Before I Can Bury You

Chapter 1: Room 214

Lejla Delić met Dragan Petrović on a gray Monday in October, nineteen days after a clot no bigger than a grain of rice had closed an artery on the left side of his brain.

He was sitting by the window of room 214 at Southside Rehabilitation Hospital when she knocked. He was a big man, broad through the chest, with heavy shoulders that had spent a lifetime carrying things, but the stroke had pulled his whole right side down. His right arm rested on a foam tray clipped to the wheelchair. His right hand lay curled on it, still as an empty glove. His hair was white and thick and combed straight back, and he wore a blue flannel shirt with creases ironed sharp down both sleeves.

Someone loved him enough to iron his shirts. Lejla always noticed that first about a new patient: who had dressed him, and how carefully.

The someone was standing beside the wheelchair with a hand on his good shoulder. She was in her late thirties, in navy scrubs and white clogs, with dark hair pulled into a knot that was coming loose. Her badge was from the big teaching hospital in the Central West End. Under her name it said ICU.

"You're the speech therapist," the woman said. It was not a question. She looked like someone who had been waiting a long time and had decided to be polite about it.

"Lejla Delić. I'll be working with your father on speech and swallowing." Lejla held out her hand. "You must be Jelena."

"Jelena Petrović." Her grip was quick and firm. "And that's Nikola."

Lejla had not seen the boy. He was folded into the chair in the corner with a backpack on his knees and a tablet held up in front of his face like a shield. He was nine, according to the family notes in the chart, with his mother's dark hair and a cowlick at the crown. He lowered the tablet an inch and looked at her over it.

"Hi, Nikola," Lejla said.

He raised the tablet again.

"He's shy now," Jelena said. "He wasn't before."

Before. Lejla heard that word every day in this building. Before the accident, before the fall, before the stroke. Families split their lives into two halves and stood at the line between them, waiting for someone to tell them which half they would get to live in.

She pulled a stool over and sat so that her face was level with Dragan's. She had read his chart that morning. Sixty-one years old. Retired long-haul trucker. Left middle cerebral artery stroke. Right-sided weakness. Global aphasia. Under social history, the case manager had written: Lives with daughter and grandson in Affton. Widower. Sings in church choir. Originally from Bosnia. Speaks Serbian and English.

She had noticed the name when she read it, the way every Bosnian in St. Louis noticed names. Petrović. A Serb name. She had treated Serbs before, and Croats, and Bosnians like herself, and once a Kosovar Albanian who had cursed her fluently in four languages. In this building they were all people whose words had been stolen. She had noticed the name and set it aside, the way she had learned to set many things aside.

"Gospodine Petroviću," she said, in the language they shared. "Ja sam Lejla. Pomoći ću vam da opet pričate."

Mr. Petrović. I'm Lejla. I'm going to help you talk again.

His eyes moved to her face. They were pale gray, the whites threaded with red, and they held hers with a kind of hunger. He understood something. She could see it land. His mouth opened. The left side moved; the right side hung slack.

"Da," he said. "Da. Da. Da-da-da."

"Good," Lejla said gently. "That's good."

But he was not finished. She watched the muscles in his throat work. His left hand lifted from the armrest and pointed past her, at the corner of the room where the boy sat behind his tablet.

"Ni," Dragan said. "Ni. Nnn. Da. Da."

His face crumpled. It happened all at once, the way it does with stroke patients, when the part of the brain that holds back tears has been damaged along with the part that makes words. His chin shook. Tears ran into the white stubble on his cheeks. He made a low sound, half a word and half a sob, and pointed again at the corner.

The tablet hit the floor. Nikola was out of the chair and through the door before anyone could stop him.

"Nikola!" Jelena called. Then, to Lejla, "Sorry. I'm sorry." She went after her son.

Lejla stayed. She took a tissue from the box on the tray and offered it to Dragan, and when his left hand fumbled it, she wiped his face for him, the way she had for a hundred patients. He let her. His breath came in shudders. She waited.

"It's all right," she said in Serbian. "It's very hard. I know."

He looked at her with those wet gray eyes, and for a moment she had the odd feeling that he was trying to tell her something that had nothing to do with his grandson.

Then it passed, and he was a tired old man in an ironed shirt, and she began the assessment.

It took forty minutes. She asked him to point to the cup, and he pointed to the window. She asked him to close his eyes, and he looked at her, waiting. She held up a pen and asked what it was, and he said, "Da," and then "Da-da," and shook his head. She asked him to count from one to ten, and he got as far as "jedan" before the word fell apart in his mouth. He could follow a few simple commands if she showed him with a gesture. He could not repeat a single word after her. When she put a pencil in his left hand and asked him to write his name, he made a shaky D, then a line that wandered off the page, then put the pencil down and turned his face to the window.

Global aphasia. The chart had not lied.

Jelena was waiting in the hallway when Lejla came out. Nikola sat on a bench by the elevators with his hood up, kicking the floor.

"How bad is it?" Jelena asked. "Tell me straight. I work in an ICU. I don't need it softened."

"It's significant," Lejla said. "He has damage to the areas that produce language and some of the areas that understand it. Right now he understands part of what he hears, especially if it's simple and he can see your face. He can't get words out. You've seen that."

"Will he get them back?"

"Some. I can't promise how much. The first months matter most. His brain is trying to rewire itself, and we're going to help it."

Jelena nodded. She looked down the hall at her son. When she spoke again, her voice was lower.

