Chapter 6: Vidovdan in Gračanica
Two days passed in a numb blur of antiseptic and soft fur. Cecilia, subdued and pathetic in a cone, healed from her surgery in a patch of sunlight on the floor. Her kittens, four squirming balls of fluff, were discovered by the neighbor’s children. Vanja gave them away freely, a minor dispersal of life that felt strangely symbolic. She kept one, a tiny grey tabby with white paws, naming it Zeko, “Bunny,” for its frantic hops.
In the quiet apartment, she tried to read. The books she’d brought with her, dense academic histories of the Balkans, felt like artifacts from a dead civilization. The irony was a bitter taste in her mouth. She was living in the footnote of a future dissertation she would never write. She stared at the two filled pages of her diary, the pen hovering over the third, but no words came. How could she describe the feel of Adem’s anger, the way it had vibrated in the air between them like a plucked wire? To write it down would be to make it a fact, and some part of her still hoped it was a terrible mistake.
Dragana’s invitation came on the third day, a scrap of paper passed through the door. Vidovdan. Gračanica. I’m going. Come with me. We can stay at my cousin’s in Prishtina after. You shouldn’t be alone.
Vidovdan. St. Vitus Day. June 28th. The date pulsed with historical blood—the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Sarajevo assassination in 1914. For Serbs, it was the ultimate symbol of martyrdom and national faith. To go to Gračanica, the heart of Serbian Kosovo, on that day, felt like walking into a church naked.
Vanja almost refused. Then she thought of the accusations in Adem’s green eyes. Spy. Tourist. Danger. She thought of the auburn-haired Adile and his easy smile. A perverse, defiant impulse took root. He told her to stop digging. But he didn’t own the earth. He didn’t own her history, even if it was a history that hated him.
“I’ll go,” she told Dragana that evening.
Her friend studied her, seeing the shadows under her eyes. “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, Vanja.”
“I’m not proving anything. I’m learning.”
They left early on the 28th, the black Mercedes swallowing the road south towards Prishtina and beyond. The tension in Skenderaj, a constant low hum, was replaced by a different frequency as they neared Gračanica. Serbian police checkpoints became frequent, their scrutiny lax for Dragana’s familiar face and Vanja’s foreign plates. The flags changed, too—the Albanian double-eagle replaced by the Serbian tricolor, hanging from balconies, draped over fences, defiant and abundant.
The monastery rose from the plain, a jewel of medieval Serbian architecture, its red brick and white mortar a stark statement of permanence. Today, it was less a sanctuary than a fortress of identity. The courtyard pulsed with a defiant, celebratory energy. Hundreds of people milled about, mostly older, their faces etched with a pride that bordered on belligerence. The air was thick with the scent of roasting meat, damp stone, and the sharp, sweet fumes of rakija. A folk band played near the church doors, the rhythmic, insistent pound of the kalamata drum echoing off the arches.
Vanja felt a dizzying sense of dislocation. The language surrounding her was her own, the hymns slipping from the church were the ones from her childhood liturgies, the Cyrillic script on the banners was effortless to read. It was a homecoming to a home she’d never truly had, and it felt like a betrayal.
They moved through the crowd. Dragana greeted people, introducing Vanja as a friend from Switzerland. The reactions were uniformly warm, patently relieved. “A Serb from abroad! You see? The world has not forgotten us!” an old man in a veteran’s cap boomed, gripping her hand. His breath smelled of plum brandy and nostalgia. “This is the heart. Always the heart. They can try to carve it out, but it beats here.”
She nodded, smiled, said little. She accepted a small cup of rakija from a woman distributing them from a tray. The liquid fire burned a path to her stomach, a familiar warmth. She drank another.
In a corner, a circle had formed around a man with a magnificent white beard. He was reciting, not singing, his voice a gravelly river of sound. It was the Kosovo Cycle—the epic poetry of the battle. He spoke of Prince Lazar choosing the heavenly kingdom over the earthly one, of Miloš Obilić sacrificing himself to slay the Sultan. The words, learned in her own university classes, landed differently here, in this sun-dappled courtyard under the eyes of painted saints. They weren’t literature. They were ammunition.
“Better a heroic death than a life of shame…”
Dragana leaned close, her voice barely audible over the recitation. “You see? It’s not a picnic. It’s a battery recharge. For what’s coming.”
