by Kate Hewitt
I stared at her for a long moment, caught between concern, compassion, and a morbid curiosity. “Whatever this is… have you ever spoken to anyone about this?” I finally asked. I sensed something far deeper and more complex happening here than a single slap. “Because I don’t think it’s healthy to—”
“Healthy?” She opened her eyes, and they flashed nearly golden with anger. Suddenly I believe she could slap Alexa, or even me, and I was taken aback by the change. “Healthy?” she repeated with an incredulous sneer. “This was not about being healthy. It was about surviving.”
We stared at each other, her wild-eyed and me having no idea where this conversation might lead, or even how it had got here. We weren’t talking about Alexa anymore. “What happened to you, Maria,” I said quietly, half-statement, half-question.
She stared at me for another long moment; it was as if there was a furnace blazing behind her eyes.
“You want to know what happened to me, Nathan?” she finally asked. “You really want to know?”
Did I? “If you want to tell me,” I said, backtracking a bit.
“If I want to tell you.” She let out a high, wild sound; I think it was meant to be a laugh.
“Maria, if you’ve been keeping this inside for who knows how long…”
“Twenty-six years. Since I was fourteen. Fourteen,” she emphasised, as if I might not realize that was the same age as Alexa.
“Fourteen,” I agreed. “Perhaps it’s time for you to talk about it.” I sounded so sanctimonious. I heard it, I knew it, and yet I couldn’t keep myself from it. I didn’t know how else to be. “You might feel better, getting it all out in the open.”
I registered Maria’s wild expression and started to regret making such an offer. Did I really want to hear what she had to say? Could I handle it? I had so much to deal with already… what was I supposed to do with yet another person’s pain? And yet how could I leave it here, when I’d been the one to encourage her to speak?
“What happened?” I asked gently. “What happened when you were fourteen?”
“It doesn’t begin there. It ends there.” A shudder went through her and she sank back against the sofa, her gaze turning inward and distant.
“Where does it begin?”
“Where? In Sarajevo, I suppose. In my family’s apartment on Logavina Street.” She let out a huff of sound. “We had an apartment a bit like this one. Big rooms. A fireplace. My father’s bookcases with glass doors…” She trailed off and I waited. Already I found the details jarring; Maria had lived in an apartment like this one? Had had a life like this one? Why did that surprise me? “We were happy,” she said quietly. “My mother, my father, my brother and me. It was a simple, quiet life, but we were happy.”
“Tell me about your family.” I wasn’t sure if I was asking because I was genuinely interested or simply as a stalling technique. Both, perhaps.
“My father was a school inspector. My mother worked in a dentist’s office. My brother loved music.” She fell silent, lost in thought. “It sounds so little, as if that is all I can say about them.”
Yet with just a few simple sentences, she had painted a vivid picture. I found I could envision the apartment, with its homely, slightly shabby, Old World feel; I could see Maria’s brother, with eyes and hair like hers, a slight figure, lost in his music. Her mother making krofne. Her father reading. And Maria… there in the middle, telling one of her stories, enlivening everyone with her laugh. What had happened to her?
“The siege started in April 1992,” she said flatly. “I was twelve. It felt very sudden, at least to me. There were murmurings of things happening—people leaving the city, soldiers seen nearby. Civil wars erupting in countries all around us, after Communism fell. But no one thought it could happen to us. We weren’t like those in Croatia, who seemed to be fighting over nothing, a squabble over who was who, and who belonged where. We wouldn’t be so foolish. We all got along.” She sighed heavily. “But, of course, you know something about the war.”
“A little,” I said, which was the truth. I knew a very little, a few photos, an item on the news, not much more. Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats all fighting for their own place—or something like that. I wasn’t really sure, and now was hardly the time to ask.
