Washington, DC. Immigrant Life

1992–1998

During the first months of my American life, Washington, DC, puzzled me in the exact reverse of the ways I had imagined it would. I had moved to America to live in a museum and I was a part of the display. Here is the Museum of Natural History, and here is this girl from Serbia. Here is the modern section of the Art Gallery, and here is the Serbian woman that Mark Lundberg married. Here is the Pentagon, and here is Mark’s wife, the Serbian woman who escaped the war, what a tragedy, a European war in this day and age. As I had played the tour guide with Mark during our first weeks together in Belgrade, so did he now proudly guide me through the architectural and cultural gems of Washington, DC. He showed me the great landmarks of his city as if I were a tourist on a short visit and he took me on endless tours to introduce me to all his friends and colleagues. Sometimes he even told me what to wear before meeting them. We had our first fight a month after my arrival in America, on account of what I should wear to visit his department chair in one of the chic residential neighborhoods of the city. I swore at him, which was an extremely rare occurrence for me. “I’m not your fucking mail bride,” I said putting on the belt of the floral silk dress that my mother had bought for me before leaving Belgrade, in one of our rare, warm mother–daughter moments: “To have it for a special occasion, out there in America,” she said, “and to remember your home,” she added, wiping a tear. “I’m wearing whatever the fuck I want.” I regretted my language and high-pitched voice the second they emitted from my own puzzled mouth. “You’re right, sorry,” he said. I brushed that weird exchange off as an anomaly in our otherwise happy and smooth relationship.

At his department chair’s party Mark was the very personification of charm just as he had been at the first dinner with my parents and on every social occasion during our Belgrade months. He talked with great pride about me as if I were a newly purchased car or a new mahogany chair: “Lara speaks four languages fluently.” “Lara is a political scientist.” “Lara was an antiwar activist in her country, very courageous!” “What language did you two speak to each other when you first met?” the chairman’s wife asked. She was wearing a pair of baggy black pants and a boxy faded-blue shirt that made her look like a human square. Now I knew why Mark didn’t want me to wear the fitted floral dress: I couldn’t be too ostentatious and sexy, but not too drab, either, the academic chic was to be understated as if you didn’t care and to hide as much of your body as possible under folds of badly fitted material. “First I tried my Serbian on poor Lara,” Mark said with self-deprecating modesty, “after which she took pity on me and we switched to her impeccable English.” “How romantic,” said the department chair’s wife. She was “a stay-at-home mom,” I was told. I had no idea what that meant, though it was true, I could have given a lecture in any of the four languages Mark was so proud of, about Plato’s theory of ideal forms or Aristotle’s political and ethical views. I asked her if other moms did not stay home and if so where did they stay when they stayed away from their homes? I was shocked to find out that a stay-at-home mom was a woman who after she had her baby did nothing but just that: stayed home with her baby and waited with a warm meal for her husband to come home. Everybody laughed and thought I was adorable. They asked me what we ate in my country. That touched some wicked chord in me for some reason as I felt again put on display next to the other Washington curiosities and artifacts from foreign countries. I said we ate mostly rat sausages and during Tito’s time cat and dog sausages used to be a great delicacy. “Too bad now there’s such a shortage of cats after the fall of Communism, and what with the war and all,” I said. Everybody laughed profusely and said I was “a riot” and Mark said I was “on a roll.” I hated my English teacher in our former Belgrade high school for having skipped American idiomatic expressions while teaching us every useless word denoting literary devices used in a poem or the different parts of a Shakespearean historical play. I knew what a synecdoche meant but had no idea what the expressions to be a riot or to be on a roll meant. I delighted in literal interpretations of American expressions and imagined myself starting a big riot right outside Mark’s chairman’s house to liven up the dead street. Then I would have been a riot all right. I imagined myself rolling down on the floor as you do in the fire drills to kill the flames that somehow lit up all over me. Then I would have been “on a roll.”

