Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (5 page)

We still have ten crates of tracers from the Viktor Bubanj Barracks.

Why won't we harden that checkpoint?

Bald Man says they're shelling Konjic worse than ever.

Was he there?

Of course he was, shitface. Bald Man goes where the brigades can't.

Then why doesn't he liberate Konjic for us? Armchair hero—

. . . Killed them both on the Vrbanja Most, after giving their guarantee. And ever since then my sister's not right in the head. She and Zlata were classmates—

Don't worry, brother. We'll get our revenge. Those Serbian girls are going to learn how to make Bosnian babies.

A shell came hissing, and everyone fell silent. The experienced soldiers relaxed first, shrugging their shoulders as they listened for the explosion, which sounded far away when it finally came.

Mirjana's fingers were shaking. She saw the American look.— Nerves, she said with a smile.

He said: I envy the people who can understand what they hear. It must give them a few extra seconds of peace—

The brunette nodded, her ringed fingers flashing as she raised the glass of slivovitz to her lips, and then she said: At the beginning it was funny for us, and we didn't even know what a grenade was, so we would be on the balcony trying to look. So we learned that this kind made a buzzing sound, and one made a hissing sound, and on the ninth floor of our building there was this one Serb who would always cheer anytime there was a bombing; he would shout,
oh, they got it!
I remember how he would cheer—

What happened to him?

Oh, he's still there, but he doesn't cheer, at least not so loudly, because we got fed up—

Now Amir approached him and said: Enko's waiting for you on the landing.

The American went out.

Give me an advance, said Enko.

How much?

All of it.

Sure. I'll be back in five minutes.

Make it two hundred.

It'll have to be dollars.

How much?

A hundred.

That's not right.

Well, it's what's on me just now.

When are you going to give me those binoculars?

At the end. I'll be right back.

Rather than disturbing the fighters who were smoking cigarettes just outside Vesna's bathroom, he ascended two more dark and silent flights of stairs—far enough to give him time to hide his moneybelt from Enko
or anyone. Without incident he removed and flashlight-verified the banknote. The American walked back into Vesna's. Enko was glaring and smiling at a blonde in a cheap print dress. The blonde was giggling. Jasmina, weeping openly, rushed into the bathroom. Mirjana rolled her eyes. Vesna was laying out crackers on a little plate. Amir met the American's eyes, saying nothing.

Enko, I have something for you, said the American.

Shut the fuck up.

I'll give it to Amir.

I said shut up.

The party fell nearly silent, so that the American could hear a fighter say: Fifty men armed with rifle grenades—

Turning away from his good friend, the American clasped Amir's hand, transferring the money that way. Then he went to seek out the poet.

Every day they worked for him, Enko and Amir earned their money. He interviewed fighters in a concrete building with wadded-up shutters in the smashed black-stained windows, met the mothers of murdered children and imagined that he would “make a difference.” All the while they were running Enko's errands, the most common of which was to carry ammunition to comrades at the frontline. Once they took a bag of onions and potatoes to Jasmina's mother. What Amir could have used and even where he lived the American never knew. In the shade, a longhaired boy was hosing down his sidewalk, walking on broken glass. Sometimes Enko said: Tomorrow I'm with the squad, and then the American went out with Amir alone, who of course could interpret perfectly well. Often no interpreter was needed, as when he and Amir sat on a terrace near the head of some steep high street, drinking slivovitz with a blonde named Sandi (twenty-two years old, he wrote in his notebook); for them she had arranged fresh flowers in a big jar on the table. Her boyfriend lived down in Centar; she could not reach him even by letter. Beyond the fence began a view of other red-tiled roofs, then trees, then more red roofs, then the zigzag mined path. Sandi said: The fear is the most difficult, don't you think? It's so awful. My sister is in Germany and I don't know what I can
explain to her. She just doesn't understand that every minute you're in the street you feel it, and then when you go inside . . .— He wrote this down, thinking that he must make others comprehend what the sister could not, while Amir gazed into his eyes.

