Twice Born, page 46
Sebina dances and jumps around. The woman who’s making the soup tells her to stop. Sebina opens her geography book. Then she closes it and tells a joke she’s learned from her brother. She makes funny faces and plants her fists on her hips. They all laugh, even the grumpy woman stirring the soup.
Mirna hasn’t come down yet. She’s up on the rooftop terrace hanging the laundry. It’s the first real sunny day after months of cold. That’s why the artillery squads on the mountains are so euphoric.
The terrace is in a relatively safe position because their building is lower than the others around it and set slightly apart.
Mirna’s blond hair masks the white streaks. She’s wearing clothes from her girlhood, a close-fitting skirt and a turtleneck sweater that fit her perfectly once again.
I see her on the terrace and wave to her. These are the last moments of her life. The second year of the siege has just started. More than once we’ve sat chatting on this roof with its chimneys and television antennae. Sometimes I’d go up to help her get the laundry and we’d end up staying to smoke a cigarette and look at the world below. I was fond of her and she was fond of me, in her own way, though there was no real intimacy, because of her shyness, because I always seemed a little remote. I could have been her son’s wife. I was her daughter’s godmother. But we never got to know each other very well. In a few minutes, after her shell falls, we’ll never have the chance.
I go back down to Sebina. She’s leafing through her geography book again. She’s used to the darkness. By day a little window set at street level lets in a ray of pearly light and nothing more, enough to see each other and let some of the smoke out. Down here those who have cigarettes smoke them. The smoke bothers Sebina, even though she hardly notices it anymore except when they leave the cellar and she smells it on her clothes. She thinks of her mother. Sometimes Mirna lets her go up to the terrace with her, and she can finally stretch her legs, do splits and cartwheels and roundoffs and walk on her hands among the chimney tops and antennae.
Her legs are squat and strong. They used to be stronger. Now she’s out of shape, but it won’t take her long to get it back. She’s lucky to be a little athlete. The war won’t steal the Olympics away from her.
The moment has arrived.
I see Sebina as if I could reach out and touch her. We share a greater intimacy. I held her in my arms when she was a few hours old. I baptized her.
I’m sitting in the lobby of this art-house cinema where they’re showing a movie I’ll never see. I stepped in here by accident on a rainy day and now this is the movie I’m seeing: Sarajevo, May ’93. The deaths of Sebina and of her mother, Mirna.
I sit and the girl talks. She remembers everything down to the smallest detail. I ask her if she only translates or if she’s also a writer. She says, How did you know?
I know from the details. They’re the details someone with a writer’s memory would recall. A knife that separates and chooses.
My details are: a dirty handkerchief I once used to clean Sebina’s mouth after she ate an ice cream cone. Now, absurdly, I wonder where I put that handkerchief with the imprint of her lips.
My details are: her fishy smell.
She’s standing. Her head comes up to my stomach. I bend to kiss her and smell the mackerel from the humanitarian aid packages.
My details are: her fish flapping around in the dust.
The first shell lands close by. The pan falls from the burner and the soup ends up on the ground. Cursing the war, the woman yells and burns herself as she gathers up what she can with her hands.
Sebina watches the broth slide toward her. It’s full of pieces of winter vegetables and misery. She raises her head and says she wants to go out. She wants to find her mother.
In the cinema lobby, the girl pauses and says, No one stopped her. That’s the most absurd thing of all. We shouldn’t have let a little girl go out. She stops.
Sebina runs up the stairs.
The girl didn’t stop her. She was playing chess with a friend. Their homemade cork chess pieces had fallen on the ground and they were arguing because it wasn’t clear anymore where they were in their game.
Now she thinks she could have used the arm she was always dragging behind her on the stairs to stop the little neighbor girl from embarking on that black journey.
The girl stops. She’s a writer. She knows that destiny flows like ink and that there’s no way to stop a little girl who’s fated to die.
Sebina goes up the stairs because that’s what’s written. Where is it written? In what fucking book?
Sebina, with her funny face, her hair as straight as oil, her slightly square head, her jutting ears like pink strings of transparent skin and the mouth that it’s impossible to describe because you have to have seen it at least once to understand how a mouth could be entirely inhabited by the joy of living.
She isn’t beautiful. She never has been. She’s the ugliest member of her family. She’s short and her arms are too long. Her face looks like the character on the package of orange cookies.
And yet she’s the most beautiful little girl in the world. She’s my goddaughter. She’s life in its purest state. She shines with all the light that isn’t visible anywhere else, like a precious stone that’s been dug out from the surrounding rock.
She’s the one who took my hand and guided me toward motherhood. Every time I hugged her I said this creature has something for me. Somewhere she has a present for me.
I recall how incredibly exposed the knot of her elbow bone was. I remember her eyeballs and the downy hairs growing in on her forehead like a little curtain.
She rises. Like water parting from a sloping riverbed to flow upward like a flame.
