Heritage of Smoke Page 9

  “Why would I?”

  “Don’t lie to me, I can see it in your mouth, in your overly white teeth. But you know what? I studied history in Novi Sad.” He waited to see what effect the statement would have on her and then asked, “Who are you going to write for?”

  “The Boston Globe, I think. Possibly Harper’s!”

  “Herpes? We have no herpes here. Syphilis, yes, but herpes, that’s an American thing. What do you want to write?”

  “I simply want to find out how the prison functions.”

  He squeaked. “Sure, come with me. I’ll show you how it functions.”

  He walked with her to a small windowless room. Anna hesitated at the threshold.

  “What kind of journalist are you?”

  Ana stepped into the dank room that smelled of salt, mold, and urine. She held her breath, and her heartbeat intensified.

  “How come you speak Serbian so well?” he asked.

  “Croatian. My roots are in this country. Somewhere around here.”

  “Let me see your press credentials.”

  “I don’t carry those around. It’s not prudent to have them. More than fifty journalists have been killed in this war already.”

  “Nice that you are so well informed. Are you a spy?”

  “If I were, I’d have the press or diplomatic credentials— wouldn’t come without a cover.”

  He grinned, revealing two large gaps among his upper teeth. “How much will you make if you get a sensational story? Give me thirty percent of what you make. Is that a deal? So what do you want? We can create news, whatever you want.” He came closer to her and bent down to lean into her face, breathing out tobacco and decay. “We could arrange executions so you could witness and write about them and become famous. How about that? You’d just have to observe and write it all down, and you’d be bound to sell your articles to Die Zeit, Le Monde, everybody. In that case we’d do fifty-fifty.”

  Ana didn’t know whether the man was earnest; for a couple of seconds she couldn’t draw a breath.

  “Are there any women captives?” she asked.

  “You a feminist? No stories from me, then. You think I’m boring?”

  “I’ll take yours too.”

  The director walked her out of the cell and into another building. He called two guards in uniforms, coughed, spat, cleared his throat, and said, “Go ahead and interview her.”

  They led her into a large room with muddy windows and slammed the metal door shut. They pushed her into another room, where there were a dozen women, most of them asleep, some groaning, one singing slowly.

  The guards ripped Ana’s clothes off.

  Ana kicked one of them. They subdued her, and as they pinned her to the floor, she said, “You can’t do that. I’m an American.”

  “So?” said the first guard, with a sparse gray beard. “You’ve had lots of practice then.”

  “If something happens to me, American marines will attack your camp.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “That’s how America works, protects her citizens.”

  The men laughed.

  “I have AIDS,” she said.

  “You trying to protect us?” said the second, clean-shaven guard, who had a broken nose. “You hate us, and so you’d like us to get it if you had it. So you don’t have it!”

  “You’ll rape others and spread it. I’m not trying to protect you but the other women.”

  “That’s generous of you!” said the clean-shaven one. He raised his arm to hit her, but the bearded guard caught it and said, “Leave her alone.”

  “All right, you go first.”

  “She may be right. I don’t want to mess with any strange diseases. Can’t trust Americans. Plus this one’s too skinny.”

  “Well, you have a point.”

  The two of them walked out.

  Meanwhile, outside Bihac, an officer was talking to the plump and ruddy General Mladic. “Have you read the foreign papers? The whole world is in an uproar about Bosnian concentration camps.”

  “We have no camps. Education centers.” “And they talk about mass rapes.”

  “What mass rapes? There aren’t nearly enough. Sometimes I worry…”

  “Shouldn’t we issue our troops warnings not to do it?”

  “If you keep talking like this, I’ll have to demote you.”

  “I’m not expressing my views. Just what the world reaction is.”

  “Don’t you remember how when the Red Army was liberating Vojvodina, Djilas complained to Stalin that there were 110 reports of rape committed by the Soviet soldiers. Stalin replied, ‘Here, our boys are dying on the battlefield and freezing to death, and you object to their having a little bit of fun?’ Here, we are freeing Bosnia from the Muslim terrorists and you complain.”

