‘The Bridge’

Gahyun Rho is a 10th-grade student at Saint Paul Preparatory Seoul, where she excels in athletics, including representing Korea on the Women's U16 Lacrosse team, while pursuing interests in sports, architecture, and urban and regional studies.

The Bridge

As the flight crossed the snow-dusted mountains and descended toward a rain-sodden landscape, my mind harked back to the rainy Saturday afternoon in a university library where this all began. I could never have imagined the events so many years ago would put me on the path to Sarajevo—a city I would have struggled to locate on a map at that time—to attend the memorial for the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.

I sat up straight, trying to brush away the cobweb of distracted thoughts and keep my eyes open. In the distance, the runway sharpened into focus, its wet tarmac giving it a sleepy look. Against the gray backdrop, the yellow and blue-tipped tails of Bosnia & Herzegovina Airlines planes lined up at the airport gates added a splash of color, as did the red-tiled roofs scattered across the surrounding hills.

I took a deep breath as the airplane screeched past the airport’s jetways before taxiing slowly back. 

Dressed in a teal-colored kameez with long white sleeves, jeans, and a lavender scarf draped around her head, Lamija sat next to me in the backseat of the Skoda taxi as we headed to Visegrad. Lamija worked as an analyst for a government agency that assisted in identifying the remains of Balkan war victims. Along with members of the host committee, she had been waiting at the airport the previous evening to receive me, holding a bouquet of red roses and wearing the warmest smile. I chose to accept her invitation to stay at her apartment instead of checking into a hotel.

We drove through the hills surrounding Sarajevo. Unpainted brick houses rose up, gaped at us in silence, and then vanished. Some were mere brown brick walls with holes where windows should be and no roofs.  An hour and a half after we started, a sign welcomed us to Gorazde—the last town in Bosnia before entering the Bosnian Serb-ruled autonomous territory of Republika Srpska. 

My mind immediately flashed back to Marja’s testimony over a decade ago at the war tribunal in The Hague. She had walked from Visegrad all the way to Gorazde, the first Bosnian majority town, to get treatment for her wounds. 

She testified that she threw her infant son out of an open window of the house on Pionirska Street before jumping out herself. She kept running, Marija said, even after a bullet hit her. She hid in the sewer and watched as the house she had just escaped from burned with seventy people still trapped inside. After staying hidden in the sewer for three days with maggots eating at her bullet wound, she finally decided to walk to Gorazde.

“Is it a short drive from here to Visegrad?” I turned to ask Lamija.

Lamija shook her head. “No. It’s at least an hour.”

“An hour by car?”

“It’s almost forty kilometers from here, Kareena,” she said.

We arrived in Visegrad and checked into a hotel near the Mehmet Sokolovic Bridge. Leaving our baggage in the room, we walked to a restaurant across the street from the hotel, chose a table on the sidewalk, and ordered lunch. 

Our seats faced the bridge—one I knew all too well, even though this was my first visit to the city. It was built over five hundred years ago by a man who grew up here before the Ottoman Sultan’s men took him away from his childhood home. 

I was starving, but the waiter took a while to come to our table to take our orders. Lamija and I ordered moussaka and hoped our food would arrive faster than it took the waiter to notice us. 

Thankfully, the waiter brought us our drinks quickly.

In the distance, Visegrad, with its neighborhood of houses painted in a burst of spring colors, looked as if it might glide down the hills and into the river.  

I sipped my glass of Ayran and pictured little Sokolovic’s mother running past me toward the river—toward her little boy as the Sultan’s men prepared to take him to Istanbul. The boy screamed, struggling against the soldiers’ grip, and turned back only to see other soldiers holding back his grieving mother as she tried to save him. 

The river, Drina, must have stood as a silent witness, watching the anguished mother as they dragged her flailing boy into the boat, his ears echoing her screams.

Long after his mother died, Sokolovic would return to Visegrad, this time as the sultan’s Grand Vizier. Did the Drina recognize the boy, now the Vizier Mehmet Pasha Sokolovic, or remember his mother, who had cried her heart out on its bank? 

The bridge, built by Sokolovic, lasted for over five centuries, serving as a main route that connected the east with the rest of Europe, until the Austrian Habsburgs destroyed it during World War I. It was rebuilt as part of the post-war rebuilding efforts. While the bridge itself had changed so much over the centuries, nothing altered its reputation as a helpless witness to human brutality. Or as a witness to the tears of countless men and women begging for their lives and the lives of their families before their blood spilled into the river below. 

“We’ve been trying to get those who were forced out of Visegrad during the war to return,” Lamija said, bringing me back to the present as our server set down our food. “But, of course, they don’t want to. Their lives are permanently damaged, even without the town reminding them of family members who were brutally killed.”

