Chapter 4: A Week of Waiting
The week in Srbica passed with a leaden slowness. The apartment, which had once felt like a neutral, temporary pod, now smelled only of her own anxiety and the stale ghost of his tobacco. She washed his shirt in the tiny sink, scrubbing at the tear down the front, then wore it to bed, the mended fabric a poor substitute for his weight. She wrote bland, observational pieces about street markets and the new library’s architecture, her words as empty as her cupboards. Every engine sound in the street below made her heart stutter. Was it him? Or the police?
It was neither. On the eighth day, a hard knock rattated her door just after dawn.
Bahri stood there, his expression unreadable. Beside him, Shqiponjë, the young woman from the garage, offered a tight, not unfriendly nod. “He sent us,” Bahri said simply. “You are ready?”
She was. One bag, clothes and notebooks. Nothing of value except the Swiss passport tucked against her ribs.
The drive to Prekaz was conducted in near silence. Shqiponjë drove, her knuckles white on the wheel. Bahri stared out the window, watching the barren winter fields scroll past. “He is busy,” Bahri said finally, as if answering an unspoken question. “Preparations. You will be with the women.”
The compound, when they finally pulled up to the heavy metal gate, was not just a house. It was a small fortress. High walls, reinforced windows, a watchful, armed presence at the gate who waved them through after a careful glance. The main house was a long, low building, but around it clustered other structures—a workshop, storage sheds, animal pens. Children, bundled against the cold, chased a ragged soccer ball in the muddy yard. They stopped to stare at the unfamiliar car.
Vanja was led not to the main house, but to a separate, cleaner wing. “The girls,” Shqiponjë said, opening a door to a narrow corridor with several rooms off it. The air smelled of soap and steamed vegetables. A young woman with Adem’s serious eyes stepped out of a doorway, wiping her hands on an apron. She looked Vanja up and down, a flicker of curiosity cutting through her reserve.
“This is Vanja,” Shqiponjë said. “She will use Hana’s room while Hana is in Peja.”
The sister—Adem’s sister—nodded. “I am Sheremete. The room is here.” Her German was halting but clear.
The room was small, painfully neat, and pink. A lace doily on a small desk, a narrow bed with a floral quilt, a crucifix on the wall. It was a teenage girl’s sanctuary. It felt like a violation to put her bag on that bed. “Thank you,” Vanja said.
Sheremete hesitated. “You are the journalist? The one who helped?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are welcome.” The words were formal, but not cold. “We eat at seven.”
The day stretched, interminable. Vanja was given a tour of the kitchen, introduced to a blur of aunts, cousins, sisters-in-law. Eyes assessed her, conversations in Albanian dipped when she entered a room. She was an exotic, worrying bird that had flown into their carefully ordered coop. She helped peel a mountain of potatoes, the repetition of the knife a dull anchor. The compound hummed with a low-grade tension that had nothing to do with her. Men came and went, speaking in low tones with Adem’s brothers. Weapons were cleaned in the workshop. Maps were consulted.
She saw him only once, at a distance. He stood in the yard with three other men, pointing toward the tree line on the ridge. He wore a heavy sheepskin vest, his bearded profile etched against the grey sky. He did not look toward the women’s wing.
Night fell, a deep, cold blanket. Dinner was a boisterous, crowded affair in the main house, dominated by the men’s talk of politics and security. Adem sat at the head of the long table, a brooding patriarch. He acknowledged her with a slight, neutral nod, nothing more. The distance was a physical ache.
Later, in the pink room, she lay on the narrow bed, listening to the sounds of the household settling. Footsteps in the hall, a child’s cough, the murmur of a radio. The door opened so softly she almost missed it.
He filled the doorway, backlit by the hall’s weak bulb, then slipped inside, closing the door without a sound. He didn’t speak. He crossed the room in two strides, pulled her up from the bed, and crushed his mouth to hers. It was a kiss of pure ingestion, filled with the frustration of the long day, the unspoken strain of his public indifference. She could taste the smokiness of his evening coffee, the familiar sharpness of rakia.
