by Evans, Jon
Dragan lifted his cup. “Paul Wood!” he said. With his other hand he clapped me on the back so hard I nearly spilled my slivovitz.
“Paul Wood!” the Tigers chorused, and they raised their glasses to me, then drained them. I was so surprised that I forgot to drink.
“It is friends like you we need, Paul,” Josip said. “Friends who can stand up to NATO and make them listen. Friends who can support our business.”
“I’m happy I could help,” I said cautiously. The appreciation was flattering. I had to admit I got a bit of a buzz from all those battle-hardened warriors smiling approvingly at me. But I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be an honorary member of the Mostar Tigers. A subject change seemed like a good idea. “What is this place?”
“One of the rich Turks lived here,” Josip said. “It was our headquarters during the war. We did great things here. Great things. And now, now we come here to drink. Look at us. Hiding here like children escaping their parents. It is a humiliation. Look at these men around you. Every one of us has killed men in battle. We saved one another’s lives times beyond counting. Our enemies trembled at our name. And now, now the war is over, all we do is drink and curse NATO and talk about how bold we once were. But look, Paul, look, I tell you, these are some of the bravest and most dangerous men in the world. We are not useless. But this peace,” he spat the word out, “this NATO peace, it comes with nothing, no opportunity. If we were given an opportunity, I tell you what we would do with it. We would make a miracle. We would make an empire.”
It was a stirring speech. I wished I was a rich Western investor, wished there was some way I could help Dragan and Josip and the Tigers. But they were aiming their speeches at the wrong man. I couldn’t even help myself.
“You are tired,” Josip said. “I understand. We will speak of this further tomorrow. But do not forget what I tell you. You are with men capable of great things.”
* * *
I woke early. Partly because ten time zones’ worth of jet lag was still making my metabolic clock spin like a compass in a magnet factory. Partly because I always wake up early when I’m badly hung over, as if my body wants me to suffer through as many hours of my self-inflicted agony as possible, some kind of moral lesson. It was barely dawn. Talena slept beside me. I didn’t remember coming into the house and going to sleep. I hoped I hadn’t woken her up.
The bathroom, I remembered, was downstairs. Standing up was a terrible mistake. A sledgehammer began to pound at my skull from the inside. I felt so weak that I tottered rather than walked. I descended the stairs slowly and clumsily. There was no rail, so I pressed my hands against the wood-panelled wall next to the stairs for support. The steps creaked beneath me. Eventually I reached the bathroom door and pushed it open.
The toilet lid was down, and Saskia sat atop it, her face in her hands, tears leaking from her closed eyes. She was crying without making a single noise, absolutely silent even though her whole body shook violently. She wore sweat pants and a black bra, and her long dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her stomach and upper arms were mottled with bruises the size of apples, vividly purple and yellow against her otherwise porcelain skin.
I stood there, stunned, my mind wrapped in my hangover’s thick blinding cloth, barely able to parse what I was seeing. No wonder Talena was so upset, was my first coherent thought. You’d be upset too if you met your half-sister and once-best-friend after eight years and found that she was a battered wife. I wondered if I should turn around and go upstairs and pretend this encounter had never taken place. It seemed horribly rude to intrude on Saskia’s misery like this. But she would hear my retreat. She must have heard me coming downstairs.
“Sorry,” Saskia managed to whisper through her silent sobs. “Sorry. Wait. Please wait.” Her eyes had at least flickered open, so she knew who stood before her.
I waited, amazed at her noiseless weeping, at the discipline it takes to control an involuntary physical reaction like that. Easy, and terrible, to imagine how it had happened. Dragan liked beating her, but he didn’t like the way she sounded when she cried afterwards, so he punished her even more severely when she cried until she learned how to be silent. A kind of self-control that didn’t come easy. Hindu fakirs practiced for half their lives to have so much control. Years upon years of patient, methodical, endless abuse must have been inflicted on the woman before me before she had learned to cry silently. I shivered at the thought.
“Sorry,” she whispered again, getting control of herself. “I am sorry, Paul, I am sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered back. “Saskia. It’s okay.”
“I am think you are Talena,” she said. She frowned, trying to find the right words in her broken English. “But it is okay it is you. You are good man, Paul. Talena tell me. You are good man. She tell me. I tell her to stay with you. It is okay you see me.” She spread her arms wide to display her bruises, almost proudly. “But no tell Dragan. No tell. Please. No tell. You tell, is bad, is most bad for me, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “I understand.”
“I am sorry. I not, I do not know English. Not good. In German I am good. In English I am so stupid. Please know, please know, I am not stupid. I am…what is word? Good, not stupid.”
“Smart,” I said.
“Yes. Smart. I am smart like Talena, I am, please know. But in English I am not say the words I want. It make me…” She shrugged with a frustration which required no translation. “I am not stupid. I have diploma, good school. In Croatian or German I am smart. Big smart. In my school I was most smart, girl or boy, I was most smart. I know you must think, stay with Dragan, must be stupid. But please, I am not.”
“I don’t think that,” I said. “I don’t think you’re stupid.” And I didn’t. I had some idea how hard it was to flounder in a language you had only a bare and broken understanding of, and she was doing wonders to convey what she needed to with her hundred-word vocabulary, on the fly, without hesitation. I would never have done near as well in French.
