Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Such a beautiful, quiet morning, said her mother, it’s hard to believe. Perhaps they are preparing some surprise for us.

  Zoran said: Even so, we will manage, with God’s help.

  Zlata, make some coffee. So delicious, his coffee!

  Thanks, but we have plenty at home. Please keep it for yourselves.

  Zlata, is he lying? How can there be so much coffee?

  Never mind! said the boy, smiling in embarrassment.

  Zlata’s mother gazed out the window. She smoked half a cigarette. Presently she went heavily downstairs, and he took Zlata’s hand.

  She’s getting fond of you, said the girl. That’s why she left us alone. Are you happy?

  Yes.

  Then why don’t you look at me? What’s wrong?

  Last night we didn’t sleep well, he said.

  Here also it was bad.

  Perceiving that the hollows beneath his eyes were the same color as the stubble on his chin, she longed to kiss him. As she began to pull his head against hers, a shell smashed loudly down, neither near nor far. She began to scream.

  Her mother rushed upstairs. An empty jar fell from her hand and shattered.

  Zoran stayed long into the green evening light, holding Zlata’s hand. But before dark he had to go home, because his family needed water. When he said goodbye, the girl could not stop sobbing. That half-cruel look of hers which he used to find so erotic had now entirely gone. She was ill. A machine gun chittered at him as he pedalled round the corner, but he swerved between the buildings whose dusty window-shards resembled scraps of grey cloth. Perhaps Zlata trusted too much in destiny, which he attempted not to think about. Passing the white profile of an Austro-Hungarian medallion upon a sky-blue wall which for some reason had not yet been shelled, he felt desperate at her suffering.

  Just as when seen through the window of a rising airplane Bosnia goes blue and then blue-green, her indistinct patches of greyish-green, cut by whitish roads, now falling into shadow, so his anguish dimmed down once he made up his mind. His parents had two other sons to help them. He explained how nervous Zlata was becoming, and his mother said: Do whatever you can to take care of her.— His father said: That’s right; you heard your mother.

  What Zoran now contemplated was merely dangerous, not impossible. For example, fifteen years after this incident, the Muslim pensioner in the stained blue suit who sat on a bench beneath the trees on the north bank of the Miljacka told me that his son used to walk his puppydog every day no matter how many shells fell; and one afternoon he walked the dog across the Vrbanja Most and was captured, but the Serbs did not kill or even torture him. They sent him to Beograd. He did not even have to enter a prison camp. Right away a beautiful Serbian girl fell in love with him.— Now he is living with that same dog and that same girl in Florida! said the old man. The dog sleeps with them in their bed. If my son goes out to swim in the ocean, the girl takes care of the dog, and even though that dog loves her, he cries, he cries.

  And of course Zoran was himself a Serb. Moreover, he had uncles and cousins.

  There were friends to see, and friends of friends to pay off. Zlata’s mother cried out: They can do anything to her, right in front of you! but Zoran shouted: They’re human just like you! and she lowered her heavy head, remembering as well as he that not long ago the Vrbanja Most had merely been barricaded by Serbian officers with stockings over their faces who threatened and gloated. In good time the friends of friends informed him of a certain telephone whose wire remained uncut; is it a consolation or a shame that there will always be such conveniences? He paid fifty Deutschemarks, black smoke slowly unclenching its infinite fingers over the hill, and called his cousin Goran, who congratulated him on not being dead. Zoran asked how the life was on their side. Goran answered: Everything is becoming better, and we have no complaints.

  He mentioned Zlata, and his cousin was silent, then said: Yes, we remember her—not like the others, thanks to God! That would be no problem. Of course I can’t watch her every minute.

  We won’t stay with you, and we thank you for your kindness.

  It’s good you understand.

  When should we cross?

  Thursday night, at ten-o’-clock. I’ll be on duty at the Vrbanja Most.

  Zlata knew that for the rest of her life she would remember that her mother was sitting at the table with the soap opera on; a man was deeply kissing a woman. Her mother opened the trunk of ancient dresses whose red had gone to russet, the gold embroidery along the edges dignified against the darkness. From them she chose a young girl’s black dress embroidered with gold and silver patterns resembling the ones carved on ancient stones.

  I know you can’t wear it, her mother said, because you may need to run. But let’s see how you look. I always thought . . .

  Zlata turned away. Her shoulders trembled and she wiped her eyes. Then a machine gun fired mindlessly on and on.

  Go with God, her mother said.— Her elder sister’s head hung down. The father had been killed months ago. As for the two younger girls, they began weeping and screaming.— Shut up, their mother said. Don’t you want her to have her chance? Now help your sister get ready.

  When Zoran came to fetch her, with all the money that his family could spare sewn inside the knees of his trousers, in her deep voice the mother demanded that he defend Zlata with his life.

  I swear it, he said, and then she embraced him for the first time.

  Zlata stared out the window. Under a half-clouded sunset the river was coppery, and the trees of the enemy hills began to thicken into a single texture. She realized that the river was almost the same color as Zoran’s eyes.— You’ve said goodbye! her mother shouted. Now go!

