Chapter 4: prekaz
The cold in the kulla was a living thing. It seeped from the ancient stone, from the stone floors beneath the old carpets, from the very breath of the twenty men crowded into the main room. It was a masculine cold, smelling of damp wool, gun oil, and the sharp, sour tang of nervous sweat. Adem Jashari felt none of it.
He sat by the small, inefficient stove, a cup of cold coffee in his hand, and stared at the glowing elements. Behind him, the debate ebbed and flowed like water against rock.
“The protests in Priština are a sign,” one of the younger men from Mitrovica said, his voice tight with fervor. “The students are ready. The police are nervous. We add pressure there, and it stretches their resources.”
“Students throw stones. Police fire bullets,” Bahri’s voice cut through, cool and dismissive. He stood apart, near a narrow firing slit, a silhouette against the grey light. “It is theater. The supply route from Albania is not theater. Weapons are not theater. We focus on the real work.”
Burim Ramadani, having arrived with his brother and others from Skenderaj, listened quietly. His presence was a still point in the room. “The police checkpoint two days ago was not theater,” he said, his tone factual. “They had his photograph. They were asking for him by name. They are done with stones.”
Adem’s brother, Hamez, stirred a pot of beans on the stove. He was broader than Adem, his face softer, but his eyes missed nothing. He glanced at Adem’s rigid back, at the untouched coffee. “The question is not where they look, but where they will strike first. And with what strength.”
The words should have hooked Adem’s full attention. This was the planning, the mapping of his own destiny. Instead, her voice superimposed itself over the strategic talk.
“What will you do when the police come for you the first time?”
It was the specificity that ate at him. Not ‘if they come’. Not ‘when they come’. But ‘the first time’. As if she knew there would be a sequence, a grim chronology of escalation. As if she had already read the script.
And the other thing. The Kuči. The blood oath that predated the Ottomans. It was a piece of history known to scholars, to old men in mountain villages, not to blonde researchers from Germany. It was a key to a door he kept locked inside himself. She had turned it.
“Adem.” Hamez’s voice, closer now, a low murmur meant only for him. “Your mind is in Skenderaj.”
Adem didn’t turn. “My mind is here.”
“Your body is here. Your mind is with the Serbian girl.” Hamez lowered himself onto the wooden bench beside him, the old wood creaking. He spoke so softly the others couldn’t hear. “Burim says she is a ghost. Bahri says she is a knife. The old man says she is a stone. What do you say?”
Adem finally took a sip of the bitter coffee. It tasted like mud. “I say she asked me what I would do when the police come for me the first time.”
Hamez went very still. The spoon in his hand halted. He looked at his brother’s profile, the hard line of his jaw working under the skin. “How would she know to phrase it like that?”
“That is the question.”
Across the room, Bahri had grown impatient with the circular talk. “We are spending more energy on one woman than on the Serbian Interior Ministry! Adem, you said yourself—she is a variable. Variables are solved. Remove her. Send her away, or let me—”
“You will do nothing,” Adem said, his voice slicing through the room’s chatter. It wasn’t loud, but it carried the force of an axe blow. He turned his head, his green eyes finding Bahri in the dimness. “Your anger is a straight line. It is easy to see, easy to ambush. She is not a straight line. Until we know what she is, we do not reveal our hand by acting in panic.”
Bahri’s face flushed, the pride wounded. “It is not panic. It is clear thinking.”
“It is thinking with your gut, not your head,” Burim stated flatly, not defending Vanja, but defending the principle. “We watch. We learn. Then we act. This is what he said.”
The room’s attention was on Adem now, a palpable weight. He stood, unfolding his height, the leader re-engaging. “The meeting in Drenica proceeds. The supply line from Tropojë is the priority. Bahri, you leave for Albania tomorrow. Take the Xhani brothers. Use the Shishtavec pass. The snow is still shallow there.”
Bahri gave a sharp, resentful nod, his jaw clenched. The assignment was a sanction, a removal from the immediate drama of Skenderaj.
“Burim,” Adem continued, “you return to the town. Your task is unchanged. Be a source. Let her research you. See what she writes.”