Then the most unnerving question of all came from the wife of another colleague of Mark’s who taught journalism. The wife was in her last month of pregnancy and proud to have decided she was going to also be a stay-at-home mom: “Why do you think your people started this terrible war in the Balkans? It must be so hard for you.” She was a sympathetic woman and cared about my Serbian sentiments. “We started the war because we want to kill our neighbors the Bosnians, take away their land, and erase them from the face of the earth. We are a greedy brutish people. Wait, didn’t your ancestors do the same with the Indians? Oh, and then there was slavery, too. Any idea why your people had slaves and decimated the Indians?” I said. There was an awkward silence around the table and I realized I had gone too far. I thought I noticed an angry expression pass on Mark’s face like a fleeting shadow. I had a sinking feeling that he would punish me for it. Maybe I had drunk too much; maybe I was still adjusting to the new schedule, climate, culture, and alcohol affected me differently and more dramatically. As we left the chairman’s house I thought I detected a mean-spirited look on the face of that chairman’s wife, the woman with the boxy shirt. A look that for a very brief second seemed to say: We’ll get you sooner or later, Serbian girl with funny jokes and sarcastic remarks. I brushed it off again. I was just adjusting to my new surroundings after I had escaped a country at war that had been a Communist country before the war. I was entitled to brief moments of paranoia.

I had imagined streets swarming with people, but instead the streets were empty in the evening. Mark said the downtown area was where most government people worked so when the offices shut down, so did everything else and the people went home. The first day I wanted to go out on the bus, the train, the metro, to try everything in my new hometown. I wanted to go by myself and Mark said I couldn’t, I had to be careful. I had no idea what he meant. In Belgrade I went wherever I wanted and there were people in the street near the government buildings, too. Not to speak of Sarajevo that was always swarming with people, street vendors, and open markets. When I wanted to shop at the outdoor market for our weekly groceries, Mark said there was only a farmers market at the other end of town on Saturdays. I walked on the streets in the downtown area during the day to see if there would be more people and was delighted to see that there were, like a child who discovers the way home after thinking she was lost. I had to get used to the rhythm of my American city.

After the first months of incongruous encounters, conversations, and curious evening ramblings on empty boulevards, I was determined I was going to love my new city, and I did. Life seemed to move at just the right pace, not too fast, not too slow. I loved the duplex where we lived. It was right in the heart of the nation’s capital, on Connecticut Avenue, and I was enchanted by the large boulevards, parks, and bridges with people jogging and walking their babies, or jogging while walking their babies in funny-looking three-wheeled strollers. During the day the streets in our neighborhood were lively and I tried to stay outside in the street as much as possible. I was happy we lived in a district with people in the streets and outdoor cafés. I sometimes sat on the stoop in front of our duplex just to look at the passersby and I even counted the number of people that walked by our house on some days. The next-door neighbor thought I had locked myself out of the apartment and asked me if I was okay, as if I were ill or had lost a relative. I was thrilled to start a conversation with the neighbor, as in our old Belgrade apartment all the neighbors talked to one another and sometimes knocked on each other’s doors to borrow a cup of sugar or chat about daily hardships and politics. But she said “good-bye have a nice afternoon” and shut the door to her side of the house in my face. I continued to sit on the stoop and counted thirty-three people in an hour. That was fewer than the day before and fewer yet than the day before that. The thirty-fourth person that day was Mark who was returning from his day at work. I wanted to come back from work, too, and not spend my time sitting on the stoop like a stay-at-home mom. My initial tourist’s naïveté and excitement about America were turning into palpable boredom and I realized I needed to work and to find a clear direction in my life. Sometimes I wished I had been a classic immigrant, the kind that landed by themselves in a big American airport with no money and not a soul to help them and they worked night shifts while going to school in the daytime, or the other way around and they didn’t have money for rent at the end of the month and were terrified of becoming homeless. I was slightly ashamed of the easy way in which my immigrant experience was shaping up. Poor little Serbian immigrant bride, I thought to myself with a certain amount of self-disdain.

Being an immigrant in America both matured and infantilized me as I stood and looked aghast at formidable constructions, obelisks, giant drinks with cherries and miniature paper umbrellas on top, and as I tried to pull out of my fractured psyche and life experiences enough strength and energy to keep up with some kind of a reckless race for something that everyone around me seemed to be engaged in. I couldn’t believe President Clinton’s abode was only a few minutes away by car from where we lived. We were practically neighbors. Maybe I could see him or picket the White House with a sign saying: HELP SARAJEVO! or STOP THE WAR IN BOSNIA! I saw people with all sorts of signs moving or standing in front of the White House and some seemed to have stopped counting the years, as they looked as if they’d been left there since the Vietnam War. I wanted to tell them that particular war was over and others had come and gone and new ones were starting again. And also to suggest that maybe if they washed and changed their clothes, they might have more success with the president that way.

