When Natalia spoke, her voice was crystalline, and the room was silent. You had to listen to her, and listen carefully. The judge asked all the questions himself, not the lawyers. His voice became almost tender. He was a tough guy with a kind heart, I thought. He asked Natalia if she had any preference about who she wanted to spend more time with. She said no, she loved us both the same. He asked her about her cello lessons. She told him about her classes and the pieces she was working on. What would her ideal living arrangement be given that her parents were going to live separately now, the judge asked her. “You mean like my dream living situation?” I watched her face unblinkingly and noticed a quick expression of pain spread over her. She looked so delicate, I thought she might break into a thousand small pieces. At that moment, I was cracking, too. If she broke I would turn to dust. The judge smiled and said that yes, that was what he meant. “It would be fun to live with Aunt Biljana and my cousins Amanda and Melissa and Uncle Rick and see my parents on weekends for now. For a while, until they both calm down, that would be my dream living situation, Your Honor. I still love both my parents but right now things are sort of crazy in the house with the divorce and all.” The judge released Natalia from the stand and wished her good luck with her cello playing. He thanked her for her help. “It wasn’t to help, it was to tell the truth or something.” She smiled and stepped out of the room in her pretty sunflower-yellow dress.
“You should try to settle, Lara,” said Diana in low whispers after the judge ordered a recess. “I think neither of you is going to get full custody so it’s better at least to attempt to come to an agreement, this way for whatever is left unresolved at least the judge has seen you are both reasonable people and are thinking of what’s best for Natalia. Then he will most likely rule in favor of who is showing most reason.” “But she said she wants to live with Biljana,” I said naively. “This is not a wish-granting institution, Lara, and you know it. It’s a court of law, the judge has to rule according to the way he thinks will best serve the child.” Diana told me I should settle for split physical and legal custody. “Lots of parents settle with these kinds of arrangements these days, you could go for one week each, split vacation time and alternate holidays. She’s tough, your Natalia, she might take this better than being yanked unevenly in one direction, and the novelty of the living situation might offer her some excitement, too.” I told Diana that was fine, I’d go with that, if Mark accepted. But what if he didn’t? “Let’s see what happens, and we’ll deal then,” said Diana and hurried to the other end of the room where Mark and his lawyers were deliberating.
Mark did not accept my proposal. He stuck to his initial claim. The judge looked disappointed, and even angry. Then he ordered equally split legal and physical custody between the parents with reasonable visitation rights for both my sister and mother. I had underestimated that owl-faced judge who stared at all the witnesses with a mad fixity. America was not like Serbia after all, Justice was sometimes possible, and as in the painting, Justice meant keeping things in balance, bare-breasted or not. Then the judge spoke to each of us, addressing Mark first. He told Mark he needed to cool off from his anger and hurt, it was human to feel that way, but it was hurting Natalia, too. He couldn’t be the best parent he could be if he did not deal with his anger and stop tearing the child in two in order to punish the mother. What had happened between us was solely between the two of us and should not affect the child. He waited to hear Mark say that he understood and he would act accordingly. Mark was shocked, and began to speak in a whisper. But then the judge raised his voice and asked Mark to speak up. That was when I experienced a sharp sense of satisfaction. Mark said meekly: “Yes, Your Honor, I get it, I understand.”
But then when the judge turned to me he changed his tone and spoke to me harshly and disdainfully. He told me I should be ashamed for having caused such havoc in my family. Didn’t I know that marriage was forever? I had taken vows and I had caused great pain to many people with my reckless behavior. He had scolded Mark but it was a man-to-man scolding, like two guys wrestling and then shaking hands after the match. But he talked to me like I was the fallen woman that all the lawyers had tried to portray in their statements and questioning. I now could understand that “liberty and justice for all” meant that if you were a man, and the judge was a man, you most likely got the thicker slice of that frosted cake called Justice. What irked me most in his statement was the marriage foreverness bit. It sounded like next he would order me to believe in the afterlife or in God. When he asked me if I understood, I said loudly: “Yes, sir, Your Honor, I understand.” I wanted to sound militaristic, not to give him the satisfaction to think he had crushed me under his heavy and Just step. I cast one last look at the space in which I had spent the most excruciating eight hours of my life. Lady Justice seemed to wink at me as I left the courtroom. Her exposed boob even seemed to be shining, and I finally allowed myself to laugh.
When I arrived home that evening, depleted of all energy and willpower, a large envelope from Hassan was waiting in the mail. At first I thought it was for Mark, but it was my name that was clearly spelled out in capital letters on the envelope. I breathed deeply as I opened the package, which contained another envelope on which my name was written in Marija’s handwriting. Inside the second envelope was a new wad of letters addressed to me and more notes from her diary. Almost forgetting about the day in court, I sat down in my study and began to devour the pages from Marija until Natalia walked in, and I closed them. She of course knew exactly what they were and climbed into bed next to me. I would continue after she fell asleep.
