Chapter 10

P ietro turns over in bed and covers his face with his pillow to block out the light.

“Get up. It’s late.”

“Is it raining?” he asks from beneath the pillow.

“No.”

He’s up in a flash. “Really?” He moves toward the window and stays there awhile, stuck to the glass, his eyes on the uncertain sun in the muggy sky.

This morning Gojko is taking him to the water park, the one advertised all along Marshal Tito Boulevard. He opens the wardrobe and empties his bag onto the bed, then locks himself in the bathroom. I can hear the water running pointlessly.

“Turn it off. People are dying of thirst.”

It’s something I say all the time, to Giuliano, too. I can’t stand it when he leaves the water running while he’s shaving. Some things have become a part of me, my shadow. Like that woman, dead on the pavement next to the beer factory where people lined up to get water, her legs folded as if she were sleeping, her head resting on the plum-colored stain of her blood beside the tank she hadn’t managed to fill.

Pietro comes out of the bathroom in his quick-drying surfer trunks. Danka, the girl from the hotel café, will be going with them. Pietro invited her last night.

“What do you think, Ma? Should I ask her?”

He’d been thinking about it for a while but hadn’t dared mention it.

“Of course!”

He takes a few steps, then turns around. “Never mind.”

“Why not?”

“What do I say?”

“You’ll think of something.”

He stands up once again and sidles over to the counter where Danka is filling glasses with ice. For the first time, I see him approach a woman. As I watch him I think he’s charming, despite the shyness and long arms. To ease the tension he’s drumming with his hands on his jeans. He sits, raises those indigo eyes, smiles.

He comes back to sit beside me.

“What did she say?”

He grabs a bag of Bosnian potato chips off the display rack and starts munching on them. “It looks like she’ll come.”

 

Danka, mounted on a pair of platform sandals and wearing tight jeans, looks thin and very tall this morning. She has a silver ring in her belly button. Pietro notices it right away, shining in that pale strip of belly. It must be enticing but intimidating. He looks away, starts horsing around. He shows her the towel he’s bringing, one from the hotel. Danka laughs and says it’s not allowed. Pietro hides it under his T-shirt and pats his terry-cloth belly. They laugh again.

Gojko shows up in last night’s jacket and shirt, a pair of flip-flops on his feet. We get a coffee, Italian espresso, in the café across the street from the hotel. The man standing next to us is reading a book. His whitish hair is as long as his beard. He looks like Karadžić when he was captured, disguised as a holy man, the same long white robe, like an Indian guru, the same lamb’s gaze. How many of those people must there still be, killers going around unimpeded like Karadžić, who went to soccer matches and was practicing medicine? I ask Gojko how he felt when Karadžić was arrested.

He puts out his cigarette, pushing the butt against the ashtray until he burns his finger. He says Karadžić wasn’t arrested. He was sold. Karadžić’s arrest left him cold.

Gojko’s flip-flops have synthetic grass in them that massages his feet. He takes one off so I can see it better and stands there with one bare foot on the sidewalk. Then he almost falls into me when he puts it back on. He’s glad it’s not raining, glad summer’s finally here. I ask him how high the slides in the water park are, whether they’re safe.

They jump in the car, slamming the doors.

“When will you be back?”

“When it closes.”

I go up to the room and fill my little backpack. I want my arms to be free so I can walk.

The old men are already at it playing chess in the square. The birds are there, too. A new battle is beginning. The giant chessmen are back in their starting places. I look at the two facing armies, one black, one white.

As I pass the circular building of the covered market, I speed up, eyes on the ground. Then I stop in front of a bank that wasn’t here before. A car bearing the words HEINRICH BOLL FOUNDATION in little blue letters is parked in front. I shake my head and laugh. I’ve got a book by Boll in my backpack.

The music school is across the way, a corner building flanked by a steep street. It looks exactly the same as before. Only the paint has changed, a pale sky-gray. Nobody pays any attention to me. I go up one flight. There’s a smell of closed spaces and bodies crammed into little rooms, the smell of every school and place where people grow, where they sweat. I move along the corridor over a rope-colored carpet held in place with brass borders. The old floor sways beneath me. Perhaps they simply covered it over after the war. Arpeggios and chords rain down upon me as I climb, a violin rehearsing, an upright bass. I let myself be sucked into this place of perseverance, of solitude, of hands, breaths, craziness, an old eccentric teacher, a young autistic talent. The doors are padded and covered with leather. FLAUTA. GITARA. KLAVIR. VIOLA. I push one open and see two young faces and a teacher bent over a keyboard, ethereal as a flickering flame, and beyond them a coffee dispenser.

I ask the piano custodian if I may go on with my tour. He comes with me. He has an elderly face and a short smock like an altar boy’s cassock. He walks with a limp. We climb higher. The landing is crammed with kids. Perhaps they’re waiting for an audition. A crouching boy moves his hands over the keys of a clarinet held far from his mouth, not emitting a sound. The custodian explains that in the common areas of the school, playing instruments and talking aloud are forbidden.

The sound of the black, double-soled shoe he wears on the foot of his shorter leg accompanies me as I climb. He stops, opens a window and shoos away some pigeons brooding in the space between the glass and the iron bars. We’re almost at the top.

The wall still says TISINA. Silence. Underneath, there’s a gaping chasm, created by an explosion. The custodian says it’s been left this way as a reminder of the time silence was violated. He lights a cigarette and touches his rigid, skeletal leg, nodding to himself as he remembers. I ask him if I can stay here for a few minutes. He leaves me alone, dragging that rigid leg along behind him.

I sit on the ground in front of the gaping wall. On the other side, a corpulent woman with a strange hairdo of rolled braids is teaching solfeggio to a group of kids. She waves a pencil in emphasis, like an orchestra conductor.

I look at the writing on the wall, absurd and solemn at the same time. SILENCE! I imagine the impact, the shell that violated the silence of these walls accustomed to absorbing notes. I watch my life through this dismembered wall, this abyss no one has ever filled.

The referendum for Bosnian independence had just taken place. The streets were plastered with nationalist posters. Mothers of soldiers in the federal army took to the streets wrapped in banners demanding their sons be sent back home. There was alarming news. Some even said that as far back as the preparations for the Winter Olympics, while the ski slopes were being leveled, there were those who were thinking ahead to the trenches for the coming war.

Gojko dismissed it all as stupid alarmism.

