Work Text:
The canvas walls breathed with each faint change of wind, bowing inward and easing out again beneath the pressure of the Bosnian night, while somewhere beyond the partitioned sleeping quarters a generator kept up its uneven mechanical thrum, losing half a beat every few minutes before catching itself again. Boots occasionally rasped across gravel outside, a truck changed gears on the road beyond the camp and laboured away into the hills, and somewhere nearer the communal kitchens somebody set down a metal basin with a dull clang before the sounds folded back into the larger nocturnal life of the camp. Lucille lay awake beneath the accumulated warmth of six young women and felt no desire whatsoever to move, not because she feared waking them so much as because there was something deeply satisfying in simply remaining where she was, her long body stretched beneath blankets, her arms loosely enclosing the little human landscape that had arranged itself across her.
They had settled over her gradually after the heat and laughter of the evening had faded, their bodies finding spaces against Lucille with the instinctive efficiency of people who had spent too long sleeping wherever there happened to be room. One girl had tucked her cheek beneath Lucille's collarbone, another curled along her left side with one knee resting over her thigh, while two more had claimed the broad shelter of her chest and shoulder between them. A fifth lay diagonally across her waist, hair spilled warmly over Lucille's skin, and the sixth had nested herself into the crook of her right arm, close enough that every breath brushed against Lucille's neck. Their hijabs had been carefully folded with their clothes within easy reach, treated with the same casual respect each woman gave her own belongings, and Lucille had noticed the care without making a ceremony of it. She had long since learned that the six wore hijab for different reasons and with different feelings, just as nearly everything else about them resisted being flattened into a single explanation simply because outsiders found categories easier than people.
All six were eighteen, although adulthood rested differently upon each of them. Lejla had expected to begin university and still spoke about mathematics as though the interruption of war had merely delayed an appointment. Selma had worked beside her mother as a seamstress and could inspect a torn sleeve with the seriousness of a surgeon. Mirela had spent the previous year helping care for younger cousins and possessed a patience with frightened children that Lucille admired without romanticizing the reason it had become necessary. Nadira devoured translated detective novels whenever she could find them, Esma regarded almost every indignity of camp life as material for mischief, and Amina Hadžić, resting nearest Lucille's face, had grown up in her father's bakery on the outskirts of Sarajevo and planned to become an architect with a conviction that made the word planned feel considerably stronger than hoped.
Their exhaustion had gradually turned the group into one warm, breathing weight. Lucille's left arm curved around several of them while her right gathered the others, an arrangement that would have been uncomfortable for most people but barely challenged her extraordinary size. One broad palm rested between a girl's shoulder blades while the other loosely held Amina against her ribs, and from time to time Lucille's thumb moved almost unconsciously over warm skin in a soothing stroke before becoming still again. She was wide awake, but there was nothing restless in the wakefulness. She could have slept easily enough had she been alone, yet there was something better in feeling the changing rhythm of six sleeping bodies, the occasional adjustment of a knee, the tightening of fingers in a blanket, the faint warmth of breath moving across her chest.
The intimacy of the evening remained around them without needing to announce itself. Warmth had become trapped beneath the blankets, hair clung damply against shoulders, and every now and then one of the girls shifted closer with the half-conscious possessiveness of somebody unwilling to surrender a comfortable place. Lucille felt an enormous tenderness in the aftermath, a sense not of conquest or appetite but of trust, and that distinction mattered to her more than she could have easily explained. She had been careful from the beginning because the camp created imbalances without anyone intending them; Lucille possessed money, mobility, documents, contacts and the freedom to leave, while the women around her had been displaced by forces larger than any of them. She would not allow aid, transport, medical help, food or simple human kindness to become confused with personal affection, and she had made that separation painfully clear until the girls themselves had finally teased her for behaving as though displacement had robbed them of the right to know their own desires.
They had understood her caution, but they had also refused to let caution become condescension. They were frightened, exhausted and living through circumstances none of them had chosen, yet they were adults, capable of saying yes, no, not yet or never, and Lucille had eventually recognized that continuing to doubt them after they had repeatedly made themselves clear would have been another way of denying their agency. The evening had therefore unfolded not out of gratitude or obligation but because attraction had been present, mutual and increasingly impossible to pretend away. Now that desire had burned itself into something quieter, Lucille was content simply to hold them while the camp continued around them.
Her eyes moved slowly over the faces and limbs she could see without disturbing anyone. Mirela's face was almost entirely hidden by her own hair where she slept across Lucille's middle. Selma, the smallest of the six, had somehow acquired the greatest share of blanket and maintained a determined grip upon its edge even in sleep. Lejla's hand rested over Lucille's sternum, fingers slightly curled, while Nadira had folded herself neatly along Lucille's side as though solving some private problem of geometry. Esma, who had spent half the night turning over whenever she became too warm, now lay finally still except for one bare foot that periodically escaped the blanket before vanishing again. Amina remained closest, her face resting against Lucille's shoulder, one arm lying loosely over Lucille's chest and her breathing warming the same small patch of skin again and again.
