About ten that night I woke with Nara layered against my side in my bed. Well spent, we had dozed for an hour. The shade was up and I could see flecks of stars in the black sky, a rare sight in The Hague, where nightfall so often brings clouds. From the pace of her breath on my neck, I could tell she was awake, too.
“Are we just lonely?” she asked suddenly in a small voice.
I took a second.
“No,” I said then. “It doesn’t feel like that to me. Does it feel like that to you?”
“This is such an immense step that I am still in shock, especially with myself. I am not sure of anything, except that my life after tonight will never be the same. But for many weeks now, when I have dared to be honest, I have thought I was falling in love with you.”
“But now you don’t know? That’s high praise for me as a lover.”
She poked my side hard in reprisal for the teasing. Against my expectations, we’d both had a grand time. For all her occasional timidness, this was one arena where Nara had proved to have no trouble letting go.
“You are changing the subject,” she said. “Do you love me, Boom? A little?”
“At this moment, yes. Far more than a little.”
I was afraid she would regard my answer as hedged, but instead she giggled.
“A friend of mine, an older woman, once told me that every man is in love for an hour before and after each orgasm.”
I laughed, too.
“This is more than orgasms, Nara. For both of us. Of that I’m sure.”
She pushed herself up to an elbow to peer down at me with her essential earnestness.
“And what will happen?” she asked. “With us?” She was trusting me as a sage older person to be able to tell her. “Do you know?”
“No. Not yet. But I’m not prepared to worry about it. We’ll breathe. We’ll live.”
“But I’m not even sure what happens next.” She meant on Monday or Tuesday when better sense invaded us both.
I pulled myself up in the same posture as her so I could face her. Then I smiled.
“That much I know,” I answered.
“Really?”
“Let me show you what happens next,” I said and gently eased her down on the bed again.
30.
The Cave—June 29–July 2
Goos called from Bosnia about noon on Monday in what was, for him, a fairly agitated mood.
“Any word from your cobber Attila?”
“You mean today?”
“Today, yesterday. I’ve got my whole professional staff out here, ready to go fossicking about in the Cave, and there’s none of the heavy equipment he promised.”
“She.”
“She, he. Nothing. And not one of the hired blokes we were looking for either.”
“Did you call her?”
“Constantly, mate. Just finally spoke with her office. Back in the States, they say.”
“Maybe there was some emergency.”
“Not so, buddy. They say she’s been planning a vac since last week.”
As had grown common recently, I was having a difficult time discerning motives. Perhaps Attila had been instructed to stop being so helpful by the people she relied on for business at the Department of Defense. Or perhaps that direction had come from Merriwell.
“Doesn’t sound like she’s on our side anymore, does it?” I asked.
“That might not be a change, mate.”
I understood why Goos was saying that, but the person who picked us up from the salt mine seemed, within the limits of recent acquaintance, a genuine friend. Attila’s fundamental delight in life seemed to come from thinking she’d been helpful. It was hard to square that with the notion that she’d been playing us false all along.
Goos and I signed off and spoke again around 5 p.m. He had reached the construction company that had helped him and the Yugoslav Tribunal exhume some of the hundreds of mass graves near Srebrenica eighteen years ago. The firm was still in business and said they could have equipment on-site tomorrow afternoon. Their price was actually lower than Attila’s. As for laborers, with 25 percent unemployment in Bosnia, Goos wasn’t worried. He’d called one of the desk clerks at the Blue Lamp, who said she could organize a team of workers by nightfall. Digging would begin late Tuesday. Unless I heard otherwise, Goos and I agreed I would come Wednesday as we’d projected originally.
I had told Nara I would be going back to Bosnia, but she was unhappy receiving the news as we were dressing to run Tuesday evening. I emphasized that armed troops would guard us at all times.
Our new life together, now in its fourth day, did not seem all that different from our old life. We went to work. We came home. We ran. We ate seafood and drank wine and talked, except that now it was between bouts in bed. Whatever caution I had meant to exert evaporated in the heat of our bedroom and the clutch of intimacy. I trusted Nara Logan. I knew she would never harm me intentionally. As important, she had seen too much of me, over the months in which we’d dwelled in the same space, for me to engage in the attempts to conceal weak points in my personality that were typical at the start of a relationship, when people were waiting to find out how much love could change them. Nara’s guileless honesty sometimes exceeded sensible boundaries—as when she compared Lewis and me as lovers, naturally giving the prize to me, even though as a male I was apparently no match for Lewis’s generous proportions—but overall I relished being with a person so free of calculation. With Nara, I was as much myself as I was ever going to be in the company of someone else.
Over time, we would see whether that would endure and how far it could take us, but by Tuesday I’d faced the fact that I was utterly mad for Nara. Somewhat perversely, I was glad to be leaving town, just to see how much of my consuming hunger for her would remain when we were apart.
At the Sarajevo airport, where I arrived around 1 p.m. after a stop in Munich, I had no trouble spotting my two NATO escorts. Just beyond the secure area, they awaited me in the full combat gear of the Danish Army, including flak vests, helmets, and M10 carbines. The sight of assault weapons in the airport attracted a fair amount of attention, but General Moen was clearly making an emphatic statement to anyone who might want to revenge Kajevic’s capture.
An SUV was at the curb with the blue NATO flag, sporting its four-pointed star, mounted over each headlight. We sped into the Bosnian hills that I had first seen deep in snow, and which were now dressed in the heart-lifting green of summer. Mid-journey, I felt a brief spurt of terror when something in the mountains, a shape or even the angle of the light, ignited a memory of my last trip to this country. For the most part, though, I was calm and strangely pleased to be back.
I asked the driver to take me straight to Barupra, as I wanted to get there before work closed down for the night. We arrived a little before four.