The Solace of Trees

by Robert Madrygin

  “Oh, sorry,” Amir answered, quickly picking up the menu and fingering it, “but actually, I’m not really hungry.”

  Jadranka gave a questioning look, furrowing her brows to stare at Amir as a mother might to chide her child for some minor offense. The truth was, he was hungry, but he felt discomfited, his awkward presence surely a nuisance to the girl who stood there in front of him waiting for his words to make some sense. Her skin was soft, beautifully translucent…he felt its warmth radiate across the distance from where she stood.

  “Um, I guess I’ll just have an iced tea. That’s all.”

  It was, Amir knew, a lame response. Later, when Jadranka brought him the drink, he finally was able to speak the reason he’d come. “What time do you get done with work? I thought maybe we could do something.”

  “The restaurant closes at ten o’clock tonight, but sometimes we aren’t finished until eleven. Then we begin again in the morning.”

  Seeing his shoulders sink, Jadranka added that in the lull between the lunch and early dinner crowds she had a break. If he would like, she offered, they could take a short walk. The sky was clear and the sun strong as they strolled along the boardwalk of a nearby harbor. Amir felt a surge of happiness. Surprised at the strength of the emotion, his mind chose to see it as a force coming from the outside in, telling him his elevated mood was provided by the beautiful, brilliant sunlit day. He was unable or unwilling to understand that it might be its opposite: that his happiness traveled from the inside out and emanated from feelings that would continue to linger within him long after the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Before they went their separate ways, they arranged to see each other on Jadranka’s lone day off the following week. She said she would love nothing more than to do the same as all of those whose hungry mouths she spent her days and nights satisfying—to go to the beach, swim in the water, and lie peacefully in the sun.

  In the intervening days, Amir’s thoughts often returned to Jadranka but were made less anxious by the arrival of his sister, Alice, and her family. Emily, now six years old, and Abigail, five, vied for their teenaged uncle’s attention and kept him occupied on the beach and in the house, with near-constant requests for his presence. The two little girls were disappointed, then, when one day, as they prepared to head off to the beach, they saw him packing a picnic lunch and were informed that it wasn’t meant for them. Amir was going off to visit a friend.

  When he arrived at Jadranka’s apartment, she was standing outside waiting, a small canvas bag looped around her arm. They exchanged greetings and the kind of small talk people of casual acquaintance might engage in.

  “So, where do you want to go?” Amir asked, once they were seated in the car.

  “To the beach, of course,” Jadranka answered. “It is what we talked about, no?”

  “Yes, but I mean, which beach?” Amir responded, feeling like less than the confident leader.

  “You are the driver, so you must choose,” Jadranka answered, smiling at the boy’s nervous indecision.

  “OK, let’s go to one of the national park beaches then. I know a good one that’s usually not too crowded.”

  When they arrived at the beach parking lot, Amir opened the trunk of his car and began to fill his arms with the cumbersome beach paraphernalia he had brought for their day on the sand, and Jadranka began to laugh. Under one arm, he tucked a beach umbrella, a blanket, two folding chairs, and towels. His other arm grasped a cooler and a large canvas bag.

  “What’s so funny?” Amir asked self-consciously.

  “We are just like the people who come to my work,” Jadranka smiled, taking the cooler from his hand. “You only need the funny hat and the sunburn. But it’s good for me. I never get the chance to be the tourist.”

  It was, from her perspective, a distant view. Her days and nights were spent moving from table to table serving vacationers whose freedom to enjoy the sun and beach she could only envy. On her lone day off she normally slept late, went grocery shopping, ran errands, and attempted to keep up with the housecleaning she and the other young women with whom she shared her rundown quarters had put off.

  Walking down the long run of sand, away from where the main concentration of beachgoers lay like a resting colony of seals, they spread their blanket, set the umbrella in the sand, stripped to their bathing suits, and walked out into the waves. Despite all of the careful management of their emotions, the two couldn’t help but be aware of the other’s body, now released from the veil of clothing. Amir’s eyes were drawn to the beauty of Jadranka’s barely clothed form—to the graceful length of her body, the curve of her neck flowing down to the bare slope of her back…to where the clear skin of her flesh met the cut of her bikini, mounding like the gentle rise of a dune. Catching himself, Amir forced his gaze outward toward the ocean.

  When he removed his shirt, Jadranka’s eyes took in the tanned, smooth skin of Amir’s chest and arms. Lithe and wiry, his body could have been that of a younger boy, yet the way he carried it spoke of someone older.

  Though they both felt the draw of physical attraction, they were circumspect in the direction of their attention. They spoke of the beach, the weather, school, and their summer, keeping the conversation to small, simple subjects while another communication, wordless and subconscious, carried on between them. They ate lunch, walked, swam, and even napped for a time before finally picking up their things to leave. Driving her home, Amir felt awkward. He was torn between asking her out to dinner and sensing that it was time to part. He was saved the internal debate when they arrived at Jadranka’s apartment and she thanked him for the day at the beach, saying she would invite him in but unfortunately had a dozen chores to complete in her remaining free time.

  “What about next week?” Amir asked as Jadranka moved to open the car door.

