The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (6 page)

But the mention of the man's name—hearing
Haris
pass from her lips—seemed to prod Vlado out of his accustomed trench, and she out of hers, and from that day on neither was quite as insistent about documenting their two years apart. Gradually, those discussions faded, and with them the name of Haris.

It was not the last time Vlado would hear the name, however, and he regretted that all the more now that the American, Pine, had arrived on his doorstep.

He had met Haris more than four years following his return—a mere month ago—in a place called Noski's. It was a bar, one of the few where a Bosnian could hang out and not worry about being beaten within an inch of his life by the neighborhood pack of young toughs. Vlado went there sometimes to read outdated newspapers and magazines from Zagreb and even from Belgrade piled at the end of the bar. Sometimes there was a fairly recent copy of the Sarajevo daily,
Oslobodjenje.
The manager, an old barman from Prijedor, never seemed to mind that Vlado seldom bought a drink. He knew most of his customers couldn't afford it, and the few who could more than made up for the others by drinking themselves to oblivion, day after day.

Vlado was sitting at his customary roost when a voice hailed him from behind.

“You're Vlado.”

He turned to see a thin, grizzled man in jeans and a scuffed black leather jacket, hair unkempt, eyes that would have been a nice calming blue if they hadn't been bloodshot. But they were eyes that wouldn't let you look away, and Vlado knew exactly who this must be.

“And you're Haris.”

The man nodded. “I'll buy you a drink. Then I'll tell you a story.”

He sat down at the next stool, smelling of whiskey. But he seemed sober enough, neither swaying nor slurring his words.

“I don't want a drink,” Vlado said. “And I definitely don't want a story.”

“It's a story for a policeman, and you're the only one I know. And, okay, it's a story for a husband, too. A husband who only wants to read his newspaper and go home to his wife and daughter.” He turned to the bartender. “One beer, please. And a whiskey.” Then, turning back to Vlado, “Just hear me this once. That's all I ask.”

Those eyes again, pleading from some far and distant hill in the man's past.

“Okay. Just this once.”

Haris waited for his whiskey, then began.

“I came here with my sister in late '92. My sister Saliha. From Bijeljina. We grew up there. Went to school there, got jobs, made friends. Most of our friends were Serbs. When the war started, I knew we would all be fine, because everyone knew us. No one would let anything happen.”

He took a long swallow of the whiskey, wincing, then wiping his mouth with a sleeve before he continued.

“Saliha was raped in the first month of the war. Five times by a group of men in a room where they kept her for two days. I was put in the concentration camp at Keraterm. They loaded fifty of us on a bus and put us behind a fence. Nothing to eat for four days while they took us out, two at a time, beat us around the head, chained us to trucks. A few of us they shot. Me they just beat. Legs and face. Left us behind the wire for five weeks until one day a commander drives up and sets us loose. All the ones who hadn't died, anyway. But they took our papers, our money, then put us on trucks and drove us up to the front lines, where they dumped us out and told us never to come back.

“Snipers shot two of us while we were walking to the other side, stumbling across the lines. Another one stepped on a mine. The UN was there and everything, but there was nothing they could do. I think someone filed a protest later.”

He sipped the whiskey again, gestured toward the foaming mug of beer. “Please. You will need to drink if you're going to hear all this.” He put a crumpled bill on the bar for the first round.

“I found my sister three weeks later in a school gym where she was sleeping on the floor. The place was full of refugees. Hundreds. Whole families on towels and blankets, laundry hanging between the basketball hoops.

“Lice, bad food, every smell you can imagine. That was life in the gym. My sister wouldn't talk to anyone. Just lay there all day on a cot, eyes open. I slept on the floor next to her for a week. Then on the eighth day she finally stands up and decides to take a walk outside. It is snowing and she is barefoot, but she just keeps walking while I follow her, afraid to say a word. Two blocks and she stops and looks down at her feet and begins to cry. I carry her back, and on the way she tells me what had happened, whispers it into my ear like a child telling her father she's done something bad. She knew the men, three of them anyway. Knew their faces and names. One taught our nephew in school. One grew up on the farm next to our uncle's. I used to play football with him at school. The other guy was from the village, a baker.” He paused, shaking his head. “Five months later we came here. This was late '92. And for a year she was pretty much the same, not going anywhere, just lying around the apartment, watching TV.