In my second year in America I avoided the nagging feeling of guilt about having left my parents, my sister, and my beloved Marija by drowning myself in graduate studies. With Mark’s encouragement and financial help I started a doctoral program in political science that not only filled some of the empty spaces in my time and heart but gave me the self-importance of an immigrant molding her American Dream with a steady step and fierce determination. I was making it in America. Marija’s blessing was coming true, the one she had given me when I first called her in the shelter where she now worked as a journalist for Sarajevo’s main newspaper: that I find marital bliss and professional fulfillment. I devoured the scholarly studies listed on my endless bibliographies with as much hunger as the ethnic foods that Mark introduced me to with great meticulousness: the Thai and Vietnamese cuisines, Indian, Middle Eastern, and African. My palate made the tour of the world in my first Washington years. Whenever Marija called me, though, and I heard her deep raspy voice move in its various tonalities from excitement to serious engagement, from irony to melancholy resignation, I became jittery and ill at ease for the rest of the day. The building of the main Sarajevo newspaper had been blown to pieces at the very beginning of the war and the director, a passionate journalist and reporter, had set up the headquarters of his paper in a forsaken bomb shelter left from the Cold War era. Marija was utterly thrilled to work there as a war journalist. It sounded movie-like, so perfectly fit for Marija and her adventurous, courageous spirit. When I heard voices of fellow journalists in the shelter where Marija was calling from, I experienced tinges of jealousy. They were living under daily bombings and off humanitarian care packages, yet in the background they sounded so animated, like they were having the time of their lives. For one thing, war must not have been too boring. Sarajevo was crumbling under mortar and shells every single day, my friend was in danger of being shot dead by snipers with every step she took in the street, and I wasn’t there to help. I missed Marija’s presence to the point of desperation on some days, her voice, spirit, and humor.

During those first two years of the war I received several letters from Marija in which she gave me more details about her life in besieged Sarajevo, the journalistic work in the bomb shelter, and news from her parents and grandparents. They had all moved in with her parents, in their three-room apartment, crowding together as well as they could, as the hills had long become uninhabitable. Farah and Kemal held on to their house for awhile longer until they were forced out by the continuous shootings and bombings. Marija described how she drove her car through intersections at 150 kilometers an hour to escape the snipers, feeling like a plane pilot. One time the team of journalists had a party with sausage, cheese, and whiskey inside the bomb shelter. They even had chocolate and they danced the twist and rock-and-rolled to songs by Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Elton John. With chocolate and whiskey in an atomic bomb shelter, they produced a truly glorious two-page newspaper every day, Marija said. There were packages of UN humanitarian aid that their editor distributed to them. My life in America seemed so insipid compared with Marija’s exciting life under bombs. Something heavy and hollow like a missed heartbeat echoed through my days in the nation’s capital, and in my marriage.

My love for Mark went up and down in cycles and stages as if searching for a particular shape or a place to settle. Was it a comfortable domestic kind of love as we chose new furniture for the duplex or decided what food to take out or what to cook for the couple we were having over for dinner on a Saturday evening? Was it a sweeping love that made you hold your breath in excitement like some wild ride, as my first nights and days in Belgrade had been in the atmosphere at the beginning of the war with foreign journalists and loud disgruntled students swarming all around us? Was it a calm tender and intellectual love that would finally settle with us writing joined scholarly articles together? I picked a little from each of these options like I picked a spring roll from the Vietnamese restaurant and a samosa from the Indian one and then gorged on a burrito and was still left wanting, missing.

On some days Mark seemed both too deep and not deep enough. We still talked about all the intellectual and political problems that we used to during our long hot summer in Belgrade. I now missed the premarital honeymoon days with Mark when I was showing him secret walks on the Veliko Ratno Ostrvo magic island where the Danube and Sava poured into each other, took him to five-hundred-year-old Orthodox churches with Cyrillic writing and golden icons of puzzled faces of medieval saints, or showed him the old ornate school building where Marija and I spent much of our preteen and teenage years. Now the roles had changed: He was the guide and I was the tourist, even though I was not supposed to be a tourist but a full-fledged immigrant, soon to become a naturalized US citizen. While in Belgrade, Mark had particularly impressed me and lured me into his world with his relaxed and debonair attitudes, the way he always listened to me and seemed interested in every word I enunciated, a rather rare occurrence with the Serbian men I knew who would tell you that your eyes sparkled like stars while you were heatedly talking about national identity and ethnic hatred. Most of the Serbian men I knew didn’t listen to a word you said if you were a woman and happened to have a pair of eyes, relatively decent-looking hair, and two normal legs and arms. Milko might have been an exception, and maybe some of the Goth men that Marija and I hung out with in our proverbial taverns. But Mark seemed genuinely interested in all of me. And he was. Only now, on his own native earth, his debonair and relaxed attitudes, his humanitarian perorations and intellectual musings, could seem pretentious and overbearing. He still listened to my thoughts and opinions, but now it seemed he could hardly wait for me to finish a sentence so he could develop a complicated argument to show me how I was wrong. Unlike Marija, who would fight to the death over a political argument, I would always give in. I just didn’t feel the same energy and passion for the intellectual or political arguments that Mark did. Sometimes, particularly if the argument took place while we were walking in the street, or while he was driving, I pretended to be absorbed in the passing landscape, the faces of the people we walked past, the architecture of the gigantic government buildings, or the layered tastes of the Guatemalan cornmeal or Vietnamese soup we might have been eating in one of the myriad ethnic restaurants Mark took me to.

