Chapter 12: family part 2 and future plans
The silence after the children left was a physical presence. It lived in the unused corners of the house, in the untouched toys gathering dust on a shelf, in the terrible, echoing quiet of the supper table. Vanja felt their absence like phantom limbs, her arms aching to hold the warm, squirming weight of Leon, her ears straining for Vigan’s serious questions. Lira’s hairbrush sat on the nightstand, a golden strand still caught in the bristles.
The journey to Germany had been a clinical exercise in severance. Adem’s brother, an engineer in Stuttgart, had met them at the airport. His eyes, so like Adem’s but without the fire, had filled with tears as he gathered Enver into his arms. The goodbyes were quick, brutal. Vanja kissed each damp face, memorized the scent of their hair—apple shampoo and child-sweat—and shoved the passports into the brother’s hands. “Keep them safe. No letters. No calls. When it’s over, we will come.” She turned and walked through security without looking back, her body moving on a script written by cold necessity. On the plane, she locked herself in the tiny bathroom and vomited until her throat was raw.
Returning to Prekaz in December 1997 was like entering a tomb that was still being built. The hills were skeletal under a gunmetal sky. Adem met her at the edge of the property. He didn’t embrace her. He just took her small bag from her hand, his fingers brushing hers, and nodded. His beard was flecked with more grey. The lines around his eyes had deepened into trenches.
“They arrived safely,” she said, her voice hollow. “They’re confused. Scared. But safe.”
“Good.” That was all. They walked back to the house in a silence that was both empty and full of everything they couldn’t say.
That night, he came to her. There was no preamble, no kiss. He pushed her onto the bed, his hands wrenching her trousers and underwear down her thighs. He was already hard, his cock jutting against her belly. He spread her legs with a knee, his breathing ragged. He entered her in one brutal, shearing thrust. It was dry, painful, a punishment and a plea.
“Fuck,” he hissed, burying his face in her neck. He didn’t move. Just held himself there, fully seated inside her, his body rigid with a tension that had nothing to do with lust. “I can still smell them on you. The airplane. The city. It’s wrong.”
She didn’t fight the pain. She welcomed its sharp clarity. Her hands came up to claw at his back, anchoring herself to this raw, ugly reality. “They’re gone,” she gasped. “It’s done.”
He began to fuck her then, a hard, mechanical piston motion, each drive of his hips a hammer blow against the hollow inside her. It was devoid of pleasure, a grim reconnection. He came quickly, with a shudder and a low groan, spilling into her with a kind of angry defeat. He collapsed, his weight pinning her, and she felt a hot tear hit her collarbone. He said nothing. Just rolled off, turning his back to her in the dark.
A few more months, she had said. The calendar became their scripture. January passed, a month of iron cold and endless drilling. The compound was no longer a home; it was a garrison. Young men arrived in twos and threes, their eyes bright with fanaticism, their bodies lean and tense. They wore black uniforms. Vanja recognized the insignia before it was ever spoken aloud: the Tigers. The KLA’s special units. History was congealing around her.
Burim was a constant, his gentle demeanor at odds with the weapon he cleaned with devotional care. “Bahri has a girl now,” he mentioned one afternoon, oiling the bolt of his rifle. “From Likoc. Kosovare.”
Vanja was kneading dough for the endless rounds of burek. “Is she kind?”
Burim glanced up, a faint smile touching his lips. “Kind, yes. Not beautiful like you, but then again,” he shrugged, the smile turning wry, “he is no Adem Jashari.”
Vanja snorted, a real laugh surprising her. It felt strange in her throat. “No. He is not.”
As if summoned, Bahri walked in, dumping an armful of chopped firewood by the stove. He was broader now, his boyish petulance hardened into a wary competence. He caught Vanja’s eye and hesitated. The others filtered out, leaving them in the steam-filled kitchen.
“I was wrong,” he said, the words seeming to cost him effort. He stared at the floor. “About you. About many things.”