“Come,” he breathed against her lips, his voice a sandpaper whisper.
“Where?”
“Anywhere that is not here.”
He took her hand, led her out into the silent, dark hallway. Past closed doors, past the main room where embers glowed in the hearth. He opened a narrow door she hadn’t noticed, pulling her into a cold, dark space that smelled of dry grain, earth, and motor oil. A storage room. Sacks of flour and seed were stacked against the walls. He kicked the door shut with his heel, plunging them into near-total darkness, then fumbled for a moment. A click, and a single, bare bulb dangling from a wire flickered on, casting stark, dramatic shadows.
He pressed her back against a tall stack of burlap sacks, the rough material scratching through her thin nightdress. His hands were everywhere, mapping her as if to confirm she was real. “A week,” he muttered between searing kisses along her jaw, her throat. “I thought of nothing else. The way you sound. The way you clench around me. It is a sickness.”
“Good,” she gasped, her fingers tearing at the buttons of his shirt, desperate for the feel of his skin. “Be sick with me.”
He yanked the nightdress from her shoulders, baring her to the waist in the chilly air. His mouth was hot and ruthless on her breasts, sucking deep, branding marks onto her pale skin. He knew her body now, knew what made her shudder, and he used that knowledge without mercy. One hand shoved the flimsy fabric of her nightdress up around her hips, his fingers pushing her underwear aside and delving into her without preamble.
“Fuck, you’re wet,” he growled, working two fingers inside her, his thumb circling her clit with a rough, perfect pressure. “Already. For this. In my family’s house.”
“Yes,” she hissed, bucking against his hand. The scandal of it, the sheer risk, fed the furious need coiling in her belly. “They’re sleeping. They have no idea their hero is in a closet, ready to fuck a Serb.”
A sharp slap landed on her outer thigh, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to sting, to spark. “Do not,” he warned, his eyes glittering in the low light. “Not here. That stays outside.” He removed his fingers, bringing them to his mouth, sucking them clean while holding her gaze. The obscenity of the gesture made her core throb. He unbuckled his belt, the leather sliding free with a sinful hiss.
He pushed his trousers and long johns down just far enough to free his erection, thick and ruddy in the gloomy light. He spat into his palm, slicked himself roughly, then gripped her hip, turning her around to face the burlap sacks. “Hands flat,” he commanded. She obeyed, bracing herself against the scratchy grain. He kicked her feet wider apart, then mounted her from behind in one smooth, powerful thrust.
The fullness stole her breath. He was deeper like this, the angle unforgiving. He set a punishing rhythm immediately, each drive forward slamming her body into the unyielding sacks. The sound was obscenely loud in the small room—the rhythmic shuffle of their feet on the dirt floor, the rough fabric catching on her skin, his guttural grunts with every push.
“This is what you needed?” he rasped, one hand fisting in her hair, pulling her head back. “After playing the polite guest? To get filled up in a storage room? To be used?”
“Don’t stop,” was all she could manage, the words fractured. Every nerve was alight, the roughness, the danger, the raw physicality of him splitting her open. His other hand snaked around her hip, fingers finding her swollen clit again, rubbing tight, frantic circles in time with his thrusts.
“You come on my cock,” he ordered, his breath hot and ragged against her ear. “Come for me now. Show me you feel it.”
The combined assault was too much. The climax ripped through her, a silent, violent convulsion that clenched around him, milking his length. A sharp cry was torn from her, muffled by the burlap.
Feeling her pulse around him shattered his control. With a choked-off roar, he buried himself to the hilt and came, his release hot and pulsing deep inside her. He sagged against her back, his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades, his whole body shuddering.
For a long moment, the only sound was their ragged breathing, coalescing in the cold air. Slowly, he softened and slipped out of her. He turned her around, his hands gentle now, cupping her face. He kissed her, slowly, deeply, a benediction after the violence. He rested his forehead against hers.
