Chapter 14. Taking Liberties
Taking Liberties
Love survives death. Stubbornness perhaps its only attribute; its will wounded, but not broken. A lake may be silent, its surface dull, with no echo or reflection, with no rushing of wind or agitation of flocks. Yet it holds its ground.
Taciturn by nature, Nazer Marić had gone silent after the deaths of his parents and sister. Struck mute by guilt for being in Travnik that day, for not perishing; survival snatched his voice away. He’d never spoken much to me to begin with, and I felt he blamed me more than Richard or Louis for what had happened. Evil could just not pass carelessly through his life like that, destroying, wrecking utter devastation, without accountability. As for me, I had as much true insight into his psyche as I had knowledge of the spiritual makeup of the fir trees on Mt. Vlašić, and no interest in acquiring any, stung as I was by his contempt and floundering under the burden of my own guilt and denial.
This was many weeks before our rescue operation in Novi Sad, Serbia, where the horses, as predicted, were now stabled. Nazer would not, could not accompany us, obviously; a mere ghost without asylum outside his rubbled enclave, but he was essential in the planning. He hunched over maps of the area surrounding Novi Sad, trapped in solitude, speaking at last, not to the sentient, but into a hand-held tape recorder. I later learned he was telling his story—of his village, of his life—then walking the talk along his village streets, leaving fully recorded microcassettes to be found long after the blood waters had receded, and long after his death; some wedged in the crevices of the balustrades arching over the village stream, others jammed into the ripped spines of books in the ransacked library, a story within a story. A story not destroyed by the forces of ethnic cleansing; rather, a story rediscovered by future forensic scavengers and through the serendipity of survivors.
* * *
Three others had joined our little band at this point: two German women operating undercover as translators, who were, indeed, multilingual—and Olympic-level dressagers. The third person was an older man, a local, who was always about on the streets, it seemed; who talked mainly to Richard and who stared at me constantly until it was all I could do not to yell “What? What?” right in his face. To myself, I called him “One-eyed Jack”—not because both of his eyes didn’t function simultaneously, but because I thought of him as a periscope, an entity always spying, identity concealed. He watched me watch Nazer during our every scattered and catch-as-catch-can randevu. And I did study Nazer. I could see nothing of his sister in him. Nazer remained aloof, although he would eventually speak directly to the two equestrians, which surprised me because, based on my experience, I did not believe Nazer trusted women. “Jack” sensed my puzzlement after one such exchange, and jerking his head in the women’s direction and tapping his forehead, said simply, “Die Pferde—they speak to them,” indicating their possession of a cognizance and a skill level that negated to a sufficient extent, evidently, the anomaly of their gender.
Our cover was set up thusly: I was never told explicitly how the others would arrive, but Richard and I would travel to nearby Vitez, where UN operations were based, and where a portion of the Cheshire Regiment was deployed. Then we would return with their convoy back to Split, and lastly, join a C-141 transport flight to Brize Norton in the UK and make our way to London, location of the home office of Medicine Nonsectarian as well as our little offshoot operation. Our traveling with the troops was not officially approved, of course—we never appeared on a manifest—but rather was carried out without request, as, again, there was a great love of horses among the command. Richard used his persuasive charm and strength of will to full effect. Plus a little cash for the remaining skeptics. A few days were to be spent in London, then we would fly back into Belgrade on a commercial flight with clean passports.
The grandfather of a London staff member of Medicine Nonsectarian had recently died leaving a house situated not too far from Novi Sad, and Richard was returning as his grandson to close the estate. I was his fiancée, a position which allowed me to speak only English and a little German without suspicion. The others, when they arrived or appeared, assumed their roles in a motley cast of characters: ne’er-do-well distant older relative (Louis) and his friend, Dr. Landru (a large animal veterinarian); affluent young skiers—snow bunnies—who had lingered well past the season (the Germans and Robin).
Once settled in Novi Sad, the word discreetly went out from the old Jovanović house that let it be known there were those in the grandson’s party who would not turn their nose up at the prospect of buying a few show horses on the black market—the rumor being the Lipik Lipizzaners were somewhere close by—the burly one acting as agent for some unnamed businessman. All of us kept a low profile, except the burly guy—Louis—who made a show as a gambler, and in the service of veracity, once allowed himself to be rolled.
