Small things, hedgehogs and answering machines, were the tiny shots of light and hope across the horizon of those days.
Sarajevo got worse. Thousands of people were dying. I cringed at the television footage, but was always alert for his face or anything that might have to do with him. I bought a map of Yugoslavia and studied it, trying to say the names of towns and cities. Where was he today: Trebinje? Donji Vakuf? Pljevlja?
You and Roland called and it was the first time I’ve ever been disappointed to hear your voices. I wanted to get off the line so that it’d be free, just in case. The things we talked about were all background noise to me, whereas any other time I would have cherished our conversation.
Immediately after that the phone rang again and it was he. He was in Sarajevo, conditions were desperate, but he’d called to say he was all right and still thinking about things. Most of all, don’t worry. Don’t worry? Was he nuts? But you’d be proud of me; I held my tongue. I didn’t push him about anything—not to come back, not to know what he’d been thinking. I treated him like… like the igel that had allowed itself to be held. I was so glad to hear his voice that I let him talk and asked only questions that might make him talk more and stay on the line. When he hung up, I put the phone down but kept my hand on it, as if to get whatever echoes of him it still might hold.
Coincidentally, Standing on the Baby’s Head was on TV that night. I watched it because I’d never seen one of my films in German. The woman’s voice they chose for mine was eerily similar, making me sit way forward in the chair and pay complete attention. Listening, I could understand some of what she—I—was saying, but it was like having the oddest German lesson ever, with me both as teacher and rapt student. Was the story the same in translation? Was it better or worse with Weber’s original words inverted, emphases altogether different? Could a story ever be the same in another tongue? I thought about Leland telling his life story in a language I considered my own, but I wasn’t a man, wasn’t HIV positive, hadn’t experienced what he had, although the way he told it brought it vividly to life. So is there any language common to all of us? For a while I thought the language of the human heart, but no way. That’s the most complex and diverse, you know? Is there any way to fully grasp another’s story without actually being that person? Doubtful.
When I’d almost gotten used to those strange anxious days, almost gotten used to worrying and wondering and not hearing from him, I got a telegram from someone in Yugoslavia saying Mr. Leland Zivic was coming to Vienna. His train would be arriving early the next morning and could I possibly meet it.
Rose, I folded and folded the piece of paper until it was impossible to bend anymore. I put it on the table and watched it slowly try to uncurl itself and tell me the blessed news again. Minnie was asleep on the couch. I lay down next to her and put my arms around her warm body. She lifted her head and looked at me to see if everything was okay. We lay there a long time: she snoring gently, I knowing tomorrow was going to be the beginning of something extraordinary.
What I didn’t know was the way he’d chosen to return. In one of the innumerable cease-fires that had been negotiated by Lord Carrington, it was agreed by all the warring factions to allow those who wanted to leave Bosnia-Herzegovina to go to other countries. Hungary, Austria, and Germany agreed to accept most of these poor people, but there were so many who wanted to leave that not even the experts knew what to do with them once they’d made their way to safety. It was the largest exodus in Europe since the Second World War and no one had any idea of how to handle it.
In keeping with his adventurer’s way of doing things, Leland chose to ride back to Austria on the first refugee train out of Sarajevo. There were literally thousands of people on that train, and being in the Südbahnhof when it arrived was one of the most harrowing and electrifying sights of my life, so help me God. It was like hell on earth.
I got there half an hour beforehand. Since I didn’t then know anything about the significance of the train, I thought because it was so early in the morning few people would be around. But the platform was overflowing. Large families, singles, old, young, well dressed, tattered… every type you can imagine had gathered.
The mood of the crowd was just as mixed. From what I could see, half of them were carnival-happy, festive; the others looked worried or terribly, terribly sad. What was going on here? Children were everywhere, darting in and out, wrestling down on the ground and being shouted or laughed at by their families. Old women wrung their hands and rocked back and forth as if praying. Men with two-inch-thick mustaches looked down the tracks with thousand-yard stares.