“However, without them returning, it’s like we continue to lose. The Chetniks,” Lamija continued, using the slang for Serbs, “wanted to cleanse Visegrad of Muslims. And this town, once sixty-five percent Muslim, is now entirely Serbian.”

She looked at her plate in silence for a moment before saying, “I know I sound vindictive and should be ashamed to say this… But those who killed, burned, and raped us, those who told us at gunpoint, ‘Move out or every one of you Muslims will be butchered,’ succeeded, didn’t they? Even if we sent a few of them to jail, it wouldn’t undo what has already happened.”

I sat there, unable to speak, and unable to resume my meal, even though the moussaka tasted great.

“Say something,” she pleaded, as though I could conjure magic words to alleviate her impotent anger.

After lunch, Lamija returned to our room while I headed toward Andricgrad for a stroll. I understood why Lamija, like many other Bosnians, didn’t want to come to the plaza. The new showpiece square in Republika Srpska, located at the tip of the “thumb” of land between the Drina and Rzav rivers, was built on the site of barracks used to imprison, torture, and kill Bosnians not so long ago. 

From the center of the plaza, the eight-foot-tall statue of Ivo Andric stared down at me through his thick glasses. Dressed in a long winter coat with his hands in his pockets, he was the man whose writings first introduced me to Visegrad, its history, its bridge, and the River Drina. Gazing up at the imposing figure, I wondered what Andric would think of today’s Visegrad and all the turmoil the city had experienced over the past decade and more. For now, only his smile, half-sarcastic and half-sympathetic, answered my silent question. 

This was my first time in the plaza, and in Visegrad, for that matter, although the place had long held a hold on me. Sitting on the steps leading up to the statue, I let my mind wander back to the start of the long journey that finally brought me here.

Twenty years ago, I arrived in St. Louis, Missouri—exhausted, jet-lagged, and already homesick—to begin my graduate studies at Washington University. When the representatives of the Indian Student Association, who had picked me up at the airport, handed me a list of Indian students looking for roommates, I chose Preethi Mathur, who was pursuing her PhD in the School of Humanities and had been on campus for nearly six years.

Four weeks in, when Preethi told me she wanted her boyfriend to move in with her, I promised to move out by the end of the spring semester. 

However, within weeks, her boyfriend, who had lost his assistantship and had no place to stay, had made himself comfortable in the apartment.

As I leafed through the ads for a sublease in the local newspaper, I found the only one within walking distance of the campus—a sublease for a bedroom in a townhouse on Fowler Street, posted by a student named Rahim. I kept looking. A few more days passed, but I found no other ads, so I called Rahim and left him a message.

Rahim, a graduate student in the School of Engineering, returned my call the next day. He spoke with an accent that I couldn’t identify as either European or Arabic. “I had two roommates who lived in the other two rooms,” he said. “They left because of an emergency.” He added he did not plan to take in a third person unless I was okay with it.

A few months ago, back in India, the idea of living with a male roommate would have been unthinkable, and I desperately hoped to find a better option. How could I be sure I wasn’t moving in with a Hannibal Lecter? Over the next few days, I pored over every rental ad in the local newspaper but found that all the other available subleases were too far from campus. 

Preethi’s boyfriend, meanwhile, was practically living in the apartment. If I wanted to be on good terms with the first person I had befriended after moving to this country, I needed to move out quickly. 

I decided to move to Rahim’s.

One evening, three weeks after moving into my new home, I returned from campus, tired and famished. It was late fall. The days had grown real short, real quick, and it felt like late night already. I dropped my backpack and the pile of mail I had collected on the coffee table, parked myself on the couch, and reached for the remote. I had not seen Rahim Siljadic for almost a week, and wondered if I was obligated to check on my housemate. After deciding to call his lab the next day, I sat on the couch and worked through a bowl of cereal because there was nothing else in the fridge to eat. Once I had emptied the bowl, I reluctantly got up and walked to my room to change. 

I had just taken off my top when a loud clanging jolted me, paralyzing me for a few moments, before I ducked under the bed. A chaotic crashing sound followed the initial bang, and I realized the loud noise was coming from Rahim’s room. Was someone shooting at his window?

Loud male voices continued to holler from the street even after the sound of breaking glass had stopped. Then, the shouting too ceased. A car engine revved on the street and sped away, and an eerie calm returned to the usually quiet street. 

Wondering if Rahim had been in his room the whole time, I crouched motionless under my bed before crawling to the window and lifting my head. I raised the blinds a few inches and looked out at the street. Lutz Avenue was still dark and quiet. 

