Chapter 3: The Mechanic's Garage
The mechanic’s garage below thrummed with the impact of a mallet on metal, a steady, percussive heartbeat that vibrated up through the floorboards. Burim let the sound fill the silence after his report. The room held the three of them like specimens in a jar—Adem at the table, Bahri against the wall, himself standing, still feeling the ghost of her forearm in his grip.
“A beautiful young woman in Skenderaj is not strange,” Adem said finally, not looking up from the map. His voice was calm, a low river running under the noise from below. “A beautiful young woman who walks into arguments between police and activists, who speaks like a professor, and who lives alone in a flat two streets from your cousin’s house? That is a question.”
Bahri pushed off the wall, his movement abrupt. He picked up the sharki again but didn’t play it, just held the neck like it was a weapon. “She’s a spy. She has ‘researcher’ written on her German passport and ‘polje za špijunazu’ written on her face. Send her back to Belgrade with a message in her teeth.”
“What message?” Adem asked, his green eyes lifting now. They weren’t angry. They were calculating, appraising Bahri’s heat with detached interest. “That we are so frightened of one woman we must send her away? That we have secrets so obvious a rookie from DB can find them?”
“She is not a rookie,” Burim cut in, the words coming out sharper than he intended. He leaned on the table, pointing to a spot on the map near the border. “Her fear in the café was real. But it was the fear of someone watching a play, not someone in the scene. She understood the words too well.”
Adem’s finger tapped a winding mountain pass. “The supplies from Tropojë come through here next week. Bahri, you will take the truck. Your German is good. If she is from BND, you will know the signs.” He then looked at Burim. “And you. You watch her. Not from a shadow across the street. Get closer. A researcher needs sources. Be a source. See what she wants to hear.”
Bahri made a disgusted sound in his throat. “So we babysit a Serbian girl while the army paints targets on our homes?”
“We think,” Adem corrected, his voice hardening just a fraction. It was enough. The room seemed to cool. “Anger is a fuel. It is not a brain. If she is a spy, we learn what she reports. If she is something else…” He trailed off, his gaze drifting to the barred window as if he could see through the stone to her apartment. “Then we learn that, too. The meeting in Drenica is in one month. Every eye the police have will be on that valley. I will not have a wild unknown variable living in my town without a leash.”
He stood, unfolding his height, and the small room became smaller. He looked at Burim, a direct, penetrating stare. “You find her interesting.”
It wasn’t a question. Burim felt his jaw tighten. “I find her dangerous.”
“Danger can be interesting,” Adem said, a flicker of something—not humor, but a kind of ruthless recognition—in his eyes. “Just do not get so interested you forget what she is. Or what she might be.”
He left first, his exit as quiet as his presence was loud. The after-image of his command hung in the oily air.
Bahri waited until the footsteps receded on the stairs. He plucked the single string of the sharki. A low, dissonant note vibrated in the space between them. “He likes her,” he said, his tone flat.
“He’s curious,” Burim countered, gathering the maps.
“He’s a man. She’s a painting. And she’s Serb.” Bahri spat the last word like a piece of bad meat. “It’s a sickness. He should let me handle it. A conversation in a dark car. Five minutes. We get answers.”
Burim looked at his friend, at the beautiful, arrogant face twisted by a hatred so pure it was almost childish. “And if the answers are just that she’s a stupid academic writing a book? Then we are men who hurt women for writing books. Is that the legend you want?”
Bahri’s blue eyes flashed. “There are no stupid academics here. There are only enemies and us.” He threw the instrument onto a pile of greased rags. “You watch her, brother. But I am watching you.”
The thin gold chain of Vanja’s necklace felt like a wire against her skin. She stood in the self-service market, a bizarre oasis of fluorescent light and near-empty shelves, holding a can of Slovenian-made peas. The normality of it was ludicrous. She was choosing between peas and a jar of pickled peppers while the architecture of a war was being drafted in garages and police stations around her.
A woman edged past her, bumping her hip against the shelf. No apology. Just a quick, assessing glance at Vanja’s blonde hair and city coat. The look said stranger. The look said enemy. Vanja placed the peas in her plastic basket, her historian’s mind cataloguing the exchange: Non-verbal hostility in commercial setting, indicative of rising ethnic polarization in daily life.
