Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

“I know, but it’s not silence. It’s like the murmur of beetles in the heat.”

  “You want to get cleaned up? We have hot water.”

  Brian, Alija, and I take turns showering. We burn our bloody clothes in a metal drum and drink raki. Megan joins us. Snow falls but melts over the arc of our flame. Four men carry a coffin into the house. It is borrowed from a mosque and stained from deaths past. Coffins here are not buried; they are vessels to the grave’s rim. The body enters the earth wrapped in linen. I hear the lid open. The breaths of men lifting. The coffin hurries through the night, illuminated in the red taillights of the truck. There is a bang, the click of ignition, the whine of an engine in reverse, the tires on the main road, headlights on, the rattle of gear change, and then the snow becomes the only color in the night.

  “I’m going to sleep,” says Brian.

  “How you doing?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “I’m tired too,” says Alija. “I think I’ve gotten all of his blood out of my hair. They’ll bury him tomorrow.”

  I stay and sit with Megan in the snow by the fire. A man comes out of the house and hands me a sack. Vijay’s wallet, a few pens, a little money, a map drawn by Vijay, business cards, a bullet, a comb, a mint, and a folded piece of paper with the letter R written above a sat-phone number.

  “Have we ever danced?”

  “I don’t know, Jay. We’ve done a lot of things.”

  “I think we did dance.”

  “Maybe.”

  I throw sticks in the can. The fire brightens.

  “Who was your friend?”

  “A local hack on his way to America.”

  “What’s happening up there?”

  “The planning of two wars.”

  I move closer to Megan. She smells of oranges, blood, and smoke. Her hair is pulled back. It fights the rubber band in the way thick hair does, and strands of it float untamed in the firelight. She has her chin on her knees. The lines around her eyes are thin, as if drawn with a needle. She could not heal tonight. We brought her something she could not fix, like a stillborn calf from her childhood on her father’s farm. All she could offer was the exact place of the exit wound. She dabbed Vijay’s face with cotton, pinned his name to his shirt, and sent him on his way. People are deliberate and clipped around death. They are the way the Leopard moves through the forest: methodical and waiting for it to be over.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you so soon after Pristina.”

  “Pristina was nice, Jay.”

  “It was. I’m out of shape.”

  “You look fine.”

  “No, I’ve got to start jogging or something.”

  “I don’t think they do much jogging around here.”

  “Take your stethoscope and listen to my heart.”

  “Jay.”

  “Really.”

  “Lift up your shirt.”

  The stethoscope glints like a coin.

  “Sounds like a bell, a nice echo. You’re fine. Are you trying to stay young for that translator of yours? That’s not like you, Jay.”

  “I’m an old lady’s man. The young need too much instruction.”

  “They are nice to look at.”

  Megan and I go inside. A candle burns on the table. We lie on separate couches. I would like to go to her, to lie beside her, but I don’t. It is enough to hear her breathe. A guard patrols outside. By now, Vijay’s passed through the checkpoints and is in Pristina. They’ll cut off his clothes and wash him. Women will gather, and men will go out at first light and break the frost line to the soft earth. The grave will widen. Vijay will be carried through the snow and lowered into the dirt. People will whisper that war is insatiable, unfolding through mountains and creeping across valleys, taking the best and the worst, indiscriminately. They will hate the Serbs, as if they could hate them any more, for a death committed by another. Vijay, the new martyr, his picture photocopied and hung, his black eyes peering through streets and alleys, blowing in the wind, ripping and fading until he is diminished and all that’s left are staples and faded strips of paper. Then a new face will be hung. And another. And another. This is what I think, but what do I know about anything? I get up and go outside. The guard waves. I put the sat phone on the hood of the Jeep. I dial the number on Vijay’s paper. There is that gap, that fuzzy pause between connections. It rings.

  “Yeah.”

  “Its Jay. We need to talk.”

