Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “The guerrillas don’t have much ammo,” says Brian.

  “Hardly any counterfire.”

  “Jay, get me up that mountain,” says Alija.

  “We have to wait.”

  “There’ll be places to get up later,” says Brian. “We’re only seeing one slice of this. The MUP won’t move at night. They’ll hunker.”

  “Jay, what do you want to do?”

  “One of us stays here and finds some guerilla commander. The other goes to wherever the MUP camp is. Then we’ll pool it.”

  “The MUP aren’t going to say shit, Jay. They’ll shoot first.”

  “You and Alija stay here. Call the Leopard on the sat phone. I’ll take the Jeep out to the main road and see how far I can get.”

  “Translator, Jay, translator. You know about eleven Serb words and several of them deal with ‘Where’s the booze?’ “

  “Some MUP speak English. I’ll see if I get lucky We need some assessment from the other side. Maybe I’ll run into some Serb hacks. They speak English.”

  “Don’t be gone long.”

  “I don’t think the fighting will swing in this direction.”

  “Alija, are you okay with this?”

  “Yeah, Jay, but we get up the mountain, right?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  The MUP camp is muddy and crisscrossed with APC and tank treads. A blue-eyed officer, possibly the biggest, broadest man I have ever seen, marches toward the barbed wire at the checkpoint and grabs my passport and MUP press pass. The MUP hate reporters, and the press pass is another of Milosevic’s false veneers to create the impression that, despite Western propaganda, he is committed to democracy. There are thousands of little, scruffy men in shiny suits bent over laminating machines across the country spinning out press passes and credentials in a Balkan jungle of manila folders and rubber stamps.

  “An American?”

  “Yes.”

  “Americans I don’t like these days. Wait here.”

  He is one big man. The snow whirls around him. He takes my passport and press pass into a shack. I stand in the mud. Mud is very much the same throughout the world. A young guard standing a few feet away asks me for a cigarette. I tell him I don’t smoke, and we both listen to the firefight and the distant percussion of artillery.

  “Have you seen the battle?”

  “I drove past it.”

  “I’m going up tonight.”

  “Your English is good.”

  “School and TV. I was studying languages at university but got drafted.”

  “How long?”

  “They said one year, or until I die.” He laughs. “I wish you smoked,” he says.

  The kid is lanky, a spackling of fading acne on his right cheek. He is pale in his blue-gray fatigues. “How long have you been here?” he says.

  “A few months.”

  “It’s a shitty place. We should just give it to them.”

  “I thought this was holy ground to the Serbs. Field of the Blackbirds.”

  “Field of nothing. What’s America like?”

  “I haven’t lived there in a while.”

  “Kids?”

  “No.”

  “Wife?”

  “No.”

  “Just like me.” “Basically”

  “You think NATO’s coming?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I hear the bombs dropped by NATO planes are so big that pebbles dance off the ground when they hit. I think guys like me on both sides are going to get wasted. A guy in our unit got it the other day. He was talking and then he wasn’t. You ever drag a dead body? Heavy, like dragging a bag of chains.”

  “Have you lost a lot of guys?”

  “He’s the only one I saw. But no one’s gone into the fields to collect what’s fallen.”

  “Have you ever been to the Adriatic?”

  “Before the first war. My father used to take us for the summer. He had a boat.”

  “I hear the calamari is good.”

  “The best. The Italians think they have the best cala-mari, but no way. They don’t even have the best prosciutto. That’s in Montenegro.”

  “Serbs are good with meat. Best hamburger I ever had was in Pale, you know, just outside Sarajevo.”

  “Nah, the best hamburgers are in Belgrade at this little place near the river. You can just sit there in the sun, eating hamburgers and watching girls. What do you think of Serb women?”

  “I like them, but too much tinted hair.”

  “I think the chicks down here are sexy. I like darker skin.”

  “I didn’t think you were allowed out to see women.”

  “We’re not. I see them when we’re driving through villages. They walk arm-in-arm in twos and threes. Some wear head scarves, but most don’t. It’s so dirty here, but they look clean, as if they’ve figured out a way to float through the dust without it sticking to them. They hate us, but they don’t show it. Sometimes I feel like shouting to them, ‘Hey, I don’t care if you keep this fucking land.’”

