Chapter 5: x
The news came in staccato bursts over the next forty-eight hours, each transmission a fresh laceration. The radio and the frantic telephone calls painted a tableau of such grotesque, methodical violence that Vanja’s mind simply refused to assemble the pieces. A two-day siege. Armored vehicles. Grenades launched through windows. Families cornered in basements. The numbers climbed, a grotesque arithmetic: eighteen, twenty-eight, thirty-six. Finally, it settled, a stone sinking to the bottom of a frozen lake. Fifty-eight. Adem, his wife, his brothers, their wives, their children, cousins, neighbors. A whole ecosystem erased.
The survivors were a scant, horrifying footnote. A nephew, somehow alive. A niece, a girl of ten named Donika, found hiding in an outdoor bread oven. A few others, scattered and broken.
Vanja sat at the kitchen table, her hands flat on the wood grain. She had stopped crying hours ago. The tears had been hot and furious, then cold and silent, and now there was nothing, a hollowed-out silence where feeling had been. Lulzim had shattered a chair against the wall. Elsa had not made a sound; she had simply folded in on herself like paper held to a flame.
Bahri moved through the house like a ghost armed with purpose. He spent hours on the phone, his voice a low, continuous growl, coordinating, arguing, receiving reports. His face was a mask of such concentrated fury it seemed carved from stone. When he looked at her, his eyes were unrecognizable, dark pools reflecting a fire she couldn’t see.
He came to their room as dusk bled into another endless night. He didn’t turn on the light. He stood in the doorway, his silhouette black against the grey gloom of the hall.
“Leona called,” he said. His voice was scraped raw. “Her and the children. They crossed into Macedonia. They’re on a plane to Germany now. They’re safe.”
Vanja, who was sitting on the bed staring at her own hands, nodded. A single, sharp movement. “Good.” And she meant it. It was the only clean, good thing left in the world. Five small lives, salvaged from the inferno. It did not feel like a victory. It felt like a pathetic, desperate subtraction from an obscene total.
He crossed the room in two strides. He didn’t kiss her. He fisted his hands in the front of her sweater, the wool rough against his knuckles, and hauled her to her feet. His breath was hot and smelled of tobacco and cold coffee.
“They are animals,” he spat, his face inches from hers. “You see? You see what they do?”
She saw the agony in him, the grief transmuting into a berserker’s rage. She brought her hands up, not to push him away, but to grip his wrists, her nails biting into his skin. “I see.”
“Do you?” He shook her, just once, a jarring rattle. “Your people.”
“They are not my people,” she snarled back, the emotion finally breaking through her numbness. “They are fuckers with guns. Monsters. Just like the monsters on any side of any line.”
He stared at her, his chest heaving. The conflict in his eyes was terrifying—the need to blame warring with the knowledge that she was the one person in the house not echoing his hatred back to him.
He kissed her. It was a collision. Teeth clacked. His tongue forced its way into her mouth, a claiming that was all anger and salt. She met it with equal ferocity, biting his lip until she tasted the coppery tang of his blood. He grunted, a sound of pure approval, and ripped her sweater open. Buttons pinged against the floorboards.
He didn’t bother with the bed. He spun her around, pressing her front against the cold plaster of the wall. His hands shoved her trousers and underwear down over her hips in one brutal yank. The cold air hit her skin, followed immediately by the scorching heat of his body pressed against her from behind. She heard the rasp of his zipper, the rustle of fabric.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t prepare her. He was hard as iron, and he drove into her with a single, brutal thrust that knocked the air from her lungs in a punched-out gasp. It hurt. A sharp, burning tear of protest from her still-tender body. She cried out, her forehead pressed against the wall.
“Bahri—”
“Shut up,” he growled into her ear, his voice vicious, his breath searing her neck. He didn’t pause. He set a punishing rhythm, each slam of his hips driving her flesh against the unyielding wall. “Just fucking take it.”
