Chapter 3: The Proposal and Prekaz
The cold of the Drenica field seemed to seep into Vanja’s bones and stay there throughout the winter. The knowledge was a live wire in her chest, sparking with a sickening jolt every time Dren’s mother smiled, every time she heard the name ‘Jashari’ in casual conversation. She carried it like a stone, the prophecy of Prekaz, a dull, constant ache beneath her ribs.
The seasons turned, the harsh winter giving way to a tentative, muddy spring in 1994. One afternoon in early March, the air still crisp but holding the promise of thaw, Dren asked her to walk with him in the courtyard of the kulla. The patchy snow was retreating, revealing black earth and stubborn winter grass.
He didn’t say anything at first. He just led her to the old bench by the bare rose bushes, the same one where his mother had served them tea. The silence was heavy, but not uncomfortable. It was the silence of shared weight.
Then he knelt.
Not on one knee in some polished, romantic gesture, but awkwardly, his boot sinking into the half-frozen mud. He looked up at her, his green eyes serious, the easy confidence she loved replaced by a vulnerable intensity. In his palm was a ring. It was not a store-bought solitaire. It was a band of heavy, warm-looking gold, intricately carved with a pattern of twisting vines and ancient Illyrian knots. It looked old.
“This was my grandmother’s,” he said, his voice rough. “My father’s mother. She told him to give it to the woman who could stand in this courtyard and not feel diminished by the stone.” He swallowed. “I’ve been carrying it since December.”
Vanja’s breath hitched. The live wire in her chest flared, now mixed with a soaring, terrifying joy. She looked from the ring to his face, to the serious set of his mouth, to the mud on his knee.
“Dren…”
“I’m not asking you to marry me tomorrow,” he said quickly. “I’m not even asking you to promise me forever. I know what’s coming. I see it in my father’s maps. I feel it in the air. I’m asking you to wear this. To be my nuse e zguar. My promised one. So that everyone, my family, your family, the whole fucking world, knows that when the storm hits, we are anchored to each other. Brick by brick, Vanja. This is my brick.”
Tears blurred the intricate knots on the ring. The future screamed in her head—images of camouflage, of funerals, of this very ring perhaps lying in the dirt. But his face, here and now, was more real. His choice, made in full view of the storm, was the bravest thing she had ever witnessed.
“Yes,” she whispered, the word tearing free. “Yes.”
He slid the ring onto her finger. It was a little big, but its weight was profound, a tangible link in the chain they were forging. He stood, mud and all, and kissed her. It tasted of cold air and unconditional commitment.
Spring deepened, and with it came the inevitable journey. “We’re going to Prekaz,” Dren told her one Friday in May. “To see my uncles. My mother is coming. She wants to see her brothers.”
The stone in Vanja’s gut turned to ice. She just nodded, twisting the golden ring around her finger.
The Jashari compound in Prekaz was not a fortress like the Kelmendi kulla. It was a sprawling collection of houses and barns, a small hamlet unto itself, buzzing with activity. Children ran between laundry lines strung between trees. The smell of fresh bread and livestock mingled in the warm air. It felt like a vibrant, stubborn heart pumping in the middle of nowhere.
Adem Jashari emerged from the main house. He was shorter than Dren’s father, but broader, with a quiet, condensed power in his movements. His eyes, when they found Dren’s mother, lit with a deep, soft joy. He embraced Lulije for a long time, murmuring into her hair.
Then he turned to Dren, and then to Vanja. His handshake was firm, calloused. His gaze was unsettlingly direct, not hostile, but profoundly measuring. He looked at her as if assessing where she would fit in a landscape he already understood would become a battlefield.
“So you are the one,” he said, his voice a low rumble. His eyes flicked to the ring on her hand. “The bridge.”
“I try to be,” Vanja managed, her throat tight.
“Bridges are what they attack first,” Adem said, but he said it not as a threat, but as a grim, factual truth. A shadow passed over his face, a man already living in the consequence of a decision not yet fully made. He looked past her, towards the tree line, his mind clearly on terrain, sightlines, defensible positions. The legend was here, in this living man, brewing behind his quiet eyes.
Later, as they drank coffee in the yard, surrounded by Jashari cousins and the playful shouts of children—Adem’s children, Hamëz’s children, beautiful, laughing kids whose names and faces Vanja now desperately, painfully memorized—she felt the future pressing directly against her ribs. It was a physical pressure, a nausea of foreknowledge. She saw Adem lift a small niece onto his shoulders, the little girl squealing with delight, and the image superimposed itself with the black-and-white future-photograph of a corpse in a burned-out house.
