Chapter 10. Your Dams Won't Hold
Your Dams Won’t Hold
The Khmer Rouge held power in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979; during that time almost ninety percent of the country’s artists, including Apsara dancers and their master teachers, were killed. Others had fled the country and were unable to return. Khmer classical dance hung by a thread on the memories and shattered bodies of the scattered survivors.
I closed my book, Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma by Amitav Ghosh, and stared out the airplane window at the rose and saffron colored sunset clouds. The crew was collecting the last of the flight trash, and we were beginning our descent into Pleso Airport. I opened the book again and continued reading. Four years ago almost to this day, in 1988, with food still scarce and electricity erratic, those who had made their way back from their personal hell danced for the first time at a national arts festival in Phnom Penh. Costumes were missing or handmade, the choreographic cannon not quite obtained, yet the populace of the city came to see the troupe, jamming the theater, and everyone cried. From the beginning of the performance to the end. The world they thought was gone had not been taken from them—here it was flickering in front of them like a spark from the past. There were no dams built that could hold the emotion, the tears. According to one eyewitness, ‘You could have sailed out of there in a boat.’
I thought about the contingent of young women passersby, my former compatriots of my New York City block. What did they know about the world, I used to ask, smugly, as if I myself had ever ventured beyond comfort or predictability. They knew quite a bit, I could now guess; they knew about the dams not holding. Their presence in the mustard colored building on 6th Avenue was part of a long painful healing of a wound. As the plane touched down in Zagreb, I had just the vaguest understanding that I was entering one that had just started to bleed.
It was past dinnertime by the time I made my way down to the ground transportation level of the airport, the lights outside sparkling through the dark windows like constellations in the night sky. I was looking for a young man in his early twenties called Barton—whether that was his first or last name, I was uncertain. He would be holding a Time magazine upside down and wearing a red sweater slung over his shoulders. Whether I was told this as a nod to my willingness to make this trek or just a joke on me, I was again not quite certain. I stood to the right of the escalators for about twenty minutes, but saw no one fitting this specific description. The thought struck me that I might just be stranded here without much recourse, and the ill-advisedness of my decisions hit hard at that moment. But then I saw him—there he was—a sturdy blond young man, even with the sweater looking very much like the Sugarfoot cowboy in the western reruns my brothers used to watch on our old black and white TV. He turned out to be a Brit, however, and after some slightly-forced genial conversation over a quick supper in an airport cafe, we made our way out of the terminal, and eventually boarded the night train to Split.
* * *
My first meeting early the next day in Split with Richard Sedlak, who headed up the rescue operation, was brief. He was an attractive man—and would have been more so if he didn’t give off an air of being continuingly irked at everyone wasting his time—with dark chestnut hair and hazel green eyes, strong and fit with admirable posture which I assumed he gained from horseback riding, given his reputation. He handed me an UNHCR* identity card. "Keep this on you at all times. Speak as little as possible if you’re questioned; just show the card."
"Is this real? Is this forged?" I asked.
"Not that you know of.”
“Okay . . . thank you.”
“You’re here,” he continued as if I had not spoken, “we’re here, to make this one very small contribution. We’re not trying to solve this conflict; we’re here to get the Lipik Stud horses back, get them to safety. If you harbor more grandiose visions of yourself, you can leave now. If not, Robin will fill you in and you’ll be bunking with her.”
My operating premise on coming to Split, at least in my mind and I kept this to myself, was that simply joining in this adventure would provide a clue as to the true purpose of my life, a clue quite metaphysical and high-minded, like being given a golden token by the spiritual keeper of the keys type of clue, but it turned out not so. The only thing I could hook onto was a wary but steady small hope for the future, for getting the Lipizzaners out, for making that one thing happen. This steadfastness, I was to discover, was the ballast needed when making an attempt at surviving the onslaught of violence and despair we were about to encounter, more so than the narcissism of starring as the hero in the movie of your own mind. You got up each day, you put one foot forward after the other—each day. You kept an emotional distance from the horrors that penetrated the very fabric of your current existence. You kept an emotional distance from everything and everybody. Otherwise, you’d be lost. Richard embodied this straight ahead thinking more than anyone else, and I began to think of him as the long lost son of Aunt Jean.
* * *
The Lipik Stud stables were shelled and the herd stolen at the end of 1991, early on in the Balkan conflict. Within a few weeks, Richard and his old professor friend from school, Dr. Louis Pfeiffer, who at that time was affiliated with Medicine Nonsectarian, organized a small group of rescuers with the mission of establishing a base in Croatia and trying to locate and return the Lipizzaners. Besides Richard and the Time carrying Barton, there was Robin Cochrane, whose sister had vouched for my animal rescue credentials having met me once or twice in connection with my New York shelter; Galina Novak, a librarian working in her native Split and a master at procuring whatever it was we needed at the moment no matter how outrageous; Dr. Pfeiffer, of course; and then me. A British Jamaican couple, Shirley and Lloyd Williams, ran the office in London. Our official name was Independent Medical Relief Services (IMRS) to blend in with Medicine Nonsectarian and the UNHRC; our first objective was to find out exactly who stole the Lipizzaners and for what purpose, and, most importantly, where they would ultimately be taken. We believed they were headed toward Serbia. Our next steps would be formulated based on what information we could glean.
