“You should have told me earlier, Jay.”
“There was a lot uncertain. I was hoping . . .”
“You had no right.”
“We’ll find him.”
“You had no right, Jay.”
She wipes her eyes and pulls her face tight. Brian and the Leopard come in.
“We scoured the place,” says Brian. “We found another underground bunker. Probably for munitions. Freshly dug but empty.”
“There wasn’t that much up here, anyway,” says the Leopard. “I visited twice before. It was sparse even with people. All you heard were whispers.”
Alija stomps the wall twice with the bottom of her boot and walks to the corner. The Leopard follows, wraps an arm around her. She turns in to him.
“The war is coming, and Allah’s boys have scattered,” whispers Brian.
“What do we have here?”
“Let me give you the U.S. intel version: terror hive in faraway mountains. Shadowy figure escapes in Land Cruiser, leaves blueprint on walls.”
“Bearded men, architecture, and bombs,” I banter, to forget about Alija’s eyes.
“Or architecture, bombs, and bearded men.”
“You should end with the strongest word.”
“Bombs would appear to be the strongest image, but bearded men is more poetic. It lingers longer.”
“Carries you nicely into the next graph.”
“Are we doing narrative or straight up?”
“Straight up.”
“I don’t like narrative anyway.”
“You’re too impatient for narrative.”
“The more narrative you do, the more editors you deal with. Who needs that? I listened to a guy read his narrative ‘reportage’ at a conference once. It went on and on and on. He described the pictures on the wall, the color of the toilet, how many slices in the loaf of bread. I got a headache, so I put my hand up and asked this guy, ‘What’s the point?’ He said, ‘The point is I’m taking you to a place.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to be there, so what good is it? Just tell me what the skinny is.’ And he said: ‘That comes later.’ I said, ‘I don’t have time for later. I don’t care how many slices of bread are in the loaf. I just want to know if Johnny killed his mommy, or are you going to jerk me off for three thousand words?’”
“You have this hostile streak, Brian. And anyway, no one gets three thousand words anymore.”
Alija walks along the wall again, looking down the avenues of the dateman’s city. She is crying. A slow, quiet cry. Alija is good at binding sound; she stores it in her bones. The Leopard goes to the window. He smashes it with his gun and breathes the cold air that rushes in like wind through hanging laundry. I close my eyes and feel it, remembering linens ghosting in backyards; I remember: sheets billowing, shirts lifting, a strange bloom of snapping colors. I remember all that stuff years ago as a boy when things were folded and crisp and the best feeling of all was sliding at night into a bed of sheets still cool from the line. And then, late at night, sneaking out the bedroom window, dropping on a dewy lawn and racing up the sidewalk to meet my friends, older guys with paper routes and crumpled cigarettes. I’d help them fold and load their baskets. I’d shine their reflectors and send them peddling toward the lip of dawn. I’d walk home with a newspaper. The ink damp, I felt the news had just happened. I knew the stories of the world before anyone else. They slept, and I understood the troubles in faraway places, all those little foggy, sinister capitals. I knew presidents and revolutionaries; there was always a Castro story, always a bit of misery and rain from the Soviet bloc; there was polio and baseball and Bart Starr; there were union guys and murders and blood the color of ink, my ink, the ink that rubbed off on my hands as I flipped the pages back to the comics and then to the television section, where I’d check on Sea Hunt and those Cartwright boys. It was a world on paper, a compressed thing of wonder. There was no bargain like it — the planet in your hands for a dime.
The Leopard steps out the door and pulls me aside. Another paper unfolds. A map. His finger moves to red dots: Pristina, Belgrade, Novi Sad.
“Targets?”
“Yes. Young men blowing themselves up. These fanatics tried it in Bosnia, but it didn’t work. Could it here? I don’t know. Look at this brainwashing. These wills. They’ve crossed over to someplace beyond us. This country, Yugoslavia, it’s not even that anymore. It’s been broken apart, divided, piece by bloody piece. And this is the last piece, Jay. Who will win?”
