Chapter 9

W e’re in business class, with big seats, real-glass goblets and cloth napkins. I didn’t want to fly coach, not on these run-down planes, didn’t want to deal with cramped seats and harried flight attendants. I wanted to be able to stretch my legs. This isn’t a pleasure trip. It’s treatment. When you’re sick, if you can afford it, you choose a private clinic, a room to yourself, a nurse who behaves like a hotel maid, curtains to keep the world at bay. I thought the plane would be empty. Who wants to fly over a war? But the plane’s full of men bound for clubs full of opalescent lights and butter-white girls who have just started to dirty themselves. It’s the beginning of the fire sale; it’s a huge draw to be among the first to grab at purity. These men will return to Rome with jars of caviar and an icon or two. There are Russians, too, headed home, like the two men sitting next to us with their hard black briefcases, which they did not put in the overhead compartment but prefer to hold beneath their seats where they can be supervised by their feet in their shiny black shoes, Italian shoes for two businessmen from the former Soviet Union. What were they trying to sell? Pieces of their crumbling country—oil pipelines, buildings, mines, nuclear warheads? For a moment I imagine that their briefcases contain pens that can kill and vials of cyanide, like the spies who came in from the cold in American movies. But the Cold War has melted along with all the rest. At most they’re probably carrying a few pieces of Parmesan.

The curtain that separates us from economy class is closed now. The Russians have drunk glass after glass of champagne with no change to their facial expressions or tones of voice.

The attendant who is looking after us has a plump face and a short nose. Her cap is perched precariously upon her teased hair. It looks like a little boat riding the waves. There’s something charming about the way she pours our drinks and gracefully extends her chubby arm without spilling a drop.

More, please.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time but now it’s no longer clear to me why. I moved mountains to get on this plane, and now I’m thinking that if someone—a madman, a hijacker—opened the door, I’d jump out, too, into the powdery white of the clouds and the cold of this altitude.

It was a sudden decision. I bought the tickets and made sure our passports were still valid. Let’s go see, try to figure it out. It can’t hurt.

I did it out of love . That’s what the woman said in the article I read at the hairstylist’s. I helped a woman like myself. I wasn’t an incubator. I was the stork. I sip my champagne. More, please. In the sogginess of drink and altitude, I flagellate myself a bit. If it’s something a woman does out of love, then why are we going to an impoverished, disintegrating country? The Italians across the aisle talk in loud voices. What makes me any different from those whoremongers? I’m looking for a woman, too, for a womb, and I have to make this trip to find one because it’s illegal back home.

“Listen.” Diego puts one of his earphones over my ear. It’s R.E.M. Together we listen to a bit of “Losing My Religion.”

That’s me in the corner... that’s me in the spotlight .

“Don’t worry.”

Then he falls asleep. I look at his hand. What is a hand? Who decided what form it should take?

A woman stands up and gets a bag from the overhead compartment. Thanks to a bit of turbulence she almost falls on me. “Excuse me.”

She has a pleasant face. Her husband is sleeping, too. A skull with a few gray hairs, his mouth open against the pillow they gave out at the start of the flight.

They’re sitting in the row behind us. After a while she touches my shoulder. “Are you scared of flying, too?”

“No, I’m afraid of the land.”

“Pardon?”

What the hell am I saying? I don’t know. It must be the champagne. I correct myself. “I’m scared of landing.”

She’s a talker. “I’m not scared of landing because you can already see the houses.”

She moves to an empty seat in the row next to ours. She’s neither old nor young. She has a nice smile. She opens her bag and pulls something out, first some lip balm, Have you noticed how your lips dry out when you’re flying? Next comes a box, which she opens to reveal a pair of little red sneakers with a pink border. She pulls them out.

“Do you like them?”

I nod.

“My husband got them in New York. He has to go there a lot for work.” She rubs the shoes affectionately, raises them to her nose, smells them. “Look. There’s a surprise!” She smiles.

I wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with her. Maybe she’s a pill popper.

“They light up. See?”

She sticks her hands in the shoes, bends over and moves her hands to simulate footsteps on the floor. It’s true. Little lights flicker through the transparent rubber sole.

“They don’t have them yet in Italy.”

“Are they for your daughter?”

She smells the shoes for a while before answering. “She isn’t a daughter yet.”

It’s the opening she’s been waiting for. She’s one of those people who look around when they’re traveling for a funnel to pour their voice into. Now she’s found me. Her husband is sleeping. He must sink his head into the pillow like that out of self-defense. I’m treated to the entire story. For two summers in a row, she and her husband have hosted a little girl from Chernobyl, an orphan, one of those children who come to get rid of the radiation. She and her husband have donated a refrigerator and a projector to the orphanage and befriended the woman who runs it. Now they’re going to visit the girl, Annuška. The shoes are a present for her. The woman and her husband are too old to adopt Annuška, but they hope they can take her as a foster child.

“Our lawyer has spoken with a Ukrainian lawyer.” She gestures—thumb sliding back and forth beneath index and middle finger—that it’s a matter of money. “With money you can do anything in Ukraine.”

Annuška is seven years old and at their age they can only adopt a child who’s nine or older. She brandishes two fingers like little knives and her voice becomes a plaintive whisper. “Two years. What can two years matter?”

She moves the shoes again and shakes her head with a nervous gesture, as if she were brushing off a recurrent thought. It’s a gesture I recognize. There’s a code known to every woman who’s desired motherhood in vain.

“Two years. I even tried to falsify my documents. I’m not ashamed to say so. They force you to break the law.”

I ask for more champagne and wonder in the meantime if I’ve met the woman I will become, wonder whether life is what it seems or a series of luminous signs, like these fucking shoes and the little light over the exit.

The woman goes on and on. “When Annuška first came she’d never seen an armoire. She was so scared she hid under the bed. We took it apart and had her fold her clothes and put them on a chair because that’s what she was used to. This summer she wanted the armoire. We got it out of the cellar and put it back together again. My husband was sweating like a pig. I thought he was going to collapse. It was the most beautiful day of our lives. Annuška was laughing. She wasn’t scared anymore. She kept getting into the armoire and knocking on the door for us to open it and set her free.”

The woman bends over and once again moves those shoes over the carpet so that the little soles light up. For a moment it feels like I know Annuška. I can see her running in her American shoes. She won’t get lost at night. I remember the day I went with Diego when he took pictures of the children who’d just arrived from Chernobyl at that summer camp. They seemed phosphorescent.

“What about you?” the woman asks.

I touch the armrest, the black hole left by a cigarette.

“Do you have children?”

I stick my finger in that old hole.

“Not yet.”

She smiles, sighs. “You’re still young. You have time.”

Diego’s opened his eyes. He checks the time and stretches.

“Your husband looks like a kid.”

Diego smiles.