She wanted to scream at herself. This wasn’t a fieldwork paper. That woman’s son might die. Might kill. The peas were just peas.
At the checkout, the elderly Serbian clerk rang up her items with slow, trembling hands. He barely spoke. Behind her, two Albanian teenagers whispered, their eyes on the back of her neck. One of them laughed, a short, sharp sound like a stone cracking. She felt a flush crawl up her throat, part fear, part a profound, isolating shame. She was a ghost here, but a ghost they could see and hate.
Back in the terracotta apartment, the silence was a roar. She dumped the groceries on the counter and went to the window. The doorway across the street was empty. She scanned the rooftops, the other windows. Nothing. That was worse.
She pulled out her diary, the blank pages an accusation. Her pen hovered over the paper.
Day… whatever. Burim Ramadani escorted me home. He smells like tobacco and cold air. His eyes are the colour of a glacial lake. In 1998, he will command the sector along the Llap River. He will be responsible for the ambush near…
She stopped. The pen tip dug into the paper, blotting the future. She couldn’t write it. It was no longer a historical fact. It was a possibility held in the shoulders of the young man who had caught her arm. A possibility she could, theoretically, alter. The weight of it made her nauseous.
A sudden, loud bang from the building’s pipes made her jump. The pen skidded, drawing a long, jagged line across the page. She slammed the diary shut.
She needed air he hadn’t poisoned with his surveillance. She needed to see something he didn’t control.
Without a plan, she left again, turning away from the main streets, delving deeper into the residential sokaks. Here, the houses pressed close, their high walls hiding courtyards where fruit trees bloomed. She heard the chatter of a family behind one gate, the sizzle of something frying. A normal life, persisting.
She turned a corner and found herself facing a dead end. A high stone wall, graffitied with a faded Yugoslav star. And sitting on an overturned plastic crate, rolling a cigarette, was an old man in a mechanic’s blue overalls, stained dark with oil. He was the one from the garage beneath the hideout. She recognized the proud, hawk-like nose, the deep grooves around his eyes.
He looked up as she stopped. His eyes were milky with cataracts but his gaze was direct. He said something in Albanian, his voice a dry rustle.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Vanja said in Serbian, then instinctively switched to German. “Entschuldigung.”
The old man’s face hardened. He understood. He took his time lighting the cigarette, sucking the flame into the tobacco. He blew smoke out slowly, then spoke in slow, heavily accented, but perfectly clear Serbian. “This is a dead end. Only living things here are cats and old men who remember when that star meant something. What are you looking for?”
The directness was disarming. “I… got lost.”
“The first true thing you’ve said in this town,” he grunted. He nodded toward the wall. “That was painted for Tito’s visit in 1979. I was younger than you. We all believed in it. The brotherhood. The unity.” He barked a laugh, a sound without joy. “Now a Serbian girl pretends she is German in an Albanian alley. And the men who meet above my garage… they are young again, but they believe in nothing but the gun.”
Vanja’s blood went still. He knew. Of course he knew. The garage was his. The walls had ears, and the ears were attached to a man who had seen empires come and go.
“I am just a researcher,” she said, the lie ash in her mouth.
“You are a stone thrown in a pond,” the old man corrected, standing up with a creak of joints. He dropped the cigarette, crushed it under a heavy boot. “The ripples reach places you cannot see. My nephew, Bahri. He has a temper like a summer storm. The blond one, Burim… he has a colder fire. And Adem…” He shook his head, a lifetime of wisdom condensed into the gesture. “Adem Jashari is a mountain. You cannot move a mountain. But a pretty landslide can make a mountain look in a different direction.”
He walked past her, back toward the mouth of the alley. He paused, not looking back. “Be careful of dead ends, girl. Sometimes, you are the one who is trapped in them.”
She stood alone in the shadow of the wall. The graffiti star seemed to pulse in the fading light. The old mechanic’s words mapped a new, more terrifying landscape than any she’d studied. She wasn’t just an observer. She was a variable. A stone. A potential landslide.
When she finally moved, her legs were stiff. She retraced her steps, but every window now felt like an eye, every silent figure in a doorway a sentinel. She was not just watching history.
