“Well, Jay, we’re going down the rabbit hole.” Seems so.
“Build an army. Men with guns. Assembly required.”
“How much training you think these guys get?”
“Training? Give me a break. They get, ‘Here’s your AK. Follow that path into the woods and kill somebody.’”
“Ye of little faith, Brian.”
“Jay, I don’t want a full-scale war at this particular moment. I have three weeks’ vacation coming. Fiji. After that, fine.”
“Let’s go see who’s in charge.”
“That house, there. It’s the only one without a mortar hole.”
The Leopard has the finest mustache in the Balkans. It is the first thing you notice. The gentle conceit of a refined man caught in unexpected circumstances. He waves his two sentries away and rises to greet us. Tea appears before we sit. Brian, in his usual manner, plunks in a chair, crosses his legs, and eases into a cynical slouch, biting on his pen, tightening his eyes. The Leopard folds his tapered hands. Alija sits at the desk next to him.
“Thank you for coming,” says the Leopard through Alija.
“Things seem to be happening.”
“They are. Weather dictates much. Winter is not far away.”
“And money?” says Brian.
The Leopard doesn’t respond and eases to another tack.
“We are tired of the way we live. We are changing that.”
“Do you have enough firepower?” says Brian, pushing for more.
“Not yet, but it’s coming. The MUP are one-speed. They know how to surround and shell villages. But they don’t know how to fight an enemy on the move. We will be mercurial.”
“Alija,” says Brian. “Is mercurial the accurate translation?”
Before she answers, the Leopard says, “Yes.” He shifts to English.
“In my previous life, the one I had until five months ago, I was a human-rights lawyer in Pristina. But the MUP doesn’t pay attention to human rights. I was tired of filing petitions, tired of losing young men in places I could never again find them. I’m a commander here because I’m educated. I’ve never killed a man. But I think I can now. I will.”
“I hear you have mercenaries from the West training some of your fighters. I’ve seen some Chevy Suburbans with the tinted glass roaming around up here. We know who drives those.”
The Leopard purses his lips, his mustache falling like a curtain.
“When were you last attacked here?”
“A few days ago, the MUP came. We fought only a few hours and retreated to the hills.”
“This is not your headquarters?”
“No, this is the lowest territory we hold. Our strong places are in the mountains.”
“How many men have you lost?”
The Leopard does not respond. “How many fighters do you have?”
Silence.
“Who’s your top commander?”
Nothing.
“Any talks with the MUP or negotiations going on?”
“No.”
“Do we really need a press pass to go into the mountains?” says Brian.
The Leopard laughs.
“So, you’ve run into our office of registration. That’s Mr. Hani. A civil servant in another life. A meticulous man. You probably don’t need a press pass, but why not humor him. It would be better to have it than not. You can stay the night here. If the MUP come, though, you’re on your own.” The Leopard stands, smoothes his mustache.
“Do you all have animal noms de guerre?” I say.
He laughs again. “Yes, we have many Lions and Leopards and Panthers. Not many Elephants or Ducks. We do have a Salamander.”
“I’d like to meet him.” Brian flashes a half-smirk, one of a dozen or so facial variations in his interview repertoire.
The Leopard disappears out the door with his sentries.
“I was serious,” Brian says to Alija. “I want to meet the Salamander. He’s got to be original. I bet he’s the best fucking interview up here.”
“You know, you ought to curb the fuck. These guys are Muslims.”
“They have a song now,” he says, looking to me. “Have you heard it? Some guerrilla’s daughter recorded it in Tirana. A real heartstring tugger. Heavy percussion, rising chorus, lots of references to blood and land and bravery A freedom song, man. It’s officially here, Jay, a ditty for a war coming to a theater near you.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not. I told you we’re going down the rabbit hole.”
“You think the mujahideen is coming? That would raise the level of play.”
“They’re here, man. We just can’t see ‘em.”
“I don’t think these guys will buy the muj.”
“We’ll see.”
Brian and I have reached that journalistic juncture between competition and camaraderie. I don’t think he knows about the dateman, but I hadn’t seen the Chevy Suburbans or heard that crazy song he’s talking about. Suburbans mean the spooks are here, not Rolo’s tribe but most likely State Department ops accompanying a diplomatic envoy. Washington’s trying to contain this thing. They’re reaching out to the guerrillas. Washington wants the MUP gone, but the guerrillas, as I am witnessing, are an unknown quantity, driven by what and run by whom?
