Creative Cardinal #5

Death on the Drina

Gorazde, Bosnia. May 22, 1992

Her eyes were swollen and his hands tried to cover them but the whites just seemed to bulge out around his fingers. My mind told me that it wasn’t possible, that it was just a trick of the light because his hands were shaking so hard. That didn’t change the fact that it looked like the eyeballs could explode. So white. I didn’t even know eyes could look that way. Empty. Whitewhitewhite.

This is my mother, I tried to tell myself, but it was like trying to tell myself that rain is made of cheese. I couldn’t reconcile her manicured nails resting gently against our kitchen tiles, her black hair sliding out like a shimmering oil slick against a blue-eyed ocean… I couldn’t reconcile that image with this pale apparition, this pitiful corpse. All the grace was gone from her now. She was never dance to The Beatles again. This is my mother, I thought, not believing it. She’s dead. My father is trying to shut her eyes and failing.

He shook himself slightly, as if trying to remember where he was. Blood still flowed from her skull even if her heart had forgotten how to beat. I tried not to think too much about the pink and gray pieces smeared across my father’s blue jeans. He bowed over her body, lowering her to the ground as if she was made of glass. As always, he answered my thoughts. “I know she can’t feel anything,” his throat was making a strange rasping sound. “I know it doesn’t make any sense. But…”

“Shh,” I told him. I closed my eyes. “This isn’t a day for sense.”

I hadn’t believed the refugees. Everyone knew that they were driven mad by gunpowder. They told me that the chetniks made a grandfather eat his own grandson’s liver at gunpoint. The other girls told me about bloated bodies floating down the Drina from Foca, their castrated, limbless bodies tangling with the weeds. My father never let me go down to the river and so I had never quite believed it. “You’re too young,” he whispered. I didn’t know if he was talking to my mother or me.

“Not too young for some.” I knew what happened to girls caught by the chetniks. There was a cold feeling in the pit my stomach. “I don’t want to die, daddy.”

My father shook himself. “We must get to the river.” He hesitated for a moment. The tears followed the crevasses of his face, dripping down to mix with his wife’s red blood. “You won’t die, Sudija.” He was trying to sound certain for my sake. The sniper bullets struck the stone corner with showers of plaster, booming like fireworks, and we cowered behind the buildings. I thought about the refugee woman who had taken shelter in our basement. She wouldn’t come out, and whenever she spoke her wrists clenched and she rocked back and forth. “They cut out his eyes,” she whispered, trying to grab my collar but never really looking at me. “Why didn’t they kill me, too?” She was probably still there, curled deep in her own filth.

“I won’t let them catch me alive, father,” I told him. He nodded slowly and pointed to a kitchen knife which mother had taken. It wasn’t much of a weapon, more like a talisman that she had grabbed off the kitchen counter when the shelling started. He held it like a sacred relic before sliding it in his belt.

“We just have to get to the river,” he repeated. “We’ll be safe there, I’m sure. If we stay here, we die. If we die, better to die on our feet and running.”

I didn’t remind him that the Drina was where they dumped the bodies in Foca. It didn’t remind him about the stories of the Chetnik armies, waiting to slit truckloads of refugee’s throats on the bridges.

My father took my hand. “Come on.” His mitten was warm and sticky. And we ran.

The street was empty. Tall, shattered buildings rose beside us like scabbed tombstones, bare and burned. I remember later that the foreign reporters and their t.v. cameras wanted natives to show them damaged buildings. The villagers just laughed coldly, pointing all directions at once. Laughter like ice.

Yes, I remember…

The moment froze, a stain on cold air. For an instant, I was falling forward. The muscles in my right hand snapped, making a sick, melon-cracking sound. I cried out, my bare fists slamming the pavement, my body jerking as I fell face-down in the dirt.

Snipers. The rain had finally broken and the dust became the mud. Maybe they’ll go away if it’s raining.

My hand… I let myself look down the fingers that had gripped my father’s just a moment before. I couldn’t even feel any pain, but I looked away quickly. Damp spots. Bones splayed in jagged directions. You wouldn’t think that hands could look like that, you wouldn’t think the laws of nature would let them.

The cold numbness was half from that, half from seeing my father lying bent on the ground. Wouldn’t the Chetniks be happy? Two Muslims with one bullet? My father was still breathing, his eyes twitching, agitated. Blood oozed out around the tail of his shirt. I didn’t think the wound was fatal but he was pale as a sheet and his teeth clenched twice.

“Go,” he hissed at me. “Go on. Don’t worry about me.” One bloody hand held out that kitchen knife, the one my mother had grabbed right before we ran into the night. In the lightning, it suddenly looked like one of the chetnik’s crosses.

“Father, you’ve got to get up,” I whispered to him. I crawled on my belly over the tracks of artillery, the scars the shape of bear-paws crushing stone. “Father, I can’t make it alone.”

There was another crack and plaster chips flew by my left ear. I couldn’t help screaming. Men laughed on the hilltops, their jackal cries blending with thunder. “Father…”

The knife flew the few feet between us, landing in the dirt. The handle was smeared with the blood of both my parents and I wanted to vomit until my stomach was clean again. I wanted to vomit for the grandfather who had to eat his grandson’s liver, vomit for the little girl who had a bullet pulled out of her forehead without any anesthetic, vomit for the greasy stains on my father’s blue jeans. Vomit for the blue in my mother’s eyes.

“Run, Sudija,” my father whispered, his hand still outstretched. “Fly away, little bird. Don’t let them have you.” Another bullet cracked by my elbow, slamming pavement. I was whimpering worse than the refugees ever had.

God help me, I ran.