The Solace of Trees

by Robert Madrygin

  “No, no Lenny, it’s not Serbia, it’s Bosnia and Haresgonia,” Brian said, slurring his words as he addressed his drinking buddy. “That’s the place we went in and saved the day. Remember? We saved them first, and then Kosovo later.”

  “You saved us?” Jadranka asked incredulously, looking toward Amir for support.

  “Yeah, USA, babe,” Lenny answered with drunken assertion.

  A smile drew across Jadranka’s mouth, an expression that was in polar contrast to the one in her eyes. Her mind engaged two conversations at once: one was internal and spoken in a silent, angry, bitter voice; the second was external and expressed in a calm, leading, matter-of-fact tone.

  “And when was that?” Jadranka asked out loud, holding her smile with quizzical face as if she herself needed clarification of the war’s history.

  “When the Marines came,” Lenny answered, grinning at the quickness of his own wit.

  “And what year was that, exactly?” Jadranka queried, no longer bothering to hide the contempt of her anger’s voice. The ethnic cleansing of Bosnia had been allowed to continue unabated for two years before any intervention by NATO forces that even then had been token and ineffectual.

  “Whatever,” Lenny answered, not having missed the angry sarcasm in her voice. “What difference does it make? We came and saved their butts, that’s all that counts.”

  Lenny, in fact, knew little if anything of the actual history of the Bosnian War. The few partial and often-enough distorted facts he’d garnered second- or third-hand from school or the news were lost to a thousand other pieces of unsubstantiated information that made up the bulk of his worldview.

  Jadranka nodded her head, holding her voice for fear of screaming her anger. Her breath, tight in her chest, constricted her vocal chords, blocking the sound that might exit her mouth and speak words she herself didn’t want to hear. “What difference?” she would have asked if she had let her words out into the open. “I will tell you the difference it made. While the world turned its head those bastards came to our town and beat the little boys to death with their rifle butts because they said they were enemy soldiers.”

  Those words having been spoken, others would have followed, ones whose volume would have grown louder in anger and pain.

  “They raped the girl next door…not just one of the men, but all of them,” she would have shouted. “After they were done, they tied her to a tank and paraded her around the town square. Then they threw her naked, half-dead body in front of her parents. They loaded the rest of us into buses and took us to their camp, the place where they would murder your father and brother…the place where they took your mother and raped her in the room next to you, only a sheet for a door. Where you could hear her crying, pleading as one man after another took her. And then they took your sister, thirteen years old. Do you understand? Thirteen years old! And they raped her. Not just once, but all the men in turn. Can you imagine? Can you imagine your mother having to take the gruel they gave you for food and smear it on your eleven-year-old cunt so that when it dried it looked like an infection? And only that way were you saved from them, because they were afraid of getting a disease. Not even an eleven-year-old was safe from them, you see? From men, from fucking men like you.”

  While the noise of the party around them continued at high volume, the conversation among the others in their small group seemed to have fallen to a whisper, Jadranka’s inner dialogue screaming out from her eyes. The intensity of her gaze had grown, until it felt to Lenny like the girl’s eyes might pierce him. He could see their accusation, though he had no understanding of what their charge might be. The soon-to-be soldier felt strangely frightened by her look and suddenly grew angry that he should be made to feel that way.

  “Jadranka, I think Katy and I are going to head home now,” her roommate Chris said, breaking the short silence that seemed to linger interminably long. “Are you guys coming?”

  “I don’t know,” Jadranka answered, casting an accusatory glance at Amir. His silence had angered her as much as had Brian’s and his companion’s glib, arrogant ignorance. She heard Brian attempt some witty remark to someone on another topic, like a sleight of hand, a change of subject to make the discomfort of the moment disappear. As the casual conversation around her slowly regenerated, Jadranka’s anger at Amir grew. “How can you just stand there and say nothing in the face of such shit?” her eyes accused. “What?” Amir looked back. “What do you want from me?” his eyes asked in reply. But of course he knew.

  “OK, let’s go,” Jadranka said, casting a quick glance toward her roommates before returning her gaze in Amir’s direction. She was waiting for him to say something. Anything. It didn’t matter, as long as he didn’t sit there like a goddamned log.

  He understood her look, yet now he was angry too. What do you want me to tell them? he asked, without the assistance of his voice. What do you want me to say to them, Jadranka? To tell these people what happened to us? Because if that is what you want, it will do no good. You can tell it all to them, shock their minds, but nothing will change. Because it is easier to believe in a lie, even a terrible one, than it is to see the truth.

  Jadranka would have none of it. She continued to look at Amir, now only to see if he was coming. He saw that she wanted him to come with her, yet he didn’t move. A minute later, by the time his obstinacy had calmed to make room for other thoughts, she was gone.

  Yes, he could see in the future soldier’s eyes that which Jadranka had seen, observed the trace of a snarl that revealed itself on his face for the briefest moment before it was quickly replaced by a smirk meant to say he couldn’t care less…that dark secret peering through a tenuous veil of civility.

  Chapter 26

  There can be moments in life, of seemingly inconsequential instance, that later come to stand in memory as having been the catalyst of extraordinary personal transition. What for Amir had begun as a random event, a party he had no real interest in attending, had led him to just such a moment.