History, in the form of proud, angry, complicated men, was now watching her back. And it was clear, from the mechanic’s warning to Burim’s cold curiosity to Adem’s calculating silence, that they had not yet decided what to do with what they saw.
As she reached her street, she saw a flicker of movement in a second-story window across from hers. Not Burim. A different shape. Bahri. He stood, framed in the grimy glass, holding what looked like a pair of binoculars. He lowered them slowly, ensuring she saw him, ensuring she understood the scope of her audience.
He didn’t smile. He just watched, a handsome, arrogant statue of vengeance in the making.
Vanja walked to her door, her key clicking in the lock sounding like the cocking of a hammer in the quiet street. She didn’t look up again. She didn’t need to. She could feel the twin points of their focus—Burim’s cold blue scrutiny and Bahri’s hot, disdainful glare—pressing against her skin like the points of two knives.
Inside, she slid down the back of the door until she sat on the floor. The canned peas and the diary with its savage line across the page were on the counter. The mechanic’s voice echoed. A pretty landslide.
She put her head in her hands. The air in the apartment, once just empty, now felt different. It was charged, waiting. It was the air in the second before a detonation, when the fuse is gone and everything depends on the quality of the explosive.
It was the air in the second before a detonation, when the fuse is gone and everything depends on the quality of the explosive.
Three days passed in a brittle, watched quiet. The canned peas sat unopened. She avoided the market, the café, any place where the threads of the town wove together. Her world shrank to the four walls of the apartment and the window that was both a shield and a lens. She saw Burim twice—once buying cigarettes at the kiosk, another time speaking with the old mechanic, their conversation a silent pantomime of gestures that ended with the mechanic nodding toward her building.
It was the mechanic who finally broke the seal. A firm, deliberate knock landed on her door just past noon on the fourth day. Not the hurried tap of a neighbor. This was announcement.
She opened it to find him there, wiping his hands on a rag that smelled of petrol. “He wants to see you,” he said in his rough Serbian. No name was needed. The pronoun hung in the hallway, singular and absolute.
“Where?” Her own voice sounded thin.
“My garage. Now. He does not wait.” He turned and left, his footsteps echoing in the stairwell, the summons delivered.
Vanja’s hands were cold. She pulled on her coat, a pointless armor. What did you wear to meet a monument that was still breathing? She locked her door, a silly ritual. If they wanted in, the lock was nothing.
The garage was a cathedral of grime and machinery. A gutted Fico sat on blocks, its intestines of wires and engine parts spread on a tarpaulin. The mallet was silent now. In the cleared space near a workbench, Adem Jashari stood.
He was taller than she remembered from the scattered, pixelated photos of her old life. He wore a simple grey sweater and dark trousers, but they couldn’t hide the leashed strength in his posture. He was examining a carburetor, turning it in his hands with an artisan’s focus. He did not look up as she entered.
“Close the door,” he said in Albanian.
She did, the bang of the heavy metal door final, shutting out the weak Kosovo sun. The only light came from a single, caged bulb overhead. It cast sharp shadows under his cheekbones, deep in his beard.
“You speak Albanian?” he asked, finally placing the part on the bench and looking at her. His eyes were the green of a deep forest, absorbing all the light in the room.
“A little. Not well.” She switched to Serbian, a defiant pulse in her throat. “Is this an interrogation?”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. It wasn’t friendly. It was the look of a chess player seeing an expected, but interesting, opening move. “We are talking. In a garage. An interrogation happens in a room with no windows, with men who enjoy the work.” He leaned back against the bench, crossing his arms. The sweater stretched across his shoulders. “You are Vanja. From Germany. Researching… what, exactly?”
“Social structures. In transitional communities.” The academic lie now felt flimsy as tissue paper.
“Transitional.” He tasted the word. “A soft word for a hard time. You picked a very transitional community. My cousin’s boy, Burim, says you listen to arguments in cafés. My friend Bahri says you have the eyes of someone who is recording everything. My uncle,” he nodded toward the small office where the old mechanic had vanished, “says you are a stone in a pond. I look at you, and I see a woman who is not afraid enough for someone who is lost.”
