The four of us creep quietly from building to building, away from the main street. It’s a mile walk to the bus stop. We cut through an alley, spot two Serb soldiers with the double-headed eagle patch on their shirts, and hide behind a corner until they pass. At the station, we buy four tickets on the first bus going across the border to Austria, a safe country. Nobody stops us or asks questions.
As we board, I count ten other passengers. No families who look nervous, like us. In the middle row we see Ljilja, the wife of Milisav who was also Eldin’s art teacher, wearing all black, with a long silver cross around her neck. Eldin waves to her. She looks down, pretending she doesn’t know who we are.
The bus pulls out of the station, and we sit silently in our seats for fifteen minutes. Then the driver stops at a checkpoint. I’m sweating so much, my hair is wet.
A tall paramilitary soldier stomps aboard. They’re like war gangsters, forming their own special units, Eldin says. Some are criminals just released from jail, more lawless than other Serbian troops.
This one is demanding to see our IDs. Mom shows him the papers, but he is not impressed. “Get the hell off!” he yells. He has a beard down to his chest and dark glasses. Despite the heat, he wears a hat and a black uniform buttoned above his Adam’s apple. The bayonet knife in his holster hangs halfway down his thigh. He gives me chills.
We climb off the bus and wait by the side of the road, like he commands.
“Ultranationalist Chetnik,” Dad says quietly to Mom. “You can tell from the knife and the crazy hat.”
“They were a brigade of Serb psychos from World War II that they’re bringing back now,” Eldin explains to me.
“Hey, that’s my coworker, Slobodan!” Mom says, spotting a man in a car stopped at a nearby intersection. Good timing! I remember him as the nice prankster from her company’s fudbal tournament. He called me Little Keka and showed me dribbling tricks.
Mom waves, and Slobodan rolls down his car window.
“We need help,” Mom says. “We don’t know if this paperwork will get us out of the country. Would you vouch for us?” She’s sure that if he says these papers are legit, they’ll let us go.
He takes the papers through the window and studies them. “These are no good,” he sniffs, throwing them back at my mother and driving off.
She picks up the documents from the ground, her hand shaking. I have to remember that everything is flipped around. Friends are enemies. My parents are powerless. Religion rules. We’re nobodies now.
“I can’t believe that piece of trash,” Dad mutters.
As we stand outside near the bus station, I realize there isn’t anyone to help us. The bearded “Chetnik psycho” returns, and he tells Mom, “Hey, lady, you can come and cook us some bean soup.” Then he makes a kissing noise and laughs.
I want to punch him. From the looks on their faces, so do Dad and Eldin, but we all know to keep still and quiet. Another soldier nearby says, “Let’s just take them to River Sava and shoot. You haven’t killed anybody recently.”
Mom is tense, breathing heavily, but she doesn’t flinch. The psycho raises his rifle and orders us to march forward on the road, in the same direction the bus is going. We line up single file, holding our bags by our sides. As we walk up the one-lane highway, I hear him cock his gun.
“Just keep going. Don’t stop,” Dad says. “Don’t turn around.”
Petrified I’ll be shot in the back, I’m sweating buckets and my legs are jelly. I smell stale, worse than after playing sports.
We walk for a long, flat block, and then the road climbs. I can’t keep up with long-legged Eldin. Mom is crying, exhausted, falling behind. I take hold of one strap of her bag to help. Sweat stings my eyes.
Once we’re at the top of the hill, I dare to look back. I can no longer see the psycho. Maybe he was distracted by a car pulling up or another fleeing Muslim family he can terrorize. I put down my bag, try to wipe the wetness off my face with my shirt, and exhale slowly, relaxing my shoulders.
I don’t understand why they don’t want us here but won’t let us leave.
Eight
We have no idea what to do. I wish we could go home, but the only way back to Brčko is blocked by the psycho at the checkpoint behind us. “Be careful,” Eldin warns. “I heard on the radio there’s land mines around here now.”
