Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (4 page)

   The party had already begun. Men barbecued two pigs on spits over a pit in one of the larger vacant lots, drank beer and passed bottles of slivovitz around although it wasn’t even noon. Women sat beneath a temporary tented canopy, arranging food on big folding tables, sitting on plastic chairs, talking and smoking, watching over the children and the dozen teenagers playing football in the street who paused the game to let us pass. About sixty people in all. There were hardly any old people, and noticeably more adult women than men, and while there were teenagers and small children, there were very few children of any inbetween age, which said a lot about the demographics of the war’s victims. Everyone waved and peered curiously into the car as we passed. The attention made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t a party person at the best of times, and Honoured And Somewhat Resented Rich Foreign Guest was not a role I liked to play.
   We parked outside Dragan’s and Saskia’s house. There were many cars parked on the street. That at least made the neighbourhood seem vibrant. Theirs was one of the good houses, small but in a plot of land big enough to boast a vegetable garden. Their property was clean and well-cared for, inside and out, with garden implements hanging neatly from a rack outside, comfortable couches and fresh flowers and small landscape prints indoors, threadbare but comfortable sheets and pillowcases. Upstairs there were two tiny bedrooms; downstairs held the living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom.
   Saskia led us up to the guest room, where we deposited our packs, and then out to the party, whose participants surrounded us and welcomed us with a boisterous cheer. They were flashier and prettier people than I had anticipated. I had half-expected country bumpkins with banjos and patched clothes and half their teeth missing, a Bosnian
Deliverance
, and admittedly there was a minority who fit that profile, men like Dragan with tangled hair and beards who didn’t seem to have bathed lately, and women who wore rough simple dresses that had had all the colour washed out of them; but most of them, especially the younger ones, wore designer jeans and shiny skirts and leather boots and football shirts made of space-age materials adorned with the names ZIDANE or RIVALDO or MIHAJLOVIC, and the music thumping out of the CD player beneath the table full of bread and cheese was not banjo but Eminem.
   After greeting us with a cheer, the men returned to the roasting pigs, the children returned to their games, and the women milled about and talked and laughed and asked us questions. Talena smiled at a few of the things they said and answered the questions politely. I didn’t understand a word and she didn’t have time to translate. After a moment Dragan clapped his hand on my shoulder, hard enough that I almost stumbled, and half-led, half-dragged me to the cooler next to the barbecue pit. He dug through the cooler’s ice and unearthed a cold bottle of Niksicki Gold for me, improving my opinion of him immensely. Technically it was too early to start drinking, but I figured, when in Bosnia.
   I stood next to Dragan and the other men in a semicircle around the pigs, sipping beer and watching as a lanky old man carefully basted and rotated the glistening flesh. The smell made my mouth water. I looked around and smiled, partly to seem polite and friendly, partly because I was amused by the universal-human-nature of the scene; the women gossip with the newcomers, the children play a game, the men stand around the roasting meat.
   Dragan said something to one of the other men, in his forties with gray hair and a beard, both a few inches long but neatly clipped. They exchanged a few words and then the older man turned to me and said in careful but good English:
   “Hello. My name is Josip. They call me the Professor, but I am not really. I studied in London for two years, once, that is all.” He smiled. “Many years ago, when I was young.”
   “Paul,” I said. We shook hands.
   “Your girlfriend is very beautiful,” Josip said, looking at Talena. “You are a lucky man.”
   “She certainly is,” I agreed.
   We smiled at each other stiffly.
   “Do you all live on this street?” I asked, waving my hand at the assembled masses.
   “Yes,” Josip said. “But there are also other people on this street who do not live here. Those of us here, we are not just neighbours. All of the men you see here around you, we fought together in the war. We were the Mostar Tigers.” He said the name proudly. “First we fought the Chetniks. Then we fought the Turks. We fought for three years.”
   “The Turks?” I asked, bewildered. I knew from Sarajevo that ‘Chetnik’ referred to the Serbs, but the second reference confused me. I was no historian but I was pretty sure Turkey had never gotten involved in the Bosnian war.
   “The Muslims,” Josip said, spitting out the word. “The people across the river.”
