William Vollmann: Last Stories and Other Stories

What Zoran now contemplated was merely dangerous, not impossible. For example, fifteen years after this incident, the Muslim pensioner in the stained blue suit who sat on a bench beneath the trees on the north bank of the Miljacka told me that his son used to walk his puppydog every day no matter how many shells fell; and one afternoon he walked the dog across the Vrbanja Most and was captured, but the Serbs did not kill or even torture him. They sent him to Beograd. He did not even have to enter a prison camp. Right away a beautiful Serbian girl fell in love with him. — Now he is living with that same dog and that same girl in Florida! said the old man. The dog sleeps with them in their bed. If my son goes out to swim in the ocean, the girl takes care of the dog, and even though that dog loves her, he cries, he cries.

And of course Zoran was himself a Serb. Moreover, he had uncles and cousins.

There were friends to see, and friends of friends to pay off. Zlata’s mother cried out: They can do anything to her, right in front of you! but Zoran shouted: They’re human just like you! and she lowered her heavy head, remembering as well as he that not long ago the Vrbanja Most had merely been barricaded by Serbian officers with stockings over their faces who threatened and gloated. In good time the friends of friends informed him of a certain telephone whose wire remained uncut; is it a consolation or a shame that there will always be such conveniences? He paid fifty Deutschemarks, black smoke slowly unclenching its infinite fingers over the hill, and called his cousin Goran, who congratulated him on not being dead. Zoran asked how the life was on their side. Goran answered: Everything is becoming better, and we have no complaints.

He mentioned Zlata, and his cousin was silent, then said: Yes, we remember her — not like the others, thanks to God! That would be no problem. Of course I can’t watch her every minute.

We won’t stay with you, and we thank you for your kindness.

It’s good you understand.

When should we cross?

Thursday night, at ten-o’-clock. I’ll be on duty at the Vrbanja Most.

Zlata knew that for the rest of her life she would remember that her mother was sitting at the table with the soap opera on; a man was deeply kissing a woman. Her mother opened the trunk of ancient dresses whose red had gone to russet, the gold embroidery along the edges dignified against the darkness. From them she chose a young girl’s black dress embroidered with gold and silver patterns resembling the ones carved on ancient stones.

I know you can’t wear it, her mother said, because you may need to run. But let’s see how you look. I always thought…

Zlata turned away. Her shoulders trembled and she wiped her eyes. Then a machine gun fired mindlessly on and on.

Go with God, her mother said. — Her elder sister’s head hung down. The father had been killed months ago. As for the two younger girls, they began weeping and screaming. — Shut up, their mother said. Don’t you want her to have her chance? Now help your sister get ready.

When Zoran came to fetch her, with all the money that his family could spare sewn inside the knees of his trousers, in her deep voice the mother demanded that he defend Zlata with his life.

I swear it, he said, and then she embraced him for the first time.

Zlata stared out the window. Under a half-clouded sunset the river was coppery, and the trees of the enemy hills began to thicken into a single texture. She realized that the river was almost the same color as Zoran’s eyes. — You’ve said goodbye! her mother shouted. Now go!

Congregations being perilous, no one accompanied them when they commenced their escape. Feeling their way down the dark street, they found a doorway to kiss in. Her tongue was in his mouth and his hand on her breast.

After this night we’ll sleep always in one bed, he whispered.

What time is it?

Nine-forty.

My God, Zoran! We need to hurry now…

At five to ten they arrived at the bridge. I wish I could compare the Vrbanja Most to the white bridge in Vranje that a bygone Pasha built after his daughter drowned herself over the Serbian shepherd he had executed for the crime of love. Unfortunately, the Vrbanja Most lacks monumentality. What legends could there possibly be concerning this all too ordinary structure?

Fifteen years later I met Zlata’s mother, who now lived alone in that apartment in the Old Town. Her hair was almost the color of cigarette smoke. She said: In this place people were taking care of each other. When we were living in the basements, whenever we got something to eat we would cook it and we would share it. Maybe after the war we became more selfish.

As we talked about the war, the old woman’s eyes seemed to sink into their sockets. At first she had not believed that anything could happen to Sarajevo, and then the first bombshell landed; and when it was over, she could not quite believe that it was over.

In her thunderous cigarette smoker’s voice she told me about the third year, when shrapnel flew into her spleen. A couple were kissing on television. She showed me a photograph of Zlata, and the echoes of the footsteps across the hall exploded in my head like gunshots.

They wanted to cross the bridge and they killed them on the Chetnik side, said the old woman.

I had always imagined what had occurred as simply sadistic treachery, but Zlata’s mother said: Anyone who tried to cross over the bridge was killed. Only certain bridges were open. They had no idea.

Who had no idea?

The Serbs. They were careless with everyone, she said, lightly striking the coffee table with her massive wrists.

Zoran’s family was gone, of course. Nobody knew what had happened to them, and it seemed wisest to stop asking. I walked away. A drunk cursed me from behind a wrecked airplane.

The old pensioner on the north bank of the Miljacka did not remember them, so I asked others. — I think she was Muslim, said a woman on a bench, but another lady insisted: No, no; he was the Muslim and she was the Serbkina.

At least they agreed that Zlata had been shot first. It must have been an abdominal wound, for she kept screaming (for hours, they said, but I hope they exaggerated) in that puddle of light which the enemy had trained on No Man’s Land. Zoran, trying hopelessly to drag her back into the besieged city, was shot in the spine with a single rifle bullet, then shot again in the skull, which, considering the distance, might be called fine marksmanship, although on the other hand the snipers had had months to learn the range. Some embellishers claim that Zlata had not yet escaped her agony even at sunrise. Whether or not this is so, everyone agrees that the corpses of the two lovers lay rotting for days, because nobody dared to approach them. Eventually, when the international press made a story out of it, it became an embarrassment, and another truce was arranged. And it turned out just as Zoran had promised his bride, for they were buried in one grave.

In memoriam, Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic

In the dimming living room they were drinking slivovitz and water out of fine crystal glasses, and everyone was laughing and smoking American cigarettes until a shell fell twenty-five meters away. The women jumped. Another shell fell slightly closer and the women screamed. Then the people sat silently smoking in the last light, their smoke nearly the same color as the drinking glasses, and presently began to laugh again, leaning over their hands or spreading their fingers; they stubbed out their cigarettes in crystal ashtrays, and the poet who loved Vesna even suspected that finally he had found life. But Enko the militiaman sat glaring. Now it was dark, with echoes of the last light fading from the bubbles of mineral water just within the glasses and from the women’s pale blouses, and they sat in silence, listening to the shells.