  Mladic offered a full wineglass of plum brandy to the officer. They toasted the glasses, looking each other in the eye.

  “Pretty good stuff, huh?” said Mladic. “By the way, when a lower officer was brought to be court-marshaled for rape, Stalin, who got hold of the case, promoted him to major. He knew that rape is good for morale. We have problems with morale. Go tell our boys to have fun.”

  The officer left. Mladic continued to lift weights, examining himself in the mirror.

  Ana was transferred to a room with a few women. A bruised artificial blonde, Selma, told her the story of her abduction, straight from the mosque gate when she was going to pray. Another woman told her she’d been intimidated into leaving her apartment, and when she wouldn’t several thugs came in, beat her and abused her. The women were not done with their stories when three guards came in and took them away.

  In the morning, there was a performance. The camp director forced Ana to sit next to him. “I organized this just for you, so you’d have something to write about. Remember, fifty percent of income is mine!” Ana looked over her shoulder in fear and saw no policemen behind her, but she still didn’t have the courage to leave.

  Several officers sat in armchairs, drinking brandy and singing folk songs.

  “You’ve read The Bridge on the Drina by Andric, haven’t you?” the director said. “Remember the scene where Turks impale a young Serb on a stick? Over the centuries, Turks did a lot of impaling, to humiliate us, and now we have to pay these Turks back.”

  “But these are no Turks,” Ana said. “And even if they were, they wouldn’t be the same Turks; all that was six hundred years ago, up to two hundred years ago, and who knows how much in fact.”

  “You doubt history? In 1985, a gang of Albanians impaled a Serbian man on a broken wine bottle. The papers reported it all over the country, and the people went wild; this reopened the historical wounds of so much impaling by the Turks that the only way out of it is this, my friend. Here, we are balancing history! Watch now!”

  He squeaked and majestically made a sweeping motion with his right arm. To Ana, he resembled an eagle in profile, with his beaky nose and slanted forehead, and just as an eagle has a feeble call, this predator had his squeak.

  The policemen ordered a tall and bony boy to sodomize his silver-toothed father. When the son resisted, a guard cut off one of his ears with a rusty kitchen knife and forced him to go on. And then he shouted, “What? You can’t get it up?”

  “Come on,” the squeaky cop said. “Let’s be objective. If someone cut your ear off, you couldn’t either. Enough of this. Bring in the next crew!” he shouted, and the bleeding son and the father were dragged away. Soon, guns reported and echoed their end.

  “How do you like our little show?” the director asked Ana. “Not quite Broadway, but we could call it off-off-Broadway, right?”

  Ana gagged in anguish.

  “Would you like a typewriter?” he asked.

  Later that evening, in a solitary cell, a guard put his knife to Ana’s throat. “Undress!” he whispered loudly.

  “Go ahead, cut my throat!”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Leave me alone.”
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  And the guard moved away and sat on a bench, where he continued to drink from his half-full bottle of beer. “To be honest with you,” he said, “I don’t feel like doing it. But they’ll kill me if I don’t do it. They’ll soon be here.”

  “Who’ll be here?”

  “The Major.”

  “Can’t you pretend you’ve done it?”

  “It wouldn’t work. They would know.”

  “Who’s they? What Major?”

  The guard shattered the bottle. “Don’t ask! What’s that to you?” He approached her. “Don’t resist. It’ll be easier for both of us.”

  She withdrew, and he did not pursue her further. A big policeman walked in and settled down on the bench, lighting a filterless cigarette. “Why aren’t you at it? Who taught you how to fuck? Your priest?”

  “You make me self-conscious.”

  “Self-conscious! What opinion will Americans have of us if we don’t do it?”

  “You believe she’s an American? She’s obviously a Croat, no matter where she lives. Would you call a donkey, once you moved her to the Sahara, a camel?”