Amina had been the most openly fascinated with Lucille from almost the first day, although open fascination had never quite translated into effortless boldness. She could stare at Lucille across a tent with such intensity that her interest seemed impossible to mistake, yet the instant Lucille returned the look Amina would become magnificently occupied with whatever happened to be nearest, whether a cup, a folded blanket, a loose thread or an entirely imaginary task. Once, finding herself without any convenient object behind which to hide, she had simply covered her face with both hands until Lucille's laughter made her laugh too. The memory still warmed Lucille, particularly because Amina had never lost the combination of seriousness and mischief that made her expressions change so quickly; at rest she could appear thoughtful enough to be mistaken for solemn, then something amused her and her whole face brightened at once.
She was slender but strong through the forearms after years of helping her father knead industrial quantities of dough before sunrise, and she had described the bakery to Lucille in enough detail that Lucille could almost smell it whenever she spoke. Flour apparently reached everywhere, from eyelashes to hems to the backs of cupboards nobody remembered opening. Her father began before dawn, her mother arrived later and reorganized everything he had left in the wrong place, and Amina had learned to shape bread before she had been tall enough to see comfortably across the worktable. She had told Lucille these things with the pride of somebody who had once considered them too ordinary to preserve and now found herself remembering each detail because ordinary life had become precious.
Amina's family had survived, though not intact in the immediate sense. Her parents and younger brothers were alive, while an aunt and two cousins had become separated from them during flight and seemed to appear in different places depending on which rumour reached the camp. The uncertainty changed Amina from one day to the next. Sometimes she became frantic and asked the same questions repeatedly, as though persistence might somehow force geography to yield an answer. Sometimes she became furious at anyone who offered comfort too easily. At other times she threw herself into work with such brittle energy that Lucille learned to keep an eye on her without making the watching obvious. Tonight, however, that tension had temporarily released her, and she slept with the relaxed heaviness of someone who had finally allowed herself to stop guarding against the next bad thing.
Outside, a guy rope creaked under the pull of wind, somebody crossed between tents carrying something metallic that knocked softly against a leg, and farther beyond the perimeter a dog barked twice before receiving a faint answer from somewhere in the dark hills. A child woke briefly in another section of the camp, murmuring an indistinct complaint before an older voice soothed them, and then even that receded beneath the engine noise and the rustling of canvas. Lucille listened without concentrating on any one sound, content to let the night continue around her while the women slept.
Amina moved first with the smallest flutter of her eyelashes. Lucille immediately stilled the motion of her thumb, watching as awareness returned gradually to the girl's face. Her brow tightened for a moment as though she had woken without remembering where she was, then recognition arrived and softened the confusion into something drowsy and deeply affectionate. She raised her head without sitting up, her dark eyes finding Lucille's in the low light, and the smile that followed came so slowly that Lucille felt something tighten pleasantly beneath her ribs.
Amina shifted perhaps two inches higher, taking care not to dislodge Selma's arm where it crossed Lucille's shoulder, and brushed her nose lightly against Lucille's cheek before kissing her. There was almost no urgency in it, only warmth and familiarity, the lingering kiss of somebody who had woken exactly where she wanted to be and wished to acknowledge the fact before doing anything else. Lucille tilted her head to receive her more comfortably, one hand rising to cradle the back of Amina's head, and when Amina drew away she remained close enough that their foreheads nearly touched.
Then Amina's expression changed into such elaborate innocence that Lucille immediately understood she was performing. Amina looked down at Mirela draped across Lucille's waist, glanced toward Lejla and Selma, then turned her head in the other direction to survey Nadira and Esma as though only now discovering the astonishing fact that five other young women occupied the same bed. Her eyebrows lifted, and when she looked back at Lucille she murmured with deliberately exaggerated surprise that she had somehow failed to notice they had company.
Lucille's mouth curved, and the movement of her shoulders betrayed the beginning of a laugh before Amina quickly touched a finger to her lips, warning her against waking anyone. The gesture only made Lucille more amused, particularly when Amina admitted after a moment that perhaps she had noticed the others after all. Lucille raised one eyebrow and waited, allowing the look itself to demand greater accuracy, until Amina finally conceded that she had known perfectly well where every one of them was before she opened her eyes and had merely wanted Lucille to herself for the first few seconds of being awake.
