The men distinctly heard the gunshots that the deaf-mute boy registered only as a faint rush of air passing near the surface of his skin. Panic, arising from some instinctual place of fear, welled up within the men, momentarily freezing their march. Amir, reacting at the instant, lunged ahead to retake Josif’s hand but halted his thrust forward because his friend was inexplicably falling. Spinning round in his descent, Josif landed on his back, his eyes staring into the darkening sky until a second later Amir’s face appeared inches from his own, blocking out his view of the heavens.
Josif saw his little brother looking pale and shocked. Josif didn’t want him to be afraid. He smiled that it was all OK. He felt so funny. Everything tingling and numb.
Freeing himself from the paralysis that had seized him, Ismet screamed for everyone to run. He had seen Josif hit the ground, the front of the boy’s shirt going dark with red. The little deaf-mute was kneeling beside his fallen brother, shock and confusion on his face. The older man ran to their aid.
The younger boy would not let go of his brother’s hand. Ismet could see the life fading from the older boy’s eyes. He reached out his arm to grab hold of the younger boy, to lead him to safety. But the silent child wouldn’t release his grip and held onto his brother with a fierceness of strength unimaginable for one so small. Ismet began pulling both boys toward the camp, one arm wrapped around the small, shocked body of the young child whose only words were the tears that ran down his cheeks, and with the other dragging a body that would never cry again.
Yelling, Ismet called out to the others for help, through the rifle shots whose sounds filled the air all about them. His two companions quickly joined him, taking hold of Josif. They struggled toward the camp with their burden as fast as they could. The sound of rifle fire continued, but the bullets could no longer find their mark, the refugees being now beyond the snipers’ range.
At the sound of the rifle fire, the camp sentries ran in the direction from which the shots had come. The peacekeeping force had their weapons at ready, but by the time they reached the group straggling in to the perimeter of the outpost the firing had stopped. A paramedic quickly went to the aid of the wounded boy. A soldier knelt down beside the child who sat rocking next to the bloodied body, his small hand clinging to that of the injured boy.
“Come, come,” the man said softly, bending down toward Amir. “It’s alright. He’ll be fine. Come with me. What’s your name, son?”
Ismet spoke English. He now stepped forward to intervene, his hand reaching out to touch the soldier’s shoulder.
“He cannot hear you,” he said, his voice no more than a hoarse whisper. “He is deaf and neither can he speak. Let him be with his brother. It is all that he has left.”
The look in the refugee’s eyes spoke the obvious. Josif was all but dead. The soldier hesitated. The older man looked down at the peacekeeper, not sure whether the man understood. Anger crept into Ismet’s voice as he repeated, “The wounded boy is the deaf-mute’s older brother. Their entire family has been killed. There is no one left. No grandparents, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins. No fucking nobody. You understand? Nobody. They have killed them all.”
The medic stepped in then, telling the assisting soldier they needed to evacuate the wounded boy to a nearby field hospital as soon as possible if they were going to have any chance to save him. The soldier nodded and quickly moved to arrange the transfer.
“OK, OK,” the medic spoke softly to Amir, moving to detach the boy’s hand from Josif’s. “I have to help your brother now. You can stay. Just sit to the side. Look into my eyes now. See, I’m going to help your brother.”
Amir’s expression was blank, his eyes hollow, his face wan and shocked. He let his hand be moved without resistance.
“I need you to translate for me,” the medic said, addressing Ismet. “I have to keep this boy conscious. Ask him how he feels…whatever you can think of. Just keep him awake.”
Ismet nodded and bent forward to speak to Josif. Blood bubbled from the boy’s mouth. His face was moribund and his eyes glazed. Ismet told Josif that everything was going to be OK, that the doctors would take care of him. He asked the boy how he was feeling. When there was no response he came closer still, until he could make contact with the wounded boy’s eyes. He asked once more, and this time Josif moved his mouth, but the only sound that came out was a gasping and the gurgling of blood bubbling forth from his lungs. The medic cleared the boy’s mouth and made sure his tongue wasn’t obstructing his airway. Ismet sat, silent, a deep, weighted sigh escaping his mouth. It was too much. He couldn’t try to talk with this dying boy and still maintain the buffer of emotional distance that was the only protection left to his sanity.