Enko demanded an advance on three days' salary. Smiling, the American paid. Every night that he could get a ride, he went to Vesna's. On other nights he sat in the lounge of the Holiday Inn, where there were occasionally off-duty soldiers and always both kinds of journalists, the suit-and-tie species with the press card on the lapel, and the devil-may-care ones in the photo vests, making extravagant plans or exchanging boasts. It was scarcely comme il faut to sit alone, as the callow American did. This branded him as the impoverished freelancer that he was—a parasite, in fact. When he first arrived, some television journalists had taken pity on him and given him a ride from the airport to the Holiday Inn (the speeding auto receiving a token bullet from the heights of Gavrica). That day there had been no means of getting into the city but with that group. He was grateful, and hoped not to require any other favors. He had not yet learned that one can always pay one's own way, whether or not the currency is acceptable to others. Indeed, there was an exchange of sorts: To the extent that they noticed him at all, they dismissed him as a denizen of that backwater called “features,” while he for his part pitied them for being the merest producers of spectacle.
He
was going to get to the
why.
— Mostly, of course, all parties ignored each other. They schemed out their stories and listened for the shells.

How old were your sons? he asked Mirjana.

Five and three.

What were their names?

I don't want to talk about it.

But in time (by which I mean half a week, for where there is much death, friendships mature quickly) Mirjana and the others came to know (or at least such was his impression) that he cherished them for their suffering, which he hoped to preserve for others because it tormented him. (He could not decide whether to admire Enko, not for his bravery and his knowledge but for his pain, which armored him like a bulletproof vest.) The poet of course had been the first to trust him. Around Vesna the poet resembled one of those silent, spindly-legged, deer-eyed little dogs
which sit beneath the table, rarely looking into anyone's eyes but never being the first to look away. Because the American also admired Vesna, but without designs, much less possessiveness, the two men's understanding ran deep; moreover, the American believed in the poet's kindness. As for Amir, he perhaps had liked the American from the beginning, although with Amir one could never tell. Vesna of course would have smiled at anyone but the ones who shelled them from the hills. The other women seemed to take their cue from her. He supposed himself beginning to understand the first and second meanings of the shells but not yet the hundredth; perhaps not even the frontline fighters were capable of that.

Enko was there. Enko said: Mirjana doesn't talk about it because her family is mixed.

That's not true! the woman cried. Silently Vesna slipped an arm around her shoulders.

Glaring into their eyes, Enko said: I think it's a problem not to talk about it.

That was when the American realized that Enko sought to help him.

But do we need to talk about it? said Mirjana.

My personal opinion, said Enko, and the American was astonished to discover that for Enko there was any such thing, is that the only way to prevent war is to shame people.

Do you really think that you can do that to Serbian people?

No, I'm talking about Germans, replied Enko with a sarcastic laugh. Germans are different.— Then he strode over to Amir and muttered in his ear.

Stroking Mirjana's hair, the redhaired girl Dragica said: Enko is right. Nowadays I'm always asking myself, What is the story? What is the truth? When you go to Catholic school, like I did, you hear only Croatian history, and you won't hear what bad things Croats did under Hitler. If I live to have children, someday they'll go to school and they won't hear what bad things Croats did today. But I'm going to tell them: We too had bad people during the war. And I think the best thing would be to write their names, and say,
they killed.

Isn't that why you're here? Vesna asked the American.

Yes, he said, and after that more told him their stories.

Clenching her lips, her cigarette smoke streaming away, Mirjana took him aside and said: Write.— Then she told him how her children had died.

He wrote. She was gazing into his face as if he could help her. He was thinking: Nothing is more important than this. I came here for this; perhaps I was born for it. If someone reads her story and then refrains from taking a life . . .

Bitterly laughing, the poet was relating how in preparation for the siege their Serbian neighbors used to come by night to the Orthodox graveyard overlooking Bucá-Potok, in order to inter crates of shells, machine guns and sniper rifles.— Write that down, he said, and the American wrote.

