“Are you a student?” Boris finally asked Bertha.
“I’m a teacher,” she said, and Boris said right away, “You’re so young!”
“So are my students. I teach third grade.”
“So this film career of yours is only –“
“A man in a shopping mall told me I had a wonderful face, a picture face with values, a delightful face.”
“A perceptive man,” Boris said. “And you are married?”
“Divorced.”
“Many journeys,” Boris said.
“Only inside,” she said. “Yours have been outside. Your home is gone. Do you have a family?”
“My family was killed,” Boris said. He could feel it then, on his hand, as she leaned into him, could feel the wetness and looked down to see her tears and her quiet crying.
“Do you cry for me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“It is a marvelous gift for a man to have a young woman cry in his honor. I thank you for it.”
Truthfully, there had been rudeness at every step of his journey, callousness, abrupt officials. There had been those who’d thought him slightly deranged as his book English had turned itself into speaking English and listening English, a turning not without its perils and misadventures. But there had been kindness, too – clothing offered, transportation, now and then a quiet room in a friendly home.
What filled Boris’s heart about this Bertha, though, was that she was not trying to make him better or to see that his future was full of attainment and good times. She was lamenting him and giving his losses a new place. He could say, finally, “Yes, there are those who have been sad for me, but we really must put all that away now. Those places, those people, they are of another time and of places that hardly even have names anymore.”
Bertha made him feel that at least his dreadful losses hadn’t disappeared. They were here now and she had taken it upon herself to mourn, however briefly, however commercially in this huge commercial place.
Someday he would have to write to Bertha to tell her that at the time she mourned he was, really, quite happy. Somewhere someone had decreed that he would suffer tremendously, but then everything about him would be changed – the times when he slept, the places on the earth where he put his feet; his food, his water, his work. Then someone would say – fate the most chaotic of all the jokesters – Here is this young woman. Believe in her and follow her. There is still youth inside of you, and in all the countries of the young you will find that Boris Izetbegovic can still laugh, can still sing, can still see that in the worst of all things, in the ashes and in the death of dreams, there is still that first minute in the morning, that good minute, and then the one after that and the one after that – moments that have never been, moments like fleece bags waiting to be filled.
“Today is my birthday,” Boris said to Bertha.
She looked up at him and dried her eyes with the back of her hand. “I will buy you ice cream, then,” she said. “I think there are certain timeless laws in the universe about that. Good laws, and they will not be denied.”
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