Between Gravity and Grace by Maria B Olujic

They found a ledge at 220 meters.

That’s what the French expedition reported last spring, after lowering a mini-submarine into Red Lake, into a gash of blue and rust carved in the karst above Imotski in the Dalmatian hinterland. The footage was grainy, cold. A stone shelf appeared, seemingly suspended in nothing, like a secret step inside a bottomless throat. The divers filmed slowly, methodically, as if trying to make silence confess. The jagged cliffs, the color of copper and red velvet, held the sky. 

Villagers shrugged.

“Did they see the palace?” one woman asked, not with disbelief or sarcasm. I knew the tone. It was defense of the story, of the idea that not everything needs discovering. Some things just are.

We all knew the legend. Gavan, the rich lord who laughed at the poor. Gavanusa, his wife, who mocked the beggar at the gate—the angel in disguise. She kicked bread toward him. The earth opened and swallowed everything: palace, gold, children, their laughter.

Red Lake, they said, was born from that arrogance—a mouth-like crevasse where the ground had spun and sucked it all inside.

When someone asks about the palace, they’re not really asking about ruins.

They’re asking if justice leaves an imprint. If shame has a shape.

The scientists had sonar, pressure readings, depth charts. But the lake has always had its own language, measured not in meters, but in memory. I’ve been listening for that language most of my life. Sometimes it speaks in echoes. Sometimes in stones that refuse to fall. And sometimes, it speaks only when you stop trying to understand it.

That was the day I saw the raft. I stood there, stunned. A raft? It shouldn’t be possible.

Light blue, almost white. Plastic. It drifted in the sun near the cliff’s edge, tethered to something I couldn’t see. At first, I thought it was a trick of the water. I had never seen anything float on Red Lake. Not in all my years of coming here.

As children, we were told nothing could float on Red Lake. That the air above it was cursed, or charged, or claimed. If you threw a stone, it veered. If you shouted, your voice came back wrong. Some said there were spirits—the vile, or fairies, with blond tresses stretching to their ankles who floated just above the surface, waiting for the shamed and the half-forgotten. If you were lucky, you might see them sitting on the lake’s rim, braiding their blonde hair. No color like that existed in our villages. We were all brown-haired.

They don’t pull you under, my grandmother whispered once. They wait for the ones already falling.

I remember peering into the lake the way other children peer under beds or into closets—looking for shimmer, for movement, for the flicker of hair across still water. I imagined their hair silky like corn silk, the kind I used to braid in secret, wading through fields when no one was watching. I never saw the vile. But I believed in them the way you believe in gravity: not as threat, but as truth. I believed her.

Grandmother warned us to stay away from the lake. She said it was dangerous: the cliffs too steep, the water too cold, the rocks too loose. But there was something else in her voice, something quieter and harder to name. That veiled tone women use when they mean more than they say. The kind of warning that wasn’t just about falling, but about being seen. Or shamed. Or sent away.

Later, I understood what she was really saying. Girls had disappeared here, not by accident. Some had thrown themselves in. Pregnancy. Shame. A belly noticed too soon. The wrong boy. The wrong time. The right story told too late.

The whispers were always the same—bacila se u Crveno jezero—she threw herself into the Red Lake. But no one said their names. No one carved a stone. The lake became their grave and their judge.

And it was only ever girls. No one warned the boys. No one told them to stay away.

Maybe when my grandmother told me to keep my distance, she wasn’t warning me about the cliffs. Maybe she was warning me about boys. About consequences that only ever fell one way.

The first time I brought Sveto to the lake, he laughed at the idea of stones that veered.

But he still believed—enough to bring a pile of stones from his own village, each a different size.

Around Red Lake, no stones ever linger; everyone throws them in, testing their luck, their fate.

We each picked one up and threw. Mine bounced twice against the cliff face, then vanished. His spun off-course, as if slapped midair. We waited for the splash. There was none.

We were young then, still shaping a language together, before we knew the shape of each other. The stone’s silence felt like a shared secret, proof that what we were building was real, because it was witnessed by something older than us.

