IT BEGINS HERE. IN THE CITY OF SARAJEVO, BOSNIA, ON a bitter November day in 1993. A city where minarets and steeples once shared the skyline; where men drinking cardamom-scented coffee from brass cups argued and sang into the night. In 1984, Olympic athletes skied down the slopes of Mount Igman to the cheers of the world. Only nine years later, the abandoned bobsled track overflows with stockpiles of Serbian artillery. The mosques are rubble. Petals of collapsed concrete, blown apart by shell after shell, pock the streets—gaping wounds that will be filled with scarlet resin when the bombings end. Sarajevo Roses, they will call them. To commemorate the dead.
A nondescript gray cinderblock apartment complex looms above the bombed-out buildings on the west side of the Miljacka River. Imagine yourself there, picking your way across the debris to building number 4, carefully, slowly, while sirens wail around you. When you’re close enough to touch the walls, wipe a circle in the dust that covers the ground-floor window on the left.
Look inside.
At first, you won’t see any signs of life. But don’t turn away. Look closer. In the back corner of the darkened room, a three-year-old girl lies on the dirty floor under a cot. She stares at a diamond pattern of rusted bedsprings above her head. Tufts of ticking from rips in the mattress hover over her like the clouds above the hills that ring the city. The scent of cabbage and garlic rises from the pot that’s been simmering on the hot plate for hours.
Her six-year-old brother huddles against her, pressing his sweaty hands over her ears to dull the sound of exploding concrete. Close your eyes, he says. But she’s too frightened. Without shifting, she moves her head as much as she can until she sees the wedge of floor beneath the kitchen counter. Shards of glass and piles of concrete on green tile. Dust motes swirl in a gash of daylight streaming from a new hole in the front wall. The round yellow rug, covered in soot; her stick horse crosswise atop it, one glazed button eye peering out from a pile of shattered brick. And, from the corner of her field of vision, a pale hand, motionless amid the debris. A hand whose wrist sports the brown sleeve of her mother’s dress—the dress the girl helped fold that very morning, warm and sun-sweet from the clothesline in the back.
A giant boot steps between the girl and the hand, then more boots. Two male voices whisper. It’s not a language she’s used to hearing in their home. Her brother covers her mouth now instead of her ears—keep quiet, keep still, his gestures tell her. He’s always trying to shush her! She wrests herself away.
The whispering stops. Suddenly a man’s head appears, blond hair and beard, smears of dirt across his face, startling blue eyes.
“Shit!” he says. The girl recognizes this word: she’s heard men shouting it from the trucks that rumble back and forth on the street outside their apartment. It’s a word about things you don’t want.
Another man, who looks like the first one but with no beard, appears. His eyes are kinder.
The bearded one shakes his head. “Vlado never said there were kids.”
Vlado. This is the name of the tall man who’s been sleeping next to her mother on the cot every night since he brought them out of the camp. The rest of the bearded man’s words sound like nonsense to her. But she knows Vlado. She yells: “Vlado! Poznajem ga!” despite her brother’s agonized hisses of “Ne! Ne!”
The bearded man’s thick hands slide under the cot toward her. His fingernails are split and caked with grime. Her brother pulls her back toward the wall, trying as hard as he can to make them both disappear. The girl feels the man’s hands grab her ankles. She tightens her grip on her brother’s narrow shoulders. She’ll be ripped in two, she thinks. Then another blast screams from outside. The apartment tilts again. The girl shuts her eyes, and the world closes in.
She lets go.
________
Yes, that girl was me. But she doesn’t exist anymore, other than in the nightmare that still shakes me from my sleep. Is it true? Or is it a twisted, truncated dream version of events I’ve been told about over and over again by my adopted family: the story of how Paul and Antonia came to America, rescued by two brave brothers from Thebes, Minnesota, working as contractors in Sarajevo when the siege began?
Christopher, the one with the beard, told us to forget everything that happened in Bosnia. That our arrival in Thebes was the beginning of our real lives.
Eddie, the one with the kind eyes, told us nothing.
Before we even learned to call him Dad, Edward King was gone.