Vanja wiped her floury hands on her apron. She saw the young man who had sneered at the city woman years ago, now seasoned by the same dread that seasoned them all. “It’s okay, Bahri.”
“It will be fine?” he asked, echoing her common refrain, but it was a real question.
She met his gaze. “It will be what it must be. We will be ready.”
He gave a single, sharp nod and left.
The knowledge was a tumor in her brain. March. She lay awake at night, the dates scrolling behind her eyes: January, February… March. The Serbian police would come. The first attempt would fail. Then the second. Then the real assault. The siege. The end.
One night, she slipped from bed and went to Lira’s empty room. She sat on the narrow cot, clutching the small pillow to her face, and wept. It was a silent, wrenching thing, her shoulders shaking, the sobs trapped behind her teeth. She didn’t hear him come in.
Adem stood in the doorway, a shadow. He watched her for a long minute. Then he crossed the room, sat beside her, and pulled her into his lap. He didn’t tell her to stop. He just held her, his chin resting on top of her head, his arms a vise around her. His own chest hitched once, a broken sound.
“I miss them too,” he whispered into her hair. “Every second. It feels like someone carved out my organs and sent them to Germany.”
She cried until she was empty. Then they just sat in the dark, in their daughter’s room, clinging to each other as the house groaned around them.
The need between them changed after that. It was no longer just a desperate release or a violent reclamation. It became a silent, detailed conversation. Two nights later, he pulled her into the storage room off the kitchen, where sacks of grain were stacked to the ceiling. The air was thick with dust and the smell of dry beans.
He backed her against a sack, his hands cradling her face. “Talk to me,” he murmured, his lips against hers. “Tell me what you see.”
“I see you,” she breathed, her heart hammering. “I see this.”
His kiss was deep, searching. He unbuttoned her shirt, palmed her breast, his thumb circling her nipple until it peaked into a hard, aching point. He bent his head and took it in his mouth, his tongue hot and rough. She tangled her hands in his hair, arching against him.
“Not that,” he said, lifting his head, his eyes gleaming in the sliver of light from the hall. “You know what I mean. In March. What happens?”
She shuddered. “They will come. They will surround us. They will use armored vehicles. They will give demands. You will refuse.”
His hands went to the waistband of her skirt, unbuttoning it, letting it fall. He hooked his fingers in her underwear and dragged them down. “And then?”
“Then they will attack.” Her voice was a thread.
He turned her around, bending her over the rough sack. He pushed her shirt up her back, exposing her. The cool air raised goosebumps on her skin. He undid his own trousers, freeing his erection. He rubbed the head of his cock through her slick folds, making her gasp.
“Will we hold them?” he asked, his voice low and steady, even as his body trembled against hers.
“The first time, yes.” She pushed back against him, wanting him inside, needing the solidity of him. “The second time… it will be harder. Longer.”
He drove into her, a single, deep, perfect stroke that punched the air from her lungs. “Fuck,” he groaned, settling deep. He began to move, a slow, relentless rhythm. “And the third time?”
She couldn’t answer. She was lost in the feeling of him, the exquisite fullness, the gritty friction of the burlap on her cheek. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging in, setting a harder pace.
“The third time, Vanja,” he insisted, his thrusts becoming urgent, punctuating each word. “What. Happens. Then.”
Tears spilled from her eyes, mixing with the dust. “They bring everything,” she sobbed, meeting his thrusts. “Tanks. Artillery. They will not stop. They will set the houses on fire.”
He fucked her harder, faster, his balls slapping against her, the sound obscene and desperate in the small room. “And us?”
She was hurtling toward her climax, the pleasure building monstrously alongside the horror of her words. “You fight. From room to room. You don’t surrender. You never surrender.”
“Do you die?” The question was ripped from him, raw and naked.
Her orgasm exploded, a silent, shattering wave that clenched around him, milking him. “Yes,” she cried out, the word a confession and a release.
With a guttural shout, he came, pouring himself into her, his body buckling over hers. He stayed there, buried inside her, both of them panting, sweating, wrecked.
