All of it.
Sure. I’ll be back in five minutes.
Make it two hundred.
It’ll have to be dollars.
How much?
A hundred.
That’s not right.
Well, it’s what’s on me just now.
When are you going to give me those binoculars?
At the end. I’ll be right back.
Rather than disturbing the fighters who were smoking cigarettes just outside Vesna’s bathroom, he ascended two more dark and silent flights of stairs — far enough to give him time to hide his moneybelt from Enko or anyone. Without incident he removed and flashlight-verified the banknote. The American walked back into Vesna’s. Enko was glaring and smiling at a blonde in a cheap print dress. The blonde was giggling. Jasmina, weeping openly, rushed into the bathroom. Mirjana rolled her eyes. Vesna was laying out crackers on a little plate. Amir met the American’s eyes, saying nothing.
Enko, I have something for you, said the American.
Shut the fuck up.
I’ll give it to Amir.
I said shut up.
The party fell nearly silent, so that the American could hear a fighter say: Fifty men armed with rifle grenades—
Turning away from his good friend, the American clasped Amir’s hand, transferring the money that way. Then he went to seek out the poet.
Every day they worked for him, Enko and Amir earned their money. He interviewed fighters in a concrete building with wadded-up shutters in the smashed black-stained windows, met the mothers of murdered children and imagined that he would “make a difference.” All the while they were running Enko’s errands, the most common of which was to carry ammunition to comrades at the frontline. Once they took a bag of onions and potatoes to Jasmina’s mother. What Amir could have used and even where he lived the American never knew. In the shade, a longhaired boy was hosing down his sidewalk, walking on broken glass. Sometimes Enko said: Tomorrow I’m with the squad, and then the American went out with Amir alone, who of course could interpret perfectly well. Often no interpreter was needed, as when he and Amir sat on a terrace near the head of some steep high street, drinking slivovitz with a blonde named Sandi (twenty-two years old, he wrote in his notebook); for them she had arranged fresh flowers in a big jar on the table. Her boyfriend lived down in Centar; she could not reach him even by letter. Beyond the fence began a view of other red-tiled roofs, then trees, then more red roofs, then the zigzag mined path. Sandi said: The fear is the most difficult, don’t you think? It’s so awful. My sister is in Germany and I don’t know what I can explain to her. She just doesn’t understand that every minute you’re in the street you feel it, and then when you go inside… — He wrote this down, thinking that he must make others comprehend what the sister could not, while Amir gazed into his eyes.
Enko demanded an advance on three days’ salary. Smiling, the American paid. Every night that he could get a ride, he went to Vesna’s. On other nights he sat in the lounge of the Holiday Inn, where there were occasionally off-duty soldiers and always both kinds of journalists, the suit-and-tie species with the press card on the lapel, and the devil-may-care ones in the photo vests, making extravagant plans or exchanging boasts. It was scarcely comme il faut to sit alone, as the callow American did. This branded him as the impoverished freelancer that he was — a parasite, in fact. When he first arrived, some television journalists had taken pity on him and given him a ride from the airport to the Holiday Inn (the speeding auto receiving a token bullet from the heights of Gavrica). That day there had been no means of getting into the city but with that group. He was grateful, and hoped not to require any other favors. He had not yet learned that one can always pay one’s own way, whether or not the currency is acceptable to others. Indeed, there was an exchange of sorts: To the extent that they noticed him at all, they dismissed him as a denizen of that backwater called “features,” while he for his part pitied them for being the merest producers of spectacle. He was going to get to the why. — Mostly, of course, all parties ignored each other. They schemed out their stories and listened for the shells.
How old were your sons? he asked Mirjana.
Five and three.
What were their names?
I don’t want to talk about it.
But in time (by which I mean half a week, for where there is much death, friendships mature quickly) Mirjana and the others came to know (or at least such was his impression) that he cherished them for their suffering, which he hoped to preserve for others because it tormented him. (He could not decide whether to admire Enko, not for his bravery and his knowledge but for his pain, which armored him like a bulletproof vest.) The poet of course had been the first to trust him. Around Vesna the poet resembled one of those silent, spindly-legged, deer-eyed little dogs which sit beneath the table, rarely looking into anyone’s eyes but never being the first to look away. Because the American also admired Vesna, but without designs, much less possessiveness, the two men’s understanding ran deep; moreover, the American believed in the poet’s kindness. As for Amir, he perhaps had liked the American from the beginning, although with Amir one could never tell. Vesna of course would have smiled at anyone but the ones who shelled them from the hills. The other women seemed to take their cue from her. He supposed himself beginning to understand the first and second meanings of the shells but not yet the hundredth; perhaps not even the frontline fighters were capable of that.
Enko was there. Enko said: Mirjana doesn’t talk about it because her family is mixed.
That’s not true! the woman cried. Silently Vesna slipped an arm around her shoulders.
Glaring into their eyes, Enko said: I think it’s a problem not to talk about it.
That was when the American realized that Enko sought to help him.
But do we need to talk about it? said Mirjana.
My personal opinion, said Enko, and the American was astonished to discover that for Enko there was any such thing, is that the only way to prevent war is to shame people.
Do you really think that you can do that to Serbian people?
No, I’m talking about Germans, replied Enko with a sarcastic laugh. Germans are different. — Then he strode over to Amir and muttered in his ear.
Stroking Mirjana’s hair, the redhaired girl Dragica said: Enko is right. Nowadays I’m always asking myself, What is the story? What is the truth? When you go to Catholic school, like I did, you hear only Croatian history, and you won’t hear what bad things Croats did under Hitler. If I live to have children, someday they’ll go to school and they won’t hear what bad things Croats did today. But I’m going to tell them: We too had bad people during the war. And I think the best thing would be to write their names, and say, they killed.
Isn’t that why you’re here? Vesna asked the American.
Yes, he said, and after that more told him their stories.
Clenching her lips, her cigarette smoke streaming away, Mirjana took him aside and said: Write. — Then she told him how her children had died.
He wrote. She was gazing into his face as if he could help her. He was thinking: Nothing is more important than this. I came here for this; perhaps I was born for it. If someone reads her story and then refrains from taking a life…
Bitterly laughing, the poet was relating how in preparation for the siege their Serbian neighbors used to come by night to the Orthodox graveyard overlooking Bucá-Potok, in order to inter crates of shells, machine guns and sniper rifles. — Write that down, he said, and the American wrote.