An eternity later, I crawled on all fours to Rahim’s room, my jaw still trembling. When I opened the door, I saw shards of broken glass shining on the floor and across his desk. I crawled back to the living room, grabbed the phone, and stayed low behind the couch while dialing 911 and asking for the police in a trembling voice.

When the cops arrived promptly, I told them I hadn’t seen Rahim in over a week. The officers assured me that the rocks were aimed at my housemate and that it was no accident. Apparently, there had been trouble in this house before, although no one was charged. The police said they would post an officer outside to watch the street and advised me to go to bed.

After the officers left, I switched off the lights and tucked myself under the covers. Still, I kept waking up every five minutes to check the street outside and make sure the cop car was still parked there.

The next day, while doing my laundry at the nearby laundromat, I ran into Amanda, who lived next door. I shared with her the events of the previous night. She reiterated what the police had already told me—that Rahim and his former housemates had been involved in a serious altercation, which led to their moving out.

“You know what’s going on in Yugoslavia, right?” Amanda asked.

“Of course,” I replied, even though I had no idea what she was talking about.

“He and his ex-housemates belong to different groups involved in the war,” she added.

Back at home, I called Rahim’s office. His colleague, who answered the phone, informed me that Rahim had not shown up for the past week. He believed Rahim had gone back to his native country because of an emergency.

 I turned on the TV and tuned into CNN, which was hosting a panel discussion about the ongoing siege in Eastern Europe, accompanied by video clips of buildings being shelled, rising smoke, and falling debris. Footage continued to show people carrying injured countrymen, heartbroken family members hugging corpses, and screaming in heart-wrenching agony. I realized I hadn’t watched the news for some time when I read the ticker headlines at the bottom—Siege of Sarajevo.

I got up and paced the house, glancing at the images on the TV every time I walked past. Then my eyes fell on the mail addressed to Rahim that I had picked up and set aside in the kitchen cabinet over the past week. I looked at the envelope on top, which had Airmail stamped on it and a Sarajevo postmark. I skimmed through the pile and found three more letters from Sarajevo, all from Lamija Siljadic—letters that would shape my university research and, subsequently, my career. 

Later that afternoon, at the library, I would learn that the word ‘Sarajevo’ originated from the Turkish phrase Saray ovasi, meaning “the plain around the palace.” Saray, the Turkish word for palace, was also the word for “harem” in Urdu and “inn” in Hindi, my mother tongue.

When I returned to our room in the riverside hotel, Lamija was in better spirits. We still had much to catch up on, so we ordered tea and snacks from room service while Lamija settled down to show me pictures of her travels since we’d last met. 

She had spent a month that summer traveling around Scandinavia with her daughter, who was attending college in Gothenburg. Every time I looked at a photo in her album, I scanned Lamija’s face as if to make sure that this was indeed the same person. 

When her eyebrows knotted questioningly, I said, “You look so much happier in these pictures, Lamija.” 

 She bowed her head, confusion spreading across her face. “I don’t know,” she said, as if talking to herself. “I never was a good mother.”

The server brought the tea and kiflices into the room to interrupt our conversation. When he left, I asked Lamija if she missed being with her daughter. 

She looked at me with a blank expression. “I can’t just give up on this place, Kareena, and go to Sweden,” she said, staring at an imaginary stain on her finger. “I can’t give up on our country, no matter how messed up our lives are.” 

I took a sip of my tea and a bite of the pistachio-filled pastry. 

“Everyone has been advising me to leave this place and move closer to my daughter, but I can’t see myself doing it," she quickly added. “However, I am happy my daughter is far away from this place.”

After we finished our tea, Lamija called a taxi and we took a drive through the countryside. As we got in, Marja’s testimony floated through my mind again, and I asked Lamija, “Can we drive through Pionirska Street?” 

“Sure,” she said. “And we can drive to Koritnik from there. It is not far.” 

The victims burned alive in the house on Pionirska Street had been herded from the village of Koritnik, seven kilometers north. On Pionirska Street, the house from which Marja had escaped stood desolate and decrepit in what appeared to be a newly built neighborhood. 

On Pionirska Street, the house where Marja escaped from stood abandoned and dilapidated in a seemingly newly developed neighborhood. The wall facing the street was missing, and the ground was covered with rubble and knee-high weeds, with a hollow, damp basement. The other houses on either side of the street were painted white or cream, with nearly square windows facing the street and white picket fences around them.

As we traveled farther from Visegrad, tall, barren pine trees covered the surrounding hills. Evening sunlight seeped through the branches, casting the leaf-strewn ground in shades of russet. A dark brown fog hovered over the land, with the occasional lonely brick house poking through the trees. 

