One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [88]
“Independence means no one can tell you what to do.” The others agreed.
“When the Serbs were here they would not let us go to school,” Nora explained. “They wanted to keep us undereducated so we would be easy to rule. With independence, they could not do that to us.”
All the Albanian children believed they had a future if they could achieve independence, except for Karl, whose father survived the first forced evacuation of Zahaq only to be gunned down a few weeks later by a man in a yellow Mercedes. He said, “I probably won’t live to be a grown-up.”
Karl had trouble in school, had trouble sleeping and sitting still, I was told. He had problems beyond memories of the war and the loss of his father. His family was very poor. They struggled to survive in a devastated economy. Kosovo had always been the poorest province of Yugoslavia, but since the war and the post-war interim government, the poverty, everyone told me, had gotten worse. Unemployment was high. Alcoholism was high. Drug use was high. Depression was high.
Karl still struggled with the past and the present, reminding me that not all wounds heal with time, that even resourceful, intelligent children break under the strain of all the stress this world can heap onto them, that not everyone is as resilient as Valerie, the little Zahaq girl who told me that she survived because she must, because “life continues.”
Nora gave Karl her advice. “You must live,” she said.
She said she would like to tell this to all the children of war that I met in my travels, all the ones who were losing hope. “You must live,” she said, and I thought of Keto in Lugufu Camp and of Nicholas on the Thai-Burma border, and of Charity from the Sudan and Paul in the Congo. All of these children were eloquent testimony to the idea that in a society at war, the smallest citizens carry a heavy burden, that of living, of continuing because one day peace will come, as it had, in its own way, to Kosovo. Because they were the future; because they would be the next ones to wage war or to make peace and maybe they could do things better than their parents had, if only they could take her advice and live.
As I mused on these grand thoughts, bigger than the room we were in, bigger than the girl who spoke them, thoughts that moved continents, thoughts that could end wars, that united the children of the world—in my mind—into one grand celebration of life and innocence and the resilience of man, Nora kept speaking. Her next words brought me back to reality, away from the dangerous, ridiculous, greeting-card idealizations I was drifting into.
“Except the Serbs,” she said. “I would not give them that advice. To them I would say, go straight to Hell.”
The others laughed, bright smiles nearly knocking me over. Karl’s sad face broke into a smile. Even my translator, a bit of a nationalist himself, laughed.
Later in the day, Karl told me that he would be a soccer player when he grew up, a professional, and he would live in a free Kosovo. It felt good to hear him talking about dreams, expressing some vision of himself living to see adulthood. I had scrawled “Depressed? Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?” in my notes next to Karl’s name when we had first spoken, but these sorts of labels are perhaps too easily applied. As the psychiatrist Lynne Jones notes of children who survived the war in Bosnia, “these children might experience intrusive recollections of events, might have nightmares and difficulty concentrating in school,” but when one takes into consideration where they live, what they’ve been through, and what their current conditions are, could these reactions be understandable responses to horrific events rather than symptoms of a psychiatric disorder?
In a depressed economy like Kosovo, in a society where everyone was the victim, how could one define what an abnormal reaction would be? In a time when the local high schools were turned into rape camps, when men were pulled from their families and shot then dumped in