Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

“So then why don’t I go instead. You’ve got a family. I’ve got nothing but a few girlfriends who would mourn nothing but the loss of the occasional night on the town. My mother and father can fend for themselves, for all I care anymore. Just lay out the questions for me and I’ll ask them, simple as that. It’s really no contest, is it?”

“Thanks. But Kasic would have it no other way, I’m afraid. It’s my investigation, when you get down to it, and if I’m not going to share much information with you …”

“Yes, I’d noticed that.”

“… Then I’ve got no business being so free with the dangers. Which reminds me. I soft-pedaled that shakedown business when I told it to you the other day. Actually they scared me to death, but I’m still not sure how serious they were.”

“Well, it should be good practice for tonight. You’ll have plenty of time to be scared to death.”

Damir clapped a hand on Vlado’s back, resting it there in the manner of someone comforting the bereaved at graveside. Then, without a trace of his usual mirth, he said, “Good luck, Vlado. Up there you’ll need all you can get.”

What did one take to a war? For it occurred to Vlado that this was where he was going. Off to war. He’d assumed for the past two years he was already living in the middle of one. Yet now that he was contemplating a walk to the trenches of Zuc he realized otherwise. He’d only been working at its fringes, padding about like everyone else in hopes of escaping the notice of the shells and snipers.

Once the ferocity of the first few months of fighting had passed, the bigger guns had refocused most of their attention on the city’s edges, on the frontlines of the armies encamped in the snow and the mud. Only occasionally now were there days of heavy firing into the city center. Only now and then did a freak shot fall with deadly accuracy into crowds gathered to play children’s games, mourn a burial, shop at a market, or line up for bread or water.

Vlado poked around his house, opening doors and rooms that had been shut for months. He felt strangely unequipped for his journey. A sleeping bag? He didn’t have one. A helmet? Ditto. But that was nothing unusual. Most of the soldiers had little more than their coats and the dark wool caps every man seemed to wear in the winter. A gun? They handed you one at the top of the hill, and you returned it on your way back down.

He opened the door of his daughter’s closet, rummaging aimlessly. He picked up a few toys from a small pile on the floor next to the disassembled panels of her crib. He brought a fuzzy red dog to his nose. The synthetic fur was stiff and chilly, smelling faintly of drool and old canned fruit.

He walked into his and Jasmina’s bedroom, opened the drawer of a bedside table, and found a half-read book, its jacket stuck in the middle to mark the place where Jasmina had last set it aside. He pictured her sitting up in bed reading it, her every-evening pose, leaning back on a pillow propped against the wall, a small cone of lamplight pooling on the pages of the book, the whiteness of the sheets gathered at her knees, her long brown hair draped across bare shoulders.

He remembered the conversation from one of their last nights together.

“There’s a convoy of twenty buses leaving Monday. Goran says he can get you and Sonja on it.”

She dropped the book to her lap, an accomplishment in itself, and looked up, eyes widening. “And you?”

“You know the rules.”

The rules were, and always had been, that no able-bodied male between the ages of sixteen and sixty could leave the city They were vital for defense. The unwritten rules were that those who weren’t regular army could buy an exception for a going rate equal to three thousand dollars, provided you had the right connections, and even buying your way out came with risks, not the least of which were being either shot in the back or conned out of every penny.

She looked back down for a moment at her book, staring but not reading, then looked back up, though still holding the book open in her lap.

“All the more reason we shouldn’t leave,” she said. “Why don’t we just wait until we can all go?”

But they both knew her defense was bound to crumble, if not on this evening then on some later night. Like everyone, they had assumed at the beginning that the war would be a quick ride into either oblivion or salvation. It would pass like a strong fever, killing or breaking. Instead it had become a long illness that took its toll in slow measures, and they both knew by then that the prognosis wasn’t likely to change anytime soon. Those who could get out, did, if they had any brains, even if it meant leaving behind sons and fathers.

“We could wait two years and we still might not be able to all get out at once,” he said.

She closed the book, laid it beside her on the bed, and looked away toward the window, out at the night. She blew out the bedside candle. “I don’t know. Probably not, I guess.”

He waited through a minute of silence, knowing by the rhythm of her breathing that she was fighting to gain control of her emotions, perhaps marshaling her next rebuttal as well.

“I’ll stay and hold down the house,” he said, “make sure it’s repaired as it needs it. Keep the roof whole and the windows covered, keep some refugee family from moving in. When it’s all over we’ll be together again.”

“And where are we supposed to go? Zagreb? And to live where? Karlovac? To live in some tent city with ten thousand other refugees? Germany? So Sonja can be shouted at all her life? Austria? Switzerland? And what will I do? And what does Sonja do without a father?”

“Do you want her to grow up here? With all of this? Do you want her to get used to this kind of a life, to think it’s normal to run from bullets or line up every day with buckets for your water.”

Jasmina pulled the sheets up around her shoulders and turned over, tucking her legs up to think. He moved up against her from behind, curling around her, taking her hand and holding it tightly, and they slowly relaxed into sleep.

Vlado awakened the next morning to shells and shooting, and opened his eyes to see Jasmina dressed and standing before her closet, a suitcase already open on the bed.

Vlado turned away from the bed and opened the drawers of his dresser. Inside were clothes he hadn’t worn for ages, having winnowed his wardrobe to a few sturdy shirts and trousers and a single sweater of coarse brown wool. The items in the drawer felt strange to him, as if they were of another era, artifacts in an unsealed tomb. In this room even the motes of dust tumbling through the pale light seemed encoded with the past. He inhaled the staleness, smelled its difference in his lungs, all the old moods and atmospheres shifting and settling inside him. Some inner chemical switch, long untended, briefly fluttered on at the sudden register of these false readings, and he exhaled deeply to collect himself, tears pooling in his eyes. He straightened, blinked once, and swallowed heavily, then began packing a small duffel with some heavy dark clothes, a few old items that he wouldn’t mind muddying, and tossed in a blanket for good measure along with a canteen and an old rain jacket.

And that was about all he could do. There was a small flashlight in the house, but no batteries. There were no snacks to scrounge, and his gun, a service revolver locked in a drawer at work, would seem even more useless up there than it did here.

He stripped down to change, smelling the sourness of his unwashed skin. When had he bathed last? Four days ago? Five? He’d sponged himself with a cold washcloth in the dark, lathering up from a thin knife of soap. He’d then felt itchy all the next day.