  Shortly after Jadranka left the party, Amir slipped out unseen, invisible and silent, with no good-byes, hearty words, jokes, or pleasantries to mark his exit. He walked in the direction of Jadranka’s apartment but halted part way there. Stopping at a small park, he entered it to seek solace in the quiet whisperings of his old friends, the trees. He wandered to its deepest part and leaned up against a large, leafing maple. Hidden in the dark recesses of the grounds, he was comforted by the shadows and the low, soft song of a gentle spring breeze. With his mind in turmoil, Amir looked upward through branches pushing out newly sprouted leaves, gaps of the night sky intermingling in the gentle flutter of their dance to reveal the light of distant stars.

  What did Jadranka want of him? To remember that which he only wanted to forget? To speak it out loud for all to hear? The world had ignored the genocide that had killed their loved ones when it was in the making, so what good would any words of commiseration do now? Nothing he could say would make a difference. And even if he could find the courage to speak, to let those terrible memories out into the open, there were no ears to listen. And even if there had been ears to hear, there were no hearts to act. People believed in war. And even if they said they didn’t, their words in opposition were cautious and whispered.

  As Amir’s mind spat out its denials, another voice rose up within him, this one not loud and angry, but rather like a quiet breeze, gentle and dispassionate. Yes, it said, there was a story he could tell, one as much for his own ears as for those of others. It was what Jadranka had asked of him. He could tell of a day a child woke up in the warm home of a loving family and that same night fell asleep cradled between the branches of a tree, no longer able to hear or speak. He could tell of finding a mound colored with the lifeless faces of his cousins, the grocer, his schoolteacher—the populace of his universe peering out from their death masks like so many broken, tattered, discarded dolls. He could tell of wandering the woods alone or with others like himself, knowing what it mus
t feel like to be a deer in hunting season. He could talk about his friend Josif, tell how the boy had died in his arms, shot in the back by a sniper’s bullet, and how, till this day and for all the days of his life, those dying eyes would never leave him.

  There was still more for the telling. Stories, all documented and available from any local library, accounts of acts of inhumanity never spoken of on the nightly news, acts of such depraved physical and psychological tortures they would never be read even if printed, their telling too intense, too graphic for people sitting in the comfort of a safe world to take in. Yet truth is for telling, and without it being spoken the inertia of ignorance remains sitting in its place.

  Amir began to cry. “Damn them, damn them all to hell,” he sobbed, kicking at the ground with his heel.

  Had there been anyone there to hear his curse, someone who might ask to whom it was directed, Amir would have been unable to find a specific answer. It wasn’t aimed at those to whom he could not find words to tell his story. It wasn’t for the militia who had invaded his family’s house, or for the country or religion in whose names they killed. There were a thousand names from a thousand wars, names aplenty to point finger and lay blame—the false face of civilization quick to single out villains. And then there was he, Amir. Wasn’t his curse thrown inward as much as it was out into the dark night of humanity? Wasn’t he who had seen the face of war and felt its foul breath upon his neck, even guiltier in his silence than those who would excuse its cruelties?

  The silent dialogue of his thoughts choking him, Amir, one small, dark shadow among the many in the night woods, slumped to the ground. He was tired of his fears and tired of the harbor of his safety. He was just now coming to learn the price of his place of refuge. He understood Jadranka’s anger with him. He realized that from silence must come something, or it remained nothing at all but the absence of sound. Yet he felt as if he were back in the woodbin on the day his family was killed: paralyzed and unable to move, the world taking the minuteness of his being and blowing it like the smallest speck of dust into the wind—the infinitesimal into the invisible.

  Rising to his feet, Amir stood and slowly walked from the park in the direction of Jadranka’s apartment. When he arrived at her building, he stood outside for some minutes debating whether to leave or to enter and speak with her. His emotions had been scraped raw; obscured feelings cached beneath the surface of his sentiment rose up within him, confusing his thought. He wanted to see her, wanted everything to be the way it had been before the party. But it wasn’t.

  He turned and walked home, where he lay alone in his bed, the roil of his emotions keeping sleep at bay. As his thoughts turned inward, the play of the evening’s events evaporated to leave only himself as the focus of his contemplation. The central question of his meditation wasn’t a conundrum of who he might be, but rather whether he, Amir, was anyone at all. Tears began to stream down his cheeks in silent answer. As sleep finally overcame him and despair emptied him of thought, he was struck by an awareness of self that was shocking to him as much for its simplicity as its clarity. Though the brief moment of revelation was soon lost to slumber’s advance, it remained illuminated in outline long enough for his conscious mind to understand that his question was not a weight he carried alone, but was, in one form or another, shared by everyone.

  The following morning Amir drove to his mother’s for his usual Sunday visit, but without Jadranka. Margaret was surprised that her son’s girlfriend had not come with him as planned and sensed that something was wrong. When she asked, Amir recounted the event of the night before. Margaret listened intently as Amir spoke of the incident and about what he saw as his weakness in facing the past. He was, he said, ashamed of himself and his frailty of spirit. He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, with his body held upright, his eyes directly facing his mother.

