(Note: “Widows of Srebrenica” by Dutch artist Ronald Ophuis is the only image I found to fit this piece properly, so I reached out to him and he graciously sent back permission *and* a hi-res image file at no cost. Thank you, Mr. Ophuis.)
The nesting dolls took me back to those seven months I spent adjacent to Eastern Europe, of white vinyl windows on houses painted pink and brown and tan, the practical rebuilds of people pressed between empires, accustomed to fending off or absorbing invaders, to rebuilding after wars.
And there I was in the back left seat of an up-armored HUMVEE, rolling toward Orašje, past the Pizzeria Mafioso with faded banners boasting Pilsner Urquell and a year-old airing of the Euro Cup Final when France beat Italy.
Then along the road at the edge of Donja Mahala was the line of widows we’d see every so often, picking their way along the shoulder, a row of small, bent bodies, wrapped in black, moving as one.
Their alliance stood stark in a country where gatherings were still laden with remnants of violence, where we met with people one-on-one. We also moved as one, in armored convoys, but the widows were their own sort of army, reminding us of the costs of adjacency to men who live by the sword.
Or landmines. The unwalkable fields were salted with them, which is partly why the widows stayed close to the road. They were a testament to the tearing madness—a convent of convalescence from the excision of family—making their way to Orašje.
I thought of them later, the little widowers, while attempting to rend my heather gray t-shirt, but the seam held at the collar so the cotton was only left warped.
There’s no line of black-clad compatriots to walk with. The other widowers seem stuck, or have been at this so long, or are remarried already. Past the loneliness, I suppose.
The widows knew the loneliness, compounded to unfathomable degrees: lost parents and siblings and friends and children—cleansed is the false phrase their killers used—or harvested elsewhere by the Reaper. So many so far, except that Stygian sisterhood.
They knew the moon, and sometimes I shared their watch, and I wonder now if they were curled on the floor of farmhouses nearby, the bed too soft to accept.
I hope there won’t be more of those hunched black lines, yet I know they’ve always been and will be, until other hopes we hold arise. For now the cycle spins over and over, hurling us outward, until someday day the widows and I will be under the ground—preferably shaded by old oaks and pine and not littered with plastique and mines—and I’ll say, “I was witness, and when I saw the nesting dolls, I remembered.”
This is a beautiful heartache of a piece. Thanks for sharing.
I love that you found a piece of artwork to go with your writing and that you connected with the artist. Thank you for this, especially on this grey February morning. -S