The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  He ended up in the old central square, where restaurants had set out tables in the August sunshine. He sat and ordered a coffee. Then he realized it was 1:00 p.m., so when the waiter returned, he asked for a lunch menu. He had spent some of the last six months reading up on Yugoslavia, but had arrived only at the conclusion that local opinions were passionate and prejudiced, and that there was virtually no trustworthy data. The various peoples here did not seem to share the same reality. He was surprised at how deeply it unnerved him, this inability to find a factual foundation to stand on. Then again, he didn’t often read about ethnic conflict, maybe it was always this vertiginous. If so, he wanted no part of it.

  There he went again, retreating, with his hands up. Protect me, big sis.

  He ordered. He’d learned a couple of phrases for politeness’s sake, but assumed English would be widespread in the city. He had never been good at languages. Whereas Susan had become fluent in Spanish after a year in Madrid, had picked up Dutch while living in Belgium and the Netherlands, had acquired a working knowledge of Serbo-Croatian (or Bosnian, or whatever you were supposed to call it, what a load of nonsense over a label) before she came here. Yes, children in families differentiate assiduously, studies showed that. Competition for parental attention, need for a secure sense of self. Reverence for a sibling could be just as strong a motivation as resentment. How much of his personality had been formed in opposition to Susan? Susan disobedient, Mark obedient. Susan combative, Mark conflict averse. Susan impulsive, Mark strategic. In a strangely compelling way, he felt that, with her gone, he no longer had any justification for being the kind of person that he was. Illogically, he felt like a fraud.

  If one feels like a fraud, one behaves fraudulently. He and Saskia had had their first coffee date on March 2, only five months ago, and their last dinner on June 21. So they were “together” for three months and nineteen days. In that interval, they were alone in each other’s presence on nine separate occasions, yet he had never told her about Susan’s recent death, nor about Susan at all. What did that say? Oh, he had fooled himself with reasons. First, he’d thought it was too big a subject to bring up early. It might be seen as a pity ploy. It might have been a pity ploy. Then, on the night of the Lyrids, she had told him that her childhood had been unhappy, and that made him worry on their next two dates that talking about Susan might appear to undermine the gravity of her complaint, or even seem like competition. After that, it felt increasingly awkward to bring up because he could imagine her expostulating, “Why haven’t you told me this before?” By this time it had become clear that she considered him hyper-logical and hypo-“emotional,” and to bring up Susan so late, and to explicate his reasons for doing so, might confirm for her all that she found lacking in him. He knew he would eventually have to tell her, but from moment to moment he kept avoiding it. Then she broke up with him, and obviated the problem.

  The whole sordid affair—his unethical pursuit of her, his suspiciously quick emotional attachment—filled him with shame. He was grateful she had had the common sense to end it, as he doubted he would have been able to do it himself.

  He ate his lunch and paid, walked a block and couldn’t remember what he’d eaten. He was in a narrow street heading upward. Someone at the hotel had said there was a palace and church on top of a hill.

  When Saskia dropped him he spent two weeks in such anguish that it disrupted all his work. It was fortunate the semester was over. He remembered the resolution he’d made in his twenties, after two relationships came and went in quick succession, to avoid entanglements. They were too unpredictable and painful. Smart people were supposed to learn from experience. He saw that he was in danger of continuing to repeat this folly if he didn’t address the underlying cause. He had hidden from Susan’s death the way he hid from everything uncomfortable. Bubble-boy had become bubble-man.

  He had had the excuse, when she died, that the place where it happened was too dangerous to visit. (Her body was shipped home and his mother identified it. Mark saw nothing but the box, later the urn.) But the area had quieted down after some political agreement was signed in Washington this past March. You could be granted access, and even transport, provided you had a compelling reason, such as the death of a relative who had worked for the UN. So Saskia dumped him in June, and after he picked himself up off the floor he started calling people. And here he was.

  At the top of the hill. He looked at the church. He looked at the palace. He went back to his hotel. He spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on colleagues’ recent research, then dined in the hotel restaurant. Heavy curtains, silver-plated claptrap, Central European fare: wiener schnitzels and the like. He wasn’t hungry, but he ate a cutlet in a brown sauce with those doughy wet white things whose name he couldn’t remember. He usually didn’t drink, but he had a glass of red wine.

  His last conversation with Susan had been over dinner in New York City. That was March of last year. She’d just spent a number of months in the Netherlands. She’d originally gone for pleasure, a stay with old friends, but while she was there she got caught up with the plight of the Bosnian refugees who’d recently washed up in the country. There was as yet little structure in place to help them, so Susan, Susan-style, merely showed up where the refugees were being housed and volunteered to do whatever was needed. Within six weeks she was able to speak and understand elementary Bosnian, and since she also knew Dutch, she accompanied refugee families to welfare bureaus, rental agencies, school offices, and so on, serving as an interpreter. Some of that work brought her into contact with officials at UNHCR in The Hague, and eventually she decided she could be more helpful if she went to Bosnia. But first she returned briefly to the US.

