Chapter 4: meeting
The following week stretched, thin and taut as wire. The mother dog, now named Zana by Ajmone, gained weight, her ribs disappearing under a sleek brindle coat. Her remaining pup, a bold little male with one white sock, tumbled around the kitchen. The silence from the Jashari compound was a physical presence. Bekim did not come for his jacket.
Vanja folded the leather jacket carefully. The smell of pine and grease had faded, replaced by the woodsmoke of Ajmone’s hearth. She placed a bar of Swiss milk chocolate, bought in Priština, on top of it.
“We will go today,” Flamur announced over breakfast, stirring his coffee with a slow, deliberate hand. “To take the pups. It is time.”
The air outside was brittle, the sky a flat, unmoving gray. Flamur drove the old Zastava with a grim focus, the two puppies dozing in a cardboard box between them on the bench seat. Vanja held the bundled jacket and chocolate on her lap like an offering.
The Jashari compound felt different. Not empty, but coiled. Men moved with purpose between the low buildings, their breath pluming in short, sharp bursts. She saw Rasim first, loading canvas bags into the back of a muddy tractor. Then she saw Bahri. He stood with his back to a wall, sharpening a long, curved knife on a whetstone. The rhythmic shink-shink sound carried across the yard. He did not look up.
And then Bekim emerged from the main house. He looked older. The open curiosity was gone, replaced by a hardened focus that didn’t fit his face. He saw them and walked over, his movements efficient.
“Flamur. Vanja,” he said, his voice neutral.
“Bekim,” Vanja said, forcing a lightness she didn’t feel. “You didn’t come for your jacket. I’m sorry, I didn’t have the chance to…” She trailed off, her eyes flickering to the men, to Bahri’s rhythmic, unbroken motion.
“It’s okay,” Bekim said. His gaze softened for a second, touching hers. “I understand.”
She understood, too. Something bigger was happening. The air was thick with it. “Here they are,” she said, kneeling to open the box. The pups tumbled out, yipping. She picked each one up, kissed its soft head, and placed them gently in Bekim’s waiting hands. Then she handed him the bag. “Your jacket. And some food for them for the next few days.”
“Thank you,” he said, his fingers brushing hers as he took the bag. The touch was brief, electric.
“Take care,” she said, smiling. She nodded towards Rasim, who had stopped his work and was watching them, his expression unreadable. Bahri finally looked up from his knife. His eyes, cold and clear, met hers across the distance. He gave no sign of recognition.
“Flamur,” a voice said from the doorway of the house. It was a voice that didn’t need to be raised. It stopped the shink-shink of the whetstone. It stopped Vanja’s breath in her throat.
Adem Jashari stood there. He was taller than she remembered from her visions, more solid. His mustache was neatly trimmed, his wool cap pulled low. He wore simple working clothes, but he wore them like a uniform. His eyes, dark green and assessing, swept over Flamur’s car, the puppies, and settled on Vanja.
m“Come in,” he said to Flamur. “Sit with us.” His tone was not warm, but it was not hostile. It was an order that permitted no refusal.. He had a presence, he was handsome even, in a wild way. Then those eyes moved to her. “You too,” he said, not unkindly. “Bekim and my brother have spoken about you. Bahri too.”
Vanja looked at him for the first time, truly looked. This was the man who would become a statue, a song, a battle cry. This was the man who, in a few months, would be dead in these very rooms, his body dragged through this same mud. The knowledge was a sick, spinning weight in her gut. She saw the living man—the slight weariness around his eyes, the strength in his hands—superimposed over the ghost of the corpse from her memories. It was unbearable.
She followed Flamur inside, her legs unsteady.
The main room was warm, crowded with the smell of men, tobacco, and black tea. Hamëz was there, seated by the stove. He gave Vanja a slow, measured nod. Rasim and Bahri filed in behind them, filling the remaining space. Bahri leaned against the far wall, arms crossed, his face a carefully carved mask. He hadn’t looked at her since Adem spoke.
Adem took a seat at the head of the low table. He poured tea from a large copper pot into small glasses, the steam curling in the close air. He handed one to Flamur, then one to Vanja. Their fingers did not touch.
“Your Albanian is excellent,” Adem said to her, sipping his tea. It wasn’t a compliment; it was an observation.
“I listen,” Vanja replied, holding the hot glass. “It’s a beautiful language.”
A faint, grim smile touched Adem’s lips. “Many of your people do not think so. They have tried to make it disappear.” He watched her over the rim of his glass. “Bekim says you saved a dog. Gave it medicine. Paid the vet with Swiss francs.”
