Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “An Allah’s boy. You think that will sell here?”

  “I don’t know. You Americans haven’t helped. We’ve listened to your promises of human rights and, what’s that famous phrase, oh yeah, self-determination for a decade. Americans sound pretty on paper.”

  “Sound bites. Americans give good sound bite.”

  “Good talkers.”

  “Your English is softer these days, more delicate.”

  “Haven’t you noticed I’ve been watching CDs of British movies on your laptop? You can get anything on the black market now. I like the American accent, but the Brits know how to pronounce. They hold on to the word.”

  “You weren’t so uppity when we met.”

  “I was watching Hollywood back then. Scorsese. You know, ‘Where’s my money, you fucking low-rent piece of shit?’”

  “That’s it. Poetry!”

  “I’m more . . . Oh, what’s that word?”

  “Cultured?”

  “No. Refined. That’s it. I’m more refined these days.”

  In a mock British accent, Alija says, “Would you be so kind as to pass the bullets? And please, do tell John to stop by for a spot of brandy after the massacre.”

  She laughs.

  We stop at a house. Alija knocks. A boy peers through a crack in the door and lets us in. He hugs Alija and asks for candy. He whirls around her like a breeze around a pole. She hands him a gumdrop and kisses him on the forehead. The place smells of onions and kerosene, and the kid vanishes and a slender man with deep-set eyes and badly cut hair appears. He wears an old cardigan and baggy pants and sits beneath a window in a slant of sunlight. He is a teacher in the school in the next village, and Alija tells me two of his brothers are guerrillas. They left home months ago, and they send news down from the mountains. The boy brings tea and sugar cubes. He throws wood into the stove and vanishes again. Children here do that. In an instant they can shift from omnipresence to ether. The man must be reading my mind.

  “It’s the war,” he says. “Children must know when to become invisible.”

  He offers a cigarette. I decline.

  “American?”

  “Yes.”

  “Americans are funny They grow the best tobacco, but they’ve stopped smoking.”

  “We are full of contradictions.”

  “The world has suffered because of them.”

  He looks at me, flicking ash off his sweater. “Alija says you want to know about the resistance.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know much. But it will last. It’s the way now.”

  “Have you heard about this new man in the mountains? The one with the beard and dates?”

  Alija stops the translation and glares at me. I am pushing too quickly. The man sits back in the sunlight. Interviews are tiny plays. They have pleasantries and climaxes, subplots and asides. To neglect one is to spoil the other. The man enjoys tea and conversation. I am pulling him faster than he wants to go. He needs intimacy. He needs to reveal what he knows layer by layer. Information here is cherished, hard-won, not easily surrendered to some nonsmoking American with a notebook. I know this. I pride myself on listening. Why, then, am I breaking cadence? Maybe I’m tired of this dance, tired of unraveling all the barbed secrets of dirt-house schoolteachers in war zones, tired of chasing information as if it’s a lantern moving ahead of me from village to village. I wonder if the man knows I’m thinking this. I’m sitting across his table, stirring my tea and wondering what worth this man has for me. I don’t want to be this way. I want to be enchanted; I want this man to unfold the story of his family, how he survives on this land, why he became a teacher, why his brothers picked up Kalashnikovs, and I want to know what will happen to the boy who opened the door and let us in.

  I saw a man once in Africa. Rebels had just left his village. He stood in blood and dirt near the piled bodies of his family. He looked at me. He spoke no English. He pointed to his family and then he pointed to my notebook. His fingers were crooked as kindling. He moved his hand as if he were writing against the sky. He wanted it recorded. Somewhere, on some scrap of paper, he wanted words for all that had been taken. But there were a lot of villages just like his, a lot of stacked bodies, and when I sat down to write the story that night on the banks of a tributary feeding the Congo River, the man who scrawled his hand across the horizon never made it into my copy, his family’s fate chronicled by obscurity.

  Alija says good-bye to the teacher. She gets into the Jeep. Slams the door.

