Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  I knew exactly when it had happened. I had come home earlier all elated about my classes that day, happy that my professor of political philosophy had found my defense of Machiavelli’s notions of virtue and leadership intriguing. It was a cool and brilliant early-summer day in DC, a rare one of its kind, as summers in Washington were usually miserably hot and humid. I was wearing a light gauzy white dress with red and blue flowers. I felt airy and everything in my life seemed in its right place. Even the news of the war in Bosnia seemed pale and quiet for a short while. When I walked into the house, I was surprised to see that Mark was already home, sitting at the computer in his study, probably working on one of his articles. I didn’t want to disturb him so I started making myself some tea in the kitchen. Suddenly I felt him next to me, watching me as I filled the kettle. He was smiling one of his rare happy smiles. It must have been the article he was working on, I thought. Wallace Stevens sent him into ecstasy every time he worked on one of his poems. But he said: “You look really hot in that dress, Lara!” I had a sudden urge to hold and kiss him, the way I had the first time I met him in the Belgrade café. I liked it so much more when he called me by my name than by the clichéd “babe” and “honey.” I felt bold and sexy and in that moment in our fancy kitchen it felt so right to be in Mark’s arms, pressed against his strong chest. I indulged in my naive immigrant state of mind, the Eastern European girl who got her Marlboro Man, rugged but also intellectual and poetry loving, an American dream come true. Mark actually picked me up and carried me to the sofa in his study. I undressed him with fidgety and eager hands, forgetting about political theories and the war and even Marija. After some time Mark got up from the sofa and brought me my cup of jasmine tea. He was tender and graceful. We sat for a while naked and in silence: me drinking from my tea, him holding me with all the affection he was capable of expressing. There was something to be said about flying to America: “the pursuit of happiness.”

  Then Mark told me that he had begun to help bring Hassan’s wife and children over from Bosnia the following month and could I go with him to Boston to offer company and translation skills to Hassan’s family as they tried to settle into their new life. “It would be nice for Hassan’s wife to have the presence of a woman from her part of the world, wouldn’t it?” I stared at Mark and only said: “Yes, it would be nice for Hassan’s wife to have the presence of a woman who speaks her language.” Mark blushed, quietly put on his pants and buttoned up his shirt and left the room. I looked at my dress negligently thrown on the floor and realized it had the colors of the American flag and for some reason that seemed funny. How could something feel so right one moment and yet be so wrong the next? Mark was both right and wrong for me and that realization seemed like too hard of a nut to crack on that clear summer day when I had just acquired a new ontological status in the large book of lives: I had become a mother.

  On April 5, 1995, I gave birth to an ethereal and perfectly shaped girl whom we called Natalia. It was the third anniversary of the Bosnian war. Marija called me the next day and said she had a feeling I was giving birth and that it was a girl. I was stunned, but then remembered Marija’s craft at feeling events, people, situations as if she had magical powers. Her friend Ferida had also given birth to a girl that same night. She called her Mira, which derived from the word for “peace.” “That should be a good omen, shouldn’t it?” Marija said. “Two girls born on the third anniversary of this hellish war. And by two beloved friends of mine. Maybe there is some hope. These girls will make the world a better place.”

  Her voice quivered with emotion, as if she was on the verge of tears. She told me that she helped deliver Ferida’s baby in her basement during a concert and art exhibit. She gave a huge sigh. Natalia was sleeping blissfully next to me after her morning feeding and I suddenly felt afraid for all of us, for Marija and me, for Natalia and Ferida and her newborn baby girl with the identical birth date as my own daughter, for our worlds, our bodies, and our lives. I didn’t understand a thing from the description of Marija delivering Ferida’s baby in the basement of their house during a concert and art exhibit. “Everything is possible in times of war, Lara, you know. Don’t worry, it was actually fun. And it’s not all that bad. I’m getting a lot of sleep.” She was lying of course. I knew that it was just that bad.