“Talk to him…talk to him,” the medic admonished in an urgent voice.
Despite the pain it cost him to do so, Ismet continued to speak to the wounded boy until a vehicle arrived to transport him to the hospital. The medic transferred Josif to a gurney and with the driver’s help carried him to the makeshift ambulance. Ushering Amir into the van, the medic jumped in and closed the rear doors, doing what little he could to cushion the patient during the slow, rough ride over the bomb-cratered roads that led to the field hospital.
Midway there, Josif’s eyes seemed to liven for a few moments, and he turned to smile at Amir, who sat curled next to him. The younger boy’s eyes were closed, and his head lay on top of Josif’s left hand. When his friend’s hand stirred, Amir looked up. Their eyes met. Amir smiled back. Some moments later the medic saw Josif’s respiration stop. He attempted to resuscitate him, to no avail. The boy’s eyes had a glassy, fixed stare, his pupils had become abnormally large, and his pulse was gone.
The medic lowered Josif’s eyelids with his hands, and Amir gave the man a questioning look. The medic shook his head. A lone tear fell from the corner of Amir’s eye. And then another. He lay his head down on Josif’s chest. After a few moments Amir’s back began to rise and lower, his chest heaving convulsively from the great gasps of air entering and exiting his lungs. After a time the sobbing stopped, and the child lay quietly with his head resting on the lifeless body of his friend.
When they pulled into the UN compound and stopped in front of the tent housing the field hospital, the medic stepped out of the vehicle to speak with a young woman who held a two-way radio in one hand and a clipboard in the other. He informed her that the gunshot victim was dead and that there would no longer be need of emergency medical services—only a body bag and a tag. The woman nodded and spoke into the microphone of her radio, instructing the voice on the other side to fetch the body and deliver it to the morgue. Her voice was calm, and she spoke with a clear, precise, accented English.
Pia Struch was in her early thirties, held a graduate degree in international relations, and prided herself on her professionalism and composure in difficult circumstances. It was her second time as a UN volunteer but her first experience working in a war zone. This particular chore done, Pia began to move on to the next item on her list, but then she noticed that the medic who had brought in the gunshot victim stood there, looking as if he expected more.
“Is there something else, then?” Pia asked.
“Yeah,” the medic responded, nodding toward the vehicle he had arrived in.
Pia looked through the early evening light into the rear of the van. From where she stood she couldn’t see anything other than the shape of the prone body of the victim.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve got his brother here,” the medic replied, leading Pia toward the vehicle.
He pointed toward what had, at first glance, appeared to Pia to be a pile of clothing on top of the corpse but that now, at closer inspection, turned out to be the slumped form of a child.
“Why did you bring him with you? Is he injured?” Pia asked, her tone of voice changing to one of reproach when the medic answered in the negative. “Then he should be processed at the camp he entered. You know that.”
&nbs
p; “It just happened. I didn’t think. I just put him in with his brother,” the medic said with a shrug as he stepped into the van and gently shook the boy by the shoulder, the emotional exhaustion of the ordeal having caused the child to retreat into sleep.
Amir awoke to his body being jostled. Disoriented, he saw a woman speaking to him. Josif lay next to him. The memory of what had happened returned to his mind.
“He can’t hear you,” the medic informed Pia as she greeted the boy with a soft hello. “He’s a deaf-mute.”
“Oh, my god,” Pia sighed.
“The kids’ names are Muhamed and Jusuf,” the medic offered. “The men who came in with the boys said the rest of the family are all dead.”
“Who are these men?” Pia asked, her mind attempting to buy time with which to think.
“I don’t know.”
