Lie in the Dark vp-1

by Dan Fesperman

  Five minutes later Vlado was prying open the grate of the storm sewer and stepping back into the shallow water. An hour later he’d fought his way back through the razor wire and was staring out the end of the tunnel into the river. Both banks seemed quiet. It wouldn’t do to head onto the streets here, though. He dropped back into the river, sliding down the slimy rocks feet first, splashing at the bottom. He began wading downstream, scanning the banks as he moved.

  At the first spillway the surge knocked him down as he fell in the three-foot waterfall. The weight of the falls pounded down, but he pulled himself free. Soaked to the bone once again, he trudged through the thigh-deep water. He passed three more spillways before he figured it was safe to climb up the bank.

  Safe was a relative term, of course, because he had reached the portion of the river that wound through a narrow no-man’s-land between Grbavica and the western side of downtown, a few hundred yards west of the Holiday Inn.

  These areas were supposedly mined. But he also knew that people desperate for firewood sometimes crept into them at night, rummaging among shattered doors and window frames in search of anything that would burn. Otherwise, one could generally count on only a few rats for company.

  Vlado stepped inside an abandoned building that had been split down the middle like a hickory log, seeming to defy half the laws of physics by standing at all. Sheltered by the walls, he spent the next half hour poking around for wood, striking it rich on the second floor up when he found a splintered window frame dangling from its opening. He wrenched it loose and carefully stepped down the stairwell. He pulled free enough pieces to kindle a small flame with his cigarette lighter, the smoke drifting up through the huge fissure in the building.

  He decided to wait there until an hour before first light. Then he would make his move, sprinting back across to his own side of the city. If he hit a mine, then he hit a mine. If he was shot, then he was shot. It was easy to think that way after the evening he had just survived and, as he watched the small flames, he wondered why Kasic hadn’t had him killed earlier, and why his investigation had been allowed to get as far as it had. Sure, there would have been some embarrassment if he had died, but nothing that couldn’t have been explained away to the U.N. by arresting a few shady characters to take the blame.

  Then, the reason occurred to him. Kasic had hoped to use him to find the transfer files, and the rest of the missing evidence. As long as they were unaccounted for, he and the whole operation were vulnerable. Who better than someone under his own thumb to track it down for him. And with Damir reporting most of Vlado’s movements, it had almost worked, until Vlado had disappeared into a place where even Damir and Kasic couldn’t follow.

  The fire had at last begun to warm him. He rubbed his hands above the small flame, wondering how Jasmina and Sonja must be spending their evening, and he began to pace through the debris of the building’s first floor.

  The room seemed to have once been part of a large apartment. Here and there in the wreckage of crumbled plaster and broken glass were wrinkled old photos jarred loose from their frames. Faces looked up at him, the young and the old, the married and unmarried, with their prewar smiles. He wondered where they all were now, what they’d managed to take with them in the rush to leave this building, and if they would ever return. Or even want to.

  As he wandered from room to room, staying clear of the windows in case some vigilant sniper should be watching at this wee, small hour, he imagined himself in Berlin, strolling about Jasmina’s darkened flat.

  He knew something of the look of the place from photographs, the small but cheerfully painted rooms with a child’s crayon drawings in evidence everywhere. He passed through a doorway, picturing a small bed before him, a child’s form curled beneath the sheets. He leaned to kiss her brow, a caring father seeing to it that his daughter was safe in the night. He pulled the sheet more snugly around her shoulders, then crossed the hallway, following the scent of Jasmina’s perfume, turning back the covers to climb in, then drawing himself close against her back, his stomach fluttery as he felt himself growing stiff against her. He placed a hand on her waist and she stirred, her hair brushing against his cheek as she turned to meet him. He felt the warmth of her lips.

  Outside, on a nearby hillside, a New Year’s celebrant fired a final reprise from his mortar before turning in for the night. The deep boom startled Vlado, who found himself staring into an empty room, its ceiling torn halfway to the floor in great shards of plaster and batting. He checked his watch and saw that it was nearly 5:30. Soon the sky would begin to brighten, though it was still a few hours before sunrise.

