Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “The machine, man. Everyone knows that.”

  Chapter 9

  We are in the wheat on a cloudy night.

  “Jesus, Jay. What are we doing?”

  “Getting muddy. Shhhhhhhh.”

  The Serbs didn’t want to invite us, but here we are, the guests of Milan the sniper. The guerrillas have grown bold. They burn Serb fields in the night. Milan and thirty other men gather in the dusk at the village barn. They draw in the dirt, assigning patrol routes and handing out guns and flashlights. A few get grenades. One crazy bastard has a scythe. Then they disappear, slipping shadows through the furrows. This land and its divided people know how to be quiet. The guerrillas roll across the countryside in silent waves, and the Serbs, a boisterous lot in a bar, are as swift and mute as water bugs when protecting their land. Whispers coil through the wheat, hand signals flash, and when darkness comes footsteps turn to soft, slow patter. Brian, however, is about as stealthy as a garbage truck.

  “This is like duck season in Michigan.”

  “That’s not your line. I’ve heard it before.”

  “I stole it from a guy at The News!”

  “I know that guy. He’s got this calmness about him. He files great stuff and never misses lunch.”

  “I always miss lunch. I can’t see, Jay. I think it’s going to rain.”

  “Shhhhhhh. Take some notes.”

  Megan and I said good-bye hours ago. She’s on her way to a small clinic in the mountains. Alija is back in the city buying jeans for herself and gumdrops for village kids. I think she sometimes slips them money, too. She doesn’t think I notice but she never gives me the change from the stuff we buy. I’d like to have her here tonight, but no small platoon of angry Serb farmers is going to trust an Albanian translator. We have hired Marko. He has a pallid face and spiky dyed blond hair; he looks like a ghost Serb. He’s from Belgrade. The farmers don’t trust him and they speak to him in terse snippets, partly because they’re jittery in the dark wheat and partly because Marko reminds them of a misbehaving dog. The quotes could be a lot better, but not all days are victories, and, besides, the scene is what makes this story. Brian knows this, too. A lot of hacks don’t understand reinvention. They get set on how they think a story should be. But things change, lands shift, and the day planned in the morning often veers another way. Stories are everywhere, and the best often hide in the unexpected. Do I sound like a sage? I am not. I just know where luck comes from.

  Rain rattles the fields. Brian was right. I tuck my notebook into my jacket. Marko’s spikes are wet and wilted, and although he’d rather be interviewing girls at a dance club, he’s intrigued among these gruff, rustic men. Eight hundred acres. That’s what the farmers will patrol tonight. Their greatgrandfathers guarded the land before them. Blood and seed, blood and seed, through the generations. I feel for them, though. Victims of geography and nationalist politics, they are outnumbered nine to one by the Albanians. All they want is to farm, to break soil and grind wheat in Milan’s water mill and to end each day with a stinging sip of plum brandy. But their government’s “policy” on Albanians brought an uprising that will likely chase them from their land. This may be the Serb farmers’ final harvest. Some will die fighting; others will load the coffins of their ancestors onto hoods of cars and flee in a broken, weepy circus, meandering down the highway with the maps and bones of history. The new owners will burn the fields, scrape away the purified ash, and plant different crops. This is what I’m composing in my head. It’s a bit premature, a little too much analysis; the final harvest may be a touch dramatic. I’ll have to tone it back when I write, but in the end this is what will happen.

  “Jay, you’re wet.”

  “You’re pretty soggy yourself, Milan.”

  “I am a man of the elements.”

  “Anything moving?”

  “No, it’s quiet. The rain helps.”

  Milan’s rifle is slick and shiny. It seems a part of him.

  “My uncle used to say that wind through the wheat made the fields look like the sea.”

  “I could imagine that.”

  “Sometimes, Jay, I get tired of this shit.”

  “You have a lot of enemies.”

  “We made some, inherited others.”

  He hands me the rifle.

  “Lift it and look through the scope.”

  “It’s dark. I won’t see anything.”

  “Just lift it.”

  The scope was like a miniature dripping tunnel.

  “What do you see?”

