Washington, DC, and Belgrade. Revelations

1998–2000

I missed my parents and my sister, Biljana, and the heavy smells in our Belgrade apartment. The feeling that Marija had been swallowed up inside a dark hole paralyzed me. But Natalia and her incredibly clear greenish eyes telling me that she needed me gave me a center and a hold on reality during those months and years. By the time Natalia was three and talking in full sentences, more than three years had passed since the end of the war in Bosnia and I decided that Marija was dead. The letters from Sarajevo no longer came. None of her friends, the ones whose numbers I still had, ever answered the phone. After hearing what had happened in Srebrenica, Tuzla, Banja Luka, and other places throughout Bosnia, I wished for her to have died a quick death in a red explosion like the ones in my dreams or by a sniper bullet in the street as she was running to her newspaper reporting job.

I was now teaching political philosophy to college students, carrying a full load of mothering duties, and entertaining our friends on weekends. Yet there was a constant and painful ringing in my head, ears, soul like the sound made by wind through an empty hallway. I had heard from Mark that Hassan was running a newspaper in a suburb of DC in northern Virginia and that he never went back to Bosnia. At first he reported or wrote articles about the situation in Sarajevo, but soon it seemed that his sources weakened, or even more likely, news about a civil war in a tiny faraway country in the Balkans wasn’t hugely popular among the rich people and politicians living in the vicinity of the capital and eventually the news about the war disappeared altogether. It became clear to me that Mark had used the Bosnian war and his so-called activist work only to advance his career in America, his aura of the politically conscious academic who not only wrote brilliant articles and enchanted his students with his charismatic lectures but was also involved in what everybody called “the real world.” He wrote powerful political letters to the New York Times and cared about the suffering of people in remote Balkan countries. How desperately Marija must have wanted to escape the nightmare of her “real world,” I thought. How painful it must have been for her to see her newspaper director being swooped up across the Atlantic directly into the world’s most prestigious university by none other than my own husband.

I was talking to Biljana more often now and the sound of her voice, always upbeat, optimistic, and positive no matter what misery was lurking around her, would give me an invigorating shot of hope. Biljana was specializing in art and dance at the University of Belgrade and got parts in all the musicals and shows at the university and in professional companies around the city. She was becoming restless and talked more often about wanting to come to the States. At first I pretended I didn’t get what she was alluding to, until one day when she actually said it bluntly: “Lara, what the hell is wrong with you that you are not getting it? Can’t you just bring me over? I want to come to America, I’m sick of this fucking country and this fucking city.” I burst out laughing and said: “Well, if you put it that way, I’ll see what I can do. Why don’t you start by trying to get a visa for the States? I’ll do all the necessary formalities at my end. How is that?” “You mean it?” she screamed with joy. “No, I was just teasing you to see how you’d react. Of course I mean it. Just get your dancing butt into motion then! Only one thing: How about Mama and Papa?” “How about them?” she asked, pretending not to get it. “You know what I mean, how will they take it, having both their daughters gone?” “They’ll be just fine, Larichka, they’ve even told me to try leaving if I could, that they didn’t see much hope for my career and future in this country. And you know how tied to each other they are, they’ll be fine without us, as long as they have each other.” Biljana’s words, both wise and blunt, made me realize that what I had been waiting for was precisely that: someone with whom I could be as deliciously enraptured as my parents had always been with each other. That someone was not Mark.

I promised Biljana I would help her come to the States, to Washington, to Connecticut Avenue duplex heaven. What a boon after all to have my own flesh and blood, my beautiful red-haired nymph sister next to me and be able to talk my mother tongue and reminisce about our messy native part of the world. Whenever Biljana kept saying “my country” or “this country” or “our country” I would have an initial reaction of wondering: What country? Whose country? Oh, that country, the one that has been decimating, massacring, raping its neighbors, Sarajevo, my best friend, and her family? That country? That was certainly not my country. In that quick second I experienced a surge of joy for having immigrated to America, and Mark seemed like a pretty great deal despite his cold and even duplicitous nature. He seemed like a godsend actually. I had no birth country as far as I was concerned, only an adoptive utopian, idealized country. As for my native country, I wouldn’t even know what to call it. Was it Serbia, was it Yugoslavia, or was it Republika Srpska? None of that touched an affectionate chord and the third one actually sent shivers of terror throughout my body anytime I heard it pronounced. Whenever people asked me where I was from, I would tell them I was from Sarajevo. I lied about my birth country with impunity and named the city, not the country. Sarajevo was city and country in one and I preferred siding with the victims than with the genocidal Serbs at any moment of my waking or sleeping hours.

