The Cairo Affair

1

1991

Zora’s friends were numerous and varied, and none of them, as far as Sophie could tell, were criminals. They were artists and writers and students of various disciplines, intelligent people who wore their intelligence loosely, never afraid to slip off of their high chairs and laugh at themselves. After the self-conscious intellectuals of Harvard, this impressed her deeply. They seemed attracted to Sophie and Emmett’s exoticism, but they had also been presented with a challenge the moment Zora introduced them: These my educated friends from America, who have come for to learn everything. Her friends took this seriously.

On that first day a gaunt medical student named Viktor gave them a lecture on the geography of socialist Yugoslavia: the plains of Vojvodina (of which Novi Sad was the capital), the genteel mountains of Slovenia, the great valleys of Macedonia, the Adriatic beaches of Croatia, and the wild crags of Bosnia and Montenegro and Kosovo—the birthplace of Serbian Orthodoxy. “What you have to understand is that, since the end of the Second World War, we’ve had every natural advantage right here in our borders. Lakes, mountains, sea—everything except deserts, as you have in America. We’ve always been able to travel, but going to other countries is a little depressing because of what we have at home. Everyone here has their own reasons for wanting to keep Yugoslavia together, but this is mine—I want to be able to see everything without having to leave my home.” He turned to Zora. “Did that make sense?”

Emmett answered: “Absolutely.”

Viktor held forth at the same central café as the day before, around the corner from their hotel, and after him a bobbed sculptor cum linguist named Nada talked them through the political development of Serbo-Croatian, the official language of Yugoslavia—“a cross-lingual compromise.” Afterward, they piled into Zora’s rickety Yugo to reach the Strand, a length of sandy beach along the Danube where they drank beer and bought oily paper bags of fried sardines to eat off of toothpicks. They found more of Zora’s friends lounging on beach chairs under the shadow of Most slobode, Liberty Bridge. Eight years later, NATO planes would destroy that bridge, but in 1991 there was no sign that anyone was worried about war. They just wanted to show their new American friends a good time.

When they weren’t lecturing about the many facets of Yugoslav history and culture, they asked questions about America.

Was Thomas Jefferson in favor of slavery?

Why do Indians live in squalor?

How hard is it to get a residence permit?

As the sun began to set, Nada broke out a foil-wrapped chunk of hashish and rolled it with tobacco squeezed from one of Zora’s cigarettes. Sophie hesitated, but Emmett didn’t, and so she followed his lead. Resistance was just a passing thought. The stew of alcohol and hash helped her relax fully into the experience. She was, she believed at certain moments, happy: She had friendly acquaintances, her husband was close by, and she was intoxicated enough to let her numerous inhibitions slip away.

It was dark when Milorad, a painter Zora described as a genius, suggested they move on to the Tribina Mladih—Youth Tribune—a multi-use space with a cinema, disco, art gallery, and bar, where they wandered, stoned, through the gallery, looking at violent conceptual paintings from a Belgrade artist before moving on to the bar and later sliding on to the disco. As on the previous night in the fortress, Sophie and Emmett found themselves drawn into the pulsing rhythm that seemed to lie just beneath the surface of everything they saw, yet while their first night had felt innocent and pure, the mood now was different. They could sense that Zora was neither innocent nor pure, and this knowledge colored the night. Still, the festivities were no less enjoyable—perhaps more so, because these people weren’t strangers anymore. As she packed them into a taxi back to the hotel, Zora said, “Tomorrow is prison break.” Sophie began to ask what she meant, but Zora slammed the door and called in Serbo-Croatian for the driver to get moving.

The explanation came in the morning, when Zora again found them hunched over their Hotel Putnik breakfasts, foggy and hung over. She, however, looked perfectly rested. “My friends,” she said in a high whisper, “we get you out of this hellhole. It is time for prison break.”

She had decided that it would not do for her American friends to stay in the dismal Putnik, and so she waited for them in the lobby, eyeballing the man who was still reading Politika.

Upstairs, as they packed, Sophie and Emmett discussed the change in plans. “What do you think?” she asked.

Emmett folded a shirt over his forearm. “I think she’s pretty generous.”

“Too generous?”

He grinned. “She’s got a crush on you. Who wouldn’t?”

So they climbed into Zora’s Yugo, giving themselves over to her care. They crossed the Danube along the Liberty Bridge, chatting about their day on the Strand until the buildings fell away, replaced by countryside. This was farther out than they’d expected, and there was an edge to Emmett’s voice when he said, “Where, uh, are we going?”

Zora pointed through the filthy windshield. “Fruška Gora,” she said, naming the low mountain ahead of them. “My uncle has summer-house up there. It is big and has electricity and hot water. You love it,” she said, almost a command.