And she did. The pain was a bright, clarifying thread in the numbness. It was a feeling. It was something. She pushed back against him, meeting his thrusts, a raw and physical argument. Her fingers scraped at the plaster. His hand snaked around her hip, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her mound, finding her clit. His touch was rough, insistent, not meant to please but to dominate, to force a response.
“You wanted to know what war feels like?” he panted, his voice broken. “This is it. It’s this. It’s fucking and tearing and taking.”
He plunged deeper, hitting a spot that made her vision blur. A ragged moan was torn from her throat. The pain was fragmenting, mingling with a terrifying, rising swell of pleasure. It was wrong. It was perfect. It was the only way they could communicate through the shroud of death.
“Come on,” he snarled, his fingers working her ruthlessly. “Come for me. Come while I think about their burned fucking house.”
The obscenity of it, the raw truth, was the final trigger. Her orgasm ripped through her with the violence of a detonation, a wave of shocking, shameful heat that clenched around him. She screamed, a short, choked sound muffled by the wall.
Feeling her convulse around him broke the last of his control. With a guttural roar that was half agony, half triumph, he buried himself to the hilt and came. She felt the hot, pulsing jet of his release inside her, a claiming more profound than any words. He slumped against her, his weight pinning her to the wall, both of them slick with sweat and shuddering.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing in the dark room. The smell of sex and despair was overwhelming.
Slowly, he softened and slipped out of her. He gently pulled her trousers back up over her hips, his movements now oddly tender. He turned her around. In the dim light, she could see the tracks of tears through the grime on his cheeks. He hadn’t made a sound.
He pulled her to the bed. They lay down, not under the covers, still half-dressed. He curled his body around hers, his front to her back, his arm a heavy band across her stomach. He nuzzled his face into her hair.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, the words cracked.
“Don’t be.”
“I hurt you.”
“I wanted you to.” She placed her hand over his, lacing their fingers together. “I needed to feel it, too.”
They lay in silence. The house around them was a tomb. Elsa’s silent weeping from down the hall was the only other sound, a low, constant hum of grief.
“It starts now,” Bahri said into her hair, his voice hollow with certainty. “For real. There is no going back after this. The whole region… it will blow.”
Vanja closed her eyes. She thought of the little girl, Donika, pulled from an oven. She thought of Leona’s fierce hug. She thought of Adem’s hand on her shoulder. I probably won’t see you again.
“What will you do?” she asked, though she already knew.
His arm tightened around her. “What I have to. They will need commanders. They will need everyone.”
“And me?”
He was silent for so long she thought he might not answer. “You stay here. The house is solid. There are supplies. Lulzim and Elsa will be here. It’s… defensible.”
It was a plan, but it was also a confession. He was leaving. He was walking into the fire he had predicted.
“When?” Her voice was small.
“Soon.”
Morning came, grey and indifferent. They dressed in silence. Downstairs, Lulzim was cleaning a rifle at the kitchen table with a monastic focus. Elsa was staring at a blank wall. The radio was off. The silence was a physical presence.
Bahri made coffee. He handed Vanja a cup. Their fingers brushed. The normalcy of the gesture was obscene.
The sound of engines broke the stillness. Not one, but several. Tires on gravel, doors slamming. Bahri was at the window instantly, the curtain pulled back a fraction. His posture shifted, alert but not alarmed.
“Ours,” he said.
Three jeeps and a battered truck were in the driveway. Men in mismatched camouflage and heavy jackets disembarked, their breath fogging in the cold air. They were young, their faces hardened by the last few days’ news. They carried their weapons with a new, casual familiarity.
One of them, a man with a beard and weary eyes, approached the house. Bahri met him at the door. They spoke in low, urgent Albanian. Vanja caught words: “recruitment,” “muster point,” “Štimlje.”
Bahri nodded. He glanced back into the kitchen, his eyes finding Vanja. He gave her a look that was both an apology and a farewell. Then he turned back to the man. “Give me two minutes.”
He came to her. He didn’t kiss her in front of them. He took her hand, his grip firm and warm. “The border crossing to Macedonia near Kumanovo,” he said, his voice low and rapid. “If it gets… if you have to. The name I gave Leona. Use it.”
