Escape (3 page)

After, back home, the woody scent of colored pencils, the feel of the fibrous paper under his hands, the dry, rhythmic scraping sound as he drew a fine green point across the virgin field of white. Maybe it didn't even matter if he was good. Maybe he could bear working in Željko's barber shop for the rest of his life, as long as he could spend his free hours with a pencil or a paint brush in his hand, rendering to materiality the images that seemed to be a tethering line, a bridge between life as it was, and the world he dreamed. A place where he could be happy.

*

“Exceptional, Luka.”

The sudden rush of warmth to Luka's chest made it feel like his heart was swelling, engorged almost to bursting with happiness. For the first five weeks of the course, Professor Gudelj had given him nothing but criticism. Night after night Luka had been pricked by barbs of jealousy each time Gudelj said, “Lush,” or “Provocative,” or “Challenging,” to one of the other students.

“Thank you, Professor Gudelj.”

Since starting his two night classes, art had swallowed Luka whole. His former pastime, squeezed in between watching or playing football after work with his few neighborhood acquaintances, visiting the library and lazing under a tree when it was warm, or curling up in his garret when it was cold or raining, suddenly felt like his whole life. Maybe it was just the way formal instruction was focusing his attention, now, after years of flipping through books on Remedios Varo, Edgar Ende, and Hieronymus Bosch, and doodling in his spare time. But he also had to admit that, more and more, the surreal realities he forged in paper and ink were his way of slipping out of the net he'd felt caught in since the order to register and wear the armband.

No one he knew was anything like the Nazis he'd seen in
Schindler's List
and a dozen other movies, but wearing the armband made him feel like a Jew in the Krakow ghetto. Obviously the Eršbans weren't going to build concentration camps and try to exterminate all the Bokans, but still, being marked as different made him feel humiliated, even if he couldn't figure out why walking around with a label proclaiming he was Bokan would be degrading. Maybe because all his life he'd done everything he could to hide all the ways he was different from everyone else.

But this ethnic, religious crap was bullshit. This time, he hadn't done anything wrong. Fine, there were crazy extremists committing acts of terrorism in other countries, but you could say that about any religion. As far as he knew, the only thing the Eršbans could accuse the Bokans in Xukrasna of was that their ancestors had come there from somewhere else a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years before, while their own Eršban ancestors had been there a few hundred years longer. Did anyone really care?

*

As soon as he'd wiped away the lingering traces of shaving cream from Andrej's face and whisked away the cape protecting his clothes, Luka tossed the towel and cape into the laundry bin, then tugged the apron from around his waist and tossed that in, too. But when the bell over the door chimed and he saw Mr. Stefanovik shuffling in, he sighed. Glancing over, he saw Željko was still gossiping with Nemanja as he meticulously shaped the sideburns he insisted on maintaining, even though they were long out of fashion.

“Can you take care of Mr. Stefanovik, Luka?”

Luka stole a peek at the clock by the door. Already five past six. He was going to be late. “My bus leaves at six-thirty, and I have to go by the store, first.”

“Come on, Luka, I'm still working on Mr. Stankic. It'll only take you ten minutes.”

Luka stifled a sigh. God, he needed to learn how to say no. Luckily Željko wasn't the kind of boss to take advantage. Some of the guys he knew worked for real assholes.

By the time he had Mr. Stefanovik out of his chair and on his way, it was six twenty. Luka dashed upstairs, jammed his sketchbook and pencil case into his backpack, and was out the door.

*

“Back of the line, Bokan.”

Luka turned around and looked at the man standing behind him. “What?”

“It's my country. Why should I have to wait while you're served like a prince?” The man looked at the next person behind him, an old woman in a green pantsuit, and under his breath, mumbled, “Little Bokan monkey.”

The woman startled and turned away from the man, but didn't say anything.

Blood rushing to his face, heart hammering against his ribs, Luka looked at Neno, working the register, sure he'd tell the asshole behind Luka to shut up and wait his turn, but as he watched the smile Neno had for the old woman he was ringing up thin and harden in a grimace, Luka's certainty faltered.

“Go on, kid.”

What? But Neno was Bokan, too. Why wouldn't he stand up to some jerk who just wanted an excuse to get through the line faster? Flustered, humiliated, face burning, every vein in his body throbbing, Luka tried to cobble together a protest. Neno had been selling Luka bread and milk and the occasional sweet since he was thirteen years old. He'd teased Luka about girls and jokingly complained about his wife. He'd encouraged his penchant for drawing since Luka started buying colored pens and pads of unlined paper at his shop. After six years, treating Luka like a friend, what had changed? Was he just afraid of getting in trouble with a customer? With his boss?

The slight hesitation in the cashier's voice evaporated. “You heard me. Get in back and wait your turn. Otherwise, stay out of my store.”

He was half an hour late to class, but it didn't matter. Professor Gudelj never showed up. The following week, there was a different professor standing by the screen at the front of the room, holding the remote in his small, pale hand, flicking through slides of art. For each new technique and theme, Gudelj had always shown examples of paintings from different eras, different regions, galloping across continents and centuries: one week it was Goya and Velasquez and Bruegel, the next, it was Russian Futurists juxtaposed with their Italian counterparts. Professor Stojanovic, though, stuck almost exclusively to contemporary Russian and Eršban art, occasionally bringing in a lone example from other traditions as an example of supposedly inferior perspective, or use of light, and above all, baser content.

Luka often wondered, but never found out what happened to Professor Gudelj.

