Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (3 page)

“Paul? Are you okay?”
   I opened my eyes. Talena was sitting on the bed, looking at me, concerned. I had fallen asleep sitting on the chair.
“Sure,” I said slowly, still slightly dazed.
   “What…why did you sleep on the chair?” Her voice half-incredulous, half-accusatory.
   “I didn’t sleep much. I was up most of the night.”
   “Why? What happened?”
   “I’ll tell you over breakfast,” I said.
   We dressed and had bread and sliced meat and yoghurt and Turkish coffee in one of the many cafes in the nearby Bascarsija district, a cobblestoned warren straight out of the Ottoman Empire. I told her about my encounter with the little boy and the smugglers. I tried to make the story into a lighthearted anecdote, but her expression as she listened was grim. She let me finish but I could tell she wanted to interrupt and chastise me on several occasions.
   “You make them sound charming,” she said when I was finished. “You and your friendly neighbourhood gangsters. Jesus, Paul, how could you have been so stupid? They’re monsters. You understand that? They’re rapists and murderers and…and…and I can’t believe you’re sitting here cheerfully talking about it like you had a fun little adventure and you saved a child and you’re all proud of it now. Those people are practically going to be slaves, you know. Those women will all be raped. Every one of them. And you, you should never have gotten involved. You should have just kept walking. You don’t know how lucky you are you walked away. If they weren’t in a good mood, if you weren’t a foreigner, they would have beaten you to a pulp just to teach you to keep your nose out of their business, you might never have walked again, that’s the way this country works, you understand? And then you went and told this Sinisa where you were staying, told him the truth, maybe your little adventure it isn’t even over yet, maybe they’ll change your mind and come find you, find us, wouldn’t that be fun? I can’t – I just can’t believe you. I would never have imagined that you would do something so reckless and stupid and then act like this. Like you’re so fucking proud of it.”
   “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, wilting in the face of her righteous wrath, looking down at the table, away from her icy blue eyes. “I’m sorry.”
   But that was a lie. Lack of sleep had caught up with me despite the jet-fuel Turkish coffee, and I was too tired to argue, but I wasn’t sorry for what I had done. I was sorry that I had upset Talena, I appreciated that what I had done was foolish and reckless, but she was right when she said I was proud.
   After the silent remainder of our breakfast we gathered our packs and took a streetcar to the bus station. The Croat/Muslim station. Postwar Sarajevo had two bus stations, at opposite ends of the city, one for the Serb-controlled part of the country – the Republika Srpska, a name which always reminded me of the satirical Onion article “Clinton Deploys Vowels To Bosnia” – and one for everywhere else. A typically crazy consequence of the ethnic fault lines that had cracked Bosnia open like an egg.
   ‘Ethnic’ isn’t really the right word. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are physically indistinguishable and their spoken language differs only in accent if at all. Religion was the theoretical dividing line, Orthodox vs Catholic vs Islam, but prewar Bosnia had been one of the more secular places on Earth, and it still seemed a whole lot less religious than the good old USA. It didn’t matter. Despite all their similarities, each side had found plenty of reasons to hate and slaughter the other two.
   Postwar Bosnia was a stable place only because stability had been forced upon it by thousands of NATO troops. Without them it would have fragmented in weeks. People paid lip service to Bosnia being a single indivisible nation, but it was effectively partitioned into the Republika Srpska and the Bosnia-Herzegovina Federation, which in turn seemed to be subdivided into the largely Muslim Bosnian Federation and Croat-dominated Herzegovina. Sarajevo itself seemed a quasi-independent entity. My Lonely Planet guide claimed that the presidency rotated between the three ethnicities every six months, and the ruling cabinet was equally divided among them, which meant that it never reached any decisions at all because each side vetoed all propositions brought by either of the other two, which was fine because in practice NATO completely ignored the cabinet and made all the country’s important decisions and would for the foreseeable future. Like everything else in Bosnia, half tragedy and half farce.
   At least the bus station was halfway civilized; snack shops selling various configurations of meat and starch, kiosks of junk food and newspapers, computer-printed bus tickets. We boarded the 8:40 bus to Mostar, off to visit Saskia, Talena’s half-sister.
