Authors: Dan Fesperman
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Spies & Politics, #Espionage, #Suspense, #Contemporary Fiction, #Thrillers
Lie in the Dark (14 page)
Even if there was eavesdropping by the army, the people working in the radio room also couldn’t help but hear your call as they kept the connection open. Nor did you have much privacy from the others standing with you in line.
Unless the shelling was heavy, there was always a large daytime crowd at the center. On the first floor you could get a hot lunch of the standard beans, macaroni, rice, and bread. If you were bored you could find a card game, or chess, and there was a welcoming wave of heat from woodstoves and the rub and shuffle of people crowded around small tables.
The center also ran a mail service, sending and receiving by the truckload via the aid convoys that arrived at erratic intervals from the port city of Split on the Adriatic, a ten-hour journey across rough mountain roads that had been carved out of goat paths by British engineers for the U.N. The convoys were often delayed for weeks at a time, either by fighting or by paperwork at the Serb checkpoints at the entrances to the city.
The center also arranged some of the few evacuation convoys that still got out of the city every few months, always crammed full with women, children, and old folks. For men of fighting age, or those who held some technical skill deemed indispensable by the government, the only way out was up over the hills on your own, which required passage through two lines of opposing armies.
Vlado’s wife, Jasmina, and his daughter, Sonja, had left in one of the first of these convoys. They had survived shell and shot on the grinding ride out, eventually making their way from Croatia to Germany, well before the Germans decided they’d had enough and clamped down on their refugee and asylum laws.
As the man at the slaughterhouse had known all too well, Jasmina was now working for an architect, although not legally, earning wages and benefits far below the German standard. She and Sonja lived in a crumbling highrise. An old police friend of Vlado’s had arranged both the apartment and the job. He was an East German cop who’d survived the background checks after reunification to keep his job, though he was still stuck with his clunky Soviet-made Lada patrol car while his western colleagues worked in VW vans.
Vlado had met him on a trip to Berlin less than a year before the war, during a special training course. Imamovic had bent the rules and the budget to make sure Vlado got to attend, because it was a seminar on handling evidence and searching crime scenes, lessons he’d botched completely the other night as he stumbled around Vitas’s body in the dark.
Vlado’s memories from the trip were all he had to go on as he tried to imagine Jasmina’s new life. Berlin had been in turmoil then, only a few weeks before reunification. Mostly he recalled the women, so tall, almost spectral, and invariably in black clothes, as coldly grim as winter itself with their severe haircuts, heavy boots, and unsmiling faces. He recalled his rides on the S-Bahn, jostling commuter trains with doors that slid shut with a slam, legions of somber people shuffling on and off at every stop, ignoring the graffiti in their orderly but disheveled surroundings, angry messages in spray paint which demanded, AUS-LÄNDER RAUS! Foreigners Out.
His walk to the Jewish Center took only a few minutes, and by the time he arrived he’d mostly calmed himself. The less said about the encounter, the better. He wondered how much he should tell Damir. Perhaps he’d had a similar experience.
There was a crowd in front of the center, faces raised to scan a long list of names of people whose mail had arrived. He elbowed through and headed upstairs to the radio room.
Vlado’s monthly phone call was invariably slotted between the same two people—a lovesick young soldier in a ponytail who phoned his girlfriend in Vienna, and a stooped old woman phoning her grandson in Hungary. He always drove up from Belgrade to take her call, crossing the Serbian border into Hungary long enough for their brief chat plus an extended shopping trip for whiskey, gasoline, and cigarettes, which he could resell in Belgrade.
Vlado had come to know the faces of the other regulars, and they usually nodded and chatted while waiting in the hallway, but always without giving up too much of themselves, figuring that they already revealed enough in their phone conversations. Today it seemed especially comforting to see everyone in their places as usual, as if nothing had changed from the last time around.
Vlado had begun to daydream abundantly about Jasmina only a week after she left, and he soon found himself far more mindful of her than when they’d been together, preoccupied with the daily duties of keeping a home and raising a child. Suddenly cut off from those routines and left to face a war on his own, he pictured her often. In idle moments when he least expected it an image of her would stand before him, her long slender legs in black hose, disappearing up into a skirt. The moments crept up on him with a slow building tightness in his chest, and at night he would dream of them astride each other in frantic energy and motion, her face locked in a grimace of pleasure. Always in the aftermath, laying awake on the bed, he would imagine he could hear the slow, measured breathing of their daughter coming from across the hall, asleep in her crib, curled like a fetus beneath a soft yellow blanket.
