1. Birth of an Island
2. The Valley of Sugared Trees
3. Sad Geneva
4. Returning the Better to Leave Again
5. Cedar Hill Berry Farm
6. Cuba, Paradise Lost
7. The Fall of the Titans
8. The Virgin and the Concentration Camp
9. Chronicle of a Murdered City
10. A Century of Torment

AN OPENCANADA SUMMER READ 2019

In the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina lies Mostar, a medieval town on the banks of the emerald Neretva, which flows from the “valley of sugared trees” through sunny hills to reach the Adriatic Sea. This idyllic locale is the scene of Maya Ombasic’s childhood—until civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia and the bombs begin to fall. Her family is exiled to Switzerland, and after a brief return, they leave again for Canada. While Maya adapts to their new home, her father never does, refusing even to learn the language of his new country.

A portmanteau of Mostar and nostalgia, Mostarghia evokes Ombasic’s yearning for a place that no longer exists: the city before the civil war, when its many ethnicities interacted in a spirit of civility and in harmony. It refers as well to Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Nostalghia, the viewing of which illuminated the author’s often explosive relationship with her father, a larger-than-life figure who was both influence and psychological burden: he inspired her interest, and eventual career, in philosophy, and she was his translator, his support, his obsession. Along with this portrait of a man described by turns as passionate, endearing, maddening, and suffocating, Ombasic deftly constructs a moving personal account of what it means to be a refugee and how a generation learns to thrive despite the struggles of its predecessors.

Excerpt from Mostarghia

BIRTH OF AN ISLAND

Just a few days before your death you’re determined still to be strong, to be the man of the hour, he who can do everything, always, even have his children forget the war and the concentration camps, the bombs and the hunger, the danger and the fear. Your doctor has come to inform us that you are living your last days, and that you are to be moved up to the floor for palliative care. They want to put you on a stretcher to carry you to the floor for the dying, but you refuse. You insist on taking the stairs, leaning, when necessary, on me. I feel you to be short of breath and feverish, like a leaf trembling at the approach of a hurricane. I like your smell, your silky skin, your boniness, and your lightness of weight. You were never a big eater, and even before your illness you said that we had to feed ourselves like birds, just enough to be able to fly. I see our two shadows making their way slowly along the hospital corridor. The impassive beauty of the flowers brought to the dying seems extravagant to me in this thankless place. You hold to me, as once you held to my translations in all the countries we knew where you refused to learn the language. For a long time I reproached you for this linguistic sulkiness, but towards the end of your life I understood that it was a deliberate strategy, a refusal to accept any social contract. As you lean on me and your breath comes faster, I search for words to tell you how deeply sorry I am for all our misunderstandings. (How to say sorry properly in your language, no longer really mine ever since others, like young wives unseating the older ones in a harem, have come to dwell in me, and to make me multiple.) A strange feeling runs through my entire being. As I adjust my body to better serve you as a support, my left breast slips naturally into the cavity in your chest, there where once resided the lung and ribs that have been taken from you. Gently, my breast has begun to swell, to breathe, as if it wanted to become the organ your are lacking, as if it wanted to complete you, but also to hide itself from the world and to return to whence it sprang. At the same time, in a neighbouring room, the Rwandan priest you chased away the other day because he wanted to convert you to Christianity, is reading the Bible to a dying person in a low and solemn voice: “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made he a woman.” With your rolling Slavic accent, you whisper in my ear: “My rib is the Adriatic coast. That’s where you were conceived. You will conceive in your turn on another coast.” Your face, like that of mystics in a trance, glows with a beatific smile, and I have a sudden conviction that you have always understood everything, all the languages and all the codes you claimed not to comprehend.