Lucille kissed the fingertip Amina had left resting against her mouth, and Amina's playful expression softened almost immediately. The change came gradually, enough that Lucille saw it forming before Amina said anything; the little spark of mischief remained at the corners of her mouth, but her gaze dropped toward Lucille's chest, and one thumb began tracing an idle line over the skin beneath it. Lucille did not prompt her. She had learned that Amina sometimes needed a question to help words arrive and sometimes experienced a question as another obstacle she had to get past, and this was plainly one of the latter moments.
Amina swallowed before admitting that she knew Lucille could not stay forever. There was no accusation behind the words, which made their sadness sharper rather than softer, and Lucille's fingers paused where they rested against the back of Amina's neck. Amina said everyone in the camp knew that outsiders came and went, sometimes after days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, and that even the ones who became familiar eventually packed their bags, climbed into vehicles and disappeared back into lives that had continued waiting for them elsewhere.
Lucille understood what Amina meant before she elaborated. Camps taught attachment under the worst possible conditions, because instability made kindness memorable and memory made departure hurt. Doctors rotated away, drivers changed, reporters arrived full of questions and vanished, volunteers promised to write and sometimes did, while officials were photographed beside people whose names they occasionally never learned. Even the decent ones left, and the decent ones could be more painful to lose because they had allowed themselves to become part of the routine before leaving another absence behind.
Amina drew a careful breath, blinking repeatedly as sadness gathered against her effort to control it. She said she hated becoming attached to things that disappeared, then immediately corrected herself because she did not mean things at all. She meant people. She hated becoming attached to people who disappeared, and the correction seemed to strip away whatever composure had remained around the thought.
Lucille lifted one hand to Amina's cheek, and the girl leaned into the broad palm without hesitation. Lucille had spent much of her life believing that almost any difficulty could be answered by action; wounds could be dressed, supplies found, bureaucrats harried, officials embarrassed, vehicles repaired, money raised and doors forced open by persistence if not by authority. This was different because she could not honestly promise what Amina wanted without making the sort of beautiful lie that Lucille disliked most. She could not promise never to leave Bosnia, could not promise that the war would become kinder, could not promise perfect safety or uninterrupted correspondence or that every person they loved would remain exactly where they ought to be.
She could promise something smaller and truer. Lucille drew Amina closer until the girl's face rested briefly against her neck, feeling one shuddering breath there and then the warmth of a tear against her skin. Lucille kissed her temple first, then her cheek, and when Amina finally lifted her face again Lucille kissed her mouth with a tenderness more deliberate than passionate, holding her gently enough that the meaning could not be mistaken for an attempt to distract her from what she had said.
When they separated, Lucille kept her forehead against Amina's and whispered that she would never forget any of them. She repeated it when Amina opened her eyes, telling her quietly that there would not be one among the six whom Lucille simply allowed to become part of an indistinct memory of Bosnia. Amina studied her with the seriousness she reserved for statements she desperately wanted to believe, and another tear escaped before Lucille caught it with her thumb.
Amina asked whether Lucille truly believed she could remember six girls from one camp when her own life was already crowded with so many people, places and years. Lucille answered without hesitation, not with a general assurance but by beginning to name what she already remembered. She remembered Lejla becoming genuinely furious because someone had described a pot of badly brewed brown water as coffee. She remembered Selma defeating three grown men at cards and insisting afterward that it had been beginner's luck even though she had plainly counted every card on the table. She remembered Mirela spending an entire afternoon repairing a little girl's coat because the child had become embarrassed by the torn sleeve, remembered Nadira's appetite for detective novels and the way she always tried to solve the mystery before the last chapter, and remembered Esma deliberately teaching Lucille the wrong Bosnian word for spoon and allowing her to misuse it through an entire meal before finally confessing.
The last memory pulled a small smile from Amina despite herself. Lucille noticed and continued, telling her that she also remembered the first time she had caught Amina staring across the distribution tent as though she had never previously encountered a woman taller than most doorframes. Amina immediately protested that she had not stared, but under Lucille's raised eyebrow she amended the claim into an admission that she had not stared continuously. Lucille accepted this correction with such solemnity that Amina's smile broadened.
Amina then accused Lucille of evading the important part, pointing out that all the examples concerned the other girls while she herself had yet to receive anything properly memorable. Lucille looked almost offended by the accusation before telling her she remembered the flour. Amina blinked, uncertain for a moment, and Lucille explained that she remembered the way Amina had described the bakery, remembered flour collecting in her eyelashes and cuffs, remembered her father beginning before sunrise and her mother singing while she swept the floor later in the morning. She remembered that Amina preferred the heel of a fresh loaf, that her youngest brother picked raisins out of anything containing them and arranged the rejected fruit in little piles beside his plate, and that Amina had once burned an entire tray of bread at nine years old before spending several years insisting that the oven rather than the baker had been at fault.
