The Wild West

MAY 2004

“No,” said Marija later that day as she was driving me to her LA apartment. “On second thought, let’s not go to DC right away. First we take a trip out west. We need it. Both of us. We need a winding-down time, we need some time to cross over and to discover America. Neither you nor I has any idea what this country is all about, Lara. Now that you are with me and I know you will help me out, we can take our time for a while longer, don’t you think so, Lara dear? We’ll go to Washington next week.” “What about Natalia? She’s expecting me home this week.” Marija thought for a few seconds: “We’ll make it up to her, she’ll understand.” How did Marija know that Natalia would understand? What did she know about Natalia? Nothing at all. Again, for another second I wanted to run away and forget that Marija was back, forget that Marija existed. But I might as well have forgotten that I existed. Maybe soon I was going to be whole and I was going to reach the stream of clean water and be renewed. A new Lara without cracks and with a smooth face and soul would emerge from the clean water.

I couldn’t say no to anything that Marija asked for. Once on that ride, I couldn’t stop. And when she said “Lara dear” with her elongated vowels the way she always used to, I had even less willpower to deny her anything she asked for. It wasn’t that she imposed her will on me. It was the way it had always been since the day she stood in the door of our classroom in second grade: I wanted to do everything she wanted because I knew it would be a magical ride, whether we ran across Sarajevo in the summer or went to Persia on the miniature Turkish golden velvet slippers. I provided the politics of it, she provided the magic, she joked and I laughed. I called Natalia and told her I was going to take another week or more to be home, that I would come home with Marija and she was going to love her. “Really, wow! How cool,” she said joyously, but then asked: “Is she all right, Mama, you know, you said she had been hurt…” “Yes, Natalia, she is fine, great actually. She is coming home with me and then we’ll all go on a trip together. We’ll go back to Sarajevo, isn’t that exciting?” Natalia said not to worry, that she was fine, she and Dad were doing things together. “How awesome, we’re going back to Sarajevo, Mama,” Natalia said. I wondered by what miracle Natalia came so complete out of cracked and incomplete me, Lara Kulicz, by what miracle had she been left unscathed and was emerging stronger than any of us.

“You put all your love into her, Lara, she’ll always have that, she is full to the brim, don’t you know it?” Marija said with her usual wisdom about life. “And you think a trip out west is going to give us the final understanding of the mystery of America?” We were flying again in her red Corvette. “America is not a mystery, it’s a project of displaced people with a short-term memory that is still in the works. America destroys and creates itself simultaneously in an ongoing process. And yes, I think going out west, seeing the frontier, might be of some help to us. We are frontier girls ourselves, aren’t we? If anything it’s fucking stunning, you’ll love it, I promise.”

In this Balkan version of Thelma and Louise, Marija and I drove for hours and then for days across high plains, through canyons and alongside turbulent waterfalls, across orange deserts, through brooding forests of spruce and shimmering light-green aspen, on hairpin roads along several-thousand-foot drops that made your head swirl like you were drunk on absinthe. We were running away from our pasts but also thanks to the distance we could better understand them. We relived our childhood, our teenage and college years, and stopped at the brink of the day when we parted in Belgrade right when the war had started. We reached that point several times from different perspectives and every time we got stuck there. We rewound everything and played it backward and forward and invented new scenarios. What if I had stayed with Marija, gone with her to Sarajevo, forgotten about Mark? “You would have never had Natalia!” Run, run, Lara, run from the past, you’re in the Wild West now, no need to tiptoe around what-ifs! “Yes, but I would have had another Natalia, I wouldn’t have known about this Natalia and it would have been just fine. And maybe you and yours would have been safe,” and my voice would drop to almost inaudible on the last words as if stepping on minefields. “Because you were the holy mother of Christ to protect us all from the rage of the Republika Srpska? You might have been dead, too. And then what?” We would burst out laughing at points of memory where most people would have lain on the ground and howled in misery. “We are crossing over,” Marija would say as if we were going to witness a cosmic event. “We’re reaching the frontier,” she would say with an alluring smile. The frontier was anything from a run-down gas station with an orange awning in the literal middle of nowhere of endless expanses of rocky land and big vaulted sky to lines in the past that neither of us was ready or willing to cross but were tiptoeing gently around in a carnivalesque ballet of swift forward steps, pirouettes, and swift steps backward.

