Los Angeles. We’ll Always Have Hollywood!

APRIL 2004

Marija was not answering the phone. I stood confused in front of the Los Angeles airport not knowing what my next move should be. Tanned, slender, and overconfident Californians passed me. By some stroke of luck the taxi driver I flagged down was a kind man from Uzbekistan who decided to give me an hour-and-a-half tour of a dizzying conglomerate of highways punctuated by short tours of LA neighborhoods. He then dropped me in front of a lovely white hotel with blazing azaleas on the porch on a sunny street, all for the price of an airplane ticket back to Washington. It didn’t matter where he took me, since I had no idea where any part of my life was going.

The hotel room was white and plain. Specks of darkness and redness like splintered body parts from a recent bombardment were encroaching themselves onto the wall of my room like miniature paintings, the visual art abridged version of my life. I had done bad things and was all alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles. Whiteness and purity were a fraud. Only specks of blood and darkness were real. And then suddenly out of those crowds of black specks that were all the bad things in my life, Marija walked toward me like a goddess of fire, more beautiful than I had ever seen or remembered her. She wore dangling sparkling jewelry all over her body, even on her ankles and in her nose, and her eyes were blazing, but not with hatred, with love. With golden shining love like a benevolent sun. She asked me to go with her. And I did.

At that same moment, my cell phone rang, breaking my reverie, and without even looking at the number on the screen I said: “Marija? I’m in LA.” She had the same throaty, warm, somehow ironic voice I remembered. She didn’t sound a bit surprised I was there. Her voice matched the image of power and beauty I had just had of her in my vision. There was no whiteness in her voice, but neither was it all speckled with blood and darkness. It was a voice like a flooding river that swept you away and overpowered you. Marija was going to come pick me up at my hotel any minute. When I told her where I was, she said, “Fancy, fancy!” I waited for her sitting on the steps in front of the hotel, framed by enormous pots of azaleas, like a girl in some Mexican painting I once saw. The street was uncannily quiet as if everybody had died. Yet the sun shone with such warmth and conviction onto everything and enveloped me so lovingly that even if everybody on that street was dead, the warm light made it all right. I dozed off for what seemed to be a fraction of a second and when I opened my eyes a red car appeared from around the corner like a blazing eagle. It sparkled in the sun and for a second it looked like it was all ablaze. Then Marija got out wearing a simple black-and-white dress and a yellow headband. She had none of the colors I had expected, she was a black-and-white movie with a speck of yellow that seemed both amiss and necessary, both attractive and irritating. Marija looked somehow unchanged and yet a completely different person, as if time had not touched her but as if she had gone through a transformation that changed her completely. My greatest shock was that she looked neither devastated, nor broken, nor a pulsing blob of raging anger, as I probably would have been. She laughed when she saw me and her laughter scratched the surface of my brain sharply and deeply all the way to one of the last memories I had of her laughing and talking in the hallway of Belgrade University, surrounded by a group of men and women who all seemed to be mesmerized by every single word flowing out of her mouth. How did one laugh after one had been through what Marija had been through? But laugh she did. War, genocide, mass rapes, NATO bombings, adultery, bloody divorce, and custody battles in between two of Marija’s laughs stretched across a full decade and then some.

Marija had a glass eye and a reconstructed nose but you could barely tell. It was all done to perfection by a plastic surgeon in LA who operated on movie stars, on people like Cher and Michael Jackson, she told me. During the attack, the rape, the murder of her family, she “obtained an injury” that crushed her optic nerve and her nose. She used the word obtained as if it were something one would ask for. She passed out from the pain and didn’t remember the rest, a blessing she said. “Yeah, I was among the lucky ones,” she repeated. Marija was frighteningly beautiful while she spoke. There was something detached and unnaturally poised about the way in which she rushed through the telling of those events as if recounting someone else’s life. At some point her glass eye produced a tiny sparkle in the sun in the café on Sunset Boulevard where she took me. And at that exact moment something cracked and I started sobbing with uncontrolled rage. My body shook from its core and my chest was heaving in excruciating pain. Marija held my hands without moving and without flinching and without blinking until my sobbing crisis passed; she told the blond tanned waitress who asked if we were all right and whether we needed anything to stay away from our table and not to bother us again until we called her. The people at the surrounding tables cast surreptitious glances and pretended not to hear or see anything. They dug into their salads and sipped their diet drinks. It was only then that I realized Marija and I were speaking English and not Serbian. It felt perfectly normal to speak in English to each other about Serbian atrocities. You saw everything in LA and nobody cared. Marija paid the bill and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here. I want to show you something.”

