The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  Vlado and Pine were relaxed, both sensing that, even without an official answer yet in hand, their immediate futures were decided, and that it was time to begin getting used to each other’s company. Vlado uncorked the obligatory bottle of slivovitz—plum brandy—and the drinks flowed as they spoke of families, friends, and others they remembered on the distant landscapes of home.

  Pine said his father was an advokat, a lawyer working in a small town in the American South.

  Vlado’s had been a foreman in a machine shop. Metalworking. Could do anything with tools. Made the equipment sing but never said much himself. He’d let his work do the talking.

  “Still alive?” Pine asked.

  “No. He died fifteen years ago.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Two years later.”

  “Did your father fight in the war? World War Two, I mean.”

  “As much as most people did, I guess. It was that or hide in a root cellar. He was with some volunteers, although it never came to much. There really wasn’t much fighting where he grew up, so it was lots of digging trenches and guard duty. Some marching through the woods at night and lots of time being hungry. There wasn’t much room for a Muslim in that war, which is one reason he seemed to be one of the few who didn’t try to make it something more noble than it was. When I was a boy I used to resent that, especially after hearing other fathers brag about what heroes they’d been. Now I realize it was a virtue. It was the lying that got everyone in trouble in the end.”

  “Well, good for him, then.” Pine raised his glass. “He was from Sarajevo, too?”

  “Farther south and west. Podborje. Small village in the hills toward the coast. Rattlesnake country. After the war he couldn’t find work, so he moved to Sarajevo. They lived in a small valley a few miles from the city until I was about six. From then on we were in the middle of town.”

  “Brothers and sisters? Uncles and aunts?”

  “I was an only child. They got a late start. Either that or I was all they could stand. Some uncles and aunts in Sarajevo, mostly on my mother’s side. A few in little places out in the country. We’d visit a few times a year, weddings and funerals. Most of my father’s people had died by then. I only remember one uncle, down on a farm with goats that were always trying to eat my sleeves. He and my aunt lived like hermits, so we only saw them once or twice. My father and he would drink brandy all night out in the back. It was about the only way you could get my father talking.”

  That was an understatement, Vlado thought, recalling his father’s brooding silences. Like a bird on its perch, seeing things below that others didn’t but never bothering to share what they were. His mother had always been the talker of the family.

  “Family always seems to make such a difference in your country,” Pine said. “Families and where you grew up. I’m always amazed. You’ll meet people from the tiniest villages who got uprooted in the fighting, maybe had to move twenty miles down the valley, but you’d think they’d had to move to another country, the way they talk. Their village was all that mattered. Hell, if you’re from a small town in America, the first thing you want to do is get out. Staying is a slow death. I think that’s one reason we don’t understand half of what’s gone on in Bosnia. We had the Civil War, and we drove out a few million Indians along the way, and we’ve got race and crime and poverty. But history is pretty much, well, history. People are too worried about their jobs and their sports teams and whatever’s on cable that night to be shooting each other over something that happened fifty years ago, much less six hundred.”

  “That’s because you didn’t grow up listening to everybody older than you gripe about the last war. Telling you not to believe all that crap about peace and brotherhood because someday those people over in the next house would try to do it to you again. In some places it was the same whether you were a Serb or a Muslim or a Croat. So I guess the mistrust never really went away, and once the fighting started, boom. No more peace and brotherhood.”

  “We’ve got plenty of old farts griping at the dinner table, too. But I thought part of growing up was to not believe a word your parents tell you. In America nobody listens to the old farts except other old farts. What happened to you guys?”

  By now Pine was drunk. But Vlado, tipsy himself, realized the man had made a pretty good point.

  “I guess we all bought into the whole ‘wisdom of the elders’ business a little too much. Even I did. And look where it got us.”

  “But you weren’t out there hunting down Serbs during the war, so you couldn’t have been too poisoned. What was the wisdom of the elders in your house?”