“And you?” Hamez asked, watching him carefully.
“I will go to Albania as well. But a different route, for different meetings. If the police are circulating my picture at checkpoints, it is better I am not here for a while.” He said it logically, but the subcurrent hummed. He was removing himself from her proximity. A tactical retreat.
The men absorbed the orders, the room breaking into smaller clusters of logistical talk—vehicles, fuel, false papers. Adem moved towards the steep stone stairs leading to the upper floor, needing a moment away from the collective breath and suspicion.
Hamez followed him. The upper room was emptier, used for storage, littered with old farming tools and sacks of grain. The cold was even sharper.
“You are unsettled,” Hamez said, closing the wooden door at the top of the stairs.
“The situation unsettles me. That is normal.”
“It is not the situation. It is the girl. She looked at you and saw the ‘first time’. I saw your face when you said it. She found a crack.”
Adem leaned against the rough stone wall, looking out through a narrow opening at the frosted hills. “She knows things, Hamez. Not just facts. She… speaks in echoes. As if she has heard the story already and is checking it for mistakes.”
“A spy, then. A very good, very strange one.”
“Perhaps.” Adem’s hand clenched at his side. “Or perhaps something else. A journalist would ask about politics, about grievances. A spy would ask about numbers, about plans. She asked about a moment. A personal, tactical moment. As if that moment… matters more than the cause.”
Hamez lit a cigarette, offered one to Adem. He took it. The shared smoke coiled in the frozen air. “You sent Bahri away because you know he would kill her. You send Burim to watch her because he is cold enough to report the truth. You leave yourself because you do not trust your own judgment around her.”
Adem shot his brother a look, but didn’t deny it. “She is dangerous.”
“I know,” Hamez said softly. “But not in the way Bahri thinks. She is dangerous to you. To the idea of you. A man who is becoming a symbol cannot afford cracks. Cannot afford… private curiosities.”
Below, the rumble of voices continued, planning a war. Up in the cold storeroom, the two brothers sat in silence. Adem saw her face again, not as a photograph or a symbol, but as it was in the garage: pale, defiant, terrifyingly intuitive. She had not flinched. She had thrown his history back at him and then asked a question about a future she had no business foreseeing.
He stood abruptly, grinding the cigarette out under his heel. “Make sure the others are ready to move at dawn. I will take the route through the Black Drin.”
“And the girl? Vanja?”
Adem paused at the door. The noise from below seemed to fade. For a second, he was back in the oily silence of the garage, the space between them charged with unspoken recognitions.
“The girl,” he said, the word feeling foreign on his tongue, “is a question I cannot answer yet. When I can, I will.”
He descended the stairs back into the planning room, his presence immediately pulling the gravity of the room to him. Orders were given, maps consulted, the gritty business of insurgency resuming.
But as he pointed to a river crossing on a worn topographic map, a part of him remained stuck on that look in her eyes—not fear of him, but a profound, weary knowledge of what was coming. It was the attraction of a man who has carried a heavy weight alone to see someone who seems to understand its exact shape. It was infuriating. It was intoxicating.
It was, he knew with a sinking clarity, a problem that no supply run to Albania, no strategic meeting, would solve. She was in his head now. And a man with a war to plan could not afford such a distraction, especially one who asked questions that felt like fragments of a prophecy he was still trying to outrun.
The plan to outrun the prophecy lasted precisely fourteen days. For Burim, assigned the duty of being her "source," those days became a study in contradictions that chafed against every certainty he carried. He watched from his cousin’s empty flat, the binoculars leaving ringed impressions around his eyes, and he reported everything, his voice flat over the crackling phone line to a safe house in Albania.
She fed the half-wild tortoiseshell cat that lurked by her building’s rubbish bins, every morning without fail. Then, on a Tuesday when a vicious wind cut down from the mountains, she emerged not just with scraps but with a cardboard box lined with a frayed sweater. She placed it in the sheltered doorway. The cat ignored it. Vanja went back inside. Burim noted it. Subject showed concern for local stray. Possible attempt to curry favor with neighborhood.
