by Fritz Galt
He turned around and suddenly found himself face-to-face with several lines of police. And the blue line was advancing toward him.
Then he realized that the students were all breaking for the Parliament.
Rather than follow the crowd or face the riot police, he scrambled onto a side street. He was momentarily safe, but surrounded by anxious people covering their mouths in disbelief. At the end of the block, he realized that he was on Professor Cercic’s street.
He leaned over to catch his breath. Cold wind chilled his damp hair. Then he shuffled down the street and jabbed at the professor’s buzzer. There was no response.
Having gained some distance from the hostilities, he turned inevitably to the question, why did the government oppose action against its neighboring countries? It refused to protect its troops in Croatia. It downplayed the killing of ethnic Serbs in Macedonia. And it lashed out at Serbia’s own sons and daughters with weapons clearly designed for that purpose.
That night, Mick hovered over the spaghetti sauce that he was preparing for the next day when the telephone rang.
Natalie set her mug of coffee down and left to answer it.
Zvonko hulked over the kitchen table sipping his coffee. Mick didn’t mind keeping Zvonko wired if it kept him awake at night.
Natalie came back and announced, “That was Ed. The embassy is closed tomorrow.”
“For good?”
“Not quite. He said Security is warning us not to go outside.”
It was too late for that.
Mick slid the sauce he had prepared into the refrigerator and joined Natalie in the den to watch the news.
She was furiously changing channels. On two of the three channels, a woman warbled and danced around a stage.
On the third channel, a newscaster was calmly reading statistics. One demonstrator and one policeman had been killed that day. Two people were critically injured. Seventy-four were being treated in hospital. As for sports, qualifying matches for the World Cup had begun.
“Forget this staying inside stuff,” Natalie said. “I’ll still have Tammy over for dinner.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“I’m glad I didn’t let you out on the streets today.”
He smiled. “Just got veggies. Had to wait for gas, though.”
“How long was the wait?”
“Honey, if I told you, you’d only think I was looking for sympathy.”
“You have such a tough life.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“But the wives are beginning to talk about you.” She looked at him imploringly. “They say you’re a good-for-nothing freeloader.”
“What does that make them?”
“You don’t hear what they say. ‘You don’t take your turn with the kids. You don’t attend the Women’s Association functions. You don’t bake for the sales.’ I’m worried about your reputation.”
“And dear,” he said. “I worry about yours. Guess what the wives are saying about you.”
“What are they saying?”
“That you work too hard. You show up their husbands with your Serbian vocabulary. That you pull night duty while they take vacations. You don’t spend time with your family.”
“Mea culpa. And I resolve to address all those complaints. With the embassy closed indefinitely, we’re officially on vacation.”
“Let’s get out of here before Ed’s crisis center needs you.”
“If the phone rings this weekend,” she said defiantly, “I’m not home.”
“Right.”
“If some stupid American citizen brings his grandfather here for his ninety-ninth birthday and he has a heart attack, I’m not here. If a journalist loses his Yugoslav press pass, I’m out of the office. When America’s vast interests are pressing on poor little Belgrade, I’m officially on vacation.”
He grinned. “You sound like Henry Fonda at the end of Grapes of Wrath.”
Chapter 16
Mick brought Natalie a mug of latte for breakfast and sat in bed beside her. She started to curl around him, but he had already turned to switch on the short-wave radio.
A local stringer, unschooled in BBC English, reported that there had been more violence during the night.
“Just what the country needed,” Mick said.
Demonstrators had returned, this time marching across the Sava River toward the city center from New Belgrade. Police had met them halfway across the bridge and beat them, breaking the crowd into two groups.
Then inexplicably the police had withdrawn and the crowd was able to advance to Trg Republike. There, further clashes had ensued. The BBC reporter described the police as beating people indiscriminately with nightsticks.
Natalie didn’t touch her drink.
By midnight, the report went on, JNA tanks had rolled into town and surrounded City Hall. When pressed by the anchor in London, the reporter estimated fifty people wounded during the early hours of the morning.
Studio B radio announced that the government had not agreed to meet with the demonstrators, who remained in the city center.
“I’m calling Tammy to make sure she comes,” Natalie said. “I’m not sure she needs to be in that big house all alone.”
“By the way, I invited Harry for the evening.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“And I think I’ll drive into town.”
“Oh no you don’t.”
That morning, shops and factories were closed across Yugoslavia due to the threat of civil unrest. The country was under martial law. In other words, it was a holiday.
Alec smelled rain in the wind as he maneuvered Zoran’s Corvette convertible south out of town.
He passed large crowds of stranded villagers clutching empty fabric shopping bags, waiting for buses that wouldn’t come. He swerved around a hay wagon yoked to a tractor. He heard the wagon’s ungreased axle sighing under the strain.
Rail-thin, Professor Cercic came out of his two-story country house to greet him. When Alec reached the front gate, he could already smell the fragrant chicken soup.
