The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (13 page)

“True enough. But I'm not a policeman anymore. I'm working for some internationals now. Nobody important.”

“Oh, and you can't talk about it. Even better. And more impressive, too. Maybe you can clean this place up.”

“It's not like that,” Vlado said, realizing he was sounding too mysterious for his own good. “Just some aid work. No big deal. But are there still a lot of rackets going?”

“Same as during the war. You just don't notice them as much because they can't carry their guns around now. They lost their cover when the fighting stopped. Now you can only tell them by their cell phones, and even that's getting harder, 'cause now it seems like everyone's got a phone.”

“But the place looks good. Or a whole lot better, anyway.”

Marko shrugged. “I guess. Maybe I haven't noticed because the changes have come so gradually. Or because I never go into any of the new stores. Versace. Benneton. There's even a McDonald's coming. But who can afford it? If you don't have mob money, or work for the internationals, then you probably don't have any hard currency. And it's the internationals who run everything.”

“So I've heard.”

“It's better that way, believe me. Our own people would only fuck it up and start another war. The new parliament couldn't even agree on a flag, or a license plate. It's still an international call to Banja Luka, just because a bunch of Serb idiots think they're still a part of Serbia. Still, do we really need fourteen thousand foreigners here?”

“That many?”

“And maybe more. They're the only ones paying real wages, but even then you're usually just an interpreter or a driver. Not much call for engineers. The outside contractors usually bring their own. But what about you? An aid agency, you said?”

Vlado remembered his cover and figured he better start using it. But he wondered, too, if Marko was fishing for a job. Already hustling him at some level, not that he would have blamed him. In that way the war was still on.

“The European Union,” he said sheepishly. “A few grants and programs I'm involved with. Mostly with demining.”

“No need to be ashamed,” Marko said with a laugh. “It's not like you have a choice. Impressive, in fact. And you think your family might be coming back?”

“I don't know. We'll see.”

Marko nodded. “I understand. Believe me, if my family was in Germany, I'd stay until the Germans kicked me out. Well, good to see you. But bring them for a visit, at least.”

Poor Marko, Vlado thought. And suddenly it didn't seem so bad to be “stuck” in Berlin. Maybe things would feel different out in the countryside.

A block later he contemplated stopping for coffee. He had some D-marks and a little local currency in his pocket, courtesy of the tribunal, and felt like treating himself before heading back to meet Pine. There was a new café nearby, and he gazed through the big windows, checking the scene. He noticed a familiar face.

It excited him more than he would have wished. It was Amira Hodzic. Without her he never would have escaped Sarajevo, would probably be buried somewhere out in the soccer field with all the other casualties, listed as a sniper victim but actually done in by the mob. Her role hadn't involved much risk, but she'd provided him with shelter just long enough so he could plot his final escape, having been pursued halfway across the city. Amira and her two small children had tended to him as if he were a member of the family, though he'd barely known them. She had been a prostitute then, forced into the work by hardship. With her husband dead on some battlefront far to the east, she and her children had been herded into the city along with tens of thousands of others from the surrounding valleys.

Vlado had turned to her when he had nowhere else to go, and the way he remembered it now it seemed he had sought her out as much for her warmth and spirit as for the knowledge that she would be a safe harbor. And now there she was, speaking with someone at her table, keenly interested. From the look of her clothes and makeup, she was one of the lucky ones.

Then, seeming to receive his signal through the glass, she suddenly looked his way, reacting first with astonishment, then with a slow but wide smile and a glint in her eyes that almost looked like tears.

Now he had no choice but to go say hello, a thought more pleasing than he cared to admit. As he entered, her companion turned, and for a fleeting moment of panic he was sure it was Calvin Pine.

