Stillness
In the Jasmine Shade
ON THE LAST MORNING of that other life, the air had seemed sharp as she awoke, as if she were looking through a lens designed to bring everything into searing focus. There was none of the usual grogginess that accompanied waking, nor did she turn and huddle closer to her husband's warmth, hoping to regain the dream landscape from which she had just emerged. She could not remember dreaming at all and lay with her eyes open wide.
Listening, she realized that the shelling and gunfire which had torn the silence of the past several weeks had come to a halt. The morning was conspicuous in its quiet, lending painful clarity to details in the room which she would not ordinarily have noticed. Wall and ceiling met in a crease that caused an ache in her chest, and she lowered her gaze to the pictures on the opposite wall and the books stacked on the heavy wooden armoire. Despite the lowered blinds, which made shadows cling to the floor and corners like a low-slung fog, she was able to read their titles.
Marko stirred beside her and she turned onto her side, watching as he became still again, his eyelashes like dark wings against the paleness of his face. Marko, she mouthed, watching his chest rise and fall. She held a hand in front of his face, near enough to feel a faint exhalation. Careful not to wake him, she closed her fingers like the petals of a flower over the warmth of his breath. What's going to happen now?
His eyes had opened in the half-light, as if aware that his wife's hand hovered over his face. His expression as he watched her was so somber that for a moment she tasted something like burning paper as a slow, sad fire rose in her throat.
But then he smiled, rolling her gently onto her back, and lowered his face to her ear. The scent of burning receded and she could feel the brush of his lips against her neck, moving to form the letters of her name. Lejla.
Yesterday's decision to spend the last night in their bed had come after weeks of sleeping on an old mattress in the cellar. They somehow knew that it would be the last night. The shelling had stopped. A sharp-edged moon observed them in the darkness of their room until Lejla lowered the blind, watching the plastic fall past the reflection of her own stricken eyes.
She had not been able to tell Marko about the baby after she slid into bed beside him, nor any of the times that night when he had awakened only to find her feigning sleep, her face wet with tears that she let slip onto her pillow. Nor even the next morning, when she had come so suddenly awake.
Then there had been no time for her to tell him before being "evacuated" from the house. She packed only one bag for them both, mechanically filling it with clothing and food. Opening her jewelry box, she wrapped necklaces and rings in a cloth, placing the bundle at the bottom of the bag beneath some heels of bread. The deutsche marks that she kept in a tin over the refrigerator went into the waistband of her stockings. Before they left the house, she handed Marko his woolen hat. He took it and the bag without saying anything.
And there was little time to talk when they were ordered out onto the road, Marko walking beside her, linking his arm in hers. She had come close, though, before he unwittingly deflected her confession.
"You were right, mila. It wasn't the right time." His voice was flat and she became uncertain.
Trucks speeding past them spat gravel from beneath thick tires and they could see people standing in the beds, crammed against the sideboards. Each time a truck passed, Lejla scanned the faces for someone she knew, for her parents or for Marko's.
Several times she thought she heard a timid voice call out to her: Lejla! But each time she looked up, she was unable to find its source. Marko, walking silently beside her, seemed not to have noticed.
Nearing the middle of town, they could see people converging on the old mosque. It had been converted into a "collection center," the sterile phrase which men had been repeating through megaphones all along the road to town.
In the courtyard stood an old stone fountain where the faithful washed their feet. Years ago, an art historian had come from Sarajevo to take pictures of it. His article later appeared in a Western journal with glossy color photographs of the mosque's courtyard. There was one of the fountain, green climbing vines wreathing a stone canopy, which Lejla had clipped and kept in a notebook at home.
Now she climbed the steps in her shoes, her face rigid as she stepped over the threshold. She had not been in the mosque since childhood. But, in stepping onto the richly colored rugs, she swayed suddenly, stabbed through by a memory of her grandmother, who had prayed five times a day until her death. Even when arthritis had buckled her legs and she was unable to pray comfortably on the floor, she would place her prayer rug on the kitchen table and, seated, bend to rest her forehead against it. Playing under the table, Lejla would grow quiet for this ceremony.
