Washington, DC. The Truth and Everything but the Truth

SUMMER 2003

I found out from Mark that Hassan was now overseeing the newspapers all over northern Virginia. “What news of interest could there be in northern Virginia?” I asked Mark. I held on to my Serbian sarcasm, I was on a roll as he had once said at the beginning of my life in America at the chairman’s party: “Rich senator living in Alexandria slips on ice, litigation lawyer from Herndon runs into a pole at a stoplight, news like that, Mark? This is the news that Hassan was brought over from war-ridden Bosnia to report on?” Mark was walking next to me on the National Mall with the debonair air that had so charmed me at the beginning of the Bosnian war. It had been his idea to walk and talk about the next steps of our litigation instead of arguing at home where Natalia could hear us. He kept his calm; only his jaws moved imperceptibly as a sign he was reining in his anger. I had no desire to talk about the litigation, it seemed like the most boring subject in the world to me. Only Natalia’s custody worried me. I listened to him talk in legalistic terms about our child and our future in a language that was as foreign to me as Karim’s Arabic, which nevertheless sounded sultry and sexy during our illicit encounters. “Mark, please tell me if you have heard anything about Marija from Hassan,” I begged him. An African American vendor behind one of the food carts on the side of the Mall winked at us as if we were young lovers and offered us discounted pretzels. I stared back at him as he reminded me of Karim. “Hassan must know something for sure; he is from the same city, after all, and the same Bosnian community. He knows everyone,” I went on feeling more and more distracted by the foods, sights, smells bombarding my psyche. An Indian vendor offered us tandoori chicken, then a Mexican one lemonade and churros. The smells and sight of foods fogged up my thinking and made everything seem trivial and frivolous. In my Serbian family we didn’t mix eating junk food with tragic stories. In America, everything was covered up in greasy foods, ethnic foods, fast foods, junk foods, advertisements for panty hose and detergent and then life was made to look easy, clean and sweet, a piece of cake, the saying went. I was a foreigner amid foreigners.

“Go and speak to Hassan yourself,” he said, walking ahead of me on the endless grass strip. Why hadn’t I thought of that myself?

When I went to Hassan’s office the following afternoon, for some reason I put on a nice dress as if going on a date. In the old Yugoslavia, Serbia, Bosnia, people dressed up for even a casual meeting. Even in times of war they dressed up. As if to defy the ugliness of the siege and bombardments, they crossed the streets under the rain of sniper bullets in their Sunday best, women wearing lipstick and nail polish they had gotten on the black market or through daily acts of barter. My heart was beating like mad when I knocked on Hassan’s door, expecting a harsh self-confident man who had stepped over Marija’s chances of coming to America without a second’s hesitation. Instead, Hassan reminded me of Kemal, Marija’s grandfather: He was on the short side, with a white beard, a red round face, and a heavy limp. He hugged me like he had known me for a lifetime and asked me to sit down, and I felt sorry that I had never met him until now. He spoke softly and looked straight into my eyes. He lit a pipe that smelled just like Kemal’s pipes, and wiped his forehead with a chiffon handkerchief. All those old country habits and objects, men with white handkerchiefs with embroidered initials in the pockets of their coats. I missed that.

I didn’t ask him about Sarajevo, Belgrade, or Alexandria. All I wanted to know about was Marija. Did he know anything about her, was she alive, where was she? I grew more agitated as he took his time to answer. First I learned that Hassan initially didn’t want to come to the States, and even suggested that Marija go in his stead; he had other occasions to leave, he could have been aided by UN organizations that knew of his work, and he had a family, wife and children, whereas Marija had no husband or children and it would have been easier for her to emigrate to America with Mark’s help. In 1993, in 1994, and in early 1995 she could have come, before the sunny July of genocidal murders and rapes. “What wasted opportunities!” I said and realized that Hassan was becoming uncomfortable. I spoke not in Serbian but in angry simplistic English. “Where the hell is she, Hassan? Where is she?” He couldn’t tell me where Marija was, he didn’t know, it was something of a mystery, he said.

“How bad was it, Hassan, did Marija suffer a lot? Can she ever recover? Will I ever see her again? How bad was it really?” “Unimaginable,” he said. “And yet for those who went through it and survived, nothing is unimaginable any longer.” I saw that his eyes were heavy with tears. Hassan’s laugh was warm and enveloping and again it reminded me of Kemal and everything that had once been warm and joyous in my life: Marija’s brilliance and love, Sarajevo in times of peace, the smell of cinnamon and the taste of Farah’s apricot jams. We spoke Serbian again and the many consonants of my native language soothed my burning mouth, my parched throat, my devastated soul. I needed a break from English, from America, from idiomatic expressions and mannerisms.

