pick his cuticles, was alert to his tiniest physical movements, and that was all.

  In court, Lieven’s face was still, professional. If the blind was up, he sometimes glanced at me and I noticed a delicate flush on his jawline.

  In my apartment I asked, What do you talk about while he’s smoking during the breaks?

  Nothing. I don’t know his language.

  Why don’t you wear headphones in court?

  It is not my job to follow the proceedings.

  But he might do something, strangle his attorney, take poison.

  Lieven shook his head. He said, That cannot happen. It is why I am there.

  But what if something happens during the proceedings? Don’t you want to know?

  Lieven reached for the buttons on my blouse and said, I am good at my job.

  He slipped my blouse off.

  I said, I see you from the gallery. What do you think about when you’re guarding?

  You.

  That’s not true. Do you have other girlfriends?

  Wat ben je toch een lekker ding.

  I understood only the word for delicious so I let it go. We were just two people who worked in the same building. When you work closely with people, you sleep with them from time to time, you just do, you need to, and this revives you like a sip of spring water.

  * * *

  —

  Two expert witnesses cancelled after listening to the televised proceedings. The judges chided lawyers for delays, for scheduling gaps. Karla and her team continued to weave individual testimonies into a collective story, each voice substantiating the others, to demonstrate systematic intent. They corroborated dates. Nura Muslimović, PW-91, remembered the day she was taken away from her village because it was her mother’s birthday. PW-75, Šefika Tvrtković, remembered the day her daughter was taken because it was St. Ilija’s Day, a holiday for all her village though the Serbs call it Ilinden and Muslims call it Alidjun. Mothers marked their time by their children. Mubera Sokolović, PW-187, said, I was there for six months. I know because I wanted to know how my pregnancy was advancing. When the security officers at the doors had newspapers I borrowed them and checked the dates. Anyway I lost the baby at four months and seven days and I am glad. I will never bring a child into this world. Never. The soldiers made us monsters. One night I saved myself by picking up a baby and making it scream when a soldier was dragging me to the door. He threw me off him and said, Not you, I’m not listening to a screaming baby. I was shocked at myself that I did this and I never did it again. Nejra Kulenović, PW-186, was the mother of that baby. Her two children were with her in Partizan, two years old and ten months. She was determined to remember her children’s milestones, first steps and words, and she scratched little marks in the bathroom which the investigators documented. Her milk dried up. She was continuously taken away by groups of soldiers for an hour, a day, three days, and each time she was pushed back into the hall she looked only for her children.

  She testified, When I came back I tried to hide my burns, bruises. But I counted days. To know their ages.

  The interpreters never interrupted the women witnesses or asked them to slow down. The rhythm of emotion is uneven. Rage and indignation can be told from a tightened throat or in open sobbing. Some of the interpreters unconsciously mirrored the women’s rhythms.

  Breath, like the eyes, cannot be rendered emotionless.

  * * *

  —

  Finally. The day of the last prosecution witness.

  Jasmina Begović, PW-52.

  The blind was up for her because she was the mother of a girl who was never found. She wanted to testify in open court. She wanted her daughter’s name not to be forgotten.

  Karla had scheduled her last because her testimony was meant to linger in the judges’ minds. As she had earlier agreed, William Steyn was assigned to question her.

  Jasmina had managed to hide her twelve-year-old daughter, Hana, from the soldiers by keeping her with very small children. After six dreadful weeks, on the day that group of mothers and babies and small children were being moved to Tuzla, their bus was stopped on the bridge on the way out of town. A soldier saw Hana and pulled her out of the bus. Jasmina was screaming and holding on to her child and the soldier knocked her out with the butt of his rifle. PW-31 and PW-97 verified the girl was taken from the bus, and Edina had earlier verified she was brought to Karaman’s house, where Edina often tried to hide her. One night the soldiers came in late and Edina hid the child under the bed and when they were gone, she found the little girl curled like a snail under an old potato bag. Hana used to bring in a bit of mint from outside to sniff. Later PW-199 saw her being sold to a soldier in the Ribarski restaurant.

  The prosecution scheduled an afternoon session with Hana’s mother, hoping her cross-examination would take place in the morning, after she had rested. During the witness-proofing, Steyn told her he would show her a picture to verify her daughter’s identity. Then she would be asked to describe the child’s disappearance.