“Tomorrow,” he whispered, the word a promise and a plea. “I have to go to Glogovac. Meetings. When I come back, tomorrow night. We will have time. A real room. A bed. I promise.”
He straightened his clothes with military efficiency, his face slipping back into its commander’s mask, though his eyes remained darkly satiated. He glanced at her, her nightdress torn, her skin marked, her lips swollen. A shadow of something like pain crossed his features. He touched her cheek, once, then turned and slipped out into the dark hallway, vanishing as silently as he’d come.
Vanja leaned against the grain sacks, her legs shaking. The smell of sex and sweat and earth filled the small space. From the main house, she heard the faint, melancholy strain of an Albanian folk song on the radio. A child murmured in its sleep. The ordinary sounds of a home.
She rearranged her clothes, the evidence of him slick between her thighs. As she moved to leave, her foot kicked something half-buried in the dirt floor by the sacks. A small, tarnished silver locket, the chain broken. She picked it up, prising the rusted clasp open with her thumbnail.
Inside was a tiny, faded black-and-white photograph of a young couple. The woman was smiling, her hair in a style from decades past. The man looked stern, proud. On the reverse, a handwritten date: 1967.
Vanja’s blood turned to ice in her veins.
It was her grandmother. And the man was not her grandfather.
She snapped the locket shut, her heart hammering against her ribs. The mystery of her family’s flight from Kosovo, the reason she had been digging through archives in a future that now felt like a dream, it was here. In this compound. In this soil.
The door to the storage room was still ajar, a slit of yellow hall light cutting across the dirt. From outside, in the far distance, came the unmistakable, flat crack of a single gunshot. Then another.
A moment later, the peaceful nighttime sounds of the compound erupted into purposeful, rushed chaos.
The gunshots were distant, maybe a kilometer down the valley, but they acted like an electric charge through the compound’s wires. Doors slammed. Boots pounded on frozen earth. A woman’s voice, sharp with fear, called for the children. Vanja clutched the locket, her discovery instantly swallowed by the present danger. She slipped from the storage room, the cold hall empty now, and hurried back to the pink room. She dressed quickly in the dark, pulling on trousers, a sweater, her boots, the metal locket burning a hole in her palm.
She waited by the window, watching shadows dart between outbuildings. Figures with rifles converged near the main gate. Headlights flared, engines coughed to life, and two vehicles sped out into the night. The organized frenzy subsided into a wary, humming stillness. An hour passed. Then two.
A heavy tread approached her door just before dawn. It opened without a knock. Adem stood there, still in his sheepskin vest, smelling of cold air, gasoline, and something acrid—cordite. His face was drawn, his eyes hollow with a fresh kind of fury. He saw her fully dressed, saw the tension in her posture. “It was a checkpoint,” he said, his voice flat. “Serb police. They stopped a car carrying two of my cousins. There was an argument. Shots were fired.”
“Are they—”
“They got away. One is wounded, not badly.” He ran a hand over his face, the weight of the coming war in the gesture. Then his gaze dropped to her clenched fist. “What is that?”
She hadn’t realized she was still holding it. She opened her hand. The broken chain dangled, the small silver disc glinting in the pre-dawn grey. Her throat tightened uncontrollably, and to her horror, a hot tear broke free, tracing a path through the dust on her cheek.
He stepped fully into the room, closing the door. “What are you doing holding this?” He moved closer, his voice low but coiled. “Where did you get this from?”
She shook her head, unable to form words, and extended her hand. He took the locket, his rough fingers brushing her palm. He peered at it, then pried it open. His breath stalled. The blood seemed to drain from his face, leaving his beard a stark black against suddenly pale skin. He looked from the photo to her face, his eyes searching for something he clearly did not want to find.
“Do you know these people?” she asked, her voice a fragile thread.
He was silent for a long moment, staring at the tiny, smiling woman. “Do you?” he finally countered, his tone unreadable.
“That’s my grandmother,” Vanja said. The confession felt like stepping off a cliff. “But who is the man?”
