Chapter 21

I walk through the sand and feel it rise up around my steps. Aska’s tale was a lost song, a sevdalinka . When she finished, I got up like a robot and left the room.

As she spoke she looked at the white curtain swelling in the window. She didn’t shed a tear. Far from its genesis, atrocity is reduced to ash on the wind. The smell of her house remained, the smell of the small peace she’d won for herself.

When her daughter called her, she moved her head abruptly. She’d never regained the hearing in her right ear. There’s a constant noise in it like the sea dragging over rocks. She smiled and called it the ear of History .

I walk. I’d like to trip and fall, but I don’t. I’d like to lie down on the sand, embrace it and thank someone, something—a passing insect, the infinite path of all lives.

 

I squint against the light and see my son jumping and sparring with the waves. The child is struggling against the young man and begging to be allowed to play for one more day.

He comes out of the sea and throws himself onto the sand. Then he gets back up and runs again toward the waves.

“How’s the water?” I yell.

“It’s even better than Sardinia!”

He asks me to take a few pictures with his cell phone. He wants to show the turquoise sea to his friends. They’ll be so jealous , he says.

He stands with his hands on his hips and smiles, his nose crinkled, his eyes buried in the folds that shield them from the sun.

I wade in up to my knees and take his picture as he jumps. His body in the air, splashes of white foam.

He throws himself back down onto his towel. His curls are full of sand. He turns and says, “Mom, do you have a Band-Aid? I hurt my foot.”

I rummage frantically through my purse. The wind blows my hair in my eyes. I open my wallet and find the Band-Aid I always carry around, stuck between bits of paper.

I carry it for him because he’s always hurting himself. It’s an old habit, as old as our habit of being mother and son, of walking along side by side.

Pietro waits, his eyes following my messy gestures. When I find the Band-Aid it feels like I’ve found who knows what treasure. He smiles, too, and sticks out his sandy foot. He stubbed his toe against a rock. It’s bleeding and there’s a piece of nail hanging off.

“Go rinse it off.”

He doesn’t want to get up. It really hurts.

I lower my head and suck up the blood and sand in my mouth. Then I dry his foot with a corner of my skirt.

The Band-Aid doesn’t stick very well because his toe is still a little damp, and I can’t really see what I’m doing because I don’t know where my glasses are. But Pietro doesn’t complain. He even says, Thank you .

 

Who are you? How many times will I ask myself that question? How many times will I look at you with suspicion? You laugh like Diego used to laugh, like boys laugh. You’re at once foolish and intelligent, harmless and dangerous. You’re one of millions of possibilities. A boy from the year 2008, born in Sarajevo at the end of December 1992. You’re one of the first children of the ethnic rapes.

I see his back rise and fall as he breathes.

He’s lying on one side, motionless as a boat pulled up on the beach, his bony butt inside his Australian surfer trunks. He turns. I see his broken tooth and his too-thin cheeks.

How many parts are there in a body? The fold where an ear attaches and hangs. The shape of a fist. An eye with its moving lashes. The knee bone. Little hairs like faded grass.

I look at the pieces of my son. The truth is that maybe I’ve always known. And I’ve never wanted to know it. You’re free , I could tell him. You’re not his son. You’re the son of a bunch of devils drunk on hate .

He hops along on one foot and leans on me for support.

“You know I can’t hold you up all the way.”

“Yes, you can.”

I recognize things here and there. The fish shop with its plastic curtain to keep out the flies looks just like it did all those years ago. So does the wild geranium bush as tall as a tree.

Pietro said, I want to go there. I want to see where Dad died . All of a sudden he’s calling him Dad . It all seems so absurd.

I follow along behind this lie. Pietro climbs in silence.

Aska pointed the spot out to me. It’s easy. It’s the only big rock that looks like the head of a dinosaur with its mouth open. Diego climbed into that mouth.

Aska said, He was coming back to you. He was ready.

Then he started to climb.

It was just before sunset and the light was right, the light from all his best photos.

Pietro is faster than me and he’s already reached the top. He looks around.

“Be careful!”

I’m scared, so scared.

“There’s nothing up here!” he yells.

When I catch up to him, he says softly, “Mom, there’s nothing here.”

What was he expecting? A gravestone? A sanctuary? A camera buried in the rocks?

I’m sweaty and old and he’s as young as one of these flying seagulls. We sit down and watch the sea, which looks truly infinite. Pietro rests a protective hand on my shoulder for perhaps the first time in our life together. Then he shoves something into my hand. My chin trembles.

“The wrapping kind of sucks,” he says.

I unwrap the crumpled red paper he’s been carrying in his pocket since who knows when, since that night beside the fountain. It’s a pin, the silver filigree rose from the window display in the Baščaršija.

“Do you like it?”

“ Yes.”

“I knew you would.”

He gets up to rummage around in the brushwood and comes back with a couple of sticks. He makes a cross and tries to hold it together with a few pieces of grass but it falls apart. So he takes his bandanna out of his pocket and ties it around the sticks. Then he plants this cross in the ground.