One day I told him I wanted us to start cooking at home and not go out to eat all the time. Even when we ate at home, Mark brought in take-out Indian, Chinese, or Mexican from one of the restaurants in our neighborhood. We sat across from one another at his large mahogany dining room table eating out of cardboard boxes like we were in an airport or railway station. I thought it was the American way: easy, fast, disposable, prepared by someone else, usually an illegal immigrant working in the kitchen. I found myself missing the dinners with my parents. As heavy and greasy as some of my mother’s cooking was, at least it was served on beautiful china with rose or sunflower motifs on the edge of the plates. I had no idea why such details would spurt into my head, except that I must have been experiencing some form of immigrant homesickness. It will pass, just wait to get more settled and adjusted, I told myself. Mark was ecstatic at my proposal that we cook more at home. He hadn’t dared to mention it himself, not wanting me to feel obligated to cook for us. I thought that was another one of Mark’s endearing traits of thoughtfulness. I had no idea what to cook, and true enough, I would be the one preparing the meals. In our house my mother most always did the cooking while my father did the grocery shopping and dishwashing. And I had no ideas of recipes or meals that I could have prepared.

I called my mother for a goulash recipe, thinking that I’d tone down the fat and salt and add some fresh vegetables and American spices, and it couldn’t be too bad. My mother couldn’t believe her ears that I was calling her for a recipe. She asked me how I was doing, and told me again how lucky I was, and updated me on the ever-growing violence of the war. Mark shopped for every ingredient on the grocery list with rigor and enthusiasm, proudly unloading each item like it was an artifact for a museum. We prepared the meal side by side, and for the first time I had a sense of home, and did not feel like a tourist on a limited visa. Mark played a Beatles record and once or twice even twirled me across our blue Italian kitchen tile floors, in between browning the beef and caramelizing the onions. It was a hot humid summer evening in Washington and a fragrance of honeysuckle entered our kitchen merging with the smell of cooking beef and onions. It reminded me of the smell of beef stew on the evening when Mark and I visited my parents for the first time. The Beatles music made me more nostalgic than the stew, reminding me of the high school parties at Marija’s house for her birthday. Mark’s presence made me feel safe and cozy, yet the mixture of smells and music overlapping onto my memories from a country and family at the other end of the world also gave me a feeling of vertigo. I was hanging above a transcontinental precipice and I could have been anybody, or no one at all. I could have been an opportunistic hairdresser, a greedy Serbian American housewife, a double agent working for the Bosnian Federation and the UN. Mark was the only one to hold on to, to remind me I was Lara Kulicz, a political science graduate from Belgrade University, born and raised in a modest Serbian apartment by intellectual parents in love with Hollywood movies. He alone was the witness to my heritage. He was handsome and kind, a great dancer. He could recite entire sets of Shakespeare sonnets by heart. He even liked to prepare Serbian goulash with me on a humid August evening when all our neighbors were eating Ethiopian or Thai takeout from cardboard boxes. It was a new kind of happiness, but it was one that obliterated entire portions of myself. This must be the immigrant experience. There were no roots, just lots of leafy branches reaching out toward the starless Washington evening, the great American night with twenty-four-hour supermarkets, millionaires, homeless people, truck drivers, movie stars, neoclassical granite buildings, high-rises, malls, and everything else in between. It felt hopeless and exhilarating at once. As we sat across from each other at the long mahogany table like an aristocratic British couple from a BBC series proudly eating our American version of Serbian goulash, I looked at Mark and tried to figure out who he was at his core. I was desperate to find the rawest and crudest part of him, a burning quivering point of truth and vulnerability behind the witty conversations, perfect dance moves, Shakespeare sonnets, steady thoughtfulness, and occasional distance he took whenever he prepared for his classes or wrote a scholarly article. I thought I’d get to that by opening up first. “Remember our first evening at my parents’ apartment in Belgrade, when you made your marriage proposal?” I asked Mark, smiling and looking at the diamond and pearl engagement ring on my finger. “How could I forget, it was a lovely evening,” he said. In my mind that translated to, Why waste our time reminiscing about the past? Wouldn’t you rather talk about the metaphysical poets or Clinton’s foreign policies? I tried again, thinking the more I was going to unfold my nostalgic soul, the more he would unravel his. “I wonder how my parents are faring with this war, I miss them sometimes. The news from Sarajevo is getting worse every day. I miss Marija, too, I worry about her. Do you think the war will end soon?” “I have no idea, my dear,” he said with the accent on no in the typical emphatic way Americans uttered that phrase, with a quick raise of the eyebrows and shake of the head. “I’m sure your parents must be okay, they are not in a war zone yet,” he said, calmly taking a large spoonful of the successful goulash. For a millisecond I saw myself throwing my bowl of goulash right at Mark’s head, and fantasized about it dripping with stew, caramelized onions, and local organic beef sticking to his ears. Instead I politely soaked a piece of the whole-grain bread in the stew and ate it quietly. The record had stopped playing and only Mark’s methodical chewing could be heard in the room, which ground more on my nerves. I wanted so badly to love my American savior and know who he was. But he suddenly seemed like a well-mannered stranger. Why the hell are we eating so far away from each other, at the bloody mahogany table, I thought. Whose table is it anyway, maybe he has other wives that bequeathed him expensive mahogany furniture, what do I know of his past? Nothing. What do I know of his soul? Nothing. Why did he come to Serbia? We should be eating at a round table next to each other, I went on in my head. We should be touching knees and kissing between bites.

