Chapter 5: school.
The money was a tool, not a treasure. Vanja understood that now. The thick wads of dinar and Deutsche Marks in her closet were meant to be converted into means, into mobility, into a shred of normalcy that would make her less of a specter. So when old Mr. Hoxha from downstairs mentioned, over a shared pot of tea, that his son Nderim was back from Stuttgart and needed to sell his car before returning, she paid attention.
"It is a good car," Mr. Hoxha said, his wrinkled hands smoothing the tablecloth. "A Mercedes. He is a mechanic there, he kept it perfect. But here, with the roads... and the police..." He let the sentence hang, the unspoken truth of ethnic profiling lingering in the steam from their cups. "He will give a fair price. Especially to a neighbor."
Nderim was a bear of a man with gentle eyes and oil permanently etched into his cuticles. The car was a 1984 Mercedes 190E, black, boxy, and intimidatingly solid. It sat in the alley behind the building like a dormant beast. The engine, when he started it for her, purred with a deep, obedient hum.
"It is too much car for a woman alone," Nderim said, not unkindly, as he showed her the immaculate interior.
Vanja ran a hand over the cool leather of the steering wheel. "It is exactly what I need."
The transaction was swift, conducted in a mixture of German and broken Serbian, a language of shared exile. He gave her a price that was, as promised, more than fair. The papers were signed. The keys, heavy and cold, landed in her palm with finality.
Her first drive was not to the market or the school. It was an escape. She pointed the black Mercedes north out of Skenderaj, the powerful engine eating up the potholed road toward Podujevo. The sense of liberation was physical, a loosening of a cord around her ribs. She rolled the window down, letting the slap of cool spring air clean out the claustrophobia of the last months. For a few hours, she was just a woman in a car, untethered from history, from prophecy, from the weight of watching eyes.
But the eyes, she discovered upon her return, had vanished.
The palpable pressure of surveillance—Bahri’s glowering presence, Burim’s silent, rotating watch—ceased. The street outside her apartment felt empty. She was no longer a fixed point in their orbit. The relief was immediate, like stepping out of a cold draft into a still room. Yet, within days, the relief curdled into a strange, hollow disappointment. Their attention, however hostile, had been a perverse validation. It meant she mattered to the story. Their absence felt like a dismissal. Had Adem decided she was irrelevant? A harmless oddity to be ignored?
Spring arrived in earnest, timidly at first, then with a sudden, lush insistence. The hills around Skenderaj turned a vibrant, impossible green. Fruit trees exploded in clouds of white and pink blossom. The air lost its bite, carrying the scent of turned earth and wildflowers.
And with the spring, Adem Jashari returned.
She didn’t see him. She felt it. A new current in the town’s subdued energy, a subtle tightening. Dragana confirmed it one afternoon, her voice low. "They say he’s back in Prekaz. Things are quiet. For now."
It was Dragana, pragmatic and connected, who brought the next piece of the puzzle. "I talked to a friend who knows the director of the elementary school in Prekaz i Poshtëm," she said, stirring sugar into her coffee. "Not the Jasharis' Prekaz, the lower village next to it. They need an English teacher. The pay is terrible, but it’s a job. It’s something real. And... it would be good. For you to be there. To see."
Vanja’s heart hammered against her sternum. Prekaz. The name was a bell tolling in her blood. "An interview?"
"Tomorrow. I’ll take you."
The school was a long, low, socialist-era building of yellowing concrete, softened by climbing ivy and the shouts of children playing in the yard behind a rusting fence. The director, Mr. Xhaka, was a lean man in his fifties with a careful, measuring gaze. His office smelled of chalk dust, stale coffee, and old books.
He interviewed her in a mix of Serbian and English, testing her. "Your papers are in order. German passport, yugoslavian too but Yugoslav residence. A historian. Why do you want to teach children English in Prekaz?"
"Language is a bridge," she said, the answer feeling both true and insufficient. "Before politics. Before everything else."
He nodded slowly, his eyes on her application. "The children are mostly Albanian. A few Roma. No Serbs. You would teach in English. You may explain in Serbian or Albanian if needed. You are fluent?"
"My Albanian is... improving," she said, then switched to the language, slowly, carefully. "Unë mësoj çdo ditë. I learn every day."
