The Cairo Affair

5

1991

Zora drove them down the mountain, north toward Novi Sad, and then headed west, occasionally skirting the Danube as they passed through towns that she named along the way—Sremska Kamenica and Ledinci and Rakovac and Beočin, whose cement factory was fed by an offshoot of the Danube. She pointed out historical tidbits: Sremska Kamenica had been the home of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, “greatest Serbian children’s author.” Ledinci was a young town, built after World War II to house the inhabitants of Stari—Old—Ledinci, which had been burned down by the dreaded Ustaše. In Rakovac the Croatian fascists had killed ninety-one citizens. Beočin created the first Serb schools in the Vojvodina countryside. She then pointed out another town, Čerević, where the Ustaše had killed eighty-seven.

Sophie thought of the concentration camps, the one for men, the one for women, and the one for children. She thought of ankles and the sharp corners of brick buildings.

As they made their way through small towns in that tiny Yugo, they listened to Zora’s roll call of atrocities. “They no rest until they exterminate every Serb. It is moral crime to let that to happen.”

When they didn’t answer, Zora looked at Sophie in the rearview. “You no believe me.”

“I believe you,” Sophie said, knowing it was the only thing to say. They were deep in the countryside, farms stretching as far as the eye could see, in a country where they couldn’t speak the language. They were depending on Zora for everything. But that’s what they’d been doing for the last four days, and hadn’t she only given them kindness? She remembered Viktor’s assessment: I’ll fight with her, but I know she’s right about everything.

From the passenger seat, Emmett winked. Nothing to worry about. All fine.

They were soon in a region Zora called the “Serb Autonomous Oblast of Eastern Slavonia, Baranja, and Western Syrmia,” but was firmly inside the territory that Croatia was claiming for itself. As they passed a sign directing them toward Vukovar, she told them about Borovo Selo, a town just north of Vukovar. “They make big deal out of attack our boys do on Croat policemen, but that was retaliation. A Croat government minister—for fun, you know—use antitank missiles to blow up three Serb homes. This is what they think of us. Weekend sport. Since referendum on Croat independence, they do what they like. Eighty-six Serbs in Vukovar just disappear.” She paused. “You know what that means. We all know.”

Though they could hear the distant thumps of artillery and see smoke rising on the horizon, they were not able to go into Vukovar, where the Vuka and Danube rivers met, for it was surrounded by the JNA—the Jugoslav National Army. Instead, Zora drove them to a muddy village east of town that she never bothered to name. There were tired-looking horses standing amid the rusting Yugos, but the streets, lined with small old-style houses, were empty until they reached the center, where a single shop advertising ice cream had attracted a few disconsolate-looking young men in army uniforms clutching bottles of Lav. They watched Zora’s Yugo drive by.

“It’s dead here,” Emmett said.

“Not behind doors,” Zora said as she turned up a puddle-choked side road and stopped at a tiny house with smoke drifting from a chimney. Like the others, it looked a hundred years old, brick walls covered with cracked, sand-colored mortar, a clay-tiled roof. When she parked behind a mud-spattered pickup track, the front door opened and an enormous black-bearded man in battle fatigues limped outside, arms raised high.

“Draga moja, Zoro!” he shouted, and she climbed out and splashed through the mud to accept his embrace. He lifted her more than a foot off the ground. They kissed cheeks, and she brought him over to meet her Americans. His name was Bojan, and he spoke no English. While he seemed initially pleased by their unexpected appearance, he hesitated and lowered his voice and spoke to Zora. A look crossed her face; then she shrugged elaborately.

“Something wrong?” Sophie asked.

“Nothing, nothing,” Zora said as she brought Bojan to the trunk of the car. She popped it open and let him look inside. A broad smile broke out on his hairy face as he reached into a ragged cardboard box and took out a military-green, pill-shaped metal canister, about the size of his hand, with a tube leading to three prongs opened like the flower petals. There were letters on the side, and Sophie could make out PROM-1.

“Bravo!” Bojan said.

“What’s that?” asked Emmett.

“Land mines. Bojan is paramilitary, but the army no share its mines.”

“We were driving with explosives in that car?” Sophie snapped.

Zora smiled and raised a finger. “And we live. Praise God! Come, we drink.”

They crowded into Bojan’s cramped, dirty kitchen. On the counter, beside the sink, were two old pistols with wooden handles and cylinders. Perhaps he’d been cleaning them, but now he ignored the guns and went to a cabinet, inside which were three large plastic bottles of homemade plum brandy.

“Does he have anything else?” Emmett asked, for the rakija they’d drunk the last days hadn’t done his stomach any good.

Zora asked, and Bojan said, “Samo pivo.”

“Just beer,” she translated. “But first we toast successful trip.”