  Rolo sits in the bones of a house in the woods beyond a stream. He lives easily amid charred things. He moves through another’s heartbreak, he borrows their forks and cups, eats the rice they’ve left behind. He is a refugee himself, a man with a bag of electronics and a map in a game of someone else’s creation. That’s the beauty. To be dropped in and to secretly skitter across this terrain and then vanish, leaving nothing and taking nothing, except maybe a trinket from a house just to remind yourself that one day you were making mischief in the mountains. A man like Rolo can change everything, though. A poorly rolled cigarette dangles from his lips.

  “Jay, our little chats are too frequent.”

  “This is a small place. You look tired.”

  “You called.”

  “Vijay’s dead.”

  “I figured.”

  “How long?”

  “We recruited him about a year ago. He was perfect. He knew everyone. He was coy and flamboyant. He could move between all the worlds here. He was a journalist, so his asking questions didn’t raise suspicion.”

  “Why did he agree?”

  “He wanted America. We promised him that fellowship he kept yakking about. Do us a favor, we do you a favor. He loved it. You know what kind of guy he was. You know he loved it.”

  “Now he’s dead.”

  “All we wanted was some basic intel from the mountains and some longitude and latitude coordinates to lay down a bombing grid if things got that far.”

  “What happened? How was he found out?”

  “I don’t know, Jay, I really don’t. This guy up there, your dateman, we just can’t get to the bastard.”

  “The guys who killed Vijay spoke Arabic.”

  “Remember the movie Alien? Something from the outside comes inside and turns nasty.”

  “Jesus, Rolo, you’re going to have to do better than that.”

  “I know, but I’m tired.”

  “We were with him. Why didn’t they kill us?”

  “Probably figured why agitate Washington. They’re not ready for that yet. These are calculating Allah’s boys, Jay. They’re not foolish. They’re more mathematical than emotional. “

  “You don’t seem talkative. I’ll let you be. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Nothing personal. Just frustrated. You know how Vijay never could shut up. He was like an always-running faucet. I asked him once about what he thought was going on up in the mountains, and, get this, he quotes Oscar Wilde: ‘The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity.’ You going to his funeral?”

  “No, there’s too much going on.”

  “A true friend.”

  “There are no true friends, Rolo, just guys you pass on your way to someplace else.”

  “Stay out of the Hallmark business.”

  “Noted.”

  “Jay, one day you’ll come to Boston and I’ll take you on my father’s old bus route. We’ll get drunk in all his old taverns like I did when I was a kid. My mom used to make me shadow him to make sure he got home and didn’t fall into the Charles. She said she’d be mortified if she had to fish him out of the river and wake him at St. Jude’s with everyone tsk-tsking and knowing.”

  “I think we’ll meet in other shit holes before we get to Boston.”

  “The way the world’s going.”

  I leave Rolo and head to the Doctors Without Borders house. The guard waves at me. I slip in and go to Alija’s room. She sits on a mattress, rows of gumdrops at her knees, her damp hair hanging. She says she’s worried she’ll run out of gumdrops; there are fewe
r places to get them now that war is coming. She says she won’t have anything to give the children we meet. I tell her that we’ll give them coins. I have a bag full of coins. She says gumdrops would be better to give in war. She lies down and faces the wall. I ask her if she wants me to stay and she says no. She says it’s funny that we now say war is coming, when war has been here for so long. A tear is swallowed. She pulls her knees to her chin, retracting even from the speck of space the world has granted her. I go back to my couch before Megan wakes. Her breaths a ticking clock; her hands scrubbed and white, knuckles chapped. There are scalpels and sutures in a cabinet, rolls of gauze and bandages, antibiotics and morphine, enough, maybe, to keep the dying alive a little longer.

