FROM THe DesK OF: Barbara Borst
The First Front Lines
​
December 1993
​
The artillery shell seemed to hover, spiraling slowly, selecting with casual cruelty the boys it would maim.
“Razim! RAH-ZEEM!” Mehmed shouted as he lunged forward to shield his brother. He heard his own words muffled and distorted and too late. The shell spun deliberately onward.
“Mehmed, it’s OK,” the doctor comforted his young patient as he hurried to the bedside.
Stone and metal flew up from a sudden fiery crater, flinging the brothers apart, slashing their tracksuits, tearing through muscle and bone. The explosion and the screams and the thud of bodies on the ground pounded in Mehmed's ears.
“Razim!” he shouted through clenched teeth, lurching past the doctor in a futile gesture to protect his brother. The murky turquoise of hospital gowns ballooned and swirled before him, transmuting into a street littered with the wounded, into sheets covered in blood, into wards crowded with moaning patients.
“Mehmed, it’s OK. Razim’s OK, too,” Dr. Marc Worthington assured him, leaning across the gurney to prevent the young man from rising. “It’s just the anesthetic, the drugs,” he explained, speaking distinctly to make himself understood across the language barrier.
“Gdje je Razim?” Mehmed demanded in Bosnian, surveying the hospital recovery room.
Wishing he had learned more Bosnian, the doctor made a guess about Mehmed's question. “Where is he? Razim is in bed. He is OK. Do you understand?”
Mehmed nodded and lay back quietly, his face gaunt and pallid against the pillow, his dark hair shaved away in large areas. Raising his hand to feel the bandages across his temple, eye and cheek, he started at the sight of his carefully wrapped left forearm and the place where his hand should have been. He faded back into unconsciousness.
“Are you ready to go see Razim?” a voice asked later.
Mehmed dragged himself up through the anesthetic confusion. Turning his unbandaged eye toward the sound, he found Dr. Worthington. He made himself remember who that was and that he was in Yale-New Haven Hospital, half a world away from the war in Bosnia. With considerable effort, he replied in English, “Yes, Doctor Marc.” He did not trust mere words; he needed to see for himself that his brother was alive, that Razim’s legs were still whole.
The doctor wheeled the gurney to the elevator, a task he would normally have left to hospital staff. But Mehmed Grbic was more than his patient; he was his full responsibility.
“Here he is,” Dr. Worthington announced, thinking how poor he was at bedside chatter after many years in emergency care.
Mehmed scrutinized the patient sleeping in the next bed while a nurse helped him transfer onto his own bed. The patient’s dark curls seemed familiar, though he rasped with each breath and tubes hung from his chest and arms. Mehmed eyed the blankets and found signs of two feet.
“Razim,” he whispered in relief.
****
Frances Disario pulled into the driveway of her yellow suburban ranch house. The front door hung open in the frosty air. For the first time in a month, her sister’s car was parked outside the garage. Frances grabbed her schoolbooks and rushed in.
“Hey, Donna, it’s great to see you,” she began as she discovered her older sister in the spare bedroom.
“I’m not staying. Dad just wanted me to get some things.”
Frances’s hopes slid to the floor. “Why don’t you come for yourself sometime?”
Donna said nothing but rummaged through their father's belongings, which their mother had dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the guestroom floor. They were in no mood for guests anyway.
“We miss you,” Frances started again. “I miss you.”
Donna dug into another pile of papers and clothes.
“And mom could use a little extra kindness these days.”
“Mom!” Donna shouted, suddenly standing up straight to confront her sister. “Mom,” she added in disgust, giving up on the idea of discussion. “What a pathetic, clinging jellyfish.”
“You expect her not to cry?”
“If she hadn’t spied on him,” Donna argued, flinging clothes back onto the pile, “and been a sniveling little nothing…”
“I can’t believe you think it’s her fault,” Frances muttered, turning away and shuffling toward the kitchen. She pivoted in the hall and asked, quietly, through tears that her sister did not look up to see, “What do you want her to do?”
Donna found what she was looking for, stuffed it into a shopping bag and re-buttoned her coat.
Frances pleaded, “Don't you miss us?”
