The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

“Memory does seem to be something of a local specialty in the Balkans. It’s like what Talleyrand said about the Bourbons: ‘They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.’”

  “Yes,” Eric agreed sadly. “They remember. They remember everything. Even things that never happened.”

  JASENOVAC

  MARCH 20, 1942

  3

  The gruel was thin and tasteless, a few lumps of starch mixed with water from the river that had not been boiled long enough to sterilize it. Natasa pushed away the battered tin cup that was almost her sole earthly possession with an expression of disgust. Her cousin, Ivan, pushed it back.

  “You have to eat, Natasa.”

  They were sitting on the back steps of the barracks. The wood was slick with mud and slime, but there was no place else. They were lucky. Most of the prisoners ate standing up. A few crouched in the muddy yard bent over their cups and bowls like dogs.

  “Eat,” Ivan said, gently this time.

  “I won’t. It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s life, Natasa. If you don’t eat, you die.”

  “I’ll die anyway.”

  “Maybe,” Ivan acknowledged. “Maybe even probably, but if you don’t eat, you’ll end up a muselmann first.”

  The muselmanner were the living dead. Skeletons. They were empty husks who had lost the will to perform the most basic human functions. They would not eat or sleep or clean themselves. Some shuffled mindlessly through the camp moaning softly. Some cowered in the darkest corners of the common buildings, their rough cotton pants soiled with urine and feces. They were no longer human. The Croatian guards called them muselmanner. It was the German word for Muslims. The Croatian fascists, the Ustaše, must have picked it up from their Nazi overlords.

  “Why do they use that word?” Natasa asked, as she grudgingly took a sip of the dirty water that passed as soup.

  “I think it’s because of the ones who lie curled up on the floor like Muslims in prayer. Don’t worry about it, Natasa, don’t worry about anything except living one more day.”

  Ivan smiled and Natasa felt warmer even though the March weather was damp and cold. The winter had been harsh. Thousands of prisoners had died of malnutrition and exhaustion. Thousands more had been judged too weak to work and sent to the brick factory. What happened there no one knew for certain, but no one ever came back from the factory. The clouds of ash that spewed from the factory’s tall chimney were thick and black and reeked of death.

  Natasa finished her soup and firmly rebuffed Ivan’s efforts to give her the last few swallows of his serving. Ivan was only a few years older than Natasa—twenty to her fifteen. But he acted as though he were the grown-up and Natasa the child. She did not mind so much. She wanted so desperately to be a child.

  He had always been protective of her even back in the village near Mount Kozara, where the fields were fertile, the streams clean and clear, and the larders full of smoked meat and cheese, apricots and honey. That was before the madness.

  Ivan’s father and Natasa’s mother had been brother and sister. They were dead, along with their spouses. Natasa’s father had died back in the village resisting deportation by the Croatian fascists. Her mother had died in the fall from typhus. Ivan’s father had died before the war, and his mother had been taken to the brick factory soon after their arrival in the camp. She had always been somewhat frail.

  There were a few others in the camp who Natasa knew, even a couple of distant relatives. But Ivan was the only one she was close to. This was not a place you made friends.

  There was nothing alive in the camp. No trees. No grass. No flowers. Nothing beautiful. Everything was colored in muted shades of gray and brown. Outside the barbed-wire fence, the landscape was covered in ash from the furnaces.

  In truth, Natasa was not entirely sure why they were here. Ivan said it was just because they were Serbs, and the blue ribbon pinned to her thin jacket marked her as a Serb as clearly as the Jews were identified by their yellow stars and the communist Partisans by a red badge. Only the Gypsies were not marked by a color, and they largely kept to themselves in a part of the camp that was if anything even more squalid and fetid than the block of wooden shacks where Natasa and Ivan worked and slept. It was unfair, Natasa complained. They had not done anything wrong—nothing except to be born Serbs. But that seemed to be crime enough.

  A pack of guards in their warm black greatcoats marched into the yard as though they were on parade. Weapons hung over their shoulders or across their backs like oiled serpents.

  “Oh, to be young . . . and fascist,” Ivan said, with the wry smile that not even a year in a concentration camp had been able to take from him.

  “They do seem happy,” Natasa agreed.

  The guards spread out, kicking a few of the prisoners to their feet.

  “Up, you bastards,” Natasa heard one of the guards shout as he slammed a leather boot into the ribs of an older man who was slow to rise.

  The prisoner, a Partisan to judge by the red badge on his threadbare jacket, lay in the mud on his side unable to or unwilling to stand. It was hard to believe that this old man was a fearsome guerrilla fighter. Maybe he was being punished for a son who had joined the communists. The guard swung one leg back as though preparing to kick him again then seemed to change his mind. There was no point to it. The prisoner was too weak to be of any value. Instead, he pulled a fingerless leather glove from the pocket of his greatcoat and strapped it tightly to his right hand with practiced ease. A short curved blade was built into the glove. It stuck out like the sharp spur on the gamecocks that the village men used to wager on. The guards called it the Srbosjek—the Serb cutter. It was good for only one thing, cutting throats. But that it did very, very well.