Vanja looked at the faces, rapt, nodding, some with tears gleaming in the creases of their eyes. She understood the function of the myth, its power to fuse grievance with glory. She had analyzed it in papers. But feeling its pulse in the air, its righteous, tragic fury, was a different thing entirely. It was seductive. It offered a clear enemy, a noble defeat, a place in a story that had lasted six centuries. The confusion of her life in Skenderaj—the moral murk, the personal dangerous entanglements—was absent here. Here, the lines were stark, drawn in stone and blood.
“It’s a beautiful story,” Vanja heard herself say to the old veteran later, as he refilled her cup. “But it’s just a story. The people living here now, they have their own stories.”
The man’s friendly face cooled several degrees. “Their stories are written on our graves. This is Serbian land. Always. You, a young girl from the free world, you can afford to be generous. We who remain here cannot.”
Chastened, she withdrew. Dragana found her by the monastery wall, looking out over the fields. “You okay?”
“I feel like a ghost,” Vanja said honestly. “Or a spy. He was right.”
“Who was right?”
“No one.” She shook her head. “It’s just… hearing all this. I understand it. Part of me feels it. But the other part… I’ve been living on the other side of the wall.”
Dragana lit a cigarette, offering one to Vanja, who declined. “There is no ‘other side,’ sestro. There’s just people trying to live. The flags and the poems… they are for days like this. The rest of the time, it’s about bread, and work, and not making trouble.” She exhaled. “Come on. Let’s go to Prishtina. The cousin is cooking prebranac.”
The drive to the city was quiet. The cousin’s apartment was small, warm, cluttered with family photos. The bean stew was hearty, the conversation deliberately light—gossip, music, the price of things. Vanja was grateful for the normality. That night, in Dragana’s old room on a narrow fold-out bed, the dam broke.
It started quietly, a hot pressure behind her eyes as she stared at the unfamiliar ceiling. Then a tear traced into her hairline. Then another. Then she was crying in earnest, soundless, body-wracking sobs that she muffled in the pillow. The weight of it all—the double vision, the constant fear, the crushing loneliness, the memory of Adem’s shattered knuckles and his face when he’d smiled at someone else—came pouring out. She cried for the future she knew was coming, for the graves not yet dug, for the children in her class whose fates were already sealed in history books she’d read. She cried for herself, trapped in the ticking clock of the past, wanting something she could never have.
She didn’t hear the door open. A hand, warm and solid, landed on her shoulder. Dragana didn’t speak. She just sat on the edge of the bed, her presence a silent anchor in the storm, and waited until the tears subsided into shaky, ragged breaths.
“Who is he?” Dragana asked finally, her voice soft in the dark.
Vanja shook her head, the pillowcase damp against her cheek. “It’s not like that.”
“It’s exactly like that. And it’s also everything else. But a man is usually at the center of a cry like that.”
“He… he thinks I’m a spy.” The absurdity of it almost made her laugh, a wet, choked sound.
Dragana was silent for a long moment. “The Albanian? From Prekaz?”
Vanja didn’t confirm or deny. The silence was confirmation enough.
“Ah,” Dragana sighed, a world of understanding in the sound. “A dangerous hobby, dušo. For both of you.” She squeezed Vanja’s shoulder. “Sleep. Tomorrow is just another day.”
In Prekaz, the report was delivered by Hamez, just after dusk. He found Adem cleaning his rifle, the parts laid out on a cloth on the floor of his room.
“The woman. Vanja. She left Skenderaj this morning with her Serbian friend. The teacher, Dragana Petrović.”
Adem’s hands didn’t pause. He ran a cloth along the barrel. “And?”
“They went to Gračanica. For the Vidovdan celebrations.”
The cleaning rod stilled for a heartbeat, then continued its smooth passage. The only sign was a faint tightening along his jaw, a minute clenching of the muscle. The image flashed, unbidden: Vanja in that red dress, now standing under Serbian flags, drinking rakija with men who cursed his existence, listening to poems that celebrated his people’s historical subjugation. A deep, cold void opened inside him. It was the confirmation he’d pretended not to need. Of course. The pull of the tribe was stronger than any individual curiosity. She was listening, just as he’d suspected. But not to the children in Prekaz. She was listening to the epic from the other side of the field.
“She returned to Prishtina with the friend. She didn’t go back to Skenderaj tonight.”
Adem reassembled the rifle, the clicks and snaps precise, final. He said nothing. He placed the weapon back in its place, stood, and walked to the window. The night was deep and quiet over the Jashari lands. The distance between Prekaz and Prishtina felt infinite, and also meaningless. She was exactly where she belonged. He had been a fool to let her—her questions, her eyes, her impossible accent—distract him.