“Sarajevo was surrounded by the Serb Army. They were extremists, radicals—they hated Bosniaks.” At my blank look, she clarified, “Bosnian Muslims. It lasted for years—no one getting in or out, food limited, electricity and water constantly disrupted, if they were on at all. And worse, far worse… snipers hiding in the hills, shooting at anyone, even children. And mortar shells whistling through the air… you could hear them coming, you knew. We all slept in the kitchen, away from the windows. We couldn’t go out… sometimes for days, weeks. And always someone was being hurt, being killed. Every day.”
“I can’t imagine…” I murmured, because of course I couldn’t, not remotely. It sounded like something out of a film.
“My father died in April of 1993, a mortar shell flew into our sitting room. He’d been reading the newspaper. I heard him turning the pages, and then that awful whistling.” She shook her head. “After that, nothing but silence.” I opened my mouth to speak, but found I had no words. Maria continued with her story, her voice flat and determined. “Then, one day in June, after my father had died, our apartment was hit again, worse this time. None of us were hurt, but my mother decided we should try to leave Sarajevo.”
This surprised me, after all she’d just described. “I thought you said no one could get out?”
“Not many could. We were surrounded. But there were ways… you could pay people…” Her throat moved convulsively. “Some people were lucky, and were taken as part of a humanitarian convoy, to somewhere safe. Others…”
The silence lengthened and stretched into something else. “And what about you?” I asked finally.
“We were not so lucky. We paid someone to hide us in the back of his truck. We wanted to get to Mostar, to where my father’s sister and her husband lived. My mother thought it would be safe there, but I learned later that it wasn’t. It wasn’t safe anywhere.” A sort of stillness came over her, her expression so distant it seemed as if she wasn’t there anymore.
I felt a sense of dread creeping up on me. “Did you get to Mostar?”
Maria shook her head. I didn’t think she was going to say anything more, as if that were the end of the story, when I knew it had to be only the beginning.
I leaned forward, my heart thudding strangely. I reached out one hand to her but didn’t touch her. “What happened, Maria?” I asked softly.
“The soldiers found us, outside Mostar.” Her voice was so quiet, I could barely hear it. “They took us to a camp.” Her face hardened. “We never should have been in that camp. It was meant for men, for the military. There shouldn’t have been any women or children there at all.” The raw, jagged note in her voice had me tensing where I sat. I didn’t know what question to ask, and I was afraid asking any would break Maria. Her head was bowed, her body shuddering with the effort of holding back.
I waited, staying silent, unsure if she would say any more. Unsure if I wanted her to. Whatever happened in that camp…
“The camp was filthy,” Maria said after a long moment. “There was no clean water, not enough food, rooms made like cages. No beds, no blankets.” She drew a shuddering breath, seeming to draw the air from right down in her toes. “It was awful, like nothing I’d ever seen before, and yet I could have stood it. I could have.” She looked up at me, the expression in her eyes both blank and fierce. “My mother became very ill. My brother…” Her voice wavered. “My brother broke. The things they made him see and do… but we could have stood it, I think we could have. They made us cook and clean for them. We were useful.” Her face contorted. “So useful.”
“You don’t have to tell me, Maria.” I didn’t know why I said that then, perhaps because I felt a towering sense of something dark looming, something
that could not be unsaid or unheard, and I was afraid to know it.
“No, I will tell you now.” Maria’s voice was flat and firm. “You have asked, Nathan,” she reminded me, and it sounded like a warning. “I will tell you.”
I fell silent, waiting, wary.
“There were perhaps fifty women and children in that camp, among all the men.”
Briefly I closed my eyes before I forced them open. I made myself look at Maria, as she was looking at me. She wasn’t shuddering any longer; she looked very steady and sure, and it scared me.
“They took the girls and women out in twos and threes,” she said, and everything in me thought no. “To a room—a shabby bedroom. With a padlock on the door. And the smell of beer. There was an orange bedspread. I remember that.”
“Oh, Maria…” I could barely get the words out.
“There were four men.”
