He stopped at home. Amir sat smoking at the kitchen table. Enko’s mother was in a queue to buy bread.
Enko’s room was still untouched, a shockingly ordinary room, with two televisions that didn’t count for much now that the electricity was gone, bookshelves adorned with statuettes, trophies, the Opca Enciklopedia and other sets of books from his student days, stacks of cassettes which he lacked the batteries to listen to, snapshots of girlfriends, a clock stopped at 9:04 and one of his pistols, a heavy old French Bendaye BP, solid black steel, flat, with a scaly black grip.
Enko was airing out his bulletproof vest. Men who couldn’t afford to buy their own, and had to share them in shifts, increased their risk of traumatic death; because, as I have already told you, when a vest is damp, for instance with sweat, it stops bullets more poorly.
Enko asked Amir: Does he deserve to meet Bald Man?
Amir shrugged.
Well, Mr. Journalist, do you or don’t you?
Sure.
The thing is, guy, Bald Man’s got style. Someone like you, there’s nothing you can give Bald Man. But Bald Man, he can give you everything.
Oh. Well, maybe I’d better not waste his time.
That’s a fact.
By the way, what neighborhood has the most trouble getting water? I’d like to interview some—
Let’s go. Amir, swing by Anesa’s.
In the safe shade of an office building, couples walked calmly. They reached the intersection, looked down into the openness nervously, and quickened their steps until they’d crossed. The President sped by in a grey Audi. Now Amir floored the gas pedal, and the American felt that same meaningless bitter flood of fear behind his breastbone. They rounded the corner successfully, completed a sickeningly exposed straightaway on which nothing moved, made a hard right on three wheels, and then another car careened toward them, struck the curb, screeched and whirled out of control, wrecked. The driver and passengers got out slowly. Soldiers gathered. It didn’t appear that anyone was injured. Perceiving this, Amir drove on, toward a sign which had been shot through half a dozen times, and then they pulled up at the portico of the almost unscorched apartment tower where Anesa lived; she was part of Vesna’s circle. Enko leaped out. The journalist sat in the back seat taking notes while Amir smoked a cigarette.
Enko returned. — That goddamned little cunt, he said. In case you were wondering, she’s got plenty of water.
The American said nothing, since Enko looked to be in a rage. Amir started the engine and put the car in gear.
Now where we’re going, said Enko, the Serbs cut off that well on July eighteenth. This place here, this is a low area, like the Holiday Inn, so these people can still get water from the reservoir. Why the fuck don’t you say something?
That well that the Serbs use—
I already explained that. Who do you want to interview?
Anybody who has trouble with water.
All right. I know a fighter over there, and his mother, she’s a sick old lady. That’d be just about perfect for you, wouldn’t it? Maybe if you’re lucky you can watch her get killed by some Chetnik. That would be a scoop, wouldn’t it? 15
I need a drink, said Enko. You got your story, right?
Right.
The bar lay behind a courtyard five floors high, and hence protected from snipers. Jasmina had told him that it was organized by Bald Man to keep it safe — evidently a relative term, since he saw a few shrapnel-pocks and windowpanes nibbled away by explosions; one windowpane was blasted into a hole the shape of a flayed animal. Someone with a machine gun was standing in the half-silhouetted stairway.
It was midafternoon, the canned music (Bosnian rock and roll) loud but not deafening. The singer’s voice reminded him of the golden shimmers in Anesa’s purple sweater. At the next table, crew-cut men in bulletproof vests and camouflage sat smoking. Across the room, a dozen men and women in civilian clothes were getting drunk. A beautiful woman in camouflage from head to toe, her outfit completed by an impractically thin black bulletproof vest with a Bosnian army insignia on it, sat smoking, sipping juice and tapping the toe of her combat boot to the music. A man with a pistol at his hip, likewise smoking, gazed at her urgently; his hand gripped her knee. No one appeared to be listening for the shells.
Enko and the American ordered American whiskey. Amir had a Turkish coffee.
The song ended. — No, said one of the civilians, she was killed by a sixty-millimeter shell, just after her children had left the table. — The next song began.
A soldier said something to Enko, who laughed and told the American: He found a Serbian flag at his neighbor’s house; he’s gonna use it for target practice.
The American smiled, because Enko and Amir were both watching him.
This guy is an amazing fighter, said Enko, evidently deciding to trust the American for a few more minutes. — I’ll tell you what he did. He killed a Chetnik who was wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. Got him right in the forehead!
Ask him if he wants a drink, said the American wearily. And if he cares to tell his story…
If he accepts a drink from you, you’re lucky.
Well, let’s hope for the best.
He says he’ll take the drink.
And a drink for everyone at his table. Tell them I wish them all the best.
They want to know when the Americans will finally show some guts and intervene.
Tell them I’m also wondering that. Amir, are you sure you don’t want anything else?
No. Because I am driving.
Amir, said Enko, you babysit him. I’ve got some business.
The American took out his notebook and began to write. Although the music did not entirely obscure the echoing chitter of machine guns elsewhere, he felt safe here, like a child who pulls the blanket over his head.
He wished that one of these women would sleep with him, although he would rather sleep with Vesna, whose front window was newly cracked and taped. The men at the other table bought him another whiskey and Amir another coffee. He was happy then. When he was older and had forgotten most of his interviews, it was such meaningless kindnesses that he remembered.
We’re going right now, said Enko, so Amir and the American followed him to the car, where a fighter stood watching a crate, which they loaded into the back seat, and without explanations Amir slipped in beside it and lit a cigarette, so the American rode up front as Enko, who took more chances in his driving than Amir, brought them down a main street, past a windowfront crazily taped and shattered, a Serbian machine gun barking like a dog, and many people running as beautifully as a flight of dark birds, although no explosion had sounded by the time they rolled past a queue for something unknown around the corner from another apartment block with a shell-hole punched right through both ends. More slowly they rolled down a quiet narrow street of people walking calmly past bullet-holes, sitting under trees. Enko’s jaw tightened as he turned the next corner, already accelerating; so the car screeched into another lifeless place, then through a scorched place without any glass in any windows, the roof of one house still on but jagged like a kinked bicycle chain, and the American’s chest ached with useless fear. After another corner they went sedately down a sheltered straightaway, stopping to hand over the crate to three military police who sat playing cards in what used to be a photocopier repair station. They slapped Enko on the back and poured everyone a shot of loža. A policeman lit Amir’s cigarette with his own. Laughing, Enko wrote Sieg Heil and Wehrmacht on the wall. They returned to the car.