Chapter 8: The Weight of Grandchildren
The oil lamp guttered, painting their tangled shadows across the rough wooden ceiling. Adem’s weight was a familiar anchor, his sweat cooling on her skin where their bodies finally parted. He rolled onto his back beside her, the old bedframe groaning. For a long while, there was only the sound of their breathing slowing, merging with the night sounds of the compound—a guard’s murmured exchange, the rustle of oak leaves in the mountainside wind.
“She won’t listen,” Adem said finally, his voice a low rumble in the dark. The sex had not placated the worry; it had only carved out a quiet space for it to solidify.
“She’s twenty-two,” Vanja replied, her hand finding the coiled tension in his forearm. “Listening is not the point. Surviving is.”
“With a Serb.”
“With a man she chose.” Vanja propped herself on an elbow, looking down at him. The lamplight caught the silver in his beard, the deep lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there a decade ago. “You think I don’t taste the irony every day? My daughter. In love with a footballer from Belgrade.”
“Basel,” he corrected, almost automatically.
“His accent is from Belgrade. A soft, privileged Belgrade. He probably grew up in Dedinje, stealing apricots from Tito’s old gardens.” She said it with a strange, wistful bitterness. A world that, in her other life, she had only ever read about in archives.
Adem turned his head to look at her. “You see a boy. I see a potential informant. A leverage point. His family’s connections, his travel… the police could turn him like a tap.”
“Then we will be the fire that burns the tap until it melts,” she said, and her voice held no romance, only a cold certainty that mirrored his own. She leaned down and kissed him, a hard, possessive kiss. “We made nine children. We can handle a Serbian son-in-law.”
He gripped her hips, his calloused fingers digging into the soft flesh, and flipped her onto her back with a sudden, practiced ease. The blankets were tangled at their feet. He drove into her again, deeper this time, the fullness a sharp, breathtaking shock. She gasped, her legs locking around the small of his back, pulling him closer.
“I’m not worried about him,” he grunted, sweat beading anew on his brow as he moved, each thrust a punctuation to his words. “I’m worried about her. She has your fire. She’ll burn him alive.”
The rhythm broke, became frantic, a raw and wordless argument. He came with a groan, spilling into her, a hot, insistent pulse, and she clenched around him, pulling him deeper, milking every last drop as a faint tremor ran through his powerful shoulders.
“Good,” she whispered into the hollow of his throat, then kissed his damp forehead. “Let her.”
He collapsed onto her, heavy and spent. She held him, her fingers tracing the old pink scar on his arm, the one from the shovel, the one from before the war truly began. A scar from building, not destroying. It was the story she preferred.
Aleksandar arrived two days later, in a sensible German sedan that looked absurdly clean on the cratered road to Prekaz. He was taller than expected, his handshake firm, his smile a flash of impeccable dentistry. He called Adem “sir” and Vanja “madam,” his Serbian accent indeed soft, cultured, leaching into his German when he spoke to Vanja in that language, trying to find common ground.
Lira hovered, a live wire of defiance and hope. She was her mother’s daughter in the sharp architecture of her face, her father’s in the unblinking intensity of her gaze. Dinner was a tense pantomime. Nazmije served flija with a face like stone. Shkumbin, now a broad-shouldered replica of his father at that age, talked football with deliberate neutrality, dissecting Aleksandar’s last season with Basel FC with tactical coldness. The younger children stared.
Aleksandar spoke of his parents, professors at the University of Belgrade. He was careful, politically sanitized, but Vanja, the journalist, heard the unspoken words. Liberal, cosmopolitan, likely quietly opposed to Milošević, viewing the noisy nationalism of the regime as a vulgar embarrassment. They were not the enemy. They were something arguably more dangerous: they were irrelevant. They lived in a parallel Kosovo, one of academic journals and European conferences, a Kosovo that was a tragic abstract political problem, not a land scorched by the memory of specific crimes.
After the coffee was poured, Lira took her mother’s hand across the table. Her palm was damp.
“There’s more,” Lira said. Her eyes flicked to her father, then back to Vanja. “Aleksandar has an offer. From Borussia Dortmund. A real contract. A big one.”
A silence fell, thick and immediate. The offer was not just for football. It was an escape hatch, a portal to a normal life. It was everything Adem had fought to make possible here, packaged and delivered from the outside world he deeply distrusted.
“I’m moving with him,” Lira said, the words a single, clean blade. “To Germany.”
Adem’s chair scraped back. The air left the room. His face, usually so masterfully composed, flickered with a raw, paternal terror—the terror of a man who had built a fortress only to see his most beloved cannon walk out of the gate, waving at the besiegers. His jaw worked. Vanja could see the words forming, the commander’s words, the father’s decree: No. You will not. Not with him. Not now.
