The Solace of Trees

by Robert Madrygin

  With so little to go on, and the communication so challenging, Pia turned to a colleague, Teresa Fried, for help. Among her several university degrees, Teresa had one in art therapy and had been using art in her work with the refugees to surprisingly good results. In addition, she was fluent in Serbo-Croatian. If the deaf-mute child couldn’t sign, at least he could hopefully read. Pia arranged for Teresa to meet with Amir in the hope that she might gain enough information to help trace his background and ultimately find one of his family members.

  Pia’s colleague had set up a small art space in the corner of one of the administrative tents. There she had gathered a folding table, a few chairs, several rolls of art paper, and some colored pencils. When Pia had brought him to her, Teresa had begun her session with Amir by writing down simple questions in the boy’s native tongue: Do you like to draw? Can you write your name?

  When confronted with queries about who he was and where he came from, Amir, however, had responded as he had with Pia, his writing hand heavy at his side and his gaze distant. The words on the paper were like those spoken out loud and inaudible to his ears; his eyes saw them but did not seem able to register their meaning. Recognizing that the boy was beginning to shut down, Teresa decided to turn to simple drawing as means of communicating with him. At first she had a difficult time getting Amir to pick up the colored pencils she placed in front of him.

  Amir had been trained to show respect to his elders by being shown the same from them. His mother and father, Emina and Asaf, tried to never speak ill of others nor fall prey to the temptation of gossip that came so easily to village life. When he got angry at his sister, at one of his cousins, or at playmates and reacted with negative actions or words, his parents didn’t lecture him about politeness but showed their understanding of his feelings, then they did the very same for the person who had drawn Amir’s ire. When their son did something that hurt another’s feelings, they didn’t scold him—their disappointment said more in its silence than a thousand reproving words. Amir understood that the two women were trying to help him. As pained and constricted as his emotions were, Amir knew he must make the effort to show appreciation, no matter how small a response he might be able to muster. His hand reached out and took a green pencil. He drew a tree, and then another. To the right of the trees he drew a pasture and added a cow. With a brown pencil, he filled the background with mountains. He wound a road through the pasture and the hills.

  The act of drawing calmed and soothed him. His body relaxed as it lost itself to the rhythm of his hand going from one colored pencil to the next, the pencils moving as if on their own across the paper in front of him as the images appeared.

  “Very nice. It looks like your road is high up in the hills,” Teresa said, looking over Amir’s picture. She used her hand to indicate the meaning of her words by curving it back and forth in progressively higher motion.

  “Yes,” Amir nodded.

  “Pia and I have something for you to look at,” Teresa continued. “It’s a map of the towns higher up in the hills. Can you look at it?”

  Amir could see that she was asking him to look at the sheet of paper she was unfolding on the table. Pia, standing by her side, looked on.

  “Alright,” Amir nodded. It was a map. After a few seconds he began to recognize some familiar names written next to the small dots designating towns. Then Amir saw a name that caused a rush of air to fill his lungs and linger for a time before it rushed out in one long current of breath, the sound lost to his deaf ears. He now knew what they wanted.

  After his finger had pointed to the village where his family had lived, he looked away from the map and the women, his breathing becoming audible. He felt the gentle touch of a hand resting on his shoulder but didn’t respond. When he finally turned his head back, he could see the two women speaking. The one who did the drawings with him picked up a piece of paper, wrote something down, and placed it in front of him. It said “name.” The other woman had also done this the first day he had been there. But he had been confused; the names Muhamed and Jusuf had been written on the paper, and he didn’t understand to whom they might refer.

  Seeing the boy hesitate, the art therapist took the paper and added another word so that it now read “your name,” and then added her own, Teresa, and pointed from it to herself. She handed the paper to Pia, who did the same. They could hear the air enter and exit the boy’s throat. He picked up a pencil and wrote “Amir.”

  “Amir?” Pia asked, mouthing the name carefully.

  “Yes,” the boy’s nod spoke, “my name is Amir.”

  Now it was the UN volunteer’s turn to be confused. She had been told the boy’s name was Muhamed. After some back-and-forth with him, it was clear he understood the question. The women repeated the exercise of writing their names down, the boy following suit, once again his hand speaking his name, “Amir.”

  Seeing his name on the paper in front of him, Amir could feel no connection to it, no special familiarity to its presence before him. He had taken up the pencil and written down his name as he might write the answer to a history question in a classroom quiz. The only thing of note that he felt as the word emerged from his own hand was his lack of emotion at seeing it. A name, especially one’s own, he knew, should have special significance, should be filled with meaning. Yet a name was just a word like any other if there was no one to speak it with love.

  “And your last name?” the art therapist asked, both she and Pia adding their surnames to their given name. Nodding his understanding, Amir began to write his family name with the same feeling of emptiness with which he had written his forename. As the letters appeared one by one, however, the sound of the name began to ring inside his ears…Beganović…like a pebble tossed into a pond, traveling waves of emotion rippling outward toward his conscious mind.

