The Jigsaw Woman

Posted on September 27, 2002 in Peace Travels - Past

Those who have read what amounts to, I suppose, my original “blog” MIRacles will probably notice that this story isn’t in there. It moved me at the time but I just didn’t know how to write about it. It’s still tough. I hope my readers will learn from this that wars happen in neighborhoods. We should think very hard before bringing one to someone else’s yard.

You couldn’t look at her. Not right at her. Not in those eyes that ballooned out of their sockets. I looked away from her face, but I saw her leg.

I guess I can start by describing what probably happened to her. When a bomb hits a house, the house explodes. The walls just don’t fall in. Everything scatters. Splinters, nails, bits of plaster, stone, brick fragments, glass, and, of course, the shrapnel from the exploding shell turn the room into a lacerating atmosphere. Huge pieces of foundation and structure slip out of place and hop from their places. Any soft tissue that gets in the way gets sliced or battered.

I saw plenty of houses in Vukovar rendered to dust and less. A doctor in Osijek showed me the hole where a rocket had pierced and destroyed her neighbor’s condominium. Houses became targets for many reasons in that war. They were in the line of fire for some other target; they held or were suspecting of holding soldiers; they stood next to some strategic target like a post office, a power substation, a police station, a church, or a transit stop; or some bored soldiers amused themselves with target practice.

One girl I heard about from a priest decided one night that she was sick of living in the basement. She resolved to spend one night — just one night — in her own bed. A rocket tried to join her under the sheets. The Belgium Jesuit was praying at her grave when we met. Her’s was one of many of the new.

The woman I saw sprawled on the sidewalk in Zagreb had lived through whatever invaded her house. What I saw on the leg weren’t the marks of torture. No Serb stood there with a knife, carving cyrillic runes. I doubt her mutilator even saw her. He flicked a switch or pressed a button. Something finned shrieked into the sky — coming out of a tube or falling from the belly of a plane. The soldier or the pilot felt a slight lurch as the war thing departed. The woman felt felt the walls and the furniture sprouting teeth when it hit.

About her leg: long red scars wriggled and split across it. A scimitar half encircled her knee. A few spots — colored a grim wedgewood blue — welled up like gigantic wrinkled blisters.

Zagreb was, at that time, full of gypsies who pretended to have war injuries. One little girl rolled around a cafe in a wheel chair, pretending to be lame. When she came to me asking for money, I smiled and shook my head: I had seen her out of the chair showing another gypsy child how to work the brakes and turn the wheels. She didn’t have a single scar.

My Irish friend, Brendan, and I laughed. “I can tell a fake,” I said. After lunch, we met a friend and went for ice cream at a place over near the streetcar stop. I told the other fellow about the gypsy racket and how you had to watch for it. The jigsaw woman slouched against a wall. Brendan said: “That’s not fake.”