But no, it was some other foreigner. A European, perhaps an American. The man rose in greeting as Amira spoke a few hasty words of introduction in her English, then he stood by the table as if he didn't know quite what to say, seeming as flustered as Vlado. But he had the composure to realize that this reunion deserved a few moments of privacy, or as much as you could muster in a crowded café. His name was Henrik, and he graciously pulled an empty chair from another table. “Here. Join us. Vlado, was it?” The accent was German. “I'll get a waitress, or else you might be waiting an hour. The service is notoriously slow.” And he left them.

Vlado was impressed with the way Henrik handled the moment, keeping things more comfortable than they might have been. But why should it be awkward at all, when nothing had happened between him and Amira?

He remembered the warmth of her apartment, heated by a wood-stove, in a high-rise that had otherwise been as cold as a slab of granite. He recalled the faces of her two young children peeping from around a corner as he'd bathed and toweled, then as he'd eaten an orange, his first fresh fruit in months.

Amira, too, was standing now. She reached for Vlado across the table, but with a certain reserve, and not just due to her friend Henrik, he sensed.

Vlado settled into the chair, not sure where to begin. “How did you two—”

“I'm an interpreter,” Amira replied. “For the Red Cross. And sometimes, when they don't need me, for other people. I once did some work for Henrik. He's an assistant to the high representative. It seems the only people I work for anymore are foreigners. So, still whoring, as you can see.”

She smiled but Vlado grimaced, coloring slightly, looking down at the table. She reached over, touching his hand. “Please, don't be embarrassed. It's just the way I feel sometimes.”

Vlado hoped for Henrik's sake she was referring to her job, not to her romance. She reddened, as if realizing how the remark might be taken.

“I'm only speaking of my work, of course. You sell your speaking to the rest of the world, and it's all they want. Not your ideas or any thoughts on whether they're doing things right. Henrik was the only one who ever asked about any of that. The only one. Everyone else just wants a mouthpiece, although lately they've started to let me do a little more. I guess they've decided I'm not going to crash their computers if I sign on now and then. And it's a living, with lots of hard currency, which is more than you can say for almost everybody else.”

Vlado wondered at the undertone of bitterness from one who was doing so well.

“And you?” she said. “You are living here again?”

He shook his head.

“Just visiting. A small assignment for the war crimes tribunal.” He caught his mistake too late, realizing he should have said the European Union. So much for his cover story, at least with Amira.

“Nice to hear you're still fighting for the right side,” she said. “But I never thought I'd see you in Sarajevo again. So many memories from that time when you left.”

Now he was sure of it. There
were
tears in her eyes. Something was troubling her, and Vlado couldn't place it. “Amira, what's wrong?”

She paused, reaching into her purse for a tissue. She dabbed her eyes, then checked her face in a compact, touching her cheeks lightly and turning her head, seeing that her makeup was in place before looking back at Vlado.

“Do you remember my children?”

“Yes. Your daughter, Mirza. She must be what, nine by now?”

“Ten.”

“And your son. What was his name?”

She lowered her face, speaking into her plate. “Hamid.” She looked around quickly, almost furtively, but Henrik was still across the room, leaning into a doorway in the back, no help from the kitchen in sight. Had she not told Henrik about her children? Vlado found that unimaginable. But perhaps that was the sort of thing that would scare a man off.

“The day after you left my house, the authorities came,” she said.

“As you'd said they might. They were looking for you. Your partner had remembered me coming into the office to answer questions. He knew I was one of the whores from the French barracks, and they got my name from one of the others. So they came for me. You must have been on the plane by then, but I didn't know, so I told them nothing. They didn't believe that, of course. They thought I was your lover. They wanted to know what you'd been doing, what you'd been saying, where you'd gone. Fortunately I'd already given the things you left to a neighbor for safekeeping, so they didn't find them. But they did find your dirty clothes, the ones I'd washed. Some colleague of yours recognized them.

“So they took me away for more questions, for more time to let me think about what might happen to me if I didn't cooperate. I asked them to let me call a neighbor to take care of Hamid and Mirza, but they wouldn't. They said they'd take care of them.”

