The Solace of Trees

by Robert Madrygin

  “The breaking-door one.”

  “Ummm,” Margaret murmured, looking pensive. “Was it specific, or just the general feeling of it being broken in?”

  “No, I saw the things specific.”

  Margaret glanced toward Amir and paused. The word “specific” was one they used as a key to signal that they were speaking of the actual event that took the lives of Amir’s family. She could see by his facial expression and the language of his body that, though hesitant, he was willing to continue. Margaret gently probed deeper.

  “Was it more than just the faces this time?”

  “Yes, there was the words too. They was talking, yelling, screaming. I think it is just how it is. Then, you know, loud noises…”

  Amir’s voice trailed off, indicating he didn’t want to go much further into the description of it.

  “No explosion dream?” Margaret asked.

  “I don’t know. I think it is both dreams.”

  “Was both dreams,” Margaret corrected as if in absentminded consideration.

  “Was both dreams,” Amir repeated in a distracted voice, his mind, like Margaret’s, puzzled by some change in the pattern of his dreams that he couldn’t quite make out.

  The dream of the door being broken down had always been separate from that of the explosion. They had never come together. The one with the explosion was always more intense and also more obstructed. It never came in any detail, as did the dream-memory of the paramilitary soldiers bursting through the front door of the Beganović home. From the latter dream they had progressed quite far into Amir’s memory of the event. He could even recall some of the soldiers’ conversations in the house. The rest was a blur.

  A few days later Amir had another occurrence of bad dreams. This time he was able to go deeper into the memory than he had ever before. He was even able to recall one or two of the names the soldiers had called each other by. It was a small memory recovery, but in its way was a major breakthrough. As Amir spoke, Margaret could see a tremor in his body that seemed to come from deep within, as though speaking the names unlocked the door to the room where all of his suffering lay stored quiet and still, deathly afraid of making any movement that might betray its presence to his conscious mind. The frequency of the boy’s nightmares suddenly began to increase, until for several days they occurred every night without break. Margaret called Dr. Caron to inform him of the episodes and ask if he would see Amir earlier than the next scheduled appointment.

  “What happened next?” Dr. Caron asked. The physician’s voice was kind, yet its encouragement wasn’t so much in the gentleness of its tone as in the strength of its neutrality. Steve Caron had heard stories from the mouths of young war victims that few would be able to listen to, even in brief, secondhand detail, let alone while watching the faces of the children as they recounted them. The last thing such children needed was the incredulous, horrified reaction of an adult unable to believe such things possible.

  “The man, the captain they called him, he take out all of the bullets from his gun but one and then he make my mother take his gun.”

  Amir spoke calmly and without emotion. His eyes looked down and away without meeting those of Dr. Caron, whose gaze passed back and forth between his notebook and the boy’s face with no attempt to force visual contact. The dream sequences Amir had described to him carried within them a surprising amount of detail, much more than any of his previous accounts of his family’s death. Dr. Caron wondered whether the memories had been accessible to his recall all along, Amir unwilling or unable to speak them. Whatever the case—whether his subconscious had opened through dream or he had reached a point at which his conscious was willing to communicate the secrets his subconscious held tight—the boy’s mind had begun playing out the full memory of his family’s murder for the first time.

  “Why did he give her the gun?” the doctor asked.

  “Because they are saying they going to take my sister away and do things with her. And my mother she scream no and start crying, then the captain he said if she don’t want them to take Minka away he is going to help her, so he make her take his gun and said OK just shoot Minka and then she don’t have to worry about the men taking my sister.” Amir paused for a second to take in air, the long run of his sentence and the story it recounted having emptied his lungs.

  “And then…?” Dr. Caron prompted.

  “She could not do it,” Amir continued. “My mother, she could not shoot Minka, and she start crying even more. So the captain and the other men they are laughing like it is the big joke, and he take the gun back. Then he said it would have to be me shooting Minka.”

