Chapter 15

P ietro is standing in front of the mirror after one of his interminable showers. He raises his bare arms and studies himself at length before coming to ask me if I notice a difference between one muscle and the other. He wants to know if he’s already developed the arm of a tennis player.

“Touch here.”

I don’t see any difference. I touch two long thin rolls of flesh and then the bone just underneath.

“I’ve got to join a gym. I have to lift weights.”

Now he’s sitting on the bed, a towel around his waist. He’s getting the sheets wet but it doesn’t matter because we’re leaving.

I look at his bent naked back, the grains of his backbone, the shoulder blades that stick out of his skin like folded wings.

“I’m ugly,” he says.

He says it all the time. He thinks he’s full of flaws. His shoulders are too narrow, his eyes too big, his lashes too thick, like a girl’s . There’s a little brown mole with hairs growing out of it on his thigh near his groin. He thinks it’s disgusting and because of it refuses to wear anything but knee-length swim trunks at the beach.

“You’re so handsome. What are you talking about?”

He hasn’t had a girlfriend yet. I’m the only woman who ever compliments him, and of course he doesn’t believe me.

The light down over his upper lip makes it look dirty. His teeth, nose and ears are too big because his face hasn’t grown yet. His features resemble something by Picasso, distorted horse eyes in a bean face.

He’ll be gorgeous. You can tell from his smile, from the graceful way he interacts with small children, the way he greets people he barely knows with kisses on each cheek as if they were dear friends.

His passport says he was born in Sarajevo. To him, this city is a noman’s-land where I ended up by mistake because I was following a father he’s never met.

He’s only asked once how he was born. He was in third grade. It was for a homework assignment. We used a glue stick to attach a picture of him as a newborn to a piece of cardboard. “What should I write, Mom?” He had to tell the story of his birth, and of course he asked me. I stood up, opened the fridge and took out a steak. I talked to him over my shoulder, inventing our story as I turned that cold piece of meat over and over.

At the end of the school year I saw his essay on a bulletin board next to his classmates’ essays. I stood there with a plastic cup of orange soda in the middle of that henhouse of mothers I’d never managed to fit in with very well. I was scared of getting too familiar with other mothers. None of them were like me. I stood there alone before my son’s words. The birth he described was trite and sickly sweet, and it was precisely the triteness of it that moved me. We were like everyone else, a loving mother and a chubby newborn baby. Our absurd story was lost among all those orthodox birth stories with their pink and blue ribbons. He’d done a much better job of making things up than I had. He stood next to me, a calm expression in his eyes, the pallor of city life on his face, his father’s spindly frame. The perfect accomplice. “Do you like it, Mom?”

A tear fell in my orange soda, a stupid tear like my life. I didn’t even manage an answer. I just nodded like a pecking hen. I pecked at that long, tepid lie, spread thick with pencil in my child’s uncertain handwriting. His innocence was my cover. He was the one who baptized me his mother, who said, It’s you. Here’s the certificate.

What should I have told him?

Every time I went to see a friend who’d just given birth, ensconced in a nest of white pillows and flowers, every time I saw the splendor and smelled the indescribable smell of just-born flesh, of new baby—even the smell of detergent was enough, or of nipple-disinfectant pads for before nursing—every time I smiled and said, What a lovely baby , I felt a little lonelier, a little uglier. I’d deposit my little welcome gift and leave the padded den in a darker mood than when I arrived. Then I’d wander around for a while like a stray, no longer myself.

I didn’t give birth. You never recover from what you lack. You adapt. You tell yourself other truths. You learn to live with yourself, with nostalgia for life, like old people do.

I didn’t take part in the primal event, the regeneration of myself. I was barred from the banquet that normal women indulge in again and again in sated indifference toward women like me.

Birth changes one’s bones, shifts them around. My grandmother said every birth was a nail pounded into a woman’s body, and that before they die women see the images of all the births they’ve lived through, when their bodies burst open. They see the nails, the traces of their journey. What will I remember when I die?

Pietro wrote that I put him on my stomach and that he fell asleep there. I should have felt shame, but instead I felt peace. Everything else was nails to throw away.

 

Gojko came to get me. I heard him knocking at the door. I wasn’t sleeping. I was lying with my eyes closed on the bed I’d dragged next to the wall at the end of the room. Fear made it impossible for me to pull myself away from that cold wall. Day was just dawning. In normal circumstances I wouldn’t have noticed, but by now I was aware of the slightest variation in the dark.

Gojko didn’t say anything. He was holding a lighter so he could see in the dark. He let it go out, maybe to save the fluid.

“What is it?”

I no longer see his face. I’m imagining it in the reflection of the previous moment, of the little flame that’s just gone out. He moves a hand to his face and leaves it there. He cups his cheek with it like a shell made of flesh as if he wants to protect himself. It’s an unusual, feminine gesture I’ve never seen him make before.

“What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head and mutters.

Fool. Why doesn’t he say something? I’m ready. I’ve been ready since I visited that morgue, since the first snowfall. Jovan has already taught me everything. The body empties itself out like a leaking sandbag. You hear the sand rustle as it falls. Calm is one of Sarajevo’s virtues, a calm you don’t realize you possess, unexpected as the calm of the dead.

I grab my flashlight and shine it on him. He retreats from its light, shakes his head, moves his hand away from his face and spits on the ground.

“Ahhh ...”

I smell brandy. Gojko curses and complains that one of his zub hurts, a tooth, one of the big ones in the back. He says he keeps the brandy in his mouth to cradle his molar. I look at him. One of his cheeks is swollen as if he’d been stung by an insect, and his eyes are listless and half closed.

Then he tells me that the baby is about to be born and that Diego asked him to come for me.

I go back to my room with the flashlight and drag my suitcase out from under my bed. I take out my backpack, which contains the money Dad sent me through Vanda, the volunteer I’d met on the military plane. We met up in a kafana. She’d shaved her head like a Marine. We split a package of sanitary napkins between us like sisters.

 

This chilly dawn may be the prelude to a luminous day. We race along the ruined little lanes of Bjelave.

I first climbed into this car a thousand years ago during the Winter Olympics. Gojko was full of that stupid happiness. He reeked of naïveté and presumption. He sang, Everybody’s got a hungry heart , in English with a Croatian accent and wore faded jeans like Bruce Springsteen’s. He was an intrusive boy, born in Sarajevo . He wanted to impress me and I thought he was pathetic. I’ll never see him again , I thought.

Here we are, buried in this labyrinth of skeletons and boulevards. All of a sudden I think that this crazy, violent moment isn’t the worst thing. The worst is yet to come, when the cannons leave, and the television crews, too, and the only thing left is the gray flank of this city spilling out a silent pain like mold or pus.

“Are you still writing?”

“ No.”

He doesn’t seem sad or even lost. Now he knows the topography of this new, mined city, divided into zones, where you move like a ball in a pinball machine and only the best manage not to end up down the hole. Gojko’s good at pinball. He doesn’t bother looking at the destruction anymore. He’s used to it. He just looks for a free passage, an opportunity.

“What are you thinking?”

He tells me he has a toothache and that all he’s thinking about is his aching molar.

