The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (25 page)

So now, here’s how it is—we want to go to sleep. We can’t sleep. Go on, ask the boys.
You Ustashe shouldn’t have kept this secret to yourselves. Pills that turn men into
eagles—what else are you hiding from us? We hear the snipers crawling through the
fields like rabbits. In the dark we know everything. Now we just need to lie down
and catch our breath. Slavko is a musician, very clever, always with good ideas. In
the old days he had an orchestra, did you know that? Yes, in Sarajevo. So the piano,
you can see how it makes sense. You know about music—it helps to relax. It’s restful,
it’s soothing, it reminds us of nice things. Bring me a piano, says Slavko. Okay,
good idea. The men deserve it, don’t you agree? We can close our eyes and see our
mothers, our homes. But please look, who is that over there on the ground? Slavko.
What’s the problem? You can clearly see the bastard is asleep. And we are not. What
did he take? He took something and did not tell us. How can he tell us his solution
if he’s asleep?

So look, the captain had said fervently, taking the driver aside, the old man repelled
by the zoo-like stench of the officer’s body. We’ll scratch each other’s backs, eh?
That’s the way among countrymen. You see what I’m saying? Take it or leave it. Indulge
us for a few minutes. Bring the wife of Kovacevic. She’ll know what to do.

And like an old fool I came to get you, Bogdanov said, pouring her a brandy. Like
a stupid old fool.

His chest thrust out like a Prussian, the captain mimed chivalric grace; perhaps in
his former life he had imagined himself something of a courtier. He offered her the
crook of his naked arm and, gagging from his smell, she averted her eyes from the
frightening, crazed earnestness of his stare. She took his elbow, disconcerted by
its tremble, which she found contagious, and by its feverish heat, which felt lascivious
and seemed to scorch her stomach. To her chagrin, he strolled like a former intimate
reuniting after a quarrel, the captain feigning solicitousness, trying to impress
and appease, scuffling in his loose boots like a novice skater, a ridiculous guide,
pivoting on his heels, his free arm presenting the sights—here are the men, this is
the table, there is our camp, there is our pillage, here is the road, and, over here,
the roadside—not far or long but enough for her to feel keenly the closing trap of
her position, a female on display before a gathering of men capable of anything—deranged,
battle-poisoned brutes. Her cheeks flushed, her blood began to chill with numb acceptance.
He flattered the blonde waves of her hair, the modesty of her high-collared dress,
steering her ineluctably toward the fire and through its smoky curtains into the theater
of the oak tree. Ah! he said, delighted, as if he were seeing the piano for the first
time. The piano! What do you think? Okay? Yet she found it impossible to accept that
this was what he wanted from her.

She looked back, momentarily relieved to see the other men had remained stationed
on the road, their eyes nevertheless boring into her.
Bogdanov will save me,
she told herself but knew the hope was irrational and that saving the boy was all
that mattered anyway. When she asked, respectfully, if the captain had a request,
his unshaven cheeks inflated like a blowfish but he said nothing, studying her with
mute inscrutability, overfocused like the madmen you sometimes saw on the streets.
She heard herself stupidly encouraging him—Something happy?—moving the bench away
from the buzz of flies feasting on the dead man on the ground.

She sat down, her palms damp, and watched her hands, poised above the keys, shaking.

The Internationale! yelled out one of the soldiers.

Silence! Shut up!

She felt his feral presence behind her, the hot current of his obsession, a terrible
counterweight to the terrible feeling of absence she found occupied by her husband.
The captain’s voice tapered from snarl to purr. Please, just play, he said reasonably,
and she commanded her bitten fingers to open and spread themselves above the keys
and fall like a shattering release of sorrow.

No, no, no, said the captain, his hands digging painfully into her shoulders.

What then? she gasped, frozen by his touch, the roughness melting to the nauseating
softness of a caress. Just tell me.

Not that. He leaned closer, cooing into her ear. Your Blessed Virgin must wait her
turn.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
she thought, shivering with disgust, and prayed for hate to overtake her fear. Strike
this monster dead.

Opera, said the captain with an inflection of triumph, his hands lifting off her body.

She asked which one and he answered, Why not something beautiful? and with surrendering
bitterness she said, Of course.

