Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

He turned to see his image in the full-length mirror hanging inside Jasmina’s closet door. Staring back was a pale ghostly man, rib bones showing and goosebumps rising, and he was overcome by the sensation of seeing his own corpse, stretched upon a slab.

The chest, now slightly sunken, would be more so, like the broken ground of a frost heave, whitened and deflated; his arm muscles gone flaccid; his eyes vacant, lids swollen, lashes encrusted with mud; hair stiff and standing in every direction. Only the fingernails would be growing, or so the books said, but no longer either pink or clean. He scanned the reflection of his chest, wondering if it would be torn by one of those wounds he’d grown so accustomed to seeing, only uglier, ragged edges caked with dirt, a foul and rusting porthole spilling its slippery contents in a steaming coil. He even knew the smell, its essence of cold and damp soil and of nascent rot after a few days in the elements.

He turned abruptly toward the bed to shake the image, then looked back at the mirror and saw that it remained, the ghost of some future he never wanted to reach, yet would be walking toward in a few hours. Why not just call it off: It’s not as if Kasic would mind if he turned over his early results. Then he considered the next day at his desk, feet propped, the underpowered fluorescent tubes humming and throbbing above his head. Garovic in motion toward his desk, a folder in his hand, Damir rattling his jar of shells and talking of his latest conquest. And the siege, lurching onward with its unstoppable mechanical force. No, he would go to Zuc. See what there was to be learned, whether of the war or of this case.

He shut the closet door, swiveling the mirror out of sight, then walked from the room.

So this was the fear of going to war, with its dry metallic taste and its dark play of imagination. He’d read enough about trenches and bunkers and pitched battles to know what he could be getting into by walking up to Zuc. He felt familiar already with the the splintered trees, the moonscape of cratered mud, the rats that grew fat and the feet that grew soft and wrinkled within sodden boots. As for the whine and shatter of shellbursts, they, at least, would be nothing new.

He’d overheard the teenage boys in the cafes talking of their weekly one-night stands up on the line. They smiled weakly and forced a few jokes, half out of bravado and half out of cathartic need, their conversations continuing until they eased themselves to an acceptable distance from their deepest fears. At least until next time.

Infantry attacks were rare up there, he knew that as well. Neither side ever gained enough of an advantage to try them often. Both sides were thin along most of the line, and neither could mass enough for an offensive without the other finding out and responding in kind. Defenses were left mostly to mines and artillery, and overnight duty was usually a matter of waiting out the shells while yearning to walk back home. That was the night’s reward, a predawn stroll back down into the bowl of the city, with its monotonous comforts of scattershot and siege, its torn plumbing and its weak gas flames, its hard beds rucked against less exposed walls, its slow curl of woodsmoke and steaming piles of garbage, and at night, its inkwell of darkness.

Vlado’s rendezvous point was at a brigade headquarters on the west side of the city’s center. He arrived just at nightfall. An old woman wrapped in a red shawl squatted on the ground next to a water spigot, peddling a small mountain of cigarettes one by one.

The contingent of men who were to march up to Zuc was to gather in a group of about sixty, then split into six groups of ten that would leave at ten minute intervals, to keep from attracting too much attention from enemy gunners. An unshaven commander told Vlado to follow him in the first group up.

“Just stay quiet and do as I say, that’s all I ask. If you get killed all I can promise is we’ll bring you back. If you’re wounded you’ll take whatever treatment you can get up there. You’ll get nothing better than what the soldiers get, which isn’t always so great. But it’s your decision.”

It was clear that none of the arriving soldiers was part of a well-trained unit. They appeared in street clothes and sneakers, as if for a pickup game of basketball, some wearing the same muddy jeans and jackets they’d worn the last time up the hill, not bothering to wash them in the interim.

The commander assigned leaders to the other groups that would follow, then called together the first ten. Three men in their late forties stood to themselves, huddled in the fraternity of age and silence, conserving their energies for getting up the hill and safely through the night.

The younger ones, however, gave way to the schoolboy inclination to make light of even the most solemn occasion. They fidgeted and shadow boxed, playing tapes on a large radio shouldered by a tall boy with acne and a black ponytail.

He sorted through a stack of cassette tapes, a cigarette waggling in his mouth as he talked. Another of the younger ones handed him a tape, putting in his request for the walk up the hill.

Another member of this group was busy off to the side, kissing his girlfriend good-bye, he in a caricature of sternness and duty, she in a tearful mime of sorrow.

The slow walk began, and Vlado fell in with the younger ones, partly out of curiosity, partly out of knowing there would be no conversation with the older ones anyway, no way to make the time move any faster. Perhaps that was the difference between knowing you’d have to do this over and over again and knowing, as Vlado did, that this would be a one-time journey.

For a while the only noise was the thump of the bass line from the big radio, still propped on the shoulder of the tall boy, the music jumping as if in time to the movement of his plaid flannel shirttail, which swayed back and forth with every step uphill.

In the darkness they passed people headed down the hill, some saying hello, others carrying water jugs or pulling wagons. Most were headed home for the night, although some of the younger ones were headed toward the feeble and expensive offerings of Sarajevo night life.

After a few more blocks the houses began to thin. The higher the group walked, the more damage there seemed to be.

Two of the boys began to kid the third one about his girlfriend. From their conversation it was obvious he’d just met her a few days ago, and after a few minutes of this Vlado piped up to ask how one managed to acquire a new girlfriend so easily while a war was going on.

The three of them looked back, questioning him without saying a word. He told them he was a policeman looking for someone, a witness in a case. Just along for the ride.

“Not much of a ride,” said the boy with the new girlfriend.

The others laughed, as if privy to an old joke.

“So you want to know how to find a girlfriend?” the boy asked.

“Not exactly. I’m married. Just wondering how those things go at your age. From what I can remember it was hard enough taking care of that kind of business when there wasn’t a war on.”

“Oh, it’s easy. Easier, even. Meeting them, anyway. The hard part’s finding time alone with them. Moms and dads are always home now. Always indoors. And it’s not like you can go hang out in the park. Your best hope before was to wait until everybody else went to bed. Now there’s a curfew and you’ve got to get home yourself. But there’s always a way. She sleeps over at a friend’s and you do the same. Or maybe you tell your parents you’re off to ‘the front’ again, only you’re really off to somewhere else.”

“But easier to meet? That I still don’t get.”

“The ones in your building, anyway. These guys here.” He motioned toward his friends in the group. “None of us knew each other before the war. We hung out with other people, all of us. But now most of my old friends are gone, theirs too. Most left. Some got killed. And in those first few months you remember how it was. Everybody in the basements and the shelters. It was you and everybody else from your building down there, and you weren’t going to spend the evening talking to your parents. So you found the other people your age and had a party. A few weeks of that and you’ve got a new set of friends. A few more weeks and some of the boys and girls are starting to pair off. And when there’s a war a month with a girl seems like a year. Everything’s more intense. More serious. They start talking about having babies, wanting to leave something of themselves behind.”