“Everything gets muddled up in the war, yet you get to the ultimate truths about people like in no other situation. There is a fierce clarity about the war, you get to see humanity all bare, like an X-ray, just the skeleton, the bare bones of humanity, who people really are,” Marija said at some point as we were driving past pueblo settlements and Indian reservations, layers of frontiers and past wars for territory. “Maybe it’s all about land,” she went on. “Marija, it’s about power,” I ventured on the lines of my incorrigible lifelong political training. “You’re such a politician. Of course it’s about power—land is power.” I wasn’t going to give up so easily. Something in the fiercely violet sunset descending upon the layers of mountains gave me the stubbornness to stand up to Marija’s theory, as if I had any stake in winning this argument about the real cause of wars. “No, it’s never as concrete as that. It’s the abstraction of power, the thrill, and the rush that comes with the subjugation of one human being by another. Land is a pretext. Even oil is a pretext. There is enough land for everybody on this planet—look at this,” I said, proud of my theory, extending out my arm to the high plains and the indomitable mountains in the distance, all empty, all uninhabited, all ready for the taking.

Marija was quiet for a while, a silence akin to death. Then she stopped the car at another gas station, put her head on the steering wheel, and repeated five times the word subjugation. A torrent of sobs erupted from her like the flood of doomsday. The sobs were a creature in themselves, taking full possession of Marija and tearing every bit of her reconstructed self apart. I was afraid that parts of her were going to fall off like in my nightmare, as if she were splintered by a bomb from within: limbs, organs, body parts shattered across the rural gas station as in the most atrocious of horror movies and in the midst of it all the wicked and immortal glow of her glass eye staring in grotesque immobility at everything. Some men in cowboy boots stared at us as they were filling up the gas tanks of their enormous trucks. A woman truck driver got out of her truck and moved slowly toward our car. Marija’s sobs were unstoppable. The woman truck driver was tiny and red-haired and reminded me of Sally Bryant.

“Sweetheart, do you need some help?” Her low voice trailed sweetly in the cool air of that spring somewhere in the Wild West, where two refugee women from the Balkans were lost and trying to make sense of lands, frontiers, memories, their own lives, and the desert ahead of them. Marija stopped her sobs instantaneously. She looked up at the woman and smiled. There was the Marija of my childhood again sitting next to me on the school bench and playing with toy Turkish slippers. I couldn’t keep up with Marija, and again I thought maybe I wanted out. The past was intolerable and we would never be able to cross over that frontier. I wasn’t made for that insanity, I hadn’t started the Bosnian war and it wasn’t my fault that Marija went through what she had been through. I missed Natalia, I missed sanity and normality. I missed my corner of the stupid Washington duplex, safety and peace. The expanses of red rocks and the huge edgy rocks and drops terrified me like prehistoric monsters. “Thank you, we would like some help, yes, if you don’t mind,” said Marija in her sweetest voice.

The red-haired woman truck driver, whose name was Pam, told us to follow her gigantic truck to her little adobe house in the desert. I drove Marija’s Corvette while she was fixing her tear-smeared face and combing her hair. Pam fed us cactus stew while her Chaco Indian husband worked on an ancient Chevrolet convertible with wings like the cars in the seventies. Everything seemed stuck in previous decades except for the cell phones and the computer. Her twin boys played on the dirt floor with miniature trucks while their mother fed to them bits of dried beef and cactus from the stew. They were four years old yet tiny as toddlers. The entire family was small, the house was small. It felt cozy and safe to be there.

We found out we were in a pueblo and the lunar landscape surrounding us was made of mesas and ridges, canyons and dune fields. The sagebrush and the juniper bushes spread luscious and delicate perfumes in the dry quivering air. “I too have a son. He is eight years old,” Marija said, leaving me with my mouth wide open, cactus stew dripping on my chin. “He is very tiny, too, he is smaller than he should be for his age.” The Chaco man spoke softly with an unexpectedly thin voice. His name was Hope and also Crazy Bull because he had left his reservation in New Mexico years ago and went around the country talking about the poverty and desperation on the reservations, trying to raise money and consciousness of the plight of his people. He told Marija that small boys are good, they will never be too arrogant, but kind and gentle. Marija grinned with pleasure. “Yes, I know, that’s exactly how my son is: blond and small and very gentle.” I wanted to say that she had hardly even met her son, that she had no idea whether he was sweet and gentle as a lamb or violent as a crazy bull. But the certainty in Marija’s voice and expression was so indomitable that the words died on my lips and for the first time, Marija’s fantasy of her own sweet, tender blond boy entered my spirit as well. For some inexplicable reason the image of that boy fit perfectly with the dune fields and the juniper-delicate fragrances and the cactus meal in Pam’s small adobe house.

