Chapter 7: house
The upstairs hallway was long and blank, doors standing open to empty rooms. Bahri led her to the last one at the end. This room held a bare mattress on a simple frame, a folded blanket, and a view of the winter-browned field behind the house. It was a cell, but a sunlit one. He closed the door behind them. The click of the latch was louder than any shout.
For a moment, they just stood there. The bravado of the driveway had evaporated, leaving a raw, quiet space between them. Vanja’s heart was a frantic bird against her ribs. This was it. A choice, not taken in passion but in the strange, still eye of the coming storm.
“You’re sure,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“No,” she answered honestly. “Are you?”
A faint, pained smile touched his lips. “No.”
He stepped forward then, and the space vanished. His kiss was different now—softer, searching, less about conquest and more about discovery. His hands came up to frame her face, his thumbs tracing the arches of her cheekbones. She reached for the buckle of his leather jacket, her fingers clumsy with cold and nerves. He helped her, shrugging it off, letting it fall to the bare floor with a heavy thud.
It was slow, and awkward, and profoundly real. The cold of the room made them shiver until the heat of skin on skin took over. There were no words for a long time. Just breath, and the rough texture of the wool blanket beneath her, and the shocking softness of his mouth on her neck, her shoulder, the curve of her breast. He was careful, so careful it made her ache. When she flinched, a small, involuntary gasp catching in her throat, he went completely still.
“Okay?” His voice was rough against her skin.
She nodded, her eyes squeezed shut. It was a sting, a sharp, bright pressure that briefly fragmented the world. She focused on the weight of him, the solid reality, the smell of his skin—soap, cold air, and something uniquely him. This was a deviation no history book could ever record. This was hers.
After, they lay tangled in the thin blanket, the weak afternoon sun painting a long rectangle of pale gold across the mattress and onto the wall. Her body felt strange, a familiar landscape subtly rearranged. A faint, dull ache throbbed in her core. Bahri traced the line of her spine with a single finger, his touch absently gentle.
He saw the blood first. A small, rust-colored smudge on the sheet beneath her. He went very still. Then, without a word, he slid from the mattress, pulled the sheet free from the corners, and folded it meticulously, the stained part tucked inside. He opened the empty closet and placed it on the shelf, a secret archive of a breaking world.
The gesture was so loaded, so ritualistic, that Vanja felt a cold wave of understanding. It was proof. A commodity. In the world he came from, it had a value. In the world she remembered, it was meaningless. The clash made her feel suddenly, terribly alone.
He came back to bed, pulling her against him, his body warm and solid at her back. “Sleep,” he murmured into her hair. “They won’t be here for hours.”
Exhaustion, deeper than physical, pulled her under.
She woke to the sound of a car door slamming, voices in the gravel driveway below. The room was dark. Bahri was already gone from the bed. She heard his footsteps on the stairs, the low rumble of his voice greeting someone. A woman’s voice answered, melodic and tired.
Vanja scrambled up, her body protesting. She found her clothes, dressed quickly in the dark, and slipped into the adjacent bathroom. She washed her face with cold water, finger-combed her hair. Her reflection in the mirror was pale, her eyes too wide. She looked like someone who had just survived something.
By the time she came downstairs, the house had transformed. Lights were on in the kitchen, and the sharp, comforting smell of onions frying in butter filled the air. A handsome woman in her fifties with kind, weary eyes and Bahri’s same dark blond hair was unpacking groceries from a burlap sack. Burim leaned against the counter, smoking.
“Ah, you are awake,” the woman said, glancing up. She spoke in careful, formal Serbian. “I am Zana. Bahri’s mother.”
“Vanja. Thank you for… coming.” The words felt inadequate.
Zana waved a hand, dismissing the awkwardness. “It is no trouble. A house is not a home without people in it.” She went back to her onions. Burim offered Vanja a small, knowing smile that made her cheeks heat.
Bahri re-entered from the hall, his hair damp from washing. He avoided her eyes, busying himself with filling a kettle. The atmosphere was thick with unspoken things.
“You cook, Vanja?” Zana asked pleasantly, still in Serbian.
“A little,” Vanja said.
“She speaks Albanian, Nena,” Bahri said, his voice tight. He said it in Albanian, a correction.
Zana paused, her knife hovering. She looked at Vanja, reassessing. “Oh. Whatever you prefer, dear,” she said, switching effortlessly to Albanian, her tone still warm.
Vanja felt a perverse spark. She looked directly at Bahri, who was watching her warily. “I miss speaking Serbian,” she said, in clear, perfect Serbian. A small, deliberate barb.
