by Ted Dekker
Father, protect your children. A flutter of wings to his right caught his attention. He turned and watched a white dove settle for a landing on the vestibule’s roof. The bird cocked its head and eyed him in small jerky movements.
“Father Michael?” a child’s voice said.
Michael turned to face Nadia, the birthday girl. She wore a pink dress reserved for special occasions. Her lips and nose were wide and she had blotchy freckles on both cheeks. A homely girl even with the pretty pink dress. Some might even say ugly. Her mother, Ivena, was quite pretty; the coarse looks were from her father.
To make matters worse for the poor child, her left leg was two inches shorter than her right thanks to polio—a bad case when she was only three. Perhaps their handicaps united her with Michael in ways the others could not understand. She with her short leg; he with his hunched back.
Yet Nadia carried herself with a courage that defied her lack of physical beauty. At times Michael felt terribly sorry for the child, if for no other reason than that she didn’t realize how her ugliness might handicap her in life. At other times his heart swelled with pride for her, for the way her love and joy shone with a brilliance that washed her skin clean of the slightest blemish.
He suppressed the urge to sweep her off her feet and swing her around in his arms. Come unto me as little children, the Master had said. If only the whole world were filled with the innocence of children.
“Yes?”
NADIA LOOKED into Father Michael’s eyes and saw the flash of pity before he spoke. It was more of a question than a statement, that look of his. More “are you sure you’re okay?” than “you look so lovely in your new dress.”
None of them knew how well she could read their thoughts, perhaps because she’d long ago accepted the pity as a part of her life. Still, the realization that she limped and looked a bit plainer than most girls, regardless of what Mother told her, gnawed gently at her consciousness most of the time.
“Petrus says that since I’m thirteen now all the boys will want to marry me. I told him that he’s being a foolish boy, but he insists on running around making a silly game of it. Could you please tell him to stop?”
Petrus ran up, sneering. If any of the town’s forty-three children was a bully, it was this ten-year-old know-nothing brat. Oh, he had his sweet side, Mother assured her. And Father Michael repeatedly said as much to the boy’s mother, who was known to run about the village with her apron flying, leaving puffs of flour in her wake, shaking her rolling pin while calling for the runt to get his little rear end home.
“Nadia loves Milus! Nadia love Milus!” Petrus chanted and skipped by, looking back, daring her to take up chase.
“You’re a misguided fledgling, Petrus,” Nadia said, crossing her arms. “A silly little bird, squawking too much. Why don’t you find your worms somewhere else?”
Petrus pulled up, flushing red. “Oh, you with all your fancy words! You’re the one eating worms. With Milus. Nadia and Milus sitting in a tree, eating all the worms they can see!” He sang the verse again and ran off with a whoop, obviously delighted with his victory.
Nadia placed her hands on her hips and tapped the foot of her shorter leg with a disgusted sigh. “You see. Please stop him, Father.”
“Of course, darling. But you know that he’s just playing.” Father Michael smiled and took a seat on the top step.
He looked over the courtyard and Nadia followed his gaze. Of the village’s seventy or so people, all but ten or twelve had come today for her birthday. Only the men were missing, called off to fight the Nazis. The old people sat in groups around the stone tables, grinning and chatting as they watched the children play a party game of balancing boiled eggs on spoons as they raced in a circle.
Nadia’s mother, Ivena, directed the children with flapping hands, straining to be heard over their cries of delight. Three of the mothers busied themselves over a long table on which they had arranged pastries and the cake Ivena had fretted over for two days. It was perhaps the grandest cake Nadia had ever seen, a foot high, white with pink roses made from frosting.
All for her. All to cover up whatever pity they had for her and make her feel special.
Father Michael’s gaze moved past the courtyard. Nadia looked up and saw a small band of soldiers approaching. The sight made her heart stop for a moment.
“Come here, Nadia.”
Father Michael lifted an arm for her to sit by him, and she limped up the steps. She sat beside him and he pulled her close.
