“I like this part of the world better. It’s more honest. You don’t get shit like, ‘We thinned enemy positions and advanced to sector nine achieving our stated goal and further positioning ourselves for victory’ Not with these guys. You get, ‘We blew ‘em away, burned their village, and raped their grandmothers.’”
“Write. Batteries are running.”
We slip into our own worlds. Every writer, even a hack, is master of his page. Moving scenery and people, stoking narrative like you make a fire, stick by stick. Sometimes it’s a wheezing, smoky fire; others times it burns incandescent. That’s what you’re after. Vijay opens the back door and slides in next to Brian. He’s got a runny nose and a pen. He starts scrawling.
“Isn’t this great? Here we are, three journalists scribbling our dispatches together.”
“What are you writing, Vijay?”
“Jottings for a daily journal I run in the paper. Page two with my picture. I’ll have one of these men scurry it over to my office later.”
“We’re using a sat phone.”
“Brian, you look so earnest. A diligent schoolboy peering into his computer.”
“Quiet, man. I’m past the nut. It’s flowing now.”
“Brian’s writing a scene setter.”
“That takes thought.”
“What kind of trees are these?” says Brian.
“I don’t know. There’s some pine.”
“I can figure out the pine. I’m talking about the other ones.”
“I don’t know. Birch?”
“See, that’s what I hate. Journalists should have to take a course in botany. Look how many times you’re outside and trying to evoke landscape and you have to settle for the generic trees because you don’t know what they’re called. I hate that. I hate not knowing the name of the tree I’m looking at.”
“Perhaps you could get a little tree almanac or something to carry with you,” says Vijay.
“Don’t jerk my chain.”
“No, I’m in agreement with you, Brian. Really. We know what kinds of weapons we’re looking at. Kalashnikovs. RPGs. Et cetera, et cetera. Why shouldn’t we know the trees?”
“Good point.”
“And, of course, we’ll want to know the kinds of rocks we’re looking at, too.”
“I don’t give a shit about rocks.”
The Leopard knocks on my window. I get out, and the two of us walk toward the camp below. Young crimson faces float amid faces of gray-threaded eyebrows and arching wrinkles that mark the distance between son and father. Most of these guys have no boots or fatigues. They seem to have dropped their hoes and scythes and meandered into the woods, hoping someone would gather them into an army. When we arrived last night, they appeared as an ominous, almost infinite band stretching through the darkness. The new day has revealed they are not. There are a few commanders. Discipline is lax, and there is no sustained regime of order. They have plenty of Kalashnikovs. But how many bullets? They have RPGs. But how many rounds? A few old men sit in a circle and draw battle plans in the snow with their canes. The Leopard leads me along the southern rim of the camp. There’s a brief shit and piss stink, and we pass through scents of metal and cigarettes and then tea and then, I think, the hint of rubbing alcohol and Mercurochrome, and then damp blankets and fresh-cut wood. But no death. There is no scent of death. Winter stanches the death odor. I ask the Leopard where the dead are. He doesn’t answer. We wrestle through brush and onto a path that widens and bends toward a ridge. The sun warms me, and again I feel good. The Leopard moves in quick, precise strides; the snow off his boots sparkles in the sun. His holster jostles. We reach an outcropping. He unzips his coat and hands me binoculars. We take a few steps toward the ridge’s edge and then crawl on our bellies and peer through the cracks in the rocks.
“See them?”
“Where?”
“Forty-five degrees to your left, across the ravine in that snow and brown.”
“I see. How far?”
“About two kilometers.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. They started setting up a week ago.”
“Is that a tank?”
“Two tanks and some heavy artillery. We sent a team to scout it. It’s guarded too well. We can outflank this one, but if they take more positions like this, it will be difficult. We’ll start digging a trench here today and station fifty fighters so we don’t get surprised.”
We crawl back from the ridge and rest against a fallen tree.
“I know where Alija’s brother is.”
He tucks the binoculars beneath his coat. He looks at me with his hard Leopard eyes that until today possessed no trace of worry or doubt.
“Is he alive?”
“What I tell you now you can’t write.”
“Don’t do this to me.”
“Do we have a deal?”
“How can I make a deal if I don’t know what the information is?”
“A deal or not?”
