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Chapter
One (cont.)
It
had become a habit of Franko to take his morning
coffee in the yard, literally the barnyard of
his landlord, Vornuto Dalil-jaj. This was not
as unappetizing as it might seem. It had been
a long time since the barn-yard had been used
by animals, although a faint and not unpleasant
aroma was still detectable. It was a large, open
ground nominally enclosed with a delapidated wooden
fence as well as the battered walls of some sheds,
the old barn, and the cottage. It was a staging
area for farm imple-ments, but it had an aspect
of privacy. One might almost de-scribe it as a
kind of bucolic plaza, populated by a few strolling,
garrulous chickens and the silent, prowling cat.
The east wall of the old stone cottage Franko
occupied also served as part of the enclosure.
In fact, if one looked closely one could see where
an overlarge doorway or opening in this wall had
been reduced with later stone work, not quite
in the style of the original, less crude and using
a finer mortar. A conven-tional door was mounted
in the newer opening.
Franko reckoned that animals used to be housed
in the stone cottage. He won-dered if it had been
the bullpen, in fact, where a cow was introduced
to the sire of her calves. Probably at the time
when the entry was reduced was also when the wooden
floor was in-stalled, to create housing for farm
hands, or another family. There was a definite
air of the byre about the cottage. It also had
a front door, which gave onto the area outside
the barnyard.
Franko had found a weathered wooden bench that
he set next to the barnyard door. The crude, unfaced
stone wall behind the bench was plas-tered with
stuc-co in some long ago past, so that now it
had a pleas-ant tawniness that took the morning
sun very well, warm but not glaring. It was pleasant
to sit on this bench and lean one's back against
the warm stucco, particularly now, in this good
fall weather when there was a hint of frost in
the morning air.
From this bench Franko could look past the barn,
the tackle shed now used to store tractor parts,
an old granary converted into a chicken coop,
a delapi-dated jakes, and down the sectioned fields
to the east, down the mountain side to where a
minaret poked up above the tree tops. Then one's
eye rose to distant ridges, other farms half-hidden
among the trees. There was often a wisp of mist
rising out of the trees, mingling with smoke from
chim-neys, and generally as one's eye approached
the horizon the air thickened and blurred into
a grayish blue.
"Look away, look away ... Dixieland,"
were the words that came to his mind when he saw
this. But it was hardly a southern landscape --
almost exactly the same northern latitude as his
native Montana, six or seven thousand miles to
the west.
Franko sometimes brought out his notebook and
sketched the view. He thought moments like these
were made for smoking a pipe. But he had never
taken up smoking. So he just gazed and thought,
allowing himself to come fully awake.
Montana was also mountain coun-try, but it was
not much like this. These mountains were not as
large as the mountains around Butte, not as clearly
a part of a huge, distinct range. But maybe it
only seemed so, he thought, because these valleys
were smaller, not so grand and sweeping. They
were rugged and precip-itous, but somehow not
such massive structures. And then, he thought,
it could be that it was just lower here, with
the Adriatic not more than eighty miles away,
as the raven flew, beyond another mountain range
at his back.
These thoughts were pleasantly dislodged by the
appearance of the daughter of Daliljaj, very pretty
and dark-eyed Fedima, who was only eighteen and
looked remarkably elegant to Franko's mind in
her head scarf, blue jeans, a heavy sweater and
rubber Wellington boots. She was the crown of
his morning pleasure.
She tramped across the old, rough but well-flattened
and sun-baked yard carrying his coffee in a little
iron pot. She had ground the beans herself, he
knew, in a tubular brass device with a handle
on the top, and had poured the hot water over
it to steep. It was very strong, but Franko had
learned to like it. It was also too sweet, but
he tolerated that, as well.
It always happened, he noticed, that within a
few moments of Fedima's appearance around the
stone side of the old granary another person could
usually be seen -- remote but not too far off,
not so close as to require even a casual wave,
ostensibly uninter-ested in the conjunction of
Fedima and Franko. Often this person was old Daliljaj
himself, though frequently it was his wife, or
even one of Fedima's brothers. But there would
be someone, just a black image on the perimeter
of Franko's vision, a crow or raven, as it might
be, attending to some useful but not evidently
pressing business.
Today, it was old Daliljaj, repairing part of
the fence that formed the other part of the entry.
He was winding a length of baling twine from an
old fence post to the gate post. And at that moment,
the world changed forever.
A large, brutal-looking man in a paramilitary
uniform walked up to Daliljaj and kicked the gate
free of his hands.
"That your fucking tractor out on the road,
balija?" the fellow demanded loudly.
The old man gaped. Nobody, not even a Serbian
cop, talked to the old man like that. The phrase
"balija" was derisive and contemptuous,
and hadn't been heard in these parts until quite
recently. Certainly not up in this mountain village
where the Daliljajs had been farming for generations.
The cop didn't even have a real uniform, just
some foolish camo outfit. Was he even an officer?
What was his rank? But something about the oaf's
grinning face made the farmer hesitate.
"What is the problem?" he said, careful
not to address the policeman with disrespect,
but also not to honor him with a title like sergeant,
or lieutenant, which might not properly apply.
"The problem is that it's parked in the road,"
the cop said. He looked about the compound in
a way that suggested he was taking inventory.
He raised an eyebrow at the figure of Dalil-jaj's
daughter, Fedima. Like a good Muslim woman, she
immediate-ly vanished into Franko's house, leaving
behind the coffee pot sitting on the bench next
to Franko. A moment later she exited from the
other door and presumably went to the farmhouse,
via a route shielded from the eyes of the men
in the yard.
"Who are you?" the cop said to Franko,
who stood up and approached the gate.