  “Good point. So what are you hesitating about, then?”

  When they attacked her, she passed out.

  In the morning, the director walked into her cell. “How are we feeling?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I got a typewriter for you. You can come over and type in my office.”

  She went along in her tattered clothes.

  “I’ll get you some better clothes, too.”

  While she was seated at a desk staring at the white paper, the director talked to several Serb officers. “We have journalists up our asses. All kinds of international organizations want to examine the entire place. We’ve managed to keep them away from the back barracks. But at this rate, we’ll get Boutros Boutros-Ghali. that journalist Gutman, Clinton, international lawyers, you never know.”

  “You’re paranoid. Clinton is too busy with his orgies at the White House.”

  “In my place, you would be paranoid too. Look, even she’s a journalist!” He pointed at Ana.

  “Why do you let her write?”

  “That’s different. She’s working for me. Anyway, you’ve got to truck all the bad cases away. Get me some healthy-looking ones, and we’ll grease them up for a photo session. Twenty thousand DM. How’s that?”

  “Forget it. That’s not much. Shoot everybody who doesn’t look good and bury them in the woods.”

  “I don’t want any freshly turned soil around,” the director said.

  “All right, a couple of truckloads without traces. That will be fifty thousand.”

  A truck was leaving through the rear gate of the complex, transporting women prisoners out, up a steep road. The tormented people collided with one another in the dark as the truck clanked over rocky gravel and slid along sharp curves.

  When a guard bowed down to light his cigarette, Ana jumped out of the truck. She rolled on the road, scraping her knees and elbows. The guard shot after her, but the truck kept going. She walked gingerly through the heavily mined woods. At dusk, she heard wolves howling in the distance. A hundred yards away, an explosion. A boar stepped on a mine. Ana found its foot, still warm, its scorched flesh smoking.

  Later she tried to sleep on a heap of windblown leaves. Her teeth chattered from the cold. Nearby a nightingale whistled her melody to the rhythm of a woodpecker that would peck slowly, only to accelerate into bursts of hollow wood-drumming. All the other sounds vanished; the two birds quieted the forest, enchanting it. Amidst those liquid sounds floating and echoing, she fell asleep.

  In the early morning, she ate acorns and wild onions, which didn’t do much to assuage her hunger. She stepped on a copperhead. The snake lashed at her, trying to bite through her jeans. Ana ran, and the snake jerkily darted after her for several yards, spitting out its tongue, and then vanished below a fallen tree. Vultures circled at an angle from her. She avoided the spot below them, afraid of what she might see there.

  From a distance, she heard the bleating of sheep and the laughter of men, echoing together from two hills at either side. It had the strange effect of the past and the present creating the same cacophony.

  Several men were beating a young man. They stripped him naked, tied him to a spindle well, and stuck a beanpole up his anus.

  “Turk, how do you like the Greek way?”

  The man passed out. Blood flowed from his nose.

  The men slaughtered a sheep. They put a stake through it and grilled it. They drank. They reminisced about what happened the first time they got drunk, as kids. A grandfather taught one of them, at the age of ten, to drink slivovitz. Another one was self-taught, discovering white wine in the pantry when he was nine. A third one was given cooking wine one harsh winter at the age of eight. It seemed incongruous to Ana that these men would have childhood memories. At one time, they must have been charming little toddlers. The men withdrew into the house.

  Ana quietly approached the young man and untied him. She whispered to him that they would run away together. He crawled and she helped him.

  Soon afterward the men came out and looked in a small circle around the house, shot randomly into the bushes, and tore more flesh from the sheep, gnawing at the bones.

  The young man’s name was Hasan. At night, they slept together for heat. They hid away from any potentially human sound. They ate mushrooms they found; in a mix of ceps there were some bitter boletes. Hasan claimed they were medicinal and perked up after eating them.

  Explosions resounded in the distance. There seemed to be an artillery exchange from two nearby hills.

  “There must be two armies,” said Ana.

  “There could be three.”