   “Oh, right, them,” I said. “I take it you’re still not friends.”
   “You must be careful while you are here,” he warned me. “Especially near the river. Don’t believe anything they say. They smile and smile, but they’re all fundamentalists, fanatics, they want to make all of Europe an Islamic state, they want every woman in a chador, every man in a mosque, they won’t rest until either they win or they’re all dead. If we aren’t careful, your people and mine, if we aren’t careful they will win. This is still the front line, here, the battle for Europe is still going on, never mind this peace, it’s still jihad to them, it’s just a different kind of war now, now they’re terrorists. They were always terrorists. They’re no different from the people who destroyed your World Trade Center, no different at all, there are high-level connections to Osama bin Laden, he sends money and weapons and Arabs and blacks here to fight for the Muslims, it’s well documented, ask anyone, ask a Muslim, they are proud of it.”
   “I see,” I said, nodding expressionlessly, hiding my shock. I hadn’t encountered anything like this virulent bigotry in Sarajevo. The people there, at least those friends of Talena I had talked to, were disgusted by their country’s past, eager to turn their backs on nationalism and embrace the West, considered themselves European rather than Bosnian.
   “You must be careful. At night they come across the river, they break windows, they cut electricity, they cut car tires, they steal anything they can, they try to burn our churches, and if they find one of our women…Animals. No better than animals. There are still Muslim war criminals walking around on the other side of the river, dozens of them, in broad daylight. And your people, NATO, they do nothing to stop them. Nothing.”
   I smiled politely and took a long swig of my beer. When the slivovitz came around, I took a big swallow of that. I could see why Bosnians drank so much. Sometimes it was the only way to deal with the place.
   Dragan conferred briefly with Josip, who then turned to me and said, “But enough about the Muslims. Enough about the war. God willing the war is only history now. Even so we shouldn’t talk about history here. We have too much history. Surely you have seen that already. We have too much history and it has too many teeth. Let us focus on the future. To peace and hopes for the future.”
   I clinked my bottles against his and Dragan’s, who bestowed a toothy smile upon me.
   “My good friend Dragan here,” Josip continued, “tomorrow he and I would like to show you something. We have a business proposition for you that you may find interesting. A very promising business proposition for which we need an outside investor like you. An investor who I truly believe will become very rich.”
   My stomach sank. I considered explaining to Josip that I was unemployed and already in debt to MasterCard to the tune of eight thousand dollars, but I knew he wouldn’t believe me. Everyone in places like this knew beyond any doubt that all Americans were impossibly rich, and any attempt to deny this would seem a rude and transparent lie. I smiled and nodded.
   “Good,” Josip said. “Tomorrow. But we shall speak no more of this today. Tomorrow is for business, and today is for living!”
   We clinked our beers together again. I looked over at Talena; she and Saskia stood next to one another, ignoring the rest of the world, talking fast and laughing, making up for so much lost time. Josip introduced me to the rest of the fifteen Mostar Tigers, whose names never made it past my short-term memory. They were as scary as Dragan. Three of them were missing limbs, and two others walked with pronounced limps. Even the ones who didn’t have visible scars, even the several who were of the lean fine-chiseled-features almost-effeminate type that seemed to be grown en masse in a pretty-boy factory somewhere in the Balkans, all of them had the flat, arrogant demeanor of men who are casually comfortable inflicting and receiving violence.
   Woody Allen once said that every time he met a woman on some level he was thinking about having sex with her. Whenever two men meet, on some level they are both thinking:
could I take him? If it comes down to him or me, in a fight, who wins?
Usually there is some element of doubt in the answer. Here there was none. Against any one of them I would lose. The Mostar Tigers were friendly, and at that point they were still mostly quiet and reserved, but like Sinisa’s lieutenants last night, the woman and the uber-thug, they had the feral aura of wild animals. Carnivores.
   I noticed that several of them looked towards Talena more often than necessary, and let their gazes linger. I was used to Talena attracting attention; she was tall and slender and startlingly pretty, even in khaki cargo pants and black T-shirt. But for the first time I felt irrationally threatened by it, as if she might decide on the spur of the moment to replace me with one of the pretty-boy Tigers, or one of them might challenge me to a duel for her.
