Lie in the Dark

CHAPTER 13

What did one take to a war? For it occurred to Vlado that this was where he was going. Off to war. He’d assumed for the past two years he was already living in the middle of one. Yet now that he was contemplating a walk to the trenches of Zuc he realized otherwise. He’d only been working at its fringes, padding about like everyone else in hopes of escaping the notice of the shells and snipers.

Once the ferocity of the first few months of fighting had passed, the bigger guns had refocused most of their attention on the city’s edges, on the frontlines of the armies encamped in the snow and the mud. Only occasionally now were there days of heavy firing into the city center. Only now and then did a freak shot fall with deadly accuracy into crowds gathered to play children’s games, mourn a burial, shop at a market, or line up for bread or water.

Vlado poked around his house, opening doors and rooms that had been shut for months. He felt strangely unequipped for his journey. A sleeping bag? He didn’t have one. A helmet? Ditto. But that was nothing unusual. Most of the soldiers had little more than their coats and the dark wool caps every man seemed to wear in the winter. A gun? They handed you one at the top of the hill, and you returned it on your way back down.

He opened the door of his daughter’s closet, rummaging aimlessly. He picked up a few toys from a small pile on the floor next to the disassembled panels of her crib. He brought a fuzzy red dog to his nose. The synthetic fur was stiff and chilly, smelling faintly of drool and old canned fruit.

He walked into his and Jasmina’s bedroom, opened the drawer of a bedside table, and found a half-read book, its jacket stuck in the middle to mark the place where Jasmina had last set it aside. He pictured her sitting up in bed reading it, her every-evening pose, leaning back on a pillow propped against the wall, a small cone of lamplight pooling on the pages of the book, the whiteness of the sheets gathered at her knees, her long brown hair draped across bare shoulders.

He remembered the conversation from one of their last nights together.

“There’s a convoy of twenty buses leaving Monday. Goran says he can get you and Sonja on it.”

She dropped the book to her lap, an accomplishment in itself, and looked up, eyes widening. “And you?”

“You know the rules.”

The rules were, and always had been, that no able-bodied male between the ages of sixteen and sixty could leave the city They were vital for defense. The unwritten rules were that those who weren’t regular army could buy an exception for a going rate equal to three thousand dollars, provided you had the right connections, and even buying your way out came with risks, not the least of which were being either shot in the back or conned out of every penny.

She looked back down for a moment at her book, staring but not reading, then looked back up, though still holding the book open in her lap.

“All the more reason we shouldn’t leave,” she said. “Why don’t we just wait until we can all go?”

But they both knew her defense was bound to crumble, if not on this evening then on some later night. Like everyone, they had assumed at the beginning that the war would be a quick ride into either oblivion or salvation. It would pass like a strong fever, killing or breaking. Instead it had become a long illness that took its toll in slow measures, and they both knew by then that the prognosis wasn’t likely to change anytime soon. Those who could get out, did, if they had any brains, even if it meant leaving behind sons and fathers.

“We could wait two years and we still might not be able to all get out at once,” he said.

She closed the book, laid it beside her on the bed, and looked away toward the window, out at the night. She blew out the bedside candle. “I don’t know. Probably not, I guess.”

He waited through a minute of silence, knowing by the rhythm of her breathing that she was fighting to gain control of her emotions, perhaps marshaling her next rebuttal as well.

“I’ll stay and hold down the house,” he said, “make sure it’s repaired as it needs it. Keep the roof whole and the windows covered, keep some refugee family from moving in. When it’s all over we’ll be together again.”

“And where are we supposed to go? Zagreb? And to live where? Karlovac? To live in some tent city with ten thousand other refugees? Germany? So Sonja can be shouted at all her life? Austria? Switzerland? And what will I do? And what does Sonja do without a father?”

“Do you want her to grow up here? With all of this? Do you want her to get used to this kind of a life, to think it’s normal to run from bullets or line up every day with buckets for your water.”

Jasmina pulled the sheets up around her shoulders and turned over, tucking her legs up to think. He moved up against her from behind, curling around her, taking her hand and holding it tightly, and they slowly relaxed into sleep.

Vlado awakened the next morning to shells and shooting, and opened his eyes to see Jasmina dressed and standing before her closet, a suitcase already open on the bed.

