“The cleanliness brigade, the suicide bomber platoon, and all the other Byzantine layers of jihad.”
“It’s like some sinister place in the Catskills where the strange neighborhood kids go for summer. Kind of bare bones, though. Our satellite images don’t show anything major. The guy’s still building. Alright, Jay, I’m off. See you in the dust storm.”
Rolo jumps over a rock and disappears. His guy with the tea-and-lamb breath leads me back down the path, and then he’s gone. I find my way to the sheep shed. A slice of orange muted with slate gray burns far off in the sky. Alija is curled and quiet. I slip into my sleeping bag. I hear footsteps and coughs. The circled stones are cold, but fires will soon burn and water will boil and kettles will blacken. I close my eyes and drift, following cigar smoke and clipped voices to an anteroom. Guys in nice suits with pretty ties. Plum brandy and manicures and some kind of pate, goose, I suspect. I should have been a diplomatic correspondent. Then I could have waited for war in a hotel or a palace, talked to (diplomatic hacks say “chatted up”) officials amid paintings of fox hunts and dead ladies and lords of the manor. I could have been part of the traveling glitter of cuff links, briefcases, secret pouches, varied but refined elocution, and self-generating gravitas. They’re ruminating now, a chatter of diplomats and envoys, and, in a high-back chair with golden brocade, President Slobodan Milosevic, with his spoiled-boy’s scowl, sits and listens to threats and niceties dreamed up by generals and presidents who are thinking, privately, of course, how crazy is this son of a bitch and how can we buy him off before he starts another mess? They are looking for what they call the “climb down.” And Milosevic is thinking, “Ah, look at this parade of messengers from Europe and Washington, flying through the night fog to talk to me, unrolling blueprints for war, drinking my brandy, and then scurrying away like beetles to make their phone calls.”
Milosevic likes the pitch of night, eating grilled meat and caviar, throwing little tantrums mixed with the timorous Serb persecution complex and dark Balkan frivolity. He’s a nut case with a long cigar. He wanders underground bunkers, accepts money in paper bags. His wife’s nuttier than he is. Together, the silver-haired former banker — who, by the way, often seems as if his shoes are too tight or he’s suppressing a bout of gas — and his paunchy black witch of a wife with her hummingbird alto preside over a broken toy set of a country. What must it be like to be insanity buttoned in a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit? I can hear the faint thrum now. The ticktock begins. The ticktock is what editors call the big-picture piece. How did we get from point A to point B to point C? It is a shifting narrative to recap what happened. Many will contribute. There will be a file from the Milosevic negotiations, a file from me in the mountains, a file from Washington, a file from some capital in Europe, a file from a village about some poor bastard refugee family. All these will be compressed by somebody on the rewrite desk into one hell of a long story. Probably to run on the Sunday after the calamity begins. I can tell you how it’s going to read now; it’s so predictable. Except for the dateman. He may add, and I mean this only in a narrative-storytelling-device sense, a refreshing twist. But when it’s all over and the peace treaties are signed and the vanquished scurry, what will become of Alija’s tale? It will be lost like thousands of others. You can publish only so many stories. The rest are carried and endured and handed down through families until they become a few sentences from another time, or maybe only a single word, like the one carved into Alija’s back.
I turn in my sleeping bag. Bits of light gray fill the sheep shed. A map unfolds somewhere, a finger traces. I will have one more drift between waking and sleep before daylight. I wish there was a sandpaper soft enough to rub away the raised word on Alija’s skin. In slow circular motions, and blowing away letters made of scar tissue, I could make her pure again. Give her an unblemished canvas to carry into the world. Can you do that, though? Can you take away a stain left by another? I think of that long-ago football field between the school and the creek, the worn grass and the faded chalk lines and the smell of white tape and rubbing alcohol. I see that quick kid with the new cleats and the rosary and wonder if he ever got slow, if he ever broke a leg or wrecked a knee, if he ever had as much fun as those days when he was the most gifted among us.