“Propaganda finds its converts in the countryside. It’s easy to convince a peasant that his neighbor is a Turk who wants to steal his land and slit his throat. But here we’re not Turks, we’re not Chetniks, we’re not Ustashas. Here we’re just Sarajevans.”

But Diego knew the language of stadium mobs. Karadžić had been the psychologist for Sarajevo Soccer, Arkan the head of the Red Star Belgrade ultras.

“Wars begin in peacetime on the edge of the cities, while you sit around in your cultural centers discussing poetry.”

Interminable arguments accompanied us homeward each evening.

 

Diego and I left our hotel and took a rented room in the apartment of an elderly couple. Jovan, the husband, was a biologist, a white-haired and silent old man who suffered from the cold and wore flannel shirts buttoned to the neck. Velida, his wife, had been his assistant all her life. She was thin, with lively green eyes, and always wore gray, like a nun. We did little favors for each other. I passed her the foreign newspapers Diego bought once a week. They couldn’t afford them on their pension. When she cooked something good, Velida would leave a plate of it for us in front of our door. A little balcony separated our room from the rest of the apartment, so we could come and go without disturbing them. We had our own key and a bathroom, as well as a burner where we could make coffee.

That night, Diego was out taking pictures in the direction of Grbavica. I was alone and upset. It was very late. Gojko knocked on the door, stepped into the room and threw himself on the bed. He’d spent the entire day in Parliament translating for an American, arguments between politicians that went on until late. The members of the Bosnian Serb Party had abandoned the proceedings. He was exhausted and depressed.

“Šteta .”

I turned. “What’s a pity?”

He shrugged. “Ništa .” Nothing. “Are you really leaving?”

I nodded.

He closed his eyes. I let him sleep for a while but his snoring was too loud. When I went to wake him, I could smell the stink of alcohol. He must have tanked up with the American. He looked at me with a strange expression in his eyes, like a lost child, a child who’s had a nightmare and can’t tell his mother from an ogre.

 

He takes me by the neck, strokes my cheek.

“My love.”

“You’re drunk. Go home.”

He pulls his wallet out of his jacket, rustles through bits of paper and reads me a poem.

My sister is sleeping, what a pity.
Her hands are growing
far from me
as the day dies.
Tomorrow I’ll take her skating
she’ll stop on Vase Miskina Street
in front of the window display of computers
they’ve just turned on.
My sister believes in the future,
what a pity.

I smile and nod.

“You think it’s awful.”

I shrug. He can think what he wants. He’s impossible, still young but aging badly.

“Does Sebina want a computer?”

Gojko turns.

“I came to invite you to a concert.”

It’s the end-of-year recital at the music school. He wants to introduce me to a girl.

“I told her about you.”

I’m putting the blow dryer in my suitcase. I freeze. “What did you tell her?”

He takes a step toward me and puts a hand on my stomach, low. He holds it there, not moving. I can feel its warmth, a friendly fire that penetrates. I’m sweating. He doesn’t move, just stays there, that shameless hand just above my groin. I breathe, and don’t brush him aside, and maybe all of a sudden it feels like I want him, because there’s something of his that I share, something defeated, a solitude I no longer share with Diego. I breathe and feel the breath descend into my belly, below his hot steady hand that’s pressing on me.

Diego comes in, his face like a cat at night.

“What’s going on?”

Gojko doesn’t move, like a corpse. I give him a light kick.

“I’m drunk,” he says, and leaves.

I watch him from the window as he moves away along the dark street. Diego watches my head, my hand holding the little embroidered curtain.

“Did he make a pass?”

“No. He invited us to a concert.”

That’s how we end up going to the music school. It’s a rainy afternoon. Water flows in torrents through the streets. While we wait for the concert to begin, I rest my wet feet, one at a time, on the cast-iron heater. Around us, country women in galoshes stand next to women in summer sandals and long evening dresses with damp hems. A robust woman with a whistle hanging from her neck is setting up chairs. This little cultural event clearly means a lot to these people. Their chitchat is cautious, polite, and even the miserable quirkiness of the gowns has its grace. I think of Rome, the mixed crowds that flock to socalled events , women in rags worth thousands, nightclub intellectuals, politicians, people with no purity, the spirit of our time the ad men were always talking about.

Not everyone gets a seat, but no one complains. No one even leans against the wall. It’s warm in the room, I fan myself with the program. A continuous stream of musicians comes and goes on the little wooden platform. They are all young, the boys wearing bow ties, the girls dressed in black, their dresses altered for the occasion. They thank the crowd, rise behind their instruments and bow their heads. The second group comes in, then the third. I can’t take it anymore. Gojko touches my knee and points to the brass section.

She’s the tallest in the group. Her face is too white, her lipstick too dark, her hair rust-red. She’s waiting her turn. She stands clutching her instrument, a trumpet, as if she were holding her heart. She’s wearing a velour dress that skims her thin hips and her breasts, which stand out despite the dark dress. I devour every detail in a flash, like an ordinary woman curious about a more beautiful creature. I search for a flaw. She raises her chin. I’m a bit too far away to make out her features. I need a little pair of binoculars like the ones ladies use at the opera. I can see the blotch of her face, traces of expression. She starts to play, surrounded by violins. She empties her cheeks, tightens her lips and bends over the trumpet, then raises it along with the music, which has become an onslaught. I don’t know if she’s any good, I don’t know enough about music. I don’t care. She plays with her eyes shut and moves around a bit too much. She shakes her head, that red hair hacked into imprecise tufts. She looks like a bird with too many wings.

They’re playing Shostakovich’s concerto for piano, trumpet and strings. The music changes, becomes darker, more insistent. The wail of the violins is overwhelming, the trumpet enters in bursts, the girl is trembling, her cheeks filling and collapsing, emptying slowly. Now her fingers on the valves are like soldiers on the battlefield, facing off, retreating. The blond boy at the piano looks crazed as well. He’s running back and forth, dragging his body behind his hands, crashing down here and there like a dying moth. The trumpet is the cry of an owl in the night. The girl’s chest rises, then falls, wounded. Her red hair is a trail of blood. Nobody dares move. All are entranced. Outside, the rain is still pouring down. You can’t see anything through the windows. We’re locked in a watery prison, and the music, too, is a prisoner of the water that won’t stop coming down. It’s hot. I fan myself. The woman beside me is crying, solitary tears that leave tracks down her immobile face. They are like veterans of a great sorrow yet to come, a pain the music anticipates.

