Chapter 3: The Girl in the Café
The rain had stopped, leaving Priština glistening under a flat, grey sky. Vanja walked towards the university district, the damp air cold against her skin. She’d spent the morning in the archives, cross-referencing land deeds from the 1970s, building a dry, academic shield against the memory of the night before. The smell of wet wool and cheap perfume from the students crowding the sidewalks was a welcome anonymity.
She turned the corner, heading for the café where the coffee was strong and the waiters didn’t ask questions. And then she stopped.
There he was. Luan. Sitting at a wrought-iron table outside Kafana Dielli, the weak autumn sun catching the dark sheen of his hair. He wasn’t alone. A young Albanian man with a thin mustache was with him, gesticulating with a cigarette. And beside Luan, close, was a girl.
She was good looking not stunning in a conventional way—long, dark hair, large brown eyes, a smile that was easy and unburdened. She wore a bright blue sweater. She said something, leaning in towards Luan to be heard over the café din, her shoulder brushing his arm. He listened, a faint, polite smile on his lips, nodding.
Vanja felt her body react before her mind could corral it. A warm, automatic lift in her chest, a softening around her eyes. Her hand began to rise, a casual, acknowledging wave already forming in the air between them.
Then the girl laughed, tossing her hair, and placed a hand on Luan’s forearm. Just for a second. A possessive, comfortable gesture.
The warmth in Vanja’s chest crystallized into a sharp, cold speck. Her smile, halfway to her face, faltered. It died. Her hand, only inches from its wave, dropped back to her side as if the strings had been cut. She stood frozen on the sidewalk, a statue of unexpected irrelevance.
Luan’s eyes lifted then, scanning the crowd as if he’d felt the weight of her stare. They found hers. For a long second, they held across the bustling space—her face now carefully blank, his own unreadable. He gave a single, curt nod. Not a greeting. An acknowledgment of a fact: I see you.
It was worse than being ignored.
Vanja turned on her heel. She walked away, her boots clicking a rapid, steady rhythm on the wet pavement, a military retreat. She didn’t look back. She counted her breaths. Out. She focused on the sensation of the cold air in her nostrils, the concrete under her feet. Anything but the hot, stupid prickling behind her eyes.
Back in her apartment, the silence was a physical presence. She closed the door and stood in the middle of the room, her coat still on. The map on the wall seemed to mock her, its red lines now resembling childish scribbles. All her grand designs, her architect-of-change posturing, unraveled by a girl in a blue sweater.
She sat heavily on the edge of her bed. The dam broke. A hot tear spilled over, carving a path through the chill on her cheek. Then another. She didn’t sob; she sat perfectly still, letting them fall silently onto her wool coat. She refused to name the feeling. It wasn’t jealousy. That was for children, for people with the luxury of simple futures. It was… tactical disappointment. Yes. He was an asset. A valuable, conflicted, connected asset. And now he was potentially compromised by a distracting variable in a blue sweater. That’s all it was. The tightness in her throat was merely frustration. The hollow ache beneath her ribs was just operational stress.
She repeated it until the words lost all meaning.
At the café table, the girl in the blue sweater—Elona—leaned back, still smiling. “So you will talk to your father? It would mean so much to my uncle.”
Luan nodded absently, his eyes straying back to the spot on the sidewalk where Vanja had vanished. “I’ll mention it.”
His friend, Bekim, nudged him with an elbow. “Who was that?”
“Who?”
“The Valkyrie. Tall, blonde, scary beautiful. She looked like she was going to wave a sword at you, not her hand.” Bekim grinned, taking a drag of his cigarette. “Is that someone you know?”
Luan picked up his espresso cup. It was cold. “No,” he said, too quickly.
Bekim’s eyebrows shot up. “No? She certainly knew you. Stopped dead like she’d seen a ghost. Then you did your famous stone-face nod. Very convincing.”
“She’s nobody. A Serbian student. Albijanić.” He used the surname like a barrier.
“Albijanić?” Elona’s nose wrinkled slightly, just a tiny flare of disapproval. “She didn’t look Serbian.”