We’re rushing down the path and away from the camp. The Leopard is fast. He glides shadowlike over the rocks. Alija is behind me and then beside me. She doesn’t say anything. She takes my hand and walks with me awhile, then lets me go and moves ahead. Farther back, I hear Brian’s big boots scuffing. The four of us find a disjointed unison and appear at the ridgeline; clouds and clear sky battle. Night is minutes away, and guerrillas huddle in blankets. I unroll my sleeping bag in the sheep shed. The Leopard checks his men. Brian writes in the Jeep. He’s beyond a thousand words and still clattering, hunched in the window like a card player contemplating a bluff. No matter how much he writes, no matter how much I write, the dateman is a bit of refracted light, a glimpse, not essence: a riddle of journalism. Think of the editor peering at his screen. What’s he to make of this story? Bomb vests and Koranic verses, a stunted pattern implying something more. Yes, it will be noted. Of course it will be given words and a headline and noted. But the dateman is but a wrinkle in a larger set piece. The warplanes are parked and pointed, the dictator Milosevic slinks with brandy in his bunker, a draftsman down a corridor in a Washington basement ponders grids on a map. War in Europe. How can the dateman’s jihad whispers and weird architecture compete with that? What media marketability does he have to dim the glamour of a Stealth Bomber flown by a young man from the middle of Nebraska, a guy with one of those American kick-ass smiles who’s doing a live feed with Oprah about his impending mission across the dark Balkan skies? He calls her ma’am and everyone goes, “Ahhhh.” The dateman was right to break camp and scamper. Why get creamed before your message gets out? Briefly chronicled but ultimately forgotten, a curiosity for arms merchants and Swiss bankers and those who know that the currents moving the world run deeper than images flickering across screens. He was here, he made a mark, but perhaps he is for another time. He is the laborer in the Bible, the farm hand in the Koran, dipping a hand in a sack, scattering seeds. Alija lies beside me. Her face is cool and smells of soap.
“Is there water?” I ask.
“A few bottles left in the Jeep.”
“I haven’t heard any gunfire in a while.”
“The Leopard says they’re not fighting tonight. I checked with some of the guys who came from the dateman’s camp. No one knew my brother.”
“How many Arabs did you see?”
“None. They must have gone somewhere else. The Leopard doesn’t know either.”
Alija’s silhouette is sharp. She says nothing more. In all the time we’ve been together, our conversations have mostly been with, and through, others, with Alija the conduit, the alchemist turning two languages into one. She is my screen, my sieve, my word collector. I want her to whisper her secret to me again. I want to know more; I want her story to never end. It lies out there in remnants on a field of lightning and a galloping horse. She will never tell me all. I have been given images I can understand and process: rape, a dead boy soldier, escape. A tragedy in three acts. Language, this smattering of ink and sound, cannot explain all; there is a layer, an invisible space between syntax, that cannot be bridged. You can write poems on the pain of fire, but you know nothing of fire until you place your hand on the stove. I live in that vocabulary between poem and stove. I turn toward Alija. She kisses me. Perhaps I am forgiven. The tears on her face press to mine. She rubs them off my cheeks, and I feel like the young man in the grave. The one with no hands. She holds me, and I hear Brian outside connecting the sat phone to the Jeep’s engine and cursing a
t one of his sources like some night bird cawing into the ether.
“My father painted houses,” says Brian.
Alija sleeps; I stand with him near the Jeep.
“No ambiguity in painting houses.”
“Not once you mix the color right. I worked with him in the summers.”
“T-shirts and turpentine.”
“It was good work. Every day you could see how far you’d gone. You finished one house and went to another. Thousands of miles of paint over a lifetime. I used to love his truck. It was battered, it stank and was cluttered with so much shit, from rollers to coffee cups to faded bills, that I thought all the world’s lost things ended up in that white pickup. Sometimes I just want to paint a house, Jay. See something finished, complete, in the sun.”
“Alija thinks her brother may have gone back to the university in Pristina.”
“That kid will be screwed up no matter where he is. Let’s drive her there tomorrow. I could use a scenery change, maybe look up my Russian buds. Wash some clothes.”
“We may get cut off. May not be able to get back here.”