   The group dynamics of the Tigers made it clear that Dragan was their leader. The others came to talk to him. They asked questions and he answered. On the rare occasions when he initiated conversation, those around him immediately fell silent and listened intently.
  
Well
, I thought,
at least Saskia got the alpha thug
.
   The party went on all day and into the night. I didn’t enjoy it. I was tired, and hot, and I wasn’t accustomed to drinking as early or as much as the Bosnians, and by midafternoon I was wobbly and exhausted. I’m not a people person to begin with, I’m uncomfortable in big groups, quickly bored by small talk, uncertain of the appropriate conversational protocols, although in Mostar that wasn’t a big deal as the only people I could communicate with were Josip and Talena. I was actually glad that the language barrier walled me off from everyone else. I wasn’t used to being at parties without Talena by my side. Here, she and Saskia were inseparable and didn’t want company, and I couldn’t blame them, but it made me feel like I was an awkward teenager again, lounging around a party looking for someone to talk to, pretending I wasn’t bored and embarrassed by my solitude. I passed my time by drinking more beer, which didn’t help. And in addition to my usual party insecurity I had to swallow the angry contempt with which I responded to the all-too-common manifestations of the endlessly deep vein of bloodcurdling hatred and bigotry that lay beneath Bosnia’s unconvincing veneer of civilization.
   And, I didn’t want to think about this and walled it off, but the more I drank the more my awful understanding began to seep in through the cracks and around the edges, I had to start dealing with the conscious knowledge that Talena and I were through. She was the only good thing in my life, and I was about to lose her forever. I tried to tell myself that maybe this would be the best thing for me. Maybe, like the US economy, like Bosnia itself, I had to hit the rock bottom of my pit before I could start clawing my way up towards the light again. But no matter how much I drank I couldn’t even begin to convince myself.
   Sometime near dusk I looked around from my intoxicated self-pitying haze and realized that Talena and Saskia were nowhere to be seen and that I badly wanted the party to end. I was very tired, my clothes were thickly crusted with my own dried sweat, and I wanted to curl up and sleep. But Josip wasn’t around either, so I couldn’t even tell this to anyone, and I didn’t remember which house was Dragan’s and Saskia’s. I got another plate of roast pork and bread and cheese and, all of it dry by now but I had the vague idea that it would sober me up a little and make me stronger. I washed it down with another beer. The soccer ball came my way and on a whim I tried to play with the teenagers.
   Like all Europeans they were frighteningly good and like all North Americans I was laughably bad. After clumsily stepping on the ball and tumbling onto the street, scraping my hand and cuing a stinging chorus of mocking laughter, I retreated back to the vacant lot next to the food tables, found a rotting concrete block in the weeds, and sat atop it for awhile. Nobody paid me any attention. By this time everyone was too drunk to feign interest in their Honoured Canadian Guest. That suited me fine.
   I vaguely noticed that the party had escalated into loud ragged laughter, short emotional bursts of song, men grabbing women and kissing them roughly, brief impassioned arguments. I watched as one of the Tigers, the one with a prosthetic leg, drunkenly tried to make the teenagers march like they were soldiers and shouted at them, spittle flying from his mouth, when they refused. Instead of laughing at him they backed quietly away. A woman hesitantly approached the one-legged man and gently tried to convince him to leave the kids alone. He rewarded her with a shove that sent her sprawling to the street. Nobody seemed to notice or care as she scrambled to her feet and retreated to her plastic chair with a newly skinned elbow, tears staining her face. I wondered if they were married.
   “Paul,” Talena said.
   I jerked with surprise and looked up at her. She and Saskia had returned from somewhere. I had a dim notion that they had been gone for hours. Saskia’s eyes were red with tears and she clutched Talena’s arm as if she would collapse without its support. She looked like a child next to Talena, who was eight or nine inches taller. Talena was pale and tense, and I could tell she had been crying too.
   “What happened?” I asked.
   She shook her head. “You’re drunk.”
   “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Shit. Yeah, a little, I guess.”
   “That’s great,” she said. “That’s just fucking great. You go get drunk.”