The rakija burned and then warmed her, and when Emmett switched to Lav, she stuck with the brandy. It helped keep her calm. Though he couldn’t talk to them directly, Bojan wanted to tell stories, but not war stories. He told them about his youth in Tito’s Yugoslavia, of swimming on the beaches north of Dubrovnik, now part of the Republic of Croatia, and climbing the Slovenian mountains. He was full of the glory of the communist past, yet he was no communist. “Ideology,” Zora explained, “is not his bag. He is simple man, and he like to remember good times. I think we all this way. In few years, after you make new life in America, you think of us nostalgically, too.”

By then the room was spinning, and Sophie was ready to agree. They were here, here, in a war zone, drinking with a sentimental soldier who—tomorrow, perhaps—would be back on the front lines, fighting against the children of the Ustaše. They had come. They had seen.

Emmett said, “What was that?” He was cupping his ear.

“I hear nothing,” Zora said, still smiling.

Sophie didn’t hear anything, either, and then she did: thumping. Not the distant thump of artillery, but something closer, under their feet. It was faint, but it was there, and it was close, inside the house.

“Yeah,” she said. “I hear it.”

Zora looked at Bojan, her smile finally fading, and said something to him. Bojan shook his head, almost embarrassed, and rubbed his face with a big, hairy hand. He spoke to Zora for a few minutes, another story, his face twisting into shapes of agony and anger as he went on. Finally he waved his hands, pushing everything away.

“What?” said Emmett.

Zora turned to them, her face hard now, no trace of warmth in it. “It is a man. Down. In basement.”

“Who?” Sophie asked.

“A monster.”

Silence followed. Then Emmett said, “Maybe you want to be more specific.”

“Ustaša,” Zora said. She lit a fresh cigarette and leaned back. “I tell you about them, no? About what they do.”

Emmett placed his hands on the edge of the table, as if he were going to push himself to his feet. “You’re holding a man prisoner down there?”

He had directed that question at Bojan, but Zora didn’t bother to translate. “Emmett,” she said soothingly, “that monster—I can’t even to call him a man. He is with Croat paramilitary. They move into Serb town not far away and kill everyone who does not run. There is woman who just give birth. It is difficult birth. She is bedridden. So they find her in her little house with baby in cradle. This man come in, say hello to her, pick up baby and toss it into air. Like a football. Soccer—that’s right?”

Neither of them answered her.

“He catch baby and toss him again, like he playing. But the mother, she know what kind of man is this. She begs him please to put child down. So he says okay, holds out baby in front of him, like so, and counts backward from three. On one, he drops baby and kicks. Like soccer ball, you know? Kicks baby across room and against far wall. Killed.” She snapped her fingers. “Instantly. The mother,” she said, cocking her head to the side and breathing loudly through her nose. “Well, you can to imagine. She is hysterical. Screaming. So he walks over, puts hand over her mouth and nose, like so, and when she fights he takes out hard cock. And fucks her. As she is suffocated.”

“You don’t know this,” Emmett said after a moment of not breathing. He shook his head. “You can’t.”

Zora shrugged. “I can know this, because later, when he drink with comrades, he tells it. He says he fucks this woman to death. He think this is funny. Bojan hears all this when they retake town. The Croats tell him.”

Sophie thought she was going to vomit. During the story Bojan had gotten up and left the kitchen. Emmett swallowed loudly and spoke in a whisper. “I don’t believe it.”

“I no make it up,” said Zora. “Bojan does not.”

Another pause. Then Emmett said, “What’s he going to do with him?”

“Starvation. It take maybe a week. Maybe more. He is down there two days.”

“Give him to the police.”

Zora shook her head, a quiet laugh escaping her lips. “The police in this area, they are Croats. Are you not been paying attention? You see what kind of world we live in. No. This man will die in basement. It is better than he deserve.”

“Then he should just shoot him.”

Zora shook her head. “Bojan sees too much to give mercy so easily.”

“I want to see him,” Sophie said.

“What?” Emmett looked as if he’d forgotten she was there.

Zora hardly reacted. She only watched Sophie.

“I mean it.”

Zora nodded and stood up.

“No,” said Emmett, reaching out to her.

“We have to,” she told him, for a kind of plum brandy insight had come to her: To go. To see. To experience. If they left this house without looking, it would haunt them forever. “We have to,” she repeated.

Zora took one of the pistols off the counter, checked that it was loaded, then called something to Bojan. He appeared in the doorway, looking bleary but hard, resolved, a key dangling from his pinkie. A few more words passed between them—he was perhaps asking if Zora was sure about this. Sophie was sure; she was casting aside her ambivalence tonight. They hadn’t gotten close to a war zone. They were in a war zone. This was as far from Harvard Square as it was possible to be.

Bojan led the three of them through his dusty living room, where a silent television showed snowy images of an old movie, to a padlocked door at the end of a brief hallway. He unlocked and opened it. He flipped a switch, illuminating rickety wooden steps leading down into the earth. But he didn’t go down. He handed the key to Zora and returned to the living room, where he sat down, lifted an acoustic guitar onto his lap, and stared at the television.