I hear the woman say, “And where are you headed?”

He answers over the nape of my neck.

“We’re on vacation.” He thinks a moment, then smiles. “To the Black Sea.”

 

We meet Oksana, our interpreter, at the Kiev airport. She’s tall and thin. She’s waiting stiffly in the crowd of people in the arrivals hall, a sign with our neatly printed surname clutched in her hand. She has a serious expression and the solemn posture of a soldier. She relaxes when we approach her. We shake hands. She smiles a faint smile and nods, almost bows. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail. She’s wearing a light blue coat with short sleeves above her bare wrists. A cloth bag hangs from her shoulder. She asks about our trip. She speaks Italian well, with a slightly humorous accent. We follow her ponytail amid a shifting anaconda of shabby-looking people who don’t seem to be about to board a plane; they look as if they were here to take advantage of the heat coming out of the radiators. I ask Oksana about the abandoned packages beside the exit.

“Mail.”

“Aren’t they going to deliver it?”

“Sooner or later.”

 

A mustached man leans out of an old Fiat van, puts it into reverse, opens the door and takes our bags. We sit among all those empty seats. Oksana opens the glass window that separates us from the driver and says something in a low voice. Then she takes a seat facing us.

“Do you have dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Dollars are okay.”

“What about lire?”

She smiles. She doesn’t want to offend us. “Dollars are better.”

She watches us, awaiting further questions. She has the rigid grace of a classical dancer.

“How far do we have to go?”

“A little more than a hundred kilometers.”

All I ask her is when we can see the doctor.

“Today.”

I look at Diego. “Let’s leave our stuff at the hotel and go right away.”

“Okay.”

He’s also looking at Oksana, her serious face as she leans toward us, her high clear brow. Vans, tractors, buses brush past us on a road that cuts across albino fields and then endless plains of still-green ears of something.

“Is that wheat?”

“Yes. Chechnya is our oil, Ukraine our wheat.” She smiles. “That’s what Stalin used to say.”

Diego asks about Gorbachev and the aftermath. She shakes her head.

“A mess. A real mess.”

Diego says it’s normal for a transition like that to take a long time. “It could take twenty years.”

Oksana nods. Her head bobs on the pedestal of her neck. “Twenty years. Like me.”

“You’re only twenty years old?”

She nods. I’d have said thirty, maybe because she’s so thin, so serious.

For a while now we’ve been looking out at dilapidated factories rather than fields. The city seems to have no center, only outskirts. Oksana gets out before us and accompanies us into the hotel, where she talks to the concierge.

The walls in the room are papered in shiny sky-blue satin that’s stiff as plastic. It’s all the same, the curtains, the upholstery on the head of the bed. We drop off our luggage, wash our hands and race out the door.

 

The clinic, a massive and spare construction in perfect Soviet style, was a few blocks from the hotel. We took the escalator to the second floor, where we spent some time in a waiting room with white linoleum on the floor. There were a few certificates on the walls as well as two big laminated posters like something from a medical school classroom. They showed the male and female reproductive systems with the pink sacks of the scrotum and the ovaries, the seminal tubes, the fallopian tubes and an infinity of red and blue filaments, the veins and arteries. I looked at the immense cross-section of a penis, soft as an abandoned proboscis, and the orange vagina that looked like the inside of a mussel. Sadness rose from my stomach to the nape of my neck. I glanced at Diego. He was smiling to himself with a stupid expression.

A woman with a white lab jacket stretched tight over her stocky figure called our name. The doctor’s desk with its green glass top was too large for the otherwise modest room. Behind him there were two flounced curtains and various framed honors.

He stood, shook hands with us and gestured for us to sit. “Please,” he said, in Italian.

Oksana sat beside me and translated as Dr. Tymošenko apologized for not speaking Italian. He knew only a few words but was planning on learning more because he had begun to see lots of Italian clients. “Our country is a pioneer ... in this field.”

Oksana translated without hesitation, her face inscrutable. I had the impression she knew by heart the doctor’s little speech, which continued on in this vein. On the walls to either side of us hung images of smiling children in the arms of smiling mothers. They must have organized the whole thing into a set series of stages, like a visit to a spa where you’d have cold treatments, then warm stones and then oil. First the depressing waiting area with those listless reproductive organs, then this reassuring room with its happy mothers and embroidered curtains like something out of an alpine hut. I was tense, waiting for some hidden trick.

Dr. Tymošenko’s white lab jacket was clean but grayish. He had Mongol cheekbones and salt-and-pepper hair slicked back with gel. He told us we could smoke if we liked.

“We don’t smoke.”

He lit a cigarette and waited.

I did the talking. I told our story. Occasionally, Oksana put a hand on my arm to signal that I should pause for her to translate. I watched her and tried to understand whether or not she was good at her job. I gestured brusquely to Diego to give me our medical files, the enormous pile of sonograms, tests, money thrown to the four winds. I showed the doctor the picture of my uterus and the rest.

“Deformed uterus,” I said.

I waited while Oksana translated the words. The doctor opened the file, looked at a sonogram, nodded. He twisted his mouth. One of the windows overlooked a playing field with an old basketball hoop that no longer had a net. I looked at that empty metal eye and cried.

The doctor waited calmly. He must have been accustomed to this, too. My sobs were hard as rocks.

I stood and went to the window. Diego joined me, and we hugged behind those two people we did not know. I looked at the playing field and the line of identical flat-topped houses visible in the distance. They looked like abandoned seaside cabanas.

I sat back down. I was calm. The mud had moved on like a kidney stone, which hurts terribly when it’s passing but then, when it’s really over, simply leaves you a little tired. An enormous woman came in with a steaming samovar. We drank tea. We discovered that the doctor spoke French, and so for a while we talked without Oksana’s help. Then he went back to Russian. He opened a drawer and pulled out some sheets of paper.

Now I was clear-minded and alert.

He drew three circles, A, B and C. Above the circles he made a triangle with an X. He pointed with his pencil to the X.

“This is your husband.” He looked at Diego and smiled.

Mother A was the donor whose egg would be fertilized with X’s seminal fluid and inserted into the womb of surrogate mother B. He made a new pencil line to connect one circle to the next until finally he got to me, circle C.

Too many circles , I thought. Too many mothers .

“I’d rather there be just one woman.”

He said there was no problem; it was also possible to do everything with a single woman. But it was more expensive.

“The surrogate mother of a child who does not belong to her genetically has no rights. The natural mother, on the other hand ...”

I knew it was riskier, but I wanted to see the face of the woman, smile at her, establish a relationship.

Oksana translated but my eyes were on the doctor, his big hands, his mouth as he spoke, his small deep blue eyes. I was wondering if I could trust him, if he bore some sign of goodness.

