Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  The bus was more comfortable than I expected. I dozed through most of the three-hour ride. During my periods of waking I saw to my surprise that Bosnia was an achingly pretty country. The road followed a rushing river, its water a deep pure blue, along breathtaking gorges and canyons, up and down high rocky hills covered with thick wild forest, past lazy scenic postcard vistas where the river grew fat and slow for a few miles before narrowing into whitewater cataracts. The hills were as craggy and rugged as any I had ever seen. Geography alone explained why Bosnia had been the poorest, most backward, least developed part of Yugoslavia. Sarajevo had been a thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan city. It still was, albeit a crippled one. But most of the rest of Bosnia was rough and wild. A natural haven for mystics, misfits, outlaws and smugglers.

  Or, as the nineties had shown, a haven for slavering hatred, concentration camps, mass rape, mass murder, torture, slaughter and genocide. A natural home for war and for warlords.

  “I’m nervous,” Talena said, when we were about half an hour away.

  “About what?”

  “Seeing Saskia again. I know it’s stupid. But I’m nervous.”

  “That she’ll be different? Or that you’ve become different?”

  “Of course we’ll be different,” she said impatiently. “We’ve had eight very different years since I last saw her. I think we’ll still get along fine. I’m nervous that she’s miserable.”

  “What does she say in her emails?”

  “She always says things are fine…but the way she says it…It always follows a list of things that are definitely not fine. And she hardly ever writes about her husband, and when she does it’s just a really quick thing about how he’s really a good man after all, always winds up sounding like she’s trying to convince herself. But, you know, email, no context, no nuance, maybe I’m reading too much into it.”

  “Is she jealous that you went to America?”

  She nodded. “Sure. Everyone was jealous. Most of my friends applied for that scholarship, and I was the only one who got it. Saskia was the only one who had enough space left over after being jealous to be happy for me too. I tried to bring her over, you know. In 1997. Two years after I came to America. She wasn’t married yet, and she had this temporary breakup with Dragan. I tried to sponsor her as an immigrant. It’s supposed to be easier for family members, but Immigration and Naturalization seems to think half-sisters don’t count as much as sisters, and they dug up this bullshit criminal record she had, so no go. And she went back to Dragan and got married and lived who-the-fuck-knows ever after.”

  After a pause I asked, “What if she is miserable?”

  “I don’t know,” Talena said. “I don’t know. I’d do whatever I could to help her out. But right now whatever I can basically amounts to nothing. I have no money and I live ten time zones away.” She sighed. “I guess that’s what I’m worried about. That she’ll be miserable, and here I come home at last from the great American dream she was so jealous of, here I am her glamorous half-sister who lives in California and works for the big famous publishing company, and I can’t do fuck-all to help her or anyone else.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “We were best friends,” Talena said. “We used to tell people we were identical twins who happened to come from different mothers. I mean, we looked different, but…sometimes when we went out we’d call each other by our own names, it was a little game. So when I see her, that’ll be like seeing what would have happened to me, you know? There but for the grace of God and all that shit. And…damn it. And her husband better fucking deserve her, that’s all. He better at least be trying to make her happy. But I don’t know. She doesn’t say. But it doesn’t sound like it.”

  “Half an hour till we find out,” I said.

  She nodded. “Half an hour.”

  We rode on in silence.

  “Paul?” she said after a minute.

  “Yeah?”

  “It was still really stupid of you. But I’m glad you helped that little boy.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Me too.”

  * * *

  “There she is,” Talena said as the bus pulled into its slot, clutching my arm so tightly that I later found fingernail bruises. I followed her gaze to a small, dark-haired, porcelain-skinned woman, pretty in a waifish-pixie way, dressed sexy and skimpy like most Bosnian women, black leather skirt and tight gray shirt and boots with two-inch heels. Her long hair was arranged in such a way that a canopy of it almost covered the left side of her face. A man, presumably her husband Dragan, stood beside her. Dragan had the Wild-Man-Of-Borneo look, ragged shoulder-length hair, thick beard, brooding eyes. He was much taller than Saskia, in torn jeans and, despite the heat, a black leather jacket with a red CCCP emblem.

