Chapter 11: lovi
The nausea arrived not with a wave, but as a constant, low tide in her veins. Vanja would wake in the gray pre-dawn, the smell of the damp wool blankets suddenly intolerable, and stumble to the basin, retching until her ribs ached. She kept a tin of powdered ginger by the bed, from the kitchen stores, and would let the sharp granules dissolve on her tongue, staring at the weakening stars.
It was a private struggle. By first light, she was dressed, hair braided tight, moving through the routine of the house. The children—Hamës, Adem’s nephew, and Besa, his niece—found her in the main room one afternoon, puzzling over a maths textbook. Their father, Rifat, was busy; their mother, shy and worn, grateful for the help.
“The teacher says it’s wrong,” Hamës grumbled, shoving the paper toward her.
Vanja scanned the column of figures. Simple long division. The method was slightly different from what she recalled, but the logic was eternal. She pulled a stool close. “Forget the teacher. Look at the problem like a puzzle. You have this many apples, and this many friends…”
Her Albanian was fluent now, but she slowed it for them, making it musical. As she guided Hamës’s pencil, Besa leaned against her shoulder, a warm, trusting weight. For a moment, the chemical fear in her blood receded, replaced by a simple, solid warmth. This was lineage. This was continuation.
In the kitchen, Adem’s mother, Shote, watched her. The older woman said little, but her observations were precise as a sniper’s aim. She noted when Vanja paused to breathe through a sudden dizzy spell before lifting the heavy iron pot. She saw the way Vanja seasoned the tavë, not with the brutal handfuls of salt the men preferred, but with a measured mix of paprika, pepper, and a pinch of something fragrant she couldn’t name.
“What is that?” Shote asked one evening, pointing a bony finger at the small cloth pouch Vanja had produced from her pocket.
“Herbs. From the market in Mitrovica. It’s for the beans. My… a woman I knew in Germany used it.” It was a lie wrapped around a truth—a memory of her own grandmother, in a kitchen a lifetime from now, complaining that Serbian beans tasted like dirt without a little savory.
Shote nodded slowly. “Let me taste.”
The beans that night were richer, deeper. Shote ate two portions. The next morning, she silently placed a mortar and pestle and a bundle of dried wild thyme on the table before Vanja. It was not praise. It was greater. It was inclusion.
Hamez’s wife, Zana, was kindness itself, bringing Vanja weak tea and gossiping softly about the village. Rifati’s wife, Donika, remained quiet, but her eyes were gentle. Vanja was becoming a thread in the weave of the household, no longer a splinter.
Shaban’s birthday arrived at the end of a brittle, cold week. The old warrior was grumbling about the silence, no party, no fuss. Vanja decided on baklava. It was a risk—a sweet, frivolous gesture in a time of hardening austerity. She spent the afternoon in a cloud of filo dough and clarified butter, layering the sheets with a patience she didn’t know she possessed. The nuts she ground herself—walnuts from their own trees, sweetened with honey from Hamez’s hives. The syrup was lemon and rosewater, a scent that cut through the house’s gun-oil and woodsmoke aroma like a promise of a softer world.
When she presented it, Shaban’s eyes, usually sharp with cunning or mistrust, went wide and soft. He took a piece, the sticky pastry defying his fingers. He ate it in two bites, closing his eyes. A rumble started in his chest, becoming a full-bodied laugh. “By God, girl. You cook like an angel from a land of plenty.” He took another piece, nodding at Adem. “This one. You keep her. Even if she shoots like a city girl.”
The men laughed. Adem’s smile was a rare, unguarded slash of pride. That night, after the household had slept, he pulled her into the larder, amidst the sacks of flour and hanging strings of onions. His hands were on her face, his kiss tasting of honey and phyllo.
“You see?” he murmured against her mouth. “You are making a home in the fortress.”
“It’s just pastry, Adem.”
“No. It is a weapon they do not understand.” He backed her against the rough wooden shelves, his hands sliding under her sweater, finding her breasts, heavier now, the nipples painfully sensitive. He thumbed them through the fabric of her shirt, and she arched into the touch, a moan catching in her throat. “It is life,” he growled. “You are life, in this place of death.”
