The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  Twenty minutes from the checkpoint, the road split. Sarah slowed to make the turn to Zvornik.

  “Stop here,” Eric said impulsively.

  They were in a small village called Konjevići. There was no road sign, no store, no obvious reason to stop at this particular crossroads.

  “Turn right,” Eric said.

  “Zvornik’s to the left.”

  “I know. I want to make a stop first.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been back there since?”

  “No.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  The secondary road was rutted and washed out in places. The Peugeot was built for the autobahns and smooth tarmacs of Western Europe, and nearly bottomed out crossing a couple of deep gullies. Thirty minutes of hard driving brought them to a small black-and-white sign with an arrow that pointed to the left. SREBRENICA-POTOČARI GENOCIDE MEMORIAL.

  Sarah stopped and looked at Eric questioningly.

  He nodded.

  “Turn here.”

  The parking lot was empty. Srebrenica was a Serbian town now, and with the uptick in tensions between the Federation and the RS, the flow of tourists and visitors from Sarajevo had slowed to a trickle. The memorial itself was striking. Rows of small, Egyptian-style obelisks that looked like miniature Washington Monuments covered acres of ground. Each one a grave. To one side was a graceful arc of gray granite, a memorial wall with names and birth years. The victims of Srebrenica. There were more than eight thousand names on the wall. It was stark and powerful.

  Eric and Sarah stood at the edge of the cemetery. The sheer number of graves was daunting, a mute testament to man’s capacity for evil.

  “Can I help you?”

  Eric almost jumped out of his skin. The voice was right behind him, and he had been so lost in thought that he had not heard anyone approach.

  Turning, he saw a wizened old man bent over almost double and using an old shovel as a cane. There are few things, Eric thought, more macabre and redolent of mortality than a shovel in a graveyard.

  “Are you looking for someone in particular?” the man asked. He spoke in Serbo-Croatian with a Bosniak accent.

  “Yes,” Eric answered. “I’m looking for a friend.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Meho Alimerović.”

  The old man arched one of his eyebrows, and he stiffened as though trying to stand straight.

  “Alimerović, you say.” He stared intently at Eric through eyes that had grown milky and dim with age.

  “Yes, Meho Alimerović. He would have been twenty-five years old.”

  “Follow me.”

  “You know where he’s buried?”

  “I know where all of them are. It’s really not that difficult. They don’t move around all that much.”

  The old man was surprisingly sure-footed. The blade of the shovel crunched into the gravel path with each step. The steles, Eric noted, were engraved with a name and two dates. The first dates spanned decades, but on every grave the second date was the same: July 1995.

  “Your friend is one of the lucky ones,” the attendant said. His accent was so rural that it was a little hard for Eric to follow.

  “Lucky?”

  “He’s all here. Some of the other graves have only bits and pieces. When the Serbs saw they were starting to lose the war, they dug up the graves and scattered the bodies. They used heavy machinery and they weren’t especially careful. Most of those buried here would never have been identified without DNA testing.”

  The man stopped in front of one of the thousands of identical steles.

  “Here’s the one you’re looking for, Eric,” he said.

  Eric’s attention snapped from the stele to the graveyard attendant.

  “You know who I am?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “For how long?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “You were here that night, weren’t you? You were here with Meho.”

  “I was. Along with thousands of others.”

  “And you survived.”

  “A few of us did. Those too old to be any kind of threat. And I was a considerably younger man back then. I suppose they didn’t want to go to the trouble of burying us all.”

  “And he told you about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “That he was here because of me.”

  “No. Quite the opposite, in fact. He asked me to give you a message. He told me to tell you that it was not your fault. In truth, it was a strange message. I asked him if you would understand it, and he assured me you would.”

  Eric did and he felt a hot flush of shame at the memory. From beyond death and across twenty years, Meho reached out to him to offer succor. But Eric could not accept. It was his fault. It was his responsibility, his pride and vanity and ambition. The graveyard swam in his vision behind a wall of tears that he fought back, knowing even as he did so that this was just another act of pointless pride.

  “How did you know it was me?” Eric asked.

  “Who else could it be? Meho hasn’t gotten many visitors. Two women, his sister and his mother. That’s all. No friends before you. Where are his friends?”

  “Dead.”

  “All of them.”

  “All that mattered.”

  “I’m sorry,” the old man said. “There were so many. So very many.”

  “Too many,” Eric agreed.

  “I looked for you after the war. In Sarajevo. But I couldn’t find you. All I knew was Eric the American.”

  “I was gone by then,” Eric said. “I left not long after . . . this.”

  The caretaker nodded his understanding.

  “I’ll leave you to grieve in private. May the blessings of Allah be upon you. Thank you for coming here, even after all these years.”

  He walked away slowly, leaving Eric and Sarah alone at the grave.

  Eric bowed his head. He wished that he believed in God. It would have been easier if he did. He laid his palm on the top of the stele. The marble was cold to the touch.