“No…”
“I didn’t even know what they wanted from me. Not at first.” She paused, her breathing ragged and I fought the urge to say something, to make her stop. “Still, I was one of the lucky ones, really. It only happened a few times. There were others…” She shook her head. “They did not fare so well. Many times, even more men. They lost their souls in that room.”
Oh, God. Oh, God. I didn’t know whether I was cursing or praying. Perhaps both. I opened my mouth to say something, but I had no words.
“None of us spoke of it. We came back from that room and no one ever said a word. My mother was too weak to be taken there, thank God. But she started to wonder, to suspect. Before she died, she asked me. She asked me what had happened, and I said nothing. Nothing happened, I told her. I could not have her die knowing. And I so wanted to believe it as well.” She drew a quick, hard breath. “She made me promise and I did.”
“I’m sorry…” So feeble, but what else could I say?
“My brother, the last time I saw him, asked me as well. Maria, did they? That was all he was able to say. I looked away as he was dragged off by the soldiers. I heard a gunshot. I never saw him again.”
I shook my head helplessly.
“Before I went into that room, I had never been touched by a boy. One had never even held my hand.”
I felt tears well in my eyes, but I could not let myself cry. This was Maria’s pain, not mine. I could not take it from her, even if I wished to.
Finally she sagged back against the sofa; it felt as if a gust of wind had blown through the room. “In twenty-six years, I have not told anyone that. Even the immigration officers, in order to come to this country. I told them I was at the camp at Vojno, that was all. Though perhaps they knew what that meant. But I never said a word—not to friends, not to my aunt and uncle, whom I lived with after, although my aunt suspected.” Maria let out a harsh laugh. “She was shamed by me, and I never said a word.”
“How could she be ashamed of you?” I demanded. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Even so.” Maria shrugged this pain away, heaped on all the others. “But even after all that…” She paused. “I thought to myself, I will forget. I can make myself forget. I told my mother it didn’t happen. I didn’t answer my brother. I will forget.” She turned back to look at me, her gaze focused once more. “But I could not forget. I lived in Mostar, and I saw one of those men in the street. He was the butcher, where my aunt shopped. He stood behind the counter with his white apron smeared with blood… he didn’t even remember me.”
I gaped at her. “But how could that be? He must have been arrested…”
“No. That was not how it happened. Everyone made peace and went back to their homes. Everyone went back to their lives.”
“But…”
“And I could not forget.” She drew herself up. “That was why I came to America. I could not stand it anymore. I could not live in that city, in that country, and see those men. I felt like a ghost, but I wanted to live again.”
“I’m glad you came here,” I managed. It felt like so little, but I didn’t know what else I could offer her.
“But I have still been a ghost. All these years…” Her voice cracked. Her lips trembled. The steady force of her gaze faltered as she struggled, finally, to keep from crying.
“Maria…”
“All these years,” she gasped out, and then she was crying, the sounds pulled from deep within her, racking her whole body, her hands hiding her face. I had never cried like that. I had never let myself. And I didn’t think Maria had, either.
“Maria,” I said softly, and then, clumsily, afraid to scare or hurt her, I put my arms around her. She tensed for a second and I waited, ready to move back if I needed to. If I should have. But then she leaned into me, her face pressed against my shoulder, the sobs torn from her body like they’d been part of herself for all these years and were only now wrenching free.
I didn’t know how long we sat like that, how many tears Maria shed. I felt my shirt grow damp and my arms ached and still I held her. Finally she drew back.
“You should fire me,” she said as she wiped her eyes.
“Maria, I’m not going to fire you.” Of that I was sure.
“I should not have let myself become so angry. It wasn’t Alexa’s fault.”
It wasn’t Maria’s, either. I knew that much. “Look, we’ll sit down, the three of us, okay? We’ll hash it out. You can apologise to Alexa. We’ll make it work.”
She stared at me, her expression clear yet desolate. “How can you trust me?”
How could I not? She’d been through so much, and yet she’d still had love to give. A slap couldn’t discount that. “I trust you, Maria,” I said, and she bowed her head, overcome.