A faint, almost imperceptible softening around his eyes. "The position is for the remainder of the school year. Then, if it is satisfactory, the contract renews. One year, then five, then..." He shrugged, a gesture that spoke of a future no one dared truly plan. "You would start after the holidays. Easter. Ramadan. The children will return, and you will begin."
"Thank you," Vanja said, again in Albanian. "Faleminderit."
The walk back to the car with Dragana was quiet. The beauty of the place struck Vanja suddenly—the emerald valley, the distant mountains wearing caps of snow, the ancient, watchful hills. It was peaceful. It was a lie.
"That went well," Dragana said, squeezing her arm. "You'll be good at this."
Vanja nodded, a contract for a fictional future burning a hole in her bag. That night, she dreamed.
In the dream, she was in a sun-dappled room, quiet and safe. A little girl, perhaps four or five, sat before her on a low stool, her head bowed. The child had hair the color of dark honey, thick and slightly wavy. Vanja was brushing it, the repetitive, gentle strokes a meditation. A deep, resonant contentment filled her. Then, a shadow fell across them. She looked up.
Adem Jashari stood in the doorway. He wasn't the severe guerrilla leader, but a man softened by the domestic light, his green eyes warm, a slight, unguarded smile on his face. He watched them, saying nothing. The love in his gaze was so specific, so devastating, that it choked her. It was not the look of a man at a symbol, but of a man at his family.
Vanja woke, her face wet, the ghost of the child’s hair still tingling in her fingertips. The confusion was total, a physical disorientation. The emotion from the dream—profound, possessive, peaceful—clung to her, clashing violently with the stark reality of her solitary bed in the dark apartment. Cecilia the cat mewed from the pillow beside her, a grounding pinprick of reality.
In Prekaz i Epërm, the Upper Village, the Jashari compound was a hive of subdued activity. Adem’s return was a quiet event, not a celebration. Men came and went, paying respects, sharing news in the shadowed rooms of the great kulla.
Hamez found him by the sheep pens, looking out over the land. "The mechanic's daughter in Skenderaj says the Serbian girl bought a car. A black Mercedes from Nderim Hoxha."
Adem didn't turn. "So she can move freely now"
"Not just that," Hamez said, lighting a cigarette. "Dragana Petrović got her an interview at the school in Prekaz i Poshtëm. For an English teacher."
That made Adem turn. "The school?"
Hamez nodded, exhaling smoke. "She got the job. Starts after the holidays."
A long silence stretched between them, filled with the bleating of sheep and the distant cry of a hawk. "A school teacher," Adem finally said, his voice unreadable.
"Just like our father was," Hamez remarked, his tone casual but his eyes sharp on his brother’s face.
Their own father, Shaban, was nearby, mending a harness. He had heard. The old man’s hands, gnarled and strong, never paused in their work. He made no comment. The fact that he offered no warning, no decree, was itself a message. The problem, the variable, was Adem’s to manage.
That night, in his main room, big bedroom that overlooked the forest behind, Adem did not sleep. The house was a fortress of stone and tradition, but his mind kept escaping its walls, traveling a few short kilometers down the road to the lower village.
A school teacher. It was such a normal, mundane thing. A act of construction, not destruction. It was what you did if you planned to stay, to build a life. It was the last thing a spy or a provocateur would do. It was also a brilliant, infuriating move, placing herself at the heart of the community, in front of its most vulnerable and precious asset: its children.
He thought of her question, the one that had haunted him for weeks. "What will you do when the police come for you the first time?"
He had run through tactical answers: disperse, hide, fight if cornered. But her question wasn’t about tactics. It was about the moment of rupture. The moment the fragile pretense of normalcy—of being a farmer, a son, a brother, a man who could perhaps, in some other life, watch a woman brush a child’s hair—shattered forever.
She had foreseen that rupture. And now she was taking a job teaching children, sewing herself into the fabric of the ordinary world that he knew was about to be torn apart.
The contradiction of her was a fire in his brain. It was a strategic distraction he could not afford. And yet, in the dark, he found himself mapping the short distance between the schoolhouse and his kulla, not as a commander assessing a threat, but as a man measuring a space he might need to cross. The question echoed, not as a threat, but as a shared, terrible secret. She was there, a few kilometers away, waiting. Not for him, perhaps. But for the moment his answer would be due.