“Jay”
“What?”
“Why are we never in the place where earth and heaven meet?”
“It’s too early for this kind of shit, Vijay. Where’s Brian?”
“Writing more atmospherics in the Jeep. I noticed you disappeared the other day with the Leopard. Where did you go?”
“For a walk.”
“And you saw things. You heard things.”
“Get to the point.”
“Alija’s brother.”
“I know.”
“Have you told the poor girl?”
“No.”
“What a world, Jay, where young men strap on dynamite and ball bearings.”
“You disagree.”
“I abhor it. But it may have its place.”
“I’m surprised at you. Doesn’t sound like the talk of a man on his way to a fellowship at the JFK School of Government at Harvard.”
“We are desperate. Imagine the fear one of those exploding men would create in this part of the world. The Middle East, Israel, okay But here in Europe, what a nefarious novelty. Of course, the IRA and others have been blowing up things for decades. But, Jay, that’s different. These men up in that camp have gunpowder and combustible religion. What could be more lethal? What could be more dangerous and exotic?”
“The West cuts you off at the knees.”
“Not necessarily. A few explosions and the West pays attention. Understands the tenacity of our cause.”
“No. The West would see you as co-opted by lunatics and zealots. Diplomatic condemnation of the MUP would fade. Milosevic would get a free hand. You lose.”
“It may be worth the gamble.”
“Have you been up there? Have you seen the dateman?”
“No comment, Jay. We are, in of course the broadest sense, journalistic competitors. Don’t worry, though, I haven’t written anything. It’s not any easy story to decipher, is it?”
“The Leopard’s troubled.”
“He has been troubled since he was a child. He is a man of reason forced into war. The gun fits uncomfortably in his grip.”
“You don’t seem to have that problem.”
Alija steps into the shed.
“Finally up, huh, Jay?”
Brian follows her.
“I’m deep into another piece. My battery’s dead. Show me again how to recharge on the Jeep. I need to do some more interviews, too.”
“Sleep well, Brian?”
“Curious people, the Serbs.”
“Brian, how’s the tree situation? Any new species emerge overnight?”
“Screw you, Vijay What were you doing rattling around in the dark?”
“I couldn’t sleep, and there was no one to talk to. Imagine my predicament. I found a few sentries in a foxhole and we shivered together.”
“Sounds like a blast.”
“It was, actually. I studied the night. Did you ever really look into the night? See it like a sentry or a night watchman? The night seems liquid to me. It is black, but things run through it, flits of half-formed things. Is there danger? Do you shoot?”
“I didn’t hear any shots.”
“There were none, just sounds, endless sounds, whispers from the earth.”
“There’s some atmospherics for you, Brian. Put that in your story.”
“The Earth whispered.”
“What did it say?”
“Bet on Nightwind in the fourth at Saratoga.”
“You Americans are so undeep. Open up to the abstract.”
“Undeep? I would have expected a shallow or superficial from you, Vijay.”
“I agree with Vijay,” says Alija. “Americans joke about everything. You roll in and act as thou
gh all will be fixed when you say so. You’re fat with confidence. But you don’t know this land. It is the night for you, and you don’t see all that’s in it.”
“You mean you in a general sense, I hope.”
“Yes.”
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
“Ecclesiastes?”
“Book of Proverbs.”
“Not bad, Vijay.”
“This is all lovely morning prattle,” says Brian. “Point noted, Alija. But I need to charge my battery and write. It’s funny, though, huh? Here we are freezing our asses off waiting for an appointment with a guy who in reality wants to kill people like us. He may serve us tea and whack us.”
