The First Casualty

26

Džaja shared the front seat with Jason. The hotel’s desk clerk, Aleksandar, now off-duty, had eagerly accepted Jason’s offer to come along and act as interpreter should one be needed. His enthusiasm at the prospect of extra cash was undiminished by being stuffed into a space that was a backseat in name only. He and Džaja chattered away with only an occasional translation.

The house was on the edge of town, a single-story clapboard a few kilometers past the rail station and the cobblestone square with its circular fountain. As the houses became farther apart, the spaces were frequently filled with crude roadside shrines, some still bearing the dried flowers of summer. Beyond the house lay the high, flat, mountain-rimmed plateau above the Novčića River, land that reminded Jason of the high plains of the United States.

Džaja pointed at the street number and swerved across the road to park the little Zastava in the otherwise barren yard where patches of winter-yellowed grass were islands in the sea of snow. The house’s occupant must have seen them coming, for she opened the door just as Jason was getting ready to knock.

At least seventy, the woman’s face was road map of furrows. Wisps of gray hair had escaped the bun at the back of her head, and blue veins were the only color in the white hands that held the door. But there was nothing old or decrepit about the sky blue eyes that peered out from the drooping lids that gave the face a sleepy look.

“Herka Kerjck?” Jason asked.

She nodded as her eyes went to the two men behind him. “Da.”

“I’m George Simmons. Someone told you I was coming I believe.”

She started at him blankly until the hotel clerk translated. She stepped aside, opened the door wider. “Dobro jutro. Uci.”

The three men entered a room that reminded Jason of his grandmother’s house. Knitted doilies occupied every horizontal space above floor level. A sofa and two chairs were covered in a cabbage-rose pattern through which stuffing escaped along seams long parted. The halo of the crucified plaster Christ gleamed from the far wall just above the rabbit ears of a small-screen television. What was really reminiscent for Jason was the sterile cleanliness. Not a mote of dust dared to be seen. The glass of the room’s two windows showed recent attention and even the faded patterned rug, though showing threads, was without stain. The room smelled vaguely of lye soap and stale tobacco.

She indicated a chair for Jason and sat opposite on the sofa. She crossed her arms and waited expectantly. Džaja found an ashtray and applied a wooden match to a cigarette before he sat. The thing smelled like silage. Apparently, Croatians did not ask permission before lighting up in someone’s home.

Jason spoke to the desk clerk. “Ask her who she told I was coming.”

After a brief exchange, the woman looked at Jason though speaking to Aleksandar.

“No one, she says. No one other than a few neighbors and her daughter who comes to visit every Sunday.”

Hardly a secure network, but that explained Natalia. Well, Momma could hardly have expected an old woman, this old woman, to keep a tight lip without an explanation that would have put Jason in more jeopardy than he already was.

“Is she related to the scientist Nikola Tesla?”

At the mention of the name, the old woman sat up straight, full of pride. She didn’t wait for the translation. “Da!”

She continued.

“He was her father’s uncle,” Aleksandar translated.

And so the interrogation went, question, translation, next question. She remembered that, when she was a very little girl, the Nazis came, men dressed in frightening black uniforms with lightning bolts on them and high boots, boots like no local people wore.

“I thought the German army wore a shade of gray,” Aleksandar observed.

“They did,” Jason replied, impatient to get back to the subject at hand. “But SS, Schutzstaffel, uniform is what she described.”

Wait a minute, Jason thought. Why would the elite of the German military bother with an out-of-the-way place such as this?

“Ask her if these men in black were really Germans or just local men who had joined.”

She was quite sure they were real Germans. What they wanted, she answered when asked, was the box that had come from America, the box that came a few days before her father returned home from Russia, miraculously excused from further military service on behalf of the Third Reich.

“The box, what happened to it?”

She shrugged as the question was translated.

“She doesn’t know.”

Jason was becoming increasingly impatient, both with the cumbersome process of translating back and forth and with what seemed to be a dead end. “Ask her to explain, tell us when she last saw the box.”

The family, it seemed, lived on adjacent farms, of which the present house was one. The SS had arrived within hours of the mysterious box. They had moved the animals out of the barn, taken the box there, and put a guard on duty to make certain only those permitted entered. For the next several days, strange noises had come from the barn, and weird lights at night. There was much speculation among the locals as to what was being done there. One or two of the more superstitious recalled old legends about conjuring up the devil. One night, the Allies dropped a single bomb that destroyed the barn, but oddly did no damage to surrounding structures.

“A bomb?” Jason asked.

She nodded. At least that was the only thing the townsfolk could think of that could have caused the explosion, though no one had heard an aircraft overhead. The device must have fallen through the roof and exploded inside, for the walls were blown out, not in. But this was not an ordinary bomb, those who knew of such things said. The bodies of the dead Germans had shrunk, she understood, although, as a small child, she was not allowed to see such a thing for herself.

Jason glanced out of a window. “I don’t see any barn.”

An exchange between the old woman and the translator ensued before the latter said, “It was never rebuilt. As a matter of fact, some of the rubble is still there. Her father said it was a bad place, forbade the children to go near it. They did, of course. The box had been opened, and there was a machine that looked like it had been partially assembled. Or perhaps partially destroyed by the bomb.”

“What kind of a machine?” Jason wanted to know.

The old woman shrugged again as she fished a cigarette from somewhere in the folds of her dress. She accepted a light from one of Džaja’s wooden matches. If anything, the tobacco smelled worse than his.

“Other than her sewing machine, she knows little of machinery,” the clerk translated. “Besides the fact this one was about the size of her sewing machine and its table, she remembers little about it.”

Jason did a masterful job of concealing his growing frustration. “I thought she didn’t know what happened to the box.”

“She doesn’t. She never saw it again after the Germans took it to the barn. She’s guessing they threw it away after they took the machine out.”

Was the woman dense or simply being intentionally difficult?

“OK, ask her about the machine. What happened to it?”

The clerk asked.

“The machine stayed where it was. Odd thing, it didn’t rust in all those years of sitting in the weeds. Then came the Bosniaks…”

“The who?”

“Bosniaks, Moslems.”

The clerk must have seen the puzzled look on Jason’s face. “October of 1991, the so-called Gospić Massacre. Serb troops shot at least fifty people in the town, some Moslems. The Moslems took it as a renewal of the conflict between them and Christians, wanted revenge.”

He said something to the old woman and she responded.

“A number of them came here, burned the next house down, the one where her relatives lived.”

She became agitated, moving her hands in a parody of aircraft and making a whoosh-ing sound as the translation continued, “But two American jets came over the hills, scattered the Bosniaks.”

“What does that have to do with the machine in the yard?” Jason wanted to know.

“After the Bosniaks left, it was gone. She is sure they took it.”