But for the moment his answer would be due, the ordinary world, fragile as it was, insisted on continuing. The holidays passed—a muted Orthodox Easter for Dragana and the few remaining Serbs, the solemn fasting and subsequent celebration of Ramadan for the vast majority. Vanja marked the days in her empty apartment, listening to the different rhythms of prayer and feast from the streets below.
Then, she began.
The classroom was a riot of noise and fidgeting energy. Twenty-three faces, mostly Albanian, a few Roma, all watching her with a mixture of curiosity and profound skepticism. She wrote her name on the board. “I am Teacher Vanja. We will speak English here. When we must, we can use other languages. But we will try.”
The first week was chaos. A game of pointing to objects and naming them—“Desk! Window! Book!”—descended into a giggling contest. She learned their names: Argjend, Liridona, Fatmir, Edona. Edita, her Roma girl from the market, was in the back row, her new uniform crisp, her eyes fastened on Vanja with a ferocious intensity, as if sheer will could conjure the knowledge.
One afternoon, struggling to explain “tomorrow,” Vanja drew a simple calendar on the board. She pointed. “Today. Yesterday. Tomorrow.” Then, on impulse, she pointed to a date weeks ahead. “Future.”
Little Argjend, a boy with serious eyes, raised his hand. “Future is not here.”
“No,” Vanja agreed, her throat tight. “It is not. We must… wait for it.”
Spring warmed into early summer. She fell into the exhausting, satisfying rhythm of the job. Grading simple worksheets by lamplight, Cecilia purring on the stack of papers. The black Mercedes became a familiar sight parked by the school fence. The other teachers, initially wary, began to greet her with nods, then with offers of coffee in the staff room. The wariness never fully left, but it was edged now with a tentative respect. She showed up. She worked. The children responded.
The invitation to the Bajram celebration at the end of Ramadan came from Mr. Xhaka, the director. He presented it as a formality, but his tone held a quiet test. “It is for the families. The teachers are welcome. It is good for the community to see you.”
“I would be honored,” Vanja said.
The day was sharp and bright, the sky a hard, cloudless blue. She chose her dress carefully, a deep, rust-red wool with a simple cut. It felt both festive and defensive. Arriving at the field between the two Prekaz villages, she saw the sea of color—women and children in vibrant reds, maroons, and embroidered whites, men in darker, formal suits or clean pressed shirts. The air smelled of roasted lamb, sweet pastries, and fresh grass.
She felt conspicuously, painfully alone.
She saw Hamez first, standing with a smiling, dark-haired woman who must be his wife, his hand resting gently on her shoulder. The normalcy of it was a small knife-twist. Then she saw Shaban Jashari, Adem’s father, surrounded by a respectful circle of older men. His bearing was erect, his face a map of deep lines and quiet authority.
And then, Adem.
He stood slightly apart from the main group of Jashari men, his posture not relaxed but intensely still, as if absorbing the event through his skin. He wore a dark grey suit, the jacket open over a white shirt, no tie. He was clean-shaven to her surprise, she has never seen him like that, not here not in her history books or internet searches, , the strong lines of his jaw exposed, making him look both younger and more severe. He held a small cup of coffee, not drinking it, just turning it slowly in his hand. He was, Vanja noted with a stupid, unwelcome pang, entirely alone.
One of the younger female teachers, Aferdita, gently guided Vanja over. “Director Xhaka, you know. And this is Shaban Jashari, from the family of Prekaz i Epërm.”
The old man turned. His eyes, the same penetrating green as his son’s, took her in without hurry. “Welcome,” he said in clear, unaccented Serbian. “You are the new teacher. You are from Germany?”
“Yes,” Vanja said, forcing a smile. “I am learning much here.”
“Learning is good.” His gaze held hers. Then, smoothly, he shifted language, his voice dropping into Albanian. “Do you find our hills beautiful, or only strange?”
The question was a trap, wrapped in courtesy. It asked about her roots, her perspective. Vanja’s mind scrambled. Her Albanian, practiced on market vendors and children’s primers, emerged automatically. “They are not strange. They are… demanding. But beauty is often demanding, isn’t it?”
Her accent was clear, her grammar correct. But the pronunciation was soft, flattened, lacking the hard, melodic cadence of the Drenica highlands. It was the accent of the southern lowlands, of Toskëria. An accent from Albania proper.
Shaban’s eyes did not change, but a new layer of assessment crystallized within them. He gave a slow, shallow nod, as if she had confirmed something. From the corner of her eye, Vanja saw Adem’s head turn a fraction. He had heard it. The foreign cadence in the midst of his family’s land.
