by BRIAN HALL
“A helicopter is like a cartoon safe with a rotor attached! If a single bullet knocks out a blade, the thing falls like a rock!”
“Or like a safe, I guess!” Mark yelled.
Talking was too difficult, so no one said anything for the rest of the flight. Mark kept his eye out the open door, watching the ground fall away into a valley, then rise again as they crossed another ridge. He thought about how certain words are almost always used for certain situations, and no one seems to think about it. When helicopters hit a mountainside, they’re always said to have “slammed” into it. When they fall like a safe, they’re said to have “plunged.”
They crossed another ridge. The valley below them appeared to be empty of houses or roads. The soldier manning the machine gun sat up straight and did something that looked like flipping off a safety catch. Perhaps they’d entered an area known to have snipers. Mark leaned closer to the open door. He wondered if he would see a puff of smoke down there, whether he’d feel the bullet as it came out the top of his head. But nothing happened, because he’d always been the lucky one. After another twenty minutes they crested a round-topped mountain and suddenly Mostar lay below them.
The helicopter landed at an airport south of the city, where two UN jeeps picked them up. Mark sat with Roberta and Samantha as they drove to the city center. They were on the east side of the city, the Muslim side, which, as Mark understood it, had been pounded first by the Serbs, then pulverized by the Croats. He watched the concrete buildings go by, for the most part roofless, their walls perforated by artillery shells and pockmarked by bullets in a profuse stochastic pattern. On the sidewalks and roadbed he saw scarred dimples with radiating lines that showed where mortar shells had landed. They looked somewhat like lunar craters, since the physics were analogous, the shell’s explosive charge contributing energy to mimic an asteroid’s greater momentum. The whole city looked lunar, in fact: exposed gray stone and regolith. He reminded himself that this wasn’t the city that Susan saw. She had died on May 7 last year, and the fighting between Croats and Muslims in Mostar began on May 9.
The jeeps disgorged the party near the place where a famous stone bridge had once stood. Now there was a temporary footbridge slung from steel cables that swayed and bounced as they crossed it. The opaque green river below boiled and seethed. Roberta said something about the tragedy of this destruction of a UNESCO world heritage cultural something or other, bridges being hopeful symbols of connection, etc. Everyone nodded except Mark, who surprised himself by saying, “It’s only stone. It can be rebuilt.” He felt himself blushing.
The reporters were being shepherded to a building on the west side, and Mark went along because he’d been told he would meet his interpreter there. It turned out that this young man, Goran, had a prior agreement to translate for the reporters’ interview with the deputy mayor of West Mostar, so Mark sat with the rest of them in a low-ceilinged room and listened. The deputy mayor, whose name Mark never caught, was a small man with black thinning hair whose face glistened with sweat in the hot space. He gave long responses to the questions, in gradual crescendos. The one that really set him off was a request by Roberta that he explain why Croats and Muslims could not go back to peacefully cohabiting in the city, as they had done for many years. The man’s answer, as interpreted by Goran, sounded to Mark like mush-brained nonsense about the Ottoman Empire and the clash of civilizations, that the thing to understand about the Turks and therefore the Bosnian Muslims was that they had never had an Enlightenment, while Croatia had been part of the Austrian empire, where there was rule of law, universities, Beethoven, table linen etc. Then he claimed that all Bosnian Muslims were really Croats, anyway, and that’s why all of this region should be run by Croats, and the proof of their ethnic identity was that there was a certain dialect of Croatian that only Croats spoke, and the Muslims of Bosnia spoke that dialect.
Mark had been getting angry—the social metastasis of this lizard-brain idiocy had killed his sister—and now he shot up his hand and blurted out, “Wait a minute.” The deputy mayor stopped babbling and everyone looked at him. Mark said to Goran, “That last thing he said—it’s circular reasoning. Is he really so stupid that he doesn’t understand that?” No one said anything, so Mark elaborated. “He said that Muslims are really Croats because Muslims speak a dialect that only Croats speak. But one can only claim that only Croats speak that dialect if one has previously assumed that Muslims are Croats.”
