One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [110]
Jeanine, a fifteen-year-old Burundian girl sleeping on the streets of a refugee camp, wanted peace for her own country and the opportunity to move home again, to rebuild. “I want to return home, when it is safe,” Jeanine said. “I want to go home and farm my land.”
She scoffed at the idea of moving to the United States or Canada as many others from the camp longed to do. She wanted to go home. She did not want to live the life of an exile nor the life of handouts that refugees are subject to, and she had had enough of parents. Her own were dead and the ones who took her in, her foster parents, she said, mistreated her. The war in Burundi, the war that took her parents from her, did not define her, though it impeded her dreams. It was a distant memory and the day-to-day things, the chores, the gossip, the games, the work of living took up her time and her energy.
Paul too scoffed at the idea of moving to the United States or Canada, though he did indicate that he would like to be somewhere safe where he could attend school.
“Can a child do this in Canada?” he asked. Perhaps his reluctance to resettle if he had the option was due more to a lack of perspective than a lack of desire. Regardless, his main desire for the moment was to get an education and to get out of the demobilization center where he lived with the other boys. He also said he would like a real soccer ball. The other boys at the center seconded his wish. Their dreams for the future ran parallel to their quotidian desires: soccer and joking and scribbling in books and drawing pictures and still more soccer.
Marko, the ringleader of his group of friends in the Serb enclave in Kosovo, wanted to return to Pristina, the capital city, where he had lived before the war. He was tired of the provincial life and longed for the hustle and excitement of the city, which was cut off from him by ethnic conflict. He did not want to leave Kosovo, as his parents often mentioned.
“Kosovo is our place,” he said. “We don’t want to leave. We want to remain here and to remain part of Serbia.” Asked if he wanted that even if it meant another war, he toned down some of his bravado. “No one wants war,” he said. Having seen his displays of kung fu against hypothetical Albanians, I wondered, when he got older, which version of Marko would come to the foreground, the one who wanted peace or the one who was ready to “kick Albanian asses”? The question is hardly academic. War’s children will one day become the adults of their societies.
There is no way to know for certain what sort of adults they will become. Their actions probably suggest more about the moment in which they act; their inconsistencies the working arithmetic of building a life and of surviving. They showed me parts of themselves, the parts they wanted to show. I saw other parts of some of them when they let their guard down during a game or a long walk, as when Christof slipped our dog some water and patted him behind the ears when he thought no one was watching. Other parts of who they are I’ve guessed at, based on their drawings, on what other children and other adults told me, based on what I’ve learned about their history.
Christof’s cruelty and his kindness do not exclude each other, nor do they sum him up. Marko’s wish for peace and his inherent racism, though contradictory, hold the key to what he will one day be, though no one, least of all Marko, knows what that is yet. Paul’s capacity for violence and his generosity of spirit will vie with each other in his identity, his memories and his values often at odds.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, a book written when the possibility of a second war in Europe loomed large overhead, Sigmund Freud described the two primal drives in human beings: Eros, the instinct that drives us toward love, to seek out comfort and support (and pleasure) from others, and Thanatos, the instinct that drives of us toward death and destruction, the instinct that pushes us not to love our neighbor as ourselves, but to use our neighbor, exploit him, rape him,