I put my hand on Diego’s. He takes it automatically, as if he were holding a used glove. These last few nights we’ve tried to make love, starting but not getting very far. We laughed about it. It’s something that happens to failed lovers, finished lovers. Once upon a time I was his love. Now he goes out with his camera, that’s how he makes love, with whatever he comes across in the world, like a priest. Then he returns to his housekeeper.

The girl plays, quivers around the trumpet, dies inside it. Then she comes to, like an aging actress who dies onstage every night. Now she’s sputtering out a kind of march.

I look at Diego. His eyes are closed. The concert is over.

The woman beside me is the first to stand, red in the face and clapping. The trumpet player joins the others. She’s as tall as the boys. She crosses her legs and takes an exaggerated bow. The groups that played earlier come back in. They all squeeze together on the platform. Now it’s a concert of shrieks. The conductor throws his baton in the air and then everyone is throwing something, a bow, a score, like brand-new graduates with their black hats. Diego’s opened his eyes but doesn’t stand. He claps softly.

“I fell asleep,” he says.

“That’s Gojko’s friend.”

Diego thinks I mean the plump violinist with the braid in a crest on top of her head. I say, No, the one with the red hair hugging the blond piano player . Diego looks at her—her hair, her black lips.

“What is she, some kind of punk?”

Gojko stands and lets out a whistle that would bring down a forest.

“Great, huh? They dump out your innards, dance on them and then put them back in your gut where they belong.”

Then for a moment I think they’re all crazy, as happy as if the war had already come and already finished, as if this were a festival of reconciliation.

 

We stand there against the wall, Diego and I, hemmed in by the flesh of women who resemble little embroidered lampshades and by a Bosnian cowboy wearing a crusty jacket with a rain of fringe. We’re in the room next to the concert hall. The woman with the whistle has set up a table with trays of sweets and homemade sarma. Now, along with the smell of rain and of damp clothes letting off warm steam from bodies, there’s the smell of Sarajevan food as well, spices, animal fat, tangy cheese.

The girl comes toward us. Close up she seems much younger, like a child all made up. Her sweaty hair looks like dripping rust. She’s changed her clothes. Now she’s wearing torn jeans under her velour dress. There’s a safety pin in her ear. She carries her instrument case over one shoulder and a canvas bag full of stuff. Her hands are full of pastries.

“This is my friend Aska.”

She looks at Gojko, smiles and swallows, then extends a greasy hand our way.

“I’m Aska, Gojko’s friend.”

She speaks enough Italian, she says, because she spent a year at the conservatory in Udine. She’s hungry. She can’t eat before she plays because otherwise I’d throw up on the others’ heads , so now she’s starving. Her accent is without inflection. She separates her words and closes them, every one a caesura. Her voice is like one of those little monotone voices that come out of the machines in parking garages, Welcome , insert ticket , please wait .

“Aska, like Andrić’s sheep,” I say in a whisper.

“Yes. It’s a name I gave myself.” She laughs.

I look at her soaring forehead, her long deep green eyes like leaves, stained with black makeup that’s run into the whites.

She kneels and puts the pastries on her trumpet case. Then she’s taking off her high-heeled shoes and putting on a pair of bright purple combat boots.

We compliment her. “People were crying.”

She stands up and thanks us without emphasis. “People have no sense of irony.”

An elderly man with a yarmulke comes by, an instructor who speaks to her, swathing her face in his trembling hands. She listens to him, serious, then steals a cigarette from the packet of Drinas sticking out of his pocket. The old man smiles and lights the cigarette for her. Now Aska is the one talking, looking at him intently, smoking in his face. When she speaks her own language, her voice is different, more melodic. She races over the words just as, minutes earlier, she raced over the notes.

She says she’s in a hurry. Now that she’s eaten and had a smoke, she has to get to a gig. Her motorcycle is parked out in front of the school, an old wreck that looks like something from the army. She wraps a black scarf around her head. Maybe she’s Muslim, maybe she’s cold. She crumples up her dress, ties a knot in the back like a tail and climbs on, legs wide in her jeans, her purple combat boots, her trumpet case over her shoulder.

Diego wants to take her picture but doesn’t have his flash. Maybe the cone of light from the streetlight will be enough. He tries.

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” she says to us. She starts her motorcycle and plunges into the night on that old carcass of a bike.

 

Later, Diego asks me to tell him Andrić’s fable of Aska the sheep.

“She’s a rebel sheep who only wants to dance and doesn’t listen to her mother’s scoldings. One day as she’s dancing she gets separated from the herd. When she opens her eyes again the wolf is right there. He’s hungry but he can wait. He likes watching that stupid little sheep as she dances. She can feel his black eyes on her snow-white fur. She knows her life is about to end, knows she should have listened to her mother. She’s terrified, but she keeps dancing because it’s the only thing she can do. As she dances, she moves backwards. The wolf is still there. All he’d need to do is reach out a paw, but the little lamb dances so well that he wants to enjoy it a while longer. He’s sure to come across another little lamb, but he’ll never see a lamb who dances like this.”

“How does it end? Does the wolf eat her, or does she escape?”

His eyes are acting up again. I prepare an herbal infusion and wring the gauze over his eyelids.

He takes my hand from the darkness of his covered eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Gojko says that Aska would be willing to help us.”

 

I studied old Jovan’s still face as he reclined in his worn green velvet armchair. There was a clean little embroidered cloth on the back. Velida changed it almost every day. He could hear very little and he watched TV without even trying to make out the words. The television set was ancient, black-and-white, with a little antenna that didn’t pick up the signal very well. The absence of colors and the pale grainy veil cloaking the screen brought to mind stock images, old film clips from the Second World War. The Serbian army had crossed the natural border of the Drina and was advancing through Bosnia. I remembered the long night of the first man on the moon, that distant signal. I was a little girl. I sat beside my father, who was watching the television as if it were the last piece of something he would never see again. Suddenly he felt himself a part of a single generation of men that went from the wings of Icarus to Leonardo’s flying machines to the Wright Brothers’ first Flyer, a generation that was now leaving the earth’s gravity for good to take a seat on that diaphanous, distant eye. The deep-sea diver on the screen, white, unsteady as a small child on the moon’s lead-colored crust, he was my father himself.

