Country of Red Azaleas

SUMMER 2004

When we returned to Washington, it was already summer. The duplex on Connecticut Avenue had been sold and my tenure had been denied. Welcome back to Washington, DC! I had to laugh. If Marija could laugh, so could I. According to Mark we had gotten a great offer for the duplex and there was no way we could refuse it. Or that he could refuse it. I forgot I had given Diana Coman power of attorney in my absence and she really did use it and signed the closing documents in my stead. When I called her she sounded cheerful and proud as if we had won the jackpot. Which it turned out we sort of did. Apparently a French couple working for the French embassy fell in love with the house, outbid all the other bidders, and put down their deposit in cash in a day. I was getting a little bit more than four hundred thousand dollars as my 50 percent share on the sale.

Mark was happier than I had seen him in a long time, and he even hugged me when I walked into the duplex filled with cardboard boxes to the ceiling. He looked straight at me, which hadn’t happened in a long time. It felt like a new reunion, a new beginning overlapping the final end of our marriage. It wasn’t sad anymore, but freeing and soothing. A mellow wave of understanding and resettling moved between us in the early-summer heat. After the year of battles and glacial treatment, Mark’s hug and warm welcome were more of a shock than the four hundred thousand dollars that landed in my lap. Peace always came at such a high price but it did come once in a great while. Natalia was at her most cheerful in the multicolored flowery dress that Biljana had gotten her in Chicago and was doing somersaults throughout the emptied-out portions of the duplex. Life was a never-ending carousel and the most important part of my ride was yet to come.

Marija had a way of gliding through rooms and spaces like a magic force, and she fluctuated between making herself overwhelmingly present and making herself unheard, unseen, nonexistent. She was a Cheshire cat, now she was nowhere to be found, and now she startled you sitting in an armchair and smiling as if she had been sitting there her entire life, like in an old family portrait. Although she had never met Marija before, Natalia became friends with her within the first minute we entered the house. And so did Mark to my utter shock. When I introduced Marija to Mark upon our arrival I saw a flicker of recognition cross his face. Life often stood in the way of being noble and generous. For a moment, Mark and I clung to our first encounter in a Belgrade tavern, all under Marija’s presence. And that moment was not wrought with sadness, pining, nostalgia, and all the other emotional wreckages from my past life with Mark in the madness of the divorce period. It felt like a friendly handshake taking place in the virtual space of our common memory and mediated by Marija’s flesh-and-blood presence in our house. Mark found just the right tone and demeanor with Marija, and even apologized for the mess. The finality of our life as a couple came with a new lightness and just the necessary amount of coolness to our relations. The new kind, polite, and classy man in our soon-to-be-forsaken duplex was now a good roommate and an excellent conversationalist.

I knew, however, that the old history of Mark having brought Hassan over to the States instead of Marija was still hanging in the air among us like a bird of prey ready to devour every bit of our newly acquired peace and harmony. And even though Marija’s being was fully possessed by the thought of her son, I felt we needed to clear the air of that ominous presence. To my great surprise it was Mark who brought up the subject one evening over dinner, since once in a while we actually all ate together as if we were still a family. And who was to say we weren’t, marked by cracks and wounds as we all were, but somehow now tied to one another even more, precisely because of all the wounds!

“Marija, I talked to Hassan the other day and he was happy to hear you moved here. He asked me to send you his best wishes, you know he…” Mark stuttered like he hardly ever did, he paused, he left the sentence hanging, and he seemed vulnerable, even confused. The air froze in the room for a second despite the warm summer day.

“It would be nice to see Hassan again at last,” Marija said without a shred of irony or resentment. “And you, too, Mark, it was a good thing you brought Hassan over to the States. You had no way of knowing…”

“I wish it had all been different, Marija. If I could, I would…” Mark halted and to my shock I saw tears in his eyes. I looked at Marija and her smile looked like tears, too. I followed the exchange between them like a stranger in my own house with a sense of relief and puzzlement all at once. The two of them needed to confront each other just like that and tear up the evil bird of prey feather after bloody feather.

Marija leaned over toward Mark and gently touched his hand as if consoling him. I felt a deep scratch of jealousy in my throat. I wanted to scream to Marija and say: He is not the one who needs consoling, you are the one who needs mending and consoling. Instead I stuffed a piece of blackened salmon in my mouth. I drank from my wine and stared at Natalia quivering with emotion beside me. I completely missed the remaining conversation between Mark and Marija. By the time I had finished my salmon, their words sounded like fast-forwarded bits of an unintelligible language. My thoughts were louder than the outside world and the conversation going on in the room right next to me.

“All we have is the present, and my son is in the present,” I heard Marija say. “I wouldn’t have had him if I had come…” Her Cheshire cat smile lit up the room for a brief moment, carrying with it desperation, resignation, and bitter irony all at once.