That evening, he said: “Maybe some places hold on to what falls.”

I nodded, but the moment stayed with me. The lake hadn’t returned our stones, but it hadn’t swallowed them either. They simply… disappeared.

Maybe the lake was teaching us something. Not about falling, but about what it means to hover between gravity and grace, between wanting and being.

That visit to the Red Lake with Sveto stayed with me as deeply as the dark streak on the northern cliff wall. Not red like the rust-colored rock, but deeper. Charred.

Some say it’s where a Stuka crashed during the Second World War, a German dive-bomber that never made it out of the canyon. No wreckage was ever found. Just that mark.

My grandmother called it a burn. My uncle said it was a bruise. I didn’t yet know the difference.

Back then, I thought myths explained the lake. But maybe the lake was already explaining the myths.

War leaves no clean edges. It stains. It veers. It buries what it can’t swallow.

By the time the war broke out in 1991, I had already learned how to read the lake. The Romans built roads here. Crusaders passed through on their way to the coast. The Venetians carved trade routes into the cliffs. The Ottomans renamed the land. Napoleon’s men mapped it. The Austro-Hungarians measured it. The fascists took sons. The partisans buried them. The Communists redrew the borders. And through it all, the lake didn’t change. It watched. It waited.

At home, Sveto and I had tried. And failed. More than once. After a string of miscarriages, I began to accept that motherhood might not come. That my body was not a place where life stayed. Still, I held on to the smallest hope. A sign. A reason.

So when the war came, and a new country began to form, I made a choice. If I could not birth a child, then let me help birth a nation. Now it was my turn to give something back—not the child I once longed for, but something else.

Yugoslavia, five decades thick with slogans and surveillance, was splitting open. The Berlin Wall had crumbled. The Iron Curtain lifted. The Soviet Union cracked like old ice. But Yugoslavia bled from the inside out. And still, the world—those same powers who had once invaded these lands in silks, in sabers, in gold-threaded flags—wanted to keep it whole. Their design. Their map. Not ours.

We tell stories of sons fighting battles.

As a child, I knew the story of little Nikola by heart. Nikola, son of Ivan Senjanin, the brave captain of the borderlands, who rode out against the Ottomans and was taken prisoner. It was the vila, the mountain fairy, who came to Nikola and warned: If you do not act, your father will die. Your fate will vanish with his. The boy listened and gathered fighters, crossed forests and rivers, and stormed the Ottoman prison to free the captives. A child with a sword. A son saving the father. The epic poem always ended in glory.

I believed it the way I believed in gravity. The way I believed in the lake.

It was a birthright, passed down in rhyme and rhythm of ten-syllable lines shaped for the ear, not the page. Long before anyone in our village could read or write, we remembered. The stories lived in breath and beat, in mouths that sang and ears that kept the tune.

Those songs taught us what courage looked like: a boy on a horse, a sword drawn. But no one sang of daughters. There was no meter for what we were called to do.

By the time the war came to us, the prison wasn’t Ottoman. It was Yugoslavia itself—tamnica naroda, the prison of nations. I had no sword. No vila came to me. But I stepped forward anyway.

Not as a soldier, but as a diplomat. Not with a rifle, but with my body, my language, my allegiance to something older than flags. The lake watched, silent as ever.

I didn’t know then how tightly the old power clings. Not just to uniforms and slogans, but to the people inside them. The same men who straightened our pioneer caps now issued decrees. Same posture, different emblems.

A Croatian friend once said: “There’s no frikin’ way we’ll get rid of them without steel push brooms.”

He was right. The system didn’t collapse—it clung, like cicak, the seed that looks like a snail’s shell. Small, beautiful, impossible to shake off. They say cicak keeps its grip even after fire.

The lake watched this war too. Maybe it knew we were all still trying to throw stones and hearing nothing back.

