I met Rolo years ago in Sri Lanka as he was about to be beheaded by a gang of teenagers with dangling machetes and painted faces. They thought he was an arms dealer of ill-repute, but I, who had hired the son of the village leader as my guide, happened upon the road where Rolo, hands bounds, kneeling, waited beneath a banyan tree for the flash of sunlight and steel. I wandered over and — never underestimate the vagaries of chance and outrageous circumstance, not to mention the cachet of a village connection — convinced them that Rolo was an ecumenical missionary out to save fallen temples. Muddy and stubbly, with a slightly deranged, far-off gaze, Rolo looked the part. The bare-chested machete boys huddled and then turned and laughed and cut him loose. Rolo and I have been crossing paths ever since. Crossing paths is Rolo’s phrase; he likes the serendipity of it, and he possesses a begrudging sense of indebtedness that is useful for the likes of me. He loves to go native and is partial to Thucydides and Saint Augustine. The son of a South Boston bus driver, Rolo is built low to the ground and tight. He reminds me of a ball of twine with an attitude. He infiltrates the nastiest places on the globe and sends cables back to the shirts and ties and understated blouses in Washington. Typical. One guy does all the humping so a bunch of pasty faces who have never seen a firefight or counted the dead in the morning can finesse intelligence to fit the prevailing political paradigm. Paradigm is a popular word in Washington. Its impenetrable, though. There’s no cadence, letters without a soul. I’d choose pitchfork over paradigm.
Alija and I drive and then walk, following a path that winds like a thread through the underbrush and into a clearing. Two guys with guns appear, and moments later I hear that familiar stuffed-up, smoky, perturbed growl: “It’s cool, let ‘em come.”
Rolo leans against a mud hut, a small fire at his feet.
“I thought you were the pizza guy.” He laughs. “We called about three months ago. I guess he couldn’t find us.”
“I didn’t know if I’d find you here, either. I thought maybe you had moved on.”
“In a few days there will be a relocation,” says Rolo, brushing past me. “Let me say hello to the lovelier among you, Jay”
“Hi, Rolo.”
“Alija, you remembered. I am touched. I’ve sensed for some time your attraction toward me. There’s a song-from-the-seventies romance going on between us. I can feel it.”
“I don’t think so, Rolo. I was barely walking in the seventies.”
“A sweet decade. Have a tea.”
He lifts a blackened kettle from the fire with his rifle barrel. Rolo travels with three local trackers and bodyguards; reticent and loyal, they move across the land like spirits. A face of stubble, hair in a tangle, Rolo is a secret dirt prince, a cipher with satellite phones and global positioning systems.
“You like this little war, Jay?”
“I don’t know where it’s headed. Milosevic is shaking the dice. He’s got one more roll.”
“Seems like it’s on half-burner though, doesn’t it? The guerrillas don’t have the arms yet. The fighting kicked up before the hardware arrived. It’s starting to get through, though. A lot of shit moving across the Adriatic at night in rubber speedboats. The guerrillas aren’t trained, man. These poor bastards, excuse me, Alija, are fighting in sneakers and sandals. You want to win a war, you gotta have boots.”
“Not in Africa.”
“There’s no winter in Africa, O wise journalist.”
“The MUP ...”
“The MUP just want bodies. They don’t care whose body It’s classic. Guys go into the mountains to fight. So the MUP, not trained for guerrilla warfare, go to rebel villages, burn their homes, and rape their women. You gotta make a choice, don’t you? Do I stay in the mountains, or come back to protect my village? Either way you’re in a predicament.”
“We getting involved in this, Rolo?”
“Have some more tea, Jay.”
Tiny leaves swirl in my tea. It is the same in so many places. Stories told and stories delayed over tea. Amber, deep brown, sometimes green, I can’t remember all the cups and pialas of tea I’ve peered into waiting for answers. Sugared and hot, it is the sustenance through which stories flow, connecting native and foreigner, removing boundaries. Every rebel has his rifle and his pouch of tea. Mint. Bitter. A sprig of herb.
