We lived in the woods for only a few weeks, but it looked like decades had passed when we came out again.
Sitting here, in my tiny flat in London, that time, that place seems to be from another lifetime; but I have hidden from it long enough. After Kosova (or Kosovo, as the westerners call it), was given its independence in 2001, my father sent me and my sister away to the UK to finish our educations. He knew, as it pained us all to admit, that just because we were suddenly granted a plot of land on paper, it did not rebuild our warm, beautiful home, which had been destroyed years earlier. Success could no longer be achieved anywhere near the now dilapidated Serbia: Only dingy mediocrity with a shiny new label could be offered to returning refugees who might still have any inclination of ambition. The same could be said for withering writers such as myself, but I am only a starving artist because I have denied myself the sustenance of my roots—until now. Today would have been my father's 53rd birthday, had he not been killed in 2004 during the riots back home. I strive daily to live up to his legacy: His bravery in times of complete uncertainty and his resolve in times of utter chaos were unforgettable, and so should be the lives of the millions of others who died during those terrible years.
When I was 12, my family and I escaped from Pec in the middle of the night after our neighbor, an elderly man who had lost his wife only months before, came hollering and banging at our front gates as we were just settling into bed. The retired professor had been wide awake in the inky blackness of the still night, his only light the colors emitted by the voices in his homemade radio. The Serbian soldiers spoke in choppy robotic tones; they were receiving orders. Males. Shoot. Evidence. Destroy. When the words came through the holes in the speaker that the Serbs had already plowed down a town less than 50 kilometers away, Fatos scrambled out of his house and hobbled up and down our street. He yelled out, crashing a metal ladle against a crusty iron saucepan—the one thing he had not dared disturb since his wife's passing. Before that night, the children had secretly hoped that their naïve, yet vivid, feelings of invincibility could negate our want for protection. Their mothers prayed while watching their sons play with wooden sticks carved into little swords, and Albanian flags pinned to their tiny coats like capes that could carry them away. The silently fearful women bowed their heads in the shadows, hoping the sheer volumes of their nighttime whispers could shroud us in warmth and invisibility. We older boys were not quite wise enough to be in the inner circles of the plotting fathers and grandfathers who were drawing on the basement floors with charcoal from the fireplace. At the same time, though, we were too cynical and angry to play with children's weapons. All we could do was sit up at night listening to the swirling supplications in the wind. Our blue claws squeezed white shin bones, trying so fervently to grip onto the memories we knew would sizzle away like burning leaves when the Serbs came.
That night, as we packed in agitated silence, we did not cry. Even the small ones knew not to cry. I begged my father to save the books, but he shook his head and told us we wouldn't need them where we were going. The educated ones were usually the first to be shot. My sister pleaded with my mother about saving her dolls, but there was no room for material comforts.
Some of the other families did not believe Fatos, and they stayed in their sagging beds armed with nothing but foolishly sweet dreams. When they heard the roar of the tanks and the boots and the teeth grinding over the hills, there was no time to keep anything but the clothes on their backs. Many of them never even made it as far as the edge of town, much less what would feel like the edge of the earth.
By the time we had reached the base of the mountains in the south, my grandmother’s skin was so transparent from dehydration, that she seemed more an apparition of a road map than my beloved Nënë. We had walked all night, and had run out of water in the frigid hours just before the scarlet sun scalded our empty eye sockets. We were tired, but that word was forbidden from riding on our parched lips. As individuals, we never would have made it as far as we did; we had to imagine the group as one great juggernaut crashing over the mountains, or else we would have simply melted into the earth like old snow. If one of us faltered, he would weaken everyone else.
Finally, as the golden glow of dawn’s light was fading into the bright white of day, we came to a small creek in the crease of a mountain. My father and uncle told us to stop. At first we did not hear them—our ears had closed in on themselves and our eyes had crusted over with milky scales. It was not until my shoulder, rubbed raw by the strap of my knapsack, bumped into the stone wall of my father, that I realized we were to stop moving forward. Startled, I blinked hard; the scum flaked from my weak eyes as I looked up at his stern expression. Now was not the time for him to be the man who smelled like grass and honey when he scooped his children high into the air. Here was not the place for him to be the dimpled man who tossed his head back and held his belly while laughing at his brother-in-law’s jokes. He had become a general over night, and I winced when I realized that I did not recognize him.
As our family, and the couple of neighbors who had heeded Fatos' warning the night before, trickled past my father and uncle to the stream, I was still frozen by the fact that my father was no longer a man whose face was familiar to me. I stood there, about a meter from he who had become a weathered, but unbreakable tree, and I stared, dumbstruck, at him. I was a stone in the brook, making small rapids because I could not float past my roots.