"He taught Nikola to ride a bike. In the church parking lot, after liturgy. He taught him all the old songs. Nikola's dad isn't in the picture, so my father is—" She stopped. "Every time Dad tries to say his name, he starts crying, and Nikola runs. You saw. He's nine. He thinks he's doing something wrong. He thinks Deda is crying because of him."

"He isn't," Lejla said. "It's called emotional lability. It's the stroke, not the boy."

"I know. I've explained it. It doesn't matter to a nine-year-old." Jelena pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and dropped them. "Please. I'm not asking for a miracle. Just give him enough to say his grandson's name without falling apart. Give him back his voice."

Lejla had heard that request, in some form, from nearly every family she had worked with. It never got easier to hear.

"There's an approach I want to try," she said. "It's called melodic intonation therapy. Language mostly lives on the left side of the brain, where his stroke was. Music lives on both sides. A lot of people who can't speak can still sing. We use the singing to sneak the words out."

Jelena looked at her for a long moment. "He's sung in the choir at Holy Trinity for twenty years. Bass."

"Then that's where we start."

The second session went the way second sessions usually go: slowly. She held his left hand and tapped it on the tray, once for each syllable, and sang short phrases on two notes, one high and one low. "Do-bar dan." Good day. "Vo-da." Water. He watched her mouth. He hummed with her, a deep, rough hum she could feel through the tray under their hands. On the fourth try he got "voda" out on the two notes, clear and whole, and looked so startled that she laughed.

"Yes," she said. "You did that."

He tried again and lost it. But he had done it once. Once was a door.

That evening she drove home along Gravois Avenue, past the bakeries with trays of burek in their windows and the cafés where old men sat over tiny cups of coffee and argued about soccer. The neighborhood around the old Bevo Mill had filled with Bosnians in the nineties, when the city took in tens of thousands of refugees, and it had never emptied. You could buy ćevapi and Turkish coffee in copper pots. You could hear the language at every bus stop. And you could sit in any of those cafés for a hundred years and never hear anyone talk about the war.

Lejla knew the war the way you know a house you lived in as a small child: in pieces, and from a low height.

She had been seven in the summer of 1992, when the soldiers came to Kozarac. She remembered smoke over the hills. She remembered her father, Hasan, crouching in front of her in the yard, with grease from his garage still under his fingernails, telling her to be good for her mother. She remembered men being marched down the road with their hands on their heads. She did not remember the moment he was taken. Her mother said that was a mercy.

Hasan Delić had been taken to the Kamenica tile works, a factory outside Prijedor that Serb forces had turned into a camp. Her mother's younger brother, Faruk Husić, nineteen that summer, was taken there too. Faruk came out in the autumn, starved down to bone. Hasan did not. One rainy night in late July, Hasan was among the men loaded onto a white bus and driven away. His remains had never been found.

In 1993, when Lejla was eight, she and her mother left Bosnia on a convoy, and Faruk followed a few months later. There had been a refugee center in Germany, a gray apartment block, and then an airplane and a city on a brown river where the summers were hotter than anything she had imagined. Her mother cleaned offices at night. Faruk worked in a warehouse, learned English faster than any of them, and walked Lejla to school every morning. When she was in college, he flew to The Hague and testified against the commander of the Kamenica camp, and the Bosnians of St. Louis began to say his name the way they said the names of saints.

She was thirty-six now. She had a fifteen-year-old daughter, a master's degree, a job she was good at, and a father who existed as a name on a list of the missing.

She did not think about any of that when she walked into room 214 for the third session. She thought about Dragan's vocal range.

He wore a gray flannel shirt this time, ironed. Jelena was on shift, and the room was quiet except for an IV pump beeping next door. Lejla sat beside him and took his left hand.

"Today," she said in Serbian, "I want to find where your voice lives. High or low."

She had planned to sing scales. Instead, without quite deciding to, she began to hum a song.

It was an old sevdah song, one of the slow, aching love songs every Bosnian grandmother knew. It was about a girl who waits on the bank of the Sana River for a young man who rode away in the spring, and who keeps waiting long after the leaves have turned. Lejla's father used to sing it while he worked on engines, his voice coming out from under a car, off-key and happy. It was one of the few things she remembered about him clearly. It was the first song that came when she reached for something old.

She hummed the opening line low, feeling for where his voice might sit.

Dragan's hand jerked in hers.

She looked up. His whole face had changed. His eyes were wide and fixed on something that was not in the room. And then, from somewhere deep in the undamaged half of his brain, he began to sing.

He sang the entire first verse. Every word. His voice was deep and cracked and perfectly in tune, the voice of a man who had sung bass for twenty years. The words came out smooth and whole, the girl and the river and the young man riding away, words he could not have spoken to save his life. Lejla sat frozen, holding his hand, while the song filled the little room.

It was the most remarkable thing she had seen in eleven years of practice. Her heart was pounding. She was already thinking about how to use it, how to build phrases on the melody, how to—

He reached the end of the verse and did not stop. He held the melody, the same slow, falling line, and sang two more words that were not in the song.

"Autobus," he sang. "Lista."

The bus. The list.

His hand was gripping hers hard enough to hurt.

Lejla knew that song from her father's garage. She also knew it from somewhere else: from a stack of printed pages in a box under her bed, a transcript she had read so many times the corners had gone soft. In his testimony at The Hague, her uncle Faruk had described the loudspeaker at the Kamenica tile works. The guards played music over it at night, he said. Always the same song. They played it every night before the white bus came.

This song.

Dragan stopped singing. He let go of her hand. His gray eyes filled with tears, and he turned his face to the window and did not look at her again for the rest of the hour.