“But at what price, Marija! At what price! I would have never had your courage!”

I had never seen Mark so human and so unraveled. If it hadn’t been for Mark I wouldn’t have had Natalia, my thoughts resumed, as if wanting to compete with Marija, and then I just thought The ifs don’t matter anymore. Natalia looked up and took turns examining each one of us. Then she giggled and asked for the honey-and-almond cake that Marija had made for us. Mark stood up in a flash to bring it to the table.

During the following weeks Natalia moved between us with the grace of a ballerina, tiptoeing her way in and out of all family interactions with a sly smile. I may have thought that reading and discovering some of the world’s worst horrors in Marija’s notes from Sarajevo were going to break her, but they seemed only to have made her stronger, with a maturity that still held the last sparkles of her childhood. She and Marija were made of the same metal: the bending and unbreakable gold of the stars.

I took the news of my denied tenure with a shrug. A brief moment of sadness at the word failure written all over my career crossed me. But mostly I felt unexpected relief. At least now there would be no more waiting and guessing. The news came in the form of a letter that was waiting for me on my desk, together with all the other mail collected in my absence, including a letter with Tunisian stamps. I didn’t bother opening that one, but I did open the envelope with the letterhead of the university. It announced that the vote had been “unfavorable” for my tenure and promotion. It was when I read that word that I laughed. Unfavorable, a word of diluted negativity, was priceless. Why couldn’t they just say: You did not get tenure, or The vote for your tenure and promotion was negative, or You failed, your academic career is finished? That wimpish unfavorable evoked a scene with people sitting in front of a meal they didn’t like and turning up their noses at the sight and smell of it. Maybe to get tenure everything was supposed to be the other way around, maybe I had gotten it all wrong and I should have done a lousy job teaching, not done any research, and pretended not to see my colleagues when they passed me in the hallway. Maybe you weren’t supposed to be good to be promoted, or maybe you just had to be a man. What was the difference, really, between here and good old Yugoslavia, I asked myself without bothering to find an answer.

Marija was more upset by the news of my denied tenure than I was. She suggested I appeal it, or sue the university. I should go ahead and hire a labor attorney, she advised. That only made me weary, to think of throwing myself into a new litigation procedure with those same colleagues of mine who had already been inappropriately involved in the messy operation of my custody and divorce trial. The most important thing, I told Marija, was to unravel the logistics of adopting her son and bringing him to America. I was now ready to throw myself into someone else’s tragedy and misery. I asked her to please not mention my tenure and suing anymore, I might even get out of the academic line of work altogether and work for a nonprofit organization for women’s rights or something noble like that. Then I told Marija of my plan to see my attorney and get her advice on the matter of her son. I knew Diana had worked on some cases of adoption of orphans from Romania. Every time I mentioned the boy, the son, the little round-headed child in the blurry picture that had become a tiny spider in my nightmare in the LA hotel, Marija stretched and relaxed and moved like a purring cat. I kept thinking: How was she going to look at him every day of her life without being reminded of that day, how was she going to pull any love toward that child? And invariably, every single time, Marija heard my thoughts and answered me directly, without me having uttered a single word on the matter: “I think about that day all the time, Lara. But the sperm and the egg that merged and produced this child didn’t know what was going on when that happened. I look at the two things,” she’d say, “the violence and the child—as separate. He could have been born just as much as the result of overpowering and tender love as of a hideous crime, it makes no difference to him—or to me.” Her voice would wind down in a melodic way, her face acquiring again that lunar sadness that transfixed me like a supernatural force. “I can’t go on with my life until I have that boy. It’s just how it is. He must be lonely and scared in the care of that woman, with no children to play with, stigmatized because of his origins.”

Diana Coman told us we had to go about it via the regular adoption route, and not try to claim the child on the basis of Marija’s biological maternity. First, she needed proof that she was the biological mother. Who was going to believe her? And to start the process of showing biological parentage based on DNA testing across two continents would have been too daunting and most likely not successful. When Diana said that, Marija became fidgety like I hadn’t seen her yet since our meeting in LA; she wrung her hands and cracked her knuckles. When I looked at her, I saw the full horror of that day in July 1995 displayed glaringly on her face. The gushing of blood, the obscene panting, the muffled screams, flesh, organs, guns, screams, begging for death, sighing for death, screaming the sharpest scream across the black earth. It all passed for one second on Marija’s face like an apocalyptic cloud. The next second it was gone and a strange light, a blueness and rosiness, spread over her like the sky becoming uncannily clear after a devastating tornado. Red azaleas flooded the world in a fierce desire to make it bearable, livable, and possible again. Both Diana and I were heaving from what we had just witnessed and couldn’t say a word. It was the first time I had seen Diana Coman undone. Tears flowed down my face. Tears flowed down Diana’s face, the air in the room felt damp with sadness. And then Marija spoke: “All right, tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it. That’s all.”

