The Heaven Trilogy (59 page)

Ivena put one hand on her hip and ran the other through her gray curls. She'd cared for a hundred species of roses over her sixty years and never, never had she seen such a thing. Each bud from Nadia's bush was priceless. If there was a graftable branch alive she would snip it off and nurse it back to health. But every branch seemed affected.

“Oh, dear Nadia, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

She couldn't answer herself for the simple reason that she had no clue what she would do. She had never considered the possibility that this, the crown of her flower garden, might one day die for no apparent reason at all. It was a travesty.

Ivena picked through the branches again, hoping that she was wrong. Dried dirt grayed her fingers. They weren't as young or as smooth as they once had been, but years of working delicately around thorns had kept them nimble. Graceful. She could walk her way through a rosebush blindfolded without so much as touching a thorn. But today she felt clumsy and old.

The stalk between her fingers suddenly snapped. Ivena blinked. It was as dry as tinder. How could it fail so fast? She tsked and shook her head. But then something caught her eye and she stopped.

Immediately beneath the branch that had broken, a very small shoot of green angled from the main stalk. That was odd. She lowered her head for a closer look.

The shoot grew out a mere centimeter, almost like a stalk of grass. She touched it gently, afraid to break it. And as she did she saw the tiny split in the bark along the base of that shoot.

She caught her breath. Strange! It looked like a small graft!

But she hadn't grafted anything into the plant, had she? No, of course not. She remembered every step of care she'd given this plant over the last five years and none of them included a graft.

It looked like someone had slit the base of the rosebush open and grafted in this green shoot. And it didn't look like a rose graft either. The stalk was a lighter green. So then maybe it wasn't a graft. Maybe it was a parasite of some kind.

Ivena let her breath out slowly and touched it again. It was already healed at the insertion point.

“Hmmm.”

She straightened and walked to the round table where a white porcelain cup still steamed with tea. She lifted it to her lips. The rich aroma of spice warmed her nostrils and she paused, staring through the wisps of steam.

From this distance of ten feet Nadia's rosebush looked like Moses's burning bush, but consumed by the flame and burned black. Dead branches reached up from the soil like claws from a grave. Dead.

Except for that one tiny shoot of green at its base.

It was very strange indeed.

Ivena lowered herself into the old wood-spindle chair beside the table, still looking over the teacup to the rosebush. She sat here every morning, humming and sipping her tea and whispering her words to the Father. But today the sight before her was turning things on their heads.

She lowered the cup without drinking. “Father, what are you doing here?” she said softly.

Not that he was necessarily doing anything. Rosebushes died, after all. Perhaps with less encouragement than other plants. But an air of consequence had settled on Ivena, and she couldn't ignore it.

Across the beds of flourishing flowers before her sat this one dead bush—an ugly black scar on a landscape of bright color. But then from the blackened stalk that impossible graft.

“What are you saying here, Father?”

She did not hear his answer, but that didn't mean he wasn't talking. He could be yelling for all she knew. Here on Earth it might come through as a distant whisper, easily mistaken for the sound of a gentle breeze. Actually the greenhouse was dead silent. She more felt something, and it could just as easily have been a draft that tickled her hair, or a finger of emotion from the past, as the voice of God.

Still the scene before her began to massage her heart with fingers of meaning. She just didn't know what that meaning was yet.

Ivena hummed and a blanket of peace settled over her. She whispered, “Lover of my soul, I worship you. I kiss your feet. Don't ever let me forget.” Her words echoed softly through the quiet greenhouse, and she smiled.
The Creator was a mischievous one,
she often thought. At least playful and easily delighted. And he was up to something, wasn't he?

A splash of red at her elbow caught her eye. It was her copy of the book.
The Dance of the Dead.
Its surreal cover showed a man's face wide open with laughter, tears leaking down his cheek.

Still smiling, Ivena set down her teacup and lifted the book from the table. She ran a hand over the tattered cover. She'd read it a hundred times, of course. But it never lost its edge. Its pages oozed with love and laughter and the heart of the Creator.