It is suddenly midday. Alija and I interview a few guerrillas, reconstruct their lives to what led them here. I write in the Jeep. Brian pitches snowballs at a tree. Word in camp spreads that the Serbs across the valley, the ones the Leopard and Rolo showed me, are moving forward; there are new foxholes and fresh dirt on the snow. My guess is Milan is close. This is sniper terrain. I’d like to see Milan again. I’d like to cross to the Serb side and hunker for a bit. Milan and Alija, battered by the same land. Milan told me once — I wrote it in a long-ago notebook — about a Serb tale that wound its way through the Bosnian war. It went like this: Muslim paramilitaries swept into a Serb town at night. It was the standard Bosnian massacre, only the ethnicity of victims had changed. In the morning, there were blood and flies and mud and mist. The paramilitaries departed. They left a Serb woman crucified to a barn, her pregnant belly slit, her fetus dangling from its cord. The story became the stone of hate. It spread to Serb villages, and men promised vengeance. Months later, Milan said he met a man from the massacred village. He asked him about the woman. The man told him the woman was his wife. Milan cried and bought the man a whiskey. He hugged the man, and they ate dinner and drank until dawn. The man stood to leave. He leaned his forehead into Milan’s. There was a woman, he said, but she was not his wife. She had been killed, but not crucified. There was no barn. She was barren. Yes, the man said, he was from the village. He heard the massacre while hiding behind a rock on a hill. It went on for hours. He was the village’s sole survivor, and he invented the crucifixion story. Why? The man said massacres and village burnings had become common. They numbed and deadened but did not anymore inspire vengeance. They no longer shocked. “People needed something more,” said the man. “I gave them that. They believed in that story more than they believed in God. It became their God.” Other such stories were told and retold, fictions loosed like rain upon the land. Villages were haunted. Villages were cursed. Villages were emptied. Children and mothers disappeared into the maw, and men slunk into the hills. Life frozen the way a camera catches a moment. A teacher’s assignment left scrawled on a chalkboard, a carton of milk on a grocery counter, a dead donkey tethered to a hitching post, the long ash of a cigarette left by someone in a hurry, the running of water, the peaches rotting in the orchard, the wheat left too long in the fields, laundry billowing on lines like fading flags. The people turned invisible, slipped into the air like a coin in a magician’s hand. Ghostly villages turned into props for narratives. Milan said he invented stories, too. He kept them to himself. Each burned village he traveled through had a fairytale. Not the castle kind. The castle kinds were over. They were simple. A woman peeking through a curtain, the scruff of a soccer ball in the dirt, a girl in a new dress, dust on patent-leather shoes, Easter lamb, long bottles of raki, a table of cakes, a wedding announcement, a dance in the field. I told Milan they weren’t fairytales. They were life.
“Whose life?” he said.
Where is Milan now?
The Leopard knocks on the Jeep window.
“No decision on when the dateman will see you.”
“It’s not going to happen, is it?”
“I don’t know, Jay.”
“Alija’s brother?”
“Nothing yet. Maybe you should go down the mountain for a few days and then return.”
“Can we get back?”
“Go to the same man at the gas station. We’ll meet you again.”
Chapter 14
“The dateman’s overrated, Jay. Probably doesn’t even exist.”
“He’s there.”
“Screw ‘im.”
“Turn here,” says Alija.
“You sure?”
“This is the way”
The snow has turned to slush. We are driving in a valley; the mountaintop to our back is lost in fog and sleet.
“What now?”
“We seem to have run out of atmospherics.”
“Screw you too, Vijay.”
“Brian is an angry boy today. I must buy him a tree book.”
“Anybody have alcohol?”
“Fanta.”
“I hate Fanta. It’s not a real-world drink. Who drinks Fanta in civilization?”
“We’ll see the dateman, Brian.”
“You’ve probably already seen him, Vijay. The way you ferret and sneak around up there in the woods and dark.”
“I have not talked to him. But I can tell you I have been close. I was up there, a door opened, and I glimpsed him. The door closed. He did not want to see me. He is real.”
“Slow down,” yells Alija.