  In the end, my primitive maternal side won over the rest of me and my daughter took complete possession of my life. I stopped worrying about Marija and took her for her word that all was not “that bad” and she was doing all right. Mark surrounded us with a pleasant and comforting protectiveness without being too intrusive. What with the constant nursing, changing, putting to sleep, waking up three or four times a night, my mind became wrapped in a gooey numbness that rejected with stubbornness any input from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Machiavelli, Marx, Hegel, the whole lot of them. I postponed my comprehensive exams for the following year and moved through my beloved Washington with panache, proudly strolling my porcelain-skinned green-eyed baby daughter up and down those busy streets. I was now a full-fledged stay-at-home mom myself and didn’t mind it too much, except for when I caught a glimpse of a sassy woman in pumps rushing to work, alive and excited about her day. Some days I felt like a mail bride, prize wife, something that Mark got on a trip to the Balkans. On other days, I almost enjoyed my lazy days filled with parenting and household duties, beautiful things and ethnic foods. And still there were occasional other days, when I wanted to get on a plane and flee to where the war was.

  Toward the beginning of that summer there was news that President Clinton was going to order an intervention to stop the war in Bosnia. The region of Srebrenica had been a site of indiscriminate mass killings, and other parts of the country were seething with mass rapes of women. The last time I had heard from Marija was July 4. She had called to jokingly wish me happy birthday for America. She told me that her father’s family had gone back to the region near Srebrenica in Semizovac, where they had a farm, and that she and her parents, Farah and Kemal, were all going to join them the next day. She said the UN declared the region a safe area and they needed to see the rest of their family and help them out. “I’m sick of living under the snipers’ rule. And it’s safe… or safer,” she said tentatively. “Didn’t you hear about it? So I’m packing up and off I go,” she laughed. “Be careful Marija, please, promise?” “I promise. Here, I promise on your turquoise necklace, I’m wearing it right now.” She laughed and hung up. Something felt awfully wrong and unfinished. But I felt helpless. I knew something new and dark had entered my life and it would change me forever.

  After that last phone conversation an intolerable silence spread between Marija and me. Whenever I talked to my parents I got mixed messages: One day they were telling me that things were calming down, the next that something terrifying was going on in Srebrenica, Potocari, and Banja Luka. Every time I asked about Marija they said there was no news from her or her parents. “They are probably fine,” they said with hesitation. But I knew better. It was a silence that smelled like death and blood. Nobody was answering at the newspaper offices, either.

  I went back to studying for my doctorate, took my comprehensive exams, and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the role of women leaders in the “newly freed” Eastern European states. My professor wanted me to refer to these states as the “new democracies” but knowing too well what went on in my native “newly freed Eastern European states,” the word democracy seemed like a cruel joke. Even the words newly freed seemed altogether sadistic and ludicrous. But my professor insisted that I choose one comprehensive term to refer to all of them, even as I kept explaining that just the fact we had all been crammed out there in what Western Europe had conveniently relegated to the realm of the “Eastern Bloc” and the “Iron Curtain” did not mean we were all the same, it certainly did not mean that all those states had achieved equal levels of democratic governance, nor did it mean they were all “freed.” Some got freed only to start chaining and massacring others.
“I know, I know,” the professor would say, nodding his graying head at me with a bemused smile as if I were telling him the joke of the year. “But just for simplicity’s sake, go with that title,” he said. “You can explain all that in the body of your dissertation.”

  Whenever he said “body” he would look at me with a prolonged stare measuring me from head to toes as if he was going to grade me for that “examination.” I always had a queasy feeling I tried to ignore when I left his office. Surprisingly, he went along with my new topic, the role of women in the Eastern European governments. He was apparently a feminist when it came to ideas and theories, even though I’d heard stories of times when he’d sexually harassed his female students, maybe to make up for the boredom of being a feminist in theory, I thought.

  In my dreams I saw Marija running ahead of me in a tunnel filled with water like the one she had described that Bosnians had built as an escape route and that was leading to the Sarajevo airport. She always melted in the darkness at the end of the tunnel. There was no light there, only raw-smelling blood. Another dream was of Marija in front of a mirror fixing her hair. I could not see her actual face but only its reflection in the mirror. She was going through an elaborate hair combing and fixing, braiding, teasing, the works. Her hair was shiny black and stunning as always. Then she turned around and her face was ashen and filled with holes, a terrifying vision of death and decay. I would wake up screaming from my dreams and with a great desire to get on a plane and visit the Balkans and see everything with my own eyes. The last time I called the newspaper I waited for five minutes until the ringing stopped by itself and a metallic tone took its place. I called her parents’ number, her grandparents’ number. I even called Ferida’s number and there was only ringing with no answer at the other end of the line.