  Congregations being perilous, no one accompanied them when they commenced their escape. Feeling their way down the dark street, they found a doorway to kiss in. Her tongue was in his mouth and his hand on her breast.

  After this night we’ll sleep always in one bed, he whispered.

  What time is it?

  Nine-forty.

  My God, Zoran! We need to hurry now . . .

  At five to ten they arrived at the bridge. I wish I could compare the Vrbanja Most to the white bridge in Vranje that a bygone Pasha built after his daughter drowned herself over the Serbian shepherd he had executed for the crime of love. Unfortunately, the Vrbanja Most lacks monumentality. What legends could there possibly be concerning this all too ordinary structure?

  Fifteen years later I met Zlata’s mother, who now lived alone in that apartment in the Old Town. Her hair was almost the color of cigarette smoke. She said: In this place people were taking care of each other. When we were living in the basements, whenever we got something to eat we would cook it and we would share it. Maybe after the war we became more selfish.

  As we talked about the war, the old woman’s eyes seemed to sink into their sockets. At first she had not believed that anything could happen to Sarajevo, and then the first bombshell landed; and when it was over, she could not quite believe that it was over.

  In her thunderous cigarette smoker’s voice she told me about the third year, when shrapnel flew into her spleen. A couple were kissing on television. She showed me a photograph of Zlata, and the echoes of the footsteps across the hall exploded in my head like gunshots.

  They wanted to cross the bridge and they killed them on the Chetnik side, said the old woman.

  I had always imagined what had occurred as simply sadistic treachery, but Zlata’s mother said: Anyone who tried to cross over the bridge was killed. Only certain bridges were open. They had no idea.

  Who had no idea?

  The Serbs. They were careless with everyone, she said, lightly striking the coffee table with her massive wrists.

  Zoran’s family was gone, of course. Nobody knew what had happened to them, and it seemed wisest to stop asking. I walked away.
A drunk cursed me from behind a wrecked airplane.

  The old pensioner on the north bank of the Miljacka did not remember them, so I asked others.— I think she was Muslim, said a woman on a bench, but another lady insisted: No, no; he was the Muslim and she was the Serbkina.

  At least they agreed that Zlata had been shot first. It must have been an abdominal wound, for she kept screaming (for hours, they said, but I hope they exaggerated) in that puddle of light which the enemy had trained on No Man’s Land. Zoran, trying hopelessly to drag her back into the besieged city, was shot in the spine with a single rifle bullet, then shot again in the skull, which, considering the distance, might be called fine marksmanship, although on the other hand the snipers had had months to learn the range. Some embellishers claim that Zlata had not yet escaped her agony even at sunrise. Whether or not this is so, everyone agrees that the corpses of the two lovers lay rotting for days, because nobody dared to approach them. Eventually, when the international press made a story out of it, it became an embarrassment, and another truce was arranged. And it turned out just as Zoran had promised his bride, for they were buried in one grave.

  In memoriam, Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic

  LISTENING TO THE SHELLS

  1

  In the dimming living room they were drinking slivovitz and water out of fine crystal glasses, and everyone was laughing and smoking American cigarettes until a shell fell twenty-five meters away. The women jumped. Another shell fell slightly closer and the women screamed. Then the people sat silently smoking in the last light, their smoke nearly the same color as the drinking glasses, and presently began to laugh again, leaning over their hands or spreading their fingers; they stubbed out their cigarettes in crystal ashtrays, and the poet who loved Vesna even suspected that finally he had found life. But Enko the militiaman sat glaring. Now it was dark, with echoes of the last light fading from the bubbles of mineral water just within the glasses and from the women’s pale blouses, and they sat in silence, listening to the shells.

  When a shell approaches closely, you may well hear a hiss before it strikes. Once it does, you will be deafened for a minute or two, during which time you are not good for much except to wait for another shell. Meanwhile you see what they call the big light. After that you can hear the screams of children.

  Vesna’s best friend Mirjana had had two little boys, and a shell killed them both. A shell had sheared away the tree in front of Vesna’s apartment; the smash had been so loud that she was certain she must be wounded.

  Mirjana said: Marinko has a car but no petrol. Do you know where he can get petrol?

  Ask Enko, said Vesna.

  Enko said nothing.

  Smiling brightly, Mirjana tried to light another cigarette. The match-flame trembled between her fingers and went out. Vesna leaned toward her, so that they could touch their cigarettes together. People still had plenty of tobacco at that time. In a couple of years they would be smoking green tea.

  Vesna said: It’s quiet now, thanks to God!

  In the corner sat Enko with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and his police ID clinking on its neck-chain. He had pulled off his bulletproof vest, which was leaning against the wall in easy reach. Every now and then his hand touched the grip of his gun in the holster; then he swigged from the crystal glass and took another drag; finally he pulled off his now ridiculous sunglasses, his head turning rapidly as he listened to his comrade Amir, who leaned forward as if anticipating something, all the while touching his moustache with a ringed forefinger. No one else could hear their conversation. Enko’s cigarette burned steadily between two fingers as he raised it again, tapping his foot, and his face was young and hard.