  Forgive me.

  “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  Had he said that out loud?

  Eric looked over at Sarah.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she explained. “We went over this a thousand times before . . . we stopped seeing each other. I know why you wanted to come here. It’s not your fault. It’s Captain Zero and the Green Dragons and the Yellow fucking Wasps. It’s not your fault. It’s not Meho’s fault. It’s not my fault or the fault of the poor DUTCHBAT veteran who wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because he was here and he was armed and maybe he could have done something even though his orders were to stand by and watch. It’s not your fault. Meho himself just told you that.”

  “You don’t understand . . .” Eric began.

  “Don’t I?”

  “No. Listen. By early July 1995 the situation in Srebrenica was deteriorating pretty quickly. The whole city was supposed to be a UN safe area protected by a Dutch batallion, but it was clear to the Bosnian Serbs that the Dutch weren’t willing or able to fight to defend the city. So Ratko Mladić and the Bosnian Serb army were going to go ahead and take it. We could all see it coming. The regular staff reporters were too nervous to go to Srebrenica and see for themselves what was happening. A few of us stringers wanted to go. I was ready to go, but I asked Meho to go first and scout around for a few days. I told him I would join him later. I had someplace to go first.”

  “Vienna?” Sarah asked resignedly.

  “Yes.”

  “To be with me?”

  “Yes. Just for the weekend like we’d planne
d. Then I was going to Srebrenica to meet up with Meho. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me.”

  “Or me.”

  “You didn’t know. I did. It was dangerous and I asked him to do it.”

  “He was a grown-up. Meho made his own choices. Don’t take that away from him.”

  “He was a fixer. He worked for me. He would have done anything I asked. If I had asked him to go to hell and get me an interview with Satan himself, he would have done it. I should have known. I should have been more careful. It’s my fault.”

  “It’s the past, Eric. You need to let it go.”

  “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

  “Faulkner was an alcoholic prick.”

  Eric smiled in spite of himself. Only Sarah.

  “Yes, he was. But he had his moments.” Eric paused, struggling for the right words. “According to the State of California, my mother’s cause of death was suicide. But it was really murder. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed her as surely as they killed her father and mother and brothers and everyone else who mattered to her. They stripped her of her past, and it was more than she could bear. Before her, my father’s family fled Armenia steps ahead of the genocide. I heard all their stories about their village near Trabzon. Their own paradise lost. And then Meho. Three generations of genocide. The defining features of my life.”

  “I understand, Eric. I do. My mother’s parents had numbers tattooed on their forearms. The years had blurred them, but they were still legible. They were both at Bergen-Belsen although neither would ever talk about it. They met there, actually. Never again. That’s why we do this. That’s why we are here. Don’t lose sight of the good we can do.”

  Eric reached out again to touch Meho’s grave with the tips of his fingers, as though performing a benediction.

  “Why today, Eric? You’ve been living in Bosnia for years and you haven’t come here before. Why now?”

  Eric turned from the grave to look Sarah in the eyes. They were standing inches apart, and he could feel her hot breath on his skin, as intimate as a kiss.

  “Because being with you is a bridge to the past. It’s like it was all the day before yesterday. I had to come here eventually, and I’m glad I could do it with you.”

  Sarah took his hand.

  “This war wasn’t about him or you or me. It was much bigger than all of us. We were all of us caught up in its wake and tossed about like bits of sea grass in the ocean. You and I washed ashore, is all. Meho didn’t make it. He was my friend too, Eric. I loved him same as you. But I buried him and I mourned him and I moved on. Time for you to do the same.”

  Sarah was right. He knew she was right. Eric nodded as though he agreed with her. But it was a kind of lie. He would never be able to let go of the past.

  Sarah shook her head. She seemed to recognize the lie.

  “Come on,” she said resignedly. “Let’s go.”

  —

  Another ninety minutes of driving brought them to the outskirts of Zvornik. The transition from sylvan wilderness to the urban and industrial was shockingly abrupt. On the far side of a sharp curve, the city appeared like a concrete spaceship that had landed in a farmer’s field. It was an ugly town, comprised mostly of two- or three-story buildings, many half finished as though the owners had overreached and run out money for windows and doors and roof tiles. Many of the homes had a kind of gap-toothed quality, missing something even if it was hard to pin down exactly what.

  On the edge of town, there was a complex of large factory buildings, all of them shuttered and silent. For political reasons, Marshal Tito, the unquestioned ruler of Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980, had spread industrial production across the country’s six republics. One factory in Croatia might make the soles of work boots while another factory in Macedonia made the uppers and a third factory in Slovenia stitched them together. When Yugoslavia broke up, many of these inefficient socially managed factories lost their reason for being. Eric knew of at least one former steel plant that had been given over to growing mushrooms.

