Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  We settled in Sarajevo like it was our home and within hours I refamiliarized myself with the streets, the alleys, the buildings, the views of the river, even though much of it was so changed: Some parts were uncannily smooth and fresh as if just emerged from the ground, which they were, some were crooked and slashed in a toothless grin from the war damage. We stopped at a little café called Pod Lipom, “under the lime tree,” and the owner, a beautiful sultry dark-haired woman, laughed at us sweetly as we entered. The evening was light and laughter was quivering in the air as if no suffering of any kind had ever touched the city. We drank hot lemonade and ate warm polenta and felt heavenly from the golden repast. “It’s good to be in Sarajevo tonight,” I said and her laugh widened and she said back to me: “Yes, it is.” This new Sarajevo emerging from the rubble had even more warmth than I remembered, the quivering beauty and sweetness of a creature that had come out at the other end of a long dark tunnel of death and was stretching languorously as it rediscovered life and its balminess. The next day we would start our search—or, as Natalia liked to refer to it, “our investigation.”

  The golden Sarajevo of our first day was morphing into a harsh and scary one. I was going down many stone steps, down, down between stone walls with the sound of the Miljacka River gurgling nearby. Natalia’s firm and relentless grasp of my hand told me it was not a dream. I wondered what devil possessed me to put myself and Natalia on this path. The first number that Sonja had given me seemed wrong. After many tries someone finally answered: a raspy woman’s voice, unfriendly and almost hostile. She said she didn’t know anyone by that name. I knew she lied. I stood in the street shivering, holding my cell phone like a useless object. Natalia said to be patient, we should try the other number. A woman with a soft voice who sounded almost asleep answered and said to wait. Then she gave us an address and said to go to it.

  In the city center, we met Ferida in a small café. She did her best to appear warm and hospitable, but she seemed remote. She had brought along her nine-year-old daughter, Mira, born on the same day as Natalia. Mira, who spoke English better than her mother, asked Natalia about American bands and singers my daughter had never heard of. Mira laughed at Natalia’s ignorance and asked her if she really lived in America. Natalia held her own and asked Mira if she really lived in Sarajevo and if she knew of an American artist that she had seen in the Hirshhorn Museum with me. The girlish confrontation between our daughters made Ferida and me smile. Ferida said she hadn’t seen Marija in over five years. I didn’t believe her, either, but I was learning to live with half-truths. Ferida didn’t want to talk about the war, what it had been like living among sniper bullets and shells, with no water, no electricity or gas for three years. “We made do,” was all she said. Then with an almost angry tone she also said: “People here want to move on, we all want to move on.” I understood, she didn’t want American tourist Lara Kulicz who had spent the Sarajevo siege years safely cuddled in her American husband’s lush Washington apartment to come now, almost ten years after the war, to gather information and shower compassion. We drank our dark Bosnian coffees and ate our baklavas in silence. After thirty minutes, Ferida excused herself and said she had to go somewhere, and that she was working on an international poets for peace event. She reminded me my country was at war with Iraq, and there were apparently American poets as well who participated in this huge poetry for peace project. I felt guilty, and told her no, I was not engaged in any poetic antiwar activities. As we were saying our good-byes, I grabbed Ferida’s hand, begging her to tell me more about Marija. I saw a warm flicker in her eyes for a brief second but then it disappeared. “There is nothing to tell,” Ferida said. “She survived, that’s what matters. I haven’t seen her in years.” She and Mira said good-bye, leaving Natalia and me in the café.