He unbuttoned her trousers, yanked them down along with her underwear. The air in the larder was cold on her exposed skin. He turned her around, bending her over a sack of rice. He fumbled with his own belt, the buckle clinking. Then he was pressing against her, his cock hot and rigid. He entered her with a single, smooth, deep thrust, sheathing himself fully in her wet heat.
“Fuck,” he hissed, his hands gripping her hips. He began to move, a steady, claiming rhythm. “This sweet cunt. My life. Right here.” Each thrust jarred her against the rough sack, a counterpoint to the fierce pleasure coiling in her core. He leaned over her, his beard scratching her neck, his voice a raw whisper in her ear. “I come in here, and you make a son. You make baklava. You make a future. How do you do that, Vanja? How do you make hope out of nothing?”
She couldn’t answer. She could only push back against him, meeting his thrusts, her fingers clawing at the burlap. The crudeness of the act, here amidst the food supplies, the visceral, grunting necessity of it, felt more sacred than any prayer. He fucked her with a concentrated fury, as if trying to physically imprint his essence, his lineage, into the very heart of her.
“Gonna fill you up again,” he promised, his pace turning ragged. “Every day. Keep you full of me. Pregnant with my will.” His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her ass. “You like that? Being my fertile ground?”
“Yes,” she gasped, the word breaking on a sob as her climax began to tear through her, violent and shattering. Her inner muscles clenched around him, milking him, and with a guttural shout, he followed, pumping his release into her in hot, pulsing waves. He collapsed over her, both of them panting in the dark, dust-mote air.
Later, clean and wrapped in blankets by the hearth, they watched the fire die. The world outside was quiet, frozen.
“1992 will come in a few hours,” he said, his voice flat.
“It’s falling apart, isn’t it?” she asked. “Yugoslavia.”
He nodded, his gaze on the embers. “Slovenia and Croatia are gone. Macedonia will go. Bosnia… God help them. It is a contagion. And our chance is now, while they are sick with their own fighting.”
“It will take time,” she said softly, echoing the cold chronology she knew by heart. “Years. Decades.”
“I know.” He turned his head, his green eyes catching the fire’s last light. “But we are young. And we are strong. And we have started.” His hand settled on her stomach, where a firm, small bump had begun to press against the wool of her dress. “He will see it. Our son. He will see a free Kosovo.”
He will see you become a legend, she thought, the history a lead weight in her chest. He will see you die for it.
But she said nothing. She placed her hand over his. A fierce, sudden movement fluttered beneath their joined palms—a quick, insistent push from within.
Adem froze. His breath caught. A look of pure, unadulterated wonder shattered the severe lines of his face. He had faced down armed police, planned insurrections, carried the weight of a nation’s hope. But this—this tiny, internal kick—rendered him speechless.
“Zemër,” he breathed, the word for ‘heart’ an endearment he rarely used. He looked at her, his eyes shimmering. “Did you feel that?”
“I feel it every day,” she whispered, smiling through a sudden blur of tears.
He leaned down, pressing his ear to her belly, his arms wrapping around her waist. He stayed there for a long time, listening to a future he was determined to shape. The old year bled away outside, taking with it the last fragile fiction of a united country. The new one waited, cold and sharp, full of blood and possibility.
“Sleep, zemër,” he finally murmured, helping her to her feet, guiding her to their bed with a tenderness that felt entirely new.
And she did, curled into the furnace of his body, her hand resting on the swell that housed their son, while the first silent snow of 1992 began to fall, blanketing the hills of Prekaz, covering the tracks of men and the scars of the land in a deceptive, pristine white.
The white did not last. Winter melted into a tense, muddy spring, and her body bloomed into a territory of its own. The baby was a vigorous settler, turning her bladder into a drum, her ribs into a percussion instrument. She moved with a new, heavy grace, and the men in the courtyard averted their eyes from her shape with a respect bordering on superstition.
Adem’s touches changed. They were less about possession, more about mapping. His large, calloused hands would cup the full, aching weight of her belly as they lay in the dark, feeling the rolls and jabs. “He’s practicing,” he’d say, a trace of awe in his voice. “For the fights.”
“Or she’s dancing,” Vanja would murmur, though they never used the female pronoun. The future required a son; they both knew it.