Vanja was on her feet before the first syllable could leave his lips. She moved not to her husband, but to her daughter. She framed Lira’s face with her hands, feeling the fierce heat in her cheeks, seeing the fear and the steel behind her eyes. This was the fire. This was the girl who would burn worlds, or herself, for a choice she believed was hers alone.
She stopped Adem with a look—a look forged in their shared history, in buried weapons and midnight escapes, in blood and milk and nine impossible births. It was a command as absolute as any he had ever issued on a battlefield.
Then she pulled Lira into a fierce, crushing hug. She inhaled the scent of her hair—olive soap and the distant, ghostly trace of Basel perfume—and held on as if the mountainside itself were trying to tear her girl away. Over Lira’s shoulder, she watched Adem. She saw the protest die in his throat, extinguished by the terrifying, united front of his wife and daughter. He stood there, a commander rendered mute, his hands clenched at his sides, his eyes on Vanja’s, shining with a furious, bewildered love.
Vanja released Lira and turned. The silence was a physical thing, pressing in from the smoke-darkened timber walls. She walked to Aleksandar, who had risen from his chair, his athlete’s posture bracing for a blow.
“Dortmund,” Vanja said, not in Albanian or German, but in the clean, polished Serbian of Belgrade University. His eyes widened. “A great club. A serious city.” She placed a hand on his arm, feeling the fine wool of his sweater, so foreign in this room. “That is wonderful, Vanja says to Aleksandar in Serbian, we should all meet there, meet your parents too.”
Adem nodded. It was a stiff, mechanical movement, but it was assent. He could not find the words, so he granted her this, his silence a form of brutal trust.
Aleksandar looked shocked but grateful. The tension in his shoulders slipped down a single, measurable degree. “They would… they would like that very much,” he stammered, switching to his native tongue with obvious relief.
Later, after Lira and Aleksandar’s headlights had vanished down the mountain track, the family collected in the main room. The younger ones were shooed off. Shkumbin, Nazmije, and a few of the older boys remained, their expressions guarded in the firelight.
“Your sister is happy,” Vanja stated, her voice leaving no room for debate. She looked at each of them, meeting their dark, conflicted eyes. “And the fact he is Serbian should not matter.” She let the pause hang, sharp as a blade. “Or did you forget your mother is one too?”
They glanced at their father, who stood by the hearth, a monolithic shadow. He said nothing. They shook their heads, a flutter of nervous motion, then nodded, slower, more definitive.
“Good,” she said, the word a dismissal. “Besides, we didn’t fight for you to hold old grudges and hate. Now go to bed.”
They went, filing out with a quiet shuffle. Soon it was just the two of them and the crackling sap of the pine log. Adem looked at her, his expression unreadable. Then a faint, weary grin touched his lips.
“You command the army, Adem Jashari,” she said, stepping close to him, her voice dropping to a whisper only the fire could overhear. “I command this house.”
He grinned and kissed her. It was not a gentle kiss. It was a conveyance of everything unsayable—the fear, the pride, the surrender. He walked her backward through the dim corridor to their room, his hands already on the buttons of her blouse.
He pushed the door shut with his boot. “Command me now,” he growled into her mouth.
She tore at his shirt, buttons pinging onto the wooden floor. He yanked her skirt up around her waist, his fingers digging into the bare flesh of her ass. There was no slow undressing, no tenderness. It was a collision. He spun her around, bent her over the edge of the heavy oak chest at the foot of their bed. The carved wood bit into her hips. He fumbled with his belt, the leather rasping, and she heard the wet, hurried sound of his spit as he slicked himself.
He drove into her from behind in one brutal, claiming stroke. She cried out, a short, sharp sound swallowed by the room. She was not quite ready, the stretch was a burn, exquisite and painful. “Fuck,” he grunted, his hands clamping on her shoulders, holding her down as he pistoned into her.
“Is this… your command?” she gasped, pushing back against him, taking him deeper. Her breasts were crushed against the cold wood. Each thrust shook her whole body.
“Yes.” He was breathless, animal. One hand snaked around her hip, his fingers finding her clit, rough and urgent. “You take my daughter away. You give her to them. So you take this. You take all of me.”
His fingers worked her, a harsh, rapid rhythm that matched his fucking. The pleasure was jagged, a rising wave threatening to shred her. She could feel every ridge, every vein of his cock sawing in and out of her soaked cunt. The obscene, wet sounds of it filled her ears.