Mrs. Cercic greeted him at the front door with a bowl of strawberries picked that morning from her garden. He handed the stocky, red-cheeked woman a bag of sugar, salt, baking soda and other treasured goods left over from his kitchen after he had packed up to leave. She was embarrassed, but didn’t turn it down.
The professor led him out onto the terrace. A hired Albanian was building windows around one end of the terrace. “The price of glass is too high to complete the entire terrace.”
He heard a cat’s meow. “That’s Barbara!” he cried in recognition. She was lean, but her tiger-striped fur gleamed as she lay nursing a newborn kitten. “Where’s Felix?”
“Look in here,” Cercic said. He led Alec to the living room. There, Felix lay asleep on an armchair under a kitchen towel. Beside him, the portable television silently aired some American police show with subtitles.
Alec nibbled strawberries and talked with the professor in the darkened room. They shared glasses of vinjak, twice distilled plum brandy. One shot would loosen Alec up for the rest of the afternoon.
The professor described his neighbors, who were all communists.
“Take the little girl behind us,” he said. “Her grandfather is an illiterate communist. He remembers everything by rote, and often repeats the same stories word for word. He can quote long passages of Das Kapital. He wonders why people leave Yugoslavia for Germany and the United States to make money when they can make so much more in Russia and China. I’m surrounded by communists.”
“That guy’s wife died this week,” the professor continued. He pointed to a half-built house out the window. “He’s a professor at the University of Pristina in Kosovo. He’s what I call a ‘mercenary academic.’ That’s one who teaches where all non-Serb students and faculty are let go, and Serbs move in to take the jobs.”
The man’s young wife had died of diabetes that week. He did
n’t need to say that there was a shortage of insulin in the country.
Mrs. Cercic walked in at that point.
“I went to her funeral,” she said. “But I couldn’t make myself look into the open casket. Then they opened the casket again at the cemetery. Her sons just petted her hair and cried over her.”
Mrs. Cercic had prepared a feast. They dove into the pieces of chicken whose succulent meat easily fell off the bone. She proudly served a type of lasagna and fried tikvica squash, along with a garden salad, miniature potatoes, carrots and a huge platter of pork in dark, sweet sauce. Local red wine washed it all down.
Alec was just beginning to wonder when the professor was going to ask him about his previous two years or reveal why he had asked Alec out that day when the Cercics’ friend Nadia arrived, dressed in black. She joined them at the table.
She showed Alec her family pictures. She planned to leave the country to visit her son’s family in the States in several months after she observed the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death.
“I didn’t know he had died,” Alec said. “I’m sorry.”
It was difficult to talk about her grandchildren, because her son had remarried three times, and raised three families, two of which she had only learned about that year.
Her son wanted to bring one of his families back to Belgrade later that summer for a “vacation.” He would be lucky if the military let him leave once he entered.
After lunch, Alec joined the professor in picking sour cherries from a tree in the manicured front yard.
He checked the sky. Dark clouds were dumping rain across the valley. “I was wondering if you had any interesting news.”
Just then a car hiccoughed, died, rolled down the grassy road and came to a squealing halt in front of them.
It was the professor’s kum, his best man or blood brother, arriving with his wife.
They all sat on the back terrace. Everybody there had a child living in the United States.
“You ought to form a club,” Alec suggested.
They talked about inflation, shortages, the Mafia-like government, how to repair their car’s clutch, how gorgeous Key West was, how hot Washington was and how the world was right to impose sanctions.
The storm moved on to another valley, but the smell of wet grass remained.
Meanwhile, the neighbors had returned from a slava and the father was pouring pails of grayish-white slop for the eleven piglets and their mother.
Mrs. Cercic cleared her throat. “I’ve promised to buy a pig from him once it reaches forty-five kilos.”
“Too bad I won’t be around to eat it,” Alec said.
The professor turned suddenly to him. “You’re leaving?”
“I need to move. My time’s up.”
“You know that your brother is in town.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“But you haven’t seen him?”
“Missed him.”
“That’s strange.” The professor caught his eye. “He said he would blow a covert money exchange operation tonight in order to find some map.”
“Interesting.” Alec spat out a cherry pit.
So his big brother was looking for the Karta. It sat out front in the convertible. And rain was just beginning to fall.
Chapter 17
Natalie cut off several rose blossoms from the bushes that grew along her walkway. An even number of flowers signified death in Slavic culture, so she picked one pink, one yellow and one red. She wanted to divert all attention away from John’s death.
She regained her full height and stared into a line of gaunt, watchful peasant faces. A group of black-shrouded women separated by bags of belongings stared from the curb across the street.
Tammy’s slim figure passed in front of them. Her bright yellow and black sweater seemed overly festive considering the circumstances. Her children wore dress shoes and her son Jake even sported a bow tie.
It was good to see them taking care of themselves.