Adem froze. His shoulders tensed as if bracing for a blow. “That is my father’s brother. Hamez. My brother was named after him.” He swallowed, the sound loud in the quiet room. “And the woman was to be his bride. Besa Kastrioti.”
The name ‘Kastrioti’ hung between them, a ghost from two histories. Vanja’s mind raced, connecting shattered fragments. “What happened?”
“He died. In an accident in ’66. She left.” He spoke the words like reciting a grim, familiar verse. “Married a Serb, they say. Left Kosovo. Shortly after that picture was taken.”
Vanja nodded slowly, the mystery of her family’s flight crystallizing into a cold, hard truth. “She married my grandfather. They left for Switzerland. She changed her name to Slava. I never knew. I didn’t know any of this.”
“You should have told me,” he whispered, but the accusation had no force, only a dazed confusion.
“Told you what?” she snapped, a sudden flash of anger cutting through her tears. “That my grandmother, might have been promised to your uncle? I didn’t know, Adem. She never showed me this. She never said the name Jashari.”
His head jerked up. “Who taught you Albanian?”
“She did. We spoke it at home, but my grandfather did too. She said they used to speak both languages back home.” The phrase ‘back home’ now had a specific, terrifying coordinate. Prekaz. This soil.
He closed the locket with a definitive snap. The silence that followed was profound, filled with the immensity of the collision between their bloodlines. “What does it mean, Adem?” Her question was barely audible. “For us?”
He looked utterly lost, the commander stripped of his map. “It means a debt is to be paid,” he said, the words seeming to come from an old, deep place. “In blood. For her betrayal. For his lost life.”
“Like killing me?” she asked, her voice flat, resigned. “Is that the debt?”
“What?” He stared at her as if she’d slapped him. “No. God’s woman, are you out of your mind? And even if it did, do you think I could do it? After… after everything.” His gesture encompassed the room, the storage closet, the tangled sheets of her bed, all the unspoken heat between them.
A small, weary smile touched her lips. She saw his heart skip in the jump of a pulse at his throat. He stepped closer, the space between them humming.
“It means marriage,” he whispered, the word hanging like a promise and a sentence.
“To you?” she asked, her breath catching.
“To a member of my house. To restore the honor. To tie the blood back together.” He sounded like he was explaining a brutal, ancient arithmetic.
“Only if they know,” she whispered, thinking of Sheremete, of his brothers, of the armed men outside. “Your family. The village. They would see it as a solution?”
“But they know,” he said, his eyes holding hers. “The old ones remember Besa who ran. This,” he took her hand, placing the locket back in her palm and closing her fingers over it, “is their way out. A curse, but also a blessing. A reason they can understand.”
From outside, a rooster crowed, shattering the delicate spell. The compound was waking up. The reality of the morning—the wounded cousin, the heightened patrols, the war inching closer—crashed back in.
Adem’s hand rose, cupping the back of her neck, his thumb stroking her jaw. His touch was no longer that of a frantic lover in a dark closet, but something more possessive, more claimed. “This changes nothing,” he murmured, though they both knew it changed everything. “And it changes everything. You are mine now. Not just because I want you. But because you have always been mine. Your blood has been calling to this land, to my blood, since before you were born.”
He kissed her then, deeply, a seal on a pact older than both of them. When he pulled away, his eyes were dark, resolute. “Stay in the house today. There will be more police. They will be looking for reasons.”
He turned and left, the door shutting softly behind him. Vanja stood in the center of the pink room, the cold silver of the locket biting into her flesh. The chaos of the night had folded into a terrifying, perfect clarity. She was not just a journalist out of time. She was a lost piece of a feud, returned. A debt to be paid, or a thread to be rewoven. Outside, the grey dawn began to bleed light over the ridge, illuminating the very trees where, in a history she remembered, Adem Jashari would soon make his final, legendary stand.