  “Have you killed anyone?”

  “Shot into the trees once. Probably only wasted some berries and leaves. I don’t really want to kill anyone. I don’t hate these people. They’re just keeping me from doing what I want to be doing. You’re not going to put any of this in your paper, are you?”

  “You don’t want me to?”

  “I guess I don’t really care.”

  The big guy with my passport comes out of the shack and walks toward us.

  “See you around,” says the guard. “Next time bring cigarettes.”

  He walks away The big guy tells me the commanders not here and there’s no one authorized to give information. Authorized is a popular concept here, and even the roughest Serb grunt can pronounce a crystalline not authorized in English. He hands me my passport and press pass and orders me to leave. He tells me I could be a spy. He says Americans have many spies in these mountains. He says America watches him by satellite while he sleeps and counts his troops with a big computer in the sky. He says he’d like to shoot me, but he doesn’t have the authority. I try to joke with him and tell him I am glad he doesn’t have the authority, but this, I can see, only makes him want to shoot me more.

  “Do you know Milan?”

  “I know many Milans.”

  I give him Milan’s last name.

  “The sniper?”

  “He’s a friend.”

  He narrows his eyes and nearly grins.

  “You have a sat phone? I use your sat phone, then I get you Milan.”

  The big guy dials a number in Belgrade. He mumbles for a while, and then his voice goes high and strange. His words stretch out. He sings Serb nursery rhymes into the phone. There is a pause, and he cups his hands around the receiver, trying to block out the war rumble. An explosion rocks the ravine, a firefight follows and then dies. He looks toward the mountains and sings another lullaby to a distant, frightened child. He whispers into his hands, this big man standing in the sleet and mud. You could draw the map of the world on his back and still have space for another ocean. He laughs and makes kissing noises into the phone. There is a pause as if a word failed to swivel through the air and technology to him. His face tightens. His voice goes normal. He uncups his hands, mumbling into the receiver for another minute. He rolls his eyes and hangs up. The screen on the sat phone says the call lasted six minutes, forty-nine seconds.

  “Let’s get Milan,” he says.

  The camp is not so big. Tents and APCs. They must have strung out their bases around the mountain. The big guy leads me toward a single tent near a stand of trees and a long coil of barbed wire. He raps on the tent. Milan’s head peeks through a flap, and it seems he is being born from canvas. He sees me and emerges.

  “Jay, the weather was the same when we first met in Sarajevo.”

  “I remember.”

  The big man leaves us.

  “I have learned not to feel the wet. I’m a magician that way. Come in.�
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  The tent smells of socks and canned spaghetti. Milan adjusts the kerosene heater, and we sit on blankets. His sniper rifle leans near a postcard of Saint George and the dragon. Milan pulls a small bottle of plum brandy from his coat.

  “For the bones,” he says.

  The rain on the tent sounds like the footsteps of gentle insects. I feel I could sleep.

  “How are the fields back home?” I say.

  “They burned some, but we protected most. One day, our priest, you remember him from the church after our night in the rain, walked through the fields with incense to bless and purify. The guerrillas shot him in the leg, but he’s okay.”

  Milan puts a charred coffee pot on the heater.

  “Better than that tea shit you’ve been drinking with the other side.”

  “You know I have to wander.”

  “You are like a moth. From flame to flame, my mother used to say. Jay, you have any batteries? I was in the middle of Miles’s Bitches Brew and my CD player died. I’m a piano player, but Miles pulled it all together around that horn. He made it all dance quietly around that horn. When I open my club after all this shit, I need to find a trumpet player.”

  I pull two batteries from my coat pocket, and Milan smiles.

  “How big is this battle?”

  “Just a skirmish on this end of the mountain. The guerrillas came down and tried to take a village. Dumb fucks.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To kill the man you want to interview.”

  Milan was called two weeks ago. The Serbs had their own spies in the guerrilla camp and decided it was time to shut down the jihad. Milan had been roving along ridges and through crevices looking for a bead. The dateman’s patrols keep a wide perimeter, and Milan hasn’t gotten close.