I prayed with you then, she remembered. Crouched at her grandmother's feet, eyelids shut tight, she would flutter her lips in imitation of the old woman. She had not known the words to the prayers, had not even known that the faint whispers from above represented language in any regular sense. But she had been earnest in her emulation, returning to her conversations with dolls only once she heard the chair being pushed back from the table.
Inside the mosque, she and Marko were ushered to a table where a humorless woman sat, a thick stack of computer printouts before her. She found their names on the list and slid a piece of paper across the table to them.
"Sign here." She indicated a line on the paper. "And then you'll be processed and sent to Germany on the next convoy."
Lejla lowered her head and read aloud. "We the undersigned surrender all our property …"
She trailed off, looking at Marko as the woman tapped her pen against the table impatiently. The document was illegal, Lejla knew. But the city would be under occupation now, anyway. If it was ever freed, the paper would mean nothing. If it was not, they would be unable to live there.
Lejla signed after Marko. She made the L big, so that her sloping script joined her name to the blocky letters of his.
They began pushing men to one side of the mosque and women to the other.
She clung to Marko's hand until the last possible minute. "Marko …"
"It will be all right," he told her, but she could see that he was far from sure.
A woman started to cry behind them.
He touched the dark braid that hung across her shoulder. She wore her hair in one plait when she was at home, cooking or reading the newspaper with him on their bed. He liked to hold the braid in his hand, unraveling it as he kissed her.
"Zamirisa kosa, ko zumbuli plavi," he sang under his breath in the middle of the crowded mosque. "The smell of her hair, like blue hyacinth."
A roar like a forest fire rose through her chest. "There's something …" she started wildly.
But a new group of men, dressed in camouflage, had entered the mosque. They flowed through the bewildered people like a river, running between them and around them and stranding them like human islands. She herself was carried away, twisting to look over her shoulder to where Marko had been standing. But a soldier directly behind her pushed her so that she almost fell, and Marko was gone.
She could hear snatches from the low conversations of the newly arrived men. Some of the men in camouflage she recognized from town. Others were old classmates from high school. She saw her math teacher, and when they made eye contact, she thought that he was about to call out to her. Instead he turned his back and started talking quietly with the men next to him. A moment later they burst into laughter.
There were men who owned businesses in town and even neighbors. But they looked through her as if she had been away for years and had returned with another's face.
"This is the way you usually do it," she heard one slurred voice say as the separation continued. And as she joined the group of women, she realized that some of the uniformed men were drunk. She could smell the rakija, the odor so sweet and sickening that it yellowed the air in front of her.
Lejla looked at the swirling room around her, detached enough to feel as if she stood in the eye of the storm. She tried to find the familiar shape of Marko's lowered head, the shirt he was wearing which she had ironed only days before. But she was surrounded by a crowd of bewildered faces, a kaleidoscope of gray skin and unhappy eyes.
"Lejla!" A voice called out to her, and she turned to see Marko's sister, Mira, pushing through the crowd.
"Where's Marko?" her sister-in-law asked. Lejla noticed that the woman's wide black pupils were static. She wondered if her own eyes had that center of frightened black.
"He's over there with the other men. Where's your father? Have you seen mine?"
Mira shook her head. "I don't know. We were separated before we ever got into the trucks." Her eyes filled with tears, and she was carried in one direction by the shoving of the crowd, pressed hard against the wall.
Lejla was about to grab her sleeve to prevent their separation when another commotion started beside her. An older woman had a desperate hold on her son's hand. "He's only a child!" she wailed. "He should stay with me!"
The uniformed men closed in around her, dragging the startledlooking youth away into the crowd. The woman's sobs hovered over the heads in the mosque.
"For the love of God," another woman pleaded. "Be quiet. You're going to make it worse for him. For all of us."
