Nothing in the World (9 page)

J
oško woke wrapped in a horrible silence. The sun was already well into the sky, and sweat was beaded on his face. He sat up, held his breath and
closed his eyes. Even the insects had fallen quiet. So that was that. He’d failed. The girl was dead or taken.

He headed west, and the hills grew into mountains. He came to no villages and passed few roads. When his course led uphill his lungs tightened and
strained, and when it led downhill his legs pulsed and flared, giving way every so often and pitching him from the path. Each time it was a little more
difficult to get up.

As afternoon fell to dusk he climbed the last mountain he’d have strength for that day. He neared the ridge, hoping that on the far side
he’d see nothing but flatlands. Instead there was another range of mountains.

He sat down in the pass, ate a roll, drank what was left of his water. If the mountains did not end soon he would never see Klara again. He had walked
so far and found so little.

He heard the taut keen of a hawk somewhere above him, and the crescent moon hung close in the sky, dagger-sharp and deadly. He burrowed into the grass,
hoping that the moon had not seen him, could not hear his quickening heart.

* * *

Joško knew that if he didn’t find a village soon he would have to follow the next road he came to and take his chances with jeeps and
soldiers. He dropped into the valley and started up the next hill. An hour later the sun was up, and his throat closed in on itself once again.

He worked his way from tree to tree, pulling himself along with the help of low branches. Each footstep raised a small plume of dust. The trail led to
a ravine, and he slid down into the bottom, clawed his way up the far side. He pounded his legs with the sides of his fists and waited for his lungs to
cool, then pushed on, one cramped step after another.

The ridgeline was tremendously distant. When he couldn’t walk any farther he stopped in the shade of a massive dark stone and closed his eyes.
Jezera seemed unreachable, but that left him nowhere to go. Then something brushed against his arm. He opened his eyes, and standing beside him was a
boy with dirt crusted around his mouth, and hair twisted like kelp down his back. The boy smiled at him, and Joško smiled back. He tried to say
hello, but a harsh unfinished whisper was all that came out.

The boy pointed at the ridge. Joško nodded. The boy slipped his hand into Joško’s, took a step forward and pulled. Joško lifted
his right foot and planted it higher. The boy grinned, took another step, and pulled again.

Each step upward seemed a separate life, but the boy would not let him stop. The horizon began to drop in the sky. Joško leaned on the boy’s
shoulder, and limped the last few steps to the pass.

A wide flat valley stretched away from the foot of the mountains. Joško dropped his rucksack and knelt down, tried to thank the boy but no words
would come. The boy brought his hand to his mouth, to his ear, and shook his head.

Joško opened his rucksack and worked through it. He found a postcard of a bridge, a sewing kit, a carton of cigarettes, and handed them all to the
boy. The boy nodded his thanks, and pointed at the knife on Joško’s belt. Joško pulled it out of its sheath. Old blood had dried black
on the blade. He wiped it on his tattered shirt, turned it in his hand and held it out. It was immense in the boy’s palm, and he smiled, tucked
it into his waistband, and pointed down the hillside.

A hundred meters below was a small white house. The boy patted his chest, pointed south along the ridge and turned to go, but Joško caught him by
the back of the shirt and motioned for him to wait. The boy nodded. Joško searched around for a stick, cleared away a patch of grass, and
scratched ‘Jezera?’ into the dry soil. The boy shrugged. Joško smoothed the ground as best he could and wrote ‘Murter?’

The boy stared at the word, looked up into the sky, and pointed down the valley. Joško rose, kissed the boy on the forehead and watched as he
walked down the ridge, then headed toward the house.

He went onto his tiptoes to look in through the back window. Books and magazines were scattered across the kitchen table, and dirty dishes were stacked
on the counter. He made his way down the side of the house, stepped carefully through the withered flowerbeds, rounded the corner and stopped.

Sitting in a straight-backed chair on the front porch was a very old woman. She was watching the valley as if waiting for something to begin. On a
small table beside her were the remains of her lunch: a bit of salad, a crust of bread, part of a potato dumpling and a glass of water.

