Terracotta-topped white walls curved upwards as the road ascended. A landing crow rocked down terracotta, wings spread, claws scratching tiles, wings falling, bird stopping dead.
Dog and Gypsy irises gleamed warily from dim doorways. Fearful wonderment smeared the Gypsies’ faces. One retreated when Johan looked at him.
Speech suddenly bellowed from speakers at the top of the hill.
“Albanian?” Johan asked.
“Must be Serbian,” Vincent replied.
The road entered a cobblestone square at the top. A Serbian flag covered a thirty-metre-long wall behind a screaming, microphone-holding man. People packed before the man were holding placards: Let the Russians in. We’re not criminals. I want my father back. We need doctors.
The crowd roared when microphone man stopped screaming. Trepidation swished inside Vincent’s head. Friendly faces added confusion to bubbling uncertainty.
A woman observed Vincent from a rooftop. Being observed by beauty emphasised normalcy’s upending, airborne parts from violent change still seeking places of permanent fall.
A soldier-packed Jeep dashed through the square. Crows fled from the flag wall, like dark thoughts ascending from belligerent belief. Beaks screeched. Bird eyes wild. Images seared Vincent’s memory.
Russians or Dutch? he wondered. Is this crowd cheering or jeering?
A chocolate-skinned teenager insisted Vincent photograph a sign listing atrocities committed against Serbs. The teenager’s skin glowed, like the charity of his heart, his eyes mica blazes of enthusiasm. He directed Vincent to a sign held by a boy that said: My father isn’t a criminal. The boy’s father had been arrested by NATO. The chocolate-skinned teenager’s trepidation-eliminating warmth reduced fear.
Vincent’s clicking aperture redirected emotion from concern to intrigue. The teenager patted him on the back. The boy’s confident amiability contrasted with the gloom of a man who said: “They massacred sixty people in a church.”
The man’s long-term-unemployed look suggested premature aging. Time’s grey dust covered his black head. His resigned shoulders rose, then dropped. Albanians were blameless. So the West said. Bushy eyebrows emphasised the depth of his crater eye sockets that looked bruised by adversity’s relentless hammering.
“People just disappeared,” he said. “Never seen again……”
His eyebrows and shoulders lifted then dropped with melancholic frippery. Only the Serbs were murderers. So the West said.
A woman, with big, round glasses, like transparent wheels, remarked: “They find bodies. Some don’t know who are.”
Her gesture indicated mutilation. Outrage enflamed her blue eyes.
“Oo Chi Car,” (UCK) she said. (Kosovo Liberation Army). “Why are Western governments supporting terrorism?”
She’s ignorant, Vincent thought, of how her disbanded police force beat up and stole from Albanians, conflicts fuelled by false big pictures – by only the enemy being evil.
A tunnel of curiosity, formed by people’s faces, faced his face, the bespectacled woman at its head.
“I wish I knew,” he lied.
Moral superiority usually disgusted him; but how could these people have known what happened behind their backs, especially when media tells people what they wanted to believe?
An ancient, lunar-skinned woman in black faced a photographer’s lens. Conflicts turn the wrinkled into celebrities. The powerful increase their celebrity by starting wars they dream of winning. Politicians supposedly employing diplomacy to stop wars are paid to start them.
A helicopter’s chugging rumbling made hands sway above heads in a collective hello.
“Russians,” a teenager, with a warm, disarming face, remarked, pointing upwards.
The teenager’s blue eyes glowed amiably above his cheek fires. His snowy hair emphasised his facial flames. The Serbian and Russian tricolours ironically decorated his face.
“I had Albanian friends before the war,” he said. “I’d like to know where they are. But it’s impossible for me to see them. They live in the valley.”
His smiled tearfully.
“Maybe,” Vincent offered, “you’ll see them sooner than you think.”
The teenager smiled.
“That would be nice,” he replied, “but it will be impossible for years – probably forever.”
The mountains behind the town had become barriers, not the liberating places they once were.
“I just want to finish school,” the teenager continued, “get a job, make money, and have a great life, just like you. But….”
Emotion rushed up Vincent’s throat.
“No teachers here?” he asked.
“No books, papers or pens. Everything is down there,” the teenager said, “in the valley. I won’t be going to school for years.”
A Gypsy woman’s eyes shone weirdly as she ran through the square. She seemed to have swallowed a hallucinating potion. Bushy Eyebrows said: “Oo Chi Car.”
Resignation made Bushy Eyebrows’s eyebrows drop like hairy stones. His black hairs’ prematurely grey ends suggested a make-up artist had produced an impression of aging. And aging was appropriate. Everyone had been forced into early retirement – including the teenagers.