Diana devised a plan. She knew people who knew people in Sarajevo at one of the adoption agencies. She also knew a couple of Bosnians in Washington who worked at the Bosnian rehabilitation center and who could give her invaluable information about the adoption of children who were born during and after the war. Apparently they were a special category, the “war children.” She was going to do all the paperwork as if it were all a regular adoption. But the woman who had raised the child needed to get involved, too, and to go along with the plan. Over the next few days Diana drafted papers and made phone calls while Marija was on the phone with people from Sarajevo, sometimes hiding in my study or in the bathroom to talk, not even letting me overhear the conversations. Sometimes her voice was shrill, sometimes plaintive and defeated. But always she kept on moving forward. There was no stopping Marija from getting what she wanted. Once I heard her talking to the woman who had the child, something about compensation. One evening I heard Marija cry on the phone, begging the woman to let her son talk to her. And then I heard her say in the sweetest Serbian, “I will see you soon, my love.” Still, she needed a location, so she could find the mystery woman.

Mark happened to be home from work the day the three of us were leaving on our Balkan adventure and he offered to take us to the airport. Despite all my expectations, Mark and Marija had developed a warm friendship during the weeks in our house starting with the evening of our mythic dinner. Brief and achy waves of jealousy went through my body occasionally. Mark’s idiosyncrasies started irritating me all over again like in the period preceding our divorce, while they didn’t seem to bother Marija a bit. I didn’t want to share Marija with Mark, or really with anyone other than Natalia. It seemed that love hardships and breakups had made me brittle instead of stronger. At the airport, Mark embraced and kissed Natalia tenderly and asked her to send him a postcard. He hugged Marija and wished her good luck with her search and then he turned to me and said “Good-bye, Lara,” as if it was adieu and forever. It melted all jealousy and revealed to me the puzzling paradox that I had been right both to marry Mark in the fall of 1992 and to divorce Mark twelve years later. I leaned over and hugged him with no regrets.

When Marija, Natalia, and I landed at the Sarajevo airport, Marija turned pure white and I thought she was going to drop dead the next second. She stood in the middle of the airport, her eyes closed and breathing very slowly. It wasn’t the shock of being on native land—she had visited Sarajevo a couple of times since the war. It was the weight of what was ahead of us. I observed as she breathed deeply, opened her eyes, and regained her color and her force.

Natalia seemed to be as much Marija’s daughter as she was mine. She understood Marija’s brief journeys to the edge of life and death, and would take her hand and hold it tight. Ferida waited for us at the airport with Mira. Ferida cried and hugged both of us effusively, a different Ferida from the controlled and almost aloof woman Natalia and I had met on our last trip. After I’d traveled back and forth out of American and French airports, the Sarajevo airport now seemed like a little toy version of one. The customs police were tired and old-fashioned, the security machines and checkpoints obsolete, the whole place unusually drab and nearly deserted.

We discovered that the woman had left her Sarajevo apartment right before we’d arrived and left no trace. She was supposed to call Marija as soon as she knew we were there, but this never happened, nor did she answer her phone in Sarajevo. Marija was growing more agitated, holding her nervousness under layers of maternal anticipation. Sarajevo shone and hummed that summer of our return with the enthusiasm of reconstruction and the pride of hosting international tourists. We moved through the city of our childhood like a colorful caravan of reckless refugees. To Marija and me, who hadn’t witnessed the processes of its reconstruction over the years, it seemed almost fake, a movie set, a bit too glossy, a bit too colorful. Tarik the copper vendor was still selling his shiny coffee- and teapots at the same corner, only his face was wrinkled and his hair white. We drank little cups of dark, grimy coffee at the café next door while talking with Tarik about the business and the reconstruction, and avoiding the topic of the war, which Marija refused to discuss. We drank our coffee, ordered a baklava, we smiled at each other and just said nothing. Somewhere in another life, two adventurous girls chased each other and a wild ray of magic all through those streets and sloping alleys, up and down cobblestone steps, in and out of hidden courtyards. They stopped at a street corner, ate their fruit spoils for the day, ran some more, brushed by rows of stone houses with red flowers hanging from their windows, and ended up in an enchanted courtyard crossed by a tiny gurgling stream and surrounded by fruit trees and pines.

Natalia, ecstatic, absorbed the sounds, smells, and sights of Sarajevo in the summer with the pride of recognition. She and Mira ran carefree ahead of us, still reminding me of myself, Marija, and Biljana at their age. But the reminiscing broke. Everybody in Marija’s family was dead. Marija’s face was reconstructed. Sarajevo had been blasted to smithereens and its soil swallowed ten thousand dead. The surrounding hills were crowded with orderly white tombs in new cemeteries, myriad white tentacles moving toward the sky in a pointless prayer. Yet here we all were. Ferida with her daughter, Mira, born in the midst of the war in a basement in the dark, Natalia born on the very same day, Marija desperately and yet lovingly searching for the child born out of the blob of darkness that befell her the fated July of 1995.

