The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Praise

Prologue - Eastern Bosnia

CHAPTER ONE - November 1998

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Acknowledgments

Epilogue

About the Author

ALSO BY DAN FESPERMAN

Copyright Page

For Emma and Will,
the chairmen of the board

ACCLAIM FOR DAN FESPERMAN AND
The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

“A wonderful book. . . . Timely, thoughtful and vividly written.”

—
The Seattle Times

“A new standard for war-based thrillers.” —
Los Angeles Times

“[A] keep-em-guessing plot, littered with hidden treasures, international intrigue, lusty old Croatian thugs, and late-night crypt openings.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“A dark and morally complex novel.”

—
The Daily Telegraph
(London)

“A haunting sense of place and enough twists and turns to make the reader giddy. . . . This is not an ordinary thriller, and this is enforced by the precision and the quality of the writing.”

—
The Birmingham Post

“[An] ambitious, morally complex thriller.”

—
The Observer
(London)

“Fesperman tells his atmospheric tale with great elegance . . . [and] a sharp analytical curiosity.”

—
The Guardian
(London)

“[A] fine follow-up to the equally fine
Lie in the Dark
.”

—
The Orlando Sentinel

“A well-paced tale of deceit, manipulation and double-crossing.”

—
The Spectator

Awesome symbols, the Crescent and the Cross;
their kingdoms are the realms of graveyards.
Following them down the bloody river,
sailing in the small boat of great sorrows,
we must honor the one or the other.

From the Serbian epic poem
The Mountain Wreath
PETAR PETROVIC NJEGOS, 1847

Prologue

Eastern Bosnia

When they came to arrest the general he was polishing his boots, an orderly man to the very end. At least that's what the soldiers would tell the debriefers and reporters, having found the boots on the bed with a blackened rag, the smell of polish still strong in the air.

Earlier that morning it had rained, and when the soldiers first assembled in the trees some two hours before dawn the general was asleep. Lulled by the wet drumbeat on his bunker roof, he dreamed of marching, watching a nocturnal parade pass before him—his men, their men, everybody's men, it seemed, the dead and the wounded among them. They wore bedclothes, he realized with a start, and their feet stirred clouds of dust that coated their skins in chalky gray. He wanted to look away but couldn't, hypnotized by the tramping feet, row after row of everyone he had ever commanded or fought.

Then the rain on his rooftop slackened. The sleepwalking legions faded. And when the tinny alarm on his watch sounded a few minutes later, at 5 a.m., the general awakened with the taste of dust sticky in his mouth. He climbed from the bed craving water, drinking straight from the tap, as if he were bivouacked in the field, crouching at some farmer's spigot.

The gray light of the mirror revealed a drawn face with bags beneath the eyes, deep creases framing loose jowls. Stubble everywhere. With luck it would be a full beard within a week, though he couldn't say for sure, never having grown one. He had a high, jutting forehead, peaking with a thick shock of gray in need of a trim, brushed straight back and smelling of the pomade that forever scented his pillow. But the most striking feature was his gray-blue eyes, as clear and cool as stones in a stream, eyes that could convey either rage or resolve without a word being spoken. “Command eyes,” one colonel had called them, and they had watched dozens of offensives come and go before the guns had fallen silent nearly three years ago. It was only later, in the calm of peacetime, that people in other places had decided that his army had exceeded the rules— rules made in their lands, where no one knew the fears and histories that ruled his. And somewhere, he knew, in some room with maps and charts and file drawers stuffed more richly with information than any order of battle, others were still fighting his war. They were still assessing his movements and commands, clucking and shaking their heads, exercising a calm reason that one never had time for in the midst of battle.

He remembered the heat of those five days that were now the subject of such scrutiny, the hardness of the roads on soles worn thin by four years on the move. Cicadas roared in the spiky underbrush while his men forded the thickets of scrub and low trees, calling out to one another, and to the enemy, too. The town in the eastern valley, so long a problem, had finally fallen, months of stalemate bursting like a worn belt in a tired engine, and during the first night thousands of the panicked foe had broken through to the forest, becoming a long, sinuous column in the darkness. By morning they were running, a herd cut loose with only fear to drive it, and his army joined the chase as if it were a hunt, the rattle of gunfire nonstop.

The cleverness of his men had astonished him, a rustic ingenuity blooming in the elation of pursuit. Some donned blue helmets—the trademark of the UN “peacekeepers”—luring the skulkers from the trees by shouting through loudspeakers, pledging protection, food, water, a bed to sleep in. Others drove hospital trucks slowly down country lanes past patches of woods, beckoning the wounded out of hiding. We will heal you. We will save you. Give yourselves up and end the struggle. It worked more often than he would have believed.

The roads were dry. There was nowhere to fill your canteen, and the dust was so heavy that by nightfall of the third day he and his men were coated, ghostly in its whiteness. Too weary to wash, they slept where they halted and swallowed dust in their sleep, and by morning it was the taste of death itself, so they rinsed and scoured with shots of brandy, passing bottles down the line. They grew giddy with the flush of alcohol and the promise of another easy chase; more fighting that would help bring this war to a close. Destroy a hundred of their sons and you saved a hundred of your own. It was an old formula, closed to debate. With any luck they would shut down the bastards for a generation. So they moved back onto the roads and into the trees, clipping their ammunition into place, a sound to get your blood going.