The light in the hospital is dim as the light in a cemetery. Little flashes every so often, then long dark areas and plummeting stairs. I feel the tile floor beneath my feet. It seems to be set directly on mud. An electric cord and then a dangling panel brush against my head. Almost all the wards have been shelled. The beds are parked in the hallways. The bodies look like sandbags in the dark. I try not to look at feet sticking out from under covers and blood-filled IV lines. I move behind Gojko through this tunnel. Figures move toward us, brush against us. Someone yells. Although day is starting to dawn, it feels as if I were advancing through a dirty twilight. A uniformed soldier limps along with the help of a woman in a blue shirt. An old man whose leg finishes at the knee in a bloody bandage sits on a stretcher, smoking a cigarette. Gojko takes my hand and helps me up broken stairs with holes you can see through to the bottom floor. There’s a truce in the labor ward. No one is complaining. A woman bends over her swollen stomach like an exhausted traveler over a suitcase.

Diego is sitting on the last step of one of the railless stairways.

This is not any old dawn. It feels like we’re buried in a flooded mine, as if we were moving slowly through water. Gojko goes off to find someone to pull his tooth, hollering that he’ll do it himself if no one else will, all he needs is a pair of pliers. Diego sees me and stands. I collapse against his smell. I haven’t seen him for three days. He hasn’t come back to our room to sleep.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

A few words and then the cold vapor of our breaths in this maternity ward that feels like a storage room for old scrap metal. There’s no heating. It’s like being outside. One day I’ll have to tell Pietro about this smell of cold and exhaustion, about the way his father’s neck trembled as if he were a goose about to be caught.

“Tell me something.”

“What?”

“Anything.”

I love you is maybe what he wants to hear. We’re sitting on the step. He’s got his head burrowed in my legs.

“I brought the money,” I tell him. “It’s in here.” I touch my backpack. I’m wearing it in front, beneath my parka, rather than on my shoulders, because I was scared I’d be robbed at a checkpoint. Only now do I realize that this backpack is like a pregnant belly. Diego smiles an ancient, disconsolate smile. This bellyful of money contains everything, our fortune and our sorrow.

Is this what I should tell Pietro? Your mommy was pregnant with fifty thousand marks in small bills. They weighed upon her womb, beneath her breasts. Tell him, Look how generous the photographer and I were. Grandpa sold his house at the seaside to help us. It was an enormous amount of money. There were people who bought babies for a pittance in Sarajevo.

I cradle the belly full of money to myself and hold it tight. We hug with its weight between us. It keeps us at a slight distance.

Aska is pacing back and forth in front of the doors to the bathroom stalls. Every so often she stops and leans against the wall between two sinks. I go to her, a few steps across the flooded mine.

The smell of disinfectant isn’t enough to mask the strong odor of clogged toilets. Our breaths are white smoke. We’re in an Arctic lake, buried beneath the ice crust, the three of us together again after so much time.

I’ll have to tell Pietro about this, as well, tell him about this other smell, of prisons and abandoned places, tell him about this encounter.

Aska the trumpet player, Andrić’s undisciplined sheep, the rebel who danced before the wolf. When she looks at me there’s no change in her expression. It’s as if she doesn’t remember me.

And yet we were friends, way back when, before the siege ate up the city. We danced one night, our arms around each other in front of a poster of Janis Joplin. Though she was younger and poorer than I was, she held me up, radiant with her wild future as a musician, and I said, I’m much poorer than you are . Her hair is not as shiny as before. It falls on her neck in a ponytail. The gray light crossing her face reveals no emotion. I look down.

The sheepskin coat Diego bought at Markale Market hangs open over her dressing gown. Her stomach is gigantic as it protrudes from her thinness. She holds her hands behind her, on her kidneys, and leans her head against the wall. Diego’s next to her but in a certain sense it’s as if he weren’t there, as if he’d left us alone. Aska’s belly is big and still.

“Can I touch it?”

The voice rises up out of the depths and I hardly recognize it as my own. She moves her arms away from her body to make space for me and I reach out a hand.

And I’ll have to tell Pietro about this, too. One day before I die I’ll have to tell him about this hand that moves away from me toward him.

My hand wavers tentatively, then lands delicately on Aska’s belly like a lunar module.

I’m no one. I’m just an invader, an iron bird on a planet that doesn’t belong to me.

But then, naturally, I know what to do. It’s like taking off your clothes, stripping down to go into the water. It’s freezing cold, but it’s as if my hand were glued to the belly with warm snow. I’m here, and I’d never leave. I breathe.

This is the only water now, amniotic, submerged.

“Did you bring the money?”

I nod with my whole body and point to the backpack hanging off my front beneath my parka. That belly full of money, the most pitiful thing of all, the thing that really makes me miserable.

“Dobra ,” she says. Good.

Then I feel a blow against the hand resting on her stomach. It’s like a head butting against me, the head of a fish below the ice.

I scream. I feel that body from the inside and scream.

What was it? A foot? An elbow? A fist?

But I don’t see anything else, just a blue mud sky and a wave of nausea that moves down from my head. I know I’m fainting, because I haven’t had a thing to eat, because that blow went straight to the empty place between my pelvic bones, the parts that on a skeleton are flat and white.

I’m a broken sandbag. I feel the grains descend and move roughly through my body, all the way down to my feet. My head is empty.

I open my eyes into Gojko’s dirty hair. He pushes his bottle under my nose.

“Breathe, beautiful woman. Smell this marvel.”

It’s brandy from Montenegro, the legendary 13 July brand, a real rarity. They must be a little drunk already. Diego’s hands are warm despite the cold and Gojko is euphoric because the tooth’s out. He opens his mouth to show me the black hole, baring his bloodied teeth as he laughs.

I see Aska through my liquid trance. She’s resting her head against the wall. Then she collapses to all fours between the sinks.

“Do you need something?”

“A cigarette.”

I ask Gojko for one of his Drinas. I kneel down and put it, already lit, into her mouth.

She trembles as she draws in and her face contorts in pain.

Now I feel a strong pain in my back. I remember it well, this forked pain that drips down my back and insinuates itself into the deep soft parts like two blades piercing my kidneys and pushing toward my groin.

It’s Aska’s pain sticking to me. I wasn’t ready for this. I move away and go back to sit on the step.

Diego moves to Aska’s side and massages her back a little. Then he sidles toward me, head lowered.

Now she’s ugly, incapacitated with exhaustion like a rabid dog. Her cigarette falls to the filthy floor. I’ll have to tell Pietro about how his mother’s head banged against the base of a sink and about the cigarette I’d like to throw away but can’t because she’s hollering in her own language for me to give it back to her.

I put the butt back in her mouth. She puffs out smoke in spurts. Maybe it helps the pain. She yells again like before, as if she had a rag in her mouth, a stopper.

Women know how to hide themselves, bury themselves like the earth at night, but when it’s time to give birth they bare their souls and their courage as the nail is driven in. Fate pounds the nail and a new skeleton passes through your own like a river through a river.

I’ve remained back in the dark of the earth, eclipsed. I haven’t had to reveal myself.

Aska is forced to come out in the open. How many times, looking at the hills, have I thought of her stomach pointing at me like a cannon?

“You have to breathe,” Gojko says.

“Who told you?”

“My mother.”

We all breathe, swallowing the air into our bellies and exhaling it in bursts, like broken stoves. Aska spits out a few breaths along with us, then groans and pushes us away. Gojko tells her that giving birth is like getting a tooth pulled and that in a while she’ll feel as good as he does. He opens his mouth wide and shows her the hole. Aska wants another cigarette. Gojko looks at me. “Get ready, baby. This kid’s going to stink of Sarajevo, like an ashtray.” He laughs, and if it weren’t such a tragedy, it would be a farce. We’re like four crazies in a madhouse crawling on all fours around the labor pains of the sheep.

She pulls herself up and rolls like a big insect along the wall toward the only window in that cesspit. It’s covered with military plastic that’s been torn down the middle, maybe to let some air through, to let out the bad smells. Aska stands in that hole and looks at the sky lit up by the glare of a tracer bullet. She looks at Sarajevo, the burnt houses, the soccer field that now serves as a cemetery.

