Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

“You’re not bringing these Russians with us?”

  “Screw them. They don’t even know how to fish.”

  Brian and I go to breakfast. The Russians have vanished. Alija sits alone, squeezing brown from a tea bag and cursing the lukewarm water in her cup. We tell her.

  “Jay, I need to look for my brother one more time. Today, here.”

  “Okay, Brian and I will drop you closer to the main mosque on our way to the black market. It’s really happening, isn’t it? This is the day the people here have wanted for so long.”

  “Be careful what you wish for.”

  “No, Brian, that’s not true. You’d have to have wished like we did to know that that’s not true.”

  “At least you got a dance in.”

  She smiles.

  “If only we’d had a piano player in the corner,” I say.

  “In a white jacket,” says Brian.

  “Jay, if we find Ardian, he can come with us, right?”

  “He can babysit Brian, keep him on the wagon.”

  “I want a real coffee,” says Brian. “What’s so hard about a real coffee? These are modern times.”

  We walk through the lobby. A guy sits bent over an espresso and a paper. Black leather and a dour mood; he looks like a bodyguard or some kind of backup for something going on upstairs. A wire-service photographer rushes out of the elevator, his cameras hanging off him and jangling like dull chimes. He owes me money, but I can’t remember from when or where. The big war is landing tonight, and the bellhops and the concierge have no idea. They don’t know our secret. They sense something has shifted, some twist in the air, but they don’t know; they just feel that today, for the first time in a while, seems different than yesterday. We step outside. The sun on my face cajoles me into thinking I’m not here. The Jeep is so streaked with mud that I’ve forgotten what color it is. Alija hops in the front, Brian in the back, I’m at the wheel: our little family, each with his or her assigned roles. We’re off.

  “Jay, we gotta wash this thing. It’s starting to smell in here. There must be an old banana under the seat.”

  “Alija, where do you want to go?”

  “A few blocks up, and then you guys turn left to the black market. Jay, get an extra flak jacket in case we find my brother.”

  “Meet us back at the hotel. Then Brian and I are going to see a spook friend of ours.”

  “Hey, Jay, we gotta write some B matter too. Need some stuff in the computer to put under the lede in case we need to file fast.”

  “Jay, stop. Stop, Jay!”

  “What?”

  Before she answers, Alija’s out of the Jeep and running toward the cafe on the corner. It’s a half-lit place with clean windows, a multicultural den of old magazines, piano sonatas, and a first-rate espresso machine, where out-of-uniform MUP, Albanian intellectuals, NGO types, hacks, and Western spies pretend that life is fine and everyone gets along and if every place could be like this place — a MUP passing the sugar to some dark-skinned kid with a false smile — then the world would be just grand. Alija rushes through the door, and I see him standing at the counter. He’s lean. His hair is shorn; he’s a coarser version of the boy in the picture Alija carries in her pocket. It’s him. Ardian. I see the back of her as she hurries through the crowd toward him. She opens her arms, a bird at the brink of flight. I can only imagine the expression on her face. The journey ended, the search over, her brother, the polisher of shoes, the beaten boy, found. Ardian steps toward her. There’s no warmth on his face, only eyes registering recognition, but it is barely even that. He knows her but he doesn’t, squinting as if someone from long ago, a vaguely remembered face, appeared unexpectedly before him. He freezes for a moment and then lifts his arms to embrace his sister, but that is not what he is doing. Through his sleeves and through his open coat I think I see wires, and my eyes move toward his hands, and I see, on the left one, a cocked thumb. Then there is that pause in the world, that strange gap of immeasurable time. I feel the heat before I hear the sound, smoke and glass and then limbo, strangely soothing, a numb blindness until what’s knocked out of you comes back. I open the door and run around the Jeep and see blood, bits of teeth, broken cups, glinting, twisted spoons, a finger, and the shred of a vest like the one we saw in the dateman’s camp hung near the book of stick-figure drawings of men on fire. The heat seeps into my nose, grows heavy in my lungs. There’s ash and sugar beneath my feet. Every sound seems as if its reaching me from miles away or like the muffled voices of childhood traveling through a tin can and a string. A man with blood on his face lies on the sidewalk, vegetables and streaks of milk around him. A woman with torn stockings and a twisted foot, the ankle exposed like a fleshy white knuckle, crawls toward a baby stroller with no baby in it. I check Brian. He’s lying in the backseat, dazed but okay. I turn toward the cafe. Flames like filaments lace through black smoke, and then the smoke rolls and whirls. I run toward the cafe, but the heat is a wall and my face burns and I stand there looking in, the smoke playing magician tricks with my eyes, and I see two men sitting at a table, charred and slumping, white wisps rising from their clothes and disappearing into the black. I see a hose and water and people running and blue lights and MUP pushing people back and the sounds of crying and the flame shrinking and hissing and the black smoke fading to gray and the skeleton of the cafe exposed and nothing in the place where Alija stood. Where is she? I turn away. I close my eyes and breathe in. A boy tugs at me but sees I am not who he wants; he steps over a coat soaked with water and blood and disappears down the sidewalk. Two tires on the Jeep are flat. The headlights are shattered. I gather Brian. He has a few nicks on his forehead, but the blood is light, almost dry “Alija?” he says. He looks past me. The smoke is turning yellow-gray. The fire is nearly out; hoses slide and curl like snakes. “Alija?” he says. He leans on me, and we step toward the cafe and look through to the blown-out back wall, its bricks a ragged frame to an alley where more wounded stagger through falling cinders. He says nothing more. We turn and rush over the curb and across the street. Sirens, footsteps, shrieks mingle in a messy finger-painting of sound; none of it’s distinct, it’s as if we’re swimming through an echo. We reach the Grand. The lobby lights surge and dim. The concierge and bellhops huddle around the front desk, counting money, pushing keys across marble. A man in a gray suit guards the safe. He looks like an ethnic cleanser from another era, older now and pressed into less vigorous tasks that call for fronting a sneer and keeping a hidden finger on the trigger of a Glock. Bartenders, sweating in cheap white shirts but their bow ties tight, hurry back and forth from the kitchen carrying sandbags and stacking them by the door. The cafe is empty, half-drunk espressos and cappuccinos dot the tables, and the Muzak, oblivious to the changed mood, plays like a misplaced interlude, a tinny string of false notes. A truckload of MUP arrives. Two of them hop out and haul a crate of grenades behind the front desk. Others run for the stairs to take positions on the roof. Hacks scatter through the lobby, conferring, sharing assumptions, calculating where to be next in a stream of what-if scenarios. Its like a weird sales convention for the dirty, the unshaven, the intrepid, and the lost. It comes now, the pulse, the charged air, the waiting for the when. An explosion can do that. Brian sits on a couch and reaches for his notebook. He looks at me, says nothing, starts scribbling. A man with a bloody child in his arms walks to the hotel window. He lays the body down and falls to his knees. The boy must have been killed in the blast. The man strokes the boy’s hair; he cries out but no sound comes, a wail as hollow and hushed as a cave in a forest. TV cameras appear one by one and then clatter into a crowd of lenses zooming and widening; the click, the insect whir, and the cameramen, engaged in their own little war of elbowing and shoving, bend and contort to get the best picture they can of a fresh kill. The boy’s legs are gnarled, curled; his arms skin-ripped and showing bone; his face, eyes wide, angelic and gashed, heaven skimming hell — dead. The man scoops up the body and turns. The boy’s feet and head sway, a pup
pet being put away for the night. Blood trails the man. He turns a corner.

