by Evans, Jon
“That’s me,” I said. We exchanged firm handshakes.
“My name is Sinisa. I understand you claim to be a tourist who happened to find this boy and followed my people to return him, correct? A tourist and a computer progammer?”
His English was nearly fluent. His accent was like no other I had ever heard, not quite Eastern European, not quite anything else.
“That’s correct. I know it’s weird, but it’s true.”
“You will be happy to know I am inclined to believe you,” he said. “I do not think anyone would invent such a ridiculous story. But I would like to verify some things. Where are you staying in Sarajevo?”
“This, crap, I forget the name exactly. Pensione Karnak or something, not that exactly but something like that. It’s a really cheap little backpacker place, thirty KM a night, downtown, next to a parking lot. Right on the streetcar line, near the old synagogue, you know? Shit. I forget the name right now.”
“I know the place,” Sinisa said, sounding amused. “One moment. I will put an engineer on the telephone to ask you about computers. Try to convince him you are a real programmer.”
He withdrew an expensive cell phone from his suit pocket and selected a number to call. I was surprised he got any reception out here. He explained the situation to whoever answered, in English, and passed the phone to me. I took it gingerly, as if it might explode, and put it to my ear.
A gruff voice with yet another unidentifiable accent asked me, “What languages do you code in?”
“Uh, Java, mostly,” I said faintly. “I can find my way around in C and Smalltalk and a bunch of –”
“Java. Fine. Why would you use the synchronized keyword in Java?”
I had not thought that the evening could get any more surreal. And what kind of gangster overlord had a computer expert on staff at this hour? “Well…basically it’s a way to indicate that while a thread is running a given block of code no other threads may concurrently access that object.”
“Yeah,” my interrogator said. “Good description. Give me back to Sinisa.”
I returned the phone. I was beginning to feel much better about my situation. For one thing, I was beginning to understand my situation. I had stumbled into a gathering of refugees who had been staying in various different safe houses. They had probably all been brought here to move on to the next stage of their journey, probably tonight. Sinisa and his people were no doubt unhappy that I was here but they had already concluded that killing or kidnapping a Canadian tourist, and I was sure they now believed I was a tourist, was going to bring far more grief upon their heads than letting me go. I figured they would probably keep me here overnight, until the refugees had been taken away, and then release me. I hoped they would give me a drive back to Sarajevo. My cab driver wasn’t going to wait all night.
Sinisa listened, said, “Good,” hung up, and said to me, “You are free to go.”
“I…what? Right now?”
“Yes. Now.”
This I hadn’t expected. “I can just walk away right now?”
“Yes,” he said impatiently. “Go.”
He motioned to the door. Mini-Hulk scurried over and pulled it open, one-handed.
“Right,” I said. “Okay. I’ll go.”
I stared at Sinisa for a moment, waiting for the punch line, but none came.
“Well, see you guys, thanks for everything,” I said, automatic Canadian courtesy, and I walked out into the night. For a moment I was afraid they had just lured me outside so they could shoot me with less mess, but the door rattled back down into place behind me.
I was so surprised I nearly pitched off the edge of the loading dock instead of going down the steps. I didn’t understand. I show up out of nowhere, I find out exactly where they are and what they are doing, and they let me go? What kind of criminals were these?
The answer came to me halfway back to the taxi. Very confident ones. Certain that there was nothing I could do to harm them. Go to the police? The police got a percentage. Sinisa and his people-smuggling ring had to be abetted, if not outright aided, by the Bosnian authorities. Why wouldn’t they let me go? They had nothing to hide. They had no one to hide from.
The taxi took me back to Sarajevo.
I never saw the child or his family again. I hope they made it.
Chapter 3
Fraying
My adventure had taken up much of the night and I expected Talena to be up waiting for me, worried and angry. When I walked through the Pansione Konack’s battered wooden door, the little brass bells crudely rigged above it rang loudly. But when I climbed up the uneven wooden stairs into the Pansione’s common room, there was no one there but the old troll-like woman who worked there and seemed to have given up sleep years ago. She sat in one of the much-repaired chairs, squinting at an ancient magazine, paying no attention to me.