We were all staying in Ferida’s apartment, where she had given birth to Mira nine years earlier. The building, near the Howard Johnson hotel where the foreign journalists had been lodged during the war, was now renovated, but the bullet and shell marks remained, dotting the exterior, a sign of remembrance. Marija thought it was bullshit, that it all should have been renovated and covered up and made to look new and fresh. “People want to start over and go on living—if they survived, if they are still alive—why stick the painful memories under their noses every single day of their lives?” she would say. Ferida seemed to agree with her. “I don’t need to be reminded. I remember everything pretty damn well. This is for the tourists,” Ferida said, “so that they can look and shed a tear and take a photo on their cell phones; it’s to make the foreign tourists feel good about themselves.” Marija and Ferida both laughed heartily, but I failed to get their humor. I didn’t see how the tourists were made to feel good if they saw the bullet and shell marks on the sides of buildings in Sarajevo. “It’s like a sign of sympathy or something, to remember the ‘wretched’ war victims, it’s like the tourists who visit these faraway places such as Bosnia and see their war ruins are courageous and compassionate, you know what I mean? Maybe you’ve become too Americanized, Lara, and you can’t see these subtleties any longer,” said Marija.

Ferida served us some fruit and cakes from the kitchen. Mira and Natalia whispered in a corner of the room as if they had known each other since birth. Which in an indirect way they sort of did. Marija and Ferida and I laughed until Ferida stared at Marija and I realized it was only then she noticed the glass eye. She stopped short. “That’s right. When all of me is rotting in the ground my glass prosthetic organ will still be as good as new,” and she burst into a deep laugh. “They did a good job, didn’t they? A complete makeover, Hollywood-style.” Ferida confirmed that she had seen worse, that Marija was lucky. But I couldn’t understand the meaning of luck like that. Marija and Ferida continued to recount war stories like soldiers sitting by the fire. It was only then that I heard the full story of Mira’s birth in the basement of Ferida’s house. It seemed like the birth from hell, yet both Ferida and Marija were having the time of their lives remembering the details. They talked about their friend’s sculptures displayed in the basement, horrid and stunning at once, thin spiraling pieces of metal with recent bloodstains and multimedia materials wrapped around or hanging from the metal and giving the illusion of sad monsters. There were musicians with violins and guitars and one of them brought a keyboard while another one brought a tuba. Ferida had baked bread by putting together several rations of flour. They’d even salvaged some eggs, and vodka. “Somebody must have paid big money on the black market for those eggs,” said Ferida.

“And then the ad-hoc band started playing waltzes,” Marija reminisced. “Of all the choices they could have made, they decided to offer a medley of the best-known waltzes: Strauss, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich.” Marija became immersed in her own storytelling and I feared the new rush of her memories. “We danced as if our life depended on making those waltz steps in the crammed damp basement. Everybody was crying and dancing. Even my parents were dancing and my father played the flute.” Marija’s face was smooth as ever, almost too smooth; it took on a serene expression, like overly blue skies before a storm. “Even now I can’t believe you delivered my baby from the sheet of instructions that my husband had left for me in case he was on call at the hospital when the baby came, which with my luck it turned out he was,” said Ferida at a point of hilarity. Together they recounted the birthing instructions with peals of unrestrained laughter. I thought of my own luxurious labor and delivery of Natalia in a clean hospital room with Mark holding my hand and the nurse wiping my forehead. This, compared with Ferida’s adventurous and almost comical wartime labor and delivery, even more in stark contrast with the birth of Marija’s son somewhere in a dark house, in loneliness and in a semiconscious state. Yet it was this same visceral and primal experience that tied us. I finally was coming to understand Marija’s desperate search and yearning for her son.

The morning when Marija announced that this was the day we were going to fetch her son, we all ate our breakfast in silence. Mira and Natalia were talking about pop music stars in the conspiratorial tones they had adopted. Ferida was feverishly writing bits of a poem on a paper napkin all the while gulping toast with cheese and a hard-boiled egg and pastrami. Marija drank her coffee in silence and ate all the berries at the table before either of the girls had a chance to touch them. I had forgotten how Marija devoured fresh fruit. She looked radiant; she was wearing the turquoise pendant I had given her when we parted in Belgrade, which was now more than ten years ago.

“So what shall we do in town this morning?” I said, daring to break the silence.

“We’re not going into town,” said Marija.

“What do you mean? Where are we going?”

“To Semizovac, that’s where.”

Semizovac, near Srebrenica, where Marija’s family had lived and where they had returned upon Marija’s suggestion and where they had been killed and where all the unimaginable rest had happened. My mouth literally hung open and Ferida’s eyes were wide with disbelief.