Marija had dropped her past somewhere in a red desert in the Wild West yet she also carried it. She was inventing herself and her past as she went along, but the little boy in the house with the well was at the center of everything, an unmoved point in the darkness like a lighthouse for lost ships. “That’s good,” said the truck driver woman, “boys are good. They are fun to have.” She gave them each a piece of dried beef in their tiny mouths, which opened up for the food like hungry birds. “Where does your son live? Does he stay with you?” Pam asked. “He is far away in Bosnia, in Sarajevo, at the end of the world, really,” Marija answered casually, like she had known and raised this mystery son for her entire life and as if Sarajevo were just next door. “You’ve been through something, haven’t you, honey?” said Pam with no preparation. “I can tell. I’ve been through stuff, too,” she added. “People say it gets better with time, but it doesn’t really. You just learn to live with it, whatever it is, with the stuff that hurt you. With your wounds and scars I mean.” People were like the landscapes in that part of the world, in constant metamorphosis, becoming something else before your eyes, from rounded orange desert rocks to luscious aspen forests, to edgy gray rocks hanging above your head, to high plains and dark lakes to desert again. The desert and the orange rocks and the mesas and the sagebrush were our favorites. This was our America. Pam gave us her own and her husband’s bed to sleep in that night and she and Hope and the children all slept on different sofas in the tiny main room. Even though everything was tiny, there was room for everybody. The lands out there were endless, uninhabited, and wild, but the adobe houses were small and self-contained, they held us in, they made us feel safe and whole. During the night, the two boys crawled into bed with us and cuddled against us, between Marija and me. Their bodies were fresh and light, velvety and soft, they whispered words in a language that could have been Spanish, but wasn’t really, maybe Navajo. Marija and I each fell asleep holding one of the twins. It felt perfect for a night.

“This is a new generation of boys who will make the world a better place: these twins, my son, the new boys of this century.” Marija had a habit of talking in the middle of the night. She wasn’t sleep talking, she was awake and would start up a conversation in the dead of the night. I learned not to answer, and after a while she would go back to sleep. Marija’s sleep was forever compromised so she took me with her on long conversational rides that ranged from theories of war and warfare to French movies to nouvelle cuisine to fashion to child psychology or modern architecture. She made up for lost worlds at night and the rides were exhausting. But during our road trip through the Wild West, no matter how hard and troubled our night rides through past and future universes might have been, I was always happy to find her still next to me in the morning.

“My son is blond,” Marija repeated in the morning at the breakfast table with the Chaco Mexican American family. “That’s nice, blond is always beautiful,” said Pam. She was leaving that day for another week of driving transports across the country. She held her boys each on one knee through breakfast and fed them again like a mother bird would feed her chicks. “You need to go see your son, wherever he is,” Pam said. “I hope my boys didn’t bother you during the night. They’re used to always sleeping next to someone, usually it’s their father and me, but if someone else visits, they have no problem climbing in bed with them. They are funny that way.” The boys said, “The ladies smell nice,” and I was surprised to hear perfect little English words come out of the boys’ mouths almost in unison. Marija laughed and said she enjoyed their presence in bed, it was comforting, and it made her think of her son. Marija spoke of her son with the assurance and knowledge of a consummate mother. If she had deserted him once because she hadn’t even been aware she had given birth to a live creature eight years ago when it happened in some woman’s house near Sarajevo, she was now giving birth to this blond son again and again in Pam and Hope’s house. He was as real and as alive as the dark-skinned twins sitting on their mother’s lap across the table. Upon departure Pam gave us a quilt in shades of orange and light green; it had the colors of the landscape and was soft and feathery and smelled sweet like some kind of hay or lavender. We gave her money and chocolate and she took it with a smile. Her husband came out from under the Chevy he was fixing and wished us a good trip. We left the small family standing in the road against their tiny adobe house with cacti and orange earth and red flowers around it. We wanted to take them with us, we wanted to stay with them forever, for some reason it broke our hearts to leave the pueblo family with the twins in the adobe house. We couldn’t stand any more departures, separations, good-byes, but we had to go on.

