The Cairo Affair

4

1991

After Prague they moved on to Budapest and the drearily aristocratic Gellért Hotel. With the memory of that Czech boy and her stolen Lenin still fresh, Sophie shied away from tourist spots, preferring to sit with Emmett in dusty Hungarian cafés on streets called Vaci and Andrassy, reading the Herald Tribune and pretending to be locals. It didn’t work, for their clothes gave them away, and as soon as they opened their mouths they received shocked stares, but it did give them time to read and learn about the war bubbling just to the south, in Yugoslavia.

In late June, Croatia and Slovenia had declared their independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and after a brief ten-day war Slovenia had become sovereign. By September, as they huddled over their newspapers, the young Croatian republic had been fighting for its existence for two months.

“It’s the biggest news since the Berlin Wall,” Emmett told her in their hotel room as they watched grainy television images of bombs and talking heads. “And we’re right here, one country away.” She could feel his excitement.

During breakfast, their waitress told them in spotty English that Budapest was swelling from an influx of Yugoslavs—mostly Serbs—fleeing military conscription, smuggling goods across the loose borders, and escaping the prospect of an unknown future. “Criminals,” she said with undisguised contempt, but this only added to their vision of themselves as explorers into the unknown. At a bar in Liszt Ferenc Square they listened to a drunk young Serbian man ranting in English to a table of Hungarians about how Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman were preparing to “set fire to the Balkans, you mark my words.”

The tension in the air, whether real or imagined, added a new dimension to their honeymoon, and on the white Gellért sheets they tangled and fought as if their room had caught fire and this was their last chance for connection. Sophie lost track of herself during sex; this kind of exhilaration was new to her. While a part of her was terrified by the loss of control, when she saw the look of pure satisfaction on Emmett’s face her fear faded away.

On September 18, two days before their scheduled return to Boston, Emmett suggested they travel south. “We missed the Wall, Sophie. You really want to miss this?”

She didn’t know. They were at breakfast again in the Gellért dining room, and she was tired. A part of her longed to get back to their friends in Boston, where they could understand the language again and spread tall tales of their adventures; another part was enchanted by the idea, recently hatched, that this honeymoon could be the first step of a journey that would take them around the world.

“We can go down to Novi Sad,” Emmett said as he pulled out the regional map they’d only used a couple of times. Now, she saw, there were pencil circles around cities, and she realized that he’d gotten up sometime during the night to scribble on it. Where had he worked? The bathroom, or had he snuck down to the hotel bar?

Novi Sad, she saw, was a town in the north of Yugoslavia, on the banks of the Danube, not so far from the Hungarian border. To the west, he’d circled another town, also along the Danube, called Vukovar, just inside Croatia, though on their map Croatia did not exist. He pointed at it. “There’s fighting right there.”

Sophie knew the name. For nearly a month, Vukovar had suffered under a continuous rain of artillery by the JNA, the Jugoslav National Army. “It’s not too close?” she asked.

“I’m not suggesting we go to the fighting, Sophie. We get to Novi Sad, and we settle in for a week. We keep our ears open; we see what we can see.”

“To what end?”

He stared at her a moment, as if he only now realized that he’d married an imbecile. Or maybe he was asking himself the same question. He smiled and opened his hands. “To go. To see. To experience.”

They were only twenty-two.

It was a straightforward enough proposition, but Sophie saw it as a life-changing decision. She was right to think of it like that, for in a way the decision redirected their shared life. At the time, though, she couldn’t predict any of this. It was simply the first test of their marriage. Either she would encourage her husband’s sense of adventure, or she would take the initial steps toward clipping his wings. She was already thinking more like a wife than the independent woman she’d always told herself she was.

She was also thinking of that boy in Prague. She was no wiser a week later, but her eyes were a little more open, and she was beginning to understand how ridiculous she had looked among those gray, historically miserable people with her dollars and her American smile and her little trinket of communist kitsch. She didn’t want to be like that anymore. She, like Emmett, wanted to be someone who’d seen things, and not just on television. She was beginning to think of her friends in Boston as cloistered, just as she had been. While her courage faltered occasionally, she knew that she wanted to be different from them. She wanted to be authentic. She wanted to know. She said, “Sure, hon. Let’s go look at a war.”