I wake up early in a boy's bedroom, head on a pillowcase patterned with fire engines, next to a shelf of books in English: The Golden Guide to Dinosaurs, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The people who live in this house are still in bed or gone.
I tiptoe to the bathroom past Boris, father of the boy whose bed I've slept in. I imagine Boris under blue sheets, eyes closed, mind awake thinking: I don't want to bale hay today, but shit, the sky is blue. If I were still in America, I'd be discussing Shakespeare, Doctorow, Joyce, in bed with my American girlfriend before driving to my American university job spoon-feeding pimply boys and sorority girls the rich fruit of their own language. But I left America thirteen years ago to tend this farm, my father's farm in Slavonia: his farm — always — even though he's been dead these seven years. What could I do? Stay in the U.S. while he and my mother defended his cherry trees from the Yugoslav Army? I had to come back, felt compelled to marry the widow of a Vukovar soldier. We made a son but I could never make her, or this, my life.
Boris's ten-year-old son is not at his father's house. He lies under sheets (patterned with soccer balls, perhaps) at his mother's, probably happier there. The room I slept in — his room — has only books in English, stuff about dinosaurs, Harry Potter. Maybe he can barely read them, maybe he is allergic to hay, but he still has to help with farm chores. At Boris's house, he probably misses his mother, his friends, books in Croatian. I suspect his grandmother follows him everywhere with food.
In the bathroom, I color the toilet water with menstrual blood — possibly the first woman to do so in eight years. I tread quietly downstairs, past Boris's white-haired mother dreaming of husbandly snores and arms. I imagine her waking in yellow tangled sheets thinking: I can't get used to this life, to Boris repeating, always repeating: I am your son not your husband. All I do is wait for him to come home so I can feed him, make sure his stomach is satisfied; his clothes are clean and warm. My sausages, my eggs, my honey, all for my son — I ask for nothing in return. Yet he brings home strangers; they walk around my garden; I say nothing, want nothing; am nothing; what more does he want from me?
Boris's mother, now awake, smiles at me from the doorway as I admire the purple and dark green leaves of her beet plants, her flowering radishes, trussed up pole beans. I have no Croatian to say more than lijepo, beautiful, lijepo as Renaissance paintings, your cherry orchards and plum; lijepo, your rising and falling tapestry of grapevines; lijepo, the sun ray wrinkles on your apple cheeks.
How did I arrive here in the silent suffering beauty of this Slavonian family farm? Boris, friend of a colleague in America, responded to my American request, emailed from the comfort of my Midwestern suburban home, to see the region where some of the fiercest fighting between Croatia and Serbia occurred in the last fifteen years. American curiousity, research for a book.
Yesterday, Boris drove me through every Slavonian town between Osijek and Vinkovci, pointed out Serbian roofs (old and brown moss-covered clay untouched by war) and the new red tiles on recently rebuilt Croatian homes.
We visited the field near Vukovar where two hundred men were dumped after execution by the Yugoslav army. From the car, Boris directed my attention to signs for still-live mine fields — red slashed circles — in pastures overgrown with prairie grass.
We talked about his life. Then he offered me his son's room (cheaper than a hotel) and a lift to the train this morning: nothing more, nothing less. I will never be able to repay this kindness.
"Eve in the garden," says Boris, appearing by his mother's side in the doorway, still in pajamas, sun crowning his yellow-gray hillock of hair — stranger whose story I've landed in. For him, I wish I were not the American researching war in Slavonia, three more days in Croatia then back to America, husband, cat, computer, Interstate 94 and English. I wish I could play the missing person here: wife, mother, daughter-in-law. I wish I were Eve in the garden.
Alison Morse's writing has been published in The Potomac Review, Water~Stone, Rhino, Opium, an anthology called The Bush Years and elsewhere. Recently, she completed a novel, The Beethoven Frieze, about animators in Croatia during Yugoslavia's collapse, which won an Outstanding Fiction Thesis award at Hamline University.