The Solace of Trees

  Published by New Europe Books

  Williamstown, Massachusetts

  www.NewEuropeBooks.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Robert Madrygin

  Cover design by Julia Madrigan

  Interior design by Knowledge Publishing Services

  This is a work of fiction and, except in cases of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN: 9780997316902

  First English-language edition, 2017

  Ebook ISBN 9780997316919

  v4.1

  a

  For my wife, Susan

  and

  for Amir and all the silent victims of war

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  A Conversation with Robert Madrygin, author of The Solace of Trees

  Also from New Europe Books

  About the Author

  Prologue

  They kept asking him the same questions, over and over. Questions they already knew the answers to. He felt so tired, so impossibly sad and broken. All he wanted was to sleep. To let his eyelids fall, his mind shut off. But they wouldn’t let him. “What is your name?” they asked for the thousandth time. “Why did you return to Bosnia?” “What do you do for Zakariyya Ashrawi?” “Where are you really traveling to?”

  Amir answered the questions, but they dismissed anything he said, as though no response he could give would please them. He was so weary that he would say anything they wanted just so he could close his eyes. They asked him again, Why had he come back? He answered that he had returned to visit his country. “Your country? What do you mean, your country! You are American now, aren’t you? Why are you here?”

  He had no answer to this other than what he’d already told them. The two men interrogating him turned to speak to each other. They talked in hushed voices behind the chair his body was slumped on. Amir heard a lighter being struck, and the smell of cigarette smoke filled the room. He closed his eyes. If only he could keep them shut. But at least he had the few minutes until their cigarettes burned low and they resumed their questions.

  American or Bosnian? The truth was, he felt neither completely the one nor the other. It had been nearly ten years since he had been relocated from the land of his birth to the United States. Yet each of those years might as well have been a decade in itself for the distance he felt from the painful, sad memories of those times. He had been ten when the Bosnian War began, the history books having assigned the date of April 6, 1992, as the beginning of the conflict. He had been eleven when, nearly a year later, it reached the doorstep of his family’s home with brutal and savage intent.

  December 14, 1995—the day of the signing of the Dayton Accords—marked the end of the war that had decimated the land of Amir’s birth. But for him, as with all victims of war, there was no simple, finite ending—no day, month, or year that closed the door on the past with reassuring finality. Human souls were not history books, couldn’t relegate the past to letters and words, couldn’t disappear traumatic events into paragraphs of analytic explanation. What had been suffered lived on, remained a part of you, like an arm or a leg, for the rest of your life. There was no use in denying it, for then it became like a phantom limb, an invisible appendage whose pain could be felt but not eased. The struggle to come to terms with it was made all the more difficult because the world seemed only too happy to forget.

  While the smoke swirled about the room and his interrogators continued to chat behind his back, Amir’s mind traveled back in time….He was a child wandering the woods alone. He didn’t speak, and couldn’t if he’d tried. His ears could no longer hear the singing of the birds, the sound of his own feet touching the earth, the wind blowing through the trees.

  A loud voice startled him. “What is your name?” it demanded.

  Amir’s eyes struggled open, his mind disoriented.

  “What is your name?” the second interrogator repeated, shouting the question even louder than his compatriot.

  “Amir,” he answered, confused why they would demand he speak his name again and again when he’d spoken it so many times already.

  “What-is-your-name?” the first interrogator asked once again, this time in a slow, angry voice.

  “Amir. Amir Beganović-Morgan,” he answered hoarsely, distantly…his mind still wandering in the memories of his lost childhood.

  Chapter 1

  He awoke at dawn’s light, cold and confused. At first, Amir couldn’t understand how he had come to spend the night in the tree fort he had built in the woods behind his house. The disorientation of waking up not in one’s bed but in the resting place of birds, however, was soon subordinated to the sense that something was drastically wrong with his head. It felt pressurized, and he could hear nothing at all. Images slowly began to appear in his mind…men shouting, charging past the front door of his home. There were the cries of his mother and sister, and an ear-shattering explosion. His father had been shouting, yelling for him to run.

  Amir struggled to find his bearings, to draw the images wandering about his mind into focus. Were they fleeting fragments of a nightmare, or were they shards of real memory to be put whole again? A part of the boy’s mind rebelled in opposition, not wanting to pull the clouded visions closer into view, but rather calling out to abandon them until they disappeared and became indiscernible from the gray, murky atmosphere that enveloped them.

  Hesitantly sitting up, Amir looked around at the tree limbs that surrounded him, as if by doing so his eyes could somehow find the sounds his ears could suddenly no longer hear. He struggled to remember the cause of his deafness, at the same time he fought to keep its memory at bay. Between the push and the pull of opposing impulses, bits of recall slipped into his mind.

