Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  This is where the story usually stops. But tonight there is more. Alija, her voice flat and steady, turns in her sleeping bag and looks toward me in the darkness. I say nothing. She says, “Jay there is one final thing.” I stay quiet, and Alija skins memory and steps further into that day when she sat branded in her kitchen. I close my eyes and go back with her to the quiet house. She steps off the kitchen table and stands. Blood and milk run down her legs. She almost falls. The table catches her. She’s cold. Blood is dried and streaked on her breasts. Her fingers curl and attempt to straighten. The house is dim, but she knows its turns and angles. She does not look in the mirror. She wants no light, and she washes nothing. She puts on jeans and a shirt in her bedroom. Mother and father. Gone. She looks out the window. Fires flicker from rooftops. A few bodies are scattered in the road. She knows them. Whoever they are, she knows them. The village is small, a family grown from the same distant seed. The village is not on the map. How did the men in bandanas find it? She wants to sleep. Her bed is prickly with glass and burnt things. She walks down the hall. Someone lies on the floor near the front door. She stops and listens to the breathing, a wet wheeze. It is the reluctant boy with the bright bandana. He sleeps next to a bottle of raki, a knife, and a Kalashnikov. Why is he here? To stand guard? Over what? She sees he has carved Saint George slaying the dragon in her father’s wall. Why do Serbs pick this image, as if they are the world’s only chosen, as if they are the purest? He doesn’t stir, this drunken boy. She sits next to him. He lies on his stomach, drooling like a child, his black boots splayed on the floorboards. His hands are thick and white. He is big, but his face is unfinished and pasty like flour and water before the oven. He lacks lines of time and manhood. He will always be a boy. He was inside her. He pushed like the others. They all pushed. How many? Of all the ones, she thinks she will remember him. She has blurred the others, but not this puffy-faced boy. She straddles him and sits on his back. He doesn’t notice. She must be light as a bird’s wing. She is hay and dust. She lifts and descends on his breathing. She thinks of the horse she chased and rode home in storms. She holds the boy’s knife. It is wide and heavy and balanced. He sleeps. She reaches through his hair like a comb and gently pulls his head back. He doesn’t move. She had seen her father do this with sheep. A jab and then quickly across the throat. The boy jerks as if he might awaken, but his eyes stay closed and she holds back his head and blood widens across the floor. She thinks it is red, but the house is dark and she doesn’t know. She doesn’t hate this boy. Hate is not the only reason to kill. He didn’t want to do it, and now he will never do it again. His mother will wail and grieve, but it is better that a boy like this grows no more. Alija releases his head. It slides into the blood; the last breath gurgles like the rattle of a tractor after a long day. She slips off him and lies on her back. She reaches into her pants and between her legs. She wants to pull the last hours out, but she cannot, they are sealed inside her, in those places her mother never told her about and her father demanded she protect. She wipes her hand on the dead boy’s shirt; his bones feel like cable. She rises and walks out the door. She digs beneath the pear tree and lifts a sack of money and silver. She steps out the smashed courtyard door and onto the dirt road. Fires lap the night, but they are diminishing. There is little left to burn. She walks past the mosque. The silver minaret is tilted. She thinks of a crooked candle on a cake, or a tree aslant and alone on a plain. She whispers, “Is anybody here?” No answer. Nothing. She leaves the dirt road and heads over the field toward the forest in the mountain crease. Whoever survived went there. She looks for the horse, but he is gone, and she thinks he must have died years ago.

  “It’s finished, Jay.”

  She reaches out of her sleeping bag and lays an arm across my chest. She moves closer; her breath cuts a warm hole in the night.

  “I understand about the boy.”

  “I wanted you to know. I sleep with you. I feel your skin. You move over me. But I am not ready for anyone to go inside. Maybe never.”

  “Do you think about the boy?”

  “He is with me, but I don’t think about him. He is like the fruit beneath the skin. I took his bandana. I burned it in the forest.”

  “Do your parents know?”

  “I told them everything at the refugee camp. My mother said nothing. She gathered and held me and took me to a doctor. It was okay with her. My father closed me off. To him, I’m what they wrote on my back. I am his blackened daughter. In this culture I don’t exist for him. I also killed a MUP, or at least a boy wearing a MUP’s clothes. My father only talked about such a thing. I remind him that he is mostly a man of words.”

  “Your brother doesn’t know.”

  “I haven’t seen him. How can he know?”

  I don’t tell Alija what the Leopard told me about her brother. She kisses me and turns in her sleeping bag. I listen to her small, rhythmic breaths. She moves again, and I hear nothing. It is not close enough to dawn for me to sleep. Rock. Scissors. Paper. Knife. The boy with the lost bandana is dead. A wind moves up the mountain. It rattles and moans through cracks in the rocks. It whistles on the ridge. I can hear it, faintly. I am a night-noise expert. Sounds are the energy of darkness. I count them like beads on a rosary. The rosary lengthens every night. I will add the dead boy. He is a bead I will keep. I knew an altar boy once. He rode a spider bike with cards in the spokes. He had a crew cut and wore a rosary around his neck. We played football together, and before each practice he’d stop at church and say a prayer, his bike parked near the bell tower, his helmet balanced on one handlebar, his cleats on the other. He was fast and hard to catch, but one time we tackled him and his rosary snapped and the beads scattered through a pile of boys in the dirt. It was dusk. I found the cross and handed it to him. He slipped it in his sock and went back to the huddle. The sky was hard and frozen in shades of color. He took the ball again. He cut up the field the same way. We ran toward him in spastic jagged angles, cleats clicking on the hardening earth, but he swiveled left and darted right and he was gone, and when he crossed the end zone he reached into his sock and lifted the cross to his lips. He was the star of our team, the reticent leader of a bony, fast, hard-hitting bunch of boys with too-big helmets and sliding-down pants. Our coach, an electrician, called him the “power booster.” The coach gave us all electrical names. If you scored a touchdown, you were a “surge.” If you dropped the ball or missed a tackle, you were a “charred fuse.” I played safety and was the last “filament” of our defense. I loved that name, so bright and final. I could hang at the edge of the game, a solitary hunter watching a play unfold and picking my target through the blur of jerseys and the clatter of pads. At the end of practice, we’d drink Gatorade and our coach would draw plays in the dust on his car hood. The moon would brighten in the sky. The blood and dirt on our hands and shins would dry in the autumn air, and the kid with the cross would pass me on his bike riding home, and I’d hear the cards in his spokes long after his red reflector faded.