A man had climbed onto a chair near the doorway, and began to speak through a megaphone. "Listen to me. You will all be reunited once we take down some information. We are only separating you because we hope to exchange some of your men for our prisoners …"
The people in the mosque looked at one another.
The man with the megaphone went on, "We need to draw up lists of men for the exchange, and women will be sent in trucks directly to your people on the other side of the lines. We will not harm any of you, but you must cooperate."
And then, suddenly, they were being herded toward the mosque doors.
"Lejla!" It was her sister, Emina, pushing her way through the surging crowd. Their mother was behind her, hanging on to the belt loop of Emina's jeans.
Lejla began to cry, and the three of them held on to each other, all the while being pushed outside, toward several trucks that were lined up on the street.
When it was their turn to clamber into one of the trucks, they pushed their mother up from behind. Lejla was about to give her sister a hand up when a man stepped out of the line of soldiers overseeing the loading.
"Not you two," he said curtly.
Their mother began to shriek, but another man stepped out to lift the gate of the truck. He struck the metal with the flat of his hand, making a hollow sound that seemed to vibrate in Lejla's rib cage like the ringing of a deep bell. The truck lurched forward, and Lejla could see her mother's frantic face over the side.
"Lejla! Emina!" she was shrieking.
The two younger women were dragged to another truck and pushed up roughly. Together they landed in the truck bed, where other women helped them sit up. When the truck was full, a tarp was lowered and they were sealed in complete darkness, filled with the sound of weeping. But even then Lejla could hear the timid inflections above the sobs of the other women. She covered her belly with her hands, listening to the little voice.
Will you tell our children how their father had to walk eight kilometers to see their mother every night? Marko had asked when they both finished university and began courting.
Lejla's father would not allow her to go into town to meet him. If he wants to see you, he can walk out here. And, doubting his intentions, had likewise doubted that his visits would occur with any regularity.
Young people are lazy, she overheard him telling her mother. He'll tire soon enough.
Lejla had protested. He doesn't have a car.
All the better, her father had retorted.
But each evening Marko had appeared in their yard, asking Lejla if she would like to take a walk.
A walk, her father would snort from behind his newspaper. Haven't you walked enough?
Their wedding lasted until morning. It was summertime and people crowded the town hall, singing, drinking, and spilling out onto the street. Her father toasted the couple, his voice growing gruff as he recounted Marko's persistence. "I said to myself, This boy …" He lifted his glass with an impish expression. "This boy I want for a son."
And the wedding guests, many of whom had witnessed Marko trotting through snow, rain, and wind, dissolved into laughter.
Later, she watched Emina, who was then still in school, whirl past in a cloud with her sweetheart Suad. He was a tall, shy boy, but on that night his face was flushed and his eyes bright.
When they were all exhausted from dancing and a little drunk, one of Marko's cousins started teasing Lejla's younger sister, breaking into song about another Emina. The song, from a poem by Aleksa Šanti, tells the story of a man who passes a jasmine-filled garden where a young woman is filling a watering can. Awed by the girl's beauty and grace, he calls out to her. But she will have nothing to do with him and his love goes unrequited.
Emina had reddened at the words, and someone slapped Suad on the back. But a strange quiet soon descended on the crowd and Lejla became uneasy listening to the song … Slalomljen je ibrik, uvelo je cvijee … The watering can is broken, the garden overgrown … The old poet is dead. Lejla's hand twitched violently, nearly overturning a wineglass. And Emino has died.
"This is a wedding, not a funeral!" someone shouted in protest, and the musicians roused themselves to start another song. People began to dance once again and Marko kissed away her frown, laughing as people started to whistle.
From the truck the women were led into a concrete building, down a corridor and into a windowless, unlit storage room. She and Emina sat on the cement floor, their backs against a wall.
Lejla leaned her head against the hard, rough surface, the conversations floating around her like birds in a children's cartoon. Every once in a while one would flutter near enough that a few words penetrated her fog.
