Chapter 2: The War Council Below
The silence in the kitchen after her words was total. Rasim stared at her, the color draining from his face. The other men had gone still as statues.
“Don’t ever,” Rasim said, his voice low and shaking with a fury she had never heard from him, “say such a stupid thing again. Do you understand me?” He took a step toward her, not threateningly, but with an intensity that pinned her to the spot. “I would rather cut off my own hand.”
One of the other men, the one with the cut, shifted. “Rasim. This is a problem.”
“It’s my problem, Ardian,” Rasim snapped, not taking his eyes off Vanja. “She is my family’s guest. She is under my protection. That is the end of it.”
“She heard,” Ardian persisted.
“She heard a place name. She heard nothing of value. She is a politics student from Switzerland. What is she going to do? Write a memo?” The sarcasm was sharp, desperate. He was arguing for her life in front of her, and the sheer terror of that knowledge turned Vanja’s legs to water.
She found her voice, aiming for a steadiness she didn’t feel. “I am going back to my room. I will pack. You are right. I cannot stay here.”
She turned, forcing herself to walk, not run, back toward the hallway. Her back felt exposed, a target. She heard the low, urgent restart of conversation behind her, Rasim’s voice overriding the others.
Upstairs, her hands fumbled. She stuffed clothes into her backpack, her movements jerky. The pretty room was now a cell. Five minutes later, a soft knock.
It was Rasim. He leaned against the doorframe, looking exhausted. “We leave in ten minutes. Just you and me.”
“Where are we going?” Her voice was flat.
“To Prekaz.”
A cold laugh escaped her. It sounded unhinged, even to her. “You are taking me to Adem Jashari. For what? A welcoming party?”
He flinched as if she’d struck him. “Stop it. Just stop. You are going to my cousin’s house. My mother’s sister. It is a family home, in the village. It is… safer. For you, and for my father.” He rubbed his face. “They are good people. They are not involved in… this. They are just living there.”
“And you think that will matter, when it starts?” She couldn’t help it. The vision was too clear: a village house, ordinary, surrounded by orchards. Then smoke, and the distant crack-crack-crack of rifles she knew were already being cleaned and distributed.
“It has to matter,” he said, and it sounded like a prayer. “Get your coat.”
The goodbye to Besim and Valbona was rushed, a silent pantomime in the dim front hall. Besim hugged her tightly, his old-man smell of tobacco and mint filling her senses. He said nothing, but his eyes said everything: sorrow, fear, a plea for forgiveness. Valbona pressed a cloth-wrapped bundle into her hands—bread, cheese, some apples. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
Then she was back in the Yugo, the engine coughing to life. The two other men were gone, vanished into the twilight. It was just them. They drove in a silence thicker than the frozen fog gathering in the hollows of the fields.
The road north was bad, a winding thread through the dark hills. The car’s headlights cut a feeble path through the gloom.
“Why are you doing this?” Vanja asked after an hour, the question hanging in the warm, oily air of the car.
“Doing what?”
“Any of it. Bringing me. Being… with them.” She gestured vaguely into the darkness, toward the idea of the men in the sitting room.
Rasim was quiet for a long time. The wipers squeaked against a fine, icy drizzle. “You remember when we were kids? That summer the cow got stuck in the ditch behind the house?”
She nodded, a small smile touching her lips despite herself. “You said you could pull it out with rope. You nearly got trampled.”
“And you ran and got my father and Uncle Besim. You were ten. You weren’t scared. You just saw a problem and went to fix it.” He glanced at her. “You were always like that. A little kind girl, straight and smart. You didn’t see a Serbian kid and an Albanian kid. You just saw two idiots and a cow.”
“That was a different world,” she whispered.
“It was last week,” he said, bitterness edging his voice. “That’s the joke. It was always last week. But now… there is a ditch. And the ditch is everywhere. And someone has to pull us out, or we all drown in it. They,” he said, meaning the men, his cause, “they are the rope. A rough, ugly rope. But it is the only one we have.”
“And I am the cow,” Vanja said.
He smiled, a real one this time, brief and tired. “No. You are the one who runs for help. But there is no one to run to anymore, Vanja. That is what you don’t understand. There are no grown-ups coming.”
The truth of it sat between them, cold and final. He was choosing a side because neutrality was a fantasy. And she, by her blood and her history and her cursed knowledge, was on the other.
“Will I see Bahri there?” she asked, the name foreign on her tongue.
Rasim’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Maybe. His family has land near there. He moves around. Why?”
“No reason.”
He shot her a look. “It is a reason. He is not a man for… distractions.”