He was giving her an exit. A final, desperate chance.
“What about you?”
A ghost of his old smile, bleak and beautiful, touched his lips. “I’ll find you when it’s over.” He raised her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles, a strangely formal gesture. Then he released her, turned, and walked out the door.
She watched from the window as he slung a loaded pack into one of the jeeps. He shook Lulzim’s hand, a solemn transfer of responsibility. He did not look back. The vehicles turned around, spitting gravel, and disappeared down the mountain road.
The silence they left behind was different. It was no longer waiting. It was begun.
Lulzim walked back inside, the cleaned rifle in his hands. He looked from Elsa’s catatonic form to Vanja standing at the window.
“We will need to bring in more wood,” he said, his voice practical, dead. “And fill every container we have with water.”
Vanja turned from the window. The empty road was burned into her vision. She nodded, rolling the sleeves of her ripped sweater up her forearms. “Show me where the axes are.”
The axes were in the stone outbuilding where the wine presses stood silent. Vanja hefted one, the weight unfamiliar and solid in her hands. Lulzim showed her the notch in the ancient stump, the scattered debris of old beech logs. She swung. The blade bit into the grain with a satisfying thwack, sending a shock up her arms. She did it again. And again. The rhythmic, physical labor became a prayer, a curse, a way to metabolize the dread that had settled in her bones like lead.
The days bled into a monotonous cycle of preparation. They filled bathtubs, pots, every bucket and bottle with water from the well. They stacked wood until the side of the house looked like a barricade. Elsa emerged from her stupor to silently sort through medical supplies—bandages, alcohol, needles she’d procured from somewhere. The radio stayed off. The news was a poison they could no longer afford to drink.
Vanja woke each morning to the same crushing silence where Bahri’s breathing should have been. The bed was too big, too cold. She wore his sweater, the wool smelling faintly of him, of gun oil and pine. She worked until her muscles screamed, trying to exhaust the fear, the images of Prekaz that played behind her eyes when she closed them. Donika in the oven. Adem’s hand on her shoulder.
He came back two weeks later.
It was near dusk. Vanja was carrying an armload of split wood to the pile, her back aching. She heard the engine—a single motorcycle, the sound ragged and sputtering. She froze, the logs tumbling from her arms. Lulzim was at the door, his rifle raised, then lowered.
Bahri killed the engine and pushed the bike the last few meters into the yard. He was coated in a fine grey dust, his clothes filthy and slept-in. He looked older. Thinner. A raw, fresh scar jagged across his left eyebrow. But his eyes, when they found her, were the same.
He didn’t speak. He just walked to her, his boots crunching on the gravel, and pulled her into him. He smelled of sweat, exhaust, and the cold, metallic scent of fear. He held her so tightly she thought her ribs might crack. She buried her face in his gritty neck and breathed.
Inside, he drank three glasses of water in succession, his throat working. He stared at the table. “It will take a few months,” he said finally, his voice raspy from disuse. “Until the war starts in earnest. But it’s not safe. For anyone. Not anymore.”
Lulzim nodded, his expression grim. “The checkpoints?”
“Serb police. Army units moving into position. It’s a fucking net.” Bahri looked at Vanja. “You can’t stay.”
She said nothing. Elsa put a plate of bread and cheese in front of him. He ate mechanically.
That night, in their room, she undressed him. The dust came off in clouds. She washed him with a cloth and a basin of water, tracing the new lines of tension in his shoulders, the stark outline of his ribs. He watched her, his gaze heavy.
When she was done, he pulled her onto the bed. This time was different from the fury against the wall. It was slow, a deep and searching reclamation. He kissed every inch of her skin as if memorizing it. He entered her with a shuddering gentleness that made her want to weep. They moved together in a silent, liquid rhythm, a wordless conversation of touch. She came with a soft, broken cry, her body arching into his. He followed, spilling inside her with a groan that was almost a sob, his face pressed into the hollow of her neck.
