In The Name Of Love

Chapter 15

His emotions were so brittle that I didn't dare ask what he needed to do when he was still driving. He was close to losing it. We stopped off somewhere and Mircea went into a shop coming out a moment later with a bunches of flowers.

I got it after that.

He hadn't been back to the mass grave since the end of the war. He hadn't gone to the section of the memorial park where his family was buried even then. He hadn't been able to face it.

I let him drive in silence.

The mass graves were in what had once been the city's largest park. There were trees and there was still a play park in one corner, I wasn't sure why. There was still an ice cream and drinks kiosk in the middle and it still sold refreshments to the people who visited. Schools came over from all over the country to pay respect to the dead here in the city where the worst of the fighting was after the borders. There was a Freedom Day service here every year.

I knew what mass graves meant in theory, but seeing the place where they were sent chills down my spine. I knew that under those sectioned off meadows were bodies reverently piled on top of one another, some were twenty people deep or so I'd heard. Each grave had a basic fence around it, just wooden beams supported on spaced out legs. Wildlife had been allowed to take over and flowers were in bloom, there were butterflies and birds flying around. The people had wanted their dead to not be remembered in sad sombreness, but as people who had been full of life, and so they'd been allowed to give life back to their home in the most beautiful way I could think of.

Mircea parked his car at the side of the road and another one pulled up right behind us. A couple of guards got out of it. Mircea gave them a bunch of flowers each. They looked at him understanding that he needed time and space to do this alone. They took the flowers gratefully and walked through the gates of the cemetery together. I crossed over to my boyfriend and held his hand.

"I originally wanted to come here alone," he whispered. "I thought I had to do it alone."

"You don't have to do anything alone."

He nodded and walked in.

He took his time getting to the grave where the people executed by the Bulgarians was. Because it had important people in it, leaders of the rebel forces, ministers of the former government, Romanian army leaders, it was in the middle. Pretty much his whole family was in that grave. It was one of the newest ones. The Bulgarian leaders had kept the bodies of the people they executed, they'd preserved the bodies perfectly behind glass and kept them on display in the palace, had lined the corridor to the justice room with them so that anyone who was unlucky enough to go in there saw the punishment they were facing.             

Now in the ground they were very slowly decomposing, the natural world struggling to break the bodies down because of the preservation process. But this year flowers were beginning to take root and turn the soil green.

The huge memorial in front of the grave was the only headstone the dead got. It listed all of their names, royalty mixed in with military and rebels. They'd been listed in the order they were killed. There was no special decoration, no special colours just because leaders were buried here. They had fought the same war as their people; they were buried and remembered in exactly the same way.

Mircea traced his fingers across a few names.

"I didn't know most of them that well," he said sadly. "But as soon as they were gone I realised how much I love them all. How... important they are to me."

He said a prayer, lay a bunch of flowers with some of the others that had been left and then walked away. His father, brother and sister were in one of the oldest graves being amongst people who died in the first bombings. The grave was in a far corner and we passed many mourners on the way. None of them pointed out to us or waved. None of them got excited. They just smiled sadly, but with encouragement that was only found amongst solidarity. I felt a bit weepy just because they all looked so sad. I couldn't cry though.