 

My father believed in the future, like Sebina. He believed that common men would take to moving through the skies, full sail ahead. Mournful tanks were advancing across the screen, and the only signal that came in was a disturbed image on that ancient television.

Velida stood to free the two blackbirds from their white cage in the kitchen. They never left, just flew through the rooms, at the very most crossing the street to perch on the balcony of the building across the way and then coming back when Velida called them, tame as hens. She turned off the television with an irritated gesture, almost a challenge, rummaged through the vinyl albums on the shelf and slipped some jazz onto the turntable of their old gramophone. Then she made coffee, with maniacal care, without spilling the tiniest bit.

I breathe in the calm of those rooms, smell the perfume of objects accumulated over the course of many years. Art books, scientific volumes, crockery on the kitchen shelves, photographs of Velida and Jovan when they were young, the clock on the wall. It’s as if nothing is ever to move from this house, a little domestic labyrinth where blackbirds fly and come to a stop on the couch next to the cat, who doesn’t even look at them. “It’s odd for a cat not to pounce on a bird,” I say to Velida.

She lifts the ladle. “I taught them to respect each other.”

We’re in the kitchen. I’m helping her make sarma. We mix the rice with the meat, lay out the grape leaves, fill them and roll them. Velida’s gestures bring to mind eternity, stuffed grape leaves endlessly boiling and satisfying palates. It’s relaxing here in this kitchen with this ancient biologist, who banishes the black of the world by turning off the television and dicing an onion.

“Why didn’t you and Jovan have children?”

Her eyes are red from the onion, but she’s smiling.

“We didn’t want them. Jovan was too caught up with his research and I was too caught up with him. And so it went.”

“And you’ve never missed having a child?”

She could lie. She’s accustomed to reserve, to solitude. But she doesn’t. “Always,” she says. “Always.” She piles up the stuffed grape leaves in a pan, crumbles red pepper. She’s smiling again.

Earlier, in front of the television, I asked her what she plans to do if the war reaches them, engulfs them. She shrugged and went to let the blackbirds out. Now she answers. She pours a bit of vinegar into the pan and says they will never leave their home. She says she’s had cancer twice but God must not want her. He’s left her there to cook. “People are only afraid when they have children.”

A pleasant smell is coming out of the pan. I tell her God is right to leave her in that kitchen. She asks why I don’t have children.

I tell her the truth in a moment, easily. She looks at me with her biologist’s eyes and shakes her head. She tells me that my name, in the process of gemmation, indicates the first draft of a new individual.

 

I told Gojko I wanted to meet Aska on my own. We met in a bar I’d never been to before, a turban made of copper and glass in the middle of a park, a funny, Austro-Hungarian reworking of Ottoman design. Inside, the elegant decadence of a turn-of-the-century Viennese café mingled with the smell of pickled cucumbers and bosanska kafa. Aska was half hidden by a curtain of mirrors. Her black trumpet case sat next to her. She was deep in conversation with Gojko.

I moved toward the table and held out a hand. “Hello.”

She stood and hugged me warmly. She was wearing a black sweater full of slashes and the jeans from the day before. The safety pin was still there in her ear, but she wasn’t wearing makeup. In close proximity to her hair, to the skin on her neck, I breathed in her smell, rosewood and cedar.

She ordered for me. Austrian bavaroises and local pastries made with honey.

While she eats, I study her face. We’re sitting very close. In the day’s inclement light, I look for hidden damage, a little flaw, but she’s beautiful, her face is a perfect oval, austere, and there’s a natural swelling under her eyes and in her skin, which is transparent, like water. It’s a sensual tiredness that ruffles her beauty. She is observing me as well, the crumbs on my mouth, the ring on my finger. We talk a little.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

I had hoped she was a bit older. I look around. A middle-aged woman is talking and smoking and clutching her pack of cigarettes in her free hand as if it were her own breath. At the end of the room there’s a door, the bathroom maybe. Suddenly I think I should leave now, get up, say I need to use the bathroom and instead leave this sheep with those puffs beneath her eyes like swollen petals.

And now I think she resembles me the way I was a few years ago, the expression on her face haughty and foolish at the same time.

Gojko shoots me a malicious glance, like a panderer, a procurer.

It’s hot in the café, and Aska’s taken off her sweater. Underneath, she’s wearing a T-shirt with a gray print on it of a young face. It’s not clear whether it’s a man or a woman.

She asks me if I want the last bavaroise .

“It’s yours,” I say.

I’m full. I was never actually hungry. Aska eats the bavaroise and licks her fingers.

She has strange eyes, with a shadow of sadness like little boats forgotten on a river. Her expression as she looks at me is serious, and even when she laughs she doesn’t strike me as someone who would make fun of people. Gojko treats her like a younger sister, with the same gruffness he sometimes uses with Sebina. He asks her who the girl on her T-shirt is.

Aska tells him, You’re old, you don’t know anything . The girl is a man, a legend named Kurt Cobain.

That’s how I discover she’s a fan of Nirvana, that she listens to them at night, in the dark. She says they carry her away.

“And where do they carry you?” Gojko mocks.

“Somewhere you could never go.”

He lights a cigarette, throws the pack on the table. He sneers, grumbles that Nirvana is a bunch of lukavi , slick operators. “Fucking millionaire nihilists.” He gets up, says he has to take a piss. He does it on purpose to leave me alone with Aska.

At the bottom of her T-shirt there’s a sentence in English, something Cobain said. NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW MY PLANS.

I want to leave the café.

“What are your plans?” I ask her point-blank.

She tells me she just wants to leave. She’s from Sokolac, thirty miles from Sarajevo. She supports herself by playing gigs now and then in clubs and by giving trumpet lessons. In fact, she doesn’t have much time now because she has to go teach the son of a Baščaršija jeweler. She puffs out her cheeks to show me that the boy is fat. He can’t even spread his fingers over the valves. She says it’s all the rage among well-off Sarajevans to give their children music lessons. She says that she’s young and doesn’t want to get old doing this. She smiles. One of the three guys in Nirvana is Croatian. If he could do it, so can she. She wants to go to London or to Amsterdam and start a band. That’s why she needs the money.

“What did Gojko tell you?”

“That you need a roda . A stork.”

“That’s right.”

There’s some cream left on the plate along with a few grains of sugar frosting. Aska scrapes up these remnants with a spoon.

“I’m ready,” she says.

She looks around, plants a fist under her chin and draws near me with her green eyes. I can smell her breath.