  I walk upstairs and open the door. It is as we left it. Computer on desk, coins for the maid, a bag of gumdrops, a towel coiled and damp on the floor, the curtain closed, the comb on the bed, the bed still wet from when Alija jumped under the covers with me after her shower. I sit and trace the outline of her body, so small, slender, like a drawing from a sketchbook. She is here. I see her socks in the covers, strands of hair on the pillow, all the little clues that make a life. I reach for the towel and breathe her in, clean, a riddle of elements. This room is alive; it hasn’t yet entered the day. It slumbers, waiting for light. It is hours behind. We are dancing. Boots untied by the window, noises in the hall, the creak of a far-off closing door. We are watching the falling snow; the cold, frozen country beyond us, wrapping us in hills and mountains. It conspires and whispers with us. The land gives, the land reclaims; we have seen it with others but not with us. Alija laughs and kisses me. We are in bed. She holds my face in her hands and slides alongside me. She breathes into my ear, and, with a finger, carves my profile from the night. She moves over me and settles on my chest, listening to my life, a thrum beneath bone. I roll toward her; she opens her arms. She laughs again, sweet and raspy, a girl fighting sleep. We are together, not because she is young and I am old, or because she is beautiful and I am not, but because we are damaged and we understand. We are sleeping. I, who could never sleep, am sleeping in her arms, and in the quiet, I hear a voice.

  “Jay, let me tell you the story.”

  Syllable. Word. Inflection. Nuance. Paragraph. Life.

  I sit up. The room and the day are one. I pack my things and reach into the shower for the small bottle of shampoo. It is the last scent I have of her. Apricots and rain in a field. I dry the bottle and seal it. I slip it into my bag next to the roll of undeveloped film I keep from another war.

  The missiles come at 8:13 p.m. on a night of scattered clouds, a light breeze out of the southwest.

  Chapter 17

  “People insist that Macedonia is beautiful, but I don’t think so.”

  “Rolo. What are you doing here?”

  “This is an airport, Jay. I’m flying out just like you.”

  “It’s over.”

  “Seventy-eight days and billions of dollars later.”

  “When did you get out?”

  “A few days ago. Took a little R and R with a couple of hooker twins. They told me they were twins, anyway. How about you?”

  “Came out this morning.”

  “In the whole time, huh?”