He seemed nervous. The soldiers.
She put her arm around him, rubbing his humped back.
Father Michael swallowed and kissed the top of her head. “Don’t mind Petrus. But he is right, one day the men will line up to marry such a pretty girl as you.”
She ignored the comment and looked back at the soldiers who were now in the graveyard not a hundred yards off. They were Partisans, she saw with some relief. Partisans were probably friendly.
High above birds cawed. Again Nadia followed the father’s gaze as he looked up. Five ravens circled against the white sky. Michael looked to his right, to the vestibule roof. Nadia saw the lone dove staring on, clucking with its one eye peeled to the courtyard.
Father Michael looked back at the soldiers. “Nadia, go tell your mother to come.”
Nadia hoped the soldiers wouldn’t spoil her birthday party.
JANJIC JOVIC, the nineteen-year-old writer-turned-soldier, followed the others into the village, trudging with the same rhythmic cadence his marching had kept in the endless months leading up to this day. Just one foot after another. Ahead and to the right, Karadzic marched deliberately. The other three fanned out to his left.
Karadzic’s war had less to do with defeating the Nazis than with restoring Serbia, and that included purging the land of anyone who wasn’t a good Serb. Especially Franciscans.
Or so he said. They all knew that Karadzic killed good Serbs as easily as Franciscans. His own mother, for example, with a knife, he’d bragged, never mind that she was Serbian to the marrow. Though sure of few things, Janjic was certain the commander wasn’t beyond trying to kill him one day. Janjic was a philosopher, a writer— not a killer—and the denser man despised him for it. He determined to follow Karadzic obediently regardless of the elder’s folly; anything less could cost dearly.
Only when they were within a stone’s throw of the village did Janjic study the scene with a careful eye. They approached from the south, through a graveyard holding fifty or sixty concrete crosses. So few graves. In most villages throughout Bosnia one could expect to find hundreds if not thousands of fresh graves, pushing into lots never intended for the dead. They were evidence of a war gone mad.
But in this village, hidden here in this lush green valley, he counted fewer than ten plots that looked recent.
He studied the neat rows of houses—fewer than fifty—also unmarked by the war. The tall church spire rose high above the houses, adorned with a white cross, brilliant against the dull sky. The rest of the structure was cut from gray stone and elegantly carved like most churches. Small castles made for God.
None in the squad cared much for God—not even the Jew, Paul. But in Bosnia, religion had little to do with God. It had to do with who was right and who was wrong, not with who loved God. If you weren’t Orthodox or at least a good Serb, you weren’t right. If you were a Christian but not an Orthodox Christian, you weren’t right. If you were Franciscan, you were most certainly not right. Janjic wasn’t sure he disagreed with Karadzic on this point—religious affiliation was more a defining line of this war than the Nazi occupation.
The Ustashe, Yugoslavia’s version of the German Gestapo, had murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs using techniques that horrified even the Nazis. Worse, they’d done it with the blessing of both the Catholic Archbishop of Sarajevo and the Franciscans, neither of whom evidently understood the love of God. But then, no one in this war knew much about the love of God. It was a war absent of God
, if indeed there even was such a being.
A child ran past the walls that surrounded the courtyard, out toward the tall cross, not fifty feet from them now. A boy, dressed in a white shirt and black shorts, with suspenders and a bow tie. The child slid to a halt, eyes popping.
Janjic smiled at the sight. The smell of hot bread filled his nostrils.
“Petrus! You come back here!”
A woman, presumably the boy’s mother, ran for the boy, grabbed his arm and yanked him back toward the churchyard. He struggled free and began marching in imitation of a soldier. One, two! One, two!
“Stop it, Petrus!” His mother caught his shirt and pulled him toward the courtyard.
Karadzic ignored the boy and kept his glassy gray eyes fixed ahead. Janjic was the last to enter the courtyard, following the others’ clomping boots. Karadzic halted and they pulled up behind him.