I’d rather be on my own with this. But Brian’s a good man, and he’s here and it’s safer traveling in twos. Which means I have to share the dateman. That prospect is not bothering me like it would have fifteen years ago. Then, I would have wanted the exclusive. But we change, don’t we? You want to scoop some guy at city hall or in Washington, that’s fine. But here the land explodes, houses burn, women are sliced and raped, dirt paths vanish into thickets, roadblocks appear like gangster lemonade stands armed with drunken MUP or jittery guerrillas. You can get lost in this, get lost and never get out. No story. No exclusive. You end up a cautionary tale around the hack bar at night; you become that moment of silence, a scribe briefly remembered between sips of whiskey and speculation about who is going to bed whom in the hours after deadline. I scraped one colleague off a road years ago somewhere in the sub-Sahara. I slipped him into my trunk and drove him seventy miles to an airfield with a dirt runway and paid a diamond/arms smuggler five hundred dollars to fly me and the body to some sliver of civilization, where I found a consulate and two guys brought a rubber bag with a zipper and I signed some forms, went back to the diamond/arms smuggler, paid another five hundred dollars to fly back into the jungle, and before dusk filed a story about a massacre of refugees. The story landed on page A-10, behind a piece on the dangers of cosmetic surgery and some badly written tale about cod fishing. These days I wince when I hear an editor or some media bean counter talk about commitment to journalism. It did exist once, beautiful, untrammeled. But now that commitment begins only after the shareholders get their 21 percent and incompetent CEOs wheedle the legalese of golden parachutes. Let ‘em have it. All I want is the quiet, lingering mystery in the stories of the day.
“Hey, Alija. What do you think about Brian traveling with us?”
“We’ll never get sleep. That guy’s always on. And he borrows stuff.”
“Yeah, but it might be safer with an extra body. It won’t be constant. It’ll be off and on. He’ll peel away and do his own stuff sometimes.”
“He doesn’t even have a translator.”
“That’s where you come in.”
“Oooh, a verbal threesome. How perverse.”
“It’s your call.”
“Fine. I just want to find my brother, Jay. We’ll get your stories. We’ll get the dateman, but I have to keep looking for my brother.”
So we are three, all imbued with and moved by different rhythms. We eat bread and cheese and listen to the rattle and packing of young fighters preparing to leave camp. The Leopard summons us at night. He has four men with him, and he leads us out of the village and onto an ascending path. Clouds are ghosting the moon, and the breeze chills the sweat on my brow as we cres
t a ridge and walk the midsection of a mountain. No one speaks; we are a discordant chorus of breaths, and sometimes a kicked rock clatters and our breathing stops as the Leopard holds up his hand and listens. I think about mines and tracer fire, whores and cathedrals. The Leopard leads us down. We trace a stream, and the land softens.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” says Brian.
“Quiet, man.”
“Shit, Jay, I hated the Boy Scouts.”
Brian laughs. Hating something only makes him happier. The Leopard stops us before a clearing. He hands me binoculars. They are night-vision, not the toy of your everyday rebel A MUP checkpoint lies two hundred meters south. Two armored personnel carriers and about twenty soldiers, their cigarette embers moving like lazy fireflies.
“We’re going to attack” says the Leopard.
“What?”
“Not us. Our men over there. We watch from here.”
“What time is it, Jay?”
“Two a.m.”
“Shit, we’re going to miss deadline.”
“Quiet,” says Alija.
A click and a whoosh. Two mortars explode near the checkpoint. Kalashnikovs flash as the guerrillas advance, a team from the north and another from the east. A rocket-propelled grenade whistles and strikes one of the armored personnel carriers, exploding like a flower blooming against velvet. The MUP scatter. The other APC snaps to life, its headlights cutting out over the fields, Illuminating haystacks. Radios crackle. The MUP return fire with a .50-caliber machine gun humming from a trench. Dogs howl, and the MUP are yelling and cursing and suddenly the crazy bullet barrage stops and the guerrillas recede like a wave, falling back into the darkness as smoke obscures the checkpoint and a thread of fire burning leaking APC fuel squiggles down the dirt road. The MUP chase the guerrillas heading east but can’t cut them off before the guerrillas vanish into the forest cover. The MUP don’t want to go there, and they spin and head back to the checkpoint. We ran along the stream and climb, skirting the mountain ridge, silhouetted in the blue-gray light of the moon. It starts to drizzle, and the land gets slippery Alija nearly tumbles and the Leopard grabs her arm, hurrying her around the bend and into rebel territory, where he and his men smile at their victory. The Leopard speaks Into his radio. Five dead MUP, three dead guerrillas, one battered APC. We return to the village. The Leopard disappears.