  Like a descent into some kind of hell we continued on to the next address, below the river down the many stone steps. We crossed the Vrbana Bridge, now also called the Romeo and Juliet Bridge because during the war two young lovers were killed there as they were trying to flee and lay dead in each other’s arms for days. Nobody ventured out to retrieve their bodies because of the relentless snipers. I had just found out that bit of information as I was rushing to the address given by the soft-spoken woman on the phone. A small plaque noted the deaths of the first two casualties of war, two women crossing the bridge on April 5, 1992. April 5, Natalia’s and Mira’s birthdays. As I looked at the plaque a woman stopped to tell us the Romeo and Juliet story. Natalia stared with huge eyes that shone with tears as the woman told us how the girl had crawled on her lover’s dead body after she was shot. The Sarajevo of the lower level was a place of small narrow streets, some still broken down or in reconstruction, closer to the hills where entire neighborhoods had been obliterated by shells and snipers. Farah and Kemal’s house had been farther up the river on one of the hills. But we were going farther and farther down. “Mama, why are we going on this chase, really?” asked Natalia just as I was about to ring the bell to the apartment. “What are you hoping to find?” “Marija, of course,” I said to my little Sherlock Holmes. “Yes, but why do we have to see all these weird people? It’s clear she doesn’t want to be found. I don’t think she is anywhere near here, that’s what I think.” I had a sinking feeling of hopelessness because I knew Natalia was right. It was her traces, not Marija herself that I was following, hoping to understand some of her terrifying journey. I wanted desperately to understand her disappearance into a dark zone of forgetfulness.

  The woman who answered the door looked just as sleepy as she sounded on the phone. She had dark circles around her eyes like she never slept. The sound from another room of a small child whining seemed incongruous with the aged worn-out look of the woman, the cigarette she was smoking as if in a dream, the unkempt aspect of her surroundings. She said my friend had long gone. She didn’t know where, but maybe she was out of the country. I wanted to make sure we were talking about the same person and I asked: “Marija Kurtovic? Beautiful dark-haired woman, right?” “Maybe she was beautiful once,” the woman answered ruthlessly. “Nobody is beautiful anymore, no one who went where she went. But she survived.” That was what Ferida had said, that at least Marija had survived. There was a high price on survival. I knew I couldn’t quite appreciate what that meant. Then she said: “Wait here, I have something.” The sound of the whining child continued, and the apartment seemed to be getting darker. It smelled of burnt meat and something else that reminded me of Farah and Kemal’s house, a sweeter, more merciful smell that was comforting. The overlapping of heavy smells and the cigarette smoke made me feel dizzy, and Natalia started coughing. Natalia was right. This search seemed without purpose. And it was as the result of all the phone calls and visits and stubborn searches that it was happening. I wondered why Sonja had given me this woman’s contact. How was she related to Marija’s life? The woman came back wiping her hands on the yellow apron she wore and was holding a folder with papers in it. Something that looked like a manuscript. “Here, have this. She said if somebody came looking for her, to give this.” “Somebody? Just anybody?” I asked in disbelief. “Yes, anybody, a woman of course, how many people do you think would come looking for her? You must be the one she meant,” the woman said. “She’ll come back someday, that’s what she told me,” she added matter-of-factly. “Who knows if she will, but that’s what she said! When she stopped here last month and left this, she said she’ll be back again. But I won’t be here then. I’m moving away.” I was incredulous. “Do you mean Marija was here a few weeks ago? What exactly did she say?” The woman looked at me blankly. She stood in silence staring at me and smoking in an unearthly calmness. How could it be that Marija was leaving packages and was in correspondence with this woman? Another awkward silence stretched between the strange woman and me, the whining of the child growing louder in the other room. “Good-bye,” she said abruptly, as if she was throwing us out. I held tightly to the folder with the typed pages, the treasure I had
yet to discover.

  Natalia and I walked for a long time, lost on the narrow winding streets bordered by dark forests on the side of the hill or opening in little plazas with parks or yards where children played on the sidewalks or in the narrow alleys. The streets started to become familiar, a corner house that seemed to emerge from a dream, a tiny bridge that needed repair; some of the houses were rebuilt or new, built to look like the old ones, others were still dismantled or under construction, or studded with bullet marks and abandoned. Gardens were overgrown with bare leafless branches coiling around the wrought-iron fences or on the front porches that looked like unkempt hair and gave the neighborhood the face of a place in mourning. Occasionally a rebuilt, fresh-looking house with its stucco walls and perky orange chrysanthemums looked to the autumn sky with an almost spiteful contrast. A corner of my memory opened up like a window to the image of two little girls running around and gorging on fruit, a grandmother with a babushka picking up weeds and fallen apricots in the violet dusk of a summer afternoon.