  While Amir spoke, Margaret listened, as intent upon the look on her son’s face as on the words he spoke. There was a strange aura about him, a kind of desensitized state emanating from within as he talked. It was as if he were speaking not about himself, nor even about another person, but almost as though he was discussing a literary character in a book.

  “Why are you smiling?” Amir asked, seeing a gentle, pensive expression appear on his mother’s face.

  “Because I think you’re finally getting beyond it. Or, perhaps better said, that you have come to finally be able to meet it face on.”

  “But Mom, I feel terrible.”

  “Yes, I can see that. But I believe something has changed. There is no longer the sense that your past owns you, that you are captive to it. I can hear in your voice and see in your eyes that you’ve come to a place of change. A part of you has been trapped for so many years by what happened in the war that it can only see things in terms of what it has always known. It’s what many prisoners suffer after their release from prison. The bars that have cut them off from ordinary society for so long have, paradoxically, come to represent a place of security for them. They are afraid to live outside of their enclosure, afraid to leave their prison cell when the time comes for them to be freed.”

  Amir sat looking off into the distance, as if trying to grasp something beyond his mind’s reach. He could feel the touch of truth in his mother’s words, but he couldn’t find a frame of reference from which to make sense of it. It was as if he had been walking along a road toward a destination whose distance lay so far off that all thought of arrival was lost to the endless journey, one day following the other. Then, suddenly, he arrived and found himself struggling to remember why he had come in the first place.

  That night, sitting alone in his room, Amir realized that his path forward had been in front of him now for quite some time. It had not been the lack of knowing that it was there that kept him from it, but rather the fear of engaging it. What he had suffered in Bosnia, he now understood, marked his future just as surely as it had his past.

  It was only natural that Amir would think of film as the medium to confront the emotions that had held him captive for so long. He wasn’t sure, however, just how he might approach it or even what its expression should be. All he really knew was that, whatever it might be, he wanted it to be true. He had no illusion of finding truth in any objective sense of the word. Rather, what he sought was an internal declaration that was honest, and despite his fears, probing and deep. Though he had little idea of how to proceed, Amir braved forward to step into the past.

  Jadranka and Amir had been unable to bear their separation for more than a day. Knowing each other’s schedules, they crossed paths at the earliest opportunity, their anger and icy stubbornness disintegrating at first look. Their first reaction was to laugh, and then as they hugged Jadranka started to cry, saying she was sorry and that she didn’t know why she’d acted the way she had. Amir, in turn, offered the same. They had survived their first real spat.

  Jadranka soon noticed a change in Amir. Though he had not directly spoken of his internal decision, he began to speak freely of his former life in Bosnia without being prompted to do so.

  “So you really were the little farmer,” Jadranka teased. “And did your father take you hunting and fishing for dinner?”

  “Yeah, actually he did,” Amir smiled. “Not every night, of course. But it wasn’t uncommon. It wasn’t always game or fish, though. Sometimes we gathered wild herbs and mushrooms. My mom loved mushrooms. She made soup from them, used them in salads, cooked them with vegetables. She made a great mushroom gravy, too.”

  “They were a good family, huh?” Jadranka smiled at the look in his eyes, catching a glimpse of the rural Bosnian farm boy he’d once been.

  “Yeah, they were good,” he acknowledged with a gentle smile.

  “And your sister? Tell me about her.”

  “She was three years older than me. We got along really well. Minka was always watching out for me, taking care of me. She was really beautiful, inside and out. She was like the quintessential Bosnian country girl. You know, reall
y pure?”

  “ ‘Quintessential’? Such a big English word. But yes, I know what you mean.”

  In her turn, Jadranka spoke of her family, her father and her brother who had been killed in the war. Describing her mother and sister, she said she hoped Amir would one day be able to meet them. In fact, she had been planning on returning home for a visit that summer, but money was tight and even with a full scholarship she needed to work for as many weeks as she could during the summer vacation to make ends meet. In any case, it would be her last year at school. She would be returning to Bosnia soon enough, an idea Amir had begun giving thought to as well.

  Chapter 27

  That summer Amir took a job on the Cape to be with Jadranka. They rented a small, rundown, bare-bones apartment in a ramshackle house that had been cut up to fit as many apartment units as possible. Amir worked on a landscaping crew and Jadranka returned to her waitress job at the Blue Whale. When their work schedules kept them apart, Amir busied himself reading all he could about the Bosnian War. After years of having avoided the subject, he had finally begun trying to understand the conflict that had taken his family from him and left him an orphan. Reading about the recent war in his homeland led him to investigate other armed conflicts, and soon he was researching the numerous wars of the twentieth century that had preceded his own country’s fall into chaos. By the time summer vacation ended, he had come up with an idea for a film. On his return to school he had been in the final stages of its outline when Zack Ashrawi once again approached him for help.

  It was Amir’s first day back in class and with his mind wavering back and forth between the film he wanted to make and the reality of getting back into gear for the new school year, he had been caught by surprise at Zack’s approach, to see him going about business as usual. Amir had imagined that, after all of the trouble he’d been in, the professor would keep a low profile.