I went into our room and turned on the light. A dingy room that contained a sagging too-small bed, a bedside table, a chair, and nothing else. The walls and ceilings were pitted and cracked. Our backpacks barely fit into the available floor space. The light was a single dim bulb dangling from bare wire. We could have stayed with any of several of Talena’s old friends, but neither of us had felt comfortable with that idea, given that it had been eight long years since she had seen them. I wished we had taken up one of those offers. I suspected Talena wished the same thing, but I didn’t want to ask. It was one of an increasingly long list of subjects I was reluctant to bring up for fear they might trigger another icy communication breakdown. We had had more than enough of those in the last six months.
Talena was curled up in bed, asleep. Not so worried about me after all. Without pausing to wonder whether it was a good idea, I sat next to her and shook her shoulder. I wanted to tell her all about my adventure it while it was fresh in my mind. I was proud that I had done something bold and reckless and gotten away with it, that I had had an adventure. Maybe it was stupid macho bullshit, but it was the only stupid macho bullshit I had had for a long time, and I wanted to share it with her.
“Huh?” she mumbled, eyes flickering open. “Wha? The – what is it? What time is it?”
“You’re not going to believe what just happened,” I said.
“What the fuck time is it?” She squinted at her watch. “It – Jesus Christ, it’s four in the fucking morning!”
“Seriously. Listen. It was unbelievable. I was walking down this random street, I turned the corner, and I saw this Tamil family –”
“Paul, what the fuck? I’m trying to sleep! Jesus fucking Christ! Do lives depend on you telling me this shit right now? Do they?”
I hesitated. “No.”
“Then shut the fuck up and let me sleep.” She rolled over, turning her back to me. “And turn the fucking light out.”
After a moment I rose, deflated, and turned out the light.
I stood in the darkness for a moment. Then I went back out into the common room. I knew I should try to get some sleep, we had an early bus ride to Mostar tomorrow, but I was still wide awake. I sat down in an uneven wooden chair and looked around like I had just noticed where I was. Which was how I felt. A strange and disturbing feeling. Like some kind of film had been peeled off my eyeballs and I was really seeing the things around me, in full vivid colour, for the first time in ages.
Like the rest of the Pensione the common room was gray, low-ceilinged, undecorated, poorly lit, too small, encrusted with grease and dust, and smelled old and sour. Everything, walls and lights and furniture and bedding and plumbing, was old and faded and rickety and barely worked. I wished we had more money. I was twenty-nine years old now, Talena twenty-eight, and I didn’t associate squalid accomodations with desirable backpacker chic any more. I would have been happy to sacrifice gritty authenticity for comfort, but we couldn’t afford comfort. We couldn’t even afford the air fare that had brought us here. This holiday was entirely financed by MasterCard.
I sat in one of the uneven wooden chairs. The troll
-woman continued pretending that I didn’t exist. I felt itchy, physically dissatisfied. After a moment I realized to my surprise that I wanted a cigarette. I had never been a regular smoker, and I hadn’t had a cigarette in two years, not since starting to date Talena.
What the hell. She would be angry if she found out, but that hardly mattered, these days she would find reasons to be angry with me if I morphed into the Angel Gabriel and started healing cancer patients. I got up, went downstairs, exited the Pansione, and headed for the 24-hour convenience store a few blocks west.
It was dark out, only a few occasional street lights, and the street was utterly deserted, as if the city had been evacuated while my back was turned. A warm breeze drifted eastward. The streetcar rails in the middle of the street gleamed in the moonlight. As I walked I wondered how many people had died on this stretch of road during Sarajevo’s three-year siege. It was easy to imagine it, now that the streets were empty as a deserted movie set, easy to mentally superimpose bloodsoaked scenes of anguish, terror, and war. I didn’t have to imagine bullet marks, or bear-claw-shaped mortar scars, or apartment towers blasted into gargantuan Swiss cheese. The signs of war were still easy to find, in this city overflowing with angry ghosts.
