Courtney Angela Brkic's Story in Mercury News

Posted on Sun, Aug. 01, 2004
The unburied past
By Charles Matthews

Mercury News

Many years ago, three friends and I wedged ourselves into a VW Beetle and set out to drive through what was then Yugoslavia to the Adriatic. We didn't know how wild and beautiful and strange and lonely much of the country was, or that we would ride for hours, hairpinning through green hills and barren ones, and seldom see another car or come upon a village or farm.

And in the towns and cities, we naive Americans were surprised to see minarets rising above the rooftops. We hadn't known that Yugoslavia had such a large Muslim population. Later, the whole world would know that -- and, terribly, much more.

When that time came, and the names of places where I had been -- Dubrovnik, Jajce, Mostar, Sarajevo -- filled the news, I felt sadness and horror but also remorse: I had learned so little when I was there; I had passed through those places in the tourist's cocoon of ignorance. At least I was not one of those Americans who, in Courtney Angela Brkic's words, ``asked whether Croatia and Bosnia were in Latin America.'' But though my ignorance was lesser, it was still strong.

``Those savvy enough to know the region's geography would express surprise and confusion that the war had happened at all,'' Brkic writes. ``Yugoslavia had been an idyll, hadn't it? Where the past had been forgotten and people lived as brothers? I did not relish explaining, over and over again, that the past had never been forgotten, but merely buried.''

Brkic may not relish explaining that, but she has done so eloquently in ``The Stone Fields,'' trying to bring into emotional focus -- such things are beyond reason -- the hideousness that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the rapes and torture and massacres, as well as the ignorance and indifference of the outside world.

As her name suggests, Brkic is Croatian-American. Her father left Yugoslavia in 1959, and, she says, ``Like other new Americans who seek to reinvent themselves, he let weeds and dirt overtake the past.''

She was given the all-American name Courtney, along with an Americanized version of her grandmother's name, Andelka (pronounced ``Anjelka''). But as she notes, ``My father had been troubled when I started responding to the name Angela. I think it seemed to him a rejection of the safe life he had created for us in America.''

Trained as an archaeologist, Brkic went to Bosnia in 1996 to work with a forensic team of the Physicians for Human Rights that was unearthing mass graves and attempting to identify the bodies. ``My father did not know that I had come to Bosnia,'' she tells us, ``and the knowledge would have eaten away at him.''

Part of the book is about Brkic's work on the grim task of identification, handling human remains and working in fields that had been land-mined. It was work that took both a physical and psychological toll. She came to be bothered by a burning sensation in one of her fingers.

``I had the terrible feeling that a splinter of bone from one of the bodies had made its way into me and lay buried under my skin.''

But the book is also about her grandmother, Andelka. Brkic has always been ``a stubborn demander of stories,'' she tells us, and from the stories told by her father and her aunts, she has crafted a fascinating account of her grandmother's life -- one ruled by the unresolved tensions of her country's violent history.

``Politics is a whore,'' Andelka would say, bitter at the sway it held over her life. She was born in Herzegovina, orphaned at 14, and married at 16. Soon after their marriage, she and her husband were exiled to a remote village by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia because he was a follower of a Croatian nationalist.

Andelka gave birth to four children, two of whom survived, before her husband died of typhoid when she was 21. Not wanting to live the life of a self-denying village widow, she moved to Sarajevo with her two small sons, Bero and Zoran.

In Sarajevo, she fell in love with Josef Finci, who was Jewish. With the coming of the Nazi occupation, Andelka was arrested for hiding Josef, who was sent to a concentration camp. Twelve-year-old Bero and 10-year-old Zoran were left on their own for weeks -- a neighbor looked in on them and fed them -- until Andelka was released. They never saw Josef again.

After the war, chaos was succeeded by the regimentation of communism, but the country's ethnic tensions were only repressed, not resolved. Andelka ``had endured her own life,'' Brkic writes. ``This impossible country had undermined her.'' So she urged Bero and Zoran to leave: `` `Get out while you still can,' she told them. `And don't come back.' ''

For Brkic, a tension remains between Andelka's ``impossible country'' and the ``safe life'' her father, Bero, had tried to create for her. And her desire to understand overcomes her need for security.

In Zagreb, she has an affair with Stjepan, who has served in the army and seen terrible things. She tells him that her father would like to come back -- ``a piece of him is always here'' -- but would find the adjustment difficult after growing used to life in America. ``This troubled him. Stjepan had, after all, fought for the right of people like my father to come back permanently, to reclaim their lives.'' But deep conflicts about his country also trouble Stjepan, who is prone to nightmares. Their relationship sours to an end. The buried past will not stay buried.

``The Stone Fields'' has a haunting, lyrical economy. Brkic wonderfully blends precise depictions of a harsh land and hard lives with a deep and sympathetic understanding of what people have endured. Added to this is a keen self-awareness that never becomes self-indulgence.

It's a book designed to banish ignorance, and it goes a long way toward its goal.

THE STONE FIELDS: An Epitaph for the Living
By Courtney Angela Brkic
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 320 pp., $24
RELATED READING

STILLNESS AND OTHER STORIES,
by Courtney Angela Brkic (Picador, $13 paperback)
Fiction based on Brkic's experiences in Croatia and Bosnia

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/books/9294920.htm