Hassan had gone back to Bosnia several times during the war and saw Marija. Apparently he was in awe of the tremendous job she was doing running the newspaper in the darkest times, without a single day’s break. “She did a better job than I ever did,” Hassan said. “She had humor and poetic flair and she was afraid of nothing. She was a stunning woman.” I noted he said “she was” as if she were dead. My dearest Marija, of course she awed him, of course she did a better job than anyone else. She wrote like she spoke and she spoke like she lived: with unforgiving energy and intelligence, with dizzying flair and reckless humor. As I had always thought, she could have been the president of the country, if only our people hadn’t been so stupid to elect a vicious president, the new Hitler and Stalin together, only more pathetic. Who in the world actually cared about little Bosnia and tiny Albania with no oil fields for any Western countries to dig in? The politics became even more confused in my mind as I was sitting in Hassan’s office reeling from what I had found out about Marija.

Just as I was about to leave and Hassan got up from his chair to walk toward me and give me a good-bye hug, I couldn’t contain myself and asked him looking at his limping leg: “What happened?” He was quick to answer as if waiting for the question: His leg had been torn by a blast while driving his car from the newspaper office in one of the 140-kilometer-an-hour races to elude the Serbian snipers. He got to the hospital too late, and had to wait for hours with pieces of flesh hanging from the bones of his calves and his femur crushed until a doctor was available. He was lucky his leg wasn’t completely amputated, just the steel rod, half an amputation, he said and laughed. A man in the bed next to him had shared his vodka bottle with him, and that had helped. Now a metal rod was replacing his femur bone. “It’s all right,” he concluded, laughing as if he had just told a funny story. “I survived, that’s what matters.”

I left Hassan’s office staggering and drove aimlessly around northern Virginia until I remembered I had a home to go to. I had a family that waited for me, disjointed as it might have been. The thought of Natalia, so fragile, so torn between Mark and me, made me weep in the car as I drove through atrociously ugly new developments and malls and waited at the red light in a state of utter alienation. It all looked like the new inferno, a place with no shape and no soul. The light changed to green and I rushed home to hold my dear Natalia.

After the meeting with Hassan I strangely felt less angry at Mark. Maybe because now I knew more of the truth about Marija, and hard as that truth was, it was better than the fogginess of ignorance. Maybe also because Hassan reminded me so much of Kemal, warm, thoughtful, and straightforward. I kept trying to find my own big truth pulsing underneath the messiness of my life. Some nights, falling asleep with Natalia next to me, I yearned for the quiet times before Karim. “Haven’t we been a happy family?” I was asking myself in the private litigation with my soul. “Yes, we sort of have, for periods of time at least,” said my soul. “Have you really given Mark a chance, all the chances he deserved?” My soul answered: “No, not really, I haven’t given Mark and our marriage all the chances they deserved.” Some mornings, when I woke up and took full consciousness of the new day of misery that lay ahead of me, I was determined to meet Mark in our beautifully tiled kitchen as he was drinking his coffee, take his hand, and tell him: Let’s forget that this ever happened, let’s start a new day and stop the madness that is tearing us and Natalia apart! But each morning brought only a new legal notice from Mark, a severe statement about our next court date, or about Natalia’s schedule over the weekend, which now was divided equally between the two of us.

Natalia always seemed to find the split second when Mark and I crossed paths in the kitchen to make her morning appearance and acted as if we were the same family as before. “Can we all go to a movie tonight?” she would ask. “Pirates of the Caribbean is playing.” Mark and I pretended we hadn’t heard her and went on doing whatever we were in the process of doing. But then she got angry. “Hey, guys, are you deaf or something? I asked a question.” Then Mark would lecture her about the “inappropriate” tone of her voice or I would tell her she needed to finish her homework. Sometimes she ignored our answers and would return to the kitchen ten minutes later dressed in an old Halloween costume as a ladybug, or as a biker rock star, which was her most recent costume and involved a pink wig. When I told her she needed to get dressed for school, she said that she was dressed for school. One day when I did take her to school dressed as a biker rock star, her homeroom teacher looked at me angrily and with disgust when she greeted us at the school entrance. I watched Natalia as she walked into the school with her huge backpack, her back slightly bent, her pink biker’s wig perched on her head. I regretted everything.