His need for her became more frantic, a raw desperation that mirrored the tightening noose of police patrols on the road to Mitrovica. One evening in late July, the air thick with the smell of hot pine and impending storm, he came in from a meeting. His knuckles were scraped raw. He didn’t speak. He simply crossed the room, pulled her up from the chair by the sink, and walked her backward to the wall.
His kiss tasted of salt and rage. He pushed her dress up, his fingers hooking into the waistband of her underwear, tearing the cotton aside. He unbuttoned his trousers, freeing himself, already fully hard. He lifted one of her legs, hiking it around his hip, and pushed inside her with a rough, gratified groan. She was wet, always ready for him, her body responding to his tension.
“They talk of lists,” he gritted out, thrusting into her, the force driving her shoulders against the whitewashed stone. “Our names are on them. They think we are items to be collected.” His hips snapped harder. “But this. This they cannot catalogue. This heat. This filthy, perfect cunt wrapped around my cock. This is mine.”
She clutched at him, her nails biting into the hard muscle of his back, her other hand braced against the wall. The crude talk, the violent claiming, ignited her. Each drive of his hips was a negation of the lists, the patrols, the inevitable end he couldn’t yet see. “Yes,” she hissed back, meeting his rhythm. “Yours. Nothing else.”
“Say it.”
“I’m yours. The baby is yours. Everything.”
He came with a choked-off roar, shuddering against her, spilling deep. He held her there, impaled and panting, for a long minute. When he slipped out, a trickle of his release followed, staining her thigh. He rested his forehead against hers, his breath evening. “Forgive me,” he whispered, the fury gone, replaced by exhaustion. “Sometimes I need to feel… real.”
“You are real,” she said, kissing his scraped knuckle. “You are the most real thing I have ever known.”
The pains began on a still, oppressive night in late August, a vise tightening low in her spine, distinct from the usual false alarms. She was in the kitchen, wiping down the table. The cloth slipped from her hand. She focused on her breathing, the technique from a book she’d once read in another life.
Adem was across the compound. She sent Besa, wide-eyed, to fetch him. By the time he burst through the door, his face pale beneath his beard, the contractions had a measurable, cruel rhythm. Shote and Zana took command, their voices calm, shooing the men out. Adem refused. He stood rooted in the corner, a spectator to a battle he could not fight.
Hours dissolved into a liquid continuum of pain. Vanja bit down on a leather strap, sweat soaking her hair. The world narrowed to Shote’s instructions, to the terrifying, undeniable pressure building. Zana mopped her brow. “Now,” Shote commanded, her voice iron. “Push.”
It was not like in stories. There was no single moment of transcendent triumph. It was raw, animal work, a tearing, burning expulsion of life from her body. She screamed, a guttural sound she didn’t recognize, and pushed until her vision frayed at the edges.
And then, a sudden, wet release. A thin, furious cry sliced the air.
Shote’s hands were swift, sure. A small, blood-slicked body, purplish and squirming, was lifted onto Vanja’s heaving chest. The cry grew stronger, indignant.
“A boy,” Shote announced, a grim smile in her voice.
Vanja’s trembling hands came up to touch him. He was impossibly small, his face scrunched, a thatch of dark hair plastered to his scalp. His cries softened into shuddering gasps against her skin. The relief was so total it felt like annihilation.
She looked past him, to the corner. Adem was on his knees. Silent tears carved paths through the dust on his cheeks. He was staring, utterly shattered, at the raw, howling fact of his son.
Later, clean and swaddled, the baby slept in the wooden cradle Hamez had carved. Vanja lay exhausted, hollowed out and remade. Adem approached like a man approaching an altar. He looked from her to the child and back again, speechless.
“Hold him,” she whispered.
He shook his head, a quick, frightened gesture. “I’ll break him.”
“You won’t.”
His hands, so capable with a rifle or a steering wheel, were visibly trembling as he reached into the cradle. He lifted the tiny bundle with infinite, clumsy care, bringing him to his chest. The baby made a soft, snuffling sound. Adem’s entire frame shuddered. He bent his head, inhaling the scent of his son’s head.
He looked at Vanja, his green eyes swimming. “He has your hair,” he said, his voice thick.
She smiled weakly. “It’s black, Adem.”
“The shape, then. The line of his ear.” He was babbling, lost. He finally tore his gaze from the child’s face. “What he did to you… I saw it. I felt every second of it in my own bones.”
