Siren Song

She remembered the sirens when the war began, bursting the silence of the night two or three times a week. Her mother yelled from the kitchen for all her children to hurry to her and they gathered, tightly packed, in the broom closet that was the most interior room of the house. Belma often fell back to sleep standing up on these nights, supported by the bodies of her female family members, numb to their terror, which long ago had switched in her brain from dreadful and wrong, to normal and consistent.

She could no longer go to school because of the bombings and because she was Bosnian. She was not allowed to go outside under any circumstances. Her mother had heard what happened to woman and female children the Serbian soldiers rounded up. Her father and older brother were fighting with the resistance. They were alone, 5 women in the house. They kept the lights off and all the curtains drawn so that it would look as though the house were deserted.

It had been months since the sirens had stopped. Now there was no warning when the bombs began to fall. After the first few shells exploded, they would rush to the closet together, in a choreographed dance that had become second nature.

Belma rarely slept at night anymore. Inactivity during the day did not tire her young body and her mind would no longer wind down and turn off. Instead she lay on her back and stared into the blackness listening for the whir of missiles, trying not to hear the sobs of her mother and the barking of the wild dogs in the street.

It was happening again. She heard the sound of falling from a great height. She felt the house shake with earthquake force, heard splitting, fracturing, crumbling. She moved robotically to rise from her sunken mattress but she could not see the walls caving in around her. She raised her body but her arms were pinned and crushed beneath the house’s collapsed weight. Pain screamed in her brain with such unfamiliar intensity of feeling that she was overcome and lost consciousness. Blood soaked the bed and pooled on the floor around her.

Two year later.

Belma sits in a small apartment in Dallas, Texas. Her mother lifts a cup of strong Slav coffee to her lips. She looks down short-sightedly into the cup as she sips. Her sweater hangs from her shoulders, the sleeves pinned down so they will not swing. Her legs are folded beneath her. They tell me, in the stilted English that I am slowly teaching them, that her arms were still on the bed when they left and may be there still. They wrapped her like a mummy in bedsheets and carried her between the four of them through the streets, dodging bullets and Serbs, until they found Bosniak soldiers. They tell me that she did not wake for 5 months. They set out lunch on the small coffee table, but feed Belma first, mother by her side, three sisters and myself on the floor. She is their sacrificial lamb. Because of her injuries, they escaped from the genocide, the rape camps and the warfare to the refuge of the United States. They are the lucky ones, Belma, her mother and sisters.