I’ll have to tell Pietro about her gaze as she stands there smoking and contemplating the dead city frozen in cold and mud.

These are his last moments inside her.

Her living belly exposes itself for the last time to the Sarajevan roulette.

Why does she do it? The snipers are staked out not so far from here in the skeletons of the houses to the west. With that lit cigarette, she’s a beacon.

Her belly is the dome of a mosque, the Ferhadija Mosque where I saw her prostrate herself.

But I let her do it. She can decide for us all.

There’s a rock that’s hardened in the depths of my body over the years. Now my blighted ova, one on top of the other, are mounds of fresh earth like all the corpses dated 1992.

It’s Diego who takes her by the arm and pulls her away from the window. They stand side by side and breathe, with their shoulders against the wall. She gasps, her neck twisted toward the broken ceiling. He looks at her. Perhaps he looked at her with that same tenderness, the same longing, when they made love.

Should I tell this to Pietro?

Once again, with the intimacy of this gaze, they take everything away from me. Her final gesture is to take Diego’s hand, pull it to herself and bite it as if it were a rag between her teeth, as if it were a love about to leave.

“Dosta ... dosta ,” she moans. “Enough, enough. Get it out of me.”

Finally someone comes. A woman in a nurse’s uniform and short wool socks takes her away.

Everything takes place behind a white plastic curtain just a couple of meters away. As she went toward the stretcher, Aska looked at me. This look remains with me like a weight pushing down on my shoulders, the sluggish gaze of the refugees, of people who separate themselves from themselves.

It’s over very quickly. All we can see behind that white plastic curtain are shadows of limbs and agitated gestures. One of Aska’s feet dances in the air. I’ll have to tell Pietro about that foot, about the shadows that hold our misery and our fears.

 

Then we see the midwife’s back and elbows. It looks like she’s digging. She speaks in loud bursts. Aska whimpers.

Our eyes are glued to the black shadows on the white curtain.

Bursts of gestures, hands digging in a body like the hands that have begun digging an escape route toward the free territories beneath the Butmir Airport.

And now the whole war is here, on this curtain, and it’s as if there were a thousand hands, like the thousands of marchers on April 6, all those people yelling for peace. It looks like a long retreat through the snow, columns of exhausted soldiers limping across this curtain.

The midwife digs, pulls, drags, knots.

We stand motionless against the wall like statues beneath the Eternal Flame.

Should I tell Pietro what I was thinking about as he came into the world?

The snipers, their tragic lives. That interview I saw. The boy has blue eyes and he smiles. He says it’s just like shooting at rabbits. And I see the blue child. He’s playing with a sled, pulling it up the hill by a rope. It’s hard work every time. On the way down it goes by in a flash, but climbing up ... But it’s worth it. It’s a beautiful sunlit day. The snow is a fresh white covering over the black. The sniper drinks rakija, smokes a cigarette and throws the stillglowing butt onto the ground. Then he takes up his spade, his gun. One day his mother brought him into the world and baptized him. The sniper wears a cross around his neck and believes in the divine trinity of Greater Serbia, or at least that’s what he seems to recall, because although only a few months have passed, everything’s changed and he’s no longer sure why he climbed up into the mountains with the others to fire upon his city, upon his neighborhood. He raises his rifle, puts his still eye to the viewfinder and looks for a target. He likes looking. It gives him a thrill that descends from his chest to his gut and then his testicles. He chooses the very slope, the very snow-covered path where he used to play as a child. Like all men he misses his childhood. Not that he’s sorry. When he walked through the mud to cross the river and march up into the mountains, he knew he wouldn’t go back. There are other children now on the slope between two gutted buildings. The building on the left is the elementary school he went to. For a moment he thinks of the teacher who spread pašteta on a slice of bread and gave him a piece. He smiled and said, Hvala . He liked that teacher. He tries but can’t remember if she was a Serb or a Muslim. Now the school is a skeleton like the frame of an unfinished building that someone set on fire. The children are playing. He saw them arrive. He didn’t expect them. He never knows what will come along, what will capture his attention, which target, which cilj . He likes the word cilj because it’s a clean word from his everyday work life. Man, woman, child —words like these dirty his mission. Children are small targets, maleni ciljevi , and he tends not to fire on small targets. They move around too much. But today it’s so easy it’s an invitation. The maleni ciljevi look like rabbits scattered about on the snow. Their mothers let them come out because they couldn’t keep their children in all day in the damp of the shelters, and maybe they wanted some freedom to do laundry and prepare soup from bits of grass. The sniper looks for a target. The children are still spots on the snow, little figures with blurry outlines. He turns the small lever that regulates the viewfinder on his precision rifle and sees a mix of snow, bits of sweaters, bits of faces. Too close; the image is fuzzy. He adjusts the focus, moves closer, zooms in, pulls them out of the unknown, the snow. Now the maleni ciljevi are children. He walks a bit with his viewfinder, takes a few steps with them, follows their game. He used to play that game himself, sliding down inside a plastic box with his brother beside him. Once he hit a big rock sticking out of the snow. He wonders if it’s still there. He looks for it and finds it. He likes finding signs of his past life even though he’ll never go back. He feels no emotion. It’s like recognizing a territory. This is important for a hunter. His gaze comes to rest on a child. He doesn’t know why he picks that child and not another. Maybe because he isn’t wearing a hat. The child’s forehead is bare, and when he turns the sniper can see the depression in the back of his neck.

Is this what I should tell Pietro? That as he was coming into the world I was thinking about the nape of the blue child’s neck, the line where hair starts growing, where life begins? I could see it, in front of me, as if through a sniper’s viewfinder.

My heart beats inside the sniper’s. I’m the one who chooses the child. I choose him because his neck is uncovered and his hair is short, compact, a fur-covered head. His hair smells. The sniper can smell that smell. He had hair like that as a child, thick, hardened with sweat, noiseless. The child is taking the last steps of his life over the snow. He laughs. His cheeks are red. He breathes out the white smoke of cold and drags his sled up the hill.

The viewfinder on the rifle moves with the child’s steps, climbs with him up the snow. The sniper doesn’t know why this job fell to him, doesn’t know quite how it happened. It was circumstances. There are bags of earth piled around him in the snow. He could change his aim and fire at one of those bags. It wouldn’t make any difference to him. The fact is that for every target he strikes, he gets a nice prize in deutschmarks, and he needs that prize because a soldier’s take-home pay is low and he wants to buy a car, a BMW with a convertible roof. He thinks about that car, the black seats, the cigarette lighter in the dashboard, thinks about the wind that will make his hair come alive. The rabbit is a child. He moves along, his hair like a furry cap, and below it the nape of his neck. The sniper’s body is glued to the rifle. Together they are a single piece. It’s the moment of the act, the penis hardening mechanically. The bullet’s desire is all that counts. The sniper lets the bullet guide him. He bends his finger, then releases. It’s a dangerous moment, the bullet’s silent journey through the white air. Like a sperm slowly moving beneath the lens of a microscope. It could encounter something, an obstacle that would change its path. This is the best moment, not quite pure pleasure because it’s also painful, like an ejaculation delayed for too long. He feels the blow as the rifle recoils into his shoulder. The air is white. The bullet strikes the nape of the child’s neck. The child falls facedown. The others flee, leaving behind their sleds to run like scared rabbits. The sniper takes another look, circling with his lens, and casts an eye on the footprints that remain. He likes the silence as he checks over his work, when it’s just him and his target. The hole in the nape of the child’s neck is perfect. The little target, the maleni cilj , died on the spot and didn’t even slide when he fell. The sniper won’t have to waste any other shots to finish him off.