“She is,” Luan muttered, disliking the discussion.
“She’s beautiful,” Bekim said, blowing smoke into the damp air. “Even for a nobody.”
Luan didn’t answer. His mind was a split screen. On one side, Elona’s polite request, his father’s predictable grumbling about favours, the mundane politics of diaspora fundraising. On the other, a stark image: Vanja Albijanić in that ridiculous black dress, hiding behind a dying fir tree, her eyes wide with something that wasn’t quite fear. The way her confident smile in the alley had crumpled in the café’s light, replaced by a look of such profound, unguarded negation. It had been more intimate than seeing her in her apartment. It was a glimpse behind a curtain he hadn’t known was there.
And the poetry book. Këngë Dashurie. Belonging to ‘someone she knew.’ Dren. A friend ? A lover? The thought was an irritant, a piece of grit in his shoe.
“You’re distracted,” Elona said, her voice gently chiding.
“Sorry. Tired.” He forced a smile for her. It felt stiff on his face. “I’ll speak to my father about your uncle. Next week.”
He left them soon after, pleading errands. He walked without direction, his hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets. He found himself on her street. He didn’t look up at her balcony. He kept walking, past the park, towards the older, more dilapidated part of town where his cousin kept a garage.
The garage was warm, smelling of grease and gasoline. Adem, his cousin, was under the hood of a battered Fico. “Luan! You look like you lost a lek and found a parë.”
“Something like that.” Luan grabbed a rag, wiping nonexistent grease from his hands. “I need a favour.”
“Always.” Adem emerged, his face smudged. “What?”
“A woman. Vanja Albijanić. Student at the university. She lives on Mother Teresa Boulevard. I want to know who’s watching her.”
Adem leaned against the fender, crossing his arms. “Watching her? Police?”
“I don’t think so. Private. Maybe family. There was a green Ford. Now maybe a dark Opel. I need to know who pays them.”
“Why?” Adem’s eyes were sharp. “She’s a Serb, this Albijanić?”
“It’s complicated.”
“It always is with you.” Adem sighed. “I’ll ask around. But this costs. Information always costs.”
Luan nodded, pulling a fold of German marks from his pocket. “Just find out.”
As he left the garage, the sky was darkening again. He looked back toward the city center, toward the university, toward her apartment. He had called her a nobody. A variable. A potential threat. But nobodies didn’t ask you to translate love poetry. Variables didn’t look at you with eyes that held a sadness older than the both of you. Threats didn’t make you lie to your friends about knowing them.
He had seen her tactical mind at work in Podujevo. He had felt her calculated charm in her apartment. But today, on the sidewalk, he had seen something raw and uncalculated. It didn’t fit. And things that didn’t fit were dangerous.
Yet, as he walked away, the memory that surfaced wasn’t of her blank, stricken face. It was of her voice in the stairwell, tired and defiant: The offer’s there. Five minutes.
He had stayed for ten. And the coffee had been excellent.
And the coffee had been excellent. The memory of its bitter taste lingered for two days, a stubborn anchor in the churn of his thoughts. He forced himself to focus on the meeting he’d arranged, a necessary transaction in a back room of a club called Kukësi. It was about procurement, about funds moving through Frankfurt, about things that felt solid and real. His cousins Isuf and Mentor would be there, providing muscle and wary eyes.
The club was a cavern of smoke and stolen sound, bass lines thumping through stained concrete floors. Strobe lights cut through the haze, catching the sweat on a hundred faces. Luan pushed through the crowd near the bar, his eyes scanning for his cousins. Then the lights swept across the dance floor, and he stopped.
There she was.
Vanja was dancing, a fluid, unselfconscious movement in the center of a small group. She was laughing, her head thrown back, her long hair a dark-blonde swirl. The dress was silver, tiny, and clung to her like liquid metal. It had a high neck, no cleavage, a fact his brain registered with absurd precision. It didn’t matter. The way the fabric moved with her, catching the fractured light, was a different kind of statement altogether.