  —

  Their route took them past the Bijela Džamija, the White Mosque. A week ago, it had been a graceful link to the region’s Ottoman past. But the firebombing had put paid to that. The dome had collapsed and the marble-clad minaret was streaked with black. The air smelled of smoke and diesel. Bright yellow police tape was strung mockingly around the mosque, as though the police would really investigate the crime with an eye toward possible arrests. The cops were just going through the motions, and the crime scene tape was just so much bunting. It was oddly festive.

  “Do they know who did this?” Sarah asked.

  “Almost certainly the Scorpions. This was ground zero for the chitinous bastards.”

  Sarah stopped the car.

  “I want to look at this,” she said. “And remember what this is all about.”

  “Do we have time?”

  “Viktor’s not going anywhere. He’s got nowhere to go.”

  Sarah pulled the Peugeot up onto the curb. They stood side-by-side on the sidewalk in front of the mosque, close but not touching.

  “It’s already started, hasn’t it?” Sarah said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can we stop it?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m sure as hell going to try.”

  She took his hand and squeezed it hard as if they were shaking on a deal.

  —

  “Bježi! Pusti me!” It was a girl’s voice shouting “Go away. Leave me alone.”

  A knot of boys in black leather jackets embossed with red scorpions rounded the corner. They surrounded two young girls wearing headscarves and long dresses in dark colors. The girls were hunched over, afraid. The boys were taunting the older girl, who could not have been more than sixteen.

  “Come on, you little Muslim bitch. What’s the going rate for a Turkish whore? Five dinars? I think you’ll have to do me for free.” One of bigger boys grabbed the girl’s right breast. She screamed and tried to push him away. The second girl, who was no more than ten or eleven, looked confused. Eric could see that she had Down syndrome.

  “Are you armed?” Eric asked Sarah.

  “You’re goddamn right I am.”

  “Try not to kill anyone.”

  “No promises.”

  Eric strode quickly toward the girls and their tormentors. Sarah was right behind him.

  “That’s enough, boys,” he shouted.

  The Scorpions turned to face him, no longer laughing but deadly serious in the face of a challenge.

  “Go home, old man,” one boy said dismissively.

  “Not without the girls,” Eric said calmly.

  “You can have the little one. This one’s coming with me.” The boy who said this was the biggest and, Eric suspected, the ringleader. He put his arm possessively around the older girl, who struggled in vain to get away.

  “Let her go right now, or my friend here will put a bullet between your legs. That should cool you down a bit.”

  A gun had appeared in Sarah’s hand as if by magic. It was now leveled straight at the Scorpion’s groin.

  He let go of the girl and reached behind his back.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Eric said. “It might hurt. A lot.”

  The boy seemed suddenly unsure of himself.

  “Go ahead,” Eric suggested. “Give her a reason.”

  The Scorpions slunk off, leaving the girls free and at least temporarily safe.

  The young girl with Down syndrome hugged Eric, pressing her face into his jacket. He patted her back awkwardly.

  “Are you two okay?” he asked the older girl.

  “Yes, thank you. Come on, Edita, we need to get home.” The girl’s eyes were red and brimming with the tears she h
ad been fighting to hold back.

  “We’ll take you,” Sarah said. “I don’t think those poisonous bugs have gone far.”

  The girls accepted the ride gratefully.

  “Why are you still here?” Eric asked, as they drove the few short blocks to the address the girls had given them. “Zvornik is hardly a safe place for Bosniaks.”

  “Our mother is sick,” the older girl, whose name was Aida, explained. “We have nowhere else. No family. We’ll survive here.”

  “No, you won’t,” Sarah said, and there was bitterness in her voice. “You have to leave.”

  “To go where?”

  “Sarajevo.”

  “We have no place to live there.”

  “I can help you with that,” Eric said. “A friend of mine is the head of a group that helps resettle people from the RS in Sarajevo. I’ll put you in touch.”

  They brought the girls home, and Eric took their contact information. It would be easy enough to bring the family to Sarajevo and get them set up with a temporary place to live and maybe even a job.

  Twenty minutes later, they were back on the road driving to their rendezvous with Jovanovski.

  “You do understand what we just agreed to,” Sarah said sadly. “What we decided to do.”

  “I do,” Eric said. “We just agreed to take part in the ethnic cleansing of Zvornik. Ain’t life a bitch.”

  ZVORNIK

  OCTOBER 16

  8

  Sarah turned off the main road onto a side street and stopped in front of a charmless building with a sign in Cyrillic letters identifying it as Vitez, which means knight. A Balkan kafana was a kind of hybrid bar/coffee shop. Men would get their morning coffee at their favorite kafana, maybe a beer in the afternoon, and something stronger in the evening with a little music thrown in for good measure. The kafana was a full-service establishment and the linchpin of Balkan social life.

  Vitez was decidedly down-market.

  “Nice place.”

  “Not much to look at,” Sarah agreed. “But it’s one of the places where Viktor and I used to meet when he was an active asset. It’s quiet and out of the way. The owner is discreet and the beer’s cold.”