Years ago I fled over the Himalayas in Tibet with Buddhist monks who were escaping Chinese soldiers to get to the Dalai Lama in India. We’d trek at night, our line moving swift and speechless like a snake, over rocks and ice, beneath an arc of stars that seemed close enough to swallow. Just before dawn, when yellow and blue splintered a purple horizon, we’d find a crevice to hide in and the monks would build a fire under a blanket and a kettle would appear and tea would be poured as the monks, robed fugitives with frostbitten faces and blistered feet, chanted and sipped before they slept on the gray-brown husk of the world. One of the monks, a raisin-skinned man carrying ancient scrolls, fell ill with fever midway through the two-week journey. His feet tightened, knotted, and balled up; he vomited tea and blood and couldn’t go on. The stronger monks huddled in diminutive whispering shadows under the moon. They decided to leave the old monk behind. He would be reincarnated. His soul would be born into a higher life and move a realm closer to the deities sprinkled across the infinite. They explained it to him; he accepted his fate, closing himself into a chant. Back then there was a bit of an altar boy in me. I believed I could save such crumpled characters, either by word or deed. I volunteered to carry him. They looked at one another, then they looked at me, this strange guy with a pencil and dressed in insulated boots and ruffles of Gore-Tex. They protested but then agreed.
I lightened my backpack and folded the monk over my shoulder. I carried him through the night, his chanting body vibrating against mine like the ping of a tuning fork. As we climbed, the oxygen thinned and the monk, light as balsa at eighteen thousand feet, seemed heavy as a car at twenty thousand. I laid him on a rock in a mountain pass. He curled up. I waited and tried to lift him again, but I couldn’t. I drank some water, waited, and tried again. I couldn’t. Another monk wrapped him in a blanket, and another handed him beads and an empty teacup. They tied a prayer flag to a stick and stuck it in the dirt. We left him. I kept looking back until his gnomic silhouette grew fuzzy and turned to darkness. The monks told me the snows would come and cover the old man until spring, when shepherds would gather him from the thaw and, depending on their religious fervor, would either burn him or cut him into pieces and feed him to birds. Rolo would have appreciated the monks. But guerrillas are on his mind. He rolls a cigarette and leans back, picking dried hay from the mud wall.
“It’s getting near dark, Jay.”
“Can we stay?”
“You know I don’t like that shit. This is Special Ops, man. I’m secret, undercover.”
“Just the night. Then we’ll be gone. We can’t make it back to Pristina by dark, and I don’t want to be robbed or ambushed.”
“I couldn’t very well turn Alija away. Your sorry ass I wouldn’t care about.”
“Hey, man . ..”
“I know what you’re going to ask, Jay. He’s here. But we don’t know who he is or where he came from. He seemed to appear out of the ether. We don’t know why he’s here or what he wants.”
“I heard this story about dates and donkeys.”
“That’s the tall tale. Who knows? This guy could be some bad electricity. You remember when the mujahideen enlisted in the Bosnian war, bringing all that Islamic radical shit from Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. This is like that, but this guy’s different. It’s like he’s some kind of prophet. Some oracle or vision out of Homer. We just don’t know, Jay. Be careful if you go hunting him.”
Rolo’s guys kill a sheep and we eat well. Rolo breathes in the big, clean air, and, sitting around the fire, flames lightening and shadowing his face, he seems a sage, a curious creature folded into a mission that doesn’t officially exist in any Washington file. He is what my mother used
to call a saint without a heaven. Rolo once told me that his dream was to be a beekeeper: to build wooden hives at the edge of his lawn and sit on his back porch listening to a lulling hum of incessant energy. He said one has to move slowly around bees and that a beekeeper has a monastic quality that Rolo finds intriguing. Alija likes Rolo, though not in the way Rolo likes Alija. She knows that as long as Rolo stays in the mountains other hands are at work, that it isn’t just the MUP and the guerrillas, that the landscape has become a kind of big-budget movie with tailored men offstage speaking in euphemisms and cryptic lines about fate and the messiness of realignment.