  He pulled back the plastic from his satchel and pawed through the contents until he found his notebook, flipping through the pages to locate the correct address. He went over the best route in his head, then crept out the door and around the corner, heading away from the river and out of no-man’s-land, angling toward the Holiday Inn.

  There was nothing for it now but to run, and he gave it all he had, stepping with as much care as possible through a rubble of bricks, stones, and twisted metal, while wishing he had enough time to check for the little metal boxes with their tripwires, the most common sort of mine found in these places.

  On one stride, his trailing foot indeed snagged a wire, and he shouted as he stumbled, a strangled cry of panic, but he kept going. It was probably nothing but the tangle of an old radio, or a fallen telephone line.

  He reached Sniper Alley, which for once seemed a symbol of safety, and sprinted across, his footsteps slapping loudly on the pavement, a lonely noise at this hour of the morning. He didn’t rest until he’d passed behind the sheltering bulk of the Holiday Inn, then he slowed to a walk, panting to catch his breath. He looked around, but there were no police, nor anyone else. When he reached the next street he turned left, heading west, for the highrise apartment building at 712 Bosanska Street. He climbed three flights of a dim stairway, through a musk of rot and old urine, and arrived at the doorway of apartment 37.

  He knocked, and in a few moments Amira Hodzic opened the door, sleep still deep in her face. She wore a heavy cotton robe belted tightly at the waist.

  “I need your help,” Vlado said. “I’m sorry.”

  Her face was clear of makeup, her hair tangled, and her eyes tired and bloodshot. Vlado’s appearance was doubtless more frightful than when he’d reached Mrs. Vitas house. But she didn’t appear alarmed, only weary, and perhaps a trifle put out.

  “Why am I not surprised to see you,” she said, then paused on the threshhold before opening the door wider and turning inside. “Come in,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll make you coffee. You look like you need it. But quietly, please, my children are sleeping.”

  She turned to face him again. “Would you like to wash? I can heat some water.”

  “That would be heavenly.” Although it was probably as much a favor for herself as for him. By now he must smell like a sewer rat.

  He stood in the tiny bathroom, peeling off his sopping pants, shirt, underwear, and socks. It was chilly in here, but not too bad. And anything was better than staying in those clammy clothes.

  A few minutes later, she knocked lightly. “The pot of water is outside the door.”

  He wondered briefly at this display of modesty from the woman who had undressed in front of him for a few packs of cigarettes. Then he forgot everything else as he felt the luxury of the hot water, sponging it across his chest, his legs. He submerged his face in the pot. He held his breath, eyes shut, then pulled out with a gasp, dripping. He almost felt like laughing at the simple joy of it.

  A few moments later she tapped at the door again, speaking barely above a whisper in the quiet apartment. “Here is a towel, and some dry clothes. They’re my husband’s. A little large, probably, but dry and clean. I’ve sold most of the rest, so you might as well keep these.”

  Dried and dressed, Vlado stepped into the kitchen in his stocking feet to find she had made a breakfast of bre
ad, cheese, and sausage. The gas lines, he could see, had been installed neatly and professionally here. In the corner sat a small woodstove, homemade but far sturdier than the one that had belonged to Glavas. It was burning steadily, an ample pile of chopped logs stacked nearby He would have liked nothing better than curling up on the floor like a cat to sleep for the rest of the day.

  By Sarajevo standards, Amira had established a prosperous lifestyle, Vlado thought. She followed his gaze as it moved from luxury to luxury, seeming to read his mind.

  “The fringe benefits of my line of work,” she said. “It pays better than almost any other job I could have found, even if most of the currency is cigarettes. Appropriate, I guess, that an old farm wife should be relying on a harvest of dried leaves for money”

  “A farm wife. I’d always imagined you worked in an office. A bank, somewhere like that.”