A priest stood on the ancient church steps, dressed in flowing black robes. Dark hair fell to his shoulders, and a beard extended several inches past his chin. He stood with a hunch in his shoulders.
A hunchback.
To his left, a flock of children sat on the steps with their mothers who held them, some smoothing their children’s hair or stroking their cheeks. Smiling. All of them seemed to be smiling.
In all, sixty or seventy pairs of eyes stared at them.
“Welcome to Vares,” the priest said, bowing politely.
They had interrupted a party of some kind. The children were mostly dressed in ties and dresses. A long table adorned with pastries and a cake sat untouched. The sight was surreal—a celebration of life in this countryside of death.
“What church is this?” Karadzic asked.
“Anglican,” the priest said.
Karadzic glanced at his men, then faced the church. “I’ve never heard of this church.”
A homely looking girl in a pink dress suddenly stood from her mother’s arms and walked awkwardly toward the table adorned with pastries. She hobbled.
Karadzic ignored her and twisted his fingers around the barrel of his rifle, tapping its butt on the stone. “Why is this church still standing?”
No one answered. Janjic watched the little girl place a golden brown pastry on a napkin.
“You can’t speak?” Karadzic demanded. “Every church for a hundred kilometers is burned to the ground, but yours is untouched. And it makes me think that maybe you’ve been sleeping with the Ustashe.”
“God has granted us favor,” the priest said.
The commander paused. His lips twitched to a slight grin. A bead of sweat broke from the large man’s forehead and ran down his flat cheek. “God has granted you favor? He’s flown out of the sky and built an invisible shield over this valley to keep the bullets out, is that it?” His lips flattened. “God has allowed every Orthodox church in Yugoslavia to burn to the ground. And yet yours is standing.”
Janjic watched the child limp toward a spring that gurgled in the corner and dip a mug into its waters. No one seemed to pay her attention except the woman on the steps whom she had left, probably her mother.
Paul spoke quietly. “They’re Anglican, not Franciscans or Catholics. I know Anglicans. Good Serbs.”
“What does a Jew know about good Serbs?”
“I’m only telling you what I’ve heard,” Paul said with a shrug.
The girl in the pink dress approached, carrying the mug of cold water in one hand and the pastry in the other. She stopped three feet from Karadzic and lifted the food to him. None of the villagers moved.
Karadzic ignored her. “And if your God is my God, why doesn’t he protect my church? The Orthodox church?”
The priest smiled gently, still staring without blinking, hunched over on the steps.
“I’m asking you a question, Priest,” Karadzic said.
“I can’t speak for God,” the priest said. “Perhaps you should ask him. We’re God-loving people with no quarrel. But I cannot speak for God on all matters.”
The small girl lifted the pastry and water higher. Karadzic’s eyes took on that menacing stare Janjic had seen so many times before.
Janjic moved on impulse. He stepped up to the girl and smiled. “You’re very kind,” he said. “Only a good Serb would offer bread and water to a tired and hungry Partisan soldier.” He reached for the pastry and took it. “Thank you.”
A dozen children scrambled from the stairs and ran to the table, arguing about who was to be first. They quickly gathered up food to follow the young girl’s example and then rushed for the soldiers, pastries in hand. Janjic was struck by their innocence. This was just another game to them. The sudden turn in events had effectively silenced Karadzic, but Janjic couldn’t look at the commander. If Molosov and the others didn’t follow his cue there would be a price to pay later— this he knew with certainty.
“My name’s Nadia,” the young girl said, looking up at Janjic. “It’s my birthday today. I’m thirteen years old.”
Ordinarily Janjic would have answered the girl—told her what a brave thirteen-year-old she was, but today his mind was on his comrades. Several children now swarmed around Paul and Puzup, and Janjic saw with relief that they were accepting the pastries. With smiles in fact.
“We could use the food, sir,” Molosov said.