And so was it by choice that you embraced this silence? To escape men’s idiocy, their flawed languages and their ancient hatreds? Or was it to be true to your vocation as a painter? “There exists in painting,” you often said, “an inner light that precedes the ignorance of words, the intellect, and knowledge.” Georges de La Tour, your favourite painter, understood that well: the inner light, beyond language, springs from the dark of consciousness. But what to do when faced with the darkness of death? Nothing, ever, will be the same without you, and that mortal ennui, which I so often experienced in the grey and murky streets of Geneva, will again haunt my nights. As I feel a strange ball forming in the hollow of my throat, like a black hole drawing me more and more into the gloom of early sorrow, I come across a sentence of Charles Juliet: “To write is to snatch light from the shadows.” But writing has always come as an aftermath for me, as if to chew over and digest more fully an event. For the moment I am still inside it, and the very idea of writing seems lazy, idle, indifferent, cowardly. Pending the slow arrival of its lifesaving virtues, I bear witness to your last hours. I am filled with anger. I want to do something. To comfort you. To give you hope. But there is nothing more to do, other than to await your last breath. With each breath you take, I see that empathy has its limits: the greater your suffering, the more I want to flee before this helplessness and that finality. That night I went home to write a letter that I hoped to read to you before you disappeared. Too late. Mama tells me that it was just before dawn when, your hands upon your stomach, with an air both serene and surprised, you left us. When we reached your bedside, a composed serenity had taken possession of your face, despite the stiff wind agitating the trees near the hospital. After the official declaration of your death, the doctor tells us that we have an hour to make our farewells. The hour passes in the blink of an eye, and then a white sheet covers over your body. Your life’s final curtain drops softly into the hollow of your chest. It’s there that I want to slide myself - there where you are missing a lung and a few ribs - to keep you company in the morgue. Now orphaned and with no captain for our drifting ship, we go back to the house to think about your funeral. I count my savings, meant to finance a doctorate at the Sorbonne. I only hesitate for a moment: forget Paris! You will rest forever in the land of the sugared trees.

At night, stretched out in your bed, I cannot close my eyes. I think about your short life. You were born on December 28, 1952, in Mostar, the second biggest city in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and one of the sunniest in Europe. That year the Americans, delighted that Tito was not allying himself with the Russians, provided military equipment for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. No one suspected that these arms were going to be used, forty years on, for us to kill each other. You were born into a Communist family of six children, catching your mother by surprise. Forty-six years old when she realized that she was three months pregnant, my grandmother had no other choice than to keep you. Imagine the look on her face when she was informed that you were not arriving alone, and that she had to push harder to enable your brother to see the light of day! The logic of bonding proper to twins was crucial in all your relationships. “Only death can separate us,” you used to say of your brother. Tito said the same thing about the six republics that composed the Yugoslav federation. Except that the fusion he imposed on his people did not have its origins in a womb, but rather on a continent where, after the fall of the great empires, a new concept supplanted all the others: the nation state.

You were twenty-seven years old when I came into the world, and I turned twenty-seven the year of your death. Twenty-seven years intertwined within a sphere of intense emotion, typically Slav, where hate and love, sadness and burlesque are knit from the same yarn, as in the films of Kusturika. How many times did I not try to break out of this pathetic circle? We don’t so easily free ourselves from the Balkans and their timeless madness. Your twin brother, devastated since learning the news of your death, badgered me, calling me several times a day to be sure that your coffin would be lined not with cotton, but with silk. He exemplifies it well, that Balkan madness. He proved it the day of your funeral, when he decided, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to throw himself on the coffin and open it in order to satisfy himself that I had followed his orders.

At night, I can’t close my eyes. I think of the frigid solitude of your body in the morgue, and your legendary claustrophobia. To ship a corpse abroad can sometimes take two weeks. Meanwhile, the only way to get you released from there, your Haitian nurse tells me, is to entrust you to a religious institution that will prepare your body for its last journey. I am caught between your antireligious principles and the need to spring you from the morgue. I dial the number of the little parish near the hospital.

“Your father is baptised?”

“No, he’s communist…”

The priest sends me off to the Department of Foreign Affairs. I explain the situation, and the polite bureaucrat gives me the addresses of churches that “speak your language.” The Croatian parish priest asks me for your name.

“What? Your father’s called Nenad? I’m sorry, but that sounds Serbian, you have to call the Greek Orthodox pope, or the Armenian.”

I call the Greek community centre. The pope speaks Serbo-Croat because his wife comes from Montenegro.

“Your father was called Nenad… And your grandfather?”

