by Scott Simon
“They shoot the second mortar shell,” Mr. Zaric reminded his family, “to hit the people who run out to help those they’ve hit.”
There was a third shell, then the sound of sobs carrying over blocks of rubble. Once more the Zarics exchanged hard, sour smiles across the room, their shoulders hunched, their eyes widening, as if listening for an intruder on the roof.
Mr. Zaric rubbed his hands back and forth over his legs, his head bowed. “It sounds close,” he said. “We can get there.”
“Others will be there already,” said his wife.
“No one will be there,” said Mr. Zaric, “if no one goes first.”
Irena leaped up from the floor to tie on her basketball shoes. She felt suddenly lighter—her fingers flicked over the laces. She felt scared, anxious, and eager, and was at the door before her parents had clambered up into a crouch.
She raced along an empty Tomas Masaryk Street. Hungry stray dogs awakened from gutters and vestibules roused themselves at the sound of her feet, as if they might try to run with her, then dropped back, too weak to keep pace. Irena had not run, really run, for months. It was good to feel blood pumping to the backs of her ears. She looked down to see her feet flashing and hear her shoes slapping the pavement. Inches of smoke, fear, and stale air seemed to drain out of her heels. No sniper, she was sure, could fire a shot that could keep up with her. She could see plumes of smoke twisting above Vase Miskina Street; she could hear sirens shout and die down below the smoke. Irena broke for the basket.
MEN AND WOMEN wearing white smocks emblazoned with red crosses pulled bodies by the one arm or leg they had left into the backseats of cars. When Irena got to Vase Miskina Street, she saw that the rusty skids on the street were streaks of blood. A man in a blue shirt with a paper badge stopped her, roughly, taking her by the shoulders.
“Who the hell—” he began.
“I ran all the way to help,” heaved Irena.
“Let us get a handle first,” he said.
There was a foot on the street perhaps three meters behind them, five toes intact, toenails painted pink, no fading or chipping. Blood had clotted quickly but incompletely over the stump, giving it the appearance of some improbably bloody rose.
“What happened?” Irena gasped. One of the white smocks had come over to them.
“People were standing in line to get bread,” he said. “Three shells, I guess—you heard them. I don’t know how many dead. Sixteen, somebody counted. Wounded—it must be over a hundred. Cars are coming and going.”
Irena’s parents had come up behind her, wide-eyed and huffing.
“We don’t have a car to help,” said Mr. Zaric. “At the moment.”
“They’re piling two and three people into the backseats,” said the man in the smock. “They lay out others in the trunks. Children,” he added with some difficulty, “fit into the trunks. Are you looking for someone in particular?” he asked, swallowing hard.
“For no one,” said Mrs. Zaric. “We’re just here.”
“Well, maybe this is how you can help us,” said the worker.
THERE WERE BODIES laid out on drab gray blankets. The first was a man who was turned onto his belly, in a blue-checked short-sleeved shirt, white socks, and black shoes that hung off his heels—they must have been borrowed or stolen. The Zarics went over him slowly, from the back of his head to his heels.
“I can’t identify any part of the body,” said Mr. Zaric. The man’s age and appearance seemed closest to his own; he seemed to feel responsible for recognizing something. “Could I see his face?”
“Not until we can find it,” the man in the smock said curtly.
Next to that man was another in dingy white jeans and a worn white T-shirt. He had a pronounced round nose and rumpled ears, almost like squash.
“I almost recognize him,” said Mrs. Zaric. “Perhaps I just passed him in the street. Maybe it was the tram. Maybe we went to school together.”
“I don’t think so,” said Mr. Zaric. “But there is something familiar.” The man with the paper badge leaned over to pull up the man’s eyelids. His eyes were a watery blue, but they weren’t familiar to the Zarics.
“Perhaps we’ve just seen the nose on someone else. A cousin or someone,” said Mrs. Zaric.
“Don’t see too much in the nose,” said the man with the badge. “I think he fell on it. God knows what it looked like half an hour ago.”
Next was a young woman in a pale blue tank top who had what seemed to be only a series of slight wounds, small as strawberries, on the right side of her chest. She had dyed blond hair that had been curled around her throat, and wispy dark eyebrows. The Zarics just shook their heads. The attendant folded a blue blanket over her shoulders and chest, as if he were swaddling a kicking baby. But when she was covered her legs remained still.
“Wait,” said the man in the smock. “We have another girl over here.”
The man turned back a sheet to reveal a girl’s face, framed by short dark hair that was just beginning to grow out, like feathers, and a length of blue ribbon around her neck, still tied tight even as her shirt and sweater had begun to pull away. She wore thin metal frames with oblong lenses. The glasses were intact and made her eyes seem huge. No one had closed her eyes; they were too startling, brown with grains of green. Irena put her right palm softly against the girl’s face. It was like touching stone.
“You know her?” the man in the white smock asked, a little more gently. The sirens had stopped. The dead were already gone, and there was no need to rush.
“My teammate,” said Irena.
“You remember her name?” he asked more loudly. “Dear,” he added, as he turned to write in a small orange pad.