She was dancing with a young man with glasses who looked like a graduate student, all earnest movements and a wide grin. Arben, she’d called him once, her friend from the sociology department. They looked comfortable, normal, a world away from clandestine café confrontations and poetry books named Dren. Luan felt his jaw tighten. Of course he had to be here, he thought with a surge of irrational annoyance. Out of all the places in Priština.
He watched as she spun, catching sight of him over Arben’s shoulder. Their eyes met in a staccato flash of white light. Her laughter didn’t falter, but her gaze cooled, slid over him as if he were a stranger, a piece of the furniture, and then fixed back on Arben with renewed focus. She turned her back deliberately.
He was unfairly bothered by it.
“There you are,” Isuf said, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder. “They’re in the back. You’re late.”
“I’m here,” Luan said, not moving for a second. He watched the silver dress disappear into the pulse of bodies. He dragged his eyes away. “Let’s go.”
The meeting was straightforward. A man from Tirana with thick fingers and a calculator mind. Numbers were discussed, delivery routes, payment in cash or weapons. Luan spoke when required, his answers concise. His mind kept replaying that dismissive glance. It was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? Distance. Clarity. She was a complication. Yet her indifference needled him more than her direct challenge ever had.
After twenty minutes, it was settled. The man from Tirana left through a side exit. Luan needed air. He pushed out into the narrow alley behind the club, the cold a shock after the indoor heat. The bass was a muffled throb through the bricks.
He wasn’t alone. Vanja stood a few meters away, leaning against the graffiti-tagged wall, her face tilted up to the few stars visible between the rooftops. The silver dress seemed to glow in the dark. Another man was with her, handsome and blond, leaning casually next to her. He held out a cigarette packet.
“Want one?” he asked.
She shook her head, the movement sharp. “I don’t smoke.”
“I’m Bahri,” the man said, smiling. “Nika Bahri.”
She knew him. Nika Bahri. And she knew he had a girlfriend, a Kosovare from Gjakova, a proper girl he would marry after the war, after he’d sown all his wild oats with girls who didn’t meet the family standard.
“You have a girlfriend,” she said simply, her voice flat.
Bahri laughed, a smooth, confident sound. “So why are you talking to me, Bahri?” she asked, finally looking at him.
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said, his smile widening, an invitation to a well-practiced game.
“You will have one,” Vanja stated, the certainty in her voice absolute and cold. “A good Albanian girl. Proper.”
Luan, lighting his own cigarette in the shadows, heard that last part. He froze, the match burning close to his fingers.
Bahri’s smile finally slipped. “Why are you saying this?” he asked, confusion replacing charm.
“Because we both know what a man like you would want with a girl like me,” she said, pushing herself off the wall. Her tone was analytical, dissecting. “And it does not include me meeting your parents.”
She left him there, stunned and silent in the alley. She walked straight past Luan without a second look, the club door swallowing her and the pulsing music whole. The scent of her perfume—something clean and cold, like frost—hung in the air for a moment before the alley’s smells of garbage and wet concrete reclaimed it.
Bahri shook his head, muttered something, and stalked off in the opposite direction. Luan stood alone, the unlit cigarette forgotten in his hand. A man like you. A girl like me. The phrases circled. Her words weren’t bitter. They were a clinical forecast. She had looked at Bahri and seen his entire future, a future he himself probably hadn’t even decided on yet, and she had judged herself entirely excluded from it. Not with sadness. With a bone-deep resignation that felt decades old.
The door opened again, spilling noise and warm light. Arben, the friend with glasses, peered out. “Vanja? You okay?”
Luan dropped the cigarette, crushing it under his heel. He met Arben’s questioning look for a second, then turned and walked down the alley, away from the light, the music, and the unsettling, prescient chill her words had left behind.
He met Arben’s questioning look for a second, then turned and walked down the alley, away from the light, the music, and the unsettling, prescient chill her words had left behind. The encounter with Bahri played on a loop in his mind for days, a discordant melody underneath his routine. He traveled to Skenderaj two weeks later, the drive through the Drenica valley a blur of bare oak trees and low stone walls. He went with his brother Haxhi and three cousins, a visit to deliver funds and a message too sensitive for any phone.