More silence. Then Goran said, “Is that a question?”
“It’s a refutation. Tell him that.”
“Hey, man,” Jeff interjected, “I don’t think—”
“Just tell him. He shouldn’t be allowed—”
“You’re wasting your time, pal,” Jeff was saying. “These people say twelve kinds of stupid before morning coffee.”
“Just tell him! It’s unbearable that he can sit there and spout such nonsense.”
“Uh, sure,” Goran said. He and the reporters were looking at Mark with frowns of sympathy. They all knew why he was here. “So . . .” Goran went on tentatively, “what was it again you wanted me to say?”
At this moment, Mark caught up with the rest of the room. Yes, he was wasting everyone’s time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forget it.” He said to the room at large, “Ignore me,” and made it easier for everyone to do that by leaving. Goran met up with him in the corridor twenty minutes later. “I’m sorry,” Mark said again.
Goran held up his hand. “No need.” Then he put his hand forward. “It is good to meet you, though of course very sad.” They shook hands. “Your sister was a wonderful person. Everyone loved her.”
Mark nodded. They left the building. Goran led him around a corner to where a battered dark green Zastava was parked. He reached through the open passenger window to unlatch the door from the inside and gestured, “Please.” They drove south along damaged streets. After a few minutes, Goran stopped at a two-story concrete box surrounded by sandbags piled twelve feet high. “Spanish battalion local HQ,” he said.
They walked through a gap in the sandbags and made a right angle turn to get around a baffle wall. A memory stirred in Mark concerning his father, something about Chinese demons. Inside the building were soldiers, desks, a conference table, a coffee machine. All the glass in all the windows had been removed, or maybe blown out, and replaced with plastic sheeting. Goran asked around, using what sounded like simple Spanish, until a man with some sort of insignia on his shoulders introduced himself as Major so-and-so, and took Mark’s hand, putting his other hand on Mark’s shoulder. He said in English, “Everyone loved your sister. She helped the people here very much. It is a terrible thing that happened.”
Presumably, Mark replied. The major called out something and other soldiers converged. They spoke mainly in Spanish, fragments in English, and several of them put their hands on Mark’s shoulders and arms. They all agreed: everyone had loved Susan, her death was a tragedy. There was nothing to say in response that wasn’t so obvious as to be unnecessary, so Mark didn’t say anything. He didn’t know precisely when she had arrived in Mostar, but she couldn’t have been here more than three weeks. He wondered how well any of these people really had known her. But she was dead, and therefore had been lovable.
One of the soldiers was handing him a three-by-five photograph, a shot of a sunny street, two figures standing next to an armored personnel carrier. One was Susan, with her knapsack, short hair windblown, looking to the left and beginning a gesture, perhaps saying to someone out of the frame, Come on. The other figure was the soldier standing in front of Mark. Mark nodded and tried to hand it back. He could hardly bear to look at it. The soldier gestured, You keep it.
Nothing occurred to Mark to say to any of these people. He allowed them to put their hands on him, he felt their goodwill and concern. He probably kept nodding, and probably said thank you. He stopped hearing whatever they were saying. A psyc
hosomatic deafness had come over him. Then he and Goran were back on the sidewalk, back in the car, and Goran was heading southwest out of the city, toward the round-topped mountain the helicopter had flown over on the way in. Mark returned to watching ruined buildings go by.
Susan had never been much of a correspondent. Over the years Mark got a letter every four or five months. “Dashed off” was probably the way to describe them. He always imagined her borrowing someone else’s back to write them on, out on some dusty tarmac, a chance courier waiting. She sent only two letters to the family from Yugoslavia, or “ex-Yugoslavia,” as everyone seemed to call it now—one to his parents and one to him. His had been written in Mostar, eight days before she died.
