Grandma Marija wasn’t as lucky. When the soldier got to her, I heard some scuffle in the back. I didn’t turn around to look. Like everyone else on the bus, I stared at the space ahead of me. I was terrified they’d remember me and come back for me. “What do you want my papers for? Let go of my arm,” Grandma Marija protested.

“Do what you’re told.”

“Don’t look through my things. You’re rude.”

Her purse fell to the ground. A bottle of medication slipped out and rolled under a nearby passenger seat. The soldier dragged her out of the bus. I hoped she’d be insane enough not to remember me or mention my name. She passed by my seat. She did not point me out. I breathed out a sigh of relief. They took her suitcase out of the luggage compartment. Through the window I watched her arguing with the soldiers on the roadside. Grandma Marija was still wearing the same black skirt and blouse I’d seen her in days earlier. There were large food stains on her clothes. The soldiers opened her luggage. They threw clothes and a set of silver knives and forks onto the pavement. They pointed at the silverware and asked Grandma Marija about it. I wondered if I was supposed to intervene. What was my duty? Should I run out and plead with the soldiers to leave her alone? What could I possibly do to sway things in our favor? I was a teenager of ambiguous ethnic loyalties and she was a semi-crazed old woman. My legs were glued to my seat. My mouth was frozen. I said nothing. I did not move. The other passengers turned their heads to the Vrbas river across the street, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening to Grandma Marija right in front of their noses. The bus was completely silent.

I tried to push these feelings aside… But a lingering sadness remained, and a vague sense of duty unfulfilled. Years later I have not shaken it off. My silence on the bus still haunts me.

After a while a soldier waved to our driver. The driver turned on the engine. We drove off. My confusion intensified. Why didn’t they let her board the bus again with the rest of us? What was going to happen to her now? I did not dare ask anyone. I watched Grandma Marija stay behind, the contents from her suitcase strewn around. The soldiers were sternly combing through the items. She looked so sad and forlorn. As we moved ahead, her white hair and wild, gray eyes became just a speck in the distance. At the next curving in the road she disappeared from view altogether.

That was the last time I saw Grandma Marija. Nobody found out what happened to her after the bus left. Grandma Marija eventually came back to our town and resumed her daily Mexican soap opera habit. People said she sometimes dressed up in her Sunday church suit and feather hat and shouted at people on the sidewalk. “The bishop is coming to grant me a special visit. He’s coming,” she’d announce from the balcony, looking out for the bishop with Grandpa Ante’s old binoculars. She did not go indoors even if the rains poured or the sharp fall winds blew. She stayed there soaked and freezing, until the neighbor came over and lured her indoors with false promises of new episodes of her favorite shows. After she returned to our town, Grandma Marija told some women in the neighborhood that she’d been raped by Serb soldiers. She would announce this unexpectedly, while the women were watching television or going for a walk and talking about something completely unrelated and ordinary. Nobody knew for sure if this claim was true or a lunatic manifestation of a madwoman. She died a few years later in a mental asylum.

When I lost sight of Grandma Marija on the bus that day, a massive wave of guilt and sorrow overcame me. I tried to push these feelings aside and think about my parents who were waiting for me across the border. But a lingering sadness remained, and a vague sense of duty unfulfilled. Years later I have not shaken it off. My silence on the bus still haunts me. Sometimes I look at an old photograph of me posing with Grandma Marija and Grandpa Ante in front of our town’s Center of Culture. The photo was taken many years ago, a snapshot of a saner time. In this picture the two of them had few wrinkles, the Center of Culture hadn’t been destroyed yet in a bombing raid, and I was just a happy little girl with pigtails, my conscience unburdened by the murky past.