The locket was a cold, live coal in her fist. She hid it under a loose floorboard beneath the narrow bed, a secret beneath a secret. The day unfolded with a brittle, choreographed tension. Serbian police vehicles, grey and ominous, idled at the end of the mud track leading to the compound. Two officers in heavy blue coats strutted to the gate, demanding to speak to the head of the household. Adem’s brother Hamza met them, his face a placid mask of weary cooperation. Vanja watched from the kitchen window, her hands wrist-deep in flour and water as she helped the women prepare lunch.
“They look for excuses,” Sheremete muttered, deftly rolling dough into perfect, paper-thin circles. “A wounded man. Any man.”
“Will they come in?” Vanja asked, keeping her German soft.
Sheremete’s dark eyes flicked to her. “Not today. They have no warrant. Only appetite.” She watched Vanja’s hands work the dough. “You are quick. You learn.”
It was Adem’s mother, Nazmije, who truly took Vanja in hand. She was a small woman, a bundle of sinew and will wrapped in a black wool dress, her face a roadmap of stern lines. She moved through the crowded kitchen with a quiet authority that made the younger women straighten up. She stopped beside Vanja, observing without comment as Vanja attempted to replicate Sheremete’s filije. The first two were ragged, too thick. The third was passable. The fourth was nearly perfect, a delicate, sheer circle draped over the back of her hand.
Nazmije gave a single, slow nod. “Good,” she said in Albanian. Then, her eyes appraising Vanja’s form with a brutal practicality, she added, “Great hips. Beautiful, strong. Good blood.”
Vanja, understanding perfectly, simply nodded. There was no point in demurring. Here, she was an asset being assessed, a missing thread being pulled back into the weave. She felt it with a strange, resigned clarity.
Days stratified into a new routine of cautious domesticity. Vanja peeled, chopped, kneaded, and learned. She drank thick, bitter coffee with the women in the afternoon, listening to their chatter about cousins and crops, a lexicon that carefully avoided the word “weapon” or “police.” Adem was a ghost presence, leaving before first light, returning long after dark, smelling of winter forest and diesel. Their only contact was fleeting—a scorching glance across the yard, the brush of his fingers against hers as he took a coffee cup.
The frustration built in him like a head of steam. One evening, as Vanja carried a stack of blankets to the storage room—now strictly off-limits—he materialized in the shadowed corridor, backing her against the cold stone wall. His mouth found hers in a hungry, silencing kiss, his hand sliding up her thigh beneath her skirt. “Tonight,” he breathed, his voice ragged. “I don’t care. I need to be inside you.”
The click of a door latch broke them apart. Nazmije stood there, a small, immutable silhouette, holding an empty basket. Her gaze took in her son’s frantic posture, Vanja’s flushed face, the intimate proximity. She said nothing for a long, chilling moment.
“Adem,” she said finally, her voice like grinding stone. “A word.”
Vanja slipped away, her heart hammering. She heard the low, vehement rumble of his voice, a commander being dressed down. Nazmije’s replies were quieter, icier, absolute. The law of this house, older than any rebellion.
Later, Nazmije found Vanja plucking feathers from a chicken in the scullery. “You and Adem,” she stated, not asked. “You will not be alone in the dark. Not until after the marriage. This is not a suggestion.”
Vanja met the older woman’s gaze. “I understand.”
Nazmije’s expression softened, almost imperceptibly. “It is for the talk. For the honor. Your honor, too.” She reached out, her gnarled fingers adjusting a dress Vanja had taken to wearing. “The locket changes the past. A wedding fixes the future.”
So Vanja humored her. She found she liked Nazmije’s blunt, unsentimental care. It was a fence, but a protective one. Adem, the legendary commander, stalked around the compound like a caged wolf, snarling at his men, kicking the stubborn tractor tire. His mother, half his size, ignored him completely.
One afternoon, a rare moment of weak sun found them all in the sheltered side-yard. Vanja sat with Nazmije and Sheremete, sipping coffee. Adem was across the way, cleaning a rifle with two of his men, but his attention was a tangible heat on her skin. The separation was a sweet, terrible torture.
