The Cross of Irena Mitic
I took my friend Irena Mitic into the men's urinal at Marble Arch
and held her in my left hand while doing my business with my right.
"What's that, then?" asked the man on my right-hand side,
indicating the Cross with Irena's name on it,
that I'd carried into the toilet.
“That's the name of someone who's been killed in the bombing of Yugoslavia,” I answered.
“People were carrying Crosses on the march against the bombing,
each one bearing the name of someone killed by the bombs.
I asked them for one, so here she is – Irena Mitic.”
“You ought to be carrying a Cross for someone who's been driven out of their home in Kosovo,” he said, and walked away, leaving Irena Mitic and me to think about what he'd said.
I forgot to tell him that the name Irena means “peace”.
But, you know, he's right.
And also I could carry a Cross for the two hundred thousand Serbs who were driven out of Croatia,
and the Muslim women whose men were taken out and shot in Srebrenica
and bulldozed into a mass grave,
and the six thousand children who die each month in Iraq,
(not to mention those developing leukaemia from the radioactive residue from the hundreds of thousands of depleted uranium shells fired in the Gulf War, and those who will develop the disease in Yugoslavia where the shells are being fired today, and in Scotland where they are being tested even as we speak),
and the Kurds who were gassed in northern Iraq, using technology that kept British arms factories working,
and the hundred thousand Kurds who've been killed by our Turkish allies in NATO,
and the three hundred thousand who have fled from American-armed killers in Colombia,
and the two hundred thousand killed in East Timor by weapons made in England,
and the million Tutsi and Hutu who perished in Rwanda because of the mess we made of their borders,
and the thousands of Vietnamese babies born deformed because of Agent Orange . . .
I could add the hundreds of thousands burnt to death in Hamburg and Dresden,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the six million dead in the Holocaust camps,
all the young men sent into the Somme meatgrinder,
the naked children dragging the coal out of their mines
and coughing their young lungs out deep in the dark,
the wise women whose skill with herbs and potions brought them to the stake,
the thousands of slaves crucified along the Appian Way
in revenge for the revolt of Spartacus,
the children cast into the flaming jaws of Moloch,
the blood of murdered Abel crying out for vengeance
from the ground where Cain struck him down.
The death-toll rises
and it's been rising all my life
but I cannot identify all these nameless dead ones
demanding my pity.
I cannot imagine a million dead,
nor a thousand,
nor even a hundred.
If it were my neighbours being led into their graves
I could see their faces in my memory
and burn candles for them under the apple tree in my garden
on each anniversary.
I have seen the body of a Serbian child on my computer screen,
the victim of collateral damage,
but these coloured pixels are more remote to me
than the flames on the video my friend Sojanka taped for me from Belgrade TV.
I try to imagine my own son lying there in the blood and shit,
flies buzzing round his eyes,
seeking for the tears King David cried for his son Absolom,
but I cannot weep for these words in a book,
even a holy book.
So I cling to this one name,
one I can murmur in my prayers as I compose myself for sleep,
remember as I wake
and lift her to the Lord,
remembering all these other deaths in this one death.
I do not know you, Irena Mitic.
You could have been an old lady waiting to die,
or a young girl skipping through the fields to school,
a new bride or a mother in childbirth
when they bombed the power station and the electricity failed in the delivery room.
But I know you are a real person who has died,
and I have taken a rock from my garden
and hammered down the Cross with your name on it
into the soil where I can see it from my bedroom window
as I wake each day to see what sort of weather the day has brought.
When my postman came this morning,
I think he guessed it was the name of a new flower we had planted there.
He was right.
“That is Irena Mitic,” I said in answer to his question.
“And she is blooming in my heart.”
Bradford, May 8-11, 1999
