Against the Day (189 page)

“Full of surprises ain’t you,” Reef
taking Ljubica and with calibrated softness kissing her streaming eyes. “No
more bumblebees, kid.” When it was quiet again, he thought of something. “Be
back in a minute.” He went off in the direction the machinegun fire had been
coming from. Ljubica wrinkled her forehead and waved an arm and made an
inquisitive sort of “Ah?”

“Your father’s needs are simple,”
Yashmeen explained, “and so it wouldn’t surprise me if—why yes, look,
just what I thought. See what Papa has brought home.”

“A miracle,” Reef said. “It’s all in
one piece.” He held up a peculiarlooking rifle whose barrel seemed much wider
than usual, though this turned out to be a perforated casing for aircooling the
weapon. “Folks, meet the Madsen machine rifle. Been hearing about these for a
while now. Every Russian cavalry division used to carry some, but they decided
to get rid of ’em awhile back and a lot came on the market out here, especially
up in Montenegro, where they’re known as Rexers. Lookit this. Five hundred
rounds a minute on auto, and when the barrel gets too hot—” He produced a
duplicate barrel, twisted off the first, and replaced it. He had also managed
to scavenge a number of quartercircular magazines holding forty rounds each.

   
“I’m
happy for you, of course,” said Yashmeen.

“Oh
and here.” Somewhere in this ashen field among the corpses and blood and the
seep of cordite smoke and fragments of steel he had found a patch of
wildflowers, and now he handed them each a small bouquet. Ljubica immediately
began to eat hers, and Yash just gazed at Reef until her eyes were too wet, and
then she wiped them with her sleeve.

   
“Thanks.
We should be moving.”

Now and then in the weeks that
followed they would find themselves wondering—though they could never
find the time to just sit and talk it through—if the permission they had felt
when Cyprian was with them, the freedom to act extraordinarily, had come from
residence in a world about to embrace its end—closer to the freedom of
the suicide than that of the ungoverned spirit.

The winter coming
down
. The war
unpredictably everywhere. They sheltered often in the temporary thatch huts of
Sarakatsàni, for it was these people of no country, no native town, no fixed
abode, the nomads of the Peninsula, who would see them to safety, who shared
their own food, tobacco, and sleeping space. Yashmeen gave them jars of rose
preserve that Zhivka had put up for them, brought this far miraculously
unbroken, and they gave her a wooden babycarrying rig to strap to her back,
which she and Reef, who had started calling Ljubica “the papoose,” took turns
with. Ljubica rode along perched up like a lookout, inviting her parents’
attention to horsemen, sheepdogs and sheep, drops of rain
. . .
the obstinate accompaniment of horse
and field artillery, flanking, pursuing. At last they came over the Bukovo Pass
and down into Ohrid, beside its pale windrippled lake, in among red roofs,
acacias and alleyways, its town clamor, which did not include guns, welcome as
silence. Turkish deserters slept on the beach, haunted the mosques, traded
weapons for cigarettes.

There had been forty thousand Turks
at Monastir, Germantrained under the legendary Liman von Sanders, whose plans
included sending his murderous creatures into the Ukraine when the time arrived
for war with Russia. An intimidating claim, to’ve been schooled in the arts of
mass death by Germans. But now the Serbs knew they could beat them.

They looked
across the lake
, up at
the black peaks, already with some snow on them. A chasm had opened in the
clouds, which light poured down through, a vertical torrent of light, cleaving
through all the imaginable shades of gray which inhabited the sky, as if
presenting the day with choices it seldom if ever saw.

“It’s Albania,” she said. Cyprian had
told them to stay out of Albania. Everybody had. Not that the folks there
weren’t warm and hospitable as ever, but there was some kind of revolution
going on up north, against the Turks, the Greeks had invaded and occupied the
south, and much of the fighting was

informal, by way of longrange rifles.
“There may be one paved road somewhere, but it’s bound to take us right into
the worst of the fighting.”

“Let’s see. Winter in the mountains,
no map, everybody shootin at everybody else.”

   
“That’s
about it.”