Hey little brother—
This place! Wild! They need everything—the kids break your heart. Some adults can drive you crazy—but not all. I hate the attitude of reporters and some UN people here—“these Balkan savages.” Ignorance hiding behind condescension. Turns out my Bosnian sucks—Mostar dialect is different, a lot of Turkish loanwords. But I don’t think I’m wasting space. Mainly translating, but also doing anything that needs doing. Found ten typewriters in a building the Serbs bombed and spent all day yesterday cleaning them. Also helping a local engineer, a sweetheart of a guy, who’s repairing waterlines on the east side (Serbs again). For example. Maybe you already read somewhere, fighting has broken out between Croats and Muslims in some villages in central Bosnia. People here are scared. I’m counting on the city being different from villages. Civilization, I tell people—invented by cities! Hope your work’s going well. If you want to write, the return address on the envelope should work.
Love Susan
“What’s that?” Goran asked.
Mark folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. “Nothing.”
The car was climbing the mountain. No houses now, just yellow rocks and vegetation gray with dust. They swung around a hairpin curve, and Mostar was spread out below them on the left. It looked like Dresden, circa March 1945. “It’s a letter Susan wrote to me,” Mark admitted. “April thirtieth.”
Goran clucked his tongue. They went around another hairpin and passed a retaining wall black with graffiti. “What does ‘ne, nikad, nikako’ mean?” Mark asked.
“Where did you hear that?”
“It was on the wall back there. The deputy mayor kept saying something similar.”
“It means ‘No, never, not in any way.’”
Mark thought for a few seconds about whether there was any comment worth making. “Many things are impossible with people like that,” he finally came up with.
The car cleared the steep lip of the slope and entered a saddle between two rises. This was the landscape they’d flown over, where snipers shot at helicopters.
“That population chart the deputy mayor showed,” Goran said. “You should not believe it.”
“I didn’t.”
“The Croats love to show census figures, which they say prove most Muslims came to Mostar after 1961. But the reason the Muslim numbers go up after 1961 is because that was the first year they were allowed to choose ‘Muslim’ as their ethnicity on the census.”
Mark didn’t say anything. He didn’t want Goran to think he was judging all Yugoslavs. Instead, he said, “May I ask what your ethnic background is?”
“My father is Croat, my mother is Muslim. But here—” he gestured to the land going by—“this is West Herzegovina. Croats here are very strong Croats, very Catholic. So it is lucky for me that my name, Goran Galić, is a good Croatian name. I don’t tell anyone here that my mother is Muslim.”
“Mm.”
“‘Goran’ means ‘mountain man.’ Maybe I’ll go up into the mountains to escape all this stupid ethnic shit.”
“The in-group/out-group obsession does seem particularly strong here,” Mark ventured.
Goran winced. “The question is why. Even some Yugoslavs say we have this, what do you call it, a predisposition for ethnic hatred. But I reject this.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“This war is the result of deliberate planning by certain political parties to enhance their power. Their use of propaganda—have you seen what the Croatian and Serbian media broadcast in this country?”
“No.”
“Lies, every day. People watch these lies and believe them. There is a deliberate creation of fear. I am telling you, Mark, if people in the United States had this same kind of media propaganda, after five years you would have a civil war, too.”
Mark was silent for a while. “National cultures differ,” people liked to say, but what did that mean? Few things meant much at all when framed in such general terms. He forced himself to really look at Goran. He found this hard to do with new acquaintances. The man was quite handsome. Thick brown hair, regular features, olive skin, notably light gray eyes. Against his skin, the eyes seemed to glow. Susan had probably liked him, perhaps been attracted to him. “How did you learn such good English?”
“I majored in American literature,” Goran said. “I wrote my thesis on Dos Passos.”
Who? Mark thought, but didn’t say. Since he was American, his ignorance of this writer might be interpreted by Goran as a judgment that he or she was not important. And for all Mark knew, Dos Passos was the most celebrated writer of . . . whatever time period he or she had written in.
By this time they were driving through a mostly level upland area. Low dry hills were visible here and there in the distance. They passed a crossroads where a few houses were clustered, then another. “There doesn’t seem to be much damage here,” Mark said.