Vlado turned away from the bed and opened the drawers of his dresser. Inside were clothes he hadn’t worn for ages, having winnowed his wardrobe to a few sturdy shirts and trousers and a single sweater of coarse brown wool. The items in the drawer felt strange to him, as if they were of another era, artifacts in an unsealed tomb. In this room even the motes of dust tumbling through the pale light seemed encoded with the past. He inhaled the staleness, smelled its difference in his lungs, all the old moods and atmospheres shifting and settling inside him. Some inner chemical switch, long untended, briefly fluttered on at the sudden register of these false readings, and he exhaled deeply to collect himself, tears pooling in his eyes. He straightened, blinked once, and swallowed heavily, then began packing a small duffel with some heavy dark clothes, a few old items that he wouldn’t mind muddying, and tossed in a blanket for good measure along with a canteen and an old rain jacket.

And that was about all he could do. There was a small flashlight in the house, but no batteries. There were no snacks to scrounge, and his gun, a service revolver locked in a drawer at work, would seem even more useless up there than it did here.

He stripped down to change, smelling the sourness of his unwashed skin. When had he bathed last? Four days ago? Five? He’d sponged himself with a cold washcloth in the dark, lathering up from a thin knife of soap. He’d then felt itchy all the next day.

He turned to see his image in the full-length mirror hanging inside Jasmina’s closet door. Staring back was a pale ghostly man, rib bones showing and goosebumps rising, and he was overcome by the sensation of seeing his own corpse, stretched upon a slab.

The chest, now slightly sunken, would be more so, like the broken ground of a frost heave, whitened and deflated; his arm muscles gone flaccid; his eyes vacant, lids swollen, lashes encrusted with mud; hair stiff and standing in every direction. Only the fingernails would be growing, or so the books said, but no longer either pink or clean. He scanned the reflection of his chest, wondering if it would be torn by one of those wounds he’d grown so accustomed to seeing, only uglier, ragged edges caked with dirt, a foul and rusting porthole spilling its slippery contents in a steaming coil. He even knew the smell, its essence of cold and damp soil and of nascent rot after a few days in the elements.

He turned abruptly toward the bed to shake the image, then looked back at the mirror and saw that it remained, the ghost of some future he never wanted to reach, yet would be walking toward in a few hours. Why not just call it off: It’s not as if Kasic would mind if he turned over his early results. Then he considered the next day at his desk, feet propped, the underpowered fluorescent tubes humming and throbbing above his head. Garovic in motion toward his desk, a folder in his hand, Damir rattling his jar of shells and talking of his latest conquest. And the siege, lurching onward with its unstoppable mechanical force. No, he would go to Zuc. See what there was to be learned, whether of the war or of this case.

He shut the closet door, swiveling the mirror out of sight, then walked from the room.

So this was the fear of going to war, with its dry metallic taste and its dark play of imagination. He’d read enough about trenches and bunkers and pitched battles to know what he could be getting into by walking up to Zuc. He felt familiar already with the the splintered trees, the moonscape of cratered mud, the rats that grew fat and the feet that grew soft and wrinkled within sodden boots. As for the whine and shatter of shellbursts, they, at least, would be nothing new.

He’d overheard the teenage boys in the cafes talking of their weekly one-night stands up on the line. They smiled weakly and forced a few jokes, half out of bravado and half out of cathartic need, their conversations continuing until they eased themselves to an acceptable distance from their deepest fears. At least until next time.

Infantry attacks were rare up there, he knew that as well. Neither side ever gained enough of an advantage to try them often. Both sides were thin along most of the line, and neither could mass enough for an offensive without the other finding out and responding in kind. Defenses were left mostly to mines and artillery, and overnight duty was usually a matter of waiting out the shells while yearning to walk back home. That was the night’s reward, a predawn stroll back down into the bowl of the city, with its monotonous comforts of scattershot and siege, its torn plumbing and its weak gas flames, its hard beds rucked against less exposed walls, its slow curl of woodsmoke and steaming piles of garbage, and at night, its inkwell of darkness.

Vlado’s rendezvous point was at a brigade headquarters on the west side of the city’s center. He arrived just at nightfall. An old woman wrapped in a red shawl squatted on the ground next to a water spigot, peddling a small mountain of cigarettes one by one.

The contingent of men who were to march up to Zuc was to gather in a group of about sixty, then split into six groups of ten that would leave at ten minute intervals, to keep from attracting too much attention from enemy gunners. An unshaven commander told Vlado to follow him in the first group up.

“Just stay quiet and do as I say, that’s all I ask. If you get killed all I can promise is we’ll bring you back. If you’re wounded you’ll take whatever treatment you can get up there. You’ll get nothing better than what the soldiers get, which isn’t always so great. But it’s your decision.”

