The Day of the Pelican (6 page)

The flour for making bread was almost gone, so for the rest of them Mama was making a sort of gruel from pounded chestnuts on the gypsy stove. As she stirred this strange concoction, she said, "Mehmet, I think you should start a school for the younger children. All they do is shiver."

Mehmet shrugged. "I don't have paper or pencils, much less books."

"You can clear a place where it's flat near the fire and write in the dirt," Mama said. "At least you can help them with their letters and numbers."

It wasn't much of a school, with Mehmet writing words in the dirt while a dozen shrill voices screamed out the sounds and a dozen small bodies jumped up and down to keep warm. He pretended to hate it, but it was plain to Meli that he relished being in charge. He was almost as proud of being "Teacher" as he was of the caterpillar fuzz that had sprouted from his upper lip about the time of his fourteenth birthday in October. He even borrowed a ball from the military camp and found an almost level spot lower on the hillside where the boys could play soccer. Naturally, girls were not allowed to join in, but Mehmet permitted them to watch and to chase the ball when it rolled downhill away from their playing field.

To Meli's surprise, children flocked to the makeshift school. They may have been shivering in the weak sunshine, but they still seemed to be listening to Mehmet. Even the smallest ones tried hard to write in the dirt the words he was teaching them.

"I teach only Albanian words," he said proudly. "When the revolution is won, there will be no need for Serbian obscenities."

Finally, one day Meli heard a rattling sound that really did turn into Uncle Fadil's Lada. A tired Baba and a weary Uncle Fadil climbed out. She ran and threw her arms around her father's neck. "Oh, Baba. I thought you were never coming back."

He patted her head as though she were Vlora's age. "Don't fret, little one," he said. "First we had to bring in the harvest. A farmer can't leave his fields at such a time, you know. And"—he paused and looked around to make sure his younger children were not in earshot—"Milosević has called back most of his army. It's safer to travel."

It didn't take long to pack, for they had far fewer goods than they had had when they arrived. Only Mehmet seemed reluctant to leave.

"I'm needed here," he told his father. "I—I run the school. All the children count on me."

"We need you too, my son," Baba said. "We can't risk losing you again."

"Next year I'll be fifteen," Mehmet muttered to Meli, but he climbed up over the front seat of the car and into the back to sit down between his brothers. He was grimly quiet the first several miles as they wound their way down the hill away from the encampment. "He still treats me like a child," he said to Meli over Isuf's head.

Meli couldn't say what she wanted to:
But you are a child.
It would only have made him angrier. So instead she said, "Baba knows best, Mehmet. You know he only wants what is best for each of us."

Mehmet gave his horse snort. How she hated that insolent noise! He used to worship their father, and now ... But everything would be all right again, she told herself. Baba had come, and he and Uncle Fadil were in charge. They were taking the family away from the mountains. Baba knew the mountains were no place for a boy so obviously thirsting for Serbian blood.

But what had happened to her big brother—the person she had alternately adored and resented all her life? What would become of him, poisoned as he was by such bitterness?

T
HE DOOR WAS ALREADY OPEN WHEN THE LADA PULLED UP
in front of Uncle Fadil's house. Auntie Burbuqe was standing there, her arms wide open to welcome them. But it was, as Baba had predicted, a crowded house. Meli had never seen such a pile of shoes at a door before. Granny was there, of course, sitting next to the stove, her head wrapped in her traditional scarf, her shawl pulled tightly around her narrow shoulders, and wearing her Turkish-style
dhimmi
trousers that came clear to the ankles. Nexima came out of one of the back bedrooms. She had indeed come home, bringing her three-year-old son, Elez, and her twin babies. Hamza, her husband, was nowhere to be seen, and no one spoke of him—which could only mean, Meli thought, that he was in the KLA. She had come to realize on the mountain that if a man had been killed, he was mourned aloud, and if he had disappeared, people worried about him, but if he was with the KLA, no one even breathed his name.