“Mark, where is this table from?” I heard myself ask. He looked up at me with his eyebrows raised in surprise, then smiled and said: “It was a gift from my mother. When my father passed, she divided some of her most precious furniture between my sister and me. She said she had no use for so much stuff around her.” He seemed genuine, and I was desperately searching for genuine. I felt like a policeman investigating a crime, Inspector Columbo looking for the littlest details, a scratch on a mahogany table, maybe a drop of Serbian goulash on the Italian tile. The wine had made me tipsy, Argentinian wine that Mark had spoken very highly of as if describing an important philosophical principle.

That night I cried quietly in my pillow. Mark kissed me good night and he said I would feel better in the morning. I probably drank too much, he said. The future was gaping in the dark like an open crater. I cuddled close to Mark, and his calm breathing and warm body were soothing. Despite everything I was glad he was there sleeping next to me. What would I have done all alone in a bed in a foreign city, in a foreign country, not a soul who cared or knew who I was? Somebody called for Bobby in the street outside our window and laughed heartily. For some reason that felt reassuring. The honeysuckle smell felt reassuring, too, reminding me of another night back home.

Over the course of the next couple of years I threw myself into my graduate studies, spinning the threads of Continental, Eastern, and American political philosophies from Aristotle to Locke to Machiavelli, from Confucianism to The Federalist Papers, from Marxist feminism to everything else in between, to the point that any clear idea of goodness, democracy, justice, government, and leadership turned round and round in a murky whirlpool. On many of the days I came back from my classes excited about a new idea or book. I had brilliant discussions with Mark. He became particularly excited about notions of goodness and democracy and in turn shared his love of American poetry and the Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. He quoted from them by heart, dancing and sliding on our shiny hardwood floors, picking up a leather-bound edition of a metaphysical poet from his long and perfectly organized rows of books in the study and then coming to swirl me around in a spontaneous dance, kissing me on the mouth with breathless agitation. I found myself giggling like a teenager in love with her literature professor.