German soldiers in a Jeep bounced along the winding road that the Gypsy had entered the square from. People followed. Twisting walls lined the meandering unpaved thoroughfare that reached a house where the Jeep stopped. Sobbing women’s heads huddled like solace-seeking ducklings. The women’s colourful skirts, shimmering in the light that fled off the street’s white walls, seemed to reverberate from ultraviolet blows.
The Germans were handed the ID of a kidnapped man. The victim’s mother’s blue eyes looked gripped by visions of hell as she slid down a wall. Her throat throbbed. Her chest heaved like a wild sea.
Vincent glimpsed her son’s face on the ID. Black hair. Broad face. Flat cheeks. Another statistic in a millennium of mistrust.
The Germans asked questions dispassionately, like bureaucrats performing perfunctory tasks. A woman wearing a floral apron – a happy garment of repression – responded calmly. She pointed to the slope above. The Albanians had descended from there. Unlikely they would spare the son’s life.
The soldiers, going in search of the probable corpse, headed into where violent righteousness seethed in a misleading quietude, where the world ended for the minority in the town below. The mother’s whining, like a bird being hounded by a cat, made the wind howl more intensely and the sunlight gleam more bitterly upon the walls.
Vincent had never before heard the sound shrieking from her mouth: a high-pitched howl of gasping terror, her future a blizzard of despair.
No photography, he thought, this situation already slashed badly enough with voyeurism’s sharp steel, etched permanently by memory’s cameras onto consciousness.
The observers left the women to their pain. New stories would arise elsewhere, tragedies acknowledged and forgotten by our lust for distraction.
Johan and Vincent were invited to a rooftop terrace. A stairwell reached where red-and-white-checked tablecloths covered tables. People were playing cards. Shadows from columns on the rooftop’s edge stretched like mental scars across where these people socialised, Vincent and Johan the only two with money to buy drinks. The rest were imprisoned, their surrounding enemies motivated by revenge.
Before sitting, the people stared down at a world no longer theirs. Horses in hazy languor on green fields kissed fertility. Sloping orange roofs framed plummeting land. Mountains glowed in purple haze. Globules engulfed peaks in silent vapour blazes. Jewelled leaves obscured roofs. Glinting vehicles, like shiny beetles, crawled below, beauty masking danger, as beauty often does.
A man arching his back swept his hands through his hair before wiping his face, habits enacted from unwanted inaction. He stood at the terrace’s balustrade facing his departed past.
The Albanians had blocked the village. The only way out for Serbs was in coffins. The soldiers who had first dashed through the square had been Dutch, not Russian, reducing Vincent’s concerns.
Back Archer sauntered back to his chair and plonked himself down, mouth tight under intense eyes, another lap completed amid frozen time.
Clouds’ shadows slipped over slopes behind the town. Marshmallow vapours fractured when striking the peaks, like puffed up illusions disintegrating.
“Before the war,” Sasha, the blue-eyed teenager, said, “we would go up there with our girls, take wine, and have fun.”
Uprising land fights gravity, like curiosity fighting fear.
“But for two years,” Sasha continued, “nobody goes out at night. People disappear. Things don’t change.”
The mountains, once symbolising freedom, had become barriers upon which clouds’ shadows slid like the spirits of the dead across the past.
A sleeping cat on a chicken coop’s roof across the road was surrounded by crows, cat paws splayed out, the birds calm.
“It’ll be different,” Sasha said, “when the cat wakes.”
Smoke from a fire, hanging over distant roofs, merged so tranquilly into blue radiance that it made intentional destruction appear ridiculous, ridiculous in that listless lassitude that anyone could pursue violence. But revenge, that fire of ferocious enthusiasm, burns bright under all conditions.
“They burn Serbian houses every day,” Sasha said.
The Serbs, who once lived in the valley, had concentrated themselves under NATO protection in their relatives’ houses at the top of the hill.
“Down there,” Sasha said, “is my house. We’re now living up here with relatives.”
His family’s house’s burnt rafters protruded through a smashed-ribcage roof. A giant seemed to have clobbered the house with an almighty thump. Black fire stains above missing windows resembled bruises upon the house’s white walls. Crows danced upon its undamaged chimney, everything gone from within. The past’s remnants lingered like a penance in the world’s depression.
Johan and Vincent wanted to investigate the burning houses. Their appreciation unfolded in handshakes, promises of returns made. The most depressed had returned to the balustrade. He waved to Vincent and Johan without smiling, too drained of enthusiasm to socialise.
Down the hill, German soldiers, glaring at Vincent and Johan, resembled mystified children observing bizarre animals in a zoo, the soldiers’ heads swollen by khaki helmets, leather straps under their chins.