At that moment, a woman approached Adem. She was young, perhaps in her mid-twenties, with a kind, open face and hair dyed a vibrant, hopeful auburn. She smiled up at him, saying something Vanja couldn’t hear. She touched his arm briefly, a casual, familiar gesture.
Adem looked down at her. And he smiled.
It was a real smile, warm and unguarded, transforming his severe face completely. It was the smile from Vanja’s dream, but it was not for her. He said something back, and the woman laughed, a light, easy sound. Then, as if pulled by a wire, his gaze lifted and found Vanja across the crowd.
The smile vanished, replaced by the familiar, impenetrable mask. But the look held a new, deliberate coldness. A message, sent and received.
This is what normal looks like. This is what is possible here. Not you.
The understanding was immediate and humiliating. He would never smile at her like that in public. She was the question mark, the variable, the serbian woman with the Tosk accent and the knowing eyes. She was a secret to be kept in dark rooms above garages, not a woman to be smiled at in the sunlight.
A hot wave of shame and anger washed through her. She wanted to slap the neutral expression off his face. She wanted to cry. Instead, she clenched her jaw until it ached.
“Please excuse me,” she said to Shaban and the director, her voice surprisingly steady. “The children are playing that game again, I should…”
She turned and walked away, not toward the food or the other teachers, but toward a noisy cluster of her students playing a clapping game near the edge of the field. She knelt, her red dress pooling in the grass, and corrected a girl’s hand position, her focus absolute.
She could feel his eyes on her back, a pressure between her shoulder blades. She didn’t look up. She concentrated on the small, sticky hands in hers, on the childish voices chanting, on the solid, present reality of the grass beneath her knees. She tended to the children with a fierce, borrowed warmth, building a wall of their innocence between herself and the man whose gaze she could still feel, steady and inescapable as the sun.
She tended to the children with a fierce, borrowed warmth, building a wall of their innocence between herself and the man whose gaze she could still feel, steady and inescapable as the sun. The celebration wound on around her, a vibrant tapestry of laughter and connection from which she was fundamentally excluded. She left before the singing started, the engine of the black Mercedes a comforting growl as she fled the green valley.
For days, the memory of his public smile for that other woman—Adile, she’d learned her name was—burned like a brand. It was stupid. It was irrational. She had no claim, only a dream and a terrifying knowledge. Yet the hurt was a physical knot beneath her ribs. She threw herself into lesson plans, into taking Edita and her brothers for new shoes, into anything that felt like forward motion.
The following Thursday, a tire on the Mercedes went flat halfway between Skenderaj and Prekaz i Poshtëm. She pulled onto the gritty shoulder beside a fallow field, the spring wheat just a green whisper. She stared at the slumped rubber. She had a spare. She knew how to change it. But the frustration of the past week boiled over, and she kicked the flat tire hard, a sharp burst of pain shooting through her foot.
“A German car,” a voice said behind her. “But kosovo roads always win.”
She spun. Adem stood five paces away, having emerged from the line of trees that bordered the field like a ghost. He wore simple trousers and a worn green jacket, no suit today. He looked like what he was: a man of these hills. He held a rifle loosely by his side, not pointed, just present.
“What are you doing here?” Her voice came out sharper than she intended.
“Walking.” He nodded toward the trees. “It’s my land. What are you doing here?”
“My job,” she snapped, turning back to the car and popping the trunk. The jack and spare were heavy, cumbersome. She wrestled them out, the metal clanging.
He watched her for a full minute, not offering help. The silence was aggressive. She finally got the jack positioned, her hands already dirty. She strained to crank it, the car groaning as it lifted.
“You shouldn’t have come to the Bajram,” he said finally. His tone was flat, conversational.
Vanja paused, her knuckles white on the jack handle. “The director invited me. It was polite.”
“Polite.” He repeated the word as if it were in a foreign language. “You think this is about politeness? You, in that red dress, speaking Toskër to my father. Drawing every eye. Playing teacher in a place where every stranger is counted.”
She went back to cranking, the wheel rising off the gravel. “I’m not playing. It is my job.”
“It is a deeper game, then.” He took a step closer. The air between them tightened. “A school. The children. You weave yourself into the village, and for what? So your reports have more color? So when they ask you who is close to the Jasharis, you can name the families of the children you teach?”
