Standing on the rock shelf with Amir by his side, Josif lifted his arms upward, palms spread open. The older boy momentarily lowered his right arm to point at Amir and then to his own eye in spontaneous sign language. “Watch this,” he said, a small look of pride peeking out from behind his smile. Standing with his body erect and his back arched, the memory of once having seen a professional diving event on television playing in his mind, Josif raised his arms yet higher above his head, then lowered them to his side and pushed off the ledge, trying to imitate a classic diving pose as best he could. As his body neared its goal, Josif tucked his head between his extended his arms, his body breaking the water’s surface with a clean, neat incision. Stepping out from the pool, Josif pulled up his sagging underwear before raising his arms and pumping them up and down in victory celebration. Standing on the ledge, Amir gave him a thumbs-up and smiled broadly.
“OK, now you try,” Josif yelled, his arms mimicking the action of his dive.
“No way,” Amir replied, his head moving back and forth.
Before Josif had a chance to say anything more, Amir leapt into the air, his legs curled into his chest, wrapped tight by his arms. The splash of the younger boy’s cannonball rained over Josif, and it was Amir’s turn to raise his arms in victory. Back up on the ledge together, Josif, feeling himself the expert from his first dive’s success, persisted in getting Amir to try it.
“Look, you do it like this,” Josif demonstrated in encouragement. “Yeah, come on, friend, you can do it!”
The expression on Amir’s face looked doubtful. Nevertheless, he began to imitate the older boy’s pose and, cheered on by Josif, he leapt outward from the lower ledge. Amir flew out parallel to the water and looked like he might stay that way, ending up with a belly flop, until, at the very last moment, he was able to make an adjustment, tucking his head downward and tilting his body at a sharper angle, to hit the water with a reasonable facsimile of a proper dive.
“Yeah man, cool. Really great,” Josif called out to Amir when he surfaced. “Hey, look there! Your underwear!”
The impact of the dive had removed the old, ill-fitting underwear from Amir’s body. Laughing, Josif dove at the floating piece of cloth and took hold of it just as his hands breached the water. He emerged from the dive holding the briefs up teasingly toward Amir and, still laughing, threw the garment over the younger boy’s head, up onto the rocks at the pool’s edge. Seeing Amir’s embarrassed surprise, Josif’s grin grew larger, and he spontaneously reached down to take hold of his own underwear, which had slipped low on his waist, and removed it, then threw it over his young friend’s head as well, giggling with drunken delight. Their breath bursting forth from their lungs in laughter, the boys raced up to the shore to gather their underwear. Reaching his first, Josif took hold of them and covered the area of his crotch, grinning and pointing at his younger friend’s nakedness. Then, as though playing peekaboo, Josif kept moving them away from and then back over himself, giggling at a blushing Amir, the older boy’s knees buckling as if he were about to fall down laughing. But all of a sudden Josif’s jesting ceased, something about the younger boy’s nakedness catching his eye.
“Oh, my god,” Josif said. “You’re circumcised. Your worm is cut.”
Amir returned his older friend’s surprised expression with a quizzical gaze. Josif was clearly pointing toward the area of Amir’s pubis. At first instant he thought his friend might be teasing him for lack of any body hair there, but in the very next second his eyes caught clearer focus of the older boy’s penis. His immediate reaction was that there was something wrong with Josif’s member. It didn’t look right. In the very next beat of his heart, though, Amir understood what Josif’s surprise was all about. He, Amir, was circumcised, and Josif was not.
Seeing the blush of embarrassment on his younger friend’s face change to the flush of fear, Josif sought to assuage the boy and tell him there was no need to worry. It was lost on neither boy that, in their land, to be circumcised was considered a badge of Islam. In a time and place where the violence of war had come as suddenly and swiftly as it had in their country, the fact of one’s being circumcised or not could mean the difference between life and death. That the presence, or lack thereof, of a small piece of foreskin could hold such significance seemed an absurdity. Yet now, for the two boys, things had changed.
The surprised look on Josif’s face quickly changed to one of concern and was followed by a moment’s silence. A thought came to Josif, and he bent to his knees and lowered himself to the ground, his body prostrating forward the way the Muslims did at prayer. Josif then looked up at his friend with a question in his eyes.