“See you sometime,” the older girl replied. She left the door open again.
Frances stood on the front step, wrapping her school blazer tighter against the cold, and begged, “Please don’t go.” The roar of Donna’s departing car buried her plea.
****
Mehmed tore himself apart in his dreams and his half-dreams and his sleepless hours in bed too uncomfortable to rest. If only he hadn’t talked Razim into playing basketball, if they had gone for military training like his brother wanted, if it had rained, if they had taken another route, if they had walked instead of running, if they had ducked into a doorway, if there had never been a war.
His mind leapt frantically from one alternative to another seeking the one that, if he thought about it hard enough, would undo the reality through which they suffered, would wrench time backward long enough to erase what never should have been, would free him from the ball-and-chain of guilt.
When the whirlwind of failed choices became more than he could bear, he turned to the one refuge that remained. He picked up his tattered journal to write a letter to Dzenana just as he had done every day since the fighting that started in April 1992 had severed communications with her village.
As he spoke to her on the handwritten page, Mehmed reentered the peaceful realm in which he had faith that she still lived. The distrust that had seeped into his thoughts about the world, like floodwaters wicking their way up through the walls of a house, subsided. The squint that toughened his gray eyes relaxed. The mask of angry sorrow that he turned on everyone except his brother fell away at the thought of her. He could reveal the intense loyalty of his love for her, for Razim, for his family, clandestinely, hoping not to stir a jealous fate that might rob him further.
To Dzenana he described the pastel hospital room that always smelled of disinfectants and institutional cooking; the neon signs and streetlights that New Haven, not being under bombardment, was free to illuminate each evening; his difficulty understanding news reports and medical terms in a foreign language.
He told her how well he was recovering, glossing over his pain. He detailed the sophisticated equipment used to treat them and dwelt with deep concern on Razim's slow emergence from the crushing blows to his chest and the full length of both legs. He described the doctor who had delivered them from Sarajevo's siege.
He did not dwell in writing, as he had in his heart, on his own part in causing Razim's injuries. Nor did he commit to paper his anguished questions about whether the Serbs had destroyed her village and whether they had hurt her. He did not allow himself to think of all the women and girls raped, of all the families murdered or driven from their homes. To write such things would permit the possibility that the worst had befallen her. He banished those thoughts and kept Dzenana alive through letters he could not send.
When he finished writing, Mehmed listened to Razim's coarse breathing to be sure his brother was asleep. He switched on the television and waited for the world news.
The anchorman, with practiced smiles and rumple-browed concern, introduced a report from Bosnia. The correspondent stood outside the United Nations’ military installation at the Sarajevo airport. The camera jumped to a dark room at the brown-and-yellow Holiday Inn, where many foreign journalists stayed, as tracer bullets ricocheted off the walls and carved orange blazes across the screen. It jumped to a major thoroughfare where pedestrians carrying heavy water jugs and piles of firewood scurried behind the hulks of burned-out buses and trucks, their only protection from snipers’ bullets.
Mehmed crawled to the end of the bed for a closer look, in case he recognized a face. To watch was painful; not to watch, impossible.
The scene switched to an interview with the United Nations commander, General Sir Michael Rose, who sported a pale blue helmet and a bulletproof vest. Mehmed increased the volume in hopes of understanding the general’s British accent. The image flicked to diplomats in expensive suits discussing Bosnia in gilded halls, returned to the reporter at the airport, then changed into scenes of Jerusalem. Mehmed turned it off.
No wonder they don’t help us, he reflected. We’re just one more war to them. Far away. And the news is not about us. It’s about UN soldiers, diplomats, foreign reporters. They do not see the suffering from the inside, like we live it.
Then he asked himself, cruelly, what good he was doing for Bosnians. He glanced at Razim. I am taking care of the one I hurt.
****
Dr. Marc Worthington sat at the kitchen counter that served as a desk in his studio apartment near the hospital. He finished his letter telling Mehmed and Razim’s parents about their sons’ medical conditions and placed it next to Mehmed’s letter to his parents, ready for the next volunteer from Aide Medicale to carry their messages into Sarajevo. Such couriers brought mail when they could to the city but couldn’t get it to the countryside. The doctor began another series of telephone calls.