Still, those moments became rare and what began to set in was more like cohabitation with a stranger than the continuation of the sweeping love affair that had started at the beginning of the war. I still didn’t know what had made him come to Belgrade in 1992 and why he continued to be involved in the war, to the point that he had even decided to bring Hassan Rakic, the director of the newspaper where Marija worked as a wartime journalist, to Harvard on a prestigious fellowship. “I promised Marija I would stop the war, remember, Lara?” he said with a cunning smile one evening over a dinner of take-out Indian food. He’d truly meant that, hadn’t he? I remembered that one night in Belgrade when we were slightly drunk and I called Marija from his apartment, he had taken the phone from my hand and asked Marija in his most charming tone what he could do for her. Anything that she wished, he would do it. I picked up the receiver in the other room and listened in. “Stop this war for me, will you?” Marija said simply and crisply. Mark said: “No, seriously, what would you like me to do, Marija? I would do anything for Lara’s best friend.” Marija answered breathlessly: “I couldn’t be more serious. Stop the fucking war and you’ll be my hero forever.” Mark answered confidently: “All right, I’ll do that for you, Marija, anything really. As soon as I get to America I’ll get on to trying to stop the war.” I remembered thinking then for just a quick moment: What a fool, what a self-important fool. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life with him? But I never answered that question and the next day we were making wedding preparations. I chose to believe he was truly an idealistic pacifist and fighter for human rights. “Bringing Hassan to America, a Bosnian hero and a first-class journalist who risked his life to produce a newspaper even at the height of the armed conflict, is the perfect way to bring this war to the attention of American politicians, even President Clinton, can’t you see that, my dear?” When he saw I was looking at him in utter puzzlement, Mark corrected himself without batting an eyelash: “All right, not stop the war, help stop the armed conflict, contribute to the peace process, something of that nature. It’s something, all right, better than nothing.” The more he tried the less I believed him.

“Why didn’t you talk to me first, Mark?” I finally asked. “You know of Hassan from me and I know of him from Marija and she is my best friend in the world. How is your getting a Harvard fellowship for Hassan helping the peace efforts? Why aren’t both of them coming over? That would have made more sense both politically and personally, for me,” I told him. Mark looked as puzzled as I had ever seen him. “And it’s not a goddamn armed conflict but a war of aggression and ethnic cleansing. Besides, Marija is the one running the newspaper now in Hassan’s absence, and she is the one out there in the street every day sneaking her way through sniper bullets to get news and stories for the newspaper. She is at least as much of a hero,” I flared up at Mark. “In fact she is the real hero.”

He looked straight at me with his deep-blue eyes the way he had the night when I was imparting antiwar lectures and vodka. He dismissed my anger as one would an annoying mosquito buzzing around one’s head or the antics of an unruly child. “I did what I had to do,” he said with his usual calm. The glacial expanses of self-composure and calculated behavior that Mark served me in our hardest confrontations left me confused and lonely. Who is this man posing as my husband? I thought in quick flashes that left me spent and panting.

Mark wanted to make love in the different places in the house and at odd hours, at times when I was either writing a paper or getting ready to go for a run, in the laundry room or on a chair in his study, and I always went along, whether I felt like it or not. Then there were also the times when I genuinely desired Mark and found him charming and irresistible and felt lucky to be his wife in his apartment on Connecticut Avenue, amid his dark-colored velvet and mahogany furniture like an exotic princess in a Westerner’s palace. But those times became scarce as time went by and the only safe place from my marital conundrums was the crystal realm of abstract ideas and theories. And the short stolen telephone conversations with Marija when she sometimes called me from the bomb shelter where she did her journalistic work. The background noise of journalists, always talking, arguing, laughing, gave me a rush of pleasure mixed with jealousy. I held on to each conversation for as long as I could, and asked Marija to tell me more. She gave me abbreviated news about mortars and shells and market bombings or a rock concert held in a basement as if it was no big deal and just as ordinary as a walk in the park in times of peace. Sometimes she sounded extremely upbeat and almost happy, pouring on awful and wonderful information all together, in indiscriminate order, snipers killing children as they crossed the street holding their mothers’ hands, getting a pound of fresh coffee and five eggs on the black market, a poetry club in times of war, her grandparents having to leave their house on the hill because that area was being taken over by Serbian snipers altogether. I wanted to hold on to one image alone and process it and talk more about it but Marija went on at a dizzying velocity and then she would stop and say: “But tell me about you, how’s life with Mark? How’s life in graduate school? Are you learning anything?” I would hear her light up a cigarette and drag from it at the other end and I felt a fierce desire to smoke with her and be in her presence, my heart beating, my mind racing, all of my senses alive as I always was in her proximity. There was nothing for me to say about Mark. “It’s great, my courses are fabulous, and life with Mark is exciting.” I mumbled banalities that sounded so important in English, but so hollow in Serbian.

One day after a similar exchange she said: “And Hassan, how is he doing in America, is he at least drawing the attention of that president of yours?” Then came a silence, filled only with the sound of Marija puffing her cigarette. I felt ashamed, yet I didn’t want to trash Mark’s name to her. But I wasn’t going to insult her and our friendship with some worn-out cliché. “I know, it sort of sucks,” I said. “You should have come instead.”

