Instead of a Roadside Cross

I don’t know why I remember her from time to time. She is dead and I didn’t know her. She has been dead for over 10 years, and the only reason I know that, is because I saw it happen.

It must have been spring 1998. I was working at Belgrade University, and was renting my first “place of my own,” a small studio (an old garage space transformed into living quarters) in a private house in the suburb of Banovo Brdo. The previous fall I had spent many hours sitting in the American Cultural Centre (which was later to be demolished in riots, during the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999), leafing through thick catalogues of North-American universities, and copying the information of any university that offered post-graduate studies in the fields of linguistics and literature, as well as reasonable scholarships. I wasn’t depressed or unhappy, but I had spent the year before at Cambridge, and was hungry for more, and wanted to leave again, and felt ready for a new continent. When in early spring 1998 Dalhousie University in Canada sent me an acceptance letter, I first looked up Halifax in our World Atlas with my father, then started the long process (there is no better word for it) of getting through all the malicious administrative hoops involved in obtaining the visa. The required documentation included the results of a medical check-up, so that particular morning I was on my way to do the bloodwork.

I had to leave early, to avoid a long wait at the clinic. It was before 7, the morning was grey and bland, and even though I had never feared the sight of blood, I caught myself wishing idly I had someone to come with me that morning. I stood in the half-full streetcar, watching the growing traffic through the window as we made slow progress towards downtown, but barely registering any of it. On Savska Street, with the District Court on our right, the streetcar crawled to an indifferent halt at the red light. Still half-asleep, coming to terms with another day, nobody spoke. Some had closed their eyes, taking advantage of a few moments strangely empty of urban noises; others stared ahead, at nothing in particular. The red light held steady for what seemed like a long time, but nobody paid attention.

I happened to be facing the window looking straight at the main entrance of the District Court, so I saw her when she ran out. She dashed down the long concrete stairs like there was no tomorrow. Later, I always thought that she must have been preoccupied out of her mind (and out of the reality of the street), but now I think it’s quite possible that she was just trying to make it to the streetcar, while it was still motionless on the other side of the street. Not stopping at the curb, where a parked van blocked her view to the right, she flew onto the street. Then the stretched-out laziness of the indifferent morning rolled itself into a fast-travelling ball and exploded before our eyes in a few seconds.

The light had turned green for the traffic going in the opposite direction from ours, and in the same infinitesimal fraction of the second my brain needed to realize that a small green truck and the running woman were on a collision course, it had already happened. The worst part of it was the sound. A dull, deep, overpowering, non-negotiable thud – so painfully wrong for a human body to produce. The truck driver immediately hit the breaks, but the impact threw the woman’s body several meters down the street, her shoes catapulted off her feet. She was not alive. This was clear from that thud, and from the very unnatural position her body was twisted into, lying inert on the street. Through one last act of modesty, her skirt was thrown up only slightly above the insides of the knees. She was wearing a slip under the skirt, its lacy hem showing shyly – the kind of slip worn by my grandmothers, and even my mother when I was little.

Outside, a few people were rushing towards her; inside, caught in the transfixed streetcar, we watched in stunned silence. Then somebody began to cry; then the light finally turned green and the streetcar slowly jolted forward, leaving behind the quickly evolving mayhem.

Somebody waited for this woman at home that day, and she never came. It was somebody’s worst nightmare, and it came true. I don’t know anything about her, not even her name, I only witnessed the last two minutes of her life. But if this means that there is a certain, however tenuous, connecting thread between us, I want to tell her that I think of her sometimes. And maybe (just maybe) this counts for something.