We’re afraid we could detonate them if we step off the pavement. Trucks full of soldiers pass, waving. Are they mocking us? One flips us the three-finger salute that Mr. Miran held up.
“What is that?” I ask my brother.
“It used to symbolize the Orthodox Christians’ Holy Trinity of father, son, and holy spirit,” he says.
“Now it’s a sick sign of Serb nationalism,” Dad adds.
“Hey, isn’t this the road to Aunt Bisera’s village?” my brother asks.
“Yes!” Mom exclaims. “Let’s go stay with my sister!”
Dad nods. “I hope she’s okay.”
It’s only a half hour car ride from our city apartment to her rural neighborhood, but today it takes hours to walk, carrying our bags in the heat.
When we finally arrive at the entrance to Bisera’s sub-division, we find a guardhouse, with a Serb soldier stationed inside. “This whole village is now a detention center,” he says. “Once you enter, you can’t leave. There’s an eight p.m. curfew. All men over eighteen have to sign in every morning at the school and get a number.” Eldin and Dad promise. I feel a little left out.
On the twenty-minute trek uphill to Aunt Bisera’s, my brother fills me in. “Serbs are occupying the entire village. They’re guarding the only two roads out, so none of the remaining Muslim men can escape to fight in the resistance.”
I’m exhausted. My arms are weak and shaky from carrying our luggage. My hands are so wet, I’m losing my grip on the duffle bag’s handle.
Stray dogs and chickens and cows who’ve been freed from their pens roam around. They look as lost as we are in this farm country. The redbrick house Aunt Bisera recently moved into is on a main road, overlooking the river. The backyard borders a corn field and is filled with pear, apricot, and apple trees, but the house has an unfinished roof and no garage door. Aunt Bisera lives there with her second husband, Halil. He’s a river-boat captain who doesn’t make much money. But he has the sweetest heart, she always says.
Standing on her doorstep, we’re very happy to see Halil now. He’s tall and quiet, with bushy eyebrows. He takes our bags and gives us cold towels to wipe our faces, along with glasses of water from the nearby well. Bisera kisses me and Eldin, hugs Mom and Dad, and tells us that Majka’s side of town is destroyed. Thankfully, she says, Majka and my cousins have escaped to a Bosnian safety zone nearby that’s protected by the newly formed Bosnian army.
“But the Muslim men who stayed behind were murdered,” Bisera cries. “My friend Fadila, she was shot on her own doorstep. Dear God, what did we do to deserve this? Were we throwing rocks at you?” she asks the Lord. Then she turns back to Mom. “We have twelve other Brčko refugees staying with us too.”
We go into the living room to find some of Aunt Bisera’s friends, people of all ages, sitting on the floor, sobbing. A husband and wife who look younger than my parents take turns holding their toddler. They are all sharing stories of husbands, wives, and teenagers who were herded onto buses, taken to jail, shot, or used for prisoner exchange. Mom hugs Katica, her Croatian coworker’s mother, who once baked us Christmas cookies. She’s Catholic, on our side. I think the rest of these refugees are all Muslim. I’m now sorting everyone by their religion, to be safer.
In the backyard, two parakeets in cages squawk like maniacs. Aunt Bisera loves animals. I say hi to her birds and turtles, the pretty fish in her aquarium, and her neighbors’ roosters and chickens prancing outside. They make me feel better.
“You’re all right?” my aunt keeps asking Mom when I go back inside.
“Better with you,” Mom says as her sister strokes her hair.
I feel pinched and airless. There’s no electricity here either, no phone service. I miss my bed, my room, with my marbles, miniature cars, and fudbal. Nothing here is mine.
* * *
But I almost forget the war in the morning, when Aunt Bisera greets us with creamy eggs frying on her wood-burning stove. She serves us warm bread and sweet corn and a juicy salad with tomatoes and crunchy cucumbers from her garden. Aunt Bisera is a wonderful cook. It’s been almost a month since I’ve had a good meal, and I eat too much, too fast.