“I am not a distraction. I am a problem. He made that quite clear.”
“Good,” Rasim said, but it lacked conviction.
They lapsed back into silence. She dozed fitfully, her head against the cold window, jarring awake every time the car hit a deep pothole. The world outside was a black nothingness, punctuated occasionally by the lone, yellow light of a remote farmhouse.
She woke properly when the car slowed, turning off the main road onto a narrower, rougher track. It was still dark, but a pale, milky pre-dawn glow tinged the eastern sky. She could make out the shapes of houses, clustered closer together. Stone walls. Bare fruit trees.
Prekaz.
It looked like any other sleeping village. But Vanja’s skin prickled. The knowledge was a physical weight. This was the heart. This was where the first major earthquake would rupture. The silence felt different here—not peaceful, but watchful.
Rasim pulled up in front of a two-story stone house with a sloped roof and a wide, covered porch. A dog barked once, then recognized the car and fell silent.
“Come,” he said, his voice soft.
The door opened before they reached it. A woman in her fifties, wrapped in a thick dressing gown, her hair in a long braid, stood there. Her face was kind, etched with the same weary lines as Valbona’s. Behind her, a man peered out.
“Ajmone, Flamur,” Rasim said, greeting his aunt and uncle. “This is Vanja. The one I told you about.”
Ajmone’s eyes took her in, a flicker of surprise—at her height, her face, her obvious foreignness—subdued by innate hospitality. “Come in, come in, you are frozen. Rasim, you drove all night? Madness.”
The house was warm, smelling of woodsmoke and dried herbs. It was simpler than Besim’s, older. They sat at a heavy wooden table in the kitchen, and Ajmone set about making coffee without asking, the ritual immediate and comforting.
“You will stay in Shpresa’s room,” Ajmone said, indicating upstairs. “She is in Tirana at university. It is quiet. You are safe here.”
Vanja nodded, muttering thanks, the words sticking in her throat. Safe. The concept was absurd. She was in the epicenter.
Flamur, a quiet man with thick hands, studied her. “You are the Serbian girl who wants to protect graves.”
It wasn’t a question. News had traveled. She met his gaze. “Yes.”
He nodded slowly, as if confirming a curious but ultimately minor fact. “Respect for the dead is a good thing. It used to be a normal thing.” He sighed, sipping the coffee his wife placed before him. “Now, everything is a political thing.”
Rasim stood. “I must go. I have… things.”
“You will sleep first,” Ajmone insisted.
“I can’t.”
The three adults exchanged a look that excluded Vanja, a look of shared, grim understanding. Rasim walked to the door. He paused, turning back to Vanja.
“You will be okay here. Listen to them. Do not go wandering. This is not Basel.”
“I know what it is,” she said, and the certainty in her voice made him pause again.
He gave a final, curt nod and was gone, the door closing softly behind him. The sound of his car engine faded into the waking sounds of the village: a rooster, a distant tractor, the soft murmur of a language that was not her own, in a place that was destined to become a synonym for martyrdom and massacre.
Ajmone showed her to the room. It was a young woman’s room, frozen in time—posters of pop stars, a small desk, a neat bed. Vanja put her bag down.
“Rest,” Ajmone said, patting her arm. “Later, we eat.”
Alone, Vanja went to the window. The dawn was properly breaking, washing the village in a cold, gray light. She could see other houses, orchards, the narrow ribbon of the road. It looked peaceful.
Then she saw it. On a hillside at the edge of the village, a larger, compound-style house. Even from this distance, she could see figures moving in the courtyard. More than usual for this hour. A certain organized bustle. And though she could not see his face, she saw the tall, broad-shouldered silhouette of a man standing apart, watching the road, one hand raised to shield his eyes from the rising sun.
She knew the posture. The arrogant, alert stance. It was him.
He was here. And he was, she realized with a sinking certainty, not just visiting family. He was standing guard over the very ground where history was about to detonate. Her request to protect the bones of her dead now seemed a faint, pathetic whisper against the gathering storm he was helping to build.
She let the curtain fall back. The room was cold. She crawled under the covers of a stranger’s bed, fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling. Downstairs, she could hear the soft, ordinary sounds of a household beginning its day. Outside, a future of fire and blood was quietly putting on its boots.
And she was right in the middle of it, a ghost wide awake, waiting for the past to catch up.
She slept for two hours, a thin and troubled sleep. The house came alive around her.
She rose, made the bed with hospital corners, and went downstairs. Ajmone was scrubbing potatoes at the sink. Vanja rolled up the sleeves of her sweater. "Let me help."