"I didn't see him in the line …"
" … they're dead …"
" … cousins in Germany …"
She and Marko had been trying to have a baby for a year, ever since the war had started in neighboring Croatia. Marko's was one of the few Croatian families in the town, and his older brother had left to join the fight. Things would be harder on Marko, wherever they had taken him.
"It's not the right time," she had told him at first. "Who knows what is going to happen. It's wrong to bring a baby into this."
But she had not convinced him. "Lejla," he had told her, "it's never the right time. Let's just let nature take its course."
Not getting pregnant had both disappointed and relieved her. But on the day that the Crisis Committee formed, staffed exclusively by Serbs who had uniformed themselves overnight, she realized that she had not menstruated in six weeks.
She had not told Marko in those first weeks. She had wanted to be sure. There was almost no morning sickness, and she did not want to raise his hopes. Later, she had not wanted to burden him more than he already was.
He doesn't even know, a voice wailed inside her head, but she quieted it immediately. She would tell him when they were reunited in Croatia or Germany, or wherever they were going. They had all been promised safe passage out of Bosnia.
That night they took three teenage girls out of the room. The girls, whose names had been called from a piece of paper, had risen uncertainly to their feet. Lejla recognized two of them as the imam's daughters. She could hear music and men's laughter from the other side of the door.
A stunned silence descended on the women when the door slammed shut and darkness again covered them.
"Maybe they're going to be freed in an exchange," one voice whispered tremulously, breaking the silence.
Someone from the other end of the room snorted loudly. "Don't be stupid."
When the door opened hours later, two of the girls were thrown back into the room. The music reached a dizzying pitch, making the air in front of Lejla's eyes vibrate as she blinked from the sudden light.
The sound of the two girls crying had gone on for a long time.
Lejla pulled her knees to her chest and leaned her forehead against them. When she felt Emina shivering beside her, she straightened, putting an arm around her sister's shoulders.
Emina curled up into a ball and lay her head in Lejla's lap. Her mouth was moving soundlessly in the dark and Lejla dropped a hand to stroke her hair. Emina's trembling jaw made a rhythm against her leg and Lejla concentrated, trying to discover if the soundless words were a prayer or a song.
There are deaths that happen only in the dark, she thought her sister was saying.
When the door was again unlocked, hours later, there was a scrambling as women tried to back away. A man entered the room carrying a powerful flashlight. Its beam cut across downcast and terrified faces, all looking down.
And in the middle of it all, the baby was singing to Lejla. She looked at her sister. "Do you hear that, Emina?" she whispered.
"Shhhh. Be quiet." Emina sat up stiffly and reached around Lejla's neck to cover her mouth.
But Lejla could hear the little voice. It was strong for all its small size, and reminded her of an aria. Something about an alignment of sun and stars, and the sound the sea makes when you are underwater.
"I think this is the one." She felt one of the men stand in front of her, ordering her to rise.
There's something I need to tell you, Emina, she thought, getting to her feet unsteadily.
Her sister's small face was white in the flashlight's beam, the skin under her eyes blue with tears.
"Budi jaka. Be strong," she told Emina, and then leaned in, whispering the words so quietly she wondered if she had said them aloud or just thought them.
But her sister nodded swiftly and placed a hand across her own belly to show that she understood.
Now you exist, Lejla thought.
She was led down a long hall, out of the building, and across a courtyard to another smaller structure. It appeared to be an old factory complex, although she recognized none of the buildings. She had tried to map out the truck's turns in her head, but they had been too numerous and the journey had been too long.
She was pushed into a room with a dirty uncovered mattress. The door swung shut and she listened to the footsteps receding. They grew fainter in the distance and she imagined her sister being led out of the room. Now you are real. Later, she remembered the yawning silence on the other side of her door.
The little voice talked to her, despite the days during her imprisonment when she would not respond, angry, thinking she was losing her mind.
