Chapter 2: The Hebrew Test
The lecture hall emptied around them in a shuffling tide of bag straps and murmured conversations. Vanja’s fingers curled into the worn cotton of Dren’s sleeve, a persistent, grounding pressure. He was still talking to a classmate about Hoxha’s tortuous interpretation of the 1974 constitution, but his attention was split, a radio tuned to two stations. One was the dry legal debate. The other was the quiet, frantic frequency of her, standing so close he could see the fine, fair hairs on her temple, lit gold by the slanted afternoon sun.
“Dren,” she said, her voice low beneath the chatter. “A word. Please.”
He excused himself, letting her pull him into a dim alcove near the fire exit, away from the stream of students. The air here smelled of damp concrete and old cigarettes.
“What is it?” he asked. His mind was still half-occupied with her library confession, the words man in the ground circling like crows.
She took a breath, as if steeling herself. “You asked for straight talk. So. I need to prove something to you. Not to convince you I’m a prophet. Just to prove I’m not… hallucinating all of it. There’s a detail. It’s useless, but it’s verifiable.”
“Okay.” He crossed his arms, leaning against the cold wall.
“I speak languages. Languages I never learned. Here.” She met his eyes, her gaze intense. “After my fever broke, I woke up and I could understand Hebrew. Read it, write it, speak it. Fluent. Not a word of it before. My parents thought it was delirium. I told the doctors I must have heard it on some shortwave radio broadcast while I was sick. They wrote it down as aphasia, crossed wires in the brain.”
Dren just stared. Hebrew. It was so specific, so bizarrely out of place in the gritty reality of Priština. “Say something.”
The words that left her lips were guttural, flowing, completely alien. They had a different shape, a different music than anything he knew. It wasn’t the stumbling attempt of a language student. It was confident, natural. She stopped, watching his face. “It means, ‘The truth is a strange and heavy stone.’ It’s a line from a poet. Amos Oz. He won’t be well-known here for years.”
A cold thrill, entirely separate from fear, shot through him. This wasn’t a feeling. This was a fact. A piece of data. “Prove it to someone else.”
“What?”
“Professor Hoxha. He lived in Haifa for two years in the seventies, did his postgraduate work there. He never talks about it. My father told me.” Dren pushed off the wall, a new, driven energy in his limbs. “Come on.”
“Dren, no, that’s—”
“Straight talk, Vanja. You want me to carry this? Give me a brick. Something solid.” He took her hand, his grip firm, and pulled her back into the thinning crowd. She resisted for a second, then followed, her hand tense in his.
They found Professor Hoxha in his cramped office, a cave of teetering books and ashtrays overflowing with lipstick-stained cigarette butts. He was a weary-looking man in a frayed suit, wiping chalk dust from his fingers. He glanced up, eyes narrowing behind thick glasses.
“Kelmendi. Kastrati. Lecture is over. Debates continue in the courtyard.”
“Professor,” Dren said, closing the door softly behind them. “A question. About comparative legal frameworks. In Israel.”
Hoxha’s bushy eyebrows rose. “A strange specialty for a Kosovar law student. Why?”
“Indulge me, sir. If you were to predict a major shift in Israeli political stability, based on the tensions between religious and secular jurisprudence, what would you look for?”
The professor leaned back in his creaking chair, steepling his fingers. He looked at Dren, then at Vanja, who stood very still. “An oversimplified question. But. I would watch the reactionaries. The ones who believe law is divine, not democratic. They will call a political process a sin. And from that sin, violence is born.” He spoke academically, but his tone had a bitter, personal edge.
Vanja’s voice cut through the dusty air, quiet but clear. In that same guttural, fluent Hebrew. “And if a peacemaker is labelled a traitor by those reactionaries, does the system itself become the assassin?”
The effect was instantaneous. Hoxha jerked forward as if slapped. The color drained from his face. He stared at Vanja, his mouth slightly open. The language in this room, in this city, was a shock so profound it seemed to stop time.
“Where did you learn that?” he whispered, first in Serbian, then, reflexively, in Hebrew.
“I read,” Vanja replied, staying in Hebrew. Her accent, to Dren’s ear, sounded flawless. “I listen. The rhetoric of dehumanization precedes the bullet. It always does. Rabin will learn that too late.”