Bahri’s eyebrows lifted, a flash of confusion and irritation in his eyes. He opened his mouth to retort.
“Oh, Bahri,” Zana sighed, shaking her head. She spoke in Albanian now, a gentle scold. “I thought we raised you better. Language is a tool, not a weapon. You do not punish a guest for the crimes of a state.”
“But, Nena—” he started, the arrogant young commander reduced to a lectured son.
Zana shook her head, cutting him off. “Go. Go with Burim. Do your business. Let us be.” She made a shooing motion with her knife.
Bahri pressed his lips together, nodded once. He shot Vanja a look that was equal parts frustration and reluctant admiration. As he shrugged on his jacket, Vanja caught his eye and gave him a slow, deliberate wink.
A muscle flexed in his jaw. Then, almost imperceptibly, the corner of his mouth twitched. He turned and followed Burim out into the night.
The kitchen was quiet then, just the sizzle of vegetables in the pan. Zana worked in silence for a minute. “He is a proud boy,” she said finally, in Albanian. “It is his greatest weakness. And his father’s absence does not help. He thinks everything is a battle to be won.”
“I know,” Vanja said quietly.
“Do you love him?” The question was blunt, without malice.
Vanja stared at the flickering gas flame. “I do. and I think I might need him. And he might need me. In a way that has nothing to do with love, and everything to do with what’s coming.”
Zana stopped stirring. She looked at Vanja, her gaze deep and sorrowful. “That,” she said softly, “is the most honest answer I have ever heard about marriage.” She nodded toward the cabinet. “Fetch the coffee, will you? We will make a pot. And you can tell me, if you wish, what it is you think is coming. My son sees a war. I see the price of it. I would like to know what you see.”
The kitchen felt suddenly vast, the question hanging in the steam from the pan. Vanja took the coffee canister down, her fingers tracing its metal ridges. How could she describe the slide of history, the specific weight of a future that clung to her like a second skin?
“I see the bridge at Kaçandoll,” she said quietly, measuring coarse grounds into the pot. “I see the motion sensors in the willows, put there by Germans who think they’re helping. I see a field in Glogovac where the frost doesn’t melt because the ground is churned by boots and mortars.” She looked at Zana. The woman’s face was still, listening. “I see your son’s face on a poster nailed to a telephone pole in a year’s time. A martyr. He’d hate that, you know. Being useful only after he’s gone.”
Zana’s knuckles were white around the wooden spoon. She said nothing.
“I see this house,” Vanja continued, her voice dropping. “With new windows. And a different family living in it. An Albanian police captain, maybe. His children would sleep in that room upstairs.” She nodded toward the ceiling. “They’d have no idea.”
“Stop.” The word was a whisper. Zana turned off the gas. The sizzling died. “You are not a ghost. You are a girl. How can you know these things?”
Vanja filled the pot with water, the practical motion at odds with her words. “I don’t know how. I just do. I woke up one day in Basel and remembered living a whole life already. Dying in one, too. The memories are… granular. I know the taste of the bread they’ll distribute after the ceasefire. I know the serial number on the bulldozer that knocks over the wall of my family’s church.”
She set the pot on the stove, lit the flame. “I came to change the granular things. To save the wall. To maybe save the boy in the field. Not because I’m a patriot. Because I’m selfish. I’m tired of carrying ghosts.”
Zana wiped her hands on her apron slowly. She looked ancient for a moment, weighed down by a premonition she hadn’t asked for. “And Bahri? In this memory of yours. Was he…?”
“He was gone long before that field,” Vanja said, the truth a stone in her throat. “A checkpoint. March.. It was fast.” It was the merciful version, the one she’d given Bahri. The real memory—the pointless spray of bullets, the body left in the dirt for two days—stayed locked behind her teeth.
Zana absorbed this. She didn’t cry. She nodded, as if confirming a dreaded diagnosis. “Then you have already given me a gift. A mother’s fear is a shapeless thing. You have given it a shape. Now I can fight the shape.”
They worked in silence after that, a strange, somber alliance forged over peeled potatoes and the brewing coffee. Vera, Burim’s quiet wife, arrived and began setting the table with quiet efficiency. The men returned as dusk settled, bringing the cold with them and talk of shifted patrols and a missing shipment of batteries.
Dinner was a tense, performative affair. Bahri and Vanja sat opposite each other, playing their parts. He was polite, distant. She was demure, helping Vera clear plates. Their knees never brushed under the table. Their eyes only met once, a spark that traveled the length of the room and settled as a slow heat low in her stomach.