“People killed each other over land and gold and supremacy in these parts not too long ago,” Marija said as I was driving her Corvette this time on the way to Utah. “I can still smell the blood, it’s as if the orange desert rocks are this color because of all the blood impregnated in it. I want to find a piece of earth where no blood has ever been shed, a clean and virgin piece of land. Then I want to buy it.” She was smiling and radiant like the first hours after our LA encounter.

We went on the lookout for a virgin place where no blood was shed. We acquired no better understanding of America but we found a zone of the earth where no memory of ours could implant itself and grow roots and bring our past into the present like an inevitable cataclysm. We needed to understand history and the need for blood now more than ever. Was it for power or for land that people killed and destroyed each other? Was land power? Or was power just a rush for an abstract sense of subjugation?

“You and I don’t know anything about America, Lara. All we know about America is from the movies. It’s all stereotypes and clichés, and a few memorable lines uttered by Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, or John Wayne.” Marija laughed. I was getting used to her unpredictable passages from the darkest depths to frivolous talk about Hollywood actors or movie scenes. At some point in the trip I wanted to know what had really happened during those days in July but could not ask Marija directly. By now, I had read her notes so many times that I knew parts of them by heart, but still only really understood the aftermath, the recovery period. I wanted to go with her as deep as she would take me and feel at least part of her pain. Then maybe she would feel a bit lighter. And she wanted to know about Karim and all the rest. We both knew that the telling of our darkest places was now as necessary as the road taking us through the lunar landscapes we traversed. The stories were completely out of sync with one another, but they were each our own stories.

“It was my idea to leave Sarajevo,” Marija said, almost screaming through the hot wind of our ride. She kept reminding herself of that like a punishment. “I thought we would be safer and we went right into the devil’s mouth and the devil chewed and swallowed us all and spat our bones back in the surrounding hills. The UN said it was a ‘safe zone’ and stupid me, I trusted the UN. There was actually a resolution with a number attached to it that declared it an area of safety, meaning where people could take refuge and be secure from harm. The best lesson I learned was that whenever the UN declares something safe, you should run in the opposite direction. I was to blame for the massacre of my family and it’s up to me to decide whether I can live with that or not.” Her voice trailed in the wind, it sliced the quivering dry heat like a sharp blade, it circled our heads like a famished vulture, it rested on my heart.

“You and I can never get away from the Balkans, you know that, right, Lara dear?”

“I thought we just did, Marija dear. This is not the fucking Balkans and you know it,” I went on with conviction. “For all the bloody episodes in these parts, for all the feuds, the massacres, in the end they got it right. Or they got it better than our people. Do you see anybody running for refuge in the other direction, from here to there? Do you know anybody from New Mexico or Utah immigrating to Bosnia or Serbia?”

“It’s just that they have more land, that’s all, look at all this! There’s enough for everybody. In the fucking Balkans everybody’s crowded on top of one another until you want to kill your neighbor and their mother. And anyway it’s the fucking Wild West. Why do you think they call it Wild? These are lands acquired and built through the power of the guns. First taken from the Indians, then from the Mexicans, it’s what Westerns are made of. And none of that will ever change the fact that I am responsible for the death of my family.” She slammed on the brakes at a dusty tiny gas station. I restrained from saying anything. What could I have said, a meager: No, Marija, you didn’t kill your family, the Serbs of Republika Srpska killed your family and hurt you and the UN tricked everybody because they were incompetent and evil and you are no more responsible for what happened to them than Pam’s twins or Sally Bryant are responsible for the Bosnian war? She had probably heard all that from Sally Bryant, from Ferida, from women in the rehabilitation center and countless other people.

“It dragged out for a while,” she said, nonchalantly filling up the gas tank. The sky was always impenetrably blue and immense and the dry air scratched your lungs. Marija, wearing a yellow dress, looked majestic framed by the blue sky and the red awning of the gas station. I had no idea that if you survived the worst you could emerge as a thing of beauty. Indomitable and frightening, but beautiful nevertheless. “I said let’s leave Sarajevo, and let’s go to the country, it’s safe there, that’s what I said. And we all went to the house in the country where we thought it was safe. Just like we think it’s safe out here. And before we knew it they were butchering us.”

