Afterward, I went home with my ex and her husband, Howard, an engineer who’d become unfathomably rich as one of the original patent trolls. Having a former spouse with whom you get along is a little like acquiring another sibling, someone who knows you intimately and with indelible affection. On the other hand, most of us would go screaming in the other direction at the thought of again living under the same roof with a sib, and the prospect of even a single night here filled me with apprehension. I’d accepted because Ellen, in her usual direct style, had made an unassailable argument: “Who else are you going to barge in on at eleven p.m. on Saturday night? The boys don’t have room.”
I’m sure Ellen had wanted to show off the splendor of her new life in the mansion on Lake Fowler that Howard had built with his first wife, who’d died of cancer more than six years ago. But my stay proved calm and companionable. I enjoyed the comforts of their guest house, then moved down to Center City on Sunday morning to begin my labors with my former partners and clients. After two days of listening to oil executives make unconvincing excuses, I was happy to depart.
I arrived in Bosnia at dusk Wednesday. From Kindle County, I’d had a nine-hour flight to Istanbul and a layover there in the terminal, which is stylish, but thronged and airless as a casket. In Sarajevo, I emerged into what was no bigger than a regional airport in the US, with robin’s-egg signs declaring DOBRODOSLI U SARAJEVO.
Before I had taken my job in The Hague, Bosnia, to me, like most Americans, had always seemed remote, baffling, and largely irrelevant. The Cyrillic alphabet, which was used frequently, was indecipherable to me; the language, Serbo-Croatian, bore no resemblance to the Western languages I knew; and I understood next to nothing about the two largest religions, Islam and Serbian Orthodox. I arrived prepared for something very different, and found that expectation immediately met.
Goos had flown into Tuzla through Austria that morning in order to complete arrangements for our trip to Barupra tomorrow, but had promised to send a car for me. I didn’t see my name on the placards carried by three or four dark-suited drivers, but I suddenly heard someone calling, “Boom.” The person waving was not only nobody I knew, but also weirdly unrecognizable on a more basic level.
This is what I saw: someone rangy and lean, about five foot nine, with a springy mass of brown hair, dressed in oversize worn jeans cinched at the waist and a round-necked Members Only windbreaker at least two decades old, smiling exuberantly as if we were meeting again after years apart. I was feeling out-of-body due to the travel and the unfamiliar locale, and my mind spun like an old disc drive as it grasped for a fundamental category, namely, gender. I thought immediately of Pat, a sketch character on Saturday Night Live who appeared for several seasons, eluding the intrepid but fruitless efforts of everyone else to determine if Pat was a boy or a girl.
“Attila Doby.” A sinewy hand was extended in welcome. Attila was a male name, but the voice was thinner and sounded like a woman’s. The jacket was open but the blue button-down shirt was too loose to reveal if there were skinny breasts beneath. “Merry said you was on your way. So I told my guys who were fetchin you to stay home and I’d zip down from Tuzla myself.”
Attila’s racial origins were also uncertain. There was the freckly complexion of people who years ago were called ‘High Yeller,’ but Attila’s eyes were muddy green, even if the nose had an African breadth. ‘American’ was the only biographical detail I was certain of after he or she had spoken the first words.
Attila grabbed my bag and wheeled it along, waving me to follow across the small parking lot. Attila had a jerky, knock-kneed walk, elbows held away from the body, shoulders peaked as a result. Ultimately, he—that was my best guess—opened the door to a cushy Audi A8, into whose trunk he tossed my luggage.
“So,” Attila said from the driver’s seat, hiking around to back out, “you’re thinking, ‘What in the fuck have I got here?’ Right?” Attila’s eyes hit me briefly before turning forward to put the car in drive. “Don’t bother apologizing. I go through this shit every day. That’s what you’re thinking, true?”
“Right,” I said, realizing I had no way out.
“A woman, okay? Married to a woman. And dress however the fuck I please. But last time I had a skirt on, I was thirteen. Played with the boys since I was three. Okay?” Attila smiled throughout all of this, as if it was all a good-natured joke at her expense.
“And yes,” she said, “the name is Attila. Etelka, actually, but Attila is the closest thing in English. Mom is Hungarian. Dad was a US Army lifer, master sergeant, born in Alabama and passed until his daughter came out a little toasty looking, after which everybody pretended like they didn’t notice. So yeah, I’m one big fuckin freak, and now we got that out of the way, okay?”
“Okay,” I answered, and started laughing. Giddy from jet lag, I couldn’t figure whether I should have been quite this amused by Attila’s candor. “Did you say that General Merriwell sent you?”
“No, I talked to Merry, but it was your guy who ordered a car. Swan?”
“Goos?”
“Goos, shit. Any kind of vehicle for hire—truck, half-track, limousine—that’s my business. One of them anyway.”
We were entering Sarajevo proper, where Tito-era apartment buildings, concrete blocks that resembled high-rise prisons, stood beside contemporary glass towers dressed up with garish Shanghai-style lights. The city I was seeing was no longer the shell-ravaged wreck of twenty years ago, but reconstructing the buildings was probably a lot easier than recovering from the trauma.
“And how is it you know Merry?” I asked.
“He was my senior commanding officer close to half my time in service. Sergeant Major Attila Doby,” she said, sticking a thumb into her sternum, “US Army retired. Twenty years in and a whole fruit salad on my chest. I served under Merry in Desert Storm and he brought me along when he come to Bosnia. I was the top noncombat NCO here—Quartermaster’s Corps. Shit’s always the same in the Army, but QC’s worse. Senior officers were all in Virginia signing contracts and managing future requirements. But you wanted so much as a sheet of toilet paper to wipe your heinie, then better call me.
“My twenty come up in 2000. I mustered out, but the US, man, fifteen years ago—black and queer? People didn’t know what to do with me. I ended up back here a couple years later to straighten out CoroDyn. You know what that is?”
I said no. Attila took a second, nodding to herself as she looked out the auto windshield.
“So here,” she said. “Merry was a great field commander for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important was that he wasn’t afraid to change things. He sort of invented using private defense contractors to take on noncombat functions. It’s a volunteer army, so you need to stretch the troops. Why have your privates doing KP when they can be out toting a bang-bang? CoroDyn was the contractor here, and when I was in service, I was the Army liaison, making sure they did what-all they were supposed to.
“But Bosnia, after the war, there just wasn’t any normal here. And a lot of CoroDyn employees were into sex slaves, twelve-, fifteen-year-old girls they were fucking on the job and trading back and forth. The press got wind of that when Merry was at NATO CENTCOM. After he’d just about choked their CEO to death, he called me up personal and said, ‘How much do I gotta make these monkeys pay you to get you to come back here and run it all?’
“We basically did everything on base that didn’t require shooting. Fed the troops. Ran the buses. Washed the clothes. Provided the trucks and drove them. Stockpiled captured weapons. Handled all the trash. And did most of the bookkeeping. We were like the stage crew and the soldiers were the actors.”
Attila had taken a detour on our way to the highway to show me City Library, an extraordinary structure built in Austro-Hungarian times. The masonry alternated stripes of salmon and rust, while the roof sported a Moorish dome and a line of decorative crenellations. According to Attila, the whole thing had been resurrected from rubble.