Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER (35 page)

13

S
TATELESS

Stateless: [f. STATE n. + LESS.] 1. Without a state or political community. Also, destitute of state or ceremonial dignity. [OED]

“Today's ceasefires and armistices are imposed on lesser powers by multilateral agreement—not to avoid great power competition but for essentially disinterested and indeed frivolous motives, such as television audiences' revulsion at harrowing scenes of war.”

—Edward N. Luttwak,
Foreign Affairs
magazine, July/August 1999

I
N
M
AY
1999 I
CAME TO
M
ACEDONIA
with Doctors of the World to work in a camp for Kosovar refugees. There, on a good day—or rather a bad day—and they were all bad—each doctor saw at least one hundred patients during a twelve-hour shift. Most of the patients had minor complaints in the clinic—things that served as a pretext for the real reason they were there: anxiety, depression, despair. After a while I stopped asking questions about the patients' symptoms and just started asking what had happened to the man or woman sitting opposite me. Then I would just sit back and listen to the stories. All these stories. Women giving birth in the woods, old men walking for days over the mountains, diabetics without insulin, children with unattended broken bones. None of the stories were any better or worse than any other—they were each horrible in their own way—but some stories were harder to forget…like the story of the deaf girl.

She was about ten years old and had been deaf since she was six months old from a bout of meningitis. Late in April, the Serb paramilitary forces entered her town and broke into her family's house. There they found the family cowering upstairs. One of the paramilitary (they are called just that, no one graces the term with the explanatory “soldiers”) lined the father and the mother next to each other up against a wall, the mother holding their six-week-old baby. The Serb then asked the husband, “Who do you want me to kill? You or your wife and child?” As he said this, the deaf girl started screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs. “The loudest scream I have ever heard,” the mother told me. The soldier turned around, and at that moment the family could see that the soldier had changed his mind; he was not going to kill any of them. He shouldered his Kalishnikov and as he did, the little girl began laughing, a laugh almost as loud as the scream. It took them several hours before they got her calmed down enough to stop this insane laughter. Ever since then, though, every morning in the camp, the little girl would wake up laughing the very same way. She would laugh and laugh until her mother would shake her and slap her. No one knew what the girl was thinking—or dreaming—that made her wake up with laughter; she couldn't speak at all because of her deafness. Every morning, though, it was the same thing: laughter and slaps, slaps and laughter.

Everyone had a story about what happened to them at the border—where they crossed, what the Serbs did there, what the sheltering country's border guards did. The refugees we saw had fled to Macedonia. Given the dramatic urgency of the situation, it wasn't surprising that the Macedonian method of dealing with refugees was initially ad hoc, at best. But over the course of weeks and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, there did develop an informal method of “processing” refugees at Blace. This was the main transit point for most of the refugees attempting to enter Macedonia.

Essentially, if the Serbs were in a giving mood, they would allow the refugees to cross through the Serb border onto about a mile-long strip of pavement into no-man's-land. No-man's-land itself ran as a swath of heavily mined territory between Kosovo and Macedonia. This land, while a subject of dispute between the neighboring countries, also served as a buffer zone. In no-man's-land the refugees would wait, sometimes for hours, usually for days, to see if the Macedonian officials would let them through to safety and relative freedom. Those that got across were interned initially at Blace Camp itself, a hellhole land of mud and tarpaulins strung between trees. After this, everyone was bussed by the Macedonian authorities to one of the main refugee camps. Camps like Stankovac I, Stankovac II, Cegrane, had, at times, held over thirty thousand refugees apiece.

On the other hand, if the Macedonians decided to close the border, the refugees were sent back into Kosovo and into the arms of the Serbian military and paramilitary forces. The Serbs would get rid of them by beating them away with sticks.