He stepped forward and cleared his ravaged throat. The woman’s head swung around. It took a moment for her eyes to focus, and when they did she
chirred like a squirrel, pushed herself up from her chair and stuttered toward her door.

Joško had never seen such slow hurrying. She finally reached the threshold, hopped inside and closed the door, and still he waited. When it was
clear that she wouldn’t be coming back out, he stepped onto the porch and helped himself to what she’d left. The water first, and it was
easier this time, the liquid slipping down and his stomach quickly cooling. Then a bite of potato dumpling, the bread-crust, a mouthful of salad, and
the plate was empty.

He looked up to see the curtains drawing shut. So he wasn’t welcome to what he’d had, nor welcome to ask for more. He found a well on the
far side of the house, drew up a bucket of water and took a long draught, filled his canteen, and dropped down the final hill.

* * *

From time to time he passed other houses, and from the few that were empty he stole what food he could find. He followed a creek so that water would
not be a problem, and avoided roads as best he could, crossing only when he could see no one in either direction.

Dusk now thickened the sky. The creek emptied into a culvert too wide to jump across, but there was a makeshift bridge, two tree trunks laid side by
side. Joško was sad to see the creek end. His eyes traced the layers of soil and stone, the alternating grays in its banks. His cheek twitched
once and went still.

He walked onto the bridge, then heard voices, jumped down and hunched in the scrub. A pair of women passed by, complaining about the price of potatoes.
He waited until they were gone, climbed back onto the bridge, and was halfway across when he saw someone step up on the far end. It was a young man
about Joško’s age. A leather patch covered his left eye, and aside from the patch he was wearing only his underwear.

The two men were now face to face, and the bridge was not wide enough for either to slide cleanly past. The man scratched his stomach, and motioned for
Joško to step aside. Joško stared at the leather patch, and a dizziness took him, the patch faded in and out of focus, the glistening
surface, he seemed to be slipping through it and then felt a blow to his chest as the man pushed past. Joško leaned away, out and over the edge of
the bridge, spinning his arms to keep from falling.

* * *

The following morning he heard artillery fire, distant but getting closer. The barrage grew more and more intense, the reverberations shivering up
through his legs. He crossed to the far side of the valley, came to a wide road, and heard the low rumble of vehicles coming toward him. He jumped from
the roadway and dove into a lavender thicket.

A pair of jeeps flew by, and then a convoy of trucks loaded with soldiers. The soldiers jolted against one another. Some had their eyes closed, the
rest stared blankly at the landscape, and they all looked exhausted. Joško hoped the war was going well, wished only the best for these soldiers,
then wondered why their uniforms were so different from his, why the insignias on the trucks—

The soldiers were Serbs. They’d gotten this far. And how much farther? Šibenik? Tribunj? Jezera?

For the next several hours he jogged when he could, walked when he had to, and kept the road in sight. He saw more jeeps and trucks, heard more
artillery fire. His rucksack and rifle were immensely heavy on his shoulders. The horizon blurred and shifted. Hills rose in front of him, and faded
when he tried to climb.

Night came, but he didn’t stop until he saw the fluttering glow of a campfire. He watched for a while, then picked his way forward—his
canteen was empty, he had nothing to eat, and maybe it wasn’t soldiers, maybe it was only... But now he heard voices coming from around the
flames, and he did not recognize the accent. A faint wind stirred the leaves around him, and Joško walked quietly away.

* * *

The sun was not yet above the horizon but the sky was softly bright. Joško skirted a high rock bluff, heard the thick hush of water, and then
another sound, a hum that was almost familiar.

He came out of a dense stand of pines, felt the sun now on his back, and his shadow stretched long and loose and strange along the path. He looked down
a grassy hill and across a maze of blackberry bushes. Beyond was a shallow river, and to his right was a concrete dam.

Two hundred meters downstream there was a small village, but no people were in sight. Joško sat on the hilltop to rest. A breeze rose from the
river, poured over him, and he heard a girl’s voice.