She dropped the jack handle. It hit the ground with a thud. She stood straight, facing him, grease smeared across her cheek. “Is that what you think? That everything is a calculation for some report?”
“What else should I think?” His voice remained low, but it gained a razor’s edge. “A beautiful woman arrives from nowhere with perfect papers, too much money, and questions about police raids. She buys a car. She gets a job next to my home. She looks at me like she’s reading my obituary. So tell me, Vanja from Germany. What is the real mission?”
The word ‘beautiful’ hung in the air, not a compliment but a weapon. The accusation was so vast, so rooted in the truth of her origin yet blind to its reality, that it stole her breath. “You are paranoid.”
“I am alive,” he fired back, closing the distance to just two paces. His green eyes were chips of ice. “Because I am paranoid. My father liked your answer about the hills. He said it was clever. I think it was a slip. Your Albanian is from Tirana, not from here. Another coincidence?”
Tears of pure fury sprang to her eyes. She willed them back, failed. “You know nothing about me.”
“I know you are a danger. To yourself. To them.” He jerked his head toward the distant school. “Go back to Germany. Write your thesis. This is not a place for tourists with a conscience.”
The casual viciousness of it, the dismissal of every real effort, every fractured piece of honesty she’d offered, broke something. A tear traced through the grime on her cheek. “You stupid man,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “You have no idea what’s coming. You’re worried about my dress and my accent? Worry about the men who are coming for you. Worry about the first time. You have bigger things to worry about than me.”
He flinched, just barely, at the callback to her question in the garage. But his face hardened further. “Your warnings are just noise. Stay out of Prekaz. Stop digging. Or the consequence will not be from the police. It will be from the people you are pretending to care for. They do not forgive spies.”
He was so close now she could see the faint scar through his eyebrow, the tight line of his mouth. He was magnificent and utterly closed, a fortress she could never scale. From his perspective, her tears were just another tactic. She was so beautiful it was a physical ache in him, a distraction that threatened the granite focus he needed to survive. He was a man, under all the layers of leader and fighter and Jashari legacy. He wanted to shake her. He wanted to strangle the truth out of her. The problem, the furious, undeniable problem, was that he wanted to kiss the defiance off her mouth infinitely more.
“Stop looking at me,” she snapped, seeing the conflict in his eyes and misreading it wholly.
He shook his head as if to clear his mind, a ragged, frustrated motion. “Why are you here anyway?” he asked, the question ripped from him.
She wiped her cheek with a dirty wrist, leaving a streak. “You shrug. You have no answer for yourself, so you accuse me. You are stupid. And you are cruel.” She bent, picked up the lug wrench, her hands trembling. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a tire to change. And a class to teach tomorrow.”
She turned her back on him, a dismissal as complete as any he’d given her. She focused on the bolts, her vision blurry. She heard his footsteps on the gravel, not toward her, but away. Then a solid, wet thump, the sound of flesh and bone meeting rotten wood from a broken fence post at the field's edge. A guttural curse in Albanian, foul and pained.
Then silence. Then the sound of him leaving, crashing back into the woods.
She finished the job with mechanical efficiency, the tears falling freely now, dripping onto the spare tire. She drove home too fast, the car shuddering on the rough road.
In her apartment, she locked the door. Cecilia meowed, twining around her legs. Vanja slid down the length of the door until she sat on the floor, the cold seeping through her clothes. She drew her knees to her chest and buried her face in her arms. The sobs, when they came, were silent, heaving things that contained all of it—the loneliness, the impossibility, the look on his face when he’d smiled at Adile, and the raw, wounded sound his fist had made against the wood.
He remembered it, too, all the way back to the kulla. He remembered how Adile had looked at him, friendly and open, how he had smiled back because it was easy, expected. And he remembered how Vanja had looked, standing there in her red dress—wounded. She’d had no right to look that way. It implied a claim she could not possibly have, a betrayal he had not committed. It seeped past his defenses and found the raw, ordinary man beneath. That was her true weapon.
In the yard, he examined his knuckles, split and bleeding. He cursed again, lower this time, at the wall, at the hills, at her. The pain was clean, clarifying. It was better than the other feeling, the one that clawed at his gut. He went inside, the shadow of the great stone house swallowing him whole, his hand throbbing with every beat of his heart.