My father’s granite gaze was possibly more haunting than the disillusionment of suddenly going from being comfortable in my bed, in my country, to being a ghost in black mountains. As I noticed his arms folded across his broad chest, it occurred to me that the safe space of his embrace was gone, just like home. I knew as well as everyone else that I would not be going back any time soon, and that when I did, it would no longer look like home. It would no longer exist. I no longer had a place in the world; none of us did.
"Largohu," he suddenly barked at me. The actual word meant "go away," but I was sure I had heard it wrong. He must have meant for me to go on down to the creek and drink. Surely he was just concerned that I quickly get nourishment, and then rest for a moment to gather my strength; but what he said was not the same. He was shooing me out of his presence.
The general had spoken, so my uncle, leaner but taller and younger, was the enforcer. He turned and silently took me by the arm and walked me down to the creek to be with the others. They had not seen what I had seen. They were just happy to feel the cool refreshment on their hands and faces. They laughed and cried softly, overwhelmed by deep exhaustion and also momentary relief.
I will never forget my aunt's face as she cupped the cool water in her thin hands. Her mouth was wide open, as if she could not get enough air into her lungs, and two silent tears darted down the folds of her face. Her eyes were shut hard, like clam shells we would find at the shore, and her brow was cinched up as if pulled by a drawstring anchored to her chin. As she let it fall through her fingers over her head, sheets of water wrapped around her arms like a shawl and dribbled off her sleeves, which were pushed up to her elbows. When the liquid crystal reached her face, she was momentarily transformed into an angel. All her features were softened, and her wrinkles filled and glossed over so her skin looked like the glazed porcelain of my baby sister's dolls. The piercing temperature instantly brought color to her cheeks and lips, and the quicksilver down her face and shot off her chin in a smooth arc. Just then, the sun beamed from behind a cloud at just the right angle to light my aunt, mother and grandmother all aglow.
It was the most beautiful image I had ever seen, and at that, one treacherous tear escaped from my eye: the last one I would shed for years to come. Coated in sticky sap and gritty dirt chafing us under three or four layers of our most practical clothes, homeless exhausted refugees could still be as gorgeous as heavenly beings. Amidst chaos, I quizzically observed perfection. It was not the first time that day, though, that my world would stop.
Fatos sat on a fallen tree and tweaked his radio. He told us that the transmission he had intercepted the night before was just as likely to be a miracle as it was to be the result of sound engineering. Now, in the mountains, hours from civilization, it was unlikely we would hear anything, much less soldiers' orders; but we pressed him to try anyway. He contorted the antenna and rolled the knob back and forth until he thought he had heard something coming through the static. Then he handed the little box to my cousin, Pëllumb, telling him to climb high into a tree with it to see what he could hear. My aunt was worried about the thin boy climbing so high, especially while trying to carry Fatos' radio, but Pëllumb tucked his shirts into his trousers, carefully placed the radio between his sticky stomach and dingy undershirt, and nimbly climbed the highest nearby tree. We waited.
I couldn’t stand not knowing what my cousin might be hearing up there. Being so close in age, we did almost everything together. Now he was carrying out the most important task either of us had ever been asked to do, and all I could do was pick at my cuticles while staring up the skirt of a tree. It was more intense than waiting for my turn in the spelling bee at school, and I was more envious of my cousin than I had been the day he had won the contest the year before.
After a few minutes, my uncle walked up to the trunk of the tree and knocked on it three times with a thick stick he had found. Concerned he might give our location away to someone who could be hidden nearby, my uncle did not want to yell up to the boy. We heard no response from my cousin, nor did the tree shake with his impeding return. After about 30 seconds, my uncle rapped the stick against the trunk again. Finally the leaves rustled as the tree swayed with the Pëllumb's weight. He seemed in a hurry, and finally jumped from about 2-and-a-half meters up, almost hitting my uncle in the head. The radio was obviously not of primary concern.
"Si është puna?" my uncle asked, sternly.
"Pashë ata," Pëllumb replied, jumping to his feet. His eyes widened. "Pashë ata!"
He hadn't needed the radio. He had seen the forces with his own eyes. Immediately, my uncle clapped his hand over his son's mouth, and dropped to a squat, tripping the boy. My father bent over next to him, and they waved over Fatos, another neighbor and my oldest cousin, Ylli. I wanted to go to them too, but my mother locked her arms across my chest, and muttered "Jo." My aunt scooped up my younger sister, herded the smaller children back toward the creek, where my grandmother still sat, and distracted them by quietly singing a lullaby in an eerily smooth voice. For a second, I found her glazed expression to be more distracting, though.