His report felt hollow even as he said it. The next night, the Albanian widow who lived directly beneath Vanja’s flat caught him in the stairwell. “That Serbian girl,” the old woman whispered, clutching her shawl. “In the middle of the night, she was cooing like a pigeon on the fire escape. Took that cat and its three kittens right into her apartment. I heard the meowing stop. She must have let them in.”
Burim added this to his next report. Subject has taken stray animals into residence. Irrational or sentimental. Creates vulnerability. Adem, on the other end in Albania, had just grunted. “Continue.”
Her routine was painfully visible. She said “Dobro jutro” to the elderly Serbian couple next door. She said “Mirëmëngjes” to the Albanian siblings who ran the bakery, stumbling over the pronunciation until the younger sister smiled and corrected her. This, too, Burim reported. Subject attempts basic Albanian pleasantries. Interactions appear genuine but could be calculated.
The market was where the picture truly broke apart. Burim and Bahri, the latter just returned from his truncated supply run, were observing from the cramped doorway of a shuttered tobacco shop. Bahri was a tense, silent presence, his earlier fury banked into a simmering watchfulness. They saw Vanja at the greengrocer’s, her basket already holding potatoes and a bananas.
A young Roma girl, maybe eight, stood frozen before a display of bananas. Her clothes were thin, her feet dirty in oversized plastic sandals. In her hand she clutched a small loaf and a packet of white cheese, likely her family’s entire purchase. She stared at the yellow fruit with a hunger that had nothing to do with stomachs.
Vanja saw her. She knelt, said something in soft Serbian. The girl shook her head vigorously, hugging her bread. Vanja stood, picked up a bunch of bananas, and paid for them. She then walked to the girl, offering them. The Albanian butcher, sharpening his knives behind his counter, paused to watch.
The girl hesitated, then took one banana. Vanja peeled it for her. The child ate it in three swift, ravenous bites, her eyes wide. Vanja didn’t smile. Her face did something else, something that made Burim’s throat feel tight. She then led the girl to the butcher, bought a string of sausages, a block of yellow cheese, a bag of flour. She paid with large bills she didn’t bother to count.
They were too far to hear the words, but they saw the girl’s head bow, her thin shoulders curve in a gesture of stunned thanks. Vanja leaned close, speaking intently. She pointed down the street toward her apartment, seemingly giving directions. She asked the girl a question; the girl whispered an answer—a name. Vanja touched the girl’s shoulder, a brief, tender contact, then turned away.
She walked quickly, head down, rounding the corner out of the market square. Bahri nudged Burim and they followed at a distance, instinct taking over. They saw her halfway down her own street, her pace faltering. She stopped, leaned against the rough plaster of a building wall, and slid down it until she was sitting on the cold pavement.
She put her face in her hands. Her back shuddered. It was a silent, exhausting collapse, the kind that comes from a pressure valve failing. She cried for maybe a full minute, then wiped her face roughly with her sleeve, stood up, and walked the remaining distance to her door with stiff, regained control.
She never saw them.
“What was that?” Bahri muttered, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.
“I don’t know,” Burim said.
They went back to the market. The butcher was waiting, his expression unreadable. He knew who they were, what they represented. “The blonde,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron. “She bought food for the Qehaja girl. Bananas first. The kid said she’d never tasted one. Then she filled her bag. Told her where she lived. Told her to come if she needed.”
Burim relayed it all that evening, the facts sterile over the phone. Subject exhibited charitable behavior toward a Roma child. Displayed significant emotional distress afterward. Offered her address. Interaction witnessed by multiple locals.
The silence from Albania was longer this time. He could almost hear Adem thinking, processing data that refused to coalesce into a clear profile. “And Bahri?” Adem finally asked.
“He is here. He saw it.”
Another pause. “What does he say?”
Burim looked across the room at Bahri, who was cleaning a pistol with terrifying focus, as if he could scrub away the confusion. “He is unsure.”
Bahri’s head jerked up at that, his blue eyes flashing a warning, but he didn’t contradict. Unsure was exactly what he was. The ideological purity of his hatred had no folder for a Serbian woman who cried in the street after buying bananas for a Gypsy.