“It was a living creature,” she said simply.
“Hamëz says you are not afraid of hard work. That you see things,” Adem continued, his gaze unwavering. “Bahri says you ask questions that have no good answers.”
Now Bahri looked at her. His expression was flat, but a nerve twitched in his jaw.
“I have questions, yes,” Vanja admitted. The heat from the tea was seeping into her palms. “Everyone here must have the same questions. They just don’t ask them out loud.”
The room was utterly still. Flamur shifted uncomfortably beside her.
“What is your question for me?” Adem asked. His voice was quiet, a razor wrapped in silk.
Vanja took a breath. She could feel the future in the room, pressing in from the corners. She could give a safe answer. A political answer. But the words that came out were raw and personal, ripped from the heart of her nightmare.
“Is there a way,” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper, “for your children to grow up?”
The silence that followed was profound. Rasim stared at the floor. Hamëz closed his eyes. Bekim, standing near the door, looked as if he’d been struck.
Adem Jashari placed his tea glass on the table with a precise, soft click. He studied her face, his eyes digging into hers, searching for mockery, for deceit, for the spoiled Swiss girl Bahri must have described. He found only a terrible, knowing anguish.
“That,” he said finally, the word hanging in the smoke-filled air, “is the only question.” He leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight. “The answer, for now, is in God’s hands. And in our own.” He paused, his gaze sweeping the room, encompassing his brothers, his son, the other men. “It is also in the hands of people who see a dog freezing in a field and do not walk past.”
He stood up, the conversation clearly ended. “Thank you for the puppies. They will be cared for. Flamur, walk safely.”
It was a dismissal. Vanja rose, her knees weak. As she turned to go, Adem spoke again, this time directly to her, his voice low.
“The chocolate,” he said. “It was a good thought. He will need sweet things, where he is going.”
Vanja nodded, unable to speak. She felt Bahri’s eyes on her back like a cold spot as she followed Flamur out into the brutal, colorless day.
In the car, Flamur was silent for a long time. He started the engine, the noise shattering the quiet. “That was a dangerous question, Vanja,” he muttered at last, pulling onto the rough track.
“They’re all dangerous questions now,” she said, watching the compound recede in the side mirror. She saw Bekim, a small figure holding the two pups, watching them go. She did not see Bahri.
That night, the dream was not of rivers, but of walls. She was in a small, stone room—the very room she had just left. Adem Jashari was speaking, but his words were holes in the air, silent. She looked at the walls and saw they were not stone, but pages from history books, from newspapers, the ink running like blood. Bahri was there, too, but he was a boy, holding a toy knife. He looked at her with accusation, and then with a sorrow so deep it woke her.
She sat up, gasping. Zana whined from her bed in the corner. The house was silent. Through her small window, she saw a single, lonely light burning in the Jashari compound, a yellow pinprick in the vast, consuming dark. It was the room where Adem had served tea.
Downstairs, she heard the soft scrape of a chair. Then Ajmone’s voice, murmuring to Flamur. A single, clear sentence floated up the stairs.
“They say Bekim is leaving for Germany tomorrow,” Ajmone said. “Before first light.”
Vanja lay back down, her hand on her own throat, feeling the frantic flutter of her pulse. The chocolate, the jacket, the pups—they had been farewell gifts, and she hadn’t even known. The thread of normalcy she had been clinging to was unraveling, strand by strand, and the raw, bloody fabric of what was coming was being revealed beneath.
The light across the fields continued to burn, a watchful, solitary eye. She knew, with a certainty that chilled her marrow, that Bahri was in that lit room. And he was not thinking of chocolate, or puppies, or the strange Serbian girl with too many questions.
He was thinking of the sharp, clean edge of a knife, and the long, cold wait for war.
In that same lit room, Bekim zipped his duffel bag. The chocolate bar was tucked inside, next to the folded Swiss francs she’d given the vet, which he’d secretly retrieved. He couldn’t explain why he needed to keep them.
Adem watched him from the doorway, a solid shadow. “You have everything?”
“I think so.”
“The girl,” Adem said, stepping into the light. “You care for her.”
Bekim didn’t look up, tightening a strap. “Not in that way.”
“She is beautiful,” Adem stated, his tone factual, like noting the weather.
“I have eyes, uncle,” Bekim said, finally meeting his gaze. “But she is not for me.”
“No,” Adem laughed softly, a low, rumbling sound. “Who then?”
“I don’t know.” Bekim’s voice tightened. “But she is kind. She is good. In a way that feels… separate from all this.” He gestured vaguely at the walls, the tension, the waiting.
