Lie in the Dark

by Dan Fesperman

  She turned toward him, her face blank, lips shut primly, still unbuttoning and unsnapping.

  “Please,” he said in a quiet voice. “Stop.”

  She looked at him, her expression a mixture of relief and worry. Af ter all, she needed those cigarettes.

  “Here,” he said hastily. “Take them.” He handed over not only the six packs agreed upon but the entire carton. “Take them and go before I change my mind.”

  She quickly pulled up her skirt and buttoned her blouse, not fumbling at all now, then strolled briskly away, heels clicking toward the stairs as she rebuttoned her overcoat, leaving Vlado to sink back onto the couch, the vision of Jasmina appearing for a moment, then fading, once again indistinct.

  His connection to his daughter Sonja had become even more remote. She had been eleven months old when she left, a loyal girl who clung to her father whenever possible, pulling herself to her feet by holding his hand, and crawling rapidly after him each morning as he walked to the bathroom to shave. Now she was two years and eight months. She’d nearly tripled in age since he’d last seen her. She’d learned to walk, talk and count to five.

  She chattered now in a blend of German and Serbo-Croatian, and even her voice seemed different the few times he could hear it in the background of his telephone calls to Berlin. Although more often lately he didn’t hear her at all.

  Early on she had come to the phone whenever he called, too shy to make any sound but a giggle, but eager to listen and reluctant to give up the receiver without a piteous wail of indignation. But he’d quickly faded for her, and now she couldn’t be dragged close to the phone.

  “I don’t want to,” he’d heard her say, or simply a stern “Nein!” her obstinance crackling through the static from hundreds of miles away. Usually now he didn’t bother to ask, although today he felt a special urgency to hear her voice again, to hear the soft, steady breathing across the miles.

  A set of photographs had arrived in a recent pack of convoy mail, postmarked October, 1993—three months late of course, after the long delay of checkpoints and permissions. They’d depicted a robust young stranger, smiling and confident, dressed in a bright warm snowsuit and standing on the raked sand of a Berlin playground. In the background were sturdy wooden swingsets, a fleet of strollers, and other children and their mothers, relaxing on a sunny day without worry.

  It was Vlado’s turn to call now, and the radioman glanced at him and repeated the Berlin telephone number into his headset without even having to ask.

  After a brief pause he motioned for Vlado to pick up the receiver. Vlado listened to the series of hums and clicks, then heard a phone being picked up. He then waited through that slight, halting delay in transmission that always reminded him of boyhood broadcasts of the Soviet cosmonauts, calling in from space.

  “Hello,” Jasmina answered. “How are you?”

  “Safe. Quite safe. How about you?”

  “I always wonder what I will do if you miss a call, or if you’re late. If I’ll panic, or what I’ll think.”

  “No, it’s been quiet this week. The war is slowing down. Maybe it’s good news.”

  He felt himself beginning to deaden, to go numb and cold and dreary as he left the truth behind. Not for the first time he wondered what it must be like for the people who work in the radio room, sitting in on these conversations every day, hearing the index of hope slide off toward the bottom of the register as the months passed without change.

  He told Jasmina that he almost wished for more fighting to make the days pass faster, then realized as soon as the words left his mouth what a stupid thing it was to say.

  “So how are you, then,” he asked, “and how is the job. And Sonja, how is she.” Against his better judgment he then added, “I don’t suppose that she’d ...”

  “Oh! well, no. I’m sorry. I tried to keep her here as long as I could but she’s off at a playground now with a friend. They were in a rush to go swimming. There’s a new indoor public pool. There are new lessons for toddlers, and she’s very excited.”

  In the background Vlado could hear the television. It sounded like the sharp exaggerated noises of a cartoon, the sort that Sonja apparently watched all the time. He felt heat rising behind his face, and glanced around at the others in the room, but they were all facing away from him.

  “You’d be so proud of her, Vlado. She is speaking full sentences now. Long thoughts, very complex. She’s so smart. And her German is better than mine. You should hear her talking with her friends. Their parents say she even speaks it better than their own children.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll need a phrasebook to talk with my own daughter.”

  Then a pause, followed by either a deep intake of breath or a burst of static.

  “Please don’t say things to make me feel guilty. It’s what we have to do here. You know we would have stayed if it had been up to me. It’s hard enough to get along here even knowing the language. We have to assume we could end up here forever.”

  “I know. I know. It’s all right. And I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. And you shouldn’t. I was just stating a fact. Sometimes I feel she’s gone from me forever, even if I could be there tomorrow. And it’s depressing, like everything else here.”

  “I know. I understand. We shouldn’t waste our three minutes arguing.”

  She mentioned that some Bosnian friends had spotted a few notorious Serbs in the streets of Berlin, one of them a particularly nasty guard from a detention camp. They’d reported the sightings, given lengthy statements to the police, but no one had seemed very interested. In fact, it was becoming difficult to get any news at all of Sarajevo beyond the daily summary of shelling, perhaps a body count, or a few words about another stalled U.N. convoy.

  The radioman motioned Vlado that his time was nearly up.

  “Keep yourself safe,” he said. “Don’t trust just everyone. Even the ones from home.”