They decided to eat at a small place near the market, a family-run grill known for its quiet booths and reliable ćevapi. The air inside was thick with the smell of roasted meat and onions, the rumble of conversation a comfortable din. Luan was halfway across the worn tile floor when he saw his cousin, Granit Gashi, sitting in a corner booth. Granit was leaning forward, smiling broadly at his companion, a young woman whose laugh Luan heard just then—a bright, unguarded sound he recognized instantly.
He stopped walking. The woman had her back to the room, but the fall of her dark-blonde hair over the collar of her wool coat was unmistakable. It couldn’t be her. Not here. Not in Skenderaj, laughing with his Aunt Hava’s son.
“Granit,” Luan said, the name leaving his mouth before he could stop it.
His cousin looked up, his smile shifting from warmth to surprise. “Luan! Zotti! What are you doing here?” Granit stood up, always one for a proper greeting.
Vanja’s laughter died. Her shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly. Then she deliberately turned her head toward Granit and, in clear, slightly exaggerated Serbian, said, “Šta je? Ko je to?” What is it? Who is that? She made a faint, playful face at him, a pantomime of confusion for an outsider who didn’t understand the language. Granit understood she was pretending to be s Brian again.
One of Luan’s other cousins, Agon, nudged him. “Who are you with?” he asked Granit in Albanian, his eyes curious on the woman’s back.
“With a friend,” Granit replied smoothly, but he switched to Serbian for her benefit, mirroring her chosen language. His protective instinct was a subtle physical shift, a slight angling of his body between her and the newcomers.
Vanja turned then, slowly, as if just realizing the commotion was for her. Her eyes found Luan’s. The surprise in them was perfect, a little too wide, a fraction too long. She was a flawless actress. “Oh,” she said, still in Serbian. “Hello.”
Luan was speechless. He could only stare, his mind trying to reconcile the map on her wall in Priština with this booth in Skenderaj, the poetry book named Dren with his cousin’s attentive gaze.
“I’m Vanja,” she announced to the table of suddenly silent men, her voice assuming a brisk, academic tone. “I’m working on a research project with Granit. Sociological fieldwork.” She smiled, a polite, stranger’s smile that didn’t touch her green-gold eyes.
Granit watched them all, his gaze lingering on Luan’s face. The protective urge was palpable in the way his eyes narrowed, assessing the dynamic he hadn’t anticipated.
He knows this girl, Luan thought. Really knows her.
The silence stretched, awkward and heavy. Luan’s brain, frantically scrambling for purchase, landed on the single, stupidest thing possible. “Is he helping you translate Albanian love poems?” he blurted out in Serbian.
His brother Haxhi shot him a bewildered look. Agon choked on a sip of water. Granit’s eyebrows climbed.
Vanja laughed. It was a genuine sound, rich and surprised, that transformed her calculated performance into something momentarily real. “No,” she said, shaking her head, her eyes gleaming with something like triumph. “We’re working on much more interesting things than that.”
“Come,” Granit said finally, his voice firm. He placed a hand lightly on the back of Vanja’s booth. “I’ll take you home. We can finish our talk there.”
“No need,” Luan heard himself say. The words were out, calm and definitive. “I’m going to Priština. I’ll take her.” He held Vanja’s gaze, a challenge and an offer tangled together.
Granit looked between them, his suspicion deepening. “You two know each other?”
Vanja nodded, gathering her bag. She met Granit’s concerned look with a placating, intimate smile he had never seen her use before. “It’s okay,” she said, now in gentle . “I know him.”
The drive began in absolute silence. The Mercedes ate up the darkening road, leaving the yellow lights of Skenderaj behind. The tension in the car was a live wire. He waited until the third kilometer marker.
“Research project,” he stated, his voice flat.
“Yes.”
“With Granit Gashi.”
“He’s a valuable local source,” she said, looking out at the passing fields. “Very insightful on land use patterns.”
“He’s my cousin,” Luan snapped, his composure fracturing. “His mother is my aunt. My father’s sister. Did you know that?”