We followed him on a brief tour of the clinic. We stepped into a room with a bed, an iron cupboard, a shelf full of ampoules and medicines, one bucket full of cotton wool, another full of specula. I saw an old plastic container with a handle. Maybe that was where they put the ova, the seminal liquid. It looked like an old-fashioned beach cooler.

The doctor sat on the bed and with nonchalance began talking about money. He wanted to be paid in foreign currency, either dollars or deutschmarks. There would be no other fees, nothing for the surrogate mother’s upkeep during the pregnancy, nothing for the local lawyer. They would take care of everything.

“And if the mother changes her mind?”

Oksana translated. “They don’t change their minds. These women offer to do this because they want to.”

For a long moment I had the impression that there was not one ounce of truth either in the man’s gaze or in any of the words he had pronounced.

We walked back to the hotel. It was raining. Oksana insisted on covering our heads with her umbrella as she followed us. We told her she could go ahead, that we’d be fine on our own. Instead, we got lost. All the street signs were in Cyrillic and no one spoke a word of any language we knew. Many of the stores were closed, with faded PRADUKTI signs and half-empty windows. We ducked into a bakery. There were a few loaves of bread on a wooden shelf, like rocks on a tomb. The few people on the streets turned to look at us.

Diego took pictures of the puddle reflection of an old woman sitting beneath a cement kiosk. She sat motionless without ever changing her expression as this boy knelt and took pictures of the dirty water at the end of the road. Then Diego stood, his knees all wet, and rummaged in his pockets for a ten-dollar bill. The old woman had a yellowish face that seemed to be made of some spongelike substance, dry and unhealthy. She threw herself to the ground to thank Diego. He tried to hold her back, to rein in her exaggerated reaction. He kissed her head through her headscarf.

We resumed our walk.

We found the hotel. It rose up out of the cement in the gloomy light of that rainy afternoon.

I took a shower beneath an onion-shaped showerhead that sent weak jets spurting to fall far from my body against the plastic shower curtain. The beds were small and separate. We moved them together. The noise of metal against the floor scraped inside our ears. The bedcovers were fitted tight around the beds like straitjackets. Diego didn’t complain about the shower. He stood by the window taking pictures of the view, a long gray wall with a ring of barbed wire on top, like the wall around a barracks.

We went downstairs to eat. A singer in a red-sequined dress like a mermaid’s outfit, her eyes swimming in green eye shadow, was singing for the diners, mostly single men and a few couples. Our waiter, with his swollen belly, big feet and black-and-white uniform, really looked like a penguin. We sat at a little table. They brought us a big menu with translations in French and English. We read through it and called the waiter over. It was farcical. Every time we pointed to a dish, the penguin would shake his head and shrug his shoulders. Nyet .

They had borscht, so we ordered it. Then the man came back to our table and pulled a little container out from under his jacket, as if he wished not to be seen by the maître d’. It was caviar. The price was ten dollars, cash, to be paid to him. We bought it. The cash slid out of sight. Another payment brought a bottle of special vodka.

Now the maître d’ smiled our way with a little bow whenever he passed our table on his way to other diners, women with teased hair dressed in miniskirts and pointy-toed boots, men in shiny jackets. They brought the caviar with blini and sour cream, and it was delicious. Diego had a little black egg on his nose. I smiled, leaned toward him and cleaned it off with a finger. He looked down my silk shirt like a boyfriend and for a while we felt like a couple on vacation. After we’d finished eating we stayed on our padded benches. Diego raised his glass of vodka to the singer and she sang us a song. Volare, oh oh oh oh. We laughed and applauded.

 

Back in the room we made love. The beds made an infernal racket. It was entirely sexual, a release. We didn’t mind. At least we were alive.

“Even if nothing happens, who cares?” I sighed. “We took a trip. We made love.”

Diego, at the window, points his lens at the dark.

“What are you taking pictures of?”

“A light.”

It must be the big spotlight on the barracks across the way.

 

The next morning we went down to the breakfast room. We found two big containers of boiling water, some eggs and some sweets, along with a lingering, stale kitchen smell of meat left soaking in its broth. Oksana joined us there, the same elastic holding back her hair, the same pallor. We put a cup of tea into her pink hands. She said the doctor was trying to find the right person for us and that we’d hear from him in the afternoon.

We took a walk. Diego photographed an old wooden church and a statue of the Cossacks next to an eternal blue methane gas flame. Even in the center of the city there was a strange silence and an overwhelming impression of absolute misery.

Oksana came back in the afternoon. A taxi, a prune-colored Škoda without bumpers, took us to the clinic. The doctor had found a woman who might work out.

“Who is she?” I asked.

Oksana was sitting next to the driver. She turned toward us and said that the woman was trustworthy. “She’s done it before.”

I thought about the woman who was waiting for me somewhere, a woman who gave away her children for money. A professional , I forced myself to think. What could be better than a professional? I looked at Diego’s hand on the seat. It was closed into a fist. It was immobile and anything but serene, the skin taut as if he were clutching a nail.

Before we left, Diego and I had discussed the moral boundaries of our journey. Diego said, The only law is the law dictated by our conscience. The important thing is to stay true to ourselves. Otherwise we’ll come back home and that will be the end of it.

I had dragged him into this adventure after a night of tears and desperation. Now, I was irritated by his serious face and his thoughtful gaze.

 

The woman sat facing away from us as we walked into the room. She did not move when the doctor came to greet us. I glanced at her without really seeing her. We sat down and only after a while, as the doctor spoke, did I study her carefully. I pulled her out of the context and secretly swallowed her up. I saw a hand, an ear, a short, masculine haircut. She was a simple woman, dressed humbly but with dignity. She had a long, thin face and a well-proportioned nose. She was clutching a bag with a stiff, fake leather handle. I took in her bony ankles and her comfortable oxford shoes like a church lady’s. She nodded as the doctor spoke. Oksana translated.

I smelled grass and ashes. I asked if she was from the city. It was the first question that came to mind.

She smiled in my direction and then faced Oksana as she answered. She lived in the country, about twenty kilometers away. We exchanged a few pleasantries. The fat lady came in with the samovar and served tea. The woman bent her face toward the cup as she drank, clearly worried about making noise and taking care not to dirty the saucer.

Then she stood and made a little bow. Oksana translated that she had to go because she didn’t want to miss her bus back home. She held out her hand. It was so cold and meek that it seemed almost incorporeal.

“Thank you,” I said.

Diego stood. He hadn’t said a single word. She extended her hand to him, as well, and he bowed as if he owed her something.

The woman patted Diego’s hand, a kind, brusque, comforting gesture like a mother to a son.

 

She left without a trace, carrying away her smell of ashes and her plastic purse.

“She’s perfect,” the doctor said. “She’s a dependable woman and very reserved.”

It was a brief and informal meeting. That was the procedure. We hadn’t really talked about anything.

