William Vollmann - Last Stories and Other Stories

He remembered the tram tracks between the two lanes of the highway, but nothing else appeared correct. Now they had arrived at the former frontline. He told the driver to stop and wait. He stepped out. His wife took his hand. For the first time ever he was able to survey the enemy positions. Here was the old age home, called “Disneyland” for its multicolored façade, whose construction had been nearly completed when the Serbs occupied it. Considerable sniper fire had originated here. Now the drug addicts used it.

We’d better not go in, he told his wife. I don’t know if it’s still mined.

He photographed an arched window with a black tree growing through it, the wall-tiles pitted and pocked. (He still used a film camera, of course; why should he put away what had always worked for him?) Seeing the hateful place ruined and abandoned gave him pleasure. He said nothing about that to his wife. Weeds, rose hips, young walnut trees and blackberries strained up toward the blackened concrete cells, some of whose highest honeycombs were floored with grass. There was a tunnel like a grave-shaft which passed right through the gutted edifice and into the summer greenness by the highway.

I’m getting worried about how much the taxi will cost, he admitted. So they got back in and rolled toward Centar, passing a smashed apartment building, with Mojmilo on the right. Now they drew near the tall white skyscrapers of Centar, wondering whether it would rain, for clouds already pressed over them like crumpled bedsheets.

Up there, he said, that meadow there with the new houses, I think that’s where we had to run. I had my bulletproof vest on, and it was so heavy I fell down…

His wife took his hand.

Actually, he said, that might not have been the place.

Next morning they took a brisk walk from their hotel up into the hills. Once their backs began to ache as usual, they sat down against the ancient rock wall in the shade of the four walnut trees by the Yellow Bastion, with heavy, fragrant clusters of white elderflowers bowing the branches down below them, and then, far down through the greenness, a hoard of those other white flowers called tombstones, rising delicately and distinctly from the grass.

They had been friends of a sort, perhaps more so in his parents’ mind than in either of theirs. Had they never seen each other again, the insignificance of their accidental association would have been plainer, although as it turned out he rarely thought about his childhood; and when his acquaintances mentioned school reunions he produced his supposition of a smile, enduring the subject warily because his boredom resembled withered branches over a hole. He knew that others were different; sometimes he wondered whether they had made real friends when they were young, or even been happy; or whether (which would have rendered his own situation relatively enviable) they were simply in the market for false memories of joy. From what little he recalled, his high school classmates, even Ivan, had longed to get away and enter the shining world where they could dwell apart from the elders whom they were already becoming. He could barely recollect the place he had fled, so deeply had he despised it; therefore he felt unable to deduce how far, if at all, he had gone, which gratified him since it ought to be best to forget what one runs from: Amir watching silently while he interviewed fighters beneath the thudding and booming of shells along the frontline, and the morning when there were six new bullet-holes in Enko’s mother’s kitchen, and Enko’s contempt for him (the natural feeling of the crucified for the free man who climbs on and off the cross), those he remembered better than his two or three dull school years with Ivan, who had likewise, so he’d supposed at the time, looked down on him, or at best askance; Ivan’s mother’s opinion of him he never learned, although the last time he met her she must have been far from pleased; as for Ivan’s father, he had died long ago. The journalist (if we allow him to call himself such) could not recall the house where Ivan had lived with his mother, brother and sister, so perhaps Ivan had never invited him over; but, after all, we live so hemmed in by our memories that we scarcely realize how few they are. For instance, he could hardly bring to mind the beardless version of Ivan’s face. He had invited Ivan to his home once or twice. Ivan, two years older, possessed older friends; besides, Ivan had been born in that town, while his own family had moved so many times that he could not say where he was from, which might have been the real reason he felt lonely in those days, although he naturally never considered that, and therefore believed his presence to be distasteful to others, which rendered it so. His nature was impressionable — a fine quality in youth, when one stands a chance of adapting to one’s dreams; an excellent characteristic in a journalist; but a liability in those later years whose captive will manage best through stolid stupidity. Anyhow, he passed much of his childhood either by reading and dreaming alone or by watching others, wishing that they liked him. To him Ivan appeared to be laughing unfailingly, charming his true friends. — Ivan’s such a nice boy, said his mother. Not knowing how to make the world admire him the way it did Ivan, he withdrew into his room.

Sometimes an accident returned them into propinquity, especially when Ivan was visiting someone else. The younger one might have been flattered when Ivan sat beside him — flattered, yes, but coolhearted; he needed no favors from Ivan. Each time, they liked each other more, but by then it was the shallower liking of grown men, for whom conviviality suffices. Men know what they think, at least; and anyone who pretends to think the same will do; some people can afford to be different, and tolerate what they fail to understand, but were that the rule, there might still be a Yugoslavia. As it happened, Ivan passed a year in Zagreb and even learned the language, which in those days was still called Serbo-Croatian. Why was he interested? Well, it turned out that he was Croatian, or Croatian-American as anxiously inclusive Americans would say; when they were boys together, Ivan’s shy half-friend had never heard of Croats; Ivan was simply the older one whom he should perhaps look up to. The idea that he could ever get away from the narrow darkness which so faithfully contained him hovered beyond him; therefore he could not even envy Ivan, who lived in sunlight.

Later they were journalists together — mere freelancers, of course, being dreamers who lacked the ability to do as they were told. Despite his superiority, Ivan was a less methodical dreamer than his friend. He had grown almost fat by then, while the journalist was only plump. Kinder, not so disciplined, loving to sit up all night talking history and smoking cigarettes with any Balkan type, more fluent than ever in Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Slovenian, and all the other languages which used to be one, Ivan gloried rather than labored on these journeys. He had a paying job; Yugoslavia was his leave of absence. With shining eyes he spoke of Knin and Tuzla, Sanjak and Banja Luka, Vukovar, defiant Sarajevo. Very occasionally the other man still wished to be like Ivan, and sometimes he pitied him a little. When he could, he took Ivan as his interpreter.

Once between assignments when they met for dinner in their home city, the journalist happened to be lost and drunk. Ivan watched him make a rendezvous with a transient hotel’s hardest passion girl, then distracted and delayed him in a bar, until he missed his hour. Ivan was protecting him! The journalist insisted on searching for the girl, who was long gone. In the hallway, two men were fighting. The journalist wanted to look for his girl all the same. With that gentle, almost feminine laugh that he had, Ivan tried to jolly him. They went around the corner for another drink. Was Ivan sorry for him? He agreed to sleep on the sofa in Ivan’s messy apartment. He felt disappointed, irritated, amused and touched.