Lie in the Dark vp-1

by Dan Fesperman

  And that was about all he could do. There was a small flashlight in the house, but no batteries. There were no snacks to scrounge, and his gun, a service revolver locked in a drawer at work, would seem even more useless up there than it did here.

  He stripped down to change, smelling the sourness of his unwashed skin. When had he bathed last? Four days ago? Five? He’d sponged himself with a cold washcloth in the dark, lathering up from a thin knife of soap. He’d then felt itchy all the next day.

  He turned to see his image in the full-length mirror hanging inside Jasmina’s closet door. Staring back was a pale ghostly man, rib bones showing and goosebumps rising, and he was overcome by the sensation of seeing his own corpse, stretched upon a slab.

  The chest, now slightly sunken, would be more so, like the broken ground of a frost heave, whitened and deflated; his arm muscles gone flaccid; his eyes vacant, lids swollen, lashes encrusted with mud; hair stiff and standing in every direction. Only the fingernails would be growing, or so the books said, but no longer either pink or clean. He scanned the reflection of his chest, wondering if it would be torn by one of those wounds he’d grown so accustomed to seeing, only uglier, ragged edges caked with dirt, a foul and rusting porthole spilling its slippery contents in a steaming coil. He even knew the smell, its essence of cold and damp soil and of nascent rot after a few days in the elements.

  He turned abruptly toward the bed to shake the image, then looked back at the mirror and saw that it remained, the ghost of some future he never wanted to reach, yet would be walking toward in a few hours. Why not just call it off: It’s not as if Kasic would mind if he turned over his early results. Then he considered the next day at his desk, feet propped, the underpowered fluorescent tubes humming and throbbing above his head. Garovic in motion toward his desk, a folder in his hand, Damir rattling his jar of shells and talking of his latest conquest. And the siege, lurching onward with its unstoppable mechanical force. No, he would go to Zuc. See what there was to be learned, whether of the war or of this case.

  He shut the closet door, swiveling the mirror out of sight, then walked from the room.

  So this was the fear of going to war, with its dry metallic taste and its dark play of imagination. He’d read enough about trenches and bunkers and pitched battles to know what he could be getting into by walking up to Zuc. He felt familiar already with the the splintered trees, the moonscape of cratered mud, the rats that grew fat and the feet that grew soft and wrinkled within sodden boots. As for the whine and shatter of shellbursts, they, at least, would be nothing new.

  He’d overheard the teenage boys in the cafes talking of their weekly one-night stands up on the line. They smiled weakly and forced a few jokes, half out of bravado and half out of cathartic need, their conversations continuing until they eased themselves to an acceptable distance from their deepest fears. At least until next time.

  Infantry attacks were rare up there, he knew that as well. Neither side ever gained enough of an advantage to try them often. Both sides were thin along most of the line, and neither could mass enough for an offensive without the other finding out and responding in kind. Defenses were left mostly to mines and artillery, and overnight duty was usually a matter of waiting out the shells while yearning to walk back home. That was the night’s reward, a predawn stroll back down into the bowl of the city, with its monotonous comforts of scattershot and siege, its torn plumbing and its weak gas flames, its hard beds rucked against less exposed walls, its slow curl of woodsmoke and steaming piles of garbage, and at night, its inkwell of darkness.

  Vlado’s rendezvous point was at a brigade headquarters on the west side of the city’s center. He arrived just at nightfall. An old woman wrapped in a red shawl squatted on the ground next to a water spigot, peddling a small mountain of cigarettes one by one.

  The contingent of men who were to march up to Zuc was to gather in a group of about sixty, then split into six groups of ten that would leave at ten minute intervals, to keep from attracting too much attention from enemy gunners. An unshaven commander told Vlado to follow him in the first group up.

  “Just stay quiet and do as I say, that’s all I ask. If you get killed all I can promise is we’ll bring you back. If you’re wounded you’ll take whatever treatment you can get up there. You’ll get nothing better than what the soldiers get, which isn’t always so great. But it’s your decision.”