“She’s not yours to give,” Vanja managed, her vision blurring. The orgasma built, a terrible pressure. “She’s mine. I made her. And I’m giving her a fucking peace we never had.”
He swore into her hair, a filthy, beautiful oath. His pace became ragged, frantic. His fingers on her clit were relentless. “Come for me,” he demanded, his voice breaking. “Come on my cock, you impossible woman. Show me what your peace is worth.”
It tore through her, a silent, seismic convulsion that locked her muscles and stole her breath. Her cunt clenched rhythmically around his driving length, milking him. With a final, shattered groan, he pushed deep and held, spilling into her in hot, pulsing jets.
They slumped together over the chest, lungs heaving, skin slick. The cold air raised gooseflesh on her exposed back. He was still inside her, softening. He nuzzled into her tangled hair, his breath hot on her neck. The fury had evaporated, leaving only a raw, exhausted truth between them.
“They will eat her alive in that world,” he whispered, the dread returning now that the passion had burned off.
Vanja stared at the grain of the wood beneath her cheek. She thought of Basel’s sterile streets, of polite bigotry and quiet alienation. She thought of football contracts and professorial parents, of a life where war was a chapter in a history book.
“Maybe,” she said finally, her voice hoarse. “But she will be eating at a full table, in a house that isn’t made of ash and memory.” She pushed herself up, his softening cock slipping from her with a tender, final ache. She turned and looked at him, at the legendary commander naked and afraid in the dark. “That has to be enough. It has to be more than we had.”
The autumn in Prekaz turned sharp, the wind carrying the smell of woodsmoke and wet earth from the excavated foundation of the new house, a project now paused. The news, when it broke, did so with the sterile crackle of Radio Prishtina, then the hurried, excited shouts from a cousin’s satellite television in Srbica. It was a two-line item on a German sports channel that blossomed into a fungal bloom of speculation across the Balkans. Footballer weds guerrilla’s daughter. The myth-making machines on all sides cranked to life, distorting the fragile, personal truth into grotesque shapes.
Adem stood by the radio, his knuckles white around a cup of cold coffee. “They are making a cartoon of her life,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. Outside, a strange car, a Renault with Priština plates, idled at the end of the dirt track. A man with a camera stood beside it, his lens a black, unblinking eye pointed at the compound gate.
Vanja watched from the window, Eliza’s toddler heavy on her hip. “They were always going to,” she said. She handed the child to Nazmije. “Get everyone inside. Bolt the shutters.” She smoothed her hands over her wool skirt. “I will pull the cartoon’s teeth.”
She walked out alone, into the brittle sunlight. The photographer surged forward, another man scrambling from the passenger seat with a notepad. She met them halfway, her posture erect, her face a calm mask she had not worn since her days in Basel press conferences. She stopped just outside the gate, the scarred timber at her back.
“Mrs. Jashari—” the reporter began in clumsy Albanian.
“Vranic,” she corrected, in Serbian. His eyes widened. She continued, shifting seamlessly between the languages, her voice clear and carrying, a diplomat’s cadence imposed over a raw, maternal core. “We love our children. We love Lira. We wish only for her health and her happiness, and for the health and happiness of Aleksandar, who is now our family.” She paused, letting the Serbian words hang in the air, a deliberate provocation to some, an offering to others. She repeated the sentiment in Albanian, then again in precise, neutral German. “Thank you for your thoughts. The wedding will be in Dortmund. We ask for privacy for our family here. There is a new life beginning. Respect it.”
She turned before they could ask a follow-up question, walking back to the house with a measured pace that betrayed nothing of the furious hammering of her heart. The statement, a tiny, controlled detonation, was picked up and repeated across wire services. It solved nothing and everything all at once.
Dortmund was a city of steel and glass and rain, a monochrome expanse under a low, grey sky. The wedding venue was a civic hall, all chrome and potted ferns, a deliberate choice of anonymity. Vanja dressed in a severe navy suit she’d bought in Basel a lifetime ago; Adem wore a new, ill-fitting suit that made him look like a mountain stuffed into a cardboard box. They were a pocket of tense, foreign silence amidst the cheerful German bureaucracy of the event.
Aleksandar’s parents were exactly as she’d imagined: intelligent, polite, horrifically uncomfortable. His father, Mihajlo, shook Adem’s hand with a cautious nod, his eyes skipping away from the man’s bearded, legend-scarred face. The conversation was a minefield in three languages, tiptoeing around everything that mattered. They discussed the weather in Dortmund, the efficiency of the German rail system, the architectural merits of the hall.