  “No.” Amir’s internal voice spoke with a shake of his head, his hand letting go of the pen. “No,” he repeated, this time more resolutely. “No,” he repeated again and then again, the internal sound of the negation like a dam holding back deep waters—a flood of emotion threatening to drown him in sorrow. Feeling the weight of the moment, the two women refrained from intervening.

  Breathing in short, sharp inhalations, Amir closed his eyes for a time and then opened them again, his anxiety lessening. Collecting himself, Amir reached down and took the pen in hand once more. Placing the tip of the pen to the paper, he wrote his family name, “Beganović.”

  The next day Pia and Teresa met with Amir again, this time to try to gather information about what had happened to his family. The men who had accompanied Amir and his brother into the UN camp had said the older boy told them that their family had all been lost to the war. But the men had also said that the boys’ names were Jusuf and Muhamed. The two women well knew that misinformation, both from error or purposeful, abounded in war zones. It was important that they get as much firsthand detail from the boy as possible.

  The art therapist began by indicating to Amir that she would like him to sketch a simple picture of his home. He was hesitant to do so, his hands remaining rigidly by his sides when she offered him the pencils. Taking a sheet of paper, she drew a picture of a house and showed it to Amir. Underneath the drawing she wrote, “my home.” Teresa offered him the pencils once more. This time he accepted them and began to draw a picture of his family’s house.

  The resulting drawing seemed to confirm the story that his family had met a tragic end. The picture showed a small farmhouse that appeared to have collapsed upon itself, with no people to be seen either inside or out. Next to it was a barn. Like the house, it was colored black and seemed to be lifeless. Beside the barn was a cow on its side. Teresa gently pushed for more information.

  Showing the child a series of photos depicting families standing together in pose, she wrote down the word “family” and indicated by sketching a picture of her own family members that he should attempt to do the same of his. Amir drew his picture as had she, using stick fi
gures to portray the people. Yet while her drawing showed everyone in standing position, his figures, like the cow beside the barn, were all drawn in horizontal position. What was even more disturbing than the prone position of the family members was that they were drawn one on top of the other, as if stacked in a pile.

  When she had finished, Teresa picked up the picture she had drawn of her family and wrote a name beneath each figure. She took a separate piece of paper and asked Amir to do the same. The art therapist looked on as Amir took the pencil in hand in what almost seemed a trance and wrote down his family’s names. “Asaf. Emina. Minka.”

  “And your brother?” Teresa asked after a moment’s pause, taking the paper, writing the words “brother” and “Jusuf,” followed by a question mark. But Amir suddenly grew agitated and unresponsive. Letting go of the pencil, he lowered his head and stared at the ground in front of his feet. The UN worker reached over to touch Amir’s shoulder in an attempt to bring his gaze back up.

  The art therapist spoke the name Jusuf slowly and repeated it several times so that she was sure the boy understood the word.

  “No,” Amir shook his head in a rapid, brief movement meant to end the encounter. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t want to talk about this,” his body said, speaking his emotion as clearly as any words.

  Amir understood that the woman had been talking about his friend. He knew Josif’s name because Josif had written it down for him once, and he’d seen it spoken on the lips of the man and woman whose farm they had worked at. Somewhere in a far-off region of his mind Amir realized there was some kind of misunderstanding. But he didn’t want to answer questions about his friend, didn’t want to think about Josif in the specific, in the here and now. Because that would mean thinking about what had happened. That would mean accepting that Josif was dead, a thought Amir dared not approach for fear of touching yet another pain, one even sharper and deeper than the loss of his friend.

  Thoughts of Josif, triggered by the woman’s questions, brought unpleasant images to Amir’s mind. But his emotional remembrances, those held in his heart, were different. They brought Amir comfort. They carried a sense of his friend as though he were still there, as if Josif’s smile still hovered in front of him, his body still radiating warmth, the imprint of his arm hooked affectionately round Amir’s shoulder, the smell of him, his skin and hair, still lingering in the air. Unlike thoughts, these feelings traveled to neither past nor future but hovered in a kind of amorphous present and could live in a world of their own, in a place without time or demands.

  Why could he hold his feelings for Josif so close to the surface of his consciousness, but not the memory of his family? If the loss of his family was an open wound yet to scar over, Josif had been the salve. Josif had provided him a refuge, had created it by braving his own place of pain to share with Amir his hope and what little love he had been able to find in the world. The woman who had Amir make the drawings kept mouthing Josif’s name. He could see by the woman’s eyes that she wanted to help, wanted him to let her in. But there was no room. What little there had been, had been made by Josif, and Amir knew he must save it for his friend. It was the only way to keep Josif from completely disappearing, as had his mother, father, and sister.

  Having both the boy’s full name and that of the village he came from, Pia was hopeful that she would find some connection to Amir’s family. Her hope, though, was short-lived. Even with the more detailed information they were able to get from the boy in subsequent sessions—the names of other family members, the fact that Jusuf was in fact not his brother but a friend whose real name was Josif—she was unable to find anyone in the other nearby UN refugee camps who recognized the boy’s name or photo or knew anything of his family.