   The bus was more comfortable than I expected. I dozed through most of the three-hour ride. During my periods of waking I saw to my surprise that Bosnia was an achingly pretty country. The road followed a rushing river, its water a deep pure blue, along breathtaking gorges and canyons, up and down high rocky hills covered with thick wild forest, past lazy scenic postcard vistas where the river grew fat and slow for a few miles before narrowing into whitewater cataracts. The hills were as craggy and rugged as any I had ever seen. Geography alone explained why Bosnia had been the poorest, most backward, least developed part of Yugoslavia. Sarajevo had been a thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan city. It still was, albeit a crippled one. But most of the rest of Bosnia was rough and wild. A natural haven for mystics, misfits, outlaws and smugglers.
   Or, as the nineties had shown, a haven for slavering hatred, concentration camps, mass rape, mass murder, torture, slaughter and genocide. A natural home for war and for warlords.
   “I’m nervous,” Talena said, when we were about half an hour away.
   “About what?”
   “Seeing Saskia again. I know it’s stupid. But I’m nervous.”
   “That she’ll be different? Or that you’ve become different?”
   “Of course we’ll be different,” she said impatiently. “We’ve had eight very different years since I last saw her. I think we’ll still get along fine. I’m nervous that she’s miserable.”
   “What does she say in her emails?”
   “She always says things are fine…but the way she says it…It always follows a list of things that are definitely not fine. And she hardly ever writes about her husband, and when she does it’s just a really quick thing about how he’s really a good man after all, always winds up sounding like she’s trying to convince herself. But, you know, email, no context, no nuance, maybe I’m reading too much into it.”
   “Is she jealous that you went to America?”
   She nodded. “Sure. Everyone was jealous. Most of my friends applied for that scholarship, and I was the only one who got it. Saskia was the only one who had enough space left over after being jealous to be happy for me too. I tried to bring her over, you know. In 1997. Two years after I came to America. She wasn’t married yet, and she had this temporary breakup with Dragan. I tried to sponsor her as an immigrant. It’s supposed to be easier for family members, but Immigration and Naturalization seems to think half-sisters don’t count as much as sisters, and they dug up this bullshit criminal record she had, so no go. And she went back to Dragan and got married and lived who-the-fuck-knows ever after.”
   After a pause I asked, “What if she is miserable?”
   “I don’t know,” Talena said. “I don’t know. I’d do whatever I could to help her out. But right now whatever I can basically amounts to nothing. I have no money and I live ten time zones away.” She sighed. “I guess that’s what I’m worried about. That she’ll be miserable, and here I come home at last from the great American dream she was so jealous of, here I am her glamorous half-sister who lives in California and works for the big famous publishing company, and I can’t do fuck-all to help her or anyone else.”
   I couldn’t think of anything to say.
   “We were best friends,” Talena said. “We used to tell people we were identical twins who happened to come from different mothers. I mean, we looked different, but…sometimes when we went out we’d call each other by our own names, it was a little game. So when I see her, that’ll be like seeing what would have happened to me, you know? There but for the grace of God and all that shit. And…damn it. And her husband better fucking deserve her, that’s all. He better at least be trying to make her happy. But I don’t know. She doesn’t say. But it doesn’t sound like it.”
   “Half an hour till we find out,” I said.
   She nodded. “Half an hour.”
   We rode on in silence.
   “Paul?” she said after a minute.
   “Yeah?”
   “It was still really stupid of you. But I’m glad you helped that little boy.”
   “Thanks,” I said. “Me too.”
* * *
   “There she is,” Talena said as the bus pulled into its slot, clutching my arm so tightly that I later found fingernail bruises. I followed her gaze to a small, dark-haired, porcelain-skinned woman, pretty in a waifish-pixie way, dressed sexy and skimpy like most Bosnian women, black leather skirt and tight gray shirt and boots with two-inch heels. Her long hair was arranged in such a way that a canopy of it almost covered the left side of her face. A man, presumably her husband Dragan, stood beside her. Dragan had the Wild-Man-Of-Borneo look, ragged shoulder-length hair, thick beard, brooding eyes. He was much taller than Saskia, in torn jeans and, despite the heat, a black leather jacket with a red CCCP emblem.