  “Seen him?” he says.

  “Not yet.”

  “I remember these guys from Bosnia. The ‘muj’ we called them then. Bearded nuts. I shot a few of them. All you can do is shoot them. They’ve crossed the line. I saw it in their eyes, their dead eyes. It’s a part of nature we know nothing of. The Serbs, the Croats, and even the Bosnian Muslims here kill and rape and burn, but none of us is going to blow himself in two. Not even Milosevic is demented enough for that. What makes a man do it?”

  The rain has stopped; snow blows through the tent flaps.

  “Its my last war, Jay. My muscles are going. My eyes aren’t so sharp anymore.”

  He’s right. The young man inside him has gone away. The decay began outside Sarajevo years ago, his sniper rifle crossing his lap on that APC. It followed him into the psychiatric clinic and then home to his water mill and fields. He sought the simplicity of grinding wheat from the slow stone of his ancestors. He wanted to close his door and pull his fields in at night and sleep with his wife. He wanted to play his piano. But they came to him with stories of women nailed to barns and village burnings. There were more enemies to be killed, enemies to be killed from a distance, so they called him. His jaw is tight. He doesn’t look slackened. His fatigues, his smell, his hands, raw and thinly furrowed, suggest his intimacy with nature, his understanding for the patterns and grooves of where he hides. His fingers, so tapered; they shimmer like seaweed beneath the surface, playing with jazz and titanium-tipped bullets in the mud of a mountainside. But he is right that his eyes are tired. I see they have lost a bit of that quick hardness. He showed me once how he shoots. The arc of the rifle butt snug on shoulder and high pectoral. The left hand cupped and firm below the barrel. The black barrel searching. The trigger finger frozen like a fish hook. The right eye squints into the scope. His breathing rhythm changes and finds unison with the target. They are one. A deep breath and a slow exhale and, before the second breath, the shot, the ripple through shoulder and spine, the powder smell like wisps from cap guns when I was a kid, and then the rifle down, the casing flickering to earth.

  He turns the heat up and wraps a blanket around his shoulders. We drink coffee. We don’t speak. The barrages near the mountain are further apart. The Kalashnikov fire comes in bursts and longer pauses. It is the sound of poorly trained men wasting bullets they do not have to waste. I lift the tent flap. MUP are gathering. A man on a stretcher is carried into a shack. Bandages speckle the mud. I hear a far-off helicopter. Milan’s eyes are closed, but he is not sleeping. It’s getting near dusk, and I have to go.

  “So this isn’t the big battle?”

  “A mild tempest, Jay.”

  “When you going out again?”

  “Tonight. I’ll find the crack up there somewhere. It’s patience and not minding the shit. They’ll make mistakes. A Jeep will break down. A patrol will arrive late. Someone will take a piss at the wrong time. It’s math. Spinning equations. Where you going?”

  “I gotta go pick up my translator and another guy and try once more in mountains.”

  “You still have that young girl?”

  “Yeah. Hey, Milan, don’t make a mistake and shoot me up there. I’m the guy without the beard.”

  “I told you my eyes were going.”

  He laughs and holds the tent flap open.

  “Jay, I’m gonna open that jazz club one day. No kidding.”

  He disappears into the tent. I hear batteries loaded and Miles Davis rising like a bit of lost music, drifting into the trees.

  Snow blows, and the Leopard waits with Alija and Brian near the bombed wall of a farmhouse. The battle is dying. The MUP have pulled their units back toward their bunkers; tanks are netted in camouflage. The guerrillas are trying to slide past, and every few minutes the crack of a gun echoes with the false promise of something more. The Leopard looks at a map, but he doesn’t need to; he knows what’s out there in the near dark.

  “Shit, Jay, thought we lost you,” says Brian. “You get what we needed?”

  “Yeah.”

  Alija stands near me, her face blushed with melting snow.

  “The Leopard says we can get back up the mountain tonight.”

  “The problem is getting back down.”

  “This is true, Jay How are you?”

  “Your men seem scattered and confused.”

  “It was not a good day.”

  “How many?”

  “Jay,” says Brian. “We already have that. I’ll fill you in later.”