Mark went along with my idea of bringing my sister over with no resistance. That was what confused and threw me off balance about Mark: Whenever I took it for granted that he would go along with something without a blink, we ended up in a huge argument that lasted for days and poisoned my life to the point where I cursed my white bridal gown and those nuptial vows in the Orthodox church in the center of Belgrade. It could be anything, a one-hundred-dollar difference in the monthly fees for one day-care center for Natalia versus another one, or whether we should invite the McElroys or the Bryans for dinner on Saturday night. And then there were those times like now when he acted like the most generous and easygoing guy in the universe: just like the sexy American I remembered in the Belgrade tavern when we first met.

Biljana arrived at Dulles airport a week before Christmas in 1998. The six years since our separation had molded her into a stunning, voluptuous young woman. She treaded the ground with such steadiness, precision, and grace, as if expecting that at every second the world would be her audience, her adoring public. Which it often was. As soon as she emerged from the gate at international arrivals people stared at her, turned their heads and twisted their necks to catch a glimpse of her as if she were a celebrity who had just landed from a Caribbean trip. Some failed to see their own relatives coming out, so enthralled were they by the apparition of my younger sister and her flaming curls bouncing on her back, the cavalcade of scarves and ribbons around her neck and hanging from her hair, and the colored layers of sweaters. As for me, our childhood and teenage years rushed into my head like a torrent, sweeping away everything in its path. For a few moments I even forgot Natalia who, almost four and a stunning apparition herself, was jumping up and down and asking every second when Aunt Biljana was going to come. Our reunion was every bit as dramatic and colorful as Biljana’s appearance. Tears flooded our faces, screams emerged spontaneously from our throats, sighs and moans from our heaving chests. Natalia was confused when she saw us crying and started howling and pulling at my coat, thinking that something awful had just happened. But Biljana immediately recovered, picked up Natalia with one arm, and started talking to her in Serbian and telling her what a beauty she was. Natalia was transfixed and although she did not understand one syllable of Serbian, she stared and smiled at Biljana as if she had just met her fairy godmother who happened to speak an incomprehensible magical language. Biljana breathed in the American air, took in the dreary sight in front of the airport where buses, shuttles, and taxis moved in a continuous flow poisoning every metric cube of atmosphere, and said: “Hm, rather ugly but exciting, I can live here!”

Biljana’s presence in our house made everything harder and easier at once, sweeter and more raucous, more interesting and more painful. The air quivered, the atmosphere brightened up, but the constant swinging between Serbian and English, between stories of “home” and the realities of my new “home,” marriage, child care, and work routines, between Mark’s increasing passive-aggressive moodiness and Biljana’s intensely manic personality, placed a huge strain on my psyche and made me feel like a paragon of calm and sanity by comparison with either of the two adults around me. The feeling of something out of balance seeped through me at all hours of the day. I had secretly thought that Biljana’s presence would soothe Marija’s absence instead of sharpening it. But it became clear that Marija was not replaceable by anyone even if that someone was my diva sister, and in fact her presence incited torrents of memories from Sarajevo, Belgrade, our childhood and youth that had stayed somewhat dormant before her boisterous arrival. I now yearned for our trio of girlish exuberance and mischief as we flashed across the streets of Sarajevo in our mad runs, or as we sat and talked about everything under the stars in my parents’ apartment in Belgrade. And in that trio of our youth, the three musketeers that we thought we were, it was Marija who had always brought the clamor of magical adventure. Without her, a gaping void of loneliness opened on all sides and gave a hollow ring to our voices. Hello, hello, is anybody there, there, there? I kept hearing in my head, in the hallways of my memory. Marija, are you there? I wanted to say out loud sometimes. Her absence was steely and I was cold all the time.

