by Carrie Arcos
I can hardly wrap my head around what he’s saying.
“The Bosnian Muslims from the villages, like where your mom came from, had it the worst. If you were lucky, you got kicked out of your home and put on a bus or a train, or loaded into cattle cars or the back of a truck, and taken out of the country. If you weren’t so lucky, you were killed.”
“But I just don’t understand how that could happen. How could people just take someone away and kill them?”
“People fear what they don’t understand. And that same fear and lack of understanding make people do terrible things to one another.”
I think of the bombing I just survived. The fact that I live in a world where people bomb farmers markets. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of a terrorist attack happening in America; it’s just the first time I’ve experienced it firsthand.
“So is that what those terrorists want for us? To kill us just because we’re American?” I imagine the guy who planted the bombs in the market. Did he think he was fighting a war? Maybe that God wanted him to do it? I shudder. What kind of God would ask that?
Dad takes my hand again.
“Zara, the world we live in is broken. And . . .” His eyes fill with tears. “As your dad, all I want to do is protect you from it, but I can’t. You don’t know how helpless that makes me feel.”
Seeing my dad cry makes me want to cry. It also makes me scared. I need him to stop crying. He’s the strong one. If he falls apart, what chance do I have?
“I’m okay, Dad,” I say. I squeeze his hand. “Just . . . Can you tell me more? Like, how did Mom get to Sarajevo?” I ask.
He rubs his eyes. “She’s never told me the full story. I only know she was one of the many refugees who escaped to Sarajevo, and a family who knew her father took her in. She lived with them for two years until she was smuggled out through a Red Cross convoy.”
“She was smuggled out in a car?”
Dad nods slowly. “She was. And from there she lived in a camp in Germany for a year. Then she won a lottery that gave her passage to the US. I met her two years later.”
“At the hospital, right? When she broke her arm?” I ask this to encourage him to tell the story, even though this is the part I know.
“Yeah. Well, it wasn’t a true break, just a hairline fracture. When I saw her, she was sitting so erect and staring straight ahead. It must have been very painful, but you’d never know it. I was a resident and nervous, but not from lack of ability, of course.”
“Of course,” I say.
“She was just so beautiful. And stoic. And those eyes. Pretty, green and defiant. I stumbled through her exam like an idiot. I walked her out of the hospital and asked her if she wanted to have lunch with me.”
“And?”
“And now I’m looking into those same eyes of our daughter.”
“Can I see the picture?”
Dad gives a small smile and reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. He pulls out a photo that has been cut to fit inside one of the plastic flaps. It’s one of the only photos of them from when he and Mom were dating.
They’re at Baker’s, down near the water. There are bathhouses in the distance behind them. Mom’s wearing a cute blue bikini top; the photo is cut off above the waist. Her hair is in a ponytail, and her head is thrown back mid-laugh. She’s really laughing, hard, at something. Dad’s next to her in a pair of swim trunks, and he’s laughing too, but looking at her.
I used to ask Dad to see it all the time. It’s one of my favorites. One of the few glimpses of Mom as she used to be, captured when she was young. I would stare at this picture and try to get into the moment. I’d absorb all the details. The colors. The sand caked to the side of her arm. Dad’s goatee, which seems hilarious in its ’90s grunge vibe; I’ve only known him clean shaven. His hair down past his ears. The bracelets on Mom’s arm. The other people sitting on towels and chairs around them. Everything about the picture is oriented toward her.
My eyes tear, but I blink them away. She looks so happy. I would have given anything to be there with them. To know her when she was still capable of feeling such joy.
“She’s going to be okay,” Dad says, misunderstanding my emotion.
“Yeah,” I say, wondering what my mom was thinking in the photo, what it was that could have made her so happy. Wondering what has changed since.
1992
Spring
Višegrad
BiH
THAT MORNING, NADJA was up before her parents. She hadn’t slept well, worrying about whether she should tell her dad about what Marko had said. But she would be punished for having a boy alone in her room. She stood and shivered in the chill and headed for the kitchen. The heat wasn’t on because there was something wrong with the electricity again.
She put on her gloves before opening the stove door and placing some wood inside to get it going. With no electricity, the only heat they had came from the fireplace in the living room and the woodstove, which her mom always used to complain about, but now came in handy.
Her parents soon awoke and they had some leftover vegetable soup and bread from last night. They were all quiet.
Benjamin had his sketchbook with him at the table. Nadja saw he’d added a long-haired bearded Četnik to the page. The sleeve of the man’s jacket bore the patch with their emblem—a skull, a double-headed eagle and crossed swords. Superman stood over him and pointed in one direction as if to say, Go! You are not wanted here.
“Good drawing,” Nadja said, surprised at how lifelike the Četnik looked.
Her father took the book. He flipped through it. “Benjamin. No more of these, okay?” He tore out the one with the Četnik, opened the stove and threw the page in the fire.
“But I just got him to where he looked right!” Benjamin said.
