Not a Fairy Tale But… Fourth Chapter, First Story: War and Cancer

25 May Not a Fairy Tale But… Fourth Chapter, First Story: War and Cancer

“War and Cancer“
First Story of the May Monthly Chapter
Written by Aleksandra Panić
Voiceover by Marija Drndić

April 2026. At the Institute of Oncology, a long corridor ending in a closed window overlooking the hospital’s inner courtyard can accommodate about twenty women. Today, there are three times as many in front of the office where breast cancer patients come for their regular check-ups. I take a broken chair, so the good ones are left for the women who came in pain. In my third hour of waiting for my mother’s doctor, I start recycling the air I exhale. In a cotton tote bag from the last writers’ conference, I carry the latest scans of my mother’s abdomen, confirming the movement of metastases from her thoracic vertebrae to her pelvis and liver.

Around me are women of all ages, younger and older than me. Most are here for themselves, and most are alone. A few of us wait instead of a mother, sister, or daughter. We are all quiet, united by silence — not necessarily in a struggle for life, but for dignity. Anne Boyer[1], in The Undying, quotes the words of her surgeon, a breast specialist: the main risk factor for breast cancer is having breasts. In this waiting room, under the white neon light that doesn’t forgive exhaustion, a temporary and fragile community of women seems united by that shared risk factor. A community of women who divide their lives into before and after the day they were handed (on a white piece of paper in some foreign language) a draft notice for war: neoplasma malignum mammae. Or, in plain language, breast cancer. As I write this, I pause at the fact that the words war and cancer found themselves so easily in the same sentence. In Serbian: rat and rak. Only now do I realize I learned their meanings the same summer of 1991.

Growing up, I spent my summer vacations with my grandparents at their summer house near Novi Bečej, right on the banks of the Tisa River. I had a friend there, Simonida, who was two years older than me. One day she came to play, sad because of the news that her grandmother had cancer. Cancer spreads through the body, she explained to me, eating away at the organs; when it eats the one we can’t live without, it’s over. Can they take it out? I asked her. If it’s small, yes, Simonida explained. But her grandmother’s had already grown too big. At nine years old, I imagined a creature from horror movies digging through our insides with pincers and biting off pieces of lungs, intestines, and hearts.

That same evening, my brother and I were playing in the bedroom while my grandparents, with their dinner on trays, watched the evening news. Outside, the rays from the setting sun were still entangled through the greens of my willow and my grandfather’s walnut tree. My grandmother told us to be a little quieter, the news was important. Curious, I stopped playing to listen to the woman on television. I understood almost nothing. It has begun, my grandfather said. We need to hide Mića, my grandmother said. I didn’t know what had begun, nor who my dad needed to be hidden from, but I decided to stay quiet that evening. The red creature with pincers — irreversibly biting off Simonida’s grandmother’s organs. That was enough for me.

In the following days, I learned new words and phrases: Declaration of Independence, armed conflicts, mobilization, liberation. I didn’t understand geography, I didn’t understand history, I didn’t understand who was freeing whom, or why this liberation required a rifle, a truck, a draft notice, the hiding of men in houses and summer cottages. But I quickly understood the mood. I understood when adults spoke in code. When they cautiously pronounced someone’s name. When the TV volume was higher than usual. When something important happened, but it wasn’t for my ears. For me, the word war was primarily a change in the temperature of our family language.

The life I had known until then was forever divided into before and after. And although the word war grew louder, in our house, paradoxically, it was always spoken in a whisper. But I was more afraid of the other one — the one with the power to stealthily spread through our insides. War and cancer. Both taught me the shape of silence.

Soon after, the silence in our house would become organized. My mother and grandmother would turn our everyday life into a small crisis center. And I would get my first political assignment: to learn when to lie, and when to keep quiet.

During the fall and winter of 1991, my mother and grandmother gave me a set of instructions. If anyone asked where my father was, I should say he was on a business trip. If a stranger called asking for him, I should say he wasn’t there. If on my way home from school, I saw men in uniform, I should hurry home and tell my mother or grandmother immediately. I should not talk to anyone except the neighbors we knew well. And never, ever answer questions about my father.

During those months, the main topic of the adults’ evening conversations was draft notices: first they arrived in the mailbox, then came the phone calls, and then, sometimes, a uniformed person at the door. In the evenings, my parents would tell each other who they had spoken to, which friends and acquaintances had been taken away and where, whether they were calling home, and whether they had already been sent there. There meant the battlefield. My mother always had news about those resourceful women who managed to send their husbands, sons, or sons-in-law across to relatives abroad, at least until the situation calmed down. From her voice, I understood that those women were luckier than her, or at least better equipped for this kind of misfortune — they had better connections, more money, real opportunities. My father had nowhere to go. And it didn’t seem to me that he wanted to leave.

My grandmother, however, insisted on sending her only son to her family in Vojvodina. She would hide him in the summer house on the Tisa River. They wouldn’t find him there. For my grandmother, Vojvodina was safe territory. Until she got the news from her sisters that the mobilization there was even more massive than in other parts of Serbia. In November 1991, nearly 500 residents of Senta received draft notices to serve in the war in Croatia. Nonsense, Grandma would say — this isn’t our war at all.

Even then, it was clear to me that war, like cancer, spreads through the body of the country, moving from one territory to another, without warning or reliable prognosis. No territory is safe forever — only temporarily, until a new scan reveals metastases. At that time, I was obsessed with another new word that adults uttered daily: republic. As I understood it then, barely ten years old, the war began when half the inhabitants of the great republic of Yugoslavia wanted their own independent republics. I didn’t understand how the idea of independence could produce a war. On one side were those defending their right to independence, and on the other, those disputing that right. Living in constant fear that I would reveal my father’s location to the wrong person, I decided that I no longer liked our republic. Or rather, the piece of it that was left to us. I began to fantasize about my own, asking my grandfather and father the most important political question I knew: how do you make a new republic?

[1] Anne Boyer is an American poet and essayist, best known for her 2019 book The Undying, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is distinguished by a radical interweaving of bodily experience — illness, labor — with sharp critique of contemporary capitalism, making her one of the most important voices in modern engaged literature.