Halil gathers peaches from their trees for us, milk and cream from the neighbor’s cows. We drink sweet rose juice that my aunt has made from flowers. She gives us clean shirts and robes to wear while she washes our clothes with soap and water from the well and hangs everything outside to dry.
“We signed in at the school two hours ago with Halil, while you were still sleeping,” Eldin says to me as we eat.
“They called the names of twelve other Muslim men staying here and took them away,” Dad adds. “But luckily they let us go.”
“Why?” I don’t understand.
“It’s only a month into the war. They haven’t figured out what to do with all of us yet,” Halil says.
“What are their choices?” I ask.
“Kill us. Use us for prisoner exchange. Force us to dig trenches.” Eldin lists the possibilities. “They want to keep checking that we haven’t fled to Muslim-controlled territory, where we can get arms.”
I really wish I’d stolen weapons from the army to protect us.
After our feast, I play alone in the backyard, staying out of everyone’s way, feeling lonely. A neighborhood kid comes up and says hello. He has a dark crewcut. I’m not sure what this new kid’s deal is, and after being betrayed by Vik and the gang, I’m not going to be friendly to somebody I don’t know. But his hunting dog sniffs my feet, and I can’t help petting him.
The boy smiles at me. “I’m Almir.”
It’s a Muslim name. He’s safe.
“My family’s friends with Bisera. We live up the hill. Want to see my cows?”
As we make our way up the road, he introduces me to another kid, Omar—also one of us. Omar’s hair is longer, like mine. They’re both eleven, and not much taller than I am, but they look rugged and strong compared to the guys back home.
When we reach the small farm, I’m happy to see a fudbal on the grass. I pick it up and say, “Let’s play a game.”
Almir shrugs. He doesn’t seem that into sports. He leads me to the barn instead. I’ve never been in one before, and I don’t get why he puts on rubber boots before we enter. Then I get a whiff of the horrible smell and realize the mud on the ground is mixed with animal crap. Yuck! I zigzag around the hay and debris so the only sneakers I have won’t get stinky.
Almir introduces me to his dad, who is peeling the green husks off ears of corn. His mother is milking a huge cow. “Ah, you must be Bisera’s nephew,” she says, showing me the udders she squeezes to extract milk. How does she know who I am?
“Want to try?” Almir asks.
It grosses me out. I pray he doesn’t ask me to touch those bloated-looking balloons. The cow flops her ears, shooing away a fly. She seems mean. I shake my head no, worried if I get any closer, she’ll kick me.
“Go get some fruit for Bisera,” Almir’s mom tells him.
Almir and Omar lead me to a tall pear tree they start climbing. “Come on,” Almir prods.
“No way.” I’m afraid of heights, and I get queasy just staring up at them. At home, Ivan was the only one I knew who could climb a tree; I never dared.
“Oh, a city boy,” Almir says, and I feel wimpy. Omar laughs, but not in a mean way.
“You can see the whole world from the top,” Almir says, trying to convince me.
But I won’t budge. So he tells me to hold a plastic bag to catch the pears he starts throwing down, one at a time.
After catching a few, I have an idea. I take his fudbal and punt it into the branches with my foot so several pears fall.
“Good job, city boy!!” Omar says. “Do it again.”
My foot blasts the ball into the tree again and again, knocking a bunch more pears to the ground. The fudbal kick I worked so hard on is still good for something. We repeat my new trick to get apples and apricots too, gathering our spoils in triumph.
“We’ll go fishing tomorrow,” Almir says as I wave goodbye to him and Omar and head down the hill toward Aunt Bisera’s.
* * *
“Where the heck were you?” Mom yells when I get back.
“With the neighborhood boys, getting fruit,” I say proudly, handing her the pears and apples I have in my shirt. “They invited me fishing tomorrow. Can I go?” I’m excited to have new friends.
“We’ll see,” Mom says as we walk into the living room. A group of the old women are sitting at the table, smoking and wailing.
“Dear God, why did you take my son away from me?” one cries.
