“Bravo!” Bojan said.
“What’s that?” asked Emmett.
“Land mines. Bojan is paramilitary, but the army no share its mines.”
“We were driving with explosives in that car?” Sophie snapped.
Zora smiled and raised a finger. “And we live. Praise God! Come, we drink.”
They crowded into Bojan’s cramped, dirty kitchen. On the counter, beside the sink, were two old pistols with wooden handles and cylinders. Perhaps he’d been cleaning them, but now he ignored the guns and went to a cabinet, inside which were three large plastic bottles of homemade plum brandy.
“Does he have anything else?” Emmett asked, for the rakija they’d drunk the last days hadn’t done his stomach any good.
Zora asked, and Bojan said, “Samo pivo.”
“Just beer,” she translated. “But first we toast successful trip.”
The rakija burned and then warmed her, and when Emmett switched to Lav, she stuck with the brandy. It helped keep her calm. Though he couldn’t talk to them directly, Bojan wanted to tell stories, but not war stories. He told them about his youth in Tito’s Yugoslavia, of swimming on the beaches north of Dubrovnik, now part of the Republic of Croatia, and climbing the Slovenian mountains. He was full of the glory of the communist past, yet he was no communist. “Ideology,” Zora explained, “is not his bag. He is simple man, and he like to remember good times. I think we all this way. In few years, after you make new life in America, you think of us nostalgically, too.”
By then the room was spinning, and Sophie was ready to agree. They were here, here, in a war zone, drinking with a sentimental soldier who—tomorrow, perhaps—would be back on the front lines, fighting against the children of the Ustaše. They had come. They had seen.
Emmett said, “What was that?” He was cupping his ear.
“I hear nothing,” Zora said, still smiling.
Sophie didn’t hear anything, either, and then she did: thumping. Not the distant thump of artillery, but something closer, under their feet. It was faint, but it was there, and it was close, inside the house.
“Yeah,” she said. “I hear it.”
Zora looked at Bojan, her smile finally fading, and said something to him. Bojan shook his head, almost embarrassed, and rubbed his face with a big, hairy hand. He spoke to Zora for a few minutes, another story, his face twisting into shapes of agony and anger as he went on. Finally he waved his hands, pushing everything away.
“What?” said Emmett.
Zora turned to them, her face hard now, no trace of warmth in it. “It is a man. Down. In basement.”
“Who?” Sophie asked.
“A monster.”
Silence followed. Then Emmett said, “Maybe you want to be more specific.”
“Ustaša,” Zora said. She lit a fresh cigarette and leaned back. “I tell you about them, no? About what they do.”
Emmett placed his hands on the edge of the table, as if he were going to push himself to his feet. “You’re holding a man prisoner down there?”
He had directed that question at Bojan, but Zora didn’t bother to translate. “Emmett,” she said soothingly, “that monster—I can’t even to call him a man. He is with Croat paramilitary. They move into Serb town not far away and kill everyone who does not run. There is woman who just give birth. It is difficult birth. She is bedridden. So they find her in her little house with baby in cradle. This man come in, say hello to her, pick up baby and toss it into air. Like a football. Soccer—that’s right?”
Neither of them answered her.
“He catch baby and toss him again, like he playing. But the mother, she know what kind of man is this. She begs him please to put child down. So he says okay, holds out baby in front of him, like so, and counts backward from three. On one, he drops baby and kicks. Like soccer ball, you know? Kicks baby across room and against far wall. Killed.” She snapped her fingers. “Instantly. The mother,” she said, cocking her head to the side and breathing loudly through her nose. “Well, you can to imagine. She is hysterical. Screaming. So he walks over, puts hand over her mouth and nose, like so, and when she fights he takes out hard cock. And fucks her. As she is suffocated.”
“You don’t know this,” Emmett said after a moment of not breathing. He shook his head. “You can’t.”
Zora shrugged. “I can know this, because later, when he drink with comrades, he tells it. He says he fucks this woman to death. He think this is funny. Bojan hears all this when they retake town. The Croats tell him.”
Sophie thought she was going to vomit. During the story Bojan had gotten up and left the kitchen. Emmett swallowed loudly and spoke in a whisper. “I don’t believe it.”
“I no make it up,” said Zora. “Bojan does not.”
Another pause. Then Emmett said, “What’s he going to do with him?”
“Starvation. It take maybe a week. Maybe more. He is down there two days.”
“Give him to the police.”
Zora shook her head, a quiet laugh escaping her lips. “The police in this area, they are Croats. Are you not been paying attention? You see what kind of world we live in. No. This man will die in basement. It is better than he deserve.”
“Then he should just shoot him.”
Zora shook her head. “Bojan sees too much to give mercy so easily.”
“I want to see him,” Sophie said.
“What?” Emmett looked as if he’d forgotten she was there.
Zora hardly reacted. She only watched Sophie.
“I mean it.”
Zora nodded and stood up.
“No,” said Emmett, reaching out to her.
“We have to,” she told him, for a kind of plum brandy insight had come to her: To go. To see. To experience. If they left this house without looking, it would haunt them forever. “We have to,” she repeated.
Zora took one of the pistols off the counter, checked that it was loaded, then called something to Bojan. He appeared in the doorway, looking bleary but hard, resolved, a key dangling from his pinkie. A few more words passed between them—he was perhaps asking if Zora was sure about this. Sophie was sure; she was casting aside her ambivalence tonight. They hadn’t gotten close to a war zone. They were in a war zone. This was as far from Harvard Square as it was possible to be.
Bojan led the three of them through his dusty living room, where a silent television showed snowy images of an old movie, to a padlocked door at the end of a brief hallway. He unlocked and opened it. He flipped a switch, illuminating rickety wooden steps leading down into the earth. But he didn’t go down. He handed the key to Zora and returned to the living room, where he sat down, lifted an acoustic guitar onto his lap, and stared at the television.
6
Then it was morning, and she felt as if she’d been in a dream. Not only of Yugoslavia, but of Egypt. A dream that was lingering still, for what was this cinnamon smell? That flowery, brown-tinted wallpaper? The green knitted blanket under her? Harsh daylight cut through venetian blinds. The ache in her back was enough to tell her this wasn’t a dream, but she had to sit up, look around, and then hobble to the bathroom she’d been given a tour of the night before to really believe it. After she flushed the toilet and washed her face and hands and opened the door, she found the old woman—yes, Fouada—standing in the corridor, smiling at her, holding out a large cup of tea. Gratefully, Sophie accepted the steaming cup. She said, “Omar?”