“You are right,” Goran said. “The Croats of Herzegovina have done very well for themselves.” Neither spoke for a minute. The car rattled and made a continuous throaty sound. “The Virgin Mary visits them every day, that’s how loved they are.”
“In Medjugorje,” Mark said. He’d read about the claims of visitations there.
“Mary wants peace. Medjugorje was getting rich on all the pilgrims, but the war stopped that. The main Spanish HQ is there, because they have so many comfortable new buildings, all completely undamaged. A miracle!”
The car came to a rise where the road turned to the right so as to ascend the slope laterally. They went around one switchback, and as they approached a second Goran slowed the car and steered it into an area of beaten dirt on the outside of the curve. Stopping by some low bushes, he switched the engine off. He turned to look at Mark with eyes that seemed strangely deep and bright. “This is where it happened.”
Mark looked around. “Where are we, exactly?”
“Ten kilometers from Medjugorje. We’re just about to get to a village called Sretnice.”
Mark wrote down, “Sretnice.” Then got out of the car. It was midafternoon, hot and dazzling. There was a light breeze, a smell of stone dust. Also of the pungent oils that vegetation produces in dry climates to impede respiration and provide a chemical shield against thirsty insects. Also, a sweetish carob-like smell that was some sort of feces, maybe goat. Mark turned slowly to take in more of the view in all directions.
“Don’t step off the road,” Goran said. “Mines are unlikely here, but you never know.”
Unlikely, because this was the land that Mary loved, where Croats had done very well for themselves. “The sniper was probably a Croat, right?” Mark said.
Goran shrugged. “Probably. But it could have been a Muslim, trying to make the Croats look bad. The car had clear UN markings.”
“The bullet came from where?”
Goran pointed away from the hairpin, up the hill. Bushes and boulders lined what appeared to be a distinct upper edge, but was probably just where the slope curved away from the sight line. “He was lying on the ground somewhere up there.”
Mark turned to look back down the road. “Cars coming up the hill would slow down
before entering the hairpin,” he said. “He would have a good shot through the windshield.”
“Yes,” Goran said.
“You were driving?”
“Yes.”
“And Susan was sitting next to you.”
“Yes.”
“And someone else was in the car, right? Some official?”
“There was a guy from the UN who’d been in Mostar looking for places to house some refugees. People were fleeing central Bosnia, the fighting hadn’t started here yet. He didn’t speak Spanish very well, and of course no Bosnian, so your sister was going around with him. He needed to go to Spanish HQ in Medjugorje and she came along to help. I was driving because I knew the route. Also, I had permission to drive the UN-leased vehicles.”
“Where was he sitting?”
“In the back.”
“You two were chauffeuring him.”
“He might have preferred to sit in the front, but your sister had some things she wanted to talk to me about during the drive.”
What? Mark wanted to know, but didn’t ask. Perhaps it was private. Susan had always valued her privacy. “What kind of car was it?”
“You mean . . . ?”
“What make?”
“I don’t remember for sure. A Fiat, maybe. You know, one of the boxy ones. It looked a lot like this car.” Goran pointed at the Zastava.
“A Fiat 128.”
“Maybe.”
Mark returned to sit in the passenger seat and spoke to Goran through the open window. “Show me where the bullet hit the windshield.”
“I don’t know exactly, the whole windshield fractured.”
“You didn’t notice an impact hole afterward?”
“Well . . . I guess it was just about in the center of the right side.”
“Point to the spot.”
“Look, I don’t really know—”
“Just point to the spot you think is most likely.”
Goran did so. Mark sat in the seat and looked past Goran’s finger toward the slope rising beyond the hairpin. The angle would be roughly the same back on the road. According to the autopsy, Susan had been hit on her right side just below the seventh rib. The bullet had gone through her liver and out her lower back. If the sniper was hidden approximately where the curving slope seemed to present a vantage point, then the trajectory Mark was looking at seemed conceivable.
