The Solace of Trees

by Robert Madrygin

  “Take it down to the lower pasture and bury it behind the big boulder at the far end,” his father, Asaf, had commanded.

  The order had confused Amir. Why would he hide the hunting rifle? But his father didn’t have time for explanations. “Please, please just do it,” Asaf had shouted, his face showing his fear. In Amir’s dream-memory, just after he had hidden the rifle and returned to the house, the soldiers came. One of them kicked open the door. The progression of images that followed played out in Amir’s mind in a fast-forward matter of seconds. In real life, the experience unfolded in tortuously slow and painful ordeal.

  At first, when the paramilitary barged in through the front door, it was as though everything was moving in slow motion. The men who filled the room were like the presences in Amir’s dream, but in real time they didn’t shift in sharp, angular images, one after the other in rapid-fire frames, but rather seemed to loom in a kind of slow, hovering threat, as though moving through a viscous atmosphere. The leisurely, measured ease with which they moved inferred their intentions with a horrible certainty.

  Amir’s father, Asaf, felt a chill of fear invade his body. He was paralyzed, unable to move, and his knees wanted to give way and lay him on the ground. He felt his wife move close and lean upon him. She took his arm with a shaking hand that silently begged he make the nightmare disappear. Asaf’s fingers, touching hers, spoke back mutely, trying to give comfort where there was none to be had. Some frightened bird of illusion momentarily flitted through his mind. He looked at his wife and his children and saw their beauty and innocence with more clarity than he’d ever known. The men wouldn’t do them harm. Their humanity wouldn’t let them. There was hope.

  “What have we here?” one of the men asked, stepping forward from the rest. He spoke calmly and smiled as if greeting an old friend. There was about the man a confident, almost pleasant demeanor, one that carried the unmistakable look of command, though more like that of a university professor than a soldier at war.

  The father remained silent as the leader of the paramilitary group walked toward him as though in approach to shake his hand. The rest of the men stood quiet, relaxing the grip on their weapons as an unspoken look passed between them. It was their calmness that sent fear coursing up Asaf’s spine.

  “Seska, search the house for weapons,” the commander ordered, stopping in front of Amir’s father. The man’s eyes, scanning the family, lingered on the daughter, Minka. “How old are you, girl?”

  Minka hesitated, her voice lost. She willed herself to find it in order to get the man’s eyes off of her, a lone word forcing itself out in strangled voice. “Fourteen.”

  “Ah, a lovely age,” the commander smiled. “And you, boy,” he asked, turning to the son, “how old are you?”

  His eyes fearful, Amir looked away from the man to his father and then unconsciously out the window to the lower fields. There was no one down there, and they wouldn’t find the rifle anyway. He had been very careful. Where he had buried the rifle, he had brushed the ground with a fallen limb to make the setting look undisturbed and natural.

  “Boy, I asked you a question,” the commander spoke coldly now, no pretense of kindliness in his voice.

  “He has just turned eleven,” Asaf answered, seeing that his son’s eyes were like an animal’s caught in a trap.

  “Eleven, old enough to be a soldier then. Are you a soldier, boy?”

  Terrified, Amir shook his head, finally getting a word out, “No.”

  The leader smiled, his head nodding up and down in slow motion, the languorous movement of his gesture belying the menace of his eyes.

  “Stogan, search the father,” the commander directed one of his men.

  The paramilitary leader took a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and scanned its contents. The information it contained had been provided by a local resident aligned with their side, and it listed the name of every Bosniak in the village. The names of the ones thought to be participating in the resistance had been circled and annotated with detailed information about their activities and whether or not they might have access to arms.

  “Nothing,” Stogan reported, after running his hands over Asaf’s body.

  The commander looked at Asaf as if with some interest, studying his features: a man in his prime, in his mid-thirties, of healthy complexion. His face was marked by a broad mustache, and his dark hair contrasted with the green eyes that had found their way from some ancient heritage into the gene pool of Bosnian Muslims. Of average height, he looked capable and agile. Just the sort of man who would have given them trouble. The smile on the captain’s face hardened, then disappeared altogether.

  “Well,” the commander said, looking at the report in his hands, “there is a rifle listed here. It must be hidden somewhere.” Turning to the soldier who had searched the father, he commanded, “Stogan, search the girl, then. Maybe she is concealing it.”

  Stogan moved quickly from the father to the girl, clearly happy to follow the ludicrous idea that an object as large as a rifle could be hidden within the confines of her clothing. The soldier ran his large, calloused hands over the girl’s shoulders and from there moved under her arms, his fingers spreading wide, taking in her breasts as he moved down her body. Jerking backward, Minka cried out, trying to move away from the soldier. His hands grasped her before she made even half a step, and he pulled her roughly toward him, bending his head to her ear to whisper something in it. The parents could not make out his words, but the daughter thereafter remained paralytically still.