  “I’m sorry about Vijay,” says the Leopard.

  “Did you know?”

  “I only knew he liked to talk.”

  “We can wait another hour and take the Jeep up halfway and then walk. The fightings done for tonight.”

  “Jay, I gotta file.”

  “We’ll write now and file before we leave the Jeep.”

  “I’m checking on my men. I’ll be back and we’ll go.”

  Alija, Brian, and I sit in the Jeep. Brian’s fingers are doing their tap dance over the keyboard. We write fast. If you can’t write easily about battle, you have no business being in this business. A battle is concise, compressed, although I must admit casualty figures tend to be elusive. But all else is there, a grid of lines and rockets on a game board, shifting scenes of color, the battered, the smart, a whiff of analysis, a wink of foreshadowing, all taking shape in letters and strokes growing across the gray-blue glow of my eleven-inch screen. And then there’s all that stuff that won’t get in. That stuff you mark in the notebook to use later, but another day comes and more marked stuff gets added and there’s little you can do except to keep writing and saving stuff because the fun is in the collecting.

  “How many tanks, Jay?”

  “I saw two.”

  “I saw three.”

  “I’m going with two.”

  “Why isn’t it ever the same? Why can’t two hacks in the same place come up with the same fucking numbers?”

  “I left for a while. You didn’t. You saw an extra tank.”

  “I know, but I’m a congruent guy.”

  “An obsessive.”

  “Ah, Alija makes a joke. I thought you were sleeping,” says Brian, “
Hey, Jay, how many words you write?”

  “Nine hundred and sixty.”

  “I’m at a thousand ninety-nine.”

  “Okay, you win.”

  “Most of it’s shit. They’ll cut it.”

  The Leopard knocks on the window and slides into the Jeep. Strands of guerrillas are walking the mountain road. The wounded hang off stronger men. A few are draped over donkeys. Some of them try to hop on the Jeep, but the Leopard yells them off, and I lock in the four-wheel and up we go again into the black and snow and toward the stars, but the stars aren’t out, only the moon, glowing like a slim white flame between passing clouds. The Leopard’s mustache is not trimmed to its usual perfection. His fatigues are wrinkled; there’s dried dirt on his face. His boots are scuffed, and he smells of damp leaves. We drive slowly. Three guerrillas walk in front of us; they seem like comrades from a picture taken long ago. They smoke and laugh and readjust their guns. We pass them, and they wave. Then there is a whine and the sound of tires grabbing loose earth. Three Land Cruisers veer down the mountain and slide around a curve about a hundred meters away. Lights off, they head toward us.

  “Stop, Jay.”

  “What?”

  “Stop. Get out now.”

  The Leopard hops out and stands in the road waving his hands over his head.

  “Jay.”

  The Land Cruisers slow and then stop. The Leopard walks toward the first one. A window goes down. Alija can’t hear what they’re saying. Two men get out of the back of the Land Cruiser. Their stubby, Eastern European — made machine guns hang low on shoulder straps. Brian and I walk toward the Leopard, but the men with the guns, I can see now they have beards, wave us back. The Leopard leans into the window. Another door opens, and, in the interior light of the cruiser, I see him. His back is straight, but there is an underlying fluidity about him. His black eyes dart back and forth from the Leopard to the windshield. His beard stops at his sternum; bandoliers crisscross his chest, but, unlike most men arrayed in bullets, he seems compressed by their weight. He is willowy, cane-thin, a crack in a window. All energy is in the calmness of his face. It is sepia but not old. It is carved not in fine angles but in a long oval flow, as if its features were shaped from a desert. His hands, moving in the light, are supple. He pulls at his beard and laughs, and the Leopard laughs, and the men around him relax their trigger fingers and breathe in the snow and the night air. I wonder if Milan is out there peering through his scope. There is no shot, only the after-battle sounds of retreating steel and leather. The man slides out of the Cruiser. The door shuts. The light goes off. He stands in silhouette with the Leopard. A few minutes pass. The Leopard and the dateman come toward us. Alija steps near me. The dateman looks at the Leopard, and the Leopard guides Alija toward the Jeep.