She excused herself and walked to the edge of the compound, gripping a fence post until her knuckles turned white. Dren found her there, minutes later.
“You’re white as chalk,” he said, placing a hand on her back.
“He’s going to fight,” she breathed, not looking at him. “He’s already decided. He’s not preparing a home. He’s preparing a… a last stand.”
Dren was silent for a moment. “Yes.”
“And you?” She finally turned to him, her eyes blazing with unshed tears. “When do you decide?”
He didn’t answer. He just looked back towards his uncles, his jaw tight. The answer was in the silence.
The leaves turned, then fell. The year barreled towards its end. Vanja turned nineteen on November 3rd, 1993, a quiet dinner with both families that felt like a fragile ceasefire. The tension in Kosovo had a texture now, a constant low hum in the background of daily life. Checkpoints. Angrier graffiti. Averted eyes.
A few days after her birthday, Dren came to her apartment in Priština. He had a key now. He let himself in, his movements charged with a new, grim energy. He found her at her desk, textbooks open.
“It’s happened,” he said without preamble, closing the door softly behind him. “The UCK. The Kosovo Liberation Army. It’s formally declared. It exists.”
The words landed in the quiet room like dropped anvils. Vanja slowly closed her book. This was the moment. The fork in the road from her memories was now right here, in her shabby living room.
“And?” Her voice was flat.
“And my father has a command. And I have been given a unit.” He said it cleanly, a surgical cut. His eyes held hers, waiting for the blow.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. A strange calm settled over her. The waiting was over. The path was chosen. She stood up from the desk and walked over to him. She took his face in her hands, feeling the tense muscle of his jaw.
“Okay,” she said.
He blinked, confusion breaking through his resolve. “Okay?”
“You made your choice. I made mine a year ago, in a library, when I decided to stay.” She leaned forward and kissed him, a deep, consuming kiss that was all possession and desperate acceptance. “So tonight, Dren Kelmendi, you are mine. Not the commander’s son. Not the unit leader.Mine. Do you understand?”
A fire lit in his green eyes, a release of the coiled tension. “Yes.”
She took his hand and led him to her bedroom. The late afternoon light slanted through the blinds, painting tiger stripes across the bed. There was no gentle undressing. It was a collision.
He pushed her against the wall by the door, his mouth crashing down on hers again, all tongue and teeth and hungry noise. His hands yanked her sweater up and over her head, her hair tumbling out in a messy cascade. He unhooked her bra with a quick, practiced twist, and his mouth was on her breast, sucking her nipple deep, his tongue circling the tight peak. She cried out, her fingers tearing at his belt.
“Fuck, Vanja,” he growled against her skin, his breath hot. He bit down gently on her nipple, then soothed it with his tongue, making her whimper. His hands shoved her jeans and underwear down her hips in one rough motion. She kicked them away, bare now except for her socks.
He stripped his own clothes off, his erection springing free, thick and already leaking. He was all hard lines and tense muscle, a soldier’s body before it had ever seen a trench. He didn’t carry her to the bed. He turned her around, pressing her front against the cool wall. He kissed the nape of her neck, his hands gripping her hips.
“Tell me you want this,” he demanded, his cock sliding through the slickness between her ass cheeks, nudging against her entrance.
“I want it,” she gasped, pushing back against him. “I want you. Hard. Now. Make me feel it, Dren. Make me feel you so I can’t forget.”
He needed no more invitation. With one hand on her hip and the other guiding himself, he drove into her in one relentless, deep thrust. She shouted, a raw, unfiltered sound, as he filled her utterly, stretching her, claiming her. There was no gentle build. This was a taking, a claiming, a physical manifesto against the coming darkness.
He set a brutal, pounding rhythm immediately, each slam of his hips driving her against the wall, the impact shuddering through her frame. The room filled with the sounds of skin on skin, their ragged breaths, the filthy, wet sound of him fucking her deep and hard.
“This cunt,” he grunted, his voice choked with lust, “is mine. This is where I live, Vanja. Right here.” He pulled almost all the way out and slammed back in, making her see stars.
