But he couldn’t pull himself from the window. There seemed to be no one up and about. He listened closely, cupping his ear, but there were no moans, no cries for help, only the stillness of an early morning with bright sunshine flashing on a new dusting of snow. A hot metallic smell mixed with the usual sharpness of woodsmoke and burning garbage.
He completed the hasty repair of his window, pressing the final strip of duct tape into place. There would be no more morning inventories of the gravediggers, and the thought unexpectedly filled him with a sense of relief, the lightness that follows the completion of any long-dreaded chore.
Then, standing back from his work, he thought again of the family in the next apartment. His window plastic billowed slightly with a fresh breeze, and he shivered. There was still no sound from next door. Someone else would sort it all out later, he told himself. But he decided to take another look, and as he peeled back the new strip of tape there was a voice, a man’s, telling someone to stay inside. Vlado rolled away enough plastic to see a disheveled man, his hair and beard full of plaster dust, walking unsteadily through the hole in the front wall into the snow.
“Everyone all right?” Vlado asked. The man turned robotically, and his eyes briefly fixed Vlado with a blank stare. Thin streams of blood oozed from each of his nostrils, but otherwise he seemed in one piece. The man turned back around without a word, and when another minute passed without a reply, Vlado retaped the plastic over the window.
He should put the water on to boil for coffee, he told himself, as he turned toward the kitchen. Should tend to his cleaning, should shave and prepare for work. They would be fine out there, whoever they were. And if not, then the hospital would be far better equipped than he to set them right.
A few days earlier he had seen the two smallest children in the family playing out front, a boy and a girl, cooing and laughing as they tugged at a small raggedy doll. He turned toward his door and walked into the snow.
The man he’d seen earlier was visible through the opening of the apartment’s blown-out window. Vlado strolled across the courtyard and over the threshold, and saw that the man was shaking, on the verge of collapse. Vlado grasped him around the shoulders and lowered him into a chair covered with dust and chunks of plaster. A second explosion followed, perhaps a block away, and down a hallway a small child began to wail. Now he could see that there was also a large, ragged hole in the ceiling.
“Come on,” Vlado said sternly. “Those shots are coming from the north, and there will be more of them. You’ve got no protection here, now. Bring your family next door with me until this is over.”
The man still didn’t speak, but he seemed to stir himself, and he walked unsteadily down the hallway toward where the wail had come from a moment ago. He emerged at the head of a straggling column, with his wife trailing the children. They were all as quiet as the father, the four children staring with wide eyes, the mother seeming only weary, as if she’d finally given up.
“Come. Quickly,” Vlado urged them, more to get their muscles moving than from any fear of imminent danger. Often these “bombardments” consisted of no more than two or three shells at a time, flung like scattershot toward random points of the city. Then, having made their statement for the hour, the gunners grew bored and went back to their naps or their card games.
But the sooner this bunch was up and about, Vlado figured, the sooner they’d purge the shock from their systems.
He saw with relief that everyone seemed intact, although they had yet to speak a word. They followed Vlado into the snow, not exactly dressed for the weather. He glanced around to make sure that the children were at least wearing shoes.
Once inside his apartment he practically had to shove them into chairs, cutting his right hand as he hastily flicked shards of shattered glass onto the floor from the cushions. He then moved to the kitchen like the anxious host of a dinner party, lighting the burner to heat water for coffee.
“You should probably get yourselves checked out by a doctor,” Vlado shouted from the kitchen, still to no answer. “The concussions from these explosions can do more damage than you think. You can come away without a scratch and be dead an hour later from internal bleeding.”
“The hospital,” someone finally said. It was the woman. “Can you tell us how to find it?”
Christ, these really were newcomers if they didn’t know that. “It’s on the top of the hill over there,” Vlado motioned toward his covered window to the east. “Right across the graveyard, and on up the street from there. But I’d wait at least a half hour after the last shell.”
He clattered on with his hospitality, wiping out a pair of dusty and long unused coffee cups, and four small tumblers for the children. He wondered what he might give them for breakfast, figuring bread would have to do. It was probably what they were accustomed to, anyway.
Their silence resumed, and it began to unsettle him. He glanced up quickly, as if to make sure there wasn’t a roomful of zombies in his living room, propped in their chairs and going stiff with rigor mortis, and he saw to his relief that the two youngest children had dropped onto the floor, and were playing with something.
When he saw that their toy was one of his metal soldiers, his first impulse was to ask them to put it away. But what better use could there be for them, he told himself. Play with them all you like. The parents, however, remained as silent as stones.
“So, how long have you been in the city,” Vlado asked.
For a moment it seemed no one would answer. Then the father moistened his lips, as if with great effort, and spoke up. “Four weeks,” he said. He’d stopped shaking and seemed to have collected himself somewhat.
Vlado handed him a hot mug of weak coffee, and another to his wife. “The children, have they eaten?”
“Yes, some bread,” the mother said. “We will get more this morning.”
“What was your town?” Vlado asked. “Where did you come from?”
They named some village Vlado had barely heard of, some dot from one of his maps about forty miles distant, in the middle of a narrow beleaguered supply corridor. They must have had quite a time of it these past few years, and getting here couldn’t have been easy, either.
“How did you make it into the city.”
“With another family,” the father said. “By cart. We came across Igman. Sometimes you can still get through. We were lucky. A family that left only an hour after us lost two sons along the way to snipers.”
“I didn’t even know anyone was still trying to get in,” Vlado said. “I thought it was just people trying to get out.”
“You can’t,” the man said. “At least, not over Igman, not if you’re a man. The soldiers in the pass will only let a family in with an able-bodied male. For more soldiers. I keep wondering when they’re going to pick me up for that. But it was the only way we got in.”
“Oh, they’ll find you soon enough, I’d imagine. But I’d send your wife to the bread-and-water lines by herself from now on, if I were you, even if she can’t haul back as much. That’s how they get most of them.”
Then, something seemed to dawn on the man. And he looked Vlado full in the eye as he asked, “And you. How do you stay out? I noticed you our first week here and wondered that. You’re young and strong.”
“Strong, no. Young, debatable after two years like this. But you’re right, definitely of military age. I serve in the police, though. A detective. Investigating murders.”
The man shook his head, assenting to the reasonableness of Vlado’s occupation with the air of one obliging a lunatic. It was hardly the first time Vlado had seen such a response.