The analysis was calm, surgical. It stripped her pretense layer by layer. “Maybe I’m a slow learner.”
“Or a fast one.” He pushed off the bench and took two slow steps toward her. The space between them crackled. He wasn’t threatening her physically; he was simply occupying the environment, making her aware of his totality. “You live alone. You ask no one for help. You walk with a purpose, but to no place we can see. This is not how a researcher survives here. This is how a spy operates. Or a fool.”
“Which do you think I am?” she asked, holding his gaze. Her heart was a frantic bird in her chest.
“I think,” he said, stopping an arm’s length away, “you are hiding in plain sight. The question is: from whom? The Serbian police? Or from us?” He studied her face, the silence stretching. “Your Serbian is Belgrade-Serbian. Perfect. Your German passport is perfect. Too perfect. Things that are perfect are made, not born.”
He reached into his pocket. Vanja’s breath hitched, but he only pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He offered her one. She shook her head. He lit his, the flare of the match illuminating the sharp planes of his face for an instant.
“So, Vanja from Germany. Let’s play. You want to research my… transitional community. Ask me a question. A real one.”
This was the test. A wrong answer would cement her fate. She could ask about crops, about migration patterns. Safe, dull. She saw the expectation of that banality in his eyes. He was waiting for her to choose safety.
She didn’t. “What will you do when the police come for you the first time?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
The garage went utterly still. The question hung in the smoke between them, a grenade with the pin pulled. His expression didn’t change, but something shifted in the depths of his green eyes—surprise, followed by a fierce, blazing intensity. It was the look of a man who had just heard an echo of his own most secret thoughts.
“The first time,” he repeated slowly, emphasizing the ordinal. Not if. When. And the first time. “That is a very specific question for a social researcher.”
She said nothing. She had jumped, and now she was in the air.
“Who are you?” The question was no longer an investigation. It was a demand, low and charged.
“I told you.”
“You told me a story for a child.” He took a final drag and crushed the cigarette under his heel. “The police will come. Probably before the snow melts. And when they come, we will be ready. We will send them back. That is my answer. Now you give me yours. Who sent you? DB? Sicherheitsdienst?”
“No one sent me.” The truth, at last, felt like a stone dropping from her lips.
“Then why are you here?” He moved closer again, the scent of tobacco and hard soap wrapping around her. “Why ask a question only a soldier or a prophet would ask?”
Because I have seen the graves, she thought. Because I have read the reports of your last stand in a white farmhouse seven years from now. Because you are a chapter heading to me, and I walked into the book.
She looked up at him, at the living, breathing man who history would either canonize or vilify, but would certainly not forget. A reckless, terrifying clarity filled her. She could not be the researcher. Not with him. “I’m here because the story is wrong. The lines are wrong. The Kuči remembered their blood oath, didn’t they? Even when some converted. The mountain doesn’t care about the mosque or the church. It just is.”
Adem froze. The color drained from his face, then rushed back. The reference to the tribe, to the ancient bloodlines that predated the religions now carving the land apart, was a key turned in a hidden lock. It was knowledge no foreign researcher, no spy, should possess.
He stared at her as if seeing a ghost. Or a miracle. His hand came up, not to strike, but as if to touch her face, to verify she was real. He stopped it inches from her cheek, his fingers curling into a fist.
“Çka je ti?” What are you? The words were a breath, barely spoken.
Before she could fashion an answer from the chaos in her mind, the metal door of the garage rattled with a frantic, pounding fist. A young voice, cracked with panic, shouted from the other side in Albanian. “Adem! They’re at the checkpoint! They’re stopping every car! They have his picture!”
The spell shattered. The prophet vanished, replaced by the commander. His gaze snapped from her to the door, every muscle coiling. The future had just knocked, loud and impatient.
He looked back at her, a final, searing assessment. The confrontation was over, interrupted by the very history she had alluded to. “Go home. Lock your door. Do not look out the window.” It was an order, blunt and absolute. “We are not finished.”
He turned and was gone, yanking the door open and disappearing into the daylight with the messenger. Vanja stood alone in the sudden, ringing silence, the ghost of his near-touch still burning on her skin.
The explosive had been named. The detonation was next. And she was now, irrevocably, inside the blast radius.