I followed Marija into her red convertible. I would have followed her to the moon. She seemed superhuman to me, only her glass eye—the idea of it—hurt me more than the idea of the rape, while to her it was a “blessing” because it reminded her that she didn’t remember what had happened. Her own psyche protected her from the memory. She didn’t want to talk about the war and that day, only about the future. It wasn’t clear to me what future she was talking about. Her son, probably. She asked me about my “adventure” in Paris with a throaty laugh. I poured everything out to her as if she were my personal therapist. She was whizzing across serpentine LA highways at the wheel of her red Corvette with her shock of black hair rising in the wind like a magic bird. She said: “That’s awful, Lara, what an awful thing to happen to you, I would have strangled the man.” Then she said: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Nothing made sense. How could she be so sorry for me and my little pathetic Paris melodrama, when she survived the unsurvivable? It turned out that I did need Marija as she had suggested when she called me in Washington and a good thing it was she gave me her phone number. It wasn’t her who needed saving right now, but mostly me.

She must have guessed my thoughts: “Everybody’s suffering is their own, Lara. We all have our own boulder to bear up that fucking hill. Nobody’s pains are traded for someone else’s pains.”

Because Marija spoke a lot in riddles and aphorisms, I had to construct the puzzle of her full meanings in my mind as we talked while also observing every one of her expressions and gestures. It was exhausting and thrilling, like a carnival of the mind. I felt I was being taken on a spatial journey in Marija’s red Corvette and all the questions that were scorching my mind about her past and the last ten years were pulverized into fine dust. At some point she turned toward me smiling lovingly and asked: “How are you doing, girl?” Then she said: “Just because one went through Apocalypse and back doesn’t mean one has to wear dowdy clothes and look like shit and be miserable all day long, right?” Soon after that she pulled into a parking lot in Burbank and showed me a sign that said WARNER BROS. STUDIOS. “Come, let’s see behind the illusion,” she said, smiling again. We got on a small tram and got off at a set that looked French. “We’ll always have Paris?” She laughed heartily. “Paris be damned!” I said. But then it clicked and I burst out laughing, too. It was the set where the Paris flashback scenes were shot in Casablanca, Ingrid and Humphrey driving in a convertible, drinking Champagne at a piano bar, dancing, swirling, laughing, and kissing, all in a make-believe cardboard reconstruction of Paris. It had all started with Marija: my fixation with Casablanca. We were in sixth grade and Casablanca was playing one night at the Kinoteka cinema where they showed old movies in the center of Belgrade and where my parents had first taken me to see the notorious Doctor Zhivago under whose fated stars I had been born and raised. I remembered the cans of condensed milk in her pantry that we ate as dessert before going to the cinema. We sat in our chairs at the end of the movie while everybody was leaving the theater, and cried like we had just watched the funeral of our parents or something tragic like that. We stayed up all night talking about the movie and arguing whether Ilsa should have gone with Rick or should have done what she did. We decided we did not like Ilsa as a character either way but we still wanted to be like her—sort of like her—only I would have gone with Rick, and Marija would have left both of them and gotten on the plane alone. I didn’t get that about Marija at the time. Why was she going to dump them both? “To increase my chances at happiness and adventure,” she had said then, and I remembered admiring her so much for the courage of her freedom. I laughed, imagining the perplexed faces of both men as their beautiful Ilsa/Marija got on that ugly warplane with neither of them. Then we opened and gulped down another can of condensed milk from Marija’s pantry and fell asleep holding hands and drowning in sugar overdose. From then on all throughout high school and sometimes even when we ran into each other in the hallways of our university, once in a while Marija would stop and look at me and recite me a line from Casablanca. It was our inside joke. “But what about us?” she would say, looking at me teary-eyed, and I wouldn’t answer with the most famous line but the one after that and would say: “We got it back last night.” The “We’ll always have Paris” line was embedded in silence and we swallowed it in a greedy gulp like the best spoonful of condensed milk in the world, sweet, gooey, and creamy.