The lovemaking in these dreams became far more passionate and frequent than it had been during their last year together, and he realized that this was how it should have been before. It had taken the first few weeks of separation to rediscover her as lover, as something more than the wife and mother she’d become. But as the weeks turned into months the dreams faltered, grew fuzzy at the edges. Often as not the face before him on the bed was now borrowed from some woman he’d passed in the street that day, one of the improbably well-groomed women you saw everywhere in the city, in their crisply ironed skirts and dark lipstick, every hair in place.
Two months ago Vlado had clumsily tried to break the cycle by buying a prostitute one night after work. He’d made sure he was the last to leave the office, then walked two blocks to the sandbagged alley outside the side entrance to the French garrison. In the glow of a U.N. security lamp he’d evaluated the prospects—three women standing limp and slack in oversized coats. Two had angled a leg forward, showing long legs in nylons and no hint of where any skirt might begin. The third had tried to smile. Then, belatedly noticing her colleagues, she, too, had slipped a thigh forward from beneath her overcoat.
Vlado had chosen her, as much for her lack of professional polish as anything else. Ever the bad bargainer, he quickly settled on a price of six packs of Marlboros, to be paid from a carton he’d received the week before from a U.N. official. He then took her back to his building and up the stairs to the office, hoping no one had by chance returned.
The place was still empty, and when he flicked the light switch he was relieved to find that the generators were still going. He locked the office door from the inside, then steered her gingerly by the elbow toward a couch along the wall in the office’s small waiting area. Neither of them had yet spoken or touched since they’d agreed on the price.
It occurred to him this was probably one of the better locales she’d worked lately. Both the French and the Egyptian soldiers on this side of town preferred to arrange their cut-rate trysts in the back of an armored personnel carrier, their buddies looming out the hatches and doors, chatting and smoking, maybe making a joke or two, and for a moment Vlado thought of her stooped beneath the low armored ceiling, the space musty with old sweat and the smell of metal; sucking off some strange man from a faraway place, then spitting discreetly while he zipped his fatigues and she silently calculated what she might be able to buy with her new packs of cigarettes.
She began to undress, and Vlado followed her lead, both of them fumbling with buttons and zippers, the chill of the room creeping onto them, raising goose bumps. He looked at the pale skin of her face in the blueness of the fluorescent light, and flashed for a moment on what sort of life she must have lived before the war, for it was obvious from her discomfort this hadn’t been her profession for long. He pictured her, neat and efficient in nylons and a sensible dress, arriving at an office much like this one, removing the same wool overcoat, then sitting before a typewriter, or opening a file drawer, or perhaps lifting the phone receiver to speak crisply to a subordinate on another floor, illuminated all the while by the same pale, fluorescent glow.
She turned toward him, her face blank, lips shut primly, still unbuttoning and unsnapping.
“Please,” he said in a quiet voice. “Stop.”
She looked at him, her expression a mixture of relief and worry. Af ter all, she needed those cigarettes.
“Here,” he said hastily. “Take them.” He handed over not only the six packs agreed upon but the entire carton. “Take them and go before I change my mind.”
She quickly pulled up her skirt and buttoned her blouse, not fumbling at all now, then strolled briskly away, heels clicking toward the stairs as she rebuttoned her overcoat, leaving Vlado to sink back onto the couch, the vision of Jasmina appearing for a moment, then fading, once again indistinct.
His connection to his daughter Sonja had become even more remote. She had been eleven months old when she left, a loyal girl who clung to her father whenever possible, pulling herself to her feet by holding his hand, and crawling rapidly after him each morning as he walked to the bathroom to shave. Now she was two years and eight months. She’d nearly tripled in age since he’d last seen her. She’d learned to walk, talk and count to five.
She chattered now in a blend of German and Serbo-Croatian, and even her voice seemed different the few times he could hear it in the background of his telephone calls to Berlin. Although more often lately he didn’t hear her at all.
Early on she had come to the phone whenever he called, too shy to make any sound but a giggle, but eager to listen and reluctant to give up the receiver without a piteous wail of indignation. But he’d quickly faded for her, and now she couldn’t be dragged close to the phone.
“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.”
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