After a long moment, he softened and slipped out. He turned her, holding her up as her legs threatened to give way. He tucked himself away, then gently pulled her underwear and skirt back up, buttoned her shirt. He wiped her face with his thumbs.
“Good,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Now I know.”
He never asked how she knew. It was the final, unspoken testament of his trust. He simply took the dread and made it a part of his plan.
February bled away. The Tigers dug trenches. They laid wire. They stockpiled ammunition in every conceivable hiding place. Vanja, Zana, and Shote worked like automatons, cooking vast cauldrons of food, rolling bandages, filling every container with water. The atmosphere was electric, a held breath.
On the last day of February, a new commander arrived with a contingent of Tigers. He was older, with a scar cutting through his eyebrow and a cold, assessing gaze. He and Adem closeted themselves in the main room for hours. Voices rose and fell, sometimes heated.
Vanja brought them coffee. The new commander, Jakup, looked her up and down, not with lust, but with calculation. “The German woman,” he stated.
“The mother of Adem Jashari’s children,” Adem corrected, his tone leaving no room for discussion.
Jakup’s eyes flickered. “Her passports could be useful. An exit, if needed.”
“They are not for discussion,” Adem said, finality like stone in his voice.
Later, in the deep of the night, Adem came to her. The house was quiet but alive with the tension of sleeping warriors. He simply pulled the covers back and moved over her. This time, it was slow. Devastatingly slow. He kissed every part of her, as if memorizing a map. He worshipped her with his mouth, his hands, his tongue, until she was sobbing with a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain. When he finally entered her, it was with a profound tenderness that broke her completely.
“Whatever happens,” he whispered, moving inside her with a sweet, deep rhythm that touched her soul, “you were the miracle. You and the children. You made these years a life, not just a wait.”
She held his face, crying freely as she climaxed around him, a deep, pulsing wave of love and loss. He followed, spilling into her with a quiet sigh, his own tears wet on her skin.
They lay entwined, listening. In the distance, a dog barked. A truck engine guttered on the road miles away. The wind shifted, coming from the north, carrying the faint, metallic scent of snow, and something else—diesel, and the cold, impersonal scent of forged steel.
March was here.
The first dawn came smeared in greasy, low clouds and the static crackle of radios. A scout’s voice, tinny and tight, spilled from the handheld unit on the table: “Three vehicles. Police. At the fork.” Adem’s fingers, resting beside the radio, barely twitched. He looked at Vanja across the room where she stood motionless, a sack of flour in her arms. Their eyes locked. No words. The script was in place.
“Hold,” Adem said into the radio, his voice calm. “Let them see the wire.”
Vanja put the flour down. Her heart was a frantic bird, but her hands were steady. She walked to the hidden cabinet behind the pantry, retrieved the German passport, and slipped it into her dress pocket. Its weight was a cold, flat promise. Shote and Zana were already herding the other women—Bahri’s Kosovare, a few cousins—toward the basement door, their faces pale moons in the gloom. “Go,” Vanja told them. “I’ll follow.”
She did not follow. Instead, she went to the window in the front room, now a firing position sandbagged to the sill. Burim was there, his cheek welded to the stock of his rifle. Outside, the police vehicles had stopped. Men in dark blue uniforms spilled out, taking cover behind doors, shouting through a megaphone. The distorted Serbian commands bounced off the stone walls. Lay down your weapons. Surrender the terrorists.
Adem ignored them. He was watching the tree line through binoculars. “They’re probing,” he muttered to Hamez. “This is just the hand.”
The demand came again. Silence answered. A shot rang out, a high, sharp crack from the police line. It splintered a shutter above Vanja’s head. The war had spoken its first word.
“Now,” Adem said.
The compound erupted. Gunfire from the Jashari house was not a barrage, but a precise, disciplined series of cracks. One police officer fell, clutching his leg. Another scrambled behind an engine block. The vehicles reversed, tires spitting mud. The first attempt was over in minutes, a skirmish that left only the smell of cordite and a silent, bleeding man in the field.