“You have to bring the boy back. They must be relatives of some sort. He should be with them.”
“Those guys found the kids in the woods,” the medic countered, shaking his head. “I can take the boy back if that’s what you want. But the people he came in with are in no shape to care for him. And if I bring him back to our camp they’re going to process him and probably just send him back here anyway.”
“We’re at capacity,” Pia countered.
“So are we.”
Pia drew in a large breath. One more thing to add to a never-ending list: an unaccompanied minor, likely an orphan, and on top of that, a disabled one. Focusing her attention on the reality at hand, her mind began to order the necessary steps needed to deal with this unexpected turn of events. The boy would have to be processed and placed with the other unaccompanied minors at the camp until arrangements could be made to send him elsewhere. Turning to the van, she looked inside. The rumpled pile of clothing was now sitting upright, staring at the body lying on the gurney by his side. From what she could see of him, the surviving brother looked to be about ten years old. His clothing was stained with dirt, grime, and the blood of his brother’s wound.
Two men showed up from the medical tent that housed the temporary morgue. They helped the medic pull the gurney with its lifeless load from the back of the van and lower its wheels to the ground. Amir’s eyes followed the exiting cot as though under a hypnotist’s spell, his face now fully turned in Pia’s direction. The boy’s eyes were a deep ocean green, and their gaze momentarily intersected her own without touch or acknowledgment, offering no emotion nor anything of personal note. Yet it was the very emptiness of the child’s expression that caused the UN volunteer to waken from the buffer of her professional posture.
With the wheels of the gurney set in place, the men prepared to move. As they took their first steps, the boy, who still sat in the ambulance, grew agitated and began to breathe out in sharp, rapid exhalations.
“He’ll want to take a last look,” the seasoned medic said and then lifted the sheet he had placed over the dead boy’s body.
Pia watched as the cloth billowed and rose. Her mind, caught off guard, had no chance to process thought, no time to object nor call out for pause to consider the act’s propriety. There, suddenly, before any reaction could surface to voice itself, lay a truth that could no longer be veiled by emotional detachment or the weariness of war: a dead boy’s face gazing up into the sky through eyelids lowered and shut tight to the world of the living. There would be no more life for him, she thought, no matter how many cries of compassion, calls for justice, reason, or revenge rang out.
The UN volunteer felt her stomach constrict and her throat go numb. She wanted to look away but found herself immobilized by the pallid beauty of the dead boy’s face. Her lungs held tight to her breath, and her body seemed to float as though gravity had suddenly lessened its force. The medic’s lifting of the boy’s shroud had seemed to her like the graceful sweep of a magician’s hand, the cloth rising high in the air and the thing it covered dematerializing into the ether. Yet it wasn’t the object beneath the sheet that had disappeared but rather that in which it and all materials things were held—time itself. In the vacuum that followed, the corpse seemed to speak its final words. Ones that were in a voice too hushed for any to hear.
As she looked on, Pia had a fleeting vision: the pale, inanimate features of the boy lying on the gurney in portrait with the child looking down upon him, the two faces meeting in a realm beyond the clock’s reach, in a place of neither death nor life—silent but for the rustling of one heart’s whisper to another.
With the drop of the cloth, the medic broke the spell. The white sheet now back in place over the slain boy’s face, the men dutifully began wheeling the gurney away toward the morgue. Pia shook herself, her shoulders and head giving a small shudder. Her eyes refocusing, she saw that the young boy was now looking at her. He held her gaze for a second before turning away to watch his brother being carted off.
Pia lifted her two-way radio and spoke into it briefly. “Yes, I’ll bring him right away,” she said, signing off.
“Alright then, I’ll be going,” the medic said, giving a nod in Pia’s direction.
“Wait. Which one is which?” Pia asked.
“What?”
“The boys,” Pia said, looking down at the notes she had scribbled on her clipboard. “Which one is Jusuf and which is Muhamed?”