She opened the book and brushed through a few dozen dog-eared pages. He had written a masterpiece, and in some ways it was as much God's words as his. She could begin in the middle or at the beginning or the end and it wouldn't hardly matter. The meaning would not be lost. She opened to the middle and read a few sentences.

It was odd how such a story could bring this warmth to her heart. But it did, it really did, and that was because her eyes had been opened a little as well. She'd seen a few things through God's eyes.

Ivena glanced up at the dying rosebush with its impossible graft. Something new was beginning today. But everything had really started with the story in her hands, hadn't it?

A small spark of delight ran through her bones. She smoothed her dress, crossed her legs and lowered her eyes to the page.

Yes, this was how it all started.

Twenty years ago in Bosnia. At the end of the war with the Nazis.

She read.

THE SOLDIERS stood unmoving on the hill's crest, leaning on battered rifles, five dark silhouettes against a white Bosnian sky, like a row of trees razed by the war. They stared down at the small village, oblivious to the sweat caked beneath their tattered army fatigues, unaware of the dirt streaking down their faces like long black claws.

Their condition wasn't unique. Any soldier who managed to survive the brutal fighting that ravaged Yugoslavia during its liberation from the Nazis looked the same. Or worse. A severed arm perhaps. Or bloody stumps below the waist. The country was strewn with dying wounded—testaments to Bosnia's routing of the enemy.

But the scene in the valley below them was unique. The village appeared untouched by the war. If a shell had landed anywhere near it during the years of bitter conflict, there was no sign of it now.

Several dozen homes with steep cedar-shake roofs and white chimney smoke clustered neatly around the village center. Cobblestone paths ran like spokes between the homes and the large structure at the hub. There, with a sprawling courtyard, stood an ancient church with a belfry that reached to the sky like a finger pointing the way to God.

“What's the name of this village?” Karadzic asked no one in particular.

Janjic broke his stare on the village and looked at his commander. The man's lips had bent into a frown. He glanced at the others, who were still captivated by this postcard-perfect scene below.

“I don't know,” Molosov said to Janjic's right. “We're less than fifty clicks from Sarajevo. I grew up in Sarajevo.”

“And what is your point?”

“My point is that I grew up in Sarajevo and I don't remember this village.”

Karadzic was a tall man, six foot two at least, and boxy above the waist. His bulky torso rested on spindly legs, like a bulldog born on stilts. His face was square and leathery, pitted by a collage of small scars, each marking another chapter in a violent past. Glassy gray eyes peered past thick bushy eyebrows.

Janjic shifted on his feet and looked up valley. What was left of the Partisan army waited a hard day's march north. But no one seemed eager to move. A bird's caw drifted through the air, followed by another. Two ravens circled lazily over the village.

“I don't remember seeing a church like this before. It looks wrong to me,” Karadzic said.

A small tingle ran up Janjic's spine. Wrong? “We have a long march ahead of us, sir. We could make the regiment by nightfall if we leave now.”

Karadzic ignored him entirely. “Puzup, have you seen an Orthodox church like this?”

Puzup blew smoke from his nose and drew deep on his cigarette. “No, I guess I haven't.”

“Molosov?”

“It's standing, if that's what you mean.” He grinned. “It's been a while since I've seen a church standing. Doesn't look Orthodox.”

“If it isn't Orthodox, then what is it?”

“Not Jewish,” Puzup said. “Isn't that right, Paul?”

“Not unless Jews have started putting crosses on their temples in my absence.”

Puzup cackled in a high pitch, finding humor where apparently no one else did. Molosov reached over and slapped the younger soldier on the back of his head. Puzup's laugh stuck in his throat and he grunted in protest. No one paid them any mind. Puzup clamped his lips around his cigarette. The tobacco crackled quietly in the stillness. The man absently picked at a bleeding scab on his right forearm.

Janjic spit to the side, anxious to rejoin the main army. “If we keep to the ridges we should be able to maintain high ground and still meet the column by dark.”

“It appears deserted,” Molosov said, as if he had not heard Janjic.