With another spring gliding in after a winter that looked just like the spring, I had to leave the oppressive blues of Santa Barbara and move to Los Angeles. I had to find a place to live and contact Sally’s connections, in case I wanted to work. Los Angeles’s maze of highways was almost uplifting. I found an apartment near the university with no view of the sea, just trees. I had a craving for trees and dirt as if they lacked from my diet. I craved for copper and snow. I was yearning for tree roots and sidewalks. The Los Angeles residential street provided some of those. Sally’s connections found me work on one of the Hollywood sets. I did freelance writing and reporting for one of the local newspapers. A few times I even reported on a local TV station. I was supposed to bring in my Eastern European perspective to the happenings on the Hollywood set. They loved my accent and my demeanor, they said, I should just be myself. That made me laugh since there was no longer such a being as “myself,” but only a palimpsest of bits of myself carefully arranged in a colorful simulacrum. I was light and fake like everybody else in Hollywood and it felt good for a little while. Nobody would have really wanted me to be myself, the hard-core unadorned me, if they had any idea who I really was.
Then the woman from Sarajevo called and asked if I was thinking of going back anytime soon. She was getting tired of doing the work in my place. I told her we had an understanding and it wasn’t time yet. Just a little bit longer and I would call her back. She said she needed more money, she had to move to a new place and had no money and it wasn’t safe anymore. I told her I would send her more money, if only she could be patient for a little while longer. It wouldn’t be long before I would go back to Sarajevo and take care of everything. She agreed and said she would wait for me but might still move. As I was talking to her on the phone in the living room of my new LA duplex apartment I saw that there was a tree with azaleas right in front of my window. They weren’t red but white, what a relief. For once, the azaleas that followed me everywhere had lost their color. A group of children were playing outside my window, a rare occurrence on LA streets. They spoke Spanish and sounded joyous.
Suddenly the huge hole in my womb felt full and the Spanish of the children playing in front of my window sounded Bosnian, which really was Serbo-Croatian. Languages morphed into one another and so did the azaleas and the snow and the children and Los Angeles and Sarajevo. Lara and Marija and Biljana were all play
ing amid scaffolding and chasing each other to see who got first to the highest point on the scaffolding of the National Library reconstruction. Everybody was building something in the world and the crew on the Hollywood set that I was working on three days a week was building a version of Sarajevo during the siege for a movie with Angelina Jolie. They were building shelled, mortar-hit, and blown-up Sarajevo out of Hollywood materials. The woman from Sarajevo kept talking on the phone in a language I could no longer understand, maybe it was Albanian or Turkish. It could have been anything. As I was looking outside my window and watching Lara jump hula hoops on Angelina Jolie’s set imitating wartime Sarajevo and as the red in the azaleas was quickly withdrawing leaving snowy-white fleshy petals behind, the hole in my womb grew to the size of a basketball, to the size of a grown baby. I knew the time had come to get in touch with Lara and go back and finish what I had started as the woman had said. It was time to take possession of my child. The one I had given birth to in a state of semi-coma somewhere in one of the houses where the woman kept hiding me that year. It was time for me to come to terms with that reality and embrace it. It was time to keep my promise to the woman. Remember everything and own it like it was actually happening in my own life. Enough of the emotional blunting and all the psychoanalytic crap. I called Lara. A man who was probably Mark and had a stern voice answered and said, “Hello, hello, who is it?” I hung up and I called Biljana in Chicago. “Hello, Biljana, this is Marija. Remember me? I’m back from the dead and I’d like to speak to Lara. I wonder if you could give me Lara’s cell phone number.” Just like that. It wasn’t hard at all.
I sat on the bed and stared at the wall in a state of stupor. Marija had a child. The news seemed unreal. Bizarre questions were swarming in my head with a deafening clamor: Whose child was it? Why in the world did she have a child? Were her notes really meant for me? Was this her way of letting me know this formidable news? Natalia had woken up and was looking at me. “Mama, what’s wrong?” But I couldn’t answer, my mouth stayed clenched. Natalia took the letter from my hand and began to read. What difference would another bit of traumatic news make now to my daughter who had already glimpsed a world that most American children her age had no idea existed? I remembered Marija’s collected stories of all of the women when Natalia and I sat in the Sarajevo hotel room. The women who became pregnant in the camps, or were made to become pregnant, some miscarried, others aborted gruesomely, many dying in the process. Others gave birth to dead babies that they threw in the trash, others gave birth to live babies and gave them away. There were other women still who carried their babies to term, gave birth to live babies, and then wanted to keep them. Apparently Marija was part of this last group, even though it seemed she had at first given her baby away. Marija was her own group. “A child is a child, Mama,” Natalia said quietly. But I possessed neither Natalia’s innocence nor her luminous wisdom. For me a child was not always just a child, particularly in Marija’s case. I was terrified.