Karadzic snatched up his hand to silence the second in command. Nadia held the cup in her hand toward him. Once again every eye turned to the commander, begging him to show some mercy. Karadzic suddenly scowled and slapped the cup aside. It clattered to the stone in a shower of water. The children froze.
Karadzic brushed angrily past Nadia. She backpedaled and fell to her bottom. The commander stormed over to the birthday table, and kicked his boot against the leading edge. The entire birthday display rose into the air and crashed onto the ground.
Nadia scrambled to her feet and limped for her mother, who drew her in. The other children scampered for the steps.
Karadzic turned to them, face red. “Now do I have your attention?”
CHAPTER TWO
IVENA PAUSED her reading and swallowed at the memory. Dear Father, give me strength.
She could hear the commander’s voice as though he were here in the greenhouse today. She suddenly pursed her lips angrily, mimicking him. “Now do I have your attention?” Ivena relaxed her face and closed her eyes. Now do I have your attention? Well we have yours now, don’t we, Mr. Big Shot Commander?
For years she’d told herself that they should have told the children to leave them then. To run back to the houses. But they hadn’t. And in the end she knew there was a reason for that.
Behind her the clock ticked away on the wall, one click for every jerk of the second hand. Other than her breathing, no other sound broke the stillness. Reliving that day was not always the most pleasant thing, but always it brought her an uncanny strength and a deep-seated peace. And more important, not to remember—indeed not to participate again and again—would make a mockery of it. Take this in remembrance of me, Christ had said. Participate in the suffering of Christ, Paul had said.
And yet Americans turned forgetting into a kind of spiritual badge, refusing to look at suffering for fear they might catch it like a disease. They turned the death of Christ into soft fuzzy Sunday-school pictures and refused to let those pictures get off the page and walk bloody into their minds. They stripped Christ of his dignity by ignoring the brutality of his death. It was no different from turning away from a puffy-faced leper in horror. The epitome of rejection.
Some would even close the book here in a huff and return to their knitting. Perhaps they would knit nice soft images of a cross.
It occurred to her that every muscle in her body had tensed.
She relaxed and chuckled. “What are you, the messiah for America, Ivena?” she mumbled. “You speak of Christ’s love; where is yours?”
Ivena shook her head and opened the pages again.
“Give me grace, Father.”
She read again.
&
nbsp; “NOW DO I have your attention?”
Father Michael’s heart seemed to stick midstroke. He mumbled his prayer now, loud enough for the women nearest him to hear.
“Protect your children, Father.”
The leader was possessed of the devil. Michael had known so from the moment the big man had entered the courtyard. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
He barely heard the flutter of wings to his right. The dove had taken flight. The commander glared at him. Now do I have your attention?
The dove’s wings beat through the air. Yes, you have my attention, commander. You had my attention before you began this insanity. But he did not say it because the dove had stopped above him and was flapping noisily. The commander’s eyes rose to the bird. Michael leaned back to compensate for his humped back and looked up.
In that moment the world fell to a silent slow motion.
Michael could see the commander standing, legs spread. Above him, the white dove swept gracefully at the air, fanning a slight wind to him, like an angel breathing five feet over his head.
The breath moved through his hair, through his beard, cool at first and then suddenly warm. High above the dove, a hole appeared in the clouds, allowing the sun to send its rays of warmth. Michael could see that the ravens still circled, more of them now—seven or eight.
This he saw in that first glance, as the world slowed to a crawl. Then he felt the music on the wind. At least that was how he thought of it, because the music didn’t sound in his ears, but in his mind and in his chest.
Though only a few notes, they spread an uncanny warmth. A whisper that seemed to say, “My beloved.”
Just that. Just, My beloved. The warmth suddenly rushed through him like water, past his loins, right down to the soles of his feet.
Father Michael gasped.
The dove took flight.
A chill of delight rippled up his back. Goodness! Nothing even remotely similar had happened to him in all of his years. My beloved. Like the anointing of Jesus at his baptism. This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.