by Roy Kesey
Halfway back to the apartment, a soldier maybe fifteen years old comes walking up. He and Paul look at each other, and the soldier asks something in Croatian. Paul tells him he fucking hates Los Angeles. The soldier points at his wrist. Paul looks at his watch, holds it out, and the boy examines it, nods, walks away.
Moments later he’s back with a gift: a plastic cup of warm Coke. He signals for Paul to follow him and leads along the waterfront, pointing out the bullet holes that pock the stucco of the stores, the shell craters in the road, the old black blood on the sidewalk. Paul records it all one ratchety shot at a time. When he’s done, the soldier points up in the air, and his arm describes a long arc down toward them. Paul grimaces. This satisfies the boy. Paul points at his watch. They shake hands, and Paul searches for something to thank him for the tour and the Coke, but the only thing in his pockets is sand.
By the time he gets to the apartment Goran is already done loading the car. He doesn’t say anything about Paul being late, doesn’t say anything at all except to tell him to sit up front.
They follow the water northwest. The sun lies heavy on the sky, inexplicable. Dora’s dress is hitched up high on her legs, her eyes focused somewhere between the cigarette in her hand and the hills half a mile inland. Tiny beads of sweat have formed on her forehead, her neck, her thighs. Goran punches the buttons on the radio until he finds what he wants, a mess of guitars and distortion. He turns it up, looks over at Paul, turns it up even more.
An hour later they pull off the highway and drive out a spike of land to Bibinje. It’s not far to the house where Goran’s dead friend Vanja grew up. The front door is strung with black ribbon, the fence hung with flowers. Dora adds two more wreathes and says something that Paul doesn’t quite catch—the heat makes it hard to hear properly.
Goran heads off to learn his place in the procession. The street is packed with people. Most of them say hello to Dora and ignore Paul. He shakes hands with a blond woman, and Dora says that this is Mateja, the wife of a friend that Goran helped to bury last month.
Mateja is wearing black pants, a black silk blouse, a thick gold necklace, great perfume. When she leaves Dora asks, Do you think she’s pretty?
–Of course.
–So do I. She wasn’t so pretty before, but now she is.
A woman in her early twenties comes out of the house crying so hard she can barely walk. Two men are holding her up. Her uncle and her brother, Dora says. She and Vanja were going to get married in December.
An honor guard is assembling in the yard. They’ve got white helmets, and rifles with polished bayonets. Paul asks if it’s okay to take pictures, and Dora says no one will care as long as he stays out of the way. The coffin comes out the front door and he gets one quick shot as it’s lifted off the porch. The crowd swallows the coffin and the march begins.
The heat is even thicker now. Paul stoops to pick up a broken piece of pottery lying in the dust. One side is a dull tooled reddish brown, and the other is glazed exactly the colors of the sky, pale blue in the center, fading to light gray. He puts it in his pocket to be free to forget about it.
The march follows through narrow streets, past a sickly olive grove, and ends at a church. The inside walls are bare except for a few framed prints. The priest is an enormous man, maybe three hundred pounds, and he says everything as if he just thought of it, and it’s the wisest thing he’s ever heard.
Paul shoots from the door until people start to stare, and spends the rest of the mass hunched down in the shade outside, trying to free a gray pebble from a fist-sized piece of chalk. He chips at the chalk with his fingernails, and wiggles the pebble back and forth, gives up and starts to plane the sides of the chalkstone with a weathered piece of glass. But this is too big a project for today—it would take five or six funerals to get it completely smooth.
The mass ends, and he burns the rest of the roll as the procession leaves the church. A dozen young boys dressed in choir robes sing calmly despite the glare. The priest walks with his head bowed, and another boy carries a swaying bucket of incense. Blurred in the smoke behind him are two soldiers side by side. One is carrying a wooden cross with Vanja’s name on the crosspiece, and the other is Goran, not quite crying, holding a clean charcoal portrait of his friend.
Next comes the honor guard, and six more soldiers carrying the coffin with its spread of flowers. Then a large group of men from the village, and the rest of the soldiers, and the women and kids. Paul reloads the camera and finds a place near the back as the cicadas start to sing.