In the camp clinics we were heartbreakingly busy. We slept, ate, drank, and dreamed about patients and the camp, about the things we saw and the things we heard. In the morning, every relief worker would sit at breakfast and swap dreams. I dreamed that Milosovic had come to our house to dinner and we tried to poison him, but, Rasputin-like, he refused to die. Alan dreamed that our house was bombed by NATO (foreseeable). Paul dreamed that we all went to an Orthodox monastery and found the dining room filled with howitzer-packing Mafia dons. Even awake, though, there was a hallucinatory aspect to the world around us. NATO jets flew overhead nonstop; the sky was pinstriped with jet streams. At our camp we lived in a sun-bleached world of white tents and white gravel, a well-organized desert. At night, the camp inhabitants moved like shadowy specters in the harsh halogen vapor lights that lit the camp perpetually.

One night I was sleeping, dreaming of demons, then suddenly found myself awake, sitting upright in the backseat of a Land Rover as it bounced from pothole to pothole. “Where are we going?” I asked the back of the driver's head.

He turned his face so that I could see it in profile in the oncoming light of a passing NATO convoy. “Blace,” he told me. It was Dini.

“Is the border open?”

“Serbia side, yes. Macedonia, nobody knows. There are refugees in between. They are waiting.”

“How many?”

“Many, many.”

“Why are we going there?”

“Because you are a doctor.”

Bafti, my translator, sat slumped next to me, chin down, arms folded, head nodding with each bump in the road. He was sound asleep. Bafti was sixteen and had learned his nearly flawless English from watching TV. Like most of the people we worked with, he was as much a refugee as the patients we saw. His family had crossed over a month before. “It wasn't too bad,” Bafti told me. “The first day of the bombing we were hiding at my grandmothers's house until they started burning the village. Then we ran into the woods. They were shooting at us the whole time, bullets going over our heads, my little sister crying. Then we walked and walked with nothing to eat for three days. But we were okay. Other people did worse.”

Bafti had a moon face, open and innocent, that matched his gentle spirit. He translated everything for me, the young woman who might be pregnant, the old man with gangrene of the foot, the KLA soldier tortured by the Serbs, the little girl who saw her mother and father killed. All the stories. The tortured, the maimed, the starved, the dying, all talked to Bafti, who passed them on to me. I only saw him cry once; Bafti had a special knife—a gift from an American friend—and someone stole it.

We went through sleeping Skopje, an ancient town with now a purely Soviet cement-block aspect. Most of the old town had been destroyed by an earthquake in the 1960s. We passed by the old radio station where the clock tower, still standing, read perpetually 6:42, the precise moment the quake began.

I awoke again to find myself standing in front of an exhausted-looking English woman, the only doctor at Blace Camp. I was yawning. “I'm sorry,” I told her. “I've put in a fourteen-hour shift already today.”

She yawned herself. “This is my second twenty-four hours in a row.”

Relief-work rivalry.

I looked around the medical tent, and my eye caught my name on a posted piece of paper. The title was “Coverage for Blace Border Crossing During Urgent Situations” and then opposite Thursday was my name. I had never seen this schedule before.

“How many refugees?” I asked her.

“They say almost ten thousand in no-man's-land. The Serbs let them in past the Serb border crossing at—let's see—about nine tonight. And another twenty thousand still in Kosovo. But of course, it doesn't make any difference what the Serbs do if the Macedonians keep their side closed.”

“Is there any word?”

She shrugged. “No, of course not. That would make it easy.”

The medical tent was actually essentially empty except for a woman with a squalling child who had managed to make it alone across the Kosovar border through mine-ridden no-man's-land. One of the aid workers found her shivering by the side of the road and brought her here. The baby was about six months old. He had lost all his baby fat but wasn't frankly starving yet. He had obviously been wrapped in wet clothing for a long time, though. His entire body was one giant, macerated, lobster-red open sore, the sore extending even up into his face—a whole-body diaper rash. Otherwise he was one angry baby. He squalled vehemently while the nurse peeled off the plastic triangle that had served as his diaper for God knows how long. His mother had kept him wrapped in a piece of plastic shower curtain.

I looked around…missing something. Then I realized it was Dini.

“Where is he?” I demanded of Bafti, who was sleeping in the corner. Without opening his eyes, he lifted his hand to point outside.

