She now stood in front of me in her black-and-white floral design dress with the bright yellow silky headband holding back her thick glossy black hair and uncovering her high smooth forehead. She was so beautiful that it didn’t seem right. I felt shreds and shreds of my heart and memory become loose and fall off me like I was an animal shedding its skin. We were two little specks of sugary innocence, still left from the two cans of condensed milk, flying through the cold galaxies. What came soon after that was indescribable and filled with the stench of raw human flesh and deafening screams. Marija stood in front of me having walked through all that, with a glass eye and a yellow headband and an irresistible laugh. She said: “You either survive something like that or you don’t, you know. And then if you don’t die you might as well survive with flair.” Then unexpectedly she embraced me with such fervor that I lost my breath. When I recovered it, we were both laughing, but really it felt like we were crying. Also like some new kind of laughter for people who had traveled to Apocalypse and back.
Marija sat on a bench in the fake street in the make-believe Paris and produced a perfect Gala apple from her purse and bit into it voraciously with a sparkling set of teeth. She offered me some and I bit into her apple, trying to match her hunger. It felt refreshing and soothing. I started to have the uncanny feeling that my person was finally starting to take a definite shape and contour. I was startled and surprised every second on that day, which seemed to last forever, and was irrevocably falling in love with Marija all over again. Marija said: “You know what people say, that you have to remember the past so you don’t repeat the same mistakes in the future? Look… it’s not true that people remember and then they don’t commit atrocities anymore because they remember the past and don’t want to repeat it. On the contrary, they have the model of past carnages and they keep perfecting that model… they do! What happens actually is that people become even more desensitized, they experience aesthetic pleasure, they cry, they feel good about themselves because they emote in front of a film about the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. That’s not the kind of make-believe that we need, because it is real, it doesn’t need to be made up, those horrors actually do happen to real people.” She paused and breathed deeply. I took her hand and held it tightly. It was incredibly warm, like a bird that had just landed exhausted in my palm.
“I’m not saying it should all be forgotten,” she went on with new energy and a swift move of her head, “but it shouldn’t be remembered this way, like not forget it but not remember it, either. I don’t know exactly which way. Tell the truth without telling a story, you know what I mean? I think they should stop making Holocaust movies, and Rwanda genocide movies, and if anybody ever starts making a movie about the Bosnian war again like Angelina Jolie’s sappy movie about Bosnian women in the rape camps, I’ll set myself on fire right in the middle of fucking Universal Studios. I think we should start a new slate—a clean, fresh, sparkling new slate of life and history—erase the memory of carnage instead of keeping it.”
Marija circumvented time in her speech and never said before what or since when, she just used the words before and since and after indefinitely, letting them hang in a fluid past. After our talk at Warner Bros. Studios she stopped using those words altogether, shrouding us in a cooling silence of forgetful dis-remembering. It wasn’t really like forgetting everything. You remembered it but it didn’t touch you and you said farewell to it. I also knew that when Marija said she would set herself on fire she didn’t use that as a metaphor but would actually bathe in gasoline and strike the match. I was praying that Hollywood wouldn’t be so misguided as to think of making another movie about the Bosnian war anytime soon.
When we were driving back to my hotel I looked at Marija and her profile was a living statue. I couldn’t get enough of watching her, listening to her, breathing in her life energy. The shape and sound of her letters that I had breathlessly read in the Sarajevo hotel till dawn and then the last installment only a month earlier started growing around me like living creatures that explained Marija to me through a fantastical pantomime. Now it all came alive as I was watching her shift gears, look in the rearview mirror, look at me and smile her movie-star smile, listen to her languorous voice, like no other voice I knew. “Marija, what kind of things were you sending to Hassan?” I asked suddenly. “What human rights and postwar materials was he talking about?” She didn’t turn around to look at me, but stared straight ahead at the winding road: “Information about the war criminals, those who are still running free. And accounts of women from the camps. So the world knows. That’s all. I gathered hundreds of stories from women who had been in the camps when I was in the rehabilitation center in Sarajevo. At first I didn’t know what to do with them, but then I thought they had to have told them to me for some reason. I wrote them down almost despite my will, mechanically, and when I got out I thought that at some point when I felt a tiny bit more normal I was going to reveal them to the world. I think they actually helped me recover. Most of them were more horrific than my own. I’m telling you, I was among the lucky ones. That’s all.”