It’s not far to the cemetery. Vanja’s grave has been dug near the center in a stand of pines. The crowd fans out around it as the priest begins to talk. The sky is a slow confusion of color.
The coffin is lowered down, and the father pitches in a spadeful of dirt. A stone slab is laid over the grave and covered with wreathes. The honor guard fires three quick volleys. Paul slips into the trees, works through a dozen frames.
The priest gives a last blessing. People file in front of the grave. Goran hugs the girl that Vanja was going to marry. Then Paul thinks of a shot that might be useful at some point. He hurries out the gates and chooses a spot along the wall.
And now he sees them coming, Vanja’s mother and father, arm in arm, impassive and empty and eternal, but before he can take the shot the viewfinder fills with black. He smells perfume, lowers the camera, and Mateja is standing in front of him. She’s so close that he can feel her breath. He nods, and she slaps him hard across the face.
In Goran’s living room there’s finally enough light for the bruise on Paul’s cheek to be noticed. Dora asks what happened, and he tells the story, changing details here and there, going for the punchline, pretending not to know who he was shooting at the end. Dora laughs, says Mateja has always been kind of crazy. Goran smiles a little and raps his knuckles softly on the table.
After dinner they walk to the center of town, through the high-walled maze of the palace as it falls to time. The streets and alleys fill, men in open shirts, the long dark legs of the women. Everything is limestone and glowing under the moon.
Back to the car, and they drive to an open-air restaurant above the city. They sit down at the farthest table out, and their candle gutters and flares in the wind. Goran orders a bottle of bourbon. As it arrives he sees two friends and waves them over. Paul recognizes them from the funeral, and they ask what happened to his cheek. Goran tells the story this time, but the joke has morphed into something else, a joke about the joke, and Paul’s the only one who doesn’t get it.
There’s a bit of silence. Dora says that the two guys went through army training with Goran back when Yugoslavia was still in one piece. The bourbon dwindles and they switch to wine, and a few bottles later the whole group recites for Paul the first English phrases they learned in school: One, two, that’s a shoe, three, four, close the door.
This goes on until midnight and the restaurant is closing. Goran’s friends weave down the hill on foot. The rest of them drive to the apartment. As Dora puts sheets and pillows on the sofas in the living room, Goran calls Paul to the front door, takes him out to the car, opens the trunk, flips back a blanket.
–Heckler & Koch, he says.
He lifts the assault rifle out and hands it to Paul. It is heavier and colder than it looks. Goran leans forward and flips a switch at the base of the scope, nods toward the quivering red dot on the ground between Paul’s feet. Then he turns, and points at the top of an apartment building nearby.
–Could you hit him?
–Who?
–The guy up there.
Paul takes a rest on the top of the car and looks through the scope. Standing on a balcony on the top floor is a middle-aged man. He is shirtless and still. Paul plants the red dot in the center of his chest and wonders if there’s a round in the chamber. The image in the scope blurs slightly.
Paul blinks and brings the dot up to the man’s forehead. His face is fleshy and blank. He could be thinking of anyth
ing.
–Bang, says Goran.
He smiles, takes the gun back, sets it in the trunk.
–Is it loaded?
–Always.
At Dora’s house the next morning, her father won’t let Paul help load the jugs of wine for the family reunion up in Han, the village where most of Dora’s relatives still live.
–You will need your strength for everything you must eat today, he says.
Paul has never seen Dora’s father this happy. In fact he’s never seen him smile. Either the reunion is going to be terrific or the man is constantly reminding himself that tonight Paul heads back to Portugal.
Dora’s mother brings out bowl after bowl of potato dumplings. When everything is ready they all get in. Along the water and out to the rigid highway, then inland through the hot hills. Dora’s father drives as though someone were chasing them, slows each time his wife touches his arm. A few minutes later he whips the car off the highway onto a rutted dirt road.
–I forgot to tell you, Dora says. There’s a castle we want you to see.