  Within seconds, the elderly prisoner was lying dead in a puddle of mud and blood. The guards left him there. A team of prisoners on corpse duty would be by soon enough to add him to the pile of bodies waiting to be dumped into mass graves or burned in the great ovens at the brick factory.

  Natasa felt nothing at watching the old man’s death. It was one of hundreds of murders she had witnessed. One of thousands of dead bodies. Death would come for them all. A part of her, the part that was still a girl from a large family in a small village, despaired at her own lack of feeling. This act of senseless violence should have filled her with horror. That it did not, that she had grown numb to the brutality of the camp, made her wonder if in some important way she was not already dead.

  “Come on,” Ivan said, helping her to her feet. “Let’s get to the factory before little Adolf takes an interest in us.”

  He rose unsteadily to his feet. Malnutrition brought on spells of dizziness and vertigo. Ivan extended a bony arm to Natasa to help her to her feet. The skin on the back of his hand was like parchment paper. The veins under the skin stood out in sharp relief. Her cousin had once been handsome, with strong features and curly brown hair. The features had hardened into something vulpine, and his head was shaved to deter lice. Ivan was no longer handsome, but he was her whole world. Natasa did not know what she would do if she lost him. It would be the end of her.

  They shuffled through the camp toward the factory where they stamped sheet metal into bowls and plates for the Croatian army. It took almost five minutes to cover the three hundred meters. None of the prisoners had the energy to do more than push themselves forward at a speed just above a pace that would earn a kick or a club from one of the guards. No one seemed to care. The goal of Jasenovac was not efficient production. The goal was extermination. The world had gone mad.

  “Factory” was perhaps too grandiose a term for the building where they worked. It was just a single-story wooden structure, no different from the overcrowded barracks. The carpentry was shoddy, but the roof at least did not leak. The machines inside were valuable. The factory was a relatively good work assignment. The prisoners who worked the fields or those sent
to dig coal in the mines did not last long. The factory work was at least indoors.

  This was a shift change. The factory never closed. The machines ran twenty-four hours a day, and the prisoners worked in twelve-hour shifts. The guards would have worked them harder, but the death rate among the workers was too high. The prisoners were expected to die when the Croats told them to, not on their own schedule.

  Natasa went about her job like an automaton, moving slowly to conserve energy. If they were lucky, there would be beans for dinner. If not, it would be half a litre of turnip soup. The diet offered barely enough calories to stay alive.

  Natasa’s job was to dip the bowls into a vat of enamel and stack them to dry. She did it again and again, thinking of nothing. Ivan was working the stamping machine alongside a tall blond girl from Zagreb named Jelena. Natasa and Ivan were from a village and they were used to hard physical labor. Jelena was the daughter of a physician, and she had trained as a pianist. She was stick thin and her blond hair was falling out in clumps, but there was a vestige of her former beauty that had survived life in the camp. Tuberculosis had given her skin a glow that could almost have been mistaken for health.

  Ivan was sweet on Jelena. Natasa saw him pull something from his pocket, a small hunk of black bread, it looked like, and press it into Jelena’s hand. She tried to give it back, but not too hard. The second time he pressed it on her, she kept it.

  One of the guards had seen them, however. And not just any guard.

  He was an enormous villager from Herzegovina with a face as round as the moon and a sadistic streak that was well known to the prisoners, who called him the Hand of Satan. He was one of the guards who always wore his Srbosjek and he used it without provocation.

  “What’s in your pocket?” he demanded of Jelena

  She looked at her feet.

  “Nothing,” she said dully. It was a mistake. You should always make eye contact with the guards when you lie to them, Natasa knew.

  Jelena turned out the pocket of her coat. It was empty.

  The guard reached for her wrist and turned her hand over. The crust of bread was clutched in her palm.

  “Food in the factory is forbidden,” he said menacingly. The Hand of Satan reached for a wooden truncheon at his belt.

  “Stop!” Ivan screamed, as he stepped in between Jelena and the guard. “The bread is mine. I brought it into the factory. The punishment is mine.”

  “Very well,” the guard agreed.

  He slipped the truncheon back into the holster on his belt. Natasa stood rooted to the floor.

  With a single smooth motion, the guard swung his Serb cutter across Ivan’s throat. Her cousin’s neck was so thin that she could hear the scraping sound as the razor-sharp knife cut into the bone.

  Blood arcing from Ivan’s neck fell on Jelena like a red rain, soaking into her clothes and the piece of bread she still held in her hand.

  Natasa slumped to the cement floor, her vision gray and blurry. The guard hit Jelena casually with the back of his hand, knocking her head against the stamping machine. The doctor’s daughter fell alongside Ivan. Dead maybe. Maybe not. It didn’t matter.

  The guard turned to look at Natasa as though seeing her for the first time.

  “Clean this up,” he commanded.

  SARAJEVO

  OCTOBER 12

  4

  For a brief moment when she walked through the door, Eric was twenty-one years old again and in love. She had not changed. Not really. Her hair was still chestnut and still shoulder length. She was fit and strong, with broad shoulders and a trim waist. There were a few lines around her eyes and at the corner of her mouth. She had to be well into her forties by now, Eric knew, but she sure did not look it.