She now stood in front of me in her black-and-white floral design dress with the bright yellow silky headband holding back her thick glossy black hair and uncovering her high smooth forehead. She was so beautiful that it didn’t seem right. I felt shreds and shreds of my heart and memory become loose and fall off me like I was an animal shedding its skin. We were two little specks of sugary innocence, still left from the two cans of condensed milk, flying through the cold galaxies. What came soon after that was indescribable and filled with the stench of raw human flesh and deafening screams. Marija stood in front of me having walked through all that, with a glass eye and a yellow headband and an irresistible laugh. She said: “You either survive something like that or you don’t, you know. And then if you don’t die you might as well survive with flair.” Then unexpectedly she embraced me with such fervor that I lost my breath. When I recovered it, we were both laughing, but really it felt like we were crying. Also like some new kind of laughter for people who had traveled to Apocalypse and back.

Marija sat on a bench in the fake street in the make-believe Paris and produced a perfect Gala apple from her purse and bit into it voraciously with a sparkling set of teeth. She offered me some and I bit into her apple, trying to match her hunger. It felt refreshing and soothing. I started to have the uncanny feeling that my person was finally starting to take a definite shape and contour. I was startled and surprised every second on that day, which seemed to last forever, and was irrevocably falling in love with Marija all over again. Marija said: “You know what people say, that you have to remember the past so you don’t repeat the same mistakes in the future? Look… it’s not true that people remember and then they don’t commit atrocities anymore because they remember the past and don’t want to repeat it. On the contrary, they have the model of past carnages and they keep perfecting that model… they do! What happens actually is that people become even more desensitized, they experience aesthetic pleasure, they cry, they feel good about themselves because they emote in front of a film about the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. That’s not the kind of make-believe that we need, because it is real, it doesn’t need to be made up, those horrors actually do happen to real people.” She paused and breathed deeply. I took her hand and held it tightly. It was incredibly warm, like a bird that had just landed exhausted in my palm.

“I’m not saying it should all be forgotten,” she went on with new energy and a swift move of her head, “but it shouldn’t be remembered this way, like not forget it but not remember it, either. I don’t know exactly which way. Tell the truth without telling a story, you know what I mean? I think they should stop making Holocaust movies, and Rwanda genocide movies, and if anybody ever starts making a movie about the Bosnian war again like Angelina Jolie’s sappy movie about Bosnian women in the rape camps, I’ll set myself on fire right in the middle of fucking Universal Studios. I think we should start a new slate—a clean, fresh, sparkling new slate of life and history—erase the memory of carnage instead of keeping it.”

Marija circumvented time in her speech and never said before what or since when, she just used the words before and since and after indefinitely, letting them hang in a fluid past. After our talk at Warner Bros. Studios she stopped using those words altogether, shrouding us in a cooling silence of forgetful dis-remembering. It wasn’t really like forgetting everything. You remembered it but it didn’t touch you and you said farewell to it. I also knew that when Marija said she would set herself on fire she didn’t use that as a metaphor but would actually bathe in gasoline and strike the match. I was praying that Hollywood wouldn’t be so misguided as to think of making another movie about the Bosnian war anytime soon.

When we were driving back to my hotel I looked at Marija and her profile was a living statue. I couldn’t get enough of watching her, listening to her, breathing in her life energy. The shape and sound of her letters that I had breathlessly read in the Sarajevo hotel till dawn and then the last installment only a month earlier started growing around me like living creatures that explained Marija to me through a fantastical pantomime. Now it all came alive as I was watching her shift gears, look in the rearview mirror, look at me and smile her movie-star smile, listen to her languorous voice, like no other voice I knew. “Marija, what kind of things were you sending to Hassan?” I asked suddenly. “What human rights and postwar materials was he talking about?” She didn’t turn around to look at me, but stared straight ahead at the winding road: “Information about the war criminals, those who are still running free. And accounts of women from the camps. So the world knows. That’s all. I gathered hundreds of stories from women who had been in the camps when I was in the rehabilitation center in Sarajevo. At first I didn’t know what to do with them, but then I thought they had to have told them to me for some reason. I wrote them down almost despite my will, mechanically, and when I got out I thought that at some point when I felt a tiny bit more normal I was going to reveal them to the world. I think they actually helped me recover. Most of them were more horrific than my own. I’m telling you, I was among the lucky ones. That’s all.”