At the end of the first week in our house, which felt like a month, Biljana came into my study and curled up on the bed breathing hard. Enormous tears were streaming down her freckled cheeks and before I could say anything she was pouring out sentences and news that were to leave me in wrenching pain for a long time. Through tears and sobs, Biljana blurted out the news that Marija’s family had all been killed. Just like that, shot to death, all murdered under a blue July sky. Everybody? Her parents, Farah, and Kemal, too? I kept asking. Everybody, all of them, she kept answering. “How do you know, Biljana, who told you, maybe it’s a mistake. Sometimes faulty information gets transmitted in times of war.” “I know because I talked to Ferida and Marija’s old friend, the sculptor Mirza. But no one would reveal Marija’s whereabouts. In the summer of ’95 when the big massacres happened I couldn’t get ahold of anybody. But then a year later when I actually ran into Mirza at the university, I asked him about Marija. At first he wouldn’t say anything. He just stood in the hallway and stared at me. Then I pressured him and he told me. Marija’s family made the huge mistake of going to Semizovac after the UN declared the region of Srebrenica and its vicinities a ‘safe zone.’”

I remembered the Fourth of July conversation I’d had with Marija, the one when she told me they were all moving into the countryside near Srebrenica. “We’ll just be there on the farm with my grandparents,” she had told me with an almost hopeful tone. “Until things get better and more tolerable in Sarajevo.”

“Is Marija dead?” I asked with my heart pumping out of my chest. “No,” was all that Biljana said. She stopped crying and just stared at me. “No?” I asked. “Where is she then, how is she?” Then Biljana stayed quiet, she simply could not talk. Her face was momentarily racked with grief, her beautiful features all out of whack. I got it perfectly. I had read the reports about what happened to Bosnian women, always hoping Marija was not one of them. Marija herself had told me about how the snipers and bombings were easier to understand than the rape camps. I hadn’t wanted to imagine anything, when she’d mentioned that on the phone, but now my imagination was finding the darkest corners, and the most hideous images bombarded me. I wanted to know at least if the Marija that I knew still existed, that she was still sane, or at least recovering. “Where is she?” was all I could ask. “In Sarajevo,” said Biljana in a whisper. “At least that’s what Ferida told me. But Marija doesn’t want to be seen or found by anyone. Even Ferida hadn’t actually seen her, only heard from her by phone and once in a letter. She was secretive but at least she gave me that bit of news about Marija. She told me there is a chance Marija might be brought over to the States. There were lots of American psychologists, human rights activists, artists, lawyers, and archaeologists who went to Bosnia in the years after the war, particularly after that big-time American lawyer won the huge lawsuit against Karadzic for the Bosnian women.” For a moment I had no idea why archaeologists would be on that list of professions. But then I understood in horror that the archaeologists must be unearthing the corpses hidden in the mass graves. The hills and mountains in the Srebrenica region were packed with mass graves made in a hurry by the Serbian armies. Instead of searching for Etruscan amphorae those brave archeologists had gone to Bosnia to use their digging skills in unearthing the corpses of Muslim Bosnians. Biljana told me an American therapist worked with Marija. What did she mean “worked with”? I wondered. Then she said the therapist was trying to bring Marija to America. Someone finally was working to bring Marija to the States and it wasn’t me. I now understood why Biljana hadn’t been able to render all this information before.

Christmas was in two days and it seemed a cruel joke at that juncture. The world was never going to be the same for me or for Biljana. The Marija I knew was forever gone. I understood that although she was not dead, her kind of disappearance might have been worse than death. Natalia bounced into the room, terrified by the darkness, by Biljana and me sobbing, by the grief that hung around us like a palpable laden body, and she immediately left again, howling and calling for her father.

I envisioned Marija in her full Indian goddess majesty, her mesmerizing way of talking, her shiny dangling jewelry, her incomparable dark hair and how fast she ran, like a firebird. I played our phone conversations during the war in my mind, trying to recapture her voice moving between exuberance and despair, her unlikely stories. Biljana and I hugged and sobbed in the utter hopelessness. Biljana said she could only now mourn fully and properly for Marija, that she’d had to wait to be with me. She told me she had kept in touch with Marija during the entire time of the war and sometimes she sent her provisions and foods through people who were going to Sarajevo—journalists, activists, or just random people who were reckless and crazy enough to venture into that hell. I said I wanted to go back to Sarajevo and take Marija back to the States with me. Biljana said it was impossible because Marija hadn’t given away her location to anyone. “Nobody knows where she is.” She repeated that again and again. Not even Ferida knew. Marija wanted contact with no one. She wanted to remain invisible.