I snapped my head around to watch as the men wiped the leaves and sticks aside, revealing wriggling larvae in the moist dirt. My uncle, unshaken, drew right in the squirmy earth with his finger. Ylli snatched a small compass from his pocket and pointed at it emphatically. Fatos tore open his radio, frantically searching for a snapped wire or loose connection to be fixed. My father hit his wide palm on the sweaty velvet ground, and all movement ceased; all eyes darted up at him.
In a low voice which could only be understood by those huddled under the tree, my father laid out his plan. Pëllumb explained to me later that since he had seen the forces coming up the valley from the south, and judging by the number of hours we had been hiking, my father had estimated the next village was probably Posto Selo, about 30 kilometers from home. He decided that we needed to know more about our enemy's tactics so we could better protect ourselves. He said he knew the Serbs were fearless because they were about to ambush a tiny village in broad daylight. By that logic, then, they would also be making a bold entrance, and would not be coming up into the forest first for a sneak attack. It followed, then, that it would be safe to leave the women and children disguised by the trees while the men went out to a hill above the village for reconnaissance. It was somewhat risky, but in the general's humble opinion, undeniably necessary.
Pëllumb was ready to follow when the others stood up and dusted off their knees. Before explaining the plan to his wife, though, my uncle told my mother to keep my cousin and I by the creek with the other children. My cousin was only 6 months older than I, but since he had been the one to spot the oncoming forces, and had been needed in the inner circle for the plotting session, he considered himself to have suddenly gained in years and wisdom. As he turned to trot off with his father, my mother hooked the back of Pëllumb's shirt collar and shook her head at him when he looked back over his shoulder, confused. "Jo," was all she said.
As Fatos, the general, the enforcer, the neighbor and Ylli started to disappear down the other side of the slope, my little sister cried out from the creek bank, suddenly realizing the group was splitting up. "Baba, jo," she wailed. My grandmother shot off the log and grabbed my sister's hand before her brittle knees thudded on the ground. My mother ran back to the creek to help my aunt get my grandmother up, and quiet the child. Pëllumb and I scrambled in the direction our fathers had gone. We were on a mission to be men.
We stepped cautiously over the forest floor, not wanting any noise to fall into the wrong ears. When we finally cleared the trees, we saw our fathers, Fatos, the neighbor and Ylli lying on their bellies on the crest of a hill overlooking the tiny village of Posto Selo. Terrified of being spotted by the paramilitaries, we crawled through the grass, sometimes slithering on our bellies where the plants thinned from our fathers' footsteps. When we wriggled up next to Ylli, all he did was slap Pëllumb in the back of the head. My father craned his neck forward to meet my eyes, and his glare burned through me. My uncle reached over Ylli's back and slapped my accomplice's head again. The second strike drew a tiny yelp from my cousin's mouth, but he immediately clapped his hand over his mouth, in a hurry to beat his brother to the task. Fatos pointed frantically down at a field near the small mosque.
What we saw was expected but shocking, blood-curdling yet heart-hardening. Our muscles froze as we saw the police, the soldiers and the paramilitaries climb out of trucks like ants pour from an anthill. They marched down the streets, stormed houses and other buildings, eventually pulling every single person out. Even the ones who tried to run were tackled and dragged back to the field to where they had herded the rest of the townspeople. They divided them into groups which appeared to be organized by age and gender. The women and children were pushed aside like pawns, while the men and boys were lined up and subsequently divided into four groups. One by one, the old men were shot; then their sons were killed. All I kept thinking was, why aren't they running away? I felt that if I even thought I had a one percent chance of survival by running, that it would be worth the try, but none of their feet budged. The only movement was the bodies falling like dominoes, and the ones standing next to them jerking at the sound of the gunshots.
The older boys, closer to Ylli's age, were then shot in the face one by one, and then the barrels of the guns were pointed at the younger boys. They could not have been much older than Pëllumb and I were. Some of them covered their faces, while others sobbed themselves blind. I'll never forget the last boy, though, who seemed to not even see the soldiers, but stood facing his mother and sister screaming, "Të dua. Ruaj ju vetë," repeatedly until the right side of his skull was pink mist and the remainder of his body collapsed like a sack of potatoes. If the boy had run away, he would have been turning his back on his family, and the last words out of his mouth wouldn't have been "I love you. Save yourselves."