He had his answer. She was staying away.
“Good,” he said, the word leaving his lips like a stone dropped into a well. It sounded hollow, even to him.
Hamez watched his brother’s broad back, the rigid set of his shoulders. He said nothing more. He simply nodded, though Adem couldn’t see it, and left the room, closing the door softly on the profound and solitary silence within.
He simply nodded, though Adem couldn’t see it, and left the room, closing the door softly on the profound and solitary silence within.
The silence didn’t last. It was filled, over the next week, by a sharper focus. Adem threw himself into work that was both mundane and essential. He arranged for the sale of two more cows from the family farm, the money converted into German marks and tucked into a false-bottomed toolbox. He met with boys from Glogovac and Drenas, their faces still soft but their eyes already old, in the back of the mechanic’s garage. He spoke in low, concrete terms about topography, about communication, about the absolute necessity of patience. His charisma was a disciplined tool now, devoid of any wandering warmth. When Hamez mentioned, casually, that the German girl’s black Mercedes was seen again in Skenderaj, Adem merely grunted and unfolded a map.
Vanja returned to Skenderaj the day after Vidovdan, the memory of her crying jag in Dragana’s apartment a raw, private shame. The town felt different. It wasn't just the weather, the full heat of summer pressing down on the concrete. It was a shift in the air she breathed. The boys who had once followed her, Bahri and the blond one, Burim, were conspicuously absent. She was no longer a subject of interest. The realization was a relief that curdled, slowly, into a sharp and unexpected loneliness. She was a ghost again, but now she missed the flesh.
She taught her classes in Prekaz i Poshtëm. The children were restless, smelling of sun and grass, their minds on holidays. She stumbled over Albanian phrases, and they giggled, sweetly, correcting her. Mr. Xhaka would nod to her in the hallway, his smile always tinged with a faint, unasked question. She could feel the invisible line separating her from the other teachers, not drawn with hostility but with a weary, mutual understanding. She was a temporary measure. The tension she’d studied in books was here in the staff room, in the way a Serbian teacher from the next village would sip coffee in stiff silence, in the way the Albanian teachers would switch languages when she entered. She was the complication.
One afternoon, she saw Adem. It was from a distance. He was standing by the roadside near a cluster of pine trees, talking with two men. He wore a simple green jacket, his beard dark against his skin. He didn’t look towards the school bus rattling past. His posture was all sharp angles and intent focus, a man building something in his mind, stone by stone. Vanja turned her face to the window, her reflection a pale ghost over the passing fields. He had carved her out. The operation was clean, and it was complete.
A week after Vidovdan, Vanja walked into Mr. Xhaka's office and tendered her resignation.
“It’s not the children,” she said, the Albanian words feeling clumsy but earnest on her tongue. “They are wonderful. It’s me. The situation… my situation… is too complicated. The political pressure is too great.”
Mr. Xhaka, a gentle man with tired eyes, accepted the folded letter with visible sadness. He removed his glasses and polished them slowly on his shirt. “I understand,” he said. “These are not times for complications. The children will miss you. You have a good heart for them.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it.
He sighed, replacing his glasses. “Perhaps… I might have another idea for you, if you are interested. A different kind of work. Less… visible.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a murmur, as if the walls themselves reported to someone. “My cousin, he owns a firm in Mitrovica. Import-export. He needs a translator for documents. German to Albanian, and sometimes to Serbian. The pay is better. It is office work. Quiet.”
Mitrovica. A city split by a river, a future fault line. A different kind of front line.
“It would be legal?” she asked, the historian in her immediately assessing the implications.
“Of course. A legitimate business. He is based in Basel, but comes often. He needs someone here he can trust with contracts.” He wrote a name and a phone number on a scrap of paper. Nika. “Think on it.”
Vanja agreed to consider it. What she didn't know was that the cousin was Bahri Nika's father.
That evening, she returned to her empty apartment in Skenderaj, the silence heavy and textured, like layered dust. She fed Cecilia, now healed and purring, a soft rumble in the quiet. The kitten, Zeko, attacked her shoelace. She stared at the blank wall above the sofa, where a map of Kosovo would have hung in another life. She had left Prekaz. She had cut the thread that led directly to him, to the school, to the dangerous, magnetic pull of that family compound.