Her face was smooth, not a line, not a single frown or wrinkle, almost like the smoothness of death, only she was so alive. “That’s all,” I repeated, and laughed. She had been doing both humanitarian and investigative work, even though she hated both those words. Marija lived and acted outside the boundaries of common words. She had clues and hints of the whereabouts of Radovan Karadzic, one of the three masterminds of the genocidal war, who had also happened to consider himself a poet while killing Bosnians. “Whatever was lost in world poetry was gained in the art of genocide,” joked Marija unflinchingly. I shuddered. Her two goals were justice and truth; that was all. She had some clues as to where Karadzic might have been hiding. A woman she knew had recognized him in a village near Belgrade. “Only after that I received death threats while in Sarajevo. So I’m going to stop my search for Karadzic and only worry about my son from now on. He could be in real danger. As for the rat Karadzic, he will eventually get caught and be brought to justice, I know it. For now we have to get my son and bring him back here as soon as possible, you see that, my dear Lara, don’t you?”
The dark universe that had opened to me as I went down the steps into the passages of Sarajevo with Natalia only half a year before was now becoming darker, as if a sun eclipse was threatening to darken the entire planet. I had anticipated this new and final adventure—my American years with Marija, a new world, a new me, a new life of fullness—as the other side of grief and death. But right now it still all tasted of raw blood and I wasn’t ready to face the uncharted terror. I was still so new to Marija’s world and there was so much that didn’t make sense. When I asked her about the trip to Sarajevo, the notes she left for me with the woman in that broken-down neighborhood, she said she had no idea I was going to go to Sarajevo, she had just left the notes of the women’s stories in a hurry for Ferida to pick up and send to the Helsinki human rights committee and by mistake included notes from her diary, too. “The woman must have gotten confused and thought you were Ferida, since you were the first person to come by,” she said. “Who is this woman, Marija?” I asked, feeling sick from so much confusion and secrecy. “Just some woman,” she said and then was quiet for a while, and I could tell she was hiding something. The letters that she sent Hassan, she said, had indeed been meant for me. She had wanted to make sure I got those notes. She wanted to prepare me about the child, she explained. “And plus, I don’t know, I somehow wanted to delay our meeting, I was buying time until I was fully formed, you know, ready to face you and to face myself as reflected in your eyes, Lara!” She abruptly pulled onto a side street lined with elegant white houses and sycamores. She looked straight at me as if truly trying to reflect herself in my eyes. I only hoped the image reflected back to her was as beautiful and majestic as I saw her in that moment.
“Look, I lost my parents, both sets of grandparents, I lost all my homes, my pathetic little countr
y and my beloved native city, I lost the wholeness of my body, part of my mind and my soul, I lost an eye and am trying to regain my lost son. Why the hell do you want to know all of this stuff, all these little details? What does it matter?” I felt like dying with shame and sadness for having disappointed Marija. I remembered what she had said earlier how everybody’s suffering was their own and nobody traded theirs for anyone else’s. I remembered my own agonizing days torn between grinding and banal divorce proceedings, my destructive infatuation with Karim, the fear of losing Natalia, the struggle to keep my job and get tenured, and throughout it all the unbearable sadness at the thought I had lost Marija forever. I said looking straight at her with renewed courage: “Because all of the big stuff you just mentioned is just too big for me right now to comprehend, maybe with time… it’s the little things, the little details that help me understand you and what happened to you and who you are now. For instance, I imagine you and your parents and Farah and Kemal all crammed in your blue Fiat, with whatever you could gather from the two houses piled up in the car, on your way to Semizovac driving at a hundred thirty kilometers an hour through intersections and sniper bullets…”
“And driving to our death,” she concluded with a bitter smile. Her words fell between us with a heavy thud. Then she let go of the bitter smile and the dark thought. She shifted into the light and her face shone. “I never stopped writing to you, throughout everything. Even in the rehabilitation center when I was barely more functional than an amoeba I still wrote to you, for you, about you: poems, thoughts, fleeting sentences that came to my mind, songs, whatever… you were my thread back to life, you know that?” We embraced in the car for a long time and our tears blended as our heated faces touched in the bluish glow of the dusk on the sycamore-lined street.
