Café Slavonija

CAFÉ SLAVONIJA

War is happening not only at the front, but everywhere and to all of us.

Slavenka Drakulić

A glass of Graševina on the table before me,

an unfolding drama observed from a safe distance;

watching,I think of my family far away and safe.

What do I tell them about what I have seen and heard,

when war and genocide rage so close? I breathe

hard and heavy unable to craft words from what I know.

                                     *

 All morning they range through the Konstablerwache market

having fled Slavonia to this cheerless canton of Frankfurt,

far from Croatia where no one could or would protect them.

They beg for money, food, a new or a dog-ended cigarette.

Pomozite mi molim vas, pomoc', pomoc' mene ugoditi!

They come every week and every week they are shunned

by those who choose not to see them. No one wants to see them.

The market-goers, like the world, remain silent with blinders on,

unwilling to see what is happening to these sad and pitiful people

in their villages, in the beech forests where pits await them.

Not a stone upon a stone wall remains of what was once theirs.

Refugees from a country of the forgotten, they live to suffer,

a consequence of ignorance, a contraction of the human condition.

                                   *

One does not want to know what a sledgehammer can do to a skull,

what a crowbar can do to a jawbone, to hands and feet, to testicles;

how a well-applied knife can remove an ear still hearing the screams

of others in a former library room, books now gone from where once

they came to learns their history and their folklore now being erased

as each one of them disappears into long trenches whitened with lime,

as if late autumn snow had fallen only to quickly mask these crimes,

white like the ribbons the Croats are forced to wear so the Beli Orlovi,

the Serb White Eagle militiamen, will know whom they should kill.

Are there grounds to justify this wanton inhumanity? Revenge perhaps

for the camps at Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška, old Ustaša iniquities?

                                   *

Fat white geese huddle in yards of bombed houses as refugees pass,

walking north to escape the atrocities, first to Vukovar then Osikjek;

by train to Zagreb, to the teeming stations in Vienna and Budapest.

Their bodies are no longer their own as they flee their homeland,

their bodies have been claimed by war. Citizens of no county - refugees.

They once believed the death of a body was the worst that could happen.

Their muscles tighten, the pulsing of blood reminding them they still live.

Perhaps they are the unlucky ones for escaping the pits. They do not know

that worse is the separation of self from the body, extinction before death.

                                   *

A young Croat woman, teeth yellow and cracked like autumn corn

harvested in fields along the Sava River, watches him slowly ramble

through the Konstablerwache, tugging at his jacket, a persistent pleading –

Sve kovanice? Cigarete, molimo Vas gospodine? Bitte, Zigaretten? 

He tries to ignore her, his gaze seized by her own that narrows 

with sudden recognition. Četnički! Da, ja vas znam . . . jebeni četnici!

She knows him, she remembers him from that morning in her village,

when the Chetniks came after the shelling had ended. She remembers

his cold crowbar and his knife, their work on her husband and son.

She points her finger at his dark murderous eyes. Vi prljava ubojica! 

He turns from her, swiftly retreats into a crowd, her eyes follow him

closely until he disappears, her finger pointing to where he stood.

Ubojica . . . Ubojica! 

                                   *

Here, at a table in the Café Slavonija, an empty glass of Graševina,

I watch the drama unfold from a safe distance.

Blood pulsing through my temples reminds me I am still alive.

I have no true understanding of mutilation and death,

the horrific pain induced by sledgehammers, crowbars and knives,

the secrets of the beech trees, the silence of the limed pits.

I am unable to craft words from what I have come to know.