“Hi, Judy, Tom, it’s Marc again,” he told the answering machine. “Listen, I hate to keep bugging you, but I need your help. It’s too long a story for your message tape, so please call as soon as possible. Thanks.”
He hung up and stared at the medical records he had brought home. ‘GRBIC, Mehmed,’ and ‘GRBIC, Razim,’ the documents read. “Grrreubich,” he practiced the foreign name. He flipped the files open, although he already knew every detail of the contents.
Twins, age 17. They certainly weren't identical even before their injuries, he mused.
The report said Razim, at six-foot-four, was taller than Mehmed by two inches, but Dr. Worthington had never seen him standing, never seen him any way but flat out on a surgical table, a gurney, the stretcher the airline had supplied to fly him across the Atlantic, a hospital bed. Even lying down, Razim seemed substantial – broad, muscular shoulders and solid forearms above long legs – despite the intravenous feeding tubes and the rows of metal external fixators needed to salvage shattered bones. And always that tanned face, slightly drained of color, that plane of cheek balanced by a long, resolutely straight nose and a solid chin, shone hauntingly beautiful in the serenity that heavy medication bought back from pain.
And always Mehmed with that anguished look, consumed not by his own suffering but by that around him. Slender of face and shoulder, sinewy, jumpy as a cat being hunted, despite his pain medications. Unhappy beyond anything the physician could touch.
I brought them back for medical care, but they need much more than that, the doctor admitted. They need a home.
Dr. Worthington surveyed his small abode stacked high with medical journals and texts, refrigerator and pantry bare, closet empty except for a few shirts and lab coats. The duffel bags from his recent mission to Sarajevo waited by the door, not yet unpacked.
Thirty-eight years old and I still live like a student. This won't do, he concluded. He picked up the telephone again.
****
Mehmed muted the TV as Dr. Worthington entered the room, but he left the news flashing silently in case of an update from Bosnia.
“How are you, Mehmed?” the physician asked.
“OK. No problem.” A dark circle underlined the one eye that showed. His face looked fragile next to the glaring white of his bandages. “He sleep,” he added, indicating Razim.
“All day?”
“Only when drugs.”
Dr. Worthington thought his years of emergency care had made him objective, but each time he looked at them, he felt the shock of their first meeting in Kosevo Hospital. Razim on a pallet, his butchered legs and chest soaking the sheets with blood, his untouched face tranquil, unconscious. The Bosnian anesthesiologist, although toughened by a year of carnage, gasping, “He looks like an angel,” as she struggled to stabilize the teenager. And Mehmed, shouting his brother’s name and begging, “Don’t cut off his legs. He is an athlete.” The American doctor had promised to do everything he could.
Suddenly a television image of Bosnia riveted Mehmed. A report about the Red Cross busing refugees out of Sarajevo. He searched for relatives and friends among the faces of the weeping women and children packed onto the mud-spattered vehicle. Struggling to make out the English, he tapped the volume louder.
The sound woke Razim, who groaned as he shifted in bed. Mehmed instantly turned the program off.
“He do not like,” Mehmed explained to the doctor.
“Dr. Marc,” Razim mumbled.
“Razim, I’m happy to see you awake for once,” the doctor teased as he came to the young man’s bedside.
“Dobro. Is good,” Razim proclaimed.
“Being awake?”
“All thing. Heat, electric, food. Dobro,” Razim declared, his broad face growing handsomer as he gathered it into wakefulness. In his sense of wonder at having survived, Razim re-embraced life, as yet undaunted by his injuries.
Dr. Worthington smiled at Razim’s joy in simple pleasures that were missing in war-torn Bosnia. He made a note to request double rations – like everyone in Sarajevo, the brothers had often gone hungry during the past year and a half.
“Anything I can bring you two?” he asked.
“Beautiful girl,” Razim volunteered, flashing a grin that revealed the front tooth he had chipped at age ten when he jumped off the elementary school roof into a snowdrift.
The doctor patted Razim’s well-muscled arm and replied, “Wish I knew some.”
