36.

AMELA LAY AROUND the hospital for about six weeks. But it was hard to figure the toll of time. Entire days were spent drowsing, between painkillers and the tedium that Jackie had prescribed. She read old magazines. She had no radio. She played cards, both solitaire and hands of rummy with Nurse Rasulavic and the tall, horse-maned man she had met at the brewery. On orders, they spoke only of cards. Amela found their determination odd, and a little hard to accept. But Jackie had instructed Irena’s old friends that this hornet from the nest was not to be confronted until her head, heart, bones, bowels, and guts had been squeezed of every iota and grain of knowledge she might ever have possessed.

The man named Jacobo came by almost every day. Nurse Rasulavic had told her that he was the one who had carried her away from the runway, and that some of her blood had dripped over his hands and onto the buttery leather of his shoes. She told him what she could recall of the Hornet’s Nest. He cast questions casually back, as if he were encouraging her to recollect an old basketball game, which Amela knew she was good at doing. Jacobo’s questions grew detailed and precise. But Jackie was right. With each week—probably each day—whatever information Amela possessed became dated, difficult to recognize, much less apply.

One day Amela took pains to stop him as he left the room.

“I have to thank you,” she said.

Jacobo made a show of ignorance.

“You carried me,” she explained. “They told me. I ruined your shoes.”

Jacobo smiled, and ran a smooth thumb over one of his blazer’s lustrous brass buttons. “Oh, that. Well. Blood wipes away,” he said, and let the door close behind him. Amela crawled from her bed and sat with her back in the corner by the small window. She hugged her knees to her face and cried herself out in about half an hour. (All the crying left a dampness in the knee of her jeans. She thought to herself, And tears dry, too.)

         

JACKIE CAME BY three times. She brought magazines, she brought beer and cigarettes, and she brought clothes. Amela thought there were times when Jackie seemed almost to like her, and times when she seemed to just barely abide her. It was Jackie who told Amela that Michael Jordan’s father had been killed, slain somewhere in the southern United States in the expensive car that his son had bought for him.

“It doesn’t matter if you have all the money in the world,” Amela observed. “And he does. You can’t buy your way out of death.” Amela beamed the kind of mild, wistful smile over at Jackie that invited her to join in.

But Jackie—Jackie snapped back, “Don’t be ridiculous. People buy lives all the time. Someone like you should know that.”

“I was just . . .” Amela let her thought die.

Her door was not locked. She couldn’t see any locks on the front and side doors. One afternoon she carefully tried to extract a sign from Jackie to see if they had counted on her to stay without defiance—or hoped that she would try to break away.

“Some people thought you should be locked in,” Jackie told her. “Even chained to this bed. But men with guns—we can’t spare them just to sit around. Besides, where would you go? What would you do? The whole city is a jail cell. Run, if you like. It doesn’t matter. Really, how long would you last?”

         

EARLY ONE EVENING Jackie came bustling into Amela’s room unexpectedly—silent and unsmiling but bearing a roll of clothing under her arm. Amela sat up. Jackie shook out her bundle. Blue jeans rolled out. A roll of dark blue socks bounced to the floor. Atop all was a yellow T-shirt, streaked with violet. Jackie lifted the shirt by the collar and turned it toward Amela.

“Omigod,” she said, recognizing the number on the back: “Vlade Divac.”

“Amazing, isn’t it?” said Jackie. “A Los Angeles Lakers shirt you could probably sell on the black market here for a month of razor blades or toothpaste. It arrived as a rag in a charity bundle from someplace like Pasadena or Brooklyn. As you said, the West’s rubbish becomes spoils of our war. I have appropriated this item in the larger interests of the state.”

Amela and Jackie smiled at the same time, and laughed as they realized it.

“We have a bag packed and waiting for you, dear. Have a pee and put on your new shirt. We have places to go.”

         

ZORAN WAS WAITING with his taxi in the parking lot. Amela held back a bit—Jackie could see her cringing—at seeing Zoran in the lot that was customarily kept empty since Dr. Despres’s death.

“The last time I saw you,” Zoran said with theatrical, great-uncle grouchiness, “you had a gun at my head and were stuffing me into the trunk of my car. My own fucking car.”

“I’m so sorry,” Amela said softly.

“So you said. And so I believed. Once I got out and could fucking breathe.”