“Nermina Suljevic.” Mrs. Zaric laced her right arm protectively across Irena’s shoulders.
“Where does your friend live?”
“We all used to live across the way in Grbavica,” Mrs. Zaric volunteered. “The girls played basketball together at Number Three. But nobody from Grbavica knows where anyone else is right now.”
The man kept the sheet wound in his hands near the top of Nermina’s whitening, waxen throat.
“Why is she dead?” asked Irena suddenly. “I don’t see any blood. I don’t see a wound. Are you sure?” She stiffened in her mother’s arms.
The man took a breath before answering. “I could show you,” he said. “Some shrapnel pierced her back. I could show you. Please, dear. Take my word. I want her to be alive, too.” The man dropped his gaze. Irena got down on her knees and fished through folds of the sheet to take Nermina’s right hand in hers.
“You know this girl’s parents?” the man asked the Zarics.
“Games, school meetings. Around,” said Mrs. Zaric.
“Could you find them?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know where,” said Mrs. Zaric. “And they wouldn’t know where to find us.”
“Please. Do this,” said the man. “Go to the central synagogue and put up a message for her parents. Tell them what’s happened. That’s where people are going to look for messages.”
“Tell them about Nermina?”
“It shouldn’t be a stranger,” said the man.
“Like a phone message?” Mrs. Zaric permitted herself to register horror for the first time that morning. “ ‘While you were out, your daughter died’?”
The man in the smock looked hard at Mr. and Mrs. Zaric and tightened his voice, as if that would keep Irena from hearing.
“I doubt that they are alive,” he said. “Don’t you? They would be here by now.”
Irena kept her hand locked in Nermina’s. When the man in the smock tugged the sheet gently back over the dead girl’s face, Irena leaned forward to take it down again. “Please,” she said. He did not try to pull against her hand and draw the sheet back. “Please,” said Irena. “Let her breathe. Let it look like she can.”
MRS. ZARIC WENT home and looked for sheets of writing paper. Finding none, she took three sheets of
tissue paper—pink, green, and yellow—that had been packed along with the German washing machine that Mr. Zaric had hooked up for his mother three years ago and turned them over so that she could write a note to Nermina’s parents. She took one of the pens that her husband had carried home so freely from the International Playboy store, and began on the green sheet; she hoped it would seem more soothing.
27.5.
Dear Merima and Faris,
We hope that by the time you read this letter you will already have learned what has happened to Nermina today. If that is not so, I am sorry to have to tell you something so terrible.
Nermina was killed today on Vase Miskina Street. She and many others were waiting in line for bread when the Serbs fired three shells into them. Milan, Irena, and I saw Nermina among all the others. She was dead by the time we saw her. It was unmistakably she. She had that sweet face, and the delicate little flecks of green in her lovely brown eyes under her eyeglasses. We could see no wounds. A medical person told us that she had been hit suddenly, from behind. Nermina’s face seemed to be at peace. She must have died quickly and without suffering. That is all I have come to wish for myself.
She picked up the pink sheet and smoothed it out to write.
Page two
The people said that Nermina would be taken to a unit in the Kosevo hospital and kept until the end of the month. I told them—there was no one else to ask—that I did not think you had any religious beliefs about rapid burials that would be more important to you than seeing Nermina.
But if you do not receive this note by June, they will take Nermina to the cemetery on the hill just across from the hospital. She had no money, identification, or jewelry on her to pass on to you. Perhaps, like us, you were already robbed in Grbavica. Perhaps one of our fellow Bosnians told themselves they needed Nermina’s things more. I have done some things myself over the past few weeks—perhaps you have, too—that have surprised me. The people promise that they will place a marker with Nermina’s name on that spot so that you and all of her friends can find her.
We were also chased out of Grbavica. None of us had time to say goodbye, did we? We have been living at the apartment of Milan’s mother. She is also dead. Our son, Tomaslav, is out of the country, but we have not heard from him.
Finally, Mrs. Zaric moved over to the yellow sheet.
Page three
I was always happy to see Nermina with Irena. She and Amela Divacs would go into Irena’s room and close the door after the girls had played those long games in the playground on summer nights. They just as often wound up at your place. I think it depended on who had beer (and they thought we didn’t know!). I would hear them play Madonna and Sting too loud, sip at their beer and draw on their cigarettes, and laugh and giggle as they talked about games, boys, music, and makeup, I suppose. God, I miss those sounds.
If you are still with us, Milan and Irena and I are in apartment 302 of the building on Volunteer Street with yellow panels and the outdoor wooden stairs. It would be a pleasure to see you.
I cringe at seeing those last words drop out of my pen. To see the word “pleasure” in this note looks outlandish—and insensitive. Yet paper is scarce. I will let you read my thoughts as they come. I think you will understand that if this note finds you alive it might give us all pleasure to hold on to each other and remember our girls giggling behind the door.
With love,
Dalila Zaric
Mrs. Zaric folded the sheets into thirds and wrote:
MERIMA AND FARIS SULJEVIC
OF GRBAVICA
in large block letters across the front.
“I hope they are even alive to read this,” she said to her husband.