“Will I ever be able to write about it?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Sooner than we probably both think.”
“Does anyone else know what you’re going to tell me?”
“Only our leadership and a few others. If you’re really asking do any other journalists know, the answer is no.”
“Deal.”
“There are two wars going on over this land. Us against the MUP and us against ourselves. Both are dangerous, but I am more bothered by the second. The man you speak of is dividing us. He came into our midst as if after a fog had burned away. That’s how some of our men describe his coming. He brought money and offered help. He stayed to himself for a while. He set up a small camp with his own men. They are much more disciplined than we are. They traveled light and crossed the border on foot. Soon two hundred of them had arrived. They came from Chechnya. Sudan. Saudi Arabia. Some even came from Berlin and Brussels. It’s as if they had been roused from sleep and told it was time to follow the intended path. I can’t explain it. Supplies started coming. Weapons. Night-vision goggles. Manuals on strategy and making booby-trap bombs. Then came the religion. He spoke of the Koran the way few here have ever heard. We’re not devout Muslims, we’re European Muslims. There was no fire in his speech, but his words were pure, and I have to say, although I hate to admit it, intoxicating. I thought we’d find him an enchanting novelty, show him respect and then run him out. The MUP want to paint us as fanatics. What better way for our plight to lose sympathy in the West? But a lot of our men, and, unfortunately, some of our leaders, now support this man. They think he is the only way we can win.”
“Why aren’t you convinced?”
“He wants to turn our struggle into something larger. But it’s not larger. These men just want to farm in peace. I want to practice law in peace. I don’t want a bigger purpose. I am not interested in redesigning the world.”
“Sounds like he reached in and — “
“He’s clever.”
“What’s his name?”
“They call him only Abu Musab.”
“When did he get here?”
“Six months ago.”
“Where’s he from?”
“Nobody knows. Most say Afghanistan. He says he’s a follower of somebody greater.”
“A new prophet for Allah?”
“I thought so too, but it’s not quite that fanatical. He speaks of another man. He says this man has salvation for all oppressed Muslims. He says this man is a rich man who has forsaken his riches to fight the infidel. He says wars against the unbelievers will rise like blisters across the Earth.”
“Blisters across the Earth. Poetic in a purple kind of way.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
The Leopard’s sentences are as precise as his footsteps. He had practiced what he was going to tell me. He needs to convince me. Language is a weapon. Nuance. Syllables. They must accumulate in quick or in languid strokes.
The lawyer in him knows this. But the Leopard is making his case in a foreign tongue; a misplaced word muddles meaning and opens unintended paths. He is careful, and he tires as he speaks.
“Where’s Alija’s brother?”
“In a special place.”
The Leopard says the dateman’s camp is sequestered from the rebels in a mountain fold above us. His followers built stone and wooden houses and a mosque with no dome or minaret. They dug deep bunkers for weapons. The Leopard says these men are accustomed to the meager and the crude. Women are not allowed. Before arriving at the camp, wrappers are ripped off bars of Lux soap so men will not be tempted by the bare-shouldered model with the uncovered hair. The camp is parsed into divisions. Some of the men form an “intelligence brigade” that fans out on recon patrols and draws battlefield maps of MUP movements. Others belong to the “pious and purity brigade,” ensuring the strictest interpretation of the Koran. There are the “military brigade” and the “cooking brigade” and the “instructional brigade” and the “financial brigade” and the “punishment for religious violators brigade.” Everything and everyone is placed under a heading and then a subheading.
Under the heading of “intelligence brigade” is the elite unit known as the “holy warriors recruitment brigade.” The Leopard cautiously chooses elite as if he has not seen this brigade but discerns its existence through musings that have slipped below the cloud line and become fact among the guerrillas. This bothers the Leopard. A man of documents and a collector of evidence in his earlier life as a human-rights lawyer, the Leopard despises the flutter of conjecture. “The MUP,” says the Leopard, “are so one-dimensional and easy to hate, why must our revolution turn into something complex?”