“Was machen Sie hier?” one asked.
The soldiers’ pupil moons in ocular-azure skies leered like the Gypsies’ eyes below.
“Visiting friends,” Vincent replied.
“Friends?!”
WEEEOOOTT!! Vincent imagined them thinking.
One rang the UN on a satellite phone to see if Vincent and Johan’s organisation had permission to be in Kosovo. The soldier, clutching Johan’s ID, talked while facing a wall. Vinyl uncertainty shimmered again inside Vincent’s head, his future again in doubt.
“Yes,” the soldier was told, “but they shouldn’t be where you are.”
The UN had banned NGO’s from helping Serbs, claiming this would put NGO workers under threat from Albanians, a ploy to remove Serbs from Kosovo.
The soldier asked: “Was wollen Sie hier?”
He spun so quickly that Vincent thought he was going to be arrested.
“Like I said,” Vincent replied, “visiting friends. Are we being arrested?”
Facing unflinching eyes stared…….The soldier’s leering unsociability matched the Gypsy’s, except the soldier was fearless. His eyes spewed cascades of astonishment.
“Are we?” Vincent re-iterated.
The soldier returned Johan’s ID and said: “Go!”
“A Dutchman and an Englishman,” Vincent said, as they fled down the hill, “harassed by Germans in the Serb section of an Albanian town in a province called Kosovo under UN administration in a country once called Yugoslavia.”
“These Serbs,” Johan said, “are in a minimum-security prison, minimum from the wrong direction – getting in! – and that is a joke!”
Worried Gypsies still stared dim doorways. Crows croaked on orange tiles. The Gypsies had sided with the Serbs in the recent conflict, the Albanians hence wanting them dead.
The street’s curves kept distances short. Later, after discovering how many people were dying where they had just been, Vincent thought: Bravery is curiosity fired by ignorance, life a fight between fear and curiosity, the victor’s name, alternating between the two, causing either action or restraint. His violent mother’s see-sawing attitude towards him in his infant years made him see life that way.
They passed a tank at the bottom of the hill. Empty, blue eyes stared down from the tank’s mount at those two “insects” that had crawled up and then down a steep slope. No inquisitiveness energised those dulled, Dutch irises that so-called peace had sapped of hawk-eyed gusto.
At least, Vincent thought, the Germans had been astounded!
Back where their presence wasn’t considered suspicious, tension disappeared. A smoke column lured them on. They were too inexperienced to understand that Vincent looked Albanian and that Johan’s black clothes resembled the KLA’s, who, soaking up glory, still wandered around in black. But realising their ignorance, Johan and Vincent weren’t clinging to pleasing perceptions of a Big Picture; neither were they facing blame’s challenges; hence rational investigation motivated them.
They headed towards where swirling, black vapours were fleeing from the windows of architectural death.
Caution halted them at the burning house’s driveway. The people in the backyard of that house may have been displeased about foreigners observing “ethnic cleansing”. And why wasn’t KFOR stopping these arsonists? Vincent thought.
Five boys emerged from the house’s backyard. The eldest announced: “Criminals lived here.” Sheepish defiance smeared the boys’ faces.
Vincent hadn’t been expecting children. A preconception exploded in his head.
Because the arsonists were only kids, he and Johan headed for the burning house’s back garden. Propaganda had made them assume that Official Burning existed, as though houses were being torched by the KLA as part of a program of Serb elimination. Propaganda, simplifying motives, aids the belief that the enemy is genetically malicious. That allows “eradication of the problem.” Several Albanians had already told them in the short time they had been in Kosovo that “there’s no such thing as a good Serb.”
Vines covered the house’s rear-garden patio. Smashed tiles and burnt timber littered the ground. Sunlight mottled the rumble carpet. Butterflies fluttered over flowers amid broken bricks.
Splintered building materials covered an annexe’s floor. Rusting twisted metal in fragmented plaster lay under jagged wall tops. A useless faucet protruded from a roofless wall. Fractured plaster revealed cracked bricks. Burnt timber abounded. Fantastic shapes proliferated – like sculptures representing our destructive history.
Johan, observing flames dancing upon the main roof’s blackened rafters, thought: Rubble is aesthetic. In Gjakova, chimneys rise over the varying heights of remaining walls. Maybe rubble has become an artistic reflection of the aeons of violence that constitute our history, our minds, adaptable for reasons of survival, beautifying ugly experiences? Rubble’s exoticism seems otherworldly – like something from our accumulated unconscious – as though its appeal is designed to drive us to want to see the dramatically unique, making us experience firsthand the morally distinct. I want to see it because I’m rebelling against my mother’s overprotection. This, I think, is why I’m here. She would not approve of me being here. Disapproval inspires.