  “Yes, but which one is the right one for us?”

  “The side that shoots less would be the Muslim or Croat side. Serbs have heavier guns and more ammunition.”

  Indeed, from one hill there was a constant barrage of artillery, and the explosions resulting from it were louder, while from the other side came only sporadic fire.

  Hasan and Ana crawled up the quieter hill. When they were close to the top, several bullets hit rocks next to them and sent rock shards and dusty smoke flying around them. Hasan shouted, “We are your friends!” With their arms up they walked to an entrenched Muslim regiment. While they were being interrogated as to their identities, Ana saw John in a green Muslim uniform. John shouted, “She’s all right, she’s my wife.”

  “My God, you!” she cried. “What a coincidence!”

  “Not quite,” he said. They hugged.

  An explosion nearby interrupted them, and they all crouched in a trench.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “After I couldn’t find you, and I looked all over, I thought I could go to the front and write real war journalism. Hardly anybody writes from the front. And these guys here said, All right, if you want firsthand experience, here’s a gun.”

  As the battle raged on, Ana ignored everything—including John and the nearby shelling—to write down her observations from Omarska. Several hours later, she gave them to a courier, who was on the way to Jajce anyhow, with the instructions to photocopy and mail the pages to several addresses, which she wrote down from memory.

  Ana and John stayed with the Muslim regiment, defending the hill, for two months. For the most part, there was just a lot of squatting, cleaning, card playing, boredom. Rain drizzled almost constantly, and staying warm wasn’t easy since they couldn’t light fires. A contingent of radical Muslims prayed frequently, kneeling eastward outside of the trenches, ignoring danger, and among them were Afghani and Iranian volunteers with thick beards and glistening eyes. There was a division between the secular and the religious soldiers; the religious ones stayed away from the side where there were women, they did not look at them, and so sex under these circumstances could not be easy. Nevertheless, at night John made erotic overtures, and Ana rebuffed him.

 
; “What do you want me to do? You want me to look elsewhere?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The thought of sex, any sex, made her shudder. And she had so many thoughts she couldn’t communicate with John that she felt more intimacy being by herself than talking with him.

  John stroked her cheek. She didn’t have memories of her rapists at that moment, but she flinched nevertheless. And then she worried about how he must feel, and in a moment of compassion she stroked him back, but when he touched her breast she said, “No, not yet.”

  “When, then?” he asked.

  Suddenly there was a commotion outside the trench, branches cracking, the stamping of feet, huffing. In the moonlight, silhouetted human figures rushed at them. The Muslims fired, and Ana fired her semi-automatic. The men kept coming and falling before reaching the trench, until none remained. Some of them were gasping and groaning, praying and swearing. The Muslim soldiers kept shooting at the sounds, and after a while, the moans of agony ceased.

  In the morning, the Muslim soldiers examined the several dozen dead. Most of them were Russian volunteers, still smelling of booze even in death. The Muslims took the rifles and gold watches, which must have been stolen, and examined their papers. Ana stared at the corpses with a certain degree of horror. But within the horror, she could discern a sensation she was not proud of, but which was there, of satisfied rage. This was some kind of revenge—unfortunately not on those who had injured her, but still on members of the same army. She was sure she had killed at least three men. And she could have kept shooting, even after the attackers had fallen, at their expiring sounds.

  Most of the soldiers dug into the ground with shovels, struggling through oak roots and rocks to bury the dead. Two large graves weren’t quite enough to accommodate all the bodies and, tired of digging in the rain, the soldiers carried the remaining bodies away and dumped them down the ridge into a ravine, where wild animals, crows, and vultures would dispose of their remains.

  All that day Ana couldn’t eat, under a spell of adrenaline, and her heart beat strangely, in rushes and slowdowns. She felt like vomiting, which she attributed to the disgust and horror of being among so many dead. However, the following morning she had acute nausea, when she was thoroughly exhausted and sleepy. She asked the company nurse whether she had a pregnancy test kit.