of bullets across the men’s chests. She told us that she saw herself running before them, carrying small, faceless children, presumably my brother and me. She saw headless bodies tumbling down an embankment into a muddy, swollen river, haystacks ablaze, buildings splotched with holes, and storm-pregnant clouds so close to the ground they obscured the tops of heads.
She refused to stay overnight in the weekend house anymore and made every excuse not to bring us, the children, at all. She and Dad would make quick trips up there to do some garden work, harvest the vegetables, clean the leaves out of the drainpipes and such, and would always return before nightfall. My father, the champion of taking the path of least resistance, humored her when she was around and made fun of her when she was not, saying stuff like: “Your mother and her conspiracy theories,” and “Your mother had a dream and now we can’t sleep in our own house.”
One time when we did go with them Mother had just finished making ajvar and was in the process of transporting the still-warm jars into the shed when Marija and Ostojka’s mother walked by the fence on her way to retrieve a renegade yearling.
“Oh neighbor, what are you making there?” called the woman.
“Just a little bit of ajvar . We got tons of eggplants this year and the peppers weren’t bad either. So I figured I should make something out of them instead of freezing them whole and overstuffing my freezer.”
“Make it, make it, who knows who’ll get to eat it,” the woman said and then jumped over the creek into the woods.
Mother froze, a jar in each hand, swirling the sentence in her mind, trying to work out a nonthreatening interpretation. She stood there breathing, smelling the resin and the nearby outhouse, hearingthe insects buzzing and screaming for someone to mate with them, feeling the breeze. And after a while, scrutinized by this most intense contemplation, all those stimuli began to make a new kind of sense. Her brain deciphered the code laid in the fabric of reality and she became aware that everything was saturated with terrible, mounting wrongness. She looked at our house and for a moment actually saw it roofless, stairless, and empty.
She then walked to our dark blue Fiat, opened the trunk, and placed the jars of ajvar inside. She returned to the shed and did the same with another two jars, then another two, then another two, and she didn’t stop until the trunk was filled up with jars of ajvar , pickles, pickled peppers stuffed with shredded cabbage, pickled beets, pear jam, raspberry jam, bottles of rose petal syrup, bags of potatoes, bunches of carrots, boxes of dried valerian, whole pumpkins, everything. She told Mehmed and me to get in the car, then found my father fussing about the well and told him to drive us home. He did and that was the last time she ever saw our weekend house or the property.
“To me it’s as good as torched,” she would say when Father would try to change her mind. From then on our weekends were spent around the TV, with my father taking naps and drinking and my mother staring into the void and chain-smoking.
As for the TV, it constantly showed news footage of what had happened in the Croatian town of Vukovar, just a little north of Tuzla, its buildings turned into debris by artillery, its citizens fleeing up snow-covered roads with all their possessions on horse-drawn buggies or in bulky suitcases or mere pockets, its projectile-plowed streets now full of Serbian banners and music, and dancing neo-Chetniks, rocking left and right in the backs of their trucks, smiling at the camera as the truck tires, unseeingly, crunched throughthe flesh and bone of those who had too many holes in them to evacuate and were lying there, hugging the streets.
At that time we still lived in the old apartment on Brčanska Malta, at the intersection of Titova and Skojevska, the latter of which led all the way to the Husinska Buna military base. I
She refused to stay overnight in the weekend house anymore and made every excuse not to bring us, the children, at all. She and Dad would make quick trips up there to do some garden work, harvest the vegetables, clean the leaves out of the drainpipes and such, and would always return before nightfall. My father, the champion of taking the path of least resistance, humored her when she was around and made fun of her when she was not, saying stuff like: “Your mother and her conspiracy theories,” and “Your mother had a dream and now we can’t sleep in our own house.”
One time when we did go with them Mother had just finished making ajvar and was in the process of transporting the still-warm jars into the shed when Marija and Ostojka’s mother walked by the fence on her way to retrieve a renegade yearling.
“Oh neighbor, what are you making there?” called the woman.
“Just a little bit of ajvar . We got tons of eggplants this year and the peppers weren’t bad either. So I figured I should make something out of them instead of freezing them whole and overstuffing my freezer.”
“Make it, make it, who knows who’ll get to eat it,” the woman said and then jumped over the creek into the woods.
Mother froze, a jar in each hand, swirling the sentence in her mind, trying to work out a nonthreatening interpretation. She stood there breathing, smelling the resin and the nearby outhouse, hearingthe insects buzzing and screaming for someone to mate with them, feeling the breeze. And after a while, scrutinized by this most intense contemplation, all those stimuli began to make a new kind of sense. Her brain deciphered the code laid in the fabric of reality and she became aware that everything was saturated with terrible, mounting wrongness. She looked at our house and for a moment actually saw it roofless, stairless, and empty.
She then walked to our dark blue Fiat, opened the trunk, and placed the jars of ajvar inside. She returned to the shed and did the same with another two jars, then another two, then another two, and she didn’t stop until the trunk was filled up with jars of ajvar , pickles, pickled peppers stuffed with shredded cabbage, pickled beets, pear jam, raspberry jam, bottles of rose petal syrup, bags of potatoes, bunches of carrots, boxes of dried valerian, whole pumpkins, everything. She told Mehmed and me to get in the car, then found my father fussing about the well and told him to drive us home. He did and that was the last time she ever saw our weekend house or the property.
“To me it’s as good as torched,” she would say when Father would try to change her mind. From then on our weekends were spent around the TV, with my father taking naps and drinking and my mother staring into the void and chain-smoking.
As for the TV, it constantly showed news footage of what had happened in the Croatian town of Vukovar, just a little north of Tuzla, its buildings turned into debris by artillery, its citizens fleeing up snow-covered roads with all their possessions on horse-drawn buggies or in bulky suitcases or mere pockets, its projectile-plowed streets now full of Serbian banners and music, and dancing neo-Chetniks, rocking left and right in the backs of their trucks, smiling at the camera as the truck tires, unseeingly, crunched throughthe flesh and bone of those who had too many holes in them to evacuate and were lying there, hugging the streets.
At that time we still lived in the old apartment on Brčanska Malta, at the intersection of Titova and Skojevska, the latter of which led all the way to the Husinska Buna military base. I
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