“Ahh, and miss the little war on this freezing mountain. Jay, once the NATO boys start dropping the big hardware, these guerrillas won’t mean shit. They’ll duck and go along for the ride and pop their heads up when the ground settles and the MUP have scattered. We’re looking at the big picture. The guerrillas get the spoils, and Uncle Sam does the lifting. Once the bombs start dropping, the story here is all about refugees.”
“What, you’re writing analysis pieces now?”
“I’d rather write an analysis than a narrative. You got any numbers of military-political experts I can call?”
“I don’t use them.”
“Everybody does.”
“Why do I need to call a guy sitting in an office in Washington or in some university to tell me what’s going on in the country where I’m sitting? Makes no sense.”
“I never figured you for an expert hater. Is there something dark from your childhood?”
“I don’t hate them. I just don’t need someone to tell me that I’m in a shit storm when I can look outside and see it’s brown and windy and stinky. ‘Jonathan Yukityyuk, an international expert specializing in small, messed-up countries and based in a think tank buried in the ground somewhere in Maryland, said the Balkans are spinning out of control and that time will tell what the future holds for this perilous stretch of European real estate.’”
“I’ve got goose bumps.”
“Mr. Yukityyuk, who has never actually traveled to the country in question, believes that no matter what happens Washington will have a mess on its hands for a long, long time. Oh, excuse us, Mr. Yukityyuk has to go now. He’s just been called by Nightline to pontificate his expert wisdom into people’s living rooms, a move that hopefully will prompt interested Americans into buying his latest book: The Quagmire We Live in When We Blow Up Other People: A History and Litany of America’s Overseas Engagements in Foreign Lands.”
“I’ve read it. It’s essential. I wish we had a dateman expert.”
“Hasn’t been invented yet, but soon they will be legion.”
The Leopard walks up and leans on the Jeep. I study him. The Leopard. I love the name, a sleek beast from a distant geography. But his finery and perfections are diminishing. Tea stains his teeth. His fingernails are no longer compact moons. There is that quiet majesty, yes, that belief that man can change his circumstance. The Leopard is tired, though, his hands dirty, his boots battered. His fingers are nicked, and his nose is runny, a kid left too long on the playground. His maps don’t crinkle anymore. They unfold like cloth, lines and elevations blurred. His men float below him, bobbing uncertainties in the cloud line, loading bullets and looking downhill to the Serbs stretched across the narrow valley. War is about stamina, not about death.
“Have you killed anyone yet?” says Brian.
“I don’t know,” says the Leopard. “I’ve shot into things that moved and then they didn’t move.”
“But you never saw.”
“Never saw.”
“How much does a bullet weigh?”
“A few ounces, maybe. Brian, you must have had a lot of bullets in your hands over the years.”
“Yeah, but I’m not good at weight, or guessing ages.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Fifteen.”
“Come on.”
“I’m telling you I’m lousy at this shit.”
“Thirty-four.”
“A good age.”
“Jay, is thirty-four a good age?” asks the Leopard.
“I met a woman once. She was thirty-four. She was Egyptian, and we were the only two in a hotel somewhere in Algeria. A sandstorm came across the desert. Gusts blew through window cracks. It was dusk. The small hotel staff had retreated. She came into my room with silver spoons and tea made from black lemons. We sat and talked until morning. The storm passed, but the dawn was hazy. She kissed me, just once, and left. I heard her creak down the hall and go into her room. I heard her draw water for a bath, and I fell asleep near a plate of cut lemons. It was beautiful.”
It’s time to go. The Leopard gives us a guide to lead us down to the mountain and onto the hard road. Alija hugs the Leopard, and he shakes my hand and looks at me, water in his eyes from the cold air. He gives Brian a bullet. “Weigh it when you get a chance.” I tell him we’ll be back after our trip to Pristina. He says promises like that can’t be kept anymore, no one knows what will happen, but perhaps one day we’ll meet in a different place, a free country. He hands me a letter and tells me to give it to his family in the city. He hands me a photograph of the two of us sitting on a ridge. I don’t know when it was taken. I don’t know who took it. He says he has a copy, too.