It was then that it occurred to me that being a man wasn't about being in on the secret plans, it was about planning in order to keep my family safe. Being a man was about others, not self; and upon realizing this, I looked over at Pëllumb, whose face was buried in the grass while his back heaved under heavy sobs. While the horribly surreal images I had just seen made my stomach twist like molten iron, and my eyeballs swell up like soccer balls, I clenched my teeth and took a deep breath to help it all wash over me. Pëllumb was hiding from the terror which we had read about in books at school, which we had heard about on porches with grandfathers. He was pretending history was just a story, instead of accepting it as his. Instead of allowing myself to be crushed, I used the abominable sights as building blocks so I could be strong for the people waiting for us in the woods. I rebuilt my insides out of breathing bricks.
When some of the bodies were tossed into the mosque, which was subsequently set afire, the smell of the smoke burned our eyes, but we did not cry. When some of the other corpses' noses and ears were slashed off in vengeful swipes, the sight of the blood noosed our necks, but we did not cry. When the women and children were left to bury their brothers and fathers and grandfathers facing Mecca, we sent up leaden prayers for their losses, but we did not cry. When the trucks finally pulled away and headed toward our beloved Pec, we stood up, and were transformed into granite in the grass. I grabbed Pëllumb's arm and pulled him to his feet, told him to wipe his face, and together we marched back into the woods following my father's lead. When I reached the creek, my family was safe and relatively oblivious to the atrocities we had just seen committed on our countrymen, by our countrymen. I walked straight up to my little sister, who sat cradled against my grandmother's chest, and knelt in front of them.
"Si je?" I asked them.
"Jam i lodhur," my grandmother answered wearily.
"Më ka marrë uria," whimpered my sister, rubbing her stomach.
I'll take a tired grandmother and a hungry sister any day over none at all.
"Të dua, të dua," I said, and hugged and kissed them both.
Back in London now, I remember other snapshots of those weeks we spent in the woods, but none would be seared onto my heart like that of the young boy who used his last breath to try to comfort his family. When the police and soldiers and undertaker came back three weeks later in yellow protective suits, they dug up the dead, tossed them like sand bags into the trucks and left. Upon witnessing this unthinkable act, I marched back into the trees, determined to memorize the precious details of my family members, before there was another chance for them to be taken from me. I catalogued mental pictures of the way my sister’s hair glowed orange when it eclipsed the sun; the way my mother’s fingertips caressed my father’s earlobe when she kissed him; the way my grandmother’s face looked so peaceful when we buried her by the creek. She was the only one who didn’t make it back out of the woods physically, but emotionally, we all left behind pieces of our former selves and emerged changed forever.
Sitting here, in my tiny flat in London, that time, that place seems to be from another lifetime; but I have hidden from it long enough. After Kosova (or Kosovo, as the westerners call it), was given its independence in 2001, my father sent me and my sister away to the UK to finish our educations. He knew, as it pained us all to admit, that just because we were suddenly granted a plot of land on paper, it did not rebuild our warm, beautiful home, which had been destroyed years earlier. Success could no longer be achieved anywhere near the now dilapidated Serbia: Only dingy mediocrity with a shiny new label could be offered to returning refugees who might still have any inclination of ambition. The same could be said for withering writers such as myself, but I am only a starving artist because I have denied myself the sustenance of my roots—until now. Today would have been my father's 53rd birthday, had he not been killed in 2004 during the riots back home. I strive daily to live up to his legacy: His bravery in times of complete uncertainty and his resolve in times of utter chaos were unforgettable, and so should be the lives of the millions of others who died during those terrible years.
When I was 12, my family and I escaped from Pec in the middle of the night after our neighbor, an elderly man who had lost his wife only months before, came hollering and banging at our front gates as we were just settling into bed. The retired professor had been wide awake in the inky blackness of the still night, his only light the colors emitted by the voices in his homemade radio. The Serbian soldiers spoke in choppy robotic tones; they were receiving orders. Males. Shoot. Evidence. Destroy. When the words came through the holes in the speaker that the Serbs had already plowed down a town less than 50 kilometers away, Fatos scrambled out of his house and hobbled up and down our street. He yelled out, crashing a metal ladle against a crusty iron saucepan—the one thing he had not dared disturb since his wife's passing. Before that night, the children had secretly hoped that their naïve, yet vivid, feelings of invincibility could negate our want for protection. Their mothers prayed while watching their sons play with wooden sticks carved into little swords, and Albanian flags pinned to their tiny coats like capes that could carry them away. The silently fearful women bowed their heads in the shadows, hoping the sheer volumes of their nighttime whispers could shroud us in warmth and invisibility. We older boys were not quite wise enough to be in the inner circles of the plotting fathers and grandfathers who were drawing on the basement floors with charcoal from the fireplace. At the same time, though, we were too cynical and angry to play with children's weapons. All we could do was sit up at night listening to the swirling supplications in the wind. Our blue claws squeezed white shin bones, trying so fervently to grip onto the memories we knew would sizzle away like burning leaves when the Serbs came.
