I thought for a minute. I couldn’t think of a better definition of Paradise than one that involved being given a bath by Dalia Dresner in a negligee.
“Oh yes,” I said. “I’ve been there. As a matter of fact, I was there just the other night. But there was only the one female companion. Frankly one female companion in Paradise is enough for me. And I rather think that if God does exist, he’ll look like her. At least he will in my heaven.”
“Lucky you,” said Oehl. “Me, I’ve never even been in love. And it sounds like you are.”
“He’s a typical German,” sneered Geiger. “A romantic fool if ever I heard one.”
“Right now I think I’m more fool than romantic,” I admitted.
“That’s fucking Bosnia for you,” said Oehl.
Geiger laughed. “We’ll see just how romantic you are when you’ve been here a week. This country is enough to make anyone feel repulsive and uncaring. Just look at Sergeant Oehl. He used to write poetry, didn’t you, Sergeant?”
“That’s right. I did. Had a gift for it, so my schoolteachers said.”
“Hard to believe, I know,” said Geiger. “And it seems his gift for killing is even greater than his gift for verse.”
Oehl grinned. It was the first time I’d seen him smile, and I was struck with how regular and white his teeth were. In that gray head his pink mouth and white teeth were decidedly lupine.
Going east now, with the River Sava on our left, thick woodland on our right, and the road not much more than a dirt track, our progress slowed again. You would not have thought the road to nowhere could be so flat or so straight. And yet in spite of all that I had seen, I couldn’t have felt less cynical. I tried to remind myself that with each kilometer I traveled I wasn’t getting farther away from Berlin and Dalia, but nearer her continuing good opinion of me, for wouldn’t she be grateful when at last I found her father and gave him his long-lost daughter’s letter? Even more grateful than she had been on the night before I had left Berlin to fly to Zagreb? You might even say that I was a little bit in love with her even then, for what else is love but the constant occupation of one person’s mind by the thought of another?
It was very quiet now. We seemed to drift through the thick heat like a mote in a beam of bright sunshine. Everything was still. But it was not a stillness that made you feel at peace. It was a preternatural stillness, as if the forest or some hidden creatures were eyeing Hansel and Gretel hungrily. All you could hear was the sound of the car’s engine and the occasional curse from one of us as the car’s wheel hit another pothole. Which was probably how we ended up with a flat tire. I steered to the side of the road, although there was no other traffic we could have impeded.
“Shit,” I said, switching off the engine and glancing around. There was a smell of burning wood in the air that seemed to indicate some human presence thereabouts, but through the thick curtain of trees no one was visible. And not even a breath of wind to cool things down. The leaves on the branches above our heads stayed quite motionless, as if everything around us was holding its breath. Even the birds had grown silent.
“Better make it as fast as we can,” said Geiger. “This is not a good place to change a wheel.”
“It’s never a good place to change a wheel,” I said, getting out of the car.
Instead of helping me to remove the spare from its snug place on the lid of the trunk, the other two men walked about thirty paces along the road in opposite directions, lit a cigarette and, kneeling down on one leg, kept careful lookout with submachine guns at the ready, leaving me to get on with changing the tire. They didn’t need to say anything. It was better that one man changed the wheel and the other two remained on watch.
I took off my shirt and set quickly to work, hoping that the sound of the bees might help me to stay as calm as they seemed while they collected pollen. But my heart was thumping in my chest. I knew my companions were right. This was no place to stop. You could have hidden a whole division of partisans in the trees by the road. Even now I felt unseen eyes on the small of my bare back.
It had been a while since I’d changed a tire but I managed it in double-quick time. I was just about to shout out that I’d finished when I realized that both Geiger and Oehl were gone and that I was alone on that quiet road. Where were they? In the trees? Down by the river? I waited for a long moment, hardly daring to call out in case I alerted any partisans to our presence. But after a while I fetched my pistol and walked quickly down to the riverbank to wash my hands and fill a canteen. I was almost back at the car when I heard a loud burst of gunfire up ahead. Whether it meant we were under attack I couldn’t tell so I knelt down by the car and waited. A minute passed and I decided to get back in the car and start it up in case we needed to make a quick getaway. After another minute I put the car into gear and crept slowly up the road, to where the gunfire had come from.
Geiger saw me before I saw him. He and Oehl were standing in a small forest clearing, staring at something in the bushes.
“It’s all right,” he said. “False alarm.”
I stopped the engine and got out to look. The bodies of two men lay untidily in a bush, like lost items of laundry drying in the sun. Large red stains in the center of their chests seemed to be getting bigger by the second. Neither of the two was older than sixteen and both were extraordinarily handsome, which seemed to make their accidental killing even worse. It was only gradually that I perceived them to be identical twins. Next to their bodies a dog was whimpering with grief and trying to lick one of the twins back to life. An ancient-looking, single-barreled shotgun lay on the ground a few meters away.
“False alarm?” I said. “What about the gun?”
“Just hunters, I reckon. Out for their pot. Not Muslim partisans, that’s for sure.”
I stared at the twins; there was nothing about their dress that distinguished them in any way from the men I’d seen working on the new minarets in Zagreb.
“How can you tell?”
“The dog,” said Oehl. “No Muslim would keep a pet dog.”
“Poor bastards were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Probably fell asleep hiding in the bush, waiting for a pigeon, and then we happened along. I heard something in the bushes, saw the gun, and opened fire. Simple as that.”
“Pity,” observed Oehl. “Nice-looking lads. Twins, I reckon.”
Then while we still watched, miraculously one of the twins shifted and groaned at the same time, as if the dog had worked some kind of blasphemous miracle. But not for long. Some residually civilized part of me was just about to suggest that he wasn’t beyond help when Geiger killed both man and dog with another short burst from his submachine gun.
“He was just a kid,” I said.
“Come on,” said Geiger. “There’s no time to waste with stupid sentiment. Let’s get moving again before the shots bring someone to investigate. With any luck we should make Banja Luka before dusk.”
Twenty-two
Occupying some high ground a couple of kilometers north of Banja Luka, the Franciscan monastery in Petricevac was easy to see. Umbilically attached to an imposing Roman Catholic church whose twin spires soared over the surrounding countryside like the tall hats of two ancient wizards, the monastery itself — with a hip roof and two large dormer windows — was more elegant country mansion than medieval cloister. A couple of old cars were parked on the gravel driveway and the general absence of any agriculture was evidence that these were monks for whom contemplation did not involve looking at a spade or tending a vineyard. The few trees served only to obscure the little road that led up to the monastery, which meant I drove around the place several times before finding an approach to the entrance. No one — not even a chicken or a dog — came to greet us. Perhaps they already knew better than to speak to three SS men.