“It’s done now.”
He nodded, still cradling his son. He sat on the edge of the bed, his hip pressed against hers. The baby nestled in the crook of his arm. Outside, the first hint of dawn bleached the sky. A new, different silence held the house.
“Enver,” Adem said softly, the name a statement, not a question. It meant ‘friend,’ but it was the name of a legend, a promise of continuity.
Vanja touched the baby’s tiny, starfish hand. It curled around her finger with a surprising strength. “Enver,” she agreed.
Adem sat there as the room grew light, holding his son, watching over his wife. The fear was still there, a cold, familiar stone in his gut. But layered over it now was a terrifying, devastating love that made every future risk feel like a potential abyss. The police would come. The lists were real. But this, this tiny, breathing heart against his own, changed the calculus of everything.
He was no longer just a man fighting for a land.
He was a father, and the war had just become infinitely more personal.
He was a father, and the war had just become infinitely more personal. That personal war was fought in the trenches of soiled diapers and sleepless nights, in the gummy smiles that could disarm Adem’s severest frown. Enver grew, a sturdy, serious boy with his father’s green eyes and a surprising, delicate touch with the household cats. The fortress adapted around him.
Time did not pass so much as it accreted, layer upon layer of tension and routine. Five years stacked themselves against the stone walls of Prekaz. The household hardened into a definitive stronghold. Sandbags, once a temporary bulwark, became permanent architectural features, sprouting like grim fungi beside every low window. The sweet scent of Shaban’s tobacco was now permanently edged with the acrid tang of gun oil and the sour smell of men’s fear.
Vanja’s body became a familiar landscape of creation. After Enver came Leon, a brawler from the womb, then Vigan, quieter, with Vanja’s golden-green gaze. Finally, a daughter, Lira, whose first mewling cry was the sound of a secret Vanja had carried since her own time, finally made flesh. Her hair was pale as winter wheat, just as it had been in a dream Vanja had long ago dismissed.
The older children—Hamës, Besa, others from the extended family—became liabilities in a calculus of survival. “They should go,” Vanja said one evening, her voice leaving no room for debate. She was nursing Lira, her figure softer now, a matronly strength in her bearing. “To Germany. To family there. They are targets, Adem. Living symbols.”
Shaban, ancient and gnarled as an olive tree, spat into the fire. “We do not send our blood away.”
“We preserve it,” Vanja shot back, her gaze unwavering. “Sentiment is a luxury we cannot afford. You know this.”
A long silence stretched, broken only by the crackle of resinous pine. Shaban looked from her fierce face to Adem’s, which was set in a mask of grim agreement. The old warrior’s shoulders slumped. He gave one slow, grudging nod. The exodus was quiet, tearless, and brutal in its efficiency. The compound felt hollow afterward, the laughter of the remaining little ones echoing strangely in the newly emptied rooms.
By the summer of 1997, the air was thick with a different kind of static. It smelled of hot earth, ripening corn, and imminent lightning. Adem came to bed late, his body radiating a restless, furious energy. Vanja lay awake, waiting. The moon painted a silver stripe across their bed.
“They will come for me again,” he said into the dark, his voice flat. “The patrols. They will not ask this time. They will attack.”
“I know.”
“We will attack too.” He turned onto his side, facing her. In the faint light, his eyes were chips of obsidian. “Provoke. Draw their focus. We need to be ready. They need a monster to chase. I will give them one.”
Vanja understood the strategy. Concentrate the threat. Make his name so terrifying it drew all their fury, a lightning rod for the coming storm. It was a suicide play, and he knew it. “We need a basement,” she said, her practical mind already mapping the earth beneath the house. “A proper shelter. For the children and the women. Not just a root cellar.”
He nodded, a swift jerk of his chin. “We start digging tomorrow.”
The construction was a frantic, secretive ballet. The men dug in shifts, the earth passing in buckets from the deep, cool hole beneath the main house. Vanja supervised the stocking of it: canned goods, medical supplies, water barrels, blankets, a chemical toilet. It smelled of damp soil and impending dread. She handled each tin, each bandage, with the solemnity of a high priestess preparing a tomb. She knew it was necessary. The historical record was a scream in her memory.