  Asaf forced himself to keep from going to his daughter’s aid. He could feel the soldiers waiting for him to make a move. His wife clung to him with hands pleading in their grip. Both his daughter and son now had tears falling from their eyes, but the father knew he could neither intervene nor divulge the location of the rifle. A weapon would be used to qualify him as an enemy combatant and condemn them all, if in fact they were not already so marked.

  “Nothing,” Stogan reported with an affected, officious tone after having finished the search.

  The commander’s face once again took on the demeanor of the kindly professor, pausing a moment as if in thought before responding to his student. “Well then, go help Seska search the rest of the house for weapons. We’ll wait here. And take the girl with you. Perhaps she’ll be able to assist you.”

  “Of course, Captain. Good idea,” Stogan replied with a broad grin and narrowed eyes.

  “Please, please,” Asaf pleaded, taking half a step forward, the words falling like tears from his mouth…all hope, as remote as it had been, drained from his being like rain into desert sand. He knew now, rifle or no rifle, what was in store for them. But before he could speak to tell the weapon’s hidden location, the soldier nearest to him let the flat end of his rifle butt fly into the side of Asaf’s face. Asaf resisted his body’s wish to fall. Grunting in pain, he struggled to hold himself upright as blood began running down his face.

  “It’s in the field,” Amir blurted out in quivering voice.

  He was a boy of good nature. Well-educated, he knew never to speak out unless signaled by a parent to do so. Yet, distraught at the violence to his family, the words escaped him. His eyes ran to his parents, seeking some kind of sign, either of consent or condemnation for revealing the secret that had fallen from his mouth. But there was nothing, only the weeping of his mother and the dazed, bleeding face of his father.

  “Below the lower field,” the words continued to spill from the child. “Below the lower field, by the big rock.”

  “Ah, you see,” the commander spoke in the stern voice of a righteous parent, “you should have said so in the beginning. A weapons cache, then. Stogan, tell Seska to quit searching the back and go take the boy and retrieve the arms.”

  Amir’s eyes darted back and forth between his mother to his father, reflecting fear and confusion and the guilt of having spoken the rifle’s hiding place. All these things were clearly written on the poor chil
d’s face. If there had been time, Asaf would have explained to his son that it was alright, that he too would have spoken out, in fact, had been about to when the soldier struck him.

  Amir could see his father looking in his direction. His face was saying something but the child couldn’t understand what. Was it condemnation for Amir having blurted out their secret? “What? I’m sorry, Papa. I’m sorry. What?”

  But there had been no answer to his question then, nor upon waking from the dream-memory in a strange house so impossibly far away from all that had once been his. His eyes opened to the dawn’s soft light, the vision fading and soon disappearing altogether. Blinking away any remaining threads of memory—lingering traces of the dream world that he would not follow even if he could—Amir quickly found his place of comfort: the deadened silence that would shelter him throughout his day.

  Chapter 10

  Waiting for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, Amir’s foster parents tried to make the best of the situation until an appropriate long-term placement could be found for their newest ward. Overall, Amir’s social headway at school and home, although improving, was decidedly slow and came in small spurts that felt like they might end altogether at any moment. There was a sense of detachment about Amir that his sensory impairments alone couldn’t explain. Whether it was something of his nature or resulted from his experience of war was far from clear. It was likely, his foster parents suspected, something of both. The Thorensons had been caring for children for nearly two decades and understood that the circumstances of Amir’s past experiences told only part of the story. There was, as well, always the individual to be understood. People reacted to difficult conditions in different ways. With Amir’s emotions so deeply obscured, his foster parents attempted to better understand the war that had brought Amir to their home.

  Like most people who kept up with world news, Howard and Joy Thorenson knew the name of the country Amir had come from as Bosnia. Yet the underlying politics of the region were unclear to them. To the best of their understanding, Bosnia had once been part of Yugoslavia, which they rememebered as having been a satellite of the amorphous communist nation the USSR, a country they knew simply as “Russia,” now broken apart and struggling to redefine itself. But much of their understanding departed from historical fact. They were as unaware of Yugoslavia’s split with the Soviet Union following WWII as they were of the country’s ultimate breakup in the early 1990s that had one after another of its six republics declaring independence, with Bosnia and Herzegovina doing so on March 3, 1992.

  Amir’s foster parents began to pay more attention to the nightly news, but the media’s updates on the war in Bosnia provided them little more than snippets of historical fact or present-day horror, shedding little light on what was going on in that faraway place. Even occasional, extended media coverage of the conflict was confusing. There seemed to be an expert for every side of the story, and the sides seemed to multiply by the number of experts with theories to expound. The images and sound bites felt distant, delivered by newscasters whose faces were like those of onlookers standing at a safe distance. The sympathy in their voices seemed calculated to reassure the listener, passive compassion overriding the need for action. In the comfort of their living room, the Thorensons felt they could do little more than listen with growing alarm to the stories coming from the land that had once been their young foster child’s home and be glad that he had escaped it. It was better now, they thought, that Amir’s past be forgotten.

