Natalia, ecstatic, absorbed the sounds, smells, and sights of Sarajevo in the summer with the pride of recognition. She and Mira ran carefree ahead of us, still reminding me of myself, Marija, and Biljana at their age. But the reminiscing broke. Everybody in Marija’s family was dead. Marija’s face was reconstructed. Sarajevo had been blasted to smithereens and its soil swallowed ten thousand dead. The surrounding hills were crowded with orderly white tombs in new cemeteries, myriad white tentacles moving toward the sky in a pointless prayer. Yet here we all were. Ferida with her daughter, Mira, born in the midst of the war in a basement in the dark, Natalia born on the very same day, Marija desperately and yet lovingly searching for the child born out of the blob of darkness that befell her the fated July of 1995.
We were all staying in Ferida’s apartment, where she had given birth to Mira nine years earlier. The building, near the Howard Johnson hotel where the foreign journalists had been lodged during the war, was now renovated, but the bullet and shell marks remained, dotting the exterior, a sign of remembrance. Marija thought it was bullshit, that it all should have been renovated and covered up and made to look new and fresh. “People want to start over and go on living—if they survived, if they are still alive—why stick the painful memories under their noses every single day of their lives?” she would say. Ferida seemed to agree with her. “I don’t need to be reminded. I remember everything pretty damn well. This is for the tourists,” Ferida said, “so that they can look and shed a tear and take a photo on their cell phones; it’s to make the foreign tourists feel good about themselves.” Marija and Ferida both laughed heartily, but I failed to get their humor. I didn’t see how the tourists were made to feel good if they saw the bullet and shell marks on the sides of buildings in Sarajevo. “It’s like a sign of sympathy or something, to remember the ‘wretched’ war victims, it’s like the tourists who visit these faraway places such as Bosnia and see their war ruins are courageous and compassionate, you know what I mean? Maybe you’ve become too Americanized, Lara, and you can’t see these subtleties any longer,” said Marija.
Ferida served us some fruit and cakes from the kitchen. Mira and Natalia whispered in a corner of the room as if they had known each other since birth. Which in an indirect way they sort of did. Marija and Ferida and I laughed until Ferida stared at Marija and I realized it was only then she noticed the glass eye. She stopped short. “That’s right. When all of me is rotting in the ground my glass prosthetic organ will still be as good as new,” and she burst into a deep laugh. “They did a good job, didn’t they? A complete makeover, Hollywood-style.” Ferida confirmed that she had seen worse, that Marija was lucky. But I couldn’t understand the meaning of luck like that. Marija and Ferida continued to recount war stories like soldiers sitting by the fire. It was only then that I heard the full story of Mira’s birth in the basement of Ferida’s house. It seemed like the birth from hell, yet both Ferida and Marija were having the time of their lives remembering the details. They talked about their friend’s sculptures displayed in the basement, horrid and stunning at once, thin spiraling pieces of metal with recent bloodstains and multimedia materials wrapped around or hanging from the metal and giving the illusion of sad monsters. There were musicians with violins and guitars and one of them brought a keyboard while another one brought a tuba. Ferida had baked bread by putting together several rations of flour. They’d even salvaged some eggs, and vodka. “Somebody must have paid big money on the black market for those eggs,” said Ferida.
“And then the ad-hoc band started playing waltzes,” Marija reminisced. “Of all the choices they could have made, they decided to offer a medley of the best-known waltzes: Strauss, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich.” Marija became immersed in her own storytelling and I feared the new rush of her memories. “We danced as if our life depended on making those waltz steps in the crammed damp basement. Everybody was crying and dancing. Even my parents were dancing and my father played the flute.” Marija’s face was smooth as ever, almost too smooth; it took on a serene expression, like overly blue skies before a storm. “Even now I can’t believe you delivered my baby from the sheet of instructions that my husband had left for me in case he was on call at the hospital when the baby came, which with my luck it turned out he was,” said Ferida at a point of hilarity. Together they recounted the birthing instructions with peals of unrestrained laughter. I thought of my own luxurious labor and delivery of Natalia in a clean hospital room with Mark holding my hand and the nurse wiping my forehead. This, compared with Ferida’s adventurous and almost comical wartime labor and delivery, even more in stark contrast with the birth of Marija’s son somewhere in a dark house, in loneliness and in a semiconscious state. Yet it was this same visceral and primal experience that tied us. I finally was coming to understand Marija’s desperate search and yearning for her son.
