But the scene in the valley below them was unique. The village appeared untouched by the war. If a shell had landed anywhere near it during the years of bitter conflict, there was no sign of it now.
Several dozen homes with steep cedar-shake roofs and white chimney smoke clustered neatly around the village center. Cobblestone paths ran like spokes between the homes and the large structure at the hub. There, with a sprawling courtyard, stood an ancient church with a belfry that reached to the sky like a finger pointing the way to God.
“What's the name of this village?” Karadzic asked no one in particular.
Janjic broke his stare on the village and looked at his commander. The man's lips had bent into a frown. He glanced at the others, who were still captivated by this postcard-perfect scene below.
“I don't know,” Molosov said to Janjic's right. “We're less than fifty clicks from Sarajevo. I grew up in Sarajevo.”
“And what is your point?”
“My point is that I grew up in Sarajevo and I don't remember this village.”
Karadzic was a tall man, six foot two at least, and boxy above the waist. His bulky torso rested on spindly legs, like a bulldog born on stilts. His face was square and leathery, pitted by a collage of small scars, each marking another chapter in a violent past. Glassy gray eyes peered past thick bushy eyebrows.
Janjic shifted on his feet and looked up valley. What was left of the Partisan army waited a hard day's march north. But no one seemed eager to move. A bird's caw drifted through the air, followed by another. Two ravens circled lazily over the village.
“I don't remember seeing a church like this before. It looks wrong to me,” Karadzic said.
A small tingle ran up Janjic's spine. Wrong? “We have a long march ahead of us, sir. We could make the regiment by nightfall if we leave now.”
Karadzic ignored him entirely. “Puzup, have you seen an Orthodox church like this?”
Puzup blew smoke from his nose and drew deep on his cigarette. “No, I guess I haven't.”
“Molosov?”
“It's standing, if that's what you mean.” He grinned. “It's been a while since I've seen a church standing. Doesn't look Orthodox.”
“If it isn't Orthodox, then what is it?”
“Not Jewish,” Puzup said. “Isn't that right, Paul?”
“Not unless Jews have started putting crosses on their temples in my absence.”
Puzup cackled in a high pitch, finding humor where apparently no one else did. Molosov reached over and slapped the younger soldier on the back of his head. Puzup's laugh stuck in his throat and he grunted in protest. No one paid them any mind. Puzup clamped his lips around his cigarette. The tobacco crackled quietly in the stillness. The man absently picked at a bleeding scab on his right forearm.
Janjic spit to the side, anxious to rejoin the main army. “If we keep to the ridges we should be able to maintain high ground and still meet the column by dark.”
“It appears deserted,” Molosov said, as if he had not heard Janjic.
“There's smoke. And there's a group in the courtyard,” Paul said.
“Of course there's smoke. I'm not talking about smoke, I'm talking about people. You can't see if there's a group in the courtyard. We're two miles out.”
“Look for movement. If you lookâ”
“Shut up,” Karadzic snapped. “It's Franciscan.” He shifted his Kalashnikov from one set of thick, gnarled fingers to the other.
A fleck of spittle rested on the commander's lower lip and he made no attempt to remove it.
Karadzic wouldn't know the difference between a Franciscan monastery and an Orthodox church if they stood side by side,
Janjic thought. But that was beside the point. They all knew about Karadzic's hatred for the Franciscans.
“Our orders are to reach the column as soon as possible,” Janjic said. “Not to scour the few standing churches for monks cowering in the corner. We have a war to finish, and it's not against them.” He turned to view the town, surprised by his own insolence.
It is the war
.
I've lost my sensibilities
.
Smoke still rose from a dozen random chimneys; the ravens still circled. An eerie quiet hovered over the morning. He could feel the commander's gaze on his faceâmore than one man had died for less.
Molosov glanced at Janjic and then spoke softly to Karadzic. “Sir, Janjic is rightâ”
“Shut up! We're going down.” Karadzic hefted his rifle and snatched it from the air cleanly. He faced Janjic. “We don't enlist women in this war, but you, Janjic, you are like a woman.” He headed downhill.