  “I don’t know which is my free day yet.”

  “I can call.”

  “We don’t have a phone in our apartment, and at the restaurant they don’t like the calls so much, you know? I can call you. Is that OK?”

  Amir nodded and wrote down the phone number of his family’s beach house, handing it to Jadranka. As he drove back home, his internal dialogue chattered in distracted thought, worried that Jadranka might not call, that she might forget, that something might come up to cause her to cancel…or, even worse, that she would decide she didn’t want to bother. He was relieved when, several days later, as he was about to leave for the beach, the phone rang and Emily scampered over to answer it, quickly announcing that it was for Amir and that it was a girl. Afterward, while the grownups were, despite their curiosity, respectful of Amir’s privacy, young Emily immediately began to question her Uncle Amir about the caller. Trying to maintain a neutral look in front of all the waiting faces, he said it was a friend from school, hoping to leave it at that.

  “The same friend you visited last week? The girl?” Emily, as chief inquisitor, demanded happily, and before giving him a chance to answer her first questions added another. “What’s her name?”

  Her uncle answered in the affirmative to the first questions and “Jadranka” to the last, staving off any more questions with a laugh and a pleading look to his sister, Alice, to rescue him from his niece’s prosecutorial zeal. Later, when Emily and her younger sister were out with their father, Margaret introduced the subject again, already having some knowledge of her son’s friendship with the Bosnian girl. During the school year, Amir returned home often to spend time with his mother, and once a month he drove her to Boston for a weekend’s visit with Alice and her grandchildren. On several occasions he had briefly mentioned his friendship with Jadranka to her, letting the tone of his voice say more than the few words he typically used when telling her about something of import to his life.

  “How is Jadranka faring in her job?” Margaret asked.

  “Good,” Amir answered simply but without sign of reticence.

  “So, tell me about this girl,” Alice queried, wrapping an arm around Am
ir’s shoulder and chest.

  “Not much to tell,” he answered, letting his body rest against his sister’s. “She’s a friend from school, that’s all.”

  “She’s from Bosnia, as I recall,” Margaret added for Alice’s benefit.

  “Well, that’s cool,” Alice said. “Have you talked with her much about Bosnia?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Hmm, what do you talk about then? Is there reason for me to be jealous?”

  “No, never,” said Amir, smiling.

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Alice said, as she gave her brother a squeeze and kissed the hair atop his head.

  “Why don’t you invite her here?” Margaret suggested. “She might enjoy having a home-cooked meal after working in a restaurant all summer.”

  “OK, I can mention it,” Amir answered in a tentative tone.

  Chapter 23

  When Amir invited her to his family’s beach house, Jadranka felt several reactions surface concurrently within her. Her emotion had admitted to nothing more than friendship in her relationship with this young man. In Bosnia, to invite a young woman to meet a young man’s family had significant meaning and was something she felt herself immediately pull back from. On the other hand, in her country, hospitality was valued and not to be indifferently brushed aside. It was, however, the look in Amir’s eyes that finally brought her to accept the invitation. There had been a sense of prepared rejection about the musculature of his face, as though he felt that even to have asked the question had been an imposition. She could see that he sat waiting for her polite refusal. Jadranka felt trepidation about spending the day among these strangers, sure that they would focus keen eyes upon her. Yet she found herself smiling and saying she would be happy to have lunch with him and his family.

  They arrived at the beach house just before noon and found Alice, Paul, Margaret, and the girls all in and around the kitchen in the midst of preparing lunch. When Amir made the introductions, Jadranka was surprised to see him indicate that it was the older of the two women who was his mother. Neither Jadranka nor Amir had spoken much about their families to one another. He had told her only the basics. His birth family had perished in the war. In his adoptive family there was no father, only the mother and one sibling, an older sister. Jadranka had said her father was dead. She’d had two siblings, a sister and a brother. But, like her father, the brother was no longer alive.

  As she took Margaret’s hand, Jadranka briefly held the woman’s eyes before politely shifting her gaze away. Margaret noted that the girl stood erect, with shoulders squared and straight in the direction of the person she spoke to. There was cordiality about her bearing. The girl’s body stood relaxed, as though in effort that others might feel so as well, a social grace Margaret guessed to have been a result of her upbringing. Yet there was, she felt, a more complex structure than the face of simple pleasantry might imply. She sensed the presence of undercurrents in Jadranka’s body language that, along with a quiet reserve in her eyes, spoke of deeper emotion.

  Margaret couldn’t help but wonder if there could be, as with Amir, something within Jadranka that had been damaged and disillusioned by the experience of war. More than all the years of her professional life as a highly regarded psychologist, it was her time with Amir that had taught her to recognize the signs. She had learned to hear what her son said by what he didn’t say, to see behind the apparent calm of his gaze a wariness that flickered like a nervous twitch.

  Jadranka could see that Margaret’s eyes had measured her, yet she felt no judgment in it. She noted no informality of body or mind in the woman’s greeting, no sense of indolence that Jadranka often encountered when meeting other people. Many new acquaintances seemed to weigh and measure her, then wander away the moment they had probed her for the standard data and appropriately labeled and categorized her, as if they had grasped all there was to be seen of her and now, relieved of their social obligation, could return to the comfort of their own orb.