I thought I heard hyenas in the distance, saw vultures circling above, felt scorpions swarming at my feet. Nothing was safe. The gas station with the red awning was shifting in the sun and the immobility of the place was hypnotic. Life hung on so little. A scorpion, a man with a gun, a crater opening up, at any moment we walked a thin line across the abyss. It was all just a matter of where you found yourself at a particular moment in time.

“I killed a man in the ambush,” she said with a weird grin looking at me across her red Corvette. “And it’s the best thing I have ever done. Only that it cost me everything.” The man in the red pickup truck next to the red awning of the gas station was smoking a cigarette and looking at us. We looked foreign. We were Balkan, we came from recent wars and fresh massacres. Just like everybody who came from a place with a history of massacre, only the layout of our land was different. And we had an accent.

Marija said she had also saved a young girl’s life in what she called the ambush. She killed the man that had attacked the young girl, the daughter of their neighbor. She killed the man with a gun that she found on the ground. And the girl survived, she ran and disappeared. The next soldier got Marija. Other soldiers, too, were there for the revenge. The soldier beside the one that Marija had killed grabbed her and then all the rest. Her parents and grandparents were all lying on the ground at that point. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents. All six closest people of her family, an entire family erased from the face of the earth in a matter of minutes under a ferociously blue sky, like the wide vault above our heads in this desert land with a gas station with its red awning and its red gas pumps. A hundred years had passed between the killing and the soldier grabbing Marija to avenge the death of his buddy. An entire geological era passed when the earth dried up, then flooded, then froze, then burned, then the cacti bloomed again shamelessly out of the desert sand.

She was in the woman’s house when she woke up with the crushed optic nerve. The woman had found her in the evening still breathing on the ground next to her massacred family as she crept out of her house a bit farther down the road. She practically dragged Marija to her house and she was still alive when she got there though bleeding profusely from her eye. The woman took care of her and her wounds day and night. Until the birth, the woman from Semizovac kept moving her from town to town, from house to house, like she was in an unclear chase by someone. She was Bosnian Muslim posing as Serbian. The woman who had saved Marija’s life was acting Serbian while running away from the Serbs and she was dragging Marija after her. She sang Serbian songs throughout all the moves and the rides. The woman went from place to place, driving her ancient Yugo car that occasionally dropped off parts along the way, with Marija bleeding all over the backseat. Finally the woman found a recently lived-in house on the non-Muslim edge of a town. They stayed there for a while and seven months later it was where Marija gave birth, while the woman cleaned her up and sang Serbian songs at the top of her lungs to make sure the remaining neighbors or any Srpska soldiers passing by thought they were Serbs.

“Land and women have always been for the taking,” she said looking up at the sky as if defying it. She lit up a cigarette next to the gas pump. In the quivering heat of the desert we could have all blown up at the mere spark of a cigarette. Life hung on a tiny gesture, on a silk thread, on a snap of one’s fingers. At Marija’s side, I, too, was part of generations of avengers, war starters, desert fighters, and killers. It felt cool like fresh springwater. “I am probably the only civilian woman in Bosnia who killed a Serbian soldier. I deserve a fucking medal!” Marija’s voice and laugh were raw and unforgiving. I felt incomprehensible joy at Marija’s news that she had killed a soldier. Women of the Wild West had killed attackers and killers before us in the heat of an ambush, not thinking twice, not praying or hesitating. Out here in the Wild West, the cacti were sharp as blades, their flowers luscious as bleeding hearts.

“How did it feel to kill a man, Marija?” I noticed that the man filling up his truck looked at us. The gun rack was filled. He heard my question to Marija. “It felt right, it felt damn good to kill the bastard.” The man stared at us again and muttered something. It looked like he was going to take out his gun and shoot at us. This new Balkan Thelma and Louise movie might end right here, with the two girls shot at a gas station near a canyon, their brains unromantically splattered all over red gas pumps. But instead the man let out a sinister laugh. We climbed back into the convertible without even opening the doors and screeched out of the gas station in a cloud of dust.

