I gave Milan my card before I left Belgrade. He slipped it into his notebook and said he’d call. You know, he said, perching in the window twilight, I never fired a headshot. The other guys used to aim for the heads, but I never did. I couldn’t. Why is that? Maybe, he said, he didn’t really want to kill them. He just wanted to knock them down. “They were Muslims, screw ‘em, but maybe it’s good from a human point of view that I didn’t go for the head. What do you think?” I don’t remember what I answered. What could I say? Sure, Milan, shooting someone through the heart is much less insane. I left him with his riddle. I received a letter from him years later. “I’m better,” he wrote. “Rationalization doesn’t work. I did what I did. I’m not asking forgiveness. Who would grant it anyway? I’ve been made a lieutenant and have been reassigned to my family home in Kosovo.” So wonderfully, typically Serb.
“Milan, who’s leading the guerrillas?”
“Some locals and a few outsiders. The money is coming from the diaspora in Switzerland and Austria. A little drug cash from Italy, but not much of that. This is Yugoslavia’s unfinished chapter, Jay. Macedonia is its own country Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia. All broken away from the great Serb dream. And, now, Kosovo.”
“I heard they have this bearded guy who came across the mountains on horseback or on a donkey or something?”
“Heard of him. Haven’t seen him.”
“Think he’s for real?”
“It’s the Balkans, Jay, who knows. But, yeah, he probably is. The Muslims want this land just like they did five hundred years ago. Pretty soon they’re gonna want your country. The eternal struggle, huh? Been going on since before the Crusades.”
“A philosopher and a historian.”
“Just a sniper.”
Milan pours another brandy. He takes his glass and rises from the piano. I follow him into the rain. We walk across his yard, past his plum and apple trees and into the field toward the village church. Mist hangs like angel hair in the wheat. The horizon is gray and stunted and I think of being lost out here, wandering in the rain between fields and tree lines, following a stream and wondering whose army would find me first, who would kill me based upon the arrangement of vowels and consonants in my last name. The rain falls heavy, rattling all around but calm. Blackbirds caw and preen in trees. Milan and I stop at the cemetery. Weeds and a rusted fence. The gravestones are slick with chiseled faces of the dead. Most of the markers are gray and white. Milan stops in front of a black one.
“Why are some black, Jay?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you write about this land you should know.”
“Tell me.”
“The black stone marks the man who sold his land to a Muslim. He is shamed forever.”
Chapter 7
Alija’s mask softens as we cross the last MUP checkpoint. We’re back on her land, out of range, at least for now, from Milan’s sniper scope. Her brother is lucky. If I were lost, I would like to have Alija worrying and searching for me, going from village to village, her questions direct, her demeanor pulling close whomever is listening, her fingers dusted and sticky with the gumdrop sugar that collects in the deep pockets of her coat. Where are you, Ardian? Who are you? A young man, a boy, really, a student, lost. Alija protected you from the Serb boys when you were young; she says you were slight and scared most of the time, but then there was that day when the Serb called you a name and you fought at the edge of a field, hoping your father would come, but he didn’t and you had to finish on your own, walking home bloody, your shirt torn. Alija likes that story. It is the only fighter story she tells about you. She says your English is as fine as hers and that your favorite possession is a silver cigarette case you bought in a Macedonian market. You like how thin and delicate it is, the way it rides in your shirt pocket. You pull it out to impress the girls; Alija says the girls like you even without the case, but like many boys you don’t see this. She says you are good with computers and that sometimes you take them apart and run your fingers over their circuitry. She has a picture of you two. You’re both running. The sun must be in front of you; your face is clear, russet, the face of a boy chasing his sister home.
The MUP fade in the rearview, and a tinny call to prayer warbles from a loudspeaker in a minaret. Nobody bends to pray. The poor, the farmers, and the village boys are in motion. Cattle trundle to pasture, the sheep graze in the highlands. The rain stops and the sun breaks; the mud roads spatter. Brian awakens and wants to fish.
“I’ve got a story to file.”
“It’s early. We can write later. Let’s catch some dinner.” Alija rolls her eyes.
I had forgotten that Brian, no matter how hostile the terrain, travels with a collapsible fishing pole, lures, hooks, and a rumpled straw hat his father or some ancient uncle must have given him when he was a kid. He has fished rivers in war zones across the world. He is slow and methodical. The din of battle does not deter him. He ties flies and studies the flow and swirl of rivers. I like this about him. He has another life, splintered passions that move him beyond the news and set him, it seems to me, in a private, yet oddly kinetic, solitude. The energy fits his frame, tall but not spindly, with a bit of wire and muscle around the shoulders and neck as if he does push-ups when no one is watching. His hair is long, with a slight black curl, and wild, flowing around a face with brown eyes teetering on cheekbones more rounded than finely edged.