  A complex cocktail of emotions produced an almost physical pain in his chest right above his heart. It was a mixture of regret, desire, and nostalgia. He had loved this woman fiercely and passionately as only a young man can. That was a long time ago.

  There was more than one kind of ghost.

  “Hello, Sarah.”

  “Hello, Eric.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes.”

  They were in Eric’s office in the CAA, the controlled access area that housed the ambassador’s suite, the political and economic sections, and the defense attaché’s office, those parts of the embassy that handled classified information. That Sarah was there on her own meant that she was still with the government and that she still had her clearances. He should not have been all that surprised to see her. It was bound to happen at some point.

  Eric got up from his desk and embraced Sarah Gold for the first time in twenty years. The skin on her cheek was cool where his lips brushed it. She took his hand and squeezed it firmly.

  “I’m so glad to find you here, Eric.”

  “It’s nice to see you,” Eric replied, and he was surprised to realize it was true. Time had blunted the sharp edge of hurt as it always did. Eventually.

  Unconsciously, almost instinctively, he looked at her left hand. There was no ring. That did not really mean anything, however. Many of the women in her organization did not wear their rings. The perception of availability could at times be exploited.

  “I need to talk to you,” Sarah said, and there was a note of urgency in her voice.

  “Sure. Sit down.”

  “Not here. Can we go someplace?”

  Eric glanced at the clock on the wall. It was almost seven.

  “Dinner?”

  “I’d like that.” She smiled and his heart skipped a beat or two before settling into a slightly faster rhythm. Don’t be an idiot, he chided himself. She left you, remember?

  Unbidden, an image of her chestnut hair fanned out across a white pillowcase sprang from his memory. His old apartment, the one across the road from the Holiday Inn where he and the other journalists used to drink away the dark nights of the siege. But that was before Sarah. Once they met, it had been just the two of them huddled together in the dark as the shells fell on the city, drinking red wine rather than the Scotch that Sarajevo’s close-knit community of war correspondents guzzled like expensive water.

  He took a step back from her and tried to pull himself away from the past. The past was a trap. He had known that since he was ten years old. It was full of lies and promises unkept. And death.

  “How about the old place?” he asked.

  “Is it still there?”

  “It is.”

  “Still good?”

  “Just as good.”

  “That would be fabulous.”

  Eric locked up his office, logging off the various computer systems and pulling the blinds shut against prying eyes. The Bosnians didn’t have much of an intelligence service, but the Russians and Chinese were both active in Sarajevo. There were still a few people working in the suite so he did not need to set the alarms.

  “I’m done for the night,” he told his staff, as he and Sarah headed for the door.

  One of his officers looked up briefly from his monitor and nodded in acknowledgment. “Have fun, boss. Be good.”

  Outside, it was already dark and growing cool. Eric offered Sarah his arm and she took it. They fit together neatly, just like they always had.

  It was a fifteen-minute walk at a leisurely pace from the embassy to Kod Jasne, a small, unassuming restaurant on the outer edge of Baščaršija, the old part of Sarajevo on the north bank of the Miljacka River. It was the most vibrant part of the city, with good restaurants and numerous bars and cafés that featured hookah water pipes and the fruit-flavored tobacco called shisha. Fifty years of communism and four years of war had tried and failed to erase Sarajevo’s Ottoman-era charm. And Baščaršija was ground zero for the city’s vibe of bohemian cool.

  Kod Jasne was one of the few restaurants that continued to operate more or less without
a break through the siege. Jasna, the matronly proprietress, had had a relative in the UN who was able to smuggle in enough meat and flour and coffee and sugar to keep her in business. Eric and Sarah had been regulars, along with a small group of international journalists, diplomats, and spies. Other spies, Eric corrected himself, looking over at Sarah’s profile. He had not known what she did for a living when they first started seeing each other. He suspected, of course, that she was not really a press officer. She wasn’t the type. But they had been lovers for more than six weeks before she had told him that she was with the CIA.

  On the walk to Kod Jasne, they caught each other up on the intervening twenty years. Eric told her about joining the Foreign Service, working on the soul-crushing visa line in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, almost quitting, sticking it out, and making it through the diplomatic equivalent of dues paying with his sanity mostly intact before embarking on a career that included tours in Ankara and Phnom Penh as well as two stints in Sarajevo, a year in Kabul, and two years at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York.

  “So you finally made it to Cambodia,” Sarah said. She knew about his family and his mother’s suicide. “Did you find what you were looking for there?”

  “No,” Eric admitted. “I’m not sure it exists.”

  After six months of searching, Eric had found a cousin in Cambodia, seemingly the only relative on his mother’s side who had not been lost to the killing fields. They had shared a meal and a few drinks and Eric had listened to stories of his mother when she was young and innocent. There was nothing in those stories that he could connect to the beautiful but deeply sad and damaged person who could not process what had happened to her and her family. Eric remembered finding her body in the garage and feeling not horror or anger but relief. He had been happy for his mother and relieved that as her son he had not been an anchor tying her to a life that she could no longer live. It was a complex emotion for a ten-year-old, one he was still wrestling with.