Barton turned out to be the first name of Barton Wallace; Dr. Pfeiffer turned out to be our resident philosopher as well as an MD; but from day one, despite Louis being the scheme’s originator, Richard was clearly the leader of this assembled crew. I could not have conceived of him as being otherwise. By reputation a brilliant horseman I was continually told, though I had not yet seen him astride anything. Thus his bearing, as I had first guessed, and my initial impression of him held firm: while he might ride with soft hands, he kept a taut rein on everything else. Richard was often criticized behind his back—unfairly, I thought—and even his mannerisms mocked at times. Indeed, the more he deserved kudos, the less inclined people were to give them. This puzzled me, and I often felt like challenging these critics. Over time I would come to realize that people did this in an attempt to steal his drive, appropriate his dominance to place on their own shoulders unearned. To be more like him without the cost. They fancied they would be the one to knock him off stride and step up themselves.
For now we were staying in a hostel in the center of the historic district. In time we would pick up on the stolen horses’ trail and move out with the Cheshire Regiment of the British Army, recently deployed to Bosnia and Croatia, headquartered in Split (thus our base there), and charged with providing armed escort to UNPROFOR** aid convoys. The Regiment was our protection, UN aid delivery was our cover, and we stalked the herd by shadowing the peace-keepers, the UN aid-workers, and the personnel of Medicine Nonsectarian and the International Red Cross, hiding in the interstices of the ambiguous and the never clearly defined. IMRS did provide nominal aid as a rationale for us being allowed to travel along into the dangerous areas of Vitez and Travnik in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the location of the UN central depots. Richard and Louis, in tandem with their local contacts, began to focus on Novi Sad, Serbia as the Lipizzaners’ final destination, and began to devise a plan to track them across Bosnia and Herzegovina into northern Serbia, get them out and over the border to Hungary, and then fly them to safety.
We depended on these local contacts, who were the actual saviors of the Lipik Lipizzaners, rather than our group stepping in to save the day. They were also combatants whether they chose the formality of that role or not, enmeshed in the very fabric of the conflict, and thus more identifiable and expendable. They had their loved ones to worry about. Our foreignness allowed us to blend in with the international troops, to drop in and leap out with less consequence, while they were suspended in their strife ridden web. And with no false modesty, we didn’t consider ourselves brave for trying to save a few horses. Some of us still held on to the tatters of the normal world, and in such a world, these animals would not be shelled or starved. In the normal world, it is human nature to pull the drowning up from underwater.
And how were we able to travel alongside the troops and medics on the ground? A commonality of purpose, a love of horses, Richard and Louis’ reputation, and money, money, money. But really, our ability to move about under the cloak of UNHCR and to undertake our operation rested mainly on our understanding of the cover that humanitarian aid gave us, of how this aid and the relief efforts surrounding it were given great leeway in the absence of international political will. Whenever a political decision by the international community was called for, and the parties involved balked, an announcement of increased aid was made in its stead in order to prove something was indeed being done. In the absence of any visible political decision or action taken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, international relief was the only moving object going forward, and we rode on that.
Even so, humanitarian aid itself was oftentimes seen as suspect, blue helmets and white armored vehicles notwithstanding, and we operated as chimeras within a chimera. It made for uncertain footing. It was impossible not to end up at some point on the wrong side, in the wrong place; here everyone was an enemy combatant, as Louis would say, horses included. And so very quickly, the concept of normality was ripped away. Violence on a level now occurring just kilometers from us was not new given the history of the world, obviously, but it was new to me. Still operating on the outskirts of the atrocities, we only were made aware of them by third parties and did not yet have to confront them directly, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the horrors recounted to us from returning army patrols, although I believed the soldiers kept the most nightmarish details to themselves, festering in the darker recesses of their minds. Driving around with Louis in the Land Rover with UN insignia, I felt like an actor who had no business being here. I kept asking myself, hadn’t this movie already been made? It had been made many times over. Starving horses, selling them for money, but more so for purposes of destroying what is beautiful; executing a dancer as a political act, shooting her in the head at point blank range. Beauty, simply by its existence, invariably attracted forces bent on its destruction. The world labors under this dynamic and is ultimately weakened by it. Why did we have to save ourselves from ourselves over and over again?
The most frightening thing revealed to me during this dangerous excursion I had naively and, truth be told, unthinkingly enlisted in, was the absence of parameters: you had no idea how far the expanding terror could go, you just knew it would expand further. I tried to conceive of a person’s world annihilated—my world, perhaps—not to mention entire families or villages, then multiplying that horror a hundred or a thousandfold. I often thought if all the pain were made palpable—like those tears of joy in that sweltering Phnom Penh auditorium back in 1988—if this emotion too were to turn to water, it would overflow the riverbanks and flood the streets and surge through the houses of each village; it would fill every glass and vase and pot and pan in every home. We would drown in it. The confused might think they were somehow safe, but the floods were coming, and the dams weren’t holding.
*Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
**United Nations Protection Force for the Former Yugoslavia
Image: What we know. Source: Photograph by Ᾱn Kassel, edited by J. Weigley