Mirna has stopped hanging the clothes. Up here, the shock waves of the shell that made the cellar shake felt as strong as an earthquake. They threw her off her feet against one of the antennae that are about as useful as scrap metal now that there’s no electricity. She thinks of Sebina. She could be buried down there. There’s smoke coming up off the street. She has to run to make sure they’re all okay, to make sure nothing’s collapsed. She’s never trusted these basement shelters. They weren’t made for this purpose. They’re built like any cellar, places to store lard and old sewing machines.
And so she goes down.
Yes, that’s how it happened.
The Bosnian girl with the sad forehead and the luminous hair says that anyway she’ll never write this story because it’s too stupid, because sometimes death is too stupid and pat.
But that’s exactly what happened.
Mother and daughter met halfway. They were running along the same stairwell, looking for each other, one going up, the other going down.
If they’d stayed exactly where they were they would have eaten some dust and had a scare but nothing more.
They’d finally decided to leave the siege. They were due to go any day now with a journalist friend of Gojko’s from Belgrade.
But instead they’d stepped off the chessboard of life without realizing it. They moved along, dragged by the cord that bound them.
Hold your end of the rope,
and I’ll run through the world
with the other end in hand.
And if I happen to get lost,
you pull me back, mother dear.
Death did the pulling for them. It pulled hard. A shell entered and crossed the sheltered building. In that very moment they’d reached each other. Mother and daughter. The womb and its fruit.
Gojko is sitting on an earthen step. Pietro is next to him. They’re watching a soccer game, kids running after each other, their T-shirts and flesh.
The kids are about Pietro’s age. The postwar generation.
White flowers of reconciliation.
Gojko says, “You know, she didn’t die right away.”
He lights a cigarette, spits smoke and raises an arm to holler foul. Soccer and the cemetery.
We get up and leave the burial ground.
Gojko needs a beer.
He sits on a bench beside the cemetery kiosk and drinks one after the other, straight from the bottle.
Mirna was blown to bits. They gathered the pieces together under a sheet so he wouldn’t find her that way. This was his mother, the body that had made him, but he ran to his sister in a flash.
Sebina had lost her legs. The upper part of her body was intact. He found her lying composedly in a white bed in a space beneath a stairway in the Koševo Hospital. There were tubes in her hands. Her eyes were still as glass. He saw the emptiness beneath the sheet and wondered if she knew.
His little sister had dreamt of winning the Olympics. She was the shortest on her team, the closest to the ground. Gojko closed his eyes two times, the first because he didn’t want to believe it, the second to thank God she was alive.
The doctors had said there was hope for this desperate case so similar to many others they’d seen. And Gojko, sitting in shock next to his sister, started imagining how it would be, the way he did back when he sold yo-yos and cheated the Montenegrins. He imagined shiny artificial limbs, the latest in reconstructive orthopedics. He would get her the most beautiful prosthetics ever made. He’d spend all the money he had and take journalists out into the trenches even by night to earn more if he had to.
He remembers that there was a shoe on the metal table beside the bed, an unnerving detail he can’t shake. He brings his hands together to show me how small that shoe was, to show me that it’s here in his hands. Poor Gojko. Poor brother. Now his voice is trembling, like an ogre tortured by a tiny mouse that’s incredibly strong and cruel. He wanted to get rid of that shoe. Some helpful soul must have gathered it up on the stairs and, too shell-shocked to recognize the dark irony of it all, thrown it into the car alongside the gravely wounded little girl. But Gojko didn’t dare move it. Sebina was awake. Her eyes were like marbles of light in the night, like diamonds. Gojko wasn’t sure if she could feel her body, wasn’t sure if she knew. The part of her that was visible was unscathed. There wasn’t a single scratch on her face. When he spoke to her she seemed to be listening.
She asked after her mother, called out for her.
Gojko told her Mirna was okay, that they’d put her in another ward.
Sebina listened to his lie. She didn’t want anything to drink. She didn’t want anything.
She never moved her hands. The shoe sat there beside them.
And now I see that plane, the exit light, the unknown woman as she showed me those light-up shoes.
Gojko says something must have jammed in the blast because the light in the rubber sole stayed on.
It was a tongue of pale light on the metal table. Sebina could see it. Gojko let it sit where it was. He thought, If this shoe can survive, so can she. It was one of his games, the worst one.
Sebina died at dawn. The shoe survived her by a few hours.
“After that I left.”
He went to fight, first in Dobrinja, then on Mount Žuć. He was a poet, a traveling salesman, a radio operator, a tour guide, a fool who’d never even shot at a pigeon. But he learned quickly, because you learn hatred overnight.
Months in the mud, his cartridge belt slung over his back.
“But I could have fought with my knife, or with my bare hands.”
He stops. They set fire to a village full of Serbian peasants, civilians who’d never hurt anyone. He didn’t take part, but he didn’t say anything. He sat on top of a hill, smoking.
Pietro listens. He’s no longer looking at the kids playing soccer. He’s looking at a hero from this filthy war, someone who came back at the end weighed down with medals like a laden donkey.
“How many did you kill?”
Gojko smiles and pats Pietro’s head because there’s something new now in Pietro’s eyes as he looks at him, something shining and scared.
“They’re horrible things, things to forget.”
“Tell me one story.”
I say, “Cut it out, Pietro. Drop it.”