What must be concluded about that? the poet demanded. How can anyone claim there was no premeditation?

Yes, they've been very intelligent in their way—

Vesna, who heard everything, paused in her passing and said: I don't think they are intelligent. Intelligence for me I think is that you have to be human. Intelligence, so we learn in school, is simply the ability to find a solution for unknown problems. But for me, there must be some kind of genetic memory; we must be born with certain values from previous generations. Otherwise there's nothing. I've met people without any soul. They have decent homes, they have children, they have everything, but they have nothing to share. And those Chetniks up there . . .

I want you to hand over those fucking binoculars right now, said Enko.

You can have them at the end, I promise.

Look. Do you want to interview Bald Man? Is that what you want?

Sure. I'll interview him.

A shell hissed overhead, rather close, and suddenly Mirjana's white top went dark at the armpits. Enko laughed at her.

The American journalist went to get stories from Dragica.

Dizzy with cigarette smoke, their hearts racing faster and faster, they flirted, did deals and listened for the shells. Sometimes one or two of
them withdrew from the window, as if doing that could save them. More and more he admired Vesna, who gave them this place and comforted those who could not distract themselves. In her presence the glare often departed from Enko's eyes, in much the same way that the offices at the television station slowly darkened whenever the electricity failed.

She touched the poet lightly on the shoulder; he smiled in hope.

The next day after interviewing blue-faced Gypsy women who lived alongside their excrement in a cellar insulated with garbage, they sped again down Sniper Alley and into the garage of the Holiday Inn to meet a statistician of deaths, then back nearly to the frontline, where nobody shot at them, probably because it was lunchtime.— I don't want you hanging around here more than a minute! Enko shouted. This place makes me nervous.— Sweating, the American took in sunlight, weedy grass, three men talking on the sidewalk in front of a building of black-scorched punched-out windows ringed by concertina wire. One of the men agreed to be interviewed. No one in his family had yet been killed. He couldn't understand the Chetniks, he said. And his former neighbors, them he couldn't understand.— All right, said Enko, now let's get the fuck out of here.

The American was in the back seat today, to take notes better. Enko was driving. He kept whipping his uncanny eyes left and right. Amir sat beside him, loosely gripping the leather strap of his sky-aimed M48, which appeared useless as far as the American could tell. As they rushed across a pedestrian bridge at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, a blue police car nearly slammed into them, screechingly stopped literally three inches away, and sped back the way it had come. Cursing, Enko reaccelerated, past a scorched building into a very dangerous open place where the street was spattered with blackish glass.

Now the American began to imagine that he would die today; a shell or a bullet would find him; in the mountains all around them, snipers were waiting for someone, which is to say anyone, so today he would serve. He felt certain of this but knew his certainty to be meaningless, so he kept it to himself. This lost journalist, hoping only to learn what was true—for as you know, he believed without being able to say why that if
this truth, whatever it was, could be communicated by him with sufficient eloquence (and not cut too much by his editor and the advertising director), then he would have accomplished something against war or at least for people (however wanly shone this something)—felt very afraid at times, but not afraid of his fear; for when that went away it went away; he had not yet understood that it was hollowing him out almost like an amphetamine addiction; he was not addicted to war and never came to like it, but the procedure of maintaining his calm in regard, for example, to the shrapnel-shard which had entered the wall two inches above his head just before he was about to sit up from his sleeping-place on the floor of the radio-television station resembled swallowing a pill; he could do it today, tomorrow and for however many unknown days or weeks he might now remain in Sarajevo (on the day after his arrival, the Serbs had shot down the UN plane, so the airport was closed, and he did not know when or by which method he would leave); needless to say, if he lived he would remain in the city for a finite, even relatively minute number of days, while Vesna, Enko and the others would be pinned down here until the end; he could calm himself for each and all of those days—but all the time, unaware, he was getting hollowed out within his skin, and there was no calculating how thick his skin was; meanwhile he retained the capacity to witness for awhile longer, and even to act moderately brave while listening for the shells. And Enko was slowing down.