Hoxha’s hand trembled as he reached for a cigarette. He didn’t light it. He just rolled it between his fingers. “Yitzhak Rabin is a soldier. A pragmatist. He is tough.”
“He is a soldier who will make peace. And for that, a student of halakha will murder him in a square in Tel Aviv. November 1995. Three years from now.” Vanja’s voice was stone-cold, factual. “Remember I said that. When it happens.”
The professor was silent for a long minute. The only sound was the distant shout of a custodian in the hall. Finally, he looked at her not as a student, but as an unnerving oracle. “Your insight… your Hebrew… it is not from books. It is from living there.”
“In a way,” Vanja said, switching back to Serbian. The shift was jarring. “Thank you for your time, Professor.”
Dren’s own heart was pounding. He had his brick. It was solid, and it was terrifying.
Hoxha called out as Dren opened the door. “Kastrati.”
They turned.
“That… prediction. Keep it to yourself. Here, such talk is… dangerous in a different way.” He finally lit the cigarette, the flare of the match illuminating the deep unease in his eyes.
They walked out into the corridor, now empty. The golden light had faded to a murky grey. Dren felt unmoored. The world had just proven itself capable of holding a impossibility. Vanja leaned her back against the cool lockers, closing her eyes.
“Satisfied?” she asked, her voice thin.
Before he could answer, Petrit rounded the corner, his backpack slung over one shoulder. “There you are! We’re going to the kafana. You two look like you’ve seen the war already. Come on, drinks. My treat.”
Dren didn’t move. He was looking at Vanja, at the way her long fingers pressed against the metal locker. He was remembering the feel of her in the library, the sound of a language that didn’t belong.
Petrit’s joke hung in the air, metallic and sour.
Vanja opened her eyes. They found Dren’s. A silent, charged question passed between them. She pushed herself off the lockers and took a single step toward him, closing the distance. She smelled like ink and the faint, clean scent of her skin. Her gaze dropped to his lips, then back up.
Her whisper was so faint only he could hear it, a breath against the sudden quiet of the hallway. “Should I kiss you now? To shut him up? To make this feel normal?”
His whole body went still. The wanting was a sudden, physical ache, sharp and clear amidst the chaos. But the taste of her prophecy was still in the air, mixed with Hebrew and chalk dust. This couldn’t be a deflection. Couldn’t be a performance.
He closed his eyes. Swallowed. “Not like this,” he murmured, his voice rough. “Not for an audience. Not because it’s convenient.”
He heard her inhale, a shaky sound. When he opened his eyes, she was nodding, a flicker of something like relief in her expression. “Okay.”
Petrit was watching them, confused. “What’s going on with you two?”
“Nothing,” Dren said, forcing a normal tone. “Lead the way.”
The kafana was loud and smoky, thick with the smell of grilling meat and slivovitz. Dren drank little. He watched Vanja navigate the conversation, laughing at a story, arguing about football. She was brilliant at it, this performance of normalcy. But he saw the cracks now. The way her smile didn’t always reach her eyes. The way her fingers would still, momentarily, around her glass, as if listening to a distant, grim forecast.
Later, under a sky dense with stars, he walked her to where his new, motorbike was parked. The city sounds were softer here, a backdrop of distant traffic and television echoes from open windows.
“I can get the bus,” she said.
“No.” He handed her the spare helmet. Its interior was still cold. “I’ll take you.”
The night air was a cool slap as the bike roared to life. She slid on behind him, her arms wrapping around his waist, her body pressing against his back. He felt her hold on, not tentative, but sure. The engine vibrated through both of them, a shared rhythm. He drove slower than he needed to, taking the longer route through quieter streets where the jasmine hanging over garden walls sweetened the dark.
He stopped at the gate of her apartment block, a nondescript concrete building. She climbed off, pulling off the helmet. Her hair was mussed, tumbling around her face in the yellow light of a streetlamp.
“The brick,” he said, killing the engine. The sudden silence was immense. “It’s solid. It changes nothing, and it changes everything.”
“I know.”
He got off the bike, standing facing her. The space between them was charged with everything unsaid from the hallway, everything proven in the professor’s office. The future pressed in from all sides, a dark, shapeless weight. But here, now, under this specific streetlamp, was just them.
He reached up, his thumb brushing a stray hair from her cheek. Her skin was warm from the helmet. She didn’t flinch. She leaned into the touch.