  It was clear that none of the arriving soldiers was part of a well-trained unit. They appeared in street clothes and sneakers, as if for a pickup game of basketball, some wearing the same muddy jeans and jackets they’d worn the last time up the hill, not bothering to wash them in the interim.

  The commander assigned leaders to the other groups that would follow, then called together the first ten. Three men in their late forties stood to themselves, huddled in the fraternity of age and silence, conserving their energies for getting up the hill and safely through the night.

  The younger ones, however, gave way to the schoolboy inclination to make light of even the most solemn occasion. They fidgeted and shadow boxed, playing tapes on a large radio shouldered by a tall boy with acne and a black ponytail.

  He sorted through a stack of cassette tapes, a cigarette waggling in his mouth as he talked. Another of the younger ones handed him a tape, putting in his request for the walk up the hill.

  Another member of this group was busy off to the side, kissing his girlfriend good-bye, he in a caricature of sternness and duty, she in a tearful mime of sorrow.

  The slow walk began, and Vlado fell in with the younger ones, partly out of curiosity, partly out of knowing there would be no conversation with the older ones anyway, no way to make the time move any faster. Perhaps that was the difference between knowing you’d have to do this over and over again and knowing, as Vlado did, that this would be a one-time journey.

  For a while the only noise was the thump of the bass line from the big radio, still propped on the shoulder of the tall boy, the music jumping as if in time to the movement of his plaid flannel shirttail, which swayed back and forth with every step uphill.

  In the darkness they passed people headed down the hill, some saying hello, others carrying water jugs or pulling wagons. Most were headed home for the night, although some of the younger ones were headed toward the feeble and expensive offerings of Sarajevo night life.

  After a few more blocks the houses began to thin. The higher the group walked, the more damage there seemed to be.

  Two of the boys began to kid the third one about his girlfriend. From their conversation it was obvious he’d just met her a few days ago, and after a few minutes of this Vlado piped up to ask how one managed to acquire a new girlfriend so easily while a war was going on.

  The three of them looked back, questioning him without saying a word. He told them he was a policeman looking for someone, a witness in a case. Just along for the ride.

  “Not much of a ride,” said the boy with the new girlfriend.

  The others laughed, as if privy to an old joke.

  “So you want to know how to find a girlfriend?” the boy asked.

  “Not exactly. I’m married. Just wondering how those things go at your age. From what I can remember it was hard enough taking care of that kind of business when there wasn’t a war on.”

  “Oh, it’s easy. Easier, even. Meeting them, anyway. The hard part’s finding time alone with them. Moms and dads are always home now. Always indoors. And it’s not like you can go hang out in the park. Your best hope before was to wait until everybody else went to bed. Now there’s a curfew and you’ve got to get home yourself. But there’s always a way. She sleeps over at a friend’s and you do the same. Or maybe you tell your parents you’re off to ‘the front’ again, only you’re really off to somewhere else.”

  “But easier to meet? That I still don’t get.”

  “The ones in your building, anyway. These guys here.” He motioned toward his friends in the group. “None of us knew each ot
her before the war. We hung out with other people, all of us. But now most of my old friends are gone, theirs too. Most left. Some got killed. And in those first few months you remember how it was. Everybody in the basements and the shelters. It was you and everybody else from your building down there, and you weren’t going to spend the evening talking to your parents. So you found the other people your age and had a party. A few weeks of that and you’ve got a new set of friends. A few more weeks and some of the boys and girls are starting to pair off. And when there’s a war a month with a girl seems like a year. Everything’s more intense. More serious. They start talking about having babies, wanting to leave something of themselves behind.”

  A second one joined in: “And you say, yeah, yeah, let’s make a baby, only you’re really hoping there won’t be a baby, but you’re more than willing to keep trying.”

  The others laughed.