  “You’re the one we should worry about,” she said. “Aren’t you the one still living in a war zone.”

  “I’m serious,” he said, his voice stern. “Watch out for yourself and Sonja.” His eyes flicked around the room, but every head was still turned. “The same people who are dangerous to me can be dangerous to you, even there.”

  “Okay,” she said haltingly. “I will.” She sounded puzzled. She, too, knew these calls were likely to be monitored; that if Vlado’s safety were somehow unraveling, this might be as specific as he would allow himself to get.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “And I love you.” And for a change he didn’t feel self-conscious, having uttered this before a roomful of grimy, indifferent witnesses.

  He offered a meek thank-you to the radioman, then left.

  A few moments later he couldn’t recall having elbowed through crowds of people down two flights of stairs, or pushing out the front door. He only knew that he suddenly found himself outdoors, shocked by a cold gritty breeze and blinking into the sunlight. He had been wrapped in his family’s new world, with its playgrounds, its warm homes, and its crowded, bountiful market. He was always surprised by how deeply he could immerse himself in only a few moments of halting conversation, and by how difficult it was to fight his way back to the surface.

  He plunged through the milling crowd gathered at the mail list, gaping about like a man who’d just stumbled from a darkened theater. A glance at his watch. Still plenty of time to make his other stops for the day, back across the river. No need to rush. He strolled a full block at a relaxed gait before noticing that people around him were running, heads bent. He’d moved into an open area, a clearly marked sniper zone, and a busy one as well in recent days. Vlado put his head down and broke into a half-hearted trot for the bridge.

  CHAPTER 8

  Vlado had always found a certain appeal in searching the rooms and apartments of the dead—once the body was removed, of course. It was like entering a time capsule, a privileged look at the snapshot of a life in progress, the point of
departure for another unfortunate soul.

  It was this oddly pleasant sense of anticipation that kept Vlado going on his way to Vitas’s apartment, that kept him from glancing too many times over his shoulder. Although he was still shaken by the encounter at the slaughterhouse, he doubted anyone there had gone to the trouble of following him.

  He wondered idly how Damir had fared. He was probably finished by now, while Vlado had yet another stop after this one. He found himself wishing wearily that he’d parceled out more of the day’s chores. But perhaps Kasic was right. Vlado had probably best handle most of the work himself. No sense in getting the ministry any more perturbed than it already was, or they might strip him of the case altogether, appearances be damned.

  Vitas’s apartment was ten minutes away, on the third floor of what had been a nice building in a late-eighteenth-century section of downtown built during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After fumbling for a moment with the large key Kasic had given him, Vlado pushed open the heavy wooden door.

  Right away he was impressed by the lack of grandeur, the absence of fine things. Vitas had never struck him as the acquisitive sort, or as a connoiseur who might have collected art or furniture, but Vlado had at least expected a mild expression of the vulgarity that commonly afflicts bachelors reaching the top of their field in middle age. Yet here was Vitas’s television, no large Western model but a small-screen hunk of brown plastic at least twenty years old. Not that a better set would be good for anything these days.

  Vitas’s stereo was similarly old, with a broad turntable and a high spindle for stacking albums five at a time. Looking at it you could almost hear the painful clacking, skidding sound of vinyl against vinyl.

  The walls were bare except for an old engraving of the city mounted above the couch. No framed certificates or awards from his army days. No photos of family or friends.

  There was also no electrical generator, a mild surprise in the apartment of someone with such a high rank. He did have a sturdy new woodstove, and next to it was an ample stack of neatly chopped wood. And the trim copper pipes of well-installed gas lines gleamed from a few corners of the ceiling. Someone had been called in to rig it up, no doubt. And why not? What was the worth of power and privilege if it didn’t at least bring a few comforts.

  Vlado’s second impression was that he wasn’t the only other person who’d been here recently. He felt an unmistakable presence of someone recently departed from the room, though he also felt this was silly, because if Kasic’s people had been here first—and they probably had, seeing as how Kasic had no misgivings about searching Vitas’s office—then they’d have probably finished here early this morning.

  As he strolled around there were small signs of disturbance—partly opened drawers, furniture moved slightly off its old marks in the carpet. The signs stood out because the apartment otherwise seemed to be the home of someone compulsively neat and careful. No dust. No clutter. Vitas had not let things slide just because there was a war on.

  Vlado thought of his own place, where pots crusted with beans were only halfheartedly scoured before the next batch went in. Spilled grains of rice were scattered to every corner of the small kitchen floor, and lately he’d never seemed to have the energy or inclination to track them down. His bed hadn’t been made in weeks, and the sheets had gone gray from so little washing. True, he had bathed and shaved last night as he’d vowed to himself. But he remembered his towel, sour and stuffed into a corner of the bathroom. Here, fresh towels were folded neatly on shelves in the bathroom, which smelled lightly and pleasantly of soap and aftershave. A candle stood in a small saucer in a hardened puddle of wax.

  There were clean sheets on the bed, a bedspread neatly tucked at each corner. In fact, every room except the dining room, which faced north with plastic taped and retaped over the window, seemed in tidy order. This was not the home of a man whose life was at loose ends, nor of anyone who had grown careless.