“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s all fine, I’ll be fine,” she repeated. “I’m made of steel, didn’t you know? And five percent glass.” Marija laughed one of her laughs. Natalia looked up and stared at her with the same fascination she always had for her.

“We are going to the place in the picture, Lara,” Marija said sternly.

“That’s where they’ve been living all along?” Ferida asked.

“Off and on,” Marija said in a relaxed manner. “That was where they were when the photo was taken. Then she moved to Sarajevo for a while. And now they moved back and forth to the countryside. I went back to her house in Sarajevo and she had instructed a neighbor to give me information about her whereabouts. She had left a note with a different phone number and her new address. Apparently she’d been receiving threatening phone calls, too. Welcome home, right? And she wants the money, of course.”

I bombarded Marija with questions. “Wasn’t this all prepared and set in the adoption process? Why didn’t they give you the information at the adoption agency?”

“Oh, Lara, you’ve become so American. All the legal procedures in America don’t count for much of anything over here. Have you forgotten where you’ve left? It’s her right to have the money. I don’t care about it, she could have left my little boy in the street, right, but she didn’t.” There was no arguing with Marija. On this day when she would claim her son, her face was perfectly made up and her hair flowed in black luscious waves as always. We would drive in Ferida’s eight-seater van. Marija told us she wanted everybody to be together, we were on a pilgrimage of sorts. In preparation for our trip, she put a big stack of cash in her white patent-leather purse next to the dainty gun.

But it wasn’t enough, Marija said. She still needed more money to compensate the woman. The five grand in her purse wasn’t enough. “We’ll get it somehow,” she said nonchalantly. “Today. Anything can happen, you know, I need to get there as soon as possible.” And then worry about her son spread over Marija’s face like a translucent spider’s web, making her look unreal in the morning sun that streamed through the apartment’s windows. I knew right then and there that Marija would rather die ten times before she would let go of that mystery son of hers. Ferida and I had no choice but follow every single one of her wishes. Even if she had never explained what might possibly happen within these next few hours or a day, and why she was in such a mad hurry.

“Look,” Marija started in an unexpectedly serious tone as if about to reveal an important secret. “This boy is one of those kids who around here are called ‘the rape babies’ and everybody knows it. In America they call them with a nicer, more dramatic name, they are ‘the war babies,’ but here they call them for what they are: children born out of mass rapes. Many of them were taken by the state and put in seedy orphanages like the one in Zenica up north of Sarajevo. Others were taken to Serbia by their Serbian fathers or by those who thought they might have fathered them during the rapes. This woman, for whatever her faults may be, took care of my son when I abandoned him like hundreds of other wretched women did in those days. Only she didn’t abandon him, nor did she give him up to some orphanage. She was even able to get a fake birth certificate for him, stating it was actually her child. And do you realize what this meant? It meant she was probably thought of as a victim of rape, too, which she never was. She was willing to take on that stigma just to save my life and the life of my son.”

Marija stopped to light a cigarette, which I hadn’t seen her do in weeks. She reminded me of the Marija of our university years. Mira and Natalia stared at us from their corner of the room cuddled into one another amid the Turkish cushions as if to find refuge from our conversation. The talk of rapes and “rape babies” seemed to have brushed by their girlish faces and left them darkened with premature aging. Ferida, though, looked at me and waved her hand, after which she said casually: “She’s heard it all, don’t worry.” I calmed down thinking that Natalia, too, had sort of heard it all, or at least read it all. I had no idea by now whether that was good or bad, it was how it was. An ambulance siren sliced the silence. Marija’s smoke filled the room.

“Why did this woman become so wrapped up in you and this child, Marija?” I ventured. Marija sat unmoving, without blinking, as if she hadn’t heard my question. She continued to smoke and for a second I had the uncanny feeling that nothing had happened at all. That we were all young and no wars had swept over us.

“Remember the girl whose life I told you I saved by killing the bastard who was trying to rape her?” Marija said without flinching.

“Yes, I do. Does this girl have to do with something?”

“She is this woman’s daughter, that’s what she has to do. We were all neighbors, and the daughter happened to be near our house that morning. After I killed the soldier, she managed to run home and told her mother about it. The mother took her to her sister’s house at the other end of the town and from there they escaped to Sarajevo. That evening, once it grew dark, the woman came back looking for me and found me in a pool of blood in our front yard. At first she thought I was dead, but it turned out I wasn’t. You know the rest.”

After Hollywood, the Wild West, the three days and nights in the sound of Marija’s epic sobs in the log cabin in Colorado, very little could still shock or even surprise me in Marija’s continuously unfolding story.