She’s brazen and businesslike. She wants to be paid in deutschmarks, in cash. Her head disappears and reappears as she puts her sweater back on.

“Are you only doing it for the money?”

She lifts her trumpet case, smiles and says she likes to tell the truth, that I can trust her because she isn’t afraid of the truth. “What do you want me to say?” She touches her earlobe, one of those kitsch earrings. “That I’m doing it for love?”

She tells me music is her entire life. She spent her childhood in the country cleaning rabbit hutches, husking corn and playing the ears like flutes, like keyboards. For many years, Sarajevo was like San Francisco for her, but now it cuts into her like a tight bra. She says she’ll never marry, never have a family.

I ask her if she’s Muslim.

She grimaces. She never goes inside a mosque, though now and then she reads the Koran.

“What does the Koran say about renting out your womb?”

“The Koran says to help others.” She doesn’t mind the idea of lending her womb to a mutilated woman. That’s the word she uses, mutilated . “Each of us has to give something back.” She stands up, puts on a long plastic coat to cut the wind while she’s on her motorcycle. She shrugs. She asks me to let her know soon. She has to arrange her future.

 

Diego doesn’t say anything. I look at his hollow neck, his head hanging on his shoulders. He’s exhausted. His pants are muddy. He climbed up to the Jewish cemetery and photographed the city from above. There was fog down below and it looked like the minarets and the tops of the building were sticking up out of a cup of whey. I tell him about Aska. All he says is, I don’t know . He puts his rolls of film in order, numbers them and puts them all away in their black capsules.

We found a doctor on the outskirts of the city on the state highway to Hadžići. Gojko picked us up in his car. Aska sat in front with her hacked-at red hair and black-painted nails and big dark glasses like Kurt Cobain’s. I looked like her mother, with my knee-length skirt, my eyeglasses and chignon.

The doctor was thickset and had a somewhat obtuse expression, like certain farmers. He didn’t ask many questions. He kept sucking in air through the space between his two front teeth. All I remember is that mouth curling up like a rabbit’s, that irritating noise.

Aska put her hand on Diego’s and said he was her boyfriend and that they wanted a child but that she couldn’t have sexual intercourse. “I have muscle spasms that make it impossible.”

Gojko lowered his head almost to the floor. The bastard was laughing. And again I felt the thrill of our youth together, when we were crazy and free. The doctor wasn’t interested in our eccentricities. He prescribed a series of tests for Aska, requested a down payment of one hundred deutschmarks and told us to come back the next week.

Aska left the room wagging her behind and winked at me before she put her superstar sunglasses back on.

 

We wait for her outside the music school in a hidden café because she doesn’t want her friends to see her. She moves her mouth like a beak, Quack quack , they talk too much . She doesn’t want to explain anything to anyone. She never seems very happy to see us. She laughs, accuses us of being like overly anxious parents. I wring my hands in the café and little bones crack. I’m the anxious one. Diego’s calm, too calm. He acts like a guest.

“We need to know you better.”

Aska snorts. That’s stupid, because people never really know each other, not even husbands and wives know each other. Everyone has a secret life .

“Do you two know each other?”

Diego smiles. Their eyes meet and it seems like they’re close to each other in a flash.

The sheep has traveling eyes, always a little tired, that pull themselves up like wet wings, blink and like wet wings descend. But when they touch you they leave a trace, the sorrow of beauty. I look at her lips. They’re chapped from all her trumpet-playing. She never stops licking them. I look at her breasts, her arms, the bits of her body I can see below her costume of modern calamity: punk absurdity, Sarajevo-style. I don’t care that she decks herself out that way. She’s not my daughter and she’s right, we’ll never be friends. She whitewashes her face, paints her lips dark and fierce.

She’ll go to London, where she won’t make anything of her life. She’ll waste it on the streets, in the din of clubs. I don’t care about her destiny, I care about her immediate future. I care about her flesh. She’s joking with Diego. I let them go on about music. She’s beautiful, despite the paint, bursting with health. I smile like an amiable mother. “So, you want to leave Sarajevo.”

She’s chewing. Every time we see her she stuffs herself, orders sandwiches, sweets, says every time that she hasn’t eaten since morning. She says you can’t play for too long if you really play, because the music eats you alive.

She detests Madonna and Michael Jackson.

Now she’s talking about Janis Joplin. All of a sudden her face changes, becomes sad. She stops eating and looks straight ahead. “Every so often God picks someone and says, You, come with me . You can’t say no to God. He plants himself in your body and tears your soul apart. Janis took drugs to put up with God.”

I ask her if she takes drugs, if she’s ever taken drugs.

She looks at me with hate in her eyes. She says no. Then she stands up and says the session is over.

 

We’re crossing Goat Bridge.

She’s telling me about her mother, who died just a month earlier. It was because she didn’t follow her path, Aska says. People get sick when they don’t follow their paths. “Last night I fell asleep to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ ” She laughs, says it’s almost impossible to sleep to that song, but she fell into a sleep as heavy as lead. She dreamt she was walking, naked and pregnant, along Marshal Tito Boulevard. She was very tired, her belly was heavy and she couldn’t understand why she kept walking instead of sitting down. Then she saw the tanks coming toward her. She knew they were going to crush her, but she kept going forward as if it were the only thing she could do, like the unknown rebel in Tiananmen Square. She was sure she would stop them.

She looks down at the gentle waters of the Miljacka. “Sarajevo has too many bridges.” She spreads her arms in the wind and stands there like an angel with open wings and red hair, her pathetic Sarajevan grunge outfit, big dark glasses and a safety pin in her ear. She tells me to open my chest, to breathe. We stand there like two foolish angels, me in my suit, her with her bracelets, infinite metal circles that sound like a bell on a sheep’s neck.

“Why can’t you have children?”

I tell her my story.

“It’s not just your womb. It’s life itself that’s denied you every day, time and time again.”

She hugs me without excessive emotion. The safety pin brushes against my mouth. It’s as if my future were hanging from that pin.

Diego takes our picture from behind. He says he likes to see us together, that Aska reminds him of a girl in Genoa who worked in a warehouse full of old navy military uniforms, stiff cloth that smelled of damp.

“Did you like her?”

“She was a lesbian.”

Aska asks me if Diego and I love each other.

“Yes, very much.”

She nods, looks at the water below, bends down to pick up a pebble and throws it in.