“That was beautiful,” says Alija.
“A pinprick,” says Brian.
“You don’t get it. My people never had the will to do this before. We kept choking on peaceful resistance — Gandhi translated into our tongue. But the words might as well have been spoken underwater. Nothing happened. Tonight I saw MUP scared. I’ve never seen that before. Do you understand what that’s like?”
“Okay,” says Brian. “But you know what will happen next. Tomorrow, or the next day, the MUP will retaliate and burn a village. Until the Leopard and his crew can hold the bottomland and take some cities, raids like tonight’s are illusions.”
“It’s still sweet.”
Brian is right. So is Alija. It’s nearly dawn. Breakfast fires flicker as I close my eyes. The Leopard is another man I need to know better.
Chapter 6
War is a peacock with many feathers. Let us meet some MUP. We leave the Leopard’s village and drive west, past the ambushed MUP checkpoint. The APC smolders in the rain. Bullet casings sparkle like scattered pennies in the dirt. The MUP are busy reestablishing. Uncoiling razor wire and fortifying bunkers, they wave us on without hassle. Advance to Go. A wonderful feeling. Brian’s sleeping in the back, and Alija, as she does whenever we cross into MUP real estate, puts on her mask face, pale and tight as a drum skin. Religion changes the patina of the land; village mosques turn to village churches. Allah versus Saint George slaying the dragon. Koran passages, Orthodox epic poems, and old battlefields blur mind and rainy windshield. Around a bend, then another, past a cemetery to a house by a water mill, where Milan Babic’s family has been grinding wheat into bread for three hundred years. The Jeep crackles over the loose stones in the driveway The house door opens and out comes Milan, a big man in a gray zip-up MUP suit with a 9mm bolstered at his side and a bowie knife slipped into his boot. Green eyes dipped in hazel, Milan could love you or kill you, depending on the instant.
“How are you, Jay? I haven’t seen you in months, at least.”
“I took some time off.”
“Let’s have coffee. You must be tired of drinking Muslim tea.”
I step toward him, my hand lost in his big one, his arm heavy on my shoulder.
“Smoke?”
“Quit.”
“Jesus, Jay. Don’t get American on me. Believe me, before this is all over, you’ll be smoking again.”
I let Brian sleep in the Jeep. Alija keeps her mask on and stays there too. Milan and I walk into the water mill. Stone walls and mud held together for centuries. Drying peppers hang from wooden beams near a painting of Prince Lazar, the Serb hero whose legions were destroyed by the Ottoman Turks in the 1300s in a battle not far from here. They call it the Field of Blackbirds. The Serbs have long felt misunderstood; they are Europe’s brooding half-cousin, and their bitterness flows from the graves of Lazar’s army.
Milan’s waterwheel creaks and shimmies. The stone gully that carries the water away has been smoothed by time, like the steps of an Italian church, shiny and worn, the color of butterscotch and ivory. Milan sits at a wooden table with a map and lights a few candles. He pours two coffees and two plum brandies and motions for me to sit. He spreads the map in front of me. Here is land in miniature, the heights of mountains, bent streams, roads, farm fields, cities, village specks, and red circles.
“Those are the guerrilla positions. All in the mountains. They don’t hold them for long. They’re seeds in the wind, Jay. One place then another.”
“You guys aren’t good at mountain fighting.”
“We wait them out. They can have the mountains and the birds. We have the cities and the villages.” He stops, agitated. “I don’t get it. America is supporting Muslims against Christians. This is Europe, man. The Christians and the Americans should stick together, or we’ll all be bending over for the call to prayer.”