“So she has this undying gratitude for me because I saved her daughter,” Marija continued. “She promised she would do everything to save me. When I had the baby she vowed to keep him, even though she’d been left dirt-poor after the war. And she did keep my child. Just like she dragged me from house to house during those days trying to hide me and my bleeding self. She sang bloody Serbian songs and pretended to be Serbian for my sake. Her husband and son had all been killed during those sunny July days and she hasn’t found their bones yet to bury. Like I said, killing the soldier was the best thing and the worst thing I had ever done.”

Then she smiled to herself the saddest smile I had ever seen. One life had ransomed another, and for that, sometimes it paid to kill someone. It was like the Wild West, only it was happening now in our little drab corner of the Balkans.

“It seems like the fuss we’ve made with the adoption papers, and the fuss I’ve made with that stupid search for Karadzic, were a mistake. The woman says some Serbian authorities and some Serbian thugs, which really is pretty much the same thing, found out about the boy.”

“I get it.” Ferida, no stranger to postwar mystery, now understood. “It’s possible they could actually take him to Serbia, like they’ve done with others of these ‘lucky’ rape babies.”

“It’s very possible,” said Marija in a calm voice. “The woman told me there had been a bunch of Serbian guys stalking her apartment in Sarajevo, and then there were the phone calls. With me coming and going back and forth to Sarajevo and visiting her over the past couple of years, somebody must have guessed it’s my child. You know, many of the soldiers who raped us are still around, some were Bosnian Serbs and some were our neighbors. Some are still on the prowl looking for the children they engendered or even for their mothers, to punish them for having reported the rapes to the state. We are still not safe, you know, all the glitter and shimmer and color and tourists you see in the historic Sarajevo—it’s only one side of it.” Marija wanted to make sure I understood that and held no illusions about our dear Sarajevo, nostalgic as we might have been for its prewar beauty and vibrancy. “There is still a silent, invisible war going on. At least for some of us. I need both of you on this trip. I need you to help me get this money today and get my son. Today. I have an intuition and I have to follow it like it’s now or never. It has to be now.”

Marija spoke in a detached way, like a lawyer or a politician. Her tragedy had not destroyed her. She had all the poise and logic needed for the hardest tasks, including an “invisible war.” She survived and emerged shinier and stronger. I was ready for everything next to her. The morning light burst into Ferida’s apartment in dazzling shards that blinded me for a second. I knew that something new was going to start in my life like never before.

We climbed into Ferida’s eight-seater van and flew around Sarajevo all morning and afternoon collecting the necessary funds. Marija, Ferida, and I managed to gather the necessary ten thousand dollars in cash. We went to every friend and source we knew in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and the United States. Biljana and Mark sent money through Western Union, while Ferida and Marija, who looked like burglars on the run, gathered bundles of cash in canvas shopping bags. It felt like a mafia movie, one about desperate women trying to recover a child conceived out of war and violence who was still not safe from war and violence. Sarajevo was ablaze that day, alive in the dazzling colors I remembered from my childhood. The utopian city of my youth had again come to life in our mad race for money to recompense the woman who had saved Marija’s life and her son’s. I asked Marija again why this nameless woman wanted money, anyway, if Marija had already saved her daughter’s life. “Money helps,” she said. “I owe her that, ten times this much. This way I know she’ll be set for life.”

We got out of the van and walked through the city. The silks shimmered on the vendor’s street counters; the coppers glowed with wicked reddish tints in the sparkling light. It now seemed partly unreal, and dark shadows of what Marija had called “the invisible war” seemed to move through the crowds and behind the luscious silks. I started looking behind me, worried that we might be followed. Men who seemed or sounded Serbian scared me now more than ever. Marija on the other hand, once in action, acted and looked as if she was living the adventure of her life. She was girlish one minute, stern the next, a dazzling bundle of contradictions as always. Marija joked that she and Ferida had robbed a bank. Marija compared us to Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, then to Bonnie and Clyde, and I wondered whether it was maybe her uncanny reliance on movies and Hollywood that had given her the strength to survive the most outrageous blows of fortune. I had never thought of Hollywood as therapy for traumatized people, but maybe that made sense. Everything was possible in times of war or peace when you were Marija, I thought, as we counted and stashed the bundles of fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills.

By the end of the afternoon, we got back on the road with our bundles of money, all wrapped with elastic bands and stuffed in Marija’s backpack. Marija insisted on driving the van this time, saying it relaxed her to be at the wheel. I sat next to her, and the two girls were in the back with Ferida. At first, when we left Sarajevo, it felt like an exciting adventure, some kind of a road trip with laughter and bubbly conversations back and forth between the two of us in the front and the girls and Ferida in the back. It was after we got onto the winding roads out of Sarajevo and began to head toward Semizovac that Marija became a menace. She sang Serbian songs in a deep low voice, like a cabaret singer. It made my skin crawl to hear her sing like that and made me want to get far away from that person I loved so much and yet who chilled the blood in my veins with her macabre whims and her roller coaster of mood swings and the heaviness of her past. She had told me once when we were in the Washington, DC, duplex that having gone through what she had turned her into something of a repulsive monster and that once they found out her story, most people wanted to run away from her, fearing they might be contaminated by her black destiny. “That’s why I don’t want to tell my fucking bloody story to anyone,” she’d said, laughing. Marija started passing every car in sight like a race car driver on the winding serpentine roads leading to the dreaded village. The girls in the back were squealing like they were on an amusement park roller coaster, while Ferida and I exchanged worried glances.

