insult—that’s the technical neurosurgical term. When I was a teenager, I’d overhear my mother, on the phone, taking the calls that often came as a welcome interruption to our dinner table arguments. It would be some nervous young resident in the emergency room. I’d always thought “insult” was a pretty apt term for something like being shot in the head or whacked across the skull with a bit of two-by-four. Hard to get more insulting than that. In Alia’s case, the initial insult had been compounded by the fact that Sarajevo had no neurosurgeon, let alone a pediatric specialist. The general surgeon had done his best, but there’d been swelling and infection—a “secondary insult”—and the little boy had lapsed into a coma. By the time a neurosurgeon got to the city, months later, he’d declared that nothing further could be done.
When we came down from the mountain, Ozren asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, to see his boy. I didn’t. I hate hospitals. Always have. Sometimes, on weekends, when the housekeeper had the day off, my mother would drag me with her on rounds. The bright lights, the sludge green walls, the noise of metal on metal, the sheer bloody misery hanging over the halls like a shroud—I hated the lot of it. The coward in me has total control of my imagination in hospitals. I see myself in every bed: in the traction device or unconscious on the gurney, oozing blood into drainage bags, hooked up to urinary catheters. Every face is my own face. It’s like those kids’ flip books where you keep the same head but keep changing the bodies. Pathetic, I know. Can’t help it, though. And Mum wondered why I didn’t want to be a doctor.
But Ozren was looking at me with this expression, like a really gentle dog, head tilted, expecting kindness. I couldn’t say no. He told me then that he went every day, before work. I hadn’t realized. The past few mornings, he’d walked me back to my hotel so I could shower—if there was any running water—and change my clothes. I hadn’t known that he’d gone to the hospital after that, to spend an hour with his son.
I tried not to look right or left, into the wards, as we walked down the hall. And then we were in Alia’s room, and there was nowhere to look but at him. A sweet, still face, slightly swollen from the fluids they pumped into him to keep him alive. A tiny body threaded with plastic tubes. The sound of the monitors, measuring out the minutes of his limited little life. Ozren had told me his wife had died a year ago, so Alia couldn’t have been more than three years old. It was hard to tell. His underdeveloped body could have belonged to a younger infant, but the expressions that passed across his face seemed to register emotions of someone very old. Ozren brushed the brown hair off the small brow, sat down on the bed, and whispered softly in Bosnian, gently flexed and straightened the rigid little hands.
“Ozren,” I said quietly. “Have you considered getting another opinion? I could take his scans with me and—”
“No,” he said, cutting me off midsentence.
“But why not? Doctors are only people, they make mistakes.” I can’t count the times I heard my mother dismiss the views of a supposedly eminent colleague: “Him! I wouldn’t go to him for an ingrown toenail!” But Ozren just shrugged and didn’t answer me.
“Have you got MRI scans, or just CTs? MRIs show a lot more, they—”
“Hanna, shut up, please. I said no.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “I never would’ve picked you as a believer in that bullshit, insha’Allah, fatalist mentality.”
He got up off the bed and took a step toward me, grabbing my face between his hands and bringing his own face so close to mine that his angry features blurred.
“You,” he said, his voice a low, contained whisper. “You are the one who is consumed by bullshit.”
His sudden ferocity scared me. I pulled away.
“You,” he continued, grabbing my wrist. “All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can’t. You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, ‘How awful!’ and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee.” I flinched when he said that. It was a pretty accurate description. But he wasn’t done. He was so angry he was actually spitting.
“Bad things happen. Some very bad things happened to me. And I’m no different from a thousand other fathers in this city who have kids who suffer. I live with it. Not every story has a happy ending. Grow up, Hanna, and accept that.”
He flung my wrist away. I was shaking. I wanted to get away, to get out of there. He turned back to Alia and sat down again on the bed, facing away from me. I pushed past him on the way to the door, and saw that he had a kids’ book, in Bosnian, in his hands. From the familiar illustrations, I could tell it was a translation of Winnie-the-Pooh. He put the book down and rubbed his palms over his face. He looked up at me, his expression drained. “I read to him. Every day. It is not possible for a childhood to pass by without these stories.” He turned to a page he’d bookmarked. I had my hand on the door, but the sound of his voice held me. Every now and then, he’d look up and talk to Alia. Maybe he was explaining the meaning of a hard word, or sharing some fine point of Milne’s English humor. I’d never seen anything so tender between a father and his child.
And I knew I couldn’t bear to see it again. That night after work Ozren started to apologize for his outburst. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a prelude to another invitation to spend the night, but I didn’t let him get that far. I made some lame excuse as to why I had to go back to my hotel room. Same thing the next night. By the third night he stopped asking. And anyway, by then it was time for me to go.
I was once told, by a very handsome and very hurt botanist, that my attitude to sex was like something he’d read about in a sociology textbook about the 1960s. He said I acted like the book’s description of a prefeminist male, acquiring partners for casual sex and then dumping them as soon as any emotional entanglement was required. He hypothesized that because I didn’t have a father and because my mother was emotionally unavailable, no one had modeled a healthy, caring, reciprocal relationship in my life.
I told him if I wanted to hear psychobabble, I could visit a shrink cheap on Medibank. I’m not casual about sex, far from it. I’m actually very picky. I prefer the fit few to the mediocre masses. But I’m not big on wringing out other people’s soggy hankies, and if I wanted a partner, I’d join a law firm. If I do choose to be with someone, I want it to stay light and fun. It gives me no pleasure, none at all, to hurt people’s feelings, especially not tragic cases like Ozren, who is clearly a spectacular human being, brave and intelligent and all the rest of it. Even handsome, if you can cope with the unkempt thing. I felt bad about the botanist, too. But he’d started talking about bushwalking with kids in the backpack. I had to let him go. I wasn’t even twenty-five at the time. Kids are definitely a midlife luxury, in my opinion.
As for my dysfunctional so-called family, it’s true that I’ve inherited a core belief, to wit: don’t rely on some other sod for your emotional sustenance. Find something absorbing to do—something so absorbing that you don’t have time to dwell on the woe-is-me stuff. My mother loves her work, I love mine. So the fact that we don’t love each other…well, I hardly ever think about it.
When Ozren was done with his seals and strings, I walked with him down the stairs of the bank building for what would be the last time. If I came back to Sarajevo for the opening, the book would be where it belonged, in its nice, new, state-of-the-art, securely guarded display space at the museum.
