The sound of someone entering reached Amir in delayed reaction, the trance he had fallen into having lulled his sense of time and place into the realm of daydream. Only after a few seconds had passed did his hand reach out for the remote laying by his side. Amir pressing one of its buttons, the camera lens responded, zooming out and taking in a broader swath of the room to reveal the visitor’s face on the television screen. Jadranka appeared there, it seemed to him, like a mirage standing in the doorway. Looking into the television screen, Jadranka saw a soft, gentle smile appear on Amir’s face. For a moment both remained still and silent, as if in this way they could be freed of not only time and space, but also of all the complications of self that inhibited the words their hearts would speak.
“You are very weird,” Jadranka said, finally breaking the silence, shaking her head.
Amir said nothing, his smile broadening, though whether from self-consciousness or the fatalistic acceptance of her words it was not clear.
“Are you making a movie of yourself now, to become the big star?” she asked with a teasing laugh.
“No, the camera isn’t recording,” said Amir, smiling. “It’s just a live feed. Like looking into a mirror.”
“I won’t ask why you are doing it, then,” Jadranka said with another shake of her head. “What is the music you are playing?” she asked, walking farther into the room to sit by his side and meet his eyes without aid of the television screen.
“Nusrat Fateh ali Kahn,” he answered.
“It is very nice.”
“Yeah, I like it a lot.”
“So how is your movie? Why aren’t you working on it?”
“Not good. It sucks. I’m taking a break.”
“Yes, maybe a break is good idea,” Jadranka smiled, taking his hand in hers.
They looked at each other without speaking for some moments, their eyes meeting like naked bodies, a small blush of red coloring Amir’s cheeks. A breath, something between a sigh and laugh, escaped from Jadranka’s throat. Her free hand reached up to Amir’s forehead and moved his hair backward with a gentle sweep. Bending forward, she kissed the cleared area above his brow. He lay there not moving, his eyelids closing at the touch of her lips, opening afterward to take in the smooth contours of her face as it moved away from his. Jadranka’s hand went to his cheek and touched it, pausing, then slipped down to his chest to linger in his body’s warmth.
Freeing her other hand from his, she ran her fingers along the short, flat curve of his collarbone. Lifting the hand that rested on his chest, Jadranka began to unbutton Amir’s shirt. She pulled the fabric to each side, revealing the slow rise and fall of his ribs in silent, synchronous movement with his breath. Her right hand moved to rest over his heart, the thump, thump of its beat reverberating into her palm, streaming up through her arm until it reached the source of her own pulse. Her eyes, which had been gazing at the unblemished landscape of his chest, looked up to see his face. Amir smiled, then closed and opened his eyes in a long, slow blink.
“You look just as beautiful from the back,” he said, the low hum of a soft, warm laugh edging forth from his throat.
Jadranka turned her head around to gaze in the direction of the television and saw Amir smiling at her on the screen.
“You are a strange one, my American boy,” Jadranka murmured softly as she turned back to face him.
Amir smiled, showing embarrassment, timidity, mischievousness, even a little pride—but most of all happiness. He liked it when she called him her “American boy.” Mostly, she said it in moments of affection, though also at times when she became annoyed with him. The pet name she had given him strangely made him feel more a Bosnian boy than one from his new homeland. He lifted his right hand and brought it to her collarbone, where it fell to rest upon her breast, the warmth of the one melding into the other.
Picking up the remote control that lay next to Amir, Jadranka pushed its power button, shutting down the television, the room dimming along with it, only the light of a single lamp illuminating the space. In the dimmed light, the hands of the clock turned in irrelevant motion as the two lovers removed their clothing and lay down next to one another, their time having finally come.
Later, mingled in body and silence, their eyes opened to one another—to smiles, and then to laughter.
“What just happened?” Jadranka asked, the glow on her face like a setting sun.
“I don’t know,” Amir answered, trying to look back in on the known world, suffering the same disorientation she did.
And the two laughed again, laughed like water flowing. Amir and Jadranka talked in between contented silences, as the clock still turned with wasted effort for the young lovers operating outside its boundaries. Holding each other, they feel asleep…for a moment having returned to the homes they’d lost so long ago and thought never to know again.
Chapter 25
When they met now, there was an embarrassed hesitancy, a vulnerability of emotion that hadn’t been there before. Both a new intimacy and an uncertainty had come to their relationship, making it at once easier to be in each other’s presence and at the same time more tentative and anxious. Jadranka and Amir navigated the beginnings of their love affair slowly and with caution, neither wanting to press upon the other, nor fear being pressed upon themselves…attachment and obligation seesawing back and forth in search of balance, the fulcrum hidden from view.
Jadranka began to spend more and more nights at Amir’s. Although she still maintained her room in the apartment she shared with two other girls, by the time winter came she had effectively come to live with Amir in his attic perch. On the coldest nights, even with a space heater blasting and the door swung fully open to gather what heat they could from below, the room felt more like a walk-in refrigerator than a bedroom in a heated home. The two huddled next to each other on the bed, a down quilt pulled on top of them and bunched up around their shoulders, while they attended to their studies. After a time, they would rest and chat or perhaps watch the downward migration of a million small, white flakes fall past the window, silhouetted against the black of night…or forget the outside world entirely and burrow underneath the down shield of their quilt to hibernate in the warm afterglow of their lovemaking.