  Jadranka followed as Amir and his mother led her to the back porch that overlooked the ocean. The vista was beautiful. Turning her gaze in Margaret’s direction, Jadranka noted the way the mother and son stood next to one another with their bodies leaning ever so slightly in each other’s direction, like plant to sun, in quiet, unspoken sharing. She wondered whether Amir’s mother would feel possessive of him, see her as the interloper, even though she had no designs on him. If the mother was worried, Jadranka could tell her it was needless. She hadn’t the slightest interest in becoming involved with her son—nor with any man, for that matter. She and Amir were friends. That was all.

  They ate lunch on the porch, an informal buffet of salads and sandwich makings. It wasn’t the typical American mealtime the Bosnian girl had become used to in her two years in the country, but rather, it reminded her of one she might enjoy back home. There was a sense of patience, of easy and casual ritual that had them all seated before any one person made a move toward food. Water was poured, plates were passed and filled, and nothing eaten. Only when everyone’s meal sat in front of them did they begin to eat, and then but slowly, allowing the conversation predominance over the food.

  For Jadranka, the social intercourse brought with it a sense of the familiar. There had, of course, been a few questions asked about her, but they had been of general nature. Alice made an effort to find subjects to put the girl at ease, and that they, as women, found easy link to. Paul and the two little girls, charmed by their visitor, invited her to their play on the beach in sand and water. Jadranka’s day ended with a long, delightful dinner on the same porch where lunch had been served, the Bosnian girl’s initial trepidation dissipated in an environment that made her both feel at home and miss her own family terribly.

  There was little time left to summer before the two college students were to return for the start of another school year. Jadranka had but a few days of vacation between leaving her job and her first day back at school. At Amir’s invitation, she spent those days with his family. By the last day with them, she was surprised to find herself feeling in a strangely vulnerable state.

  On the final evening of her visit, she sat outside on the screened-in porch with Amir, looking out at the ocean and thinking about her life. The rest of his family had removed themselves to their bedrooms early, partly because it was near the hour of their retirement, though in greater measure because they sensed the young couple wanted time to themselves. Amir and Jadranka’s conversation drifted from talk of their impending return to college to a topic of shared experience neither had yet broached with the other. They sat next to each other on the divan that often served as Amir’s sleeping place, their backs resting on the cushions that leaned up against the house.

  “You are lucky,” Jadranka said, turning to look at Amir. “You have a very nice family.”

  He returned her smile and met her eyes, responding that yes, he was lucky. After a few seconds of quiet, she asked where his home in Bosnia had been, and he named the village he was from. “So, you were a farm boy, then?” she asked. “Yes,” he smiled in reply.

  “And your other family, there is nobody left?” Jadranka ventured, her voice going soft.

  “I have some distant relatives, but nobody I really know,” he answered. “Margaret was able to eventually find them after my adoption, and we exchanged some letters back and forth for awhile. But then, I don’t know…I guess we all just let it go.”

  The talk of Bosnia and his family began to open doors to rooms of memory long closed, and suddenly Amir was reminded of a girl he had once known. It seemed a lifetime ago. Her name was Sanela, Sanela Oric. She had been a friend of his sister, Minka, and he’d had a nine-year-old-boy’s crush on her. She would have been fourteen at the time, almost a woman to a boy of his age back then. Her nose and mouth had been small and delicate, their beauty understated by the high rise of her cheekbones and the round, dark embers of eyes that seemed to always glow with warmth. If you placed Sanela and Jadranka side by
side they could easily be taken for sisters. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen the similarities in their faces before. He wondered where Sanela was now…if she was anywhere at all.

  Amir’s smile was sad, yet his eyes did not look downward or away, and the conversation edged carefully forward as he and Jadranka volunteered small pieces of their past, one at a time, checking at every interval to see if they had reached the boundaries of the other’s comfort. They understood that their relationship was made complicated by circumstances of a past far beyond their control. Whatever the nature of their personal connection might be, it was weighted by a heavier one that, if not approached carefully, could fall down upon them and crush the fragile link that drew them one to the other.

  When their friendship had first begun, when the pull of their mutual attraction had forced them to consider the strength of its gravity, there had been an immediate and unspoken understanding that their relationship would for the time remain platonic, and that events long held private, even from their own view, would remain as such, unless or until they were broached by the one who had lived them. Now, resting on the daybed, looking into each other’s eyes, the sound of the ocean in their ears, only a few dulled spots of light shining from the curtained windows above to break the dark of the starry night, the two children of the Bosnian War could feel the tectonic shift of deep, hidden emotion. With great caution, they took a step in the sharing of a past they recounted as much for their own ears to hear as for the other’s, braving the subject of the war in hope of some small ebbing of its grasp on the present and its seemingly relentless ownership of the future.

  Amir began the story of his family’s end, recounting simply and factually the general details of the paramilitary soldiers’ attack on his family’s home. He then went on to briefly tell the events of his subsequent exile, both the external and the internal—the deaf-mute boy by some miracle finding a home in a universe he’d thought forever destroyed.