  As time passed with no news from Amir’s case manager about a permanent placement for the boy, the Thorensons grew increasingly disheartened. The likelihood that the Bosnian war orphan would end up staying with them in a long-term holding pattern or be transferred to a larger institutional setting grew with each passing day. Yet, while their discouragement painted a less-than-hopeful picture of their foster child’s future, fate’s workings seeded a very different destiny for the boy.

  Margaret Morgan was retired, widowed, and by nature reserved. Feeling herself content to live out her retirement in the quiet, secluded comfort of her old New England farmstead, she had cut her links to Boston—and to city life—where she had been a noted professor of psychology at one of the nation’s top universities. Yet despite her declarations to friends and family—and even more emphatically to herself—that she was perfectly happy in her retirement, she felt a growing sense within herself that something was missing from her life.

  The truth of the matter was that Margaret Morgan wasn’t happy. But she couldn’t blame her unease on her voluntary retirement from her teaching career. The feeling of slow, gnawing dissatisfaction had, in fact, been what prompted her to accept the generous early retirement package proffered by the university to all of its senior professors. Margaret had been one of the few who accepted the offer, having long ago promised herself she wouldn’t end up being the kind of fossilized academic who stood selfishly blocking the aisle, keeping the younger teaching professionals from moving ahead.

  The retired professor recognized she was caught in a kind of internal conundrum, one she had avoided thinking about until the circumstances triggered by her retirement forced it upon her. She was too active a personality to simply fade off into the sunset, write the occasional article for a professional journal, and tend to her country gardens. Yet her years in academia had done nothing to prepare her for any other role, nor given her imagination fuel from which to consider any other possibility.

  If Margaret Morgan’s retirement did nothing to worsen her internal discomfort, neither did it do anything to alleviate it. Margaret was left, as she might describe it, to tread the water of complacency, even if she was not content with the ever-growing realization of an impending ending that would bring no new beginning. In her childhood, time had seemed to have the physical properties of gas: indefinitely expandable and able to occupy so large and far-reaching a space that it seemed infinite. But Margaret’s understanding of time had changed along with the years. Time for her had gone from a gas, to a thing liquid and flowing, to something solid and finite. Now in her mid-sixties, its boundaries had become frighteningly visible. The trap for her, of course, would be to attempt to fill as much of those bounds as possible with as many activities as might give the illusion of youth’s immortality.

  But it wasn’t the mirage of a plenitude of time that Margaret needed. Her spirit called out for some meaningful, if small, experience of life before having to leave it all behind. Yet Margaret felt nothing remained for her but to begin a life of retirement, pretending to herself that it was exactly what she wanted. She tended to her gardens and enlarged their scope. She wrote an article for a leading psychology journal, maintained correspondence with her former colleagues and students, and attended enough events and social gatherings that her calendar felt as full as ever.

  At a party hosted by one of her former colleagues, nearly a year to the day she had retired, Margaret was introduced to a woman who worked for a religious social services organization. Jane Coleman, the director of the charity’s children’s programs, fell into easy conversation with Margaret, the two having much to share in the way of professional experience. After a time they were joined by other guests, and the topic of conversation drifted to shoptalk, the politics of work, and from there to the politics of government and the latest human indignity to occupy the evening news—the Bosnian War.

  As the guests spoke about the lack of international intervention in the conflict, Margaret was struck by how the sympathetic dialogue coming from herself and the others mirrored the political rhetoric: neither the involved governments nor any of the partygoers were doing anything of real import to help halt the genocide in progress. Both offered only words of sympathy, abhorrence, and outrage in place of any real action.

  Among the people attending the gathering, however, one was actually doing something to make a difference: Jane Coleman, part of whose job was to manage a program that provided homes for refugee children separated from their families
. During the conversation they had shared earlier, Jane mentioned that a growing number of Bosnian minors were included among the children being sponsored by the religious charity she worked for. Margaret made a mental note to send that particular charity a donation. It was a good cause and, she thought, the very least she could do.

  Her donation was substantial enough to have crossed the desk of the department’s director. Jane Coleman, remembering Margaret from the recent gathering, phoned her to thank the former professor for her generosity. “I wish I could do more,” Margaret said.

  “Well, we’re always looking for host families for our children. If you or anyone you know might be interested in helping in that way, there is always that opportunity as well,” the program director responded. Margaret noted the casual tone in which the administrator delivered the opening, with neither pressure nor expectation in her inflection.

  “I’ll certainly pass the word on to those I know,” Margaret replied. “As for myself, I’m afraid my age would disqualify me.”

  “You would be surprised at the wide variety in age and background of our foster parents,” Jane answered. “Some of our most successful host families have been grandparents.”

  “It’s true, we old folks do have some experience to make up for our declining firepower. But it’s been years since I’ve practiced my mothering skills. My daughter grew up and left home more years ago than I care to remember.”

  “Well anyway, give it some thought. I always mention the possibility to anyone who shows interest in our programs. We are constantly in need of good homes for our children.”