Twenty-Four
Maria
The morning after—another after, such a different one—I woke up feeling heavy-limbed and foggy-minded, as if I had drunk too much rakia, although in my whole life I have never touched a drop. I imagined that was how it must feel, as if my head was full of cotton wool, my tongue thick, my arms and legs uncoordinated.
I swung my legs from my bed, blinking in the sunlight streaming through my window. I looked at the clock and saw it was after eight. I should have been up hours ago; breakfast had to be made, and Ella and Alexa needed to go to school very soon. Although, I remembered, not Alexa. Alexa was suspended.
Still, I should have been up. I wondered why someone had not woken me. I could not remember the last time I had slept this late.
All these thoughts tumbled through my mind as I sat on the edge of my bed, and then I remembered last night, and all the things I had said, and I did not feel as I had expected. I did not feel a rush of regret, a flood of shame. I felt… at peace. Fragile, tentative, barely there, but still. And yet even so I worried about going into the kitchen, and seeing Nathan.
Last night, after I had wept as I never had before, and he had told me he would not fire me, that he trusted me, I’d mumbled some sort of thanks, wiped my eyes, and, feeling wrung out and empty, I had gone to bed, all without being able to look at him. I did not know how he was going to look at me today.
This was why the women at Vojno, and so many girls and women in Bosnia, did not ever speak of what happened. Because we did not want people to look at us differently. We did not want people to look at us and see only that.
But I couldn’t stay in my bedroom, hiding away; I needed to face Nathan. I needed to get the girls ready. And so I rose, and dressed quickly, and stepped into the kitchen.
The room was filled with sunlight, so it was hard to see; everything looked bright and blurry. I blinked and the world came into focus—Nathan at the stove, flipping pancakes. Pancakes.
Ruby was helping him, standing on a stool. Ella stood nearby, on her tiptoes. Alexa was by the door, leaning against it, arms folded. She glanced at me as I came in, and then looked away. I thought of my hand on her cheek and then I pushed that thought away. I would deal with that later. I would apologise again, as much as I needed to, until it was all right once more.
&
nbsp; “I am so sorry I slept,” I said, and Ruby skipped up to me, her mouth sticky with syrup.
“Are you feeling better, Maria?” she asked.
“Better…” I glanced at Nathan, a question.
“I told them you were a bit under the weather,” he explained, and I pictured myself bowed beneath dark clouds, stooped beneath the heavy weight of them, and then, wonderfully, the skies clearing.
“I am not under the weather,” I told Ruby. “Not anymore.”
“I made you a card.” Shyly, Ella handed me a piece of folded paper with bright writing on the front. Get Well, Maria.
I smiled at that. Get well. Yes, perhaps, for the first time, I actually would. Perhaps we all would, together, a miracle borne out of grief and sorrow, like the sunlight streaming through the clouds.
I look back on that morning and I think of it as the last time. The last time of sitting simply in sunshine, of listening to Ruby’s chatter, of feeling that weightlessness inside that was so new to me, and yet so wonderful. The last time of allowing myself to hope.
“I should get Ella to school,” Nathan said apologetically, and quickly I rose from the table.
“Yes, it is late. I can…”
“You stay there,” he insisted. “Enjoy your coffee.” He glanced at Alexa, sternness and compassion tangled in his gaze. “Be good today, Alexa. Be helpful…”
Of course, Alexa would be home all day. I was determined to make it into something good.
“We will do the shopping together,” I told Nathan. “Alexa, you can help me make cevapi.” She shrugged in response, which I chose to take as assent. When we were alone, I would apologise. I would make it better.
Nathan and Ella left soon after, and Ruby danced around while I cleared the dishes and Alexa drummed her fingers on the table top; Nathan had taken her phone off her for the week, and she was clearly restless as a result. Still, it would be good. Today would be good.
Then, as the door was closing behind Nathan, my phone, left on the counter, rang.