   Saskia was so tense with anticipation that she was almost vibrating. Dragan’s arms were folded and he scowled uncomfortably. We disembarked and Talena immediately dropped her pack and rushed to embrace Saskia. Both of them were in tears. I had almost never seen Talena cry before.
   Dragan and I nodded to each other. He was clearly not the touchy-feely type. Up close he was downright scary, six foot four at least, with a wide build and a big belly. His forearms were covered with pale jagged patches of scar tissue. From shrapnel, I later learned, during the war. Another scar ran down his left cheek and disappeared beneath his beard.
  
Maybe he’s a big sentimental softie underneath
, I told myself, but unconvincingly. Dragan seemed a lot more Hells Angel than Brother Bear. He held himself like he wanted to smash something.
   After a while Talena disengaged and waved me over to greet Saskia. I shook Saskia’s trembling hand, and turned to Dragan, but before I could offer my hand he took a step back and said something. In Croatian, presumably, given that both he and Saskia were Croats. His voice was unnecessarily loud and whatever he said made others nearby stop and look at us with distaste. Saskia winced.
   Talena looked at him for a long silent second and then turned to me. “Dragan would like to go now,” she said, her voice neutral and her face rigidly expressionless, “because this is the Muslim side of the river. He says he doesn’t like staying here longer than he has to because Muslims are all criminals and thieves.”
   “No kidding,” I said. “Jeez. I guess we better go before they take all our stuff, huh?”
   Dragan, insensate to my sarcasm, took Saskia’s arm and led her towards the small parking lot. Talena frowned after them. I picked up our packs, already wishing we were back in the bus’s air conditioning. The crippling unseasonal heat wave that hung over the Balkans showed no signs of going away, the temperature had to be over 100 already.
   Their car was an ancient diesel Mercedes, not a luxury vehicle despite the brand, though in Bosnia owning any car at all was luxury. A huge zigzag crack spanned the windshield, and the back windows didn’t work. It felt like a mobile sauna. Dragan was silent at first, but when we crossed the Neretva River, only two blocks west, he sighed as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, turned to face the backseat with a huge grin spread across his face, and all but bellowed “
Dobrodasao u Mostar!
” which even I knew meant “Welcome to Mostar!”
   “
Hvala
,” ‘thank you’, Talena said faintly, as surprised as I was.
   Dragan looked back to the road just in time to avoid a fatal collision with an all-but-rusted-out Peugeot. He pounded the horn with his fist, released a toxic stream of Croatian at the offending vehicle, turned back to us with a smile and said something good-natured.
   “A party,” Talena translated. “They’re having a party for us. Not just him and Saskia, his…it’s hard to translate. His clan, maybe.”
   “A party,” I said absently. “That’s nice.”
   I was a little distracted by what I could see out the window. We were moving too fast to focus on any details, but outside its entirely rebuilt city center, pleasant three- and four-story office buildings buzzing with bureaucrats, Mostar was clearly in much worse shape than anywhere in Sarajevo. We passed a bombed-out trapezoidal building eight stories high, its walls charred black, every single window shattered. On the other side of the road was a long concrete wall, half papered over by ads for cell-phone companies, the remainder cracked and cratered by some kind of weapon more serious than small arms.
   Dragan and Saskia lived on a long and tree-lined street on Mostar’s outskirts that at first looked prosperous, if overgrown. Leafy trees and thick bushes and tall grass were ubiquitous west of the Neretva. The east side, I later learned, had no trees at all. That was the Muslim side, and like Sarajevo it had been beseiged during the war, forcing its inhabitants to cut down and burn all their trees in order to survive. But parts of the Croatian side were nearly jungle, streets that seemed to be under attack from Mother Nature herself, seeking to turn Mostar back into forest, erase all traces of mankind. After spending a couple of days there it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
   In Dragan’s and Saskia’s neighbourhood the riot of weeds and bushes made their street look green and peaceful and briefly concealed the fact that half of its houses had been razed to the ground. Dozens more had been half-destroyed but were now patched up enough with wood and concrete and corrugated aluminum that families actually lived in the two or three remaining usable rooms. Maybe one in four had been mostly spared by the war, just a few bullet holes here and there, a roof that leaked in the rain where a shell had struck but failed to explode, shrapnel marks on the wall. Like much of the rest of Mostar their street looked and felt like the war had ended only eight weeks ago rather than eight years.