“Ibrahim.”

“I’m sorry, Miss, but that’s a Muslim name…”

Even beyond your death, the labels you wanted nothing to do with know how to follow you around. A Montreal Imam is the only cleric who agrees to take care of your body. Two days later, you’re transferred to a mosque in Ville Saint-Laurent. They explain to me that men will wash you, cover you in the essential oil of the cypress tree, a symbol of eternity, and all through this ritual the Imam will recite the suras, and at the end, a collective prayer, Duhr, which will be dedicated to you. Naively, I assume that I will be able to attend both the washing and the prayer. The Imam, startled by my ignorance, explains that women are banned from the rituals for the dead. Propped against the mosque’s wall, I curse religion and its misogynistic leanings, while inside people are busy preparing your body. Suddenly the Imam, beside himself and furious, comes out of the building:

“You’re a liar! Your father is not a Muslim!”

“Of course he is. My grandfather’s name was Ibrahim.”

“Perhaps he was called Ibrahim, but his son was not circumcised!”

“For us, it wasn’t required. We were lay Muslims…”

“Then you’re not real Muslims.”

“No, listen, please take him. I can’t go back to square one.”

The man throws me a scornful look. Four hours later I hear his voice intoning a call to prayer, and I approach the mosque. At the main door, a heavy-set North African stops me. He has a suburban accent from Marseille. “My sister, come on, what’s got into you, my sister? You can’t enter here!” He points me the way to the basement, where veiled women are huddled in front of a white wall and are following through loudspeakers the prayers being performed one floor above. Kneeling before the wall, I regret having tarnished your death with religion, you who wanted nothing to do with it.

After the ceremony at the mosque, another takes place at the funeral home that has received the mandate to ship your body overseas. Your coffin is set down at the back of a plain, spare room with its strong odour of lilies. Chamber music provides a background to conversations trying to fill the emptiness. Your coffin is open, and in the room’s muted light I make out your face from afar. You seem to be sleeping peacefully, but a primitive fear prevents me from going closer: I refuse to see you immobile to the end of time. The little girl in me at last allows herself to howl with pain.

Shepherding your remains, I set foot on the soil of my childhood’s native land for the first time in fifteen years. I’m torn between sadness and joy, between mourning and my delight in reacquainting myself with the sky, the intoxicating odours of almonds in flower, the taste of cherries and Turkish sweets near the Old Bridge, and, unchanged, the fresh breeze on the shores of the Neretva. I have the odd feeling that I’m resuming the normal course of my life, interrupted abruptly by an exploding gas tank, as if a parenthesis were closing over all those years spent far from my childhood streets. Your prophecy concerning the place where I will conceive haunts me. I decide to take a trip to the seashore. In the bus going to Split the same feeling of exaltation takes hold of me when, after the arid hills of the Biokovo massif, I make out in the distance the sparkling indigo of the Adriatic Sea. All my childhood memories are tied in with this sea. We so often dreamed of taking to the open water like Robinson Crusoe, of washing up on an island that would be ours. A few summers later we set sail aboard the ferry Tiziano, after our status had altered in the blink of an eye: from carefree tourists, we had been transformed into refugees looked on askance by European democracies. Taking to the open water was practically all we did during those years of exile, and the island and coast of which we had talked so often, telling ourselves that this was where we would find our place in the sun, has now become my obsession. It remains for me to take possession of it, and to plumb the mystery of your last words, echoing in my head like a mantra. Just after your funeral, walking in the ancient, narrow streets of Split, I come across a new translation of the bible in a foreign language bookstore. The back cover states that an ancient error has been corrected: the idea that Eve emerged from Adam’s rib, his côte, was a misunderstanding. The reading should have been that the woman was beside, à côté de the man, like a cane on which he would lean for better or worse. At once I sense that we’re wrong to think that we choose the settings for our wanderings. It is rather they who embrace us, or leave us stranded. The time has come for me to acknowledge that your island prophecies were not just the incantations of a hermetic poet. Not long after your funeral I feel ready to play my Hemingway card, and to depart for Cuba. But not before setting down the story of our exile.