He played the song for me, and read me the lyrics as if reciting a poem he had written himself.
I tried to give him the drawing of my grandparents’ cottage as my gift to him, but he refused. He said that the house might not be there when I came back after the war and that the drawing might be my only way to remember. For a moment he sounded so wise, much wiser than the fourteen-year-old boy that he was.
In the end he was right. My grandparents’ house did not survive the war.
He and his family made it out the next day. Mine never did.
Maybe I am sending this to see if he will find me. Mostly I think I am sending it so I will forget. Or at least think about him in a different way. In a way that doesn’t keep me awake at night. Or maybe I’m just sending these things because I don’t need them anymore.
Novi Grad, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992, and Toronto, Canada, 2010
Katia thought she could hear two voices in her head: the voice of the young girl in the transit camp, and the voice of the adult woman looking back. She imagined herself having coffee with this woman, asking her about her life since the war and about the young man in the transit camp, whose family had left Bosnia around the same time Goran’s had.
Katia looked at him. Goran did not return her gaze. His eyes were focused on the CD cover. She saw that he was crying. It was endearing that Goran would be so moved by this, yet she knew him well enough to know that he was not easily driven to tears. Katia followed his eyes to the CD.
It was marked with initials. In a handwriting Katia had come to know, from notes left in her mailbox, or on the grocery list stuck to the refrigerator in the apartment, she saw the letters. GV.
Her GV. Goran Vukovic.
“Goran,” she said.
He did not answer.
“Goran?” she said again. “Is she talking about you?”
There was no reason to be jealous or insecure. Her tone was from curiosity and amazement that he, her Goran, would be part of this museum. And part of this woman’s life, and that this story had found him here, like this.
Goran started to answer. He turned to face Katia and she took her hand off his shoulder.
“Katia … I …” he started, his voice struggling to restrain emotion. “I had no idea this was here.”
“Goran, it’s amazing that this found you. You’ve never been in touch with her?”
He turned away from her.
“No, no, of course not. I had no way to find her and I didn’t even think she remembered. That was such a long time ago. I …”
Katia reached out gently with both of her hands to hold Goran’s arm: “You made her feel safe …”
Goran pulled his arm away and stared at her.
“It was more than that. It was the middle of a fucking war. People were doing anything to get out. You don’t know what that was like. We knew what they were doing to women and girls. Her family didn’t get out.”
“No, I guess I don’t understand. I didn’t live through the war.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Take your time, Goran. I’ll wait for you in the café.”
His look told her he was relieved to have a moment to himself. She walked out the exit and entered the lobby.
From across the small gift shop, Katia watched other visitors coming into the museum. In the gift shop she glanced at the various objects for sale, all with designs featuring broken hearts and fractured lines. After another group of visitors entered and paid, Katia felt the woman who sold tickets looking at her. Whether here or back in the US, she was used to such stares.
“You have beautiful hair,” the woman said in slightly accented English.
“Thank you,” Katia replied.
She gave a quick, false smile to the woman, looked down, and then walked to the museum café and sat at a table in one corner. The waiter, a young man dressed in black pants and a black T-shirt, offered her a menu, and took her order.
While she waited for her coffee, Katia ran her finger around each of the buttons of her sweater, starting at the top and working down and then back up. She ordered a second double espresso. Although her back was toward the exit of the exhibition space, she could sense Goran walking toward her. She felt his hesitation. He knew that Katia wanted to know more about the girl in the camp. But even more, that she wanted to know why he had reacted that way.
◆ ◆ ◆
As Katia finished typing up her notes from her session with Tyler, she looked at her mobile phone. No missed calls, no texts.
With each day away from Goran she was learning this: the normal state of lovers, of couples, is not together. Together is a transient state. The normal state of things is as much about ending and leaving as it is about beginning and staying. The normal state of love is living with the possibility that everything can, at a moment’s notice, come tumbling down. We impossibly walk for some amount of time in the same pages, in the same narrative, and we deny with every breath the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that the arc of the story bends toward being alone.
Every city, Katia thought, every village, every neighborhood, should have a museum like the one Goran had taken her to visit more than a year ago. Children should be given classes in how to break up and move on. How to mourn the sudden loss of all-encompassing love or the end of an intense, fleeting affair and carry on with dignity. How to let someone get that close, know you that way, and let them go, taking with them your secret words and bedroom stories and those private little cries and tremors. How to walk into the story with kindness, and walk out of it without drawing blood.
Sometimes, when Katia found herself missing Goran and wondering what might be next, she looked at her phone and scrolled through the pictures she had taken of the letters and objects in the museum. Someday, she thought, she might submit one.
-
MUSEUM SUBMISSION 23-2006
We met at a tattoo parlor in the Village. We were there with mutual friends. The deal was that we were all going to get one. He could see I wasn’t sure. He whispered in my ear, asking if I wanted to make a run for it. He texted an excuse to our friends that I wasn’t feeling well. Once we were outside he grinned at me like he was five-year-old boy.
We stayed up all night just talking. How many guys really say what they feel? And then there was how he reacted when he saw my left hand. I was born with just four fingers on that hand. It’s always curious to see how people react. I like to watch them squirm when I catch them counting a second time. Not him though. He just held my hand and said that he always thought nine was a much more interesting number than ten. His mother was a pediatrician so he even almost knew the proper name of my condition: Symbrachydactyly.
He called a few weeks later and said that he had broken up with his girlfriend and that he wanted to see me. I told him we