  “To put your affairs in order?” Mark remembered joking uneasily, during their dinner. She was in the city for only a day and a night. She had called him out of the blue all of six hours ago, expecting to catch up with him by phone, but by chance he was in Manhattan for a conference. They met at a cheap Indian place she knew in the East Village.

  “Well, sure,” she said (or something similar). She still had some stuff in storage in Cleveland, and wanted to pick up a few things, also visit friends. She might be gone for a while.

  How long since he had seen her? He had to think for a moment. More than two years. She’d dropped by their parents’ house briefly for Christmas in 1990. Seeing her now, he thought she looked great, but he always thought she looked great: capable, full of ideas and energy. She was tall like him, nearly six feet, broader-shouldered than he was. She had their father’s build. Her hair, which she kept short, was ashy like Mark’s, but thicker and wavier. Strong chin, strong nose. When she was still in her twenties, she would turn her face profile and say, “hatchet,” then turn it back forward and say, “shovel.” But that was just a joke.

  Now she was thirty-eight. She’d spent her twenties bouncing around the world. She ended up in Cleveland—Mark didn’t know why, there were a lot of things she kept to herself—doing some kind of work (gofer? researcher?) for a legal aid firm. After she’d established Ohio residency, she went to Kent State and majored in Peace and Conflict Studies. Turns out, she told him, the Kent State program was one of the oldest in the country. They’d started it after the Ohio National Guard came for a visit and shot those four students dead. She’d obtained her degree a year ago.

  “I learned a few things in the program,” she said over dinner, “but mainly I wanted the diploma. You remember Mom and Dad telling us ad nauseam—telling me, anyway—to ignore school stupidities, a B.A. was a ticket. Like so many things, I didn’t believe them until I saw it myself.” She was planning to fly to Zagreb. “That’s where UNPROFOR HQ is. United Nations Protection Force. Protection for citizens. Because of all that ethnic cleansing shit. How much of a sad joke the UN efforts are, I don’t know yet, but at least they’re trying.” She had some contacts in UNPROFOR, through her work with UNHCR in the Netherlands. “Nothing offic
ial yet, I’m too lowly. But if you have some skills, like language, and you’re willing to do dangerous work for a meal and a floor to sleep on, it’s amazing how many doors open.” From Zagreb, she hoped to make it to Herzegovina. “The Spanish Battalion is headquartered there—they’re called SPANBAT, you gotta love it—and since I speak Spanish and some Bosnian, that’s a pretty obvious place for me. First the Serb militias did their thing and pounded the shit out of everyone else, then the Croats and Bosnian Muslims worked together to push them out. Now everyone’s wondering when the Croats will make their move against their Muslim friends. Anyway, lots of displaced people, destroyed housing, food shortages, orphaned children. It’s a fucking mess.” She looked happy. That wasn’t the right word. It was corny, but Mark would have said she looked alive.

  After dinner, they made their goodbyes on the sidewalk. Since the March evening was warm, lots of people were out. “I’ll call Mom and Dad before I leave the country,” she said. “How are they?”

  “His Parkinson’s is worse. You can really see it now in his face. He talks a lot about how stupid he’s getting. Mom’s angry at him all the time.”

  “No place like home.”

  Mark didn’t say anything.

  After a moment, she said, “Thank you for being the one to support them all these years.”

  “Say what?”

  “I just ran away.”

  “Oh, no . . . I mean . . . You had every right—”

  “Speaking of which, I gotta go.”

  She had friends in Brooklyn she was spending the night with. All these friends she had, around the globe. Mark had never met any of them.

  She hugged him. “I love you, baby brother.”

  “Me too. I mean—”

  She laughed, shouldering her knapsack. “I know what you mean.” She turned and walked away. Her goodbyes were always quick.

  That’s how he remembered it, anyway, sitting at his table in the Zagreb hotel restaurant. He’d eaten everything, finished his glass of wine. Wine made him sleepy, which was why he rarely drank it. The restaurant was mostly empty. Tourism probably hadn’t rebounded much since the war in this region had ended. And anyway, Mark had read somewhere that this might be only a lull. Rumor was, the Croatian government wanted to take back some areas that Serbs were holding. Christ, it was depressing.

  He went up to his room and caught up on more reading. Then he wished there was a piano he could play. It might make him feel better. Instead, he went to bed early. Though still groggy from the wine, he lay awake for a long time. Eventually he was in a large white room. It had a high ceiling and decorative moldings and one of those European wooden parquet floors that rattle like a field of bones when you walk across them. The room was crowded with pianos, both grands and uprights, some in good shape, some wrecks. His job was to change all their positions, which was difficult logistically, because they were in one another’s way. The work went on and on, monotonously. He heaved, the pianos resisted (their casters were rusty), and the parquet floor sounded like the xylophone in Danse Macabre.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the airport the next day, there was a sign warning people not to deviate from the paved paths outside, lest someone step on a mine. A man had been badly injured two weeks ago. “Even here?” Mark asked the liaison from the UN press office who’d arranged the flight. “Aren’t we nowhere near a front line?”

  “The Yugoslav army mined their facilities when they withdrew in 1991, after Croatia declared independence. That included this airport.” Her name was Samantha, from Maryland. She had reddish hair in a ponytail and a bright bar of teeth. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. Another idealistic young person.