Now he’s smiling with crumpled cheeks and motionless eyes because his heart is dead. He knows that it will be a while before they come to get the child. They’ll wait until he leaves, until his shift is over. The child’s face is turning blue in the snow. The cigarette butt that the sniper threw on the ground is still glowing. Every now and then a journalist climbs up and says, Shoot so I can film you while you shoot , and the sniper shoots for the journalist. Then he gives an interview, arms crossed, the cross hanging on his camouflage jacket, his black beret. It’s like firing at rabbits . He smiles and then the crust of his face hardens. A wretched stupor remains, the stupor of the devil as he looks at himself.

 

The newborn baby cries through its clogged mucous membranes like a whining cat. Only Diego takes a step toward his child. Then he stops. He comes back to me and takes my hand.

The woman calls and beckons us over. She’s showing us the child. It’s a boy. None of us knew what he was, and yet here’s Pietro.

“Pietro.”

I look at him, but I don’t see him right away. I’ll see him later. Now I swallow him whole. I open my mouth in astonishment and he jumps into my throat. The midwife is cleaning him at the end of the stretcher. She turns him over and rubs him with a rag she dips in a metal bowl. It’s freezing cold. His body is tiny and dark. He looks like a mollusk covered with seaweed. The woman works quickly. There’s little poetry in the way she rubs at him. Pulling fish out of the sea is her job. We hear the wail of a siren. The light flickers and then there’s an explosion, but no one pays it much attention. The woman curses the noise as one might curse noisy neighbors. The war is inside her, in her arms accustomed to extracting babies.

“Odijeća ... odijeća .”

She wants clothes for the baby. She looks at us and asks if we’ve brought them.

I shake my head and open my mouth again. Nothing comes out but a sigh because I’m sorry. It hadn’t crossed my mind. Diego tells her to wait. He opens his camera bag and pulls out a tiny garment, a little hand-knit woolen sleeper, white that’s gone slightly yellow.

“Where’d you get that?”

He bought it at the market. I’m amazed he thought of it. The woman takes the sleeper and slips the baby into it. It’s much bigger than he is. The sleeves cover his hands and the legs hang past his feet like empty socks. She hands him to Gojko, maybe because he’s the only Sarajevan in the room, or maybe because she thinks he’s the father. Gojko doesn’t say a thing, just nods and moves his chin as if he were worried about intoxicating the baby with his brandy-smelling breath. He hasn’t held a tiny baby since Sebina was small, and that happened in another world, another life, far from this rust, this cold, in a hospital that smelled of raspberry tea.

He moves closer with his nose and, careful to keep his mouth closed, breathes in.

“He smells good,” he says.

Should I tell this to Pietro? Say, Look at this Bosnian buffalo, this survivor, this tour guide you’re not so sure you like because he doesn’t have much patience and he plays rough at soccer. He was the first to hold you in his arms, the first to smell your newborn baby smell .

I look at Diego but Diego’s not looking at his son in his friend’s arms.

Should I tell this to Pietro? Your father wasn’t looking at you, he was looking at the sheep, whose belly was gone, her red head limp on the pillow .

His expression was so intense he didn’t notice me or my embarrassment. The two of them were alone, this I remember, alone and immersed in the past.

She wasn’t looking at the baby, either. She’d never looked at him.

And now it really felt like I was standing beside a bed that wasn’t my own, spying on two lovers as they swore an oath to each other.

Everything had happened on the end of that bed: the changing of the baby, the makeshift bath. Aska’s legs were curled up, perhaps in reaction to the pain. The midwife was getting ready to leave. She was patting Aska’s folded legs. Aska was sitting on something, a metal container for the placenta.

The woman says she’ll be back to check.

Finally Gojko hands me the baby. It’s as if he’s handing over a meteorite.

I smell him, too, the smell of an old soul being born again to hope among men. I still don’t know if he’s my child, if he’ll be mine. I’ll have to wait until that day when he’s in the third grade for him to baptize me. But in the meantime I hold him, and I’m already the wolf, the sniper who passes back across the snowy field to look at the hole in the nape of the child’s neck.

 

The midwife takes the white curtain down and drags the shadow screen away and all that’s left is this newborn baby, wrinkly as an old apple, dressed in a sleeper that reminds me of a worn sock.

I study him in the dim light as the sand rises back up through my body and my organs return to their places. I feel my heart now, like a tongue of flame and pain beneath my ribs.

Should I tell Pietro that he’s given me back my heart, that I no longer felt it and now it’s pounding?

The woman comes back, pushes on Aska’s belly and sticks her hands beneath the covers. The sheep spits out the placenta.

As the midwife removes the metal container from beneath Aska’s body, I see for a moment her bloody leg and her sex, a bloody hole like the hole in Gojko’s mouth. It doesn’t shock me particularly. Life is the same color as war, snow and blood, trenches like intestines in the mud.

When the woman passes by me, I see for just a moment the gray package of the placenta. Now I no longer need the sheep. She’s served her purpose, like that inner membrane that kept the child alive and is now just something to throw away.

I should feel sorry for her, but I’m consumed with the fear that she’ll change her mind, start screaming, retract her consent.

She lost her family. Maybe she’ll want to keep her baby.

I’m afraid she’ll put up a fight. I’m looking for signs of restlessness because I don’t trust her. I’ve smelled the baby, the smell of Diego’s blood.

I hear Velida’s words. They fall from her wild eyes, which I dream of every night. Don’t be like me. Don’t bow down to Death. You’ve got to fight, Gemma. Seize life .

 

The money. I have to give her the money, all those deutschmarks in small bills as she requested, just like the prize the snipers get for every successful hit. She’ll buy a car, too, a convertible BMW to drive off in.

I’m myself again. For me the war has ended. The blue child is buried. Diego’s child is alive. This sheep, this lesser creature, must be banished from view like the dirty sack of her placenta.

There are no laws, there is no justice. Courage is all there is.

Gojko hollers that he’ll write a poem when he gets back home. It’s been ages since he wrote, but he’ll write one now to celebrate the birth of this child. He declaims drunkenly:

I have the feet of a pig and the tail of a mouse
life drags me upwards like an elephant in flight
Adieu, ghosts. Today I’m not with you ...

“Who are you with?”

He takes another sip.

“I’m here with my friends.”

But the truth is that we are ghosts looking at our reflections in a metal pit and mourning life.

 

I went to the bathroom and took off the backpack. I sat on the toilet and gave Gojko a bundle containing a thousand marks.

“What do you need it for?”

He took our passports, too.

“I’ll be back soon.”

I emptied the backpack into a pillowcase and went to Aska in the bed.

“Here.”

With a tired gesture she pulled the pillowcase swollen with marks to her side and hid it under the covers.

The newborn lay in a metal bed, far from his mother. The midwife had folded a piece of cloth, set him on top of it, and left him there. He hadn’t moved. Outside, the explosions were starting up, closer and closer, along with random bursts from the Katyusha rockets. The baby was used to those noises. Aska was sleeping, too, her head under the covers. She woke just a couple of times to ask for something to drink.