  Another good question. Vlado shrugged, thinking it over. “My father couldn’t have cared less about politics,” he said, “so maybe that’s why I didn’t care much, either. It was little things, mostly, that he passed along. The way he lived. His work habits. Being trusted, relied upon. Showing that even when times got difficult, you could bend without having to break.”

  “But none of the small-mindedness, then. None of the village mentality he must have grown up with.”

  “Again, just little things. Old stories about his cousins or aunts. Traditions on holidays. The best way to butcher a lamb for a wedding feast. Best way to mend a broken universal joint. Things you did with your hands. Some fathers passed on their beliefs, their hatreds and passions. Mine gave me his way of looking at life. And a toolbox.”

  “A toolbox?”

  “It’s the main thing he left me when he died. That and some old photos.”

  Pine had nothing to say to that. He rubbed his face, slouching toward the table. “I’ve had too much to drink.”

  Vlado grinned. “Maybe a little.”

  “Guess we drove Jasmina off to bed.”

  Vlado’s smile broadened. “Now we’re the ones acting like old farts from the village. Drinking late after the womenfolk go to bed. This is when we’re supposed to get out a deck of cards, or start an argument and push the table over.”

  But Jasmina wasn’t sleeping. Vlado looked down the hall and saw the crease of light below their door. It made him remember something that had been knocking around in the back of his mind throughout the evening. Before the night was over, he’d have to deal with it, face-to-face. Pine spoke up from across the table, breaking his reverie.

  “Well, give America another six hundred years and maybe we’ll be burning each other’s houses. Of course, by then everybody will have unlimited channels on his cable system. So nobody will have time to start a war.”

  They clinked glasses over that one, laughing.

  “Maybe all Bosnia needs is a little collective memory loss,” Pine said. “A lot of us at the tribunal figure it’s the only real solution. A little electroshock therapy for everybody and your troubles are over.”

  Pine laughed again. Vlado wanted to. But there was something vaguely troubling in the thought of all those Americans and Europeans in their trim Dutch apartments, laughing over cocktails at his country’s recurring genocidal folly. Making sport of all the raw country people with their quaint ignorance, as remote to most modern Europeans as the dough-faced peasants of a Brueghel painting.

  Vlado pulled deeply on his cigarette, then blew a cloud toward Pine. If the man could get used to Balkan history, then he could get used to Balkan smoke. Then he leaned across the table, lowering his voice. “Look, this job you’re asking me to take. I’ll tell you right now, I’ll probably take it. Jasmina won’t want to move. She hates the work around here, but she likes the peace, the stability, so that’s something we’ll have to decide later. But I still have to wonder what the hell I’m getting into. The way I see it, you want my ‘local expertise’ to help you go after an old man who I’ve never heard of from a war I never knew in a town I’ve maybe never seen. And I’ll tell you now, I’ve never done any undercover work. I’m not sure how convincing I’ll be posing as some kind of broker for demining concessions. So tell me, then. What part of the picture am I missing? Wh
y me?”

  Pine smiled, squinting into the tobacco smoke. Vlado saw him reel slightly, perhaps from the exhaustion of the long train journey, the heavy meal, and five shots of brandy. Then Pine straightened in his chair, as if realizing he’d lowered his guard. He was a careful one when he had to be, Vlado observed. Maybe that was part of his training as a lawyer.

  “Good questions, all of them. But you’ll have to save the tough ones for my boss. You’ll meet him later this week. Just say yes and you’ll know soon enough. Suffice it for now that, based on your file, you’re what he likes to call ‘the last honest cop in Bosnia.’”

  It was good for another laugh, and Vlado poured a final shot. Pine’s answer should have sounded an alarm bell, he knew, but Vlado had his own means of answering the questions still troubling him, never mind the lateness of the hour.