That night, as we packed in agitated silence, we did not cry. Even the small ones knew not to cry. I begged my father to save the books, but he shook his head and told us we wouldn't need them where we were going. The educated ones were usually the first to be shot. My sister pleaded with my mother about saving her dolls, but there was no room for material comforts.
Some of the other families did not believe Fatos, and they stayed in their sagging beds armed with nothing but foolishly sweet dreams. When they heard the roar of the tanks and the boots and the teeth grinding over the hills, there was no time to keep anything but the clothes on their backs. Many of them never even made it as far as the edge of town, much less what would feel like the edge of the earth.
By the time we had reached the base of the mountains in the south, my grandmother’s skin was so transparent from dehydration, that she seemed more an apparition of a road map than my beloved Nënë. We had walked all night, and had run out of water in the frigid hours just before the scarlet sun scalded our empty eye sockets. We were tired, but that word was forbidden from riding on our parched lips. As individuals, we never would have made it as far as we did; we had to imagine the group as one great juggernaut crashing over the mountains, or else we would have simply melted into the earth like old snow. If one of us faltered, he would weaken everyone else.
Finally, as the golden glow of dawn’s light was fading into the bright white of day, we came to a small creek in the crease of a mountain. My father and uncle told us to stop. At first we did not hear them—our ears had closed in on themselves and our eyes had crusted over with milky scales. It was not until my shoulder, rubbed raw by the strap of my knapsack, bumped into the stone wall of my father, that I realized we were to stop moving forward. Startled, I blinked hard; the scum flaked from my weak eyes as I looked up at his stern expression. Now was not the time for him to be the man who smelled like grass and honey when he scooped his children high into the air. Here was not the place for him to be the dimpled man who tossed his head back and held his belly while laughing at his brother-in-law’s jokes. He had become a general over night, and I winced when I realized that I did not recognize him.
As our family, and the couple of neighbors who had heeded Fatos' warning the night before, trickled past my father and uncle to the stream, I was still frozen by the fact that my father was no longer a man whose face was familiar to me. I stood there, about a meter from he who had become a weathered, but unbreakable tree, and I stared, dumbstruck, at him. I was a stone in the brook, making small rapids because I could not float past my roots.
My father’s granite gaze was possibly more haunting than the disillusionment of suddenly going from being comfortable in my bed, in my country, to being a ghost in black mountains. As I noticed his arms folded across his broad chest, it occurred to me that the safe space of his embrace was gone, just like home. I knew as well as everyone else that I would not be going back any time soon, and that when I did, it would no longer look like home. It would no longer exist. I no longer had a place in the world; none of us did.
"Largohu," he suddenly barked at me. The actual word meant "go away," but I was sure I had heard it wrong. He must have meant for me to go on down to the creek and drink. Surely he was just concerned that I quickly get nourishment, and then rest for a moment to gather my strength; but what he said was not the same. He was shooing me out of his presence.
The general had spoken, so my uncle, leaner but taller and younger, was the enforcer. He turned and silently took me by the arm and walked me down to the creek to be with the others. They had not seen what I had seen. They were just happy to feel the cool refreshment on their hands and faces. They laughed and cried softly, overwhelmed by deep exhaustion and also momentary relief.
I will never forget my aunt's face as she cupped the cool water in her thin hands. Her mouth was wide open, as if she could not get enough air into her lungs, and two silent tears darted down the folds of her face. Her eyes were shut hard, like clam shells we would find at the shore, and her brow was cinched up as if pulled by a drawstring anchored to her chin. As she let it fall through her fingers over her head, sheets of water wrapped around her arms like a shawl and dribbled off her sleeves, which were pushed up to her elbows. When the liquid crystal reached her face, she was momentarily transformed into an angel. All her features were softened, and her wrinkles filled and glossed over so her skin looked like the glazed porcelain of my baby sister's dolls. The piercing temperature instantly brought color to her cheeks and lips, and the quicksilver down her face and shot off her chin in a smooth arc. Just then, the sun beamed from behind a cloud at just the right angle to light my aunt, mother and grandmother all aglow.
It was the most beautiful image I had ever seen, and at that, one treacherous tear escaped from my eye: the last one I would shed for years to come. Coated in sticky sap and gritty dirt chafing us under three or four layers of our most practical clothes, homeless exhausted refugees could still be as gorgeous as heavenly beings. Amidst chaos, I quizzically observed perfection. It was not the first time that day, though, that my world would stop.