  An hour passes, then another. Alija stirs in her room and then walks through the hallway and steps outside into a morning of low clouds, a creak of yellow and blue in the cold distance. I get up and watch her from the window. Another door opens, and Brian walks outside. He and Alija stand near the Jeep. She picks at the ice on the windshield; he leans on the fender. Brian lights a cigarette and hands one to Alija. I have never seen them smoke before. The guard comes over, and he smokes too. They are like workers on a factory break, standing in the chill, free from machines and din. The guard says something. Alija smiles. She translates for Brian. A man arrives in a truck and hauls boxes into a shed. Another guard comes, and the smoking guard says good-bye and walks down the dirt road, his rifle riding loose and low off his shoulder. I hear Megan behind me, and then I see her outside. Brian hands her a cigarette, and she smokes. They talk for a while. I hear shreds of this and that. Alija touches Megan’s face, the way girls do when they’re young and practicing with makeup. Alija takes a brush from her coat and brushes Megan’s hair. Brian lights another cigarette. The man who was loading boxes brings them tea and sugar cubes and puts bread and cheese on the Jeep hood. He smiles and has the muffled chuckle of a man taught long ago by his wife not to wake sleeping children. I hear spoons clinking in tea. I hear ice crack. I hear the wood of the house expand. I think I hear the brush go through Megan’s hair, but that is only a remembered sound. Megan stands. She is pretty and smooth and she whirls toward Brian and they play dance and Alija and the guard laugh and the man who brought cheese turns on the radio in the Jeep. Brian tosses sugar cubes in the air and catches them in his mouth. The guard tries, but they bounce off his forehead or miss him altogether. Alija brushes her own hair, long strokes, first the outside, then the thicket beneath. A quiet ambulance comes up the drive. The two men who took Vijay away get out and open the back doors. They slide out an empty wooden coffin. They lean it upright on the shed and remove the lid. One of them goes into the shed and brings out a hose. It is cold and the water doesn’t flow at first, but then it does and the man hoses out the coffin and the other man pats it with a towel. They point it toward the sky, but the clouds are a vise and the sun is the width of a penny. Brian looks at them and tosses his cigarette into the dirt and walks away. The teacups are removed from the Jeep. Megan twists her hair into a rubber band; she reminds me of the young Megan I first met years ago, the one with the new doctor’s bag and iodine stains on her fingers. Megan, how long has it been? You are my ghost, my echo of wars gone by.

  Alija walks to the coffin and rubs her palm over the inside. She says something to the men, and they point to the top of the coffin. Alija gives them each a gumdrop and then walks to Megan, and they both come toward the house. The man with the cheese and tea disappears; the guard walks his rounds, stopping at the Jeep, turning off the music.

  Brian writes. Megan counts needles. Alija takes another shower. I hook up the sat phone and check my e-mail. My desk informs me negotiations with Milosevic are failing. The Europeans are squawking about “peaceful resolution,” but Washington is pressuring and refugees are streaming. Factor diplomacy into an equation of morals, history, and global stability and then divide it by momentum, and the answer is simple: Milosevic has to go. NATO bombing, writes my desk, seems “imminent.” What an ominous word imminent is, blows up your spine like wind. Editor testosterone levels are rising. I can see them chattering in their meetings and fixing grand schemes with ink and graphics. It’s easy to be tough when you’re not in the place where the bombs drop.

  I’ll soon get that call from the top editor. It’s the lawyer-cover-your-ass-from-liability call and it’ll go something like this: “Jay, we appreciate the sacrifice you’re making, uh, hold on, I’m headed into a tunnel, these damn cell phones. Jay, you there? As I said, we know how hard it is for you, and if you want to get out, we understand. No story is worth a life. Are you married, Jay? Hang on. I gotta make a turn, gotta switch the phone. I’m back, okay, as I was saying, have you got a flak jacket, Jay? You gotta have a flak jacket. But if you want to leave it’s still okay. Your safety’s the main thing.” At this moment, and I’ve imagined it often, I’d like to tell the editor: “You know what, you’re right. No story is worth a life. I’m coming home. Thanks a lot for caring.” There would be a long silence, not because of a tunnel, but because the editor would be so stunned to hear of my imminent departure — there goes his dateline from the war zone; how will he explain it to the guys at the club? — that the phone would slip out of his hand and thump in his lap with the accuracy of a cruise missile. But I won’t say that. I’m not bitter. This is the way things are. I tell Brian about my imaginary answer, and he can’t stop laughing. “That would be so cool, wouldn’t it? I’m coming home.’ Could you see his expression? In my case, though, Jay, I’d have to say I’d not be going home but to Fiji.”

  “What is it with you and this Fiji fixation?”