The lull that followed was worse. Vanja moved through the house, not to the basement, but to the satellite phone Adem kept locked in a steel box. She dialed a number from memory, a Berlin news desk she had researched in another life. Her German was perfect, fluent, urgent. “I am at the Jashari compound in Prekaz. The Serbian police are attacking. There are women and children inside. If you want the story, come now. Use my name at the border. Vanja Vasojević.”
She gave the passport details. She hung up. Adem stood in the doorway. He hadn’t stopped her. “They won’t make it in time,” he said.
“They’ll make it for the next part,” she answered.
The second attack came at dusk. This time, they meant it. Armored personnel carriers rumbled up the road, their diesel roar drowning the birds. Heavy machine gun fire stitched across the front of the house, chewing stone and wood into dust. The world narrowed to vibration, to the deafening percussion of impacts, to the screams of men. Vanja crouched in the hallway, her hands over her ears. Adem was everywhere, a specter in the smoke, dragging a wounded Tiger to cover, shouting coordinates to Bahri on the roof.
The fighting lasted for two days. Two days of sporadic, brutal engagements, of lulls filled with moans and the frantic click of reloading magazines. Vanja crawled from position to position with water and rags. She saw the young faces of the Tigers, now old with fear and exhaustion. She saw Hamez take a graze to the temple, the blood painting the side of his face like war paint. He just blinked and kept firing.
On the third morning, the TV crew arrived. A dented white van with a satellite dish, halted at the Serbian cordon a kilometer away. Vanja saw them through the binoculars, arguing with an officer. She took a breath, walked out the back door, and across the exposed courtyard. Shots snapped past her. She didn’t flinch. She reached the outer wall, where Adem grabbed her and threw her to the ground.
“Are you insane?” he roared, his face streaked with grime and sweat.
“They need to see!” she yelled back. “They need to see a woman walk out! Give me a white flag!”
He stared at her, his chest heaving. Then, he ripped the lining from his jacket, tied it to a stick, and thrust it into her hand. “Go. Fast.”
She walked. The shooting from the police side slowed, then stopped, confused by the figure in a dress carrying a makeshift flag. She reached the van. A Swedish journalist, pale and wide-eyed, thrust a microphone at her. “Who are you?”
Vanja looked past him, at the Serbian commander approaching. She held up her German passport. “I am a German citizen. These are my friends. You are attacking a family home. The world is watching now.” She said it in English, then in Serbian. The commander’s face tightened. The cameras rolled.
She returned to the hell of the compound. The presence of the media created a fragile, unspoken cage. The shelling stopped. The siege tightened, a slow, suffocating pressure. They were surrounded, cut off, but the world’s eye was upon them. Days bled together. The food dwindled. The water was rationed to a sip per person. Vanja finally descended into the basement, into the dank, crowded dark with the other women. The air tasted of earth and piss and fear.
She couldn’t stay. The silence from above was worse than the noise. On the fifth night, she crawled back up. The house was a carcass. Whole walls were gone, open to the cold sky. Men slept where they fell, caked in dust. She found Adem in the ruins of the kitchen, cleaning his rifle. He was gaunt, his eyes burning in deep sockets. He saw her and didn’t smile. He just reached for her.
He pulled her into the shadow of a shattered oven, his hands rough on her body. This was not love. It was a primal affirmation of pulse and heat. He yanked her dress up, tore her underwear aside. He was already hard, pushing his trousers down. He entered her with a raw, dry thrust that made her gasp. He fucked her against the broken bricks, a brutal, grinding rhythm, his teeth against her shoulder.
“Still alive,” he gritted out, each word a thrust. “Still fucking alive. Feel it.”
She did. The pain, the fullness, the desperate, animal truth of it. She clawed at his back, meeting his violence with her own, and when she came it was a sharp, silent convulsion that locked her around him. He followed with a choked groan, spilling into her, his body sagging against hers. They slid down the wall together, still joined, breathing in gasps.