“Yes,” she chanted, “yes, yours, fuck, it’s yours!” She reached a hand between her own legs, fingers finding her clit, rubbing frantic circles as he pounded into her. The pleasure was sharp, almost painful, a brilliant counterpoint to the emotional agony. It was affirmation. It was life, screamingly alive.
His pace became erratic, animalistic. He leaned over her, his chest against her back, his mouth at her ear. “Come for me. Come on my cock. I need to feel you come.”
The command, the sheer filthy possessiveness of it, tipped her over the edge. Her orgasm ripped through her, a convulsive, blinding wave that clenched around him, milking his length. She screamed into the wall, her body shaking.
With a final, guttural roar, he shoved into her one last time, hilt-deep, and she felt the hot, pulsing rush of his release flooding her insides. He held himself there, throbbing, as his climax subsided, his weight heavy and comforting against her.
They slumped against the wall, spent, slick with sweat. He slowly pulled out, and she felt the evidence of their joining trickle down her thigh. He turned her around, his eyes soft now, the fierceness spent. He kissed her forehead, her eyelids, her swollen lips.
Later, in the tangled sheets of her bed as dusk fell, they lay entwined. Her head was on his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. Her golden ring gleamed dully in the fading light.
“We get married,” she said quietly, tracing the lines of his abdomen. “Next spring. Before the… before the weather gets hot.”
He stroked her hair. “Why the hurry?”
“Because I want to be your wife,” she said, and it was the truth. “And because if I’m your wife, no one can keep me from you. Not your commanders. Not a war. I will have a right to be where you are.”
He understood. It was a tactical decision as much as a romantic one. A layer of protection, of legitimacy, in the chaos to come.
“Next spring,” he agreed, kissing the top of her head. “A small wedding. Here, or at the kulla.”
“At the kulla,” she said. “In the courtyard. Surrounded by all that stone.”
They lay in silence, planning a wedding as the world outside planned a war. The future was a locked door, but they had just forged a key. It was heavy, and golden, and worn on her finger.
That winter of 1994 was a long, clenched fist. The cold was deeper, the silence in the cafés more pronounced, the news bulletins on the radio more ominous. Vanja wore Dren’s grandmother’s ring every day, its weight a silent rebuttal to the whispers and the turned backs her mixed name sometimes invited. They planned their spring wedding between lectures and hushed meetings in the back rooms of Priština cafés where Dren’s new comrades gathered.
The war felt less like something coming and more like something already present, breathing quietly in the basement. Dren’s hands, which once held books with casual grace, now often smelled of gun oil and earth. He would come to her late, his knuckles scraped, his eyes holding a distant, operational focus that took minutes to soften. She never asked for details. Instead, she would peel his jacket from his shoulders, wash the dirt from his hands in her sink, and lead him to bed.
“Talk to me about something that isn’t this,” he’d murmur into her hair, his body heavy with exhaustion.
“The Phoenician trade routes,” she’d whisper back, tracing the lines on his palm. “Or the migratory patterns of storks over the Balkans.” She’d spin out nonsense, facts from her other life, until she felt the tension leave his muscles and his breathing deepen.
Their wedding day dawned clear and sharp in late April. It was held in the Kelmendi kulla’s courtyard, just as she’d wanted, surrounded by that ancient, defiant stone. Vanja was beautiful in a simple dress of cream-colored wool, her hair braided with threads of gold, her mother’s Serbian locket and her Albanian grandmother’s ring and Dren’s promised band all resting against her skin. She looked like a fact, a declaration. Dren, in a clean white shirt and dark vest, looked like he’d been carved from the mountains themselves.
The vows were traditional, spoken in Albanian, their voices steady. When Vanja repeated her lines, she saw Lulije Kelmendi weep quietly, and her own Serbian aunt clutch a handkerchief. The imam’s voice was a calm drone beneath the wide sky. Dren slid a second, simpler gold band next to the first on her finger, sealing the promise.
Afterwards, there was laughter and music and an overwhelming sense of temporary relief. A lamb roasted on a spit. Someone produced an accordion. For a few hours, the gathering forgot the checkpoints, the whispered lists of names, the future pressing at the gates. Dren danced with her, his hand firm on the small of her back, his smile genuine and unguarded.
“Mrs. Kelmendi,” he said, testing the words against her temple.
“It sounds like a fortress,” she replied, and he laughed.