Adem said nothing. He poured two small glasses of raki from a bottle on the shelf, handed one to his nephew.
“Uncle,” Bekim said, the word straining. “If anything happens… please, make sure she is alright.”
Adem held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded once. A pact, sealed in silence. They drank. The liquor burned a clean, clarifying path down Bekim’s throat.
He left before dawn, headlights off until he reached the main road. He regretted not talking to her more. He regretted not asking her what she truly saw when she looked at them, her golden-green eyes so full of a grief that predated its cause. He regretted many things as the German border drew closer.
He knew he was to stay there, with his uncle and cousins in Stuttgart, just in case. The phrase was a dull, constant throb in his temple. Just in case. It meant everything.
Vanja started running. It was the only thing that settled the frantic hum under her skin. She took the back path behind Ajmone’s house just after sunrise, her breaths pluming in the freezing air, her legs burning with the effort. She pushed harder, trying to outpace the images from her dream—the silent, bleeding walls.
The sky, which had been a clear, hard blue, suddenly bruised. Purple clouds gathered with shocking speed. The first cold drop hit her cheek. Then another. Within seconds, a freezing, relentless rain was sheeting down, soaking through her sweatshirt, blinding her.
Within seconds, a freezing, relentless rain was sheeting down, soaking through her sweatshirt, blinding her. The path turned to slick mud, sucking at her trainers. She stumbled, catching herself on a bare birch branch, its bark slimy under her palm.
A car engine growled behind her, a sound too smooth and deep for the farm vehicles here. Headlights cut through the gray downpour. A dark blue BMW sedan, impossibly clean, pulled alongside her. The passenger window slid down.
“Get in.” Bahri Nika’s voice was flat, his profile stern as he stared straight ahead through the windshield wipers’ frantic beat.
Vanja hesitated, the rain needling her scalp. “I can run back.”
“Get in the fucking car, Vanja. Now.”
The command left no room. She yanked the door open and collapsed into the leather seat, dripping mud and rainwater onto the pristine floor mat. The door thudded shut, sealing her in warm, dry air that smelled of new car and his cologne—something sharp and clean.
He didn’t look at her. He shoved the car into gear, spinning the wheels slightly in the mire before finding purchase. The radio was on low, a Kosovar folk station. Then a sudden burst of static, a sharp, coded Albanian phrase. Bahri’s knuckles whitened on the wheel.
A clearer voice, tight with urgency, cut through: “…patrulla në kodër, policia serbe…” Patrols in the hills. Serbian police.
Bahri cursed under his breath, a hard, guttural word. He immediately swung the wheel hard left, abandoning the track toward the village, and accelerated onto a narrow, overgrown forestry road Vanja had never seen.
“Change of plans,” he said, in English.
They drove in silence for thirty minutes, the BMW handling the rough terrain with a jarring, expensive suspension. Vanja watched the skeletal forest blur past, her heart hammering against her ribs. This was wrong. This was exactly the kind of isolated, unpredictable moment her memories screamed about.
He finally pulled up to a small, solitary house tucked into a dense copse of pine. It was new, raw timber still yellow, with a satellite dish bolted to the side. A safe house.
“Out,” he said, killing the engine.
He was already at the front door, unlocking it. She followed, hugging herself, her soaked clothes clinging to her skin like a cold second layer. Inside was a single, sparse room: a wood stove, a narrow bed, a table, two chairs. A generator hummed somewhere outside, powering a single bare bulb overhead.
Bahri locked the door, slid the heavy bolt across. He walked to a small cupboard, pulled out a thick, grey wool jacket, and tossed it at her. It landed against her chest.
“Take your clothes off,” he said, not looking at her as he shrugged off his own wet coat.
Vanja blinked, clutching the dry jacket. “What?”
“You’re shivering so hard your teeth are chattering. You’ll get sick. Take off the wet things.” He said it like a logistical problem, finally turning to face her. His own shirt was damp at the shoulders. “There’s a blanket on the bed. Change behind the stove if you want privacy.”
Her fingers were numb, clumsy. She turned her back to him, near the iron warmth of the wood stove. She peeled the sodden sweatshirt over her head, her skin erupting in gooseflesh. The sports bra followed. The jeans were a struggle, sticking to her legs. She dropped them in a heap, quickly wrapping the rough wool blanket from the bed around her torso before shucking her underwear from beneath it. She pulled his jacket on. It was massive on her, swallowing her frame, carrying the scent of him—that clean, sharp smell layered with woodsmoke and the damp wool of his own clothes.
