Read an Excerpt
Prologue
They kept asking him the same questions, over and over.
Questions they already knew the answers to. He felt so tired, so impossibly sad and broken. All he wanted was to sleep. To let his eyelids fall, his mind shut off. But they wouldn’t let him. “What is your name?” they asked for the thousandth time. “Why did you return to Bosnia?” “What do you do for
Zakariyya Ashrawi?” “Where are you really traveling to?”
Amir answered the questions, but they dismissed anything he said, as though no response he could give would please them.
He was so weary that he would say anything they wanted just so he could close his eyes. They asked him again, Why had he come back? He answered that he had returned to visit his country. “Your country? What do you mean, your country! You are American now, aren’t you? Why are you here?”
He had no answer to this other than what he’d already told them. The two men interrogating him turned to speak to each other. They talked in hushed voices behind the chair his body was slumped on. Amir heard a lighter being struck, and the smell of cigarette smoke filled the room. He closed his eyes. If only he could keep them shut. But at least he had the few minutes until their cigarettes burned low and they resumed their questions.
American or Bosnian? The truth was, he felt neither completely the one nor the other. It had been nearly ten years since he had been relocated from the land of his birth to the United States. Yet each of those years might as well have been a decade in itself for the distance he felt from the painful, sad memories of those times.
He had been ten when the Bosnian War began, the history books having assigned the date of April 6, 1992, as the beginning of the conflict. He had been eleven when, nearly a year later, it reached the doorstep of his family’s home with brutal and savage intent.
December 14, 1995—the day of the signing of the Dayton
Accords—marked the end of the war that had decimated the land of Amir’s birth. But for him, as with all victims of war, there was no simple, finite ending—no day, month, or year that closed the door on the past with reassuring finality. Human souls were not history books, couldn’t relegate the past to letters and words,
couldn’t disappear traumatic events into paragraphs of analytic explanation. What had been suffered lived on, remained a part of you, like an arm or a leg, for the rest of your life. There was no use in denying it, for then it became like a phantom limb, an invisible appendage whose pain could be felt but not eased. The struggle to come to terms with it was made all the more difficult because the world seemed only too happy to forget.
While the smoke swirled about the room and his interrogators continued to chat behind his back, Amir’s mind traveled back in time. . . . He was a child wandering the woods alone. He didn’t speak, and couldn’t if he’d tried. His ears could no longer hear the singing of the birds, the sound of his own feet touching the earth,
the wind blowing through the trees.
A loud voice startled him. “What is your name?” it demanded.
Amir’s eyes struggled open, his mind disoriented.
“What is your name?” the second interrogator repeated,
shouting the question even louder than his compatriot.
“Amir,” he answered, confused why they would demand he speak his name again and again when he’d spoken it so many times already.
“What-is-your-name?” the first interrogator asked once again, this time in a slow, angry voice.
“Amir. Amir Beganović-Morgan,” he answered hoarsely,
distantly . . . his mind still wandering in the memories of his lost childhood.
Chapter 1
He awoke at dawn’s light, cold and confused. At first, Amir couldn’t understand how he had come to spend the night in the tree fort he had built in the woods behind his house.
The disorientation of waking up not in one’s bed but in the resting place of birds, however, was soon subordinated to the sense that something was drastically wrong with his head. It felt pressurized,
and he could hear nothing at all. Images slowly began to appear in his mind . . . men shouting, charging past the front door of his home.
There were the cries of his mother and sister, and an ear-shattering explosion. His father had been shouting, yelling for him to run.
Amir struggled to find his bearings, to draw the images wandering about his mind into focus. Were they fleeting fragments of a nightmare, or were they shards of real memory to be put whole again? A part of the boy’s mind rebelled in opposition, not wanting to pull the clouded visions closer into view, but rather calling out to abandon them until they disappeared and became indiscernible from the gray, murky atmosphere that enveloped them.
Hesitantly sitting up, Amir looked around at the tree limbs that surrounded him, as if by doing so his eyes could somehow find the sounds his ears could suddenly no longer hear. He struggled to remember the cause of his deafness, at the same time he fought to keep its memory at bay. Between the push and the pull of opposing impulses, bits of recall slipped into his mind.