It was clear that none of the arriving soldiers was part of a well-trained unit. They appeared in street clothes and sneakers, as if for a pickup game of basketball, some wearing the same muddy jeans and jackets they’d worn the last time up the hill, not bothering to wash them in the interim.

The commander assigned leaders to the other groups that would follow, then called together the first ten. Three men in their late forties stood to themselves, huddled in the fraternity of age and silence, conserving their energies for getting up the hill and safely through the night.

The younger ones, however, gave way to the schoolboy inclination to make light of even the most solemn occasion. They fidgeted and shadow boxed, playing tapes on a large radio shouldered by a tall boy with acne and a black ponytail.

He sorted through a stack of cassette tapes, a cigarette waggling in his mouth as he talked. Another of the younger ones handed him a tape, putting in his request for the walk up the hill.

Another member of this group was busy off to the side, kissing his girlfriend good-bye, he in a caricature of sternness and duty, she in a tearful mime of sorrow.

The slow walk began, and Vlado fell in with the younger ones, partly out of curiosity, partly out of knowing there would be no conversation with the older ones anyway, no way to make the time move any faster. Perhaps that was the difference between knowing you’d have to do this over and over again and knowing, as Vlado did, that this would be a one-time journey.

For a while the only noise was the thump of the bass line from the big radio, still propped on the shoulder of the tall boy, the music jumping as if in time to the movement of his plaid flannel shirttail, which swayed back and forth with every step uphill.

In the darkness they passed people headed down the hill, some saying hello, others carrying water jugs or pulling wagons. Most were headed home for the night, although some of the younger ones were headed toward the feeble and expensive offerings of Sarajevo night life.

After a few more blocks the houses began to thin. The higher the group walked, the more damage there seemed to be.

Two of the boys began to kid the third one about his girlfriend. From their conversation it was obvious he’d just met her a few days ago, and after a few minutes of this Vlado piped up to ask how one managed to acquire a new girlfriend so easily while a war was going on.

The three of them looked back, questioning him without saying a word. He told them he was a policeman looking for someone, a witness in a case. Just along for the ride.

“Not much of a ride,” said the boy with the new girlfriend.

The others laughed, as if privy to an old joke.

“So you want to know how to find a girlfriend?” the boy asked.

“Not exactly. I’m married. Just wondering how those things go at your age. From what I can remember it was hard enough taking care of that kind of business when there wasn’t a war on.”

“Oh, it’s easy. Easier, even. Meeting them, anyway. The hard part’s finding time alone with them. Moms and dads are always home now. Always indoors. And it’s not like you can go hang out in the park. Your best hope before was to wait until everybody else went to bed. Now there’s a curfew and you’ve got to get home yourself. But there’s always a way. She sleeps over at a friend’s and you do the same. Or maybe you tell your parents you’re off to ‘the front’ again, only you’re really off to somewhere else.”

“But easier to meet? That I still don’t get.”

“The ones in your building, anyway. These guys here.” He motioned toward his friends in the group. “None of us knew each other before the war. We hung out with other people, all of us. But now most of my old friends are gone, theirs too. Most left. Some got killed. And in those first few months you remember how it was. Everybody in the basements and the shelters. It was you and everybody else from your building down there, and you weren’t going to spend the evening talking to your parents. So you found the other people your age and had a party. A few weeks of that and you’ve got a new set of friends. A few more weeks and some of the boys and girls are starting to pair off. And when there’s a war a month with a girl seems like a year. Everything’s more intense. More serious. They start talking about having babies, wanting to leave something of themselves behind.”

A second one joined in: “And you say, yeah, yeah, let’s make a baby, only you’re really hoping there won’t be a baby, but you’re more than willing to keep trying.”

The others laughed.

The first member of the group, the one who’d handed his tape to the boy with the radio, then repeated his request, loudly this time, for his music to be played.

The tall boy with the ponytail answered by ejecting the tape he was playing and popping in another, only it still wasn’t the requested one.

“Hey, that’s still Aerosmith,” the aggrieved party shouted. “Fuck Aerosmith.”

“Fuck Guns ‘N’ Roses,” ponytail shouted back.

“He’s always that way,” the other boy muttered. “Plays his own stuff until we’re too high up the hill, then puts yours in right when we have to cut the noise.”

“So what’s it like up there,” Vlado asked. “What should I expect?”

“Cold,” one answered. “Muddy. Lots of mud and lots of Chetniks.”

“Scary?”

“Sometimes. Usually just quiet and boring. That’s when you just sit and talk and smoke all night.”

“Can you hear them on the other side?”

