Amid the charred skeleton of what only a few weeks ago had been the new station at Crna Haljina, Cinka finds the box at her feet too small for her reedy stalk of a girl. She has no idea of how violently a body can be separated from itself, but she’s certain this rough wooden box can’t possibly contain her Lili. Beginning to wonder if these pale outsiders might be mistaken, Cinka allows herself a dram of hope.
Her brother, Joesep, has accompanied her because she speaks no English; Joesep picked up scraps of the language while working a year at an emigrated cousin’s shop in London’s East End before returning home, disillusioned. Wrapping a steadying arm around her shoulder, Joesep speaks with the young man standing on the platform; she can feel in his grip that he too is unsteady as the soldier, pink-faced in his tattered uniform, explains the inadequate vessel at their feet. Cinka sees kindness in his eyes when he turns to her, falling silent as Joesep interprets for her.
“They’ve run out of proper coffins, sister. These little boxes are all they have for now.”
For her sake, he says this as if it’s perfectly reasonable, though of course it’s not: it’s all too much to absorb, the idea of this little crate among so many others; the perversity of this soft-spoken young man smiling so gently amid so much death. When Cinka turns away, Joesep’s face tightens as the soldier begins to explain the nuanced difficulties of identification a firebombing creates. Though Cinka can’t understand what they’re saying, Joesep knows she senses the heartache he’s trying to keep from her—he knows she is holding back her own in the presence of this stranger; that if she lets it come now, his own will burst in a deluge of grief and rage. Feeling her shiver, he knows too well the invocation caught behind the tight tremble of her lips. Saint Sara, I beg of you—be with me now. Loshalo.
Pulling her closer, Joesep nods as the young man continues.
“The medical officer on duty will see you now, if that’s all right—he’ll just need a little information before we can release… well… before you can take her home.”
“I see. Okay, yes.” Joesep’s tongue, still thick around the English he so rarely speaks, turns to Cinka.
“Just birokracija, sister. Come, it won’t take long. She’ll be all right here.” Nodding, Cinka follows her brother and their young guide to a tent at the base of the hill. Looking over her shoulder at the burned-out station, at the rows of stacked boxes, it looks even more a mausoleum than when they stood in its midst.
Entering the tent, the young soldier gestures for them to wait; approaching an older man seated at a folding table, he speaks into his ear. A white coat over his uniform, clipboards lined before him, the older man glances up and nods. Motioning them forward, their guide introduces them.
“This is our senior medical officer, Sergeant Dr. Mallory. He’ll finish all the necessary paper work with you. I’ll be right over here to take you back when you’re done.”
“Okay, yes. Thank you.” Joesep is grateful for the young man’s kindness, having experienced far less from most of the others he’s encountered. Sitting on folding chairs, he and Cinka wait as Mallory sorts his clipboards. Looking past him into the tent, Joesep sees rows of cots lined all the way to the back. On some, the injured gaze silently into the rigging above; on most, blankets cover shapes he finds overwhelming in their stillness. Glancing up, Mallory recognizes in Joesep’s expression a familiar anguish.
“I understand you speak English, is that correct?”
“A little. I learn in Londra.”
“Ah, London—very good. That’ll make things easier. And this is the girl’s mother? I was under the impression she was—” Mallory catches himself; checking his clipboard, he realizes the girl misled him. If only she could’ve trusted us, we might’ve gotten her home.
“Yes, Liljiana’s mother, Cinka, my sister. Me, Joesep; Liljiana, nephew.”
“Niece, you mean.”