Amina stared at her now, no longer smiling quite so easily, and Lucille continued before the emotion could become unbearable. She remembered the drawings Amina had made on the backs of supply sheets, remembered that she wanted to design buildings with enormous windows because she disliked rooms that made people feel trapped, and remembered Amina becoming annoyed when Lucille had once called one of the sketches beautiful because beauty, according to Amina, was irrelevant if the drainage was badly planned. That finally broke the heaviness enough for Amina to laugh into Lucille's shoulder, careful to keep the sound contained so the others would not wake.
When she raised her head again, the tears had stopped, though the sadness remained visible rather than disappearing conveniently. Amina told Lucille that remembering so much was unfair, and when Lucille asked what exactly was unfair about it, Amina replied that it made leaving more difficult. Lucille could not argue with that. Instead she brushed the dampness from beneath Amina's eye and admitted that she did not remember absolutely everything.
Amina challenged her at once to prove it by naming something she had forgotten. Lucille considered the demand with exaggerated seriousness before admitting that she could not remember exactly how many spoonfuls of sugar Amina took in her tea. Amina's satisfaction was immediate, and she informed Lucille that the answer was two. Lucille told her she would remember from now on, at which point Amina realized she had corrected the single gap in Lucille's memory and accused her of having engineered the entire exchange deliberately.
Lucille gave her no explicit confession, but the warmth in her expression was enough. Amina watched her for another moment before leaning forward and kissing her again, this time remaining close afterward, one arm tightening gently across Lucille's chest. The sadness between them had changed shape rather than vanished, and neither woman pretended otherwise. Lucille would eventually leave. There would be announcements, packing, last working days, the final evening meal and probably several false departures caused by somebody remembering one more thing that needed doing before the vehicle could actually pull away.
For the moment, however, Amina remained where she was, as did Mirela, Selma, Lejla, Nadira and Esma. Lucille carefully lifted one corner of the blanket over Amina's shoulder, managing the movement without disturbing the others until Selma sensed some change in ownership and tightened her grip upon her portion. Amina noticed and smiled, whispering that Selma would probably have stolen the entire blanket by morning.
Lucille told her she had already accepted defeat. Amina reminded her that Lucille Robinson was generally considered considerably more difficult to defeat than that, and Lucille glanced toward Selma's closed fist around the blanket before replying that reputation clearly had limits.
Amina's cheek settled against her shoulder again. The conversation had drawn her fully awake for only a short while, and fatigue had already begun reclaiming her, visible in the way her muscles loosened and the hand resting on Lucille's chest slowly opened. After a few moments Amina murmured Lucille's name and, without lifting her head, asked her not to leave before she woke.
That promise Lucille could make without qualification. She bent her head, kissed Amina's hair and whispered that she would still be there when Amina opened her eyes again. Amina's mouth curved slightly against Lucille's shoulder, and within minutes her breathing had deepened into sleep.
Lucille remained awake beneath all six of them while the generator continued its rough labour beyond the canvas and a lorry rattled somewhere along the perimeter road. Wind travelled across the camp in stages, announcing itself first through trees and then through ropes, loose fabric and the faint movement of tent poles. A metal cup rolled briefly over packed ground outside until somebody stopped it with a foot. Nearer dawn, a bird began calling from somewhere beyond the floodlights, uncertainly at first and then with increasing insistence as the dark thinned.
Lucille listened and kept her arms around the women. Her public life had long since accumulated enough mythology that strangers who had never met her spoke with confidence about what she thought, what she wanted and what she represented. Her height, her romances, her clothes, her temper, her nursing, her political connections and nearly every other visible part of her had been discussed so often that the public version of Lucille occasionally seemed capable of swallowing the private woman whole.
None of that mattered here. Inside the tent she was simply warm, broad enough for six women to sleep over and around her, patient enough to remain still, and attentive enough to remember what each of them had trusted her with. Amina's words stayed lodged in her mind because Lucille understood something about people disappearing. Age guaranteed it eventually and war accelerated the process brutally, while ceremonies, headlines and public reputations did nothing to make the losses less personal.
She looked down at Amina again and repeated the details privately to herself: the flour, the bakery, the enormous windows, the defective oven that almost certainly had not been defective, the brother who hated raisins, the mother who sang while sweeping, and two spoonfuls of sugar in tea. Memory was not merely what remained after somebody was gone. It began much earlier, in the act of noticing a person carefully enough while they were present that they could never afterward be reduced to a face in a crowd.
Lucille's thumb resumed its slow movement across Amina's shoulder as Bosnia continued beyond the canvas, battered and uncertain, its roads carrying trucks through darkness and its camps gathering displaced families into temporary rows of timber and cloth. None of the women sleeping against her could know exactly where they would be living a year later, what pieces of their former lives they would recover or what entirely new lives they might have to build in their place.
For those remaining hours, however, none of them needed to wonder whether Lucille had already begun leaving in her mind. She had not. She was completely there.