We had to divide everything in half, not just Natalia’s custody. We were to sell the duplex and split the profits, savings, and assets, and divide the furniture. We each kept our own cars, me my blue Chevy (I had always dreamed of owning an American car while in Serbia) and Mark his black Honda (he boycotted American cars). The scales of justice were balanced to a T, even if I wasn’t. I had thought I would calm down and settle into my new divorced life, with everything in it split in half. But it turned out that until we found a buyer for the house the three of us still had to live under the same roof. With everything now final, and without even a tiny crumb of hope that everything would be the same as before, life was still hard under our roof. This is how it was when wars were started, I thought to myself.
When the phone would sometimes ring, I’d startle thinking maybe it was Marija. But it was never her. Once there had been a call and a cavernous silence at the other end. I now blamed myself for not having felt it, known it, and just said: I know it’s you, Marija, where are you? Let’s meet! Something direct and simple like that. I must have been gathering papers for my divorce trial or correcting Politics 101 exams or doing homework with Natalia. There had been other unanswered calls, too, wrong numbers, weird soliciting. I’d never paid attention to them, I just hung up. Once in the evening when the phone rang, Mark and I both ran to the living room to pick it up. I got there first and said a loud “hello.” But there was no answer, just a long silence, the sound of breathing and maybe the sound of soft cries. Or maybe I imagined that. “Hello, hello, is anybody there?” I kept saying, just like in the dreams and visions I had. I was certain that it was only a matter of weeks before Marija and I would see each other. Her notes seemed pretty clear on that. I called Hassan and asked him when he got the package of Marija’s notes, in what form had they arrived, were there any other letters with it, and why him? “We’ve been in communication for quite some time,” he said. His voice was warm, just like it had been in his office in northern Virginia. “I sent you the notes because they came to me sealed, inside a larger envelope, with a note from Marija saying they were for you. All the other papers she sends are postwar materials and human rights stuff. If you want to come by the office and talk, you know you’re always welcome.” I thanked Hassan but I knew I wouldn’t go. Any attempts to find her in any phone book in Santa Barbara or Los Angeles were fruitless. And though I knew I could find Sally Bryant, I didn’t want to get to Marija in that way. I wanted to leave it to Marija’s own orchestrations. Some more time had to pass for me to be ready, and Marija, too. Our trajectories had to match, to come into perfect accord across the American skies.
I started calling Karim again, to fill the void of postdivorce. His voice still sounded melodic and sexy, streaming into my ear in raspy rivulets of French vowels. He asked me to come to Paris for the same conference we had been at a year before, just when the war was starting. The divorce had been finalized and I would think about coming, I told him, although I was nervous about my tenure. He said he really missed me, to please come, that he was scheduled to speak at the conference anyway. It would be mad on our part to miss the occasion to see each other, he said, “une vraie folie,” true madness. One April morning as I watched the delicate petals of the dogwoods in front of our house, I decided I would go to the conference. I didn’t need to have a paper to present, I was free. I booked my ticket to Paris. I needed to close accounts in all the areas of my life, tidy up all the compartments that composed it like a wobbly house of cards.
We Won’t Always Have Paris
APRIL 2004
I made all the arrangements for my trip to Paris. The political science conference was to take place the weekend at the end of one of Mark’s weeks with Natalia, so I planned to leave earlier and spend a few extra days with Karim in Paris before it began. My fantasy continued where it left off the year before. Karim and Natalia and Arina and I one day would become some kind of elegant family that people would watch with interest, wondering whether we were the parents of both children or which child was whose. It was my Hollywood way of repairing the cosmic lack of synchronicity of having met too late, too married, and with children of our own.
When I told Mark I was going to be gone at a conference the third week in April, he smirked just a little. We still lived under the same roof, and I wished our new living arrangement could finally start, our fifty–fifty of everything, our lives of halves and new freedoms, when I wouldn’t feel as though I had to ask for Mark’s permission to see my lover. But house sales were slow, and our real estate agent said we might have to wait until the summer to have a good offer. Natalia didn’t say anything when I told her I was going to Paris for the conference. She put on her impenetrable look and stared at the wall. When were we going to go to Chicago to see Aunt Biljana, she wanted to know. I changed the subject back and asked her what I should bring her from Paris. She thought for a few minutes, her face changing from impenetrable to dreamy, and her green clear eyes became softer and more watery. Then she said she wanted
a painting: “A painting like the one from the artist who did your portrait in Paris before, Mama, remember?” Everything was well stored in her mind.
“A painting of what, Natalia?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” she answered lightly, “just a painting made by one of those street artists, could they make one of me if you showed them a picture of me, Mama?”
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