“You’ll never believe who operated on him and saved his life.”
“Who?” I asked.
“His brother. He was the surgeon on duty that night.”
Our topic of conversation changed as quickly as it had started. My mind raced to catch up, still dwelling on the battle scene, the aftermath. I wondered how Goran coped with all this. I could only relate through stories from World War II, but that was the past, the stuff of history books, not the present. Current events had so affected the lives of friends here.
The door opened again. A tall man holding an axe hobbled into the kitchen.
Louise introduced Sydney and me to Goran’s friend Zoran. He had just chopped firewood and wondered if Louise and Goran wanted some.
“How perfect!” Louise said to him. “We’ll use it for our barbecue tonight. Come join us.” Zoran thanked Louise but said that he already had plans. He limped away. We heard the thud of wood as it landed on the verandah and the patter of rain on the rooftop.
“What happened to Zoran’s foot?” I asked Louise.
“Half of it was blown off by a mine.”
“That’s terrible.” Louise had warned of mine-infested land by Goran’s country house. “Did it happen here?” I asked.
“Oh, no, when he was with his unit just toward the end of the war and he was really lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“His unit walked through a field. No one knew it was mined. When they marched back, Zoran stepped on a mine at the edge of the field. He fell forward into a clear area. If he had fallen back, his injuries would have been much worse.”
As we washed mushrooms and peppers, Louise told Sydney and me more about Zoran. He could not find a comfortable prosthesis. With no clinic in Sarajevo, Zoran had to order models from Germany and various other countries, but none fit properly.
“What a bad time, such pain,” Louise said. “Everything chafed.” Then Zoran found an American doctor online. They corresponded. The doctor sent him another model, which still didn’t quite fit right. But Zoran was skilled with his hands and modified this prosthesis, in consultation with the doctor, for a snug fit and minimal discomfort.
Through the window we saw the rain stop, the sky dramatic now, half dark with thunderclouds, half brilliant blue.
“Let’s pick some plums while we have the chance,” Louise said. Sydney, meat cleaver in hand, stayed behind in the kitchen. Louise and I stepped out the front door and walked down to the orchard, hung heavy with purple fruit. Louise turned up the bottom of her T-shirt, held it in one hand, stretched high and picked fruit with the other, the plums nestled in a pile in her makeshift basket. I copied her.
As we moved down the orchard rows, a reminder from Louise: “It’s fine to walk here, but some of the fields are mined.”
In the house, we transferred our harvest to a basket. Sydney’s pile of meat grew taller, a wooden bowl brimmed with salad, bright peppers lined a tray, ready for the barbecue. As the sun fell lower in the sky, mist rose up. We heard the dog bark and saw him amble up the road with Goran, who clutched a bottle. When he entered the kitchen, he held the bottle high, like a trophy.
“Šljivovica,” he said. “The neighbours make it. They have the best plums.” He’d already sampled the brew.
“We can watch the sun set from the balcony,” Louise said. “The view over the hills is beautiful. Let’s go up.” Goran led us through empty rooms. Furniture lay in a jumbled pile in one room, untouched since the movers had arrived that morning. A boom box stood by the balcony. Louise put on a CD. I recognized it as ambient electronica but did not know the group.
“Fabulous,” Sydney said. “I have this one.”
Goran found chairs. We sampled the šlivovica, then toasted the summer house, Goran and Louise, and the fragile peace. I stood up for a better view. Louise and Sydney joined me. I commented on the bucolic scene stretched out below, green rolling hills dotted with small houses, earth churned up in one field on a hillside.
“That’s great, I guess they’re farming again,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Louise asked.
“There, on the hillside, that dug-up earth. Farmers must be planting crops.”
“Oh, that’s not a field,” Louise said. “It’s a mass grave, an exhumation.” I listened, horrified, as she told me — her tone, matter-of-fact — that Serbs had marched Bosniacs who lived in the area over the ridge, shot some — possibly one hundred — and dumped their bodies in that grave. I wondered what wartime nightmares Louise and Goran had experienced that rendered a mass grave commonplace and accepted as an unremarkable part of the landscape.
I wanted to move away. It felt indecent to gaze at a grave like that. We went downstairs, the air on the ground-floor verandah redolent with the smoky smell of meat that roasted. Goran stood over the barbecue; flames leaped up through the grill, bright orange in the dark. He tended kebabs and peppers, turned them regularly, fat sizzled as it hit the fire. Sydney poured more slivovic, then wine. We toasted Goran’s neighbours, his newly reclaimed house. His dog joined us. He soon lay tucked under the table, ready for scraps to fall. Music wafted down from the balcony. Platters that spilled over with meat and vegetables filled the table. Slowly the fire died down.
Sydney left the table, slid away in the dark. A few minutes later, he returned to his seat and calmly said, “I’ve chopped my thumb off.” Louise and I both thought that Sydney meant that he had cut his thumb. Louise handed him a roll of army gauze, which she still had in her pocket from Goran’s accident earlier in the day. I could not see Sydney for lack of light but wondered at his tone of voice. I walked over to his chair.
“I’ve got to find my thumb,” he muttered. By now his hand was well bandaged. I told him not to stand. He said that he had accidentally cut part of his thumb off while chopping wood at the side of the house. I ran around there; the dog followed, sniffing the ground. He was a Doberman, the one breed that I feared. I pushed the dog away, still a race between us for the thumb.
Louise arrived with a flashlight and held the dog back. I found the thumb. The dog strained under Louise’s grip. She shone the flashlight my way and I felt pleased to see that I held only a small bit of thumb — about half the nail but fortunately cut on a diagonal so that less thumb behind it was gone. Louise held a teacup with cold water. We did not know what to do but put the thumb bit in it.
We returned to the verandah. Sydney sat on a sofa, his head bent low. He said that he felt ill. Louise ran to the kitchen for a bowl; I rushed over to the Land Cruiser so that I could reverse it and face the right direction for the road so that it was ready to depart for the hospital. It was dark and the clearing where the Land Cruiser stood was very small, with a ridge nearby. Unfamiliar with the terrain and hardly able to see, I manoeuvred the Land Cruiser so that it hung over the ridge. I stopped, worried that I might plunge down into the field below, where Louise had warned me not to walk. I shouted. Goran ran out of the house. He directed me back onto flat ground. I shook as we bundled Sydney on board and left for Sarajevo. Sydney sat quietly in the back.
“My thumb throbs,” he said.
“Just scream,” Louise told him. “That’s the best way to manage pain.”
“It’s not in my nature,” Sydney replied. I could see in the rear-view mirror that he sat quietly, hunched forwards, head bowed. I headed for the hospital on the SFOR base.
When we arrived at the base gate, Louise rolled down her window and shouted, “Can somebody help us here? We have an emergency.” The guard, startled, I think, by Louise’s take-charge attitude, opened the barrier and waved us through.