Amela had a pack slung over her left shoulder. It hung over the wound in her back, which was no longer dressed and bandaged. She rapped the trunk with her right hand. “In here with me, then?” she said. “I have it coming.”

She sat in the front with Zoran. He told her how Tedic had paid the thieves who rescued him from his own trunk with cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes. “Six cases of Sarajevo Beer,” he said wonderingly. “Twenty cartons of Drina cigarettes. Old ones, even. Not the new ones they fill with stinkweed they were going to foist off on the Bulgarians and roll up in pages from our old phone books, which are fit only to be toilet paper, anyway. And ten cartons of Marlboros. I said, ‘Miro, you must value me, to let go of ten cartons of Marlboros in exchange for my life.’ And Tedic said, ‘We need your car.’ ”

They came to a flat stretch along the hedges near the runway, and then Zoran drove on another minute and pulled up to what looked like an old airport equipment shed. The walls were made of thin tin, and were stippled with holes. Rifle shots and mortar spatters, to be sure, but also age and rust.

They went into the shed. Half a dozen soldiers in authentic Bosnian Army–issue moss-green uniforms were smoking, standing at ease but alert, around a hole in the ground. A single gas lantern hissed in the corner, spilling light over the hole. The room smelled of coffee, sweat, earth, rain, cigarettes, and grease.

Jackie took Amela’s hand into her own and led her into a corner with three overturned washtubs. They sat on two of them. Jackie kept a grip on Amela’s hand. “Jacobo has given you a name,” she began. “Personally. For our purposes. Amie. It means “friend” in French. You were a friend—a good friend, if I never said that. But Jacobo says it also means something in his language. Ami means “our people.” He says—and I think he is right—that this is a good name for you.”

Amela heard the lantern popping and sizzling. She had to blink a mist of smoke and cinders from her eyes. Jackie relaxed her hand on Amela’s, then laced her fingers through the girl’s.

“Perhaps you heard rumors,” Jackie said. “Well, it’s true. We have built a tunnel under the airport. From besieged Sarajevo into a small speck of free Bosnian territory. That’s the tunnel right in front of us. It took miners, plumbers, and engineering professors six months to claw it out of the ground with shovels, kitchen spoons, and hand axes—and their bare hands. People digging toward us from the forests used planks and tree branches to hold back the earth. People digging from the city had to use old car doors and hoods because we’ve chopped down all the trees here. I don’t think anyone has ever had to build a tunnel quite like this: blind, in the dark, two ends scratching and bumbling toward each other. Men and women died running across the runway to tell the other team that they had dug a few more inches. Sometimes two, three people died just to say, ‘Another two feet today—here’s where we stopped.’ I can’t tell you how many times the tunnel flooded . . . the oil lights went out . . . people . . .”

Jackie’s voice ran out. She had to turn away.

“But today,” she went on, “it’s the London Underground down there. We run a twenty-four-hour transport service. We bring out some of the sick and wounded in small wooden carts on narrow steel rails. We bring in bandages, bullets, onions, and antibiotics. Smugglers bring in meat, cheese, rubbers, hash—God knows, we don’t ask. We’re all happy capitalists now.”

Jackie sat up on the washtub and held Amela’s hand between them, against their chests.

“Amie, we have opened a vein into the heart of the city. The Serbs can’t bomb it, and the Blue Helmets can’t shut it down. Many more people will suffer and die here, I’m sure. But, for the first time, I think Sarajevo has a chance to live. To live.”

Amela dropped her forehead against her and Jackie’s entwined hands and fingers.

“We can bring you out through this tunnel,” said Jackie, just above the hiss of the light. “It’s eight hundred yards long, and you’ll have to crawl for every inch of it—it’s not even four feet high. But we can bring you out, put you on a truck, and get you near Bihac.”

Bihac, Amela remembered. Where Irena’s brother and other Bosnians were trying to get to from London, Chicago, Manchester, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto.

“A girl as good as you,” said Jackie softly into her shoulder, “can do a lot of damage—a lot of good—in a place like that.”

         

THEY STOOD IN the lantern light just in front of the tunnel. Amela had her pack over her left shoulder, puffy with a spare set of blue jeans, socks, panties, and a black T-shirt, three packs of tampons, a box of bullets, a toothbrush, and a small, round bar of French carnation-scented soap that Jackie said Jacobo had sent along personally. Zoran settled a rifle over the shoulder of her right arm.