“How long will it last?”

It’s so windy up here ...

Pietro hands me his phone and asks me to take his picture beside the cross.

We talk awhile longer.

“Mom, what do you think I should do when I grow up?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You like to play your guitar. Maybe you’ll become a musician.”

He says he’d like to open a chain of seven-star hotels. He’ll design the biggest suite in the world, with an eighteen-hole golf course.

Then he looks at me.

“I know why Dad climbed up here.”

He points at the sea.

“You can see Italy.”

He smiles.

“He missed us, Mom.”

 

Aska’s standing beneath the trellis. She doesn’t dare come closer. She’s washed her hair and now it’s drying in the sun. I saw her move around as she set the table and bent to pick up one of her daughter’s toys. A woman like me.

Now she’s watching us come toward her.

In the countryside many women killed these children. Mothers helped their daughters get rid of them. Gentle women became desperate killers. It was only after Aska’s daughter was born—when her body opened up for the second time and she and Gojko held on to each other and cried for hours—that she went to a center for women lacerated by the war. Only then did she feel hatred detaching itself from her like the useless sac of a spent placenta.

Aska’s eyes are on the ground. She brushes her damp hair back with one hand.

She repeats the gesture as we near her. I see her face crumple, see her mouth open and close.

Pietro is busy with his cell phone. I pat him on the shoulder.

“This is Aska. Gojko’s wife.”

He raises his indigo eyes and smiles and extends a hand.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Pietro.”

Aska holds his hand. She isn’t able to let go of it.

So Pietro leans forward and kisses Aska on each cheek. And she opens her arms wide and hugs him.

I watch as this circle closes.

She turns and says she has to get the glasses.

I find her leaning against the wall in the kitchen. She’s crying, motionless. She smiles when she sees me.

She’s holding one hand pressed tight over her mouth and nose. She’s breathing into this hand.

Gojko moves toward her and enfolds her in his noisy body.

They were friends for a long time before they became a couple.

They went to the movies together and chatted in cafés about the films they’d seen and about other stupid things. It was easy not to talk about the rest of it. They already knew everything. The silence spoke for them and served in a way as a balm.

Gojko busies himself at the grill as the sea breeze rises. We eat fish with charred skin that falls away like bark to reveal aromatic white flesh, damp with flavor. Tonight we’re eating sea.

Pietro asks me if he can have a little wine. Gojko fills his glass before I have a chance to say yes. Pietro laughs and says, I’d be glad to never leave .

Aska observes him. She consumed her meal slowly, like a serving woman or a nun, and never stopped looking at Pietro, though she barely raised her eyes. She kept them on the glasses, on the plates, on her life, almost as if she were worried she’d disturb mine.

Maybe she’s ashamed. Shame persecuted her for years. These may be its dying breaths. She looks lost, like an intruder, like a thief.

It’s a small sorrow in this sweet evening, but there’s nothing I can do about it. We all carry it within us. Fighting losing battles is the soul’s foolish agonism.

The wind keeps blowing on the embers that look the whole time as if they were about to go out but never do. Pietro talks with Sebina. They write words together on the paper tablecloth and play with the bread.

Gojko joins their game. He asks, What is the most beautiful word in the world?

Sebina says, Sea .

Pietro is undecided between freedom and tennis .

The sky is full of stars, the usual stars, the near ones and the far ones. The stars that make us surrender.

Gojko’s eyes are those of a vanquished warrior, of a drunken poet. He looks at Pietro and says, “For me, the most beautiful words in the world are thank you .”

He raises his glass, clinks it against the bottle, then raises it to the sky, toward a star, and says, “Thank you.”

Tonight, evil is dead.

 

Aska and I say goodbye on the dock like friends who’ll see each other again. Pietro and I are wearing flip-flops and backpacks like tourists. Bodies move around us. Who could imagine a story like ours mixed in with all this random flesh saying farewell at dawn? The sea is silent, busy digesting a last bit of night.

Gojko drives us back. The return voyage is incredibly brief. At the Sarajevo Airport we lean up against the horseshoe-shaped bar among all the smokers to have a last coffee together.

“Now what will you do?”

“The Sarajevo Film Festival starts in two weeks. Kevin Spacey’s coming this year. Maybe I’ll take him around. I can show him where the snipers stood when they shot at us, give him the war tour .”

He laughs and then he’s sad. He’s like Pietro.

I have to go because they’re calling our flight, because we’ve been sad and happy too many times. I punch my Gojko on the shoulder. He nods, like a big beast, like a boar.

We mustn’t cry. That’s the deal. I feel his rough beard against my face.

We’re sea that ebbs and flows. Will there be another time?

I tear off the last bit of smell, of this Bosnia, this love.

 

On the plane Pietro says that takeoff is the worst part. The plane could crash, the engines are stretched to the limit. He’s nervous. He sticks his chewing gum beneath the tray table. Business as usual.