Diego frames us, hugging on that bridge. Then Aska wants to put her eye to the viewfinder and take our picture.

Diego is talkative, like he is with his female students. “You can take pictures of reality, or you can search.”

“Search for what?”

“Something going by, something unseen, something that will appear later.”

He tells her that this is why he loves to photograph water, because it moves and inadvertently something is included, a passage, a reverberation.

Aska presses the shutter release button, gives the camera back to Diego, smiles. “Who knows, maybe I took a picture of something unseen.”

I smile, and it’s my stupid smile again, because once more I can sense the child there, floating toward us on this sidewalk. I turn to observe them. They’re walking close together on the sidewalk without looking at each other. For a moment I think there’s a resemblance. They’re the same height and they have the same way of walking, hips wobbling, leaning forward and stiff, as if they were trying to avoid some danger by going defiantly toward it.

In the meantime, we’ve given her the first five thousand deutschmarks. She counted them at the table in the café.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to put them in a bank account?”

She doesn’t trust the banks. Yugoslavia is losing bits and pieces and she’s scared someone in Belgrade will end up with her money.

 

We take a taxi back to the doctor’s. She’s clutching the card with the test results. “Everything’s fine,” she says. “I don’t have AIDS.”

I brush against her leg, the holey tights showing bubbles of snow-white flesh.

“I’m nervous, Aska.”

“Why?”

Who can guarantee she won’t want to keep the baby? That she won’t say, once she feels it move, that she can’t give it up?

She reassures me. She takes off her glasses so I can see her eyes, without makeup this morning. She’s given me her word.

“But how can you know now?”

She says she knows. She doesn’t want children. She wouldn’t know what to do with one. “All I care about is my music.”

“What will you tell your friends?”

She thinks for a moment. “I’ll go away for the last part. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Where?”

“There’s a place I like on the coast.”

“I’ll come, too.”

She nods beneath her dark glasses.

I already feel better. The car moves along and I imagine a little white house, off-season, full of damp smells. I take Aska’s hand because I’m imagining the two of us walking along a beach, hand in hand, she with her belly and me putting one of my shawls over her shoulders, making her tea, taking care of her. It will be nice, just the two of us, the wintry sea and a window with droplets on the outside, steam on the inside.

We’ve stopped in front of the little clinic.

“I’ll play music all the time for your baby. That way, maybe he’ll be a great musician.”

She saddens all of a sudden. I tug one of those locks of strong red hair.

“No Nirvana. I’m begging you.”

“What do you want me to play for him?”

“Mozart.”

“Forget it.”

“Chet Baker.”

“Okay.”

The doctor wasn’t there. The door was bolted shut. Aska climbed the stairs, rang other doorbells. The only person left was a woman in a wheelchair.

She came back to us, tired arms at her sides. “They’ve all gone away.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. There’s no one left.”

We heard voices and after a while saw two men in camouflage uniforms on one of the balconies. They stood there like two office workers taking a break, smoking, looking at us. It seemed like they were laughing at us. For the first time, I was afraid. We waited awhile under the gate, stunned, like chickens closed out of the henhouse after sunset.

The taxi was gone. We headed back on foot. Aska walked on the other side of the street, looking like someone on her way back from a ramble in the countryside. She hummed, tried to grab the bud-covered fronds of a prune tree. We were on the edge of the road. Very few cars passed, leaving behind the stink of their old mufflers. Diego gave me his hand, weightless and distracted. One of his lenses was scratched. It had fallen on the stairs at the clinic. That was his sorrow for the day. He was sick of these pilgrimages. It was out of inertia, or love, that he let me drag him along, but it was like following a wife afflicted with a solitary obsession.

I stopped to look at the sky, the retreating sun driven away by the night. There wasn’t a single star. We walked back through the dark, fumbling along until we reached the lights of the city. Aska lived in one of the outlying neighborhoods. We walked her to her house. She invited us to come up, though she didn’t have much to offer us.

“That doesn’t matter.”

We climbed the stairs.

Now we really were orphans, and she was our mother. It wasn’t a real house, it was more like a dormitory, with little apartments one next to another like dressing rooms.

“These houses were lodgings for the Olympic athletes.”

Inside there was a table made of light wood, glued to the floor, and a corner bench covered with the same brown carpeting as on the floor. There was a line of glasses on the wall behind a metal grate. It was like the inside of a camper. I took a few steps to go to the bathroom and glanced into the bedroom, which was also little and dark. On the wall was a poster of Janis Joplin with her old bag-lady face and frizzy hair, slits for her eyes and one for her mouth, the wind of delirium. Beneath the image, the words ON STAGE I MAKE LOVE TO 20,000 PEOPLE. THEN AT NIGHT I GO HOME ALONE.

We stayed and talked for a while. Aska took some glasses from the metal grate, put milk and a spoonful of cocoa powder in each one and stirred. She put her finger to her cheek and turned it back and forth, the gesture meaning that this drink was good, that it would make us feel better. She said she always cheered herself up by eating sweets, like a small child. But she didn’t seem at all sad. She’d taken off her purple boots and was walking barefoot. Her feet were white, with long thin toes. I took off one of my shoes and put my foot next to hers. We laughed, because mine was much smaller and wider. I told her she could have been a basketball player. She shook her red head and told us again that all she wanted to do was play her trumpet. She was born with the trumpet inside.

“It’s a strange instrument for a woman.”

“It’s mine.”

“Why?”

“It takes all your breath, your soul.”

She glued her lips to the mouthpiece and started playing “Diane,” eyes closed, swaying zombielike, Chet Baker–style.

Diego watched her with his mouth slightly open, the way you watch someone you care about who might make a mistake. The evening heated up like that, with the chocolate milk and the music. Diego rolled a joint. Now he was drumming on the table with his fingers. I was hugging my knees to my chest, my head back against the wall.

I felt good. I’d taken a puff, too, and now I felt a few little tepid shivers inside, blades of straw moving gently.

And so it had gone. We would leave our little Sarajevan friend behind and this evening was worth five thousand marks. By now I was used to defeat, holes in the water. Always the same, always the same little pond. It was a sweet, vibrant night. A farewell whose taste I already knew. Aska stopped playing, shook her trumpet. Some saliva fell out. She made another round of milk and cocoa powder. She pulled her safety pin out of her ear and started fiddling with it.

“Why do you dress like that?”

“I started to spite my father.”

