Occasionally, in the car, her leg brushed his. Sometimes, at the end of an interview, she’d look at him as if to ask if her work was satisfactory. Her smiles came and went like lightning.
There were the stretches of time, as long as a week, when combat paused. No guns. No mortar shells. No forced migrations. Residents of houses dotted with bullet holes traded gasoline, cigarettes, beer. Men set out tables and chairs to serve coffee to paying customers, and women sold withered carrots in the road. On those days, even if rain chilled the air, Piotr walked by Rana’s side, and they ignored, momentarily, the newspapers emblazoned with ruination elsewhere.
They were in Zagreb when Piotr asked if Rana still had her passport. She clutched her chest. Yes, she said. Hidden in her brassiere. Streetcars trundled by, the Nike logo slicing through the city like a sickle. Young people chatted into cell phones the size of tea cakes. Over the course of the conflict, only a handful of rockets had been fired into Zagreb. He and Rana could have been in the commercial district of any major city. Consumer goods in the windows of every storefront: televisions, computers, cars.
He asked, did she want to stay here?
She laughed, a mirthless thing, like a cough. “I am not Croatian,” she said. “I cannot live here.” Indeed, Connor had pressed the State Department — in vain — to convince the new Croatian government to change its policy of return: anyone who had fled his home had only ninety days to reclaim ownership. But no one was allowed to reenter Croatia without proof of citizenship. And identity cards were only issued to those already in the country. It made Piotr’s head hurt; beneath Zagreb’s glittering surface was cruelty no less hard and serrated than anywhere else.
“What if,” Piotr asked, “you could leave? The war, the conflict. The suffering.”
She had no response. At an outdoor café, Piotr bought her a bottle of Orangina, which she held like a grenade. In the window of a Benetton store, the mannequins had their arms raised, as if surrendering. She looked at Piotr, her eyes the color of a storm.
“I tried to contact my parents in Prozor,” she said. “And my neighbor told me she saw military officers sitting in folding lawn chairs outside their home. They were drinking brandy as they watched the house burn. I grew up with these people,” she said. “Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Bosnians. We ate at each other’s houses and played games until it was too dark to see. And now,” she said, “there’s nothing left.”
Rana was twelve years his junior, but already bore enough sadness for three lifetimes. It hung on her bones, as inseparable from her as skin. He touched her elbow; she was cold where he was warm.
Two months before he and Connor left Bosnia, the three of them were stranded outside Sarajevo, unable to make it back into the city. The roads were blocked with rusted cargo containers, tractors, train cars. Snipers picked off those fleeing into or out of the city. They backtracked to a small guesthouse twenty miles away. They covered the windows with sheets folded over four times and pushed the mattresses to the center of the room where a stray bullet would be less likely to strike. Rana slept between them, on the rift between the mattresses.
When she left to relieve herself in the outhouse, Piotr asked Connor how they could bring her back to the United States. Surely she qualified for refugee status.
“She’d have to go through the UNHCR,” Connor told him. “She’s still considered an IDP.”
Internally displaced person. An acronym, a chip of ice.
“The consulate in Zagreb?”
“Last I heard, their waiting list was over five thousand.”
So, years, at least. He could not leave her back in Sarajevo, at the mercy of artillery shells. But if not Sarajevo, she would have to go to a camp where the roofs could not keep out the rain. He could not abandon her after she had led them past checkpoints where the guards looked bored enough to kill for entertainment. After she had helped them fill notebook after notebook of testimony. She had taught him the words for “water,” “shelter,” and “machine gun.” She’d been with them for months now — the Croat soldiers considered her a collaborator; the Muslim militias, a traitor. If they left her now, their parting would be permanent. She’d be among the wanderers, the stateless ones; those who were part of the world, but were not.
“If I married her,” Piotr said, “would that change things?”
“If you married her,” Connor replied, his voice growing igneous, “things would change considerably.”
Piotr woke in the middle of the night, startled by far-off gunfire. She talked in her sleep, as if translating her dreams for him. He whispered to her: “I will protect you. If we run from point to point with sniper fire above us, my flak jacket will cover your head. If the NATO air strikes fail to halt the Serbian onslaught, I will smuggle you out. If a soldier with a gun asks if you are Croat, Serb, or Muslim, I will take your hand and say, ‘She is American, and she is with me.’”
Further toward Ratnal, an entire village has relocated onto the road. Men squat in the driving lane. They wave their arms in wide circles, an exhausted motion that has surely been repeated over and over with no results. The driver honks, but the men don’t move. He honks again, longer this time, but still they don’t budge. Piotr wonders where the women are, where the children are. Something is wrong.
“Go around them,” Piotr says, but even before the command leaves his mouth, men surround the cab. The driver revs the engine, as if trying to scare a flock of birds. He yells out the window, but his words drop off a cliff. He switches off the ignition, and the truck sputters still. The men hold machetes and sickles. They have checkered handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. One of them has a gun.
Piotr, Arni, and the driver exit slowly. “No sudden moves,” Piotr tells Arni. They hold up their hands, palms outturned, and are ushered to the side of the road, flanked on either side. The man with the gun shifts from foot to foot. He can’t be older than forty, but his skin is like shoe leather. The gun is a relic, possibly military, the metal discolored. The man holds it as if confused by its purpose. Next to Arni, another man hefts his machete loosely. It looks homemade, the metal fired in a wood pit and hammered into shape.
Others crawl in and out of the truck, removing everything: the first-aid kit, Piotr’s and Arni’s personal belongings, even the documents from the glove compartment. They cut the nylon straps holding the housing materials with their farming implements. The steel sheets slide off, and men below, hands raised as if in praise, catch the metal. They carry the sheets on their backs, foreheads drenched, legs shaking. One man loses his balance, and the sheet tilts until it makes contact with the ground. For a moment, Piotr does not see him as a bandit: the way his arms are spread, he could be a father pretending to be an airplane for his child. He could be adjusting the world on his shoulders.
In a way, this is their duty. They are, after all, delivering aid to those who need it most. This situation is not unheard of, and in terms of violations, this is nothing. But Piotr wonders about Ratnal, kilometers away. It has been shaken off the map. It is now a thumbprint. A smudge.
One man turns Piotr’s backpack inside out. Papers scatter. Information, crucial information — plans and schemes and orders. But the man is only interested in a bag of potato chips. His cheeks bulge as he chews. How easy it would be to return with food. There’s a warehouse full. They find nothing of interest in Arni’s pack, but Arni clenches his jaw tight. “They’re taking everything,” he whispers. The men push bundles of plastic sheeting off the truck with their feet. The packets bounce as they hit the ground.