PROLOGUE: I am going to break with my recent string of writing and tell you a story of something that happened once; it’s a story my mother gave me years ago and which she still retells now and then.

For her generation, there was before the War and after it, like a book that’s been opened and the spine cracked so that now it naturally falls open to that page spread. This is only one way to mark a place; you can fold over the corner of a page too. On the side of the book that holds all the After, I am going to lift one of those corners to show you the underneath. This is a real thing that happened once, and it doesn’t need any artfulness or embellishment to make it more than it is. I will tell it as she told me, plain but hopefully with fewer digressions. For context, and by way of a warning: in this story a blameless animal is slaughtered, but it happens in a village where this is normal. This story also contains the threat of violence.

In this story the genocide has already happened, and everyone in the story is living in the shadow of that mountain.

Let us begin:

STORY: We have fairies too, did you know that? But we call them vila. Sometimes it is very lucky to see one, other times it might mean disaster, so it’s like anything else. Someone in my village saw one, once. In that time there were almost no men in the village, no adult men, just the elderly and boys under twelve, but there were a few and one of them was Marko. He went out into the woods with some of the women to — I don’t remember, it doesn’t matter, anyway they separated from each other and when it was time to go back they couldn’t find him anywhere though they called and called. It was late in the evening when he returned to the village, pale and trembling and when they asked him what had happened he did not speak but his mouth was twisted and he wrung his hands. Finally he said vila and they asked him, the women, Marko did you see a vila, and he just stared straight ahead and did not say anything else again.

(here I asked her if people really believed him and she said ‘who knows. In that time people had already seen all kinds of impossible things, what’s one more. Someone else saw Our Lady standing in the Sredica river once, her hands cut off at the wrists and the stumps bleeding into the water and crying because the people had given themselves over to godless communism. My point Milice is that people will say any old shit, but sometimes it is true. Can I finish?’)

Well obviously he wasn’t the same after that. He started coming round to my grandmother’s house, just to sit at the table and stare at nothing and she was happy to let him sit, it seemed to comfort him in some way. You can get used to anything and after not very long at all this is just how that was. Until one day when my grandmother went out into the field and saw him butchering a calf, right there in the field, and the calf was hardly old enough, it was the wrong time altogether. He then walked to the school. At that time school was one room, all the grades together, and our teacher a former professor from the University who had pissed off the wrong party person and had been sent to teach us as a punishment. He hated us, most of the teachers were former fascists anyway. Well Marko walked in and calmly took a chair to the front of the room and sat down on it, facing all of us kids with the bloody calf-killing knife still in hand, lying across his lap. No I don’t think I was scared, nothing like this had happened in my memory, I was too young to remember all the other stuff but it was strange! We sat there for I don’t know how long until one child said he really needed the bathroom and Marko let him go, and he ran all the way to my grandmother’s house to tell her and then it was all over quickly - police came and took him and he went with them and we never saw him again. So there you go, that’s the story.

EPILOGUE: She has a lot of stories like this one; it was what you’d call a liminal space and a liminal time, where a very broken country and its people were trying to figure out how to live in the shadow of the very recent past. You might pass someone in the street who you knew was guilty of the worst things, and you had to live anyway alongside them. From early childhood, she says, ‘I learned that there are things you don’t speak of, and if you do not speak of them enough (a negative enough! imagine that) they can be erased from time itself’. When Tito broke with Stalin, and the news reached her school she came upon her teachers frantically stuffing Stalinist books under floorboards, behind things in cupboards, disappearing them as quickly as they could. Already politically suspect, what choice did they have? What choice did any of them have?

And that question is the biggest act of forgetting of them all.