A stillness full of stories

In the acknowledgments to her haunting first book, “Stillness: And Other Stories,” Courtney Angela Brkic thanks her parents, who “understood my restless nature but let me wander.” We’re talking a lot of understanding and a lot of wandering. Brkic (BUR-kitch), now 30, was only 23 when she worked as a forensic archeologist in Bosnia, helping to exhume the dead.

All the stories in “Stillness” connect to the war in the former Yugoslavia, but each refracts the tragedy through a different lens. Among the protagonists are a starving wolf in the Sarajevo zoo; a pregnant Muslim woman who endured the rape camps; an adulterous world-weary diplomat; a mercenary from Boston; an old Croatian woman exiled from her village; the father of a missing son. They are drawn from her experiences, from stories of friends in Bosnia, from stories of women she interviewed there. As well, they are drawn from her family’s history in Bosnia-Herzegovina in World War II.

Brkic grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, and her family frequently traveled to Yugoslavia to visit relatives. “I remember a Bosnia-Herzegovina that most people in the world will never know,” she wrote in a 1995 essay. “I remember the minarets of Sarajevo’s Begova Mosque, and the black birds that drove around them in the grayness of sky.” The place is deep in her soul.

During the war years in Bosnia, Brkic, agonized, followed the news from the safety of America. “I remember the days that led up to the Srebrenica massacre,” she says. “I remember the massacre that went on for days ... and I remember how they were immediately able to pick out mass grave sites .... I was beside myself with anger.”

In 1995, Brkic received a Fulbright grant to go to Croatia to study women in the war-affected population, and how rape had been used as a means of ethnic cleansing.

She interviewed hundreds of women. They “were not really so different from me,” she says. “I began to realize ... how many lives had been destroyed. They had lost their homes, their histories and their loved ones. As long as the dead have names, though, it’s somehow manageable. You feel each death, each casualty, by his/her name. It’s when the deaths happen in such speeds and numbers that you no longer know them by name that it gets truly difficult, that the sheer degree of killing gets to you.”

The interviewees -- displaced Croatians and Muslim refugees -- were bemused by the fact that Brkic’s father was a Yugoslav exile (he had escaped to Germany in 1959 and received political asylum) and that his daughter had returned. Most of all, she says, they were relieved to have a witness recording what had happened.

‘A little mad’

Early in the project she came to an important realization: “You couldn’t separate out one aspect of the war. You couldn’t analyze what the women had gone through as far as the rapes without looking at the aspect of missing persons, which is a huge and devastating part of the war.”

In the heartbreaking story “Suspension,” each year a mother marks the birthday of her missing son, cooking his favorite dishes. Every night, she draws an extra chair to the dinner table. Her husband is “wordless in the face of her delusions. She talks of the boy as if she has proof that he is alive in some camp or prison. It drives him a little mad.”

To grasp Brkic’s passion on the subject of missing persons, you have to look to her family’s experience in World War II.

Brkic’s grandmother, Andjelka Brkic, was from a tiny village in Herzegovina, “right over the border from Croatia.” Widowed at 21 and with two young sons, she moved to Sarajevo in the early 1930s, where she met Josef Finzi, a Jew, and fell in love. They lived together and he was a father to her boys.

Josef was picked up in 1942. Andjelka was jailed for sheltering a Jew but was released because -- by a miracle -- the investigating detective was a man from her village. “We know now that Josef died in the camps,” Brkic says soberly. “My grandmother waited for him for years.”

During her Fulbright year in Croatia, Brkic saw small children living as displaced people. “I could see my father in them. That aspect of the missing was the hardest thing for me. My family had gone through those things 56 years before. It’s such a senseless, stupid thing to go through, and to see it repeated.”

After her fellowship year ended, Brkic offered her services as an archeologist in Bosnia. It was 1996, six months after the siege of Sarajevo had ended. She sent her resume to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization then sending people to Bosnia in conjunction with the U.N. Her qualifications included an undergraduate degree in archeology. Most important, perhaps, she spoke the language.

She wanted to be useful. “No matter how important the work that I had done talking to these women -- and I would say 90% of them were missing close relatives -- for me, going to Bosnia represented being able to do something. I thought, ‘This will get to the point where it will provide information to these people about their family members, whether their husbands, their sons, are alive or dead. That’s really something.’ ”

In the morgue, she assisted pathologists with autopsies and laid out the personal effects for photographing. “This was actually the hardest thing for me. I would have to go through the intimate possessions that people had tucked away in their clothing and carried into death. It was devastating; the photographs, letters, pieces of food got to me far more than the bodies did.”