  There had been the sudden rumble of an approaching vehicle followed by the sound of gravel tumbling over itself as an armored truck sped in and jerked to a halt in front of his home. Stunned, he and his family had found their legs unable to move as they listened to the shouts of men charging forward on feet that, unlike theirs, raced ahead with confidence and purpose. Amir’s father had quickly gathered him, his mother, and his sister by his side, then stepped in front of them to face the home’s entryway. The door was propelled inward by the boot of a man who, rifle in hand, couldn’t bother to simply lift the latch of the unlocked door and swing it open.

  A fleeting image of the lone, shod foot entering his house flas
hed into Amir’s memory. His family stood in the main room of their modest farmhouse struck by an almost physical shock, as though they, and not the door, had been splintered and slammed into the wall. Yet it was the face of the boot’s owner that fully brought home the horror of the situation: the look that gazed over them with a perverse combination of hate and pleasure; the smile that leered its violence with lust and undisguised anticipation. The eyes of the eleven-year-old boy held the moment, like the click of a camera shutter snapping the scene, indelibly printing it upon the soft tissues of his startled young mind. But the child couldn’t understand what it all meant. He could see only that the terror on the faces of his family broadened the man’s smile.

  After a time Amir climbed down from his perch, and his feet took him in the direction of his family’s house. As he approached the edge of the woods, Amir saw the charred remains of the simple one-story farmhouse smoldering in the morning’s early light, its steep, orange tiled roof collapsed within the now-blackened whitewashed sidewalls that once supported it. Without venturing any closer, Amir walked back in the direction from which he came.

  Turning back into the forest brought him some sense of relief. He stayed there for most of the day, maundering close by, and then later, without thought, began to make his way toward the village that lay several kilometers from his family’s farmstead. If he had paused to consider the direction he had taken, Amir would have realized he was heading to the house of his mother’s brother, Murat, his wife, Ajka, and his cousins, Tarik, Reko, and Refik. The boy spent a second night in the woods, though this time more comfortably, in a hollow, covering himself with leaves and branches. Tired, disoriented, and weak from hunger, he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  When he reached his uncle Murat’s house early the next morning he could see it was empty of life and had been ransacked. The village was deserted. Amir began walking on the road leading away from town, with no idea where he was going. Freshly rutted truck tracks led off the main street toward the Omerbasics’ field. Amir followed them to where they ended. It was there that he found his cousins, aunt, uncle, and both of his grandparents.

  He found them in a ditch with other villagers he knew. They were piled one on top of the other like old rag dolls, soiled and ruined, discarded in a heap. It was as if an old collection of someone’s childhood playthings, uncared for and neglected, had finally been abandoned by its owner—the dried blood on the clothing and bodies looking like dirt stains, the eyes and mouths of the frozen faces as if painted by some artist’s hand…surprise, fear, disbelief, the last moment of life forever fixed like a doll’s face in a single, solitary emotion.

  Amir’s eyes wandered over the death mound in a shocked, fixed stare. He was able to make out the body of his oldest cousin, Tarik, and then the youngest, Reko, three years old, looking more like a doll than any of them. He had a hard time recognizing Refik, the cousin the same age as him. Refik’s face was hidden by the crumpled corpse of an elderly man, but eventually Amir made out his clothing, the shape and size of his body. He couldn’t find his Aunt Ajka, but he saw a head, mutilated and bloodied by gunshots to its face, that might have been his Uncle Murat. To the far side of the mound lay his grandfather, the elderly man’s arm draped around his wife as though embracing her against the cold.

  The boy’s body, numb and immobile, stood as still as the air about him, his eyes the only part of his physical self that moved. And though his body held its place, standing upright upon the ground, his mind swooned, the scene of lifeless horror in front of him disappearing into a blur of muted color. After a time, Amir could feel sensation returning to his limbs. He turned from the ditch, and when he got back to the main road he no longer followed it but instead returned to the forest.

  In the woods, Amir met others fleeing from the war, but he always saw them before they saw him. They took the easy ways, walking through the trees and undergrowth on well-worn paths. They never waited hidden in the shadow of the land as he did—guardedly, patiently looking for movement in the distance.

