One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [91]
Oorus’s mother tried to tell me that she could not say these things in front of my translator earlier, that he could not translate them. Then again, neither could she. Frustrated, she let Bujana’s translation abide.
I got to thinking about Oorus. With my translator present, he gave lip service to the notion that people, no matter their ethnicity, were good and that the politicians caused the problems in Kosovo. At the time, that comment struck me as thoughtful and accurate. It gave me hope that reconciliation might be possible. But his comment when we were alone, which was made offhand and which, I can only assume, was an uncensored expression of his opinion, dashed that hope. He knew enough of the world to give lip service to rhetoric of forgiveness, but in his heart, he carried all the old prejudices.
Albanian children I met said much the same things. When I would ask if it was possible for Serbs to be good, they would say, “Of course, not all people are bad.” But when pressed, they would tell myriad tales of their Serb neighbors failing them, informing on them to the police, looting their homes after they fled, throwing stones at them, joining the paramilitaries that raped and killed Albanians. By the end of the discussion they would tell me, as Nora in Zahaq said, “We can forgive them if they are punished for their crimes, but they should not come back here. There is nothing for them here.”
I wondered how reconciliation was ever going to be possible when neither side would give any ground, when the children, like the politicians, gave lip service to forgiveness and cooperation but never showed any signs they meant it. Of course, this is not the children’s fault. They have no exposure to youth from other ethnic groups. Serb and Albanian children live in complete isolation from each other. How much difference, I dreamed, would a mixed ethnicity soccer game make?
I talked to one boy, Milos, whose family had fled to the Gracanica Monastery when their home in Obilic was burned to the ground. Three children, the mother and father, and the grandmother lived in a small outbuilding on the grounds of the five-hundred-year-old cloister. The father complained that the Albanians were a people without culture as his son stood beside him, saying little. His father went on and on about the politicians screwing the people. I asked Milos about his school in Obilic. His father answered for him.
“It was like a prison,” he said. Milos nodded. “Bars on the windows. The children couldn’t even go outside to play, because the Albanian kids provoke them. The teachers can’t control the kids. It’s like they’re drugged.”
“Did you ever have problems with the Albanian kids?” I asked Milos, trying to get him to speak instead of his father.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“Tell them,” the father said. Niko, my translator, rolled his eyes very subtly to me. He was trying to get the father to back down and let Milos speak naturally, but the father was not having it. Milos did not want to talk to us and we decided to let him be, but the father insisted. I felt very awkward, as if I were forcing the child to speak against his will. “Tell them,” he said again.
“When we walked around at school, the Albanian kids came over and provoked us with cursing and swearing. They would throw stones. There were only thirty-four kids in my school, and we were right next to the Albanian school.”
“What would you do when they provoked you?” his father asked.
“I’d do the same as they did,” he said. His father patted him on the head. This was not a “turn-the-other-cheek” kind of family. Nearby, a cat had given birth to litter of kittens. The kittens kept slinking into the small building and the grandmother, a powerfully built stoop-backed old babushka, emerged from the doorway shouting and cursing at the kittens, tossing them through the air by their hind legs. We all stopped a moment to watch the kittens fly, one by one, across the lawn.
“The Albanians have been like this since ’99,” Milos’ father said, and for a moment I thought he was saying