  Chapter 13

  “Jay. Jay.”

  One of Rolo’s locals whispers at my ear. It’s dark. Alija sleeps. The guy must have slipped in with a thread of wind; his breath smells of tea and lamb, and his face hovers over me like a shadowed float in a parade.

  “Jay, with me come. Rolo wants.”

  I unzip the sleeping bag and follow the man out of the sheep shed into stingy moonlight. We head north about one hundred meters and hustle along a path. The man is silent, deliberate, even more precise in his steps than the Leopard. We veer left, brushing through pines and other trees with names unknown. I slip, and the man grabs me. We don’t break stride. I feel like a boy darting through the mischief of a broken curfew. Nobody sees us, not the guerrillas and not the dateman s strange army camped in the blue-black above us. I like this feeling. I’m a mote floating undetected through a winter forest. This would be an ideal permanent state. We come to a ridge. My guide disappears.

  “You gotta get bette
r boots, Jay, if you re going to play in the reindeer games up here.”

  I can’t see him. The voice comes from behind a rock.

  “Hey, Rolo. What’s up?”

  “What is this, a chance encounter at the corner deli in Charlestown? What do you think is up?” He rises as if he’s walking on the night air across the valley, and then he’s in front of me, taking shape, that balding pate and stubbly moon face, like some cranky kabuki actor.

  “I don’t know, Rolo. That’s why I’m always glad to see you.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “The dateman? No. We’ve been camped in a sheep shed for two days waiting for an audience, but nothing.”

  “One of the plants we had up there was found out. Remember the guy who took the photos I showed you? They chopped the fucker’s head off. They videotaped it and sent a copy to his family. We can’t get close to this guy. He’s impenetrable. His followers are gulping the Kool-Aid, man. By the way, everything I say is off, off the record.”

  “I’ve been getting a lot of that. A bit of nastiness must be coming.”

  “Look out there. What do you see?”

  “Infinity.”

  “Jesus, Jay, you’re supposed to be a halfway-decent reporter. Look again. Use these.”

  “I see two fireflies.”

  “It’s winter, dipshit. Those are cigarettes. MUP cigarettes.”

  “How far?”

  “Maybe three-quarters of a kilometer.”

  “I think I was on this ridge earlier today”

  “You were” he says, then adds: “The MUP are wasting too many villages. Killing too many civilians. The world’s getting pissed. I think NATO’s coming to the party faster than we thought. Plus our President Clinton has to show he can use his balls for more than diddling an intern in the Oval Office. I wouldn’t have screwed her myself. She’s too big in the hips, that girl. I like slender hips, Jay. Big breasts, slender hips. That’s the woman for me.”

  “I thought you were more original, Rolo. Thought you’d go more with the rustic, I-only-wash-my-hair-in-rainwater sort of slightly big-assed woman, with a well riffled-through book of Chaucer and fingers pricked from making some kind of folk art.”

  “Shit, Jay, don’t build me a woman. I’m a pretty basic guy. And if I have to listen to some chick misquote someone, I’d rather it be an ancient Greek, or Jim Morrison, or even Saint Augustine.”

  “How about Goethe? I’ve always liked Goethe.”

  “Nah, I mostly stay away from the Germans.”

  “My desk tells me Washington and Europe are saying there’s still time to slip out of this.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are they going to take out the dateman, too?”

  “That’s the intel debate. Kill him or let him go and track him to larger things, bigger people. We gotta get to the core of this nest. I vote for letting him go and tailing him.”

  “You’re a bush rat without a tie. Who’s listening to you?”

  “They listen; sometimes they do listen. I gotta go. Don’t want to be around here at first light. I just thought since I was in the vicinity. What’s your plan?”

  “I’ve got stories to write. I’ll give the dateman a couple days. If I don’t get an interview, I’ll head back down the mountain and file a bunch of war-is-coming shit.”

  “Coming fast.”

  “Yeah, but it plays like a sequel. Or a bookend. Did you ever notice tea is the drink of choice in places where the shit’s gone bad?”

  “That’s why I love you, Jay. You’re more cynical than me. Nothing’s changed since Troy. The world spins but stays fixed on one point. Annihilation’s our destiny. There’s no valor anymore, though, that’s what gets me. The ancients had valor. Now we just have noise and hate. What crystallizes us as a species? The honor has vanished from the quest, and here we are lapping around in a stew of psychotics peddling their messianic bullshit.”

  “That’s too easy, Rolo.”

  “I know, but I’m pissed and I’m tired and we’re looking at a cloud of big hurt, Jay. It’s coming. I’ve been beating the bushes for years, you know that, but this shit is different. Hey, you know about the dateman’s — Jesus, now you have me calling him the dateman — you know about his camps, right? I hope you at least got that far.”