“We don’t want anything that could make us look like we’re troublemakers.”
“It was just a drawing,” Benjamin said.
“There is no more just anything. Benjamin, Nadja, come here.”
Nadja and Benjamin walked to where their father stood by the stove. He placed his hands on both of their shoulders. “Did you pack the one bag like we asked?”
They nodded.
“Good. We are leaving tonight.”
“Tonight?” Nadja said, immediately worried that she wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to Marko. And he had acted so strange last night.
Nadja’s mom looked around the kitchen. “Only one bag. All of our albums, my mother’s dishes—”
“Bring one photo album, one dish,” her dad said. “The rest will wait for us until we return.” But there was doubt in his voice. Nadja wondered if her mother heard it too.
Her mother took a slow turn, as if she were trying to memorize the room.
Her father opened his arms for all of them, and they had a big family hug. He bent and kissed Nadja’s mom.
“Yuck,” Benjamin said, and they all laughed.
“Off to work,” he said, and he gave Benjamin and Nadja an extra hug.
“Why?” Nadja asked. “If we are leaving, it doesn’t matter.”
“We need it all to look normal. You must act normal. Do not say good-bye to anyone. Understand? Nadja? Benjamin? I’m serious. You cannot tell Marko or Uma or anyone.”
“Yes,” said Benjamin.
“I understand,” said Nadja. “Are we really going to walk all the way to Goražde again?”
“If we have to. If the main roads are blocked with checkpoints, it’s better to stay off them.”
“What will they do if they check us?” Benjamin said.
Nadja noticed the look that passed from her mother to her father.
“Detain us while we fill out the right paperwork,” her father said. “It will take forever. It’s better to leave on our own and get to Sarajevo, to Amir’s house,
as fast as we can. Think of it like a family camping trip.”
“Can we fish?” Benjamin asked, perking up at the idea.
“Yes, of course. We will fish,” her father said. “We may even catch something. It will be an adventure.”
As Nadja’s father spoke, he glanced at her mother, at the door, at the clock on the wall like he was already running from something.
“I like adventures,” Benjamin said.
“It’s supposed to rain,” said Nadja.
Their mother walked their father to the door and kissed him. With the door closed behind her, she leaned on it and said, “Well, they say Sarajevo has the best ćevapi.”
Benjamin laughed. Nadja smiled.
They knew she hated ćevapi.
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙
After bathing, Nadja stood in front of her bedroom mirror and applied blue eye shadow, black liner and mascara. She was putting in her hoop earrings when she heard something that sounded like gunfire. She froze, thinking maybe she’d imagined it.
No.
There it was again. A quick staccato. Three shots. Maybe five.
She ran to the living room, where her mother stood, her arms around Benjamin’s neck like a noose. The front door opened, and suddenly her father ran through it, slamming and locking it behind him.
“Soldiers! Down the street.” He was out of breath. “Coming up here. Everyone in the bedroom. Quick.” He led them to Benjamin’s bedroom, which was the farthest from the front door, and shut and locked them inside. Terror throbbed in Nadja’s heart and brain as she huddled next to her parents against the back wall, afraid to even breathe.
A couple of minutes later, there was loud banging on the front door. Nadja pressed her body into the side of her father. With a huge thud, the door crashed open, like it had been kicked through. Loud footsteps stomped around, followed by crashing and things being knocked over. They could also hear muffled voices. Someone tried to open the bedroom door, the only thing keeping Nadja’s family out of sight, and then banged on it. Within minutes, the door was kicked in. Nadja’s father positioned himself in front of his family, trying to shield the three of them with his body.
A man wearing a balaclava and dressed in a black military uniform with the Četnik insignia on the upper arm shouted at them to get out.
He pointed an assault rifle at them.
“Move now or I’ll kill you!”
“Don’t shoot!” her father said. “We will come. Don’t shoot.” He held up his hands, and behind him, Nadja, her mother and brother did the same.
Nadja’s father went first. Then Nadja’s mother, then Nadja and Benjamin, too, were each grabbed and pushed facedown to the floor. There were two other men dressed as paramilitaries and wearing balaclavas in the house, looking through everything. Another came out of her parents’ bedroom with a handful of jewelry, her mother’s creations.
The one who had found Nadja and her family, the one with blond hair, read from a small notebook he held in his hand. “Who is Musanović?”
“Me. I am,” her father said.
He turned and asked the man who suddenly hovered in the broken doorway of the house, “Is that true?”
Mr. Radić. Their neighbor. He nodded, his eyes large and bulging. “Yes, he is the Muslim pig.”
“Anyone else here in this house?” the soldier asked.
“No, no, only my family.”
“Out,” the soldier said, motioning Nadja’s father toward the door with his gun.
“What is wrong? What did I do?”
Another soldier exited her parents’ room holding a gun. “Found this.”
“Illegally housing weapons.”
“That’s not mine,” her father said.