Another woman came in, younger than the first, and explained how to take care of the baby, how to change him. She pulled his tiny little legs out of his sleeper and showed us what to do. But they didn’t have diapers, so she gave us some gauze and pieces of cotton. The baby didn’t need to eat yet. He let her shake him like a bundle of rags. He hadn’t cried yet. Now he was alone again in that stretcher, the roll of cloth behind his back. The girl asked if the mother planned on breast-feeding. I shook my head. She didn’t say anything, just looked at Aska’s body on the bed. She was used to exhausted women. She apologized and asked us for a hundred marks. She was sorry to make us pay but she definitely was not the one who would pocket the money. She came back with a can of formula that had already been opened and a glass bottle that had already been used. It was the first intact piece of glass I’d seen in ages. I put everything in my backpack.

Now the war was coming to our aid. No one asked us any questions. No one seemed interested in keeping that newborn baby in the hospital so near the line of fire. The two of us were foreigners and we could leave the city no one could leave. The girl asked us how the child would be traveling.

“By plane. We’re waiting.”

“Are you journalists?”

“ Yes.”

She gave us a letter for her sister, who was in a center for refugees in Milan.

The explosions were under way again, and so were the desperate journeys of the ambulances and the makeshift cars that picked up the wounded. It was daylight, but the child did not wake.

Finally Diego looked at him.

And it’s this gaze I should tell Pietro about, leave out the rest and tell him about Diego’s eyes, the eyes of a dog as it looks at another dog. Here’s our little manger scene, wild eyes, trembling hands, thoughts in flight.

Gojko comes back with the man who’s helped us, a drugged-out survivor face like the people who sell news to the journalists at the Holiday Inn. There’s a humanitarian flight due to return to Italy in the afternoon. They’ve been to the UN Headquarters and got our names on the list. He gives us our passports and the baby’s birth certificate, which is all we’ll need to get through. I read. Their language, our names, Diego’s name next to the word otac , father, mine beside majka , mother.

This odorless miracle hardly seems possible.

I hug Gojko.

“How’d you manage?”

No one bothered filling anything out when we entered the hospital because they don’t have any forms anymore. Our passports and the money did the trick.

Gojko lets me shake him like a bag.

“Nowadays certain things are easy.”

He wouldn’t have done it for anything in the world. He’s the type who would beat up the black marketeers, the profiteers getting fat off the war. But he did it for me. Now, I imagine, he’ll never want to see me again.

Aska is sitting on the bed. She clutches the pillowcase full of deutschmarks. She’s feeling better, although there’s a yellow, anemic tinge to her skin.

Thank you , I told her.

She nodded. It looked like maybe she finally wanted to cry, but there was no time.

We go. The sheep has been excluded from the documents, from history. On his stomach, hidden beneath the rough wool, there’s a knotted bit of cord where this baby no bigger than a hand was connected to the flesh of the sheep. The bit of cord will dry up and fall off and leave behind a seashell from a distant sea. The baby won’t stay in the valley of the wolves. He won’t ever be a rabbit, a maleni cilj.

 

This time the soldiers on duty are from Ukraine. They help us into a white armored vehicle. I turn toward Gojko. I don’t know it, but it will be sixteen years before we meet again. As always in Sarajevo, it’s as if I were saying goodbye to a dead man,

“Čuvaj se .” Take care of yourself.

He’s the one who spoke with the soldiers and used the rest of the money to convince them. The UN shuttle to the airport has its price. Now we’re inside the white turtle as it sets out on its journey. There’s an infernal racket. The baby bobs like a doll to the trembling of the armored vehicle but doesn’t wake up. Who is this baby who lets himself be carried along weightlessly, soullessly, like a foot in a sock? He’s everything I wanted, the reason we crossed this hell, and now I’m so exhausted I could drop him. We can feel the armored vehicle climbing over wreckage beneath our feet. One of the Ukrainian soldiers laughs and asks us in English about our baby. He reaches over to move the coverlet so he can see the baby’s face.

We stop at a checkpoint. The soldier leans out the window to talk with a militiaman. This friendly exchange between a Serbian aggressor and a Ukrainian from the UN ends with the Serbian three-fingered salute.

We climb out of the vehicle and go into the dark box of the airport. Diego tells me what to say, what to do. We’re nearing the checkpoints. A thin woman dressed in camouflage looks at me. She’s got cheekbones like a horse. I’m afraid of her gaze. I lower my eyes. I huddle close to the little group of civilians traveling with us. They all wear bulletproof vests over their parkas. No one feels safe. This is the last and perhaps most frightening gateway of the siege. All these soldiers seem to hate us. They’re the sharks of war. They know the mental state of their prisoners. The silence is tense as they smell our fear and maybe even have fun toying with us. It feels like they could start shooting at us at any moment. We move warily, avoiding sudden movements. All of us are scared something will happen. The Serbs often bomb the airport even though it’s in their hands. In the broken glass of a mirror, I see the little houses of Butmir, their roofs flopping over frameworks of beams. Now all of a sudden everyone is yelling. There’s fighting on the Dobrinja front. The air is freezing. I bend over the baby. His little nose, the size of one of my fingernails, is cold as ice. I breathe onto him. Diego rubs my back, an exhausted, mechanical caress. Then he bends over to look at the baby.

“You have nothing to be afraid of.”

And I don’t know if these words are meant for his son or for me. Or for himself.

All of a sudden they tell us to get up and run. A gigantic UN soldier escorts us to the tarmac. A police officer beside a door without glass checks for our names on the list before letting us out. It’s a rapid operation. We move forward, heads lowered like livestock. I hand over my passport with the certificate from the hospital. The police officer hasn’t noticed the bundle in my arms. His gaze is set on a group of soldiers running below the control tower. Maybe he’s waiting for a signal. I’m waiting for the red stamp, just like an animal. My heart has stopped. The police officer barely lifts his chin to look at the baby wrapped in the coverlet. It’s five in the afternoon. It’s already dark. The police officer’s face is rough with cold. He has a wide red nose. I can’t even feel my arms. I worry again that I’ll drop the baby. The man moves a hand toward the coverlet and widens the opening where the little face is hidden. A strange expression crosses his face, surprise and bitter dismay. He withdraws his hand and lets me go. I take a few steps in the chill. Bursts of wind come down from Mount Igman and raise snow that whitens the runway. I turn because I feel the emptiness, an emptiness I recognize because I’ve been carrying it around for months like an omen though I crushed it deep down inside. Diego is no longer behind me. I’ve lost him. I turn, but I know that looking back is useless because I already lost him a long time ago. I know now that earlier he was bidding us farewell.

You have nothing to be afraid of .

 

And perhaps I should tell his son about the way that emptiness felt, the sensation of life in free fall. Orphans, we take our first steps, the uncertain steps of some long-legged beast who’s just been born and must stand up right away in order to survive.

I look back at the barely illuminated hole of the airport, already distant in the darkness dirtied by swirling sleet. I see nothing but silhouettes, shadows. I don’t understand what’s happening. Diego is next to the police officer. They’re making him wait. In the meantime they let the others pass, two journalists who run past me. Diego waves both his arms and yells. He’s telling me to run, to get away from there.

I glide forward with my head turned behind me, toward him. They’re firing to the east. There’s a glare of tracer bullets.

I climb up and throw myself into that metal belly. I wait, gripping the door, my face stiff with cold and wind that cuts like a blade. I’ve set the baby on a bench next to a military backpack. Maybe I could leave him there. He’d get to Italy no matter what. Someone would take care of him. I could put his birth certificate in his coverlet and call Dad from a satellite phone at the Holiday Inn. Yes. I could throw myself off this plane, which never even turned off its engines, and go back to that glass door without glass, go back to the body of my love.

Should I tell all this to Pietro as well? Tell him I thought about abandoning him as I stood with my body hanging in the freezing wind of the runway?

“Why did they stop my husband?”

“He lost his passport.”

