Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris

Author:Priscilla Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duckworth

The tree uses up all of Zora’s paint. She slits open the metallic tubes with a sharp kitchen knife and Una scrapes out every last drop of pigment. Zora gathers up the tubes like discarded fruit skins and pushes them together, working with her hands, till she forms a sculpture of the human form, reminiscent of a Giacometti statue.

Una watches her, sitting on the sofa, thumb in her mouth.

‘Cool,’ she says. ‘Where did you learn to do that?

‘I don’t know. It just came to me,’ Zora says. Then, after some thought, she adds, ‘Maybe I learnt in Paris. I studied sculpture there a long time ago.’

‘Paris.’ Una turns the name over in her mouth as if savouring a strawberry.

Zora, continuing to work on the figure, tells Una about her Paris days. She tells Una how she could have settled there – or in Belgrade – but Bosnia’s mountains and rivers always called her back.

‘I’ll take you to my studio when this is over,’ she says.

And she describes her studio in great detail, picturing Una in the window seat below the middle window, where Dubravka used to sit, doing her homework and painting as a child. Her daughter used to suck her thumb too, dark fringe falling into her eyes.

She rests the sexless human form made from spent paint tubes against the wall, as if it were leaning against the trunk.

They stare at it for a moment. Una shifts on the sofa and flicks some paint from her knee. She has grown quiet again these last afternoons, as the last of the paint runs out.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Una says.

‘We’ll think of something.’

Zora lifts her up and squeezes her. She’s certainly getting thin. They all are. Zora realises she’s grown very attached to this little girl, who reminds her so much of her own daughter when she was the same age.

Opposite Zora’s flat on the eighth floor, a front door hangs open, seemingly left swinging in the occupants’ haste to leave. The old Serb couple, whose place it was, fled in April and the following month a family of Muslim refugees, all female, from a mountain village somewhere in Eastern Bosnia, moved in. Frightened of the city, they didn’t know how to negotiate the streets. They found living so high off the ground unnatural, and spent most of their time squabbling in the stairwells of the lower floors. Then at the beginning of August, the whole extended family – aunts, grandmothers, sisters and cousins – simply vanished overnight, leaving the flat ghostly and echoing again.

Glancing uneasily at the empty flat, Zora brings Samir a copy of Oslobođenje. The front page carries the news that Sarajevo’s death toll has passed six thousand. The death notices take up half of the paper, which has shrunk to just six densely printed pages. Zora watches Samir scan the four narrow columns on each page, a cigarette held loosely between his lips. Passport-style photos of young men about Samir’s age are prevalent, though there are many middle-aged men and women, children and elderly people too.

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