Alija wants the war to grow. She wants everyone sucked in. She is young, but she is clever enough to know that in the end you need shock and horror, brand-name journalists and TV crews, a smattering of atrocities, outraged congressmen, human-rights lawyers, White House indignation, and just the right number in the Gallup polls, and then, ipso facto, abracadabra, and presto, you’ve got a full-scale “conflict” with million-dollar bombs. A prime-time, cruise-missile extravaganza. It’s the sweepstakes, man. Not everyone wins. Tibet’s not going to win. Africa is not even entered, no matter how many dead it can stack up over a weekend. Going to war is like buying a house. Location. Location. Location. The rim of Europe is ideal geography for a fire storm. Alija sleeps with such dreams. Rolo rolls cigarette after cigarette and sits in the light of a dying fire with three men watching his back and the green light flashing on his satellite phone.
I think of cathedrals. Stained glass and candle drip, the shoe scrape, the cool, hewn stone of faith rising into gargoyles and steeples, rising above rivers and rooftops, a place of devotion and commerce, where rosaries and trinkets are sold by Africans waving translucent palms and penance is whispered and redemption granted in a light of burgundy and magenta. Three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers cleanse a soul.
The morning before I returned to this war, I met a whore in a cathedral in Prague. She slipped out of the rain and sat two pews ahead of me, her hair dripping on the wood. Her stockings and her dress gave her away. We were the only two in the church; our pews creaked like ice breaking across a lake. Czechs have been torn on religion since the medieval days, when the Catholics burned reformists at the stake over a theological difference about offering wine at Communion. The Catholics were opposed to it then, and the tussle that ensued divided everything, including the cemeteries, where today Catholic gravestones are marked with the cross while those of Protestants are etched with the chalice. We are inspired and destroyed by symbols. I enjoy sitting amid the centuries-old aftermath of such fury. Battlefields and churches possess the hushed aura of reinvented glories I somehow find soothing. I’ve visited hundreds of churches across Europe, mostly at dusk when blackened walls make bright the wings of angels. The whore genuflected. She turned and stopped at my pew.
“Do you speak Russian?” she said in English.
“No. English. Italian.”
“I want to hear Russian, my language.”
“This is a former Soviet country. I’m sure a lot of old Czechs speak Russian.”
“Yes, but they want to forget it.”
“I can understand that.”
“American, right?”
“Yes.”
There was a pause. Americans mean recalculation. Not only financial, but cultural. Whores, bartenders, and waiters know this. She was tall, long black hair and blue eyes. The lines of her body were mathematical; Helmut Newton would have loved her, would have posed her in some faded hotel room or on some crooked street; she could have been a leggy mannequin in his grainy fog.
“Listen to the roof. The rain has stopped. Quiet as a prayer. My mom used to say that. Do you live here?”
“No. Traveling.”
“Just a traveler, huh? I am traveling, too, but I seem to be suddenly stuck.”
“Where are you headed?”
“I don’t know. I’m here for a while.”
Another pause. She sensed no sale amid the icons and holy water.
“I must go shopping.”
“Good-bye.”
“Tomorrow I am working, maybe you can call me. I know how to please American men.”
She handed me a card, one like thousands of others sprinkled across the cobblestones and stuffed onto windshields. So much glamour on those little cards, promises attached to telephone numbers of girls far from their native tongues. Her card showed a champagne glass with a topless woman — not her — sitting cross-legged and bending down as if to tell a secret from the hood of a Mercedes on a dark street. Prague? Budapest? Berlin?
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Maybe another time. Learn Russian and come back.”
She laughed, clicked over the stones, and stepped through the big wooden door into the gray light. I’ll think of her for a long time. An encounter so brief there is no chance for it to be spoiled, sweetly preserved for its lack of progression. Rolo kicks me awake.
“Jay. Jay”
“What?”
“Me and the boys are splitting, breaking camp.”
“Now?”
“Dark is best.”
“You’ll contact me the same way?”
“Yeah, don’t worry, we’ll meet again.”
“Hey, Rolo. I want the bearded guy with the dates.”