She summoned forth Pamina, the abducted daughter of the Queen of the Night, her sister
Mara emerging with the notes, Mara’s artistic pretensions invigorated in the cosmopolitan
bliss she experienced studying theater in Vienna.
Oh, this Ibsen, he understands families! Brecht, he’s better off in Hollywood!
Marija had joined her on a weeklong visit only months before the start of the war,
the two of them attending a Saturday matinee of
The Magic Flute
at the opulent Freihaus
.
How typically melodramatic, Marija thought, when the lovesick soprano moved Mara to
tears, quaking with emotions she found difficult to conceal, refusing and then accepting
a monogrammed handkerchief from the man seated next to her, blowing her nose like
a duck. Marija herself could only gape at the elite spectacle of Viennese society,
the highest of highs, the swallow-tailed coats and top hats and Chanel gowns and elbow-length
gloves, the diamond brooches and jeweled crucifixes, Parisian shoes and Italian wraps
and German wristwatches, tuxedos and cravats and imperial officers’ dress and swastika
armbands of an audience captivated by the romance of its ambitions for the world,
by the excitement of the war everyone knew was coming like a long-awaited correction—the
robust glory of Hapsburg aristocracy, underwriting their cupidity with culture, the
self-affirming superiority of empires that conquer in the name of civilization. War,
the answered prayer, the only realistic remedy to the unfinished business of the previous
war, what a disaster.

The captain replaced his fingertips on her shoulders and her own fingers stiffened
and her existence shrank to a single anguish, the unrelenting pressure to protect
her son, the music perhaps an unlikely safeguard, a charm against wickedness. Don’t
stop, he warned gently. It’s beautiful. Mozart. Yes, beautiful. You think I don’t
know.

But her mind faltered from the path of the chords and she stopped and within an instant
the captain’s hands had locked around her throat. It is forbidden to stop, he said,
and she continued, choking. Then his hands relaxed back to her shoulders, massaging
her flesh, and traveled down the sides of her rib cage, rising and falling from her
waist to her armpits, smoothing the green cotton fabric of her dress. Don’t stop,
he said again and his hands rounded her body and found her breasts. Don’t stop, he
said, leaning over her, his breath a hot circle on the back of her skull, it’s beautiful,
and she could feel the lump of his penis enlarging against her spine, directly below
the last button of her dress, which the fingers of his right hand proceeded to unfasten.
She considered shitting herself in defense but feared they would simply beat her to
death for such a filthy trick. Beautiful, beautiful, he said, don’t stop, and his
fingers spidered to the next button. When she tried to stand up his fist came smashing
against her temple and white roses of pain exploded behind her eyes and her dress
was being ripped from her shoulders. In a moment she regained her senses and her fingers
searched for E-flat major, bells of hatred ringing through the aria of her submission.

A motorcycle pulled alongside the car, gliding to a stop, and Bogdanov, his head bent
under the yawning lid of the trunk, looked over to see the goggled moon-face of a
young partisan, shouting to him above the clatter. Okay, he’s coming, said the soldier,
tossing the sweep of his golden hair back toward the city, and they studied each other
for a moment, the youth’s expression obliquely curious and reassuring. Bogdanov, preoccupied,
was uninterested in the implicit offer of an elucidation.
Was death coming? Yes, probably so.
He glanced politely over his shoulder at the empty road behind him, the hint of a
distracted smile on his lips, and then returned his attention to the contents of the
trunk. The soldier revved his engine and went ahead.

He unlocked a portmanteau and opened it like a sacred book to a text composed of Swiss
francs and American dollars, stuffing the front pockets of his coat with banded packets
of hundreds of dollars. Even drug-addled hooligans like these peasant soldiers knew
a dollar was a dollar in every language, and in any hand money was strength, money
lubricated intransigence and clouded moral choices and, like a pointed gun, invited
men to rethink everything. He folded and relocked the portmanteau and, from its concealment
under a throw rug, removed the shotgun and closed the trunk and went to the front
of the car and spoke with the boy. Out, he said, close the door, stand right here,
take the gun. You know how to use it, don’t you? You’ve seen men do it. Hold it like
this, at your waist. These are the triggers, two of them. Pull one, then find your
next target and pull the second one. Don’t aim, point. Stand right here and wait for
your mother to return. If she doesn’t come and soldiers come you let them get close
and then step out from behind the car and let them have it. You can do that? Yes?
Good. Then run like hell into the fields.