“Yes, yes—niece. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. I mean…” Realizing the absurdity of the statement, Mallory feels his face flush. “Anyway, I’m afraid all we had to identify her was the name sewn in her coat.” Scouring the form, his memory is stunted by fatigue. “Yes, here it is: Lili… Lili-gee-anna… Vla… Vla-hovic? Is that correct?” Mallory still struggles with the girl’s name, just as he struggles to separate the recent past from the present, with so many of those in his charge having slipped so quickly from the one tense to the other. Hearing her daughter’s name mangled by Mallory, his grey eyes seeming to her to brim with sorrow, Cinka feels a spell coming on as that dram of hope evaporates. Pulling her scarf from her neck, she worries at it, knotting it in her fists to keep from swooning. Patting her knee, Joesep answers.
“Yes, that’s right: Vlahovic. Liljiana Esmalena Vlahovic. Lili.” Even as he speaks it, the light melody Joesep had always found in her name now rings flat, the weight of each syllable causing the idea of that implausible little crate back on the platform to suddenly land as altogether too credible. Slumping in his chair, he realizes that from now on, the only music her name will bring is the naricati—a moaning lament that, after today, will never be far from his sister’s lips.
“Nationality?” Getting no response, Mallory looks up to find a distracted Joesep staring at his hands. Cinka nudges him when Mallory repeats the question. “Nationality?”
Joesep squirms, fearing that the decency these foreigners have so far shown him and Cinka will end abruptly. He’s learned that outsiders’ views of his people are often so ugly that he daren’t identify as such to strangers, even those so seemingly kind as these. Joesep clings instead to the grim wisdom drilled into all of them as children: To tell the truth, you best already have one foot in the stirrup.
“Well, let’s not worry about that.” Mallory has felt this subtle resistance to specificity enough times over the last weeks to glean a sense of its bleak origins. “But for the form you’ll need to take your niece home, I will need just a bit more information. Will that be all right?”
“Yes, I understand.” Joesep sighs, wanting nothing more than to get this pointless paperwork finished so he and Cinka can take their Lili back home where she belongs.
“That’s fine, then. So, where did… does her mother live? In what town?”
“Cinka and Lili from Siguran-na-Rijeci. Little village just outside Krv Reka, bigger village… or was bigger. Krv Reka gone now.” Joesep blinks, as weary of the word was as Mallory is.
“Could you write that down for me?”
Taking the pencil, Joesep prints the name of Cinka’s village in neat block letters that capture none of its irony. Returning the form to Mallory, he wonders why this must always be their lot. A village named Safe On The River—ha! We are safe nowhere; not now, not ever.
Examining Joesep’s precise lettering, Mallory senses none of this. “And the girl’s age?”
Listening to Joesep translate for Cinka, Mallory again marvels at this language he’ll never understand, its cadence nothing but a sad music that makes him long for the chalk cliffs of his own home. If only I could go and let it be done… the bells, the bells. But then, Joesep’s answer quiets the ringing in his head.
“Desh-u-duy—I mean twelve. Sorry, no, almost twelve. Liljiana, soon she—” Joesep pauses, his throat going dry as he remembers there will be no soon for Lili. Swallowing, Joesep continues, attempting to address the confusion he sees on Mallory’s face. “Lili like papa—papa tall; Liljiana tall, too.”
Mallory erases his original estimate of the girl’s age, his hand shaking as he absorbs the revision.
Seeing this reaction, Joesep realizes he has no choice but to ask what he most dreads having answered.
“Please. You tell what happen, yes? We… must know. Lili, she go pick berries, that’s all—and her mama see her no more. Just this little…” Joesep traces with his hands the miserable contours of the too-small crate waiting for them back on the platform. “So, please: you tell, yes?”
Mallory realizes how lucky he has thus far been in avoiding such questions, the mercies of a language barrier not lost on him, interpreters having buffered him against the inquiries of every Next of Kin he’s processed since arriving—a constant stream rendered unendurable had he tried to articulate the sickening details of what he knows they all desperately thought they wanted to hear. But while Mallory can’t imagine any answer bringing Joesep or the girl’s mother a shadow of peace, particularly given what he remembers the girl had been made to endure, he feels he must now give one. Perhaps it’s the crushing fatigue, or the smothering quease he fights all the time now, but he senses that this is the one time he must try. Staring into Joesep’s black eyes—bloodshot, sunken, tormented—he feels certain that to not would be the greater of two evils, even as he shrinks from the telling. But needs must when the devil drives.