But the threads of this world were pulling her back in a different direction. The name ‘Nika’ sat in her pocket on a piece of paper. Outside, the long Balkan twilight bled from orange to bruised purple, and somewhere, in a garage or a smoky room, a man who thought he was done with her was reviewing a list of supplies. Sugar, cigarettes, oil. Detonators. The two lists existed in the same country, under the same sky, unaware of each other. For now.
For now, the thread led to Mitrovica.
The office of Nika Import-Export was on the north side of the Ibar river, in a narrow, cobbled street that smelled of wet stone and diesel. It was a plain door with a frosted glass pane, the company name stenciled in modest black lettering. Vanja pushed it open, a small bell chiming her arrival. The room was spartan: two desks, filing cabinets, a large map of Europe on the wall. An older woman with a kind, wrinkled face looked up from a ledger. Behind her, a massive man with a shaved head and thick forearms sat utterly still, polishing a metal component with a cloth. He didn’t glance her way.
“I’m looking for Mr. Nika,” Vanja said in Albanian. “I have an appointment. My name is Vanja.”
The woman, Razije, smiled warmly and gestured to a chair. “He is expecting you. He stepped out to the bank. Please, sit. Coffee?”
The coffee was thick, bitter, and welcome. Razije made small talk about the difficulty of parking in Mitrovica, her voice a soft murmur. The large man, introduced simply as Lulzim, remained a silent, monolithic presence. Vanja felt his occasional, appraising glance like a physical weight. This wasn’t a corporate headquarters. It was a relay station.
When Enver Nika arrived, he brought a gust of cool air and energetic purpose. He was in his fifties, with Bahri’s proud bearing and dark blond hair gone steel-grey at the temples. His handshake was firm, his eyes a sharp, intelligent blue that missed nothing.
“Miss Vasojević,” he said in German, gesturing her into a small back office. “Agim Xhaka speaks very highly of you. He says you were excellent with the children, but that the situation became… politically uncomfortable.”
“I wanted to avoid causing problems for the school,” Vanja replied, switching to German seamlessly. “The work was beautiful. The circumstances were not.”
He nodded, unpacking a sleek briefcase. “Wisdom. Here, the circumstances are commercial. On paper, at least.” He spread contracts before her—German manufacturing specs, Serbian customs forms, Albanian procurement manifests. “My business is machinery parts. Agricultural, industrial. I need someone who can read these,” he tapped a dense German technical document, “and translate the essence, not just the words, into these.” He slid an Albanian language invoice template towards her. “Accuracy is everything. A wrong nut or bolt can halt a whole production line.”
He handed her a contract and a pen. For an hour, he walked her through sample documents, watching her work. She asked precise questions about terminology, noting the Serbian equivalents for certain parts. Her mind, trained for historical nuance, latched onto the technical puzzle. It was clean, logical work.
Enver Nika watched her, his initial professional scrutiny softening into genuine approval. She was quick, methodical, and seemingly unflappable. She didn’t flirt or offer unnecessary smiles; she focused on the text. When she correctly inferred the Albanian word for a “gasket” from contextual clues, he gave a short, satisfied nod.
“You are smarter than you need to be for this job,” he said, a faint smile touching his eyes. “That is a good thing. When can you start?”
They agreed on a salary in Deutsche Marks that made her previous teacher’s pay seem like a pittance. He shook her hand again. “Next Monday. Razije will show you the system. Welcome.”
That evening, in a modern villa on the outskirts of Mitrovica, the Nika family sat down to dinner. The conversation was a lively mix of Albanian and German, the table laden with baked lamb and peppers. Enver, pleased, made the announcement.
“I found a new translator for the office today. Finally. A young woman from Skenderaj. Vanja.”
Bahri, who had been pushing food around his plate, went very still. He didn’t look up.
“Agim Xhaka sent her,” Enver continued, helping himself to more bread. “He was sad to lose her from the school. She speaks flawless German, good Serbian, and is learning Albanian quickly. Very intelligent. A beautiful girl, too, polite.”
Bahri’s younger sister, Elinda, grinned, catching the subtle shift in her brother’s posture. “Beautiful, Papa? Is that a job requirement now?”
“For the view from Lulzim’s desk, maybe,” joked their brother, Altin, earning a chuckle from their mother.
Enver waved a hand, smiling. “It’s an observation, not a requirement. But it doesn’t hurt. She has a good face. Honest.”
Elinda nudged Bahri’s foot under the table. “You’re quiet, vëllai. Do you know this beautiful, intelligent polyglot?”