  Amir quit speaking then. The behavioral pediatrician was not shocked to hear that the paramilitary commander had given a gun to Amir’s mother with which to kill her own child. He had heard sadistic stories like this one before, and yet others still even more horrifying.

  Dr. Caron saw the boy looking at him. His eyes seemed to beg the man to finish the story for him. “Take your time, Amir,” the physician said in a calm, neutral tone. “Just breathe deep and let your mind relax.”

  “I can’t take the gun,” Amir replied in slow, nearly whispered words. “The captain, he laugh at me. Then he say since I not going to take it, he is going to do it for me.”

  Amir fell silent, as though he’d reached the end of the story. Once more the boy looked to the physician, but the man didn’t take up the lead, rather just turned it back to him, saying, “Do what Amir? It’s OK, just go ahead with what happened.”

  “He just lift up his arm then and point the gun at my sister’s head,” Amir said, his voice beginning to break, tears pouring from above his bottom eyelids, as he kept his gaze fixed on the doctor. “And then he shoot her. In front of everyone. In front of my mother and father. In front of all of us.”

  Dr. Caron struggled to release the air from his lungs without the sounding of a sigh. He fought to keep his eyes balanced in their gaze, calm and compassionate, walking the tightrope of his duty’s call. Amir needed to be able to tell his story. He, Steve Caron, needed to maintain his belief in humanity, not fall victim to the hopelessness he so often had to fight from overtaking his spirit at the stories he’d heard. The boy had paused his story again, and the physician waited for him to continue, not wanting to prompt him, not having the words to help advance him onward. But Amir’s mind found its footing and returned to the story it had held at bay for so long a time, his words now coming quicker, with more urgency, like he might be able to rid himself of their memory by purging them in sound.

  “When the captain shoot Minka, my father scream and try to go to her. The soldier next to my father try to hit my father with his rifle, but my father, he grab it and then there is a shot,” Amir recounted, recalling the moment of the soldier’s surprise—the hole that suddenly appeared just above the man’s nose, blood and bone chips gushing out from the blast. Halting his words, Amir fought to breathe deeply into lungs that seemed to have shrunk so small no air could enter. After a moment’s pause, with the physician’s silent nod of encouragement, Amir continued, his mind translating the images playing out in his memory into words, his tone of voice almost neutral as the story of his family’s death unfolded from its hidden archive. When he was done, both he and the physician sat for some moments in stillness. Dr. Caron was the first to speak.

  “I think it is important that Margaret also hear about what happened, don’t you?”

  Amir nodded but said nothing.

  “Perhaps it would be best if you tell her. Do you think you are up to repeating it?”

  “Yes, OK,” Amir answered, his words riding on a long exhale of breath.

  “Good. I’ll call her in, then.”

  With Margaret seated next to him, Amir fought for breath as he began the attempt to revisit the memory of his family’s death a second time. His foster mother waited patiently for him to begin, the boy’s eyes jumping back and forth in erratic motion, darting about the room as if he were look
ing for a place of escape. Margaret held her gaze steady and firm, the muscles of her mouth laying limber and gentle, silently waiting for him to speak. Amir turned to look at her in silent question, his eyes struggling to hold their position.

  “It’s OK,” Margaret answered, calming her foster son by placing a hand on his shoulder. “Take it slowly. Just one sentence at a time.”

  Breathing in deeply, Amir nodded. The first time he had recounted the story of what had happened that day, it was as if he were describing some program he was watching on the television. That the show had been not fiction but an all-too-real accounting from his own life was just now awakening in his conscious mind. With great difficulty he began to repeat the story. He struggled to call forward the images from which he had brought forth the words he had spoken to Dr. Caron, but they wouldn’t come at first, and he had to rely on rote memory, as if he were a student repeating the sentences of some tedious lesson assigned at school. The words of the story came forth in a monotonic cadence, his voice in sleepwalk while his heart palpitated in panic-stricken anxiety, fearful of revealing the one thing he’d held back from telling the doctor, the hidden secret his shame could not speak.