  The small group of relatives and neighbors had been hiking since dawn, and the muscles of their legs, not used to so long a march, were sore and stiff. In the preceding twenty-four hours the classification of “refugee” had suddenly been made relevant to their lives. It was no longer just a word seen in print in the newspaper or used in conversation about others who had been displaced. The war had spread around them like a plague, but they had believed with false hope that it would never reach them. In the peaceful quiet of their slumber, between the time of having lain down to bed and waking, their world had been abruptly and quite literally turned upside down—mortar and artillery fire raining down upon their homes, crumbling walls and shaking them from their beds. Behind the boom of explosions they could hear a barrage of automatic rifle fire slowly but steadily coming their way. The families had grabbed what they could: food and clothing, as well as some things that made little sense for people fleeing for their lives. Half-asleep and panicked, they stuffed their belongings into whatever was at hand and fled into the heavily forested hillsides that encircled their town. Hidden among the trees, they huddled together, waiting to see what the chilly spring dawn would bring.

  When light finally came, those in the small group began to make their way deeper into the forest, doing the best they could to keep to the faint paths of animal and mankind that crisscrossed through territory none of them previously had reason to travel. Without leader or direction, they were disoriented, frightened, and wary of being found by the men who had chased them from their town and who may have been, at that moment, pursuing them.

  As they stumbled their way through the trees, a squirrel suddenly leapt onto the forest floor to scurry from one tree to the next—momentarily stilling their bodies and silencing their whisperings. Frozen mid-step, they glanced in the direction of the noise to seek its source, their eyes darting from point to point, like woodland prey wary of the presence of a lurking predator. At the realization that it was but a small creature, a bushy-tailed rodent, that threatened their path, the group released an audible, collective breath. Quiet, nervous laughter followed, and the tired travelers decided to rest and gather their strength. It was then that they came across the thin, pale boy, though in fact Amir had seen them first and watched their progress for a time to ascertain whether or not they were friendly.

  Amir’s ears could hear no sound, so he could not tell from the timbre of the people’s voices whether their words might be gentle or angry. Only when he had seen them so easily frightened by a squirrel had he let his presence be known. That he was unable to find his voice and could not speak caused the boy no frustration or concern. It seemed somehow fitting to the circumstances surrounding the loss of his hearing. They spoke to him, but he remained silent, his face as blank as his ears and voice. After a time they rose and continued on. He joined in with the displaced families without acknowledgement on either side that he should do so, assimilated into the party of refugees by virtue of common privation.

  It was apparent to Amir that there was neither rhyme nor reason to the direction these people were traveling. They roamed the woods following paths that provided them no road sign to indicate destination, and they seemed hopelessly lost and confused. Yet it didn’t bother him that they wandered about without bearing, for he had no destination of his own toward which to travel.

  Even though he could not hear the sound of their steps, he could see that these people were disturbing the peace of the forest, and he found this distressing. After he had walked with them for some time, they halted in a small clearing to rest and fuel their bodies from the meager provisions they carried. A loaf of bread was pulled from a rucksack and divided among the group, the silent boy given an equal share. He accepted the small slice of bread with a thankful nod.

  Amir was glad of the break, for now the forest could return to peace without the interruption of so many feet tromping the undergrowth unaware of the disturbance they caused. He sat by
himself, away from the others, and ate his ration, comforted by the peacefulness of the forest, a place where he had always felt as much at home as within his family’s house.

  Looking down at the ground by his feet, Amir watched a colony of ants as they suddenly appeared from the undergrowth and converged on a few tiny crumbs of bread that he had dropped on the ground beneath him. He looked upon the ants as if from afar, his eyes focused in a distant gaze. Sitting upon the soft moss cushion of an old tree stump, he held his small body still as he watched the tiny soldiers march single file through the undergrowth with intent and unfaltering determination. He stared at them silently, his muscles poised in perfect balance between tension and calm, no stirring of body nor mind to betray his presence. His eyes recorded it all without comment or judgment, neither thought nor inner dialogue interrupting the scene that played out in front of him. There was only the image of what he saw reflected through pupil to retina, streaming the trail of optic nerve to brain, leaving in his mind the picture of what was, and nothing else.

  The ants moved with precision and resolve, though the blades of grass that hindered their way must have seemed to them an interminable forest. They advanced on the tiny crumbs of bread like an army to a siege. It had been like that with the men who had come to his home. Crumbling more bits of bread onto the ground, Amir watched as the ants carried them away.

  Chapter 2

  When it came time to continue onward, one of the men among the group tried to rouse the silent boy by touching him on the shoulder. Amir didn’t respond, but continued staring at the ground by his feet. A mother handed over her infant to an older woman, who might have perhaps been the baby’s grandmother, and walked over to Amir to gently pull at the sleeve of his coat. Amir’s arm gave a few inches before it retreated to his body and crossed with his other arm to lock tight against his chest. He briefly glanced up in the woman’s direction and met her eyes with a blank stare, then returned his attention to the parade of ants marching past his feet. After another attempt the woman gave up and returned to reclaim her child. The small caravan of refugees moved on without the boy.