On Sundays, Jadranka often accompanied Amir on visits to his mother’s house, which brought forth memories of her own home, making the distance from her loved ones seem less acute. Since she had come to study in America, Jadranka had been able to return to Bosnia only one time to visit her family. Her father and brother having been killed in the war, only her mother and older sister were left. She communicated with them often by phone and email. She missed them dearly, though there continued an underlying tension of her having left to attend college so far from home, something her mother had wished her not to do. Her mother had remarried a widower, a Muslim who had lost his wife during the bombing of Sarajevo, and there, too, had risen another issue—one of faith. Jadranka’s father, a lawyer of Croat descent, had never been a believer in either his culture’s majority faith or any other. Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, it was all the same to him. Although he felt it understandable that in the face of the unknowable people should gather around religious convention to comfort themselves, he had never been tempted to take that road himself.
After the war, her mother had taken solace in her faith. Jadranka’s older sister, too, had found a place of refuge in Islam. Jadranka, however, unlike many young Bosnians of Muslim descent, felt no pull to find an anchor for identity in religion after the trauma of the war—something that previous to the conflict held little sway in their thoughts. Intellectually, Jadranka had always been her father’s daughter, and she agreed with him in many matters, including religion. Over time, though, her viewpoint had begun to grow less tolerant than his.
If Jadranka could be accused of cynicism when it came to religion and politics, she felt no shame in it, though often enough that within her that still held hope caused her to feel conflicted and con
fused. The war had cleft her being, creating a great chasm within her—on the one side, a belief in humankind, a hope that its evolution would eventually move human society beyond the kinds of horrors she experienced as a child; and on the other a bitter, despairing conviction that beneath the surface of its civilized face, humanity was motivated wholly by self-interest and suffered a blood lust unmatched by any other living creature.
For Amir, the Bosnian War had become a distant specter and, if not completely exorcised, felt sufficiently remote that he was able to substantially put it out of mind. Jadranka both envied and resented his sense of detachment from it, seeing it on the one hand as freedom, on the other as fearful denial. Amir had escaped the war in its early stages, but she’d lived through not only the whole of it, but also the reverberations of its aftereffects, which persisted in Bosnia to that very day and were likely to do so for years to come.
The warming air and growing daylight lured Amir and Jadranka, like animals waking from torpid winter sleep, from their lair and signaled the approaching end of another school year. As his second year at college drew to a close, Amir felt his past fall into what most people believed to be its proper place: into that which had been and no longer was. The war in his homeland had given way to an uneasy, unhappy peace, and he had settled into a new life in a new country that offered him the possibility of a promising future. Yet he was to discover that the past is not so easily relegated to the memories that wander through the mind in moments of incidental or sentimental recall. Its touch reaches into the present with quiet, persistent persuasion, and if fate so wills it, travels full circle to become the future.
One warm and sunny Saturday, Amir and Jadranka were invited to a “spring blast” at the house of a casual friend. By the time each had finished their schoolwork the day had gone by. They thought about going to see a movie, but none appeared promising, so they opted to attend the party instead, even though it wasn’t the kind of event they were inclined to attend.
The evening event, attended by a diverse group of revelers from a variety of schools, was in full swing by the time Amir and Jadranka arrived. After being greeted by their hosts, the young couple wound their way through crowded rooms looking for Jadranka’s roommates, who had also been invited. They found the two girls standing among a small group of mutual friends, the gravitational pull of the familiar quickly absorbing Amir and Jadranka into its field.
The light, jovial conversation within their group was suddenly interrupted by a loud chant that arose from across the room, “U-S-A, U-S-A,” followed by a loud cheer and the downing of beers. Smiles drew across the faces of those with whom Jadranka and Amir were standing, some sardonic and others indulgent, as they looked across the room to see Brian Larkin, a classmate, standing among the chanters. With a salute and a nod of his head, Brian sent them a mocking wink while waving for them to come over and join in another toast to the USA. His other hand was firmly wrapped around a plastic cup whose journeys to the keg had not been infrequent that evening.
The conversation within the smaller, quieter group dropped off as they saw Brian making his way in their direction. Brian had passed by to mingle with the group several times before. The more he drank, the more inclined he seemed to try and artfully stir some small polemic—his face carrying a smile held just a notch tauter than a smirk, his eyes flashing a twinkle that said he went about it all tongue in cheek. The last time he’d come round, Brian had brought up the subject of Zack Ashrawi, the professor’s name recently having commanded headlines in the local newspaper and well beyond. In an innocent voice, Brian had asked Amir how his former mentor was doing, insinuating a close enough relationship between the two that, given Zack’s recent troubles, assumed Amir would have intimate knowledge of the man’s emotional state.