The morning when Marija announced that this was the day we were going to fetch her son, we all ate our breakfast in silence. Mira and Natalia were talking about pop music stars in the conspiratorial tones they had adopted. Ferida was feverishly writing bits of a poem on a paper napkin all the while gulping toast with cheese and a hard-boiled egg and pastrami. Marija drank her coffee in silence and ate all the berries at the table before either of the girls had a chance to touch them. I had forgotten how Marija devoured fresh fruit. She looked radiant; she was wearing the turquoise pendant I had given her when we parted in Belgrade, which was now more than ten years ago.
“So what shall we do in town this morning?” I said, daring to break the silence.
“We’re not going into town,” said Marija.
“What do you mean? Where are we going?”
“To Semizovac, that’s where.”
Semizovac, near Srebrenica, where Marija’s family had lived and where they had returned upon Marija’s suggestion and where they had been killed and where all the unimaginable rest had happened. My mouth literally hung open and Ferida’s eyes were wide with disbelief.
“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s all fine, I’ll be fine,” she repeated. “I’m made of steel, didn’t you know? And five percent glass.” Marija laughed one of her laughs. Natalia looked up and stared at her with the same fascination she always had for her.
“We are going to the place in the picture, Lara,” Marija said sternly.
“That’s where they’ve been living all along?” Ferida asked.
“Off and on,” Marija said in a relaxed manner. “That was where they were when the photo was taken. Then she moved to Sarajevo for a while. And now they moved back and forth to the countryside. I went back to her house in Sarajevo and she had instructed a neighbor to give me information about her whereabouts. She had left a note with a different phone number and her new address. Apparently she’d been receiving threatening phone calls, too. Welcome home, right? And she wants the money, of course.”
I bombarded Marija with questions. “Wasn’t this all prepared and set in the adoption process? Why didn’t they give you the information at the adoption agency?”
“Oh, Lara, you’ve become so American. All the legal procedures in America don’t count for much of anything over here. Have you forgotten where you’ve left? It’s her right to have the money. I don’t care about it, she could have left my little boy in the street, right, but she didn’t.” There was no arguing with Marija. On this day when she would claim her son, her face was perfectly made up and her hair flowed in black luscious waves as always. We would drive in Ferida’s eight-seater van. Marija told us she wanted everybody to be together, we were on a pilgrimage of sorts. In preparation for our trip, she put a big stack of cash in her white patent-leather purse next to the dainty gun.
But it wasn’t enough, Marija said. She still needed more money to compensate the woman. The five grand in her purse wasn’t enough. “We’ll get it somehow,” she said nonchalantly. “Today. Anything can happen, you know, I need to get there as soon as possible.” And then worry about her son spread over Marija
’s face like a translucent spider’s web, making her look unreal in the morning sun that streamed through the apartment’s windows. I knew right then and there that Marija would rather die ten times before she would let go of that mystery son of hers. Ferida and I had no choice but follow every single one of her wishes. Even if she had never explained what might possibly happen within these next few hours or a day, and why she was in such a mad hurry.
