“I don’t want to,” he’d heard her say, or simply a stern “Nein!” her obstinance crackling through the static from hundreds of miles away. Usually now he didn’t bother to ask, although today he felt a special urgency to hear her voice again, to hear the soft, steady breathing across the miles.
A set of photographs had arrived in a recent pack of convoy mail, postmarked October, 1993-three months late of course, after the long delay of checkpoints and permissions. They’d depicted a robust young stranger, smiling and confident, dressed in a bright warm snowsuit and standing on the raked sand of a Berlin playground. In the background were sturdy wooden swingsets, a fleet of strollers, and other children and their mothers, relaxing on a sunny day without worry.
It was Vlado’s turn to call now, and the radioman glanced at him and repeated the Berlin telephone number into his headset without even having to ask.
After a brief pause he motioned for Vlado to pick up the receiver. Vlado listened to the series of hums and clicks, then heard a phone being picked up. He then waited through that slight, halting delay in transmission that always reminded him of boyhood broadcasts of the Soviet cosmonauts, calling in from space.
“Hello,” Jasmina answered. “How are you?”
“Safe. Quite safe. How about you?”
“I always wonder what I will do if you miss a call, or if you’re late. If I’ll panic, or what I’ll think.”
“No, it’s been quiet this week. The war is slowing down. Maybe it’s good news.”
He felt himself beginning to deaden, to go numb and cold and dreary as he left the truth behind. Not for the first time he wondered what it must be like for the people who work in the radio room, sitting in on these conversations every day, hearing the index of hope slide off toward the bottom of the register as the months passed without change.
He told Jasmina that he almost wished for more fighting to make the days pass faster, then realized as soon as the words left his mouth what a stupid thing it was to say.
“So how are you, then,” he asked, “and how is the job. And Sonja, how is she.” Against his better judgment he then added, “I don’t suppose that she’d …”
“Oh! well, no. I’m sorry. I tried to keep her here as long as I could but she’s off at a playground now with a friend. They were in a rush to go swimming. There’s a new indoor public pool. There are new lessons for toddlers, and she’s very excited.”
In the background Vlado could hear the television. It sounded like the sharp exaggerated noises of a cartoon, the sort that Sonja apparently watched all the time. He felt heat rising behind his face, and glanced around at the others in the room, but they were all facing away from him.
“You’d be so proud of her, Vlado. She is speaking full sentences now. Long thoughts, very complex. She’s so smart. And her German is better than mine. You should hear her talking with her friends. Their parents say she even speaks it better than their own children.”
“Wonderful. I’ll need a phrasebook to talk with my own daughter.”
Then a pause, followed by either a deep intake of breath or a burst of static.
“Please don’t say things to make me feel guilty. It’s what we have to do here. You know we would have stayed if it had been up to me. It’s hard enough to get along here even knowing the language. We have to assume we could end up here forever.”
“I know. I know. It’s all right. And I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. And you shouldn’t. I was just stating a fact. Sometimes I feel she’s gone from me forever, even if I could be there tomorrow. And it’s depressing, like everything else here.”
“I know. I understand. We shouldn’t waste our three minutes arguing.”
She mentioned that some Bosnian friends had spotted a few notorious Serbs in the streets of Berlin, one of them a particularly nasty guard from a detention camp. They’d reported the sightings, given lengthy statements to the police, but no one had seemed very interested. In fact, it was becoming difficult to get any news at all of Sarajevo beyond the daily summary of shelling, perhaps a body count, or a few words about another stalled U.N. convoy.
The radioman motioned Vlado that his time was nearly up.
“Keep yourself safe,” he said. “Don’t trust just everyone. Even the ones from home.”
“You’re the one we should worry about,” she said. “Aren’t you the one still living in a war zone.”
“I’m serious,” he said, his voice stern. “Watch out for yourself and Sonja.” His eyes flicked around the room, but every head was still turned. “The same people who are dangerous to me can be dangerous to you, even there.”
“Okay,” she said haltingly. “I will.” She sounded puzzled. She, too, knew these calls were likely to be monitored; that if Vlado’s safety were somehow unraveling, this might be as specific as he would allow himself to get.
“I love you,” she said.
“And I love you.” And for a change he didn’t feel self-conscious, having uttered this before a roomful of grimy, indifferent witnesses.
He offered a meek thank-you to the radioman, then left.
A few moments later he couldn’t recall having elbowed through crowds of people down two flights of stairs, or pushing out the front door. He only knew that he suddenly found himself outdoors, shocked by a cold gritty breeze and blinking into the sunlight. He had been wrapped in his family’s new world, with its playgrounds, its warm homes, and its crowded, bountiful market. He was always surprised by how deeply he could immerse himself in only a few moments of halting conversation, and by how difficult it was to fight his way back to the surface.
He plunged through the milling crowd gathered at the mail list, gaping about like a man who’d just stumbled from a darkened theater. A glance at his watch. Still plenty of time to make his other stops for the day, back across the river. No need to rush. He strolled a full block at a relaxed gait before noticing that people around him were running, heads bent. He’d moved into an open area, a clearly marked sniper zone, and a busy one as well in recent days. Vlado put his head down and broke into a half-hearted trot for the bridge.
CHAPTER 8
Vlado had always found a certain appeal in searching the rooms and apartments of the dead-once the body was removed, of course. It was like entering a time capsule, a privileged look at the snapshot of a life in progress, the point of departure for another unfortunate soul.
It was this oddly pleasant sense of anticipation that kept Vlado going on his way to Vitas’s apartment, that kept him from glancing too many times over his shoulder. Although he was still shaken by the encounter at the slaughterhouse, he doubted anyone there had gone to the trouble of following him.
He wondered idly how Damir had fared. He was probably finished by now, while Vlado had yet another stop after this one. He found himself wishing wearily that he’d parceled out more of the day’s chores. But perhaps Kasic was right. Vlado had probably best handle most of the work himself. No sense in getting the ministry any more perturbed than it already was, or they might strip him of the case altogether, appearances be damned.
Vitas’s apartment was ten minutes away, on the third floor of what had been a nice building in a late-eighteenth-century section of downtown built during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After fumbling for a moment with the large key Kasic had given him, Vlado pushed open the heavy wooden door.
Right away he was impressed by the lack of grandeur, the absence of fine things. Vitas had never struck him as the acquisitive sort, or as a connoiseur who might have collected art or furniture, but Vlado had at least expected a mild expression of the vulgarity that commonly afflicts bachelors reaching the top of their field in middle age. Yet here was Vitas’s television, no large Western model but a small-screen hunk of brown plastic at least twenty years old. Not that a better set would be good for anything these days.