Some houses had small white billboards in front of them. When I asked Lamija if she could translate one billboard, she asked the driver to stop and then read, “Our neighbors, war criminals, robbed and threw us out of our homes and then burned us alive. Eight of us survived.” 

I realized we must be driving through Koritnik. 

A kilometer further on, Lamija told me she would like to visit a family in the next town. When I agreed, she gave the driver directions. 

The Bosnian countryside continued to rush past us as we drove alongside the Drina.

Initially, I had ignored the stack of mail on the table, but my eyes repeatedly returned to Lamija Siljadic’s letters from Sarajevo, perched atop the pile and winking at me every time I walked past. 

The morning after the attack on Rahim’s window, I went to the computer center and created a user ID, Karinja92, on several Yugoslavian USENET sites. I then logged in and browsed these sites for details of events unfolding in Bosnia and Sarajevo. Reports from the BBC and other news organizations flooded the group site, along with graphic personal accounts of violence and lurid accusations against Russian Orthodox Serbs, Croatian Catholics, and Bosnian Muslims.

When I returned home for lunch, my eyes drifted toward the stack of mail again. I made rice and dal, enough to last me for two days. I ate my lunch while watching the news on TV. Just as I grabbed my backpack, ready to head back to campus, I finally yielded to the temptation. 

I wet the glue on the envelope containing Lamija’s earliest letter and gently pried it open, millimeter by millimeter, being careful not to leave any visible marks. Inside, the envelope contained eight pages handwritten on both sides in Cyrillic. 

At the library, I made two photocopies of each of the three letters, called a friend majoring in European history, and asked for help translating them. When I returned home in the evening, I placed the letters back in their respective envelopes and glued them as neatly as possible.

Two days later, my friend from the humanities school informed me that one of his colleagues had a contact at Oregon State University who was fluent in Bosnian. He provided me with the contact details, and I promptly emailed him and then faxed the letters to the provided number. Within a month, I received an email with the translations.  

I would remember bits and pieces of Lamija’s letters by heart long after I had read them.

I must get Mom and Dad out of Visegrad. In Srebrenica and Bratunac, the Chetniks and JNA are shooting our people on the street. 

The JNA commander announced yesterday, “Run away from Srebrenica and Bratunac now. Or we will kill you all.”

Dad is convinced that Uncle Nezir needs help. Since everyone in Srebrenica knows him, Uncle Nezir is a marked man. Dad wants someone to bring his wife and children back to Visegrad. I fear that if he can’t find anyone to do it, Dad might go himself.

I think I should go there, but I’m not sure how. Everyone tells me it’s hard to get through Goradze now, since it involves going through Chetnik territory to reach Visegrad. Please tell me what I should do.

The letters described her efforts to avoid snipers and reach the post office to get letters from Rahim. When Lamija did receive a letter from him, she wrote that the happiness made up for all the times she went home disappointed.

Whenever she left the house—whether to fetch water or buy groceries—Lamija always ran into someone she hadn’t seen in months. They would tear up with relief after sharing news that someone they knew was still alive, only to find out later that another mutual acquaintance had recently died or gone missing.

I don’t know if you’ve received my previous letter. Please reply if you can. Uncle Nezir is dead. I don’t want you to know the details, but if I don’t go to Visegrad, I worry Dad will do something foolish. They’re executing people on the Mehmet Pasha Bridge in public. The river washes the bodies away. I don’t know how I’ll write to you after leaving Sarajevo, or if you’ll ever receive these letters, but writing this still brings me so much relief. Praying for you…

From the letters, I learned that Rahim had tried to relocate his family out of Bosnia but had made no headway with US immigration or local authorities. The Bosnian local government did not support people fleeing the country because it wanted its citizens to stay and help fight the invaders. Allowing Bosnians to leave their villages would have made it easier for the Serbs to take over those abandoned towns.

I listened to reports on the BBC, filled with snippets about atrocities committed against women in the public square beside the bridge—mothers raped in front of horrified daughters, and daughters raped in front of helpless mothers. Stories of corpses found discarded on the streets after being raped to death, with mutilated body parts and giant crosses scored on their flesh.

I picked up Ivo Andric’s book, The Bridge on the Drina, from the university library. During the days I spent reading it, and for weeks afterward, I experienced strange dreams at night. In one frequent dream, I saw Sarajevo wobbling in the sky like a broken kite, changing colors as it floated over different cities. Waves of Turks, Mughals, Ottoman soldiers, and cavalrymen captured the kite, repainted it, and then let it drift away again.

After days and weeks of brooding and several failed attempts to write the opening paragraphs, I finally completed a letter to Lamija. Before signing the letter for Rahim, I edited and revised many sentences. Whenever I tried to make the letter feel more personal, I became acutely aware that I didn’t even know how Rahim addressed his sister. In my first version, I wrote Dearest Lamija. In the final version I mailed to her, it simply read Dear.