  “You went too fast.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t do that again. If you do, you’ll never find the man you’re looking for.”

  “You’ve reverted to Scorsese.”

  “Screw that, Jay, you know what I mean.”

  It’s nearing dusk and we need a place to sleep. We drive to another village, or rather a knot of houses near a stream. We stop at one with a small courtyard surrounded by a mud-brick wall. Another child, this time a girl, willows out of the gate, flickers around our Jeep, and vanishes. I park around back. Inside, the courtyard seems another world, a patch of green with gnarled grapevines and a long table beneath. An old man sits smoking a cigarette, and a woman, wearing a head scarf and moving with the ferocity of a bulldog, sweeps around the table. The man says, “Welcome.” Cheese and bread and jam appear, delivered quietly by the girl. Alija winks and slips her a gumdrop. The woman brings tea, and we sit — the moon quarter-full in the sky — and talk among the candles. The man is not interested in war. He wants to know about Michael Jordan’s jump shot and if I think it’s possible for a Cadillac to navigate this land’s winding dirt roads.

  “I don’t think a Cadillac would work here,” says the man. “It rides too low and elegant.”

  “You always speak of Cadillacs,” says the woman. “You have never touched one. You should worry more about your horse cart and tractor.”

  “I’ve seen plenty of Cadillacs on TV, in pictures.” He bends toward me and whispers. “She doesn’t like it when I explain about Cadillacs. She’s jealous of the Cadillac.”

  He rolls another cigarette.

  “It’s cold,” he says, gesturing toward Alija. “You two sleep in the kitchen near the stove.”

  The couple walks into the house, the woman first, and the man, with his stiff left leg, follows like an imperfect shadow. Alija and I stay at the table. The candles have nearly burned away; the moon has sharpened in the night.

  “Do you think I’ll find my brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been months.”

  “He may be hiding.”

  “All I know is that he left the house one morning. The MUP have been rounding up young men. Have you noticed there are fewer in the villages?”

  “Many are in the mountains with the guerrillas. Would your brother fight?”

  “I don’t know. He’s a university student. Students don’t make good fighters.”

  “We’ll keep looking.”

  “Maybe your man with the dates will know. This old man just told me he’s heard the dateman has a camp two mountains from here. I know the place. There are caves high up.”

  “Tough for the MUP to attack.”

  “Nothing’s too tough for the MUP.”

  “Maybe you should fight.”

  “I would be a good fighter.” She laughs.

  We go inside. Embers glow through cracks in the stove. I like what Alija said. “The dateman.” I will call him the dateman. We throw blankets on the floor and sleep in our clothes.

  Chapter 3

  The morning’s cool. We thank the old couple and leave, taking bread and fig jam the woman has tucked into our Jeep. Sheep scurry to grazing fields, and sunlight peels back fog. I love this twilight moment before life tramples clarity. I worked in a New Jersey factory years ago. Got up before dawn and drove through my patch of America in a time before I knew the intentions or even the existence of bearded men with dates and visions. How long had they bee
n out there? Not known, T. S. Eliot once wrote, because not looked or listened for. But there were inklings, and every now and then there’d be a ripple of disturbance just violent and bloody enough to slip onto the news pages, create temporary concern, and then vanish as exotic anomaly; you registered it, pondered the brutality, counted the bodies, mouthed a few unpronounceable names, and turned the page. Imagine all the sounds and furious sermons running through those tiny anonymous desert and mountain wars that never reach the streets leading to my old factory. Alija points out the window. A small crowd of shepherds and farmers has gathered around a car stopped in front of us. A man and woman bicker in English across the hood, and the shepherds giggle, understanding the gist, if not the words.

  “Let’s go down this dirt road,” says the woman.

  “No way.”

  “C’mon. It’ll save thirty minutes.”

  “Nope.”

  “C’ mon.

  “I’m not going. We don’t know if it was mined last night.”

  “We’ll go slow”

  “No.”

  “Pussy. Ted, you’re such a pussy.”