  Speaking with an officer aligned with an intelligence unit, Pia learned that Amir’s village lay in an area of heavy conflict. Specific information was spotty at best. There had been no aerial surveillance scheduled over the small hamlet, and little intelligence data existed other than a single eyewitness report. It had come from a Muslim inhabitant of the village who had been lucky enough to be deep in the forest cutting firewood when his home had been invaded by a large paramilitary unit. What he recounted was disheartening. The village had been “cleansed” of its Muslim residents. After the paramilitary left, the man had sneaked back into town, to find his family gone and his house ransacked. Searching frantically, he eventually found them in a death mound located in a killing field just outside of the village. If his story were to be believed, the invading paramilitaries had massacred everyone they found—man, woman, and child.

  “But the boy escaped, as well as the man in the woods,” Pia said, struggling for some small foothold of hope. “Couldn’t some of his family have gotten away as well?”

  “Of course,” responded the intelligence officer. “There are very likely a number of residents who either escaped or evacuated the village before the attack. But we won’t really know what happened there until we’re able to access the place. We try not to rely too strongly on a single testimony. That said, the witness account seems solid. It fits the profile of what we know has happened in other towns in that area. In general, the Bosnians have very strong family bonds, and if the boy was, as you say, wandering the countryside alone, it’s not a good sign.”

  Later that afternoon, Pia found a few precious minutes to herself. But thoughts of work continued to churn in her mind. The faces of the refugees she worked with kept replaying in her memory. The images arrived unbidden. Exhausted physically and emotionally, Pia took a walk through the camp and came to rest in a small alcove formed by a pair of old plum trees and dozens of empty fuel barrels stacked at either side. A board bridging two halves of a barrel invited her to sit. Not far away, a newly erected tent drew her attention, and sitting outside of it, his eyes staring blankly out to the distance, she saw a man she’d helped process the night before. His tale was one Pia wished she had never heard.

  The man himself had been unable to tell his own story. He had not spoken for days. A friend who had been with him at the internment camp where they had been held had to speak for him. Pia had previously heard reports about the castration of Muslim prisoners, but this one was a particularly gruesome account. If she hadn’t seen the face of the nearly catatonic victim for herself, she might have been able to put the story aside as simply one of propaganda. It was easier to do so than to believe that such acts were humanly possible.

  The man, called Sevko by the refugee who accompanied him through the processing, was a victim of castration, though in his case not of losing his testicles but perhaps something even more integral to his being than that. The friend who spoke for him recounted how they were taken to the internment camp’s maintenance building and ordered at gunpoint to drop their pants. One by one, the prisoners were offered a choice. A gun was held to their head and a knife to their testicles. When they got to Sevko, his knees buckled and he fell forward. Angered by his fainting spell, the soldiers dragged him to a nearby motor oil pit and shoved his head into it, nearly drowning him. One of the guards, already bored with the castrations, had an idea to make things more interesting.

  Dragging Sevko back to the line of prisoners, they forced him to perform the next castration, commanding him to open his mouth. It was hard to say which of the victims of that particular castration suffered more: the man who’d had his testicles bitten off…or Sevko, forced to gnaw them with his teeth until they were no longer attached to the victim’s body and then to eat them.

  After recounting the story, Sevko’s friend began to report other instances of forced cannibalism that he’d witnessed. Pia began to feel nauseous writing her report, as the silent man’s friend seemed unable to stop talking. She tried to tell him that all she needed at that point were the general details necessary to fill in the information on the intake form. But Sevko’s friend seemed possessed, as though he was retching a flood of unimaginably foul, evil substance from his gut. When he got to the story
of the decapitation by chainsaw, Pia was no longer able to stay at her desk and had to ask one of her coworkers to finish processing the man.

  Pia’s thoughts went from the lost, silent man sitting outside the tent in front of her to the deaf-mute boy whose stark drawings she had just filed away. The image of the boy looking down upon his slain friend floated into her mind. It was a memory she fought to keep at bay. Never before had she witnessed anyone’s passing so closely, no less a boy whose death mask framed its innocence in a kind of suspended animation, the smooth, silken skin of his face drained pale of blood. His face was all the more the stuff of haunting nightmares for the surreal beauty of its expression. Then there was the face of the younger “brother.” Like Sevko’s, the young boy’s visage was colored by a sadness that traveled beyond his own personal suffering, the eyes of both victims, the deaf-mute boy and the older man, speaking a horrible truth.

  It was one thing to see such a look in the eyes of the older man; to have seen it in the eyes of the child was almost more than Pia could bear. It was an impossibility to her that acts of inhumanity could happen on such a scale, impossible that wars were sanctioned, that they were tolerated. That people believed in their inevitability. Before coming to Bosnia, Pia had thought she understood war, understood its causes, its evolution in present-day reality—death and destruction somehow more civilized now with the advent of cleaner, more efficient means of delivery.

  Pulling her breath deeply into her chest, Pia rose from the makeshift bench to return to her desk. She had people to take care of, a job to do. Free time was not good for her. It gave her mind too much room to think. Without the veil of distance, the shield of her comforts, and the pattern of ordinary life to distract her, the place she found herself in—this hideous war in this lovely countryside—was too much to ponder without her own heart and mind falling victim to its brutality.