It was still afternoon and the sun was blazing like an angry blob of lava above our racing van. I realized it was a sunny day in July. Maybe the memory of another sunny day in July was scorching Marija’s psyche. She gave the finger to a truck driver that she passed, then she rolled down her window and spat out her gum while her hair rose wildly in the 120-kilometer-an-hour speed. We were on a mad race to hell and Marija was our doom and our salvation at once, a goddess of death and life, with the face of a statue. Drivers stuck their arms out of their car windows and made obscene gestures at us, people stared at us from in front of their houses as we passed them by raising clouds of dust. They raised their fists at us and promised revenge. Marija got all the more excited. She turned on the radio and blasted a rock station one minute and sang at the top of her lungs the next. She sang those Serbian songs again and again. It seemed so wrong. Like so much else on that ride. “Why am I singing Serbian songs, right? Why am I singing the songs of the motherfuckers who crushed us Bosnians and killed my family and raped and maimed me? Right, that’s what you are wondering?” I was praying that the girls in the back couldn’t hear her. When I looked back at them, they were cuddled into one another, holding hands, terror on their pale faces. The raw truth pulsated like an angry viper in the stuffy air of the van. “Open the windows for God’s sake,” I yelled, “open the fucking windows, Marija.” Marija did nothing of the sort, though Ferida opened the window on her side. “It’s because of the woman from Semizovac,” Marija stated. “She kept singing the bloody Serbian sentimental songs over and over again while she transported my shredded self in her rattling car. One night when she went delirious I got it why she was singing those songs, and I picked up on her delirium so I started singing, too. These had been our songs after all, too, hadn’t they, in the good old days of Tito and ‘mother’ Yugoslavia we all spoke the same fucking Serbian language and sang the same stupid drinking songs. We had just as much right to the goddamn hills and fields and the language and the songs.”

As we approached Semizovac, Marija drove the van right into a ditch. We scared a few cows that were grazing in the field and a bunch of kids playing by the side of the road. The girls started crying that they wanted to go home, they both had bruises on their arms and knees. Ferida’s nose was bleeding and I had a bump the size of a walnut on my head from banging it into the door. Only Marija came out unscathed and looking like a mythical Fury, with her hair disheveled and flying out in all directions, an expression of rage on her face that chilled my blood. We left the car in the ditch and walked by the side of the road like a caravan of doleful refugees in our own country. I thought Marija was finally having the breakdown to end all breakdowns, the one that Sally had warned against, when her past would come rushing in like the biblical flood sweeping everything in its passage and leaving only devastation and corpses behind. The sun was setting and the air was getting chillier. A mixture of beauty and ominous silence spread around us as we walked through the countryside. The hills surrounding us pulsated with rotting bodies. No one spoke. We entered the village and Marija stopped in front of a larger stone house painted in light pink: Chez Sonia. She stood in front of it and began laughing hysterically. Ferida whispered to me that the place had been turned into a rape hotel during the war. We tried to drag Marija away from the site but she wouldn’t budge. She just stood there laughing. Laughing, I now understood, was Marija’s way of sobbing the bitterest tears in the universe. Then she opened her purse, the patent-leather white purse that carried her pistol, and she shot at the walls and the windows of Chez Sonia hotel three times. The sound of shattered glass reverberated through the heated air. She put back the pistol as if she had just taken out a Kleenex to wipe her nose. Some people came running toward us and we stood in front of Marija trying to protect her. But Marija became composed and sweet, smiling at the people and asking them if they had heard any shootings. The people looked as puzzled as we did. Marija changed the subject and asked them if they could direct us to the address where the woman lived. There was a sudden silence that seemed to envelop everything and I stopped hearing what Marija or anybody else said for a few moments. It was not as if I had gone deaf, but as if the world itself had become deafeningly quiet. Then it all erupted again with brutal loudness: the voices, the cars on the road, the airplanes, the motorcycles. “It’s past the tracks, straight up the road, then there is a dead end and the house is right there,” was all I heard. “Past the tracks, past the tracks,” something important was always “past the tracks” or “past the corner,” and always there was a “dead end,” I thought. I had had enough of that movie. I didn’t want a dead end, but a new beginning. When I looked at Natalia, she took my hand. I wanted to ask her forgiveness for everything—for the way her father and I ended up, for having brought her into a horrendous world, for belonging to a brutal country. But she didn’t need my apologies. She already understood. She was happy to hold my hand.