“Then one day it was sunny and warm, a spring morning after some rain, so I took her for a walk, almost had to push her out the door and carry her down the steps. But she started looking around. We stopped to sit on a bench awhile, across from a bus stop. Then we decided to catch a bus, to go for a ride. We crossed the street and she looked at the crowd, seven or eight people waiting for the bus. And that's when she saw him, one of the men, not one of the three she knew but their leader, the main one, the one who had the scar and wore a black beret, leaning into her face with brandy on his breath, sweating onto her for twenty minutes. She tried to scream, tried to tell me who it was, but nothing came out of her mouth until the bus had gone and the man was on it. She told me his name was Popovic, and I'd seen him, too.

“So the next day I go to the bus stop again, waiting for him. Nine hours I'm there. Then the next day, and then the day after that. I decide I will go every day until he comes back, like it's my job, because I didn't have a real job anyway. Just construction work without papers, tearing out old walls and plaster, and half the time we didn't get paid. So I kept going to the same corner. And that is how I met Jasmina.”

Hearing him say her name was a jolt. But Vlado kept quiet, waiting for Haris to continue. He'd stopped for another swallow of whiskey.

“She'd seen me, I guess, seen me on that corner day after day, like someone obsessed. And I
was
obsessed. Crazy and dirty. Same coat, rain or shine. Same little water bottle tucked under my arm with a newspaper.

“She came up to me one day, curious more than anything, and asked who I was looking for. After days of being ignored by almost everyone in Berlin it seemed like some kind of revelation, like I'd been invisible to everyone but her. And when you're feeling like I was, so focused on something that you can't see anything else, when someone actually notices what you're up to, it seems like magic. Like they have powers no one else has. So we talked. And I relaxed a little. I felt almost normal for those few minutes before her bus came. And the next day we talked again, and I still hadn't told her why I was there, or who I was after. But she told me she was waiting on someone, too. I think that morning I might even have shaved. Changed my shirt. Wiped off my coat. I don't really remember now. But on the fifth day she brought me an apple. I must have looked pretty pale. And in a few more days I stopped going there altogether. So we would meet instead in other places, more normal places, and we became friends.”

That was all Vlado cared to hear on the subject. He started to speak, but Haris raised his hand.

“Please. Another beer. I pay, you listen. I am through with the part about your wife, but I had to tell you that much, so you would know.”

The bartender put down another round, Haris another crumpled bill.

“Later I heard more about this man, Popovic. It wasn't the name he used here, and people who knew him said he had gone back, back to Bosnia and the fighting. He had his own unit, his own men with their own black uniforms and a nickname. Popi's Lions. But by then I had a life again. I was working in old buildings. Painting, or stripping out insulation. Paid in cash at the end of every day, or sometimes not paid. My sister didn't care. She stayed at home, quieter than ever, the TV on. After seeing Popovic that time she wouldn't leave the house again. But I kept working. And, yes, sometimes I saw Jasmina.”

It was the only time Haris came close to raising his voice, a brief note of defiance.

“Then, in early '94, the person she'd been waiting for came home. And for me, that was the end of Jasmina. She called me—only once— and said good-bye, said good luck. And for a while it seemed that was the end of life. So I kept trying to find jobs. Made a little more money. And forgot about women, and even forgot about this Popovic. Until three weeks ago, when I saw him again. I'd heard about him some, like lots of people. Someone had told me that in the last year of the war he'd been at Srebrenica when the city fell, leading his unit again, helping round up men and boys. Looting, killing, doing whatever it is he did. Other people said later he must have gone to Belgrade, or even to Kosovo.