As I looked out from the window in my study, an overpowering feeling of inescapable doom hovered around us. The sky suddenly seemed to be covered in flames and crossed by explosions. How does she go on? I kept wondering. My life was sliced in two like a butchered piece of meat: the part before Marija’s doom and the part afterward. How does one go on raising a child, working, eating breakfast? I kept asking myself, too. Natalia ventured into our room again and this time she cuddled between Biljana and me on the bed. She took turns wiping our tears and asked: “What is wrong, Mami, did a wrong thing happen?” I pulled myself together and tried to explain to Natalia the reason for our grief and tears: “Yes, sweetie, Mami and Aunt Biljana’s good friend Marija was very badly hurt by some bad people back in our old country.” I was amazed that I could even articulate that much and reduce the whole miserable story to a simple sentence that sounded like a bad fairy tale: The princess was eaten up by the bad dragon. “Will she get better, Aunt Biljana?” Natalia asked. “Yes, my love,” answered Biljana like a true fairy godmother: “There are some good people who are taking care of Marija and who are trying to make her better.”

“Is your country bad, Mama?” Natalia asked. Her question took me by surprise. I hated my country at that point but somehow I didn’t want to give Natalia that prejudice against her own roots from the very start in her life. Maybe I could at some point recover the good things about my country of birth and then I wouldn’t want her to be already turned against it. I tried to reconcile, negotiate, wasn’t I a political scientist after all? “There were some very bad people in our old country that hurt a lot of people from Marija’s city and family, but everybody is not bad in our old country. Mami and Aunt Biljana and Grandma Anica and Grandpa Petar and their friends are not bad.” “Mami, I don’t want to go to your old country,” said Natalia after thinking for a while. Not all my infantile-sounding explanations and negotiations could take away the bad feeling that Natalia got from catching that glimpse of our pain and rage at that old country of ours. The language of fairy tales didn’t work to articulate the adult pain that Biljana and I had revealed to her. Maybe that’s where our society went wrong, providing palatable and sometimes even pleasurable explanations to make violence seem like nothing more than a scary story, some red paint smeared on the body of an actor who pretended to be dead or wounded.

As the three of us lay on my bed in a state of stupor there was a gentle knock on the door and Mark walked in. I was taken by surprise. It had been some time since he’d entered, not since our relations started to be so strained. He asked in a gentle voice if anything was wrong and if there was anything he could do, and for a moment I remembered the beginning of our relationship, and how thoughtful and kind he was. Without hesitation I blurted out the horrible news: “Marija’s family have all been killed. Dead. And she is… she is… not well.” Mark stood stunned in the doorway. “I’m so sorry, so, so sorry. How terrible,” he said, his face pained. And for that moment I felt no anger toward him. I even felt affection and a sense of discovery as if it was now only, on the cusp of unbearable news and when our marriage was estranged, that he revealed a real and raw section of his core that I had once so desperately searched for. Marija’s family would have been killed, after all, even if Marija had been here with me. And then how could she have possibly been able to bear the reality of her being gone halfway across the world while her family had been killed? Sometimes evil and tragedy trapped us on all sides and there was no right way to turn. Mark sat down on the bed next to us and stroked Natalia’s hair.

It had grown completely dark in the room and all I could hear was the soft snow tapping against the windowpanes and our heavy breathing. Mark had left the room as gently as he had entered it and the three of us were still lying on the bed. It felt as though Marija’s spirit had entered the room like a brooding wind. Natalia had fallen asleep between us on the bed, holding each of our hands as if she were going for a walk into a secret land. Then a name struck my memory and made its way almost involuntarily out of my mouth in a whisper: Sally Bryant. The therapist, psychologist Sally Bryant with whom Marija and I spent a night to remember in one of Belgrade’s outdoor cafés right before the start of the war. “Biljana, do you know by any chance the name of the therapist who is working with Marija?” Biljana answered sleepily: “A classic American name, someone from California, Susie or something like that.” My heart missed a beat and then another: “It wasn’t by any chance someone by the name of Sally Bryant, was it?”