Fatos sat on a fallen tree and tweaked his radio. He told us that the transmission he had intercepted the night before was just as likely to be a miracle as it was to be the result of sound engineering. Now, in the mountains, hours from civilization, it was unlikely we would hear anything, much less soldiers' orders; but we pressed him to try anyway. He contorted the antenna and rolled the knob back and forth until he thought he had heard something coming through the static. Then he handed the little box to my cousin, Pëllumb, telling him to climb high into a tree with it to see what he could hear. My aunt was worried about the thin boy climbing so high, especially while trying to carry Fatos' radio, but Pëllumb tucked his shirts into his trousers, carefully placed the radio between his sticky stomach and dingy undershirt, and nimbly climbed the highest nearby tree. We waited.
I couldn’t stand not knowing what my cousin might be hearing up there. Being so close in age, we did almost everything together. Now he was carrying out the most important task either of us had ever been asked to do, and all I could do was pick at my cuticles while staring up the skirt of a tree. It was more intense than waiting for my turn in the spelling bee at school, and I was more envious of my cousin than I had been the day he had won the contest the year before.
After a few minutes, my uncle walked up to the trunk of the tree and knocked on it three times with a thick stick he had found. Concerned he might give our location away to someone who could be hidden nearby, my uncle did not want to yell up to the boy. We heard no response from my cousin, nor did the tree shake with his impeding return. After about 30 seconds, my uncle rapped the stick against the trunk again. Finally the leaves rustled as the tree swayed with the Pëllumb's weight. He seemed in a hurry, and finally jumped from about 2-and-a-half meters up, almost hitting my uncle in the head. The radio was obviously not of primary concern.
"Si është puna?" my uncle asked, sternly.
"Pashë ata," Pëllumb replied, jumping to his feet. His eyes widened. "Pashë ata!"
He hadn't needed the radio. He had seen the forces with his own eyes. Immediately, my uncle clapped his hand over his son's mouth, and dropped to a squat, tripping the boy. My father bent over next to him, and they waved over Fatos, another neighbor and my oldest cousin, Ylli. I wanted to go to them too, but my mother locked her arms across my chest, and muttered "Jo." My aunt scooped up my younger sister, herded the smaller children back toward the creek, where my grandmother still sat, and distracted them by quietly singing a lullaby in an eerily smooth voice. For a second, I found her glazed expression to be more distracting, though.
I snapped my head around to watch as the men wiped the leaves and sticks aside, revealing wriggling larvae in the moist dirt. My uncle, unshaken, drew right in the squirmy earth with his finger. Ylli snatched a small compass from his pocket and pointed at it emphatically. Fatos tore open his radio, frantically searching for a snapped wire or loose connection to be fixed. My father hit his wide palm on the sweaty velvet ground, and all movement ceased; all eyes darted up at him.
In a low voice which could only be understood by those huddled under the tree, my father laid out his plan. Pëllumb explained to me later that since he had seen the forces coming up the valley from the south, and judging by the number of hours we had been hiking, my father had estimated the next village was probably Posto Selo, about 30 kilometers from home. He decided that we needed to know more about our enemy's tactics so we could better protect ourselves. He said he knew the Serbs were fearless because they were about to ambush a tiny village in broad daylight. By that logic, then, they would also be making a bold entrance, and would not be coming up into the forest first for a sneak attack. It followed, then, that it would be safe to leave the women and children disguised by the trees while the men went out to a hill above the village for reconnaissance. It was somewhat risky, but in the general's humble opinion, undeniably necessary.
Pëllumb was ready to follow when the others stood up and dusted off their knees. Before explaining the plan to his wife, though, my uncle told my mother to keep my cousin and I by the creek with the other children. My cousin was only 6 months older than I, but since he had been the one to spot the oncoming forces, and had been needed in the inner circle for the plotting session, he considered himself to have suddenly gained in years and wisdom. As he turned to trot off with his father, my mother hooked the back of Pëllumb's shirt collar and shook her head at him when he looked back over his shoulder, confused. "Jo," was all she said.
As Fatos, the general, the enforcer, the neighbor and Ylli started to disappear down the other side of the slope, my little sister cried out from the creek bank, suddenly realizing the group was splitting up. "Baba, jo," she wailed. My grandmother shot off the log and grabbed my sister's hand before her brittle knees thudded on the ground. My mother ran back to the creek to help my aunt get my grandmother up, and quiet the child. Pëllumb and I scrambled in the direction our fathers had gone. We were on a mission to be men.