That day I arrived at my office with my eyes red from crying. On the way up the stairs to my office, my cell phone rang and I answered without looking at the number calling. It was Karim with his sweetest and most loving voice telling me he missed me like crazy, his divorce was coming along, he had reached an agreement with his wife, and he was coming to see me this summer because he couldn’t stand being away from me any longer. Stupefied and confused by the unexpected news I asked where he planned to come see me. He said Washington of course, wasn’t I happy? Then he said “Lara, mon amour,” and my knees became weak. A student of mine was waiting at the top of the stairs to talk to me about his paper on Plato’s Republic. How did people carry on with their lives under bombs? I wondered again, reaching the top of the stairs, while at the same time smiling at the student and speaking to him in French by mistake. Karim asked me if I was okay, wasn’t I glad? The student was staring at me in puzzlement as to why I addressed him in French. I reached the door to my office and tried to unlock it while dropping my purse on the floor with everything falling out of it, including a couple of menstrual tampons. The entire material world was against me. I told Karim in my sweetest voice that I was ecstatic about his visit, could I call him a bit later, after my class. He said “Je t’aime,” and I said “Moi aussi” while smiling at the student with the Plato paper. I dropped everything I had in my hands on my desk and sat down facing my father’s eyes in the photograph on my desk, smiling his ravishing smile in the picture I had taken of him in the spring of 1989, the year that Communism fell. When the student left my office I felt a big hole in my heart. There was no perfect city, no perfect human relation, the hell with Plato’s perfect forms and cities. What really worked?

For the several nights preceding Karim’s arrival, I couldn’t sleep. I took sleeping pills. And combined with the anti-anxiety pills, I was brought into a state of bipolarity that some people had naturally and were given medication to combat. I woke up groggy and barely able to articulate a coherent sentence, and then the anxiety would kick in. Once I took the anti-anxiety pills I felt ready to walk on all the tin roofs of my beloved Washington and chant the American anthem at the top of my Serbian lungs. In mid-July the air in Washington was a hot gooey soup in which we were all drowning and Karim’s arrival was in two days at Dulles airport. How was it going to be with Karim here, in my “hometown”? How were we going to re-create Paris in Washington? But most important, what kind of lies was I going to find to excuse my absences from home, and how was I going to hide Karim so we didn’t run into anyone I knew? Make love not war, as a favorite seventies movie of my parents advised the entire world? I was inescapably caught between the two. I decided I would tell Mark I needed a few days off to collect myself and that I would be driving to Virginia to consult some of the university libraries for my new research project on war and civic consciousness. I was going to get together with some colleagues in political sciences at a summer NEH seminar, I lied with a wide smile. He was happy to have the time alone with Natalia, he said, they would take a trip to the beach.

We weren’t having another court hearing until the end of August, even judges were resting from litigations. Having a husband and a lover wasn’t the worst thing in the world, I kept telling myself in those liquefying moments of moral confusion. The heat was getting worse and the massive neoclassical government buildings seemed to sway in a veil of liquid air during the day. Karim asked me to write a letter of invitation for the US embassy. I wrote a letter saying we would be working on a common research project on practical applications of Plato’s theories in modern democracies, wondering in whose hands that letter was going to fall and under what section of the Patriot Act it was going to be judged. I even found a small Plato colloquium at a university in Virginia and called the political science department for more information. The delinquency of my personal life pushed me toward professional virtue and an illusion of moral virtue. I wanted things to actually match, the letter of invitation with the reality it referred to, what I told Mark about my whereabouts with the actual places I would cross or find myself in. The romance part of my relation with Karim had to take place in a virtual space between DC and Virginia, somewhere secret and inaccessible, or somewhere entirely obvious and under everybody’s eyes.

It made sense to love Karim. Paris, Montmartre, Aix-en-Provence, sultry hotel rooms, and student antiwar demonstrations flashed through me in a moving collage of images and emotions when I saw his freshly shaven face at the airport. Our joyride went along the bluish misty chains of the Virginian Appalachians, driving into orangey flaming sunsets or immersed to total oblivion in our delinquent caresses in tiny motels by the side of rural roads. A crisp sense of existential symmetry seemed to have taken over my destiny. In the glassy sphere of my own lies, I felt protected. Our love was transnational, the open mountain ranges of my dreams. “C’est beau, l’Amérique…” It’s beautiful, America… Karim said at some point during one of our shameless Virginia nights. I was filled with patriotic pride for my adoptive country; as it turned out our love wasn’t just Paris-bound.

The litigation started again at the end of August, and Mark produced for the court an array of pictures of me and Karim during our five-day joyride from the moment of our encounter to the second of our separation and the last good-byes: Karim and Lara kissing at Dulles airport, Karim and Lara kissing in the rented Kia in a parking lot or on the side of the road, Karim and Lara entering a small motel in the Appalachians, Karim and Lara crying and kissing at Dulles airport on the day of his departure. Karim wiping a tear off my face seconds before he disappeared through the security gate. My lawyer showed them to me when we entered the courtroom for the hearing. He said I should deny everything, photos could be doctored up and manufactured, everyone knew that. He didn’t want to know whether they were truthful or not. The pictures were part of exhibit A, evidence to show that I was unfit as a mother, an immoral influence on our daughter. Exhibit B displayed photographs of Mark and Natalia by the Atlantic beaches in Virginia and North Carolina: Natalia splashing with Mark in the waves, Mark and Natalia playing mini golf in a park filled with wooden dinosaurs, Natalia collecting seashells on the beach.