Dan Fesperman: Lie in the Dark

He knocked, and in a few moments Amira Hodzic opened the door, sleep still deep in her face. She wore a heavy cotton robe belted tightly at the waist.

“I need your help,” Vlado said. “I’m sorry.”

Her face was clear of makeup, her hair tangled, and her eyes tired and bloodshot. Vlado’s appearance was doubtless more frightful than when he’d reached Mrs. Vitas house. But she didn’t appear alarmed, only weary, and perhaps a trifle put out.

“Why am I not surprised to see you,” she said, then paused on the threshhold before opening the door wider and turning inside. “Come in,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll make you coffee. You look like you need it. But quietly, please, my children are sleeping.”

She turned to face him again. “Would you like to wash? I can heat some water.”

“That would be heavenly.” Although it was probably as much a favor for herself as for him. By now he must smell like a sewer rat.

He stood in the tiny bathroom, peeling off his sopping pants, shirt, underwear, and socks. It was chilly in here, but not too bad. And anything was better than staying in those clammy clothes.

A few minutes later, she knocked lightly. “The pot of water is outside the door.”

He wondered briefly at this display of modesty from the woman who had undressed in front of him for a few packs of cigarettes. Then he forgot everything else as he felt the luxury of the hot water, sponging it across his chest, his legs. He submerged his face in the pot. He held his breath, eyes shut, then pulled out with a gasp, dripping. He almost felt like laughing at the simple joy of it.

A few moments later she tapped at the door again, speaking barely above a whisper in the quiet apartment. “Here is a towel, and some dry clothes. They’re my husband’s. A little large, probably, but dry and clean. I’ve sold most of the rest, so you might as well keep these.”

Dried and dressed, Vlado stepped into the kitchen in his stocking feet to find she had made a breakfast of bread, cheese, and sausage. The gas lines, he could see, had been installed neatly and professionally here. In the corner sat a small woodstove, homemade but far sturdier than the one that had belonged to Glavas. It was burning steadily, an ample pile of chopped logs stacked nearby He would have liked nothing better than curling up on the floor like a cat to sleep for the rest of the day.

By Sarajevo standards, Amira had established a prosperous lifestyle, Vlado thought. She followed his gaze as it moved from luxury to luxury, seeming to read his mind.

“The fringe benefits of my line of work,” she said. “It pays better than almost any other job I could have found, even if most of the currency is cigarettes. Appropriate, I guess, that an old farm wife should be relying on a harvest of dried leaves for money”

“A farm wife. I’d always imagined you worked in an office. A bank, somewhere like that.”

“I’m surprised you’d imagined me as anything at all, other than a temporarily desirable possession. Another commodity on the barter market. Not that I’d have faulted you for it. Without that kind of thinking my children would starve.”

“That’s the way I’d have preferred to have thought of you. But somehow I couldn’t. I kept thinking of you before the war, in some normal job with normal demands. I couldn’t get past that.”

“So that was the problem. I’d assumed you’d had a sudden rush of guilt, thinking of a wife back at home mopping a floor, or wiping a small, runny nose. A baby at her breast and beans on the stove.”

“There was that, too. A wife. But she’s in Berlin with my daughter. I haven’t seen them in two years. You were my first attempt at, well, anything, since they left.”

“Sorry to have failed you,” she said, her softened tone making it seem almost as if she meant it.

“So your husband?” Vlado asked, tugging at the front of his borrowed shirt. “He is …?”

“Dead. Killed in the fighting in ’ninety-three. A patriot who died from blind obedience to zeal. He was shot in the chest, but you might just as easily have called it death by intoxication of propaganda. He heard we would have a new nation and needed to defend it, and he took it to heart, never mind running a farm or bringing in a crop or feeding a family. He joined the first week, with no gun and no training. And the bastards put him right up on the frontline where he’d be overrun in the first wave. They never even got his body back, and we’ll certainly never get our land or our house back.

“It was all the children and I could do to make our way here on a wagon. Little Hamid wasn’t even walking yet. It was a pig wagon. We smelled like pig shit and dirty hay for a week before we had enough water to bathe.”

Vlado thought of Glavas tucked in the hay of his own farm cart, wheels creaking through the same mountains a half century ago.

“What about the rest of your family?”

“We were separated by the fighting. Now they are all in towns near Split on the Dalmatian Coast, living in refugee hotels. My parents and my cousins, a sister, her husband. They’ve sent a few letters, but that’s all. They used up all their hard currency by the end of the first year. It’s all they can do to feed themselves, much less help us out. I’m probably doing better than all of them combined.”

“Are you trying to get out?”

“I did for the first year, but we were always too far down the list to get in a convoy. So in the spring I picked dandelions for salad and scrounged for every bit of change or whatever else I could find while we gradually spent every last coin of our savings. When the money was all gone, that’s when I first went to the French barracks. I was no good at first. Even you could see that. I was ready to give it up after only a week. Then you came along that night with your free cigarettes. It was enough to keep me going until I had enough nerve to do it right. And now, as you can see, I’ve become a professional.”

She offered a bitter smile. Vlado was a bit uneasy being cast as the savior of her career.

“Some of the customers even ask for me by name, now. They’re disappointed if I’m not there. Although I still don’t do just everything. Mostly blow jobs. A year ago I couldn’t even have said those words. Blow job. Now it’s rote behavior. Blow job. Give me another few months and I’ll be doing everything they want, letting them tie me up. Any perverted thing they want.” She paused, sipping her coffee. “But my children will be fat and warm, and sleep in clean sheets.”

She put the coffee cup down, staring sullenly at the wall. “A week ago they told us we were finally at the top of the list, that we would have a place on the next convoy of buses to Split. Probably only another month or two. Only now I’m not so sure. If we left now we’d only have enough money to struggle along with my relatives. If I work another year I may have enough to make it all the way to Vienna. I have friends there who will take us in if we can help with the rent.”

She offered more food, including a few slices from a fresh orange. Vlado hadn’t eaten one in more than a year. By prewar standards, it was pulpy, a bit on the dry side. But the taste was spectacular. She nearly laughed at the look of rapture on Vlado’s face as he bit into a slice.

“Another fringe benefit,” she said, smiling.

“Yes,” he said, feeling embarrassed by his reaction. “Another successful out-of-towner.” It was a flippant remark, a fragment of his own bitterness breaking loose under the sheer weight of exhaustion, but she was no longer smiling, and her face had gone rigid.

“Don’t take it personally,” he said wearily “It’s just that people who grew up here feel like they’re losing their city as much to the refugees as to the Chetniks.”