It’s ingenious, really. The way revolution is produced. You take a charismatic figure like the dateman — I’m guessing he’s charismatic; so far I’ve seen only his picture and, therefore, cannot attest to his charisma — and you create an aura. If he has money, the aura grows. If he has money, an apocalyptic streak, and, most importantly, patience, he exceeds his own mortality. Followers multiply, and mystique hardens, and suddenly, like the Serb farmers listening to the priest in Milan’s church, men believe they are battlers in the world’s final struggle. How wonderfully egotistical. I am editorializing, and because I have agreed to not yet write what the Leopard is telling me, I am allowed this indulgence as I sit against a fallen tree, my ass wet and frozen in the winter half-light.
“The men in the holy warriors recruitment brigade are all Arabs,” continues the Leopard. “They shaved their beards and split into small teams, two or three each, and went to the cities looking for impressionable boys and students. I think these recruiters must be like salesmen. They read human character. It’s not easy.”
“They found Alija’s brother?”
“Yes, they found Ardian studying in the university library.”
“And?”
“He is here now, in a special camp up there for suicide bombers.”
“You haven’t used suicide bombers.”
“They’re not indoctrinated. It takes time. A young man may say he’s willing. He sees his family disgraced. He sees his land occupied. He sees he’s studying for a career that doesn’t exist for him. In the eyes of his father, he sees that one day his masculinity will be taken, too. This is enough to get him thinking about striking the enemy. But how do you get him to wear the dynamite? How do you get his thumb to press the red trigger?”
“The Palestinians give their bombers religion, respect, money for their families, and the glory of martyrdom.”
“This man is promising that and more. His holy war comes with seventy-two virgins awaiting each martyr in paradise. He offers in another world what is forbidden in this one. His gives them sanctity and sex, the cost being their lives.”
“Paradise for me would be forty virgins and thirty-two experienced women. Virgins can be tedious all by themselves.”
The Leopard smiles.
“How many of these impressionable young men are there?”
“Dozens, I think. The plan is to explode them in Pristina, Belgrade, and other Serb cities.”
“You’d lose Western support.”
“This man and his followers want conflict with the West. It suits them.”
“It destroys you, though. You want me to write about this, don’t you?”
“Not now, Jay.”
“It’s got to be soon. Otherwise, what’s the point? The information becomes useless once the first son of a bitch blows up. Can you get me to the dateman?”
“The request is in.”
“What about Alija?”
“Don’t tell her anything yet. I’m trying to get her brother out. No use worrying her until I know if it’s possible or not.”
Order is a crazy man’s lethal proficiency. The dateman has instilled order on an unruly mountain. The Leopard despises him, but he admires the dateman’s rigidity of spirit, something his own guerrillas have yet to attain. Its not about commitment. The guerrillas have that. They will fight. They will be killed. But they are like chalk soaked in dye; the colors penetrate only so deep. The Leopards men seek comforts. Many of them sneak down the mountain to sleep with their wives and watch TV at night. The dateman’s followers crave the hard and the austere. “They seek no earthly future either, I think,” says the Leopard. “They are like fuel to be burnt. Joyously burnt. How do you defeat a man who believes he’s doing the work of the divine, who believes women wait for him in paradise? How do you kill the vision of a man who has so twisted the Koran?”
“Men have been killing in the name of the divine forever,” I say. “It’s not unusual.”
“This is Europe a breath away from the twenty-first century, Jay.”
The Leopard turns for another glimpse through his binoculars at the MUP across the ravine. I remember the first time I heard the peace and musical lyricism in the Koran. It was years ago. I was on a crowded train bound for downtown Cairo. A man rushed in and the doors closed behind him. He slid between passengers and found a place. He opened his Koran, the gold lettering on the cover faded, the pages worn. He recited verse. He was a slight man in an open-collar shirt. He seemed a government clerk or someone like that, a man who worked for low wages but kept an air of respectability with a tie and pressed trousers. His timbre soothed. It set the train’s clatter to the rhythm of prayer. The door opened, feet shuffled, a hiss, the creak of metal, and then the doors closed again as the train sped past alleys, crumbling walls, and laundry blowing on rooftops. The man prayed through nine stops. He did not call attention to himself, but his cadences beckoned like whispers in a dream. Passengers around him closed their eyes; in a city of sixteen million they had found repose in a stranger’s voice. The desert air was not so hot. The press of flesh and sweat were bearable. All life’s annoyances, muffled. The train dipped into a tunnel and the man’s voice limned the dark, the prayers not ceasing until the doors opened and he shut his Koran and hurried out with the others toward the stairways to the clamor and the light.
