The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  “He goes into the KaDeWe, the big department store, and for a few minutes I couldn’t see him. I thought I’d start crying right there in the store if I lost him after all that. Then I saw his head across the counters, heading toward an escalator. He went to the café, upstairs at the top of the store, all those plants under a glass roof. He sat down. He was waiting for someone, so I went to another table. I had to buy something, or they would have kicked me out. I took five marks out of my pocket for a coffee, and it drains me for the rest of the week.”

  Vlado couldn’t help but think of the bottle of Chanel, which must have drained him for a good month.

  “I watch him eat his schnitzel, his pastry, his Coke, and his coffee. He spends what must be twenty marks just having a snack, and he keeps looking at his watch until finally a woman comes and sits down with him. Nice-looking. Probably a Bosnian, but I couldn’t be sure because I couldn’t hear what they were saying. But she was done up. A nice dress and black stockings. Lipstick. Very nice, and she was his. She belonged to the rapist, the killer. Gave him a little kiss, then they talked for a while, a lot of smiling with his little smirk. And later she said good-bye. I think she must have worked there. Then he walked back, same way he’d come. Same U-Bahn stations. Same stop at the end, and now I’m excited. Because now I know he’s going home.

  “He walks into a house. A building like yours. And I was almost in a panic because I didn’t know what to do about the elevator. If I get on it with him he will recognize me, I am almost sure, or will see something in my eyes and know I’m crazy enough to kill him. I felt like I was about to lose him after all of this. And then, my lucky day. Movers are using one elevator. Loading some big piece of furniture. The other one is broken. Kaput. So he took the stairs, and I stayed one flight back, tiptoeing so I don’t make noise. I heard the door open at the fourth floor, and I ran up behind as it shut. I look down the hall in time to see a door closing behind him, and I get the number and check the name on the door and the mailbox. It was fake, of course, because I knew his real name. I had heard it many times, had even read it in the newspapers.

  “So, then. What to do next? First I tell my friend Huso, because he was from Srebrenica. He’d run through the woods for four days, trying to get away from there. And he had seen this man Popovic with the crowds of Chetniks, putting people onto buses, calling men and boys out of the woods. Both his brothers went, but he kept running. He made it to Tuzla, but they never did. They got on the buses. No one ever saw them again.

  “Huso says all we need to do is tell the police. He says we tell them, then they tell the war crimes tribunal, then someone will come and arrest him. So we did that, the very next day. We waited two hours at the police station, and you would have thought we were thieves the way they acted. Like we were dirty and they just wanted to put us in jail or send us home, all the way back to Bosnia. But finally they took our information. They said they’d make a phone call.”

  “And then?” Vlado asked. By now the policeman in him was hooked. He swallowed some beer, not taking his eyes off Haris.

  “And then, nothing. Two weeks go by and I check on him every day, just to make sure he is still here. Every day he goes to see the same woman, but in different places. Sometimes he spends the night with her. Sometimes she comes back with him. He wears the same nice clothes and spends his marks like they mean nothing at all. But no one has come to arrest him or take him away. And Huso and I, we’ve started to think that no one ever will.”

  Haris paused, as if reluctant to continue. He asked for another whiskey, then looked straight at Vlado.

  “So now you want me to do something about it,” Vlado said. “Because I used to be a policeman.”

  “Because you know how these things are done. Making arrests. Bringing people to justice. You’ve been a part of that.”

  But it wasn’t the policeman in Vlado who answered. It was the husband, suddenly and irrationally angry that this man who’d taken comfort from his wife wanted comfort from him as well.

  The policeman in him would have said, “Let matters take their course. Report him again if you want to feel better. Make yourself a nuisance if you have to, or telephone The Hague directly, and definitely offer yourself as a witness, but otherwise stay out of the matter. You’ll only be asking for trouble.”

  The husband in him shouldered such practicalities aside.

