Bundles For the Soul

The island sun, a white-gold coin pressed against the immense blue dome of the sky, baked the limestone flagstones of Hvar’s main square. Tourists flowed like a bright, chattering river between cafes and yachts in the harbor, their laughter bouncing off ancient walls. Yet, in the shadow of the Renaissance cathedral’s bell tower, there was a pocket of stillness. It was the stall of Magda, the woman who sold lavender.

Her stall was not like the others selling embroidered linens or plastic replica boats. It was a study in muted purple and dusty green. Lavender bundles hung like silent chimes, not a garish tourist purple, but the true hue of the plant — silvery stems tipped with flowers ranging from deep violet to a pale, almost wistful grey-blue. They were arranged not by size, but by some unseen taxonomy known only to her. Magda herself, perhaps sixty, perhaps seventy, sat on a worn wooden stool. Her hands, mapped with veins and sunspots, moved with a tranquil economy as she tied fresh stems with jute twine. Her face was a landscape of wrinkles, not harsh lines, but the gentle erosion of wind and sun and years of quiet observation. Her eyes, the colour of the Adriatic on a cloudy day, watched the world pass, not seeking customers, but seeing them.

Magda never called out prices. She simply sat, the scent around her — clean, herbal, subtly camphorous — creating an invisible radius of calm. People were drawn into it, often without knowing why. A woman with a tense jawline and expensive sunglasses would pause, inhale, and her shoulders would drop half an inch. A man scrolling frantically on his phone would look up, blink, and the frantic energy around him would momentarily still.

And then they would notice the bundles. They were all lavender, yet undeniably different. Some were fat and bushy, bursting with blooms. Others were slender, a mere five or six stems tied with exquisite care. Some were tied with rough twine, others with a thin, elegant ribbon. There were bundles with flowers so dark they were almost black, and others so pale they seemed to hold the moonlight. A small, handwritten sign in Croatian and careful English read only: “Lavender for the Soul.” There were no prices listed.

A young woman, Lena, approached. Her eyes were red-rimmed behind her sunglasses, which she kept on despite the shade. She moved with the brittle caution of someone afraid they might shatter. She stared at the bundles, her gaze flitting from one to another.

“How much?” she asked, her voice scratchy.

Magda looked at her, not at her clothes or her bag, but at the way her thumb rubbed compulsively against her index finger, at the slight tremor in her lower lip. She saw the grief around Lena like a haze — fresh, sharp, acrid.

“For you,” Magda said, her voice a soft rustle, like lavender stems brushing together, “this one.”

She reached not for the lavish bundles, nor the romantic pale ones, but for a small, tight cluster. The stems were slender, the flower heads modest and a muted grey-blue. It was tied with a simple, undyed linen thread.

“How much is it?” Lena repeated, pulling out her wallet.

“Ten euros,” Magda said. Lena paid, took the bundle, and brought it to her nose. The scent was not sweet, but clear and piercing, like cold air after a storm. Without warning, Lena’s breath hitched. A single tear escaped under her sunglasses. She didn’t wipe it away. She just clutched the lavender, nodded silently, and walked away, holding the small bundle as if it were an anchor. Magda watched her go. The grief of sudden loss, she thought. A father, perhaps. The bundle is small because the wound is vast and new; it cannot hold much. The grey for the shock. The linen for the raw truth.

Later, a broad-shouldered man in his fifties, with a fisherman’s weathered face and kind, tired eyes, stopped. He stood before the stall for a long time, saying nothing. Magda saw his gaze linger on the darker bundles. She saw the way he held his hands — not clenched, but heavy, as if they carried invisible weights. She saw the old sorrow, sedimented into his bones.

“For you,” she said, and selected a medium-sized bundle, dense with blooms of a deep, royal purple, tied with a sturdy, weather-beaten piece of rope. “Fifteen.”

He nodded, paid, and took it. He didn’t smell it. He just held it, his thick fingers gentle on the stems. A look of profound exhaustion, and something like relief, passed over his face. “My son,” he said, though Magda hadn’t asked. “The sea. Ten years ago.” Magda simply nodded. The grief of a long absence, she knew. The deep purple for enduring love, the rope for the bond that remains, strong though tested by storms.