  Amir paused, at a loss to find a place in the linear sequence of events that might lead away from the place of shocking admission his heart cried out to speak. His voice quavered and quaked as his mind stumbled over too large an obstacle for his rational thought to maneuver over or around.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he whispered in hoarse voice, the moment of horrible truth coming forth in images too strong to hold from memory.

  Both his foster mother and Dr. Caron stepped in to reassure him. “It’s not your fault, Amir,” Margaret said and then repeated herself. “Those men did a terrible thing. It’s not your fault.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Amir cried, tears falling. “You don’t understand. It is me! It is me that has done it! I am the one who told it to them. I told them where the gun it was hiding. It was me.”

  “What gun, Amir?” Dr. Caron asked, confused.

  “The one my father tell me to hide. The gun the soldiers they are asking about. The one I bury by the big rock in the field. It is all my fault. I told them where it was. I told the captain where it was. I should never have spoken it. I should never have told them.”

  Margaret’s eyes turned toward Dr. Caron in silent question. He responded with a brief, nearly invisible shake of his head. After about a minute of silence, Amir began to speak again, recounting the immediate aftermath of his sister’s death.

  “After my father shoot the one guy, he start shooting the gun at all the other guys. The soldiers outside, they hear the noise and they are coming to the house. My father, he is yelling for me and my mother to go to where we keep the wood. There is door there to the outside. My mother, she don’t move. My father, he yell, ‘Go, go!’ But my mother, she just standing there. So my father yells at me to go. ‘Amir go. Go!’ I do like my father tell me. Then there is a big explosion and my head, it feels like it is broken. Then I remember being outside, and I am climbing a tree. But after that I don’t remember nothing until I wake up the next day.”

  Margaret sat still and unmoving, all of the years of her professional life brought to bear. She watched silently as her foster son filled his lungs with air, as though trying to catch his breath. He seemed to look at her then, but she realized his eyes were merely turned in her direction, his gaze passing through her and beyond, to somewhere only he could see.

  Chapter 18

  Amir’s recounting of his family’s death shook Margaret to the core. At first, both she and Dr. Caron had been confused about Amir’s guilt-ridden admission. It took several times going over the full story for them to finally understand its relevance to the tragedy. The weight of its burden on the boy’s psyche, however, had been clear from the moment he spoke it—the dazed, pained look on his face reflecting an anguish he had borne alone, an anguish that had been eating away at his being.

  With Dr. Caron’s help, Amir slowly came to understand, at least intellectually, that his shame stemmed from an event he hadn’t any control over and whose outcome was unaffected by his telling of the hidden gun’s location. The soldiers’ actions, Dr. Caron assured Amir, were not influenced in any way by the divulgence of a lone, buried hunting rifle. The search for weapons had been a pretext for what had clearly been their purpose from the beginning. The fate of his cousins, his aunt and uncle, his grandparents, and the rest of the villagers spoke of the soldiers’ premeditated intent to “ethnically cleanse” the area.

  Coming to terms with the tragedy that had taken his family from him, the physician counseled, would be a long-term process. Its aftermath would manifest in both subtle and more overt ways. The important thing, he advised, was for Amir to learn to recognize the symptoms’ arrivals for what they were, not judge himself for their presence or shut them off from mind, as if the past had no link to the present. “Don’t be afraid to remember your family,” Dr. Caron advised Amir. “Remember how much they loved you, and carry that into the future with you wherever you may go. It will always serve you well.”

  By the time his second winter in New England arrived in earnest, Margaret and Amir had settled into a pattern of comfort in both their routine and relationship. The bond between them was growing deep and strong. Margaret knew she could not have expected a more profound contentment resulting from her decision to bring the orphaned child into her life. Yet she realized that if she were to make too comfortable a nest that same gratification could turn into an impediment in her foster son’s social development.