I sent the letter to my friend at Oregon State University and had it translated into Bosnian. Then, I carefully copied the printed Bosnian version onto a sheet of paper, trying my best to imitate Rahim’s handwriting. The letter was only four paragraphs long, but it took a lot of effort.

 I try to watch the news on CNN and gather as much information as possible from the internet. I am so sorry that I’m not there with you all. I have been working hard to fly back, but it is almost impossible because the US government won’t allow anyone to fly anywhere near Sarajevo. I’m considering flying into Vienna or Budapest and finding my way home. I also twisted my ankle playing football, and now I’m in the hospital. The doctor told me I will need to use crutches for the next few weeks. 

Be brave. Help is coming. The US and the UN are working to send troops, although you may not realize this from the news you receive there. Don’t lose heart. I hope to be home soon.

Over the next four months, I received more letters from Lamija, but they were not delivered in the order they were postmarked from Bosnia. I later learned that snipers even targeted aid agencies that helped deliver mail in Sarajevo, so these deliveries happened only sporadically.

When I sat down to write my fourth letter to Lamija, three months had passed since Rahim’s disappearance. Suddenly, it seemed naïve to think that my juvenile writing could bring any comfort to a family enduring such horrors, and the idea of sending it for translation and letting someone else read my “fake” letters overwhelmed me. It all felt too clumsy and cringeworthy. 

 I stopped writing. Soon, the letters from Lamija stopped arriving, too.

Meanwhile, the landlord donated all of Rahim’s belongings to Goodwill, and during that summer, leased Rahim’s room to Najyana, an international student from Thailand. Najyana was friendly, unobtrusive, and kept the place tidy. She also cooked excellent Thai food. However, the house began to feel haunted. Every time I sat on the couch or turned on the TV, memories of the day when rocks shattered the window came flooding back. My mind would wander, and I wondered if Rahim had reunited with his family and whether Lamija and her parents had survived the war.

It rained heavily that summer, almost every weekend. Whenever I stepped outside after watching the news or reading books on Balkan history, the sky wore a murky, leaden look. 

South of the campus, there was a park featuring a pedestrian bridge over a creek—a place I used to frequent. Whenever I approached the bridge, a vivid image would flash in my mind—men forced to line up on the bridge before being shot. I could distinctly hear their bodies thudding into the brook below, turning the water red. But whenever I looked down from the pedestrian bridge, all I saw was a group of turtles huddled below, gazing up and waiting for passing pedestrians to toss them some food.

In the fall, I decided on my doctoral thesis topic: Ethnic conflicts in Europe since the Second World War, focusing on the conflict in the Balkans. 

After completing my PhD, I relocated to Detroit for a postdoctoral research associate position at Wayne State University. By then, the Dayton Accords had been signed, and the Balkan War had concluded. Bosnia and Herzegovina had achieved its independence, with Sarajevo as its capital. Visegrad was now part of Republika Srpska, an autonomous region with a Bosnian Serb majority within the country.

Our car pulled outside a barbed-wire-fenced house that looked more like a warehouse than a residence, save for a few windows and the small white single-paneled doors on the first and second floors. 

“You should come in, too. It’ll give you a chance to stretch your legs,” Lamija said, stepping out of the car and walking ahead.

I took my time getting out. Knee-high grass, overgrown dandelions, and other weeds overwhelmed the front yard. Clusters of lavender-colored wildflowers dotted a lawn devoid of trees and littered with trash. A solitary haystack stood in the backyard like a silent spectator.

When I arrived at the front door, it was already wide open. Excited voices came from inside as I stood there and peeked in. Lamija and two elderly ladies were standing in the middle of the living room. The two women wore long skirts and blouses and appeared to be in their sixties, although the shorter and heavier one looked older than her companion. Wrinkles crisscrossed their faces, and only a few strands of dark hair covered their heads. The jawbone of the more petite of the two women protruded as if she had lost her molars. I wondered if they were perhaps younger than they appeared. 

When Lamija introduced us in Bosnian, the two women laughed and smiled warmly.

“Lamija say,” said the taller lady, initially pointing at me and then at Lamija before trying to compose her sentence in English. She turned to Lamija and asked, “Kako ti kazes zester?” meaning, “What is the word for sister?”

Lamija smiled before responding.

Then the lady turned to me again and said, “Lamija says you and Lamija sisters.” I felt a surge of pride and warmth. 

Wearing a radiant smile, the older woman pointed her index finger at herself and then at the other lady. “We sisters also,” she said, walking toward me with open arms, and hugging me. The other lady repeated the gesture.  