I immediately feel guilty I’ve had fun horsing around with my new buddies while the adults are crying. I keep quiet about Almir and his dog and cow, not wanting to be disrespectful. I wish I could cover my ears to stop hearing all their sadness.
“Two Muslim men who signed in at the school today were taken to Luka port,” an older man says.
“Why Luka?” I ask, picturing the port, a ten-minute walk from our Brčko apartment. My brother and I used to play there on the docks.
“It’s a concentration camp now,” the man answers.
I think of the prison camp in the movie The Great Escape, wishing I had Steve McQueen’s motorcycle.
“They’re murdering Muslims and Catholics there,” one of the women says.
Nobody watches what they say in front of me anymore. I wish they would. I feel sick.
* * *
That week, Almir and Omar show me around the village. We see local Serb soldiers patrolling the streets, but they never stop us or ask questions. On Friday, after it rains, we go fishing. Almir knows which rocks to lift up to find worms. Now’s the time, since they come up from the wet ground,” he explains.
“You do it,” Omar says to me.
I don’t want to pick up a worm, let alone kill it. Almir baits my line for me, and I feel bad for the squirmy creature who’s getting the hook dug into its brain.
“Scaredy-cat,” Almir teases.
“We’re so much bigger. They’re tiny with no power,” I say. “Isn’t that torture?”
Omar rolls his eyes. “We need to eat.”
“How else are we gonna catch dinner?” Almir asks. “We can’t put in an empty line and wait for the fish to hook itself on.”
They’re right. I’m embarrassed—but not enough to try baiting one. I’ve already maimed a pigeon. That’s enough.
Omar hands me the pole, and I dip it in the water.
The fish start to bite at Almir’s and Omar’s lines almost immediately, but not mine. After a half hour I finally feel a pull.
“I think I got one!” I yell. “What do I do?”
Almir grabs my hand and helps me reel it in.
“That’s a baby trout. Good work,” he says, taking it off the hook. The fish wiggles, still alive, as Almir throws it into the bucket of water with the other fish they’ve caught.
I bring it back to Aunt Bisera’s and Halil fillets it and cooks it on their wooden stove. Mom and Dad say they’re not hungry, so I share it with Eldin.
“Remember when we went fishing on the boat with Dad?” he asks. It was just last summer, but it seems like a hundred years ago.
* * *
Over the next few days Almir and Omar teach me to use a bow and a
rrow they make from branches, gather eggs from the chickens and hens, and pick cornhusks from the fields to feed the livestock. They give me eggs and a bottle of milk to bring to my aunt.
If I spend the rest of my life here, I could share their farm chores every day. I still miss school, but I could get used to having friends who are nice to me again.
Nine
June 1992
One Monday morning, two weeks after we arrive, Dad and my brother go to town for their daily sign-in at nine o’clock.
“Why aren’t they back yet?” Mom asks at nine thirty, staring at her watch. They usually return within ten minutes.
By ten o’clock Mom is pacing. Halil comes back alone, looking sweaty and disheveled.
“After doing chores, I was late for signing in,” he says, breathing fast. Bisera gets him water and wipes the sweat from his face with a washcloth. “Something bad was going on, with more cops and soldiers around. It seemed like a trap. So I ran back here on the side road. They didn’t see me. I didn’t get there in time to warn Keka or Eldin.”
“Where are they?” Mom cries.
Halil shrugs.
Mom runs outside to look for my father and brother. I follow her. The streets are deserted, like a ghost town in a Western. All the doors and gates of the houses we pass are open. Aunt Bisera warns us about this new rule imposed by the Serbs so they can get in easily and take anyone or anything they want.
We see a thin blond soldier who looks Eldin’s age. The Serb soldiers like him who grew up in the village are much nicer than the ones the army brings in from other towns. Halil told me they’re mostly poor farmers being forced to police their neighbors.
But they’re all working together, and they seem to know who we are. When we ask the soldier about Dad and my brother, he tells us that all the Muslim men have been taken to the Luka port. My heart stops. Mom’s frantic eyes bug out from fear.
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