  Saskia was so tense with anticipation that she was almost vibrating. Dragan’s arms were folded and he scowled uncomfortably. We disembarked and Talena immediately dropped her pack and rushed to embrace Saskia. Both of them were in tears. I had almost never seen Talena cry before.

  Dragan and I nodded to each other. He was clearly not the touchy-feely type. Up close he was downright scary, six foot four at least, with a wide build and a big belly. His forearms were covered with pale jagged patches of scar tissue. From shrapnel, I later learned, during the war. Another scar ran down his left cheek and disappeared beneath his beard.

  Maybe he’s a big sentimental softie underneath, I told myself, but unconvincingly. Dragan seemed a lot more Hells Angel than Brother Bear. He held himself like he wanted to smash something.

  After a while Talena disengaged and waved me over to greet Saskia. I shook Saskia’s trembling hand, and turned to Dragan, but before I could offer my hand he took a step back and said something. In Croatian, presumably, given that both he and Saskia were Croats. His voice was unnecessarily loud and whatever he said made others nearby stop and look at us with distaste. Saskia winced.

  Talena looked at him for a long silent second and then turned to me. “Dragan would like to go now,” she said, her voice neutral and her face rigidly expressionless, “because this is the Muslim side of the river. He says he doesn’t like staying here longer than he has to because Muslims are all criminals and thieves.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “Jeez. I guess we better go before they take all our stuff, huh?”

  Dragan, insensate to my sarcasm, took Saskia’s arm and led her towards the small parking lot. Talena frowned after them. I picked up our packs, already wishing we were back in the bus’s air conditioning. The crippling unseasonal heat wave that hung over the Balkans showed no signs of going away, the temperature had to be over 100 already.

  Their car was an ancient diesel Mercedes, not a luxury vehicle despite the brand, though in Bosnia owning any car at all was luxury. A huge zigzag crack spanned the windshield, and the back windows didn’t work. It felt like a mobile sauna. Dragan was silent at first, but when we crossed the Neretva River, only two blocks west, he sighed as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, turned to face the backseat with a huge grin spread across his face, and all but bellowed “Dobrodasao u Mostar!” which even I knew meant “Welcome to Mostar!”

  “Hvala,” ‘thank you’, Talena said faintly, as surprised as I was.

  Dragan looked back to the road just in time to avoid a fatal collision with an all-but-rusted-out Peugeot. He pounded the horn with his fist, released a toxic stream of Croatian at the offending vehicle, turned back to us with a smile and said something good-natured.

  “A party,” Talena translated. “They’re having a party for us. Not just him and Saskia, his…it’s hard to translate. His clan, maybe.”

  “A party,” I said absently. “That’s nice.”

  I was a little distracted by what I could see out the window. We were moving too fast to focus on any details, but outside its entirely rebuilt city center, pleasant three- and four-story office buildings buzzing with bureaucrats, Mostar was clearly in much worse shape than a
nywhere in Sarajevo. We passed a bombed-out trapezoidal building eight stories high, its walls charred black, every single window shattered. On the other side of the road was a long concrete wall, half papered over by ads for cell-phone companies, the remainder cracked and cratered by some kind of weapon more serious than small arms.

  Dragan and Saskia lived on a long and tree-lined street on Mostar’s outskirts that at first looked prosperous, if overgrown. Leafy trees and thick bushes and tall grass were ubiquitous west of the Neretva. The east side, I later learned, had no trees at all. That was the Muslim side, and like Sarajevo it had been beseiged during the war, forcing its inhabitants to cut down and burn all their trees in order to survive. But parts of the Croatian side were nearly jungle, streets that seemed to be under attack from Mother Nature herself, seeking to turn Mostar back into forest, erase all traces of mankind. After spending a couple of days there it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

  In Dragan’s and Saskia’s neighbourhood the riot of weeds and bushes made their street look green and peaceful and briefly concealed the fact that half of its houses had been razed to the ground. Dozens more had been half-destroyed but were now patched up enough with wood and concrete and corrugated aluminum that families actually lived in the two or three remaining usable rooms. Maybe one in four had been mostly spared by the war, just a few bullet holes here and there, a roof that leaked in the rain where a shell had struck but failed to explode, shrapnel marks on the wall. Like much of the rest of Mostar their street looked and felt like the war had ended only eight weeks ago rather than eight years.