When I put Marija’s wallet back in her bag as she asked me to, I thought I felt a gun. I did! And I pulled it out and looked at it wide-eyed: a small handgun, almost pretty, almost feminine. “That’s right, Lara dear, it’s a gun, I always carry a gun with me now.” I gently put the gun back into Marija’s bag. I had nothing to say. The ride was smooth again and now we were crossing back into Colorado and passing by the shimmering aspen forests. We greeted the light greens with joy, we had bled enough, we had had enough of the oranges and the reds of the arid desert.

Marija found a piece of land in the Wild West and bought it. We now had our own sliver of American land. We felt like bona fide Americans. On our way through the western landscapes we’d passed by a place in the Rockies that had a FOR SALE sign. It was a mixture of desert and pasture, forest and plain, rock and meadow, it had everything. And a lake farther up that glistened in the sun. A forest of aspen trees with glimmering tiny emerald leaves framed it. There was a tiny log cabin sitting on that piece of land like an old sage. It was as easy as buying a pair of cowboy boots at the general store. Marija paid part in cash and part with a check. She carried a big chunk of cash in her large white bag right next to the handgun, along with a mini Webster’s Dictionary and the picture of the blond son standing by the well. “You couldn’t do this in the Balkans. Only in America! We just got a bit closer to the meaning of America, didn’t we? We own a tiny portion of it now. It’s all in the ownership, right? Possession is fifty percent of the law, isn’t that what they say in America?” Her laugh resonated across the variegated landscape like a magic song.

We stayed for three nights and three days in the log cabin. We slept on the floor in sleeping bags and Marija cried the whole time. The rooms smelled of pine and we could see a piece of a sharp peak and ponderosa pine forest from the cabin window. “We never had a chance to say good-bye,” she said lying on her back, staring out the small window at the shard of raw blue outside. “You know, Mama and Papa, Kemal and Farah. The night before, Papa played the flute, he went through some of his classical repertoire from Haydn to Mozart to Strauss. He even played Ravel, and I had never heard Ravel on the flute. It sounded unearthly. We felt almost safe. Kemal smoked his last pipe. Farah drank her last coffee. Mama sewed her last embroidery stitches. Papa played his last tune. We went to bed. We heard voices at night but we thought it was the UN peacekeeping soldiers. We went back to sleep, all in one room. I had a dream about children playing in a garden outside of Sarajevo. The dream was beautiful but in it something felt rotten and hideous. There were only children in this area of Sarajevo, no adults anywhere in sight, and something terrifying was lurking in the background, a slimy headless monster. But when I woke up I refused to pay attention to the bad parts of the dream and just remembered the beautiful part about the children playing in a blissful garden. It reminded me of us three playing around Kemal and Farah’s house in the summer. I thought it was a sign that peace would come soon. In the morning we were all restless. I said, ‘Let’s stay for another few days, we’ll be okay, after all they declared this to be a safe zone.’ It was the first time I didn’t follow my intuitions and premonitions and decided to listen to the party line, the news, the dirty war communications. I should have known better. In the morning, they broke down the door and barged in. We saw the Serbian uniforms, and Mama said she hoped it would be fast. They dragged us all outside. Farah and Kemal were caught by surprise but Mama and Papa knew what was happening. I had the time to hold Mama’s hand one brief second, right before they tore us apart from each other. For some crazy reason I was wearing your turquoise necklace. For all I know it saved my life. The soldier that I killed was our next-door neighbor in Semizovac. You might have even seen him that summer when you and I went there for one weekend when we were in college, remember? The girl he attacked was our other next-door neighbor. So much for love your neighbor as thyself.”