Her face was smooth, not a line, not a single frown or wrinkle, almost like the smoothness of death, only she was so alive. “That’s all,” I repeated, and laughed. She had been doing both humanitarian and investigative work, even though she hated both those words. Marija lived and acted outside the boundaries of common words. She had clues and hints of the whereabouts of Radovan Karadzic, one of the three masterminds of the genocidal war, who had also happened to consider himself a poet while killing Bosnians. “Whatever was lost in world poetry was gained in the art of genocide,” joked Marija unflinchingly. I shuddered. Her two goals were justice and truth; that was all. She had some clues as to where Karadzic might have been hiding. A woman she knew had recognized him in a village near Belgrade. “Only after that I received death threats while in Sarajevo. So I’m going to stop my search for Karadzic and only worry about my son from now on. He could be in real danger. As for the rat Karadzic, he will eventually get caught and be brought to justice, I know it. For now we have to get my son and bring him back here as soon as possible, you see that, my dear Lara, don’t you?”

The dark universe that had opened to me as I went down the steps into the passages of Sarajevo with Natalia only half a year before was now becoming darker, as if a sun eclipse was threatening to darken the entire planet. I had anticipated this new and final adventure—my American years with Marija, a new world, a new me, a new life of fullness—as the other side of grief and death. But right now it still all tasted of raw blood and I wasn’t ready to face the uncharted terror. I was still so new to Marija’s world and there was so much that didn’t make sense. When I asked her about the trip to Sarajevo, the notes she left for me with the woman in that broken-down neighborhood, she said she had no idea I was going to go to Sarajevo, she had just left the notes of the women’s stories in a hurry for Ferida to pick up and send to the Helsinki human rights committee and by mistake included notes from her diary, too. “The woman must have gotten confused and thought you were Ferida, since you were the first person to come by,” she said. “Who is this woman, Marija?” I asked, feeling sick from so much confusion and secrecy. “Just some woman,” she said and then was quiet for a while, and I could tell she was hiding something. The letters that she sent Hassan, she said, had indeed been meant for me. She had wanted to make sure I got those notes. She wanted to prepare me about the child, she explained. “And plus, I don’t know, I somehow wanted to delay our meeting, I was buying time until I was fully formed, you know, ready to face you and to face myself as reflected in your eyes, Lara!” She abruptly pulled onto a side street lined with elegant white houses and sycamores. She looked straight at me as if truly trying to reflect herself in my eyes. I only hoped the image reflected back to her was as beautiful and majestic as I saw her in that moment.

“Look, I lost my parents, both sets of grandparents, I lost all my homes, my pathetic little country and my beloved native city, I lost the wholeness of my body, part of my mind and my soul, I lost an eye and am trying to regain my lost son. Why the hell do you want to know all of this stuff, all these little details? What does it matter?” I felt like dying with shame and sadness for having disappointed Marija. I remembered what she had said earlier how everybody’s suffering was their own and nobody traded theirs for anyone else’s. I remembered my own agonizing days torn between grinding and banal divorce proceedings, my destructive infatuation with Karim, the fear of losing Natalia, the struggle to keep my job and get tenured, and throughout it all the unbearable sadness at the thought I had lost Marija forever. I said looking straight at her with renewed courage: “Because all of the big stuff you just mentioned is just too big for me right now to comprehend, maybe with time… it’s the little things, the little details that help me understand you and what happened to you and who you are now. For instance, I imagine you and your parents and Farah and Kemal all crammed in your blue Fiat, with whatever you could gather from the two houses piled up in the car, on your way to Semizovac driving at a hundred thirty kilometers an hour through intersections and sniper bullets…”

“And driving to our death,” she concluded with a bitter smile. Her words fell between us with a heavy thud. Then she let go of the bitter smile and the dark thought. She shifted into the light and her face shone. “I never stopped writing to you, throughout everything. Even in the rehabilitation center when I was barely more functional than an amoeba I still wrote to you, for you, about you: poems, thoughts, fleeting sentences that came to my mind, songs, whatever… you were my thread back to life, you know that?” We embraced in the car for a long time and our tears blended as our heated faces touched in the bluish glow of the dusk on the sycamore-lined street.