They edge past a ticket booth, its paint faded and peeling. There is no one inside. Her father stops the car and everyone gets out.
–It’s called Klis, he says as they walk toward an ancient stone wall maybe thirty feet high.
–It’s where we stopped the Turks, says Dora. For a while, anyway.
Paul touches the warm stones, snaps frame after frame, catches some interesting angles, some odd light. He takes a quick look around the end of the wall, but there’s nothing else left standing.
Back to the car. Heat and steep hillsides and dry oaks. Paul drops into sleep, wakes sharply as though someone were watching him, but no one is. The road leads between vineyards and orchards. Again they turn off the pavement. Over a narrow bridge, up a driveway, and they stop near a barn. Beside it is an old man turning a lamb on an iron spit.
–My grandfather, says Dora.
The eyes of the lamb have melted away and the air is heavy with the smell of the meat. Dora does the introductions, hands Paul two jugs of wine, and leads him up a shallow hill to a bright stone house. Inside, four of her aunts are preparing salad in a bowl the size of a washtub.
They pour coffee and stare at Paul’s cheek. As always he is an awkward centerpiece, and the aunts are unduly impressed by his ability to say I’m afraid I don’t speak much Croatian in Croatian. One of them goes to turn on a light, and nothing happens when she flips the switch. There’s a flurry of conversation, and Dora tells him that early this morning some Serb commandos sabotaged the dam upstream.
They walk back down to the barn. Dora’s grandfather declines her offer to take his place at the spit, says the lamb won’t be ready for another hour or so, suggests that Paul might like to see the river. Dora nods, leads him through a pear orchard to the bank. Most of the nieces and nephews are already there. The water is only waist-deep, even in the center. Small fish slip in and out of the shadows. Then Goran comes.
–We have time for another place, he says to Paul.
His breath smells of rakija. He sways a bit, widens his stance. Paul looks at Dora. She shrugs.
A few hundred yards downstream, there is a café whose terrace stretches almost to the river. Standing on the edge is a skinny young soldier. His uniform is in shreds, and one of his eyes is swollen shut and bleeding. Blood drips from his right hand, his arms are covered with welts and scratches, and on the side of his head is an open wound, hair-matted at the edges and glowing red at its center.
There are maybe twenty other men standing around or sitting at the café tables, and they seem to be buying him beer as a form of sedation, but the more he drinks the more violently and less coherently he gestures toward the water, the hills, the giant fig tree that shades the terrace. Goran calls a question to one of the older men, tells Paul that the soldier showed up alone late this morning from somewhere upriver. A doctor from Split has been called, will be here in twenty minutes or so. They’ve tried to get the kid to stand still so they can clean him up a little, but each time they get close he attacks them.
Some of the cousins are sitting at a table nearby. They’ve got a bottle of rakija and half a dozen shot glasses. Paul does one to be a sport, then heads over for a better look at the soldier. The kid takes a smooth gray stone in his hands, fingers it like some clouded crystal ball. His cheek starts to twitch, and he hits himself on the forehead with the stone. The twitching stops. He throws the stone into the river and wades in after it.
Past the fig tree is a small vineyard. A light breeze disturbs the vines, and their shadows shift on the soil, kaleidoscopic browns and grays. For some reason there aren’t any women around—just the men drinking, the men playing balote on a narrow dirt strip, the men staring at the soldier who comes walking out of the river to stand a few feet away from where Paul is sitting on the edge of the terrace. Paul stares too. The kid picks an empty pack of cigarettes off the ground, pretends there’s still one left, lights it with his thumb and blows a chain of invisible smoke rings.
One of Dora’s uncles is standing knee-deep in the basin that a small spring has carved out of the riverbank. At his feet are bottles of beer, some brown and some green. He offers one to Paul, and it turns out that he owns the café, and the river is his bar whenever the power goes out.
Now the soldier is standing to one side of the balote pitch. He shudders each time the metal balls thud to the ground. Paul pulls out his camera and walks over. The men around him go quiet. He takes a couple of shots. The soldier smiles, and Paul takes another. He makes a face and Paul shoots again. On a hunch Paul roots through his bag, finds the ceramic piece of sky from above Vanja’s funeral, and tosses it to him.