  Washington, DC, and Belgrade. Revelations

  1998–2000

  I missed my parents and my sister, Biljana, and the heavy smells in our Belgrade apartment. The feeling that Marija had been swallowed up inside a dark hole paralyzed me. But Natalia and her incredibly clear greenish eyes telling me that she needed me gave me a center and a hold on reality during those months and years. By the time Natalia was three and talking in full sentences, more than three years had passed since the end of the war in Bosnia and I decided that Marija was dead. The letters from Sarajevo no longer came. None of her friends, the ones whose numbers I still had, ever answered the phone. After hearing what had happened in Srebrenica, Tuzla, Banja Luka, and other places throughout Bosnia, I wished for her to have died a quick death in a red explosion like the ones in my dreams or by a sniper bullet in the street as she was running to her newspaper reporting job.

  I was now teaching political philosophy to college students, carrying a full load of mothering duties, and entertaining our friends on weekends. Yet there was a constant and painful ringing in my head, ears, soul like the sound made by wind through an empty hallway. I had heard from Mark that Hassan was running a newspaper in a suburb of DC in northern Virginia and that he never went back to Bosnia. At first he reported or wrote articles about the situation in Sarajevo, but soon it seemed that his sources weakened, or even more likely, news about a civil war in a tiny faraway country in the Balkans wasn’t hugely popular among the rich people and politicians living in the vicinity of the capital and eventually the news about the war disappeared altogether. It became clear to me that Mark had used the Bosnian war and his so-called activist work only to advance his career in America, his aura of the politically conscious academic who not only wrote brilliant articles and enchanted his students with his charismatic lectures but was also involved in what everybody called “the real world.” He wrote powerful political letters to the New York Times and cared about the suffering of people in remote Balkan countries. How desperately Marija must have wanted to escape the nightmare of her “real world,” I thought. How painful it must have been for her to see her newspaper director being swooped up across the Atlantic directly into the world’s most prestigious university by none other than my own husband.

  I was talking to Biljana more often now and the sound of her voice, always upbeat, optimistic, and positive no matter what misery was lurking around her, would give me an invigorating shot of hope. Biljana was specializing in art and dance at the University of Belgrade and got parts in all the musicals and shows at the university and in professional companies around the city. She was becoming restless and talked more often about wanting to come to the States. At first I pretended I didn’t get what she was alluding to, until one day when she actually said it bluntly: “Lara, what the hell is wrong with you that you are not getting it? Can’t you just bring me over? I want to come to America, I’m sick of this fucking country and this fucking city.” I burst out laughing and said: “Well, if you put it that way, I’ll see what I can do. Why don’t you start by trying to get a visa for the States? I’ll do all the necessary formalities at my end. How is that?” “You mean it?” she screamed with joy. “No, I was just teasing you to see how you’d react. Of course I mean it. Just get your dancing butt into motion then! Only one thing: How about Mama and Papa?” “How about them?” she asked, pretending not to get it. “You know what I mean, how will they take it, having both their daughters gone?” “They’ll be just fine, Larichka, they’ve even told me to try leaving if I could, that they didn’t see much hope for my career and future in this country. And you know how tied to each other they are, they’ll be fine without us, as long as they have each other.” Biljana’s words, both wise and blunt, made me realize that what I had been waiting for was precisely that: someone with whom I could be as deliciously enraptured as my parents had always been with each other. That someone was not Mark.

  I promised Biljana I would help her come to the States, to Washington, to Connecticut Avenue duplex heaven. What a boon after all to have my own flesh and blood, my beautiful red-haired nymph sister next to me and be able to talk my mother tongue and reminisce about our messy native part of the world. Whenever Biljana kept saying “my country” or “this country” or “our country” I would have an initial reaction of wondering: What country? Whose country? Oh, that country, the one that has been decimating, massacring, raping its neighbors, Sarajevo, my best friend, and her family? That country? That was certainly not my country. In that quick second I experienced a surge of joy for having immigrated to America, and Mark seemed like a pretty great deal despite his cold and even duplicitous nature. He seemed like a godsend actually. I had no birth country as far as I was concerned, only an adoptive utopian, idealized country. As for my native country, I wouldn’t even know what to call it. Was it Serbia, was it Yugoslavia, or was it Republika Srpska? None of that touched an affectionate chord and the third one actually sent shivers of terror throughout my body anytime I heard it pronounced. Whenever people asked me where I was from, I would tell them I was from Sarajevo. I lied about my birth country with impunity and named the city, not the country. Sarajevo was city and country in one and I preferred siding with the victims than with the genocidal Serbs at any moment of my waking or sleeping hours.

