The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living
- Book Review,
by --
From Publishers Weekly
This heartbreaking memoir wends between Brkic's years in war-ravaged Bosnia (1993, 1996–1997), first interviewing refugees and then excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, where 7,000 Muslim males were slaughtered, and including her family's history in Bosnia-Herzegovina surrounding WWII. Brkic, an archeologist, was 21 when she first began working in Bosnia with the UN International War Crimes Tribunal, and 24 during her second foray, with Physicians for Human Rights. A first-generation American of Croatian descent, she returns to Bosnia, invoking what, postwar, is only memory: the land of idyllic childhood summers where she remembers her aunt's catfish swimming in a tub and the taste of lamb fed on chamomile leaves in a countryside now littered with land mines. In the former garment factory, now morgue, outside Tuzla, where she works, Brkic feels alien to the other human rights workers; her ties to the region superimpose the face of her brother on the newly dead; her assertion that not everyone bears equivalent guilt for the war causes her to angrily demand that Serb workers not excavate the mass graves she believes they had a hand in filling. Whiting Award winner Brkic's haunting, hopeless memoir is an agonizing treatise on the awful cost of war and its long, pain-stoked aftermath in which, as she records it, those outside forget and those inside can barely continue living. Photos, maps. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In the summer of 1995 the Muslim town of Srebrenica in Bosnia supposedly was under a compromise truce brokered by the United Nations. "The Muslims would surrender their arms," Courtney Angela Brkic writes, "and the Serbs would remain at their positions without overtaking the city." It didn't work out that way. On July 6 the Dutch battalion stationed there to maintain the truce appealed for air support but was denied it by the U.N. High Command in Sarajevo: "The battalion stood by and watched the Bosnian Serb Army overrun the town, separating men from women, sending the women away on buses. The Dutch soldiers were ordered onto their own compound, and they complied." A massacre ensued. More than 7,000 people disappeared, all of them presumably murdered. "Women were raped and killed. Even many who managed to escape with their lives did not ultimately survive. One left her children on the road, walked into a wood, and hung herself from a tree." The dead were buried in mass graves. Though some Serb soldiers subsequently claimed they had dug the graves themselves, Brkic believes the victims had been forced to dig them and then had been executed. Given the brutality of the conflict in Bosnia and the history of Serbian "ethnic cleansing," she probably is right. A year later Brkic arrived in Bosnia to work on the exhumation and analysis of the corpses. She was in her early twenties, trained as an anthropologist, the child of parents who lived in a suburb of Washington. Her father, a Croatian, had escaped to the United States from what was then still Yugoslavia in 1959; he worked as a radio broadcaster and had felt the clammy hands of the Tito regime's censors as well as the general oppressiveness of life there. Precisely why his daughter insisted on returning to her ancestral land (she had visited it often in calmer times) is something of a mystery even to her, though the story of her own family had given her a deeply personal connection to the violence and ethnic hatred with which the region has been afflicted for centuries.The Stone Fields is in part a recollection of her work on the graveyard project, in part the story of her father's mother, Andelka, before, during and after World War II. Both parts are suffused with a sense of death and loss and are especially concerned with the lives and fates of the women. Brkic writes: "There is a common denominator in refugee populations worldwide. I knew it before ever setting eyes on the women of Srebrenica that summer, not one of whom had been among the women I interviewed in Croatia the year before. In the ranks of exile, there are women who listen each evening for a telltale sound coming from the hall outside their drafty rooms that says their husbands and children have returned, Lazarus-like. These women wait first one year, then another. They grow old in their waiting, each year like a ball of noxious mercury that combines with another, so that the passage of time is fluid and indistinct. They reject conflicting reports of massacres and the conventional wisdom that all is lost." In Bosnia in the summer of 1996, that took some doing, because the evidence of what had happened to the missing men was everywhere and inescapable. At first Brkic worked at the morgue in Kalesija, "a town on the edge of Bosnian Federation territory . . . just a few miles from Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity from which non-Serbs had been completely expelled." The morgue had been set up in a building that once housed a garment factory: "The conditions were primitive: there were no windows in the building, and the floor was filthy cement." Decomposing bodies were brought there from the mass graves. Brkic worked alongside pathologists who X-rayed and examined the corpses brought into the morgue. It was a grim business, separating bones from decaying flesh, reaching into pockets "for heels of bread, photographs, a plastic bag of coarse salt," anything that might help survivors identify the remains. By the end of her first day, she "was aware that [she] had crossed an invisible border." She was "unsure when that moment had been," but she "knew that [she] had become suddenly quiet around midday, unable to do more than watch with large, grim eyes and follow the pathologists' instructions." She "could not wait to put the morgue behind [her]," and transferred to the operation in the field.This too was unsettling, not merely because it involved excavating the mass graves but because she had to cross the border into Republika Srpska: "I had the sensation that I was falling. My every experience classified that border as the one between hunter and prey. On the other side of it, law ceased to exist. It was a place filled with people