“They are my distant relatives, my aunts,” Lamija stated.

When the sisters left the room, I asked Lamija, my index finger pointing first at her and then at myself, “Between us, who’s older?”

“That would be me,” Lamija said with a giggle.

The two women returned from the kitchen, and I couldn’t help but notice how much they smiled at Lamija. “Sit down, sisters,” the older one said to us before guffawing again.  

She sat on the sofa and pulled us down with both hands, seating Lamija and me on either side. The younger one set two plates of assorted sweets and savories on the table. Without understanding the language, I watched the older aunt insist we eat while Lamija protested. When the younger aunt pressed Lamija’s shoulder and held her down in the seat, Lamija explained to her that our stomachs were too full to eat anything. The aunt dismissively asked her not to protest too much before the three of them went into the kitchen to resolve the issue in private.

The tea that the aunts served us tasted quite different from the Bosnian tea I had ordered several times in the Little Bosnia neighborhood of St. Louis. Lamija and her aunts mostly chatted animatedly, but at other times, they spoke in hushed tones. I interpreted the loud conversations as discussing happier topics and the quieter moments as concerning the perils, both past and present, of living in the neighborhood.

When we got up to say goodbye, half an hour later, the aunts walked us to the car. Tears streamed down their cheeks as they hugged Lamija—little trickles that stumbled and lost their way as they meandered down wrinkled faces. The older aunt said something to Lamija, then pointed to me and asked her to translate what she had said. Lamija struggled to find the right words, eventually settling on, “They want me to tell you that I don’t visit them enough, and I would visit more often if you came to see me more frequently.”

As I stepped forward to hug the aunts, I could feel the pinpricks in my eyes.

After the car pulled out of the property and we were back on the main road, I noticed Lamija’s teary eyes scanning the surroundings intensely. “They have only each other for company. Husbands, children, parents… They’ve lost them all,”  she said.

“You ought to visit them more often,” I suggested.

“These hills and valleys are filled with such widows,” Lamija said wistfully. “Men and boys executed. Daughters and daughters-in-law raped or mutilated. Raped deliberately so that any child thus conceived would be half-Chetnik. The only reason these women were allowed to live was that they were deemed too old to conceive or be raped. It is hard to face them.”

Lamija coughed and pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims. “Do you mind?” 

When I shook my head, she lit a cigarette and stared intensely at its tip before inhaling. 

 I placed my hand on her left wrist.

Back in Visegrad that night, Lamija pointed to a house at the bottom of the hills as we walked across the Sokolovič bridge. “There is a woman who hid in that house with her little daughter while her parents were taken away,” she said. “She watched through her window as her mom and dad were shot on this bridge.”

Bright orange fluorescent lights reflected off the freshly painted parapets. Young couples strolled by, laughing and holding hands.

“Then there’s this woman who now lives in Potocari,” Lamija added, “who saw her four-year-old son being thrown like a basketball into the river. They shot the boy while he was still in the air.”

Lamija stopped and began to mutter as if cursing herself before sitting down on a bench at the bridge’s apex. I stood beside her, but then decided it was best to leave her alone for a few minutes and strolled ahead. However, my thoughts stayed tethered to those who must have stood in this same spot, waiting to be executed, before their bullet-riddled bodies fell and were taken away by the water. 

My legs grew numb and heavy.

The killings on this bridge ceased only when the people living upstream started to complain that the corpses in the river were obstructing the water from flowing into their areas. That was when the perpetrators began incinerating the bodies instead of disposing of them in the river.

Shaking myself out of my daze, I realized I was standing in the middle of the bridge, the kapia, with its memorial tower and Arabic inscription praising Mehmet Pasha. I called the translation of the inscription from Ivo Andric’s book.

I pray that by the mercy of Allah, this bridge will stand firm
And that its existence will be passed in happiness
And that it will never know sorrow.

As I walked back to the bottom of the bridge, I saw Lamija walking toward me. “Kareena, could you sit down with me for a moment?” she asked when I reached within earshot. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier,” Lamija mumbled when I settled next to her, but then she fell silent. Noticing her struggle for words, I placed my hand on her wrist again.

 “There is a reason I wanted you to be here this time…” said Lamija, looking up at the sky. “Not just because tomorrow is the eleventh of July. 

“It’s unfair and selfish on my part, I know,” she added. “But I still wanted to ask you.”

“Ask me what?”

“A couple of years ago, I learned that they had identified one of Rahim’s bones—the femur—in a graveyard upstream.” She gagged before continuing, “There was a DNA match. Earlier this year, they found more of his remains elsewhere.” Toward the end of the war, the Serbs had dug up corpses from various mass graves, scattering and reburying them so that the bodies could not be recovered intact. 

