So, Vlado walked wherever he went, piling up more mileage than he ever had as a foot patrolman. He’d grown used to it, and for all the hazards of extra exposure to gunfire the walking had become something of a comfort. He worked himself into a rhythm on the longer stretches, easing his bleakest thoughts into the open, then pounding them beneath his feet, moving until his mind was blank and he could drift, with an eye out for people running or dodging, and an ear open for the whistling approach of a shell.
Besides, the only people still riding in cars were either U.N. types, foreign journalists, mobsters, officers with the army or government, or anyone else who’d become one of the small moving parts of the war’s lumbering machinery. That was an identity Vlado would just as soon do without.
He and Damir had divided up the four contacts provided by Kasic. Damir would handle the two men in the liquor trade. Vlado would take meat and cigarettes.
The only other consideration was making sure he’d be able to reach the Jewish Community Center in time for his monthly call to Jasmina, scheduled as always for 3 p.m. Miss it and you had to wait another thirty days before your next chance.
He decided to head first to the cigarette factory. That meant a long walk out past the western edge of downtown, which would likely be no problem because the day had remained quiet into early afternoon.
From Kasic’s office Vlado moved uphill toward Kranjcevica Street, which ran parallel to the river and the so-called Sniper Alley, but was protected by a long row of tall buildings, or, in open areas, by makeshift walls built of wrecked buses, sheet-metal crates, and concrete highway barriers. Some of this stuff wouldn’t have stopped even the weakest of bullets, but it blocked the lines of sight of the snipers. Occasionally they fired anyway, perhaps out of boredom, and some stretches of sheet metal were so full of holes they looked like giant cheese graters.
This time of year the route was cloaked in a haze of woodsmoke that poured from the pipes peeping out of plastered-up holes in the sides of buildings. It was yet another way people rigged heating systems, yet another way in which the city was slowly becoming a warren of battered mountain huts, one piled atop another in gray buildings being slowly knocked to pieces.
Every few blocks Vlado passed workers neck-deep in muddy holes. They pulled at the innards of old gas lines or hammered together new pipes, working to keep one or another vital substance flowing to some other corner of town. Some worked for the city Others were working for themselves or their neighbors, digging up the street to install another illegal gas hookup.
The usual crowd was out strolling. Some toted empty milk containers and jerrycans on small carts, headed to water collection points. Others walked toward the Markale Market at the city center, where most shoppers walked slowly past meager heaps of vegetables-mostly cabbage and potatoes-looking but seldom buying.
Still others, like Vlado, were simply trying to get across town while the going was safe. There were old women in head scarves clutching shawls and tattered bags, wiry men bent against battered canes, and then there were those remarkable young women, still smartly dressed against all odds, with styled hair and touches of lipstick, liner, and rouge.
Weaving through this flow like zephyrs were teenage boys in twos and threes, skittish and glassy-eyed, already as inured to war as if it were a stubborn case of acne. Somehow Vlado could never imagine these boys someday running banks and businesses once the war was over.
Overlaying the procession was the winter bouquet of the siege-a smell of damp and dirty clothes, boiled cabbage, and thawing garbage, locked together by the acrid haze of the woodsmoke.
On several corners would-be merchants had set up shop on the sidewalk, standing at small folding tables or inside abandoned kiosks that before the war had sold candy, magazines and cold drinks, fresh snacks and newspapers. Now you could choose from used paperbacks, stacks of loose cigarettes, a few very old chocolate bars priced well beyond a day’s income, and an occasional bottle of beer for about a week’s pay.
Almost all the old shops and storefronts were locked and shuttered, although on the south side of the street, less vulnerable to the shells arcing in from across the river, some window displays were still intact. Mannequins wore the same dresses they’d worn two years earlier, gesturing stiffly toward full shelves of clothing stacked behind them in the dust and dimness. In a place surviving on corruption and cunning, it had not yet been deemed permissible to break into these stores, or perhaps criminals figured it simply wasn’t worth the trouble.
It was all the more puzzling because the goods of the sidewalk peddlers were far below the quality of what was behind the windows. They were the lowest rung of a black market that had become so meager as to be pitied. Vlado thought of Grebo and Mycky, so triumphant over their acquisition of a few Bic lighters, and wondered how Vitas could have succumbed to such paltry temptations.
Was it possible? Perhaps. Under these kinds of daily circumstances small temptations easily grew larger. When it seemed that the future would never arrive, every day became a sort of judgment day. Every morning seemed a vindication of your behavior the day before, no matter what you’d done, and it soon was evident to all that the innocent fared no better than the guilty. The old rules began to seem almost quaint, in the way that an adult looks back on adolescence and wonders how he ever got so worked up over such trivial matters as exams and weekend dates.
So perhaps Vitas had found some new agenda to operate by, although it didn’t fit with anything Vlado had ever known or heard about him.
He remembered the family’s gloomy house in Grbavica, the oldest and biggest on the block, standing out like a bunker with its angled shadows and gabled windows. Inside there were lacy curtains, doilies on the couches, a weary sense of never-ending dusting and vacuuming, of pillows that would be puffed and slipcovers smoothed as soon as you left the room. He’d felt nervous about sitting down anywhere, especially when Vitas’s mother had come down the long staircase. She was a fluttering, fretful woman, eager to ingratiate herself with the friends of her young sons, attentive yet always seeming to focus on some point just over your right shoulder. She spoke in a delicate, quavering voice, in elaborate sentences that had a way of tailing off before completion, as if her thoughts began evaporating as soon as they bubbled to the surface, and she could never quite catch up to them before they disappeared.
He remembered her particularly from his last week in high school. The Vitas family had invited their youngest son’s classmates up to their cabin in the mountains. They barbecued cevapcici over a glowing bed of wood coals, the smell of smoke and the spiced meat delicious on the sharp clean air. Spring blossoms bloomed across the green sloping meadows, with a few strips of snow still lurking in the creases and shadows. They’d all taken a nice walk, crossing grassy fields of butter-cups, cutting beneath fragrant stands of balsam, and stepping across clear, rushing streams.
They’d ridden home together in a farm truck, bouncing around tight curves halfway down the mountain before Vlado had remembered he’d left his knapsack behind. He had picked it up the next morning at the Vitas home in the city, sitting gingerly on one of the immaculate couches to stay the requisite amount of time for politeness while Mrs. Vitas asked him in an increasingly distracted way about her older son, Esmir, apparently forgetting that Vlado was a classmate of her younger son, Husayn. Esmir, in fact, was by then already off in the army, serving on the Adriatic coast, and already winning glowing reports, as he’d done in every endeavor until now.