We stepped cautiously over the forest floor, not wanting any noise to fall into the wrong ears. When we finally cleared the trees, we saw our fathers, Fatos, the neighbor and Ylli lying on their bellies on the crest of a hill overlooking the tiny village of Posto Selo. Terrified of being spotted by the paramilitaries, we crawled through the grass, sometimes slithering on our bellies where the plants thinned from our fathers' footsteps. When we wriggled up next to Ylli, all he did was slap Pëllumb in the back of the head. My father craned his neck forward to meet my eyes, and his glare burned through me. My uncle reached over Ylli's back and slapped my accomplice's head again. The second strike drew a tiny yelp from my cousin's mouth, but he immediately clapped his hand over his mouth, in a hurry to beat his brother to the task. Fatos pointed frantically down at a field near the small mosque.
What we saw was expected but shocking, blood-curdling yet heart-hardening. Our muscles froze as we saw the police, the soldiers and the paramilitaries climb out of trucks like ants pour from an anthill. They marched down the streets, stormed houses and other buildings, eventually pulling every single person out. Even the ones who tried to run were tackled and dragged back to the field to where they had herded the rest of the townspeople. They divided them into groups which appeared to be organized by age and gender. The women and children were pushed aside like pawns, while the men and boys were lined up and subsequently divided into four groups. One by one, the old men were shot; then their sons were killed. All I kept thinking was, why aren't they running away? I felt that if I even thought I had a one percent chance of survival by running, that it would be worth the try, but none of their feet budged. The only movement was the bodies falling like dominoes, and the ones standing next to them jerking at the sound of the gunshots.
The older boys, closer to Ylli's age, were then shot in the face one by one, and then the barrels of the guns were pointed at the younger boys. They could not have been much older than Pëllumb and I were. Some of them covered their faces, while others sobbed themselves blind. I'll never forget the last boy, though, who seemed to not even see the soldiers, but stood facing his mother and sister screaming, "Të dua. Ruaj ju vetë," repeatedly until the right side of his skull was pink mist and the remainder of his body collapsed like a sack of potatoes. If the boy had run away, he would have been turning his back on his family, and the last words out of his mouth wouldn't have been "I love you. Save yourselves."
It was then that it occurred to me that being a man wasn't about being in on the secret plans, it was about planning in order to keep my family safe. Being a man was about others, not self; and upon realizing this, I looked over at Pëllumb, whose face was buried in the grass while his back heaved under heavy sobs. While the horribly surreal images I had just seen made my stomach twist like molten iron, and my eyeballs swell up like soccer balls, I clenched my teeth and took a deep breath to help it all wash over me. Pëllumb was hiding from the terror which we had read about in books at school, which we had heard about on porches with grandfathers. He was pretending history was just a story, instead of accepting it as his. Instead of allowing myself to be crushed, I used the abominable sights as building blocks so I could be strong for the people waiting for us in the woods. I rebuilt my insides out of breathing bricks.
When some of the bodies were tossed into the mosque, which was subsequently set afire, the smell of the smoke burned our eyes, but we did not cry. When some of the other corpses' noses and ears were slashed off in vengeful swipes, the sight of the blood noosed our necks, but we did not cry. When the women and children were left to bury their brothers and fathers and grandfathers facing Mecca, we sent up leaden prayers for their losses, but we did not cry. When the trucks finally pulled away and headed toward our beloved Pec, we stood up, and were transformed into granite in the grass. I grabbed Pëllumb's arm and pulled him to his feet, told him to wipe his face, and together we marched back into the woods following my father's lead. When I reached the creek, my family was safe and relatively oblivious to the atrocities we had just seen committed on our countrymen, by our countrymen. I walked straight up to my little sister, who sat cradled against my grandmother's chest, and knelt in front of them.
"Si je?" I asked them.
"Jam i lodhur," my grandmother answered wearily.
"Më ka marrë uria," whimpered my sister, rubbing her stomach.
I'll take a tired grandmother and a hungry sister any day over none at all.
"Të dua, të dua," I said, and hugged and kissed them both.
Back in London now, I remember other snapshots of those weeks we spent in the woods, but none would be seared onto my heart like that of the young boy who used his last breath to try to comfort his family. When the police and soldiers and undertaker came back three weeks later in yellow protective suits, they dug up the dead, tossed them like sand bags into the trucks and left. Upon witnessing this unthinkable act, I marched back into the trees, determined to memorize the precious details of my family members, before there was another chance for them to be taken from me. I catalogued mental pictures of the way my sister’s hair glowed orange when it eclipsed the sun; the way my mother’s fingertips caressed my father’s earlobe when she kissed him; the way my grandmother’s face looked so peaceful when we buried her by the creek. She was the only one who didn’t make it back out of the woods physically, but emotionally, we all left behind pieces of our former selves and emerged changed forever.