The soldier is a tall boy with a helmet and a Venetian accent. He apologizes and says there’s nothing they can do. They unloaded the humanitarian aid packages and now they have to go back. Those are their orders. They didn’t even know they’d be taking on passengers. I look at Mount Igman, petrified in the cold.

I’m a lucky guy.

Oh, really?

Very lucky .

Years earlier, his luck fell out of the sky along with a heavy snowfall that blocked all the departing planes and I wanted to slap him because he’d won. That slap is still stuck in my frozen hand as it grips the ladder while the soldiers tell me to move because they have to close the door.

I didn’t manage to do it. I didn’t manage to go back down that ladder, to leave Pietro, choose another destiny.

The wind throws me backward. The runway is immense and black. A bullet could get me. I collapse into the plane. I want to be alive when the plane climbs into the sky.

The truth is that I made my choice and Diego knows it. I would never have left empty-handed, but now I have this bundle to consign to the world. I’m taking the best part of him, this new life unsullied by any pain, and I can almost see his smile. I press up against the only opening to the outside. The plane is moving. I look at the boy from Genoa for the last time.

He’s standing there beside the policeman, his thin body black and distant against the weak bubble of light let off by the airport with no glass, no personnel, no flights. His young face, haggard like an old man’s, looks up at this C-130 as its wheels move along through the sleet. He looks at us, at what he’s losing.

He stayed on the ground, on that dirty ground, and I’ll never know whether or not his passport really fell in the snow.

I’m a lucky guy.

Oh, really?

Very lucky .

The plane goes straight for the sky. They put a belt around my body and order me to hold the baby tight. No circling around. When planes take off from this siege they aim straight for the sky, because a missile could still strike. The engines are flaming mouths. The plane moves upward vertically. Our heads whip backward. Bags roll toward the back. You feel the climb, the violent effort to cut gravity. It’s a difficult, wartime levitation. My eardrums are burning. I hang from my seat and clutch my bundle.

 

Then comes the truce. We’ve reached an altitude of nine thousand meters. Now not even the most sophisticated missile could reach the humanitarian plane flying over Mount Igman. My neck returns to its place. My bones still hurt from being contracted. The roar of the engines abates and that’s when I hear the voice. The bundle is crying. So he’s alive. He hasn’t died of cold or fright. I hold him in my arms like a loaf of bread. I push the coverlet aside. His face is red with life. His mouth is wide open in a violent, toothless howl. Who are you , I ask him, a sheep or a wolf?

The newborn’s wide-open mouth with its bare gums is like an old man’s or a bird’s.

He was quiet until takeoff, quiet for as long as he was down in the womb of war, quiet and immobile as if he’d never been born, as if he knew that a mere whimper could cost him his life. Now, at an altitude of nine thousand meters, he can finally be born, up in the sky where the missiles can’t reach us. He cries, makes himself heard, demands attention.

In sixteen years, when a friend asks him why he was born in Sarajevo, he’ll say, It was by chance, like babies born on airplanes .

And I’ll stop still, breathless, and lean against the wall. Once again I’ll hear his cries as he came to life when the C-130 reached nine thousand meters.

I look out through the opening. I can’t see anything, just blackness and the white glow of the moon in its midst. I remember something Diego used to do. He’d take my pinky finger into his mouth and hold it there, sucking on it every now and then until he fell asleep, and then I was the one who kept it there. My hands are filthy. I wash my pinky with my saliva, suck on it to clean it, then stick it in his wailing mouth. He sucks on it a little bit and then falls asleep, exactly like his father. And I kiss him for the first time, resting my lips on that tiny forehead.

 

That night we crossed the velvet carpet of the Adriatic and then we were there. When I got off the plane my hair was glued to my head. I was wearing a torn and filthy parka and carrying a limp backpack and a baby in a coverlet. I found a restroom and looked at myself in the mirror, an entire, intact terrible wall. The woman looking back at me with her bony face and her wide, absent pupils was a wild animal. I stank, the stink of Sarajevo, of war, of confinement. I hadn’t noticed the smell before but I smelled it now in that clean bathroom. I didn’t know what to do. There were two sinks. I put the baby in one of them. I left him in that ceramic cradle and washed myself in the other sink, slowly taking off my jacket and lifting my T-shirt. I rinsed my face. There was a fresh scab on my cheek and a dark mustache on my forehead. There was something else, as well, an opaque patina like pottery that’s lost its glaze and holds the signs of time and dirt.

The door opened, and a man came in. He glanced at me in the fluorescent light. I was standing there in my bra, the bones of my rib cage sticking out of my skin. He was wearing a dark uniform. He smiled.

“This is the little boys’ room.”

I clutched my T-shirt in front of me to cover myself. He closed one of the doors behind me. I heard him urinate. He came out. I hadn’t moved, hadn’t even put on my T-shirt.

 

The man goes to the other sink. He’s tall, with heavy footsteps and wide shoulders. He’s wearing a uniform with a big leather belt around his waist. He raises his eyes and meets mine in the mirror. He’s just a man who’s taken a piss and has to wash his hands, but I don’t know that. Wolves piss and wash their hands, too. I’m afraid of men in uniform. I’m looking for my boy, who’s as thin as I am and has long unkempt hair like mine and my same story in his eyes.

The man looks at me in the bathroom mirror.

“Whose child is this?”

Giuliano’s whole life is right there, in that bathroom he’s come into by chance. Until just a moment earlier, he’d planned to stop for a piss when he got on the highway. He was in a hurry to get away from a day full of humanitarian aid packages and refugees to be sent to welcome centers. He made sure warm meals were distributed along with snacks for the children. He held the smallest ones in his arms and filled out and stamped bureaucratic paperwork. He looks in the mirror at the newborn baby in the sink and at this woman clutching a rag to herself. Her shoulder blades are bluish under the fluorescent lights. Maybe she’s a refugee who for some reason did not board the bus and came instead to hide in this restroom with her baby. She has eyes like an animal on the edge of a cliff.

“Whose child is this?”

Now he notices that the woman is crying without moving, without even blinking an eye, huge tears that fall like pearls. Instinctively he would like to gather them up like pieces of a broken necklace and give them back to her. He knows the gaze of refugees, of people who seek in his eyes confirmation of their own existence, as if it were up to him to let them live. It’s difficult to maintain eye contact with them.

The man looks at me. He has a broad face, compact and Italian, and a shiny, bald forehead.

“Whose child is this?”

Giuliano doesn’t know that the child will belong to him, that he’ll be the one to bring him to school and to the pediatrician’s. He doesn’t know that he will live for this child. We endure a long moment of placid consternation in that restroom where destiny casts its net.

The baby is dirty, a ball of confused flesh, abandoned in a sink, the sky in a hole.

“He’s mine.”

I race to grab my bundle.

“Excuse me.”

I lower my head in self-defense.

The man smiles. He has nice teeth. I see them float beneath my eyes, which are sticky with old tears that descend abruptly like pieces of ice falling off rocks.

“I take it you’re Italian?”

“Yes, I’m Italian.”