He jumped to his feet, scanned down the hillside and saw her kneeling on the near side of the river, washing clothes in the diamond-blue water. She was
wearing a streaming white dress, a black apron, a black handkerchief over her head. The breeze softened, and now he could barely hear her, but it was
her true voice, at last her true voice.

Then the humming from the dam went silent. Nothing else seemed to have changed, and it was so much easier to hear the girl singing. The colors slipped
through her hands, crimson and emerald and rich royal blue. He stood and watched, closed his eyes and listened, opened his eyes, and four men crept out
of the bushes behind her.

The men were oddly dressed—almost like janitors, Joško thought, with their coveralls and boots. Then he saw their weapons, and he dropped
his rucksack and threw himself down the hill. He lost sight of the girl as he entered the blackberry thicket, but now he heard her scream, and he
fought through the vines that caught and strained to keep him, the thorns that tore at his hands and face.

The maze thinned as he neared the water, and the girl’s screams were cut off. He went to his hands and knees, crawled forward a few meters more,
and parted the lower vines of the last bush between him and the riverbank.

One of the men had drawn the girl over a large stone in the river. Her dress was pulled up and over her head, and another man had mounted her from
behind, his buttocks thrusting white in the sun.

Joško raised his rifle, took a deep breath, released it, took another, let it halfway out and put a bullet through the temple of the man who was
holding the girl. The two men who had been watching and laughing lifted their guns. Joško shot them both, the right and then the left, and they
too fell away.

The fourth man pulled back from the girl and turned toward the bank. Joško waited. The man brought his hands down to cover his dark groin.
Joško shot him in the face, and he twisted and fell, threshing the water. Joško came to the edge and watched until the man’s body went
still.

The girl stared at Joško, blood running down her throat from a cut on her chin, her eyes sick with fear. He reached out his hand. The girl
didn’t move. Joško thought for a moment, unbuttoned his pocket, pulled out the earring and held it up for her to see. The girl stepped
forward, then screamed and ran flailing toward the village.

Joško looked at the earring. There was still a bit of earlobe attached, and a little dried blood. He put it back in his pocket and went to follow
her, but slipped and fell headlong, the barrel of his rifle plunging into the mud. He righted himself, and by now she was well ahead of him. He ran
faster and faster and wasn’t far behind when she entered the village and turned down an alley.

He got to the corner in time to see the muddy tails of her dress disappear through a doorway, and the door slam shut behind her. He reached the door,
wiped the mud from his face, and went to knock.

The door swung open, and an old man with an ax was coming toward him. Joško stepped back and raised his rifle. The man did not stop and Joško
squeezed the trigger, the bullet seized in the mud-filled barrel and the gun exploded. Pain ripped through Joško’s hands and his right eye
went dark.

He stumbled backwards, fell, got to his feet as the old man swung and the ax ripped through the cloth of his shirt. The man stepped forward and
Joško turned and jumped; the man shouted, and doors up and down the alley began to open. Other men now, other hands grasping at Joško as he
ran. He reached the street and saw the river on the far side, heard footsteps behind him, ran to the bank and hurled himself into the water, thrashing
and then swimming as the river deepened, kicking away from the singing ax.

Joško swam on and on, turned to look back, and the old man was still standing on the bank, howling with anger and swinging his ax back and forth,
but the world had no depth, there were no distances, and Joško rolled and twisted and dove, his head struck a stone and in the darkness were cubes
of light, blue and white and shale-gray. The cubes swarmed and converged, collided and shattered, and the fragments glittered as they rained into the
black below.

He arched back to the surface, gasped, and opened his one good eye. The head of Hadžihafizbegović was floating alongside him, smiling
serenely. Joško swam as fast as he could with the light current, hoping that he was invisible.

He looked back, and the head was still following. The river widened and the water grew shallow again. He staggered to his feet and took the earring
from his pocket. He waited, grabbed the head from the water, held it to his chest and tried to put the earring into the remaining ear, but it slipped
from his hand and was lost. He threw the head onto the shore. It rolled back into the water and bobbed gently toward him.