But with a single look into the priest's eyes, Janjic knew the priest wanted to die now. He'd found something of greater value than life. He had found this love for Christ.
Karadzic was shaking his gun at the priest, glaring at the villagers, trying to force apostasy and carrying on as if he thought the whole thing was some delicious joke. But the priest had led his flock well. They didn't seem capable of speaking out against their Christ, regardless of what it meant to the priest.
“Speak now or I'll kill him!” Karadzic screamed.
“I will speak.”
Janjic lifted his head. Who'd said that? A man. The priest? No, the priest did not possess the strength.
“I will speak for my children.” It
was
the priest! It was the priest, lifting his head and looking squarely at Karadzic, as if he'd received a transfusion of energy.
“Your threat of death doesn't frighten us, soldier.” He spoke gently, without anger, through tears that still ran down his face. “We've been purchased by blood, we live by the power of that blood, we will die for that blood. And we would never, never, renounce our beloved Christ.” His voice croaked. “He is our Creator, sir.”
The priest turned his eyes to the women, and slowly a smile formed on his lips. “My children, please. Please . . .” His face wrinkled with despair. His beard was matted with blood and he could hardly speak for all the tears now.
“Please.” The priest's voice came soft now. “Let me go. Don't hold me back . . . Love all those who cross your path, they are all beautiful. So . . . so very beautiful.”
Not a soul moved.
A cockeyed, distant smile crossed the priest's lips. He lowered his head, exhausted. A flutter of wings beat through the air. It was the white dove, flapping toward them. It hovered above the father, then settled quietly to the cross, eyeing the bloodied man three feet under its stick feet.
The sound came quiet at first, like a distant train struggling up a hill. But it was no locomotive; it was the priest and he was laughing. His head hung and his body shook.
Janjic instinctively took a step backward.
The sound grew louder. Maybe the man had gone mad. But Janjic knew that nothing could be further from the truth. The priest was perhaps the sanest man he had ever known.
He suddenly lifted his head and spoke . . . no, he didn't speak, he sang. With mucus leaking from his nostrils and tears wetting his bloodied cheeks, wearing a face of unearthly delight, he threw his head back and sang in a rough, strained voice.
“Sing, o child of mine . . . ”
And then he began to laugh.
The picture of contrasts slammed into Janjic's chest and took his breath away. Heat broke over his skull and swept down his back.
The laughter echoed over the graveyard now. Karadzic trembled, rooted to the earth. Ivena was looking up at the priest, weeping with the rest of the women. But it was not terror or even sorrow that gripped her; it was something else entirely. Something akin to desire. Something . . .
A gunshot boomed around Janjic's ears and he jumped. A coil of smoke rose from Karadzic's waving pistol.
The resounding report left absolute silence in its wake, snuffing out the laughter. Father Michael slumped on the cross. If he wasn't dead, he would be soon enough.
Then Janjic ran. He whirled around, aware only of the heat crashing through his body. He did not think to run, he just ran. On legs no stronger than puffs of cotton, he fled the village.
When his mind caught up to him, it told him that he also had just died.
JANJIC DIDN'T know how long he ran, only that the horizon had already dimmed when he fell to the ground, wasted, nearly dead. When moments of clarity came to him, he reminded himself that his flight from the village would mean his death. The Partisans did not deal kindly with deserters and Karadzic would take pleasure in enforcing the point. He had drawn a line in the sand back there with the commander. There was no avoiding Karadzic's wrath.
But then he remembered that he was already deadâa walking ghost. That was what he had learned in the village watching the priest laughing on the cross.
And what about the fact that his heart was pumping blood through his veins? What about these thoughts, bouncing around his skull like ricocheting pellets? Didn't they avow life? In some mundane, banal reality perhaps. But not in the same way he'd just witnessed. Not like the life that belonged to the villagers. In spite of the child cut down in cold blood; in spite of the priest's martyrdom, the villagers possessed life. Perhaps because of it. And what life! Laughing in the face of death. He had never even heard of such faith! Never!