  “If the police were going to do something, they would have done it by now. Someone like Popovic must not rate too high on their list. The Germans are more worried about Asians selling tax-free cigarettes, or Turks dealing heroin. All they want from Bosnians is an exit visa and a quick wave good-bye. The only way to get them interested in someone like Popovic is to bring him to their doorstep. If you and Huso want something done about Popovic, you’ll have to do it yourself.”

  Having said that, Vlado immediately felt ashamed, even a little nervous, like a kid who has lit the fuse of a huge firework and now must throw it, not knowing where it might land. He flashed on an absurd scene of Haris and Huso tying up Popovic with about a hundred feet of rope, squirming like a team of comedians, then dumping the man at a police station with a gag in his mouth and a note penned to his shirt, scribbled in ungrammatical Bosnian. But Haris was still staring at him, as if awaiting further instructions.

  Vlado obliged, unable to resist the temptation to coax the flame a little further along the fuse.

  “Look, if Popovic is living here as another person, under another name, then who do you think would miss the real Popovic? No one. They would miss this other man. But the other man doesn’t exist, except as fake papers and passports. Which the authorities would discover as soon as they searched his house or looked into his background. Assuming they even bothered.”

  He sipped the beer, the foam cold on his lips. “And if you’ve heard nothing from the tribunal, how much does that say about their interest? Sounds like you and Huso are the only two worried about it. It’s possible he hasn’t even been indicted, and if that’s the case now, who knows, it might never happen.”

  “But Huso saw him, saw what he was doing in Srebrenica. My sister saw him, too. There must be plenty of witnesses who’ve mentioned his name.”

  “Maybe investigators have never talked to any of them. And are you sure that’s what you want to put your sister through? Have her up in the dock, answering questions from some attorney for Popovic, who’ll keep telling her how much she wanted it, how much she’d been asking for it. He’ll ask her what kind of dresses she wore, what kind of perfume she used, how many men she’d slept with. Is that what you want?”

  Haris had no answer. He just bolted down another swallow and set his glass heavily on the table, nodding once, a look of resolve in his eyes, and for a moment Vlado wanted to take it all back, to tell him, “Take it easy. I’ll make some calls. Let me handle this.”

  But the moment passed, and Haris stood, laying a last crumpled bill on the bar.

  It wasn’t long before Haris took his advice. Four nights later the phone rang. Luckily Vlado was the one who answered.

  “It’s Haris.”

  The anger rose up in Vlado almost immediately, but Jasmina and Sonja were in the next room, so he didn’t shout.

  “I don’t want to hear any more about your problems,” he muttered. “I want you out of our lives.”

  “Then come downstairs, and you’ll have your wish. I promise. Huso and I are down here.”

  Hearing that both of them were there suggested some foolhardy plan in motion.

  “What have you done?” Vlado said tersely.

  “Just come. There isn’t much time.”

  He found them standing in a dimly lit corner of the entrance, by a pay phone next to the mailboxes, trying not to attract attention and therefore doing exactly that, a sweating and nervous-looking pair who stank of effort and exhaustion, their eyes glazed with a barely contained wildness and more than a little drink.

  “Outside,” Haris whispered. “Follow us.”r />
  They walked to a far corner of the parking lot, which backed onto a small grove of trees. Both streetlights in that corner were burned out. Broken glass crunched underfoot. Their car was the only one within a twenty-yard radius, and Vlado almost laughed to see it was a brown Yugo, like the punch line to some elaborate and clumsy joke—two bumbling expats and their expat excuse for a car.

  They stopped by the rear of the car, a nervous huddle, Haris looking at Huso, who fumbled for the keys. Vlado felt his stomach sink as the trunk lid clicked open, swinging up into the darkness with a high creak. A man, presumably Popovic, was curled into place, hands bound behind his back. Vlado desperately hoped he was still alive, but the mouth was open, not gagged, and the smell boiling up out of the cramped dark space was of blood, blood gone cold and stiff on clothing and skin.

  “He’s dead,” Haris said.