Her reputation was local, whispered. The police chief, a man named Damir with a rigid posture and a voice that rarely softened, came one evening as the square was emptying. He didn’t look at the lavender. He looked at the stones.

“My sister says you… understand,” he muttered, embarrassed by the superstition of it.

Magda studied him. She saw not grief, but a corrosion. A constant, low-grade poison. She saw the things he had witnessed — not as a brother, but as a keeper of order: accidents, violence, the petty and profound cruelties of people. The trauma was not a single stone in his pocket, but a suit of lead he wore every day.

She walked around her table and picked not one bundle, but three. One was a pale, silvery lavender, almost ghostly. Another was a vibrant, spiky purple, assertive and clean. The third was a simple green bundle, just stems and leaves, barely any flower at all. She bound them loosely together with a strand of plain, flexible wire.

“Twenty-five,” she said.

He frowned at the peculiar assemblage but paid. As he took it, the combined scent hit him — the ethereal, the cleansing, the greenly astringent. He breathed deeply, and for a moment, his shoulders, always braced, slumped. He didn’t thank her. He just gave a curt nod and walked away, holding the bundles awkwardly but firmly. The pale for the ghosts he carries, Magda mused. The vibrant to cleanse the stain of seeing. The green stems for resilience, to remember life continues beneath the trauma. The wire to hold his fragmented self together.

Magda’s understanding was not magic, not as the world defined it. It was a language written in the body, learned in a different time, under a different, more brutal sun.

She had been twelve in 1991, living in a village not far from Vukovar. The lavender then grew wild on the hillsides, its scent mingling with the smell of diesel fuel and fear. The war, which to the world was a conflict, to her was a cacophony of terrifying sounds and the gradual disappearance of people, of safety, of futures. Her father and older brother went to defend their home. They did not return. Their bodies, when eventually found, were among many in a mass grave. The identifying process was a bureaucratic horror performed on gurneys in a hangar. The grief was not a private, gentle thing. It was a public, shattering force.

Her mother, Ana, had been the village’s herbalist. In the midst of the carnage, while others stockpiled cigarettes and coffee, Ana stockpiled chamomile, yarrow, and lavender. She treated shrapnel wounds and panic attacks with equal, silent dedication. One day, a Croatian soldier, a boy really, no older than Magda’s lost brother, was brought to their cellar. He wasn’t physically wounded, but he stared at the wall, trembling, unseeing. He had been in a trench when a mortar landed. He was the only survivor.

Ana had made him tea, but he wouldn’t drink. She had spoken softly, but he didn’t hear. Then, she had taken a bundle of drying lavender from a hook and simply held it under his nose. “Breathe,” she commanded. The sharp, clean scent cut through the fog of cordite and terror in his nostrils. He blinked. He focused on the purple flowers. He took one ragged breath, then another, following the scent down, away from the memory of the blast, into the simpler memory of earth and plant.

Later, Ana had said to Magda, as they sorted herbs by candlelight, “Grief is a wound, dušo. Trauma is a wound that gets infected, that won’t close. Lavender… it cleans. It’s not a cure. But it is a clean cloth. A reminder that not all scents are of blood and fire. Some are of the hills, of peace.”

Ana taught her to see. Not just the obvious tears, but the way trauma fossilized in a body: the jaw held tight against a scream, the eyes that refused to meet yours because they’d seen too much, the hands that constantly sought something to fidget with, to ward off the memory of idleness before an attack. She taught her that different sorrows needed different acknowledgments. A vast, new grief needed a small, simple bundle — too much beauty was an insult. An old, carried sorrow needed richness and depth. A fractured soul needed multiple strands, bound together.

After the war, Magda came to Hvar, an island that felt far from the mainland’s scars. She planted lavender. She learned its many varieties, its subtle differences in scent and colour. And she began her stall.

One blistering afternoon, a tour group shuffled past. Among them was a man in his late seventies, German, well-dressed. He paused, not at the lavender, but at Magda’s face. His own was a mask of polite interest, but his eyes, a faded blue, grew still and deep. He waited until the group moved on, then stepped into her circle of scent.