Of course it was Sally Bryant who had gone to Bosnia with other psychologists and archaeologists trying to unearth bones and patch up broken spirits. In all the confused pain that had entered my mind with the news about Marija, this new discovery was a single drop of light. At least if she was being pulled out of her hell by Sally Bryant, maybe there was a chance that Marija could somehow prevail over her misery. For Natalia’s sake, I held on to that possibility. I heard Marija’s voice in my head: “Come on, Lara, run faster, you can do it.” She was running ahead of me through the snow on the hilly street that led to Farah and Kemal’s house, wearing a black coat with white fur trim around the collar, and her face flushed from the cold. Biljana touched my face and I touched hers and our palms were soaked in each other’s tears. Biljana was in that picture, too. She was standing next to Marija in a maroon coat with beige trim and her red curls were falling impertinently down her shoulders. We fell asleep thinking of snow.

The massacres of Srebrenica and the stories of the camps became a taboo subject in our house. Mark had shown a kinder side that winter evening when he found us sobbing in my room and heard about Marija’s calamitous predicament. But my persistent recriminating looks and words made him distant again, and I re-became my angry, unforgiving self. It seemed that the only way to compensate for that burdensome silence was for me to revisit accounts of the genocide in Srebrenica, the excruciating day of July 16 when hundreds of men of all ages were executed on the Branjevo farm, when the officer responsible for the killings had been given the witness protection status. Between the thirteenth and the nineteenth seven thousand Muslim Bosnian men had been executed, all done during six sunny days in July.

Biljana couldn’t understand why I had married Mark and why I had left everyone to be in what she thought was a “sad” marriage. I explained that I had once liked his American ways, his ease, his grace and smoothness, so different from our Serbian macho guys. “You would have fallen, too, if some kind of Tony reminding you of the hero in your beloved West Side Story had walked your way one evening in a Belgrade bar, talking about humanitarian ideals, wouldn’t you?” I told her with self-assurance and indignation. Biljana denied it all with vehemence as if she were the only person in the world who was right about important things like love and marriage. I brooded over the conversation and admitted to myself that yes, indeed, it was in part what I perceived as Mark’s Americanness, the glow of freedom and ease, that broke down my defenses and made me act in an impulsive way. It was as if I were following some movie heroine’s script. Lara, the heroine, believed she had been attracted to Mark’s ideas, intellectual savvy, love of poetry, and passion for humanitarian causes. She could still feel the sex appeal on the American’s lips in that smoke-filled Belgrade tavern. I couldn’t blame that Lara. And perverse as it might seem, I felt that Lara would do it again: marry the American.

And as it happened, my own moralizing sister ended up finding her own American hero not long after our conversation about my “sad” marriage. At one of the schools of dance in DC, she actually did meet her Tony, who was really named Ricky. They fell in love instantaneously and within a month they were making preparations to marry and move to Chicago where they had an opportunity to open their own school of dance together. Right then, Biljana stopped preaching to me about Mark and our marriage and became hugely sympathetic to everybody’s love sorrows. She was convinced and determined that her marriage would be successful and happy. “I felt it in my flesh, Lara, the first second we set eyes on each other,” she told me. “I felt it in every inch of my flesh that we were meant for each other.” I rolled my eyes and let her talk about the intuitions of her flesh, hoping that maybe at least one of us would end up happily married.

As Biljana was dancing her way into the love story of her life, our native city of Belgrade was being bombarded by UN raids and American bombs to stop Serbia’s war with Kosovo. Our country never tired of wars. In the middle of wedding and moving preparations, one afternoon Biljana appeared with a face as devastated as when she had told me about Marija. “Who died?” I asked instantly. Nobody had died yet, she said, but Papa was in the hospital for a hernia surgery, and they were bombarding our city. Our mother was a wreck. “Our city sort of deserves to be bombarded, doesn’t it?” I said unflinchingly, to which Biljana answered equally unflinchingly that maybe it did, but it was still our city and our parents lived there, and one of us needed to go back. With Biljana involved in her wedding preparations, it was clear that it was me who would be going to Belgrade to be the savior of our family. Maybe it was an opportunity to put some order in my ethnic and linguistic identity, to try to figure out where I actually belonged. And maybe I’d be able to get news about Marija on my own, even try to find her. Against Mark’s and all of our friends’ advice, I bought a ticket to go back and see Belgrade under bombs. I had run away from war in the first place, and now I was headed straight for the bombs and the explosions, the US air raids and the NATO tanks. At that point in my life I seemed to need war like some people needed peace.