One by one the soldiers stepped from the crest and strode for the peaceful village below. Janjic brought up the rear, swallowing uneasiness. He had pushed it too far with the commander.
High above the two ravens cawed again. It was the only sound besides the crunching of their boots.
FATHER MICHAEL saw the soldiers when they entered the cemetery at the edge of the village. Their small shapes emerged out of the green meadow like a row of tattered scarecrows. He pulled up at the top of the church's hewn stone steps, and a chill crept down his spine. For a moment the children's laughter about him waned.
Dear God, protect us
. He prayed as he had a hundred times before, but he couldn't stop the tremors that took to his fingers.
The smell of hot baked bread wafted through his nostrils. A shrill giggle echoed through the courtyard; water gurgled from the natural spring to his left. Father Michael stood, stooped, and looked past the courtyard in which the children and women celebrated Nadia's birthday, past the tall stone cross that marked the entrance to the graveyard, past the red rosebushes Claudis Flouta had so carefully planted about her home, to the lush hillside on the south.
To the fourâno fiveâto the five soldiers approaching.
He glanced around the courtyardâthey laughed and played. None of the others had seen the soldiers yet. High above ravens cawed and Michael looked up to see four of them circling.
Father, protect your children
. A flutter of wings to his right caught his attention. He turned and watched a white dove settle for a landing on the vestibule's roof. The bird cocked its head and eyed him in small jerky movements.
“Father Michael?” a child's voice said.
Michael turned to face Nadia, the birthday girl. She wore a pink dress reserved for special occasions. Her lips and nose were wide and she had blotchy freckles on both cheeks. A homely girl even with the pretty pink dress. Some might even say ugly. Her mother, Ivena, was quite pretty; the coarse looks were from her father.
To make matters worse for the poor child, her left leg was two inches shorter than her right thanks to polioâa bad case when she was only three. Perhaps their handicaps united her with Michael in ways the others could not understand. She with her short leg; he with his hunched back.
Yet Nadia carried herself with a courage that defied her lack of physical beauty. At times Michael felt terribly sorry for the child, if for no other reason than that she didn't realize how her ugliness might handicap her in life. At other times his heart swelled with pride for her, for the way her love and joy shone with a brilliance that washed her skin clean of the slightest blemish.
He suppressed the urge to sweep her off her feet and swing her around in his arms.
Come unto me as little children,
the Master had said. If only the whole world were filled with the innocence of children.
“Yes?”
NADIA LOOKED into Father Michael's eyes and saw the flash of pity before he spoke. It was more of a question than a statement, that look of his. More “are you sure you're okay?” than “you look so lovely in your new dress.”
None of them knew how well she could read their thoughts, perhaps because she'd long ago accepted the pity as a part of her life. Still, the realization that she limped and looked a bit plainer than most girls, regardless of what Mother told her, gnawed gently at her consciousness most of the time.
“Petrus says that since I'm thirteen now all the boys will want to marry me. I told him that he's being a foolish boy, but he insists on running around making a silly game of it. Could you please tell him to stop?”
Petrus ran up, sneering. If any of the town's forty-three children was a bully, it was this ten-year-old know-nothing brat. Oh, he had his sweet side, Mother assured her. And Father Michael repeatedly said as much to the boy's mother, who was known to run about the village with her apron flying, leaving puffs of flour in her wake, shaking her rolling pin while calling for the runt to get his little rear end home.
“Nadia loves Milus! Nadia love Milus!” Petrus chanted and skipped by, looking back, daring her to take up chase.
“You're a misguided fledgling, Petrus,” Nadia said, crossing her arms. “A silly little bird, squawking too much. Why don't you find your worms somewhere else?”
Petrus pulled up, flushing red. “Oh, you with all your fancy words! You're the one eating worms. With Milus. Nadia and Milus sitting in a tree, eating all the worms they can see!” He sang the verse again and ran off with a
whoop
, obviously delighted with his victory.
Nadia placed her hands on her hips and tapped the foot of her shorter leg with a disgusted sigh. “You see. Please stop him, Father.”
“Of course, darling. But you know that he's just playing.” Father Michael smiled and took a seat on the top step.