  Mark went along with my idea of bringing my sister over with no resistance. That was what confused and threw me off balance about Mark: Whenever I took it for granted that he would go along with something without a blink, we ended up in a huge argument that lasted for days and poisoned my life to the point where I cursed my white bridal gown and those nuptial vows in the Orthodox church in the center of Belgrade. It could be anything, a one-hundred-dollar difference in the monthly fees for one day-care center for Natalia versus another one, or whether we should invite the McElroys or the Bryans for dinner on Saturday night. And then there were those times like now when he acted like the most generous and easygoing guy in the universe: just like the sexy American I remembered in the Belgrade tavern when we first met.

  Biljana arrived at Dulles airport a week before Christmas in 1998. The six years since our separation had molded her into a stunning, voluptuous you
ng woman. She treaded the ground with such steadiness, precision, and grace, as if expecting that at every second the world would be her audience, her adoring public. Which it often was. As soon as she emerged from the gate at international arrivals people stared at her, turned their heads and twisted their necks to catch a glimpse of her as if she were a celebrity who had just landed from a Caribbean trip. Some failed to see their own relatives coming out, so enthralled were they by the apparition of my younger sister and her flaming curls bouncing on her back, the cavalcade of scarves and ribbons around her neck and hanging from her hair, and the colored layers of sweaters. As for me, our childhood and teenage years rushed into my head like a torrent, sweeping away everything in its path. For a few moments I even forgot Natalia who, almost four and a stunning apparition herself, was jumping up and down and asking every second when Aunt Biljana was going to come. Our reunion was every bit as dramatic and colorful as Biljana’s appearance. Tears flooded our faces, screams emerged spontaneously from our throats, sighs and moans from our heaving chests. Natalia was confused when she saw us crying and started howling and pulling at my coat, thinking that something awful had just happened. But Biljana immediately recovered, picked up Natalia with one arm, and started talking to her in Serbian and telling her what a beauty she was. Natalia was transfixed and although she did not understand one syllable of Serbian, she stared and smiled at Biljana as if she had just met her fairy godmother who happened to speak an incomprehensible magical language. Biljana breathed in the American air, took in the dreary sight in front of the airport where buses, shuttles, and taxis moved in a continuous flow poisoning every metric cube of atmosphere, and said: “Hm, rather ugly but exciting, I can live here!”

  Biljana’s presence in our house made everything harder and easier at once, sweeter and more raucous, more interesting and more painful. The air quivered, the atmosphere brightened up, but the constant swinging between Serbian and English, between stories of “home” and the realities of my new “home,” marriage, child care, and work routines, between Mark’s increasing passive-aggressive moodiness and Biljana’s intensely manic personality, placed a huge strain on my psyche and made me feel like a paragon of calm and sanity by comparison with either of the two adults around me. The feeling of something out of balance seeped through me at all hours of the day. I had secretly thought that Biljana’s presence would soothe Marija’s absence instead of sharpening it. But it became clear that Marija was not replaceable by anyone even if that someone was my diva sister, and in fact her presence incited torrents of memories from Sarajevo, Belgrade, our childhood and youth that had stayed somewhat dormant before her boisterous arrival. I now yearned for our trio of girlish exuberance and mischief as we flashed across the streets of Sarajevo in our mad runs, or as we sat and talked about everything under the stars in my parents’ apartment in Belgrade. And in that trio of our youth, the three musketeers that we thought we were, it was Marija who had always brought the clamor of magical adventure. Without her, a gaping void of loneliness opened on all sides and gave a hollow ring to our voices. Hello, hello, is anybody there, there, there? I kept hearing in my head, in the hallways of my memory. Marija, are you there? I wanted to say out loud sometimes. Her absence was steely and I was cold all the time.