“I have to bury him tomorrow. With just three of his bones.” Lamija looked remarkably calm. “They have his coffin ready. I would like you to be there with me when… when I formally bury him. My mom can’t be there. You’re the only other person I know who knew him. You’ve been a sister to me, the sister I never had.”

 Lamija looked into my eyes, and I forced myself not to break down. “If you don’t want to, I fully understand. You can stay in the hotel. I will be back by tomorrow night.”

She waited patiently for my response, but I could not find the right words.

“I have done this for fifteen years—informing relatives, digging up graves, and burying victims,” she said. “Still, this is so… When they found his femur three years ago, I ignored the request to bury only his femur. Now, how long can I wait? How long should I wait? And for what? One more bone every five years or so? I’m scared, Kareena. There’s nothing more to hope for after this.” I looked up so that my tears would not spill out bu the sky was one long stretch of grey bleakness.

 Lamija sighed and turned her head away from me. “I know it’s insane to have hoped that he was still alive somewhere all this time.” 

“It’s natural to hope,” I rasped. 

Lamija choked back her tears. “I’m not what people here think I’m. I don’t know shit about anything, Kareena.”

I edged closer and touched her upper arm before she turned around and rested her head on my shoulder. She was sobbing now.

“You are an incredibly brave person, Lamija. God knows what I would have done, or what anyone would have done in your place,” I said, my cheeks now dampening with tears.

We sat in that awkward position for a few minutes before she pulled back, wiped her face, and smiled sheepishly. “We have a saying in this part of the country: The sky is too high, and the ground is too hard. You just have to grin and bear it.”

“I will be there, Lamija. I so want to be there with you.”

Not long after I took up a position as an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb leaders responsible for the genocide, went into hiding. Meanwhile, I had become fascinated by the works of prominent contemporary Balkan writers like Ismail Kadare and Dubravka Ugrešić, as well as the writings of journalists and reporters active in the region.

I was particularly drawn to Ana Duric’s writings. Her essays and memoirs about life after Communism in the former Yugoslav countries and the Balkan war were well-known across Europe, but not in the US. Her writings included semi-biographical stories of women held in rape camps by Serbian soldiers and warlords, with many of the perpetrators of these camps walking free after the war. Some even ran prominent business establishments and soccer clubs that participated in European leagues. My department was the first to invite Ana for a lecture tour in North America.

Ana and I established a rapport while she was a guest at the university. We promised to stay in touch after she returned to Europe.

When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia started its sessions in The Hague, Ana invited me to attend. One summer day, I sat in the visitors’ gallery in The Hague and watched the proceedings. 

A man with his receding hair graying at his temples testified about the Pionoriska Street fire—a fire in which almost forty members of his extended family, including his father, mother, and a sibling, were burned alive. An utterly unremarkable man, he sat there calmly answering questions from the defendant’s lawyer. Two of the three main defendants in the trial were also siblings—one of them a police officer, just like the witness. The defendant’s lawyer was trying to prove that his client was nowhere near the scene of the crime while offering the witness his condolences and sympathies. Despite his calm demeanor, I was certain that this bald man must be wondering why destiny had chosen him to sit on the witness stand and relive such horrors.

Lost in my ruminations, I did not hear the conclusion of his testimony or the next witness being called to testify—a lady in her thirties who worked for the prosecutor’s office in Bosnia and collected forensic evidence. From the moment she began speaking, a strange familiarity struck me about this slim, attractive woman dressed in white Bosnian attire, with a translucent shawl draped around her head. 

I turned to look for Ana, who had accompanied me to the court that morning, but she had disappeared. We were supposed to meet for lunch, anyway.

At the end of the witness’s testimony, I hurried to the court clerk’s desk to find her name. When I saw it listed among the entries that the clerk was examining, my knees felt wobbly. 

I dashed to the restroom, sat in one of the stalls, and let the tears flow. Lamija Siljadic had survived the war!

Her narrow forehead, aquiline nose, broad chin, and skin tone were exact replicas of Rahim’s. It was remarkable that I could recall his facial features after all these years.

During my lunch with Ana, I felt unusually reticent. I decided to wait until the evening to ask her about Lamija, but just as we were about to finish our lunch, Ana made a call on her cell phone and spoke in Bosnian. 

Once she finished her call, Ana wiped her mouth with a tissue and asked me, “Kareena, someone here— who has read all your work—wants to talk to you. Can you spare a few minutes for her?”

I had an inkling of who that person might be, but I was unwilling to show my nervousness. Instead, I just nodded. Within minutes, Lamija Siljadic was among us, walking over to our table, smiling at me, and bringing her palms together in a namaste. 