He looked over the courtyard and Nadia followed his gaze
.
Of the village's seventy or so people, all but ten or twelve had come today for her birthday. Only the men were missing, called off to fight the Nazis. The old people sat in groups around the stone tables, grinning and chatting as they watched the children play a party game of balancing boiled eggs on spoons as they raced in a circle.
Nadia's mother, Ivena, directed the children with flapping hands, straining to be heard over their cries of delight. Three of the mothers busied themselves over a long table on which they had arranged pastries and the cake Ivena had fretted over for two days. It was perhaps the grandest cake Nadia had ever seen, a foot high, white with pink roses made from frosting.
All for her. All to cover up whatever pity they had for her and make her feel special.
Father Michael's gaze moved past the courtyard. Nadia looked up and saw a small band of soldiers approaching. The sight made her heart stop for a moment.
“Come here, Nadia.”
Father Michael lifted an arm for her to sit by him, and she limped up the steps. She sat beside him and he pulled her close.
He seemed nervous. The soldiers.
She put her arm around him, rubbing his humped back.
Father Michael swallowed and kissed the top of her head. “Don't mind Petrus. But he is right, one day the men will line up to marry such a pretty girl as you.”
She ignored the comment and looked back at the soldiers who were now in the graveyard not a hundred yards off. They were Partisans, she saw with some relief. Partisans were probably friendly.
High above birds cawed. Again Nadia followed the father's gaze as he looked up. Five ravens circled against the white sky. Michael looked to his right, to the vestibule roof. Nadia saw the lone dove staring on, clucking with its one eye peeled to the courtyard.
Father Michael looked back at the soldiers. “Nadia, go tell your mother to come.”
Nadia hoped the soldiers wouldn't spoil her birthday party.
JANJIC JOVIC, the nineteen-year-old writer-turned-soldier, followed the others into the village, trudging with the same rhythmic cadence his marching had kept in the endless months leading up to this day. Just one foot after another. Ahead and to the right, Karadzic marched deliberately. The other three fanned out to his left.
Karadzic's war had less to do with defeating the Nazis than with restoring Serbia, and that included purging the land of anyone who wasn't a good Serb. Especially Franciscans.
Or so he said. They all knew that Karadzic killed good Serbs as easily as Franciscans. His own mother, for example, with a knife, he'd bragged, never mind that she was Serbian to the marrow. Though sure of few things, Janjic was certain the commander wasn't beyond trying to kill him one day. Janjic was a philosopher, a writerâ not a killerâand the denser man despised him for it. He determined to follow Karadzic obediently regardless of the elder's folly; anything less could cost dearly.
Only when they were within a stone's throw of the village did Janjic study the scene with a careful eye. They approached from the south, through a graveyard holding fifty or sixty concrete crosses. So few graves. In most villages throughout Bosnia one could expect to find hundreds if not thousands of fresh graves, pushing into lots never intended for the dead. They were evidence of a war gone mad.
But in this village, hidden here in this lush green valley, he counted fewer than ten plots that looked recent.
He studied the neat rows of housesâfewer than fiftyâalso unmarked by the war. The tall church spire rose high above the houses, adorned with a white cross, brilliant against the dull sky. The rest of the structure was cut from gray stone and elegantly carved like most churches. Small castles made for God.
None in the squad cared much for Godânot even the Jew, Paul. But in Bosnia, religion had little to do with God. It had to do with who was right and who was wrong, not with who loved God. If you weren't Orthodox or at least a good Serb, you weren't right. If you were a Christian but not an Orthodox Christian, you weren't right. If you were Franciscan, you were most certainly not right. Janjic wasn't sure he disagreed with Karadzic on this pointâreligious affiliation was more a defining line of this war than the Nazi occupation.
The Ustashe, Yugoslavia's version of the German Gestapo, had murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs using techniques that horrified even the Nazis. Worse, they'd done it with the blessing of both the Catholic Archbishop of Sarajevo and the Franciscans, neither of whom evidently understood the love of God. But then,
no
one in this war knew much about the love of God. It was a war absent of God, if indeed there even was such a being.