“Talena want me to go with you now. To Sarajevo. To go and stay.” She shook her head. “I no go. No now. Is not smart. I want to say what is not smart. I want to say big many things to you, Paul, but I not have words, I am sorry. You go back to Sarajevo. I stay here. I want to go to Sarajevo with you. I want it big, most big. If I go, then Dragan go. I go before. I know I have baby, so I go. Dragan want baby. Dragan want baby most big. I no want Dragan baby father, so I go. Dragon go. Dragan…” She hesitated, lost for words, then she formed a fist and mimed punching herself in the belly. “Many times. So no baby. Dragan want baby most big, but he want me know Dragan most big more.”
I stared at her, speechless.
“Talena want me to go with you. But if I go, Dragan go. Dragan go, Dragan kill me.” She shrugged. “I think, I kill Dragan. But is others. I kill Dragan, I go, they go, they kill me. I go Sarajevo, Banja Luka, I go Bosnia, they go, they kill me. So I no go with you. If I go America, I go with you. But Talena say, I no go America.”
Which was true. It would take months to get a visa.
“You and Talena, you go America now. I wait. You go do things so I go America, you go Bosnia, I go America. I stay America. Is good. Is most good. Is smart? Is good?”
“Is good,” I assured her. I wanted to cry. “Is smart.”
“Good,” Saskia said. “You good man, Paul. You good man.”
We looked at each other. It was clear that the conversation was over.
“Do you go to…” She couldn’t think of the word, and mimed using her hands as a pillow.
“Sleep,” I said.
“Sleep. Yes. Do you go to sleep now?”
“Yes,” I said. “Except I need to use the bathroom first.”
She looked at me, confused, and I pointed to the toilet.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and smiled, amused and slightly embarrassed. I hadn’t seen her smile before. It was a smile that seemed to belong to an entirely different woman, confident and
beautiful and insouciant, rather than the frightened, huddled, desperate person who had conducted the rest of this conversation. She got up and padded silently past me. On impulse I reached out and took her shoulder. I was going to hug her, but she pulled away, fast, her smile fading to fright.
“Sorry,” I said, kicking myself for being an idiot, for not realizing that she associated any male touch with terror and pain. “Sorry. I just… sorry.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Sorry. Is no good. Sorry.”
“Good night,” I whispered, although it was now day.
“Good night.”
* * *
I woke the second time to a pounding headache and an angry girlfriend.
“Sure hope you had a good time yesterday,” Talena said, when I made the mistake of opening my eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, reading my Lonely Planet guide. “Hope you had a wonderful time with all your new friends. Why don’t you ask them to take you hunting later on? Maybe they can explain the fine points of how you set land mines so that they’ll kill small children.”
“Nguh,” I protested. It was hard to talk. I cleared my throat. “Land mines…what?”
“But that’s all old news. What they’re really expert at nowadays is beating their wives. Ask them all about it. I’m sure they can teach you all the details. Where you hit them so that they piss blood for a week but it isn’t visible in public. How you hit them on the soles of the feet so they can’t walk if you don’t want them to leave the house. You know what? I just realized. I bet actually they learned all this from torturing people during the war, and now that the war’s over, they’re just keeping in practice with their wives. That’s how Saskia got that black eye. Dragan’s just practicing for the next war.”
“Black eye?”
“There’s a reason she dragged all her hair over one side of her face and put makeup on like she was about to go on TV.” She paused and in a slightly less angry tone said, “I didn’t notice it either at first. He stopped hitting her in the face a couple of weeks ago, because we were coming to visit. He told her that if she told either of us he would cut her tongue out. You hear that? Cut her tongue out. And it’s not some empty hyperbolic threat, he actually means he would take a steak knife and hold her mouth open and saw her fucking tongue off. That’s your new buddy Dragan for you. She was crying all day yesterday. It took her all day to start talking about it. He wouldn’t give a shit whether we knew or not, not Dragan, except he wants to make a good impression because he’s hoping you’ll give him money.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He mentioned.”
“He did? He talked to you? In English?”
“His friend. Josip. Speaks English.”
“Josip. Right. The Professor. Well, Saskia says Dragan doesn’t, so we can speak freely as long as Josip isn’t around. But if you so much as hint that we know about him beating her…” She tried to come up with some kind of consequence equal to the enormity of that action, and failed. “Don’t. Just, don’t. Please, Paul, for God’s sake, wake the fuck up. This is bad. This is really fucking bad. All those men last night, all your new best friends? They’re monsters. Don’t think of them as people. Think of them as demons in human form. I’m not exaggerating, not one fucking bit, if you heard the stories she told me…God. Crucifixions, old men and boys crucified alive, live impalings, locking children into houses and setting them on fire, shooting pregnant woman in the belly, stopping buses and picking out girls to drag outside and rape in front of their families, war or no war, and it wasn’t a war, it’s fucking unspeakable what they did, and I don’t care that half the rest of the country was doing the same kind of thing, they’re still monsters. It’s like Saskia was kidnapped by orcs eight years ago and they kept making her send letters saying she was OK. Except they didn’t make her. She just didn’t want to trouble me. If she’d only told me, if she’d just called or written and told me…Fuck. It makes me want to scream. I guess she didn’t get email until a few years ago anyway and by then he’d already kicked all the good sense out of her.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” I said defensively. “They were already definitely not my new best friends.”