“Yes,” Amir answered in kind, his eyes meeting Josif’s, “I am Muslim.”
Josif went quiet, though after a moment his smile returned, a softer one than the earlier, more playful grin.
“Come, let’s dive again,” Josif said speaking more to himself than to his friend, his thoughts trying to come to terms with what this revelation might mean.
That night in bed, Amir could see Josif’s lips moving, though barely so. Whether he was talking to himself or to Amir was unclear. Feeling the warmth of Josif’s body next to his, Amir fell off into dreams while Josif lay awake, continuing to speak in quiet whisper. After a time the older boy no longer spoke out loud, and his thoughts retreated to silent wanderings. Above all, Zoran must not know. Josif must bring his friend to town. He had heard that buses sometimes passed through to take the Muslims to what were called “the safe areas,” the places where the blue-helmeted foreign soldiers were stationed. But he remembered Zoran drinking one night with his friends, some of whom were soldiers. They joked about the buses. Some would get lost, they laughed. A drunken Zoran spoke of the things he and his soldier friends had done to the people on the buses, things that made Josif shiver.
No, he must not let Zoran know. He needed to get his friend away. To the town authorities, that would probably be best. Then again, maybe not. Josif’s thoughts began to mingle one into the other: the war, his silent friend, Zoran, the unhappiness of his own life…all mixing in jumble and then dispersing…and suddenly, in the moments before sleep took hold, he found himself in a rock-and-roll band. He was in Belgrade. He was onstage, and below him were hundreds of kids his own age dancing wildly to the music. The last thing Josif remembered before falling into dream, he was sitting in the drummer’s seat, his body pulsing like the skin on the drum to the reverberation of the beat, sweat dripping from his head to his feet, his heart as happy as music itself.
Chapter 5
Amir closed the door on Josif dancing to a popular Belgrade rock group’s hit song, this time the older boy pantomiming the guitar solo instead of taking on the role of drummer. The younger boy headed in the direction of the cow stalls, to go past them through the large double doors, to the place where he and Josif went to relieve their bladders under the night sky. The house had an indoor toilet. The boys had but a fetid, uncared-for outhouse that they avoided whenever possible.
Walking through the barn, Amir came to a sudden, though noiseless, stop just as he came onto the stalls. He sensed a presence, a movement, and too, there was the faintest of sounds breaking through the obstruction that hindered his hearing. Brief flutters of noise, like a smell so indistinct as to seem odorless, a thing too distant for the eyes to distinguish from the horizon, had recently begun to make their way in but made no impression on his conscious mind.
Scanning the evening gloom, Amir saw Zoran standing tall in silhouette inside one of the stalls. The farmer was standing on a pair of milking stools placed side by side, his pants fallen down around his ankles. The man’s body swayed back and forth, his hips moving rhythmically. His head was bent back with open mouth and moved in counterpoint to the motion of his hips. In the shadowy darkness of the barn interior it seemed to the boy as if he were looking upon the strange dance of a puppet backlit on a darkened stage. Amir stood silently watching, the invisible hands of the puppeteer pulling the strings
from somewhere behind a hidden curtain.
Zoran’s hands rested on the cow’s rump to give him balance, his left hand serving double duty, keeping the cow’s tail flipped to one side. Forward and back, the farmer swayed. Amir looked on as Zoran approached the climax of the event, his head lolling to the side, tilting just enough to catch sight of the boy standing there, only ten meters off. The young deaf-mute’s eyes were like the darkness of the night; they saw, but said nothing. A sardonic smile intermingled with Zoran’s look of pleasure, his head returning front on. Back and forth…the cow contentedly chewing grain from the feed bucket Zoran had placed in front of it, the action of the farmer’s penetration lost to the sweetness of the grain’s taste. Then, all of a sudden, Zoran’s eyes rose up in their sockets, his head no longer moving in opposition to the rhythm of the hips but tensed back, face toward the ceiling. His groan floated past the boy’s ears unheard.
