But Not Today
Our love story, like many modern love stories, begins with a kiss at a mass burial:
His name is Radic and he is taller than his height but not today. Today he doesn’t know the etiquette for mass burials. He skipped the one three years ago after the UN had discovered the graves of around 20 people that no one in the village missed very much…roughly translated, they all called that terrible night in 1998 something along the lines of “the no good night for asshole family and their loud friends who drove over our fields and probably stole stuff.” Radic heard from his friend Slobo, who attended solely for the UN-provided grief drinks afterwards, that so many of their villagers had tried to top each other in fake lamentations, over both the loss and now the burial of asshole family and their loud friends, that everyone began to truly cry at the beauty of their fake weeping and pretend loss.
This mass burial is different, or at least not different than a normal mass burial. It is cold and quiet in the way of all deep grief that has turned into what the UN-provided grief doctors called moving towards acceptance and what the villagers called waiting for revenge.
Even Radic, who barely remembers the people who were slaughtered—remembering more the one way they all had died than the many ways they all had lived—is trying to honestly grieve. He has to, because the prettiest girl in the valley is honestly grieving next to him and while he’s wearing his best and tightest-fitting funeral clothes, he knows he’s not club-nice and so he needs to walk the fine line of crying without looking like a baby, the line of being sensitive but manly, like a gangster holding a kitten but like it was a machine gun.
Her name is Milka Borka Popovic, and she is prettier than her name but not today. She’s crying because the bones of her uncle Luka and aunt Jelena are being reburied today, along with the bones of 60 other people killed a decade before. The UN-provided priest is talking about the bones being happier now they are on home ground and it makes sense. Milka remembers how much her uncle and aunt loved their house and small auto repair shop next to it. It’s one of the few things she can remember about them, that and their eponymously-named cat Mashka. She was 8 when the Tigers came and killed them for important reasons that soon after were not important but that might be again. Milka is surprised at how much she is crying and knows her makeup must be dreadful. She hates that she can’t remember more about her uncle and aunt besides where their bones are now. She hates being in public with bad makeup.
What’s worse, the kinda tall guy next to her in the terrible clothes sounds like an exhausted donkey with his crying and ragged breathing. She wonders which bones he is making an ass of himself for, and if he could remember more than their cat. He must remember everything, she tells herself as she wipes an hour’s worth of makeup from her dark eyes with a UN-provided tissue. He sounds as though he misses someone so very much. Probably had loved them and still remembered why instead of merely remembering that he had. It is this thought, of forgetting why she is sad, that makes Milka sob.
Radic sees the prettiest girl in the valley lean over with an even prettier sadness, a sadness so pure the young woman with the melting black eyes looks to him like a crystal. He feels jealous of the bones she misses even now, to be the object of such beautiful grief even after so much bleaching by soil and time. He despairs of ever receiving the type of love that must precede such sadness but not today. He reaches out to touch the girl’s shoulder so he could tangibly if only tangentially know the feel of love and loss.
Feeling a soft hand on her shoulder, Milka straightens and looks up into the saddest face she ever wants to see. The face is the irresistible balancing of strong and weak, of a policeman playing cello. His eyes tell hers, in between both blinking away tears, that the mass grave in front of them might hold only bones but not today. She wants this face to grieve for her but not today. Today she wants the love that precedes it.