I leave the bathroom in a hurry and walk through the dark hangar. I don’t know where to go. I have to get myself to the train station and find a train to Rome. Or find a hotel. Call my father. I have to change the baby. He stinks. I stink, too. He must be hungry. Fuck, he must be hungry. If I don’t feed him, I might kill him. Fuck. Where’s the war? Where are the sandbags? Where’s the ice? Where’s Mount Trebević? Where are the snipers hiding? The truth is, I can’t handle peace. I can’t even handle my own footsteps. They’re going to figure out that the baby isn’t mine. Here there’s no war. Here there are no bombed-out hospitals to protect me. Here we’re in the legality of peacetime. I have to get out of here. They’ll arrest me. They’ll do tests and discover that the baby isn’t mine, that the birth certificate is fake, that I bought it. I won’t go far away, I’ll just take a few steps in the dark and stop to die out in the open against a wall with the baby hidden like a dog, like a dead puppy. Where is the boy with long hair? Where is my favorite orphan? Where is the baby’s father? Only he can save me, because the baby has his genes. He was supposed to be the pass that would get me through, but he didn’t come with us. He lost his passport in the snow. He lied. I’m cold. My back is bare. My parka’s falling off. I set it over my shoulders to get out of that restroom as quickly as possible, to get away from the man in uniform who’s probably following me because he must have understood there’s something strange going on. A mother doesn’t leave her own child in a sink just to rinse her face in the next sink over, just to look at herself in the mirror and cry.

I see a bench and sit down. I set the baby down next to me and slowly put my clothes back on, my sweater, my parka.

A boy comes over to me. He can’t be more than twenty. He looks like Sandro, a boy I was friends with in high school. He has the same too-red, too-full lips and the same round eyes like two hazelnuts. Who is he? What does he want? Why is Sandro coming toward me from the high school desk he covered with graffiti: LONG LIVE CHE GUEVARA, LONG LIVE PUSSY?

“Excuse me, ma’am. Where are you going?”

Slightly inclined in my direction, he stands there looking at me. He isn’t Sandro, not with this southern accent and this uniform.

“I don’t know.”

The boy points toward the silhouette standing near the door. The man from the restroom is waiting on the threshold.

“The captain wants to know if you need a ride somewhere.”

“To prison?”

The boy laughs and reveals teeth that are too small for his big lips. He likes my joke.

“I’m taking the captain to Rome, to the military hospital.”

We run together to the car with CARABINIERI and a red stripe on the side. Inside there’s an incomparable peace. The seats smell good, like new leather. The black perfumed spoon of this powerful sedan welcomes me and takes me toward home along a road paved with normal asphalt, without holes, without barricades. It’s smooth as a satin ribbon. For a moment I feel like a poor little creature, a deer hit by a kindhearted driver who’s now taking me to the veterinarian’s. The fake Sandro is driving with his cap on. The captain is sitting bareheaded next to him, reading a newspaper beneath the interior light.

Before I got into the car he said, “We should have a car seat for your baby, one of those egg-shaped ones for newborns. It’s illegal to carry him like that.”

I smiled a stupid, shaky smile.

“You’re right,” I said. I waited. “What should I do?”

He said, “There’s nothing we can do about it now. Please, have a seat.”

I felt a bitter crazy laugh crackling inside me. It was full of black humor, like the jokes of the Sarajevans. The baby I’m carrying is some sort of prehistoric crab who’s just escaped a war, and yet the moment he lands on these smooth roads he already needs an egg-shaped car seat to survive. How idiotic peacetime life is.

The captain must not have appreciated the look in my eyes. He heard something, the tail of that ugly laughter. He turned on the light, set his cap with its golden flame on the dashboard and started reading. Maybe he regrets having his generosity. Maybe now that we’re in this closed space he smells my odor, which has to be something like that of the gypsy women he probably arrests every now and then, women who scream and lob curses.

I look out at freedom, the industrial apartment blocks on the outskirts, the villas with perfect roofs, the street signs without bullet holes.

Then the baby I’m holding, the little crab, starts squirming around. How many claws does he have? How many nerves?

I try to stick my pinky in his mouth again but this time it doesn’t work. The captain turns.

“Maybe he’s hungry.”

 

We stop at a highway pit stop. Fake Sandro slides the car into a parking space and stays behind to guard it. The captain gets out with me, and we walk together through the dark to the restaurant. I go into the bathroom. There’s a changing table, a white plastic shelf hanging off the wall. I set the bundle down and rummage through my backpack for the cotton wool and the bandages they gave me at the hospital. I open the coverlet and look for the buttons on the little sleeper made of wool as hard as cardboard. I pull out his tiny legs. I’ve never seen anything so small. I unwrap the gauze. The cotton wool is completely wet, and the excrement is yellow as if he’d drunk saffron, but it doesn’t smell bad. It’s the first time I see the child’s body so close up in my own hands. He’s got a swollen belly like a chicken’s. He cries and draws his legs in, holding them close against his body like paws. I take a deep breath. If I don’t manage to change him I’ll just wrap the coverlet back around him and we’ll be off. The gauze around his umbilical cord has fallen off. I see the little black bit of hanging cord. I bend over to check if it smells bad, but it still smells of alcohol. I mustn’t think. I’ve got to move my hands. I turn on the faucet, wet a piece of cotton wool and rub it between the baby’s legs. I wrap the remaining cotton wool around him and use the gauze, which I have to tear off the roll with my teeth, to hold it in place. The baby keeps crying. I have to get his formula ready. I bend over to pick up the sleeper, which has fallen to the ground. There’s a dry sound. I’d bent abruptly, my open backpack hanging from my shoulder. When I look, it’s just as I’d thought. Sarajevo glass, glass with no future.

I throw the remains of the bottle into the garbage. There’s a knock at the door.

“Do you need help?”

I pick up the bundle and open the door. There’s the captain with his sparse hair.

“I broke the bottle.”

 

We leave the highway to find a pharmacy that’s open at night.

The captain has taken to heart the case of the hungry little crab, in part because Pietro has a voice like an alarm siren that punctures your eardrums.

“Take the next exit,” he tells the orderly. “We have to find a bottle and a rubber nipple.”

Fake Sandro doesn’t say a word. He puts on the right-turn signal and heads into the darkness. What exit is it? There aren’t any houses, just fields.

The captain is no longer reading his newspaper. He doesn’t even seem to mind. He turns toward me and looks at me for longer than necessary.

I smile, my eyes wide like a captive deer’s.

“You don’t have milk?”

I point to the backpack. “Yes, I have some. Half a container.”

He doesn’t turn back around. His eyes stay on me.

“Breast milk, I mean. You don’t have milk of your own?”

Instinctively I cover my empty bosom with the bundle and hug the baby to me tightly.

“No, I don’t.”

“Too bad,” he says, and turns back to look at the road. “It would have been easier.”

 

We find a pharmacy in a little town cut in two by the rural route. The neon sign is not lit up. The captain approaches some men playing cards in a café. They take him to the building where the pharmacist lives and he rings the doorbell. The pharmacist dresses and comes down. He’s a thin man with dyed hair. He must be a small-town bon vivant. We move among the darkened shelves that light up all of a sudden to allow the uniform in, the cap with the flame. The captain suggests I get a plastic bottle.

“It might be better,” he says.

The pharmacist asks what kind of formula I want.

“For newborns.”

“What brand?”

I look at the captain, look around, look at the pharmacist.

“Whichever. A good one.”

The captain steps toward the counter.

“Let’s see what you have.”

The pharmacist piles jars up on the counter. The captain puts on his glasses because the writing is very small. He reads.

“Let’s get this one. It’s hypoallergenic.” He seeks my opinion. “What do you think?” He speaks familiarly. I nod.

“Good.”

I don’t have a lira to pay with. “I lost my wallet,” I whisper, and in the meantime I put away the diapers I’d grabbed earlier. Maybe the crab will refrain from crapping out saffron until we’re in Rome.

The captain grabs the diapers and sets them on the counter along with the rest. He looks at the pharmacist with dyed hair like an old-fashioned crooner’s.

“Do you have a whatchamacallit?”

The pharmacist looks at him and waits.