Five hours later, she was fixing the sheets in his room.
The act was strangely domestic, a quiet rebellion against the impermanence of everything. She was tucking the corner of a fresh blanket under the mattress when the door opened and shut. The click of the lock was deliberate.
She turned. Bahri leaned against the door, his expression unreadable. “My mother and Vera are gone,” he said. “Went to buy food for the week.”
“Oh,” she said, her hands stilling on the fabric.
“Yes,” he echoed, a slow smile touching his lips. “Oh.”
He crossed the room in three strides. This time, there was no hesitation, no careful exploration. It was all hunger and confirmation. His mouth found hers, his hands gripping her waist, pulling her against the solid line of his body. The bed was already made. They unmade it.
Afterward, lying in a tangle of new sheets, he kissed her temple, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth. “I need to go back,” he murmured against her skin. “Everyone thinks I’m out doing something important.”
She giggled, a soft, breathy sound. “You are doing something important. Me.”
He laughed, a low rumble in his chest, and slapped her ass lightly before kissing her again, deeply. “Tonight, at dinner,” he said, pulling back just enough to speak. “We’ll behave.”
“Yeah,” she said, tracing the line of his jaw. “I will. You will try.”
He laughed again, rolling off the bed and grabbing his clothes. He dressed quickly, the arrogant commander reassembling himself in the dim room. At the door, he glanced back at her, a silhouette against the window. “The shapes you give my mother,” he said quietly, his voice losing its playful edge. “Give me one.”
Vanja pulled the sheet around her shoulders. “Tomorrow. A man named Fadil will get drunk in the Univers café in Srbica. He will complain about the price of cigarettes. He will say it’s cheaper across the line, where his cousin runs a shop. He will describe the path he uses, the broken part of the fence. He will be overheard.”
Bahri stared, committing it to memory. A specific, granular thing. He gave a single, sharp nod. Then he was gone, the door closing softly behind him, leaving her alone with the scent of him on the sheets and the precise, terrible weight of the future in the quiet.
Vanja slept until mid-morning, a deep, dreamless oblivion. She found the house empty, a note from Zana on the kitchen table in neat Albanian script: Gone to market with Vera. Bread in the cabinet. The silence was a physical presence. She made coffee, the ritual steadying her, and took the cup to the large window overlooking the back field.
The frost had melted into a cold, grey damp. She thought of the river crossing at Kaçandoll, the motion sensors. Had they checked? Was the shape of things already bending? The granular detail of Fadil’s drunken complaint in the Univers café felt inconsequential and monumental at the same time. A man’s loose tongue, a shifted patrol route. These were the levers.
Bahri returned just after noon, his boots muddy, a canvas satchel slung over his shoulder. He dropped it with a thud by the door, his movements coiled and efficient. “It was done. The man was there. Talking. He was… persuaded to be quiet.”
“Persuaded how?” Vanja asked, leaning against the counter.
“He was shown the error of his ways.” Bahri’s expression was flat, devoid of its usual arrogant spark. This was the other him, the one connected directly to Adem’s world. He walked to the sink, splashed water on his face. “My mother?”
“Market.”
He nodded, drying his hands on a towel. Then he turned, and his eyes found hers. The flatness receded, replaced by a focused, hungry heat. The shift was dizzying. “Good.”
He crossed the kitchen in four long strides. He didn’t kiss her. His hands went to the waistband of her trousers, popping the button, yanking the zipper down in one rough motion. His fingers slipped inside, past the fabric of her underwear, finding her immediately. She gasped, her hips jerking forward against his hard, seeking touch.
“Quiet,” he murmured, though the house was empty. His voice was a low growl against her ear. “I thought about this all night. About you in that bed. About how fucking wet you got for me.”
He worked her with his fingers, his touch ruthlessly deliberate, not tender. It was a claiming. She clutched at his shoulders, her forehead dropping against his chest as he stroked her, his palm grinding against her clit. She was already close, wound tight from the tension and the quiet morning.
“Come on,” he urged, his breath hot. “Come for me. I want to feel it.”
His words, filthy and direct, pushed her over the edge. A sharp, silent cry tore from her throat as she clenched around his fingers, her knees buckling. He held her up, his arm locking around her waist, keeping her upright as the waves crashed through her.
Before the tremors had even fully subsided, he was spinning her around, bending her over the kitchen table. The cold wood pressed against her stomach. He shoved her trousers and underwear down to her knees. She heard the rasp of his own zipper.