She had said everything almost in a whisper yet incredibly clear in crisp words like crystal beads bouncing off the walls in the log cabin in the mellow light that came through the tiny window. I thought she had fallen asleep because she lay without moving for what seemed like a long time. Then Marija cried, for three days and three nights. This time she didn’t cry with torrents and sobs like she had before. Her cries were now mellow and rhythmic like a song to sadness. A serenade to the world’s most inconsolable sadness. She cried through her sleep and through the gulps of water I made her drink, through every moment of those three days she cried to the point where I thought she would die from crying. At some moments her cries were intolerable and I thought it might be better for Marija to die. I thought it would be easier for both of us and that she could never survive and bear all that grief for the years to come. But on the third day she stopped as abruptly as she had started. By then I was so used to the sound of her song to sadness that I almost missed it. I had never known such turmoil of mind, soul, and body as during those three days and nights. Yet when Marija stopped it was like she had woken up from the deepest sleep on earth. She was steady on her feet, determined in her actions, and clear in her speech. And she could always smile. We went for a walk on one of the trails near our cabin that morning. We climbed next to sparkly gurgling streams and majestic ponderosa pines through slivers of light and reckless blue. “We have never been here before, I am sure of it. All this is new, a new day,” whispered Marija, and her face shone with beauty and love. I took her hand and we embraced in the shifting light, enveloped in the ponderosa pine scent. Marija’s eyelashes fluttered against my cheeks like silk butterflies, everything melted in the spruce and ponderosa greens. Her lips were soft and honey-sweet as I remembered from our childhood. We had never been there, maybe there had never been any bloodshed where we stood and embraced, maybe we started a new America.

We decided it was time to go back to my other home in America. On our drive home, it was my turn to talk. Marija wanted to hear everything. I would tell her about Karim, Mark, and the trial. I didn’t really feel like sinking into all the mire of my past and reliving the guilt, the breakage, the fear of losing Natalia, and the shamefulness of Karim’s betrayal. But to her it was calming to hear stories of love and betrayal, divorce and legal proceedings, couples’ misunderstandings and family feuds. It was like watching episodes of Dallas when we were young: the heartaches and family upheavals of the rich and famous from the perspective of our Communist Yugoslavia. My sagas meant to her a normal life in times of peace. Only that paradoxically enough, she considered my divorce, love affair, and custody trials with the same weight and grief as her own past. It didn’t make sense to me, but to Marija it meant that everybody lived with their own burden depending on their circumstances and destiny. Despite her rationality and atheism she was a fierce believer in destiny. The drive was long, and the swaying American highways made me begin to fiercely miss my corner of banal living in my soon-to-be-lost American apartment. The quick pit stops with bearded truck drivers staring at us, the overweight waitresses with badly bleached hair, the smell of hot dogs or fried chicken in the early hours of the morning made me queasy and sad about living in a foreign country. Sometimes I remembered that Marija carried a dainty gun in her white glossy bag and that made me feel safer and more grounded. Maybe I was more American than I thought. I knew that if it came down to it and if we were to be accosted, insulted, attacked in any way, she would have no hesitation about using it.

“You needed all that, Lara, you needed to cross into some kind of delinquency and deep heartbreak, you needed to break at least one of the fucking commandments. You needed to be bad for once in your lifetime, you had always been so good. Marriage, adultery, justice, it’s all sort of mythic. It made you stronger, it didn’t break you.” She left the sentence hanging in the rawness of the night on the American highway because she knew that of the two of us, despite all the heartbreaks, I was still the unbroken one.

In the motel rooms as we were getting closer to the East Coast we watched all the John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper movies we could find, the old black-and-white ones, the colored ones, and the newly colorized ones. Once in a while, just for the hell of it, we rooted for the bad guys, for the ones who were out for money and only out for themselves, who killed and raped women and children and hung their male enemies on a lonely tree in the desert. But then we always went back to rooting for the good guys, because really they were still bad, but they never hurt women and children. And their reasons for being bad were nobler, the love of a sultry woman, an ancestral killing of a mother or wife, the haunting memory of the burning of a village or a hidden treasure. In the end they were all out for treasures, land and money. And it all hung on the women in the end. It was an ancestral, biblical universe with the sexy glow of Hollywood cinematography and the classy nonchalance of Hollywood stars. Justice and revenge hung in the movie frames interchangeably and were always diluted in the long shots of cowboys riding into the sunset, the classic ending. “All we know about fucking America is from the fucking movies, but now we are landowners and nobody fucks with us,” Marija said again and again one night, as we got drunk on miniature bottles of whiskey and vodka from the little cabinet with refreshments. We laughed ourselves to sleep the way we used to in our Belgrade college years, during our Milko period, the way we did on the night we met Sally Bryant. In the end we rooted most for the women in the movies, the lustful ones, the virtuous hardworking ones, the tough and sassy ones, the unforgiving ones with a gun, the trashy madams, the angry wives, the naive daughters. And to that gallery of western women, we added two Balkan girls with a Slavic accent, fierce in their revenge and precise in their aim, landowners in the American West and riding into the sunset in search of a blond boy.