The convenience store was a reassuring island of bright lights, modern technology, and Western brand names. I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and a box of matches. I walked back to the Pansione, unwrapped the pack, and lit my first cigarette in two years. I choked a little on the first few puffs, but old habits kicked in and I was soon smoking like I had never stopped.
I still wasn’t tired. Far from it. I was electrically awake. I hadn’t experienced tonight’s kind of adrenaline rush, or anything even close to it, for a long, long time. I felt like I had woken up from a long, deep sleep. From a coma.
I thought of the last time I had faced down a loaded gun. The smell and taste of smoke reminded me of how I and my friends had smoked our way through a pack of cheap Moroccan cigarettes on our way back to our hotel, that day more than two years ago. I hadn’t thought about that night in ages. I hadn’t thought about anything outside the bleak rut of my day-to-day life in ages. It had hurt too much, remembering how good my life had been.
Once upon a time I was a man who had adventures, who travelled several months a year, crossed oceans and continents on a whim, who had friends around the globe who would risk their lives for me and I for them, who had a beautiful girlfriend who I loved and who loved me, who was happy. Once upon a time I had money. Once upon a time my skills were in demand and I was able to get a well-paid job whenever I wanted one. Those two things hadn’t seemed so important. How wrong I had been.
I still had Talena, but, I told myself, finally able to articulate it because it had moved from fear to certainty, not for much longer. I still had those friends, but most were oceans away, and I wasn’t likely to have enough money to cross oceans again anytime soon. I didn’t have much else. Two years ago, I had everything. Now I was running out of things to lose.
At the party that night, I had watched Talena laughing with one of her old rediscovered friends, a tall easygoing model-handsome man with chiseled muscles and designer clothes, trading jokes in a language I did not understand, and for the first time I had thought: She doesn’t belong with me. I wish she did, how I wish she did, but she doesn’t. She belongs with someone better.
The troll woman said something. I started out of my reverie and looked at her. She reached for the Marlboros with bony claw fingers and looked at me for approval. I nodded. She coaxed a cigarette from the pack, lit it, and sucked at it like it was the source of life. I wondered how old she was. She looked about seventy, but Bosnians, like all residents of recent war zones, usually looked older than they were. Maybe sixty. I wondered where I would be when I was sixty, if I might be alone in a room like this, bumming cigarettes from strangers. Just then it seemed like a terrifyingly plausible future.
I lit up another cigarette and contemplated myself and my prospects. I hadn’t done so for a long time. Eighteen months of poverty and boredom and rejection, of living off handouts from my parents and Talena, of being an unemployed bum with fuck-all to do, had shrunk my life to a barren rut from which I dared not lift my head. For a long time now the mental subjects of me and the future had been too repellent to dwell on. But tonight, being in Sarajevo, carrying that little boy back to his family, staring down the smugglers’ guns, tonight seemed to have jolted me out of my lethargy and depression, for a little while at least. Tonight I could look at myself without cringing.
I stayed up all night, smoking and thinking, sometimes sitting in that common room, sometimes wandering the deserted streets, until my throat was raw and my mind was numb and the sky above Sarajevo had turned pale with incipient dawn. Then I went into our room, sat on the chair, and watched Talena sleep, peaceful and beautiful, her slender body curled up like she was cold, her face half-obscured by her long dark hair. I loved her. I wondered if she still loved me. I knew she had at one point, very much, but I also knew that she could not love someone she did not respect, not for very long.
I knew it was too late to save what we had. Much too late.
Unless something extraordinary happened.
Chapter 4
Mostar Tigers
“Paul? Are you okay?”
I opened my eyes. Talena was sitting on the bed, looking at me, concerned. I had fallen asleep sitting on the chair.