Two weeks of this. Adem returned, the cold of the mountains still clinging to him. Burim gave his final verbal report in the cramped room above the garage, the air thick with the unresolved. He stuck to the facts: the cat, the greetings, the girl, the tears.
Adem listened, leaning against the wall, saying nothing. His quiet was a physical force. He looked at Bahri. “You agree with Burim’s assessment?”
Bahri shifted his weight. “The acts themselves are not those of a spy. They are too messy. Too public.” He struggled, his pride wrestling with the evidence. “But it could be a deeper play. To build a persona. To make us… unsure.”
“It’s working,” Adem said, not unkindly. It was a simple, devastating acknowledgment.
The next morning, they were in the kafana, drinking thick coffee shrouded in cigarette smoke. The usual tension was there, but it had a new texture. Bahri was weary, his arrogance sanded down by two weeks of turning the same questions over in his mind. Burim felt a constant, low-grade unease, as if the ground beneath his convictions had developed hairline fractures.
Vanja passed by the fogged window. She was just a blur of blonde and grey coat. She glanced inside, saw them, and her steps slowed. For a split second, her eyes met Burim’s through the glass.
He expected suspicion, or fear, or the blank look of a stranger. Instead, she offered a small, tentative smile. It was neither an invitation nor a performance. It was just a human acknowledgment of a face she recognized. He gave a single, slow nod, a mirror of his own recognition.
Then she was gone, past the window and down the street.
Bahri had seen the whole exchange. He stared into his coffee, his jaw working. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The rigid certainty that had defined him was gone, replaced by a complicated, reluctant doubt that was far more dangerous. He seemed, in that moment, even less sure of everything.
He seemed, in that moment, even less sure of everything. Vanja, meanwhile, was building a life from fragments of purpose she could actually hold. Cecilia, the tortoiseshell cat, now ruled the terracotta apartment from a cushion on the windowsill, her three kittens tumbling over the threadbare rug in a chaotic ballet of needle-like claws and puffball fur. Their blind, urgent need was a anchor. They required feeding, cleaning, a gentle hand. It was a schedule. It was something to keep the crushing weight of foreknowledge at bay during the long hours when she saw no one, when the silence vibrated with the echo of Adem Jashari’s voice asking her what she was.
She found the deed to the apartment in a manila envelope at the back of the closet, tucked inside a German dictionary. The paper was crisp, official, her name typed in clean black ink: Vanja. The owner. It felt like a forgery, but the notary stamp from Priština was real. Her wallet still held a thick sheaf of dinar notes and a separate clutch of Deutsche Marks, a small fortune in this limping economy. A passbook for a local bank showed a balance that made her breath catch. The logistics of her existence here had been meticulously arranged by forces she couldn’t see, a runway laid for a mission she had yet to fully define.
Edita, the Roma girl from the market, began appearing at her door every Tuesday and Friday. First, she came for the promised food, her dark eyes huge in her thin face. Then, she came for quiet. Vanja would make tea, slice the heavy, sweet balok she bought from the Albanian bakery, and listen. Edita spoke Serbian in a whisper, her words tumbling out lessons of hunger and casual cruelties. "The teacher says my notebook is dirty. She throws it in the bin. My brother's shoes broke in the snow. He stayed home."
Vanja acted. The following market day, she purchased two pairs of sturdy leather shoes for Edita’s brothers, three warm winter coats that could be grown into, and simple, durable backpacks. She carried it all to the ragged collection of shacks on the town's outskirts where Edita’s family lived. The mother, a woman with eyes older than the hills, said nothing, just touched the cuff of a coat with work-split fingers and nodded once.
A week later, Dragana found her. She was a Serbian woman in her late 20ies, with a tired, kind face and a smear of blue ink on her wrist from grading papers. She taught at the elementary school. "You are the woman helping the Qehaja children," she said, not as an accusation, but as a fact, falling into step beside Vanja on the street. Her voice, her kind, direct gaze, the way she pushed her hair behind her ear—it was a physical punch to Vanja’s heart. She was the mirror of her Dragana, the one who would be born in a decade, the one who would be her closest friend through the lonely years of doctoral research. The déjà vu was so violent it made her stumble.