  2

  Amir rose, gazed out the window into the greenish darkness, then went out.— He knows how to get American whiskey, Enko explained.

  Vesna said: Enko, can you tell me where Marinko can buy some petrol?

  Who’s Marinko?

  Didn’t you meet him? I thought you did. He’s Mirjana’s cousin.

  Enko locked his bleak eyes on Mirjana. He said: Where are you from anyway?

  Look, I’m Sarajevan, just like you.

  Great. Now what part of town are you from?

  Her children are all killed, Vesna explained. From now she has none.

  Who the fuck cares? said Enko. What do you need petrol for?

  My cousin wants it. I don’t ask him his business.

  Enko laughed.— Sure, he said. I can get him as much petrol as he wants.

  He’ll be grateful to you.

  Gratitude doesn’t do much for me, said Enko.

  3

  When Amir came back with the whiskey, he informed Enko that there was a lost American journalist at the Holiday Inn.

  At the Holiday Inn, journalists were smoking quietly around marble tables in the dark. Across the river a machine gun chortled like a night bird. Enko found the lost American and quickly uncovered his particulars: He had no idea what he wanted, and he could pay a hundred fifty Deutschemarks per day—not nearly as much as any television reporter, let alone a sexy anchorwoman such as Christiane Amanpour, but whatever they could get out of him would be easy money, and his pockets might be deeper than he said. Amir, who had recently inherited an almost new Stojadin automobile, would be the driver, billing by the hour; while Enko would babysit the journalist at, for instance, a hundred fifty Deutschemarks a day. Amir and Enko knew that everything is negotiable, while the journalist knew that when one might be killed this very hour, all money is play money. So the three contracting parties quickly achieved agreement, Enko staring into the American’s face while Amir drummed fingers on the tabletop as if he knew of more lucrative projects elsewhere, which indeed he did.

  A man in a flak jacket and helmet strutted by, with his tape recorder’s light glowing red. At another table, some functionary from Municipality Centar was assuring a French journalist: Everything will be solved by winter. Everything must be, or there will be hundreds and thousands dead.— The Frenchman nodded delightedly. Now he could file his story.

  The American journalist was encumbered by a pair of binoculars for which he would never have any purpose. Enko told him: I sure could use your binoculars.

  We’ll see, said the American vaguely. Maybe at the end . . .

  Eight-o’-clock, said Amir to the American. Goodbye.

  See you then, the American said. Well, Enko, can I buy you another drink?

  Sure. By the way, I’m counting on those binoculars.

  This building across the street, are there snipers in it? asked a very young British journalist in a worried voice.

  Oh, no, they’ve cleaned it! his handler assured him.

  Enko knew the handler, who was a sonofabitch and had once stolen away from him a very pretty Swedish correspondent. He therefore leaned across his enemy and explained to the British journalist, as if out of helpfulness: But there’s a sniper shooting at the other entrance. You don’t use that.

  Now the lost American was looking even more lost, just as Enko had intended. He needed to be reminded that Enko could ditch him at any time. As a matter of fact, Enko was a man of his word. He would never do less than he had contracted to do, and often he would do more. But it was bad business to reveal that at the beginning.

  The light continued to fail. Looking out the front windows, which happened to be lacking a few ovals and triangles, the journalists stared at blue sky, and at that silent building across the street.

  Another drink? said the American.

  Enko began to feel sorry for him.— There’s a party if you want to come.

  What time?

  Now.

  How will I get back?

  No one expects you to go out by yourself, said Enko contemptuously. He rose, pulled his bulletproof vest down over his head and strapped it tight across his sides.

  4


  In the windows those shards of bluish twilight sky were already colder, and now the clouds swam in.

  The lights had come on in the parking garage. All was noiseless. They emerged into the grey light, which was dulling down with dust and a little rain, Enko already half flooring the accelerator as they screeched around the protected corner and into the sniper’s reach. Across the street, the journalist glimpsed a building with four rows of windows visible, grey and black like ice against the pale tan façade. Metal was chattering, but not here. Almost biting his lip, his shoulders hunched as if that could somehow diminish his vulnerability, Enko wrenched the car around another corner; now they were rushing past yellow walls into the Stari Grad; there was dust, chalk and broken glass on the sidewalk.— That’s from right now, explained Enko, perhaps enjoying himself.— Just then, more glass departed windows, smashing on the street. The journalist sat quietly in the passenger seat. He excelled at being calm when he was powerless.

  Enko demanded: What do you think about those fucking Chetniks?

  Murderers, said the journalist.

  Temporarily satisfied, Enko said: A few days ago a man was killed in front of the President’s palace. We tried to help him, but he was already bloody. The trail of blood went more than a thousand meters. Here’s where she lives.

  Who?

  Vesna. When you get out you don’t need to run, but I’m telling you, pay attention and move your ass.

  All right.

  Wait a second. Inbound. Shut up. Shut up. No, we’re fine.

  As they trotted away from the car, they heard the shell explode.

  In the dark landing between the first two flights of steps, Enko said: How about a cash advance?

  Sure, said the journalist. How much?