  Huso looked back at Vlado. It was the first time Vlado had met him. Broad flat face and a squat body, and the brown frightened eyes of a dog that has just chewed the morning paper. What did they want? For him to arrest them? This was hopeless, and he sagged with the enormity of what they had done, of what he had done. Headlight beams crossed them briefly as another car swerved into the opposite end of the lot.

  “For God’s sake, shut it,” Vlado said. He was dealing with idiots. Why was he dealing with them at all? How had he ended up out in this lot with these two men and this body?

  “I want to tell you how it happened,” Haris said. “We didn’t want to kill him. And now we don’t know what to do.”

  “Get in the car,” Vlado said. “Tell me while you drive. But don’t just stand here attracting attention. If a policeman were to pull in now, this is the first part of the lot he’d check. C’mon. Get in.”

  They obeyed, tame and tired. Huso sat at the wheel cranking the whining engine, the works tooled in some far corner of home, years ago, before the war—back when owning a Yugo wasn’t such a bad thing, and living in a mountain village was a poor but tranquil pursuit. You were forgotten and so was your country. But now their problems were scattered everywhere, a diaspora of feud and vengeance. They had brought the war to the Spielplatz and the wurst stand, little Bosnias everywhere.

  “Head for a busier street,” Vlado said from the backseat, the cop taking control. “And don’t speed, don’t do anything that will get you pulled over.”

  Huso was rigid at the wheel, the posture of a student driver afraid to do anything other than what the teacher tells him.

  “How the hell did it happen?”

  Haris turned from the front passenger’s seat.

  “We followed him home this afternoon. He’d gone back to the KaDeWe. Back to see that woman. On his way back he stopped in a park for a walk. He went up in some bushes to take a leak, and Huso grabbed him. Huso had a knife.”

  “Where’s the knife?”

  Haris got a blank look. Huso shook his head.

  “I’m not sure.” Haris said. “Maybe in the trunk. I don’t know.”

  It was how amateurs always screwed up. Some major detail left unattended to. Vlado had seen all the signs before in his work. Now here he was driving along with a pair of such fools, inextricably linked to them. All three of them could end up behind bars. Why was he even along for the ride, speaking with them, conspiring? With every moment he dug himself deeper, but there was no turning back.

  “We got on either side of him and told him to come with us,” Haris said. “Huso showed him the knife, but we told him it was about money. That if he came with us and just heard our offer, we could all make a lot of money.”

  That, at least, had been smart. If Popovic had known he was dealing with two fellows bent on revenge, he would have bolted for sure.

  “He wasn’t happy, but he came with us. You could tell he was trying to figure the odds. I think he thought the knife was something he could deal with. So we walked to the car. Huso had borrowed one, and it was only a block away. Huso kept the knife under his jacket.”

  “So this isn’t even Huso’s car?”

  “No.”

  “What’s he lying on back there? A blanket? Anything?”

  “There’s a big sheet of plastic.”

  Sometimes amateurs got it right, too, in spite of themselves. He wondered how much blood they had on their clothes. He remembered how grimy they’d seemed in the dim light of the apartment building. Not a good sign.

  “Keep going. Then what?”

  “We drove out to a construction site. A new shopping center where Huso has been doing some work, some painting. We pulled around the back. Huso got the knife out and told him to turn around. I tied his wrists. We told him we were going to take him to our stash of drugs.”

  Vlado was amazed Popovic had gone along with it. Either too stupid or too greedy. Maybe both. Or perhaps he’d merely been frightened. People used to giving orders rarely knew how to act when receiving them. But once he’d let them tie his hands, he was a dead man.

  “We weren’t going to kill him,” Huso said from the front. “All we wanted was a confession. Then we were going to turn him in to the police.”

  “A confession?”

  “Of all he’d done,” Haris said. “I was going to take a statement.”

  He reached beneath the seat and pulled out a spiral notebook with two pens slid into the loops of the binding. As if he were a cop doing the report. Haris really had thought they were going to take care of it themselves, the stupid bastard. Mostly because a real cop had been careless enough to tell him they could.