A conservative columnist had recently printed videotaped excerpts from some talks that Dr. Ashrawi had given in the mid-1990s, in which he had shouted in Arabic, “Long Live Palestine, Death to Israel!” Ashrawi had damned both the Israeli and the American governments for their roles in the deaths of innocent Palestinians. The newspaper article also quoted unidentified sources within the Federal Bureau of Investigation as saying that Dr. Ashrawi and the charity fund he managed for Palestinian orphans were under investigation for suspected ties to terrorist organizations.
Given the tragedy of 9/11, not even a year past, the article had been quickly picked up by a nationally televised conservative news show. The school had been immediately bombarded with hate mail and phone calls threatening violence. Emails arrived containing computer viruses, and the college experienced a sudden and dramatic drop in alumni giving. A raging controversy erupted within the college community when its board of trustees, reacting to the negative onslaught, voted to suspend Dr. Ashrawi with pay. But the school’s legal counsel cautioned the board of trustees that they, in fact, had little grounds for firing the professor. Soon thereafter, Dr. Ashrawi was reinstated, the college saying they could find no immediate evidence of any wrongdoing. The trustees, however, quickly ordered a more thorough and comprehensive investigation into the professor’s activities, hoping to buy time and ease the brunt of the controversy. Although he was soon back to teaching, it was clear that Zack’s troubles were far from over.
“Hey, people,” Brian Larkin called out jovially to his schoolmates. “What’s up? I want you to meet my man, Lenny, here,” he said, introducing a new acquaintance he had brought over from the group of patriotic chanters.
A round of hellos followed in polite reply. Jadranka greeted the two and then turned to her roommate, Chris, to continue a conversation she’d purposely initiated as a foil when she saw the two begin their approach. Jadranka had little use for Brian’s game play, his probing for soft spots with smiling sarcasms and joking digs. She had felt more than a little annoyed when he had come by earlier and started talking about the Zack Ashrawi controversy, addressing Amir as Zack’s “protégé.” Jadranka had been left not knowing who she was angrier at: Brian for his negative charade or Amir for the passivity with which he let himself be made its target.
“So hey, listen up, everybody,” Brian spoke out, commanding everyone’s attention. “Let’s give a big hand for Lenny here. He’s just enlisted to go off and fight in the war.”
There was no trace of hidden sarcasm in Brian’s voice now, for the moment his game forgotten. Lenny was met by a chorus of good wishes but no emotional chant of their country’s initials. There were those among the small group of well-wishers whose politics made them hesitate, but the patriotic fervor rolling across the country with tsunami-like force caused them to hold their doubt to private consideration.
“Cool, yeah, thanks dudes,” Lenny mumbled. The soon-to-be soldier’s eyes rested high in their sockets, floating on a mixture of sangria, beer, vodka, and whatever other drink had been at hand.
“When do you leave?” someone asked.
“Huh?” Lenny answered, distracted by the slug of beer he was drinking, his alcohol-dulled mind slow to realize the question had been directed to him. The future soldier turned in Jadranka’s direction, thinking the words had come from her. She repeated the question the other person had asked, indicating it had been they, not her, who had spoken to him. Lenny seemed not to hear the reference to the original questioner. Instead he looked at Jadranka and said that he would be leaving for basic training as soon as school let out. Jadranka smiled and nodded her head in acknowledgement but added nothing to continue the conversation.
“Hey, how about you? Where do you go to school?”
“Franklin,” Jadranka answered.
“So, what’s your name anyway?” Lenny asked.
“Jadranka,” she replied pleasantly, though with neutral tone, her body clearly speaking its wish to end the encounter and move on.
“Danka,” Lenny repeated in error, oblivious of the girl’s cues. “Cool name. You got a nice accent. I like it. Where you from?”
Jadranka sighed, pausing, and returned his gaze without respo
nse. What to the others appeared simply a drunken nuisance was to her something of altogether much less innocent nature. After Omarska, there wasn’t a man she didn’t look at and first wonder what he might be capable of. She had experienced firsthand exactly how thin the membrane of civilized decorum could be and, once punctured, how easily it could spew out unimaginable evil and cruelty.
“The Balkans,” Brian answered in the absence of any response coming from Jadranka.
“Where?” Lenny asked, his head tilting backward as if to gain a better vantage point from which to view the world’s geography.
“You know, Serbia, Kosovo, all that,” Brian explained, his mind meandering lazily through its intoxication to come up with an answer.
“Oh, yeah,” Lenny said, little interested, his eyes scanning Jadranka’s breasts. “That’s cool.”
Brian giggled, seeing Lenny trying to hit on Jadranka. He didn’t register the rising tension within her body and the anger growing in her eyes.
“Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Jadranka responded in correction, pointedly looking at Brian.
“Oh, sorry,” Brian grinned, the whole thing too funny.
“Yeah, yeah,” Lenny mumbled, then added his best imitation of a debonair smile. “So how about you and me go get a refill and you can tell me all about Serbia or whatever?”
Jadranka turned her head away from the boy, not wanting to waste words in response. This was her third year living in the United States, and she was well accustomed to its citizens’ ignorance of her country and the war that had torn it apart.
The Solace of Trees Page 25