My father died a few hours before I arrived in Belgrade. His surgery, I found out, had been interrupted by bombs. The empty hospital bed where he had died was surrounded by mortar and broken glass. Soldiers removed the debris in the hospital and told me to leave the premises; I was forbidden to be there, they told me.

At the funeral, remorse and nostalgia swept through me like arid winds. The priest droned on about my father going to greener places in a better universe where there would be no sorrow, and waved the incense burner across the grave. I thought about the three years when I was small when we lived in Greece, where my father had been sent on a diplomatic mission to work for the Yugoslav embassy in Athens. My father often repeated that even when we were in Greece, we should live as if we were still living in Belgrade, never getting too greedy or presumptuous. Maybe that was why my memories of Greece were like torn postcards—a corner of the Parthenon, a slice of the Mediterranean against chalky columns, the head of Zeus on top of a megalomaniacal temple—all with Belgrade towering above. I had taken my father’s advice to heart, I never forgot Belgrade. I hadn’t spent enough time with my father during my last years in Belgrade; I couldn’t even remember a warm good-bye when I left Serbia as Mark’s bride. I hadn’t written or called him enough after I’d gone.

With the slow descent of my father’s coffin into the freshly dug grave, I was too frozen to throw the slim bouquet into the ominous hole in the ground. Friends and colleagues from the embassy, neighbors, aunts and uncles whom I barely remembered, all dressed in black attire, tossed their flowers while I watched. Biljana’s absence from the scene felt profoundly wrong. My father’s death felt profoundly wrong, and utterly irreparable. A corner of sharp Athenian blue sky appeared, a vision from thirty years before, above the fresh grave.

It was from my father that I had gotten my obsession with ideas of goodness and political workings of states and governments. I wished I could have asked him what he really thought of my messy painful life. There was a heavy thud as the coffin hit the bottom of the grave. That, and the sound of my mother’s inconsolable sobs. When we got home, my mother broke one by one each of the glass miniatures she had gathered from the glass factory where she worked as a chemist—the black-and-white penguins, the small red shoes, the dolls, the birds—until a shiny pile of colored glass crumbs lay at her feet. She played the Doctor Zhivago theme song on the turntable and cried with big howling sounds until night fell.

On the exploded street corners and dirty boulevards, I gathered shreds of my youth and of my college years. I walked by Marija’s old studio apartment where we had last seen each other and held each other at the start of the war. There was no possibility of news about Marija in the desolate grayness of the Balkan madness. I walked around her apartment building several times, hoping I would meet someone who knew her. I should have gone back that morning when I’d left her, I should have at least waved back at her. “Doesn’t that Mark of yours have a brother or cousin I could marry, too?” she had asked in a playful, self-mocking whisper before we’d parted. “And don’t completely forget me, all right? Go to that Mark of yours, don’t make this any harder, all right?” She could always joke off all her pain and resentments.

Living with my mother for a few days in our old Belgrade apartment with its decades of bad smells and cracks in the walls, I started calling anyone who knew Marija in search of a lead. I called Ferida, the sculptor Mirza, a cousin of Marija’s Sonja, Sabina our old friend from middle school, and people from the list Biljana had given me whom I’d never even met. No one would share anything, let alone tell me about Marija or anything that had to do with the war. Only Ferida lingered with me on the phone in a friendly way, sharing news of her daughter, Mira, and her activities with international organizations of poets working for peace. But when I’d mention Marija, there was a hole of silence as deep as my father’s grave. I wanted to go to Sarajevo and see for myself but there was no longer any train there, and the buses were not safe. I went back to the black sadness of my mother, who tearlessly spent her days rummaging through my father’s possessions and clothes, talking to herself as she handled each item. The people I loved the most were disappearing one after another.

When I parted with my mother at the airport, it was as if she were looking through me. We waited together for my turn to go through the security check. I wanted to cry in her arms, but her arms barely embraced me. With my father gone, she had lost her will to embrace anyone. My connection to my birth country was almost entirely gone. I hurried to my plane that would take me back to Washington, DC, without any tears.