  “I’ll tell you,” says Brian. “When I was a kid they thought I had this strange disease. Some weird non-life-threatening thing. I can’t even remember the name of it now. Anyway, once a week for four weeks I’d have to go to the clinic and have blood taken, and there was this poster of Fiji on the wall. A tanned girl with a lei and a coconut or something and a beach, and I’d just stare at it as my blood ran into a vial.”

  “Sounds like some prepubescent sexual thing. I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “C’mon, Jay, I’m just explaining Fiji.”

  “I was thinking about going with you, but now, no way.”

  “You wanna go, Megan?”

  “Would I have to wear a lei?”

  Alija walks into the room.

  “We have to go back to the mountains. I need to find Ardian.”

  I still have not told Alija about her brother. There has been no right moment. I hope in the two days since we’ve left the mountains that the Leopard has plucked him from the ranks of martyrs playing with dynamite and religion in the dateman’s camp of promised virgins. What is it about spirituality and the unspoiled woman? Why does so much intersect there? The air, the land, the seas have all been fouled. We spin in vile matter. Man himself was born muddied. Perhaps woman, with her thin membrane, that onionskin between goodness and sin, is our innate hope for purity. Or is she the rib pulled from Adam, the clay and marrow of a darker place? Vijay would say she is both: temptation and virtue moving through chaos. But why arch into the dense calligraphy of philosophy and piousness? Lets keep it tabloid simple. Zealots play with meanings and reduce them to instinct: man’s need to get laid wrestles with his inability to accept his true nature. He falsifies purity and destroys what he cannot change; the world spins on this splendid irony. Virgins are the reward.

  The Leopard told me that the suicide bombs in the dateman’s camp are refashioned life vests stolen from airplanes. Dynamite replaces the foam of survival. We blow up what we once floated upon. Such details make a reporter’s notebook happy. But they don’t answer my question. Why haven’t I told Alija about her brother? Why do I always say brother? His name is Ardian. It’s true that I don’t want to hand her more despair. She has been raped and written upon; she dug the family silver from the earth. Perhaps it’s something more, though. Maybe I’d lose Alija. Maybe she’d break and never
come back. I’d be on the brink of war without a translator. Language and nuance gone. I sleep with Alija. I count her secrets, but can I say that her interests outweigh mine? Aren’t our interests really the same in the end? Is she better off knowing that her brother’s in a place she cannot save him from anyway? Who keeps the scale on how our needs and whims bleed into another’s? The same knowledge that creates compassion is the seed of selfishness. So we dance, with one another and around one another. War, however, mocks such abstractions. War is dirt and blood, the elements. It is, as a marine once told me, “Something you can get your mind around ‘cause if ya don’t you’ll get your ass blown off, sir.”

  We load the Jeep.

  “I’ll see you again, Jay,” says Megan as we leave her clinic.

  “Somewhere.”

  She wants to say something else, but she doesn’t. I see her waving in the rearview; then we hit the main road and accelerate toward the mountains, and she is gone.

  “Back into the breach, dear friends,” says Brian, his voice flat and unconvincing.

  The shit comes fast. We meet the Leopard’s guides at the assigned place, but the fighting is heavy between the MUP and the guerrillas. The MUP have tightened the perimeter around the west end of a mountain and are firing the big guns. The guerrillas scramble over paths and hidden roads. Their knowledge of the terrain is saving them, but soon the sieve will tighten and they will be eclipsed by the MUP’s firepower. We watch with binoculars from a kilometer away. Blasts of flames and white smoke. The blackbirds are circling; there’s no place to land. Snow falls in a light fog. Teams of guerrillas, trying to get closer with their RPGs, flank the MUP from the east. A MUP unit peels away from their artillery and starts lighting up the guerrillas. The guerrillas slither into the thicket and try to take cover in the ruins of a village. The MUP cut them off, and the guerrillas spin north and disappear. The MUP regroup at the artillery. Two tanks burst out of earthen bunkers and head toward the village. An RPG streams from a ditch and hits one tank. The tank keeps rolling. Another RPG whooshes past the tank and slams into a tree.