“Well, at least I got his job, you know there is a big shortage of jobs out here what with the war and all,” she said, slicing our conversation with her unforgiving irony. Then she corrected herself: “Never mind, I wouldn’t have come anyway. How could I have possibly left my parents alone in the middle of this raging war?” Then she said: “I am wearing your turquoise necklace, Lara, you were right, it looks good on me, green and blue go well together.” She laughed, and I felt like walking out the door of Mark’s and my mahogany furniture-filled home on Connecticut Avenue, joining Marija under the rain of bombs and sniper bullets the next morning. Instead, during the second summer of the war, I became pregnant.

I knew exactly when it had happened. I had come home earlier all elated about my classes that day, happy that my professor of political philosophy had found my defense of Machiavelli’s notions of virtue and leadership intriguing. It was a cool and brilliant early-summer day in DC, a rare one of its kind, as summers in Washington were usually miserably hot and humid. I was wearing a light gauzy white dress with red and blue flowers. I felt airy and everything in my life seemed in its right place. Even the news of the war in Bosnia seemed pale and quiet for a short while. When I walked into the house, I was surprised to see that Mark was already home, sitting at the computer in his study, probably working on one of his articles. I didn’t want to disturb him so I started making myself some tea in the kitchen. Suddenly I felt him next to me, watching me as I filled the kettle. He was smiling one of his rare happy smiles. It must have been the article he was working on, I thought. Wallace Stevens sent him into ecstasy every time he worked on one of his poems. But he said: “You look really hot in that dress, Lara!” I had a sudden urge to hold and kiss him, the way I had the first time I met him in the Belgrade café. I liked it so much more when he called me by my name than by the clichéd “babe” and “honey.” I felt bold and sexy and in that moment in our fancy kitchen it felt so right to be in Mark’s arms, pressed against his strong chest. I indulged in my naive immigrant state of mind, the Eastern European girl who got her Marlboro Man, rugged but also intellectual and poetry loving, an American dream come true. Mark actually picked me up and carried me to the sofa in his study. I undressed him with fidgety and eager hands, forgetting about political theories and the war and even Marija. After some time Mark got up from the sofa and brought me my cup of jasmine tea. He was tender and graceful. We sat for a while naked and in silence: me drinking from my tea, him holding me with all the affection he was capable of expressing. There was something to be said about flying to America: “the pursuit of happiness.”

Then Mark told me that he had begun to help bring Hassan’s wife and children over from Bosnia the following month and could I go with him to Boston to offer company and translation skills to Hassan’s family as they tried to settle into their new life. “It would be nice for Hassan’s wife to have the presence of a woman from her part of the world, wouldn’t it?” I stared at Mark and only said: “Yes, it would be nice for Hassan’s wife to have the presence of a woman who speaks her language.” Mark blushed, quietly put on his pants and buttoned up his shirt and left the room. I looked at my dress negligently thrown on the floor and realized it had the colors of the American flag and for some reason that seemed funny. How could something feel so right one moment and yet be so wrong the next? Mark was both right and wrong for me and that realization seemed like too hard of a nut to crack on that clear summer day when I had just acquired a new ontological status in the large book of lives: I had become a mother.

On April 5, 1995, I gave birth to an ethereal and perfectly shaped girl whom we called Natalia. It was the third anniversary of the Bosnian war. Marija called me the next day and said she had a feeling I was giving birth and that it was a girl. I was stunned, but then remembered Marija’s craft at feeling events, people, situations as if she had magical powers. Her friend Ferida had also given birth to a girl that same night. She called her Mira, which derived from the word for “peace.” “That should be a good omen, shouldn’t it?” Marija said. “Two girls born on the third anniversary of this hellish war. And by two beloved friends of mine. Maybe there is some hope. These girls will make the world a better place.”

Her voice quivered with emotion, as if she was on the verge of tears. She told me that she helped deliver Ferida’s baby in her basement during a concert and art exhibit. She gave a huge sigh. Natalia was sleeping blissfully next to me after her morning feeding and I suddenly felt afraid for all of us, for Marija and me, for Natalia and Ferida and her newborn baby girl with the identical birth date as my own daughter, for our worlds, our bodies, and our lives. I didn’t understand a thing from the description of Marija delivering Ferida’s baby in the basement of their house during a concert and art exhibit. “Everything is possible in times of war, Lara, you know. Don’t worry, it was actually fun. And it’s not all that bad. I’m getting a lot of sleep.” She was lying of course. I knew that it was just that bad.