  The party had already begun. Men barbecued two pigs on spits over a pit in one of the larger vacant lots, drank beer and passed bottles of slivovitz around although it wasn’t even noon. Women sat beneath a temporary tented canopy, arranging food on big folding tables, sitting on plastic chairs, talking and smoking, watching over the children and the dozen teenagers playing football in the street who paused the game to let us pass. About sixty people in all. There were hardly any old people, and noticeably more adult women than men, and while there were teenagers and small children, there were very few children of any inbetween age, which said a lot about the demographics of the war’s victims. Everyone waved and peered curiously into the car as we passed. The attention made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t a party person at the best of times, and Honoured And Somewhat Resented Rich Foreign Guest was not a role I liked to play.

  We parked outside Dragan’s and Saskia’s house. There were many cars parked on the street. That at least made the neighbourhood seem vibrant. Theirs was one of the good houses, small but in a plot of land big enough to boast a vegetable garden. Their property was clean and well-cared for, inside and out, with garden implements hanging neatly from a rack outside, comfortable couches and fresh flowers and small landscape prints indoors, threadbare but comfortable sheets and pillowcases. Upstairs there were two tiny bedrooms; downstairs held the living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom.

  Saskia led us up to the guest room, where we deposited our packs, and then out to the party, whose participants surrounded us and welcomed us with a boisterous cheer. They were flashier and prettier people than I had anticipated. I had half-expected country bumpkins with banjos and patched clothes and half their teeth missing, a Bosnian Deliverance, and admittedly there was a minority who fit that profile, men like Dragan with tangled hair and beards who didn’t seem to have bathed lately, and women who wore rough simple dresses that had had all the colour washed out of them; but most of them, especially the younger ones, wore designer jeans and shiny skirts and leather boots and football shirts made of space-age materials adorned with the names ZIDANE or RIVALDO or MIHAJLOVIC, and the music thumping out of the CD player beneath the table full of bread and cheese was not banjo but Eminem.

  After greeting us with a cheer, the men returned to the roasting pigs, the children returned to their games, and the women milled about and talked and laughed and asked us questions. Talena smiled at a few of the things they said and answered the questions politely. I didn’t understand a word and she didn’t have time to translate. After a moment Dragan clapped his hand on my shoulder, hard enough that I almost stumbled, and half-led, half-dragged me to the cooler next to the barbecue pit. He dug through the cooler’s ice and unearthed a cold bottle of Niksicki Gold for me, improving my opinion of him immensely. Technically it was too early to start drinking, but I figured, when in Bosnia.

  I stood next to Dragan and the other men in a semicircle around the pigs, sipping beer and watching as a lanky old man carefully basted and rotated the glistening flesh. The smell made my mouth water. I looked around and smiled, partly to seem polite and friendly, partly because I was amused by the universal-human-nature of the scene; the women gossip with the newcomers, the children play a game, the men stand around the roasting meat.

  Dragan said something to one of the other men, in his forties with gray hair and a beard, both a few inches long but neatly clipped. They exchanged a few words and then the older man turned to me and said in careful but good English:

  “Hello. My name is Josip. They call me the Professor, but I am not really. I studied in London for two years, once, that is all.” He smiled. “Many years ago, when I was young.”

  “Paul,” I said. We shook hands.

  “Your girlfriend is very beautiful,” Josip said, looking at Talena. “You are a lucky man.”

  “She certainly is,” I agreed.

  We smiled at each other stiffly.