   
“Hell,
let’s do it.”

Before setting
off
down the shore of
the lake, as if they were only out here on holiday, they bought postal cards
illustrated with scenes of the War, and stamps each printed in two or three
languages, not to mention Turkish and Cyrillic alphabets, with provisional
overprints in these as well as Roman face. Some of the photographs showed
terrible scenes of slaughter and mutilation, reproduced not in simple black and
white but varying shades of green, a quite fluorescent green as a matter of
fact—shell craters, limbless men at field hospitals, gigantic cannons,
aeroplanes flying in formation
. . . .
They
posted them, in the sure and certain hope of none arriving, to YzlesBains,
Chunxton Crescent, Gabrovo Slim and Zhivka, Frank and Mayva in the U.S.A., Kit
Traverse and Auberon Halfcourt, Hotel Tarim, Kashgar, Chinese Turkestan.

At the south end of the lake, they
went down the footpath to Sveti Naum and crossed into Albania. Traffic was
unremitting both ways, Mahommedan refugees driven from their homes in Albania
by the Greek invaders, and Turkish remnants from the defeat at Monastir fleeing
south trying to find their way to the fortress at Yanina, the last residue of
the Ottoman Empire in Europe and the only safety left to them here in Epirus.
The guards at the gate, when they paid attention at all, shrugged everybody
through. They were no longer sure, for one thing, whom they were reporting to.

Reef, Yash, and Ljubica had entered a
theatre of war where ~everyody shot at everybody, not always for reasons the
targets could appreciate in detail, though pissed off enough seemed to provide
all the motive folks needed.

They were ambushed outside Pogradeci,
on the road to Korça, by a band of irregulars, not more than half a dozen, Reef
estimated, though the distinction between guerrillas and road agents had become
for the moment meaningless.

“Stop up ’at little baby’s ears a
minute would you darlin, got to have us some recreational skeet here,” Reef
snapping a magazine into the Madsen gun and, after settling everybody in behind
some rocks by the roadside, murmuring something like, “At long last,” started
off in semiautomatic mode but

soon, as the assailants began to
curse and scatter, the appeal of the change lever in front of the triggerguard
grew irresistible, and Reef entered the domain of five hundred rounds per minute,
and before he could holler anything too gleeful the magazine was used up and
the barrel not even warm, and whoever they’d been, they didn’t seem to be there
anymore.

   
“What
he does best, of course,” Yashmeen murmured as if to Ljubica.

A
little farther down the road they ran into a Greek army detachment coming to
investigate the rapid fire they thought they’d heard. Since the war began
there’d been Greek troops everywhere in the south of Albania, which they
thought of as Epirus, belonging to some idea of Greece more abstract than
anyplace their own homes and families might’ve happened to be. Reef, with the
Madsen stashed well out of sight, shrugged and made vague gestures in the
direction the bushwhackers had gone off in, and he had soon obtained a pack of
cigarettes and a ride in a supply wagon as far as Korça, nowadays under Greek
occupation.

After
shivering under a shredded tent all night, they were up early and out again
into the freezing predawn, and on the road. Past Erseka they began to climb up into
the Gramoz Range, the beech trees leafless in the rising winds, winter peaks
above shining desolate as Alps, on the other side of which, where they were
known as the Pindus, lay Greece.

As
the sun was going down they found a farm outbuilding that seemed deserted,
until Reef came in from scavenging for firewood and found Ljubica sitting next
to one of the savage and illdisposed sheepdogs known in Macedonia as a
ša
rplaninec.

Dogs
out here were famous for biting before they barked—Cyprian had been pretty
repetitious on that point—but here was Ljubica, all sociability, talking
away in her personal language, and the critter, looking something like a shaggy
brownandblond bear with a kindly enough face, was listening to her with great
interest. When Reef approached, they both turned their heads to stare, politely
but unmistakably in warning, the dog raising her eyebrows and clicking her
tongue, which somebody back in the tunnel days had once told Reef was Albanian
for “No.”

   
“O.K.,
O.K.” Reef slowly backed out through the doorway again.