who hated Muslims and Croats. And, therefore, me." No longer trapped in the morgue, she was at least in the fresh air, though that air smelled of death. In time her tasks assumed "an odd normalcy," and for a while she was able to carry them out with reasonable efficiency, but eventually it became too much for her, so she quit, and struggled to come to terms with the terrible things she had seen, heard and smelled.There was precedent for them in her own family history, an important part of which she tells in chapters that alternate with the ones about her own experiences. They are stories told to her by her father, whose mother suffered irreparable loss as a consequence of the ethnic and religious hatreds that course through the region. As a teenager Andelka married a neighbor, Marijan Brkic, and had two sons by him, first Bero (the author's father) and then Zoran. When the boys were still very young, Marijan died of stomach typhoid. In 1933 his widow took her children from the countryside to Sarajevo, "where Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Jews, Czechs, Germans, and many other communities lived side by side." There she met and fell in love with Josef Finci, a Jew. "He was from a privileged family and had never known hunger. His family belonged to Sarajevo's tightly knit Sephardic community, and she knew a Catholic wife would be unacceptable, much less a widowed mother of two small sons." They had a passionate affair. He was kind to her sons, who clearly loved him, though they didn't fully understand everything: "They did understand the need for quiet, however: the need to avoid any and all notice, to shy away from drawing attention to their family's situation, in which their mother loved a Jew. That was how the world would look at it now, she thought glumly, how it had perhaps always looked at it, and she had been fooling herself all along to think the world capable of more than what its shriveled, black heart could manage." The rest of the story is inexpressibly sad and appallingly banal. The Germans occupied Sarajevo, and the Jews were rounded up. Andelka managed to hide Josef for a time, but a neighbor snitched on them. He was taken to a camp, and she never saw him again. Like the women of Srebrenica, she plunged into denial, stubbornly anticipating and awaiting his return. Finally she learned that he had been killed in the camp. There are respects in which the story of Andelka and Josef is more moving than that of all the unknown victims of "ethnic cleansing" at Srebrenica; it is easier to become emotionally involved with a small cast of characters whom one comes to know than with a large one to which names cannot be attached. Either way, though, the story is the same. Courtney Angela Brkic tells it sensitively, sparely and with quiet passion.Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
Brkic galvanized readers with her first book, Stillness (2003), a Whiting Award-winning short story collection inspired by her unnerving work as a forensic archaeologist in war-torn Bosnia. She now presents an equally commanding memoir in which she chronicles her psychically demanding and dangerous work as part of a UN-directed effort to identify the remains of the massacred innocents of Srebrenica, and unearths the astonishing story of her paternal grandmother, a Croatian Catholic from Herzegovina. Orphaned at 14, then widowed young and left with two sons, Adelka flees the poverty of her village for Sarajevo, only to put her and her sons' lives in jeopardy by falling in love with, and hiding, a Jew during the Nazi occupation. The overlay of intimate tales from two demonically violent times makes for a highly dramatic work, and Brkic's emotional frankness, gift for vivid portraiture, ability to write about the dead with elegiac grace and scientific precision, and deep compassion for the victims of genocide create a riveting and thought-provoking reflection on humankind's barbarity and heroism. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Every once in a while one comes across a person who is self-evidently a 'writer' in the true sense: gifted, passionate, single-minded but with a heart as proudly mysterious as the stories of our wild world and as big as all the suffering we witness." --Breyten Breytenbach
"The Stone Fields is much more than another reckoning with the Balkans' recent atrocities. It is a book of graceful prose and inventive architecture--a work of literature that lures us into the harrowing and beautiful depths of the near and distant past." --Daniel Bergner, author of God of the Rodeo and In the Land of Magic Soldiers
"In times of war, it is books like these that give hope. Brkic's attempt to honor the dead as well as the living, to write-in the suffering and injuring that is the reality of war . . . beautifully written and deeply felt." --Micheline Aharonian Marcom, author of The Daydreaming Boy
"The Stone Fields combines poetry with politics and intimate family stories with the stark history of a nation to create a powerful parable for our times that both moves and educates the reader." --Chitra Divakaruni, author of The Vine of Desire
Review
"Every once in a while one comes across a person who is self-evidently a 'writer' in the true sense: gifted, passionate, single-minded but with a heart as proudly mysterious as the stories of our wild world and as big as all the suffering we witness." --Breyten Breytenbach
"The Stone Fields is much more than another reckoning with the Balkans' recent atrocities. It is a book of graceful prose and inventive architecture--a work of literature that lures us into the harrowing and beautiful depths of the near and distant past." --Daniel Bergner, author of God of the Rodeo and In the Land of Magic Soldiers
Book Description
When she was twenty-three years old, Courtney Angela Brkic joined a UN-contracted forensic team in eastern Bosnia. Unlike many aid workers, Brkic was drawn there by her family history, and although fluent in the language, she was advised to avoid letting local workers discover her ethnicity. Brkic helped set up a morgue in Tuzla, assisting pathologists with autopsies and laying out personal effects for photographing. Later, she helped excavate graves at Srebenica, where many thousands had been indiscriminately slaughtered.