  “At the border mostly. Sometimes we got in to see the MUP and guerrilla show in the hills, but it was bullshit. Too much NATO hardware flying through the air. How about you?”

  “Jay, you keep forgetting our relationship. I can’t tell you where. I’m a spook, man. Here, take this glass.”

  “Duty free.”

  “Irish whiskey.”

  “You gonna open it now?”

  “Is there ever a wrong time to open Irish whiskey?”

  “It was long, wasn’t it?”

  “Way too long. Hey, where’s Alija? I’d figured for sure you’d be taking her out.”

  “She’s dead, Rolo. You remember the cafe bombing in Pristina?”

  “The morning it all started? I heard about it, but I was in the mountains. It was one of the dateman’s boys, right?”

  “Her brother.”

  Jesus.

  “That was the only one, too. All the other dateman boys scattered.”

  “It’s a sin, Jay. I’m sorry. She was lovely. Did you write about it?”

  “Yeah, I wrote about it. Paragraph twenty-six, forty-three words. It could have been the lede if the war had waited a day. I miss her voice. I danced with her, Rolo. The night before, we danced.”

  “Never figured you for a dancer.”

  “I did okay. What’s your prediction for Kosovo?”

  “NATO sits on it for a while, keeps the peace. Independence. Then another war. It’s the Balkans, after all.” He takes a long sip of whiskey. “Here’s something that might interest you. Somebody took a shot at the dateman.”

  “Bullshit. I was with him in the mountains right before he left.”

  “Yeah, I was tracking him. After your little roadside tete-a-tete he kept heading south.”

  “Was it you?”

  “No, I was just shadowing. I mean, I would have liked to have shot him, but I didn’t. His Land Cruiser was coming around a bend. I could see it in my night-visions, and then, just before starting up another hill, pop, pop. The Land Cruiser braked, then it swerved, straightened out, and was gone.”

  “Did either bullet hit?”

  “I doubt it. Too bad. Would have been a hell of a shot at night on that terrain. The sniper, whoever he was, could have saved us a lot of trouble. It’s still something, though, isn’t it? Someone else trying to take care of a problem you don’t know quite what to do with yourself. A fascinating place, the world. That’s me. They’re calling my flight.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “We’re tracking him, Jay. You know, you’ve gotta have more faith in the U.S. government.”

  “But where is he?”

  “You keep asking these sensitive questions. My flight’s to London. Then who knows? But I hear the place to be begins with an ‘A’ and ends with a ‘stan.’”

  “Have fun, Rolo.”

  “One day, Jay, I’m going to write all my adventures down. You’ll be in there.”

  Rolo waves and pulls his ticket from his duffel bag.

  “Who was that?”

  “Jesus, Brian. Why so long?”

  “Don’t give me shit, Jay. The line was endless. Nobody was taking bribes. I had to wait. Who was that guy?”

  “Some aide worker from somewhere. I couldn’t remember.”

  “Is that whiskey? Give me a sip. Two tickets to Vienna, my friend. Civilization. They have tortes in Vienna, right? I want a torte, Jay.”

  “I could have a torte.”

  “Then I’m going fishing.”

  “You going to call your desk?”

  “Jay, don’t bring editors into this.”

  The plane is crammed with unshaven faces and dutyfree bags. We lift through a low roll of clouds and the sky clears and we keep rising, a bit of sun on the wing. I look out the window and see Alija’s horse galloping across the blue. She will never catch him. Nothing was ever found of her; no bone, no fragment, no gumdrop, no ring. She vanished in the ash. I keep thinking about the scribbled last will and testament we found in the dateman’s camp before the war. “If innocents should die with me, there is no worry, for they are martyrs too. They are blessed.” The flight attendant brings whiskey. I reach for my notebook but slide it back into my pocket. I am scoured of words. The plane levels, and soon we will be in Austria.

  Chapter 18

  Now you know. Things happen. They connect. They come toward you from places you never considered, from mountains you never peered into, from funny-looking names you skipped over. Their prattle is discordant. They are small. They are only words and momentary images. Until they sit in cockpits and skim the morning horizon, closer and closer they come. I am in Baghdad with a new translator. He is a man with a missing thumb, but his English is good, not perfect, not like Alija’s, but good. We struggle over precise meanings, and he whispers to me that sometimes there are no words for the things people tell him. When he goes for tea, I daydream. The Leopard is buried not far from Vijay, his mustache chiseled in stone by those men who make the dead pretty. Milan played jazz piano in Belgrade for a while. He disappeared about a year ago after calling to tell me that his hands often lost their way over the keys and that he couldn’t trust them anymore. Brian, the last I heard, was fishing a river in Afghanistan. Megan was there too. No word from Rolo, but I imagine I’ll get to wherever he is at some point.

  Acknowledgments

  I thank my agent, Sorche Fairbank, for her
wisdom and tenacious spirit, and my editor at Arcade, Cal Barksdale, for his keen eye and thoughtfulness. I am also indebted to the tireless, inspiring tribe of war correspondents.