He sometimes appears larger than he is, his personality and the robust whine of his voice moving ahead of him the way clouds foretell a summer storm. There’s journalist folklore that Brian was once fishing a river in Chechnya near where separatists were sneaking along the shoals ahead of an advancing Russian army. The rebels stopped, perplexed over this lanky foreigner standing knee-deep in the cold water, flicking his wrist as filament whirred and danced across the surface. They mimicked him, and, despite being chased by Russians, the Chechens, a tempestuous people with a taste for fun and a penchant for brutality, decided to show Brian how one fishes in the Caucasus. A grenade plunked. The rebels dove into the underbrush; Brian scurried for shore. Dead fish rose like blossoming flowers. The forest rumbled with laughter as the Chechens disappeared, a swift retreating tribe of tinkling metal. The Russians arrived seconds later and debated shooting Brian. But he waded back into the river, collected the fish, and invited them to dinner. They ate and drank bottles of vodka, and Brian traveled with the Russians for three days until they got to Grozny and the fighting got heavy and they told Brian he was on his own.
“Alija,” he says, “I need a river with rocks and a touch of white water. Not too fast, not too slow, a place where the water is cool and clean and moving. Where can we go?”
“There’s a bend by an old Roman bridge about thirty minutes from here. We have to park and walk.”
“Let’s go. See that, Jay? We’re gonna fish by a Roman bridge. Last night, we saw an ambush, and today we’re fishing by a Roman bridge. What more could you want?”
“What would your editor say?”
“Jay, I’m convinced my editor doesn’t read. He’s oblivious. Doesn’t know a thing about the world, just wants to have his morning budget filled so he can carry a doughnut and a coffee into a meeting and pretend that he’s got a handle on all the little windstorms out there. Let’s not spoil this lovely day with talk of editors.”
“This is it, Brian. We’re not going to be fishing all over the Balkans.”
“You won’t miss anything by a little bit of reeling and casting. You know the saying, God doesn’t hold against a man the time a man spends fishing.”
The stone architecture of the small Roman bridge is perfect. It’s a thing worthy of study and admiration, but its hewed angles and simple majesty will be overlooked, if not bombed, in the present chaos. Empires bursting forth and then receding, bones and bridges and spearheads left behind in an incomplete puzzle. This is the world. Brian unzips his bag and grabs his gear. Alija leads us under the bridge and into the trees that t
race the river. The water clears, and stones arch out of the current.
“Perfect, Alija, just perfect.”
Brian clicks and unfolds things, ties a lure, and splashes into the river. Arm swaying, he settles into a rhythm, his line rolling out over the water like a thin, lazy snake. There’s purity to the curls and loops, each one never to be recreated in an amalgam of mathematics, human imprecision, and art conspiring gently in the sunlight beyond the trees.
Alija and I sit on the bank and watch.
So many months ago we met. The clashes had just started. Hers was one of the first villages burned. Three of her cousins were killed, and she and her mother and father ended up in a tent at a Red Cross camp. Her brother had already disappeared, and she suspected he may have enlisted with the guerrillas. I arrived in the camp with another translator. Men played backgammon on a box, and one of them, Alija’s father, invited us for tea. He was small, a flyweight with thick brown hands and a belt yanked to the last notch. He wore a vest and a pinstriped blazer, a rich man’s coat donated and handed down the line until the day he must have plucked it from a donkey cart at Saturday market. How many borders crossed and how many miles had that coat traveled? How many peasants slipped their arms through its sleeves? A few buttons missing. An archipelago of faded stains. A rip that could be mended and, inside, the glow of silk lining, dirty and tattered but still smooth, even a bit glossy in places, that suggested something regal with a fine name embroidered over the pocket. He opened the coat and pointed.
“Lon-don.”
He smiled and pulled back the tent flap. Alija was sitting on a cot in a corner. Unlike most young Muslim women, she did not turn away when I looked at her. A row of stitches, black and spindly like an insect, ran under her left eye. Her bruises were yellow and plum. Vaseline was smeared over the scabbed nicks on her face. She seemed to glisten in the half-light as her father and mother lifted a teakettle and cups and told us to sit. Her father smiled. Her mother offered sugar. Our tiny spoons stirred and clinked as if we were a chamber orchestra tuning up for an afternoon performance. The canvas scent of the tent was strong in the heat, and the dust in the still air did not float so much as hover. I looked to my translator and prepared to start my litany of questions: name, age, village, how many relatives, all the incidentals that relax someone before you get to the real stuff.
“I will translate for my family,” Alija said.
There was no lilt, no hesitation. How does one possess such a clear voice? No fragments of inhibition. Not hard or threatening, but direct, as if soul, heart, and mind moved like animals in unison. I liked its pitch. The way it sought to protect and control. I thought of a singer’s voice at the end of a night, a bit raspy, but hiding in it somewhere a strength that could rise when summoned. She stepped off the cot and pointed to bags of rice and flour. Like her father’s coat, they bore names from respectable places. She looked at them.
“This is what you get when they burn your house down. I thought somehow you’d get more.”
“Where did you learn English?”