“Those thingies that make noise. A rattle.”

It’s not really a rattle. It’s a plastic toy that plays music. As we climb into the car he says, “Excuse me for taking the liberty.”

He’s speaking more formally again. Maybe before he was just trying to make it look like I was someone from his family, his sister, his wife.

He opens the toy, extracting it from the plastic with some difficulty. He shakes it alongside the baby’s red face. The baby doesn’t stop crying. He may not even hear the rattle. He’s made of hard stuff. He’s used to the sound of bombs. The captain sighs. “You can tell I don’t have children, can’t you?”

 

We stop again at another rest stop with fringed lampshades and red booths like in a fast-food restaurant.

“Are you hungry?”

“Thank you. I’ll have something after I feed the baby.”

He goes ahead and bites into a piadina . He turns toward me and talks through his mouthful.

“How warm should the water be?”

“A little.”

He nods and looks at the boy behind the counter. “A little.”

You don’t want to contradict a man in uniform. The boy thinks for a moment before throwing in his two cents. “Actually, the water needs to be boiled and then left to cool.”

The captain steps over to the counter and interrogates the man.

“How do you know?”

“I have a little baby.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“You got an early start.”

“My girlfriend got an early start.”

The captain and the boy behind the counter share a laugh. The captain points to the milk steamer nozzle. “Proceed,” he says.

He comes back to the table with the water and two little plates with more food. His hands are capable. It’s one of the first things I notice about him, these thick hands that you’d expect would be awkward, and instead they manage to carry a bunch of things in perfect balance without dropping them. His feet are flat, firmly set on the ground, like a professional waiter’s. I look at him for the first time in this second rest stop, and he strikes me as a nice man. All of a sudden I miss my father.

Giuliano sets the things on the table and pushes the bottle toward me.

“Did you know you have to boil the water first and then let it cool?”

“No.”

He laughs and studies me.

Maybe he realizes that I’m hiding something. It doesn’t matter. I lean against the back of the booth. He puts his glasses back on. He reads the side of the formula jar to see how much powder to use. He asks if it’s too much water. And now while he waits for an answer he looks at me over the top of the glasses that have begun inching their way down his nose.

I don’t answer. One day he’ll tell me it was obvious I wasn’t the birth mother. I seemed so utterly alone in front of that jar of formula.

“He’ll eat until he’s full,” he says.

I don’t have any idea whether or not I’m pushing the nipple too far in. The baby gazes up into my eyes, wraps his entire mouth around the nipple and eats without breathing. He reminds me of a jellyfish in the water. Then his eyes go limp. He closes his eyelids slowly, releases his mouth and whimpers a bit as he falls asleep. It must have been very hard work. He’s all sweaty now in his wool sleeper from Sarajevo.

The captain goes back to the counter to get a bottle of sparkling water. He fills two glasses.

“He needs to burp.”

He pushes a glass of water to me across the table.

“I remember from when my nieces and nephews were small.”

He tells me about how his sister, when her kids were small, passed them to him after they had their milk so he could pat softly on their backs. He would put a handkerchief over his shoulder so as not to stain his uniform.

He does the same thing now in this self-service rest stop with its pseudo-country décor. He pulls an old-fashioned, immaculate white handkerchief made of light cotton batiste out of the pocket of his uniform pants and spreads it over his shoulders, covering his medals and rank.

“May I?”

“By all means.”

 

My eyes don’t stray from the plate as I eat the remaining sandwiches. It’s only after a while that I notice the captain is observing me. I’m wearing this filthy parka, my hair is dirty, I’m clearly ravenous. I don’t have a penny to my name, just a baby a few hours old whom I’ve just stuffed full of formula.

One day he’ll tell me that he didn’t even notice that my parka and my hair were so dirty. He’ll say he thought I was a beautiful woman, audacious and extravagant, and that he appreciated my appetite more than all the rest because he’d been married to a woman with a green and acid heart who let nothing but salad pass her lips.

The baby is leaning against his uniform. The captain takes a few steps toward the newspaper rack and then comes back. He’s massive, imposing but graceful as well, with calm, restful steps.

Fake Sandro drank a Coca-Cola and crumpled the can and now he’s waiting for us. When the captain moves past him, he jumps to his feet, ready for an order that doesn’t come.

The captain holds the baby with one hand and pats lightly on the tiny little back with the other. The bundle lets out a huge, sharp burp like the sudden noise of a sink drain.

“See?”

Even fake Sandro says wow.

 

The baby’s face nestles on the big shoulder. The burp shook him but did not wake him. I’ve finished the sandwiches and drunk my water. I let out a little burp myself. Now I’m as sated and tranquil as the baby.

I look at this man as he holds the baby from Sarajevo. All of a sudden I feel the sorrow that will get me every time and that has its very own way of assailing me. It clutches the nape of my neck. My whole neck stiffens. It’s Diego, holding me from behind. I recognize his hands, his breath, but I can’t turn. He should be the one holding the baby. He’d have been a wonderful father, a saint, a jester. He’s the one who’s holding me by the nape of the neck and whispering that I should look at what lies ahead, scenes from my life without him. He’s the one who won’t let me look back, won’t let me embrace Death.

The captain takes a seat across from me.

“Are you tired?”

“A little bit.”

“Did you give birth in Sarajevo?”

“Yes.”

“That certainly took a lot of courage.”

We chat. I tell him my husband, a photographer, is still there. Giuliano nods. I talk about Diego, about how we met, about his photographs.

The yearning I feel in this moment is atrocious, an overflowing river. I see Diego’s legs at the airport, thin and cold like metal tubes. I see him as he stays behind. I stop, my chest swells, I breathe and go on. Giuliano lowers his eyes and remains silent.

One day he’ll tell me that he, too, was moved because he’d never seen a woman so in love. He’d had a wife, a girlfriend, the odd relationship here and there. But listening to me that night, he felt yearning for a love that he’d never fully grasped.

He tells me he didn’t go to the military academy, that he was in the Special Forces, that he served in Lebanon. He tells me about a parachute that didn’t open properly. That’s why he’s got an office job now. He makes me laugh. He says he’s so full of metal plates that it’s always a nightmare when he goes through the metal detector at the airport.

He stands, goes to the register and buys some chocolates. He offers me one and uses one of his big capable hands to open the box without ever taking the other off the baby, who never stirs.

He tells me he’s an amateur photographer and asks if I have any of Diego’s photographs to show him.

I tell him I didn’t travel with anything except the baby.

“I didn’t make it back to the hotel.”

“And your husband?”

“He lost his passport.”

He hands me his card. “If I can help in any way ...”

 

The city with its signs and its shuttered buildings appears through the quiet winter dark. It’s five in the morning. Soon the lives around us will get up out of bed, assume a vertical position, clog the streets and resume the stupid running around of peacetime life. A garbage truck blocks our way. We stop. I watch the metallic arm as it hooks onto the dumpsters and lifts them into the air. Once again I feel like I’ve lost everything.

When the car pulls up below my building, the captain gets out to help me with the baby. He opens his mouth as if to say something but then he doesn’t say it. He puts his uniform cap back on. Maybe this trip was his way of keeping an eye on me, his kindness a way of lulling me into a sense of false security. His face looks like that of a bird dog, the ones who seem to wander aimlessly around the countryside and then come back with the prey in their mouths. He’s aware that there’s something strange about my situation. Maybe he thinks I kidnapped the baby. He turned to tell me so, but then he thought again.

One day he’ll tell me that for the entire trip he was torn between his uniform and his instinct to trust me. One day he’ll say, The law can go take a hike; love should be left undisturbed.