“You look like a million bucks,” Natalie told them. They smiled and followed her inside and down several steps into the living room. “I’m still waiting for Mick to return from an errand. Can you believe he went out for more bread?”
Tammy shivered. “Scary things are happening out there.”
“Maybe it’s the wrong question to ask, but would you prefer to sit inside or out?”
The setting sun had finally broken through the clouds, and all the windows stood wide open.
“Outside, please,” Jake said.
Tabitha went to the screen door and pressed up against it.
“There’s your answer,” Tammy said with a hapless smile.
Outside, the red ball of the sun lingered low in the smog.
Hammers rang out along the back fence. Unshaven men had begun constructing houses from discarded building material.
“Hope you don’t mind the neighbors,” Natalie said.
They arranged chairs around the metal table and Natalie carried out a tray of drinks. She set out glasses and big, sweating pitchers of iced tea and raspberry Kool-Aid.
The children drained their Kool-Aid in no time, then slipped out of their seats and followed the neighbor’s cat along the side of the house.
“Let the kids go,” Natalie said. “Don’t make them sit still all evening.”
“If it’s okay with you.” Tammy sighed. “You know, this is the first time I’ve been able to relax in days. Sometimes I just work myself into a nervous wreck.”
“I’m glad you can take a break for an evening,” Natalie said. “You must feel a lot of new responsibility.”
“It all hit me today. I suddenly saw how empty my life is without John. Both my parents have passed away. I have no brothers or sisters. I last lived in America as an Idaho eighteen-year-old falling in love with an army medic. What do I have to go back to? I have no skills besides digging potatoes and raising kids.”
“No one teaches useful life skills when you join the Foreign Service,” Natalie said. “You must rely on the friendships you’ve built with people living continents away.”
They talked for nearly half an hour. Jake and Tabitha wandered through Mick’s unfinished vegetable garden and sat on the various brick ledges that jutted out from the house and steps.
Just as the sun was about to make its final plunge into the haze, the doorbell rang.
A bearded gentleman stood there in a freshly pressed shirt and pants that almost looked new.
“Is that you, Harry?” Natalie asked, looking closer.
“In the flesh.”
“I was beginning to worry about you.”
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“Where did you get those nice trousers?”
“On sale at Beogradjanka Department Store.”
“You’re braver than I am,” Tammy said with a fragile laugh. “I never dared step in there.”
“Nothing to worry about. The salespeople don’t bite. Can you believe I bought a sweat suit there for less than ten dollars?”
“Really?” Tammy said.
Natalie couldn’t visualize him in a sweat suit.
Harry Kahler followed them out back. His eyes narrowed when he saw the shantytown behind the Pierces’ house.
“I’ve had such trouble finding clothes for our family,” Tammy was saying. “Mail order takes over half a year to get through, and then my credit card payments are inevitably late in the mail.”
“You can stop worrying about that,” Natalie said gently. “You’ll be in the States soon.”
They sat down in quiet reflection. Eventually the children dusted themselves off and came over.
It turned out they remembered Harry from a presentation he had given at school.
“Since when were you interested in kids?” Natalie asked.
“Since Tammy asked me,” he said.
“PTA,” Tammy explained. “It was a lecture on taking things from strangers. Unfortunately,
Harry advised them they should take things from strangers.”
Just then, they heard a bottle shatter nearby. Moments later, the heavy smell of vodka drifted over the yard.
“Opa!” Harry said. “Is that Mick boozing it up in the kitchen?”
“No, he’s on an errand. He should be back soon.”
“I’ll just have to enjoy your company without him.”
Tabitha was looking up at the garage roof. “The cat’s stuck.”
“Cat man to the rescue.” Harry took a quick swig of the iced tea. “If you’ll excuse me, ladies.”
He came back several minutes later with a cat in his arms.
Natalie was growing worried about Mick. Embassy personnel weren’t even allowed to leave their houses, much less drive around town. “What could be taking him so long?”
“Where was he going?” Harry asked.
“Out for bread. The store’s just down the street.”
“Did he drive?” Harry pressed.
“Yeah.”
“I think I know where he went. If you don’t mind, I’ll go after him.” He cast a look at the shantytown and said, “If I were you, I’d move the party inside.” Then he left with uncharacteristic speed.
Natalie and Tammy looked at each other. Harry was through the house and out the front door before they could stop him.
“Nice man,” Natalie said, clearing the table.
“So thoughtful.”
While Tammy brought the children in, Natalie watched Harry jump into his light red Zastava, gun it to life and leave in a cloud of blue smoke.
Mick leaned forward and shifted his chair. Its metallic feet scraped across the floating restaurant’s deck. The couple at the next table turned to look.
It was the same young man in the gabardine suit that Monday night. And the woman wore the same black dress.
Instead of turning away, Mick took advantage of their attention. “Excuse me,” he said in Serbian, “but you look familiar.”
The man took a swig of beer, but didn’t offer his name.