Which was why he had to go back there.
Janjic spent the night huddled in the cold without a fire. His neck throbbed where Karadzic's pistol had cut a deep gash from a spot just behind his right ear to his shoulder. Images of the village came at him from the dark, whispers from the other side. A young girl in a pink dress falling to the concrete, wearing yellow hair clips and a neat little hole through her temple. A priest suspended from a cement cross, laughing. Did you hear me laughing? the girl had asked the priest. Laughter. It seemed to have possessed them both. The currency of life beyond. It was the laughter that had made the killing a truly horrifying event.
Face it, Jan, you have seen worse before and left with a shrug.
But this. This had reached into his chest and set off a grenade!
He had a dream in his drifting. He was in a dark dungeon, strapped to a beam. Perhaps a cross. He could see nothing, but his own breathing echoed about him, impossibly loud in the black space. It terrified him. And then the world lit with a flash and he stared at a great white field.
He'd awoken then, sweating and panting.
Sometime past midnight, Janjic stood and headed the way he'd come. He had no idea what he would do once there, but he knew that in fleeing he had committed himself to returning.
He reached the village at daybreak, stumbling over the same hill from which they had first gazed into this tranquil valley. He pulled up, breathing steadily through his nostrils. High above, gray clouds ran to the horizon, an unbroken blanket. The air lay still and silent except for the twittering of a sparrow nearby. The church rose like a huge tombstone below, surrounded by carefully placed houses. A thin fog drifted through the northern perimeter. Several homes spawned trails of smoke from their chimneys. On any other day Janjic might have come upon the scene and imagined the warmth of the fires that crackled in the bosom of those houses.
But today Janjic could not imagine fire. Today he thought only of cold death. A knot rose to his throat. The cemetery was shrouded by a dozen large poplars. Behind those drooping leaves stood a tall cross. And on that cross . . .
Janjic descended the hill, his heart beating like a tom. Now the unseen forces that had driven him from the village reached into his bones, raising gooseflesh along his arms. He'd heard an Orthodox priest pray for protection once. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Janjic whispered the prayer three times as he approached the tall trees.
Then he was beside them, and he stopped.
The gray cross stood tall beyond dozens of smaller crosses. A black dog nuzzled the earth at its base. But the body . . . The body was gone. Of course. What had he expected? Certainly they would not have left his body for the birds. But then where had they laid his body? And the child's?
Janjic stumbled forward, suddenly eager to find the priest. Tears blurred his vision and he ran his wrists across his eyes.
Where are you, Father? Where are you, my priest?
The earth had been disturbed at the foot of the cross; heaped into a smooth mound roughly the length of a body. A tall body. And next to it a smaller mound. They had buried the priest and Nadia at the foot of the cross.
Janjic ran for the graves, suddenly overcome by it all. By the war and the monsters it had spawned; by images of peaceful women and delighted children; by a picture of the little girl falling and the priest hanging. By the echoes of that laughter and that final resounding boom!
The tears were so thick in his eyes he could not see the last few yards except for vague shapes. The dog fled and Janjic let his body fall when his boots first felt the ground rising with fresh dirt. He fell facedown on the priest's grave, sobbing from his gut now, clutching at the soil.
He wanted to beg forgiveness. He wanted to somehow undo what he had done by visiting this peaceful village. But he could not form the words. He gasped deeply, barely aware of the dirt in his mouth now. Every muscle in his body contracted taut, and he brought his knees up under him. It felt like death and he welcomed it, completely oblivious to the world now. He slammed his fist on the earth and sobbed.
Forgive me, forgive me! Oh, God, forgive me!
Janjic lay there for long minutes, his eyes clenched against an assault of images. And he begged. He begged God to forgive him.
“Janjic.”
His name? Someone was speaking his name.
“Janjic.”
He lifted his head. They'd gathered in a semicircle at the entrance to the courtyard, ten meters off, the women and the children. All of them.
Nadia's mother stood before him. “Hello, Janjic.” She smiled with ashen lips.