“Oh, Lepa, you’re a good one,” Zoran murmured while lifting his pants up to his knees.
The farmer stepped off the stool, patted the cow’s rump, then took a rag hanging on the bars of the stall and wiped off his penis. Pulling his pants up all the way now, his body sedated and laconic, he shoved the stools back into the stall with his foot and turned to look at the boy who stood in the shadows as still as a mouse. Zoran gave the boy barely a moment’s consideration, as though the child held little more concern to him than might an actual rodent.
A week had passed since Josif’s discovery of Amir’s Muslim heritage. Nothing more of it had been communicated between the two. Amir was, to an extent, innocent of its potential danger to him at the farm. The younger boy felt secure in his trust of Josif, protected and cared for by his older friend. If Josif was not by nature drawn to, nor fully cognizant of, the rationale for the violence that had ignited the war, he also wasn’t ignorant of its dangers, nor the precariousness of his friend’s situation, living in such close proximity to a man like Zoran. He decided he needed to help his young friend escape to the safe haven provided by the blue-helmeted soldiers of the United Nations, sooner rather than later.
That Sunday, Zoran came up with several hours’ worth of chores to occupy Josif on what was supposed to be the boy’s day of rest. “So you don’t become accustomed to laziness,” the man gave for reason. “And take your pet rabbit with you to help out,” he added with derisive glance in Amir’s direction, indicating that the younger farmhand was not to escape the lesson.
After lunch, when their last chore had been completed, Josif told Sonja that he wanted to take the boy into town. “He’s never seen it,” Josif said, by way of reason.
“How do you know?” Sonja asked. “That’s where I found him. Just outside of town.”
“I asked him,” Josif answered. “He shook his head no.”
If Josif had been speaking with Zoran, the man would have said something like: “You can’t ask a question of a rock. And a rock certainly can’t answer one. Go away and talk your foolishness to someone else stupid enough to listen.”
Sonja didn’t take the conversation any further but just nodded her head, more in thought than in assent. Questions of the boy’s origins hovered at the back of her conscious thought, where she had sent them to keep her nagging suspicions at bay. The farmer’s wife would rather know less than more. She had lied to her husband when he had asked where the boy came from. Instead of telling the truth, that she didn’t know—a fact that would have drawn more inquiry from Zoran—she’d made up a vague story of the boy being the relative of a friend of a friend, insinuating an ethic origin that would have the child coming from the “right” side. This was enough to assuage both Zoran and her own mind.
“Can we use the bicycle?” Josif asked, distracting Sonja from the question of going to town to that of using the bike, as though the former had already been answered in the affirmative.
Sonja hesitated before saying yes…not for any fear of loss or damage to the old, rusted bicycle itself, but rather, her thoughts traveled to her children. She remembered them riding about the yard, playing freely in rare moments when their father wasn’t bullying them about. She wondered where they might be at that very moment and prayed that wherever it was, it was far from this damned war, a war stirred up by men like her husband, only ones far more clever and ambitious than he.
“Yes, you can take it,” Sonja said, reluctance struggling with generosity, the kinder part of her winning over. “But be careful not to leave it unattended. Things disappear quickly these days. You can’t be too careful. And be back well before dark.”
Unable to keep a smile from his face, Josif raced off to the barn to collect the bike. He had already pumped air into its tires and sprayed oil on the sprocket and chain. Knowing Zoran had gone off with friends, he had assumed there would be a good chance of talking Sonja into letting him and the boy have the bike. Josif hopped onto the bike and rode it around to the back of the barn, where he had left Amir waiting.
“Hey, look,” Josif laughed. “I got it!”
“Hah, great,” Amir smiled.
“Come on, then,” Josif said. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Amir asked by way of opening his palms while hunching his shoulders and tilting his head to the side with a quizzical expression.
“To town,” Josif answered.
“Where?” Amir asked once more, not sure of what his friend was saying.
“To town,” Josif repeated, this time more slowly and mouthing the words broadly, his arm signaling the direction they would go.
When he understood where they were to go, Amir hesitated, the idea of going into town somehow disturbing to him. “I don’t know,” Amir said with a doubtful shake of his head. “Let’s go swimming instead,” he suggested, his arms miming the stroke of the crawl.