Jackie took hold of Amela’s right shoulder and left a light kiss on her neck, just above the leather gun strap. “Amie,” she said softly. “I promise you, Amie, at the end there is a sign that would make you and your friend smile.”

Two soldiers lifted her by the arms, like a child being swung between her parents, into the top hole of the tunnel.

         

AMELA BLINKED. HER first impression was that the underworld blazed with light. Every few feet a small oil fire flickered and flared from inside a tin can. The throttled smoke left black ghosts scorched on the top of the tunnel. The smoldering oil singed Amela’s nostrils.

She began to crawl. Water covered her feet and knees, her wrists and hands. After about a hundred yards, the tunnel deepened inexplicably—one of the diggers must have hit an electric cable, a pipe, or a pocket of water—and when Amela unsuspectingly crawled forward she lurched into a swell of cold brown water that rose over her elbows and splashed against her chin. It tasted of rust and worms. Occasionally, a shell crashed overhead and shook the tunnel. The walls shivered and the earth bled more water over the tunnel floor.

She crawled into the wall at the end. Fresh red bricks and a large, silvery electric bulb, blaring light. A couple of spikes of torchlight played over her eyes and chin.

“Amie?” A young man’s voice called out.

“I am. I’m here,” Amela called up into the lights.

“Reach for the sky, darling, and we’ll bring you up.”

Four arms reached down and waggled like spider’s legs. She handed up her rifle. Then the pack on her back, sodden with water and heavy as a bag of nails. Amela finally held up her own arms and was hoisted up into a dark room by two curly-haired men wearing blue jeans and red T-shirts under unzipped light black jackets. One man’s shirt said MANCHESTER UNITED, the other CHICAGO BULLS.

“Nice shirt, Amie,” said one. “Vlade, he is the greatest. You are an athlete, too, Amie?”

“I was.”

“Slithering through that tunnel is not for grandmas,” he said. “You are still a great player.”

“We have been waiting for you,” said the other man. “You do not need two more made-up names to remember for people you will never see again. We will walk with you up into the mountains tonight, and meet a truck that will take you—wherever.”

When Amela could look around, she saw that she had climbed up into a small room of a private home. The men led her into the next room, where three men were sprawled on a brown sofa. A television had been wired into a car battery, and they were watching a football match between Milan AC and Ajax Amsterdam. One of Amela’s escorts shined his light on an old woman with a black scarf folded over her head. She was sitting on a stool, and holding out a glass of water.

“Hey, Amie, this is Grandma Sida,” he explained. “It is her home. She is the grandmother here. She greets everyone, and goes back to her television.”

Amela nodded and wordlessly took the glass from Grandma Sida’s hand. She took one gulp, then another, a deeper swallow. She tasted mud in her mouth, then gulped twice more to try to wash away the taste of the tunnel. She handed the glass back to the old woman and leaned down to kiss the back of her hand.

Amela and the men walked out of the house and into a field. The runway lights had been turned out hours ago, before starlight lifted up the overgrown green and yellow grasses that rustled lightly, like soft, sleeping breaths.

“Hey, Amie,” said one of her companions. “Jackie said to show you this.”

He shined a light onto a small white sign that had been nailed on a stick and planted in Grandma Sida’s backyard. The sign read:

PARIS 3,765 KM

Amela laughed out loud for the first time, her first girlish giggle since Irena had last made her laugh.

“Jackie said she wanted to make you laugh,” said the man with the light. He began to shake with laughter himself, so that the sign seemed to blink off and on.

“Hey, Amie. Are you going to Paris? Take me with you.”

Amela looked across the swells of grass and into the stony blue shoulders of Mount Igman. She would walk over the fields and the hills to the other side of the mountain, and find the ride that would take her to Bihac, and the place in which, she was suddenly quite certain, she was going to give her life.

You may keep Sarajevo. You have earned it.

—SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC, PRESIDENT OF SERBIA,
TO ALIJA IZETBEGOVIC, PRESIDENT OF BOSNIA,
AT THE 1995 TALKS IN DAYTON, OHIO, THAT DIVIDED BOSNIA.

Milosevic is now on trial for war crimes.