BPF / Blakeslee

In August 2007, BPF member Betsy Blakeslee and her granddaughter Lotus traveled to the Balkans for the Global Children's Organization summer camp. Betsy and Lotus brought music, English, and bilingual dictionaries to “ethnically cleansed” children and other young people displaced by war in Bosnia. In this essay, Betsy reflects on one experience from her journey through the lens of her dharma practice.

I was flying from Belgrade, Serbia to Paris with my 16-year-old granddaughter Lotus, who sat to my right, gazing out the window. To my left sat a man who, weeks later, still sends a gust of cold air across the nape of my neck.

“Do you live in Serbia, or were you visiting?” I asked him.

“Visiting,” he said.

“Are you from here?”

He hesitated. “I'm Canadian.”

He was definitely Balkan. Since the mid-nineties I'd spent two months each year working with refugee children in Bosnia. I heard traces of a Balkan accent in his speech. He’d been in the west long enough to lose much of it. I guessed that he’d emigrated during the wars of the nineties. I also recognized a Balkan face in his bone structure, crewcut of brown hair, and small teeth.

“Where do you live?” I said.

A pause. “Chicago.”

“Do you have family in Serbia?”

Another pause. “No.”

I asked him a little about what else might have brought him to Belgrade. With each answer, his hesitation and carefully chosen words persuaded me that he had something to hide.

“Are you Balkan?” I asked.

“I’m German, “ he said. He must have noticed the look of incredulity on my face because he added, “and Serbian.”

Why would a Serbian with Canadian citizenship conceal his heritage? And what enabled him to live in Chicago? He wore no wedding band, so he probably hadn’t married an American for a green card. He didn’t seem cerebral enough to land a visiting professorship or research job, and if he had one, he would’ve bragged about it. I would have to wait two hours before he would disclose the horrifying reason.

“I’m sorry about my country bombing Serbia in ’98.” It was my turn to tell a partial truth. I disapproved of the American use of depleted uranium on our missiles and felt sad for the loss of Serbian lives. But I supported our military action against Belgrade. It ended seven years of Serbian aggression in three neighboring Balkan countries.

He muttered something that I took as acknowledgment. But his big, thick frame and blank face seemed eerily still, untouched.

“What would you like to see happen in the Balkans?” I said.

“We’re waiting for the international community to leave so we can finish what we started.”

I could hardly believe my ears. Was he advocating “ethnic cleansing”? I had heard hundreds of firsthand stories from Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) forced from their homes at gunpoint by Serbs who wanted their land. I knew countless orphans whose fathers had been shot as they stood at the edge of a mass grave into which they tumbled. These children had been my students at Podrinje, a school for Muslim refugees in Tuzla, Bosnia.

“What would that look like to you?” I asked.

“Create a Serbia that has only Serbs. It should include the Serbian half of Bosnia. Croats can have the Croatian part,” he said.

“What about the Bosnian Muslims whose families have lived there for centuries?”

“They should decide what they are,” he said. “They can be Croat or Serb.”

Lotus pulled her knees up to her chest and cocked her head toward our seatmate. I will call him Bogdan though I never learned his name. I didn't ask. I didn't want to know it. Asking someone's name indicates a wish to know them as a person. Not as part of a group with ideas and history I detest.

“They have their identity. They’re Bosniaks.”

“Then they can go live with Muslims in another country. They’re nothing.” His thigh, two inches from mine, claimed the space at the edge of his chair. “They sold out to the Turks. They have no right to stay.”

The seatbelt sign flashed red. I was stuck in a crucible with a killer. I don't know exactly what shifts in a man once he has killed. Something changes, as it does after someone steals or rapes.

I kept my voice steady and quiet. “You’re going to kill or expel them from their land because their ancestors changed religions in 1389?” I asked.

“We defended Christianity. They didn't. We don't want to live with them.”

For 13 years, I had wondered how the mind of a Serbian nationalist worked. Now I knew.

I couldn’t figure out what to say to Bogdan. He sat, perfectly still, as though nothing he’d revealed would shock a listener. I wanted to tell him about a girl, Amela, who still startles awake from nightmares in which she relives the day Serbian paramilitaries kicked in her door and killed her teenage brother as he stood by the refrigerator. Fourteen years later, Amela is still afraid to return to her ancestral home. In the Bosnian refugee camp Lotus and I had just left, we’d stayed with Amela’s family. “If we go home,” Amela had said, “we would have to live next to the neighbors who captured us, then starved and beat us in the torture house. There are no men left in our family to protect us.”