  “I’m surprised you’d imagined me as anything at all, other than a temporarily desirable possession. Another commodity on the barter market. Not that I’d have faulted you for it. Without that kind of thinking my children would starve.”

  “That’s the way I’d have preferred to have thought of you. But somehow I couldn’t. I kept thinking of you before the war, in some normal job with normal demands. I couldn’t get past that.”

  “So that was the problem. I’d assumed you’d had a sudden rush of guilt, thinking of a wife back at home mopping a floor, or wiping a small, runny nose. A baby at her breast and beans on the stove.”

  “There was that, too. A wife. But she’s in Berlin with my daughter. I haven’t seen them in two years. You were my first attempt at, well, anything, since they left.”

  “Sorry to have failed you,” she said, her softened tone making it seem almost as if she meant it.

  “So your husband?” Vlado asked, tugging at the front of his borrowed shirt. “He is …?”

  “Dead. Killed in the fighting in ’ninety-three. A patriot who died from blind obedience to zeal. He was shot in the chest, but you might just as easily have called it death by intoxication of propaganda. He heard we would have a new nation and needed to defend it, and he took it to heart, never mind running a farm or bringing in a crop or feeding a family. He joined the first week, with no gun and no training. And the bastards put him right up on the frontline where he’d be overrun in the first wave. They never even got his body back, and we’ll certainly never get our land or our house back.

  “It was all the children and I could do to make our way here on a wagon. Little Hamid wasn’t even walking yet. It was a pig wagon. We smelled like pig shit and dirty hay for a week before we had enough water to bathe.”

  Vlado thought of Glavas tucked in the hay of his own farm cart, wheels creaking through the same mountains a half century ago.

  “What about the rest of your family?”

  “We were separated by the fighting. Now they are all in towns near Split on the Dalmatian Coast, living in refugee hotels. My parents and my cousins, a sister, her husband. They’ve sent a few letters, but that’s all. They used up all their hard currency by the end of the first year. It’s all they can do to feed themselves, much less help us out. I’m probably doing better than all of them combined.”

  “Are you trying to get out?”

  “I did for the first year, but we were always too far down the list to get in a convoy. So in the spring I picked dandelions for salad and scrounged for every bit of change or whatever else I could find while we gradually spent every last coin of our savings. When the money was all gone, that’s when I first went to the French barracks. I was no good at first. Even you could see that. I was ready to give it up after only a week. Then you came along that night with your free cigarettes. It was enough to keep me going until I had enough nerve to do it right. And now, as you can see, I’ve become a professional.”

  She offered a bitter smile. Vlado was a bit uneasy being cast as the savior of her career.

  “Some of the customers even ask for me by name, now. They’re disappointed if I’m not there. Although I still don’t do just everything. Mostly blow jobs. A year ago I couldn’t even have said those words. Blow job. Now it’s rote behavior. Blow job. Give me another few months and I’ll be doing everything they want, letting them tie me up. Any perverted thing they want.” She paused, sipping her coffee. “But my children will be fat and warm, and sleep in clean sheets.”

  She put the coffee cup down, staring sullenly at the wall. “A week ago they told us we were finally at the top of the list, that we would have a place on the next convoy of buses to Split. Probably only another month or two. Only now I’m not so sure. If we left now we’d only have enough money to struggle along with my relatives. If I work another year I may have enough to make it all the way to Vienna. I have friends there who will take us in if we can help with the rent.”

  She offered more food, including a few slices from a fresh orange. Vlado hadn’t eaten one in more than a year. By prewar standards, it was pulpy, a bit on the dry side. But the taste was spectacular. She nearly laughed at the look of rapture on Vlado’s face as he bit into a slice.

  “Another fringe benefit,” she said, smiling.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling embarrassed by his reaction. “Another successful out-of-towner.” It was a flippant remark, a fragment of his own bitterness breaking loose under the sheer weight of exhaustion, but she was no longer smiling, and her face had gone rigid.