She tells us about her father, the prayer leader at the mosque in her village. They fought for years, but since her mother’s death they’ve made up.

“My mother’s dead, too.” I’m sad. Diego is wearing the sweater she gave him. I think back to that day, her shy eyes, uncertain about everything, like always. It seems I resemble her more than I ever realized.

Diego takes my hand and kisses me. “What are you thinking about, love?”

“Nothing. My mother.” Yes, I’m thinking about her, an insignificant woman to whom life gave so little.

Aska asks, “Was she sterile, too?”

I laugh, like I’ve never laughed before, revealing all my teeth, all my unhappiness. “I was born.”

Aska thinks it’s funny. “Oh, yeah. How stupid.”

It’s the joint taking effect. But maybe she’s right , I think. Maybe I was never born. Maybe I’m the shadow of my desires .

And once again that fable comes to mind, the sheep dancing so as not to die.

We hear the sounds of gunshots up in the hills and stick our heads out a little double window. Aska has to hold the frame up with one hand because the hook is broken. The air is cold. We can’t tell for sure where the shots are coming from.

Aska doesn’t seem worried. “It’s been happening almost every night for a while. It’s just a bunch of stupid kids having fun.”

She and I go back to the kitchen to heat some water. She’s busy trying to keep the gas burner alight when she says it. “If you want, we can do it naturally.” She’s just had her menstruacija and in about ten days she’ll be ready for mating. That’s the word she uses, mating . I laugh. She’s playing with that safety pin. She says for her the mating would be no problem. I think of rabbits in the country and their rapid couplings. My face is burning. I’m dumbfounded with joy, an unsheathed excitement.

“It could be a problem for me.” But before I finish speaking I know it isn’t true. It isn’t a problem. I look at her rust-colored hair and already I’ve leapt over the depths of ambiguity. All night something has been floating in my stomach. And before, too, when I was looking in that room, at that bed, I thought, It’s nothing. Another joint and I’ll sit on the bench while they lie down under the poster of Janis Joplin and we’ll all go back home alone, Aska, all of us, into the depths of our little bodies, born not to last .

She’s still talking. She says she’s not interested in sex, she finds it useless, like anything else that’s too goopy and wet. I can watch if I want. “Like in a clinic.” She laughs.

I thank her. “Hvala .”

“You’re welcome,” she responds, not catching my irony. She says it another time. “Za mene parenje nije problem .” For me, mating is no problem.

 

I let that sentence slide into my chest, went back to sit on the bench and waited for the effect to sink down deep, down into my belly.

Diego was watching us. He could sense something, the new wine of an intimacy.

“What are you two doing?”

“Ništa .” Nothing.

I told him to roll another joint. I wanted to laugh and laugh, for everything to melt into long languid laughter. We were done with clinics, needles, withdrawals of seminal fluid. We were done with everything that had made me suffer. Goodbye to ejaculations into glass, hello to coitus in the flesh, Aska’s white warm flesh that now seemed like my own. It would be like the three of us making love together, being warm together, like a little while ago, when the three of us huddled together at the window, the two of us and our sheep.

It was just the flesh we needed. She was young and Diego liked her. Anyone would have liked a morsel like that, a Sarajevan dimwit as beautiful as the sun, made just a bit ugly by fashion, by stupidity toward herself.

We looked into each other’s eyes for a little while longer. She wasn’t embarrassed. She didn’t lower her eyes, she held them there, abandoned in my own, guileless. She was simply not as happy as before. Now she was leaning against the window and I was learning something about her. She was slightly disconnected from the world, as if there had always been a little void to cross, to violate, between her and everything around her. There were no bridges for her, there was a flowing river, and she was looking for something to grab on to in the water, a rock sticking up, something. Now she’d found it, that rock, and little did it matter that it was her own body.

I thought she had waited for me, that she had come my way to help me, that she’d been born for that purpose, that it was her destiny. She’d floated between us by chance, like a child when a couple makes love, and this was a night of love, with those distant gunshots almost keeping us company, admonishing us, teaching us that life has its risks, its harshness, and that one might as well get straight to the point and risk everything once and for all, go all the way. I looked through the windowpanes at the profiles of the hills outlined by the glimmer of moonlight. What were we, sheep or wolves?

 

“Aska wants to go ahead anyway.”

Diego burst out laughing. He was flushed.

“What, you mean I’m supposed to ...”

His eyes met mine and fluttered away, like a moth against a light. His shirt was open, his curls pressed against his forehead, his lips chapped from the cold. Red blotches of embarrassment assaulted the skin on his face like a violent allergy. We stumbled along through the night, dazed, that strange game thrusting us forward. By the time we found the way back to our room, to our bed, my mood was already more confused, my throat thick. Diego took off his pants and got in bed without taking off anything else. He lay there under the covers in his shirt and bare legs. We stank of chocolate milk.

“How does Andrić’s fable end?”

“It’s a happy ending. The sheep keeps dancing. The wolf waits so long to eat her, he doesn’t notice that they’re too close to the village, and the peasants surround him and kill him. The mother gives the dancing sheep a good scolding and the sheep swears she won’t stray so far ever again, and since she is so good, they send her to dancing school.”

I clutched his thin legs. We kissed for a long time. Months had passed since we’d last made love. Now we were suddenly excited.

Dawn was already upon us, a nearby glimmer like a pond in the night, and far away the darkness of the mountains.

 

The next day I went to look for Gojko at the radio station. I stood in the recording studio and waited for him to finish his show. It was late morning, but in there it felt like night. Gojko sat beneath a wan yellow light with his headphones on. His voice, hoarse from cigarettes, rustled through the microphone, sensual and soft. He was reading a poem. When he saw me he blew me a kiss and dedicated Mak Dizdar’s verses to me:

Kako svom izvoru
Da se vratim?
(How will I return
to my source?)

We sat in the entry, by the door, and had a coffee from the little machine.

“What do you want me to say?”

“The truth. What do you think?”

Now and then someone came in, bringing air into the room.

I was there for advice. The coffee in the paper cup was too hot. I spilled some on my shirt.

“Those two want to fuck, that’s what I think.”

I shake my head, puff out my cheeks. I’d like to say something. I wait to recover from the blow. We look out the windows at the inner courtyard, the branches dotted with little dusty flowers.