“This isn’t convenient,” he said quietly.
“No.”
“And there’s no audience.”
“Just the future,” she whispered, a sad, wry twist to her mouth.
“Fuck the future,” he said, and it wasn’t a shout, just a firm, low statement.
He kissed her then. It was nothing like the frantic, theoretical kiss she’d proposed in the hall. It was slow, deliberate, a choice made in full view of the coming storm. Her lips were soft, and she tasted of the coffee from the kafana and something else, uniquely her. She kissed him back, her hands coming up to frame his face, her fingers cool against his jaw.
It was an anchor. A claiming. A silent pact made in the dark.
When they finally broke apart, their foreheads rested together. Their breaths misted in the cool air, mingling.
“What now?” she asked, her voice unsteady.
“Now,” he said, tracing the line of her eyebrow with his thumb, “you keep giving me bricks. And I keep building something with them. We’ll figure out what.”
She nodded, her eyes searching his. For the first time since he’d met her, the deep, haunting fear in her gaze was mingled with a fragile, blooming hope. It was more beautiful, and more devastating, than anything he’d ever seen.
He kissed her once more, softly, a promise against her lips. Then he watched her walk to the building door, turn, and lift a hand in a small wave before disappearing inside.
The engine starting again was a loud violation of the quiet night. As he rode home, the wind cold on his heated skin, the shape of his world had fundamentally altered. The path was still there. His father’s war was still coming. But now, walking that path was a girl who spoke languages of the future, and he had just kissed her. The weight was shared. The burden was halved.
And somehow, that made the road ahead feel both infinitely more dangerous, and slightly less lonely.
The memory of that kiss, the shocking solidity of the Hebrew brick, became a quiet, private constellation between them in the days that followed. They navigated lectures and cafe meetings with their friends, their ankles touching under tables, their exchanged looks holding volumes the others couldn’t read.
“I’m going to Podujevo,” she told him two days later, shutting a textbook with a firm snap. The autumn sun caught the gold in her hair. “To see my parents. Adem is coming home.”
“Adem?” Dren asked, leaning back on the library steps. The name was familiar from her scattered stories.
“My older brother. He lives in Germany, works in in Dortmund.” She shook her head, a fond, exasperated smile on her lips. she didn't tell him the obvious, adem didnt work, people worked for him. “Agron, too. My middle brother. I still can’t believe he plays football in Italy.”
That landed. Dren sat up straighter. “Agron Kastrati? For Parma?”
“The very same.” Her pride was palpable, a bright, normal light in her eyes. “Twenty-one years old and a great hope of Yugoslavian football, or so the papers say. It feels completely surreal.”
A practical idea, sweetened by pure want, formed instantly. “Can I come with you?” he asked.
She laughed, a light, startled sound. “To get an autograph?” she teased, her green-gold eyes sparkling.
“No.” He held her gaze, his tone softening, earnest. “To take you. It gives me an extra hour with you.”
She smiled then, a full, unreserved expression that warmed her whole face, and nodded. “Okay.”
The drive to Podujevo the next afternoon was a tapestry of fading October color and Vanja’s pointed commentary from the back of the motorbike. She directed him off the main road onto a narrower lane lined with poplars, their leaves scattering like yellow coins in their wake. The Kastrati house appeared behind a high wall, not the defensive stone kulla of his own family home, but a modern, two-story structure of pale plaster and large windows.
It was light, airy, surrounded by a big garden where rose bushes fought a losing battle against the season. It was just as large as his father’s house, but its luxury was open, declarative, not folded inward for protection.
Her mother, Milena, met them at the door. She was a elegant woman with Vanja’s fair skin and a teacher’s assessing gaze. “Vanja! And you’ve brought a friend.”
“This is Dren,” Vanja said, pulling off her helmet. “He was kind enough to bring me. No buses.”
Milena’s smile was polite, edged with a sharp curiosity as she looked Dren over. “Well, we will be kind enough to host him, then. Come in, Dren.”
Dren nodded, feeling the subtle shift from his world to hers. “Thank you.”
In the sprawling yard, a group of men were gathered around a low table cluttered with coffee cups and cigarette packs. Adem, older with a tired, competent look about him, and Agron, whose athletic build and easy celebrity smile seemed to generate its own gravity. Friends and cousins sat with them. The conversation hushed as they approached.