We walked for another full hour, much longer than the kind people who had given us the directions told us it would be. It was sunset by the time we arrived at the small stone house. There was the well in the middle of the front yard, just like in the photograph. A creepy feeling spread all over me. The girls were intrigued by the sight of the well in the middle of the yard, where there was also a flower and vegetable garden. The haunting nightmares that I had in the LA hotel room rushed back and all I could see and think of were bodies of Bosnians rotting inside the well. I reached out toward Natalia and Mira and tried to stop them from getting too close to the well, and just then there was a sharp scream that sounded almost playful. A tiny round-faced blond boy emerged from the side door of the house and behind him stood a middle-aged woman wiping her hands on her apron, her hair held back with a yellow scarf. The boy was no three-headed monster but an angelic malnourished golden-haired boy taken by surprise by the visit of strangers. He was an older version of the boy in the picture, but more beautiful and wrenchingly alive. His watery blue eyes sparkled in innocent amazement. For a few moments the air was motionless and clear, and there were no sorrows, no regrets, and no floating sadness. Everything stood still in suspension. Then I looked at Marija, and that was when life burst in. She was the old Marija, except that she was moving very slowly. Her hair shone in the dying light with sparkles of bluish black. In slow motion, she moved toward the boy whose name I didn’t know. Why did he have to be so blond and so terribly blue-eyed? I looked toward Ferida for an answer. But she was standing a few steps behind me in a state of stupor. Marija picked up her son and started laughing with her million-dollar laughter.

Two unhinged corners of my soul suddenly came together. Something shifted back into its place. I saw Marija and me dancing a slow dance over meadows and cities. I saw us gliding through the white snows of the Sarajevo winters and running through the apricot orchards of summer. It had been her all along, the one I had been waiting for. The long journey strewn with war and divorce, of misguided searching and incomprehensible suffering, could only take me back to her. I understood all of her tears when we hugged that final day in her apartment on the day the war started. I rewound our phone conversations from the Sarajevo bomb shelter to my duplex on Connecticut Avenue. My own unexplained longing and the nagging sense of something amiss all throughout my years in Washington, throughout my marriage to Mark, and even when I’d numbed myself into oblivion with Parisian love. The love for Marija had been there all along. At this most incongruous moment the worst and the best of life was gathered in one gleaming image in a Bosnian village. And Marija knew it at the same split second that I did. She turned to me, smiled her most radiant smile. “His name is Marijo, imagine that!” she said, and stretched out her hand beckoning for me to join them. Natalia came over to complete the circle and for the first time ever it felt like a real family. As I looked up and saw the woman who had raised Marijo wipe her hands again on her apron, the gesture triggered another afternoon in Sarajevo. On that drizzly November afternoon last year, I had brushed by Marija’s son and this same mysterious woman without having any idea of who they were. The woman in the run-down house in the unreconstructed neighborhood of Sarajevo, the one who had handed me Marija’s stories and notes! “Just some woman,” Marija had told me when I’d asked about her identity when we first met in LA.

As everything stood poised in perfect harmony and the light of the setting sun quivered in delicate pastels, Marija said: “Good-bye, Lara dear, for now. I’ll need to stay in Sarajevo for a while longer. I have to close all my accounts here with this wretched country before I leave for good. I’m here now, and no one can hurt my boy. He’s safe. I’ll stay with Ferida. Marijo and I will come to your America soon enough. Our America, I should say. I will get to know Marijo first in his world, and then we’ll make the huge leap to America. We’re a family, you and I, Natalia, all of us, what the hell. It won’t be long.” I stood motionless staring at Marija holding her son in her arms, the angelic boy who looked nothing like her. “What about us, Marija?” I said, without thinking. She laughed, I cried. Marijo the blond son laughed, too, a reverberation of his mother. The last sun rays flickered, leaving us and the garden and the well with sparkling water in the grayish light before complete darkness began to set in. Dusk was rushing on silvery wings and enveloping us. The idea of another separation from Marija weighed on me, and I had to sit down on the wooden bench in front of the house. I was surrounded by the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle. Marija put down her glowing golden son with exquisite gentleness, sat beside me, and embraced me. Her long eyelashes fluttered against my tear-soaked cheeks, just like they had when we embraced under the ponderosa pines in the Wild West. “We are home, Lara dear. We’ll always have each other and Paris be damned!”

She laughed her beautiful laugh. The sound of my name in her silky voice sparkled. I stood up from the bench, ready for our adventure even as tears streamed down our cheeks. Marija’s lunar sadness glided from her face onto mine. I was being bathed in the fluid sadness that had belonged to Marija for so long. Marija, my one and only love. I was going back to our America, and together we would be in a place where cacti bloomed out of orange dunes and red azaleas hung from the windows of adobe houses.