“There will be time for that,” said the doctor. “You need to go back to the hotel and think about it overnight.”

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Thirty-two.”

“Does she have children of her own?”

“She has three.”

“Does she have a husband?”

The doctor burst out laughing. “Of course she does!”

“How can we know for sure ...” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

The doctor understood anyway. It was as if he were responding to a questionnaire he’d answered many times before.

Oksana’s voice explained that after the insemination the woman would stay for a few days in the clinic, where the doctor would do tests to make sure that the fertilization had worked. Once it was certain, she would be sent home.

He smiled. “Your interests are our interests.” He touched his head, the gel that imprisoned his hair, and said, in a sharper tone, “Our women are humble and generous. They see themselves as neutral creatures. They would never give away the children of their own husbands, rest assured.”

We had less appetite for our caviar than the night before. We were distracted by an infinity of thoughts. Every so often a word would spill out of one of our mouths onto the table. The singer had the same red dress, the same velvety powder around her eyes, the same husky voice. I kept thinking about the meeting, about the woman. She was clean and unassuming, with a light down on her face and disorderly eyebrows. She clearly didn’t use tweezers. She had shoes and hair like a nun’s. The doctor was right. She was perfect. A few glasses of vodka slid down to make a nest deep inside our bodies.

“So? What are you thinking?”

“She seems like a decent person.”

“So, she’s the one ...”

“Do you want to dance?”

We danced among the backs of clumsy men and women with robust buttocks and sickly sweet perfume. We danced, clutching each other, lost.

 

The doctor came to get us right after lunch. We climbed into a blue sedan with leather seats that smelled like whatever detergent had been used to clean them shortly before. The streets were almost too quiet, deserted even in residential areas, where we saw light-colored houses with Alpine roofs overlooking the endless plain. The radio was tuned to a news program punctuated by brief musical interludes. We gleaned that they were talking about the war and asked Oksana to translate for us. She turned to face us.

“They’ve signed a cease-fire agreement in Croatia.”

The doctor laughed. “That’s what they like best, to sign agreements they don’t respect.”

We drove by an area that was fenced in with spikes and barbed wire and stretched for hundreds of meters across the countryside. Inside we could see a semicircle of enormous warehouses. Diego asked what it was.

Oksana said, “They’re ...”

The doctor turned and said, in his clumsy French, “They’re abandoned mines.”

He turned onto a dirt road. The car moved slowly. We reached a country house in a little rural village. The earth around it was muddy from a recent rain. I saw a bed frame and a child’s bike leaning up against a shed.

A stocky, dark-complexioned man wearing a red and brown argyle sweater came to greet us. He probably wasn’t past forty, though he looked older. The woman was waiting for us inside. She greeted us and gestured for us to sit. She set on the table a tray with glasses and a bottle full of reddish liquid, cherry juice, and touched her chest to explain that she’d made it. We heard crying. She went out and came back with a small child in her arms. He must have been a year old at most. She gave him a spoon to play with and sat down. The husband was talking, moving his hands like knives on the table as if he were cutting something. He and the doctor were speaking in Russian and more than once I heard the word dollars . Oksana translated for Diego. “The first installment at the beginning of gestation, the second when she reaches the fifth month, the third upon delivery.”

She had studied Italian by correspondence, and the terms she used were harsh and bureaucratic. She couldn’t be aware of how much they hurt. Diego swallowed.

“Okay. That’s fine.”

The child was pale like his mother, and his eyes were the same dull brown as hers. He was wearing a felt outfit of a nondescript color. Now the mother was looking at me.

“I want to know if she is happy to do this, if she’s doing it out of love. This is important for us.”

Her husband responded in Russian in his nicotine-rusted voice.

Oksana translated. They were very happy. The woman was glad to help us.

He stood and gave us a tour of the house, a few tidy rooms all with the same wine-colored ceramic tiles, curtains at the windows, lace lampshades and a few heavy pieces of light-colored wooden furniture. The man opened the doors wide and we stuck our noses in. Everything was bleak, with the same smell, but clean.

I asked if I could spend some time alone with the woman. She was shy and elusive. Her overly invasive husband had kept a constant eye on us.

She brought me with her when she went to fetch wood. Outdoors it was much more disorderly. There were tools piled everywhere and heaps of construction materials. Oksana walked behind us. I asked the woman her name. We talked about the countryside and the still-bitter weather. She said she had studied for a while to become an engineer but then had to quit. She looked mostly at the ground but raised her eyes every so often to look at Oksana, who had to translate. The constant intermediary made me feel uncomfortable. It made the conversation less intimate.

“Listen, Tereza. I only want to know if this is your choice or if it’s your husband who ...”

She shook her head and repeated that she was happy to do it, that she would have done it without payment but that she needed the money so that her children could study. She said she liked being pregnant, that the hormones of life put her in a good mood.

“What will you tell your children afterwards?”

She laughed and I saw that she had two chipped teeth, right in front.

“They won’t notice. I’m very thin, and I always dress this way.” She gestured to the baggy dress that danced around her frame.

I asked the question I had to ask.

“And won’t it be hard for you to give away the child?”

She was wearing a pair of rubber galoshes for the mud. It seemed like she didn’t want to answer. I turned to Oksana. “Did she understand what I said?”

I had inadvertently spoken in an authoritarian tone, the voice we use when we speak to children and old people, to dependent creatures.

“No,” Oksana said. “It’s natural for her. She knows the child isn’t hers.”

Finally Tereza looked at me. “Ja eto dom .” I am the house.

She was bent over. The outline of her soft belly, ruined by pregnancies, was visible beneath her clothes. She stuck a hand into the straw in the henhouse and pulled out two eggs that were still warm. She insisted I take them. They were good to drink raw. I shook my head, then stuck them in my coat pocket anyway. My hand stayed there on those warm eggs.

After a while she said, “You mustn’t think I’m a bad woman.”

Her husband came out to look for us and made a strange whistling sound as if he were calling hens. Tereza hastened toward the house. I walked behind her and observed her buttocks and hips the way someone might study an animal. She wasn’t poorly built. She had long muscles and thin ankles. She had no physical defect, no anomaly. She was neutral, that’s what she was. She wasn’t happy and she wasn’t sad, she wasn’t beautiful but she wasn’t ugly; she didn’t evince a great warmth but she wasn’t disagreeable. I’d been looking at her face until three seconds before and already I couldn’t remember anything about her. She was a good candidate—perfect, in fact—because she wasn’t anyone. She was Mrs. Nobody, a circle from the doctor’s chart.

I walked around for a while by myself in the area in front of the house. I sniffed the air, glanced here and there, checked out the territory, the square meters in which Tereza would live with our child in her womb. Like a cautious mother, I bent to move a rusty metal spike.