Gojko points to the kids playing soccer.
“One day I found myself just like them, in a field, playing soccer with the guys from my brigade. But instead of a ball we were using a head, the head we’d cut off a Chetnik. We kicked it around and sent it rolling through a green field full of little yellow and blue flowers. We were sweating and laughing. It was a game. It was normal. The only thing we were sorry about was that we were getting blood all over our pants, so we rolled them up.”
Pietro says, “Is that true?”
Gojko stands up and throws his beer bottle into the plastic recycling bin.
“It’s true. The other day when we played with those kids was the first time I’ve played soccer since.”
Chapter 19
We’re leaving Sarajevo. I look at Gojko’s back as he walks toward the car. Your back is the part you can’t see, the most vulnerable part. Your back is weighed down by thoughts and by all the times you’ve made the decision to leave.
Gojko carries his back along with him. It’s lower on one side than on the other, where life struck him when it changed course. His past sits there, motionless as a hawk on a falconer’s shoulder.
I look at the pink swollen flesh of his hand before taking it in my own. It’s the hand of a peace-loving man who exhorted his radio listeners to never, for any reason, give in to hate. It’s the hand of a poor fool who ended up killing, who followed the law of war and left his own law behind.
I ask him how he managed afterward, when the deluge ended and he had to face the stagnant pool. What state did life find him in when he stripped off his camouflage uniform and his cartridge belt and washed the mud off his body in the knowledge that he could never again be the same man as before? He said he locked himself into a hotel room for a week to drink and doze in front of the television.
Only his poems spoke to him of himself, of his soul before he met evil.
That’s why he hates them. That’s why he stopped writing them, because his soul was dirty, and a poet cannot fool himself. Bosnia saw him as a hero, while in his own eyes he was a failure, a eunuch.
I reach for his hand and he lets me take it, entrusting it to me like a child. We walk like that for a while, like in the old days when the people we loved were alive. Pietro is watching us and probably thinks we’re two fools. Before we get in the car Gojko asks, “Do you think I’m disgusting?”
I shake my head no.
He kisses my hand before giving it back to me: Thank you.
It’s not exactly a highway but I’d been expecting worse. The car climbs through the somber green woods. It’s been so hot; it would be nice to stop and enjoy some of the coolness. The trees bear no wounds. There was fighting here. The ground is still full of mines. But nature is intact, and these woods bring to mind mushrooms and blackberries and the damp we’d be sure to find beneath the pine trees.
Pietro is sitting in front. He likes to look at the road and at the cars coming from the other direction. I told him to take my seat.
“That way I can lie down,” I said.
But it’s not the real reason. I’m not tired.
Diego traveled this same road on his last journey and I want to be able to think about him in peace, to picture him with me as I go around the curves. It’s a calm summer morning. We’re like the tourists who, weary of the inland sights, head out to the coast because they’d like to take a swim.
We race southward along the Neretva River.
For a long time, Pietro stays quiet and looks attentively out at the road. He knows he’s next to a warrior, a veteran. Now he’s imagining the ghosts that could emerge from these woods.
He’s got his iPod headphones in his ears and an open map of Bosnia-Herzegovina on his lap. Gojko drives with one arm hanging out the window and repeatedly takes the other off the wheel to plunge it into Pietro’s bag of cheese snacks or to point something out on the map.
“What are you listening to?”
Pietro takes off one of the headphones and puts it in Gojko’s ear.
“Vasco Rossi.”
A truck coming from the other direction brushes dangerously close to us. The car is filled with its stink. Gojko doesn’t even seem to notice. He’s looking at Pietro.
“And who’s he?”
Pietro’s shocked. “You don’t know him?”
“No.”
“He’s a poet.”
Gojko removes the headphone. “He sounds like someone who’s sitting on the toilet and having a hard time moving stuff out of his asshole.”
“He fills stadiums.”
The former Bosnian poet shrugs. “Fuck you. Poets don’t fill stadiums.”
“Fuck you! Vasco does!”
“What is a poet, in your opinion?”
Pietro laughs and says, “I don’t know.” Then he turns toward me. “What, are we in school all of a sudden?”
Gojko insists.
“What does a real poem talk about?”
Struggling, Pietro mumbles an answer.
“Things that hurt you ... but that when you hear them they do you good, too ... they leave you feeling hungry ...”
Gojko shouts with joy. “Good!”
Then, abruptly, he asks, “Hungry for what?”
He looks at Pietro, waiting for an answer, and maybe his eyes wear the same expression as when, his finger poised for a silent moment over the trigger, he prepared to kill.
“I don’t know . . . a sandwich ... a girl?”
Pietro laughs a brusque laugh. He’d like to get away from this conversation, which is getting as serious as Gojko’s face.
“Forget about the sandwich. Keep the girl.”
Pietro nods and I’m sure he’s blushing. Gojko waits a bit longer. Then he fires.
“Hungry for love,” he says, and now he’s the one struggling.
Pietro nods. He knew the answer, but the fact that I’m here made him embarrassed to say it.
“A good poet leaves you hungry for love.”
Gojko takes his hand off the wheel to punch Pietro in the stomach.
