expected him to name, and the collision of my grandfather’s death and Fra Antun sitting in that little room with the sun glaring in past the orange tree outside was sudden and senseless until I sorted it out.
Fra Antun had already moved on, talking about the mines above the old village, about an undetonated land mine in the neighbor’s plot, by the time I said: “Where?”
“Next door,” he said, pointing through the window.
“No—the place,” I said. “You said something about boys there?”
“Zdrevkov,” he said. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his cassock. “It’s even more backwater than this, but there’s a clinic there,” he told me, blinking up, eyes unfocused. “They’ve been keeping this kind of thing quiet for years. This happened last week. Two teenagers coming home late from town at Rajkovac. Mine got them coming through their own lettuce patch.” He thought my silence was surprise, or fear, or hesitation to ask about the boys’ well-being. “Twelve years since the war, it was in their family’s lettuces the whole time.” He got up and dusted off his cassock. “That’s why the digging’s bad news.”
“How close is it?” I said.
“Zdrevkov? It’s on the peninsula,” he said. “Maybe an hour’s drive.”
I said I was getting more candy, and Zora believed me, believed me, too, when I said I would be back in an hour or less. She had wanted to come along, but I convinced her we’d look unreliable if we both left, insisted on going alone, insisted it would be faster this way, ignored her when she asked me why I needed the car, why I didn’t just walk to the convenience store in town.
North of Brejevina, the road was well paved, stark and new because the scrubland had not grown back up to it, the cliffs rising white and pocked with thorn trees. A wind-flattened thunderhead stood clear of the sea, its gray insides stretching out under the shining anvil. Past the villages of Kolac and Glog, where the seaward slope was topped with new hotels, pink and columned, windows flung wide and the laundry hanging still on the balcony lines. Then came the signs for the peninsula turnoff, twelve kilometers, then seven, and then the peninsula itself, cutting the bay like a ship’s prow between the shore and outer islands, wave-lashed cliffs and pineland. Fra Antun had predicted it wouldn’t take more than an hour to reach the village, but the closeness of the peninsula stunned me.
My grandfather, it seemed, had been coming to see me after all; but while Zora and I had gone the long way, sidetracked by having to check into the United Clinics headquarters before crossing the border, he had come straight down by bus, and somewhere around Zdrevkov he had been unable to come farther. Or he had heard, somehow, about the two boys, and stopped to help.
All this time I had been disconnected from the reality of his death by distance, by my inability to understand it —I hadn’t allowed myself to picture the clinic where he had died, or the living person who would have his belongings, but that was all drawing in around me now.
The final six kilometers to Zdrevkov were unmarked, a dirt trail that wound left through a scattering of carob trees and climbed into the cypresses, which fell away suddenly in places where the slopes dropped away to the water. In the lagoon where the peninsula met the land, the sun had blanched the water bottle-green. The air- conditioning was giving out, and the steady striping of the light between the trees was making me dizzy. The crest of the next hill brought me out of the forest and into a downward-sloping stretch of road, where the abandoned almond orchards were overgrown with lantana bushes. I could see the light-furrowed afternoon swells in the distance, and, straight ahead, the flat roofs of the village.
Even at this distance, I could see why Zdrevkov was so obscure: it was a shantytown, a cluster of plywood- and-metal shacks that had sprung up around a single street. Some of the shacks were windowless, or propped up with makeshift brick ovens. Household junk spilled out of the doorways and into the yellowed grass: iron cots, stained mattresses, a rusted tub, a vending machine lying on its side. There was an unattended fruit stand with a pyramid of melons, and, a few doors later, a middle-aged man sleeping in a rolling chair outside his tin-roofed house. He had his legs up on a stack of bricks, and as I drove past I realized his right leg was missing, a glaring purple stump just below the knee.
The clinic was a gray, two-story house that stood on the edge of town, easy to find because it was the only brick building in sight. Years ago, it had probably been a serious structure with clean walls, a paved courtyard lined with enormous flower urns that were now empty. Since then, the rain gutters had stained red-brown rivers into the walls.
The lot was empty, the clinic curtains drawn. I got out of the car. The stone stairway was littered with leaves and cigarette butts, and it led to a second-story door on which a square green cross had been painted above a plaque that read VETERANS’ CENTER. I knocked with my knuckles, and then with my fist. Nobody answered, and, even with my ear against the door, I heard nothing inside. I tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge, and then I went out along the catwalk and peered around the corner of the clinic. The window facing the valley was shuttered.
The street below dead-ended in a flattened patch of pale grass, bordered on either side by netless goal frames. A slide and some tire swings had been set up on the lip of a wheat field that caught the afternoon light and held it in a shivering glare. Beyond that lay the graveyard, white crosses turned out toward the sea. The wind had subsided, and the road was deserted except for a single mottled goat, tethered to the fence post of what looked like an enormous metal box opposite the clinic. If the BEER sign braced against an oil drum under the awning was to be believed, this was the bar.
I crossed the street and looked inside. The ceiling was very low, the place lit only by the open door and an enormous jukebox, whose sound was drowned out by the humming of a yellow refrigerator that looked like it had been salvaged from a radioactive dump. Four men were on high stools around a single barrel in the corner, drinking beer. It was just the four of them, but they made the room look crowded. One of them straightened up when I came in, a tall man with an ashen, leathery face and thinning gray hair. He didn’t ask if he could help me, or invite me to seat myself, but I didn’t go away, so he didn’t sit back down.
I finally said: “Is the clinic closed?” This forced him to come around the barrel and toward me. A prosthetic arm dangled weightlessly from his elbow on metal joints.
“You a reporter?” he said.
“A doctor,” I said.
“If you’re here about those kids, they’re dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The barman looked at the others in surprise. “Makes no difference to me, they always die when they get hoisted around here.”
“I’m not interested in that.” I waited for some further acknowledgment, but when none came, I said: “Is