"You remind me of someone," Vanja blurted out.
Dragana smiled, a warm, crinkling expression. "A good someone, I hope."
"The best."
Their friendship formed quickly, a lifeline thrown across the chasm of ethnic tension. Dragana was pragmatically compassionate, weary of politics, fiercely devoted to her students. "The uniforms," she said one afternoon in Vanja’s apartment, scratching Cecilia behind the ears. "The school requires them. Edita and her brothers don't have them. It’s another excuse to keep them out."
"Get me the sizes," Vanja said. They bought the crisp white shirts and dark blue pinafores together. When they delivered them, Edita put hers on immediately over her old dress, her spine straightening as if the fabric itself conferred legitimacy.
Bahri and Burim were constant, rotating shadows. She saw Bahri glowering from a parked car, his hatred now confused, alloyed with a resentment he couldn't name. Burim she encountered buying cigarettes for her neighbour, or walking purposefully past her building. His nods grew less stiff, his surveillance a strange, shared secret. She never saw Adem.
She thought of him constantly. It was infuriating. His absence was a louder presence than anyone else’s. She replayed their conversation in the garage, the heat of his focus, the way he had almost touched her face. He was a locked room inside a burning building. She knew how the fire would end, but she had no key for the room.
The need for mobility became urgent. She had money, an apartment, a cat. But she was a tree planted in hostile soil. To do anything that mattered, she needed to move, to see the places where the coming storm would break. She needed a car. To get a car, she needed a license. The bureaucratic maze of obtaining a Yugoslav driver's license as a foreigner was a battle she had to fight.
Her mesto prebivališta—her place of residence—was, according to the deed, this apartment. It was her legal foothold. It meant something. She gathered her passport, her deed, her painstakingly filled forms, and went to the municipal office. The Serbian clerk, a man with bored, watery eyes, processed her paperwork with a sluggish indifference that was its own blessing. "It will take time," he droned. She left feeling both accomplished and absurd. Was she really building a paper fortress against a coming war?
Spring was a tentative rumor. The wind lost its razor edge, carrying instead the scent of wet earth and the first, brave shoots of green from cracks in the pavement. One evening, as the light faded into a watery lavender, Dragana met her at the Gradska Kafana, the mostly Serbian café. It was warm inside, steamy from espresso machines, the air buzzing with conversation and the clatter of backgammon pieces.
"This is my life now," Vanja thought, sipping the bitter coffee. "Cats, a Roma child’s shoes, clandestine friendships, and the eyes of future warriors on my back."
"I have been thinking," Vanja said, circling the rim of her cup. "I have a degree. I need to work. To do something. Maybe... I could teach? English or German? Even history."
Dragana’s eyes lit up. "They always need teachers in the villages. The Serbian schools, sometimes. The Albanian ones, definitely. It’s... complicated. But your papers are in order?" Vanja nodded. "It could be done. I can ask."
"I need to get my license first," Vanja said, a practical hurdle to mask the enormity of the offer. To stand in front of a classroom here, now, felt like a greater act of subterfuge than any research.
"Yes," Dragana agreed, her smile returning. "Start with that." She glanced out the window where the last of the snow was a dirty memory in the shadows. "Spring is coming to Kosovo. Things feel possible, don't they?"
Outside, a car rumbled past. Vanja caught a glimpse of Burim in the passenger seat, his blond hair bright under the emerging streetlight. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking ahead, his profile sharp and tense, driving toward a future only Vanja could fully map. She felt the weight of it settle back onto her shoulders, the cozy warmth of the café suddenly insufficient.
She smiled back at Dragana, but the smile was a lie. Possibility was a luxury. What was coming was not possibility. It was certainty. And her time for building a quiet life, for buying shoes and learning Albanian verb conjugations, was bleeding away faster than the winter’s chill. She had the license to pursue. Then the car. Then the job. Each step a piece of normalcy to cloak the unbearable task she had given herself: to bend the arc of a history that had already hardened into text.