It isn’t time to discuss the finer points of how MUP brutality, a decade of repression, and mass graves got us here. There are few places in the world so skilled at historical revision. Whatever happened when it happened is never as it happened. Milan goes on for a while and then quiets. You have to let the Serbs prattle for a bit, travel through the centuries, and then they settle down and you can speak to them of modern things.
“I’ve been fighting eight years. Croatia, Vukovar. Sarajevo. Here. It’s like they keep making new games of war, widening the board, adding a few more pieces and reselling it.”
“Your board’s shrinking, Milan.”
“We’re tap dancing on the edge.”
He walks to the corner and pulls a tarp off an upright piano. He blows off dust and sits on a stool.
“It’s damp in here, but it’s kept a little of its tone.”
His hands lift toward the keys. They hover, not unsure but contemplating, and then a single note shimmers, and then another and a third and then a riffle at the tinkling end of the register, and then he lulls It back to the deep keys, where he holds It like a voice. I have heard him play several times, a jazzman following the resonant, circuitous lines of Art Tatum and Bill Evans, his fingers moving In the broken light and shadow of the millstone. His hands are smooth, almost sanded; they don’t fit the rest of him. His father was a classical pianist when Yugoslavia was still whole. The old man taught Milan jazz from LPs smuggled in from Montenegro. Then he disappeared. The euphemism for a nation: disappear. As if one day he’ll reappear with a stack of records under his arm and new songs to teach his son. War has kept Milan from opening the club he wants, a little place, he says, with cheap drinks and the kind of curtains they had in the 1940s, that thick red material tipped with gold, smoky
tassels. Not here but somewhere else in Europe. He misses a note and unholsters his 9mm and pretends to shoot the piano. He goes back to the orphan note and finds it, holding it longer than he should, then releasing it and backtracking to it and playing around it and going to it again, until the note finally obeys, lingering for a moment and then slipping mute beneath the keys.
“Remember Sarajevo?”
“I was heading out with my artillery unit. You journalists were all over the place.”
“Bees. We’re like bees.”
“Bees on windows. Drink your coffee, Jay.”
Milan was a man-boy in Sarajevo. There were many of them back then. Ripped fatigues and scared, mean faces. Milan shelled the city in six-hour shifts, and toward the end they trained him to be a sniper. He could kill Muslim women and old men at five hundred meters. They thought they were protected, clinging to walls, tiptoeing around corners, creeping like stealthy cats. They were stick people in his scope. Their blood spilled on tram tracks, sidewalks, river-banks, and courtyards. Sarajevo was blood and vegetables and cobblestones, and sometimes the blood made shapes — a tree, a car, a face — the way clouds make shapes in the sky. A sniper’s scope exposes all. You look the fool before a death you don’t see or hear coming. Bullet travels distance, compresses time. You fall. No one runs to help. You are in the sights You are marked. Your groceries and firewood scattered. When the sniper sleeps, your family comes and pulls you quickly away in the darkness, a smear in the moonlight following you home.
When I met him Milan sat alone atop an APC. His unit was preparing to pull back, and Milan was thumbing a tiny notebook, his ledger of death. Each kill recorded: time, date, wind condition, snow or rain. No names. Who were they? They were movements, he said. Twitches in a street, a streak of color at a corner. You’re young, I said. I killed seventy-three people, how can I be young? he answered. He and his unit retreated into the sleet and ice. A year later, I was in a Belgrade psychiatric hospital doing a piece on the trauma of war. An editor-assigned story; I hate it when they think big and abstract. But there was Milan, sitting knotlike in a chair, looking out a window. The drawn boy from Sarajevo had grown beefy and stubble-faced. He held his death ledger. He half remembered me. The doctor said Milan would sometimes stand at the window and pretend he was a sniper again. Other times he would cry. He once tried to jump off the roof. He said he wanted to fly, but the doctor told him he’d left his wings in his room and he should try another day. I visited him a few times. We sat mostly in silence. Men stumbled between piss and shit, reality and glorious invention, shuffling on floors in plastic sandals. One told me his daughter was living on the moon. He sent her there before his village was stormed. “She watches me from her high window in the sky,” he said. “She will come soon. She’ll follow the starlight to me and take me away. There are men here trying to kill me. Special agents. Men with many faces and disguises. They know what I have seen.”
Promised Virgins Page 4
