Boys and gardening sheds:
“Was your mother beautiful?” asked one of the judges. “Oh yes,” answered the girl.
As I sat on the floor of my bathroom, my forehead rested against the balled up towel on my knees, I could not help but think “I am not old enough for this.” I just wanted someone to hold my hand and rub my back, someone to make me dinner and tell me everything was all right, in short I wanted my mommy.
We were running late and so I was eating a sandwich as the city bus passed over the Sava on the way to the court house. Milos and I pushed our way off the bus through elderly women with shopping bags and adolescent girls, apparently not in school, decked out at noon for a night club they were not old enough to get into. I passed through a metal detector, watched over by uniformed Serbian men with guns, handed over my passport and mobil to a women behind a glass window, thinking of everything that could go wrong, and headed up stairs to stand around awkwardly drinking espresso with large amounts of milk and sugar out of small plastic cups in the hallway with men in expensive suits. I was palpably aware of being one of the few women in the hallway when Natasa K came through, followed by a collection of women in their late twenties or early thirties. Natasa, at about five foot four with the hair cut of an America fashion magazine editor, is a force of nature, and one of the prosecuting lawyers in the Beograd war crimes court.
Entering the observation room of the court, with it’s plush blue theater seating, I looked toward the glass wall separating the defendants from the media, families, and NGO workers. The youngest defendant, long dark hair, straight nose, and olive complexion, looked back over his shoulder at me. Our eyes connected as he turned more fully in my direction and my breath caught in the back of my throat. I looked away first. Milos and I settled into our seats, and fiddled with our translation headsets, made in Germany, as the defendant turned back around. In front of Milos and I were family members of the defendants, across the aisle from them were victims and the producers of a BBC piece on the trial.
The case was about a massacre that had occurred in Kosovo in 1999, the year my sister graduated from high school and my friends and I helped a teacher collect t-shirts to send to refugees in the Balkans. The witnesses today were to testify in english, hence my presence, since they had fled to the UK as children after surviving the massacre that killed the majority of their family. “We thought if the men left we would be safer” said the first witness, a young woman of about twenty, “I don’t understand why they would kill the kids, we had nothing to do with the war.”
the brother: the family had fled their home with the belongings they had already packed, the grandmother returned to their home, after the soldiers ahd arrived to retrieve the food they had left behind in their hurry. The boys saw the grandmother through the window returning with the food and tried to signal to her that the troops had surrounded the house - the grandmother did not understand...
everyone remembers the young cousin being searched, the marbles falling from his pockets. The marbles fell into the mud and the boy’s hands were shaking, from fear and cold, as he tried to pick them up... they all remember their mother being separated and taken away... they all remember that it was the youngest soldier, thin with long, dark hair, who was ordered to search the children
The mother of the children was pulled away from the group and forced into the gardening shed in the back of the court yard by some of the soldiers. Her son heard her scream, but could not identify the soldier who originally entered the shed with his mother.
His mother was pulled away a second time, now by the clothing around her neck as she yelled in Serbian “they are only kids” she was shot in the back and after falling to the ground was shot again - “another witness says that she was pulled away by her hair” the lead judge said to the young man - “was it her hair or her clothing?” “What did the solider who shot her look like?” - “I wasn’t really looking at him,” the young man said, “I was looking at my mother.”
After the mother was shot, the soldiers shot at the rest of the group, the family falling on top of one another, in a pile in the back garden. The young man, remembered the sound of his sister trying to breath, the smell of concrete and blood. Then he closed his eyes and pretended to be dead.
The witness’ testimony was momentarily drowned out by the sound of the cleaning crew vacuuming in the hallway.
