The Color of Watermelon

I wrote down this simple verse listening to a girl at a refugee camp near Tirana. Honestly, I had expected to find children subdued and scared. They were not. At first I thought that they looked happy, but then I realized that they were excited, hyperactive as psychologists put it.

Rugova's red-black scarf
Is our banner of rebellion

I was glad to hear that it is best to sing about Rugova the Peacemaker than men with machine guns. But every other children's drawing showed the acronym for the Kosovo Liberation Army... There were other drawings. Sevgije, 7, drew gray tanks and a green Serbian militiaman. Antigona, 10, drew spots of blood on the grass, a dead Kosovar and his hat some distance from the body. Children and I sat in a tent and they continued reciting poems.

I will turn into a bullet
And jump to meet you,
I'll attack you like a dragon
And will fire two grenades...

I spoke to the camp psychologist, a Kosovar medical student. What did he think of the children's condition? He said they slept fitfully and became nervous at hearing a helicopter approach. They often kept to themselves. "We are doing our best to make them forget their horrible experiences," he said. At Kukes, I noticed that psychoanalysts asked children to relate their stories, even write compositions, for in this way children can assume an onlooker's attitude toward their problems, turning into narrators rather than victims. I told this to the Kosovo student. The young man was surprised. He thought he deserved every praise for being so humane. I thought he was just a big kid after all. Looking at children's drawings and listening to their recitals, I remembered Disanka Maximovic's poems. I used to translate them when a young man. Particularly the cycle "At a Children's Drawing Exhibit":

What is it? A watermelon?
A watermelon.
How does it taste?
It tastes sweet.
Paint its meat redder
To make it taste still better.

There was a lot of red in every drawing made by the Kosovo children, but it was not the color of watermelon.

Special to The Day from Tirana