A tree lies across the road. I brake and swerve. We sideswipe it and jerk to a stop. Seven men rush the Jeep. They open the doors and yank us out. We all get a muzzle in the face. These guys aren’t from here. They’re bearded and lean, stringy like jerky. There’s no talking to their eyes. Black boots. Green fatigues. Two of them have long scarves laced through their hair. I hear the throaty consonants of Arabic. Hand motions. One of them hops into the Jeep and searches our bags. I’m thinking good-bye sat phone, but the guy doesn’t touch it. He hops out with a bunch of handwritten pages. He holds them up to the others and runs toward the woods.
There is a silence between rustle and scrape, and the man with the papers vanishes into the brush. The others, guns cocked, retract slowly. One of them turns toward Vijay. A pop. Vijay goes down. The bearded men disappear before the sound of the shot fades; the last I see of them is two scarves, one blue, one green, coloring the fog like kite tails. The bullet struck Vijay in the temple and veered out his forehead. His left eye is gone. Brian kneels and holds Vijay’s skull together. His hands turn red. Vijay is alive. His one eye darts and rolls as if knocked from orbit. He gurgles air. He wets his pants. He is like a half-finished painting, blood, a smattering of teeth, skin turning the hue of birch. I bend toward him. Alija takes his hand.
“We’ve got to lift him into the Jeep.”
“He’s losing too much blood,” says Brian. “I can’t stop it. Alija, grab a shirt or something from the bags. He’s going to bleed out before we get him anywhere.”
Vijay lifts his right arm.
“His skull is too shattered. I can’t keep it in place.”
Vijay’s words, all his syllables and inflections, leak away.
“Vijay, can you hear me?”
He cannot. He has a pulse, but barely; it is like a faint stream of water through a garden hose after the spigot is turned off.
Alija throws Brian a T-shirt. He wraps Vijay’s head. Alija takes his hand again.
“His fingers are cold.”
Death starts from far away. A tribesman in Africa once told me death is a stranger heading toward a house; sometimes he moves quickly, sometimes he meanders. The heart is home. He comes to the heart last, after he has frozen the rest. Alija whispers to Vijay. She tells him he once danced with a countess and ate calamari. It was on the Croatian coast. She tells him he was poetic and wonderful, a true character. She doesn’t tell him to breathe, or stay awake, or hold on. She offers no lie. She gives no prayer. She holds his cold hand, feels the blood recede, tissue compress. She leans close to him, her hair brushing his dying face as it has brushed my skin on so many nights. Brian is soaked in blood. He is crying but doesn’t know it. Vi
jay’s head is in his lap. The Jeep’s doors are open, and I hear the ping-ping-ping sound of keys left in the ignition. There is drizzle but no wind. The trees in the forest creak. It’s strange not to hear voices, to be four people without words.
We lay Vijay on the backseat. Brian sits with him. I back up from the fallen tree and find another road. It’s almost night when we locate a village and a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders.
“Put him there on the table.”
“We have to call his family.”
“Alija, who are his family?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll call his newspaper.”
“I can have one of our staff take the body into town in an ambulance.”
Megan. How strong you sound. That flat midwestern accent is so full of assurance and measured tenderness. Your rubber gloves are tight. Blood swirls on them like finger paint. Look how you trace death, from the abdomen to the chest to the yellow-blue face to the skull to the blood-black hair. So slow you move over this quiet terrain; the body is a rainbow of deep color. Flecks of gray, magenta, glints of shattered bone small as baby teeth. You pick them up with so much science in your glance.
“The bullet exited here.”
“Don’t put him in a bag.”
“What?”
“I don’t want him zipped in a bag.”
“Jay . . .”
“Put him in a wooden coffin. There’s plenty around.”
“All right.”
“We’d been driving for miles, and then I turned the bend and saw your clinic light. When did you get here?”
“After our night at the bar in Pristina.”
“You’re close to the mountains.”
“So far we’re only tending to car accidents and tractor crashes of refugees. There’s that strange silence out there.”
Promised Virgins Page 14
