11/11 Impressions

This being the War and Peace blog, I feel I should say something about Veterans Day (Remembrance Day, Armistice Day) before it's over. Truth is, I'm never sure what I should say, beyond thank you, veterans. Nevertheless, here are some of my scattered thoughts today, a few stories that 11 November brings to mind.

My grandmother is 91 years old. She was born four months before the end of the First World War. She lost her first husband, the great love of her life, in the South Pacific twenty-five years later. To this day, she can't talk about Bill without bursting into tears. The necklace he gave my then newlywed grandmother before he shipped out, young and doomed, became part of my her body over the decades that followed. It wore a groove in her skin, because she never took it off. My grandfather, her second husband, never objected. The necklace is a heavy silver cross with tiny diamonds in the pattern of the southern cross constellation and rests on my grandmother's triple bypass scar.

*

Three years ago, I was living in Belgium and spent 11 November in my small town in Flanders. While Veterans Day in the United States focuses on sacrifice and gratitude, the focus of Remembrance Day in Europe is on the costs of war, of tens of millions killed in the span of just thirty-one years. 11 November in places like small Flemish towns is a solemn, quiet day. Even though living memory of WWI is all but gone, that conflict, like the more catastrophic one that succeeded it, carved deep marks on Europe's collective, cultural memory. Even today, it's still there, throbbing just below the surface of those happy societies. This is something I always hope Americans keep in mind when they criticize European governments and publics for hesitating to support military interventions, even in those places where military intervention may be the lesser of two evils.

*

It was a cold spring morning in 2007 I woke up to my first full day in Bosnia. After slipping into sweats, I made my way to the kitchen of the guesthouse I was staying at in the oldest part of Sarajevo. I was the only guest, and the only other person in the house when I arrived the night before was the owner, Nazira, a woman in her fifties who spoke no English and fussed over me, an exhausted, surly foreigner, like I was her own child. This morning, Nazira's son, Emir, was visiting. I was taken aback by his American accent, which he said he'd developed over a decade in New York City. Emir left Bosnia as soon as the war there ended, as soon as he was demobilized. "Of the boys I graduated from high school with, not many of us are left," he said, "I think about them every day, usually about foolish things we did as kids, but also how they died. That stuff never leaves you." A few weeks later, after many, many drinks, a Bosnian employee of one of the international NGOs inserted into a previously lighthearted conversation, with no advance warning, the story of how, at sixteen, he came home one day and found his parents murdered and dismembered by paramilitaries in one of the war's first atrocities. I excused myself, ran two blocks to the Miljacka river, and vomited until I had the dry heaves. I've heard so many similar, and even more gruesome stories since then, from places as far flung as Colombia and Burma, and though I don't throw up anymore, I still don't understand how people go on after such experiences. In my heart, I know I wouldn't be able to. If I lost the people closest to me in any of those ways, I can't imagine forcing myself to keep going; I can only imagine searching, frantically, for the fastest way to end my own life. For this reason, I will never stop marveling at the resilience of refugees.

*

Z lay silent on the air mattress next to me, staring at the ceiling. "In my head, I can still hear them screaming," he said finally, "I can hear them and see them like it's happening now." Z was born in 1978, to a child mother and despondent father in Wardak province, Afghanistan. Given up to the Soviet Union by his impoverished parents at age five, he was educated in Kazakhstan. In 1992 and 1993, Kazakhstan sent Z and hundreds of other Afghan children back to Afghanistan, into a civil war in a homeland they barely remembered. The Soviet-educated Afghan teens were easy prey for murderous thugs. Z and his classmates ended up homeless, sleeping in the grounds of a ruined hospital. One day, armed men rolled up in pickup trucks and began grabbing the girls. There was nothing the boys could do. The girls kicked and screamed as the militiamen bundled them into the vehicles. Z never saw any of the girls again. Later on, some of the boys disappeared as well. Z was eventually kidnapped, but miraculously manged to escape and find protection with the United Nations. He has never spoken about what happened when he was held captive. "Only those bad people, and God, know," he whispered into the darkness between us.

*

Not having read J's file yet, I needed to ask the question: "Are you married?" The interpreter posed my question again, in French. Yes, J, a Congolese refugee resettled in the United States, replied. I asked him if his wife was still back in the refugee camp. Through the interpreter, he said no, his wife disappeared when their village was attacked. Biting my lip, I asked J if he heard anything about his wife's fate after that. He had not, but he wasn't willing to believe she had died. Not yet. "She is my love," he said, smiling sadly, "I will wait a little longer."

*

Before I left Bosnia almost two years ago, I got a lettering tattoo on my hip. "Neka Mir Prevlada Na Zemlji." May Peace Prevail on Earth. I try to remind myself.

[Photo: View from the Sarajevo-Ploce train at dusk. Author's own.]