“Sure,” I said slowly, still slightly dazed.
“What…why did you sleep on the chair?” Her voice half-incredulous, half-accusatory.
“I didn’t sleep much. I was up most of the night.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I’ll tell you over breakfast,” I said.
We dressed and had bread and sliced meat and yoghurt and Turkish coffee in one of the many cafes in the nearby Bascarsija district, a cobblestoned warren straight out of the Ottoman Empire. I told her about my encounter with the little boy and the smugglers. I tried to make the story into a lighthearted anecdote, but her expression as she listened was grim. She let me finish but I could tell she wanted to interrupt and chastise me on several occasions.
“You make them sound charming,” she said when I was finished. “You and your friendly neighbourhood gangsters. Jesus, Paul, how could you have been so stupid? They’re monsters. You understand that? They’re rapists and murderers and…and…and I can’t believe you’re sitting here cheerfully talking about it like you had a fun little adventure and you saved a child and you’re all proud of it now. Those people are practically going to be slaves, you know. Those women will all be raped. Every one of them. And you, you should never have gotten involved. You should have just kept walking. You don’t know how lucky you are you walked away. If they weren’t in a good mood, if you weren’t a foreigner, they would have beaten you to a pulp just to teach you to keep your nose out of their business, you might never have walked again, that’s the way this country works, you understand? And then you went and told this Sinisa where you were staying, told him the truth, maybe your little adventure it isn’t even over yet, maybe they’ll change your mind and come find you, find us, wouldn’t that be fun? I can’t – I just can’t believe you. I would never have imagined that you would do something so reckless and stupid and then act like this. Like you’re so fucking proud of it.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, wilting in the face of her righteous wrath, looking down at the table, away from her icy blue eyes. “I’m sorry.”
But that was a lie. Lack of sleep had caught up with me despite the jet-fuel Turkish coffee, and I was too tired to argue, but I wasn’t sorry for what I had done. I was sorry that I had upset Talena, I appreciated that what I had done was foolish and reckless, but she was right when she said I was proud.
After the silent remainder of our breakfast we gathered our packs and took a streetcar to the bus station. The Croat/Muslim station. Postwar Sarajevo had two bus stations, at opposite ends of the city,
one for the Serb-controlled part of the country – the Republika Srpska, a name which always reminded me of the satirical Onion article “Clinton Deploys Vowels To Bosnia” – and one for everywhere else. A typically crazy consequence of the ethnic fault lines that had cracked Bosnia open like an egg.
‘Ethnic’ isn’t really the right word. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are physically indistinguishable and their spoken language differs only in accent if at all. Religion was the theoretical dividing line, Orthodox vs Catholic vs Islam, but prewar Bosnia had been one of the more secular places on Earth, and it still seemed a whole lot less religious than the good old USA. It didn’t matter. Despite all their similarities, each side had found plenty of reasons to hate and slaughter the other two.
Postwar Bosnia was a stable place only because stability had been forced upon it by thousands of NATO troops. Without them it would have fragmented in weeks. People paid lip service to Bosnia being a single indivisible nation, but it was effectively partitioned into the Republika Srpska and the Bosnia-Herzegovina Federation, which in turn seemed to be subdivided into the largely Muslim Bosnian Federation and Croat-dominated Herzegovina. Sarajevo itself seemed a quasi-independent entity. My Lonely Planet guide claimed that the presidency rotated between the three ethnicities every six months, and the ruling cabinet was equally divided among them, which meant that it never reached any decisions at all because each side vetoed all propositions brought by either of the other two, which was fine because in practice NATO completely ignored the cabinet and made all the country’s important decisions and would for the foreseeable future. Like everything else in Bosnia, half tragedy and half farce.
At least the bus station was halfway civilized; snack shops selling various configurations of meat and starch, kiosks of junk food and newspapers, computer-printed bus tickets. We boarded the 8:40 bus to Mostar, off to visit Saskia, Talena’s half-sister.