He didn’t ask. He just guided himself into her with one thick, searing push. She was still slick from her climax, and he slid deep, stretching her, filling her utterly. A stunned, breathy moan escaped her.
“Fuck,” he groaned, his hands gripping her hips, his thumbs digging into the soft flesh of her ass. He set a hard, driving rhythm immediately, each thrust jolting her against the table. The sounds were obscene—the wet slap of skin, his ragged breathing, the creak of the table legs on the tile floor.
“You feel that?” he panted, leaning over her, his chest pressed against her back. “You feel how deep I am? This is what you do to me. Turn me into this. A fucking animal in my mother’s kitchen.”
She could only push back against him, meeting each thrust, a reckless energy taking hold. One of his hands slid around her front, fingers delving through her curls to find her clit again, rubbing tight, frantic circles. Pleasure coiled again, impossibly fast, a white-hot wire tightening in her gut.
“I’m gonna come inside you,” he grunted, his rhythm fracturing, growing erratic. “Gonna fill you up. You want that?”
“Yes,” she hissed, the word a broken thing.
His orgasm hit him with a choked-off roar, his body locking, his grip on her becoming almost painful as he pumped into her, deep pulses of heat. The feel of it tipped her over a second time, a shattering climax that ripped through her in silent, racking shudders.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their laboring breaths, the smell of sex and coffee in the cold kitchen light. Slowly, he softened inside her, slipping out. A warm trickle dripped down her inner thigh. He leaned heavily against her, his face buried in her hair.
Then, with a quiet sigh, he pushed himself up. He tucked himself away, zipped his jeans. He handed her a dish towel without looking at her. “Clean up. They’ll be back soon.”
The detachment was jarring, a return to the battlefield from the place they’d just been. She wiped herself, pulled her clothes up, her body humming and sore. When she turned, he was at the sink again, drinking a glass of water, his back to her.
They didn’t speak of it. The days folded into a strange, suspended rhythm. Zana and Vera maintained the façade of a normal household, but the conversations were halting, threaded with unspoken dread. Burim came and went like a ghost. Bahri was often gone before dawn, returning late, smelling of cold earth, diesel, and sometimes, faintly, of metal.
One evening, a week after the kitchen table, they lay in his bed. The room was dark, the house silent. His hand was on her stomach, his thumb tracing idle circles.
“The bridge at Kaçandoll,” he said quietly. “We checked. You were right. Wires in the willows. New ones. We cut them.”
A cold thrill shot through her. A deviation. A real one. “And the February raid? On Donji Prekaz?”
“Plans are changed. Adem listens. He doesn’t thank you, but he listens.” He shifted, turning to face her. In the dark, his eyes were just faint glints. “These granular things. They add up.”
“They have to,” she whispered.
He kissed her then, slow and deep, a kiss that felt like a promise with no guarantee. “Stay here,” he murmured against her lips. “In this room. In this bed. No matter what you hear.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have to go out. Tonight. There’s a meeting near Glogovac. A quick in and out.” He was already rising, pulling on his dark clothes. “If we’re stopped… just stay inside. My mother knows what to do.”
Fear, cold and sharp, pierced the warmth of the bed. “Bahri—”
“It’s a quick in and out,” he repeated, cutting her off. His tone was final. He leaned over, kissed her once more, hard and fast. “Remember the field. I’m not going to the field.”
Then he was gone. She listened to the soft crunch of gravel as a car pulled away. The house settled into a deeper silence. She didn’t sleep. She watched the window, the blackness slowly diluting to a predawn grey.
A car engine grew loud, too loud, too fast. It skidded on the gravel outside. Doors slammed. Urgent, muffled voices. Albanian, sharp and clipped.
She was out of bed, pulling on a robe, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. She reached the top of the stairs as the front door burst open.
Burim and another man she didn’t know half-carried, half-dragged Bahri inside. His head lolled. A dark, glistening stain spread across the left side of his jacket, from his collar-bone down to his ribcage. His face was pale as wax under the hallway light.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Burim was muttering, his own hands slick with blood.
Zana appeared, her face hardening into a mask of terrifying calm. “The kitchen table. Now. Vanja, boil water. Bring all the clean cloths. Vera, my kit. Now.”
They moved. Bahri’s boots left smeared streaks of mud and blood on the polished floor. They heaved him onto the kitchen table, the same table he’d taken her over just days before. His groan was a wet, awful sound.
Vanja stood frozen in the doorway, the kettle in her hand. His eyes opened, glassy with pain, and found hers across the room. He tried to speak, but only a bubble of blood-flecked sputum appeared on his lips.
BAHRI RETURNS WOUNDED.