  In court he handed Jasmina the photo of Hana.

  She looked down at the familiar picture. Here, under the eyes of the judges, she saw it fresh. Look, her small girl was alive, there, oh, her trusting eyes shining, her sweet lips. She could smell Hana’s fresh skin after playing outside on the mountain. Look, the little
front curl of hair slipping loose. Tonight she’ll kiss her goodnight and lie down beside her until she falls asleep.

  Jasmina was wearing a bit of Hana’s hair in a locket a neighbour had found in the burned rubble of her house. Hana would have been twenty years old. Everyone in the court was waiting to begin after the simple identification.

  Jasmina opened her mouth to say yes but a different sound was coming out, a crying moan like a half-alive creature in the mouth of a snake. Swallow, die more, swallow, die. She was a creature in hell, frozen on one side, burning on the other.

  From the gallery I saw the back of the mother bent over a photograph. Never had I heard such a cry from a human being. The courtroom fell still.

  I looked up to the interpreters’ booth where they waited, no translation possible.

  After a long, long time Jasmina had to breathe, and she looked around as if the sound had come from someone else. William Steyn stepped between her and Dragić to try to block her view of him. Judge Banda tipped her chin down toward the witness as if ready to call a break.

  Then Jasmina looked up into Judge Banda’s eyes and spoke, That is my daughter. Hana.

  * * *

  —

  At the recess I had to get out. I went to the Mauritshuis gallery, a half-hour walk from the courts. I did not want to be alone. I often went to that gallery because I like the art of the Golden Age, the radiance in the paint, Protestant wives who tucked their hair under scarves and hats and plucked chickens in kitchens and lice from each other’s hair and men who played lutes. Warm domestic scenes. Beyond the walls of their homes were the bloody battles of the Reformation. We could not guess from those domestic paintings that in the Battle of White Mountain four thousand Bohemian Protestants were killed in one hour.

  I stopped in front of a painting of a woman in a white smock worn over full blue-green skirts, her feet on a warming block. In the large canvas, she is bent over her sewing. A man stands with his hand on her right shoulder and he is twisted over her, his open left palm thrusting coins at her. Her eyes are fixed on her needlework but she is awkwardly turned away and acutely aware of him and the insistent pressure of his fingers on her flesh.

  I was startled to hear a Dutch woman beside me say in English, It is a remarkable painting. Judith Leyster painted it when she was twenty-two years old.

  Hmmm, I said.

  She painted only six years, said the woman. And then she married a painter and had five children. She may have painted in her husband’s atelier. This was common but we do not know.

  I nodded.

  We almost lost her. Her signature was JL with a star. Franz Hals stole her paintings and painted his signature over hers and showed them as his own. The fraud lasted for three hundred years. Finally someone with sharp eyes at the Louvre detected something in the style.

  I could smell coffee on her breath. The room felt close and threatening. I had to get out before the man in the painting made her drop her sewing. His eyes were piercing. She was trapped.

  I turned away from the woman and she leaned in and said, You know, in Dutch our word for sewing is slang for sex.

  I escaped to the cobbled courtyard, walked quickly through the iron gates and onto the street. I had to clear my head. I thought, What is wrong? Strangers discuss paintings all the time. I thought, This trial will not let women’s lives be painted over and lost.

  * * *

  —

  When court resumed in the afternoon, Karla’s lips were pressed tight, deepening a dimple that was in no way cheerful. As she listened to Steyn question Hana’s mother, I watched her shift slightly forward. She could do nothing. No one had anticipated the mother’s unearthly cry.

  Steyn needed Jasmina to speak, not to publicly mourn. And so he pressed on. When did she last see her child? Where? Who took her from the bus when they were leaving town? Was she ever found? He needed the mother to describe how her wisp of a child’s body had been made a battlefield on which large, uniformed, armed and brutal men fought.

  After Jasmina’s testimony, I called Edina.

  Kosmos answered, We’re having a joint.

  I said to Edina, Did you know Jasmina’s daughter?

  Hana, she said. She was the flower girl at our wedding.

  She was at Karaman’s house with you?

  Yes.

  I heard Kosmos stand and walk across the room and say, Forgive us all.

  Edina? I said.

