July, 07 | TALes

Vesna Vulovic

Jan. 26, 1972: Twenty-two year-old Vesna Vulovic was a flight attendant on Yugoslav Airlines DC-9 en route from Stockholm to Belgrade. A bomb, planted by Croatian terrorists, exploded onboard when the aircraft was at 33,330 feet. Vulovic was in the tail section that fell to Earth. It landed at just the right angle on a slope of snow-covered mountains.

A young man named Alan is sitting on a bench in a park. He is transfixed by the mist, which casts sparkles in the dewy grass. It is silent and he is alone. He has been there for quite some time. To him, there is great importance in being here. Many hours have passed, yet he waits. There are no feelings of impatience—the park is blurred by his unfocused eyes.

Sitting, for a moment he finds himself lost, moving forward, ever looking, never lost, in a dream. He rests in that moment, on this bluish Monday morning. Piercing, the mist returns beams of light from a pond. Fowl cry songs cloven in a background of city noise. The shadows of passersby stretch long into their paths and few of these moments seem to be real. He is terribly relaxed, he is sleeping, calm, he is flying, calm, he is free from all which is virulent.

Today is to be special and he wonders briefly why? It seems not to matter, so he forgets. He has long ago grown weary of his thoughts and all their weight. All seems plausible, yet he has to wonder...

Slowly, she wheels up to him. Her chair maneuvers next to his bench. Once again there is a silence that lasts for quite a while. Ducks float this way and that. Children climb iron bars and shuffle through padded sand. The park smells like a pond and the sky is the size of a dream.

"Do you know my name?"

"Yes, you are Vesna, Vesna Vulovic."

She seems much older than he had imagined. With little force, she laughs out-loud, betraying a girlish freedom.

"Yes, I knew you would remember me. Your fascination has grown over the years,” she says solemnly. “Alan, do you know why I’m here?"

"No."

"Alan, I was drinking my coffee—I was waiting in the terminal for the pilot. As I often did, I looked around the terminal at the various travelers. People were saying their good-byes; someone’s child was lost in her tears. And there, on that fateful day, completely unaware of the world that moved around him, was a young man both clumsy in dress and lost in his stride. His hands nervously clutched a bouquet of white daisies. I was hypnotized in his presence; I wondered, what was his destination? Was he off to meet someone, a girl, the love of his life, his mother? It was fun to speculate your purpose. You seemed to walk with a sense of future. You had somewhere to be and a reason to be here. I drank my coffee, just thinking about that boy with a future. I was mesmerized; you and me and that moment in time.

’Vesna, are you ready?,’ I heard the pilot say.

And then Alan, you were gone. Gone,just another episode in my life. I was never to see or think of you again and that is how it should have been."

He thinks about this for a moment. Ideas of prominence appear in his head as he searches for the importance in her words. A jogger runs by, his padded feet in rhythm and force. The young man tries to make a connection, to give her memories a time.

"As you know Alan, I was to be married and I loved him very much. He was an exciting man of character and thought. I lived for him and was idealistic. I was twenty-two—just twenty-two years young. My mind was filled with every wedding of my small village. I worked for that dress and craved its white lace with every breath. To have a husband and a farm was my dream, to sing of my family and be there for my children’s little ones."

This next pause is quite uncomfortable. He wishes to be elsewhere. The sun rests on his hair like a pat on the head. How he wishes to leave. He wants her to explain, yet in the same moment he wishes to run and never hear how this story ends—but his feet have turned to rubber, his knees to jelly. His stomach begins to churn, as her story continues.

"When the plane exploded we were en route from Stockholm to Belgrade. I was later told we were at 30,000 feet or more. It was a terrible noise; my ears rang through a deafening silence. I grabbed hold of a seat. I... Alan, it was terrible. The wind was deafening and when the fragment of the hull would swing round, a sadistic whistle would shake the security to which I clung. I was to die soon and there was nothing else.”

"Society tells us about this moment. Some morbid fascination with what you should do and what you should think. In these awful moments, I reached for that security. The one thing I could have on my way down. Down to the end. My end. It was the end of my story; the end of my life. So I made a choice to think about my husband as I fell. To think about how he loved me and the way he held me. I wanted to feel his arms around me and the security that would bring."

"But, here is where life plays its cruel little joke. I spent two years with my husband to be. I loved him with all my heart, yet all I could think about was that boy with the hurried walk. Those dreadful moments—I would try to force the image of you out of my head. I wished to think about my love, to think about my mother, to think about my cat. There you were, walking, in a hurry and completely unaware of my existence. For those minutes this went on. YOU should not have been there. YOU were not even born! You took from me the most precious of moments. Do you understand?"

Silence.

"Alan, all these years I’ve wanted to meet you. I’ve wanted to see who is the person who took the most precious of moments from me. I can see now that you are just a man like any other. When you are sick, you cough and when you sleep, you dream. You are nothing special. You’re just like anyone else. Alan, I advise you to never walk with a purpose again."

And with that, Vesna put her frail hands on the wheels of her chair and slowly began to roll herself away.

Recommend this page to a friend