Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  It was still afternoon and the sun was blazing like an angry blob of lava above our racing van. I realized it was a sunny day in July. Maybe the memory of another sunny day in July was scorching Marija’s psyche. She gave the finger to a truck driver that she passed, then she rolled down her window and spat out her gum while her hair rose wildly in the 120-kilometer-an-hour speed. We were on a mad race to hell and Marija was our doom and our salvation at once, a goddess of death and life, with the face of a statue. Drivers stuck their arms out of their car windows and made obscene gestures at us, people stared at us from in front of their houses as we passed them by raising clouds of dust. They raised their fists at us and promised revenge. Marija got all the more excited. She turned on the radio and blasted a rock station one minute and sang at the top of her lungs the next. She sang those Serbian songs again and again. It seemed so wrong. Like so much else on that ride. “Why am I singing Serbian songs, right? Why am I singing the songs of the motherfuckers who crushed us Bosnians and killed my family and raped and maimed me? Right, that’s what you are wondering?” I was praying that the girls in the back couldn’t hear her. When I looked back at them, they were cuddled into one another, holding hands, terror on their pale faces. The raw truth pulsated like an angry viper in the stuffy air of the van. “Open the windows for God’s sake,” I yelled, “open the fucking windows, Marija.” Marija did nothing of the sort, though Ferida opened the window on her side. “It’s because of the woman from Semizovac,” Marija stated. “She kept singing the bloody Serbian sentimental songs over and over again while she transported my shredded self in her rattling car. One night when she went delirious I got it why she was singing those songs, and I picked up on her delirium so I started singing, too. These had been our songs after all, too, hadn’t they, in the good old days of Tito and ‘mother’ Yugoslavia we all spoke the same fucking Serbian language and sang the same stupid drinking songs. We had just as much right to the goddamn hills and fields and the language and the songs.”

  As we approached Semizovac, Marija drove the van right into a ditch. We scared a few cows that were grazing in the field and a bunch of kids playing by the side of the road. The girls started crying that they wanted to go home, they both had bruises on their arms and knees. Ferida’s nose was bleeding and I had a bump the size of a walnut on my head from banging it into the door. Only Marija came out unscathed and looking like a mythical Fury, with her hair disheveled and flying out in all directions, an expression of rage on her face that chilled my blood. We left the car in the ditch and walked by the side of the road like a caravan of doleful refugees in our own country. I thought Marija was finally having the breakdown to end all breakdowns, the one that Sally had warned against, when her past would come rushing in like the biblical flood sweeping everything in its passage and leaving only devastation and corpses behind. The sun was setting and the air was getting chillier. A mixture of beauty and ominous silence spread around us as we walked through the countryside. The hills surrounding us pulsated with rotting bodies. No one spoke. We entered the village and Marija stopped in front of a larger stone house painted in light pink: Chez Sonia. She stood in front of it and began laughing hysterically. Ferida whispered to me that the place had been turned into a rape hotel during the war. We tried to drag Marija away from the site but she wouldn’t budge. She just stood there laughing. Laughing, I now understood, was Marija’s way of sobbing the bitterest tears in the universe. Then she opened her purse, the patent-leather white purse that carried her pistol, and she shot at the walls and the windows of Chez Sonia hotel three times. The sound of shattered glass reverberated through the heated air. She put back the pistol as if she had just taken out a Kleenex to wipe her nose. Some people came running toward us and we stood in front of Marija trying to protect her. But Marija became composed and sweet, smiling at the people and asking them if they had heard any shootings. The people looked as puzzled as we did. Marija changed the subject and asked them if they could direct us to the address where the woman lived. There was a sudden silence that seemed to envelop everything and I stopped hearing what Marija or anybody else said for a few moments. It was not as if I had gone deaf, but as if the world itself had become deafeningly quiet. Then it all erupted again with brutal loudness: the voices, the cars on the road, the airplanes, the motorcycles. “It’s past the tracks, straight up the road, then there is a dead end and the house is right there,” was all I heard. “Past the tracks, past the tracks,” something important was always “past the tracks” or “past the corner,” and always there was a “dead end,” I thought. I had had enough of that movie. I didn’t want a dead end, but a new beginning. When I looked at Natalia, she took my hand. I wanted to ask her forgiveness for everything—for the way her father and I ended up, for having brought her into a horrendous world, for belonging to a brutal country. But she didn’t need my apologies. She already understood. She was happy to hold my hand.