“He’s got quite the dance card, that guy.”
“Dance card, Jesus, Rolo. You have to watch some movies made this century.”
“I don’t know if he’s a guy we want around, you know?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m breaking camp. Bye, Jay.”
He and his men roll quietly away. Alija sleeps. I take my blanket and lie next to her in the broken house. Who lived here before the war? Where have they gone? Strangers sleep in their rooms. A few belongings left behind. An old shoe, a dish towel, grains of rice, a cup. Unseen spirits and the artifacts of wrecked lives, moving somewhere, shifting, but where, where do they go? The hills? The mountains? Scattered with children, schools in the rain, hauling river water, campfires and morning ash. Hiding. The Lion digs a grave; a wheat field shrivels. Sometimes I think I’d like to gather the children and calm the fields, but I cannot. I have come poorly armed, a man of paper and ink in a land of blood and war. I am a curiosity to them, recording and cataloguing like a requisition agent or a government clerk. Nothing changes when the words dry. If you cannot heal a wound, extract a bullet, or kill the enemy, why have you come? This is what’s in their eyes when I uncap my pen and turn to a blank page in my notebook.
A cool wire runs through the night. Dawn is a few hours away. I turn toward Alija. I remember when we met. Scared and angry in that camp, she carried, as she does now, secrets and shame even in sleep.
Chapter 5
Brian Conrad is in his best outraged-journalist mode, yet he’s losing the battle to a little man in a polyester suit.
“What do you mean I need a press pass?”
“These are the rules,” says the suit.
“This is a guerrilla war, man. There are no rules.”
“Still, you need a press pass to travel in our territory.”
“You don’t have any territory”
“We have checkpoints. We control some roads.”
“This is fucking ridiculous.”
“There are rules.”
“Okay, okay. Where do I get the press pass?”
“The man who gives them is not here.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Come back tomorrow.”
“But I need to travel in the mountains today.”
“There are rules. He’ll be here tomorrow. Maybe, while you wait, you can do a story on one of our woman fighters. We can provide her today. We have a number of women fighters. Our struggle is big.”
“I don’t want to interview a woman fighter. Women fighters aren’t news anymore. Women are fighting all over the fucking place.”
“Fuck is an important word
for you. Can you write this word in American newspaper?”
Brian would beg if it would do any good, but the guy in the suit is impervious, sitting behind a desk with pens all in a row. There’s a final verbal torrent and a furious burst of hand gestures, then Brian plunks in a chair, defeated. He doesn’t notice that Alija and I have been standing behind him.
“Getting your ass kicked?”
“Jay, don’t mess with me.”
“Guy’s not going to budge, is he?”
“Well, my friend, it’s like this. Communist bureaucracy dies hard even for the rebels. Seems we now need press passes. These guys want to overthrow the government but keep the system. Rubber stamps and paperwork. Something to busy these guys while the MUP kicks their asses. Guerrilla press passes. What’s going on in the world, Jay?”
“We don’t charge you for the press pass,” the man chirps happily.
“Small favors,” snaps Brian. “This guy says without a press pass we can’t cross rebel checkpoints.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I need a beer.”
“A fucking beer.” The man smiles. “Don’t worry, mister. Tomorrow we will get you a press pass. Remember the woman fighter.”
The village is dusty, a guerrilla outpost tucked in a mountain crease. Smuggled weapons are sold, money is exchanged from car trunks, bread and meat are ferried in, a barber cuts hair on a porch, rebel commanders whisk by in Kia SUVs, and young men, who weeks ago were working as diaspora waiters in Belgium and Switzerland, linger in the shade in shiny, mismatching fatigues. They come in scattered legions, bouncing across the Adriatic on rubber boats to join their brothers and fathers, their bravado pierced by the wandering eye of an old guy sitting on a rock and writing wills while hunched over a briefcase. Traffic is heavier than it was when I came through ten days ago. The place has the feel and energy of a poor man’s boot camp lorded over by men with grenades hanging like fruit from their vests.
Promised Virgins Page 3