  As Vlado walked toward the kitchen, he heard a stirring of noise from the apartment next door, a thumping sound followed by the crying of a child, someone else’s life going on. Then silence again.

  Vlado checked the refrigerator. A large block of ice sat on a shelf, dripping slowly. Some meat was beginning to go bad. There was a half-full bottle of milk. Vlado uncapped it and sniffed. Still fresh. He was tempted to take a swallow. It had been more than a year since he’d had any. He’d never much liked it before but the smell suddenly seemed so beckoning, so full of past associations. But something held him back, whether professionalism or the higher calling of this case or the feeling that he was being tested, examined as he went about his work. If someone else had been here earlier, he might always come back.

  Vlado saved for last the large Victorian desk in the corner of Vitas’s bedroom, its dark mahogany rich with nooks and pigeonholes. A kerosene lantern hung overhead from a newly installed hook. The ceiling above it was blackened slightly, presumably from many nights of use.

  The desk was the only place in the house where there were overt signs of disarray, although it was impossible to say whether they had resulted from a search or from Vitas’s own energies.

  Vlado went through some papers on top, finding nothing of import. In a few upper cubbyholes were stubs of bills from before the war, along with subscription notices from foreign magazines, still stacked chronologically leading up to the final months, when all such accounts halted. There were a few old letters still tucked in their envelopes, the tops torn open neatly: one from a friend in Vienna, chatty and banal, another from Zagreb, a third from Belgrade, all predating the war and each apparently worthless to Vlado. But he wrote down the names and addresses, all the same.

  Nowhere was there any address book, which Vlado found particularly irritating, because there also hadn’t been one among the box of possessions at Vitas’s office. Kasic himself must have thumbed through it by now. Perhaps later he would receive a sanitized version. All he had in this line was the scribbled named and address that Grebo had found in Vitas’s watch pocket.

  Among the bits of torn or crumpled paper in the wastebasket by the desk were a few aborted letters to friends, with only a few paragraphs in each, discarded either out of futility with the writing or with the prospect that they might not reach their destinations for months, if at all.

  Then one of these false starts caught his eye from the bottom of the pile, not so much for anything it said as for how it was addressed:

  “Dear Mother,” it began. There was no date.

  So much for his mother being dead, although Kasic had sounded fairly sure. Vlado searched for her address, finding no sign of it on the letter and no envelope on the desk or in the wastebasket. Nor were any clues to be found in the two paragraphs Vitas had written, bland offerings that he was in good health and hoped that she, too, was well.

  He looked back through the wastebasket for the other two letters. They were both written on wafer-thin air-mail paper, because even though you sent outgoing mail through departing journalists or via the Jewish Center, someone eventually paid postage, so you tried to keep the weight light.

  The note to his mother, however, was on a cream-colored bond, the sort of sturdy writing paper a mother might buy for her son in hopes of receiving some of it back someday This, too, seemed to be another leftover from Vitas’s life before the war, as outdated now as the magazines and bills from an era that already seemed centuries old.

  He searched the remaining compartments of the desk. One locking drawer, which Vlado would bet had been forced and sprung, held only old financial records, a few family documents, and a faded photo of an attractive woman standing next to a far younger Esmir Vitas, with nothing written on the back. There seemed to be nothing else of any interest, no names and numbers of butchers or cigarette cutters or whiskey smugglers. If there had been earlier, by now they were stuffed in some file drawer at the Interior Ministry.

  By now he could barely see to read anyway. The light had faded to late dus
k. As he stood up from the desk the smell of the butcher’s gift of meat wafted toward him, making his stomach growl in spite of the apprehension he felt over everything to do with Hrnic. He locked the apartment and started down the stairs, again hearing a child’s cry from next door. Once outside, he looked slowly around him but the streets were already empty. Then he trudged toward the river for his final stop of the day.

  It was a visit he’d been subconsciously steeling himself for since morning, knowing it would best be delayed until dark. And considering that he had talked to Jasmina only an hour earlier, he felt almost guilty to be making the visit at all, especially because in a small, uncertain way he was looking forward to it.

  By the time he reached the Skenderia barracks’ darkness the only light was from a small bank of floodlights the French had installed at the perimeter of their compound. Vlado worked his way toward the sandbags stacked at the entrance. Up close you could smell their dampness, an odor like wet cement that conveyed their weight and density. The French had built the walls on a day long ago when the fighting had finally slackened. Vlado had watched from an office window as they piled the bags methodically with a series of solid thunks, a sound that made one realize the very noise a bullet would make when it struck—a muffled thwack as the shell made a puckered hole, followed by the hiss of pouring sand.

  Just around the corner from the entrance, as Vlado knew from his one previous venture, was the nearest place of business for local prostitutes. By dusk a few had always gathered, like birds flocking at sunset to the bare sheltering trees of a park.

  Any earlier and they’d have been too well lit even for the U.N. to tolerate. They’d be ordered off by some sentry dipping his face low into the gathering as much to catch a whiff of perfume as to maintain discretion as he advised them, quite civilly, to please clear off, commander’s orders.