She indicated a chair for Jason and sat opposite on the sofa. She crossed her arms and waited expectantly. Džaja found an ashtray and applied a wooden match to a cigarette before he sat. The thing smelled like silage. Apparently, Croatians did not ask permission before lighting up in someone’s home.
Jason spoke to the desk clerk. “Ask her who she told I was coming.”
After a brief exchange, the woman looked at Jason though speaking to Aleksandar.
“No one, she says. No one other than a few neighbors and her daughter who comes to visit every Sunday.”
Hardly a secure network, but that explained Natalia. Well, Momma could hardly have expected an old woman, this old woman, to keep a tight lip without an explanation that would have put Jason in more jeopardy than he already was.
“Is she related to the scientist Nikola Tesla?”
At the mention of the name, the old woman sat up straight, full of pride. She didn’t wait for the translation. “Da!”
She continued.
“He was her father’s uncle,” Aleksandar translated.
And so the interrogation went, question, translation, next question. She remembered that, when she was a very little girl, the Nazis came, men dressed in frightening black uniforms with lightning bolts on them and high boots, boots like no local people wore.
“I thought the German army wore a shade of gray,” Aleksandar observed.
“They did,” Jason replied, impatient to get back to the subject at hand. “But SS, Schutzstaffel, uniform is what she described.”
Wait a minute, Jason thought. Why would the elite of the German military bother with an out-of-the-way place such as this?
“Ask her if these men in black were really Germans or just local men who had joined.”
She was quite sure they were real Germans. What they wanted, she answered when asked, was the box that had come from America, the box that came a few days before her father returned home from Russia, miraculously excused from further military service on behalf of the Third Reich.
“The box, what happened to it?”
She shrugged as the question was translated.
“She doesn’t know.”
Jason was becoming increasingly impatient, both with the cumbersome process of translating back and forth and with what seemed to be a dead end. “Ask her to explain, tell us when she last saw the box.”
The family, it seemed, lived on adjacent farms, of which the present house was one. The SS had arrived within hours of the mysterious box. They had moved the animals out of the barn, taken the box there, and put a guard on duty to make certain only those permitted entered. For the next several days, strange noises had come from the barn, and weird lights at night. There was much speculation among the locals as to what was being done there. One or two of the more superstitious recalled old legends about conjuring up the devil. One night, the Allies dropped a single bomb that destroyed the barn, but oddly did no damage to surrounding structures.
“A bomb?” Jason asked.
She nodded. At least that was the only thing the townsfolk could think of that could have caused the explosion, though no one had heard an aircraft overhead. The device must have fallen through the roof and exploded inside, for the walls were blown out, not in. But this was not an ordinary bomb, those who knew of such things said. The bodies of the dead Germans had shrunk, she understood, although, as a small child, she was not allowed to see such a thing for herself.
Jason glanced out of a window. “I don’t see any barn.”
An exchange between the old woman and the translator ensued before the latter said, “It was never rebuilt. As a matter of fact, some of the rubble is still there. Her father said it was a bad place, forbade the children to go near it. They did, of course. The box had been opened, and there was a machine that looked like it had been partially assembled. Or perhaps partially destroyed by the bomb.”
“What kind of a machine?” Jason wanted to know.
The old woman shrugged again as she fished a cigarette from somewhere in the folds of her dress. She accepted a light from one of Džaja’s wooden matches. If anything, the tobacco smelled worse than his.
“Other than her sewing machine, she knows little of machinery,” the clerk translated. “Besides the fact this one was about the size of her sewing machine and its table, she remembers little about it.”
Jason did a masterful job of concealing his growing frustration. “I thought she didn’t know what happened to the box.”
“She doesn’t. She never saw it again after the Germans took it to the barn. She’s guessing they threw it away after they took the machine out.”
Was the woman dense or simply being intentionally difficult?
“OK, ask her about the machine. What happened to it?”
The clerk asked.
“The machine stayed where it was. Odd thing, it didn’t rust in all those years of sitting in the weeds. Then came the Bosniaks…”
“The who?”
“Bosniaks, Moslems.”
The clerk must have seen the puzzled look on Jason’s face. “October of 1991, the so-called Gospić Massacre. Serb troops shot at least fifty people in the town, some Moslems. The Moslems took it as a renewal of the conflict between them and Christians, wanted revenge.”
He said something to the old woman and she responded.
“A number of them came here, burned the next house down, the one where her relatives lived.”
She became agitated, moving her hands in a parody of aircraft and making a whoosh-ing sound as the translation continued, “But two American jets came over the hills, scattered the Bosniaks.”
“What does that have to do with the machine in the yard?” Jason wanted to know.
“After the Bosniaks left, it was gone. She is sure they took it.”
27
Back at the hotel, Jason had the current desk clerk add up his bill while he went to his room to pack his single bag. Finished, he set the bag on the bed and took out his iPhone, a specially modified device with a few apps not available in the basic phone shop in malls across America.
He texted Momma a brief review of the morning’s conversation, hit a button, and sent the entire message as a millisecond burst that, without the appropriate equipment, would register as no more than an electronic mini-surge. Minutes later, he was proffering the red-white-and-blue-on-silver Bank of America Visa card of Mr. George Simmons in payment of a bill that was modest by the standards of the day.
Outside, Džaja and his trusty, if diminutive, Zastava 750 waited to begin the mirror image of the trip Jason had taken yesterday. Unlike the unmanned stop at which Jason had disembarked in haste the day before, Gospić had a rail station. A small one-room building heated by a wood-burning stove, but a station nonetheless. Džaja insisted on carrying the bag inside, where Jason paid him and shook his hand.
“Do viđenja,” the Croatian said as sorrowfully as though losing his best friend.
Perhaps he was. Or close to it. Jason guessed fares were few in this part of the world. He repeated the phrase, assuming it to be appropriate to parting.
In addition to the wood stove, the room featured a pair of back-to-back benches on which an elderly couple sat, surrounded by half a dozen cardboard suitcases. Their clothes, though worn, were clean and pressed. The grime under the man’s fingernails and the obvious calluses on his large hands suggested farming as an occupation. Whatever their purpose in traveling, Jason had a hard time seeing them as a potential threat. There was no Natalia-type visible.