Nexima gave her bed in Granny's room to Mama and Baba, and she brought her children into the small parlor. The four of them were to sleep with the five young Lleshis. The couch pulled out, so Nexima and her children slept there. Cushions were put on the floor for the Lleshi children. The small space was carpeted with bodies. Baba took one look and laughed. "I've seen orange slices with more room than this," he said. Everyone laughed with him. It felt so good to laugh, and, actually, they were less crowded than they had been in the tent. They were a lot warmer, too, and there were no rocks poking into their backs.

The next morning the household was stirring by the time the first rooster crowed. Uncle Fadil and Baba were like the generals of a little army. Everyone except Nexima's three had duties to carry out. The cow and the goats had to be milked and given hay, the chickens fed. Meli found herself in charge of the water brigade. Uncle Fadil didn't have running water in the farmhouse, but why should that bother her? A backyard pump and a proper outhouse seemed luxurious after a mountain stream and a shack straddling it a short way down the hill.

Meli was so excited about her job as sergeant of the water detail that she had her little brothers and Vlora help her fill every pot she could lay her hands on. Auntie Burbuqe threw up her apron in mock amazement. "Ah," she said, "you children are such marvelous water carriers that you have left us nothing to cook in! Oh, well, fill up the tub—we'll have to bathe the babies before the day is done, I'm sure."

Uncle Fadil and Baba had brought in most of the crops while the family was waiting on the mountain, but there were still potatoes to be dug and wood to be chopped and split, and every day there were the chickens to be fed and the goats and cow to be milked.

Between his chores with the men, Mehmet held school for Isuf and Adil. Vlora was always jumping up and down, demanding to be included, so Mehmet soon gave up and let her join them. "But you have to be in charge of her," he said to Meli. It was the closest he came to suggesting that Meli, too, would be a teacher in
his
school. The house was too small for indoor classes, so the children put on their coats and once again held lessons outdoors. November in the plains felt much warmer than October in the hills.

Despite the crowding, Meli felt that she had never been happier. Even Mehmet seemed more content than he had since ... well, since before the day of the pelican. Baba and Uncle Fadil took care to treat him as one of the men. The farm had the traditional men's chamber—a building behind the farmhouse that only men could enter—and when the brothers retreated to it, they often invited Mehmet to join them. Meli couldn't help but notice that when news from the outside world reached the farm, Mehmet was told first, even before Auntie Burbuqe or Mama.

So it was from Mehmet that Meli learned—even before they heard it on the radio—that the American ambassador was bringing in some cease-fire observers. "Observers!" Mehmet snorted at that. "They don't have any guns," he said. "What can they do? All they do is talk. They can yell and threaten all they like, but Milosević just thumbs his nose at them. We need action."

"But the threats worked," Meli argued. "Haven't most of the soldiers gone back to Serbia now?"

"Only a fool would trust that snake Milosević. Just wait. We'll be back at war in no time."

***

Meanwhile, on the farm, peace reigned. The milking was done, the cheese made, the bread baked, the water pumped and brought in, the livestock as well as the large extended family fed. Auntie Burbuqe made the best pepper and eggplant sauce Meli had ever tasted, but she was careful not to say this aloud. She wouldn't want to hurt Mama's feelings. They ate goat cheese with bread and pepper sauce, and thick potato soup. As a special treat, the women would make a savory cheese pie, which they filled with leeks or potatoes or spinach and even sometimes a bit of meat. The hunger of the lean days in the hills seemed long in the past.

The twins, with the nourishment of their mother's milk and constant attention from the rest of the family, were growing fatter and funnier by the day. While the others worked, they would often sit crammed together on Granny's lap, laughing while she tickled them and spoke to them in a language all their own. Meli was always eager for her turn with the twins. She couldn't remember enjoying her own little brothers and sister nearly so much. "Don't carry them all the time," Nexima half scolded her. "They'll never start walking."

Meli tried not to think of the continuing unrest in the country, but by January it could not be ignored. She secretly wondered how much of it was the KLA's fault. KLA soldiers had attacked four policemen near Racak, and the Serbian security forces retaliated by killing forty-five Albanians, then twenty-four more. NATO, that mysterious European military alliance led by the Americans, demanded that both sides meet in a peace conference in February. Milosević refused to attend. He sent, as Mehmet put it, "his flunkies" to represent Serbia, and by March, despite NATO's threats, Serbian troops were massing on the border of Kosovo.