“All the time. Sometimes you shout back and forth. They scream something over, we scream something back, then it keeps up until either some officer stops it or it gets nasty. ’Cause when it gets too nasty somebody always starts shooting. Then everybody’s mad at whoever was doing the talking to begin with, so you have to watch what you say.”

“Does anyone ever sleep?”

“You’re not supposed to, but you’re welcome to try. We’re never sleepy up there. We don’t get sleepy until we’re halfway back down the hill. And that’s when the asshole with the radio finally starts playing our music.”

They all laughed again.

By then they were out in the open, the road winding along the side of a grassy hill in the dark. When a shell went off now you could see flashes in the sky. They were in farmland now. Each house was a hundred yards or so from the last, places where families used to tend goats and cows and grow long rows of corn, pumpkins, and cabbage. Now the houses were empty, roofs gone, animals too.

They passed a blown-up bus tilted off into a ditch, painted camouflage green. Some sort of army transport that had gone off the tracks. Even in the darkness you could see that the damp fields were pocked with shellholes, as if giant gophers had been spent the last few years digging.

From up ahead the screech and snarl of Guns ‘N’ Roses finally filled the air. A small cheer went up from the four boys nearest Vlado.

Then, following the brief chatter of an automatic weapon from somewhere over the rise, the commander at the head of the column ordered silence.

“Off with the music and off with the talk,” he shouted. “All cigarettes out until we’ve reached the top.”

“Fuck you, sir” the boy with the tape muttered, inhaling fiercely before tossing his cigarette into the ditch.

The tape ejected from the machine with a click that signaled the crossing of some invisible line. A few minutes later they were greeted by a shell, and then a rumble. Then the sky lit up with a riot of red tracer bullets, streaming in a wild search for targets. With the approach of the Orthodox Christian New Year such celebratory firing had been growing more commonplace, and by the next night there would no stopping it until the wee hours.

They reached a small row of shattered houses, a village high on the hill just before the shank of the ridge, and it was here they halted. An officer greeted their unit, signaling them off to the left. Vlado approached him to announce his title and his destination.

“So, it’s Neven you want. You can have him. Down that way, another quarter mile, maybe a little more. I’ll get someone to take you.”

Shortly afterward he was joined by yet another teenage boy, in a plaid wool jacket streaked with mud. He seemed glad for the chance to move about.

Boards were stacked and nailed up between the houses, and fortified by mounds of earth. Men squatted behind them or sat on the ground behind the houses, talking in low voices and smoking cigarettes. One boiled water for coffee over a small stove.

Vlado heard chattering in the near distance, followed by laughter, and wondered if it was coming from the other side. Then there was a shout, more laughter, then someone yelling, this time from nearby.

He and the boy moved farther down the line, on a path behind more of the houses, sidestepping broken branches and sinking ankle-deep in mud. The path then curved around the slope of the hill toward more exposed ground, out where there were no homes and trees.

A few moments later there was the whoosh of a shell, a yellow flash, and a crushing blow deep in the pit of Vlado’s stomach. There was also a slight heave to the ground, or so it seemed to Vlado as he suddenly found himself in a crouch, his face twisted in fear.

He looked for his escort and saw the boy standing upright, relaxed, inhaling from his cigarette, and regarding Vlado with mild curiosity. “Relax,” the boy said. “It wasn’t that close.” Vlado would have to recalibrate his definition of close if he was to last very long up here.

They finally reached their destination by stepping down into a communications trench leading to a small bunker, where they found a sentry reading a paperback by the light of a kerosene lantern. The boy turned to go without a word as the sentry looked up.

“I wish to see Neven Halilovic,” Vlado announced, as if to a hotel doorman, or the secretary of a business executive.

“General Halilovic usually doesn’t see anyone but his own men,” the sentry replied.

General. That was a laugh. Though if you could manage putting together your own army while officially under army arrest then perhaps you’d earned the right to call yourself whatever you wanted.

“Tell him that Inspector Petric of the Interior Ministry would like to speak with him about a case he has some interest in.”

“Doubtful. But I’ll pass it along.”

The reply was only five minutes in coming.

“Neven says to fuck off and go back down the hill where you came from.”

Vlado pondered for a moment what to do. It was clear the sentry didn’t wish to ask again. Vlado fished in his pockets for a five mark piece he’d scrounged out of a drawer before leaving. The sentry looked at it scornfully, but took it.

“Tell him I wish to discuss the level of art appreciation of the late Esmir Vitas.”

This time it took ten minutes, but when the sentry returned he motioned for Vlado to follow him. They headed down a long, neatly dug trench, stepping deeper into the private war of Neven Halilovic.