“I think you loved that Egyptian girl,” he says.
“It was a while ago.”
“What do you remember most about her?”
“Her voice, and knowing I would never have it.”
He steps closer.
“Whatever you write about the dateman, make sure you say he is not us.”
We pull away. I see the Leopard in the rearview, his men beginning to gather around him. Instructions for a new, wet day We come around the last mountain curve. The guide hops out and disappears into the skeleton brush. The Serbs are quiet across the valley. Brian counts their APCs. Alija puts on her MUP mask. We head toward another checkpoint in the rain.
Chapter 16
Pristina slumps like a kicked dog in the distance. No matter from what vantage point one approaches, the city never inspires, not even a swatch of charm, only grids and gray blocks from demented architectural minds. It is a place half finished, yet half dead. The tallest building is the Grand Hotel, a flimsy box of fake bronze and gold where the elevators stop midfloor and the staff wears shiny, worn tuxedoes, each at least a size too small. Even the diminutive bellboys walk around bound and shrunken by buttons and cheap twill. Their bow ties are cockeyed and frayed, like droopy black propellers. A tip doesn’t raise a smile; everyone, it seems, is waiting for an RPG to whistle down a hallway, or for some suspicious-looking guy in boxer shorts and socks to be dragged across the lobby screaming, “It’s not me, it’s not me,” before he’s tossed into the back of a truck with crisscrossing-wire windows. If the Grand had a past opulence, it is strangled in the carpets that midday smell of feet and by evening emit scents of spilled drinks left by village couples on their wedding nights, who hurried and fumbled in narrow beds while downstairs gangsters in Macedonian black leather sipped Campari, which they didn’t like but had been told was chic. One night, years ago, Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” played in the bar, and a woman in a black-and-pink dress — sometimes they just appear like ghosts or lollipops — whirled alone over the floor in a broken rhythm that said, “I’m from somewhere in Eastern Europe, but, ahhh, I will try, and I will dance to the end of love or the end of hate or the end of whatever you want if
you just put me in a car and drive me west, west to the sea.” I bought her a drink and wished her luck. She disappeared hours later with a guy in a stolen Fiat with no plates, heading toward the mountains of Montenegro.
“I need to look for my brother, Jay.”
“Jay, you think the Grand serves mousse? I could go for a good chocolate mousse.”
“Will you come with me, Jay?”
“Jay, I’d even go for a Black Forest cake, nothing fancy.”
“There’s not much time, Jay.”
The Grand is full. It’s always booked until you slip the guy at the registration desk — the newly shaven one with pale cheeks and gray eyes, the one who smells of cologne rubbed out of magazine ads, the one who screws the maids in sunken hallways — a hundred-dollar bill, and then suddenly a room has opened up, another hundred and another room. Money is magic. We get in the elevator; for a moment we’re suspended but not moving, like a knot in the middle of a tug-of-war rope. We click, shimmy, and rise. Fourth floor.
“Hey, Jay, do you have a doorknob?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t.”
Brian kicks open his door and laughs. Alija and I step into our room. Green-and-tan curtains. The toilet running. A few bugs in the sink. A cracked mirror, and that dim light, that fluorescent stain that follows you from shit hole to shit hole, as if the electricity is being strangled so it doesn’t fully illuminate the things that lurk in the corners. The room is cold. The wool blankets have lost their itchy crackle. “Hold me, Jay.” She steps into my arms. We stand at the window, watching snow the color of old nickels blow through the city. There are more MUP on the streets. The war has not come here yet. It is out there, hiding in the snow, obscured but moving closer, a tin and metal prattle on the distant outskirts. Alija steps closer to the window. She blows on it, and in the steam she writes. She blows and writes some more. The words vanish before I can read them, and I ask her what she’s writing, and she turns and smiles and says nothing. The sound of traffic cracks and creaks, muffled by space and snow but lingering like an old woman’s hum. I lie on the bed and close my eyes. Alija breathes. Her letters squeak over the window. I should call my desk, file the dateman story, write a memo, send something. Later. I start to drift. Alija sits on the bed. She takes my hand.
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