"Didn't I tell you?" Mehmet said as they heard the news on Uncle Fadil's radio. "It'll be all-out war soon." He was smiling as he said this—with the kind of smile that made Meli's stomach knot. How could her brother smile at the thought of more killing and misery? But still, how else could Milosević be stopped?

***

"They re going to do it!" Mehmet had come running from the house to where she was feeding the chickens.

"What? Who?"

"NATO is going to begin bombing the Serbs! Bill Clinton says so!" He was jubilant. "It was on television in America. They re really going to help us!"

How could Mehmet be so happy, Meli wondered.
Bombs don't know, when they fall, if you are a Serbian soldier or a Kosovar child. Bombs don't ask if you are guilty or innocent. They just fall, and if you are below, they kill you.

The bombing began, so far away at first that it was only a dull thud in their ears. Then at night they heard the planes roaring overhead, and if they went outside they could both hear and see the distant explosions. Mehmet was beside himself with joy. Even Meli, for all her fears, couldn't suppress a thrill when she saw the sky light up.

But with the hoped-for NATO bombs came disaster. A westward parade began to pass by on the road below the farm: laden-down cars, overloaded wagons pulled by tractors, weary people on foot, all heading toward the Cursed Mountains—heading for Albania. Some stopped and asked for water or food. Some reported that they had been driven from their farms by masked men, others that a nearby village had been burned and they d left rather than wait to be driven away—or killed. There had been killings, they said. Many killings. A woman to whom Mama was giving water told her, "The man said, 'You wanted NATO? Ask NATO to help you now! Then they killed my husband before my eyes and took me..." She saw Meli standing beside her mother and didn't finish the sentence.

***

A few nights later, their time on the farm came to an abrupt end. Meli was sleeping close to the front door when she heard what seemed to be a gentle, rhythmic rapping.

She sat up and listened. Yes, someone was at the door. Should she open it?
Tap tap tap
—a pause—then
tap tap tap tap.
She was close by, but something held her back. She waited. There it was again:
tap tap tap
—pause
—tap tap tap tap.

She must get Baba. He would know what to do. She slid out from under her blanket and made her way carefully across the sleeping bodies on the parlor floor toward Granny's room, but before she could get there, she met Uncle Fadil stumbling out of his own bedroom.

"I think," Meli whispered, "I think there's someone at the door."

He put his finger to his lips. "I'll handle it. Go back to sleep."

Meli followed him back across the hillocks of bodies, both taking care not to let their feet touch any of them. She stood for a moment in her place by the door, listening.
Tap tap tap—
pause
—tap tap tap tap.

"Lie down," her uncle commanded. "Go back to sleep."

She lay down obediently, but how could she help but hear Uncle Fadil whisper through a crack in the door, "What is it? Why are you here? It's too dangerous—"

"I had to tell you—you must leave. At once."

Uncle Fadil slipped out the door and closed it silently behind him. Meli knew she was disobeying, but she couldn't help herself. She crept to the door and put her ear against it.

"How can I leave?" Uncle Fadil was saying. "This is the land of my father's fathers..."

"For God's sake," the voice was pleading, "they have no mercy. They've already destroyed the farms just north of here. I beg you. For the lives of my wife and children..."

So it was Hamza out there.

"Where would we go? How could we—with the bombing?"

"Go to Albania. Right away. There's not much time, I tell you."

"I must talk to Hashim. And there's Granny. How could she bear—"

"Please, please. Just go. Just leave here. At once ... I have to go now. Leave at once, I beg you."

"I ll tell Nexima you were here."

"No, no, you can't. No one must know I came."

"God go with you, my son. May your life be lengthened."

There was a whispered response. "May your life be lengthened."

By the time Uncle Fadil slipped back into the house, Meli was wrapped in her blanket, pretending sleep, but her heart was pounding and her head reeling. There were too many of them—fourteen people, not counting clothing, bedding, and food. How could they all crowd into Uncle Fadil's Lada? Even if they took nothing with them for the journey ... and how long a journey would it be and to where?