Vincent would have loved to have ventured inside the house, but the heat was too intense. Fire crackled in the roof. The arsonists justified their behaviour via convenient political views, real motives covered by sheaths of magnanimous outrage.
The boys, hurling bricks into the blaze, tried smashing a rafter to collapse the roof. That roof’s falling, Johan thought, would appease a lust for unrestricted liberation. Such actions on bigger scales deny liberation to others, perpetuating revenge.
The boys’ laughter was healthy – even if their thoughts weren’t.
Johan approached a man whose elbows topped the concrete fence that bordered off the rubble garden from the man’s backyard. Excessive calculation coloured the man’s immobility. His eyes looked braced in a steadfast glare. The apple tree behind him housed red-apple grenades in camouflage boughs. A Serb had planted the tree years before. The Albanian now plucked fruit from the tree and ate it while lying on grass planted by people who had fled from Kosovo before war’s inevitable eruption.
“Was he a paramilitary?” Johan asked, referring to the owner of the burning house.
Fiery-red dots shone in greenery behind the man’s head.
“No, a thief,” he replied.
The Albanian remained still, strangely not hysterical as if part of the concrete supporting him. Even his eyes were unusually stable, devoid of outrage’s lightning flashes.
“He took my things,” he said. “I found them in his house.”
The question of goods stolen in return wasn’t addressed.
The children cackled as the roof fell. The noise epitomised a tree collapsing, an awakening of a slumbering, teeth-gritting weight, painstaking crescendo like breaking bones.
The restless Serb’s mouth sprung open in the rooftop café. Through binoculars he saw the last positive thing in this turgid absurdity going, going, gone!! Violent emptiness shook his heart. She had left that house, never to return. Her apple cheeks, that had blended into mango-gold on her face, and her blue eyes, that had been electrified by her mind, were now gooooonnnneee!!
The Albanian said: “I rang him the other day.”
“How?!” Johan asked.
“I rang his relatives. They live on the hill. He’s with them.”
“What did you say?”
“I asked him why he took my TV. He said he had been looking after it until I returned.”
Marko, the restless Serb, who had answered that telephone, covered his face with his right hand. His lips joined to stop the whine accumulating in his throat from escaping. Pain displays were self-indulgent. Everyone had suffered. Stoicism mandatory. Ostentatious pain egotistical. His head trembled. He pushed a fist up against his face. Trenches shot from his eyes. Placing the palm of his right hand against his forehead, he fought that whine’s attempt to escape. His uncle and the Albanian neighbour had screamed, accusing each other of theft and murder. Marko continued forcing his lips together. He squeezed his eyes tight.
His uncle’s ex-neighbour said: “I tried escaping when the Serb army arrived, but my neighbour tipped the police off. He saw me heading over those mountains. I was tortured by both Russians and Serbs. The Russians aren’t getting in here.”
The Albanian blockade of the town halted Russian entry. The Russians were supposed to be protecting the Serbs under a NATO agreement. But KFOR had done nothing to remove the blockade.
Mystifyingly dispassionate, the Albanian didn’t move. His eyes are too tranquil for someone who should have been outraged, Johan thought. And why did they pick him for torture? Was it that indiscriminate? And how does he know that the neighbour tipped the police off?
The Albanian, pointing at his ex-neighbour’s house, asked: “They found weapons; a bomb strapped to his door. Is that the behaviour of a normal citizen?”
Yes, Johan thought, it is. Normal citizens prefer revenge to justice, righteousness to remorse, accusation to awareness, simplification to consideration – especially in war. And they detest taking blame. They believe anything to maintain their innocence. He avoided saying: “Yes, it is.”
Marko continued looking down. The lie of free will, he pondered, eradicates consideration of unconscious motives, reinforcing pretences of rationality, permitting the casting of blame. Bekim, Bekim, Bekim, he thought. You picked the person whose death would cause maximum pain to the greatest number of people. I should have stopped her! I should have demanded she stay! I should have just grabbed her and tied her down! Stupid!! Bekim – you killed an innocent woman because of murders done by others. You couldn’t resist! I feel sorry for you – and for her – and for everyone. There isn’t any intelligent control anywhere on this damn planet! NONE!
You’re just too obsessed for me, she had told Bekim. Nobody can disagree with you. You can’t listen! You’re obsessed with your own fixed ideas about people who you’ve never even met! Has it ever occurred to you that most Serbs here who don’t like Milosevic either?
You all loved him when he took over!
We were scared! And we still are! Even more so now!