  “They haven’t been cleared yet?”

  “There are millions of mines sown across ex-Yugoslavia. De-mining is a slow business.”

  Mark met the others while they waited for the plane to be fueled. The flight hadn’t been arranged for him, he was just tagging along on a UN junket for reporters. “They don’t think there’s been enough positive coverage of the job they’re doing,” said Jeff, a reporter for some US news outlet Mark had heard of, but never read. Also on the trip was John, a freelancer who’d written a book about the early phase of the war; and Roberta, a political columnist who was apparently well known, although Mark had never heard of her. He didn’t often read about politics. The three of them, along with the UN liaison Samantha, had been on a flight into Sarajevo three days ago, but their pilot had had to turn around when the cargo plane in front of them was hit by .50 caliber machine gun fire.

  “Serbs in the hills around the city, having some fun,” Jeff said. “The bullets go right through the plane—”

  “Yes,” Mark said, “planes are built very light—”

  “—and with all the engine noise they’re usually not even noticed during flight unless someone gets hit. This time, a UN security guy caught one in the thigh. Poor bastard, those are big bullets. I heard it shattered his ball joint.”

  All this was said with what seemed flagrant insouciance. Mark hadn’t met war reporters before, but it made sense they’d be a thrill-seeking bunch. There was a certain dopamine receptor in the brain that was responsible, increasing the pleasure reward for dangerous behavior, inducing restlessness and boredom when the stimulus was absent. It was gene-linked. Mark was pretty sure he didn’t have the gene. He derived sufficient reward from discovering that his car hadn’t developed a flat tire while he wasn’t looking.

  He learned another thing about war reporters: they liked to tease anyone who didn’t have the gene. When Jeff caught sight of the plane they’d be getting on he said, “Christ, it’s a Yak-40. You know the safety record of these things is abysmal.”

  John said, “We’ll be fine as long as the crew isn’t—”

  “Ukrainian?”

  “Oh man, are they fucking Ukrainian? Shit, we’re screwed.”

  Roberta the columnist looked unhappy. Mark tried to be impervious, but he had to admit that the scruffy pilot, copilot, and mechanic all looked like hard-drinking muleteers. He could imagine one of them whacking a faulty altimeter with a wrench, then giving the others a grinning thumbs-up.

  “UN-issue, right?” Jeff was pointing at the blue protective vest someone had handed Mark that morning at headquarters.

  “Yes.”

  “Look, you should know, those UN vests suck. They won’t stop a high-powered round. You need ceramic panels, like mine has.” He unbuttoned the top of his shirt to show Mark a few inches of gleaming black armor. “A vest like this costs five hundred dollars. I forced my bosses to pay for it.”

  “Thank you for the advice,” Mark said. The mechanic out on the tarmac was giving a grinning thumbs-up. The pilot popped the clutch and whipped the plane around, pointing it toward the runway. Mark tried to remember whatever he knew about aeronautics. The plane’s low-mounted wings and rear engines would presumably give the plane good lift at low speeds. It was probably designed for small airfields.

  John and Jeff were talking about high-powered sniper rounds. “I saw a girl reporter in Sarajevo get hit square in the chest. Her armor stopped the round, but she went flying. She hit the ground, like, a dozen feet from where she’d been standing.”

  The plane was accelerating. There had been no announcement about seat belts or lighted exits. “Hey man.” Jeff tapped Mark on the shoulder. “Once we’re in the air, you should sit on your vest.” He indicated his superior model, under his smug ass. “Any rounds would come from below, right?”

  “That makes sense,” Mark said. The nose jerked up, the pilot floored it, and the wings carved a hyperbolic slice out of the wall of air. The asymptote was at an angle Mark would have thought impossible. Roberta let out a frightened moan. Or maybe that was Mark.

  * * *

  • • •

  At an airport near a coastal city called Spl
it, they transferred to a helicopter for the final leg to Mostar. Now they were in the hands of the British. One of the soldiers explained that Split was the headquarters for BRITBAT. A painful spasm went through Mark. “You gotta love it,” he said.

  While they were waiting for the helicopter to take off, the same soldier talked about a massacre the BRITBAT troops had uncovered the previous year. (Susan had been right: the Croats had turned on their Muslim allies right around the time she arrived in Mostar.) “The Croat militias decided to take over three districts in central Bosnia. The local Croat men stayed behind to help find and kill their neighbors. The militias had marksmen in place to shoot villagers as they fled across the fields. Everyone here is fucking crazy. We’re supposed to keep them from doing what they want to do.”

  They lifted off and the coast disappeared behind them. Sitting on his tissue-paper vest, Mark looked out the open side door at limestone ridges denuded of trees and dusty dark-green valleys between. Small villages of white houses, terra-cotta roofs. His view was partly obstructed by a soldier manning a machine gun.

  “I hate helicopters!” Jeff said, off to the side. Worryingly, he looked like he meant it. He was huddled against the wall, his arms between his knees.

  “Why?” Mark asked. They had to yell because of the noise.