 

I went back inside. Diego was taking pictures of the child, who was now holding on to the edge of a ramshackle playpen. He looked at the lens of the camera without any interest. He was colorless and inert like his mother. He didn’t have a single childlike burst of spirit. He stood there, imprisoned like a fossil enclosed in resin. There was something eternal about his misery, useless flesh reproducing itself over the centuries, blooming and disappearing without a trace.

“Let’s go.”

It bothered me that Diego was taking pictures of that child. Sometimes it even bothered me to see him taking pictures. He wrapped himself around the camera as if it were a heart, something pulsating that had come out of his chest, something he held tight in order to live a few more minutes.

“Let’s go.”

His attitude bothered me, his hollow missionary face. There was too much defeat in his way of loving. One day all of this would end. One day he would photograph our child for hours and hours and all the others, all the Antes in the world, would slide away.

 

Diego was silent for the entire trip back, dozing against the window.

“What comes next?”

Oksana translated. Tomorrow Tereza would report to the clinic for blood tests. The doctor would check her follicular activity. She was about to ovulate. It was a question of hours. Ovarian stimulation would not be necessary because the woman was extremely fertile.

The doctor turned. “Unless you want twins or triplets ...”

I laughed, splitting my sides. It had been ages since I’d laughed like that. Now I liked this direct, rough man, a true Cossack dedicated to the cause of human fertility.

Diego did not laugh. I took his hand.

I wasn’t going to let him influence me with his bad mood and his scruples. Now I was worried about the woman, about moi malenchii dom , my little house. I would leave extra money for her, of course, and I would send her vitamins and minerals like magnesium and iron. The fertilization now seemed like a simple detail. Something would happen, and quickly. It would take a handful of minutes in the clinic with the embroidered curtains.

The doctor was chatty and relaxed during the drive back. He answered all my questions, assuaged all my fears. The woman would be monitored through constant checkups, and they would send all the sonograms and test results to us in Italy. We could come and visit at any time. He suggested that I, at least, should plan to stay in Ukraine for the last months of the pregnancy.

“That way you won’t have to explain things, and if you want you can simply say you gave birth abroad. It’s important that you participate, put your hands on the surrogate mother’s belly and feel the movements of the fetus. This will help you. You’re about to go through a very emotional time. You’ll have to be very careful with your health. Often it’s the legal mother who gets ill. You’ll feel weak, and when it’s time for the birth you’ll feel real contractions.”

It felt like I was a step away from life.

Diego looked out the window as he listened. Every so often he took a picture, a tractor moving across a field, a man on a bicycle. He hadn’t taken a single photo for months and now here he was taking pictures of this nothing, these ugly fields, this dusty sky.

We passed by the long fence with spikes and barbed wire that surrounded the mine, with all those posters that said who knew what. Diego raised his camera and took a picture through the window. I asked what they mined in that bunker. Oksana didn’t turn; she shrugged very slightly.

 

That night the singer was dressed entirely in white, like a big cloud. The maître d’ brought us caviar. He’d had his tip. Then the vodka descended, and we began to speak.

“Her teeth are broken. That woman has broken teeth.”

I tried to smile. “So?”

“You really didn’t notice anything, my love?”

“What was I supposed to notice?”

He brought a hand to his cheekbone. “There was something, a mark, a bruise.”

I had in fact seen that darkened eye when she turned toward me to say, I am the house .

“It must have been the baby. He must have stuck something in her eye. Or maybe she got scratched in the fields.”

Diego nodded. “Maybe.”

 

Later on I couldn’t sleep. There was an unpleasant smell in the room. My coat was drying on the radiator. Those damned eggs ended up breaking in my pocket because I forgot about them. I threw the shells in the toilet, turned the pockets inside out and cleaned them as best I could. Now the stink of drying egg wafted out from the radiator.

“Her husband beats her. That’s what you think.”

He wasn’t sleeping, either. “I don’t like that man, and the child is sad, too.”

 

The next day we went out early. Oksana came to get us at the hotel. We invited her to have breakfast with us. She pressed her white face to the cup of warm tea, then pressed the cup against her cheek. She had come on foot and she was cold and more tired than she’d been the previous days. When Diego went up to the room to load his camera, I asked her point-blank, “Do the men here beat the women?”

She was in less of a mood to smile that morning. She said that early in the morning, on the streets, the women examined each other and took count.

“There’s no work anymore. The men drink until they fall down.”

Her voice was veiled. She kept rubbing her red nose and her colorless lips that seemed incapable of regaining their natural color.

“My brother worked on a ship. He lost his job. Now when I open the door he takes two steps into the house and falls. That’s how low it’s brought him.”

I took her hand. “Oksana ...”

All her youthful pride seemed far away now. It had crumbled in an instant.

“Kasimir, my eighty-year-old neighbor, threw himself from a window. He didn’t have anything left to eat.”

She cried for a moment without changing expression. Then she laughed.

“My cousin Epifan works in a factory. They pay him with rolls of toilet paper, mountains of toilet paper. It’s the only thing that abounds in our house.”

I wanted to help her but not to wound her. I reached for my purse. She looked daggers at me, raised her hand. “Nyet! ”

I lied and said I was looking for my lip balm.

 

That afternoon we went back to the clinic. Tereza was there. They’d done some tests and she was putting her clothes back on. Without asking permission, I stuck my head in the door. She was bent over the little bed. For a moment I saw her back. Her shoulder blades were like the wings of a plucked chicken. There was a mark on her back, too, a bluish bruise that spilled downward from her neck. I smiled at her. Her husband was in a corner of the room. He came toward us. I turned and studied Tereza’s eye carefully. It was darker and puffier than the day before. The doctor said the follicular activity had begun. Her husband rubbed his hands against the cloth of his pants. It seemed like the most horrible noise on earth.

“Nyet ,” I said.

I saw the doctor freeze where he was standing, then hunch over.

“This person is not right for us. Please excuse us.”

 

There’s a huge barrel of frying oil in the middle of the street. It’s Saturday, market day. A girl with wet braids devours a dark pastry. An old lady stands beneath a dripping tin canopy selling mismatched drinking glasses and brass candleholders. The cold came overnight. There’s stiff white grass at the edges of the road. The freezing wind hurts our faces and blows sleet around. There’s another old lady selling heavy socks and yet another offering clumps of beetroot and a rubber toy rabbit. They stand there almost motionless, like the icicles coming down from the roofs. Diego doesn’t take any pictures this morning. He buys everything and throws it into his backpack. He pulls handfuls of nearly worthless karbovanets out of his pockets and sends those old women home to sit in front of a warm stove.

More caviar. It’s Sunday. Tonight the singer has decided to move through the crowd with her microphone. She weaves her way among the tables. She comes toward us. Maybe she’s noticed I’ve been crying. She briefly caresses my hair and stays beside us for a moment. Close up, she looks older.