That summer, their families pooled resources and did something extraordinary. They bought them a new apartment in a building just north of the city center in Priština. It was a stark, modern box with white walls and large windows, a world away from the stone kulla. It smelled of fresh paint and sawdust and impossible normality. Vanja stood in the empty living room, sunlight pouring onto the bare parquet floor, and felt a dizzying dislocation. This was a life, a real one, new furnitures and neighbors who argued about plumbing. It was the life they were supposed to be fighting for.
They moved their few belongings in. Dren’s law textbooks shared shelf space with Vanja’s anthropology texts and a few secreted political pamphlets. The wedding photo sat on a dresser. They continued their studies, a bizarre pantomime of student life played out against a backdrop of clandestine networks and growing fear. Vanja buried herself in her work, using the rigorous analysis of social structures to quiet the screaming memories of what those structures would soon produce.
Dren’s duality became his life. By day, he was a final-year law student, brilliant and focused, arguing constitutional theory. By night, he was someone else, moving through shadows, learning the weight and feel of weapons, memorizing codes. The apartment became their sanctuary, the one place he could shed the second skin. He’d come home and leave his boots by the door, hanging his loaded gaze on the coat hook next to his scarf.
One night in the fall, the tension between his two worlds snapped. He came home late, vibrating with a cold, silent fury she’d never seen. He didn’t speak. He just looked at her, standing in their clean, well-lit kitchen, and his control shattered.
He crossed the room in three strides, his hands cupping her face, his kiss bruising and absolute. It was a claiming, a reaffirmation wrought from whatever horror he’d witnessed. He backed her against the refrigerator, the cold metal seeping through her blouse. His fingers fumbled with her jeans, popping the button, yanking the zipper down.
“I need to be here,” he growled, his voice ragged. “Right fucking here, in you. Make me be here, Vanja.”
She helped him shove her clothes down, kicking them aside. He didn’t bother to undress fully, just unzipped his jeans, freeing his hard, thick cock. He hooked his hands under her thighs, lifting her, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He guided himself to her entrance, already wet for him, and pushed inside in one deep, claiming stroke.
“God, yes,” she gasped, her head thumping back against the appliance.
He fucked her there, hard and fast, her body pinned between his and the cold steel. Each thrust was a punctuation mark against the chaos outside. The kitchen light was unbearably bright, illuminating every expression on his face—the anguish, the need, the fierce, desperate love. She could smell the night air and sweat on his skin.
“You feel that?” he panted, driving into her relentlessly. “That’s real. That’s the only goddamn thing that’s real.”
She came with a sharp cry, her internal muscles clenching around him, the pleasure so intense it bordered on pain. He followed moments later, a low groan tearing from his throat as he emptied himself into her, his forehead dropping to her shoulder. They stayed like that for a long minute, clinging to each other, breathing in the shared, sweat-slicked reality of their union.
Time folded into a strange, dual-purpose stream. They studied. They made love in their new bed with a frantic hunger. They attended family dinners where the unspoken sat at the table like a ghost. Dren passed his final bar examinations with quiet, exhausted triumph in the spring of 1995. The celebration was subdued, held in their apartment. His father, Adem, clasped his shoulder, pride and profound sadness warring in his eyes. Dren was a lawyer now. He had the tools to build a country, just as everyone was priming themselves to burn it down.
A few weeks later, Vanja stood in their bright bathroom, staring at the plastic stick on the edge of the sink. The two blue lines were unmistakable. The world seemed to tilt, the sounds of the city outside fading into a hum. She thought of the children in Prekaz, laughing. She thought of the weight of a ring, of golden promises made in the mud.
She found Dren on the balcony, smoking, looking out over the city he was sworn to defend and destined to fight for. She didn’t speak. She simply took the cigarette from his fingers, stubbed it out, and placed the plastic stick in his palm.
He looked down. His breath caught. The carefully maintained composure of the soldier, the student, the son, crumbled utterly. His eyes filled, his hand closing gently around the stick. He pulled her to him, burying his face in her neck, his shoulders shaking silently. When he finally leaned back, his green eyes were clearer than she’d seen them in a year.
“A baby,” he whispered, the word a sacred, terrifying prayer.
She placed his hand, the one that knew the weight of a rifle and the grip of a law book, low on her stomach. “Brick by brick,” she said, her own voice thick.
The future was a storm front, black and towering on the horizon. But here, now, in the sun on their balcony, they had built a room. It had a gold ring on a dresser, a law degree on the wall, and a new, fragile life taking root beneath her heart. It would have to be enough.