So, sure enough, Louis was eventually taken around to where the horses were stabled. He learned that the herd had been split into three: only twenty-five stallions and mares were stabled here in Novi Sad, the others had been taken further south and east. With this knowledge in hand, Richard and I took an early summer evening spin a few days later and found ourselves near the identified farmstead. We parked our rental car on the side of the road and got out to watch the sunset, as the affianced do. Or was it to calculate the distance from farmhouse to paddock, from paddock to stable, from stable to road? As twilight settled down over us, cloaking the landscape in soft violet and deep blue, a momentary sense of peace was offered, but any hope of off-topic conversation was snatched away by the sight of a dark shape bobbing on the road, headed our way. Slowly the mass defined itself as some guy slowly approaching, assault rifle slung casually over his back. It never was just some guy, though, was it? Although we could not name the exact nature of it, both of us could sense the menace. A guard? The police, some militia irregular? A common thug? Surely someone looking for payback for his grievances.
“Don’t fight me,” Richard said, scaring me even more, if possible. He put his hands on my shoulders, pulled down on each side of my shirt, ripping off the top button. He took a flask out of his back pocket and poured a good bit of its contents down my throat, some of it spilling out of my mouth, running down over my exposed skin. He took several slugs himself, put the flask on the roof of the car, then crushed himself against me, pushing my back into the car door handle. It was as if I had been sucked up into the center of a whirlwind, and I tried to focus over Richard’s shoulder at the trees plastered against the darkening sky as he whispered in my ear, “Don’t look him in the eyes; don’t talk.” His mouth covered mine and he only released me as the unknown approached.
The man walked up to us, swung around his rifle, and grasping it in both hands, cocked it at Richard’s head. Somehow Richard appeared unfazed. He had been cognizant enough to have grabbed his passport and wallet and now waved them in front of the man. “Hey, hey, American! Americano!” he chided our assailant, seemingly confident through a haze of liquor that this was a simple misunderstanding. The guard, or whoever he was, looked at Richard’s passport, threw it back at him, squatted down to pick up the wallet that had fallen to the ground, pulled out the wad of cash, and tossed it back empty.
“Wha . . . wha . . .”
Ignoring Richard’s protests, he pushed Richard away, then a look came over his face when he realized cash was not all that was on free offer. “Your sister, yeah? Maybe . . . cousin?” (He pronounced it ku-seen.) He pulled me toward him and my mind went blank with terror.
My constant fear back in Travnik, or wherever we traveled in central Bosnia, was of one of us being felled from afar by some unseen agent. Snipers were omnipresent as was the sense that there wasn’t any second of any hour of any day that you couldn’t be instantly killed, and furthermore, that it was the better way to go, because I had seen things better not seen, and more than once I’d fantasized about switching places with those in the windows of the upper stories and systematically picking off those shattering the boundaries of the unthinkable. These thoughts were so continually present in my mind that I had accepted it as my particular fate, and so was merely operating stoically until that appointed time; it had been comforting in that it gave a sheen of imagined nobleness to my faffing about and provided some faux sense of forward movement amid the chaos. Now, to be presented with a violence so close to my face in the form of this man—a violence of such a corporal, sexual nature—was such an unconsidered way of going that it brought the liquor that had gone so fast down my stomach back up just as quickly, and I threw up on the ground in front of him, a good bit landing on his boots, seemingly squelching his ardor. He pushed me back away from him in disgust, grabbed the slopped flask off the car roof and, in a further snit, tossed it in through the open back window, the remainder of the ill-fated brandy spraying over the backseat, then put Richard’s cash in the inner pocket of his jacket.
“You take your fucking somewhere else. I see you here again, you’re dead, and your sister be passed around like . . .” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and didn’t elaborate. Pushing Richard hard in the back with the butt of his Zastava, he shoved us out of his way and left with his currency. Thank god for his fastidiousness; it seemed almost preposterous that he hadn’t killed us. What idiots we were.
When I came to the next day after passing out in the stinking car on our drive back and being assisted to bed by Robin, it was two in the afternoon, and I had to sit in the living room back at the grandfather’s house amid the packing crates and try to sip down coffee that tasted like weeds and thank Richard for mauling me, for taking liberties and saving my life, and I had to thank chance and serendipity for not being served up to satisfy unchecked perversion, and I never had a lower sense of self-worth that I could remember.
After washing up yet again at the old sink in the downstairs bathroom, the water so hard and polluted it left an iron stench that cut through every sensation; after squeezing out the last of the old antiseptic in its rolled-up tube to smear on the scratches that covered my neck and arms like lace; I walked out to the back garden shrubbery, the flowering white mounds silently offering up their scent under the lowering sky, and pushing my hands deep into their innards, through the many twigs and thorns, producing new self-inflicted wounds to mingle with the others, I grabbed hold of the branches, holding on as if to a life-preserver, holding on for dear life, trying to steady myself, save myself, staring at the beauty of the blooms, straight into them, willing myself to feel nothing but the sensation each individual petal projected until, finally, I could regain my bearings. And I stood there shaking until it became dark, just one lost soul and these branches of beauty in an atrocious world.
Image: These branches of beauty. Source: Photograph by Ᾱn Kassel