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View of Dobrinja, Sarajevo.
A riverside stroll through a park, or maybe it was a visit to the zoo; she can’t recall the exact excursion. But she was with a friend, Tatjana Demirovic (who would become famous in South Africa for her erotic poems before being stabbed to death in a home invasion). There were pigeons, a warm cafe, lacy-green lindens, folksy pop music playing on some picnicker’s radio, and — my wife remembers — a patch of edible violets that tasted of white-frosted wafers and candied moonlight.
The two little girls were standing atop a stone bridge, tossing blades of grass into the Miljacka, watching the tiny scars slide harmlessly down the glassy surface, when the river started to whistle and the stones began to spit. Pops in the distance. Screams, and Tatjana’s heroic young parents swept up the two children, their precious daughter, my precious future wife, carrying the terrified girls in their arms for several kilometers, until they reached their house, where my shy darling spoke to her parents on the phone, oddly believing, with the keen intuition of childhood, that she’d never see them again.
In fact she would see them again, just three weeks later, near the Old Synagogue in the Ferhadija district, but not when they were alive, or intact, or easily identifiable as the parents she knew.
The Demirovics lived in a salmon colored block of flats in Dobrinja, a densely populated neighborhood safe from the pock-walled terror of sniper’s alley but soon to become a kind of sandcastle for the incoming mortar shells to kick over. It was at this point that my wife began to fixate on — to envy in a way — the reliability of certain numbers and patterns.
Each morning she’d count the windows on the apartment block across the gaping enclave. Their number (64) was reliable, always the same. But then there’d be a shrieking ribbon of fear, another explosion, and as her rapidly maturing body billowed and bulged and expanded in the atrocity of Sarajevo, her only wish was to shrink out of sight. Amidst the smoke and the sirens, she turned her attention (truly envious now) to the small, the insignificant. From the eight story edifice of apartment windows to — while sipping chorba with a still undeveloped, unshootably slender Tatjana — the perfect rows of pale yellow floor tiles in the Demirovic’s kitchen.
Then it was the six sub-divisions in Demirovic senior’s bookcase, 129 books in all, mostly reference books, pocket almanacs, legal dictionaries, an encyclopedia, but some travel guides, adventure books, a few of the latest popular novels as well. At first my wife would try to read these books, and then she’d simply open them, stare at a page. She’d study the pattern of white space that had once wormed unnoticed between the words but which now seemed the primary organism coiled around an alluvium of print. She’d spend hours tracing, memorizing these designs, and it was in those hours that her clothes would feel tighter, her breasts more weighty.
Chess; the grain-patterns in the brown and beige squares of the wooden board. Then, with magnifying glass, the semi-translucent cells and sub-cells on the wing of a dead fly. The teeth on the mandibles of ants. And all the while she’d think back on the violets, so small, compact and safe, she felt, from all the gunfire despite such an abundance of beauty.
Summer’s warm transfusion. But soon the hours soured and cowered, the leaves began to splatter and spoil. The rain was a hardworking nurse, all buffeting small talk, a hasty slosh and scrub, until a clear line formed between the basin’s rim of mountainous white and the helpless city soaking in the dirty bathwater below.
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