Diego wants to leave as soon as possible but I insist on staying. “It’s just one more day.” I watch the women on the street, a gas station attendant, a worker painting a wall. I inspect them with my eyes, hover over their bodies. I’m seeking the thing I lack.

“This isn’t okay,” Diego says.

“Leave me alone,” I reply.

Oksana follows us with her light blue coat and her white neck like a statue’s. I ask her, “Would you do it?”

Oksana doesn’t answer. She pretends not to have understood.

Diego twists my wrist until it hurts.

 

The doctor won’t let us go. He’s set up another appointment. Diego has a strange expression on his face. He looks ugly this morning. There’s something crooked about his features. Last night he slept as far as possible from me on the bed with its tight sheets like a straitjacket.

The new woman is there, on the same chair, in the other’s place. She’s younger, more voluptuous. She stands and smiles. Her teeth are intact inside her fleshy mouth. She’s taller than Diego. Where the other was odorless, this one smells like she’s just come out of a cheap perfume factory. A sweet stink invades the air. She’s wearing a white shirt with a cameo on her chest and a dark skirt like a schoolgirl’s. She must have dressed like that especially for this interview. Now she’s trying to gauge our reaction. Like her voice, her lively eyes dart every which way. I check her skin. It looks okay. She has bleached hair, darker at the roots. Her face is strange, like a clown without makeup. Then I realize that she doesn’t have any eyebrows, not a single hair, just a bony puffiness. She looks like an unfinished painting.

I seek Diego’s eyes. He’s looking outside at the playing fields and the basketball hoop without a net.

 

We’re walking outside. I ask Diego what he thinks.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course I do.”

He continues to touch every cement column we encounter as if he were counting them. He doesn’t turn toward me. “I think she’s a prostitute.” He stops for a moment, rocks back and forth and smiles. “I think we’re disgusting, my love.”

 

Oksana finally tells us the truth about the abandoned mine while we’re riding in the van that takes us to the airport. It’s a uranium mine. Until very recently, the little city beside it was not shown on any maps. It didn’t exist.

“A friend of mine lost her little boy, but my grandmother is almost ninety and she’s lived there all her life. She has a garden; she says the uranium is good for the cabbage.”

The abandoned packages are still in the airport, in the same place as before, only more battered.

I hold Oksana’s face tight between my hands and bury my chin in her blue coat before I say goodbye. Diego gives her all the dollars he has left. This time she accepts the money and puts it in her cloth bag.

 

We had a layover of a couple of hours in Belgrade. We ordered tea at a café and sat at the counter to drink it. A man next to us was eating a sausage, red and long and dripping with grease. Diego pushed his tea aside and asked for a sausage and a beer.

I watched him devour it without saying a word. He wasn’t eating it. He was tearing into it. I said, Let’s go take a walk . He said, You go. I was moving my legs and making his stool shake, too. I fluttered through the ashes, like in the aftermath of a fire.

“Sit still.”

I kept moving my legs.

“Please.”

He had grease on his chin. He looked at me with a dark gaze pulled up from who knows where, pulsating and distant despite our nearness. “We may have to leave each other.” He stood.

“Where are you going?”

“To take a piss.”

 

I couldn’t find him anywhere near the bathrooms. I wandered around among the people waiting for flights and ducked into sad shops full of bottles on shelves and cartons of cigarettes. Then I stopped looking. I thought backward. I asked myself where, in which rotten moment, we’d begun to lose each other. I went to the bathroom again and rinsed my face and then I went to the gate. An attendant was already taking the boarding passes.

I sat until the last minute in a row of chairs clamped to each other. Someone put a hand on my shoulder. I turned to find the woman I had met on the flight from Rome smiling down at me. A Russian scarf tied like a headband divided her thick bangs from the rest of her hair.

The girl she’d hoped to take as a foster child had been adopted by another family.

“French.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They took the younger brother, too. He’s three. This way they’ll be together. It’s a good thing for the children. We would never have been able to take them both. The French couple is young.”

I hugged her. I could feel her body trembling, her breasts packed into her stiff bra.

 

Diego comes running out of the desert of dispersing people. He sits next to me.

“I thought you wanted to leave me.”

“I came back.”

“Our flight left.”

“Whose shoes are those?”

“That woman we met on the way. She gave them to me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Look, they light up.”

I put my hands inside the little shoes and crawl between benches and pipes, pressing down to make the soles light up. Diego follows the little lights with his eyes. His hair is messy, his beard scruffy, his eyes tired but still alive. He takes his Leica and shoots a picture. I smile, my hands stuck in the shoes.

“So it’s true,” he says.

“What?”

“That life speaks through light, just like photography.”

He helps me stand up and leans on me. “I know who we can take these shoes to.”

I feel the impact inside, like a broom that passes and scratches as it cleans.

“There’s a flight to Sarajevo. That’s what I came to tell you.”

 

The airport is practically deserted, populated only by airport employees and a few local travelers. The baggage claim belt isn’t moving, and when they do turn it on it bears just a few isolated suitcases, stuff that goes around and around but no one picks up. An Australian cameraman is filming a taxi driver in front of the door of his car. He has one of those sunken faces you often encounter in Sarajevo, the bones surfacing out of the nicotine-tinged skin. Gojko is there interpreting. He sees us and flushes, impatient. He gestures to us to wait and shrugs his shoulders to let us know that he was drawn into this by chance. He can’t like what he’s translating.

... They said they will leave us a bit of ground, enough for our tombs. This is what they said in our Parliament .

“Fucking nihilist,” he says, and with a gesture sends the taxi driver and the fool of an Australian off to hell. He kisses us and embraces us in his usual manner, throttling our chests with those long, motionless arms that all of a sudden become strong as a vise.

“Beautiful woman, skinny photographer.”

None of us had imagined we’d see each other again so soon. It’s a March morning. Nine months have gone by since the vacation in Croatia—time enough for a pregnancy, time enough for a war.

He holds us tight and presses his forehead against ours. He asks us if it took a lot of courage to come.

“It was harder to stay away.”

He says we’re his friends and hugs us again. His little honey-colored eyes fill with tears. “Once in a while, the poet takes a piss.” He even makes a gesture as if he were pissing and laughs.

Diego takes a deep breath, spreads his arms, takes another breath. The air is still cold even though it’s already spring.

Gojko is wearing a Gore-Tex jacket. It’s German , he says. He made a trade with a journalist from Reuters Deutschland. He takes it off right there in the airport drop-off lane. He’s wearing a cotton T-shirt underneath. He wants us to hold his jacket and feel how light it is. He puts it back on as we head toward the car.