  “Do you all live on this street?” I asked, waving my hand at the assembled masses.

  “Yes,” Josip said. “But there are also other people on this street who do not live here. Those of us here, we are not just neighbours. All of the men you see here around you, we fought together in the war. We were the Mostar Tigers.” He said the name proudly. “First we fought the Chetniks. Then we fought the Turks. We fought for three years.”

  “The Turks?” I asked, bewildered. I knew from Sarajevo that ‘Chetnik’ referred to the Serbs, but the second reference confused me. I was no historian but I was pretty sure Turkey had never gotten involved in the Bosnian war.

  “The Muslims,” Josip said, spitting out the word. “The people across the river.”

  “Oh, right, them,” I said. “I take it you’re still not friends.”

  “You must be careful while you are here,” he warned me. “Especially near the river. Don’t believe anything they say. They smile and smile, but they’re all fundamentalists, fanatics, they want to make all of Europe an Islamic state, they want every woman in a chador, every man in a mosque, they won’t rest until either they win or they’re all dead. If we aren’t careful, your people and mine, if we aren’t careful they will win. This is still the front line, here, the battle for Europe is still going on, never mind this peace, it’s still jihad to them, it’s just a different kind of war now, now they’re terrorists. They were always terrorists. They’re no different from the people who destroyed your World Trade Center, no different at all, there are high-level connections to Osama bin Laden, he sends money and weapons and Arabs and blacks here to fight for the Muslims, it’s well documented, ask anyone, ask a Muslim, they are proud of it.”

  “I see,” I said, nodding expressionlessly, hiding my shock. I hadn’t encountered anything like this virulent bigotry in Sarajevo. The people there, at least those friends of Talena I had talked to, were disgusted by their country’s past, eager to turn their backs on nationalism and embrace the West, considered themselves European rather than Bosnian.

  “You must be careful. At night they come across the river, they break windows, they cut electricity, they cut car tires, they steal anything they can, they try to burn our churches, and if they find one of our women…Animals. No better than animals. There are still Muslim war criminals walking around on the other side of the river, dozens of them, in broad daylight. And your people, NATO, they do nothing to stop them. Nothing.”

  I smiled politely and took
a long swig of my beer. When the slivovitz came around, I took a big swallow of that. I could see why Bosnians drank so much. Sometimes it was the only way to deal with the place.

  Dragan conferred briefly with Josip, who then turned to me and said, “But enough about the Muslims. Enough about the war. God willing the war is only history now. Even so we shouldn’t talk about history here. We have too much history. Surely you have seen that already. We have too much history and it has too many teeth. Let us focus on the future. To peace and hopes for the future.”

  I clinked my bottles against his and Dragan’s, who bestowed a toothy smile upon me.

  “My good friend Dragan here,” Josip continued, “tomorrow he and I would like to show you something. We have a business proposition for you that you may find interesting. A very promising business proposition for which we need an outside investor like you. An investor who I truly believe will become very rich.”

  My stomach sank. I considered explaining to Josip that I was unemployed and already in debt to MasterCard to the tune of eight thousand dollars, but I knew he wouldn’t believe me. Everyone in places like this knew beyond any doubt that all Americans were impossibly rich, and any attempt to deny this would seem a rude and transparent lie. I smiled and nodded.

  “Good,” Josip said. “Tomorrow. But we shall speak no more of this today. Tomorrow is for business, and today is for living!”

  We clinked our beers together again. I looked over at Talena; she and Saskia stood next to one another, ignoring the rest of the world, talking fast and laughing, making up for so much lost time. Josip introduced me to the rest of the fifteen Mostar Tigers, whose names never made it past my short-term memory. They were as scary as Dragan. Three of them were missing limbs, and two others walked with pronounced limps. Even the ones who didn’t have visible scars, even the several who were of the lean fine-chiseled-features almost-effeminate type that seemed to be grown en masse in a pretty-boy factory somewhere in the Balkans, all of them had the flat, arrogant demeanor of men who are casually comfortable inflicting and receiving violence.