  I realized I was on Farah and Kemal’s old street. Natalia complained that I squeezed her hand too hard, the mysterious folder with the heavy bunch of papers seemed to weigh a ton, and I felt like a possessed creature on a mission. Babica basca, the Babic’s garden neighborhood. The layout of the streets was in my blood and in my flesh, every cobblestone and every fence, every garden and every pine or chestnut tree. There was the same peachy color of the roof, part of it had been blown off, and the windows were smashed, like a mutilated person that was still uncannily attractive, like a person you wanted to repair and care for and hold in your arms despite the broken limbs and the bleeding wounds. That was Farah and Kemal’s house. Natalia felt my memories and began to cry. In fact she was the only one that cried because I couldn’t. I doubted again the wisdom of dragging my angelic daughter, already traumatized by the separation of her parents, through the ghastly ruins of my past and the gory realities of Marija’s tormented paths. Everyone here had been killed. I held Natalia for a long time as she cried, releasing all the tension and worries she had held in check for my sake, or just to prove how tough and grown-up she was. We walked around the back of the house and sat on the stone bench where Marija and Biljana and I had sat hundreds of times. Everything was overgrown with weeds and ivy, dark red from the cold autumn, the yard covered in yellow and magenta leaves, giving the place a surreal mix of beauty and unbearable sadness.

  Back in our hotel room, we sat in silence, exhausted from the day. Night had sneaked into the room and a distant bell rang like an ominous announcement of something more to come. “It’s Thanksgiving, Mama,” Natalia announced. Yes, back home, I kept saying back home, even though I was in my birth country now, another home that was no longer mine. When I turned to look at Natalia’s face, it was white and glowing in the semi-darkness of the room and staring with terrified eyes. She was reading the package of letters, which I snatched from her hands. I started to read for myself and my blood froze. It was too late, I couldn’t delete from Natalia’s mind whatever she had read from the manuscript. Why was I always a minute too slow to react? Small notes in Marija’s handwriting revealed the stories of the Bosnian women survivors she had gathered to deliver to the Women in Black organization, and also for human rights organizations in the States. The rape camps, hotels, and gymnasiums. The events were depicted right there, directly and explicitly, describing a basement, a dark room, a steel bed in a grungy hotel room, on the floor of a gymnasium. One told the story of a woman who had not been raped, but who had sung day and night all the Serbian songs she knew. The soldiers thought she was crazy and they let her be. Craziness was a safety net. There were other accounts, counting blessings of survival, almost in unanimity. Some sounded almost hopeful. One mother whose daughter had been raped and killed begged for death after having tried to end her life by hanging on a bedsheet turned into a rope, refusing food, and trying to slice her wrists with her own nails. “How much of this did you read, Natalia?” I asked in a barely audible voice, as my own voice was eluding me. “Not much.” I knew she lied. “Just the first couple of pages or so.” We sat in silence again. We fell asleep in each other’s arms. I woke up in the middle of the night, put the covers over Natalia’s sweet sleeping body, and went on reading until dawn. At the end of the Bosnian women’s stories, I found Marija’s notes, which reminded me of the first letters and diary pages she had sent me during the war, only these had a radically different rhythm and tone to them. They were not typed like all the rest, but handwritten in different pens, some clear, others barely legible, and others almost calligraphic. There was no mention of the days or the events in that horrific July, the war, or her family. It was later, while she was recovering, that Marija had written the notes. Her words, I now understood, were not for the Helsinki committee, nor were they for Hassan or the Women in Black. They were for me. In the shuffle of pages that were sometimes out of order and out of chronology, I figured out that Marija was in America, in California, namely in Santa Barbara and later in Los Angeles. She had hurriedly visited Sarajevo a couple of times, to look for something, for someone it seemed, maybe to build new bridges and unearth old ghosts. Just like the woman had said, Marija had visited her a month before. Marija had chosen not to mail me the envelope in Washington. It was as if she knew I would find her pages in the mysterious woman’s house. But how in the world could she have known? How could she have possibly decided to leave that precious package in a forgotten neighborhood of Sarajevo? Maybe she was planning to return and pick them up herself. A big secret was hidden in these pages. Marija was like a bird circling around a nest in mysterious ways.

