Ascent of Women by Sally Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

She had five grandchildren.
    Eva was a wise woman who knew that her sex didn’t guarantee her safety. She was the child of a widow who had to leave home and find work in another village. She was the niece of an abusive man who tried to force her into an arranged marriage when she was sixteen. But despite all her girlhood experiences, she could never have imagined the horror she’d be subjected to during the brutal conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
    Eva was one of the civil war’s first victims of mass gang rape. The crime committed against her was part of a plan, a cruel adjunct to the campaign known as “ethnic cleansing”—a phrase as foul to language as the act is annihilating to its victims. An estimated twenty thousand to fifty thousand women, mostly in Bosnia and some in Croatia, shared Eva’s fate.
    Historians claim that what happened there was worse than the rapes of opportunity and triumph usually associated with war. This was rape that was organized, visible, ritualistic. It was calculated to scorch the emotional earth of the victim, her family, her community, her ethnic group. In many cases, the victim’s husband, children, cousins and neighbours were forced to watch.In other cases, victims heard the screams of their sisters or daughters or mothers as one after another was dragged away to be raped in another room.
    Eva was canning tomatoes in a little stone pantry at the back of her house when her door splintered open, twelve men rushed in, subdued and blindfolded her. Hissing profanities in her ear, they bullied her out the door and beat her about her legs as she stumbled along a path to a neighbouring house, which an extremist Serbian group known as the White Eagles had moved into just the week before.
    Born of Croatian parents, Eva knew every house in her home village, every garden, the configuration of the town centre, every bend of the creek that flowed around it. Her best friend, Mira (her name has been changed), was Serbian. Along with the other kids, they spent their days chasing geese through the middle of town to the Savak Creek. The game was always the same, the kids shrieking wildly as they chased baby geese, with the big geese in hot pursuit of the kids. Eva became a sprinter of such calibre that she was selected to represent first her village, then her district in regional track meets.
    As a young woman, she fell in love with a man named Bartol Penavic, and on November 17, 1958, they were married. Together they raised three children, saw them married and settled, and in time became grandparents. Life was good.
    The countryside surrounding the village resembles a mural crayoned by children—a clutch of clay-coloured houses here, a barn there. On one side of the village stretches a patchwork of rolling hills and thick oak forest so green and purple and yellow that the colours could have been splashed there by rainbows; on the opposite side is flat black farmland with hedgerows ofvenerable old trees. The town itself is an antique treasure, a three-hundred-year-old tableau of muted colours and softly worn edges—as unlikely a setting for ugliness as could be imagined.
    By the time spring began to blossom in 1991, Croatia had declared its independence from Yugoslavia and there were rumblings of trouble. But no one paid much attention. Eva said, “We’d lived together—Croats and Serbs and Muslims—for fifty years. How could anyone change that?” Bartol had told her, “Now is the time for us. Our children are settled. It’s time for us to enjoy life.” They’d had their share of grief: Eva’s father had been killed during the Second World War, and the uncle who assumed charge of her was appalled that she dared to choose the man she would marry. Bartol’s family saw Eva as a peasant, hardly a match for the son of the biggest landowner in the surrounding villages. Despite the odds against them, their thirty-three-year marriage had been rich with the promise of happily-ever-after.
    Then in