He says he doesn’t feel the cold anymore, that the jacket’s solved a lot of problems. He can stay out all night even when the temperature is ten below zero. He talks about Gore-Tex, the literary magazine that publishes his poems, the radio station where he works now and then. He wants to take us there because the people there are quick thinkers, like blades on a helicopter. I look at the streets, the linden trees, the lead-colored buildings. I breathe in. Why didn’t we come before? This city is like a pocket for us. Coming here is like slipping our hands into the dark to feel a warmth that comes from deep inside.

We head into the city. Gojko’s voice is warm mud. He tells us that there are a lot of journalists in the city now, thanks to the International Conference on Bosnia-Herzegovina sponsored by the European Community. He’s working as a guide again, like he did during the Olympics.

Diego asks him about the impending war.

Gojko throws his cigarette butt out the window. “The whole world is watching us. Nothing will happen here.”

He takes us to the kafana near the Markale Market with upholstered walls and Bosnian blues coming out over the loudspeakers. Gojko smokes another cigarette. We look at his face. It’s a bit puffier than it was in the summer. He lowers his mouth to kiss my hand where it rests on the table. He grabs the camera from the red vinyl bench and shakes his head because Diego is still using that glorious Leica from his first days as a photographer.

The first picture Diego takes is in that café. Gojko and I are on the bench, hugging. Gojko holds his fingers in a V for victory in front of our smiling faces.

“So, do you two still love each other a lot?” Gojko whispers to me.

Diego answers, “Yes.”

“Too bad.”

We go out and walk through the cold. People are immersed in their own routines. The stores of the Baščarašija are all open, with their piles of spices, copper utensils and white tunics with gold trim.

What did the faces of the Jews look like as they beheld without recognition the evil headed their way? They must not have been much different from the faces I see here, this old man engraving leather, this girl wearing a veil and jeans as she steps out of the madrassa, her books held tight with an elastic strap.

 

We sat on the bleachers in the big gym, one of the ones they’d built for the Olympics. Sebina was standing next to a pile of blue rubber mats. We watched her for a while before she noticed us. She hadn’t changed much, just grown a few hand widths taller. Her bare legs were stocky and white as candles. Muscles rose out of her skin like little sausages. She was barefoot. Before every exercise, like a seasoned athlete, she’d take off the little wool shawl she used as a muscle warmer and then put it back on immediately afterward. The gym was dimly lit. There were a couple of fluorescent panels down below but their light barely reached the bleachers.

She saw us. She raised her eyes and rested them on us. Did she recognize me? We spoke on the phone. I’d watched her grow in photographs. Every Christmas I sent her a toy and some money, and she sent little holiday cards, angels cut from paper. She stayed in place with the others, disciplined. But everything she did from that moment on was for me, for my eyes as they watched her on the parallel bars, the balance beams, the horse, where she gripped the handles and pulled herself up, body straight, head turned toward us. In her letters she’d told me about this passion, but it was something else to see her in action. She missed a landing and fell, but then she crossed the room with a series of cartwheels like a little flame and landed in a perfect split.

We met in the long linoleum corridor lit by the distant lights of the dressing rooms. I called her. She was looking for me. She turned toward me and ran. She had the same squashed face from when she was born, the prominent upper lip. I picked her up, I think Diego and I picked her up together, both of us greedy for that smell, that pale sweaty skin.

“Darling. Sweetheart.”

“Gemma! Diego!”

“Sebina.”

What is joy? It’s this lonely corridor, rancid with good smells, this little body embracing us.

She was tiny, so much smaller close up.

“You’re so heavy,” I said.

“To su mišići .” It’s the muscles.

 

Now Gojko lived on his own, but he went almost every night to fetch Sebina. He’d wait for her near the showers. Sometimes he’d help her dry her hair, other times he’d simply plop her hat on her head and off they’d go. When he felt like it, he’d take her out for pancakes with honey and apples in one of those places with high stools where you eat looking at the wall and smell of frying oil when you leave. They’d talk between mouthfuls without really looking at each other. Like any big brother, like the father who wasn’t there, he’d ask her about her day and about school. Sebina always spoke too quickly, and Gojko had a hard time following her. She liked only two things about school: the window in one of the corridors that overlooked the parks along the Miljacka where couples went to make out, and the experiments they did in the chemistry lab. She wanted to be a champion gymnast. She was almost too small, though.

“I’m the shortest one.”

Her brother wiped her mouth with his hand. “Short people are more firmly rooted to the ground.”

If she was sad, he’d read her one of his poems.

The girl sat on the ground
before a pyre of corollas
like winter flames.
Help me, I’m tired.
We peeled roses until sunset
swathed in a sickly sweet perfume
that befuddled, like a drug.
Who will drink all this grappa,
I asked her.
You will, if you return.
I wasn’t sure I could find my way.
She waved at me from the window,
her melted plaster face
her hands dripping with the blood of petals.

Sebina liked her brother’s poems, but she asked too many questions.

He said, “Poems cannot be explained. If they reach the right place, you feel it. They itch you on the inside.”

“Where’s the right place?”

“Look for it.”

Sebina twisted her mouth and looked at him skeptically from out of her funny face. She prodded her stomach, her legs.

“Is a foot okay?”

“It’s a bit low.”

“I feel your poem itching me there.”

Gojko put her on his shoulders and climbed the stairs of his old house, where he left her with Mirna.

 

We went into a restaurant for pita bread stuffed with everything—meat, potatoes, squash. Sebina started yawning, her eyes lost and watering, like any sleepy child. She didn’t complain. She folded her arms on the table, rested her head on them and fell asleep. We stayed talking. Diego crumbled up one of Gojko’s cigarettes, then opened his little tin and made a joint. Gojko watched and mocked him.

“Since when have you been doing drugs?”

“This isn’t drugs. It’s hash.”

Gojko glued himself to the joint, bathing it with his mouth.

“Well, then. Let’s smoke.”

“Your sister ...” I said.

“She’s sleeping,” Gojko said.

The two of them smoked while I rubbed the nape of Sebina’s neck. At one point I bent down and buried my nose in that well of flesh and found that old smell of milk and forest. It had remained over the years. It struck me as the odor of the future, there ahead of us just like long ago. I looked at our bodies in the mirror that ringed the wall and it felt like time hadn’t taken anything away. Diego was weeping, motionless, seemingly oblivious to the tears that rolled down his face as calm as sweat. I touched his shoulder.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m in heaven.”

We walked back in the dark through the friendly streets. Sebina was sleeping on her brother’s neck, her abandoned arms capturing the rays of the streetlights.

It was freezing cold. I touched Sebina’s hands. They were frozen. We hurried toward the hotel, a little red door like the entrance to a house. We asked for the key and went up to the room. Gojko didn’t want to leave us, and we didn’t want him to go. He had managed to find a room that was bigger than most, with wood floors and a big wool rug. He’d even tried the bed. “I took a nap,” he said, and in fact we could see a bit of a depression in the middle of the bed and wrinkles on the bedspread.