  “A telephone pole. It’s blurry”

  “But your vision is narrow, right?”

  “Yeah, just tight on the pole.”

  “That’s what I like about it, Jay.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “History brought us here. I know the future will look different, and soon new things will come and years will pass and things will be repeated. All I have is now. Get it? What’s in the scope. The narrow vision of the scope is all I care about. I follow it. It protects me. Protects my family.”

  I lower the rifle and hand it back. We slip under a tree. Milan cups his hand and lights a cigarette. He is unshaven and pale, a small armory of a man with a knife in his boot, a bandolier over his shoulder, a pistol in his back pocket, and his rifle leaning at his side. We listen. I hear the clop of a donkey cart on the distant road. Two farmers walk up to us. They don’t speak. Milan hands them a water bottle, and they recede back to the rim of wheat. Another man arrives minutes later and leans toward Milan’s ear. Milan grabs his rifle. We run for about three hundred meters on the dirt road. Milan and I follow the man into the wheat. I feel swallowed. The mud is thick, and I hear voices. I look for pricks of light in the dark, but there are few. We are out of the wheat, running on another dirt road. Other farmers are running too. Some lumber, others are swift. They are one with the darkness and everything is hard to see, blurs and brief moments of precision and blurs again. The guy with the scythe trips in a curse and a splash in the furrows. Farmers are jostling beside me. Guns are drawn but no one is firing. Quick breaths, quick breaths. Milan runs into a small clearing and stops near a tractor. Rain and sweat. The other men arrive and Kalashnikovs are raised. Someone laughs, and I hear a squish.

  “Goddammit, Ratko.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Idiot.”

  A flashlight clicks on. This man named Ratko sits in the mud with a bottle, drunk and squinting. The other men surround him. Two guys lift him up and guide him away.

  “Carry on, men,” says Ratko, turning his head back toward us. “If you see a guerrilla, by all means shoot.”

  Another laugh. Rifles are lowered. Ratko, I am told, is the village caretaker. He tends the church graveyard and is an expert roofer. A refugee from the earlier Bosnian war, he arrived in the village one day with no money and a bag of tools. He hid his drinking habit for a while, but with a new war coming he is less inclined to secrecy and is often fished out of the wheat. The farmers are pissed but grateful for Ratko’s diversion: a spasm of excitement but no death. They disperse again into the darkness. Brian and Marko wander away with a couple of them. Milan and I head back to the tree. There’s a crack in the clouds, and moonlight makes brief silhouettes of the church and the water mill. The moon quickly vanishes and it’s black again and the men are scattered across the acres and the wheat is heavy with rain and the rain keeps falling and the ink in my notebook runs and disappears and its as if I’ve never been here at all. Milan and I spread out some plastic and sit. He hands me a flask. The taste is sweeter than usual, and Milan tells me he’s experimenting with sugar, heat, and fermentation. He laughs that he’ll become a rich man, a jazz-playing exporter of brandy. Maybe so. War takes men far away from themselves, and maybe Milan does have a jazzman’s or a tycoon’s soul. Who knows? I cannot see him as anything but a sniper, but this is unfair even though that is how he came to me years ago in the mountains outside Sarajevo. He stands and scans the wheat. He doesn’t
want to see a rustle. He doesn’t want a battle in this messy weather. He comes back and sits next to me against the tree. The rain keeps falling, and Milan talks until I don’t hear him anymore. Dawn is a foggy affair. My ass is soaked. Milan is up, smoking in the haze along the edge of the field. The wheat is safe for another day.