She came to my hotel room and we sat for a while in silence on my bed holding hands and looking at the white walls. The red azaleas on the balcony were reflected in the mirror and a feeling of rosiness entered the room with that reflection. Then Marija said: “How is she?” And I knew she meant Natalia, I was catching on to Marija’s puzzle system of dialogue. “She is wonderful beyond words! A star! And also fragile and strong. And funny, too. She went through so much grief with the divorce proceedings, she even had to testify in court. She was a kleptomaniac for a while, stealing from drugstores. But she is all right now. She is dying to meet you, asks about you almost every day. She came with me everywhere on my trip to Belgrade and Sarajevo.” I started crying again, I had to make up for all the uncried tears up to that point in my life and also for what was going to come, which I knew was going to be beyond tears, right there in the last circle of hell where tears hang frozen on your cheeks like icicles. For the moment I needed Marija more than she needed me and I felt strangely soothed and puzzled by that.
Then Marija did something perplexing again: She got up and circled the room a few times humming an old Serbian tune, the tune of a Serbian pop star in the eighties, a song about loving someone in the spring and feeling reborn. She went to her white purse, carefully searched through it, and produced a photograph. “Here, look, that’s him!” This time I knew who she meant: the boy, her son, born in 1996. The photo was of poor quality, with pale colors, and showed a tiny boy with a round head and very short haircut in the arms of an older woman with a scarf wrapped around her head and her face turned away from the camera, in a garden next to a well. I couldn’t make out the features of the boy other than that he did not have three heads and displayed no evident signs of monstrosity as I was imagining, and that he was small and round. I was intrigued by the well in the garden and wondered what part of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia that could have been. Something reminded me of Baba and Dede’s village near Dubrovnik. “Isn’t he beautiful?” Marija said with a sigh, and there was a completely new Marija emerging in that sigh and that statement, elastic and mellow and matching the silky headband on her head. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, but I didn’t think anything in that picture was beautiful. “I know what you are thinking, Lara. But the thing is, this creature is now on this earth and I am his mother and he is there and I am here.” I on the other hand thought the “creature” that came out of a monstrous act could only be a monstrous creature just by the nature of its conception and any contact with and sight of it would only rekindle, refresh, restart the oozing of the wounds, the gashes, the broken optic nerve, oh the unbearable crushed optic nerve. I just couldn’t tolerate that.
“I had no idea I was pregnant until almost the birth,” she said. “That’s because I had separated myself from my body. There was me—this abstract me—and there was my body—a blob of pulsing flesh. There was this woman… this woman who was caring for me and told me it was time to give birth… she knew it and I didn’t. I had been vegetating for months in her bed, in her room with my belly growing into this big balloon of life. I didn’t feel a thing throughout the birth, as if I had been under anesthetic, and it just slithered out, one second I was crouching and squatting in this woman’s room, the next second something with a head and four limbs slithered out of me. I didn’t want to look at it. I just asked her what it was. I told her to keep it, I didn’t want it then but told her I would come back to get it one day and she’d be recompensed. I said I would go back for it. Just like that as you would leave and come back for a coat you forgot. Now the time has come that I want him back.”
At that point Marija took off her yellow headband and suddenly with her black hair all over her face and the imperceptible crookedness of her left glass eye she looked terrifying. I was afraid of her. For a moment I wanted to run out of the room, all the way to Washington, DC, and to my Natalia. If only it could all have been a bad dream and Mark and Natalia and I were still happily together, and Karim had never existed. That same moment I thought: How did I get myself into this? Wake up and run, Lara, run!
“We have to go to Bosnia and get him, Lara, that’s all, you have to help me and you have to come with me. I need you to come with me,” Marija said very gently, almost like a lullaby. I sat on the bed transfixed, wanting to move and run away and not being able to take one step. What was Marija talking about? I wasn’t going to go with her in search of the child that resulted from her tragedy. “Bring Natalia with you,” she said. “It will be good for her to see her mother’s childhood places, to see something different from the Washington sidewalks.” How did Marija know what was good for Natalia? I thought in a wave of rage, she had no idea about Natalia and the kind of person she was and what she needed and what she didn’t. I had already brought Natalia to my childhood places once and had no desire to do that again anytime soon. I should have listened to my sister, she always knew, I should have listened to her premonition that this was dark, unbearable stuff, and that neither of us could deal with it. It was undealable.
Country of Red Azaleas Page 18