  In addition to continuing her search for extracurricular activities Amir might enjoy, Margaret also made contact with a recently formed association of Bosnians displaced by the war. The group held social gatherings at a site located less than an hour’s drive away. Part of her mandate in caring for Amir was that she should do everything possible to maintain a link to his ethnic and religious heritage. And even though Amir was at first reticent to attend and showed feeble interest in participating in the occasional gatherings of the Bosnian community organization, Margaret persisted, and the two of them attended the group’s events whenever they could.

  Amir’s progress in school was steady, if not noteworthy. His teachers reported that they were encouraged by his efforts, especially in his acquisition of English-language skills. He was a quiet student, the kind who didn’t sit close to the front of the room unless made to do so, answering the teacher’s questions only when called upon, and then in a voice barely audible. But despite his shyness and solitary inclinations, Amir eventually found a place among his classmates. His friendships were slow in starting and moved toward the kinds of children who, like himself, were relegated, or who relegated themselves, to smaller groups outside the circles of the more popular students. He was one of those children who learn to blend into the background, understanding, like the smaller creatures of the forest floor, when and where it was safe for their presence to be made known.

  When Amir brought home his first friend from school, Margaret felt as if a milestone had been reached. He had twice been invited over to a classmate’s house to work on a special assignment—their science teacher, a great believer in team projects, having grouped the two boys together in what had become a successful pairing. Margaret suggested to Amir, as casually as she could, that perhaps the next time the two worked on the project, he might invite his new friend to their house.

  “Yeah, I guess so. I can ask him,” Amir responded neutrally, in a way that made Margaret feel he might be too shy to ask.

  She was caught unprepared when a few days later Amir arrived home with the classmate in tow. It had been unlike Amir not to have informed her of the pending visit, although she in fact welcomed the spontaneity of it. She understood then that Amir must have taken her suggestion as something more, and she was struck with the realization that he had brought his friend home not for himself, but for her.

  Even
as his social integration continued to develop, Amir often found reason to be outside, to work at some chore or simply wander about the fields or the woods. It didn’t seem to matter if darkness had descended or if a cold winter wind was blowing. At times, Margaret grew worried at how long Amir lingered outside in the cold, often until after sunset. She would call him in, concerned both by the harshness of the elements and her foster son’s continuing inclination toward solitary pursuit. When called, Amir would obediently come in without complaint, even if he still felt the need to be out in the night air…there would always be later, when his foster mother was asleep. That Amir might go outside after she was deep into dream never occurred to Margaret; that a thirteen-year-old boy would wander about on his own in the late evening hours never entered her thoughts.

  Alone in the quiet hours, when evening had firmly settled in and established the parameters of its enigmatic shroud, Amir felt as though he could almost physically step from his body and the confines of his reserve out into the night, and there find something of what he once knew as himself. It was like the sense of liberation an outdoorsman might feel after being made to suffer the bridle of formal dress.

  In the light of day, Amir often felt susceptible to an anxiety that seemed to envelop him when he was in the company of others. Though it was a fear of neither constant nor intense proportion, it was all the more powerful for the vague, amorphous sensation of its random arrivals. Sometimes in mid-conversation he would find himself feeling suddenly confused and bewildered, his mind for a moment unsure whether he had ever recovered his power of speech or whether it had been but a dream of some memory from the past. At night on his own, out of doors, walking in the open or hidden within the dark cloak of an evening shadow, he was never visited by those anxieties, nor did he suffer the anticipation of their possible arrival.

  On the nights when he felt freest, when his evening walkabouts came less from the urge for escape than they did from that for adventure, Amir was drawn to the village center and its surrounding residential streets. If in those late, sleepy hours of the evening he felt freer to be himself, then the town itself transformed into something of the same. The main road, which in daytime saw a slow but regular flow of traffic, lay still, the whirling of wheels rolling over pavement diminished to occasional or singular occurrence. In the lull of the sleepy quiet, there came to Amir’s ears not a void, but rather a sound of its own—one so calm and at peace with itself that, like the black of night, it seemed to disappear into a pause of timelessness…a lull providing the human world a blessed respite from itself.