“Do you two still make love?”

We’d just come from that desolate trip and the cold had done nothing to dispel our limpness.

“Tonight we’re dead tired.”

“That’s when it’s best, when your body is empty. That’s when you fly.”

 

Later on Gojko switched on the television. Karadžić was talking, his hair blown dry into a puff, his face made up like a doll’s. It was a long, glossy interview. He spoke of his work as a psychiatrist and as a poet. As he spoke, some of his verses rolled across the screen in superimposition. Gojko snickered as he read.

“Psychopathic Montenegrin!” He scratched his head, his arm, as if he’d been attacked by a terrible itch. “How on earth can anyone believe a lunatic like that?”

Diego was lying across the bed. “It’s the lunatics we need to worry about.”

 

Diego closes his eyes. His arm flops onto the bed beside Sebina, who’s still sleeping right where we set her down.

“Aren’t you going to get undressed?” But he’s already asleep.

Gojko lights a cigarette. I tell him to go open the window and smoke there.

I look at the clock. It’s almost three.

“What were you doing in Belgrade?”

We sit on the edge of the bed. I look down as I talk. I tell him about our trip to Ukraine, the women there. Gojko listens with a serious expression and then he starts laughing.

“Are you crazy? You wanted a baby from a whore?”

Diego’s body is stretched out next to him like a big child’s.

“He didn’t even take off his bib.”

It’s true, Diego’s still got the napkin from the restaurant in the collar of his sweater. Gojko stands and takes it off and then uses it to blow his nose. He pretends to cry and bangs his head against the wall.

“Why? Why don’t you need a man? Why is life so unfair?”

He hugs me from behind and tickles me. I push him away half heartedly.

“I’ve been unhappy for so many months, I don’t know who I am anymore.”

I move toward Diego and tug at his boots, those old Camperos that are so hard to get off. Gojko watches this weary, maternal gesture.

“You’re afraid of losing him, aren’t you?”

“I’m thirty-seven.”

“He’d never leave you.”

I drop the boots on the ground and slide off Diego’s socks. I stand for a moment looking at those long feet, white on top and red at the sides.

“I want to have a child with feet like this.”

Gojko pulls a face. “What’s so great about his feet?”

“They’re his.”

“I see.”

The still-open window vibrates in the metal window frame. Gojko closes it. It’s deepest night. We can see the cathedral spires with their little crosses that look like they’re made of glass.

 

That night the four of us slept in the same bed. Gojko was too tired to carry his sister on his shoulders. I had no intention of really sleeping. I settled on the far edge of the bed and lay there stiff and precarious like the blade of an ice skate. I waited for dawn and finally fell into a brief light sleep, protected at last by the light of day. When I opened my eyes again, I found Sebina’s little face bent over my own. The first to wake, she had already combed her hair and washed her face.

“Wait.”

I got up and gave her the shoes from my suitcase.

“They light up when you walk.”

She got hiccups. Her body reacted to the excitement by literally fragmenting her breath. I helped her put the shoes on. There was room for at least a year’s growth. She stared at her feet and shook from those little spasms that would not stop.

“Try them!” The shoes lit up.

She didn’t seem so much happy as desperate. I understood her desperation. It was the same thing I felt when I reached the peak and understood that I had everything, like a sudden intimation of the rapture of nothing. I thought she might faint. I yelled to scare the hiccups away and then couldn’t believe I’d produced such a savage howl.

Sebina started and stared at me, her mouth hanging open.

I didn’t know why, but we were motionless in the face of something. We were rebelling.

“Walk. What are you waiting for?”

She smiled. The hiccups were gone. She started walking around the room while looking at her heels, those plastic bubbles that lit up from within. She came back and gave me a kiss on the mouth. I felt the softness of her lips against mine.

Gojko had rolled off the bed onto the rug and continued sleeping. Now his sister was walking on his stomach to wake him up. She put her shoes in front of his face. Gojko opened an eye, studied those luminous soles and turned toward me like a snake.

“Fuck, where did you find them? I want to import them!”

Sebina began to holler in a high shrill voice, remonstrating her brother. She wanted to be the only one in Sarajevo with shoes like that!

Diego was awake now, too. He smiled as he watched her luminous steps. “That way we’ll always find you, even in the dark.”

 

Gojko had moved into an old dilapidated building near the old synagogue. It didn’t have an elevator. There were a few elderly tenants left, but no families. Rather, the building was inhabited by young people: university students, aspiring artists, budding intellectuals. They were part of Sarajevo’s new generation. They went to concerts and frequented literary cafés and art-house cinemas. They met up at the Čeka and gathered at night beneath old statues of Tito to yell along with U2, I wanna run ... I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside . Gojko lived on the top floor in a shared apartment, a sort of mini-commune, one of those chaotic places where kids live for a while before settling into real life. At thirty-five, Gojko was the oldest housemate, but the place was a good fit for him. If friends down below see the lights on in the windows, they come on up .

He opened the door and a dense cloud of smoke and spices assailed us. A boy stood playing the saxophone near a window. He was bent over the keys, his cheeks puffed out, his eyes closed. His figure reflected in the thin glass that had been blown and cut by hand the old-fashioned way; it seemed to move like water.

Because of the advancing war we had expected to find a depressed world of aimless people. Instead, we found music and chitchat and a pair of girls stirring soup in the kitchen.

 

We went back almost every night to that apartment suspended high above the seraglio of the old city, and maybe there we found what we’d been missing, the human warmth of smiling young faces, and time—yes, time, the old Bosnian habit of taking a pause from life to talk, to be. We found time that expanded along with our breath, the needs of our bodies and our spirits. We saw Mladjo again, the painter, who was now portraying bodies of all ages on canvas smeared with pure colors and showing these modern shrouds in a warehouse in Grbavica. We saw Zoran, too, the lawyer with the acne-covered face, and Dragana, who was now acting in a theater along with Bojan, her boyfriend.

One night I saw Ana again. She hadn’t lost her smile, either. She was leaning against a door with an empty glass in her hand and a black sweater stretched tight over her prosperous chest. I watched her neck darken with the shadows of whoever walked by. I remembered her half dressed on the island of Korčula, lolling on her belly beneath the mulberry tree. As we spoke, I realized she was rocking on her heels, slowly leaning forward and then slowly moving back as if she were standing on a threshold, unable to decide whether or not she should proceed. I looked around and felt a chill penetrate my body. All these kids who were talking, who seemed alive, all of them were standing on the same threshold.

“How do you manage not to be scared?” I asked her.

“We’re together. It’s important to stick together.”

I watched the young saxophone player bent over his instrument as if it were the body of his beloved, as if he were making love for the last time.