William Vollmann - Last Stories and Other Stories

He had never been able to fight for himself. His childhood had taught him to bear with the threats and aggressions of others, and this fatalistic patience, which many mistook for compliance, had served him equally well in his profession. He raised his hands to be searched by secret police of any stripe; the insults of uniformed killers he answered with mildness; even when someone touched a bayonet to his throat he held no grudge, because what good would that have done? The killers were what they were precisely because they overreacted. Whatever he did feel announced itself within him afterward, if at all. So Zrinko’s questions did not anger him then. For one thing, Zrinko was his friend; they had met through Ivan; Zrinko evidently needed to be told the sequence of events, in order, as Americans would say, to “bring closure” to his grief; hence it was the survivor’s duty to comply and explain, all the more so since he was fond of Zrinko.

You swear that you were in the same car?

I swear, he listlessly replied; his trousers were still clotted with Ivan’s blood.

All right. If you had been ahead in another car, leading Ivan to his death, I would have killed you.

Zrinko drove him to the bus station. When he thanked him, Zrinko said: I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for Ivan.

He never saw Zrinko again.

His wife signed the bill. He longed for her to say something loving, take him by the hand, “help” him; he knew quite well that there was no help in such matters. Just then he could hardly endure his grief and bitterness. Had he voiced it, perhaps she might have embraced him, as he clearly comprehended, but he lacked the power to take charge of himself. Anyway, if he waited, the feeling would depart. He blamed her for nothing. Wasn’t he a grown man? They rose and crossed the Stari Most, which had been beautifully reconstructed, evidently with United Nations funds. How had the joke run? When that Serbian commander destroyed this bridge, he consoled his staff that in due course, Serbs would remake it: wider, more beautiful and even older than before! It rose in an inverted V over the green river. Tenderly he helped his wife up the slanting stairs; her joints were weak. There came thunder, rain, the lovely green smell. To him the grass upreaching, the swallows and the rain on the roses all seemed new, but not the narrow evergreens rising up the steep arid mountain; that horizon was hideously familiar.

A Spanish woman with a seashell belt and a leather purse like a uterus touched the bright brass writing-pens made out of shell casings. The vendor offered her another and another. She gazed at each one with doe eyes.

On a streetwall it still said USTAŠE DUBROVNIK,* and on another, ULTRAS 1994. He could not remember which brand of cigarettes Ivan had most frequently smoked. Middle-aged women in checkered hijabs were photographing one another on the Stari Most.

These white butterflies flickering everywhere like ashes in an updraft, he lacked all recollection of them although it had been this time of year, that same sweaty light, with those arid yet forested mountains across the river. There were more roadside fruit stands than before, new shopping centers and gas stations, but plenty of the same old smashed houses. On the trees the figs hung green over the river. It seemed peculiar how much he had forgotten, especially after Ivan’s brother had hounded him so closely over what might as well have been every turn in the road, from the very starting-point where that United Nations pilot, smiling faintly, reached into his camouflage-flavored breast pocket, pulled out a manual the size of a combat Bible, and edified them with a diagram of some creepy wilderness of fortifications, remarking: That’s what those Serbian checkpoints look like. I prefer to fly myself. — He could fly, while they were only journalists. After waiting two days, the three of them made the decision together. — So you admit that you convinced my brother to take that road, said Ivan’s brother, smiling with triumphant hate.

Supposing that his duty must lie in submission to the brother’s cold hatred, ready to answer any questions if it would bring the man peace — in fact it appeared to inflame him — he complied, told and clarified. When the brother first began to interrogate him (he had awaited his coming for many days), he endured it calmly, even after it became apparent that rather than being, as he had foolishly imagined, “helpful,” he was simply accused; but when the brother demanded that he tell and retell each detail of Ivan’s death, which on his own account he absolutely could not bear to think about, he shivered for an instant. No doubt this bore out the brother’s already completed judgment.

As for the sister, whose questioning took place over the telephone, and was therefore indefinitely protracted, she instructed him to call her again tomorrow at one-o’-clock. Every time he called her, it cost him a hundred dollars. He was trying to do right by that family; that was what he would have wished for in their situation, to have his questions answered.

Explain to me again just why you took that turn, she said.

So he did. He had explained it to her four times.

And you were sitting in the back seat? Why weren’t you up front with my brother?

Ted was the driver.

You say my brother was your interpreter. So why didn’t you take the rest off his shoulders?

Ivan asked the Spanish battalion for directions. He asked again at the Croatian checkpoint. In each case, he was satisfied as far as I could tell—

But you didn’t help him verify these directions?

As you know, I don’t speak the language. He didn’t ask for help. He just said, okay, we turn right just after the final checkpoint—

Then how do you account for what happened?

Ivan directed us to take a wrong turn.

A wrong turn. And all this time you were sitting in the back seat, doing nothing.

That’s right.

My brother was working for you. He trusted you. I don’t know anything about the man who was driving, but I do find it significant that you had them doing all the work while you sat in the back seat.

Put it any way you care to.

And now you’ll cash in. You’ll have your dramatic story.

Sure. I’m cashing in every time I call you.

Just what do you mean? Tell me exactly what you mean by that remark.

I mean that I’m trying to answer your questions as patiently as I can. By the way, Ivan was working with me, not for me.

You hired him as your interpreter.

I got the magazine to agree to pay him a fee, yes.

You persuaded him to go.

I invited him to go. He liked it over here.

You lured him to his death.

You know what, Jeanette?

You killed my brother. You’re just as responsible as the men who shot him. I want you to admit it.

I don’t see it that way.

So you’re a coward as well as a—

Jeanette, go to hell.

He hung up the phone.

Sweet trees were growing up through roofless stone ruins. His wife smiled at him wearily.

Now that he had come back to where it happened, he could not stop remembering Ivan’s sister, to whom he must have been a leader of unearthly power, since he could lure a man to his death for unstated reasons, conveying him, and Ted also, right into a sniper’s nest, like a prostitute who inveigles drunks into some lonely ambush of robbers, then flits away unharmed. The sister had definitely been the most plainspoken of all his judges. But the rest unanimously implied what she had asserted: he was more than he supposed himself to be. In the market, the old man selling cherries kissed a tomato and gave it to his wife. A man was selling pens made of shell casings; was he familiar? A man sat playing the accordion. And the American or survivor or whatever he was said to himself: If only I’d truly had such power! Well, I did, to my accusers at least. For once in my life I got to be a leader.