  We walked for another full hour, much longer than the kind people who had given us the directions told us it would be. It was sunset by the time we arrived at the small stone house. There was the well in the middle of the front yard, just like in the photograph. A creepy feeling spread all over me. The girls were intrigued by the sight of the well in the middle of the yard, where there was also a flower and vegetable garden. The haunting nightmares that I had in the LA hotel room rushed back and all I could see and think of were bodies of Bosnians rotting inside the well. I reached out toward Natalia and Mira and tried to stop them from getting too close to the well, and just then there was a sharp scream that sounded almost playful. A tiny round-faced blond boy emerged from the side door of the house and behind him stood a middle-aged woman wiping her hands on her apron, her hair held back with a yellow scarf. The boy was no three-headed monster but an angelic malnourished golden-haired boy taken by surprise by the visit of strangers. He was an older version of the boy in the picture, but more beautiful and wrenchingly alive. His watery blue eyes sparkled in innocent amazement. For a few moments the air was motionless and clear, and there were no sorrows, no regrets, and no floating sadness. Everything stood still in suspension. Then I looked at Marija, and that was when life burst in. She was the old Marija, except that she was moving very slowly. Her hair shone in the dying light with sparkles of bluish black. In slow motion, she moved toward the boy whose name I didn’t know. Why did he have to be so blond and so terribly blue-eyed? I looked toward Ferida for an answer. But she was standing a few steps behind me in a state of stupor. Marija picked up her son and started laughing with her million-dollar laughter.

  Two unhinged corners of my soul suddenly came together. Something shifted back into its place. I saw Marija and me dancing a slow dance over meadows and cities. I saw us gliding through the white snows of the Sarajevo winters and running through the apricot orchards of summer. It had been her all along, the one I had been waiting for. The long journey strewn with war and divorce, of misguided searching and incomprehensible suffering, could only take me back to her. I understood all of her tears when we hugged that final day in her apartment on the day the war started. I rewound our phone conversations from the Sarajevo bomb shelter to my duplex on Connecticut Avenue. My own unexplained longing and the nagging sense of something amiss all throughout my years in Washington, throughout my marriage to Mark, and even when I’d numbed myself into oblivion with Parisian love. The love for Marija had been there all along. At this most incongruous moment the worst and the best of life was gathered in one gleaming image in a Bosnian village. And Marija knew it at the same split second that I did. She turned to me, smiled her most radiant smile. “His name is Marijo, imagine that!” she said, and stretched out her hand beckoning for me to join them. Natalia came over to complete the circle and for the first time ever it felt like a real family. As I looked up and saw the woman who had raised Marijo wipe her hands again on her apron, the gesture triggered another afternoon in Sarajevo. On that drizzly November afternoon last year, I had brushed by
Marija’s son and this same mysterious woman without having any idea of who they were. The woman in the run-down house in the unreconstructed neighborhood of Sarajevo, the one who had handed me Marija’s stories and notes! “Just some woman,” Marija had told me when I’d asked about her identity when we first met in LA.

  As everything stood poised in perfect harmony and the light of the setting sun quivered in delicate pastels, Marija said: “Good-bye, Lara dear, for now. I’ll need to stay in Sarajevo for a while longer. I have to close all my accounts here with this wretched country before I leave for good. I’m here now, and no one can hurt my boy. He’s safe. I’ll stay with Ferida. Marijo and I will come to your America soon enough. Our America, I should say. I will get to know Marijo first in his world, and then we’ll make the huge leap to America. We’re a family, you and I, Natalia, all of us, what the hell. It won’t be long.” I stood motionless staring at Marija holding her son in her arms, the angelic boy who looked nothing like her. “What about us, Marija?” I said, without thinking. She laughed, I cried. Marijo the blond son laughed, too, a reverberation of his mother. The last sun rays flickered, leaving us and the garden and the well with sparkling water in the grayish light before complete darkness began to set in. Dusk was rushing on silvery wings and enveloping us. The idea of another separation from Marija weighed on me, and I had to sit down on the wooden bench in front of the house. I was surrounded by the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle. Marija put down her glowing golden son with exquisite gentleness, sat beside me, and embraced me. Her long eyelashes fluttered against my tear-soaked cheeks, just like they had when we embraced under the ponderosa pines in the Wild West. “We are home, Lara dear. We’ll always have each other and Paris be damned!”