“Look,” Marija started in an unexpectedly serious tone as if about to reveal an important secret. “This boy is one of those kids who around here are called ‘the rape babies’ and everybody knows it. In America they call them with a nicer, more dramatic name, they are ‘the war babies,’ but here they call them for what they are: children born out of mass rapes. Many of them were taken by the state and put in seedy orphanages like the one in Zenica up north of Sarajevo. Others were taken to Serbia by their Serbian fathers or by those who thought they might have fathered them during the rapes. This woman, for whatever her faults may be, took care of my son when I abandoned him like hundreds of other wretched women did in those days. Only she didn’t abandon him, nor did she give him up to some orphanage. She was even able to get a fake birth certificate for him, stating it was actually her child. And do you realize what this meant? It meant she was probably thought of as a victim of rape, too, which she never was. She was willing to take on that stigma just to save my life and the life of my son.”
Marija stopped to light a cigarette, which I hadn’t seen her do in weeks. She reminded me of the Marija of our university years. Mira and Natalia stared at us from their corner of the room cuddled into one another amid the Turkish cushions as if to find refuge from our conversation. The talk of rapes and “rape babies” seemed to have brushed by their girlish faces and left them darkened with premature aging. Ferida, though, looked at me and waved her hand, after which she said casually: “She’s heard it all, don’t worry.” I calmed down thinking that Natalia, too, had sort of heard it all, or at least read it all. I had no idea by now whether that was good or bad, it was how it was. An ambulance siren sliced the silence. Marija’s smoke filled the room.
“Why did this woman become so wrapped up in you and this child, Marija?” I ventured. Marija sat unmoving, without blinking, as if she hadn’t heard my question. She continued to smoke and for a second I had the uncanny feeling that nothing had happened at all. That we were all young and no wars had swept over us.
“Remember the girl whose life I told you I saved by killing the bastard who was trying to rape her?” Marija said without flinching.
“Yes, I do. Does this girl have to do with something?”
“She is this woman’s daughter, that’s what she has to do. We were all neighbors, and the daughter happened to be near our house that morning. After I killed the soldier, she managed to run home and told her mother about it. The mother took her to her sister’s house at the other end of the town and from there they escaped to Sarajevo. That evening, once it grew dark, the woman came back looking for me and found me in a pool of blood in our front yard. At first she thought I was dead, but it turned out I wasn’t. You know the rest.”
After Hollywood, the Wild West, the three days and nights in the sound of Marija’s epic sobs in the log cabin in Colorado, very little could still shock or even surprise me in Marija’s continuously unfolding story.
“So she has this undying gratitude for me because I saved her daughter,” Marija continued. “She promised she would do everything to save me. When I had the baby she vowed to keep him, even though she’d been left dirt-poor after the war. And she did keep my child. Just like she dragged me from house to house during those days trying to hide me and my bleeding self. She sang bloody Serbian songs and pretended to be Serbian for my sake. Her husband and son had all been killed during those sunny July days and she hasn’t found their bones yet to bury. Like I said, killing the soldier was the best thing and the worst thing I had ever done.”
Then she smiled to herself the saddest smile I had ever seen. One life had ransomed another, and for that, sometimes it paid to kill someone. It was like the Wild West, only it was happening now in our little drab corner of the Balkans.
“It seems like the fuss we’ve made with the adoption papers, and the fuss I’ve made with that stupid search for Karadzic, were a mistake. The woman says some Serbian authorities and some Serbian thugs, which really is pretty much the same thing, found out about the boy.”
“I get it.” Ferida, no stranger to postwar mystery, now understood. “It’s possible they could actually take him to Serbia, like they’ve done with others of these ‘lucky’ rape babies.”
“It’s very possible,” said Marija in a calm voice. “The woman told me there had been a bunch of Serbian guys stalking her apartment in Sarajevo, and then there were the phone calls. With me coming and going back and forth to Sarajevo and visiting her over the past couple of years, somebody must have guessed it’s my child. You know, many of the soldiers who raped us are still around, some were Bosnian Serbs and some were our neighbors. Some are still on the prowl looking for the children they engendered or even for their mothers, to punish them for having reported the rapes to the state. We are still not safe, you know, all the glitter and shimmer and color and tourists you see in the historic Sarajevo—it’s only one side of it.” Marija wanted to make sure I understood that and held no illusions about our dear Sarajevo, nostalgic as we might have been for its prewar beauty and vibrancy. “There is still a silent, invisible war going on. At least for some of us. I need both of you on this trip. I need you to help me get this money today and get my son. Today. I have an intuition and I have to follow it like it’s now or never. It has to be now.”
