No More Blood
It was Daniel’s second trip to Sarajevo, May 1992. The shadow of Mirjana’s round belly across the room was the first he saw of her. It struck him as the most incongruous shape in the midst of the siege, that protruding stomach on her slender frame. He had almost grown inured to the shelling and shortages, families trapped indoors, windows blown out. But that morning, he had watched two children, a brother and sister, neither of them more than ten, shot dead by snipers. He could still taste the disgust in his mouth this evening, his tongue blanketed in grit, when he and two journalists met at Vitek’s at dusk.
Vitek introduced Daniel to Mirjana, the final punctuation in a short string of names. Mirjana looked him up and down when they first spoke, skeptical, but then she smiled, her smile warm and open. Pregnancy suited her, despite the circles under her eyes. She no longer jumped at the sound of sniper fire or artillery too close. After her early rage, her disgust and fury at herself, her body, she had grown impervious.
Vitek passed around a bottle of wine he’d scrounged from a fellow journalist newly arrived from Paris. Mirjana brought the bottle to her lips, the small splash of deep red, a decent Côte-du-Rhône, bathing her tongue. A drop clung to the corner of her mouth, pausing before becoming a slow drip toward her chin. Daniel wanted to reach out and wipe it away, feel the heel of his thumb against her skin. Mirjana brought her hand to her mouth, and then the droplet was gone. Daniel felt they were the only ones in the room, a hush like he had not heard in weeks, all sounds soft, incidental, and it was just the two of them facing each other, the bottle still in her hand. Mirjana passed the bottle to a woman next to her in a flak jacket, and the moment ended, the room filling again with bedraggled citizens of Sarajevo, Europe, the U.S. Daniel scanned the faces, some already familiar: expats and patriots, united in surprise resistance, while most of the world slumbered.
He did not kiss her, did not feel the full pressure of her soft lips against his, did not feel that unquenchable ache arise in his spine, his shoulders, stomach, lungs, until their second meeting two days later. They spent the next five nights together, Daniel returning from hours dodging sniper fire, absorbing chilling details so he might recount them coherently for a newspaper in New York or Paris or Chicago. He was still a freelance journalist then, getting by on fierce will, stringing articles together to justify his existence.
Dubrovnik coast, 2004
Photo by Kara Krauze
By late July, Daniel had learned the safer routes to the flat where Mirjana was staying with another young couple, Rada and Ibrahim. When he arrived with a small bunch of bananas and two chocolate bars in hand, it was almost nine, later than he intended. His soft knock brought no answer, so he let himself in. Low moans from Mirjana’s bedroom in back were the only sound in the otherwise silent evening. Or perhaps he had managed to erase the sound of shelling and sniper fire for those brief moments, something else, more urgent, replacing their alternately numbing and nerve-wracking rattle.
The bedding was drenched from Mirjana’s waters. Sweat dripped from her face. Rada had left twenty minutes ago for a doctor, Mirjana managed to say, teeth gritted. Ibrahim was still not home. She was early, three weeks, almost four.
Her eyes began to glaze over. She had successfully passed responsibility to Daniel; she began to let go, something she has wished for on more than one occasion since the pregnancy began. That night on the gritty floor, the knee in her groin, she had almost capitulated, almost given up. But Dubrovnik was hers, the fierceness of it kept her alert. Perhaps it had kept her alive, but she didn’t think of it like that. Too many others were dead and so this was a privilege she refused. Agency didn’t make your life, luck did, bad and good in awkward measures; but her actions belied this way of thinking. She lived adamantly, one of the traits Daniel most admired in her. Eventually this is how she will die.
Daniel placed his hand on her forehead, unsure what to do. His touch, the firm reality of his dry palm, reassured her. Mirjana tried to focus on the jagged cracks on the ceiling above her. Her left hand flailed, seeking something to grip. Daniel’s hand found hers and his voice reached her ears. She smiled, but then her teeth gritted through a wave of pain. She remembered the floor, so cold, the stone walls, their voices, her own urine and blood sticky beneath her, his spit glistening on her filthy skin, his wretched cum on her, in her. Then had come the aftershock of the growing in her belly, no more blood, just her own body rebelling, out of her control.
“Hold on,” Daniel said, his vocabulary grown infuriatingly lame. A slight presence seemed to return to Mirjana’s vacant stare. He gripped her hand and said it again. “Hold on. Rada will be back soon. Just hold on.”
Hold. A mantra, a caress, a command, an endearment. Hold. But the center would not hold. Mirjana nodded through the pain. It hurt in her very center, yet somehow she felt she was hardly there. Pain like absence. Her self a vast nothingness. She tried to remember what was happening: a baby, her body swathed in damp. She wondered if she might be growing cold. A shiver passed over her and then a contraction, sharp, ripping her inside out. She had already died on that floor outside Dubrovnik under the brute weight of their bodies, one by one, two she had recognized and two she had not. She had died, and then she had willed herself to be born again. That was fury. That was brute force, strength of will. They could take her life still, but they couldn’t take that. A penetrating cry emerged from her mouth, an amorphous prayer flowing through her, Please. Just, please.
The room smelled so full, earthy and human, not like death, Daniel thought, a reassurance, yet also not like what he knew from life. He wanted to unblock the window, remove the boards and let the night air in. He ran his hand up and down Mirjana’s arm, caressing her, petting her damp skin, his voice low.
“Please—” Mirjana whispered back.
Rada could not find the doctor, but she finally returned with a midwife. The baby and the midwife arrived in tandem, almost a matched pair. Prayer and salvation, need and respite, wish and demand. Fear and reassurance. Bad luck and good. Luka entered the world in stealthy quiet, soon finding his voice, raising a shriek of alarm, pursued by desire. Down the street a building burned. Smoke singed the night air, and its soot hid the night’s beauty. Like Sarajevo, Luka would live. His mother would not.
Seven years later, Mirjana died in Kosovo, a landmine shredding her screams. Daniel tried to cover Luka’s eyes, but could not.
Kara Krauze has published essays in Quarterly West, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Highbrow Magazine, The Daily Beast and elsewhere. She has a B.A. from Vassar College in International Studies and a M.A. in Literary Cultures from New York University. “No More Blood” is excerpted from the novel Down the Street a Building Burned, a story of three generations grappling, across cultures, with the 1990s war in Yugoslavia and after effects of World War II. Kara recently founded Voices from War, a writing workshop for veterans in New York City.
Photo courtesy www.karakrauze.com