Afterward, in the tangled damp of the sheets, she spoke into the darkness.
“I want us to marry.”
He went very still. “What?”
“You heard me. I want us to marry.”
He pushed himself up on one elbow to look at her. In the moonlight, his face was all planes and shadow. “Okay,” he said softly. “Zemre, okay. We will. But after the war.”
“No,” she said, her voice firm. “Before.”
“Why would we do that?” he asked, confusion and exhaustion warring in his tone. He glanced at the window, as if the night itself held the calendar. It was June, 1998. Time felt both endless and evaporating.
Vanja sat up, the sheet pooling at her waist. She had rehearsed this. “I refused to go to Serbia. Or to Basel. Or to Germany when my mother begged. She went to see Adem’s children in Frankfurt instead. They told her things.” Vanja’s voice hitched. “About what happened. What they saw.”
She was crying now, silent tears tracking through the dust on her own cheeks.
“What did I do?” he asked, his hand reaching for her face, thumb brushing a tear away.
“You don’t want to marry me,” she said, the words a child’s accusation, layered over a bedrock of adult terror.
He pulled her to him. “Of course I do. I love you more than myself. But now is not the time for a wedding. It’s a time for hiding, for moving at night.”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
The words hung between them, a tiny, undeniable bomb.
He froze. His hand stopped on her back. She felt his heart hammer against her chest. His breath caught. A myriad of expressions flashed across his face—shock, a burst of wild, incredulous joy, then a plummeting, cold terror that eclipsed it all.
“You are going to Germany,” he said, the words leaving him in a rush. “I won’t have you stay here, pregnant. Not a chance.”
“Not unless you marry me,” she said, her stubbornness a wall he couldn’t breach. “And once I give birth, I’ll be back.”
He kissed her. It was a desperate, sealing kiss, a transfer of responsibility and hope and panic. He tasted her tears. When he pulled back, his own eyes were glistening. “A week,” he whispered, his forehead against hers. “We need a judge who will not ask questions. I know a man in Prizren.”
A week later, they were married.
It was in a dusty, back-room office that smelled of mildew and stale cigarettes. The judge was an old man with trembling hands and frightened eyes who kept glancing at the door. Lulzim and Elsa stood as witnesses, their faces solemn. Vanja wore a simple linen dress she’d found in a trunk. Bahri wore his cleanest shirt.
They spoke the required words in Albanian Unë… I. Pranoje… accept. The official stamped two papers with a sound that echoed in the silent room. There was no ring. No kiss. The judge nodded briskly, gathered his things, and hurried them out.
Outside, the summer sun was blinding. Bahri took her hand, his grip tight. “Now you go,” he said, his voice thick.
“Now I go,” she agreed.
Lulzim would drive her to the border crossing near Kumanovo the next morning. The plan was set. That final night, they lay in bed, his palm spread over her still-flat stomach.
“A boy,” he murmured.
“Or a girl.”
“A fighter,” he said, and she didn’t know if he meant the child or himself.
At first light, she climbed into Lulzim’s car with a single bag. She looked back at the house, at Bahri standing on the steps, growing smaller and smaller until the road curved and he was gone.
She did not look away from the window until the last slate roof of the estate vanished behind a fold of land. The silence in the car was a shared animal, panting between them. Lulzim drove with a grim focus, his eyes constantly scanning the empty road, the wooded verges. They did not speak. The border crossing near Kumanovo was a choked, nervous line of vehicles filled with women, children, and the old. Their papers—Vanja’s Swiss passport, the hastily-inked marriage certificate—were examined by a weary Macedonian border guard who looked at her pregnant belly, then at her surname, then back at her face. He said nothing. He stamped the passport and waved them through.
Germany was a blur of sterile corridors and overwhelming quiet. Bahri’s parents lived in a small, immaculate apartment in Frankfurt, their lives defined by the quiet trauma of displacement. His mother, Shpresa, was a woman of few words and deep, observing eyes. His father, Ndue, had a engineer’s hands that now fidgeted without blueprints to study. Leona was there, a frantic, loving presence, having settled the five children from Prekaz with a network of sympathetic families. She hugged Vanja and wouldn’t let go. “He is alive?” she whispered in German. “Yes.” “Then you live, too.”