Marija spoke in a detached way, like a lawyer or a politician. Her tragedy had not destroyed her. She had all the poise and logic needed for the hardest tasks, including an “invisible war.” She survived and emerged shinier and stronger. I was ready for everything next to her. The morning light burst into Ferida’s apartment in dazzling shards that blinded me for a second. I knew that something new was going to start in my life like never before.
We climbed into Ferida’s eight-seater van and flew around Sarajevo all morning and afternoon collecting the necessary funds. Marija, Ferida, and I managed to gather the necessary ten thousand dollars in cash. We went to every friend and source we knew in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and the United States. Biljana and Mark sent money through Western Union, while Ferida and Marija, who looked like burglars on the run, gathered bundles of cash in canvas shopping bags. It felt like a mafia movie, one about desperate women trying to recover a child conceived out of war and violence who was still not safe from war and violence. Sarajevo was ablaze that day, alive in the dazzling colors I remembered from my childhood. The utopian city of my youth had again come to life in our mad race for money to recompense the woman who had saved Marija’s life and her son’s. I asked Marija again why this nameless woman wanted money, anyway, if Marija had already saved her daughter’s life. “Money helps,” she said. “I owe her that, ten times this much. This way I know she’ll be set for life.”
We got out of the van and walked through the city. The silks shimmered on the vendor’s street counters; the coppers glowed with wicked reddish tints in the sparkling light. It now seemed partly unreal, and dark shadows of what Marija had called “the invisible war” seemed to move through the crowds and behind the luscious silks. I started looking behind me, worried that we might be followed. Men who seemed or sounded Serbian scared me now more than ever. Marija on the other hand, once in action, acted and looked as if she was living the adventure of her life. She was girlish one minute, stern the next, a dazzling bundle of contradictions as always. Marija joked that she and Ferida had robbed a bank. Marija compared us to Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, then to Bonnie and Clyde, and I wondered whether it was maybe her uncanny reliance on movies and Hollywood that had given her the strength to survive the most outrageous blows of fortune. I had never
thought of Hollywood as therapy for traumatized people, but maybe that made sense. Everything was possible in times of war or peace when you were Marija, I thought, as we counted and stashed the bundles of fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills.
By the end of the afternoon, we got back on the road with our bundles of money, all wrapped with elastic bands and stuffed in Marija’s backpack. Marija insisted on driving the van this time, saying it relaxed her to be at the wheel. I sat next to her, and the two girls were in the back with Ferida. At first, when we left Sarajevo, it felt like an exciting adventure, some kind of a road trip with laughter and bubbly conversations back and forth between the two of us in the front and the girls and Ferida in the back. It was after we got onto the winding roads out of Sarajevo and began to head toward Semizovac that Marija became a menace. She sang Serbian songs in a deep low voice, like a cabaret singer. It made my skin crawl to hear her sing like that and made me want to get far away from that person I loved so much and yet who chilled the blood in my veins with her macabre whims and her roller coaster of mood swings and the heaviness of her past. She had told me once when we were in the Washington, DC, duplex that having gone through what she had turned her into something of a repulsive monster and that once they found out her story, most people wanted to run away from her, fearing they might be contaminated by her black destiny. “That’s why I don’t want to tell my fucking bloody story to anyone,” she’d said, laughing. Marija started passing every car in sight like a race car driver on the winding serpentine roads leading to the dreaded village. The girls in the back were squealing like they were on an amusement park roller coaster, while Ferida and I exchanged worried glances.
Country of Red Azaleas Page 22