She came to my hotel room and we sat for a while in silence on my bed holding hands and looking at the white walls. The red azaleas on the balcony were reflected in the mirror and a feeling of rosiness entered the room with that reflection. Then Marija said: “How is she?” And I knew she meant Natalia, I was catching on to Marija’s puzzle system of dialogue. “She is wonderful beyond words! A star! And also fragile and strong. And funny, too. She went through so much grief with the divorce proceedings, she even had to testify in court. She was a kleptomaniac for a while, stealing from drugstores. But she is all right now. She is dying to meet you, asks about you almost every day. She came with me everywhere on my trip to Belgrade and Sarajevo.” I started crying again, I had to make up for all the uncried tears up to that point in my life and also for what was going to come, which I knew was going to be beyond tears, right there in the last circle of hell where tears hang frozen on your cheeks like icicles. For the moment I needed Marija more than she needed me and I felt strangely soothed and puzzled by that.

Then Marija did something perplexing again: She got up and circled the room a few times humming an old Serbian tune, the tune of a Serbian pop star in the eighties, a song about loving someone in the spring and feeling reborn. She went to her white purse, carefully searched through it, and produced a photograph. “Here, look, that’s him!” This time I knew who she meant: the boy, her son, born in 1996. The photo was of poor quality, with pale colors, and showed a tiny boy with a round head and very short haircut in the arms of an older woman with a scarf wrapped around her head and her face turned away from the camera, in a garden next to a well. I couldn’t make out the features of the boy other than that he did not have three heads and displayed no evident signs of monstrosity as I was imagining, and that he was small and round. I was intrigued by the well in the garden and wondered what part of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia that could have been. Something reminded me of Baba and Dede’s village near Dubrovnik. “Isn’t he beautiful?” Marija said with a sigh, and there was a completely new Marija emerging in that sigh and that statement, elastic and mellow and matching the silky headband on her head. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, but I didn’t think anything in that picture was beautiful. “I know what you are thinking, Lara. But the thing is, this creature is now on this earth and I am his mother and he is there and I am here.” I on the other hand thought the “creature” that came out of a monstrous act could only be a monstrous creature just by the nature of its conception and any contact with and sight of it would only rekindle, refresh, restart the oozing of the wounds, the gashes, the broken optic nerve, oh the unbearable crushed optic nerve. I just couldn’t tolerate that.

“I had no idea I was pregnant until almost the birth,” she said. “That’s because I had separated myself from my body. There was me—this abstract me—and there was my body—a blob of pulsing flesh. There was this woman… this woman who was caring for me and told me it was time to give birth… she knew it and I didn’t. I had been vegetating for months in her bed, in her room with my belly growing into this big balloon of life. I didn’t feel a thing throughout the birth, as if I had been under anesthetic, and it just slithered out, one second I was crouching and squatting in this woman’s room, the next second something with a head and four limbs slithered out of me. I didn’t want to look at it. I just asked her what it was. I told her to keep it, I didn’t want it then but told her I would come back to get it one day and she’d be recompensed. I said I would go back for it. Just like that as you would leave and come back for a coat you forgot. Now the time has come that I want him back.”

At that point Marija took off her yellow headband and suddenly with her black hair all over her face and the imperceptible crookedness of her left glass eye she looked terrifying. I was afraid of her. For a moment I wanted to run out of the room, all the way to Washington, DC, and to my Natalia. If only it could all have been a bad dream and Mark and Natalia and I were still happily together, and Karim had never existed. That same moment I thought: How did I get myself into this? Wake up and run, Lara, run!

