LIGHT FROM DARKNESS

When I began this column a few years ago my intention was to highlight the beauty of your homeland as I was privileged to discover it. But some of that beauty lies not in the land itself, but in the hearts of the people for whom it is, or was, home. And one of the things I have learned as a Zet is that this sort of beauty is often refracted by pain. Our hearts are made out of what we›ve done with hardships and obstacles, and I hope you will forgive my compulsion to explore and express these things. I know some don›t see the point of dwelling on the past, but I will audaciously suggest that true healing is better served by remembering, not forgetting. Loss cannot make sense otherwise.

The most important heart whose beauty and pain manifested itself before me was my wife’s. A well-educated Belgrade girl, beneficiary of the relative citizen-prosperity of the 70,s and 80,s, she left the uncertainty and decline  of the 90,s behind and found a new life with me in Montreal. But while she wasn’t forcefully uprooted and displaced by the acute horrors in the western part of her old country, she nonetheless arrived with a sense of tragic loss buried within. This came out on one of our summer road trips, reopening a wound she had never spoken about.

We were driving back to Belgrade from having toured Tara Mountain with our son, then five years old. We took the scenic road along the Drina in order to visit some medieval sites, marvelling at the gorgeous countryside so evocative of peace and abundance. But this impression turned out to be illusory, foreshadowed by the fact that we were straddling a border. Around Loznica, before turning towards Šabac, my wife began to recognise the names of the towns and villages across the river as they came up on road signs.

Thus began a series of recollections: events reported in the local news followed by encounters with casualties from these places at the hospital in Belgrade. That’s where my wife was working in the head trauma unit while completing her master’s degree in clinical neuropsychology. When the conflict reached the region we were now traveling through, young men began showing up on her ward with shattered skulls and brains pierced with bullets and shrapnel.

Now she was remembering her experience of the tragedy - visceral, and without filter. Her eyes had absorbed their gruesome injuries, the cruel and senseless waste of the rural youth, rarely older than she was. Her ears had heard accounts of horrible scenes, the likes of which would ruin any hope for a return to something normal. And her heart was wrenched: suddenly, the war was seated directly in front of her. As we drove along and then away from the Drina she found herself floating in poignant memories of these disfigured young men, and the crippling helplessness she had felt. I had never seen her like this and it moved me. I decided to learn more about the woeful  history before and after the Tito era. It also led me to appreciate the secondary trauma of those who were not directly affected but whose world was nonetheless deformed against their will and beyond their reach.

Which brings me to the only light I could glean from this darkness: the way she took it. The way she empathised  with the challenges these boys now faced, accompanying what recovery was possible for them. The quiet strength she built within herself as the comforts and protections of her country disintegrated in a time of insanity. And the will she mustered to change her life and make sense of everything in a new land.

It should not surprise you that I feel honoured to share a home with her.