  A bearded man in robes with a cross dangling from his chest whisks past, and Milan motions for me to follow. The other farmers are on the road too. I see Brian and Marko. We gather at the church. The holy man slides a key in the door. We step in, wet and muddy beneath mosaics of Saint George slaying the dragon and John the Baptist along the shoals of the Jordan. Bits of mosaic are missing, mildew seeps across the ceiling. Broken stained glass has been replaced by colored cellophane. The altar cloth is frayed and yellowed. The priest lights a candle, and incense wisps amid our foul clothes. He raises his arms and says the night has been good, the men have been brave, and the enemy, fearing God and the right-eous, has been kept away. But the village must not weaken in this vigil, he says. Another night is coming and another night after that. There is no time to be tired. God lifts the spirits of the courageous. The wheat is growing strong, but it is fragile amid the acts of men. God made it so. God made battlefields, and God made children, and one is needed to protect the other. The priest doesn’t conjure parables from the Bible. He speaks in the present as if new plagues and new wars are being writ that will centuries from now be remembered. He is wise. He needs to do this. Man wants to live in an epic. How else would he have the balls to arm himself and walk into the night? The priest raises his gold cross. The saints arch overhead, and we seem a strange communion of souls in this teapot of a church. The men bow their heads for a final blessing. The priest lowers his arms and makes a joke about Ratko. Everybody laughs. Milan and the farmers go home to sleep, except for the man with the scythe, who sweeps mud and water from the church as the fog lifts and the wheat shimmers, like an imagined sea, in the breeze.

  Chapter 10

  “Took you long enough.”

  “Rolo, you get harder to find.”

  “A man on the move, Jay. Hi, Alija.”

  “Hi, Rolo.”

  “Want to dance?”

  “Maybe later.”

  Rolo’s camped in a barn on a ridge. His guides keep watch. His computers and global positioning system bleep on a table. Rolo’s happy and spins around like a little knot of energy. He hands Alija and me some tea and passes a bowl of olives. He unfolds a map and spreads it out on the dirt floor. He kneels his compact body down, and I am going to glimpse a speck of American intelligence. Just a speck. Rolo’s not some Philly girl on a dark couch; he’s not going to give me all his charms in one night.

  “Your man with the beard and the dates is here.”

  “We knew that.”

  “Yeah, but you haven’t seen him. He’s fog and air. There and gone.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Don’t need to see him now. Somebody else saw him for me.”

  Rolo pulls a picture out of his vest and hands it to me. Slightly to left of center, between two guerrillas cleaning their rifles in what looks to be lantern light, there he is, the dateman, his beard hanging gauzelike over his collarbone, a scarf around his head, his nose slender, almost regal, and eyes downcast, reading a book. He wears an old green Army coat that seems too large for his frame, and the yellow lantern light brightens him in a beam of clarity that doesn’t extend to the shadowed, almost out-of-focus men around him.

  “How’d you get this?”

  “Jay, please, you embarrass me.”

  “You have somebody in there, don’t you?”

  “Alija, more sugar?”

  “No thanks, Rolo.”

  “Where was it taken?”

  “Okay, Jay. You can’t use any of this yet. No shit. I’m not kidding around. I’ll let you know when you can use it. But now, just sit on it.”

  “Rolo, as you may have noticed, there’s a lot of journalists rooting around these days.”

  “No one’s going to get to this guy. He’s way deep in the mountains.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “He came from Afghanistan. We don’t exactly know when. He’s the son of some Arab sheik. He’s spent time in the Sudan, and he may have had something to do with the U.S. embassy bombing in Tanzania. He’s a moth. We can’t get a fix on him. He floats in and out of places, but this is the first time he’s been tracked to Europe.”

  “Was he invited?”

  “We don’t know. I would guess not. He brought a lot of money, though. And, yes, he did bring two donkeys loaded with dates. That’s his shtick. He likes the whole Allah aura thing. He’s clever. He knows these guerrillas don’t have it pulled together yet. Poorly trained, underfunded. And then he arrives, sort of a mystic, a soft-spoken warrior, well, more a tactician, with money, maps, and ideas of something big.”

  I point to the picture.

  “Is that the Koran he’s reading?”

  Rolo laughs.

  “No. You know what this is? It’s the goddamn U.S. Special Forces booby-trap and guerrilla war manual printed in 1969 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The bastard stole our stuff.”

  “If you have someone inside who can get a photo of him, why don’t you take him out?”

  “We want to watch this guy. He’s intriguing. I mean, he’s reading our playbook. He’s getting into our head.”

  “You sound smitten.”

  “It’s a challenge. Remember when Achilles fights Hector at Troy.”

