Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

But it was the last verse that captured his fancy most, and which now came to him as he thought of the artillery men in their mountain bunkers, staring down toward his home:

I was the giant great and still

That sits upon the pillow-hill,

And sees before him, dale and plain,

The pleasant land of counterpane.

He looked toward the hills again, and, as at other times, he sensed a subterranean machinery at work, a heave and rumble of forces barely contained by the seams of the horizon. Perhaps if you put your ear to the ground, he fancied, you would even hear it, a throb like a pulse, giving life and order to every terrible action up above.

He yearned to glimpse that machinery, to slip unnoticed between the sliding teeth of its gears and find the men at the controls; to take them unawares and to know. Simply to know.

For all its flaws, Vlado decided, this case was his own best chance to do so, but first he had to believe that entry was possible. He decided it would be, if only because from what little he’d already glimpsed, perhaps the people at the controls weren’t always so vigilant. Two years of wartime had left them as dulled and careless as everyone else.

With a final glance toward the far side of the river, Vlado climbed back down the ladder. Then he gently refolded the map, sliced a bit of the cured meat from the butcher’s generous offering, and poured a glass of water from a plastic jug. That was dinner, and tonight it seemed like plenty, a feast of the privileged.

Before climbing into bed under a down blanket and three layers of wool, he reached for the stiff plumbing knob that controlled the gas jet. He thought for a moment of painting his soldiers. They sat on the workbench in the corner, untouched for days, going slack and undisciplined on him. He smiled at that thought, then shut off the gas, too weary for anything but sleep. The flame guttered briefly at the tip of the nozzle before disappearing without a sound, back up into the hose toward its source deep in the ground.

Through the wall he could hear his neighbor’s radio, playing for the first time in weeks. They must have somehow gotten new batteries. And he drifted toward sleep to the faint, tinny strains of an old folk tune from the Dalmatian coast, a guitar twanging against the static, while a silky layer of cold worked its way up under the blankets.

He fell into a restless dream, where the bright faces of women from the day’s streets and walkways came toward him in an anxious and beckoning parade. They smiled, but their makeup was heavy, the colors slightly off. They were too pale and garish, as if they had all been daubed and prettified by the cool, brisk hands of a mortician. But he strolled toward them, nonetheless.

Peparing to go to Dobrinja was a bit like outfitting for a wilderness expedition. Vlado had to arrange for cash, hire a car, find gasoline, plan his route in advance, and drive with a reckless precision that would evade shellholes and torn metal without slowing down enough to invite gunfire. It was not a place for stopping to look at maps, because if Sarajevo had become a sort of hell on earth, Dobrinja was its innermost circle of despair and isolation.

Dobrinja’s highrise neighborhoods crouched on a lonely peninsula to the southwest, pinched uncomfortably on three sides by Serb guns and trenches, connected tenuously to the rest of the city by a narrow lane running between abandoned buildings and walls of stacked cars and buses. The route led through checkpoints and security officers, and the reward at the end of the line was a small, hushed community of tom buildings, sandbagged and dug in against the daily tidal surges of artillery.

The safest way to go was by hitching a ride in a U.N. armored car, but that meant going through official channels. There would be forms and waivers to sign, wasting at least a day and drawing unwanted attention as part of the bargain.

Vlado found a car easily enough, his next door neighbor’s white VW Golf with two bullet holes in the passenger door. Taped plastic flapped in the rear window. The neighbor wanted no part of driving to Dobrinja, so he handed Vlado the keys and wished him well. He hadn’t particularly wanted his car going to Dobrinja, either, until Vlado sweetened the offer of four packs of Drinas with half the remaining meat from the butcher. Judging from his eager acceptance, Vlado probably could have sealed the deal with far less.

Supply and demand, Vlado mused.

Buying the gas wasn’t as easy, even though just about anyone could point out the doorways and storefronts where someone sold gasoline. Supply was tight lately, and the first two locations came up empty. The third was two blocks from the city market. Vlado parked on the sidewalk, at a corner where a stubbly-faced man in a wool cap stood behind a folding table covered with paperbacks in the alcove of a shuttered business. Vlado studied the titles-cheap mysteries with yellowed pages and half-naked women on the cover, a repair manual for an ’83 Yugo, a travel guide to Greece, a Serbo-Croat translation of Dickens’s Pick- wick Papers.

“Gasoline?” Vlado asked.

“You have money?”

Vlado showed him five crumpled bills totaling to sixty Deutschemarks. He’d gotten them earlier from Garovic, who got cash for special occasions by trudging upstairs to a location only he knew. He invariably went to it hunched and muttering like a worried old troll, reappearing a few minutes later with the bills folded tightly in his right hand.

“Two liters only,” he’d told Vlado. That, plus the puddle already in the tank would barely be enough for the trip.

The man in the cap crossed the street toward the doorway of another abandoned building, unlocking a large padlock on a bent hasp. With some difficulty he shoved open a groaning metal door plastered with scarred posters from prewar circuses and concerts, then disappeared up a dark stairwell.

Vlado shivered, partly from the cold, partly from the eerie resemblance of the whole setup to the storefront slaughterhouse the day before. He looked at the upstairs windows for any sign of light or movement, wondering who might be up there-how many men in makeshift uniforms, lounging with their guns. How many men with Motorolas, smoking at some battered desk before ledgers already filled with black ink. The stacks of petrol cans, reeking of fumes the way the other place had reeked of blood. For all he knew, perhaps even his friend from the slaughterhouse, the one he’d heard but not seen, was up there, paying a visit to another realm of his empire.

A few minutes later a second man emerged from the door, looking around briefly before crossing the street. In one hand he carried a plastic funnel. In the other was a large wine bottle sloshing with an amber liquid. Vlado recognized the label of a wretched wine from Mostar, but the picture was pleasant enough, a pastel drawing of the city’s ancient stone bridge. A few months earlier it had been blown into the river by shelling.

As the man moved closer Vlado frowned.

“Are you sure that’s two liters?”

“Quite sure. See?” he said, pointing to the markings on the label. “Just as it says.”

“Yes, but the gasoline’s not even up to the neck.”

“It’s as full as you’ll find it anywhere this week,” the man said, breaking into a crooked grin, his breath a cloud of slivovitz and cigarettes.

The gasoline fumes came to Vlado like a tonic, an old smell of nostalgia carrying him briefly to long rides through the countryside, tires thrumming on an empty highway. Hills rolled by, green and unthreatening, then the small thrill of that first blue glimpse of the ocean after the long drive to the coast. You rounded a high curve and broke into a vista of sky and water. Saw the waves marshaling themselves in long, distant rows across an endless sea.