“We have to go to Bosnia and get him, Lara, that’s all, you have to help me and you have to come with me. I need you to come with me,” Marija said very gently, almost like a lullaby. I sat on the bed transfixed, wanting to move and run away and not being able to take one step. What was Marija talking about? I wasn’t going to go with her in search of the child that resulted from her tragedy. “Bring Natalia with you,” she said. “It will be good for her to see her mother’s childhood places, to see something different from the Washington sidewalks.” How did Marija know what was good for Natalia? I thought in a wave of rage, she had no idea about Natalia and the kind of person she was and what she needed and what she didn’t. I had already brought Natalia to my childhood places once and had no desire to do that again anytime soon. I should have listened to my sister, she always knew, I should have listened to her premonition that this was dark, unbearable stuff, and that neither of us could deal with it. It was undealable.

Marija sat down in the armchair across from the bed and next to the window, and the last rays of the setting sun lingered on her. The sadness that spread on her was luminous. It was as if the moon had melted onto her face and her sadness were a separate creature. Here was Marija and here was Marija’s sadness raining all over us and drowning us. It overwhelmed me, but I couldn’t resist it. I knew I wasn’t going to run away and I was going to go with Marija to Bosnia and to the end of the world and to the empty space in the sky that was left after the meltdown of the moon onto her face.

We slept in my hotel bed holding each other like two fugitives on the run. Marija’s sleep was so deep and so dark that at some point during the night I thought she died. I lay unmoving until my body went numb for fear of waking her. In the short periods when I slept I had dreams that made Frida Kahlo’s paintings of eviscerated hearts and bloody fetuses look like innocent still lives: pears and grapes and feathers on a country table. Marija’s eyes kept opening up as if dark endless holes and armies of horrid creatures were coming out of them. Marija’s limbs were falling off her like a doll’s, and Natalia was holding one of her limbs and crying over it; the little boy with the round head in the picture was shrinking and becoming a spider. The well in the picture was bubbling with rotting bodies, the bodies of Bosnians killed in the genocide, and a yellow ribbon was tied to the well saying not to drink that water. I desperately wanted to hold the spider in the dream and protect it. Then I woke up with a jump and had to rush to the bathroom to vomit. When I came back Marija was sleeping in the same position I had left her, unmoved, almost without breathing. I fell back asleep next to her terrifyingly silent body.

At some point toward morning Marija made coffee and started talking about postmodern theory. I couldn’t tell precisely whether I was hallucinating or dreaming or whether Marija’s words were real and happening in real time in my hotel room. I thought I had said something like: “Are you kidding me, Marija, postmodern theory at four in the morning? Just shut up please and let me sleep!” She said postmodern theory claimed that everything was text, even us, humans were texts and what was the real, then? There was no real, only a concept of the real that was different for everybody. Everybody’s real was different. But then, she said, if you had your optic nerve crushed under the back of a rifle, then you were not text anymore. Then you were a handful of screaming flesh and that was the only thing that was real. Postmodern theory was bullshit, she concluded.

When the bright irreverent LA sun shone its late-morning rays onto my face and I opened my eyes I had no idea where I was. Then it all rushed in: the previous day with Marija so jammed with surprises that it seemed like an accident in the cosmic calendar. I got up and looked for her but she was nowhere to be found. The room was picked up and seemed unused except for the bed I had slept in. The bed we had slept in. I felt heavy from the horrid dreams, exhausted from the nocturnal conversation about postmodern theory, with my head screwed on all wrong. Then it hit me: the pang of pain from Marija’s absence. I didn’t want her to be gone even though her presence made me experience psychic shocks that were the human equivalent of earthquakes of the degree of ten on the Richter scale. I felt a gaping hole so deep and so excruciating that I bent over and held myself in a folded position at the edge of the bed. Marija rushed in through the door with a tray filled with pastries and fresh fruit, in her black-and-white dress, the shiny yellow ribbon holding her freshly combed hair.

“Have you found a new religion? Who are you praying to, Lara dear?” she said laughingly. “Here, have some breakfast, you had a rough night, must have had bad dreams, huh?”

I wanted to kiss Marija’s face and hair and scream with joy at the sight and the sound of her. Then she asked me: “So what do you want to do today, my dear?”

“Here is what we are going to do,” I said. “We will have this delicious breakfast together, then you will go home, wherever that is, and pack a few things, and then you will take me to the airport. And then you and I will get on the first plane to Washington, DC. And when we are there, you will meet Natalia and we will make plans to go to Bosnia and get the boy. What do you say?”