3 comments:
Let me say first of all that this story makes me want to head off somewhere with a machine gun. But who would I shoot? The central Serbian figures behind all this are gone, the UN folks were hobbled by our lack of genuine interest in helping to stop this madness, all of Europe seemed ambivalent at best about this horror show. So it goes.
The fact that this story stirred up so much emotion in me and memories of the news accounts from so long ago says that you've done a good job in communicating a good deal of the horror. I want to congratulate you on avoiding over dramatizing the story (surely it doesn't need that) and on avoiding a good deal of gory description that it also doesn't need.
What you do give us is a great deal of fresh imagery:
"The retired professor had been wide awake in the inky blackness of the still night, his only light the colors emitted by the voices in his homemade radio."
"All we could do was sit up at night listening to the swirling supplications in the wind."
"…my grandmother’s skin was so transparent from dehydration, that she seemed more an apparition of a road map…"
And this, almost like Japanese haiku:
"I stood there, about a meter from he who had become a weathered, but unbreakable tree, and I stared, dumbstruck, at him. I was a stone in the brook, making small rapids because I could not float past my roots."
There are some mixed metaphors here and there that you might want to revisit but overall I found the imagery vivid and fresh.
That said, I was very surprised by points in the story when you gave in and used a cliché like this one:
"Finally, as the golden glow of dawn’s light was fading into the bright white of day…"
To me at least, it seemed as though you might have run out of time to work on this and went for the easy cliché rather than create new imagery for your description. I'm not saying this makes the story bad but rather a little less satisfying.
I also wanted to point out that this story could benefit from reconsidering the lengths of some of your paragraphs. Rather, long paragraphs are fine if they truly hold together, each sentence logically following from the last while all remain true to your topic sentence. Without that structure, it seemed to me that some of your paragraphs were rambling, sentences heading off in different directions. I know a sentence like:
"When I was 12, my family and I escaped from Pec in the middle of the night after our neighbor, an elderly man who had lost his wife only months before, came hollering and banging at our front gates as we were just settling into bed."
should prepare me for a chaotic account of the escape but what I didn't expect was the somewhat poetic description of the little boys with their wooden swords, the description of their mothers etc. Nothing wrong with all that, just seemed to me that it deserved its own paragraph.
Also, I rather wished you had developed the professor a bit more, I liked what I read of him a great deal, I just wanted a bit more. What did he look like exactly? What was he a professor of? I mean he knows enough to make a radio so did he teach electronics?
Okay, this is getting seriously long so I'll just wrap up by telling you that I liked your opening paragraph very much even though it is only one sentence. It's ominous and very appropriate. It also gives the reader some necessary distance from the narration that follows. Nice touch. Thanks very much, enjoyed it. :)
In the opening of the story you write, “I am only a starving artist because I have denied myself the sustenance of my roots—until now,” but then you in the closing of the story you write, “Upon witnessing this unthinkable act, I marched back into the trees, determined to memorize the precious details of my family members, before there was another chance for them to be taken from me.” These two statements aren’t exactly mutually exclusive, but they are somewhat contradictory. The second statement gave me pause when I reached it.
“When some of the bodies were tossed into the mosque, which was subsequently set afire, the smell of the smoke burned our eyes, but we did not cry. When some of the other corpses' noses and ears were slashed off in vengeful swipes, the sight of the blood noosed our necks, but we did not cry. When the women and children were left to bury their brothers and fathers and grandfathers facing Mecca, we sent up leaden prayers for their losses, but we did not cry. When the trucks finally pulled away and headed toward our beloved Pec, we stood up, and were transformed into granite in the grass. I grabbed Pëllumb's arm and pulled him to his feet, told him to wipe his face,” When you say “but WE didn’t cry” it encompasses everyone present, but we already know that Pëllumb cried and it’s implied that at this point he is still crying. This is, of course, a minor and petty detail, but it is a slight inaccuracy.
In my previous comments (before you joined the group) I had mentioned something about the need to make an earlier and more explicit mention of the primary characters gender. I don’t know if I was simply dense and missed it on that first read or if you made minor changes, but from the very beginning it was very obvious on this read that this character is male.
Please let me know how your workshop went, what Miles had to say about this piece, and what grade you got.
p.b. adams and orianna gave you plenty of good advice about this story and I came around a bit late, but I didn't read it with a critical eye. I found I was unable to do so. It was completely involving and very powerful. I've been working on a book about another war, the civil war in Lebanon, but I wouldn't even attempt to equal the impact of this. I will take many of these images with me.
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