A man with a thick mustache recognized Dren, his eyes flickering with immediate understanding. “Kelmendi,” he said, the name a statement of recognition, of lineage.
“Kastrati,” Dren replied, giving a respectful nod first to Adem, then to Agron. It was a simple exchange, heavy with unspoken politics.
Vanja rolled her eyes. “Anyways,” she announced, looping her arm through Dren’s in a possessive gesture that made his heart jump, “this is Dren.”
Dinner was a lively, layered affair. Vanja’s father, Besnik, was a director at the power utility, a man with a booming laugh and a way of asking pointed questions disguised as casual interest. “And your studies, Dren? Law. A fine profession. Do you see its application here as following the statutes, or… shaping new ones?”
Agron was full of stories about Italy—the food, the trainers, the surreal pace of Serie A—his enthusiasm a buoyant force. Adem was quieter, more serious, his comments about German reunification and the flow of migrant workers economical and sharp. Vanja’s youngest brother, Agim, who was ten, demanded her attention relentlessly, tugging her sleeve to show her a beetle, insisting she sit next to him only.
Dren watched her navigate it all, the perfect daughter, the teasing sister, effortlessly code-switching between gentle Serbian with her mother and rapid-fire Albanian with her brothers and father. She was a bridge in this one house, and he saw the slight strain it sometimes required, the microscopic adjustments.
At precisely eight, Dren made his excuses, citing the road and an early lecture. The goodbyes were warm, Besnik clapping him on the shoulder, Milena’s gaze slightly softened, Agron offering a genuine “Come watch a match sometime.”
Vanja walked him to the gate, the cool evening air smelling of damp earth and woodsmoke. The light from the house windows painted soft squares on the gravel path.
“So?” she whispered.
“So your brother might get a call-up for the ‘94 World Cup if he keeps his form,” Dren said, and she swatted his arm.
He stopped her just outside the gate, in the deep shadow of a towering pine. He kissed her, a slow, deep kiss that tasted of the rosemary lamb and red wine from dinner, of a shared secret surviving a familial inspection. Her hands came up to his jacket, clutching the leather.
A raucous noise erupted from an upstairs window. Whistles and exaggerated kissing sounds. “Vanjaaaa! Is that a Kalashnikov in his pocket or is he just happy to see you!” Agron’s voice carried, followed by Adem’s deeper laugh and Agim’s confused giggling.
Vanja groaned, dropping her forehead against his chest. “I will murder them. Slowly.”
He laughed, the sound rumbling in his chest, and kissed her hair. “Go on. Before they start a full commentary.”
She stepped back, her face flushed with laughter and annoyance, a beloved sister in her element. “Drive safe. Brick by brick.”
“Brick by brick,” he affirmed.
The motorbike’s roar scattered the quiet of the neighborhood. As he rode into the deepening dark, the image of her light-filled house stayed with him. It was a different kind of fortress, built on different things. His own stone kulla awaited him, heavy with history and expectation. She existed between worlds, and now, somehow, he was planted firmly in the space between those worlds with her. The road was dark, but his hands on the handles were steady.
The road was dark, but his hands on the handles were steady. The cool air cleared the scent of her family’s home from his clothes, replacing it with the night and exhaust. He arrived at the stone kulla well after midnight, the ancient family house a hulking silhouette against the star-dusted sky of Drenica.
His father, Adem, was waiting in the kitchen, a tactical map spread beside a half-eaten plate of beans. The single bulb overhead cast harsh shadows.
“Podujevo,” his father said, not looking up from the map. His voice was flat, a statement.
Dren nodded, hanging his jacket on the peg by the door. The stone walls held the day’s cold. “Yes.”
“The Kastrati girl.” Now Adem looked up, his eyes sharp. A faint, uncharacteristic smile touched his mouth. “The beautiful one with the Serbian mother. You visited her family. This is serious.”
“It’s not like that,” Dren said, too quickly. He reached for a glass of water.
“It is exactly like that. When do we meet her?” Adem leaned back, the chair creaking. “When do I start planning the wedding?”
Dren felt his ears grow hot. “Not now. We’re too young.” The words sounded flimsy, defensive.
His mother, Lulije, entered from the pantry, her hands dusted with flour. She beamed, her whole face transforming. “Dren! You saw her? Tell me.”
“Her name is Vanja,” he said, softening at his mother’s expression. “She’s… impossible to explain.”