Chapter 12
Clouds race across the half-moon; the sky is ice and aluminum. Brian sleeps in the Jeep. Vijay has wandered off to find a warm place and some old friends amid the guerrillas. The sheep shed is quiet. Alija and I lie side by side in our sleeping bags. Our winter breaths mix with needles of moonlight and floating dust. The mountainside is still. Men with guns slumber and battle plans are crumpled in rucksacks. Tree branches snap like waking spirits. Alija is in silhouette. Then she curls toward me and the words come. I knew they would. “Jay, let me tell you my story.” It’s my strange, unfinished bedtime secret. Alija, as she likes to do, sets up her vantage points. The story has angles and perspectives. Alija gathers them as if she is measuring and snipping embroidery thread. The story starts with the sound of distant shelling. The echoes grow and shiver like wind across a field. Within minutes, shells are falling in the village. Stone and mud fly. Windows shatter. A cow explodes. (That mental image
always stops me for a second.) Patches of fire rise in the dirt streets. Walls collapse. Villagers run. But where? Where is safe? The shelling stops, and the sky is coiled with gray-white smoke. APCs whine in from all directions and set a perimeter with their big guns. The perimeter tightens. Small-arms fire rattles. A helicopter circles. Alija and her parents hide behind their courtyard wall. They hear jeeps and doors opening and footsteps that are quicker and heavier than those of villagers. A woman screams. Two pops from a semi-automatic and she is quiet. Alija peeks through a hole in the wall. Images flit across her narrow view. She fits them like pieces into something whole. She strains to see a little to the left, a little to the right. Then she spots what others in other villages have seen; she had thought it was myth, something invented by the MUP to keep order. Men in black jumpsuits with colored bandanas tied on their arms run through smoke and fire, pulling old women and men from houses and lining them up in the streets. An old man rushes to escape. The men in jumpsuits laugh, count to ten, and chase him. They tackle him and lift back his head. A bowie knife flashes. These bandana men exist, kept in boxes until they are summoned and wound up and released like those muscular toys she had once seen on TV, those toys with snap-on parts and square-jaw faces. How can this be? One of them stops in front of Alija’s peephole. His back is to her. It is a broad back, breathing hard. The neck is white and newly shaven and smells of a cologne not sold in the village store. Alija’s father lifts a pistol from his blazer. Her mother tells the man to put it away. One gun is not enough. The gun drops in the dirt. All his life he has said he wanted to fight, but he never did and now the time is gone and Alija remembers this so clearly. This is another of her vantage points. She shifts to her father’s callused hands and creased face. The pride he took in his blazer; all his promises and strong talk. But what can old men do, really, what can they do except build fires and brush dust from their blazers? She shifts back to her vantage point. The footsteps come closer. They are next door. Alija and her mother glance to the pear tree in the yard. The fruit is small and hard; the money and silver safely buried. Alija’s mother takes her hand. She gathers her daughter. She kisses her head and moves her palm down Alija’s face and the long hair she had washed in the sink a few hours before. The courtyard door shatters. Two men burst in, their boots keenly polished. Others follow. Alija’s father is kicked and punched. A knife is raised to his face, and he is led away. He says nothing. Alija steps in front of her mother. She feels something hard and quick on her face and then another just like it. Her ears go warm inside. She hears nothing. Her legs give, and she falls along the courtyard wall. It is a slow fall, and she counts — or at least it seems she did — sprigs of grass growing amid mud and mortar. She is flat on the earth, black boots moving around her eyes. Another blow strikes. Her mind dims for a moment and then is filled with that long-ago summer dusk when she chased the family’s horse across the pasture in a lightning storm. That horse, so fast and scared, trying to run from the sky. How can you run from the sky? Alija remembers this. She was a child. She remembers that horses are beautiful and stupid. When she awakens, she senses she is in her house. She hears boots crunching over broken things. She feels cold. Her clothes are gone. Blood tangs her lips. Her eyes are open, but they don’t see much. Everything is squished, like peering through a letterbox or through the plastic they cover windows with in winter. She reaches up to feel her eyes. Her cheeks are thick and soft and sore. She lifts her head. She sees she lies on her kitchen table. A man is between her legs, one of those