  “You know, when you say Achilles with that Boston accent, it’s a weird sound. It’s like the double 1 is getting hung up between your teeth and tongue.”

  “Well, screw you. That’s pretty clear, huh? Alija, why do you hang out with this twerp?”

  “He says he’s rich.”

  “He’s a hack, he’s not rich.”

  “Are you rich, Rolo?”

  “Alija, I have money buried all over. I’d dig it all up for you.”

  Rolo pours more tea.

  “I don’t get why this guy is resonating here. These people aren’t religious. They’re not zealots. They’re farmers and barbers and shop owners and an occasional heroin smuggler. They sip beer on the mosque steps.”

  “True enough. We don’t know how much he’ll impact. Maybe it’s only temporary. Maybe they reject him tomorrow, the next day. Who knows? But somebody’s listening to him. That’s why we’d rather watch him than take him out.”

  “An insect on your pin.”

  “World Trade Center. 1993. Big bombs, well planned. Tanzania. 1998. Very nicely planned. These guys are threading the world with wicked shit. They don’t like us, and it has nothing to do with economic development and the disadvantaged — Middle East youth-frustration bullshit Washington keeps peddling. It’s deeper, man. It’s not like the Cold War and the Soviet Union. Nobody wanted to press the red buttons. But these guys, Jay, these guys are all about red buttons.”

  “A spook who’s spooked.”

  “I’m not kidding. These guys are different. Patient and conniving as all hell.”

  Rolo folds his map and rises from the dirt floor.

  “Want to eat goat?”

  “No, we’d better go. Where you headed next?”

  “Time to go deeper into the mountains. You should start heading that way too. Alija, you have a sleeping bag?”

  “A couple in the Jeep.”

  “There’s a changed world coming, Jay. It’s taking form in little shit holes like this around the planet. It’s a new math.”

  “Right now all that new math is capable of doing is burning Serb wheat fields and misdirecting mortars. The MUP can crush them whenever.”

  Alija snaps me a hard look. She doesn’t like my analysis of the rebels, but she stays quiet.

  “You’re counting trees,” says Rolo. “Look big picture, my friend.”

  “I do love your abstract CIA analogies.”

  “When I’m done sloshing around the woods
and the jungles of this fine earth, I am going to write books. Intrigue novels. Cloak-and-dagger shit. I’ve got so many ideas. I’ll move back to Boston, get a little place along the Charles. I could even crew.”

  “Rolo, you’re a bus driver’s son, man. You’re not a sculler.”

  “Not at first glance.”

  Rolo builds a fire. Alija and I crisscross down the ridge toward the Jeep. The sky is autumn dusk, bright orange-yellow, retreating purple, streaks of sun against a gray template. Each color fused but separate, complementing the other. The land is hard. Ditches are cobwebbed in frost, and there’s a chill in my feet. War will come in winter. Chapped hands and mortar shells, blood in the snow, a land too hard for digging, the last breath, visible, hanging above death like a puff of dandelion. Descending below the cloud line, the terrain unfolds in the varying browns of a female peacock, with flecks of yellow, magenta, and fire rust. This is the muted time. The time of hard starry nights, when nature is through with coddling. A bullet moves cleaner in winter, more precise. Milan told me this, and I believe him.

  Alija’s brother has not been found. Ardian is one of the missing. She asked about him at his university. No one knows. The rumor is he disappeared with a knapsack to join the fighters in the mountains. Where is that young man I have never met? Mass graves are lined with what we need to know but what we cannot fathom. The only solace is that a body is not alone. It is tangled, threaded, meshed with others, a limbo of unfortunates lingering a shovel scrape below the earth. Mass graves are seldom neat; the land doesn’t accept them. But perhaps they are better than a lone body in a forest, a body with stiff upright arms, frozen in reaching for what was never attained. The face the color of flour, eyes open, mouth aslant. That dumbfounded look of a bullet to the chest. So many ways to end: slit, burned, vanished. Alija plays the scenarios one by one. She works with me to find her brother. She gives me words from the mouths of others, and I am the gas and wheels of her journey. It’s a fair trade.

  “Jay, it’s okay that I gave Rolo the picture of my brother, right?”