“Then bring her here and show us,” his mother said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Next weekend. I will make pite.”
Two weeks later, Vanja stood in the courtyard of the Kelmendi kulla, her form slight against the formidable gray stone. Dren watched her take it in—the slitted windows, the heavy oak door, the palpable weight of history. It was a fortress, not a home. A declaration.
“Wow,” she said under her breath. “It doesn’t mess about, does it?”
His sisters, Aferdita and Lirije, spilled out first, their curiosity a tangible force. They were fourteen and sixteen, all sharp elbows and gleaming eyes.
“You’re the one from the university,” Aferdita announced, circling Vanja. “Your hair is like honey and coal mixed.”
“Can I touch it?” Lirije asked, already reaching.
Vanja laughed, a bright, easy sound that seemed to startle the solemn air. “Go ahead. It’s just hair.” She bent her head obligingly, and his sisters descended, their whispers fervent.
His younger brother, Bastri, thirteen and all awkward limbs, lingered in the doorway. He stared, utterly transfixed, his mouth slightly ajar. When Vanja straightened up and smiled directly at him, a swift, warm grin, he flushed a spectacular scarlet, looked at his feet, and vanished back inside without a word.
Dren’s mother embraced Vanja gently, holding her by the shoulders to look at her. “Welcome, child,” Lulije said, her voice rich with a warmth the stone could not absorb. “Come, the sun is still good. We’ll sit outside.”
They drank sweet tea on the worn bench by the kitchen garden, the late autumn sun weak but persistent. His sisters grilled Vanja about Priština, about fashion, about whether she thought a certain pop singer was cute. Vanja answered with a quick, genuine humor that had them giggling, leaning in. She teased Dren about his motorcycle, about his stubbornness in debates, and he watched his family watch her, seeing her through their eyes: a creature of lightness and cleverness, disarming the fortress brick by brick.
Later, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, staining the sky violet, he took her hand. “Walk with me.”
They left the courtyard and followed a dirt path that wound through the family’s fields, now harvested and bare. The earth was cold and damp underfoot. The silence here was different, vast and listening.
“This is all yours?” she asked, her breath making small clouds.
“Ours. The family’s. For centuries.” He squeezed her hand. “It’s a responsibility. Not just land.”
She nodded, understanding the subtext. Blood and soil were not metaphors here.
He stopped, turning to face the darkening ridge to the east. “Prekaz is next,” he said quietly. The name was just a name to most. To him, it was a coordinate on a map his father studied, a gathering tension.
“Prekaz?” Vanja’s head tilted. The word clearly meant nothing to her in this context. Then her expression shifted, recalling personal geography. “Yeah… that’s where my mom is from. A village near there. She doesn’t go back much.”
“My mother is from Prekaz,” Dren said, watching her face.
Vanja blinked. “Lulije… from Prekaz.” She repeated it slowly, as if tasting the syllables. Then her eyes widened slightly, the green-gold darkening in the twilight. The connections snapped together in her mind, the familial web of Kosovo. “Jashari. Lulije Jashari.”
She remembered now. The names from a future news report, carved into a martyr’s monument. Adem, Hamëz, and Rifat Jashari. Their younger sister.
“Your uncles,” she whispered, the blood draining from her face. The knowledge from her other life was no longer abstract. It was here, in the woman who had just fed her pite, in the boy who blushed when she smiled. Prekaz wasn’t just a strategic point. It was a family home. What was coming there was a slaughter. It was his mother’s heart, about to be shattered.
The weight of it hit her visibly. She swayed. Dren caught her elbow.
“Vanja?”
She looked at him, and the horror in her eyes was raw and bottomless. It wasn’t a general fear of war. It was specific, graphic, and intimate. She knew the date. She knew the names. She knew the children who would die in that house.
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. The brick of Hebrew was one thing. This was another. This was a secret that could strangle her.
He pulled her against him, holding her tightly as a sharp wind cut across the field. He felt the fine tremors running through her body. “Tell me,” he murmured into her hair.
But she just shook her head, clutching the back of his jacket, her fingers cold. She was seeing the flames, hearing the gunfire of a memory that hadn’t happened yet, mourning an aunt-in-law she had just met for the tragedy that would make her a symbol.
He held her, the future pressing down on them like the gathering dusk, colder and heavier than any stone.