Viktor and two other young men were already at Zora’s uncle’s home, a three-bedroom cabin off a winding mountain road, perched on a hillside that gave them an idyllic view across the flat Vojvodina countryside of farms and villages. After dropping their bags in a dusty guest bedroom, Sophie and Emmett joined the men in the backyard, where chairs and a couple of tables had been set up in the high grass. Together they relaxed and drank bottles of Lav and uncorked red wine from Sremski Karlovci. Only up in the clean, clear mountains did they realize how dirty the air had been in town.

One of the new friends, a heavyset, balding anthropologist, began relating news items. The Slovenes were already talking to Western Europe, while the Croats were taking advantage of their newly proclaimed independence to begin ridding their land of Serbs and Bosnians. The anthropologist was already a little drunk, and when he talked of the fighting in villages across Croatia spittle collected in the corners of his mouth. Viktor told him to shut up, because a beautiful day shouldn’t be wasted on nationalist bullshit, and it grew into a Serbo-Croatian shouting match. Sophie worried the two men would come to blows, but as quickly as it flared up the conflict waned, and soon they were embracing, kissing cheeks, laughing. Zora went inside and turned on a stereo, positioning the speakers in the windows so they could all listen to a New Wave band called Električni Orgazam.

Lying in the grass with a beer balanced on his stomach, Emmett asked, “How much does a house cost here?”

Sophie looked at him, but he was squinting at the sun, lost in his own thoughts.

“For an American, lunch money,” said the third man, whose career they never learned. The others laughed.

Emmet got up on his elbows. “I’m serious. This is gorgeous. Isn’t it gorgeous, Sophie?”

“It is,” she said, because it was. For a moment, she allowed herself to consider this alternate life: a mountain cabin in Yugoslavia. For vacations, or as their primary home? What would life be like in a place where you couldn’t understand the people around you? In a place where simple statements of opinion grew into fights that ended in kisses? Where, she asked herself, was this marriage really headed?

Zora called Sophie inside to help her prepare lunch. It was a small kitchen, and Zora’s smoking soon made the atmosphere lethal. Sophie banged on the windows to get them open, then helped Zora clean chicken thighs, shape ground meat into patties, season pork chops, and skin potatoes. Outside, the men had fired up an age-old grill and were lighting charcoal. Zora said, “You think you like to live here?”

“Maybe,” Sophie said. “Maybe later, after I’ve got my career going.”

“That means never,” Zora said with finality.

They drank and gorged themselves on meat, and when the sun went down the anthropologist produced an acoustic guitar. They sang “American Pie.” Afterward, Zora brought out a bottle of plum brandy they called rakija and began to speak.

As with their first meeting in the Fortress, she still knew everything, but with the leisure of hours spreading out around them on that slanted field Zora was able to talk more lucidly about the things that were important to her. Art, music, literature, and, yes, politics. This Zora, whose arms were wrapped around her knees as she rocked back and forth, struck Sophie as thoughtful and smart, a different woman from that first night. Rational, yet utterly unafraid of conviction—this, Sophie realized, was her most attractive quality.

She thought of the lecture halls she’d lived in those previous four years, of the refrain that persisted in her liberal education: question, question, question. With enough questioning, the very ground could evaporate into conjecture. What she realized, sitting comfortably with Zora in the backyard of that house, her bare feet drawn up beneath herself as she sipped the fiery rakija and Zora chain-smoked, was that the act of questioning had been getting in her way for years. When asked what she believed, it was always easier for Sophie to turn the question around rather than answer it, and when forced into an opinion she would immediately qualify it.

Of course there’s no God … but how can I know that for sure?

Communism is a failed ideology … but has real communism ever been practiced? Certainly not in the Soviet Union.

The world is round … but I’m basing that on other people’s evidence, not my own.

Where did her beliefs lie? Did she even have any? Her parents did, but once she’d gotten out from under them she’d decided that their beliefs would not be hers, and so she’d started from scratch, entering Harvard looking for an educated way to construct her world. Education, though, had only confused the issue, and she had left as hollow as when she’d entered. If everything could be argued, then nothing could be believed.

That night, in Zora’s uncle’s narrow guest bed, she pinned her husband’s wrists down against the pillow, lowered her head, and bit his nipple. He yelped, but when she looked at his face his eyes were closed, his expression dreamy.

For three days they lived this way. Late breakfasts with Zora, laughing about the previous night, and in the afternoons friends arrived with bags of groceries and drink, with guitars and a battery-powered Casio keyboard. On the third day a loud woman brought a stack of canvases and acrylics, and in the yard they fingerpainted as they passed around a paint-spattered bong. Halcyon afternoons stretched into dinnertime, when the men controlled the grill, the women preparing food in the kitchen.

Over a dinner of pickled red peppers and grilled pork chops Emmett asked about Vukovar, as if only now remembering why he’d wanted to come to Yugoslavia. “What’s going on with the war?”

Zora was gnawing meat off of a long, sharp bone. She paused, the bone hanging from her greasy fingers. “You interested for that?”