He pushed himself to his knees, raising up on shaky legs. The world was still swimming.
“So you have come back,” Ivena said. Her smile had left. “Why?”
Janjic glanced about the villagers. Children gripped their mothers' hands, looking at him with round eyes. The women stared without moving.
“I . . .” Janjic cleared his throat. “I . . .” He reached his hands out, palms up. “Please . . .”
Ivena walked forward. “The priest didn't die right away,” she said. “He lived for a while after the other soldiers left. And he told us some things that helped us understand.”
A ball of sorrow rolled up Janjic's throat.
“We can't condemn you,” she said, but she was starting to cry.
Janjic thought his chest might explode. “Forgive me. Forgive me. Please forgive me,” he said.
She opened her arms and he stepped into them, weeping like a baby now. Nadia's mother held him and patted his back, comforting him and crying on his shoulder. A dozen others came around them and rested their hands on them, hushing quietly in sympathy and praying with sweet voices. “Lord Jesus, heal your children. Comfort us in this hour of darkness. Bathe us in your love.”
And their Lord Jesus did bathe them in his love,
Janjic thought. He continued to shake and sob, a tall man surrounded by a sea of women, but now his tears were mixed with warmth.
When they had collected themselves enough to stop the crying they talked in short scattered sentences, decrying what had happened, consoling each other with talk of love. Nadia's love; Father Michael's love; Christ's love.
When they had stopped talking, Janjic walked over to the cross. Bloodstains darkened the gray concrete. He gripped it with both hands and kissed it.
“I swear this day to follow your Christ,” he said and kissed the cross again. “I swear it on my own life.”
“Then he will have to be your Christ,” Ivena said. She took a small bottle the size of her fist from Marie. A perfume bottle, perhaps, with a pointed top and a flared base.
“Yes. He will be my Christ,” Janjic said
She held the bottle out to him. It was dark red, sealed with wax. Janjic took it gingerly and studied it.
“Take it in remembrance of Christ's blood, which purchased your soul,” she said.
“What is it?”
“It's the priest's blood.”
Janjic nearly dropped the vial. “The priest's blood?”
“Don't worry,” another spoke. “It's sealed off; it won't bite. It holds no value but to remind us. Think of it as a crossâa symbol of death. Please accept it and remember well.”
Janjic closed his fingers around the glass. “I will. I will never forget. I swear it.” A great comfort swept through his body. He lifted his hands wide and faced the sky. “I swear it! And I too will give my life for you. I will remember your love shown this day through these, your children. And I will return that love as long as I live.”
His prayer echoed through the courtyard like a bell rung from the towers. The villagers looked on in silence.
Then somewhere, behind one of the mothers' skirts or under sister Flouta's rosebushes, perhaps, a small child giggled. It was an absurd sound, foreign in the heavy moment. It was an innocent sound that danced on strings from heaven. It was a beautiful, lovely, divine sound that sent a tremor of pleasure through the bones.
It was a sound that Janjic would never, never forget.
IVENA CLOSED the book and smiled. Glory!
For the third time that hour, the phone rang in the kitchen, and this time she walked to get it. She plucked the receiver from the wall on its fifth ring.
“Yes?”
“Ivena. Are you all right?”
“Of course I am.”
“I've been calling for an hour.”
“Because I don't answer my phone you think I am dead, Janjic?”
“No. Just concerned. Would you like me to pick you up?”
“Why would you pick me up?”
“The reception,” Janjic said. “Don't tell me you forgot.”
“That's tonight?” she asked.
“At five-thirty.”
“And tell me again why I must attend. You know I'm not crazy aboutâ”
“It's in your honor as much as mine, Ivena. It's your story as well. And I have a surprise I would like you to share in.”
“A surprise? You can't tell me?”
“Then it would no longer be a surprise.”
She let that go.
“And please, Ivena, make the best of it. Some of those there will be quite important.”
“Yes. You've already told me. Don't worry, Janjic; what could an old woman like me possibly say to upset important men?”