“Yeah, maybe later,” Josif lied. “But we have to go to town now. I heard Zoran talking to one of his soldier friends last night. He said they are taking some of your people to the safe place today. To where the blue helmets are. The buses will be passing through town this afternoon. We need to get you on the bus so you can get away from here. You’ll see, it will be good.”
Amir had no idea what his friend was saying. He could sense, though, that Josif had something in mind and seemed agitated. “OK,” he shrugged and mounted the bicycle’s crossbar, sitting in front of the seat, Josif’s feet holding the bike steady.
“Yeah, it’s going to be OK,” Josif said with reassuring smile. “You’ll see. Everything is going to be alright.”
With the younger boy securely nestled between his arms and the handlebars, Josif began pedaling toward town with purpose. They were almost there when the older boy caught sight of three buses coming their way. Two military jeeps escorted the larger vehicles, one in the lead of the buses and the others taking up the rear. Most of the men riding in the escort vehicles were dressed in military fatigues, the rest in regular civilian clothing. All of them but the drivers carried weapons. As the convoy drove by, Josif stopped pedaling, his feet coming to the ground to hold the bike upright. The lead bus was nearly full, its occupants only men. Bleak, frightened-looking faces stared out the windows, a few turning to look at Josif and Amir, most gazing off into the distance. The next two buses were filled with women and young children. At the sight of soldiers Amir felt his body seize in fear. His eyes closed to shut out their image.
“Damn, we’re too late.” Josif spoke with a look of disappointment on his face, the buses already moving past them into the distance.
Amir felt the breath of Josif’s words on his neck. He opened his eyes and then turned to look at the older boy. “What?” his expression asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I was going to send you with them,” Josif responded, realizing at that moment that if he had succeeded it would have meant returning to the farm alone. The idea of losing his friend, of returning to Zoran’s to once more live at the farm without companionship of any kind, suddenly felt unbearable to the older boy. At that moment, he knew he
was finished with them. He was finished with being shipped off here and there to people who just used him as a servant. It was time for him to strike out on his own. To Belgrade. Yes, to Belgrade, to find a job playing drums in a rock group. He could take his friend with him. The boy could help in the band, be what they called the roadie, carry the equipment, set it up, and break it down. But no, it wouldn’t work. Josif needed to get Amir to the place of the foreign soldiers, to where his own people were.
“Hang on. We’re going to go after them,” Josif said, pointing in the direction of the buses. “We’ll ask people on the road where they passed to. We’ll find the safe area ourselves.”
“No, I don’t want to,” Amir answered with a firm shake of his head. “Let’s go back.”
“Look, don’t worry. I’m taking you to your people. It’s going to be OK. You can’t stay at Zoran’s. It’s too dangerous. He’s going to find out. You have to trust me. Come on, now, it’s going to be good. I promise you.”
Amir didn’t understand what Josif had said, but the look of caring and confident resolve on his friend’s face eased the tension in the younger boy’s body and mind.
Giving Amir a thumbs-up and a reassuring smile, Josif swiveled the bike around. Feeling his young friend’s body relax into his, Josif raised his feet to the pedals and began pumping for all he was worth in the direction the buses had gone. After a time, the boys lost thought of all destination and fell into a world of their own imagination. They took turns pedaling, sometimes madly as if racing against an imaginary challenger, at other times slowly and lazily, beguiled by the summer day’s promise of endless sunshine and eternal warmth.
Nearly two hours later, legs tired and their energy on the wane, the boys saw a small cloud of dust rise ahead of them. Soon a lone, empty bus emerged from the billowing opaqueness. It was headed in their direction and escorted by a military jeep, the lead vehicle’s passengers looking like tired workers whose shift had just finished. They seemed not to notice the two boys, mounted on their bicycle, who were staring at them from the side of the road. Weapons at rest, several of the men could be seen laughing and joking while the others looked off into space with blank faces. The fine mist of dust drifting earthward signaled that they had driven out from a side road just ahead.
The Solace of Trees Page 4