In the end, my primitive maternal side won over the rest of me and my daughter took complete possession of my life. I stopped worrying about Marija and took her for her word that all was not “that bad” and she was doing all right. Mark surrounded us with a pleasant and comforting protectiveness without being too intrusive. What with the constant nursing, changing, putting to sleep, waking up three or four times a night, my mind became wrapped in a gooey numbness that rejected with stubbornness any input from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Machiavelli, Marx, Hegel, the whole lot of them. I postponed my comprehensive exams for the following year and moved through my beloved Washington with panache, proudly strolling my porcelain-skinned green-eyed baby daughter up and down those busy streets. I was now a full-fledged stay-at-home mom myself and didn’t mind it too much, except for when I caught a glimpse of a sassy woman in pumps rushing to work, alive and excited about her day. Some days I felt like a mail bride, prize wife, something that Mark got on a trip to the Balkans. On other days, I almost enjoyed my lazy days filled with parenting and household duties, beautiful things and ethnic foods. And still there were occasional other days, when I wanted to get on a plane and flee to where the war was.

Toward the beginning of that summer there was news that President Clinton was going to order an intervention to stop the war in Bosnia. The region of Srebrenica had been a site of indiscriminate mass killings, and other parts of the country were seething with mass rapes of women. The last time I had heard from Marija was July 4. She had called to jokingly wish me happy birthday for America. She told me that her father’s family had gone back to the region near Srebrenica in Semizovac, where they had a farm, and that she and her parents, Farah and Kemal, were all going to join them the next day. She said the UN declared the region a safe area and they needed to see the rest of their family and help them out. “I’m sick of living under the snipers’ rule. And it’s safe… or safer,” she said tentatively. “Didn’t you hear about it? So I’m packing up and off I go,” she laughed. “Be careful Marija, please, promise?” “I promise. Here, I promise on your turquoise necklace, I’m wearing it right now.” She laughed and hung up. Something felt awfully wrong and unfinished. But I felt helpless. I knew something new and dark had entered my life and it would change me forever.

After that last phone conversation an intolerable silence spread between Marija and me. Whenever I talked to my parents I got mixed messages: One day they were telling me that things were calming down, the next that something terrifying was going on in Srebrenica, Potocari, and Banja Luka. Every time I asked about Marija they said there was no news from her or her parents. “They are probably fine,” they said with hesitation. But I knew better. It was a silence that smelled like death and blood. Nobody was answering at the newspaper offices, either.

I went back to studying for my doctorate, took my comprehensive exams, and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the role of women leaders in the “newly freed” Eastern European states. My professor wanted me to refer to these states as the “new democracies” but knowing too well what went on in my native “newly freed Eastern European states,” the word democracy seemed like a cruel joke. Even the words newly freed seemed altogether sadistic and ludicrous. But my professor insisted that I choose one comprehensive term to refer to all of them, even as I kept explaining that just the fact we had all been crammed out there in what Western Europe had conveniently relegated to the realm of the “Eastern Bloc” and the “Iron Curtain” did not mean we were all the same, it certainly did not mean that all those states had achieved equal levels of democratic governance, nor did it mean they were all “freed.” Some got freed only to start chaining and massacring others. “I know, I know,” the professor would say, nodding his graying head at me with a bemused smile as if I were telling him the joke of the year. “But just for simplicity’s sake, go with that title,” he said. “You can explain all that in the body of your dissertation.”

Whenever he said “body” he would look at me with a prolonged stare measuring me from head to toes as if he was going to grade me for that “examination.” I always had a queasy feeling I tried to ignore when I left his office. Surprisingly, he went along with my new topic, the role of women in the Eastern European governments. He was apparently a feminist when it came to ideas and theories, even though I’d heard stories of times when he’d sexually harassed his female students, maybe to make up for the boredom of being a feminist in theory, I thought.

In my dreams I saw Marija running ahead of me in a tunnel filled with water like the one she had described that Bosnians had built as an escape route and that was leading to the Sarajevo airport. She always melted in the darkness at the end of the tunnel. There was no light there, only raw-smelling blood. Another dream was of Marija in front of a mirror fixing her hair. I could not see her actual face but only its reflection in the mirror. She was going through an elaborate hair combing and fixing, braiding, teasing, the works. Her hair was shiny black and stunning as always. Then she turned around and her face was ashen and filled with holes, a terrifying vision of death and decay. I would wake up screaming from my dreams and with a great desire to get on a plane and visit the Balkans and see everything with my own eyes. The last time I called the newspaper I waited for five minutes until the ringing stopped by itself and a metallic tone took its place. I called her parents’ number, her grandparents’ number. I even called Ferida’s number and there was only ringing with no answer at the other end of the line.