The pregnancy was a foreign country. Vanja’s body swelled, a daily betrayal of the world she’d left behind. She received two phone calls. The first, in October, was a static-filled connection from a payphone. “Are you eating?” Bahri’s voice was tinny and far away. “Yes.” “Is it…?” “Kicking. All the time.” A long pause filled with broken noise. “I found the cousin. Dragana. She is safe in Pristina. I left food.” Vanja closed her eyes, tears leaking onto the receiver. “Thank you.” “I have to go.” The line went dead. The second call came in late December, just as the first hard pains clawed at her back.
The birth was a marathon of screaming and sweat and blood. Leona held one hand, Shpresa mopped her brow. Vanja pushed for what felt like hours, her world narrowing to a fiery, tearing point of pressure. When the midwife placed the damp, squalling being on her chest, the universe did not right itself. It simply split in two. He was wrinkled and furious, with a shock of dark hair and Bahri’s exact bow-shaped mouth. “Dren,” Vanja gasped, the name they’d chosen in a whisper months ago. “Lightning.”
She cried, great heaving sobs that had nothing to do with joy and everything to do with a rending, irreparable love. Leona pressed the telephone to her ear. Bahri’s voice was shattered glass. “Vanja?” “A son.” She could hear him breathing, a ragged, wet sound. “He’s here. Dren is here.” A choked sound came down the line, maybe a sob, maybe a prayer. “I have to go,” he whispered again, the war stealing even this. “Zemra ime. My heart.”
The winter was a cocoon of milky numbness and relentless, beautiful demand. Dren fed. He slept. He grew. Vanja moved through the apartment in a daze, her body a vessel that had delivered its cargo and now felt hollowed out and strange. In February, she packed a single bag. Ndue stood in the doorway of the neat guest room, his face ashen. “This is crazy,” he said, his voice trembling. “Please stay. The baby needs you here, where it is safe.”
She adjusted the strap of the bag on her shoulder. Dren was asleep in Shpresa’s arms in the next room. “I can’t. My mother will come. My father, too. They will help you with Dren.” She touched his rough cheek. “Please. Take care of him.”
Leona drove her to the airport, crying the whole way. “Tell him I have new photos. Many photos.” “I will.”
Pristina in late winter was a city holding its breath under a leaden sky. The safe house was a different one, a cold apartment smelling of damp concrete and boiled coffee. When Bahri came in, he stopped dead in the doorway. He was thinner, all sharp angles and tense muscle under his fatigues. He looked older than time. His eyes found hers and filled instantly.
He didn’t speak. He crossed the room and pulled her into him, his body shaking. He cried silently, his tears hot against her neck. She held him, feeling the new, terrifying hardness of him, the weapons and the worry. “You’re so thin,” she murmured.
He pulled back, his hands cradling her face as if she were made of eggshell. “You are so beautiful it hurts to look at you.”
She showed him the photographs, a stack of glossy squares. Dren in a bassinet. Dren with sleepy eyes. Dren with a gummy, accidental smile. Then she set up the small VHS recorder on the table. The television screen flickered to life with the shaky, intimate scene: Leona cooing in Albanian, bouncing a three-month-old Dren on her knee. His dark eyes stared curiously at the camera, a tiny fist waving.
Bahri made a sound like he’d been punched. He watched the two-minute tape three times in total silence, his gaze devouring every pixel. When it ended, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and put his head in his hands.
That night, they made love with a slow, desperate hunger that felt like surgery. He peeled her clothes off and then stared, his gaze tracing the new landscape of her body—the softer belly, the fuller, blue-veined breasts. He kissedher hips like they were sacred text. When he entered her, she gasped. It had been months. He was careful, achingly so, moving with a reverent slowness that soon fractured into need.