  She laughed her beautiful laugh. The sound of my name in her silky voice sparkled. I stood up from the bench, ready for our adventure even as tears streamed down our cheeks. Marija’s lunar sadness glided from her face onto mine. I was being bathed in the fluid sadness that had belonged to Marija for so long. Marija, my one and only love. I was going back to our America, and together we would be in a place where cacti bloomed out of orange dunes and red azaleas hung from the windows of adobe houses.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have seen the light of day without the intuition, support, and insightful guidance of two brilliant women: my incredible and vibrant agent, Anne Edelstein, and my equally incredible and passionate editor from Twelve, Deb Futter. Each in her own elegant and thoughtful way has led me toward the final artistic product that is Country of Red Azaleas. Thank you both for embracing my book with love and meticulous care!

  In order to weave the complicated fabric of this novel I have gathered many wrenching and amazing stories of survival, and talked to many people who have offered me priceless insight and information and have guided me along some of the dark paths of memory of the Bosnian war during the early nineties. I wholeheartedly thank Kemal Kurspahic for meeting with me on several occasions, visiting my university, sharing with me startling and unforgettable stories about living and reporting under siege in Sarajevo during the years of the war. I want to warmly thank Nermina Kurspahic for hosting me in her lovely house in Semizovac one July afternoon on the commemoration of the Srebrenica massacre, sharing her stunning stories and delicious fruit and opening her heart and house to the curious stranger that I was. You both have greatly inspired me.

  I want to thank Dijana Milosevic for the inspiration and insight she has provided for me for years with her stunning work as director of the DAH Theater, sharing war stories and her lucid perspective on the war. I thank her also for connecting me to the unknown woman from the Women in Black group who welcomed me in her Belgrade apartment. I thank this anonymous Serbian woman who in the hallway of her apartment handed me in silence and pride the invaluable document that is the collection of testimonials, gathered in the book Women in Black: Women’s Side of War.

  I am thankful to the Bosnian poet and peace activist Ferida Durakovic, who met with me in Sarajevo and shared her own story of survival and those of many other women, as well as her poetic vision of the war and the postwar period. Many thanks are also due to Sonja Biserko, who received me warmly at her office of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and shared invaluable insights and information.

  I owe heartfelt thanks to Catharine MacKinnon for her brilliant, poignant insights and valuable information about the sexual violence against Muslim Bosnian women during the Bosnian war of the nineties and the glorious victory she obtained for the Bosnian women victims of the war in the trial of Kadic v. Karadzic.

  I am grateful to Washington and Lee University for the ongoing support with research time and funding, Lenfest Sabbatical and summer leaves and grants that have facilitated the completion of this book. In particular I want to thank my friend, colleague, and dean, Suzanne Keen, who has offered continued support of my creative projects throughout the years.

  I am grateful to Paul Friedrich for having read and offered helpful feedback on earlier versions of the novel and for his unflinching support of my creative work. As always I thank my mother, Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, a brilliant poet in her own right, who is both my greatest supporter and my most lucid critic and who inspires me endlessly.

  About the Author

  Domnica Radulescu is a distinguished professor of French and Italian literature at Washington and Lee University. She came to the United States in 1983 as a political refugee from Romania soon after she had won a national literary prize for a collection of short stories. She is the author of two internationally praised novels, Train to Trieste and Black Sea Twilight. Train to Trieste has been published in thirteen languages and is the winner of the 2009 Library of Virginia Fiction Award. She has authored, edited, and co-edited numerous books on theater, exile, and representations of women and is also an award-winning playwright. Radulescu received the 2011 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and she is a Fulbright scholar. She is working on her fourth novel, My Father’s Orchards.

  ALSO BY DOMNICA RADULESCU

  Train to Trieste

  Black Sea Twilight

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  Drakulic, Slavenka. They Would Never Hurt a Fly. War Criminals on Trial in the Hague. New York: Penguin, 2005.

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  Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and Sonja Biserko. Annual Report: 2010. Human Rights Reflect Institutional Impotence. Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, 2011.

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  Pervan, Nenad. “Hair in Sarajevo: Doing Theater Under Siege.” In Kevin Wetmore (ed.), Portrayals of Americans on the World Stage. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009, 179–191.

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  Stiglmayer, Alexandra (ed.). Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

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  Umar, Ayesha. “From Bosnian Rape Camps to the U.S. Court: The Story of Kadic v. Karadzic.” https://www.academia.edu/629451/From_Bosnian_Rape_Camps_to_the_US_Court_The_Story_of_Kadic_v._Karadzic. May 7, 2011.

  Visniec, Matei. The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War. In Cheryl Robson (ed.), Balkan Plots: New Plays from Central and Eastern Europe. London: Aurora Metro, 2002, 14–66.

  ———. The Word Progress on My Mother’s Lips Doesn’t Ring True. Manuscript courtesy Matei Visniec, 2009.

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