  “Don’t take it personally,” he said wearily “It’s just that people who grew up here feel like they’re losing their city as much to the refugees as to the Chetniks.”

  “Yes, you great cosmopolitan people who hate no one, except people like me. You have to have somebody to look down on, I suppose. The Chetniks aren’t available. They’re all in the hills, so you’ve picked us. You write us off as ignorant peasants and think every woman who wears a scarf on her head is a religious fanatic, and every man who prays in the mosque is mujahedeen. Do you think we really want to be here? That we love your city so much we’ll never be able to tear ourselves away from the water lines and these fine rabbit hutches you call apartments, where you sleep in the back so you won’t be hit by the shots coming in through the windows?

  “What really bothers you is that we seem to be better at surviving than you. We can make a fire, slaughter a goat, plant a vacant lot with vegetables. The triumph of the peasant, and it drives you mad. So much for the wisdom of the streets.”

  “If that’s all it was we could stand it. It’s the attitudes we resent. I’m not saying it was your fault personally, but where do you think this war began? In small towns and villages where people kept alive all the old, narrow grudges for the past fifty years. You were the only ones still worried about finding out who was a Chetnik, who was a Catholic, who was a Muslim.”

  “We were the only ones who faced the truth, that’s all.”

  “And your truth was that a Serb couldn’t trust a Croat, or a Muslim trust a Serb, or whoever. Was that your truth?”

  “You heard the stories growing up, just like we did. About the bastard Chetniks or the cutthroat Ustasha. You probably had an old uncle just like I did who always warned you after his third drink that it would all happen again someday. But in Sarajevo you just went to the cafe and had another cigarette. You put it all out of your mind and let your grandparents worry about history. You were good little Titoists who didn’t just forget the past, you pretended it never happened. And now you’re so shocked and offended that it’s happened again, right under your noses, while you were drinking coffee and talking about Western music.

  “But isn’t it funny how fast you’ve caught on. Now you’re as quick as anyone to call someone by some dirty label. How many times have you said ‘Chetnik’ in the last ten minutes. And who needs Chetniks when you can look down your noses at the entire rest of your country. You act as if you are the only people in the world who are suffering, and that everyone is to blame but yourselves. No wonder even the TV cameras are tired of yo
u.”

  Vlado saw that tears had begun running down her cheeks, but her voice was unwavering, unshakable in its low monotone that hammered forward like the drone of a court clerk reading a bill of indictment.

  “My husband was just like the rest of you, so committed to tolerance and brotherly love that the first thing he wanted to do was take a gun and go shoot every Chetnik he could find.”

  She paused, calming herself, sipping again at her coffee, although by now it had gone cold.

  “That was his favorite shirt,” she said, looking up at Vlado. “It’s the only one I haven’t been able to part with.” Then her crying broke into a sob. More tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly, reaching across the table to touch her face. She stood and walked to the stove, tidying aimlessly. He followed, lightly placing a hand on her shoulder, and she again broke into sobs. She turned toward him, looking into his face as he brushed away her tears, and she pulled him to her tightly, gripping the old shirt.

  She leaned her head against his chest and he kissed her hair, with its taste of soap and kitchen smells. Her entire body smelled of a clean, warm bed, sheets rumpled. She raised her face to kiss him, and they clutched at one another. On her cheeks and her neck he tasted the traces of rouge and pancake from the night before. She unbelted her robe, and Vlado slipped his arms inside.

  They did not speak. Vlado held her as tightly as he could, and she seemed to gasp. Both were holding on for salvation as much as for desire. Vlado’s mind, still jazzed by the hot water and the bite of the orange, now leapt at the feel of warm skin beneath his hands, the body of a woman, someone who still struggled, who was still capable of rage, of life.

  A small voice called out from the bedroom doorway, and she stiffened immediately, pulling away gently but with an underlying firmness. The look on her face, like their first time together, seemed a mixture of both relief and disappointment, though of a different nature this time.