“Fuck,” he whispered, his control breaking. “I can’t go slow. I need you.” He flipped her onto her hands and knees on the narrow bed. He drove into her from behind, his grip on her hips possessive and sure. The slap of skin, their mingled sweat, the crude, animal sounds of it—it was a claiming, a confirmation they were both still alive. She came with a sharp cry, her inner muscles clenching around him. He followed, pumping his release deep inside her with a groan that seemed to come from the earth itself.
In the grey morning light, she felt a familiar, dull ache in her breasts. A damp, spreading circle appeared on the front of her shirt. Milk. She sat up, looking down at the wet patches, and a wave of grief so acute it stole her breath hit her. She wept, soundlessly, for the son whose weight she could still feel in her arms, for the brutal choices that stained everything.
Bahri woke, saw her tears, saw the milk. He pulled her back down, holding her, saying nothing. She didn’t leave that day.
The war arrived with a sonic boom. It started in March. The first NATO jets screamed across the sky, distant thunder followed by plumes of black smoke rising on the horizon. The ground shook. The apartment windows rattled in their frames. Bahri was gone for days at a time, coming back reeking of cordite and mud. One night, he shook her awake. “Get dressed. Come with me.”
They drove through blacked-out streets to a sector of the city she didn’t know. He parked behind a shell-damaged building. “Wait here.” He disappeared into the dark. Ten minutes later, he emerged with an older Serbian man, a woman, and two teenagers, their faces pale with fear. Bahri loaded them into the back of a different, beat-up car parked nearby. He spoke to the man, Mitar, in terse Serbian. “Go to Montenegro. Now. Don’t use the main road.”
He got back in their car. Vanja was trembling. “Dragana’s family is already gone,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I got them out last week.” He started the engine. “I don’t kill civilians. I won’t. I know some do. On both sides.” He finally looked at her, his eyes gleaming in the dark. “You know that, too.”
She did. The knowledge was a cold stone in her gut. For two months, the bombs fell. They lived in the cellar, the world above them a cacophony of destruction. They learned to sleep through the concussions. They learned the difference between incoming and outgoing. They loved in the dark, fast and fierce, a fuck-you to the oblivion outside.
Then, in June, the strange silence came. The guns stopped. The jets vanished. They climbed out of the cellar into a world of shattered glass and eerie calm. KFOR soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms patrolled the streets in armored vehicles. The Serbian army was gone. Retired. The air itself felt different, lighter, strained with a disbelieving hope. They stood in the ruined street, squinting in the sunlight, and just breathed.
The first thing they did was go to Prekaz. The compound was a skeletal ruin of blackened stone and twisted metal. A simple mound of earth, adorned with fifty-eight small stones, lay to the side. Adem’s grave. They stood before it for a long time. Bahri placed a hand on the raw soil. He said nothing. Vanja placed a single, early wildflower she’d picked from the roadside. The wind picked up, carrying the scent of ash and, faintly, of the pine forests that still clung to the hills.
Two days later, they boarded a plane. Vanja held Bahri’s hand during takeoff, his knuckles white. He had never flown before. He stared out the window as Kosovo dwindled beneath them, a green and wounded patchwork. He did not let go of her hand.
They landed in Frankfurt. Leona was there, jumping and waving, her face streaked with tears. Shpresa and Ndue stood behind her, looking older, holding a bundled blanket between them.
Bahri stopped walking, his feet rooted to the shining airport floor. Vanja tugged him forward gently. As they neared, Shpresa shifted the blanket. Dren, now six months old, with serious dark eyes and his father’s mouth, stared out at the noisy world. He saw Bahri. He blinked.
Bahri made a small, broken sound. He reached out one trembling finger. Dren’s tiny hand uncurled from the blanket and wrapped around it. Bahri fell to his knees right there on the terminal floor, his face collapsing into his free hand, his shoulders shaking. Vanja knelt beside him, her arm around him, her cheek against his head, their son’s fist holding them both, a tiny, undeniable anchor.