Had Bogdan rounded up Muslim families in the “ethnic cleansing” campaigns of the nineties? I would lose his trust if I asked point blank. I wanted him to keep talking because his mind fascinated me. I was sickened but mesmerized, as in a movie. But the villain was my seatmate, and Lotus was about to challenge him.

The flight attendant slid a Coke onto Lotus' tray. Lotus settled it into the recessed circle and leaned across me to face our seatmate. “What about my friend Elvir? He's Muslim. Do you think he should be forced out of Bosnia?”

“I don’t care about them,” he said.

Bogdan’s arm sprawled on the armrest between us. I studied the brown hairs sticking out of his pasty skin. His unyieding neck turned in Lotus' direction. His eyes shifted to stare at the air in front of her.

“You should go to Bosnia and meet our friend Elvir,” she said. “You'd like him.”

“I don't want to go there,” said Bogdan.

Lotus leaned farther to the left and twisted her head to get closer to his face. “We just spent 26 days there. Bosnians are the nicest people in the world.”

This was her first trip outside America, but she delivered the statement as fact.

“I don't like Bosnians,” he said.

“Why not?” Lotus asked.

Bogdan thought for a moment. “I’m shallow,” he said.

“Do you know any?” she asked.

“No. Well, I drank a Tuzlanski beer with one. We laughed and pretended to like each other. But we’re just waiting for the chance to get them out. They are the same -- they hate us, too.”

“We just worked in this summer camp outside Sarajevo.” Lotus was talking louder now. “The volunteers were Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks and Americans. We all liked each other. We drank Tuzlanski beer together every night. And we weren’t pretending.” Her eyes, brown like his, now wide, authentic, insisting. I admired her honesty.

Bogdan glanced at Lotus. His eyes cool, dull, beyond reach. What spirit hid behind his mask lay invisible, the heart drained out of it.

I gripped my thigh, the one nearly touching Bogdan’s beefy leg. I glanced at him. Maybe he was squirming a little under the barrage of Lotus’ brave assault. Maybe he was too loyal a nationalist, too bent on his primitive dream. If I am honest, I admit that I also like being with people who share my values, educational level, humor, generation. But not all the time. And not in my neighborhood. And not all the same ethnicity.

Lotus shot hard questions at Bogdan. He droned responses. I felt their currents brush by my face, hers hot, his like ice. I hoped she wasn’t angering him. Had he seen the names on our tickets? Could his venom toward Bosniaks spill over onto those who liked them?

For two-and-a-half hours, Lotus and I worked on him. I couldn’t take my eyes off his arm. The bare skin looked hungry for sunlight, for sex, for a vacation by the sea. The muscle under it burst with a restrained urge to strike. It looked to me like the arm of someone who has killed and doesn’t mind killing. The irony was this: the whole trip to Paris, his arm sat unmoving, like the rest of his body.

As we approached Paris, I noticed my hypocrisy. I am a Buddhist. I have taken the Bodhisattva vow. I thought about the part, “I vow to free all beings, excepting no one.” I was sitting tall in my seat, judging what I surmised Bogdan had done. If I was going to condemn him for closing his heart to Bosniaks, I had better try to open mine to him.

The plane swooped into Orly. Bogdan stood to pull his bag from the overhead compartment. I squeezed into the aisle ahead of him and turned toward the front of the plane.

“Why do I always have to sit next to Democrats?” he said.

I thought I had been so careful to sound neutral. Where was the nobility in that? At least Lotus had hurled her innocent candor without caution.

Only a few minutes remained before we dispersed. What Buddhist practice could I do in the crammed aisle? Of course, the four immeasurables! If I could truly wish him well, saying that prayer for him would end the conversation on a different note.

I’d have to say it aloud.

I mumbled it under my breath:

I turned around. He stared, hard-eyed and lost.

“I hope you enjoy much happiness in your life,” I said.

I don’t think he believed that my wish was genuine. But the encounter remains with me, as I hope it does with him while he performs his job as a mercenary with US troops in Iraq, which it turns out is his work.