Emmett answered: “Absolutely.”
Viktor held forth at the same central café as the day before, around the corner from their hotel, and after him a bobbed sculptor cum linguist named Nada talked them through the political development of Serbo-Croatian, the official language of Yugoslavia—“a cross-lingual compromise.” Afterward, they piled into Zora’s rickety Yugo to reach the Strand, a length of sandy beach along the Danube where they drank beer and bought oily paper bags of fried sardines to eat off of toothpicks. They found more of Zora’s friends lounging on beach chairs under the shadow of Most slobode, Liberty Bridge. Eight years later, NATO planes would destroy that bridge, but in 1991 there was no sign that anyone was worried about war. They just wanted to show their new American friends a good time.
When they weren’t lecturing about the many facets of Yugoslav history and culture, they asked questions about America.
Was Thomas Jefferson in favor of slavery?
Why do Indians live in squalor?
How hard is it to get a residence permit?
As the sun began to set, Nada broke out a foil-wrapped chunk of hashish and rolled it with tobacco squeezed from one of Zora’s cigarettes. Sophie hesitated, but Emmett didn’t, and so she followed his lead. Resistance was just a passing thought. The stew of alcohol and hash helped her relax fully into the experience. She was, she believed at certain moments, happy: She had friendly acquaintances, her husband was close by, and she was intoxicated enough to let her numerous inhibitions slip away.
It was dark when Milorad, a painter Zora described as a genius, suggested they move on to the Tribina Mladih—Youth Tribune—a multi-use space with a cinema, disco, art gallery, and bar, where they wandered, stoned, through the gallery, looking at violent conceptual paintings from a Belgrade artist before moving on to the bar and later sliding on to the disco. As on the previous night in the fortress, Sophie and Emmett found themselves drawn into the pulsing rhythm that seemed to lie just beneath the surface of everything they saw, yet while their first night had felt innocent and pure, the mood now was different. They could sense that Zora was neither innocent nor pure, and this knowledge colored the night. Still, the festivities were no less enjoyable—perhaps more so, because these people weren’t strangers anymore. As she packed them into a taxi back to the hotel, Zora said, “Tomorrow is prison break.” Sophie began to ask what she meant, but Zora slammed the door and called in Serbo-Croatian for the driver to get moving.
The explanation came in the morning, when Zora again found them hunched over their Hotel Putnik breakfasts, foggy and hung over. She, however, looked perfectly rested. “My friends,” she said in a high whisper, “we get you out of this hellhole. It is time for prison break.”
She had decided that it would not do for her American friends to stay in the dismal Putnik, and so she waited for them in the lobby, eyeballing the man who was still reading Politika.
Upstairs, as they packed, Sophie and Emmett discussed the change in plans. “What do you think?” she asked.
Emmett folded a shirt over his forearm. “I think she’s pretty generous.”
“Too generous?”
He grinned. “She’s got a crush on you. Who wouldn’t?”
So they climbed into Zora’s Yugo, giving themselves over to her care. They crossed the Danube along the Liberty Bridge, chatting about their day on the Strand until the buildings fell away, replaced by countryside. This was farther out than they’d expected, and there was an edge to Emmett’s voice when he said, “Where, uh, are we going?”
Zora pointed through the filthy windshield. “Fruška Gora,” she said, naming the low mountain ahead of them. “My uncle has summer-house up there. It is big and has electricity and hot water. You love it,” she said, almost a command.
Viktor and two other young men were already at Zora’s uncle’s home, a three-bedroom cabin off a winding mountain road, perched on a hillside that gave them an idyllic view across the flat Vojvodina countryside of farms and villages. After dropping their bags in a dusty guest bedroom, Sophie and Emmett joined the men in the backyard, where chairs and a couple of tables had been set up in the high grass. Together they relaxed and drank bottles of Lav and uncorked red wine from Sremski Karlovci. Only up in the clean, clear mountains did they realize how dirty the air had been in town.
One of the new friends, a heavyset, balding anthropologist, began relating news items. The Slovenes were already talking to Western Europe, while the Croats were taking advantage of their newly proclaimed independence to begin ridding their land of Serbs and Bosnians. The anthropologist was already a little drunk, and when he talked of the fighting in villages across Croatia spittle collected in the corners of his mouth. Viktor told him to shut up, because a beautiful day shouldn’t be wasted on nationalist bullshit, and it grew into a Serbo-Croatian shouting match. Sophie worried the two men would come to blows, but as quickly as it flared up the conflict waned, and soon they were embracing, kissing cheeks, laughing. Zora went inside and turned on a stereo, positioning the speakers in the windows so they could all listen to a New Wave band called Električni Orgazam.
Lying in the grass with a beer balanced on his stomach, Emmett asked, “How much does a house cost here?”
Sophie looked at him, but he was squinting at the sun, lost in his own thoughts.
“For an American, lunch money,” said the third man, whose career they never learned. The others laughed.
Emmet got up on his elbows. “I’m serious. This is gorgeous. Isn’t it gorgeous, Sophie?”
“It is,” she said, because it was. For a moment, she allowed herself to consider this alternate life: a mountain cabin in Yugoslavia. For vacations, or as their primary home? What would life be like in a place where you couldn’t understand the people around you? In a place where simple statements of opinion grew into fights that ended in kisses? Where, she asked herself, was this marriage really headed?
Zora called Sophie inside to help her prepare lunch. It was a small kitchen, and Zora’s smoking soon made the atmosphere lethal. Sophie banged on the windows to get them open, then helped Zora clean chicken thighs, shape ground meat into patties, season pork chops, and skin potatoes. Outside, the men had fired up an age-old grill and were lighting charcoal. Zora said, “You think you like to live here?”
“Maybe,” Sophie said. “Maybe later, after I’ve got my career going.”
“That means never,” Zora said with finality.
They drank and gorged themselves on meat, and when the sun went down the anthropologist produced an acoustic guitar. They sang “American Pie.” Afterward, Zora brought out a bottle of plum brandy they called rakija and began to speak.
As with their first meeting in the Fortress, she still knew everything, but with the leisure of hours spreading out around them on that slanted field Zora was able to talk more lucidly about the things that were important to her. Art, music, literature, and, yes, politics. This Zora, whose arms were wrapped around her knees as she rocked back and forth, struck Sophie as thoughtful and smart, a different woman from that first night. Rational, yet utterly unafraid of conviction—this, Sophie realized, was her most attractive quality.
She thought of the lecture halls she’d lived in those previous four years, of the refrain that persisted in her liberal education: question, question, question. With enough questioning, the very ground could evaporate into conjecture. What she realized, sitting comfortably with Zora in the backyard of that house, her bare feet drawn up beneath herself as she sipped the fiery rakija and Zora chain-smoked, was that the act of questioning had been getting in her way for years. When asked what she believed, it was always easier for Sophie to turn the question around rather than answer it, and when forced into an opinion she would immediately qualify it.