  “Go on,” Vlado said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “He laughed at us. He said, ‘This is all you want? Some confession? No business to do, just some crap about the war?’ So Huso hit him. Hit him across the face and asked about his brothers. I told him he’d raped my sister. He just got quiet, wouldn’t say anything. I think he was beginning to get a little scared, but he wasn’t going to admit it, wasn’t going to say anything, either. So we told him we were taking him to the police, that we knew his real name and that they would arrest him.”

  “And he told you to go ahead.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? The police wouldn’t know what to make of him, other than some Bosnian with bad papers. They’d deport him and he’d be away from both of you, and he’d know better than to ever come back to Berlin. I just can’t believe he was stupid enough to dare you. Or to laugh.”

  “We decided he was right,” Haris said. “Or I did. I told Huso we couldn’t take him in. We began arguing in the car. That’s when Popovic knocked open the door latch with his knee. He got out and ran, up toward the street. We caught him and tackled him, dragged him back to the car. Pushed him up against one of the back walls of the building. Then he spit. Spit in Huso’s face. Said, ‘Fuck your brothers, they deserved to die.’ And that’s when Huso stabbed him. He stabbed him once, then he couldn’t stop.”

  Haris paused. Huso sighed deeply in the driver’s seat, as if recalling some distant unpleasantness.

  “It was over fast. Like killing an animal. All the thrashing and the breathing, the air and the blood coming out of him, the knife going in and out with that sound, like stabbing a sandbag.”

  “Then you put him in the trunk.”

  “And came to see you. We didn’t know what to do next. Where to take him. What to do with his body.”

  Vlado took his bearings. They were on a four-lane road heading east, out of the city, the buildings growing sparser.

  “Keep going,” he said. “I know a place. Somewhere I did some work when I first got here. Another mile or so, then go north. I’ll tell you when.”

  It was too late to back out now. Too late to do anything but keep driving and do the best with what they had. The man in the trunk was dead, and he’d always be in the back of Vlado’s mind as a casualty he’d inflicted, his first. It would be something to hide from his wife and daughter and anyone else he ever met. There would always be this man’s body rid
ing behind him.

  It took another twenty minutes to reach the site. Vlado had unloaded old pipes there, the innards of some building he’d helped gut during his first month in Berlin, before the construction job had opened up. The lot was closed, just as it had been then, with broken padlocks on all the fences, which made it an ideal place for illegal dumping. There was an old waste lagoon in the back, sludge and chemicals and abandoned grocery carts jutting from the ooze.

  They looped some of Huso’s rope through cinder blocks and a discarded section of heavy iron scaffolding. Then they tied everything to Popovic, knotting the rope around his chest. It took all three of them to heave the body and all the weight over the lip of the lagoon. He sank slowly into the dark, bubbling mess. For a moment they stood, wiping their hands on their pants, staring at the spot as if the body might bob back to the surface at any moment. Then, without saying a word, they climbed into the car.

  No one spoke on the way back, and Vlado hadn’t mentioned a word of it to anyone in the few weeks since then. But now, with Pine waiting for an answer, Vlado had to see Haris one last time. Had to ask him if anyone had come poking around with questions, or if anyone had ever responded to his initial report to the police. He especially wanted to know if Haris had ever heard from anyone at the tribunal. For all Vlado knew, this assignment might yet have something to do with Popovic. Or maybe that was just the convoluted thinking of a guilty conscience.

  Vlado had learned earlier where Haris lived, and now he took the elevator to the sixth floor, the building quiet at this hour. It was a carbon copy of his own, one of those gray slabs the East Germans had built in their haste to replace the wreckage of World War II. Vlado knocked, not looking forward to the moment of confrontation, worried about what he’d learn. And even with everything that had happened, he still wasn’t used to the idea of speaking with someone who’d slept with his wife. He knocked a second time, worried no one was home. But finally there was a scraping sound, and the door opened narrowly against a security chain. A woman’s drawn, thin face stared back at him, her body stooped before its time. This would be Saliha, Haris’s sister.