“Diego is completely crazy about you, out of his mind.” He gets up, goes to the bathroom and comes back with a handkerchief dripping water. “But he’s a man. And a man’s pickle doesn’t follow the same path as his heart. It takes the low road. Through the sheep pens.” He laughs and says the sheep is a clever storyteller. He doesn’t like her, but he’s certain she’d never keep the kid. “She’s young, she wants to have fun. May I?” He rubs the wet handkerchief over the coffee stain. “Take what you need. Stop suffering. Get this damned kid, so we can send him off to war.” He laughs again, but he’s sober.

I look at him. He’s handsome this morning. His blue shirt suits him. So do his glasses. He may be the best person I know, the most sincere, the most alone.

“I’m afraid.”

“Of a sheep?”

Gojko looks at the skin showing beneath the wet silk of my shirt. “What a yearning,” he whispers.

“Why were they shooting on the hills last night?”

“The assholes want to make sure we know they’re there.”

We walk for a while, arm in arm, beneath the white pollen dust coming off the trees.

“Is something going to happen?”

“No. They’ll leave.”

He looks at me, looks again at the pink skin beneath my wet shirt. “Water can’t be divided.”

 

“After I give you what you want I’ll disappear.”

“Maybe we’ll come see you in London, or Berlin. When you’re a rock star. We’ll come to cheer for you.”

“Maybe.”

“You’ll pretend not to know us.”

“No. You won’t really come.”

We saw each other just a few more times, quick, formal encounters. Aska was always in a hurry to get away, agitated, clutching her trumpet case like a shield.

In fact, something had changed.

Diego’s eyes were nervous, his lashes like insects in flight.

They rarely looked at each other, and it was precisely there, in that avoidance, that the knots were being tied. I noticed but didn’t say anything.

All I had to do now was wait. They were the ones pulling the sled. I wasn’t risking a thing. Diego was mine like every drop of my blood. And I wanted our child to be born out of pleasure rather than sadness. I was sick of crooked ghosts, sad women, opaque children. I liked the banquet of her youth.

Aska had become more severe, more inward.

Now it seemed to me that all her nonchalance was false, like the way she dressed and hacked at her hair. She reminded me of the dolls I ruined as a child with markers and scissors.

Diego spoke very little when the three of us met. Every so often, when I said something, he’d nod. The rest of the time he seemed almost inert.

“I don’t know if I can go through with it,” he’d said.

He clung to me like a child, as if he were afraid of losing me. We had agreed: just once. If nothing happened, we’d leave.

He kept asking me, “Are you sure?”

I wanted his child. That was the only thing I knew. I closed my eyes and thought of the baby. I acted calm, spoke only of practicalities. I had become like one of the doctors. I had learned from my torturers. I used the same quiet tone, the same bureaucratic jargon. The cycle was regular. In a week the sheep would be fertile.

 

There were riots and a death. The father of a groom was killed in front of the Orthodox church.

Aska was beside herself.

“They were waving the flag with Chetnik eagles in the heart of the Baščaršija!”

I took Diego’s hand, placed it on Aska’s on the riverside wall and put mine on top.

“Everything will be okay,” I said.

It was a sort of ritual. I stood there feeling the warmth emanating from that tangle of hands, the little nerve endings, the microscopic adjustments, all the tension flowing through that embrace. I thought of the marks on the undersides of our hands, in the dark, those palms one atop the other. And once again I asked if destiny would help us.

Aska tried to withdraw her hand, but I held it down. Then Diego tried to free himself and Aska and I pushed downward with all the weight of our hands. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Diego was restless. They had that carnal appointment, and they could no longer look each other in the eyes. They would look later.

We went into the zoo, walked between the cages and the enclosures. It was windy. A light-colored dust rose up off the ground to dirty the air. The bears were agitated, holed up in a kind of empty tub covered here and there with moss. Aska had insisted we come. It had been years since the last time she visited the zoo. It reminded her of her childhood. She bought a pack of peanuts and fed them to the chimps. She wandered around the cages making funny noises. A peacock answered her. I went off to get a bottle of water.

When I came back, Diego was taking her picture. Nothing was happening. She had stepped into an empty cage, where she was hanging from the bars like a depressed monkey, her red head lolling onto a shoulder. I felt something, the weight of intimacy.

Diego had lowered his Leica and was looking at her with his naked eyes. Aska was walking ahead, her fingers running across the bars.

 

In the middle of the night I call my father. His voice is alert, as if he’d been expecting my call.

“Dad.”

“Dear heart.”

He doesn’t say anything. I hear his breathing, the rustling of his lungs, of his life through this gray, government-issue receiver. It’s been ages since I last called.

“Do you need anything?”

“No.”

“What’s that noise?”

“It’s raining.”

“When are you two coming back?” He tells me about his dog. “I don’t cook anymore. Every night we go out to the Mexican restaurant.” The dog likes meat, my father likes tequila, they’re perfect companions. He makes me laugh. Joking with him is a way of beating this rain, which is getting me down.

“What’s that noise?” he asks again.

Now I’m the one breathing into the receiver. Thunder, I tell him. But it was gunfire, deaf, insolent.

“Be careful.”

I tell him he’s far away and there’s no way he can understand. “People here are mixed together like water, one drop within the next.”

He says the news in Italy isn’t very comforting.

“They’ll bring bad luck,” I grumble, and laugh because I’ve started to sound like Gojko.

I hang up. Diego’s sleeping, one of his long feet hanging out of the bed.

It was Aska who put the date on the calendar, three days, the best ones, the most fertile, the ones right in the middle of her cycle. And instead of a circle she’d drawn a heart. We’d decided to go for the second day, the one in the middle of the heart. We’d piled our six hands on top of each other to celebrate with a propitiatory rite.

Now I thought of that heart. The calendar was right there, hanging in our room. I looked at it every night and counted down the hours.

 

A few days beforehand, we chose the place for their meeting, an inn like a mountain hut, an isolated house at the end of the city, one of the last structures on Mount Trebević. Upstairs there were a few rooms, a single corridor and a couple of bathrooms at the end. We went into one of the spotless rooms, clean-smelling like a clinic. A little barred window looked out onto the woods. Are there thieves? Anela, the owner, had laughed. No, squirrels . They snuck into the rooms to gather crumbs. The bed was covered with a white, hand-embroidered cloth. I lay down. I felt audacious and unconventional, like Gojko, like the third inhabitant of a single heart. Aska and Diego leaned against the wall, two shy little squirrels.