“I don’t know. Sorry. The guys the kids came in with said one was named Jusuf and the other Muhamed. That’s all I remember. I never got anything out of the older brother before he died. And the younger one, well…”
Pia sighed and looked away. Reading annoyance in her face, the medic shrugged as if to say the obvious: this was a war zone, not a buttoned-down, orderly bureaucracy.
Pia asked, “You’ll get me the names of the men who accompanied the boys, then?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
Pia nodded, thanked him, and then approached Amir as the medic moved to close the ambulance door.
Placing her hand gently on the boy’s shoulder, she led him along a path that threaded its way among the barracks of a small, former military base where the UN had set up the camp. Hundreds of low-lying white tents spread out surrounding the old wood and metal buildings, like daisies overtaking a yard. Laundry drying on ropes that secured the tents to the ground fluttered like flags in the breeze. People could be seen mulling about the tents, some just standing as though lost in thought, others tending to family—the rest of the camp’s inhabitants hidden away in their canvas abodes. A few children ran about playing, others could be heard crying, huddled in their tent with a parent lost in grief.
As they made their way to the administrative building where the new refugees were processed, Pia tried to comfort Amir as best she could with a compassionate look, a touch of his shoulder, and comforting words that she knew would be lost on his ears. When they arrived at the old airplane hanger that now served as the camp’s central administrative office, Pia sat Amir down at a table and began the work of filling out the intake forms. She marked him as an “unaccompanied minor” and then wrote an account of the circumstances of his arrival at the camp.
Looking at her notes, Pia took a sheet of paper and slit it in half. On one piece she wrote “Muhamed,” and on the other she wrote “Jusuf.” Taking the first half and placing it in front of the boy, she looked at him questioningly. When there was no response, she took the paper back and drew a question mark after the name Muhamed and then pointed at him, her eyes seeking an answer.
Amir didn’t understand what the woman wanted. And even if he had, there was little in him capable of responding. The names written down in front of him made no sense. He didn’t know why the woman had written them. Looking downward, Amir felt his mind shut off. He didn’t want to answer questions. He wanted to be with Josif. Although his rational mind understood that his friend had just died, there was yet a more powerful sense of Josif still being of the world, present somewhere nearby, though exactly where was not clear.
Amir rose from his chair to find Josif. He saw the woma
n rise as well and felt her hand on his shoulder, holding it with a gentle pressure directing that he stay seated. He shook off her hand but sat back down. The woman started to put more pieces of paper in front of him on which she’d written words for him to look at. He briefly glimpsed her way and saw that she was talking to him. Amir’s eyes once again sought the comfort of the floor, its clear, simple lines…its safe, unambiguous purpose. After a minute he began to feel himself blend in with the grain of the long, narrow wood slats, losing himself in the play of the linear patterns running the length of the boards like empty, peaceful roads.
Chapter 7
Pia’s attempts to gather information from the boy went nowhere. The child didn’t seem able to read lips, or perhaps he was simply too traumatized to respond to the questions asked of him. Guessing his age at about ten, she wrote that down with a question mark. Unable to go any further, Pia led the boy to the barracks where the unaccompanied minors were housed. He showed no emotion at being left there, no recognition of her leaving and being replaced by yet another person under whose charge he was placed.
Returning to her office, Pia began the process of sorting out the child’s long-term placement. Her primary job in dealing with unaccompanied minors was to reunite the children with their family or relatives as soon as possible. In instances where the children were too young or too debilitated to be able to provide relevant information about their family, she would, as the administrating agent, give the case top priority.
The situation became still more difficult when Pia discovered that the boy had no ability to communicate through sign language. Among the refugees at the camp, Pia had found a schoolteacher who was fluent in Bosnian sign language and arranged for her to meet with the deaf-mute child. After spending some time with him, the woman informed Pia that the silent boy seemed to have no knowledge of any sign language whatsoever, neither that used in Bosnia or any of the other regional dialects.
The Solace of Trees Page 6