I was too stunned to respond.

Ana introduced us, excused herself, and walked away quietly.

Seated together at the table, Lamija and I ordered coffee. She opened a binder she had brought with her and pulled out my letters, which she had preserved in a plastic folder. I cringed and focused on the ceramic cup before me, not wanting to meet her gaze, as if an embarrassing episode from my childhood were being exposed. Except I had been too old then to claim the excuse of “childhood.”

“These letters meant so much to me back then,” Lamija said, “when I had nothing to look forward to, nothing to make me believe that anyone cared.”

Her next words stunned me. Rahim had returned home long before my first letter reached her. When she received the letter I wrote on his behalf, Rahim had told her, “Kareena’s a nice person. You will like her.” 

But she continued writing to me because she wanted to read my replies.

Lamija’s words haunted me long after we parted that afternoon. The act I had previously dismissed as childish, naïve, and cringeworthy had turned out to be the only truly thoughtful thing I had performed in my otherwise selfish life.

Lamija had been working with Ana for quite some time, even though Ana had never mentioned Lamija’s name before. She had read all the papers I had published. In her words, “Through Rahim-bato, Allah had led me into her life.” 

When Lamija told me that her daughter’s name was Karinja, I choked.  

It was past nine the next day when we arrived in Tuzla for the annual burial ceremony honoring war victims whose bodies had been recovered the previous year. The crowd gathered in droves at the venue, a vast, open arena surrounded by hills that made me feel as if I were inside a stadium.

The number of burials had decreased over the years. This year—the twenty-first anniversary of the massacre—there were only one hundred and twenty-seven coffins.

Lamija led me through a sprawling area covered by a tarp. The lean, compact coffins, lined up in rows of eight, resembled green canoes parked in front of a sporting goods store. I followed Lamija past women kneeling beside some of the coffins. The marker where Lamija stopped had a name board in front—Rahim Siljadic. On the coffin rested Rahim’s smiling picture, as if he’d been photographed on the day I first met him on campus. Lamija kneeled, pulled a Koran from her handbag and opened it to a bookmarked page..

She started reading aloud from the book. Standing behind her, I looked at the freshly dug mounds of earth and the new coffins around me and shivered. Besides those inside the coffins waiting to be buried, I felt the presence of more than eight thousand people interred beneath the ground.

When she finished reciting her prayer, Lamija stared blankly ahead, unsure of what to do next. She turned to me, so I asked her if she wanted me to leave for a moment.

“Stay with me,” she urged, gripping my hand.

Lamija placed the Koran back in her handbag and zipped it up. Her eyes darted around as if searching for something. Then, gazing at the coffin in front of her, she laid the palm and all five fingers of her right hand on the green cloth covering it. I kneeled beside her.

“Rahim-brat,” she said, her voice cracking. After pausing to compose herself, she continued, “Rahim-brat, I’m here with Kareena. You remember her, don’t you? Your roommate. Yes, she has traveled all this way.”

Lamija took a deep breath and tugged at her scarf before glaring at the ground. “If you must know, I’m angry. I’ve been sad for a long time, but today I’m angry. The last time you said goodbye, you told me…” Lamija’s voice cracked with emotion. “You told me to take care of Mum and Dad, to stay safe, and not leave Sarajevo. I did all of that. Dad died six years ago, and Mum.. Well, Mum can’t remember anything now. How convenient for her, isn’t it? But I took care of them as you wanted me to… for the last twenty years. I upheld my end of the bargain, Rahim-brat. What about you?” 

Lamija wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Her voice was coming apart now, and I couldn’t bear to look at her. I squeezed her shoulder with my left hand and let it rest there. “I begged you not to go back. I pleaded with you to stay safe. You promised you would. But you didn’t. You betrayed me. You weren’t around even to meet my daughter, your niece. She is now all of nineteen years old.” I clasped her hand in mine. “Yes, nineteen. And after all these years, all you have left for me are three bones. See what you have done? Three fucking bones from your leg is all I have. This is what your little sister gets for decades of waiting.”

Rahim’s face atop the coffin smiled vacantly back at us. 

The meandering kite I used to dream about when I was reading Ivo Andric’s book reappeared in my mind. This time, it had lost its desire to fly and was sinking to the ground, weighed down by its weary frame. 

Lamija’s body shook. I kneeled beside her and wrapped my arms around her while tears streamed down my face. As her body trembled in my embrace, it felt as though we were no longer here, in this makeshift cemetery in Tuzla, but on the bridge in Visegrad. 

And the river underneath was rocking us gently—a silent spectator once again.

Kripa Nidhi has lived in Houston, TX for the past 20+ years, and when not writing, Nidhi works as an engineer.