Where’s my mother? Stjepan asked. What’s happened to her?

Nothing has happened, said Bogdanov, encouraged that the boy was not frightened but
peevish. I’m going to get her now.

He searched in the car for the short iron bar cut to the length of his forearm and
the loaded Luger pistol he kept beneath the seat, their cold familiar weight like
a consensus between thought and action. The bar went up the left sleeve of his shirt,
its lower tip secured in the leather band of his wristwatch; the Luger was hidden
under his coattail between his belt and the small of his back, its muzzle playing
coldly between the broad cheeks of his ass.

Wait here, he told the boy again, and marched back to the checkpoint, each resolute
step multiplying the lethal potency of his raging sense of honor, which he knew to
contain until the exact moment it would prove itself most effective against unthinkable
odds—bad odds merely an inspiration to the quick-witted, and no quality found in a
man’s character better defined the distance between winning and losing than self-control.
Who’s coming?
he chanted to himself.
I’ll tell you who’s coming, Turk. The old fuck is coming. Boys, the lion is old and
sleeping, but go ahead, kick him awake, see what happens. He will shit in your mother’s
milk
.

The last time he had killed a man he had broken his neck, but he did not intend to
break the Bosnian captain’s neck. Good news, he called out, striding back toward the
soldiers, who could not be bothered to peel their spellbound eyes away from the depraved
spectacle of the captain and the woman, his groaning mouth nested in her hair, his
red elastic cock bouncing from the fly of his pants, her dress torn open to her waist
and her bra drooped into her lap, the captain with one hand fondling her left breast
and the other fondling himself, half-erect, trying to jerk off.

Comrades, good news. New instructions from the colonel. I am to give you money. American
dollars. How much do you want?

The three soldiers nearest to Bogdanov each found himself holding a two-inch stack
of green currency, a magnetic wedge of good fortune driven into the wood of voyeurism,
their uncomprehending expressions lighting up with generous increments of greed as
they understood what was happening. Dollars, said Bogdanov. One hundreds. American.
Go on, divide them up, and he spun away from the ensuing scramble and hurried with
bloodthirsty enthusiasm toward the oak tree, waving the three remaining packets above
his head—Captain, for you, American dollars. How much do you want?—and then the last
few steps between them he came like a charging bear from the forest of his deception,
unseen, single-minded, berserk.

Almighty Christ, he wanted to wring the life out of this Bosnian scum, who was not
to be interrupted at any cost from his formidable depravity. You fucking animal, he
panted, incredulous, trying to subdue the captain. Even in the vise of a choke hold,
the iron bar in Bogdanov’s sleeve strapped fast against the captain’s windpipe, he
would not quit masturbating. At the same instant the boy’s mother felt the weight
of the driver added to the captain, who sank his unclipped fingernails into her breast
and she screamed in pain, biting his knuckles, her hands prying at his as he strangled
above her, his body bucking still and more rabidly against her. Bogdanov used his
thumb to gouge an eye, applying every ounce of his strength to the bar, cutting off
the man’s air and the captain, writhing in the throes of his perversion, spasmed warm
pelts of his ejaculation down the pallid knobs of the woman’s backbone. For a moment
his body rippled with the aftershock of its crime and then he slackened in the clutch
of Bogdanov’s murderous rage, expiring in ecstasy.

When Bogdanov eased the pressure on his throat a blast from the captain’s elbow struck
the pit of the old man’s stomach and suddenly they were off her, stumbling backward
toward the fire, the captain’s head slinging froth and drool, pop-eyed, rearing and
thrashing like a man with electrodes clipped to his balls. Gurgling, he clawed at
the forearm crushing his windpipe, boots kicked off and legs swimming in the air,
Bogdanov unable to free his right hand from the contest but then he did and out came
the Luger from his belt and he began pistol-whipping the captain senseless in front
of his men, an audience jaded beyond Bogdanov’s most optimistic expectation. Perhaps
not surprisingly the captain’s men displayed a reservoir of tolerance for violent
antics, counting money with a cynical lack of both urgency and loyalty, looking over
occasionally to check the progress of the beating, in no hurry to rescue anyone.