  The first member of the group, the one who’d handed his tape to the boy with the radio, then repeated his request, loudly this time, for his music to be played.

  The tall boy with the ponytail answered by ejecting the tape he was playing and popping in another, only it still wasn’t the requested one.

  “Hey, that’s still Aerosmith,” the aggrieved party shouted. “Fuck Aerosmith.”

  “Fuck Guns ‘N’ Roses,” ponytail shouted back.

  “He’s always that way,” the other boy muttered. “Plays his own stuff until we’re too high up the hill, then puts yours in right when we have to cut the noise.”

  “So what’s it like up there,” Vlado asked. “What should I expect?”

  “Cold,” one answered. “Muddy. Lots of mud and lots of Chetniks.”

  “Scary?”

  “Sometimes. Usually just quiet and boring. That’s when you just sit and talk and smoke all night.”

  “Can you hear them on the other side?”

  “All the time. Sometimes you shout back and forth. They scream something over, we scream something back, then it keeps up until either some officer stops it or it gets nasty. ’Cause when it gets too nasty somebody always starts shooting. Then everybody’s mad at whoever was doing the talking to begin with, so you have to watch what you say.”

  “Does anyone ever sleep?”

  “You’re not supposed to, but you’re welcome to try. We’re never sleepy up there. We don’t get sleepy until we’re halfway back down the hill. And that’s when the asshole with the radio finally starts playing our music.”

  They all laughed again.

  By then they were out in the open, the road winding along the side of a grassy hill in the dark. When a shell went off now you could see flashes in the sky. They were in farmland now. Each house was a hundred yards or so from the last, places where families used to tend goats and cows and grow long rows of corn, pumpkins, and cabbage. Now the houses were empty, roofs gone, animals too.

  They passed a blown-up bus tilted off into a ditch, painted camouflage green. Some sort of army transport that had gone off the tracks. Even in the darkness you could see that the damp fields were pocked with shellholes, as if giant gophers had been spent the last few years digging.

  From up ahead the screech and snarl of Guns ‘N’ Roses finally filled the air. A small cheer went up from the four boys nearest Vlado.

  Then, following the brief chatter of an automatic weapon from somewhere over the rise, the commander at the head of the column ordered silence.

  “Off with the music and off with the talk,” he shouted. “All cigarettes out until we’ve reached the top.”

  “Fuck you, sir” the boy with the tape muttered, inhaling fiercely before tossing his cigarette into the ditch.

  The tape ejected from the machine with a click that signaled the crossing of some invisible line. A few minutes later they were greeted by a shell, and then a rumble. Then the sky lit up with a riot of red tracer bullets, streaming in a wild search for targets. With the approach of the Orthodox Christian New Year such celebratory firing had been growing more commonplace, and by the next night there would no stopping it until the wee hours.

  They reached a small row of shattered houses, a village high on the hill just before the shank of the ridge, and it was here they halted. An officer greeted their unit, signaling them off to the left. Vlado approached him to announce his title and his destination.

  “So, it’s Neven you want. You can have him. Down that way, another quarter mile, maybe a little more. I’ll get someone to take you.”

  Shortly afterward he was joined by yet another teenage boy, in a plaid wool jacket streaked with mud. He seemed glad for the chance to move about.

  Boards were stacked and nailed up between the houses, and fortified by mounds of earth. Men squatted behind them or sat on the ground behind the houses, talking in low voices and smoking cigarettes. One boiled water for coffee over a small stove.

  Vlado heard chattering in the near distance, followed by laughter, and wondered if it was coming from the other side. Then there was a shout, more laughter, then someone yelling, this time from nearby.

  He and the boy moved farther down the line, on a path behind more of the houses, sidestepping broken branches and sinking ankle-deep in mud. The path then curved around the slope of the hill toward more exposed ground, out where there were no homes and trees.