“It’s like I’m a prized bloodmare,” Vanja murmured to him later, when a shuffling of positions brought him briefly near her bench to retrieve a dropped tool. His scent, gun oil and male sweat, hit her like a drug.
He didn’t look at her, but a slow, wicked grin spread beneath his beard. “You love it, zemrë,” he whispered, the Albanian endearment a secret caress.
Her heart skipped, a frantic bird against her ribs. She blushed, looking down at her hands.
“I miss you,” he growled, the words so low they were almost vibration.
“Marry me soon, in that case,” she said, the boldness fueled by weeks of deprivation.
His hand, calloused and warm, covered hers where it lay on the wooden bench for one timeless second. The connection was electric, a jolt that went straight to her core.
From her seat by the door, Nazmije cleared her throat, a sound like dry bone on stone.
Adem jerked his hand back as if scalded, a low, animal growl of frustration rumbling in his chest. Vanja pressed her lips together, but a giggle escaped, a bright, helpless sound in the tense yard. He shot her a look of pure, fiery promise before stomping back to his men.
The wedding was set for ten days’ time. A simple, swift affair. The tension in the compound shifted, becoming a buzzing wire of preparation and underlying dread. The police patrols increased. Distant gunfire at night was now commonplace.
Three nights before the wedding, Adem returned late from a drop. The house was silent, bathed in the blue dark of deep night. Vanja lay awake, listening. Her door opened. He was just a denser shadow. He came to the bed, his clothes reeking of night and danger. He didn’t speak. He pulled the blankets back and his mouth was on hers, his tongue thrusting deep, his hands rough as they shoved her nightdress up to her waist. “Can’t wait,” he panted against her mouth. “Need you now. Tell me to stop.”
“Don’t you dare stop,” she whispered, arching against him.
He flipped her onto her stomach with a ruthless efficiency, dragging her hips up. He fumbled with his belt, the buckle loud. He spat into his palm, slicking his cock, already brutally hard. He entered her in one relentless, deep push, her body sheathing him tightly in the dark. She gasped into the pillow, the stretch a delicious burn. He set a hard, driving rhythm, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise.
“You think about this?” he grunted, each thrust punching a soft sound from her. “In this little bed? Touching yourself, thinking of my cock?”
“Yes,” she moaned, the confession torn from her.
“How?” His pace didn’t falter. “Tell me.”
“I think of you taking me like this,” she gasped, the obscene words thrilling her. “Like an animal. Filling me up. Marking me.”
A groan tore from him. He leaned over her, his chest hot against her back, one hand snaking around to rub her clit in rough, frantic circles. “You’re mine. Say it.”
“I’m yours.” The words were a plea.
“Come for me. Now.” His command was guttural.
The combined sensations—the deep, claiming penetration, the sharp friction on her clit—shattered her. She came with a choked cry, her internal muscles clamping down on him in rhythmic pulses. It pulled his own release from him; he buried himself to the hilt with a sharp, stifled shout, his hot seed jetting inside her in throbbing waves.
He collapsed over her, spent, his breath sawing in her ear. They stayed like that, joined in the dark, for long minutes. Slowly, he softened and slipped out. He turned her onto her back, kissing her with a startling tenderness. He rested his forehead against hers.
“Three days,” he whispered.
“Three days,” she echoed.
He left as silently as he came. Vanja lay in the moist, spent warmth of the sheets, her body humming. She reached under the bed, her fingers finding the loose board and the cool silver of the locket. She pulled it out, holding it in the faint moonlight. The face of her grandmother, of Hamez Jashari, seemed to watch her from another world. A debt of blood, or a promise of union. Outside, the wind rattled the shutters, carrying the scent of coming snow, and from very far away, the faint, metallic scream of a mortar round being fired. It was a sound she knew from history books. It didn’t belong here, not yet.
But it was here. And so was she. She clenched the locket, the metal biting into her palm, a small, hard anchor in the rushing dark. She would wear it at her wedding.