She looked around again. Still no Henrik. Vlado had a bad feeling about where this was headed. “I hope they didn't mistreat you too badly,” he said. “Or the children.”

“Not really. They kept me overnight, but nothing much actually happened. Just a lot of the same questions over and over. I think by then they must have realized you'd gotten away and they were starting to panic, were starting to worry more about saving their own skins than about me. So they let me go in the morning. They'd taken the children to the orphanage, the one near Kosevo Hospital, so I walked there to pick them up. It was a terrible place. Pickpockets and thieves, children running everywhere in the halls. Dirty. Loud. They'd been separated, to the boys' side and the girls' side. Both of them were terrified. They thought I'd abandoned them, that they'd never see me again. But I calmed them down soon enough.”

At that, Vlado began to breathe easier.

“I'm glad they were okay.”

Then a fat tear rolled down her cheek, and he realized she wasn't finished.

“Two nights later Hamid began coughing, and by the next morning he couldn't stop. I boiled water to make steam. I went and found a doctor. I asked my neighbors, but no one could help, and Hamid couldn't stop coughing. I wanted to take him to the hospital, but it was too full, and there weren't enough doctors. They told me to keep him at home. The next day he got a fever. He was like a little kettle, hot to the touch, and sputtering with his cough. There had been whooping cough and scarlet fever in the orphanage, a miracle that Mirza didn't catch them. I heard later that five of the boys there died. I think it was especially bad on the boys' side, and Hamid had caught them both. And in four days he was dead. Lying there in his own bed, not breathing. I had fallen asleep in a chair next to him and didn't even know when it happened. I had bought every medicine I could get my hands on with my whore's money. But he was dead. I knew as soon as I woke up and saw his face. The strangest part was that I had just had the most beautiful dream, and my first thought coming out of it was how thankful I was that I had finally been able to sleep, and all that time he'd been dead. I carried him downstairs, across town, all the way to the morgue, the whole place stinking with all the bodies from the war. All the shooting we had come through, the shell fire that I'd worried about every day whenever they were outside. Then my son is killed by a cough and a fever.”

She wiped her face with the tissue, then snapped it inside her purse. There were no more tears. Vlado was horrified, claustrophobic. He looked around for Henrik but saw no rescue in sight.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “My God. I am so sorry. I am so . . .”

“Responsible?” She looked up at him, face rigid, and he teetered on the edge of the moment, knowing that was how he felt but desperately hoping she felt otherwise. “No,” she said finally. “You're not responsible. It is all of those other people. The ones who were after you, the ones who started the war. The ones who were supposed to take care of us. The UN. All of them. And it was luck, too, of course. The same luck that used to decide if you would be shot or not when you walked across town. But I didn't always think this way. Just be glad you didn't come back a few years ago. I probably would have killed you.” She fished a lighter from her purse and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply.

Vlado didn't know what to say. He felt like he was in free fall. But Amira seemed to recover quickly. After all, she'd had nearly five years to think this over.

“I shouldn't smoke,” she said. “But I have to have one right now. Henrik hates cigarettes. Unusual for a German, don't you think?” She offered Vlado a grim smile, biting her lower lip, placing her hand for just a moment atop his on the table, squeezing lightly then withdrawing. She wore some other face now. One last brush at her cheeks for any trace of tears, then a hasty rummage through her purse for the compact.

“And so now I have this. A real job. A man. A good man. Henrik is sweet. And he doesn't know what I used to do to make a living, so I hope that you won't tell him.”

“Of course. And you still have . . .” Vlado almost couldn't say the name. “Mirza?”

“Yes,” Amira said, showing her old self for a moment. “And most of the time that's enough. It's only because of Mirza that I kept going at all. But I did stop trying to get us out of the city on any aid convoys. My whoring suffered, too, sad to say.” She laughed briefly.

A woman at the next table who had overheard her remark frowned and ostentatiously shook her head.