The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living - Hardcover

Brkic, Courtney Angela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374207747 ISBN 13: 9780374207748

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

Synopsis

When she was twenty-three years old, Courtney Angela Brkic joined a UN-contracted forensic team in eastern Bosnia. Unlike many aid workers, Brkic was drawn there by her family history, and although fluent in the language, she was advised to avoid letting local workers discover her ethnicity. Brkic helped set up a morgue in Tuzla, assisting pathologists with autopsies and laying out personal effects for photographing. Later, she helped excavate graves at Srebenica, where many thousands had been indiscriminately slaughtered.

This was not the only excavating she was doing. As she describes the gruesome work of recovering remains and transcribing the memories of survivors, she also explores her family's history in Yugoslavia, telling of her grandmother's childhood in Herzegovina, early widowhood, and imprisonment during World War II for hiding her Jewish lover. The Stone Fields, deeply personal and wise, asks what it takes to prevent the violent loss of life, and what we are willing to risk in the process.

About this title

About the Author:

Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of Stillness (FSG, 2003), for which she won the prestigious Whiting Award. She has worked for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and for Physicians for Human Rights. She lives in Ohio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Excerpt from The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living by Courtney Angela Brkic. Copyright © 2004 by Courtney Angela Brkic. Published in August, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Prologue

I placed a hand on his forehead, careful not to wake him, and let my fingers rest on the vein that pulsed in evening's thin light. Beneath the warm skin were the plates of his cranium, the sutures where entire continents met in his childhood and fused over the ocean of his mind. The gentle, breakable bones of his face were like china, or the hollow bones of birds. They were as fragile as calcified breath.

The flow of his blood was like water singing through rock, and in my concentration, I was only vaguely aware of figures standing on all sides of the bed. Lifting my head, I found myself looking through their bodies as through the fluid of memory; I turned them into glass and buried my face in him once again. Whether this angered or saddened them, I could not tell.

Wind from the open window made the curtains dance and crept over my naked legs.

Stjepan's vertebrae reminded me of dinosaur exhibits at a museum. There was something salamander-like about them. They started out small and graceful, and metamorphosed into the sturdiness of the lumbar region, where they were the trunk of a stout oak.

"Ribs are the tines of a cage," I recited under my breath, "and the sternum the thing that joins them. The sternum is variable: it can bow inward or out." It can have holes down its middle, tiny pinpricks, or be as smooth as the inside of a solid piece of bark. I brushed my eyelids against him, wondering what shape his had taken.

I examined his hand, which rested on my hip. Undone, it is a jigsaw puzzle, and reassembling it takes concentration and patience. I had been told that you get better with time. The skin on Stjepan's hip was taut and smooth. Although the pelvis is called the "innominate" because there is no other shape in nature that it resembles, the construction had seemed elephantine to me. Here you can discern a man from a woman definitively.

He stirred in his sleep. Soon--sooner than I would have liked--he would return to the base, and I would go back to my Zagreb apartment. I moved my right leg, which had become entangled in his. They had been like that in the ground, all arms and legs, and I shivered. I had not wanted to let that picture intrude while he held me, but it was inevitable, as was every memory of bones.

Stjepan sighed and stretched toward me in his sleep, burrowing his face into my neck. I continued to avoid the faces around the bed, realizing that his ghosts were vying with mine for position.

Months had passed since my return from Bosnia, but at times they dwindled down to moments, and now I looked at Stjepan, wondering if his ghosts looked the same to him. They started to bend their heads over us, as if attempting resuscitation, and I closed my eyes. I found that I could not bring myself to look at them from one day to the next.

A sudden change in breathing told me that he had awakened, and a moment later he wrapped legs and arms around me in a bear hug. He opened his eyes and looked at me solemnly, his breath making a few strands of my hair shiver as the curtains had done. My heart beat faster, and I smiled.

I wondered whether I would recognize him by his bones.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0374207747
• ISBN 13: 9780374207748
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336