“That’s not what Josip said you told the NATO troops.”
“I was trying to mediate. That’s all. Defusing the situation. Come on, Talena, you know me, do you really think I was male bonding with those animals? I was just trying to be polite and friendly so that you wouldn’t be pissed off at me for ruining your reunion. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have stayed at that party more than ten minutes.”
“That’s why you told them that you were one of their blood brothers? That’s why you told NATO to go fuck themselves and dared them to arrest you? To be polite?”
“Blood brothers?” I asked, incredulous. “I told NATO what?”
“Well…that’s the story he told me this morning,” Talena said, seeing from my reaction that the tale had grown considerably in the telling. “That you’re the new local hero who told NATO to piss off, and because it was you, for once they actually did. Usually three or four of them wind up spending a night or two in jail.”
“Usually? There’s a usually?” That made the whole encounter retrospectively even weirder. “Jesus Christ, this town is fucked up.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There any water left in your bottle?”
Talena dug out her half-full liter bottle and passed it to me. I emptied it.
“Dragan wants to drive you out somewhere as soon as you’re up,” she said. “His big business opportunity. He’s very excited, he was almost going to tell me all about it but then he remembered that he was talking to a woman. After that he probably wanted to break my nose just to keep in practice. That fucker.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m going to cut his tongue out, and break all his fucking fingers one at a time,” Talena said fiercely, and for a moment I feared she meant it. But then she sighed, and said in a slightly more sane tone, “I’m going to get her out of here.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I want her to come back to Sarajevo with us. That’ll be a start.”
“She won’t come,” I said. “She’s afraid they’ll kill her. She won’t come unless we can get her an American visa. These days that could take months. If we could do it at all.”
Talena stared at me, amazed.
“What?” I asked.
“How do you know?”
I realized that Talena had not spoken to Saskia this morning, at least not in private, and did not know about my conversation earlier this morning. “I talked to her. This morning.”
“You…how? When?”
I explained. Talena listened intently.
“I didn’t see her bruises,” she said quietly when I finished, no longer angry at me. She brought her knees up and put her arms around them, unconsciously curling her athletic body into fetal position. “I wanted to see them. I don’t know why. But I didn’t want to ask.”
“They’re bad,” I said.
“The feet, he’s done that. With a coathanger. The wire from a coathanger. She wasn’t able to walk for six weeks. That was after she ran to Sarajevo and he found her and kicked her baby into a miscarriage. He came back and he actually flayed most of the skin off the soles of her feet. She showed me that.” Her face wrinkled like she had bitten something rotten and needed to spit it out of her mouth.
“Jesus,” I said.
“We have to get her out of here. I don’t care what she says. I don’t care if Dragan and all fucking Mostar comes after us.”
“They would, you know. These jokers, they probably would.”
“I know.” Talena sighed. “I’ll talk to her again when you and Dragan are gone. There has to be something we can do. I don’t know. But we can’t leave her here. We have to get her out of here. Out of the country, now. We’re going to get her out of here and I don’t care how.”
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br /> * * *
“It is very simple,” Josip said. “So simple it is perfect. We have friends who can supply us with automotive parts, very easily, very high quality, very inexpensive. We have other friends who are expert mechanics, can repair anything, but right now like everyone else they are unemployed, no one can afford them or even the equipment that would allow them to work. This would be our repair shop.”
I looked at the squat unfinished concrete shell of a building, a hundred feet square and two stories high. It was postwar, I could tell by the absence of bullet marks. There was nothing here but the foundation, the four walls, the ceiling, a few dozen slender internal columns, a skirt of gravel around the building, and a gravel trail connecting to the road. Vacant doorways and window spaces created gaps like missing teeth in the walls.
“Our investor, I will call him you for the purposes of our discussion,” he grinned as if it was a very fine joke, “will serve two purposes, one, allow us to purchase this land and construct our repair shop here, not very expensive I assure you, everything is cheap in Bosnia, and two, arrange for the vehicles. Worthless, damaged, ruined vehicles come in, they have perhaps been in accidents, or are too old for the owners to bother repairing them, automobiles that would otherwise go to the scrap heap. We repair and replace as we need to, we have endless cheap parts and expert cheap labour, and then what do we have? Cars good as new that we can sell anywhere for an enormous profit. We get work. You get rich. Bosnia gets a new industry. Is it not perfect?”
The pathetic thing was, he was right. It was perfect. It sounded like a completely viable business model, taking advantage of Bosnia’s only competitive advantages; lax law enforcement and cheap labour. Take smuggled auto parts from thieves and chop shops in Western Europe, add the work of desperate long-unemployed mechanics, and voila, instant profits. In its own sleazy way it was an inspired idea, but they were reduced to pitching it to a random Western visitor because nobody in their right mind would invest in Mostar and the Mostar Tigers.