This was not the only excavating she was doing. As she describes the gruesome work of recovering remains and transcribing the memories of survivors, she also explores her family's history in Yugoslavia, telling of her grandmother's childhood in Herzegovina, early widowhood, and imprisonment during World War II for hiding her Jewish lover. The Stone Fields, deeply personal and wise, asks what it takes to prevent the violent loss of life, and what we are willing to risk in the process.
About the Author
Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of Stillness (FSG, 2003), for which she won the prestigious Whiting Award. She has worked for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and for Physicians for Human Rights. She lives in Ohio.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living by Courtney Angela Brkic. Copyright © 2004 by Courtney Angela Brkic. Published in August, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Prologue
I placed a hand on his forehead, careful not to wake him, and let my fingers rest on the vein that pulsed in evening's thin light. Beneath the warm skin were the plates of his cranium, the sutures where entire continents met in his childhood and fused over the ocean of his mind. The gentle, breakable bones of his face were like china, or the hollow bones of birds. They were as fragile as calcified breath.
The flow of his blood was like water singing through rock, and in my concentration, I was only vaguely aware of figures standing on all sides of the bed. Lifting my head, I found myself looking through their bodies as through the fluid of memory; I turned them into glass and buried my face in him once again. Whether this angered or saddened them, I could not tell.
Wind from the open window made the curtains dance and crept over my naked legs.
Stjepan's vertebrae reminded me of dinosaur exhibits at a museum. There was something salamander-like about them. They started out small and graceful, and metamorphosed into the sturdiness of the lumbar region, where they were the trunk of a stout oak.
"Ribs are the tines of a cage," I recited under my breath, "and the sternum the thing that joins them. The sternum is variable: it can bow inward or out." It can have holes down its middle, tiny pinpricks, or be as smooth as the inside of a solid piece of bark. I brushed my eyelids against him, wondering what shape his had taken.
I examined his hand, which rested on my hip. Undone, it is a jigsaw puzzle, and reassembling it takes concentration and patience. I had been told that you get better with time. The skin on Stjepan's hip was taut and smooth. Although the pelvis is called the "innominate" because there is no other shape in nature that it resembles, the construction had seemed elephantine to me. Here you can discern a man from a woman definitively.
He stirred in his sleep. Soon--sooner than I would have liked--he would return to the base, and I would go back to my Zagreb apartment. I moved my right leg, which had become entangled in his. They had been like that in the ground, all arms and legs, and I shivered. I had not wanted to let that picture intrude while he held me, but it was inevitable, as was every memory of bones.
Stjepan sighed and stretched toward me in his sleep, burrowing his face into my neck. I continued to avoid the faces around the bed, realizing that his ghosts were vying with mine for position.
Months had passed since my return from Bosnia, but at times they dwindled down to moments, and now I looked at Stjepan, wondering if his ghosts looked the same to him. They started to bend their heads over us, as if attempting resuscitation, and I closed my eyes. I found that I could not bring myself to look at them from one day to the next.
A sudden change in breathing told me that he had awakened, and a moment later he wrapped legs and arms around me in a bear hug. He opened his eyes and looked at me solemnly, his breath making a few strands of my hair shiver as the curtains had done. My heart beat faster, and I smiled.
I wondered whether I would recognize him by his bones.
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