I’m wearing my sunglasses. I nod in silence and think, Calm down, son. You’re never quiet. You’re never still. How much life is there in your body?

Mount Igman is small, like a cat’s back. The houses are small, too, like Monopoly houses.

After a while Pietro dozes off with his head against the window and one leg tucked under him on the seat. All his thoughts and boyish chaos are at rest. Clouds discolored by the rays of the setting sun move by.

I look out at the wing of the plane. It doesn’t seem to be moving, just like always. I think about my father. Maybe Diego told him his secret back in the seaside garage. Maybe Armando knew all along and kept it to himself. He died two years ago. We were on the way to a checkup for his pacemaker. I double-parked in front of the supermarket so I could run in and pick up a few things. I was in a rush, as usual. I left the keys with him. Move the car if someone honks their horn . When I came out with the bags of groceries, there were horns honking all over the place and Dad was sitting right there where I’d left him, his head bent forward. I dropped the bags on the ground. My arms were numb. It was surreal. People kept swearing at me because I was double-parked. I had to wait for the police to come before I could move the car. It was raining. I sat behind the fogged windows next to my father’s body in this city without patience.

 

There’s the airport below us with its lights and lines of planes waiting to take off. When we land Pietro walks up the aisle with long happy strides. We’re back in the city where he grew up, the city he roams around on his scooter.

He looks at me. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m out of it.”

“Dad’s right. You should take papaya supplements.”

Roman air. A sea breeze. On the shuttle Pietro turns his cell phone back on and looks at his messages. I glance over at the screen and see the picture of Danka’s pierced belly button.

 

Giuliano’s waiting for us alongside the drivers holding up pieces of paper with names. He gives an excited little start when he sees us. He hugs Pietro. He holds him a long time and breathes in his smell.

“Hi, Pietro.”

“Hi, Dad.”

He’s shyer with me, the way my father was. He gives me a kiss and avoids meeting my eyes. He glances toward me repeatedly as he gets our bags. He’s wondering what kind of mood I’m in.

“Everything all right?”

“Everything’s all right.”

Now that we’re back he’s in a hurry. He wants to leave the airport, get away from this place where people say goodbye to each other.

“What about you? Did you eat out every night?”

“Have you come back angry?”

I smile. We know each other so well.

The first time he came in civilian clothes to take me out to dinner, we ran out of gas on the ring road around Rome. It was freezing cold. There were no cars, just a truck every now and then. I’m sorry. This is always taken care of at work. We set off on foot, hugging the guardrail. The headlights shone right in our faces. Giuliano spread his arms. Follow me . Later I discovered that there was practically nothing in his life outside of his work. He lived in an anonymous apartment in what was basically a residential hotel. I remember a bunch of forks and spoons that were still in their boxes. I rinsed them for him and put them away in the drawer. There’s always been something a little ridiculous about the two of us together. I think that’s what makes us such a good couple. Life is a hole that slides into another hole and, oddly enough, fills it up.

 

In the car Pietro talks incessantly about everything he’s seen. He remembers names and dates. He speaks with Gojko’s words. Europe didn’t lift a finger. They only arrested Karadžić now because they made a deal.

He’s sitting in the back but he keeps sticking his head up between us. He pats Giuliano’s shoulder and shows him the pictures he took with his cell phone. He skips over the one on the cliff. I’m just as calm as that cross on the rock, it seems.

 

Giuliano turns the key in the lock. The door opens. The light goes on. There are our books, our couch.

Pietro watches tennis on TV. I take off my makeup and throw the dirty cotton ball in the garbage. I check that the kitchen gas is switched off and turn off the lights. There’s nothing in the refrigerator, just the things I left, a limp head of lettuce and a couple of yogurts.

I go out onto the balcony and lean against the railing. Giuliano comes out to join me. He lays a hand on mine. We look at the bar down below and the kids leaning against their microcars.

“What did you do today?”

They moved at dawn to dismantle an unauthorized encampment of human refuse from Eastern Europe.

It’s how he’ll spend the entire summer. Depressing work. He increasingly dislikes this world where gypsy children’s fingerprints are taken and put on file.

 

I tell him everything. Giuliano listens, his arms folded, military-style. His throat moves as he swallows. He’s the one who drags me to Pietro’s room. He needs to see him, to see the rise and fall of his breathing.

The door is closed and the DO NOT DISTURB sign is hanging from the knob. We go in anyway. The Chetnik is sleeping on his extendable IKEA bed that can’t be extended anymore. His guitar lies on the ground beside his cell phone and his crumpled jeans. Giuliano crouches down and lingers with his nose against the nape of Pietro’s neck. Like the last dog, the last father. He picks up the guitar and leans it against the wall, plugs the phone in so it can recharge, picks up and folds the jeans. He moves around the room. So do I. I watch us as this circle closes. Circles of us together.