There had been the sudden rumble of an approaching vehicle followed by the sound of gravel tumbling over itself as an armored truck sped in and jerked to a halt in front of his home. Stunned, he and his family had found their legs unable to move as they listened to the shouts of men charging forward on feet that, unlike theirs,
raced ahead with confidence and purpose. Amir’s father had quickly gathered him, his mother, and his sister by his side, then stepped in front of them to face the home’s entryway. The door was propelled inward by the boot of a man who, rifle in hand, couldn’t bother to simply lift the latch of the unlocked door and swing it open.
A fleeting image of the lone, shod foot entering his house flashed into Amir’s memory. His family stood in the main room of their modest farmhouse struck by an almost physical shock, as though they, and not the door, had been splintered and slammed into the wall. Yet it was the face of the boot’s owner that fully brought home the horror of the situation: the look that gazed over them with a perverse combination of hate and pleasure; the smile that leered its violence with lust and undisguised anticipation. The eyes of the eleven-year-old boy held the moment, like the click of a camera shutter snapping the scene, indelibly printing it upon the soft tissues of his startled young mind. But the child couldn’t understand what it all meant. He could see only that the terror on the faces of his family broadened the man’s smile.
After a time Amir climbed down from his perch, and his feet took him in the direction of his family’s house. As he approached the edge of the woods, Amir saw the charred remains of the simple onestory farmhouse smoldering in the morning’s early light, its steep,
orange tiled roof collapsed within the now-blackened whitewashed sidewalls that once supported it. Without venturing any closer, Amir walked back in the direction from which he came.
Turning back into the forest brought him some sense of relief.
He stayed there for most of the day, maundering close by, and then later, without thought, began to make his way toward the village that lay several kilometers from his family’s farmstead. If he had paused to consider the direction he had taken, Amir would have realized he was heading to the house of his mother’s brother, Murat, his wife,
Ajka, and his cousins, Tarik, Reko, and Refik. The boy spent a second night in the woods, though this time more comfortably, in a hollow,
covering himself with leaves and branches. Tired, disoriented, and weak from hunger, he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
When he reached his uncle Murat’s house early the next morning he could see it was empty of life and had been ransacked.
The village was deserted. Amir began walking on the road leading away from town, with no idea where he was going. Freshly rutted truck tracks led off the main street toward the Omerbasics’ field.
Amir followed them to where they ended. It was there that he found his cousins, aunt, uncle, and both of his grandparents.
He found them in a ditch with other villagers he knew. They were piled one on top of the other like old rag dolls, soiled and ruined,
discarded in a heap. It was as if an old collection of someone’s childhood playthings, uncared for and neglected, had finally been abandoned by its owner—the dried blood on the clothing and bodies looking like dirt stains, the eyes and mouths of the frozen faces as if painted by some artist’s hand . . . surprise, fear, disbelief, the last moment of life forever fixed like a doll’s face in a single, solitary emotion.
Amir’s eyes wandered over the death mound in a shocked, fixed stare. He was able to make out the body of his oldest cousin, Tarik,
and then the youngest, Reko, three years old, looking more like a doll than any of them. He had a hard time recognizing Refik, the cousin the same age as him. Refik’s face was hidden by the crumpled corpse of an elderly man, but eventually Amir made out his clothing,
the shape and size of his body. He couldn’t find his Aunt Ajka, but he saw a head, mutilated and bloodied by gunshots to its face, that might have been his Uncle Murat. To the far side of the mound lay his grandfather, the elderly man’s arm draped around his wife as though embracing her against the cold.
The boy’s body, numb and immobile, stood as still as the air about him, his eyes the only part of his physical self that moved.
And though his body held its place, standing upright upon the ground, his mind swooned, the scene of lifeless horror in front of him disappearing into a blur of muted color. After a time, Amir could feel sensation returning to his limbs. He turned from the ditch,
and when he got back to the main road he no longer followed it but instead returned to the forest.
In the woods, Amir met others fleeing from the war, but he always saw them before they saw him. They took the easy ways,
walking through the trees and undergrowth on well-worn paths.
They never waited hidden in the shadow of the land as he did—
guardedly, patiently looking for movement in the distance.