Time seemed to slow down in the small room, the air converting itself into a thick and sluggish substance. Later, she could not remember whether hours or days had elapsed before she heard footsteps in the hall outside. A man who had been a friend in that other life let himself into the room quietly, and she raised her tearstained face. But her relief lasted only a moment, shriveling when she took in his expressionless features.
He sat down on the mattress beside her and lit a cigarette, offering her one from the pack, but she shook her head.
"Have you become so virtuous, Lejla?" he asked with a little smile. "You used to smoke."
She was silent, watching him. He had been friends with Marko in high school. They had grown up in the same neighborhood, playing soccer in the street.
"You were at our wedding," she told him.
He did not seem to hear her.
"You were at our wedding," she repeated, almost angrily.
His eyes flashed. "Not much is the same since then."
She swallowed with great difficulty. "Marko was your friend."
He shrugged. "Marko is an Ustaša. He stopped being my friend when his brother went to fight with the fascists."
"We were your friends," she told him again.
His voice was without inflection, so flat that it made her wince. He threw his cigarette on the floor. "Those friendships are dead."
The voice was crying. It was howling like a little wolf.
Lejla was hovering on the edge of consciousness, skirting it like a dancer onstage, clinging to the periphery of darkness.
You're ruined, she told the voice.
It stopped crying immediately.
They've polluted you.
There was a commotion in the hall outside her room. Her eyes flickered open and the baby seemed to retreat. She closed them, hearing shouting and laughter. Unsure whether she was dreaming, she felt some shade of herself rise to its feet and lean against the door.
"Lejla!" It was her sister's voice and Lejla began to pound the door with her fists. She beat it as she had seen a boxer in a film punch a suspended bag, hands moving in rapid-fire succession. She bloodied her hands on the doors, the baby screaming in horror.
They had the power to infiltrate her dreams, their faces a continuing presence even when she slipped from consciousness. In the dreams she tore barefoot from one nightmare to the next, as if they were horror-filled towns and the roads between them a grim respite where she hung in painful suspension, just beneath the surface of waking.
It was a torturous conversion, in which the world lost its soft color and bland edges. In the dreams, she cut herself on air, spraying blood in wide arcs, leaving stains as thick and greasy as gasoline.
She died repeatedly in her dreams, throwing herself from the mosque's tall minaret and splintering on the white stone of the courtyard below, or grabbing her captor's gun and firing it again and again through her forehead. She could chart the burning path of the bullets, squeezing her eyes tightly in expectation, but was unable to die successfully.
After these failed somnambulic attempts, she took in her surroundings from the grave of her body. It seemed that a wasteland stretched infinitely in all directions. But each time the key turned noisily in the lock, she was violently resurrected.
Not even in my dreams, she whimpered into her hands.
And then one night, toward the end of her captivity, Marko sat on the edge of their bed at home, his naked back to her. And when she leaned toward him, knowing full well that it was a dream, she expected a trick. That was the way in which they operated, after all. She expected him to crumble into dust beneath her hands or turn around bearing a stranger's face.
But as she leaned to bury her face in the back of his neck, the dream bore his scent.
When she was finally released, she was made to walk over kilometers of roads and fields that had been mined. She walked with a purpose that few of the other women straggling toward free territory shared. It was on that walk that she began to listen again. The voice echoed throughout the no-man's-land, where the barest crescent of a moon guided her steps.
How could it be that they did not kill you? How could it be that you survived?
And the voice continued, like a cricket chirruping into the night. Sometimes singing, sometimes sighing. At times it even laughed, and she smiled to hear it laughing.
When she reached the refugee center in Zagreb, the other women looked at her strangely. They nudged each other meaningfully. And it was there that her mother found her, huddled in one corner of a room.
The older woman crouched beside her, taking the strange, thin face in her hands. "Lejla?" she whispered.
There was no recognition in her daughter's face. "What are you saying?" Lejla was asking, placing a hand on her stomach. "What do you want to tell your mama?"
"Lejla," her own mother said more insistently.
There was a giggle from the other end and she smiled knowingly. "Yes, yes. You're right. It's over now."