“There's smoke. And there's a group in the courtyard,” Paul said.

“Of course there's smoke. I'm not talking about smoke, I'm talking about people. You can't see if there's a group in the courtyard. We're two miles out.”

“Look for movement. If you look—”

“Shut up,” Karadzic snapped. “It's Franciscan.” He shifted his Kalashnikov from one set of thick, gnarled fingers to the other.

A fleck of spittle rested on the commander's lower lip and he made no attempt to remove it.
Karadzic wouldn't know the difference between a Franciscan monastery and an Orthodox church if they stood side by side,
Janjic thought. But that was beside the point. They all knew about Karadzic's hatred for the Franciscans.

“Our orders are to reach the column as soon as possible,” Janjic said. “Not to scour the few standing churches for monks cowering in the corner. We have a war to finish, and it's not against them.” He turned to view the town, surprised by his own insolence.
It is the war
.
I've lost my sensibilities
.

Smoke still rose from a dozen random chimneys; the ravens still circled. An eerie quiet hovered over the morning. He could feel the commander's gaze on his face—more than one man had died for less.

Molosov glanced at Janjic and then spoke softly to Karadzic. “Sir, Janjic is right—”

“Shut up! We're going down.” Karadzic hefted his rifle and snatched it from the air cleanly. He faced Janjic. “We don't enlist women in this war, but you, Janjic, you are like a woman.” He headed downhill.

One by one the soldiers stepped from the crest and strode for the peaceful village below. Janjic brought up the rear, swallowing uneasiness. He had pushed it too far with the commander.

High above the two ravens cawed again. It was the only sound besides the crunching of their boots.

FATHER MICHAEL saw the soldiers when they entered the cemetery at the edge of the village. Their small shapes emerged out of the green meadow like a row of tattered scarecrows. He pulled up at the top of the church's hewn stone steps, and a chill crept down his spine. For a moment the children's laughter about him waned.

Dear God, protect us
. He prayed as he had a hundred times before, but he couldn't stop the tremors that took to his fingers.

The smell of hot baked bread wafted through his nostrils. A shrill giggle echoed through the courtyard; water gurgled from the natural spring to his left. Father Michael stood, stooped, and looked past the courtyard in which the children and women celebrated Nadia's birthday, past the tall stone cross that marked the entrance to the graveyard, past the red rosebushes Claudis Flouta had so carefully planted about her home, to the lush hillside on the south.

To the four—no five—to the five soldiers approaching.

He glanced around the courtyard—they laughed and played. None of the others had seen the soldiers yet. High above ravens cawed and Michael looked up to see four of them circling.

Father, protect your children
. A flutter of wings to his right caught his attention. He turned and watched a white dove settle for a landing on the vestibule's roof. The bird cocked its head and eyed him in small jerky movements.

“Father Michael?” a child's voice said.

Michael turned to face Nadia, the birthday girl. She wore a pink dress reserved for special occasions. Her lips and nose were wide and she had blotchy freckles on both cheeks. A homely girl even with the pretty pink dress. Some might even say ugly. Her mother, Ivena, was quite pretty; the coarse looks were from her father.

To make matters worse for the poor child, her left leg was two inches shorter than her right thanks to polio—a bad case when she was only three. Perhaps their handicaps united her with Michael in ways the others could not understand. She with her short leg; he with his hunched back.

Yet Nadia carried herself with a courage that defied her lack of physical beauty. At times Michael felt terribly sorry for the child, if for no other reason than that she didn't realize how her ugliness might handicap her in life. At other times his heart swelled with pride for her, for the way her love and joy shone with a brilliance that washed her skin clean of the slightest blemish.

He suppressed the urge to sweep her off her feet and swing her around in his arms.
Come unto me as little children,
the Master had said. If only the whole world were filled with the innocence of children.

“Yes?”

NADIA LOOKED into Father Michael's eyes and saw the flash of pity before he spoke. It was more of a question than a statement, that look of his. More “are you sure you're okay?” than “you look so lovely in your new dress.”