The final assault began at dawn on the seventh day. The police, pressured from Belgrade to end the spectacle, came with everything. A rocket-propelled grenade struck the upper balcony, obliterating it. Automatic weapons fire poured in like rain. Vanja was in the basement stairwell, passing up ammunition, when she heard Adem’s shout of pain—a different sound, ripped from his core.
She didn’t think. She scrambled up into the chaos. He was on his back in the corridor, blood pumping from his thigh, a dark, spreading stain. A young Tiger, Ajnur, was trying to drag him, but police were advancing, boots crunching on glass. Vanja ran. She grabbed Adem under his arms, her strength born of pure terror, and hauled him back around the corner. A bullet whined past her ear.
She ripped his trouser leg open. The wound was a torn, ugly mess. She took his belt, cinched it high around his thigh, twisting it tight with a piece of broken broom handle. He groaned, his eyes rolling back. “Stay with me!” she screamed, slapping his face. “Look at me!” His green eyes focused, swimming with pain. She hauled him, inch by agonizing inch, down the stairs into the basement, into the wails of the women. The door slammed shut behind them. They barricaded it with a timber beam.
For hours, they listened to the battle rage above. Then, silence. Then, voices. Serbian voices, in their house. They waited for the door to be blown in. It never came. The police, wary of the international cameras, withdrew with their dead and wounded at noon.
The compound was a smoldering wreck. But it stood. They emerged, blinking, into the acrid daylight. The Swedish journalist was there, his camera trained on Vanja as she helped Adem, pale and limping, onto a makeshift stretcher. The microphone appeared.
Vanja looked directly into the lens. She smoothed her filthy dress, touched her husband’s blood on her hand, and spoke in clear, deliberate Serbian. “My name is Vanja Jashari. My husband was almost killed by the police. Many are wounded on both sides.”
That was an understatement. The field was littered with bodies. Many Serbian officers were dead. The KLA had lost people too—boys Vanja didn’t know, but whose names Adem would murmur later in the dark, a litany of grief.
They buried the dead in a mass grave on the hillside. Thirty. Not sixty like it was meant to be but still 30 men too many. The earth was hard, the digging brutal. Adem watched from a chair, his leg bandaged, his face a stone mask.
Rifat came from Germany. He stood beside his brother, wordless, and helped fill the grave. When it was done, Adem gripped Vanja’s hand. “Go,” he said, his voice raw. “See the children. Breathe clean air. For a month.”
She went. The reunion in Stuttgart was a tempest of clinging arms, tears, and the overwhelming scent of safety. She spent a month bathing them, reading to them, lying in a soft bed surrounded by their warm, sleeping forms. It was heaven and hell. Every touch was a reminder of what she would return to.
In the summer of 1998, she came back. Prekaz was rebuilding, hardening. Adem was on his feet, the limp slight but still present. He met her on the road. He looked older. They all did.
“You live,” she said, her voice catching on the simple, miraculous words.
He pulled her to him, his kiss tasting of tobacco and sun and the same desperate love. “Everything changes,” he whispered against her lips. “But the war still comes. Next year.”
She nodded, her face buried in his neck.
That night, in their partially rebuilt room, he held her face. The moon through the unrepaired roof painted his features in silver and shadow. “Zemër,” he said, the word thick. “Next time. If you have to choose between you and me, choose you. Promise me.”
She shook her head, tears welling. “You would choose me.”
“I would. And I will.” His thumbs stroked her cheeks. “But so should you. For the children.”
He saw the flicker of pain in her eyes, the deep, unspoken conflict. “What happened?” he asked, his voice softening.
Her hand took his and pressed it low against her belly, where a firm, gentle curve had begun to swell beneath her clothes. “I’m pregnant,” she whispered. “Four months. It’s the worst time. I know.”
He went utterly still. His gaze dropped to their joined hands on her stomach. The silence stretched, filled only with the hum of crickets. Then he looked up, and his eyes were shining, his smile breaking through the weariness like the first pure sun after a long winter. “No,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s perfect. You are perfect.”
He leaned in, his forehead touching hers, his breath mingling with hers. “I love you.”