  For the moment, however, his overriding urge was to pack his bags, to sit before a pile of case notes, to begin the sort of work he had done before. If pressed, he might even have hopped into a car this very moment to drive south for eighteen hours, where he would ride across the border and climb into the green hills, his ears popping and the windows down, feeling the cool air of the beeches, the poplars, and the pines against his face. He was ready to go home, the sooner the better.

  They said their good-byes at the door a few minutes later, Jasmina joining them, her arms folded.

  When the elevator doors opened on the ground floor, Pine strolled to a pay phone outside.

  All in all, he thought, it had been a productive evening, even if it had taken him a while to warm up to the man. He’d read Vlado’s file on the long train ride from Amsterdam and had been suitably impressed. Vlado’s evaluations from his years as a detective had been particularly striking; he was bright, inquisitive, independent to a fault, which didn’t bother Pine because the same sort of words always showed up in his own evaluations. Even better, the man had stayed off the bottle, no small feat when you were an exile working a low-paying job well below your talents.

  Nonetheless, Pine’s first impression in the flesh had been jarring. Vlado looked like one of those young tobacco farmers from back home in Lasser County, the kind his father had always evicted for some landlord, or sued for their last penny on behalf of the power company. They struck the pose of the rough and ready but were actually naïve, always believing better times were ahead, until awakening one morning to find themselves old and poor, realizing too late that hard work alone wouldn’t save you.

  But Pine had been wrong before when he applied American standards over here, so he reappraised, shifting into his European gear—after more than five years abroad he was pretty good at it— and he now discerned a face that was classic Balkan, features cut close to the bone, with the dark searching eyes and cropped black hair you saw everywhere down there. Vlado, he surmised, would be slow to smile, slow to trust. There was also something vaguely Germanic in the man, a stolid sense of order, of everything in its proper place. Or maybe he’d drawn that conclusion from the apartment— simple but well-kept furniture with clean lines. No clutter. Floors and walls spotless. Shoes in a neat row by the door.

  But it was another, darker part of Vlado’s file that had brought Pine halfway across Europe, a piece of grim trivia that made the man oddly perfect for the job at hand. The time for those revelations would come later, and Pine didn’t wish to be the one who delivered them. For now, it was time to call the boss, and he dropped a few D-marks into the coin slot.

  It was nearly midnight. Spratt would be asleep, but to hell with him because this had been his idea. Besides, he’d wanted to know.

  “Hello?” said a sleepy voice with a flattened Australian accent.

  “It’s Pine. The deed is done.”

  That seemed to rouse him. “Good work. So he’s come aboard?”

  “Not officially. Has to talk it over with his wife. But rest assured, he’s hooked.”

  “And our secret weapon. Still a secret?”

  “Not by my choosing.”

  “Understood. But don’t worry.”

  “I’ll let you tell him that.”

  A muffled chuckle. “I’ll be happy to when the time comes. Don’t worry, the wound won’t be mortal. Now get some sleep, Pine. And let me get some sleep. You sound drunk, by the way. Hope you’re not driving.”

  “On our budget? Mass transit all the way. And it’s a forty-minute S-Bahn ride to my cheap hotel.”

  “Then don’t miss your stop. And make sure to bring Mr. Petric back to The Hague with you. An awful lot of people are eager to meet him.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  If Pine had stayed on the phone much longer, he might have bumped into Vlado, who soon headed out of the building on his own midnight errand.

  Vlado and Jasmina looked at each other the moment Pine shut the door. They were exhausted, not just from the lateness of the hour but from the weight of the questions now facing them. Should Vlado take the assignment? If so, what came next? They were too weary to discuss it but too stirred up to sleep, and for Vlado there was a more pressing matter to deal with.

  He grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Jasmina asked.

  It wasn’t something he could tell her, not now. Maybe never. Not her or Pine or anyone else.

  “There’s something I need to find out before I can give him an answer.” He came up with the closest thing to an explanation he could offer. “It’s . . . a law enforcement matter.”

  “At twelve o’clock? In Berlin?” Jasmina frowned, incredulous.