He said nothing. He just looked at her, and she at him. She saw a particular kind of holding in his frame, a formal distance that was not cold, but protective. She saw the ghost of a uniform in his posture. And she saw, behind his eyes, a flicker of a different landscape: not sun-drenched islands, but thick, dark forests. A memory, not of something he did, but of something he witnessed and had carried for fifty years.

He pointed a thin, age-spotted finger at a bundle. It was one she rarely made: stems from the lavandula stoechas, the one with the distinctive butterfly-shaped petals, a deeper, more camphorous scent. It was tied with a stark, black ribbon.

“That one,” he said. His Croatian was halting, archaic, from a textbook long forgotten.

Magda felt the old, familiar chill, the one that had nothing to do with the sea breeze. This was not the grief of her people. This was the grief of the other side. The perpetrator’s grief, the bystander’s shame, the weight of a terrible history. It was a bundle she kept for the day she knew must come, when the past would walk up to her stall, not in the form of a ghost from her own side, but from his.

She took it down. “It is twenty euros,” she said, her voice neutral.

He paid. He held the bundle, bringing it to his nose. He inhaled the strong, medicinal, almost harsh scent. His eyes closed. When they opened, they were wet. He looked at Magda, and in that look was an unasked question: Do you know?

Magda held his gaze. She gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. Not a nod of forgiveness, which was not hers to give, but a nod of recognition. A recognition of the burden he carried, a burden that was also a part of the tapestry of trauma that had ensnared her own life.

“Danke,” he whispered, though he had paid.

“Nema na čemu,” she replied. You’re welcome.

He walked away, a old man holding a bundle of lavender tied with a black ribbon, the scent of camphor following him, a scent for purging, for acknowledging a poison.

As the sun began to dip, painting the bell tower in shades of gold and rose, the last customer came. A girl of about nineteen, with dyed black hair and a defensive slouch. She had a tattoo of a sparrow on her wrist and eyes that dared the world to hurt her. She scoffed at the sign, but her feet were rooted.

“What’s so special about it then?” she challenged.

Magda saw the story instantly. Not a war trauma, but a domestic one. A father’s rage, a mother’s weakness, the prison of a small town. The trauma of clenched fists and slammed doors and conditional love. The girl wore her anger like armour, but Magda saw the fragile, bruised child within.

“For you,” Magda said, ignoring the tone. She chose a bundle of lavandula angustifolia, the truest lavender. It was full and vibrant, tied with a long, flowing ribbon of the brightest, most defiant purple Magda had. “Eighteen.”

“That’s pricey for weeds,” the girl muttered, but she paid. She snatched the bundle and sniffed it dismissively. The classic, sweet, calming scent enveloped her. Her defiant expression wavered. She took another, deeper breath.

“It’s… nice,” she conceded, grudgingly.

“It is strong,” Magda corrected gently. “It grows in poor soil, in blazing sun. It survives drought. Its scent is a defence. It tells pests to stay away. But to us… it gives peace.”

The girl stared at the lavender, then at Magda. The armour didn’t crack, but a chink appeared. She gave a short nod. “Yeah. Okay.”

She left, holding the defiant purple bundle not like a weapon, but like a standard, a flag of a different, possible self.

The square was quiet now. Magda began to pack her remaining bundles into a woven chest. The scent of lavender was thick in the evening air, a gentle, persistent presence. She looked out at the peaceful, tourist-filled pier, at the serene sea, and she saw the layers beneath. The old wounds of war, the fresh griefs of everyday life, the silent traumas carried in secret. Her lavender did not heal. It bore witness. It offered a clean scent, a specific shape for an unnameable pain. It was a language of care, spoken in stems and ribbons and hues of purple, learned in the darkness of a cellar, and now offered in the sun-drenched light of an island square, a small, fragrant rebellion against the forgetting of sorrow. She closed her chest, the lock clicking softly in the twilight. Tomorrow, there would be more grief, more trauma walking past. And she would be there, with her bundles of different sizes, ready to recognize it.