  A few moments later there was the whoosh of a shell, a yellow flash, and a crushing blow deep in the pit of Vlado’s stomach. There was also a slight heave to the ground, or so it seemed to Vlado as he suddenly found himself in a crouch, his face twisted in fear.

  He looked for his escort and saw the boy standing upright, relaxed, inhaling from his cigarette, and regarding Vlado with mild curiosity. “Relax,” the boy said. “It wasn’t that close.” Vlado would have to recalibrate his definition of close if he was to last very long up here.

  They finally reached their destination by stepping down into a communications trench leading to a small bunker, where they found a sentry reading a paperback by the light of a kerosene lantern. The boy turned to go without a word as the sentry looked up.

  “I wish to see Neven Halilovic,” Vlado announced, as if to a hotel doorman, or the secretary of a business executive.

  “General Halilovic usually doesn’t see anyone but his own men,” the sentry replied.

  General. That was a laugh. Though if you could manage putting together your own army while officially under army arrest then perhaps you’d earned the right to call yourself whatever you wanted.

  “Tell him that Inspector Petric of the Interior Ministry would like to speak with him about a case he has some interest in.”

  “Doubtful. But I’ll pass it along.”

  The reply was only five minutes in coming.

  “Neven says to fuck off and go back down the hill where you came from.”

  Vlado pondered for a moment what to do. It was clear the sentry didn’t wish to ask again. Vlado fished in his pockets for a five mark piece he’d scrounged out of a drawer before leaving. The sentry looked at it scornfully, but took it.

  “Tell him I wish to discuss the level of art appreciation of the late Esmir Vitas.”

  This time it took ten minutes, but when the sentry returned he motioned for Vlado to follow him. They headed down a long, neatly dug trench, stepping deeper into the private war of Neven Halilovic.

  CHAPTER 14

  They walked for a few hundred yards, negotiating a twist and a turn before arriving a few minutes later at a bunker of logs and sod, surrounded by soldiers who lounged amid guns and ammunition boxes. A stovepipe poked from the bunker roof, smoke pouring from it. Then a voice called him inside, where it was warm but smoky, and lit brightly by a kerosene lantern.

  And there was Neven, slumped regally in an aluminum lawn chair, its vinyl straps fraying at the edges. He was bearded and looked tired but still carried an edge of ferocity, especially in the bright, round eyes, a deep brown, the pupils almost abnormally large.

  He spoke without either rising or off
ering his hand. “So. The late Esmir Vitas?”

  “Yes. Does that help you or hurt you?”

  “Probably neither. But it is something I’d like to know more about. You have the only thing valuable to me anymore. Information.”

  He looked at Vlado a moment, as if making up his mind about something, then motioned toward a second tattered lawn chair on the opposite side of a small wooden tea table. “Please. Have a seat.”

  Neven called for an aide, then ordered two coffees as if in a cafe, showing off his easy authority as well as the possibilities at his beck and call.

  “It is real coffee,” he said. “Not instant.”

  When Vlado said nothing, Neven resumed. “So, you are here to discuss art and Mr. Vitas.”

  Vlado decided to lay most of his cards on the table right away. “More to the point, I’d like to ask you about the transfer files, and how Zarko may have used them. Vitas apparently knew something about the operation, and it seems to have gotten him killed. He may have been participating; he may only have been investigating. I think you can help me decide which.”

  “There is very little I can tell you about any of that except to say that I know we had the file cards and that for some reason they were considered very important. But they were either confiscated or destroyed in the raid, so what would they matter now anyway?”

  Well, there was something, at least. The files had survived the museum “fire,” as Vlado suspected, and might still be around. Presumably either the Interior Ministry or the army had them. He wondered again about Vitas’s remark, “in safe hands in unsafe surroundings.”

  “Confiscated by who?” Vlado asked.

  “You will have to ask the Interior Ministry. You work for them, don’t you? I only know we left them behind when we walked out to surrender. Although by then the building had caught fire, so you never know.”