Crows, populating the valley’s roofs – a supposedly unintelligent creature – could treat every house as their own, the smart ones trapped by revenge.
Marko faced where going again was impossible. You knew how everyone loved her, Bekim, he thought. Her beauty crystallised inadequacies into sharp, fractured, gleaming glass, leading a man, with frustrations, in an abnormal situation, to kill.
Humming breeze accompanied singing birds. Butterflies hovered before petals. Bird music filled green choirs. Flowers offered fruits to butterflies and bees. While humanity bickers, nature seals harmonious relationships, parallel worlds equally unconscious.
“Would you like us,” Johan said, “to bring a Serb down here to speak to you?”
“Kneeeeooo!”
Solid, bongo-drum, thumping certainty.
Bekim didn’t “want to speak to another Serb again.” The solution: “Remove every Serb from Kosovo.”
Guilt’s elimination is freedom’s privilege – the privilege of the victorious.
“I,” Bekim said, “have freedom for the first time.”
Eliminating doubt creates illusions of liberation.
“You,” Vincent asked, “will never speak to another Serb again?”
“Never,” Bekim howled.
“An apology?” Johan suggested.
“Never,” Bekim re-iterated.
Another rafter crashed. The boys were destroying something that symbolised contrary things to different people. Their cackles crackled like the flames that cackled upon a lost past. Emptiness swirled like a homeless spirit in Marko’s bones as black smoke swirled from that house into blue impartiality.
Bekim’s gaze remained unwavering. His punishment, he believed, had exceeded any sin he had committed. His sins were justified because of his people’s oppression.
How could you blame him for thinking that? Johan thought.
“Well,” Johan said, “thanks for talking. Enjoy freedom.”
Mango vapours now met evening blue. Rubble had become again wondrous monuments to our dark history.
“Thanks,” Bekim replied.
Up the road, Vincent said: “The Russians won’t be getting in here.”
“He wasn’t,” Johan replied, “as hysterical as he should’ve been.”
Marko’s bowed head became silhouetted against orange vapours. The others, filing down the stairs, knew they couldn’t comfort him.
The “kidnapped” man’s mother tried grabbing a knife to stab a NATO soldier. Army boots kicked the knife away.
“You let those terrorists loose to get our country!” she screamed.
Bekim entered his house. Next door’s flames were justified. Many Serbs had believed that too. Only others were guilty.
Marko’s mind’s empty choirs only contained her lost voice. His views, stripped of abstractions, race, and politics, centred on two individuals in a specific incident, both of whom he understood. She hadn’t liked Bekim; but that had had nothing to do with Bekim being Albanian. By concentrating his hatred upon her, Bekim had intentionally amplified collective hurt.
“The more I learn, the more I realise my ignorance,” Vincent said.
“You don’t have pretensions about understanding big pictures,” Johan replied. “These people do.”
Tasty information slices represent complete pies in the blame game. The game protects us from judgement.
“Because of the Germans,” Johan said, “we’re going to get it when we get back.”
He smiled, thinking of how ridiculous that would be, for it would imply criminals accusing the innocent of breaking rules.
“And guess why?” Vincent asked.
“Western countries want the Serbs out to grab this place?”
“Yes. So they’re keeping the Russians out.”
“I’m not worried what they say to me,” Johan said. “I’ll accuse them of the facts.”
Vincent didn’t respond. He felt disquieted by the prospect of being expelled from Kosovo for not “following guidelines.” Accusing the UN of imposing a tut-tutting dictatorship so Western powers could kick the Serbs back into Serbia wasn’t going to help him. It would only bring a jarring close to his current adventure. He felt elated to have acquired his recent knowledge; but Johan seemed motivated – even proud – of defending himself by revealing that knowledge.
That’s attractive at first, Vincent thought, but there’s also the medium and long terms.
“People,” he said, “elected to use diplomacy to stop wars start wars to make fortunes.”
Johan’s face ignited like a bonfire. In Gjakova, he told the UN this when facing “trial.” He was sent back to the Netherlands, that more preferable to him than remaining silent against pretentiously benign forces denying their ignominy. He liked being judged because it enabled him to do the same to his accusers, leaving his sincerity unimpaired.
Apologetic Vincent, admitting his “crime,” was allowed to stay. Compromising values to fulfil ambition typified the majority; only in Vincent’s case, unconcerned about having a glorious self-perception, he acknowledged his moral failings.
If everyone did the same thing, he thought, war would disappear.
About the Author
Kim Farleigh has worked for NGOs in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine, and Macedonia. He likes painting, art, bullfighting, photography, and architecture, which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. More than 183 of his stories have been accepted by more than 107 different magazines.
