I departed a few minutes before ten. When I opened the front door downstairs, I faced more rain and remembered that I’d left my slicker in the closet. I went back up, knocked several times, and finally used my key to let myself in, calling out “I’m back.” They did not seem to hear me with the tap running and dishes clattering in the kitchen.
As I opened the closet, I overheard fragments of their conversation. During the evening, Mrs. Darmadi had occasionally addressed Nara in Javanese, which her daughter had answered either in English, for my benefit, or Dutch, when she didn’t approve of what her mother was saying. But now the mom had succumbed and they were having a mild quarrel in Dutch. In six months, I had gotten to the point where I could understand more than half of what I heard, although it would be a long time before I dared to speak, since I was befuddled by the grammar. Nonetheless, the mom, as a non-native speaker, talked much more slowly than Nara and thus was easier to track.
The water was turned off for a moment, allowing me to clearly hear Nara’s mother saying, “Nice.” ‘Aardig’ was the word she used, a mild compliment. “That is not what troubles me. It is highly inappropriate for you to be living with a man who is not your husband, let alone one with whom you are so obviously fascinated. You turn to him like a flower to the sun. No wonder you are having difficulties in your marriage.”
“Mother!” Narawanda answered. “Mr. Ten Boom has nothing to do with the problems between Lewis and me. We have been isolated from one another for years.”
The mother answered as mothers do, “Ja, ja,” agreeing but not agreeing at all.
I padded out like a burglar, willing myself to pretend I had heard none of that. It was only when I got back to the front door of the building that I realized I’d forgotten the slicker again. I turned up my collar and headed into the rain.
26.
New Witness—June 15–16
On Monday, we began the preliminaries required before exhuming the Cave, a process in which I again found the diplomats and bureaucrats crazy-making. Consent, they claimed, was required not only of several departments in the fractured Bosnian government, but also from the mine owners, the Rejka company, who had abandoned the site more than two decades ago and who had gone entirely unmentioned in the months we’d been crawling all over the place. As a result, I had to undertake the equivalent of a title search in Bosnia. Beyond all that, the president’s office was understandably concerned about the expense of the operation, which was what had held us back from the beginning. I phoned Attila to see if she could help us find a local real estate lawyer and a deal on earth-moving equipment.
“I’ve been meaning to call,” she said. “You must be feeling pretty fucking special.”
In the rush of everything else, I had not given much thought to the fact that we hadn’t heard from one of the world’s leading busybodies, who, in this case, could actually claim some role in these news-making events. Now she wanted every detail.
Like everybody else, Attila was impressed about Goos’s courage in hindering Kajevic’s escape.
“Goos keeps saying he was stupid,” I told her, “because a sixty-year-old man in a dress was never going to outrun a bunch of twentysomethings. But he was really brave, Attila. I was so panicked I’d have let him dash right by.”
“For twenty years in the service,” said Attila, “it made my ass ache worse than hemorrhoids that I couldn’t get into combat. If the jokers in the five-sided puzzle palace”—she meant the Pentagon—“ever stopped acting like having a puss was like missing an arm, I’da let Merry send me to OCS, cause I always figured I’d make a great fuckin battlefield commander. But you know, I wonder. Fact is, once the shootin starts, it’s all fubar. Your brain just gets scrambled. Big props to Goos.”
The longer the period since we’d returned from Bosnia, and the more mired I again became in what I thought of as ordinary life, the odder the kidnapping and the capture of Kajevic seemed, and the less connected to my natural reality. There were still instants, especially sitting alone at my desk in the office, when my heart felt like it was veering into impromptu A-fib, and I realized I was remembering the barrel of the AK at my temple. But overall, as the events receded, it was like having been on a passenger flight when there’s a terrible landing—a tire blows and the plane skids off the runway and the film of your life goes by in triple speed. For a while afterward, it’s hard even to look at an airliner in the sky. You recognize how much trust you’re putting in everyone, the mechanics, the pilots, even Bernoulli, who discovered the principle that keeps aircraft aloft. You keep thinking about how close you came. And then, slowly, you accept the obvious: It didn’t happen. You’re here. You’ve gone on. And you head back to the airport for your next flight.
Eventually, I asked Attila about the lawyer, and then bulldozers and steam shovels.
“What for?” Attila asked.
I explained we were going to exhume the Cave.
“What kind of bullshit is that?” said Attila. “I thought you were just pretending about that so the NATO guys had a cover. Where you going with this case without Ferko?”
I didn’t respond directly. Attila still had no clue what the NATO records showed, but she seemed to sense there was something important she didn’t know. She asked several pointed questions about other evidence we’d gathered and I demurred, telling her that the Court’s rules of investigative confidentiality constrained me, just as she’d been silenced by the need to respect the military classification of information. She sounded unsatisfied by that reply.
As for earth-moving equipment, when the troops left Bosnia, Attila had bought up everything CoroDyn had brought there to build camps and repair roads. Like many of her other business moves, it had worked out brilliantly. She’d paid only a bit more than it would have cost CoroDyn to transport the machinery elsewhere, and by her own words, she’d “made a big fat fucking fortune” leasing the equipment for the constant civilian reconstruction projects. She promised us a “friends and family price” in the quote she’d e-mail by nightfall.
Since we’d returned from Bosnia, I’d finally had the chance to carefully examine the records Attila had brought us of the truck deployments eleven years ago on the night the Chetniks appeared at Barupra. It was just as she’d claimed—there were no large contingents of vehicles checked out of either the operational or logistical pool, beyond those listed for garbage runs and other routine hauling around the base. But the documents were incomplete.
“There’s nothing from the fuel depot, Attila. Nothing from the mechanics, nothing from parts supply.”
“Really?” she asked. “Fuck, I didn’t even look that close. I’ll call Virginia and kick those cementheads in the ass. Every day, Boom, America gets to be more like Italy.” She promised to have the records when we arrived in Bosnia to exhume the Cave.
I thought about Attila after I put down the phone. She was the life of the party, so to speak, wherever she went, and the logistical genius who figured out how to meet everyone’s needs. But she must have been a teeming mess of justifiable resentments when she was by herself. Like a lot of well-to-do people, she’d undoubtedly learned that money, nice as it was, didn’t heal the fundamental injuries of life, of which she’d endured many. Despite people like Merriwell and Attila’s father, who’d tried to convince her to join the officer corps, she’d refused because, she said, there really was no place there for someone who was, in her powerfully apt and prejudiced term, ‘queer.’ She reveled in queerness and hated it all the same, since it had denied her, in instances like this, her proper destiny. Attila never asked anybody to feel sorry for her. But I did in the moment, experiencing some of the unrooted feelings that must have swamped her so often, especially when she was alone.
When I returned to the apartment after work, Nara was dressed for our run. Her mother, she said, had gotten a fine report from the doctor in Amsterdam.