  “It’s related to the war. Some people from home. You’ll just have to trust me. It’s their affair, not mine. I just have to make sure it’s been dealt with before I can say anything to Pine. Please, that’s all I can tell you. But it won’t take long.”

  “You’re running to catch up with him, aren’t you. To catch Pine before he changes his mind.”

  “Don’t be crazy. I wouldn’t do that without talking about it with you first.”

  She considered that a second, seemed to accept it.

  “How long will you be?” she asked.

  “No more than an hour. Probably less.”

  He hoped it was true.

  She sighed, still skeptical. “But you are going to take it, aren’t you? This job.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Probably. If you think you and Sonja can handle it.”

  “The better question is how we’ll handle it if you don’t. You’ll be in a black mood for the rest of your life. What I’m more worried about is what comes next, when this is over and you want to move back.”

  “Maybe I won’t feel that way. Maybe it’s still as bad down there as everyone says. Just knowing I can visit awhile is good enough for now.”

  She shook her head, smiling.

  “One walk in the mountains is all it will take. One of your old paths.”

  “Until I see a mine on one of my old paths.”

  “Sure. Then you’ll run right back to your trusty backhoe. Let’s see, what would Vlado rather do for the next twenty years? Dig holes in the mud or go around asking people nosy questions, and for a better salary, too? I’m sure you’ll need a lot of time to decide that. Especially since you already love it here so much. The food you’re always raving about. The sunny weather.”

  Vlado grinned. “Don’t forget the beautiful flat countryside.”

  She smiled back. “And I hate it, too,” she said. “Some of it. Being a stranger all the time. Not understanding half of what people are saying no matter how hard I try. The stares we get from all the people who wish we’d just go home. If it were just the two of us, I’d go back tomorrow.” She nodded toward the hallway. “It’s Sonja I worry about. She’s spent all but two years of her life here. This is where she learned to speak, to make friends, to read and write. This is her home. She’s a German, Vlado, a Berliner, whether you and the Germans want to admit it or not. She likes bratwurst and döner kebap and those little chocolate
eggs with toys in the middle. She hums the tune to ‘Liebe Sandmann’ every morning at breakfast—excuse me, every Morgen am Frühstück, or however you’re supposed to say it. She probably even likes the idea of schools and playgrounds that haven’t been blown up or burned to the ground. And, okay, even if half the people on the U-Bahn give her a dirty look when she sits down, at least most of them wouldn’t kill her if she wandered into their neighborhoods without permission, which is more than you can say about our lovely country.”

  “I know. All that’s true. And we’ll talk about it more later. After I’m done. When we’ve slept on it.”

  He pulled her closer, and she whispered in his ear. “It’s also nice not worrying about you every day. Even if you do hate the job. At least I always know you’re coming home.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew where I’d been this morning,” he said. “Ghosts and old Nazis, down under the ground. It’s been a strange day.”

  And it was only about to get stranger, he feared.

  Vlado walked briskly from the building. The U-Bahn stopped running in less than an hour, but his destination was only a few blocks away. The man’s name was Haris, and Vlado’s stomach still did a back flip recalling the first time he’d heard it. He’d noticed the man’s presence almost the moment he returned to his family five years ago.

  He’d knocked twice, feeling more like a postman with a package to sign than a husband and father. Jasmina opened the door and gasped, then smiled, nearly collapsing, while the warm air of the apartment poured into the hallway. Sonja looked up from the floor just as you’d expect a skeptical four-year-old to do when a stranger was on her doorstep. She sat before a menagerie of toy zebras and lions on a carpeted plain, gathering them to her with a frown, then gasping when her mother actually embraced the stranger, sobbing and pulling him into their home.

  To her, Daddy had become a voice on the phone that called once a month from a place called Sarajevo, a private radio show broadcasting only for her, a novelty that had grown old over time. This man stepping into the house was something else altogether.