Ajmone started to protest, then nodded, handing her a knife. They worked in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable. Vanja peeled, finding a strange peace in the mundane rhythm of it. She cleaned the bathroom after, the sharp smell of vinegar cutting through the damp stone smell of the house. She swept the porch. Action, however small, was an antidote to the circling dread.
"You don't have to do this," Ajmone said, watching her wring out a mop.
"I need to do something," Vanja replied, and that was the end of the discussion.
Three days passed this way. A grim, domestic routine. She cooked a vegetarian paszticada using the dried plums and onions in Ajmone's pantry, the rich, sweet smell filling the kitchen. Flamur ate two helpings, smiling for the first time. "A Serbian girl who cooks like an Albanian grandmother," he grunted. "The world is upside down."
On the fourth morning, Ajmone’s arthritis was bad, her hands knotted and stiff. "The store," she sighed, looking at her empty cupboards. "I need oil, flour. Basics."
"I'll go," Vanja said.
Ajmone’s face tightened. "It is not safe for you to go alone."
"It's the village store in the morning. It will be old women and mothers with babies. I'll be quick." She needed the air, needed to see something beyond these four walls. The claustrophobia was becoming a physical pressure.
Reluctantly, Ajmone gave her a list and some money, along with strict instructions. "Go to Salih's, the one by the school. Not the other one. And come straight back."
The cold outside was a shock, clean and biting. She kept her head down, walking briskly past walls stained with damp and political graffiti she didn't let herself read. Salih’s store was a narrow, crowded space smelling of salt and soap. She moved quickly, filling her basket: oil, a bag of flour, some lentils, a bar of dark chocolate for Ajmone.
As she waited to pay, a voice behind her spoke in German. "That’s a Swiss chocolate bar. A woman of taste."
She turned. A man, her age, stood there holding a case of German beer. He was handsome in a polished way, with styled hair and a good wool coat. He looked utterly out of place.
She answered in German out of reflex. "It’s for my host."
"Ah, you're visiting?" His smile was easy, practiced. "From Germany?"
"Switzerland. Basel."
His eyebrows rose. "Really? I work in Düsseldorf. I'm Bekim, just home for a visit. Family, you know." He shifted the beer. "That looks heavy. Let me give you a lift. My car is just outside."
The offer was too smooth, too immediate. Vanja’s internal alarms, already hypersensitive, began to ring. "No, thank you. It's not far."
"Don't be silly. It's freezing, and that flour is five kilos. I insist." He reached for her basket.
She pulled it back, a fraction too quick. His smile didn't falter, but his eyes changed, just for a second. They assessed her, not as a woman, but as an object of curiosity. Or a problem.
"Thank you," she said again, her tone final, switching to English to break the false intimacy of German. "I prefer to walk."
She paid Salih, who watched the exchange with blank eyes, and left without looking back. She felt Bekim’s gaze on her neck all the way to the door.
Back in the warm kitchen, she unpacked the groceries. "I met a man at the store," she said, trying to sound casual. "Bekim. From Germany. He offered me a ride."
Ajmone, who was kneading dough, went perfectly still. Her flour-dusted hands stopped moving. "Bekim? Describe him."
"Dark hair. Nice coat. He said he works in Düsseldorf."
Ajmone slowly wiped her hands on her apron. "Do you know who that is?"
Vanja shook her head.
"That is Bekim Jashari. Hamez's son." Ajmone’s voice was barely a whisper. "He is our cousin. It is the people Rasim is with."
The name landed like a stone in the pit of Vanja’s stomach. Jashari. The compound on the hill. The silhouette at dawn.
"UÇK," Vanja said, the acronym tasting of metal.
Ajmone nodded, a sharp, jerky movement. "Yes. You did good, not letting him take you. You won't go to the store again." She studied Vanja’s face. "Should you leave Kosovo?"
The question hung in the air. Vanja thought of the graves, untended under the winter sky. She thought of Rasim’s face in the car, talking about the ditch. She thought of Bahri’s cold, contemptuous eyes across a smoky room.
"Do you want to leave?" Ajmone asked softly.
Vanja looked out the small window at the gray, unforgiving sky. "No," she said.
Ajmone smiled then, a faint, hard-edged thing. "Good. Then don't." She gestured to the table. "Come, sit. Let us eat. The bread is almost ready."
Vanja sat, the wood of the chair solid and real beneath her. The smell of baking bread filled the room, a simple, defiant promise of continuance. Outside, the world tightened like a fist. But here, for now, there was bread. And a choice, firmly made.