The day the U.S. delegation was scheduled to visit—from their Consulate, not yet an Embassy—I realized the bathroom across from my office hadn’t been cleaned in decades. It had become a kind of storage room. Not just old, but filthy. Grime on the faucet, water stains, cobwebs hanging like unraveling gray tresses.

We were still waiting to be recognized as a nation. But how do you show readiness for statehood when even the toilet isn’t a toilet?

I asked the cleaner to tidy it up. She shrugged. “No supplies.”

So I turned to my secretary—young Kolinda, fresh from university, still learning how to carry folders and silence at the same time. I handed some cash. “Go. Bleach. Sponges. A broom if they have one.”

She returned triumphant, rustling plastic bag in hand.

Years later, she became Croatia’s first female president. But that day, she was my runner, my witness, my accomplice in bleaching the bathroom of a country still unrecognized—even as it stained everything we touched.

The cobwebs caught my wrists like lace. I wiped. I scrubbed. I dripped bleach across my sleeves. From below, I must have looked like a contradiction: Chanel skirt, bleach-streaked sleeves, half-librarian, half-custodian, perched between statehood and mildew.

That’s when the doorman burst in—Slobodan, of all names—red-faced and horrified.

“Dr. Olujic!” he cried. “That is not your work!”

I didn’t look down. I just kept scrubbing.

But part of me wanted to shout: 

Then whose work is it? Whose hands touch what everyone pretends not to see?

The war spread to Bosnia. And then came the women.

Silent. Swollen. Shattered.

Pregnant not with promise, but with violation. Raped in war camps, in schools-turned-prisons, in forests no one dared name. They didn’t want the enemy’s child. They wanted erasure. They wanted reversal.

I saw them and saw myself—our losses not the same but mirrored. They had been forced into motherhood. I had been denied it. We stood on opposite sides of the same wound. And none of it felt accidental.

One of them had come from Omarska Concentration Camp, the same place where Roy Gutman’s Newsweek cover story showed emaciated men behind barbed wire. But no one saw the women—those held in the “White House,” within the same courtyard. Reporters didn’t look for them. No one expected them to be prisoners. Or the keepers of epic song.

She spoke with lilting cadence, as if reciting poetry. Eyes not averted and hands moving with elongated fingers in a way that oozed of intelligence. 

I brought her to Imotski, to offer a pause, a view of something wider than grief.

We sat on the stone rim above Red Lake in silence. Our hands touched—lightly, briefly—the body attuned to another’s suffering. 

Nothing was said. But the stillness between us held.

Sometimes healing isn’t in speaking. It’s in being quiet beside someone who survived.

Years passed. When I returned alone to Imotski, I walked back to the rim where we once threw stones and waited for the lake to answer. I looked for the red and black streak of the Stuka that crashed in the war. I looked for vile. I listened for echoes of my grandmother’s warnings.

The lake was still—as if waiting to exhale. No shimmer. No gossamer hair.

And then I saw it: the raft. Pale. Ordinary. Floating where nothing should.

At first, I thought it was a trick of the light—some mirage, a fata morgana. I said nothing to my neighbors, lest they think my eyes were playing games. But the next day it was in the news: a French expedition. The raft had belonged to them. No wonder it looked like something from whitewater—designed for violence, dropped into stillness.

I wanted to ask it: What did you have to forget to stay afloat?

Because some things never land. Some stories, like stones, fall sideways. 

Some voices are so quiet, you only hear them when you stop listening.
The lake remembers them.

Maria B. Olujic, Ph.D., is an anthropologist and writer who served as Deputy Minister of Science and Technology in wartime Croatia during the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. Her work appears in Brevity, 100 Word Story, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Panorama, Catamaran, Sky Island Journal, Plant-Human Quarterly, Beyond Words Magazine, and Penstricken. She explores memory and gendered violence, bridging personal and political histories shaped by diaspora, dislocation, and survival. Her memoir, Fields of Lavender, Rivers of Fire: A Memoir of War, Womanhood, and Bearing Witness, is currently under editorial review. She divides her time between California and Croatia. www.mariaolujic.com   

4 November 2026