In Zagreb, a doctor at the refugee center examined her. They estimated that she was five months pregnant.
The doctor hesitated a moment and said, "The baby seems healthy."
She nodded and looked at him expectantly.
"We have a lot of women like yourself coming in here."
She waited.
"You were in a camp?"
She shrugged, feeling her ears start to burn. I wish I were a man, she told the doctor in her head. I wish I were a man who could take a gun and go off to war. I wish I could find him and kill him.
The doctor lowered his face and began examining his pencil. "There are options. The pregnancy is too progressed to terminate, but …"
She lowered her gaze to the hands in her lap. "The baby is my husband's."
He looked at her dubiously.
"I was pregnant when we were separated."
He seemed relieved by this and nodded. "Good, good." The faint hiss as he let all the air out of his lungs had not escaped her. "Do you have any news about your husband?"
"No." She shook her head. "I'm waiting for him. They say he's dead. I want to wait for him, and then we'll go on to Germany together."
He seemed to falter. She rose and picked up her bag.
He continued to follow her in nightmares. She could hear his derisive laughter as he said her name. Lejla. Like something ugly. All her daytime bravado fled her in those dreams, all elaborate fantasies about his death foundering, and she would waken in a panic, the first few moments of consciousness always a shock.
In the next camp, on the outskirts of Munich, she and her mother shared a room with four other Bosnian women. They allowed each day to burn down to its conclusion, like a forgotten cigarette, waiting for Emina and their husbands.
"When did you last see her?" Her mother had insisted on hearing everything.
And Lejla had told her about the truck and the room crammed with women. She told her about their separation.
Her mother watched her with large eyes. "I knew, I knew …" She rocked back and forth.
"The baby is Marko's," Lejla told her.
The older woman stilled and buried her face in her hands.
They heard that the mosque had been destroyed, and that in its place was a parking lot. She no longer had the clipping of the mosque's stone fountain and spent days sifting through old journals in a Munich archive until she found the article again. Her heart had skipped to see the photographs—the fountain's carving and the curling green vines now existed solely in pictures, and the images made her eyes burn. When the respectable Frau who manned the reading room turned her back, she ripped the pages furtively from the magazine, folding them and placing them in her bag. On the return bus ride to the refugee center, she hung on to a plastic overhead strap and watched the slate-colored sky go by. This is how we regain the past, she told her rain-spattered reflection. Centimeters at a time. Lejla pictured her sister's shadow wandering through their town's broken lines, stubborn and ghostly, the guardian of memory.
When Marko was released from a camp, together with her father, they were reunited in a government-subsidized apartment in Germany. They made plans to emigrate to Canada. She did not tell him what had happened, but it was months before he could hold her in the same way, and she was sure that he had guessed. She had also seen the way he stood by the baby's crib, never certain whether he looked upon some trace of self, or the face of someone he should hate.
"She's yours," Lejla had told him.
He had nodded, but was unable to meet her eyes.
"Give him time," her mother had said.
And each night when they entered sleep, they entered it separately. And when she awoke from her battles, the bullet-riddled Lejla who threw herself from great heights turning into the conscious Lejla, she could see in Marko's eyes that he had also made his way back from some vile ground. And they held hands wordlessly in the bed, lost in their own impenetrable thoughts, shaking off the pollution of their dreams.
This is how we reach each other, Lejla would tell the ceiling above their bed. Through kilometers of tainted air.
In some of the dreams, Emina follows her through the mined fields. Their heels burn over the kilometers they walk, beating a steady path toward free territory. Fires start in the fields on either side, and they hurry down the smoky tunnel between. She can hear the whispering behind her, and stops to let her sister catch up. But when she turns around, the fires have ceased and there is nothing behind her except for a cold moon. The voice continues, rising on smoke out of the dusty ground. Pjesma o Emini, nikad umrijet' nee, it tells her. Emina's song will never die.
Copyright © 2003 by Courtney Angela Brkic