Bahri took a slow drink of water. His knuckles were white on the glass. “I’ve seen her. In Skenderaj.”
“Ah!” Altin leaned in, his voice teasing. “So that’s why you’ve been so moody. The German girl who vanished after Vidovdan. You tracked her down for Papa?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Bahri said, his voice low and flat. “It’s business. She’s a Serbian with a German passport. That’s all.”
The table went quiet for a beat, the earlier lightness evaporating. Enver’s gaze settled on his son. “Her paperwork is in order. Her work is excellent. The rest is not our concern at the office. We need someone who doesn’t draw police interest. She is… calm.”
Bahri said nothing more. He excused himself before dessert was served, the untouched lamb cold on his plate. He went to his room, closed the door, and stared at the phone on his nightstand for a long time. Then he picked it up and dialed a number from memory.
It rang three times before a voice answered, taut and quiet. “Yes.”
“It’s me.”
A pause. “What is it?”
“She’s in Mitrovica.” Bahri’s voice was a taut wire. “She starts work on Monday. At my father’s company.”
The silence on Adem’s end was profound. Bahri could picture him, wherever he was—the garage, the back room of the house—his body coiled, his mind racing through the implications. When he spoke, his tone was a carefully controlled emulsion of surprise and fury. “Your father hired her? Does he know—”
“He knows she’s a Serb from Switzerland. He knows she’s qualified. He doesn’t know she’s a subject of interest. He thinks she’s a nice girl who needed a job.”
Adem let out a short, harsh breath. “Do you think she knows? That it’s your family?”
“What do you think?” Bahri snapped, the frustration of the dinner table boiling over.
“I think you should go visit her on her first day. Unannounced. See how she reacts.”
The instruction was cold, clear. A test. Bahri digested it, his own anger mirroring Adem’s. “And if she reacts badly?”
“Then we have our answer. And you’ll deal with it there. Far from Prekaz.” The line went dead.
Monday arrived under a flat, grey sky. The office on the north side of the Ibar was quiet. Razije showed Vanja the filing system, a labyrinth of numbered folders and cargo manifests. Lulzim moved crates in the back storage room, his silence a constant, low hum in the background. Vanja buried herself in a stack of German invoices for tractor parts, the mind-numbing specificity a welcome anesthetic. This was it. A clean, quiet life on the edge of history. She could do this.
At midday, Razije prepared coffee on a small hotplate in the corner. The three of them drank it together, Razije chatting about her grandson. It was almost normal. Later, as the weak afternoon light began to fade, Vanja gathered the empty, gritty cups. “Razije, I told you I’ll clean up,” she said in Albanian, moving toward the small sink.
The bell on the front door chimed.
Vanja heard the door open and close, footsteps on the wooden floor. She assumed it was Enver Nika returning. Without turning, she called out, “Razije, I told you I’ll clean up!”
“Did you, now?”
The voice was not Enver’s. It was younger, closer, laced with a tension she hadn’t heard since a moonlit road outside Skenderaj. Her hands spasmed. The three porcelain cups slipped from her fingers and shattered on the stone floor in a explosion of white shards and brown drops.
“Shit,” she gasped, the Serbian curse ripping out of her in pure, unguarded shock.
She turned. Bahri Nika stood just inside the doorway, his tall frame blocking the light. He wore a leather jacket, his dark blond hair damp from the mist outside. His handsome face was set in a cold, unreadable mask, but his eyes were live wires, scanning her, the broken cups, the stunned dread on her face.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice shaky. Confusion, not guilt, painted her features.
He saw it then. The complete lack of preparation. The genuine, bewildered alarm. She had no idea.
“Come,” he said, ignoring her question. “We need to talk.”
“I need to clean the cups,” she protested weakly, gesturing at the mess, a futile grasp for normalcy.
“Fuck the cups,” he said, his voice low and harsh. “Razije will do it. Now. Come.”
He didn’t wait to see if she obeyed. He turned and walked back out the door into the gathering dusk. Vanja stood frozen, her heart hammering against her ribs. Razije gave her a small, pitying look and reached for the broom. Lulzim had appeared in the doorway to the back room, his massive arms crossed, watching.
Vanja moved. She stepped over the broken porcelain, fumbled for her coat, and followed him out. The door chimed mockingly behind her. He was already halfway down the cobbled street, a dark silhouette. She hurried to catch up, the cold air hitting her like a slap. She was afraid, deeply afraid, and the shock was a tangible ice in her veins. Where was he taking her? And what, exactly, had she just walked into?