The soldier standing next to him hit Nadja’s father with the butt of his gun. He fell to the floor.
“No!” Nadja’s mother screamed out.
Blood oozed from a small cut at the top of his hairline. Nadja started crying.
The man kicked her father in the side twice. “Get up.”
Her father stumbled to his feet, holding his head. The blood ran between his fingers like red paint.
“You too,” the soldier said, motioning to Benjamin, who still lay facedown on the ground.
“He is only a boy,” Nadja’s father said. “Come here, Benjamin.”
Benjamin got up and stood next to his father. He was crying now, looking back at his mother and Nadja as he and his father were walked through the front door.
“Where are you taking them?” Nadja’s mother asked, crawling toward them, slowly making her way to her feet. “Why? What has happened? They are nothing to you.”
“For questioning,” the blond said. He pointed his gun at her. “Would you like to be taken to questioning too?”
“It will be all right,” Nadja’s father said. “Be strong, Maja, Nadja. It will be all right.” He kept repeating the words as the soldiers led them away.
“I love you!” her mother shouted. “I love you!”
Her mother waited until the men were out the front door before she leapt to her feet. Nadja gathered herself and chased after her.
Outside, men and boys lined the middle of the small, narrow street. They were mostly neighbors, people Nadja had seen her whole life. Nadja’s father and brother were sent to join the back of the line. Cries of “why?” ran up and down the street from the women forced to stay behind.
Nadja recognized one of the men in uniform as her former teacher and her father’s colleague who taught a couple of doors down from him at the high school. She almost called out to him, but the look he gave her was one of complete loathing.
Hadn’t they all gone swimming together last summer? Weren’t there talks of doing that again? Something about him helping her with a recommendation letter for school in Sarajevo?
Wait, Nadja tried to say. What’s happening? Why isn’t anyone doing anything? But she could hardly open her mouth. Fear flooded her body, rooting it to the ground. Shame and fear. A fear so cold and sick that she trembled.
Nadja and her mother watched helplessly as the men and boys were led to a truck and told to get into the back.
“Be orderly about it! Hurry up!”
One of the men stepped out of line. “What right do you have to do this? What have I done? Where are you taking—”
A soldier knocked him down and hit him repeatedly in the head with the end of the rifle until the man lay still.
Nadja stared at the blood oozing out from the wound at the base of the man’s skull. She could see bits of his brain exposed from the open flap of skin. There was wailing now from the women standing by. The soldiers started shouting, telling them to get back to their homes.
“Please,” a woman begged, holding on to a boy. “Please. He is my only son.”
The largest soldier, with dirty long brown hair, approached her and hit her across the face with his palm. She fell to the ground but still held on to the leg of her son. The soldier aimed his gun and shot her in the head.
At the shot, Nadja felt her body go numb. It was like she was in a dream and everything had slowed down. She saw people moving and talking, but she couldn’t hear them or understand what they were saying.
Somewhere a woman was dying in the road.
Somewhere the blood trickled in a pencil-thin line and dribbled into the grass border at the edge of the street.
Somewhere the cries became untranslatable moans.
Nadja closed her eyes and tried to wake up. This wasn’t real. She was in a nightmare. Soon she would wake up and be in her room. She would wake up, and everything would be okay again.
Nadja opened her eyes and watched as the men and boys were loaded onto the bed of the truck. Her father and Benjamin stood in the back because there was no room to sit. Normally she’d be irr
itated at Benjamin’s tears because he could be such a baby sometimes. But now he seemed so brave. She saw her friend Jusuf then, just a little to the left of them. He held his football. He was wearing pajamas and had the strangest expression on his face. He seemed to be looking at Nadja but not looking at her at the same time.
She wanted to call to her family. She wanted to tell Benjamin she loved him. Tell her father. But she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t cry out. She could only watch. Her father held up his free hand. He was telling her something. Wait. Wait, she thought. Wait! I need to hear what he’s saying.
“Wait,” she croaked out.
But the truck was already moving. Already taking her father and brother away from her.
“Wait!” she screamed.
The truck rounded the bend, traveling downhill toward the center of town slowly because of its load. She stood with all the others left behind and watched until she could no longer see them.
Nadja sank to the ground, hysterical. Her mother stood next to her, screaming as well. Calling to her husband, to God, to anyone who would listen.
“Shut up!” a soldier said. “Everyone back to your homes before I shoot you again. You are lucky it’s not up to me. If it were, I would shoot you all today and then come back and shoot you again tomorrow!”
A soldier touched the top of Nadja’s head. “You’re pretty even when you cry,” he said.
“Nadja.” Her mother yanked her arm, dragging her away from the soldier and back to their house. Until today, he had been the man who worked at the post office.
She dragged Nadja past Mr. Radić, who stood in the middle of the street. He was saying something, but Nadja couldn’t hear. She stared at his mouth, open like a grave.
July 4
“ZARA.”
I feel a presence standing over me.