Story for performance #728
webcast from Paris at 09:57PM, 18 Jun 07

The soldiers approach the house from the maize field: the whole extended family is gathered together in her grandmother’s garden, her father reclining in a deckchair and she playing next to him. Or so her story goes, but she is just four and a half years old and something fails me as I begin imagining the seven, or was it nine, brothers, or cousins, and wives and children and the grandmother. Did they gather the others elsewhere in the village and then come for the brothers? The brothers just happen to be visiting, having arrived from the city to help with the harvesting, their wives and children sitting in their mother’s garden. It is the beginning of a war but they are used to wars here. She has never tired of repeating how her grandmother never took off the black clothes for there was always someone dying in the family.

I like her looks. In her only remaining photograph from my grandparents’ wedding she is already so wrinkled it is impossible to tell her age but then she never looked any different apparently, for as long as they can remember. But they only came later and no one else is really left to tell, so the numbers and faces multiply and confuse me and I decide to give up on the entire event.

A foreign-looking young brunette is walking in the streets of a Central European city with her mother and the two women board a tram on the pretty side of the river and stay on it for three or four stops and the mother is quiet but as they get off she is a little shaken as she tells her daughter that she feels her own father’s presence for the first time since she was a very small child. It began at an exact moment during the ride, the daughter is unsure when, or whether the mother is immediately aware of what is going on, and it ends at a very particular point as the two of them walk onto a bridge to continue sightseeing. The mother is a highly rational woman and nothing has prepared her for this but they never talk about it much. It is left to the daughter to resolve what has happened as she becomes increasingly aware of her own feet tracing her grandfather’s journeys through this city where he once lived, and where she once arrived as a well-travelled person and confident about her place in this seemingly placid universe despite the extraordinary circumstances of her journey.

When the shots are heard the little girl is probably in her mother’s arms and, in the southern landscape stilled in the July heat, the sound of the shooting must be terrifying, but she then grows up never talking about it and when the bomber planes arrive six decades later and it all comes back to her she is determined not to join in with the others in allowing the time to move backwards and instead she stubbornly continues with her routine, the only change perhaps consisting in the set of exercises that will keep her very youthful looking in the years to come.

This will be one of those evenings that the girl will often recall vividly although all that happens is that she is woken up into darkness after a late afternoon nap by her sister who has been listening to the news. The girl will soon learn that the walls of their student flat, which she could never quite get used to anyway, have definitely turned into a prison as the tanks are sent into the streets and most people seem to disappear behind their curtains overwhelmed with painful memories, with fear or a rotten conscience.

A female visitor at an important institution in a foreign country is shown a file belonging to a young woman who has been through some terrible things. She is waiting in the lounge there some weeks later when another foreigner, a girl, offers to help her work the coffee machine and they both laugh and talk although the girl has not yet learned to speak this foreign language. She is petite and pretty and dressed in blue denim but when she shows the woman an old photograph of herself it is clear that she is the person from the file. In that moment, the machine gun that the girl holds in the photograph is as absurd as the pile of letters she is now pulling from her bag in a confused effort to understand the rules of her new homeland.

After the soldiers march off having left the men to die he apparently rises and staggers back to the house. She has never seen anybody bleed before, I am pretty certain of it, yet she will never evoke this particular image in her calm recounting of the event except to say that what made the soldiers return was the sound of him gasping with pain, whereby they came running back and he was shot again. There was never much said about what went on afterwards and whenever I heard her recount the event to us over the following years, there was never any hatred, or even sadness in her voice.

I am sitting at an important gathering abroad and the people seem to be quite taken by something I say in my vaguely Slavic-sounding voice about there never existing a long-enough stretch of peace where I come from for there to be a second generation of survivors and this suddenly makes us quite distant. Then I wish I had never said it: I was just beginning to feel we were onto something, together.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Branislava Kuburovic.