  Ted is agitated. But the woman is lovely. I might have followed her down a dirt road years ago. Faded jeans and a tight T-shirt, a bandana threading her hair, she is young and has that irritating Philadelphia Main Line patrician air of entitlement. Her lips are as slender as ribbons, her nose is like a razor. She is a daughter of money, seeking a break from the sanctuary she has lived in since birth. Her first or second war, I guess; she is still too naive to understand the things she should understand. This is my private conjecture game, sketching mental composites that, I must admit, mostly turn out to be true. Ted is a less complicated affair. A straightforward type, a guy whose smile doesn’t always propel him as far as he’d like, which, whenever he is with the kind of woman he now faces across the hood, becomes sadly apparent. No matter. I know one thing for sure about both of them. They’re freelancers, and they’ve spoiled my morning quiet and mussed up the clarity. Freelancers live on promises; they are journalisms bohemians and lost souls, hauling notebooks and beat-up computers across this battered planet. They wear their nerves outside their skin and appear wherever a story is hot, disappear before it cools. They are bees at a picnic. They dish news to papers in Cleveland and Pittsburgh — those places that want a foreign byline but wait months before paying the poor rent-a-hack in the war zone.

  “Hi, guys,” I say as Alija and I get out of the Jeep.

  “Hey. I’m Ted. This is Ellen.”

  “I’m Jay, and this is my translator, Alija.”

  “You work for the Herald, right?” says Ellen.

  “For the last fifteen years.”

  “I’ve read your stuff.”

  I love how Ellen ended that sentence. “Read your stuff.” No assessment, just recognition. That’s good.

  “What are you doing up so early? Is there fighting somewhere?”

  “I don’t know. Alija and I just got an early start.”

  “Alija, is he telling the truth?”

  “He mostly tells the truth.”

  “Do you think it’s safe to go down the dirt road?” Ted

  says.

  “If no one else has been down it this morning, you don’t want to be the first.”

  “Mined, right?”

  “Could be.”

  “I asked these shepherds,” says Alija. “The MUP and the guerrillas were through here last night. Any one of them could have planted something.”

  “Let’s buy a donkey off one of these guys,” says Ellen. “We’ll send it down the dirt road ahead of us.”

  “Blowing up a donkey’s probably not a good idea around here.”

  “All right,” Ellen says to Ted. “We’ll go on the main road. It’ll waste time and cut into our day. But let’s just go.”

  Ellen slams the door, and she and Ted drive off. “Weird chick,” says Alija. “I’d hate to be one of her pets.” “And you thought I was difficult.” “Who’s that guy over there?” “Where?”

  “In the graveyard under the tree. See? Sitting with the Kalashnikov and shovel.”

  The man watches us walk across the road. He calls himself the Lion, but he lacks the majesty for such a title. A body rolled in linen lies in the shade next to him.

  “My father,” he says.

  He rises and measures the ground with a willow branch. The shovel rips grass and breaks earth. The Lion had joined the guerrillas but was called home to bury his father, who died of pneumonia several days after the MUP set his village aflame and chased his family into the mountains. He points up the hill. I see the village and smell ash and charcoal. Overnight, hamlets turn to black smudges on this landscape, and amid the ruins bones as white as starlight poke through the blackened flesh of those not swift enough. Blood evaporates like water, but the bones of a half-burned body have a mesmerizing purity that glows against the dirt and the dust and the broken clay and fallen timber of a house. The MUP torch what they cannot defeat, and with every fire more young men pour into the mountains with rifles and pitchforks. I have seen only two pitchforks, but pitchforks are like the dateman, images spun into myth. Maybe it’s the sound. Pitchfork. Two harsh syllables that add a cadence to a sentence, not to mention the anachronistic conjuring. It’s a good, strong word with a shade of ominous intent. Pitchfork works nicely in a lede. For some reason, journalists love this kind of stuff. The Lion digs. A thin line of muscles moves beneath his shirt. His sneakers are filled with soil and he works quickly, carving the walls of his father’s grave, weeping sometimes and talking to himself. He looks at Alija.