Late in the final day a messenger arrived with new orders, and the general took fifty of his best men to an empty factory six miles to the rear. The torn innards of its machinery sat rusting on high grass out front, and the big building echoed with voices, a hollow sound leaking from high windows. Hundreds of the enemy were inside, stragglers and quitters, men and boys, eyes lit by fear and exhaustion. The general strolled indoors, and the stench nearly gagged him, all the sweat and shit and grime mixed with the factory smells of metal and machine oil. The noise was unbearable, too, like the keening of newborn calves. A cordon of his troops stood on one side of the walls next to large sliding doors while an officer in a black beret walked the general to the opposite end. They climbed a cat-walk raised on a steel frame, draped with pulleys and chains, and as the general rose into view the crowd's noise seemed to rise with him, a swell of echoes appealing incoherently for his mercy.

“Listen to them, General Andric,” the officer in the beret shouted above the din. “They must think you're the lord high executioner.”

The general looked the officer over, scanning the pockmarked face. The man stank of brandy, and a belt of ammunition was draped across his torso like a sash, a risky stunt done only for style. The raked beret was smudged brown across one side. Popovic, his name was. Branko Popovic. A freelance, accountable to no one. The man did know how to fight, after a fashion. He could secure a village, clean it out, and keep moving, and you knew that nothing from that quarter would ever threaten your flanks again. But his methods were, at best, unorthodox, and the general kept his distance when he could, although lately that had become difficult. To his way of thinking, their fortunes had become far too enmeshed.

The crowd quieted after a minute or so, the men jostling as they sat or squatted on the oily floor, spent from five days in the heat. Sunburned faces turned toward him as if he were about to deliver a speech, and he looked into the eyes of a few, seeing sons and fathers, the rough hands of plowmen and hay balers, the flab of shopkeepers. Boys who needed scolding and a firm hand.

For a moment he wavered, and Popovic must have sensed it, for the man was suddenly bobbing at his side, gun at the ready. Colonel Popovic, it was, though God knows where the rank had come from. There was nothing about either the man or his unit that said “regular army.” The deep scars of acne and the croaking voice. Two days earlier the general had seen him in a burning village with a column of laughing men, their arms full of stereos, televisions, bottles of whiskey. Some hauled bulging sacks across their backs like Father Christmas, cheeks powdered by the unceasing dust.

“Take them now, sir, and we'll never have to fight them again,” Popovic urged. “Let us finish it, sir.”

The general wanted to laugh at all of the “sirs,” as if suddenly Popovic considered himself a real soldier, and this was their usual way of fighting. For the slightest moment the man's insolence was more distasteful than the thought of the rabble at his feet. But the orders were clear, so he nodded without turning, not giving the man the satisfaction of verbal acknowledgment.

The men below must have been watching for a sign, because they began standing, eyes rolling, panic taking hold. Fathers clutched at their boys, and the wailing resumed. The younger men shoved, going nowhere in the crush of bodies. Then an officer shouted, Popovic perhaps, and the shooting began, close and rapid, with no place for the bullets to go but into the meat and the filthy clothes, the shrieking roar and clatter of all that death locked beneath the low metal roof.

Most of the general's memory of the moment had gone fuzzy. All that remained sharp was the image of a single face—some farmer or laborer who happened to stand out from the crowd for a split second, his mouth opened as if gasping for breath, then overflowing suddenly with blood, chin covered in red, a gargle of anguish. Everything else was unclear, a miasma of sound and stench. But his memory of the dust remained sharp, and he still tasted it every morning as clearly as if he'd swallowed a spoonful each night before bed.

The general ducked beneath the faucet for another drink. Then he rechecked his watch—5:08. Timing was important. He mustn't be late, of course. That would be the end. But acting too early might be fatal as well. He strolled to the high window, the one he always kept open no matter the season, anything to rid the room of the damp concrete smell of a prison. The sky was clearing, moonlight beaming through the tall, slender pines like searchlights. Nothing stirred but a cow, slumped low against a dim bank of underbrush. Even his sentries were quiet, their usual bee buzz of conversation stilled for a change, although he could smell their cigarette smoke, could hear the chirp of a lighter.

He gazed at the stars, seeking omens in the deepness of the sky. There was no light from any of the houses in the valley, yet he sensed their presence, the red rooftops that climbed the gentle slope like a tile footpath. He inhaled deeply, smelling turned earth, the resinous bite of the pines.

At times like these the general found it easy to imagine the hills were enchanted, a place where mere farmers and peasants slipped their skins by night to become ogres and knights, gliding into the trees to joust and thrust in secret, writing new chapters in the lore of the forbidden. There were treasures in these fields and forests, for those who knew where to look—old bundles in oilcloth, dormant beneath cabbages and pumpkins, or concealed in the darkness of stables. So much that was buried, not just in his valley but in all of them—plots and secrets just beyond reach of memory. Wait long enough, perhaps, and the moonlight would lay everything bare, melting the cover as if it were snow, at least until morning, when all would again be concealed in the white light of dawn.

But a soldier would grow old and die waiting for the moonlight to do his work. And old soldiers didn't die, he mused, nor did they just fade away, as the arrogant American had so famously said. They simply grew slow and fat awaiting the judgment of history, listening alone for the knock of the verdict upon their bunker doors.

Not him, the general thought, as sure of himself as ever. Not him.