One evening, the basement complete, he found her in their room, folding the children’s clothes. The summer heat was oppressive. He took her wrists, stilling her hands. His touch was feverish.
“I want you and the children safe,” he said, the words rushing out. “When it starts, you go down there. You stay until the war ends. However long it takes.”
“Adem,” she said softly, her heart a cold, hard stone in her chest. “The war hasn’t started yet.”
“Zemër,” he whispered, his thumb stroking her pulse point. “Think about where you want to be after. Germany. Switzerland. Hell, even Albania. Anything is better than staying here when it starts. I will get you out. When it is done.”
She pulled her hands free, a spike of anger piercing her fear. “What about the other women and children? In the village? In Likoc? Are we to move thousands? Do we just save our own and watch the rest burn?”
He didn’t have an answer. He never did for that. Instead, he framed her face with his rough hands and kissed her, a deep, consuming kiss that tasted of shared despair and unyielding want. It was an argument and a confession. His tongue pushed past her lips, demanding a response. She gave it, biting his lower lip, her hands fisting in his shirt. The fear transmuted, as it always did with them, into a raw, physical hunger.
He pushed her back onto the piled clothes, the small, folded sweaters of their sons scattering. He yanked her cotton dress up, tore her plain underwear aside. He was already hard, pushing his trousers down just enough to free himself. He didn’t wait. He drove into her with a single, starving thrust, burying his cock in her wet, familiar heat.
“Christ,” he grunted, his body trembling. He braced himself above her, not moving, just seated to the hilt, as if trying to disappear inside her. “This. This is what they want to erase. This fucking warmth. This life.”
Then he began to move, a hard, fast, punishing rhythm. There was no tenderness, only a frantic need to connect, to reaffirm existence. The bedframe knocked a dull beat against the stone wall. He fucked her with a focused desperation, each snap of his hips a mute protest against the ending he saw coming.
“You feel that?” he rasped, his breath hot on her neck. “You feel me in your cunt, Vanja? Remember it. Whatever happens, you remember this. My cock in you. My children in you. That’s real. That’s what I built.”
She wrapped her legs around him, pulling him deeper, meeting each thrust with a force of her own. “I remember,” she gasped, her climax building like a storm surge, brutal and inevitable. “I’ll remember everything, you bastard.”
Her orgasm ripped through her, a silent, seizing violence that clamped down on him. He cried out, his own release surging hot and deep, pumping into her as if he could seal his promise with his own essence. He collapsed, his weight heavy and welcome, his face buried in her sweat-damp hair.
They lay entangled, sticky and spent, for a long time. Then, a small sound at the door. Lira, their four-year-old daughter, stood silhouetted in the moonlight, her pale hair a cloud around her sleepy face. In her hand, she clutched her hairbrush.
“Baba?” she murmured, her voice soft as thistledown. “You brush my hair tonight?”
Adem went utterly still. Vanja felt a shudder pass through him. He slowly disentangled himself, pulling up his trousers, wiping his face with a trembling hand. He turned to his daughter, and the mask of the commander, the lover, the furious prophet, completely fell away. What remained was a man staring at a miracle he would not get to keep.
His smile was the most devastating thing Vanja had ever seen. His eyes glistened, overflowing. “Yes, zemër im,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Of course.”
He sat on the floor, his back against the bed, and lifted her onto his lap. With a tenderness that made Vanja’s throat ache, he began to pull the brush through her fine, blonde hair. Each stroke was slow, deliberate, a meditation. Lira leaned her head back against his chest, sighing in contentment.
Vanja pushed herself up, gathered her dress, and slipped from the room. She could not watch. The sight was too beautiful, and too final. She walked down the cool, dark hallway to the room where their three sons slept in a tangle of limbs. Enver, nearly six, was awake, his green eyes wide in the dark.
“Nënë? Was that thunder?”
“No, shpirt,” she whispered, sitting on the edge of his bed, smoothing his dark hair. It was so like his father’s. “Just the old house settling. Go back to sleep.”
She picked up the storybook from the floor, its pages worn soft. She began to read, her voice a low, steady river in the night, weaving a tale of distant mountains and brave deeds, a fragile incantation against the coming dawn. Outside, the first patrols of a new, more vicious age were already rolling through the darkened valleys, their headlights cutting through the Kosovo night like surgical blades searching for a heart.