Franko was cautious. He'd heard about this fellow
from Captain Dedorica, the police chief in Tsamet.
He was called Bazok, and he was the informal leader
of a handful of such men, sent down from Belgrade
to "assist" the local police chief.
But Captain Dedorica's infor-mation was sketchy.
Franko had meant to press Dedorica about it, but
he'd forgot-ten.
"I live here," he said.
Bazok nodded. "Oh yeah," he said. "You
the one they call Franko? I want to talk to you."
He turned to Daliljaj. "Move the tractor.
You can't leave it on the road."
"Nobody ever complained before," Daliljaj
said. "There is no traffic, it's not in the
way."
"Move the fucking tractor, balija,"
Bazok snarled, the smile icy now. When Dalijaj
went off, he turned to Franko and said, "Where's
your place?"
Franko shrugged and led him back through the gate
and across the barnyard. He stopped and pointed
to the old stone cottage with a new metal roof.
Suddenly seeing it through a stranger's eyes,
it didn't look like much, a miserable hovel. The
stone had been laid in a style that he had known
at home as "pudding stone," that is,
a crude frame of wood was erected, stones were
simply dropped into a thick pudding of cheap,
sandy mortar. These old walls had a tendency to
fall down in fifty or sixty years, but someone
had kept this one repaired. Of course, if it had
been a bull pen that would account for the extra-thick
walls. Bazok gestured to go ahead, and took a
step toward the house, but stopped when Franko
did not move.
"We can talk here," Franko said. He
wasn't sure how recep-tive he should be to this
fellow. Was he actually a cop, or some kind of
unwarranted deputy? Back in Montana, he supposed,
it would be a question of whether he was sworn
in, part of a posse, or some-thing. In Montana
a man didn't just walk onto another man's land
in the way that Bazok had, unless he was armed
and visibly authorized with a badge and a uniform,
to say nothing of some kind of official, legal
paper. This guy looked to be about twenty-two
or twenty-three, big and beefy but with a few
complex-ion problems still and not too handy with
a razor. Still, one was not in Montana. It wouldn't
hurt to play along, tenta-tively.
Bazok looked at him, sizing him up. Franko was
not a big man, not within six inches of his own
height, nor fifty pounds of his weight, but a
sturdily built man in his late thirties. Like
most of the men in these villages, he had heavy
black hair, dark eyes, a thick black moustache.
Bazok was not impressed.
"Come," Bazok said. "I have to
dis-cuss private things."
Franko realized then that Bazok was not a Serb.
He spoke the language all right, but there was
something unnatural about his usage, as if he
were not quite comfortable with it. It occurred
to him that the man was an American. In English,
he said, "What's the big deal?"
Bazok broke into a genuine grin. "All right,"
he said, in good American. He grabbed Franko's
right hand with his own and clapped him on the
shoulder. "They didn't tell me you were from
the States. Where you from, dude?"
Franko managed a faint smile, but wrenched his
hand free and stepped back from Bazok's near embrace.
Without glancing around he guaged whether there
were any Kosovars anywhere near. He didn't think
so; none of Daliljaj's sons or cousins would be
in the compound at this time and he was pretty
sure that Fedima had gone to the house. Still,
it wouldn't do to appear too chummy with this
clown.
"I'm from out west," Franko said. "Butte."
"No shit," Bazok said. "I been
there. I rode a freight through Butte once. Burlington
Northern, eh? Friendly people in Butte, they don't
hassle you. So what're ya doin' here, hangin'
out with these hankyheads? You don't look like
no Taliban -- you ain't a fuckin' terrorist are
you?" He laughed and prodded Franko's stomach
playfully.
Franko frowned. "You must have heard about
me, from Captain Dedorica," he said.
"Oh, sure," Bazok nodded. "You're
the friendly neighborhood dope peddler. That's
why I stopped by."
Franko suppressed a sigh of depression. So that
was it. This oaf wanted to be cut in on Dedorica's
"business tax". He considered it. He
supposed he had no choice. If Dedorica had seen
fit to inform this guy then it probably meant
amending the agreement. The question was how much,
and did this mean that Dedorica now got correspondingly
less for not keeping his mouth shut. But ... he
had a second thought: who was this guy, really?
Why an American? Something was amiss.
He nodded at the door, a slight motion. "If
you insist," he said in Serb. As he'd hoped,
the cop caught on. He pushed Franko forward, his
huge hand on his back. Even if no one seemed to
be around there were always eyes. Franko was more
comfortable with an appearance of being coerced.
He could not afford any suspicion from the Kosovars.
Like any such house of it's type and vintage,
Franko's croft was not well lit. There were few
windows and the electri-cal wiring was a single
exposed con-duit. It ran an old battered refrigerator
and there was an outlet from which extension cords
served a radio, a reading light by the so-called
"easy" chair, another reading lamp clamped
to the bed frame. A single light bulb dangled
from the center of the ceiling.
The interior was essentially one room, perhaps
four paces wide and twice as many long. The kitchen
area took up one end with a sink and a counter
for preparing food. A narrow window looked out
onto the path that led around the granary toward
the main house. There was no running water, no
drain system, and certainly no toilet. A bucket
stood on the rough wooden floor near the sink.
Another bucket under the sink caught the waste.
There were an old, scarred wooden table covered
with oilcloth, and some mismatched wooden chairs.
At the other end of the room stood the metal frame
bed with a single mat-tress, some rumpled blankets.
In between was a ratty old over-stuffed "easy"
chair with a table next to it on which were stacked
a few books -- a Serbian dictionary, a mystery
novel with a black cover and a French title. A
reading lamp stood nearby. It had a battered paper
shade. Clothes were scattered on the floor, more
hung from a rod affixed in a corner.
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