  “We have women fighters,” he says.

  “I think my brother may have joined, or he was taken by the MUP. I can’t find him.”

  “We’re scattered all over. What’s his name?”

  “Ardian. He just turned eighteen. He studies at university.”

  “Won’t do him much good.”

  The Lion quiets, jumps out of the hole, and drags his father closer.

  “Help me.”

  I grab the shoulders, and we lower the father into the ground. Through a rip I see the old man’s face, a scrunched angry canvas of deep lines, gray stubble, and a protruding brow. I cannot see, but I’m sure he wears rubber galoshes and a tattered blazer, and somewhere in the death shroud there is a walking stick and at least one thing of value. A picture. A bank note. A letter mailed from a foreign land.

  “My father created ten children, seven of them boys. He dug the deepest well in the village and kept the best sheep.”

  Dirt rattles the linen. The sound softens as the Lion fills the hole.

  “Where’s your marker?”

  “I have none. I’ll know where to find it. These are not days for grieving. We’ll grieve when we have won.”

  These are the sentences you hear from a translator. Words distilled from one language and siphoned into another. Alija’s good at it, but I’m sure some words and phrases never make the trip from one tongue to the next. Was the Lion really that poetic, or was there clutter amid the verse that fell into a limbo of syllables and clauses, spoken but lost forever? Alija’s translation is direct, parsed of adjectives and flourish. She moves sentences like ships across the sea. “We’ll grieve when we have won.” As soon as it was uttered, I put a star next to it in my notebook and knew it would end up in a story.

  “Who is your commander?” says Alija.

  “Don’t speak of such things. There are many commanders. We are strong.”

  “We heard about a new man.”

  The Lion smiles. “What have you heard?”

  “That someone new has arrived. A foreigner who came on donkeys through the mountains.”

  “I saw him.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “I don’t know, but far away. He has a full black beard and a pistol with a green and gold handle.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “No. Only few can speak with him.” The Lion pau
ses and lights a cigarette. “You know, I farmed with my father before all this. He told me I must fight, and now our fields are untended and our animals are scattered. I must go.”

  “Can we come with you? To see the man?”

  “If you come to fight, yes, but to talk, no. I must move quickly. Bye.”

  The Lion leans the shovel against the tree. He picks up his Kalashnikov and heads up the graveyard hill and disappears into the tree line.

  “Where’s he going?”

  “I don’t know; could be mountains away.”

  “Should we follow?”

  “We weren’t invited.”

  “It’s not a tea party, Alija.”

  “Be patient.”

  “Let’s go see Rolo.”

  Chapter 4

  Rolo Is a charm bracelet of surprises.

  He’s American intelligence. That’s not as wincing as it sounds. Rolo slipped into these mountains several months ago to track a “little uprising” that had suddenly turned into a pain in the ass for the White House: bowie knives, bodies in clumps, Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic slinking in his villa, Bosnia all over again. What to do? The United Nations squawks and condemns, but the drama of outraged ambassadors turns to empty twitter. The Europeans are nau-seatingly eloquent in treaties on human rights yet quickly shift to opaque recitations of moral vigor to avoid specific discussions on dispatching their armies to stop slaughter. Rolo’s here to see if the U.S. is going to have to do something about the current — shall we call it, as the Europeans do, untidiness? — at the fringe of the continent in a place called Kosovo. It’s hypnotic terrain: big mountains, wide streams, and air that hangs, once you get away from the smelters and coal plants, in chilled purity, sort of like Wyoming. Ninety percent Albanian. Ten percent Serb. Kosovo is one of the few strands left of Yugoslavia, which over a decade has shrunk through war and that wonderful euphemism ethnic cleansing. The Albanians want independence, but Milosevic and his Serbs have tanks, bigger guns, and reams of nasty, inspirational folklore so easily perverted by nationalists. It’s amazing what rabid and insane devotion can be summoned from verse scratched on parchment from centuries past.