“He said to the heathen. School and movies. When I was a girl, the UN sent a couple of aid workers to our village. They mostly worked with the farmers. One of them was an Australian woman. She taught me English and read to me every day for two years. I may be the only one in these mountains who can tell you what happened to Pip and Miss Haversham.”
“How long have you been in this camp?”
She sat between her parents. Her father leaned slightly away. It seemed an unconscious tilt, as if some unfinished domestic skirmish had traveled with them from their previous life. War drains and preoccupies, but it does not extinguish. Family battles go on violently, imperceptibly, like ice cubes frozen over time at different temperatures. The curse of war is not dying; its living through the mess with all the unresolved things that were there long before the first shot was fired. Alija’s mother held her daughter’s hand and stroked her hair, balancing the slight space left by her father. Alija’s face stayed cut and unreadable.
“I can work for you,” she said.
“He has a translator,” said my translator.
“I know what you do.”
“You know nothing.”
“I’ve seen you in the villages. You spy for the MUP.”
She turned to me.
“You should be more careful.”
My translator rushed toward Alija. From the inner pocket that said Lon-don, Alija’s father drew a pistol. My translator stopped. The barrel was point blank, but the old man was shaking and I noticed for the first time the bright blue slivers of his eyes. He clicked a round into the chamber. My translator leaned back and spoke to Alija in their native tongue. Alija’s father interjected twice. I didn’t understand the words. The translator rose and asked to be paid for the day. His fists were balled, and he was breathing heavily. I wasn’t upset about losing him; he was lazy and liked to drink. I paid him and he left, shouting something as he burst through the flap in the tent, a flash of dust, shadow, and sunlight. Alija’s father eased the trigger. He was pale. Her mother stopped his shaking hand and slipped the pistol into the silk lining of his coat. The man smiled and sipped his tea as his wife shooed a few flies and offered more sugar from her Red Cross sack.
“So now I can work for you,” said Alija.
“What happened?”
“I told you. He spies for the MUP. How long did you use him?”
“A few days. My usual guy quit. Decided he had enough of the fighting and went to Italy. I was trying out new people.”
“Everything you did, everyone you saw, the MUP knows now too.”
“How do you know?”
“We all know our traitors.”
“How do I know you don’t work for the MUP?”
“Look at my face.”
“I travel all over. What about your parents? I need someone who will stay with me, maybe for months.”
“I’m ready. My parents are fine. We can give them some of my pay now.”
I handed her five hundred dollars. She kissed her mother and pushed the money into her palm. She said nothing to her father. She snapped back the tent flap, and I followed this bruised-face girl and her wonderful English. She was scared and steely all at the same time. Another morning going one way, then reinvented. Another life slips in, and the syntax and the rhythms change in your notebook. Somebody new is telling you what’s true and false, and you have to trust her because language is a weapon in war.
“Look at him,” says Alija, pointing to Brian in the river.
“I don’t think he’s caught anything.”
“He won’t.”
“He might. He’s got a lot of hooks and lines.”
“The river’s dead down here.”
“You’re kidding. Why did you bring us?”
“To watch him. To see how long he’ll stand there jerking his wrist and hoping.”
“You’re wicked.”
“Jay, admit it. He deserves it.” She laughs.
“I like Brian.”
“I like him enough, but sometimes don’t you just want to jab him?”
“Yeah, but I’m wasting hours on a fish I’ll never eat while I could be writing.”
“You’re a fast writer. What’s the problem?”
“Age.“
“You’re not even forty, are you?”
“Not that kind of age. It’s details, you know. A lot of the older hacks have lost the sense for detail, the precision of a simple thing. You can read it in their copy. There’s stuff missing. They go for big sweeping paragraphs because they don’t take the time anymore to collect the miniature. They think they already know it. But the grain changes. You have to see it. I never want to lose the details.”
“It’s about what you pick. Why one description’s chosen over another, right?”
“They must accumulate into something.”
“Yes, but you’re the collector and the chooser. You get the say. What if you pick the wrong
detail?”
“You’re careful. You don’t rush. Close your eyes and describe my face.”
“What?”
“You see it every day. Describe it.”
“Come on, Jay.”
“Really”
“I’m not good at this. Okay, here goes. Black hair, pins of gray. Strong face but not what it was, I bet. The lines around the eyes . . . oh, what’s that word?”
“Deep. Ravaged.”
She laughs.
“Prevalent, that’s it. Prevalent, but soft.”
“Like thumbprints?”
“More like spider webs. Nearly invisible.”
“What else?”
“Dark, far-back eyes, but not mysterious. Intense, though.”
“Intellectual?”
“No, more sexual.”
“Thank God.”
“The smile evens it out. The spider webs rise on the smile.”
“A face of balance?”
“No. It’s a face of waiting, I think.”
“Waiting. Waiting for what?”
“I don’t know. It’s a lighted face pressed against the window in the night.”
“I think we’ll stop at the face. You picked the details. Are they right? Precise enough?”
Promised Virgins Page 5