It
would be many years before he learned that this dog’s name was Ksenija, and
that she was the intimate companion of Pugnax, whose human associates the Chums
of Chance had been invisibly but attentively keeping an eye on the progress of
Reef’s family exfiltration from the Balkan Peninsula. Her task at this juncture
was to steer everyone to safety without appearing to.

   
Accordingly,
the next day Reef was out doing some forward scouting, Yash

and Ljubica dug in back up the valley, when from someplace he
smelled woodsmoke and heard donkeys, and next thing he knew, there were these
three Albanians who had the drop on him. “Well
tungjatjeta,
fellas,”
Reef trying to recall some tunnel Albanian and flashing his allpurpose charming
smile.

The Albanians were also smiling. “I
fuck your mother,” the first one greeted him.

   
“I
fuck you, then I fuck your mother,” said the second.

   
“First
I kill you and your mother, then I fuck you both,” said the third.

“You
folks are usually so
. . .
friendly,”
Reef said. “What’s up?” He had an enormous 11 mm Montenegrin Gasser in his
belt, but this, he sensed, was not the time to be reaching for it. The men were
packing oldertype Mannlicher rifles and one Gras, likely all taken from dead
Greeks. Some small argument had developed, which Reef dimly understood was
about who would get to shoot him, though nobody seemed that eager, ammo he
guessed being in short supply, especially for the Gras, 11 mm like his pistol,
which might be all they were after. So it would be between the Mannlichers.
They were now looking around in the mud for suitable pieces of straw to draw.
The nearest cover was a ditch with a berm ten yards to his right, but then Reef
caught the gleam off a rifle barrel there, and then a couple more. “Oh, oh,” he
said, “looks like I’m a dead duck here. How do you folks say it,
një rosë
vdekuri,
right?”

Buying him a minute and a half of
grace, which turned out to be just enough, because a voice somewhere began
calling his name, and presently a wiry figure came ambling out from behind a
stone wall.

   
“Ramiz?”

“
Vëlla!
Brother!” He ran to
Reef and embraced him. “This is the American who saved my life back in the
Swiss tunnel!”

The
three riflemen seemed disappointed. “Does that mean we don’t get to shoot him?”

   
“Thought
you’d be in America by now,” Reef said.

“My
family. How could I leave?” As it turned out, this village was inhabited by
refugees from all over the country, north and south, targets of bloodfeud
revenge who had found it possible no longer to remain each a prisoner in his
own home, and decided that setting up a villagesize compound all together would
be the best way to have a little more room to move around in while still
honoring the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjin. A community founded on vengeance suspended.

   
“You
were lucky,” Ramiz said, “strangers don’t get this close, usually.”

“Just
looking for a safe couple of nights,” Reef said, and gave him a rundown on Yash
and Ljubica.

“You are crazy to be out here, too
many Greeks loose in these hills.” He poured rakia. “
Gëzuar!
Bring them
both here! Plenty of room!”

Reef
got back to the village with Yash and Ljubica just as it began to snow, and for
the next few days they were ~were snowed in. By the time they were able to
journey on, he’d picked up a little more Tosk dialect and learned to play “Jim
Along Jo” on a clarinet, which everybody here seemed to own at least one of,
some of the men getting together nights after supper with their instruments and
playing in threeor fourpart harmony and drinking rakia.

Reef
and Yashmeen were to find themselves standing against the snow descending, in a
comradely persistence too unquestioned for either to have thought of as
honorable, their backs often as not to the wind, tall, silent, bowed over their
own hearts, over the small life it had become their duty, unimposed, emerged
simply from the turns of their fate, to protect—not only it seemed from
the storm, because later, sheltered for a moment, in Përmeti or Gjirokastra,
both remembered feeling the presence of a conscious and searching force which
was not the storm, nor the winter nor the promise of more of the same for who
knew how long
. . .
but something
else, something malevolent and much older than the terrain or any race that
might have passed in unthinking pilgrimage across it, something which swallowed
whole and shit into oblivion whatever came in range of its hunger.