He had watched. She felt it. When she turned, his eyes were on her, a dark, unreadable focus that tracked from her bare legs to the collar of the jacket where it swallowed her neck. He had shed his own shirt. His chest was lean, carved with muscle, a faint scar tracing a line down one rib.
“What do we do?” she asked, the words escaping in Serbian, the language of her childhood fear.
He answered in the same language, his accent perfect, colder than the rain outside. “We stay here until it’s all clear. They are sweeping the roads. Looking for any excuse.”
Vanja, acutely aware of the small space, the single bed, and his half-naked proximity, felt a flush of heat spread up her neck. She looked away, toward the bolted door. “How long?”
“As long as it takes.”
The silence stretched, filled only by the patter of rain on the roof and the crackle of the fire in the stove. The tension wasn’t just political now. It was cellular, animal. It was in the space between their bodies.
“You speak Serbian perfectly,” she whispered, still in that language.
“Of course I do,” he said, his voice a low rumble. He took a step closer. “I know my enemy. Inside and out.”
“I’m not your enemy.”
“Aren’t you?” Another step. The heat from his body reached her. “Your blood is. Your history is. That pretty, Swiss-neutral face is a lie. Everything about you is a fucking contradiction.”
She forced herself to look up at him. “And you? This car? These safe houses? You’re not just a farmer’s son, Bahri. You’re a contradiction, too.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. His gaze dropped to her lips. The air vanished from the room.
He closed the final distance, his hand coming up to cup her jaw, his thumb rough against her cheekbone. It wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming.
“This is a mistake,” he breathed, but he was already leaning in.
“I know,” she said, and met him halfway.
The kiss was not sweet. It was a collision. His mouth was hard, insistent, tasting of coffee and anger. She kissed him back with a desperation that shocked her, her hands fisting in the fabric of his trousers to pull him closer. The wool blanket fell from her shoulders, puddling at her feet. His large hands slid inside the giant jacket, finding her bare waist, and a raw sound ripped from his throat.
“Fuck,” he muttered against her mouth, his fingers digging into her skin. “You have no idea what you do to me.”
He walked her backward until her calves hit the edge of the narrow bed. He broke the kiss only to yank the jacket off her shoulders, tossing it aside. His eyes raked over her naked body—the full curves of her breasts, her nipples hard and peaked in the cool air, the narrow waist flaring to her hips. His look was pure, undiluted hunger.
“On the bed,” he commanded, his voice thick.
She lay back, the rough army-issue blanket scratching her skin. He undid his belt, the buckle clinking, shoved his trousers and briefs down in one harsh movement. His cock sprang free, fully erect, thick and heavy. He didn’t give her time to look, to think. He came down over her, his weight pressing her into the thin mattress, one knee pushing her legs apart.
He was not gentle. He didn’t ask. The head of his cock pressed against her, and she was wet, achingly so, her body betraying every principle. He pushed in with a single, brutal thrust, stretching her, filling her completely.
“Christ,” he gasped, his forehead dropping to her shoulder. He was inside her to the hilt, his body trembling with the effort of control.
He began to move, a hard, driving rhythm that shook the bed frame against the wall. Each thrust was a punishment and a promise. She wrapped her legs around his hips, meeting him, her nails scoring down his back. The friction was exquisite, a sharp, building coil of pleasure in the pit of her stomach.
“Look at me,” he grunted, grabbing a handful of her hair to tilt her face up. His eyes were black, frantic. “Look at me while I fuck you.”
She held his gaze, her golden-green eyes wide, letting him see everything—the fear, the wanting, the horrifying knowledge that this was a point of no return. He fucked her harder, deeper, the slap of skin on skin filling the small room. She could feel her climax gathering, a terrifying wave.
“You feel that?” he rasped, his pace becoming punishing, erratic. “That’s what you are. A perfect, fucking problem.”
His words tipped her over. The orgasm slammed through her, violent and silent, her mouth open in a soundless cry, her body clamping around him in rhythmic pulses. It tore a guttural groan from him. He drove into her two, three more times, then stilled, burying his face in her neck as he came, his release hot and deep inside her.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the rain. He didn’t pull out. He stayed lodged within her, his weight a crushing, intimate anchor.
Slowly, he lifted his head. His expression was shattered, all his polished arrogance gone. He looked ruined. He looked real.
Vanja touched his face, her fingers tracing the hard line of his jaw. He flinched, but didn’t pull away.
Outside, the rain intensified, hammering on the roof like gunfire.