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Between
Mountains
by Maggie Helwig
Vintage Canada Edition,
2005
Reviewed by Faruk
Myrtaj
For those of us from
the Balkans and Eastern Europeans who now live in Canada the fact that
we live far from our homelands allows us to get to know ourselves
better. Enemies and friends after Communism’s downfall, we’ve been
given the chance to lose our inhibitions and phobias about the past.
The artistic realism of
Maggie Helwig’s novel Between Mountains helps us do it. Helwig’s
characters live and fight and love during the absurdity of war. It’s
about the Balkan of 1990s, with its former-Yugoslavia, and its
nationalisms. And you can always look at this book in a wider scope.
Haven’t similar events happened in all the former Communist states?
The events that take
place between Helwig’s mountains are scrutinized by a third eye, a
journalist from afar. Daniel meets Lili in the way that the West
occasionally meets the East. Theirs is a special love, due to their past
lives. They meet each other in peacetime Paris, and are deeply troubled
because they are among the victims, murderers, judges, writers,
witnesses located between the Past and the Future. Thus they have to
suffer in their love what others suffered in their lives during the war
years, because an absurd war can never end normally.
The author moves
restlessly from Daniel to Lili, from the victims to their murderers,
from one language to another, always looking for human beings overlooked
in all the places of ethnic cleansing, and for the artists who represent
them. Hence we find in Between Mountains such lines as "Are
you from the same country as Milan Kundera?" and "Later she
insisted that he take away English translations of Ismail Kadare and
Danilo Kis. She didn’t need them, she said, she had the original
versions…"
Lili tells Daniel that
"My father was Serbian from Belgrad, my mother Albanian from
Pristina…My father was a Stalinist. I grew up in this little
self-contained communist world; we had a communist doctor, communist
dentist, communist plumber…" In this kind of family "she
believed, in a highly abstract sense that it might be necessary to kill
for this future, but she preferred to imagine herself dying for it, on
some elusive barricade."
Daniel, a Canadian
journalist, has spent about ten years in the Balkans, always walking on
the dynamite of awkward truths. As a war crimes court interpreter Lili
tries to avoid having opinions. "I convey every person’s words
with all the accuracy I can. I hope for the best." Both of them are
in dilemma because in this environment love is impossible.
The novel isn’t
simply about the repercussions of war. Read in that way it would remain
a book about the Past. Between the Mountains describes the
reasons that brought the war to the heart of Europe, bringing into our
minds what communism caused in the Eastern Europe by pairing up with
blind nationalism.
All of us who came here
from that area can get to know each other better by reading this book.
The truth is found in the facts: before a city was cleansed, its
citizens needed to be cleansed first, which was the politicians’
object. One of the characters in "Between Mountains" says,
"I killed some people, I tried not to, but if I didn’t they
would have killed me" said he. Asked who "they"
were, he explains that he is talking about his commanding officers.
Unfortunately, in the
same fashion as some politicians in that region, some writers and
intellectuals have and offered a terribly untrue view of Balkan history.
"In every second person seems to be a writer, I mean a serious
writer," Helwig says. "You have to question about the function
of literature, when you think about that."
The dramatic figure of
Markovic is colorfully portrayed with pain, wonder, and realism. He is
shown as a victim of nationalist ideology and co-murderer in the same
time; he and his family had by chance become victims. In such a land it
is impossible not to be a disturbed eyewitness. Accordingly, he can’t
bear to appear before the other witnesses who are accusing him of crimes
against humanity. His blindness and the blindness of his daughter, the
blindness of his dreams, are clearly depicted. Markovic thinks that
Serbs were fighting for the Heavenly Kingdom, but he is not ready to
answer Daniel’s question: "You are fighting in a war just now.
And this was for territory on earth…"
Markovic is a victim of
the Past: "It is not the question of my difficult childhood. It is
a question of the history of the Serbian people. Always we are
persecuted, always we are defeated, but never are we finished. You are
familiar with Serbian literature?" Then he tells Daniel, "You
are very typical North American. You have lost all of the presence of
history."
In fact, Lili almost
confirms Markovic’s words: "One of the things Lili didn’t
admit, then or later, was that she sometimes confused between La
Marseillaise and L’Internationale, both songs set to music that made
her want to stand up and salute, both soaked in the imagery of history
transformed, le jour de glorie, la lutte finale, debout les damnès de
la terre, marchons, marchons..." She knows herself and her father
and mother, she feels her love, she knows Daniel and his love for her,
but in the end everything is gone. The conflict and the war climate has
compromised everyone. "An Illyrian girl, her grandmother said, her
pale hair carried down from the earliest mythical Balkan people, but
there were too many histories, and she couldn’t belong to them all…"
Among all of the tragic
events, all the people declare: I wish I lived in some other time. All
the characters in this book, the criminals, lawyers, refugees,
journalists, the mad preacher and even the readers, are invited to
forget the unforgettable.
The way to The Hague
passes through Nuremberg, the novel suggests. All the people who saw the
Nazis’ death camps would have liked to witness in Nuremberg. All the
people that had seen Srebrenica during the Yugoslavian war and Sarajevo
before the war could have appeared as witnesses in the court of The
Hague. The hope is that there will be no more need for witnesses.
The danger exists. The
terrible storm of the Millennium can rise and destroy even the old
bridge of a large peaceful city like Paris. At the end of the book
Daniel is in a bad mood because the first thing he saw in the New Year
was a man being killed. He lowers his head before a priest and reaches
into his memory for the proper sentence.
At one point Helwig
describes a fish, the Human Fish, who lives in the darkness of caves for
hundreds of years, a meaningful metaphor for a species that lives in an
isolated area. "If they were taken out of the caverns, they would
die…" Between Mountains is an open window on places
where the Shadows of the Past still lurk. |