“But now it was peacetime and there he was near the same bus stop as before, this time walking across the street toward the U-Bahn. He was in a hurry. Before I'd always worried I might not recognize him if I saw him again, that his face might have gone out of my head for good, just to torment me, but even after more than four years I knew him right away, and knew that he hadn't seen me watching him. So I followed him, got on the U-Bahn a car behind his. Watched him through the windows and got off at the same stop. A long ride, a couple of changes. Then half an hour of walking and he's on the Ku'damm. And by now I'm looking out of place, I'm sure, a grimy Bosnian on this nice street of shops and theaters. The West Berliners with all their money and bored expressions, and I'm half a block behind him, trying not to lose him.

“He goes into the KaDeWe, the big department store, and for a few minutes I couldn't see him. I thought I'd start crying right there in the store if I lost him after all that. Then I saw his head across the counters, heading toward an escalator. He went to the café, upstairs at the top of the store, all those plants under a glass roof. He sat down. He was waiting for someone, so I went to another table. I had to buy something, or they would have kicked me out. I took five marks out of my pocket for a coffee, and it drains me for the rest of the week.”

Vlado couldn't help but think of the bottle of Chanel, which must have drained him for a good month.

“I watch him eat his schnitzel, his pastry, his Coke, and his coffee. He spends what must be twenty marks just having a snack, and he keeps looking at his watch until finally a woman comes and sits down with him. Nice-looking. Probably a Bosnian, but I couldn't be sure because I couldn't hear what they were saying. But she was done up. A nice dress and black stockings. Lipstick. Very nice, and she was his. She belonged to the rapist, the killer. Gave him a little kiss, then they talked for a while, a lot of smiling with his little smirk. And later she said good-bye. I think she must have worked there. Then he walked back, same way he'd come. Same U-Bahn stations. Same stop at the end, and now I'm excited. Because now I know he's going home.

“He walks into a house. A building like yours. And I was almost in a panic because I didn't know what to do about the elevator. If I get on it with him he will recognize me, I am almost sure, or will see something in my eyes and know I'm crazy enough to kill him. I felt like I was about to lose him after all of this. And then, my lucky day. Movers are using one elevator. Loading some big piece of furniture. The other one is broken. Kaput. So he took the stairs, and I stayed one flight back, tiptoeing so I don't make noise. I heard the door open at the fourth floor, and I ran up behind as it shut. I look down the hall in time to see a door closing behind him, and I get the number and check the name on the door and the mailbox. It was fake, of course, because I knew his real name. I had heard it many times, had even read it in the newspapers.

“So, then. What to do next? First I tell my friend Huso, because he was from Srebrenica. He'd run through the woods for four days, trying to get away from there. And he had seen this man Popovic with the crowds of Chetniks, putting people onto buses, calling men and boys out of the woods. Both his brothers went, but he kept running. He made it to Tuzla, but they never did. They got on the buses. No one ever saw them again.

“Huso says all we need to do is tell the police. He says we tell them, then they tell the war crimes tribunal, then someone will come and arrest him. So we did that, the very next day. We waited two hours at the police station, and you would have thought we were thieves the way they acted. Like we were dirty and they just wanted to put us in jail or send us home, all the way back to Bosnia. But finally they took our information. They said they'd make a phone call.”

“And then?” Vlado asked. By now the policeman in him was hooked. He swallowed some beer, not taking his eyes off Haris.

“And then, nothing. Two weeks go by and I check on him every day, just to make sure he is still here. Every day he goes to see the same woman, but in different places. Sometimes he spends the night with her. Sometimes she comes back with him. He wears the same nice clothes and spends his marks like they mean nothing at all. But no one has come to arrest him or take him away. And Huso and I, we've started to think that no one ever will.”

Haris paused, as if reluctant to continue. He asked for another whiskey, then looked straight at Vlado.

“So now you want me to do something about it,” Vlado said. “Because I used to be a policeman.”

“Because you know how these things are done. Making arrests. Bringing people to justice. You've been a part of that.”