Amazed and utterly baffled at both the turnout and variety around me, I stopped a railroad workman and asked why they were all here. He smiled and touched his head in the familiar Viennese gesture that says everyone is crazy. “The war train from Yugoslavia’s coming in. They’re all waiting for their families. As if we don’t already have enough damned Tschuschen in this country!”
Hearing him call them “niggers” made me frown and pull back. He sneered and slowly looked me up and down as if I were for sale. I walked quickly away. When the loudspeaker announced the train’s arrival, I found a place to wait that wasn’t too crowded.
Slowly the locomotive came around the last curve and moved toward us. When it was closer I could see all these heads sticking out the windows, lots of hands waving, faces beginning to take shape as the train loomed larger. The crowd on the platform drove forward, some of them waving back, others talking excitedly and pointing as if they’d already seen the person they’d come for. The engine gave two short hoots and came hissing into the station, brakes squealing.
If I’d been shocked at the turnout at the station, that was nothing compared with what arrived. Long before the train stopped, passengers were leaping, dropping, pouring out of the cars. If you’d just arrived, you’d have thought there was a fire on the train and these poor people were trying to escape. But no, they were only getting off. There were businessmen in suits, women in high heels, peasants, farmers with dirt all over their clothes, women in babushkas with babies strapped on like backpacks…
Window after window passed me, and the faces still on board were another show of every emotion possible. Flat-out, hand-waving joy; one whole compartment was holding hands and dancing; hysterics—Happy? Sad? Who could tell?—crying. The last thing I saw go by was a young woman slapping a man so hard that his head hit the window with a big thump. All passed in seconds. One picture after another, a living mural of humanity.
When the train finally stopped, people spilled out in a riot of shouts, gestures, flying colors. In an instant I was engulfed by at least a thousand people. Workers wearing Red Cross armbands and speaking different languages at the top of their voices tried to organize them, make some order out of the chaos, but it was nearly impossible. These people had been through months of war, praying for a way out of it and a chance to live another day. Then suddenly they were all cramped into a train with nothing to do but think about what they’d lost, what little they had left, what they’d do now so far from what could never be home again.
I looked for him from face to face, around heads, bundles… but everything was all right up in my face; everything was too much for me to be able to see clearly and make out one man in that great explosion of people. Panicking, I pushed forward into even more. No luck. There were so many eyes and smiles, arms, words, packages, children… I pushed harder and was pushed right back.
This didn’t work, and the crush scared the shit out of me. Maybe if I returned to the gate, I’d find him there. He knew me and knew I’d come for him. But how could we find each other? I turned around and bulled my way back. At the exit I stood on tiptoe to look for him in a mob that never stopped or thinned, so many of those people looking lost and scared and totally alone. God, it broke my heart.
At last, after about three lifetimes, things did get calm and only small groups were still on the platform, most of them sitting forlornly on their bags, talking among themselves or to the Red Cross workers. But no Leland. Had he missed the train? Had something happened to him before he left Sarajevo?
But then there—oh, God, oh, God—way down at the front of the train, walking slowly, carrying that big red knapsack over his shoulder and waving when he saw me… Oh, Rose, I started running. But then immediately I dropped my purse, and everything spilled across the whole ground. I bent and scooped as fast as I could, looking up constantly to check that he was still coming. I finished, zipped up the bag, and tried to run. Then my left leg buckled and I wobbled, but straightened out and was off. He was much closer now and was smiling. He was smiling at me! At me! At me! Ten feet away he dropped his bag and, throwing his arms out, shouted my name so loudly that it owned the whole station: Arrrrlennn Everybody looked at him and then at me and started smiling. One little boy screamed it out too, and their voices hung together for a few seconds, and it was the most wonderful sound.
By the time he stopped, I was hugging him as hard as I could. We stayed there so long. And then he said, “I want to go to Italy. I want to go with you. Will you go with me?”