  She said quietly, They wanted to hurt us like it was their job. Hana stopped screaming. She was so small. What did they see when they looked at her? They hurt us because they could. Night after night they performed for each other. Animals. They brought young men and forced them. We were furniture. She was a little girl. How could they? I am two people, the person before and the person after. Better to be dead.

  * * *

  —

  I got a toothache while I was in The Hague and when the dentist came in, my knuckles were white from grasping the chair and he said, We must postpone to another day. I think you are not well.

  I went to the cinema and sat alone and when someone tried to go past me I refused and waved them to a different row. It was intolerable to be near a stranger in the dark.

  I bought small Delft night lights in the shapes of canal houses and tulips for my apartment. I saved the largest, a cheery blue teapot, to illuminate my bedroom.

  But darkness seeped through. History is not scattered ashes. History is now. The women were made less than human because of being in a particular moment of history. Through no fault of their own. People claimed not to know. The women’s stories were denied. You don’t want to listen? Listen anyhow.

  * * *

  —

  Over the months of the trial, Karla and Andro and William developed an affectionate relationship, enjoyed opera together. I saw them once in Amsterdam at Lucia di Lammermoor. After the trial Karla told me about a turning point in their reasoning that may have come during one of their social times. She said that William had learned to appreciate her relationship with the women witnesses, and had told her that she provoked him to think in new ways. She said, He was not only collegial but sought friendship too which I liked. He shared my ambition in this case.

  She said, We both feared the court would not decide to place the rapes within a larger program of ethnic cleansing. It was a difficult legal bar to meet. We struggled to prove intention.

  Here was the problem, she said. Our case was focused uniquely on Foča even though rape had happened throughout the region. Because of this it was still possible to see the rapes as the depravity of individual men in one place and not as part of a widespread genocidal campaign. As the trial progressed, we sometimes had a cup of coffee together before going home. One of these times, William confessed to me that he was racking his brains trying to figure out what would meet the standard of widespread and systematic attacks on civilians.

  I told him I’d never been exactly sure of the meaning of this English phrase, racking the brains.

  I liked to tease him about language but he was not very accustomed to language play. So he answered seriously, It means tortured stretching.

  I laughed and told him that it was exactly what I too had been suffering.

  I told him that in the Srebrenica trial that was being conducted at the same time, patterns were becoming clear to me. There were three tactics in ethnic cleansing: kill a portion of people, beat a portion of people and rape the women. Life becomes so unbearable that anyone alive tries to escape. The intended result is that all the people leave.

  William said, And so, in Foča, we know men were murdered, others were beaten and the women were raped over and over. In a single year, the entire Moslem population of the town was murdered, imprisoned or left.

  Suddenly, from our refined articulation of the pattern, a new pattern appeared. It was our epiphany moment in th
is trial when, aha! we saw what we had been searching for.

  We could finally see that the rape camps—throughout the region—were part of widespread and systematic attacks on civilians, and were not just the idiosyncratic behaviour of a few men in Foča.

  We had finally stepped back together to see the larger picture. We had finally articulated a pattern that now appeared obvious. Rape was not about war booty or spoils. Rape was part of a widespread attack meant to result in the extermination of a people. Ethnic cleansing. It seems so obvious now. But for us at the time it was a consciousness shift. A new idea. And so obvious that we were certain we could make it hold up.

  The law seeks truth but it does not define truth. People define truth. Now we had to take this truth to court.

  * * *

  —

  I often made sketches of Dragić’s eyes. The eyelids drooped, as if he could doze with his eyes open, like a bored boy at the back of the classroom. When he was called to speak, his eyes were unnaturally open, two burning stones in bloodshot snow. He only relaxed when he spoke about military leadership. His eyes knew how to adjust to mountain darkness and how to threaten men into submission.

  Lieven told me Dragić had no friends in the detention centre. He lifted weights and watched television. Of course he did not fit in with the generals and politicians. I asked what else there was to do. Lieven said some detainees liked working with clay and made primitive figurines of animals and roses. But not Dragić.

  Lieven said, You do not have to worry about what they do.

  He put his hands around my waist and I asked, But does he talk with no one?

  He likes to smoke. I’m not supposed to talk about these things, especially to the media.

  I am not media.

  You will write about this trial. It is why you are here. Your friend does little, Goat, lies on his bed. He is a woesteling.