“They may be happier not to be,” said Mr. Zaric. “Quite a few of our friends must assume we’re dead. Sometimes I do. I have no other explanation for events.” He tapped the top of the letter, which he had read as she slid each page over, and had to turn away.
IRENA’S PARENTS HAD left Irena to herself in her grandmother’s bedroom. This meant that she was in a room with three windows and could easily be seen, especially if she persisted in lying across the bed to read an old magazine that Aleksandra Julianovic had found sticking to the inside of a mailbox downstairs. Mr. Zaric rapped gently on the door and waited for his daughter’s response.
“Yes?”
He turned the knob. He was standing in front of the windows, too. Irena rolled over and gave her father a small, pursed smile. “Jon Bon Jovi says, ‘I feel like shit and look like shit and I don’t give a shit.’ ”
“Well said.”
“It’s in an old Q from last year,” Irena said.
Mr. Zaric sat down beside his daughter. His mother’s old bed gave a slight wheeze. “I’ll bet we can get some wood out of this frame if we need to,” he said. “You hadn’t seen it?”
“I think we need to,” said Irena. “Soon, anyway. No, I don’t remember this Q. The cover wasn’t on it.” She flipped to a two-page photograph of a rectangular box wrapped in silver paper with a purple ribbon. “Warning,” it said below. “More than 30,000 people die in the U.K. each year from lung cancer.”
“We’re supposed to be horrified, right?” she asked her father. “But I want to write them and say, ‘Cancer doesn’t sound so bad to some of us right now.’ ”
“I don’t think we’re exactly their audience,” Mr. Zaric said gently. “Smoking is still bad for you.”
“Not being able to smoke is worse. Look,” Irena went on. “They’ve got these pictures of album covers that never made it into production. One is from the Beatles, 1966. Yesterday and Today.”
Mr. Zaric had to put his nose close to the coaster-size image to make out the picture of John, Paul, George, and Ringo in white coats, holding cuts of raw meat and dismembered dolls’ heads in their laps. “Oh, the Butcher Cover,” he said. “It’s famous. I’ve never seen it.”
“ ‘Too barbaric for general consumption,’ ” Irena read from the caption. “Until they could print a new one five days later, they pasted something over this one?”
“You see?” Mr. Zaric said with some satisfaction. “The lads from Liverpool weren’t always goody-goodies. That’s the album with ‘Yesterday’ and ‘We Can Work It Out.’ We have it,” he said, then added quietly, “we did.”
“Look at this one,” Irena said. “David Bowie in a dress. The Man Who Sold the World. He’s attractive in a dress, don’t you think?”
“To some tastes,” said Mr. Zaric.
“But look at what they wound up using,” said Irena. “A man holding a sniper rifle. Westerners are crazy. They get squeamish about a man in a dress, but not about a man carrying a rifle.”
“You should remember the days of Tito,” said her father. “They put thick black strips over all the breasts and butts in Playboy and Penthouse. They spared us the sight of bare tits by showing us bondage. We used to joke, ‘Marshal Tito must be one kinky cat.’ ”
“Who shot John Lennon?” Irena asked suddenly. “The CIA? MI-5 or MI-6? I get them confused. Aleksandra says the West was worried that rock music would take over the world.”
“Aleksandra forgets,” said Mr. Zaric. “Rock music is a CIA and MI-5 plot to take over the world. Or is it MI-6? I get them confused, too.”
“And Mossad,” offered Irena.
“And Coke and Pepsi. Which I also get confused. Rock musicians don’t want to take over the world,” he added. “Just all the money.” He lightly fingered the pages of Q, which Irena was holding almost like a bouquet. “I’ve got to get you some new magazines.” Mr. Zaric betrayed his intention to take their conversation in another direction by clearing his throat. Irena intercepted him. “I’m fine, really,” she said.
“Nermina,” he began.
“Really, I’m fine. I just don’t want to talk about it. Please, not ever. Not now. Please. I’m sad, okay? But I know what kind of world we’re in right now.”
“Not the world,” said Mr. Zaric. “Here.”
Mr. Zaric paused for a moment as his daughter lowered her head onto a pillow. He figured—by now it was a subtle calculation that they must have made several hundred times a day—that her head was about the same height as the window, but with the sun descending the view across the way would be dark.
“Talking may help you handle your feelings,” he said. “That’s all I mean.”
“I can handle my feelings,” said Irena. She sat up to face her father. “I want to turn my feelings into a club. I want to smash—I can’t believe I’m hearing this out of my own mouth—some girl on the other side. Someone like the guy we saw with the black shoes hanging off his heels. Someone like the girl with her dyed blond hair whipped around her throat. Someone like Grandma, and Mr. Bobic. Life for life.”
“You know girls over there,” said her father softly. “You’ve played with them. Your girl over there would be as innocent as you. As innocent”—Mr. Zaric’s voice snagged—“as Nermina.”
“But it sure would make them wonder about shooting the next girl, wouldn’t it?” said Irena. “If they thought one of their own precious, innocent little girls was next. Besides,” Irena announced, turning back to the pillow, “I don’t want to be innocent anymore.”