“She was found just south of Jajinci: dehydrated, malnourished, disoriented, and gravely ill. She was brought here with a handful of others after the closest settlement was burned out. Traumatized, she lost her memory for a time, but she was getting better. Then they ambushed us—us, a medical unit. It happened so fast, we couldn’t… well, Lili and the others were… gone. The firebomb was obviously meant to neutralize any surviving witnesses to what they’d done at the settlement. You see, Lili—and the others, too—they’d all been…” Mallory feels his throat cinch tight around the words as Joesep blinks at him.
“You mean Lili die here? Not camp?” What Joesep finds in Mallory’s eyes sets his skin crawling.
Mallory is at a loss: from what he saw during his examination of the girl, the camp is where she ended. After what they had done to her, seeing how they’d left her, the word alive seemed to him, then and now, a euphemism. Glancing at the girl’s mother—twisting her scarf, listening to words meaningless to her—Mallory steels himself, offering up the rest.
“You see, they did things to all of them, but with Lili, they were more—well, you see, she’d been…”
As Mallory speaks, Cinka listens for inflections, listens for her daughter’s name, watches his lips to avoid the sadness in his eyes, one she senses is directly connected to her Lili. Focused on his intonations, she doesn’t at first see what Mallory’s words are doing to Joesep, but when he stops talking—shaking his head, busying himself again with the form—she turns to find Joesep’s face a wretched grey. Feeling her gaze, Joesep pats her knee again, unable to look at her.
Finishing the form, Mallory pulls it from the clipboard; removing the carbon, he gives the duplicate to Joesep. Taking it, Joesep stares at it for a long while. When Cinka nudges him, he folds the form and slips it into his pocket as he stands. Absently extending his hand to Mallory, Joesep’s voice breaks in a way that brings the blood to Cinka’s cheeks.
“We… I…” Joesep falters, the images Mallory has put in his head too searing to fully comprehend. “We go now, yes?”
Standing, Mallory takes Joesep’s hand, muttering oproštaj—a farewell in the language he assumes is theirs, the only word he’s bothered to learn in this place fit for nothing but the leaving of it. Cinka, feeling a heat cloying at her neck and cheeks, blinks wetly, leaving Mallory with an image of her that she can’t know will linger with him long after they’ve left. When the young soldier materializes to escort them back up the hill to the platform, to the crude little box waiting for them, Joesep takes her by her arm.
“What did he say, Joesep? He went on for such a long time.”
“Only that she was well cared for, sister.” Joesep turns his face to hide the flush.
“That’s all? How can that be?”
“No, no. He also said Lili felt no pain, that she was a good girl, that he was very sorry. That’s all. He’s a good man, I think. I believe he did everything he could for her. But it just wasn’t…” Striving to keep the quaver from his voice, Joesep means to spare Cinka any more pain. But with his eyes stinging, he suddenly feels too old and too tired as they trudge after the young soldier. Glimpsing a faded tattoo on the back of their guide’s calf, visible through a tear in his fatigues, Cinka’s sobbing at last comes—quiet, heaving. Clutching her tight, Joesep resists his own as they step once again onto the station’s charred platform.
From the tent, Mallory watches this procession, picturing the terrified girl he was able to make smile only once in the briefest of unguarded moments. But as another hollow-faced Next Of is ushered in, he has no time to brood over whether what he’s just done has been an act of compassion, or just another senseless demonstration of the sadism he’s found to be the only commodity this wasting land recognizes. Avoiding the eyes of yet another confused, hopeful relative accompanied by an interpreter, Mallory pauses to offer a silent devotional to that most merciful of his few remaining angels: the uncommon tongue.