He catches it, and Paul lifts the camera. The kid steps forward, gets bigger and bigger in the viewfinder, and Paul keeps shooting—even the blurry stuff sometimes works out. Then the kid’s got hold of the camera, firm but not violent, and Paul lets him lift it off his neck.
He sets the camera on the ground, stands and reaches out, traces the lines of Paul’s face with his fingertips. He takes hold of Paul’s ears, tugs gently at the lobes. Paul can hear Goran and his cousins laughing, maybe jeering, already well past drunk.
The soldier throws the shard of pottery into the river, pulls Paul to him as if to kiss his forehead, runs his tongue across the bruise on Paul’s cheek, stoops and grabs the camera and runs. Paul stands and watches, and there’s no way he’s losing those pictures but he’s tired of feeling ridiculous. The soldier circles back, taunts him with the camera. Paul takes a step and he’s off again. They do this for a minute or two, and then the soldier threads through the café tables, and Goran stands and slugs him in the face.
The soldier hits the ground, doesn’t move, and everything stops for a moment. Goran sits back down. A car drives up, a man gets out, and there’s some conversation. He goes to where the soldier is lying, bleeding hard from the mouth, unconscious. He kneels down and pulls out a stethoscope.
Paul picks up his camera. It’s pretty dinged up but the body isn’t cracked and nothing rattles when he shakes it. He walks over to Goran’s table, waits for him to look up.
–Thanks, he says. But that wasn’t necessary.
–Nothing is necessary.
There’s probably an appropriate response to this, but Paul has no idea what it might be.
–You are useless, Goran says. What is the use of you?
–What?
The cousins start laughing, and Goran gets up, stands right in Paul’s face.
–Go away, he says. Go away and come back when you are not so useless.
He shoves Paul in the chest. Paul almost falls, and now Dora’s father is between them. Paul wonders how much he’s seen.
The balote players gather and carry the soldier to the car. They load him into the back seat, slam the door, and the doctor drives off. Paul stares at Goran. Goran stares back, and does another shot of rakija. Dora’s father takes Paul’s arm, pulls him gently down off
the terrace.
–Thirty years ago, he says, the Cetina was four meters deep. My brothers and I used to dive from the bridge to entertain tourists.
Paul says nothing.
–Now there are no tourists but you, and we are too old to dive.
A stream of wind builds and flurries. It’s a long slow walk up the hill. Each porch along the way holds someone who remembers Dora’s father as an infant, a child, a young man, and they all want to talk to him, to put their hands on his head and ask how he has changed.
Dora is waiting at the barn. Her father touches her arm, smiles, continues on toward the house. Dora looks at Paul, asks what happened.
–I think he’s warming up to me.
Dora sits down in the dry grass, and Paul slumps beside her. They sit there for a while, listening to the slow drone of flies.
–Remember last summer? he asks.
–A long time ago.
He waits, decides on one last try.
–Come to Lisbon with me.
–I can’t. The NGO thing with the refugees starts next week.
–The way everything is going—
–I know. But they’ll never take Zagreb, and they’ll never take the coast. We’re starting to get the weapons we need. They’ll get a little closer, and we’ll push them back.
–Weapons from where?
–Germany, Holland. I don’t know all the details—ask Goran if you’re curious. What time does your bus leave for Trieste?
–Ten. I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m back in Lisbon.
Dora nods, pats his leg. Her grandfather announces that the lamb is ready. Paul helps him slide it off the spit, and the old man cuts the meat in slabs, sets them in lines on an immense platter. Paul and Dora carry the platter between them, up the hill to a table on the shaded side of the house. The aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews come from where they have been standing, smoking, talking quietly.
No one else has brought a camera, and Dora’s mother asks Paul if he’d mind. The family arranges itself, unsmiling for the most part but not unhappy, squinting against the sun. Dora looks around, asks where Goran is, and no one answers.