In Croatia and later in Bosnia, she kept a journal and continued to write poems, as she had done all her life. “I was in emotional overdrive. Poetry was a way to digest.”

The protagonist in the story “Adiyo, Kerido” is a forensic archeologist. “It was the women who stood at the fence that disturbed him,” Brkic writes. “Initially they came singly or in small groups and looked into the yard where the washed clothing of the dead were hung to dry in the sun. They stood there wordless, scanning the sweaters and pants and shirts.” The team leader worries that the entire town will soon be standing at the fence, watching. To ensure privacy, “they attached plastic blue tarps to the fence, lashing them through with white cord. When the wind blew, they looked like the sails of a strange, snaking ship.”

Not one to sit still for long, she worked for several more months in Zagreb, then went to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague to help translate documents. She made it through 5 1/2 months of her one-year contract. “I had this chip on my shoulder: the fact that the U.N. would demilitarize places and then allow them to fall. Srebrenica was a demilitarized city. The U.N. was involved in the region, and then for the U.N. to be the dispenser of justice, there’s something wrong with that.”

In her satiric story “The Peacebroker,” Brkic gets in her digs about the U.N. The protagonist, a jaded diplomat, subscribes to the oft-heard argument about the Balkans: “What can you do? They’re finishing each other off. They’re animals. They’re crazy.”

Perhaps the most daring perspective Brkic assumes in “Stillness” is that of a sniper firing on Sarajevo residents from above the city. He has developed his own code of conduct: “He does not fire at men in tan coats, red-haired women, or groups of three.” Killing people has become a game.

“It would be very easy to say of a lot of people who committed crimes in this war, and probably in a lot of wars, ‘they’re monsters,’ ” Brkic says. “Oftentimes, and what is more frightening to me, they’re not. They’re ordinary people who have the propensity in them to commit unspeakable acts.”

Lejla, the Muslim woman in the story “The Jasmine Shade,” confronts the man who is about to rape her: “You were at our wedding....We were your friends.” He responds in an uninflected voice: “Those friendships are dead.”

What does it take to risk your life to protect someone, to resist the murderous tide? Brkic has pondered this question since she learned how her grandmother risked her own life and the lives of her two young sons by hiding her Jewish lover.

“It’s amazing to me that my grandmother would take the chance that she did take in the Second World War. When Josef was arrested, the very last thing he said to my father was, ‘I’m sorry.’ Josef was sure my grandmother would be killed, and who knew what would happen to my father and my uncle? My dad has a hard time talking about that day. And then on the flip side, how could she have done anything else?”

‘They are fabulous’

The stories in “Stillness” can’t be read quickly. They demand space around them. They detonate in the mind. Brkic shopped them around for several years. Agents invariably responded: “You write really well, but this is a depressing subject.” Then she submitted her work over the transom to literary super-agent Sandra Dykstra. “I remember the day she called me to say she was going to take the stories,” Brkic says, beaming at the memory. “Sandy said, ‘They are fabulous!’ ”

Brkic recently finished a memoir that addresses both her experiences in Bosnia and her father’s childhood in Sarajevo. She worked on it while enrolled in the master of fine arts creative writing program at New York University.

The memoir, she says, gave birth to the stories. “All these strange and crazy stories were clogging up the nonfiction. So I sort of split in two,” she says. “I kept working on the nonfiction, but until I got the stories out, I couldn’t finish the memoir.”

She had handed the memoir manuscript to her editor just days earlier. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish it next winter.

On this spring day, she awaits the first reviews of the stories, her first public appearances. “It’s a strange time in the life of a book and an author,” she admits. She’s on the cusp of a new phase in her life as a writer.

Breyten Breytenbach, the noted South African poet and novelist (“The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution”) -- Brkic’s mentor at NYU -- responded within hours from Africa to an e-mail request for a comment on his former student: “Every once in a while one comes across a person who is self-evidently a ‘writer’ in the true sense: gifted, passionate, single-minded but with a heart as proudly mysterious as the stories of our wild world and as big as all the suffering we witness.... Will she be a ‘citizen of the world’? Yes, surely -- but with roots linking memories and imagination. And she will first and foremost continue to be a ‘native of the word.’ ”