toy men with the bandanas. His bandana is yellow. There is something inside her. Something she has never felt, like digging in a hollow place she didn’t know she had. It hurts. Everything hurts and doesn’t hurt. Everything is fast and everything is slow. The mosaic, or picture of the scene around her, is scattered. The digging stops. Another face, another yellow bandana, appears between her legs. The digging starts again, but this time in a different place. There have never been so many men in her kitchen before, not even when the village elders came for tea. Something is different. It is not her kitchen anymore. The pitcher is not there; the vase is shattered; spice tins litter the floor; the curtains are ripped; the refrigerator is open, things are dripping; the teacups are cracked and sharp; the sugar is scattered, and there is no fire in the stove; if this was her kitchen there would be a fire in the stove. Yet it looks like her kitchen. A picture of her father’s father hangs on the wall. Her mother’s scarf drapes from the chair in the corner. It must be her kitchen. She tries to sit up, but that same hard and quick thing knocks her down. There’s the horse again. So stupid, running from the sky. Horses don’t know that lightning is God’s magic. Her mother told her that, and she will tell the horse if she ever catches him. He is pretty on the horizon, that horse. He gallops, shakes his head, his tail flowing through the rain. Something cool is poured over her face. The horse disappears. There’s another bandana between her legs. Men are laughing, and it seems like a party. Another one stands over her. He is a big, blocky boy, his face too young for stubble. The other men push him toward her. She smells that cologne again, the one not sold in her village. Sweet apples and musk. He kisses her. It hurts. He presses harder and steps back, her blood on his cheek. He stands between her legs. He is frightened. He doesn’t want to do what the others have done. She watches him through swollen eyes. She creates a biography for him. He has a girlfriend at home. His mother taught him things. Serbs can be raised well too, she thinks. He is the new one among these men. His bandana has more sheen, the color is more vibrant, like a flower in the field. He is awkward at being rough; a sting of tenderness hides in his kiss. He conceals it from the others. This is what she thinks. Maybe he will not push into her. But this is not so. He is a boy surrounded by men demanding things. Her legs are sore. There is no sensation in the places the strangers have entered, just cool stickiness, like honey in autumn. She thinks part of her body must be hiding, and she is embarrassed that her grandfather’s eyes are looking down on her. She never knew him, really. He died when she was young. He left behind stories, two pistols, a box of bullets, and a photograph. All men leave such things. Why is this? On what walls do women hang? She sees a tear in the boy’s eye. His face reddens. His bandana sways. He has become one of the others. He pushes harder and harder, and she turns, and through the broken window she sees the horse in the field. He is old. When did he get so old and wobbly? His hooves loose and splintered, his mane knotted with burrs. He looks at her on the table. What’s he thinking? Silly girl, when the sky throws fire, you must run. I ran all those years. You chased me through storms and laughed. But fire never touched me, not when the pasture was green and not when it was fallow. The sky is full of tricks. You must know this. The horse lifts his head and clops away. Alija is turned over on the table. Two men stretch out her arms, another straddles her back. She hears something slide out of leather. Something sharp and slow moves across her shoulder blade. She screams. Her mother’s scarf is stuffed into her mouth. It smells of flour and lavender. Laughter rises and fades and then nothing; all is quiet, the black boots and bandanas gone. Alija lies on the table, awake, in a sliver between dream masks and life. The dusk is cool. Gunpowder wisps the air. She sits up and looks out the broken window. The fields glow the way they do in the final minutes of the day. Blackbirds have gathered in the trees along the stream. Their cawing, a petulant choir since her childhood, will soon quiet and they will blend with the night, gliding invisibly beneath the stars, and like snipers they will seek the unlucky and the slow beneath them. The shepherds should be returning home. Maybe they are lost. Where are the shepherds? She reaches back to feel her shoulder. It is bloody and her fingers bump on raised ridges. She traces them, deciphers nothing. She will discover later that her skin, like paper, has been written upon, and the word is whore. It is not in Serb but in English, as if the writer had wanted his crude and crooked tattoo to resonate beyond the shrinking geography of his native tongue.
Promised Virgins Page 12