Lira was incandescent in a simple ivory dress, her fury at the world sublimated into a terrifying, radiant joy. She gripped Aleksandar’s hand as if he were a spar in a stormy sea. When the German official pronounced them married, she kissed him with a fervor that made the gathered aunts from Priština blush and look away.
The reception was held in a private room of a blandly elegant hotel. Speeches were made. Aleksandar’s friend from the team joked in German about his discipline on and off the pitch. Shkumbin, his broad shoulders straining his own suit, stood and raised a glass of rakia he’d smuggled in his luggage. “To my sister,” he said, his Albanian blunt and clear in the quieting room. “The bravest person I know. And to Aleksandar.” He paused, his eyes finding his new brother-in-law’s. “You have her now. Good luck.” It was not entirely a joke. The Albanians laughed, a sharp, knowing sound. The Serbs smiled uncertainly.
Adem did not give a speech. He sat beside Vanja, a monument of silent observance, drinking mineral water. His eyes tracked every interaction, every weighted glance between the two fractured halves of the room. During a waltz, he was persuaded onto the floor with Vanja. He held her stiffly, his hand a firm, warm pressure on the small of her back.
“They are talking about visas. Green cards,” he murmured into her hair, his breath smelling of mint and tension. He nodded faintly toward Mihajlo, who was in deep conversation with a well-dressed German man. “Investor visas. He is arranging it already. They will become Germans.”
“They will be safe,” Vanja said, her cheek against the scratchy wool of his lapel.
“She will be erased,” he countered, his hand tightening on hers.
The hotel room they’d been given was oppressively quiet, sealed against the city’s hum. Adem stripped off his suit jacket and tie, throwing them over a chair as if they were restraints. Vanja kicked off her heels. The silence between them was a live wire, buzzing with all the unspoken words of the day.
He looked at her, across the expanse of beige carpet. “You gave your speech perfectly. The trilingual mother. The bridge.” There was no compliment in it.
“It was the only shield to give her,” Vanja said, unzipping her suit skirt, letting it pool at her feet. She stood in her blouse and stockings.
“A shield here.” He gestured at the sterile room. “While at home, they are throwing stones at Hamza’s bakery for giving them credit. Calling him a traitor.”
The rage and the fear and the profound dislocation of the day coalesced in her then, a hot, swift tide. She closed the distance between them. “Fuck them,” she whispered, her fingers going to his belt. “Fuck all of them.” Her movements were not tender. She unbuckled the leather, yanked it free, the metal tip whipping against the wardrobe door. She unbuttoned his trousers, shoved them down over his hips. His cock, half-hard, stirred against the cool air.
He pushed her backward onto the edge of the wide, impersonal bed. He dragged her stockings down, ripping the fine fabric in his hurry. He pushed her thighs apart, his breath ragged. “You want to be a bridge?” he growled, his fingers pushing into her. She was already wet, a slick, angry heat. “Then hold still.”
He drove into her without ceremony, a deep, punishing thrust that knocked a sharp gasp from her lungs. He fucked her like that, with her on the edge of the bed, her shoulders pressed into the duvet, her legs hooked over his arms. Each slam of his hips was a rebuttal to the polite applause, to the careful speeches, to the German rain on the window. This was the only language left that was true.
“This is what we have,” he gritted out, his face a mask of strained intensity. “This. Dirt and blood and this.” He leaned down, his mouth against her ear. “Not their clean fucking visas.”
She clawed at his back, her nails digging through his shirt. “Then give it to me,” she demanded, her hips rising to meet his, taking him deeper, demanding more. “All of it. Don’t you fucking hold back.”
The obscene, wet sound of their coupling filled the quiet room. His balls slapped against her, a frantic rhythm. She could feel the coiled, furious energy in his body, the warrior with no battlefield, the father with no recourse. She wrapped her legs around him tighter, pulling him in, wanting to be consumed by that fire, to let it burn away the helplessness.
"Come inside me," she ordered, her voice a raw scrape. "Here. In this German room. Mark it. Claim it."
With a shattered groan that was almost a sob, he obeyed, pulsing into her, his whole body shuddering with the force of it. She followed, a sharp, broken cry tearing from her throat as her own climax ripped through her, a violent rewrite of the day’s careful script.
They collapsed together on the bland hotel duvet, a tangled, sweating mess of tailored clothes and spent passion. The distant sound of a siren echoed up from the street. He was still inside her, softening. She felt his tears before she saw them, a hot spill against her temple, followed by the sharp, suppressed hitch of his breath.
She held him, this man of unyielding resolve, as he silently wept for a daughter crossing into a world he could not follow, into a safety that felt like a betrayal. She said nothing. There were no words in any language. She just held on, anchor and storm both, in a room that already felt like a memory.