  I am writing poems of Lara. In the present. It can only be in the present because the past doesn’t exist and neither does the future. The present is a sliver of land between two abysses: the abyss on the right and the abyss on the left. I am in the middle. Lara is with me on this shard of land floating like an aimless island in the universe. Lara has a slender agile body that runs and dances on narrow streets and alleys filled with red flowers hanging from baskets at windowsills. There are always the damn red flowers. I will them into being yellow or beige but they keep coming back to me as red. There are no beige flowers hanging from baskets anywhere, because people think red flowers are so lively and sexy, but for me beige flowers would be rather soothing. When I get out of here I am going to grow a garden of beige azaleas through a process of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering turns something into something else by changing their DNA structure, for instance a pear into a plum pear, a tomato into a cherry tomato, and a Bosnian into a Serb.

  I don’t have a body any longer, it was stolen some time ago. It could be interesting moving around without a body if it wasn’t so boring and if the women taking care of me in this place didn’t keep nagging me to keep eating and drinking and walking for my circulation. There was a time when dying would have been easier, if it hadn’t been for the woman from Semizovac. The woman from Sarajevo. The woman from Potocari. The woman from Banja Luka. One and the same woman kept moving around and moving me around with her from place to place. Then it would have been easy to die, I could have just told her to let me be in one of those houses, rooms she kept moving me to. It takes some effort to die when you really want to and I was too lazy to make myself die, so I lived. And I kept writing poems about Lara to bring some color to my dreary survival.

  Sometimes there were blank pages in Marija’s notes with just stains on them that could have been anything from tears, to coffee, to blood. The blank pages made me squirm with discomfort. From time to time I looked over at Natalia sleeping next to me, in the calm of sleep, and despite her innocent breathing I knew the two of us would never be the same after that journey.

  I am wearing a turquoise necklace and am reading Plato. They are the two things I have from Lara and these are the only things I have other than the gown they put on me. I can no longer remember how I saved these two things from the incident that brought me to this place. I
must have been wearing the necklace and maybe reading Plato at the time. Maybe I was reading the passage about the cave and the people in the cave seeing the shadows of things on the walls of the cave in the light of the fire and taking them for real. One is so often mistaken about what is real and what is not real. But a boot kicking you in your stomach is always real and you can’t mistake it for not real. And you can’t mistake the dead bodies strewn next to you for the images flickering on the walls of a cave.

  The nurse Sonja asks me where I want to walk and I always tell her I want to walk where the copper vendors are. She says there are no more copper vendors since the war, but I insist that there must be at least one copper vendor who’s come back and survived the war. And I am right. Tarik, the copper vendor that Lara and I used to watch in awe as he carved his teapots, tiny bowls, and spoons with the precision of a surgeon and the tenderness of a lover, is still alive.

  At some point toward morning Natalia woke up and stared at me. There was worry and sorrow in Natalia’s eyes but not tears. She had grown up in a few days more than she had in an entire year, she had leaped from childish innocence to sudden adult understanding of the world’s horrors, a transformation too abrupt for her nine-year-old mind and body. But Natalia always surprised and awed me. “Mama, you should really go to sleep, you are going to be a wreck on the plane back tomorrow,” she said, touching my arm. I took her in my arms and followed her advice. We both fell into a deep sleep with no dreams. Both relieved and melancholic to leave Sarajevo, we found ourselves on the plane back home. I returned to Marija’s notes and Natalia read Through the Looking Glass, turning back into the child she had been before the trip. Or maybe she just clung to those bits of childhood before they were all going to be swallowed up in the trials that were awaiting us at home.