“English lesson,” Mehmed proposed. “We studying in the Sarajevo school but not to speak good.”
“We will work on it. Also, television will help.”
The surgeon who had patched up Razim’s chest checked in on them. “Sorry to disturb you, Dr. Worthington,” Dr. Jane Myers began.
“We’re just chatting, Dr. Myers. I’ll step out.”
“Please stay,” she said. “Hello, Razim,” she turned to her patient as she studied his chart. “Looks like you’re healing nicely now that we’ve cleaned up your wounds.”
“Is good, but feet cold. You warm?”
“That’s Dr. Stone’s department,” she replied, ignoring the flirtation. She checked his breathing and the bandages supporting his fractured ribs. She did not touch the snowy mountain range of sheets covering Dr. Stone’s work – the collection of metal pins, plates and screws drilled into the bones of each leg to line up the smashed remains.
Dr. Worthington joined her in the hall afterward to discuss the case. Dr. Myers said she was pleased the lung and ribs were healing rapidly and that Razim would be ready to go home very soon. Dr. Worthington wondered whether he could find the brothers a home to go to.
****
Razim woke every few hours, just as the morphine wore off. He felt every intrusion of metal pin, suture and shrapnel, every gap where flesh and bone had been torn away. Vicious pains stabbed him through the ankles, shins, knees, thighs and ribs that had borne the force of the explosion. They tore at him from inside as well as out, deep like the agony the Earth feels when blasted open by miners, pervasive like the scream of a siren that obliterates competing sounds. He wanted to cradle each leg, to encase its misery or to shield it from further onslaught. But when he reached toward his legs, it hurt his broken chest.
Pain tormented his mind along with his body. He learned to lie still and to fill his head with details of hard-fought basketball games, of singularly attractive classmates, of pranks he once had pulled, of rock’n’roll lyrics, of Bosnian ski trails, of anything but the terrifying pain, while he waited for the nurse to arrive with the next dose of oblivion.
****
Colored Christmas lights blinked foolishly on the artificial tree in the Disarios’ dark living room. Hugging both knees to her chest, Frances stared past the lights and through the window, looking at nothing, at nothingness. No one had bothered to close the drapes.
But she and her mother had put up the decorations, all of them: the treasured, crumbling ornaments Frances and Donna had made in kindergarten, the mirror that became a pond for tiny skaters in the middle of the coffee table, the hand-stitched quilts, the advent candles. A collection to which her mother had added every year. Every year but this one. It was all out again,
covering every level surface, transforming the room into a craft shop.
“Just in case,” Maura Disario had said hopefully to her daughter, hovering as she had been at that moment in one of her brittle, determinedly optimistic moods.
Just in case of what? Frances demanded of herself, though she did not put the obvious question to her mother. In case HE comes back? So we can all pretend this is one more merry Christmas before he goes off to sleep with HER again?
But she had said nothing, except to reminisce about each decoration they had made together and various happy holidays long past. Then her mother had grown tired and plunged into depression and gone to cry herself to sleep again. And Frances had stayed up alone to stand vigil over the death of her childhood.
In a New Haven hospital, Mehmed Grbic emerges from anesthesia into the nightmare of injuries he and his twin brother, Razim, have suffered in besieged Sarajevo. Evacuated to the United States for surgery and unable to return to their homeland while the war in Bosnia still rages, the O’Neal family welcomes the boys into their home and enrolls them into a Connecticut high school, where their physical recovery serves to mask the even greater underlying damage sustained by the two displaced boys.
While Mehmed, serious and introverted, blames himself for Razim's injuries and broods over the girl he left behind, Razim, a gifted basketball player fated never to play again, uses his impish charm to mask deep new fears. But when the brothers meet the girl next door, Frances Disario, who bears her own wounds from the bitter divorce of her parents, the three begin the first painful steps toward healing, gradually learning to trust one another with both their secrets and their first tenuous hopes for a future.
Barbara Borst teaches international affairs and journalism at New York University. Previously, she was an editor at The Associated Press. While based in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Paris and Toronto, she wrote for Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, Inter Press Service news agency, and others. Prior to living abroad, she reported for The Denver Post and the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, MS.