“Well, wake up. We've got to get moving.”

Dini was dozing in the Jeep outside. Poor Dini. Dini got roped into everything. He drove, he translated, he held people's hands, he carried the wounded, he counseled the stricken. There is no part of my stay in Macedonia that does not have Dini's infinitely weary, infinitely patient face imprinted on every memory. He was always there, always ready to shrug, “Yes, why not,” to every request, always with a lit cigarette, no matter where. I had worked with him for a month before I found out that he had finished medical school in Bulgaria and had come back to Pristina to continue his studies. “Why don't you work with us as a doctor?” I asked him. He shrugged and shook his head. “He's given up,” Bafti told me and refused to say any more. “Ask Dini,” he told me when I pressed him.

Night. Open sky. A sleeping refugee camp. I pounded on a window to wake Dini up and motioned for him to come along. The border crossing was right next to the camp. We climbed some rickety stairs and there it was, the border, or rather, a set of abandoned tollbooths and an old customs building off to the left. An old sign on the building's rooftop advertised Skopsko beer. On this side of the tollbooths, Macedonian soldiers stalked along an imaginary line, shooing back a few sorry-looking reporters who loitered on the road apparently waiting for something dramatic and cameraworthy. The reporters could wait here as long as they liked, but no one got past the abandoned tollbooths except the police and, under certain circumstances, medical personnel such as myself.

I was wearing my safari vest that had
MEDICAL DOCTOR
printed on the back. I sorted through the pockets, looking for my ID, but I found only a few tongue depressors. Bafti, Dini and I passed the reporters and came up to a bolder guard, a fatigued-looking man who glanced at Bafti's and Dini's IDs hung on chains around their necks and didn't even seem to notice me. He waved us past and just as I realized I had no ID other than the safari vest I was wearing, we were passing the tollbooths and entering no-man's-land.

It was a broad road that took off north, past the customs building. On the near side to our left were parked a crippled backhoe and few senile-looking Ladas and Yugos. From then on the scene was lit by widely spaced street lamps. Under these lights we entered a world of black and white, all the color bleached out by the night. The road was several hundred meters wide and hedged on either side by the Balkan idea of a security fence: some chicken wife supplemented with a few strands of barbed wire. Between these fences stood a wall of people, stopped to form a human embankment by a few twitchy and exhausted-looking Macedonian border guards. Behind them were more people packed in tightly and stretching out as far into the darkness as I could see. Thousands and thousands of people hemmed in on either side by a little chicken wire and kilometer after kilometer of land mines.

The guards were screaming orders at people, waving some on into a line that formed off to our left. There a column of refugees stood, everything they now possessed lying in a few bundles at their feet. All of them—even the children—looked like zombies, depleted, immobile, stricken. Everyone stood in that line, young mothers, teenagers wearing Nike caps, small children, babies, old women bent neatly double, young men wearing Budweiser beer T-shirts and Chicago Bulls baseball caps, old men clutching their canes.

Except for the shouting by the Macedonian border guards, everyone was entirely silent. The guards moved eerily about, half trigger-happy soldiers, half harried bureaucrats. It was easy to see that they had a near lethal crowd control problem. Moving forward for each refugee could make a difference between life and death—it was easy to imagine a stampede—but these people were clearly too wiped out to do more than stand limply in the harsh glow of the border light. They huddled miserably together and walked when they were told to walk and stopped when they were told to.

It was a scene I knew even though I had never seen it before in real life. Refugees, the stateless people, the great tragedy of the twentieth century. What were the precedents? The White Russians, the Jews, the Armenians, the Romanians. Most of the people here had no identification papers, no passports—and even if they did, the passports were worthless, the papers of a stateless person.

Sometimes the patients brought their Kosovar passports into the clinic, especially when they were demanding a passage abroad. The passports had a blue-black flimsy cover over a piece of paper with the name, address and occupation clumsily typed in (mistakes typed over with X's.) The ID picture, always something from some better time, would be riveted into place, but the rivets had held so poorly that most people had to tape the pictures back into place.