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To <Dave Barker> dbarker@keep-in-touch.org
From <Aleksandra Kovacevic> whiteangel@EUnet.yu
Subject: A River Runs Through It
4 April 1999
It's all the refugees' fault. Natasha's and Danica's and Zoran's. My sister and her kids are out of here and if it hadn't been for me my mother would have been with them. But because I stayed she stayed. Stubborn stubborn stubborn. We are a stubborn nation.
She said to me last night, I can't breathe. Her heart had been a disaster area for years and this psychosis we are living in is not helping any. So I thought "Heart attack!" My father's school buddy works in the Cardiac Hospital. In Kamenica. Across the Danube.
It was half past seven, and it was probably far too late for him to be there, but I panicked, so shoot me. I bundled Mama into the car and headed for the bridge at high speed.
I felt it coming. Before i heard it, before the bridge named "Sloboda" (that's "Freedom") blossomed into oblivion a few hundred meters in front of my car. I slammed on the brakes so hard that the tarmac smoked, flung open the door, forgot a possibly dying mother in the passenger seat, went running into the darkness with my eyes wide open and my arms outstretched, i could hear someone howling and I realised it was me... others who had screeched to a halt had come out of their cars and stood watching, their mouths open. Where the white suspension span was moments before, there was a black hole, and a river ran through it. There was a car hanging half on and half off the break where one section had folded into the water - someone scrambled to help a crawling figure that had managed to come out of the vehicle and was crawling up towards safety. There was.... this silence... a kind of silence that crept into my marrow and terrified me... or maybe it was just that I could not hear anything, that my ears were full of that scream and the sound of the explosion, trying to make sense of it...
I don't know how long I stood there keening before I felt someone shaking me weakly and realised that Mama had staggered out of the car and had made her way over to me. I could see her mouth moving but I could not hear what she was saying; she kept pointing though and eventually I looked away from the dead bridge and realised that a man had collapsed by the roadside - his face was Picassoesque, his nose at right angles to its usual position, his lower jaw missing or so badly dislocated that i could not make it out, his shirt and jacket drenched with blood; he seemed to be wearing two different shoes until I realised that he was wearing white sneakers and one of them was so soaked with blood that it looked black.
"Help him," my mother was saying. "Help him."
So I staggered over there and took off the scarf I was wearing and tied his face together as best I knew how. Mama and I half carried and half dragged him to my car and laid him across the back seat and I got back in the car and with hands that were not even shaking and dry eyes turned it around and drove hell for leather to the old hospital on the other side of town and got there and paked in front of the entrance and screamed "I have a..."
And then looked back, and he wasn't moving, he wasn't breathing...
and I said... "I have a dead man in my car..."
Someone in a white coat came over and looked inside and then screamed another name, called for a stretcher, someone hauled me out of the car, and I smiled and said "Oh, and my mother is having a heart attack" and passed out.
It wasn't a heart attack, it was heartburn. But they wanted to keep me in because of shock, until I started screaming that I would climb out of the window if they locked me into the place so they gave Mama my car keys and she drove us home. And I said, "Drive by the bridge."
And she said, "But it's right out of our way..."
It was also close to midnight by this time, and the city was empty and deserted and half unreal under the streetlights. But she took one look at me and did as I asked. And there were still people there. I got out of the car and I stood there and I just looked at the dark river and the bridge in its embrace; I was cold; I felt like I was dead. I didn't even know if that poor sod we took to the hospital was alive or dead, I did not ask, they did not tell me. But the inside of my car was black with his blood, and smelled of pain.
SOmebody put a pair of arms around me and I stood there and cried. I didn't look to see who held me. He wore a leather jacket and smelled of sweat and fatigue and the same kind of sadness that had veiled my own mind in darkness - so it didn't matter who it was, we just stood there and clung to each other and wept. My mother eventually came over, crying too, and pried us apart and took me home, and made me go to bed. And I lay there for three hours and stared at the ceiling, and traced the pattern on the wallpaper with that empty mind, and eventually got up again... and the night was still black... and bridge was still dead... and I was alive...
And why the hell do you need to know all or any of this? Because you are the only person I can think of who will not wake up to a city without the winged white bridge called "Freedom" tomorrow morning, and it is important, irrationally important, that you know what it feels like...?
Sasha (drunk on pain...)