*

When he finished work on Monday, Luka retreated to the soothing solitude of his garret to work on his homework assignments. For a moment, he stared at the radio, torn between the desire to preserve the illusion of tranquil safety, and guilt for trying to pretend everything was normal. Every day, the stories he heard on the free-territory radio station were grimmer. In some villages and towns, Bokan men over eighteen were being arrested in their homes or at their jobs. Some were killed in the street; others were taken away to temporary prison camps being set up in sports arenas and warehouses. In some regions, reports were cropping up of soldiers gang raping women in front of their families. Now and then, a reporter mentioned rumors of rape camps where women were kept for days or weeks, repeatedly assaulted by Eršban soldiers with the intention of impregnating them to dilute genetic heritage and family unity.

With a sigh, Luka turned the knob on the radio, until the announcer's voice was just audible. Željko never came upstairs, but still, better safe than sorry. Bad enough he was branded Bokan like an enemy the Eršbans had tarred and feathered. No point bringing extra attention and trouble, getting caught listening to the ‘subversive’ broadcast.

He'd fucked up. If he'd kept his 1250 Dinar instead of enrolling in school, he'd have money to get out of Sovići. Or, at least if he'd sent the money to his parents, like usual, he could imagine those 1250 Dinar buying them train or bus tickets, or bribing a Vega soldier to leave them in peace, the way Amar had done. As he'd delivered stacks of freshly bleached towels to the shop the day before, Amar had furtively whispered to Luka how, the previous week, two men in red uniforms had shown up at his apartment, terrifying his wife and two toddlers. “I gave them two hundred Dinar. It was all I had. If they come back before I get paid next week, I don't know what will happen to us.”

Was Luka's family safe? He'd sent them three letters, but as usual, he hadn't heard anything back. At least Bijeljina was in the far south, away from the concentration of violence in the north. These days, just the thought of his sisters made his guts twist and roll. He hadn't seen them in so long, he could only picture them as the little girls they'd still been when he'd visited four years ago. The first and last visit, because his father heard a cluster of neighbors whispering and laughing, and he told Luka not to come back. His mother had promised to visit him in Sovići the following year, but never came.

When his sadistic brain brought shadowy soldier figures into the frame of memory where Esma, Hana and Ajla giggled and played, he busied himself so there was no room in his mind for fear-forged fantasies. On the radio, a reporter and a representative from the Bokan resistance discussed the odds of an intervention by a UN peacekeeping force, while he wiped his dining table clean, then set out his colored pencils, pastels and water-colors for his next class assignment.

This week, each student had to choose a painting, and attempt three faithful reproductions, using a different medium for each. Luka pulled the thick library book on Hieronymous Bosch from his backpack, and flipped through its smooth, glossy pages until he found
The Haywain Triptych
, and the full-page detail of two fantastical beast-men, one like a deer, the other with a pointy rat's face and the thick, muscular legs of a man, bearing away a naked, all-too human victim before an armed mob. Luka had loved Bosch since the first time he'd glimpsed a book of his work at the library when he was fifteen, but in the last few months the sordid imagery of paradise decaying into hellish chaos felt suddenly prescient and weirdly, personally significant. Obviously, Xukrasna wasn't the first country to fall to pieces because of religious or ethnic conflicts still festering after hundreds of years, and it was egoistic or just naive, but Luka felt like his favorite artist might have been thinking of Bokana, even thinking of him, when he conjured his magnificent atrocities in oil and canvas five centuries earlier.

On the radio, the clean, studio-transmitted voice of the announcer was intercut at irregular intervals with the garbled accounts of men and women testifying to the barbarities they'd endured at the hands of neighbors, police officers, and soldiers. The warbling voice of a sixty-eight year-old woman broke on a sob as she recounted how her Bokan neighbors were taken away in the middle of the night, and now an Eršban family was living in their apartment, eating their food, using their furniture, which they hadn't paid for and had no right to. The youthful voice of a man mumbled that four soldiers had held him and his family hostage for an hour, making him and his brother do “bad things” to each other, their parents crying and begging while the soldiers joked and laughed.

While Luka worked, the hiss and din of badly-recorded testimony eventually yielded to the clipped elocution of the announcer and a journalist from Reporters Without Borders comparing what was happening in Xukrasna to genocides and ethnic cleansing campaigns waged in the twentieth century. Armenia. The Holocaust. Cambodia. Yugoslavia. Rwanda. Palestine. Darfur. But the nuances of those histories, those statistics, the successes and failures of international intervention were buried. Crushed. Suffocated under the lingering, sickening images flowering from the mumbled, sobbed, hurriedly confessed memories of the women and men who'd fallen prey to the soldiers in red.

*

On Tuesday, when the professor got to Luka's name during roll call, he waved him up to his desk and handed him a slip of green paper. At the top was his name and student number in heavy, inelegant letters, and below, a curt sentence declaring he was to report to the bursar's office. Even though he knew he'd paid and enrolled properly, cold panic sank through Luka's chest and settled in his belly.

“You should go and take care of it now. Take your things with you.”

Luka was about to ask if he could go after class so he wouldn't miss the lecture and discussion, but Professor Stojanovic called the next name on the roll sheet before Luka could find his voice under his panic, and he had the feeling, from the way the professor's focus was fixed on the list of student names, as if he was pretending Luka was already gone, that an appeal would be pointless. Wishing the other students would stop staring, that he could stop blushing, he forced himself down the narrow aisle between drafting tables, stuffed his sketchbook with his three versions of the Bosch painting back into his pack, and left for the bursar's office.

“Your check didn't clear,” the pretty blonde said from behind her enormous metal desk.