“It’s sort of why I wanted to come here.”

She wiped hair off her cheek with her wrist. “You want to know about it?”

Emmett nodded, but Zora hadn’t been looking at him when she asked that; she’d been looking at Sophie. Sophie also nodded.

“It is not war,” Zora began, dropping the bone onto her plate. “Not yet. But will be. Soon. A war, you know, is agreement between two countries for to fight. Right now, only neighbors agree. They make paramilitaries like old partisans and defend homes. The army’s there, but it try just to settle those little battles. Soon, though, Belgrade and Zagreb make agreement, and then real war start. As it must.”

“Must it?” Sophie asked.

“Of course,” Zora told her. “Tito, he force us together for half century. He move everyone around so Croats and Serbs and Macedonians and Bosnians share same land, but he no could make us to like each other. If he lets everyone stay where they are, okay, separation is easy. Borders easy to mark. But now there is Croats deep in Serbian land, and Serbs in Croat land. You think Serb farmers want to live in nation run by Ustaše?”

Sophie considered not asking, but knew she couldn’t wing it without explanation. “Run by who?”

Zora looked at her a moment, blinking, perhaps puzzled by her ignorance. “Croatian fascists,” she said after a moment. “Great murderers from Second War—they put SS to shame. And now …” Suddenly, she raised both hands in an expression of surrender, her palms slick with grease. “I promise no politics. I no get started.” She lowered her hands again, smiling now. “But you interested in coming war,” she said, nodding. “Maybe we can to do something about that.” Seeing the expression on Sophie’s face, she leaned forward and touched her thigh with a clean knuckle. “Don’t worry, draga. I keep you safe.”

Despite her greasy-palmed vow, later that night Zora told them about the Jasenovac concentration camp, which had been the largest “place of extermination” in fascist Croatia during the Second World War. “No one know exact number, but some say a million murdered there. They killing Jews and Gypsies, but most was Serbs. You can imagine?” she said, shaking her head, as if she’d spent decades trying to imagine just this. She sipped at her wine, then went on. “Jasenovac for men, the women shipped to Stara Gradiška. Twelve thousand, at least, murdered there. In Sisak they collect children. Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. Just children. The guards … they pick up children by feet and swing them against walls until they dead. For fun, you understand? Thousands killed.”

Neither of them had an easy reply to this. Frowns, nods, sips from glasses. Emmett looked as if he were gearing up to say something wise, but nothing came out. Sophie wondered if any of this was true—or, if it was, just how true was it? What details were being twisted in order to condemn an entire population? Finally, she said, “That was a long time ago, Zora.”

“Yes, Sofia,” she said as she thoughtfully lit a fresh cigarette, slowing down. “But it is not easy to forget such things.” She told them that, after the war, once the major criminals had been executed, Tito told everyone to make up and be friends. “But what about that young soldier, who swing a child by ankles? Men like him, they go back to farms. They make more boys, who impregnate Croat women. Those sons and grandsons—those are ones on front line now.”

“Enough,” said Viktor, rising and stretching. “You get her going and there’s no end to it.”

Bitterly, Zora snapped at him in Serbo-Croatian, and another incomprehensible fight ensued, ending only when Zora marched inside. Viktor settled into a chair and finished his beer thoughtfully. “She’s good,” he told Sophie and Emmett. “I’ll fight with her, but I know she’s right about everything. I love that woman.” Then he got up and followed her inside.

“It’s true,” Emmett whispered after a moment. “A lot of what she said. Some of it, at least. I didn’t know the names of the camps, but I learned about the Ustaše in a seminar. They weren’t very nice.”

Sophie looked at him. After what she’d heard from Zora, Emmett’s casual assessment—they weren’t very nice—seemed unbearably diplomatic. They’d listened to the same stories, and while they had provoked a banal statement from Emmett, Sophie felt like finding a long knife and carving her initials into the faces of those Croatian fascists. The desire was refreshing, as if it were the first real conviction she’d felt in her life. She’d certainly never felt so strongly at Harvard, where she’d been indoctrinated in the constitutional separation of head and heart.

When they made their way back to the guest room, they saw Zora and Viktor tangled and naked, dozing in Zora’s bed. They made love, too, but afterward Sophie dreamed of children, gripped by their ankles and swung like baseball bats.

In the morning, Zora spent some time on the phone in her bedroom while Viktor dressed and left for home. Sophie boiled eggs, and when Zora came out looking disheveled she sliced bread and cheese. They settled down to their meal. Zora said, “Sofia, Emmett, I take something to my friend. He live in small town, in west, and I think you like to see something more. Something authentic.”

“Where?” Emmett asked.

“Little village. You never hear of it. Close to Vukovar. You like my friend, I’m sure, but he no speak English. He is musician. You must come,” she said, her mood rising with each new word. Her all-knowing smile was radiant.