To the Man I Pulled Back
Translated from Bosnian by Mirza Purić.
Read this essay in Bosnian here.
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You wore a winter coat. I wore a thin, summer dress. A breeze was blowing on my bare legs. When I revisit that moment, I don’t feel the weight of clothes.
Your coat was grey, made out of thick fabric. I know—I’ve touched it. I’d just emerged from Camden Town station, spat out by the underground corridor, surrounded by hurrying bodies. You stood in front of me waiting at the traffic light at a pedestrian crossing on Kentish Town Road. It must’ve been Sunday. The crush was the worst on Sundays in Camden.
I don’t know why I went to Camden Town that day. I don’t remember. With me was Srđan, my friend. Srđan was always with me. My link to the place I came from. My guarantor of stability. We may have gone for a stroll round the market to hunt for deals, or for a cup of coffee over which I’d tell him all about another failed romance. About how no one loved me enough, as much as I needed, how there was no one to hug me hard enough to make all the hurts vanish.
My London life is a distant one; it no longer seems real. Twenty odd years, lined up one next to the other. At the end of the line is me, a little girl. I arrived in London alone, aged nineteen. The seven years I spent there were filled with pain. At twenty-six, I returned to Mostar. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Home. The war had just ended.
There was no more home. Not home as in the two-storey house I grew up in, with plants by the window, different kinds of fern and a benjamin fig. Crystal glasses in a china cabinet, a 12-piece set, for special occasions. My room, filled with books. When I lay in my bed, the window framed the minaret of a mosque, a nettle tree branching out and the belfry of a church. The sky was always blue. Bright blue. Even at night, it seemed. None of that existed anymore. Home, as in the place where I belonged, that’s what I meant. I remained forever hoisted between two addresses, with no prospect of belonging to either one.
If some other reason had taken me to London when I was on the brink of my twenties, it would’ve all been different. I wouldn’t have woken every morning with a weight in my stomach, cried myself to sleep at night. I would’ve gone out to nightclubs, fallen in love with ease, without needing someone to save me. Waitressing in restaurants, apprenticing in hair salons—all that would’ve been just a stop on the way to my real life. Unquestionable and comfortable. London would’ve been a youthful phase, a pulsating city that existed only for my amusement.
The light was red. I wasn’t looking at you. I hadn’t even noticed you until the last moment. I was busy thinking about why he, that someone, hadn’t called when he said he would. Or if he had, why he hadn’t said what he was supposed to say. Something to warm me up, make me forget all that was bad. Squeeze the fear out of me. Assure me that love could offer complete oblivion. Bodies impressing themselves into one another, powerfully, insatiably, till everything else ceases to exist. Memory, the past, the word “war” which divided life into two unconnectable parts, the displacement, me, a foreigner in a language in which I never managed to express myself fully, be funny, be me, waiting for the TV news, the exploding shells widening the hole in my stomach, my shoulders that would never be straight again, forever jutting forward in a futile attempt to protect the torso, the uncertain, unreliable, unimaginable future, the instability of identity, the answers to the questions who am I, where do I belong, does anything ever belong anywhere? The task of the other body was perfectly clear—drown it all out, stop it.
“I don’t know what I did in that street that day. Did I interfere with a plan you barely mustered up the strength to carry out and pull you back to where you didn’t want to be? ”
We were standing and waiting. Cars were buzzing past. Then you stepped out. From the first row of the crowd, into the street. This, as well as everything that followed, I remember clearly. The movements must have been simultaneous. My hand, your leg. If I’d merely seen, I would have been too late. I sensed. We moved in the same instant. My fingers on your coat. My right hand grabbing the sleeve. Even now I can feel the fabric. Soft wool, imperfections in the weaving. Your hair was grey, disheveled. I couldn’t see your face. You were about fifty, maybe more. Maybe only forty. Hard to tell from your nape, and the coat concealed your body. The wind was mild, warm. It must have been summer. People around us were in T-shirts.
I pulled you suddenly, forcefully. I don’t know where all that strength came from. A car whizzed past, grazed you. You lurched backwards when I yanked you. You didn’t turn around to look at me. You didn’t say anything. The light turned green and people moved forward. The throng pushed me on. I didn’t turn around to look at you. I sensed you stayed at the spot where I pulled you. You didn’t move with the rest of us.
A moment later, I was on the other side of the street, standing in front of a shop window. Me in the glass. Petite, skinny. Only forty-seven kilograms. My red dress with white flowers hung from my shoulders, making me look even skinnier. My hair was badly dyed with at-home dye. Yellow. My face was pale, sunken, I had dark circles under my eyes. You could’ve put me on any lorry driving refugees round Europe. I would’ve fit in the harrowing footage from the evening news. Bosnian girl. I asked Srđan if he saw it.
“See what? I didn’t see anything.”
“Well, what were you looking at? The man. I pulled him.”
He laughed.
“So it’s come to this, you pull random people in the street?”
“Up yours, he tried to step into the traffic.”
I turned around. The street was packed with people, I couldn’t see you.
“I didn’t see anything”, said Srđan. “Let’s go, I fancy a coffee, I haven’t had any today.”
I followed him. I turned around a few more times, but I still couldn’t see you. People were frenzied ants, scurrying about every which way.
In the following months I returned to Camden a few times. Looking for you. I don’t know why; I don’t know if I would’ve said anything had I found you. I just needed to make sure you were alive and well. Find out whether you were well before you took that step. And after.
That’s what I thought at first. Later I started to wonder if I’d had the right to pull you back.
There’s this forest in Japan. Aokigahara. It’s the second most-used suicide site in the world, second to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. At least according to the statistics. In a documentary film about Aokigahara, there’s a man named Asuza who roams the forest looking for suicides. When he finds one—usually a man shut in a small one-person tent where he’s trying to decide if the subsequent days will be his last—Asuza says hello, wishes him well, tells him to reconsider. He doesn’t phone the police. There is no rescue mission drama. He doesn’t tug and pull at sleeves. He leaves the man the dignity of choice about his own life.
I don’t know what I did in that street that day. Did I interfere with a plan you barely mustered up the strength to carry out and pull you back to where you didn’t want to be?
Of course, it’s possible that you were merely lost in your thoughts, unaware of what was going on around you, and you simply took a step, without wishing to meet your end there. But it doesn’t seem like it. I never believed that.
We were only bodies in that street that day—a girl in a red dress disappearing into the crowd, and a man in a heavy coat on a summer day. What did I take away from you? What did I give you? Probably something I needed myself. A hand to yank me, pull me back into safety.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Senka Marić is a poet, writer, essayist, and editor. She has published three books of poetry: From Here to Nowhere, These are just Words, and Till the next Death, and the novel Body Kintsugi. Awards for her writing include the Zija Dizdarevic Award for a short story in 2000, and European Knight of Poetry Award in 2013. Her novel Body Kintsugi won the prestigious Mesa Selimovic Award for the best novel published in 2018 in the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro.
Her works have been translated into English, Spanish, Russian, German, Hungarian, and Slovenian, and she is editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine strane.ba.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Mirza Purić is a literary translator working from German and BCS. He is a contributing editor at EuropeNow, a former editor-at-large at Asymptote, and in-house translator for the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop. In 2019, Istros Books published his translation of Faruk Šehić’s novel Under Pressure. His co-translation, with Ellen Elias-Bursać, of Miljenko Jergović’s Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah, is forthcoming on Archipelago Books.
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Header photo by Carlos Alberto Gómez Iñiguez