‘Tell me a story.’
When she was little and lived in Manhattan with her grandparents, she dreamed of New England the way that Sheldon had described it. The hills of the Berkshires would crest and dive like waves covered in wet autumn leaves. A giant doll’s house floated on that sea of leaves. Inside, the blueberry pancakes slid back and forth across the breakfast table. When the pancakes arrived at Sheldon’s side, he’d take a bite, then slide them back down to Rhea’s end, where she’d take a bite. Mabel sat in the middle, trying to pour freshly pressed cider into a cup without spilling it.
The teddy bear behind her on the hutch rocked and rolled, too, its blue bow-tie flapping like a butterfly.
At breakfast, in the doll’s house, they would tell stories.
The summer house was her doll’s house now; Hedmark, her Berkshires. And so life unfolds itself, and our dreams come true in ways we never imagined.
Lars is her imagination. He tells her stories in their doll’s house. They lie on the grass in summer and under the duvet in winter, and fly together in worlds both wonderful and sad.
This morning — the morning of the second day — he wants to be somewhere else.
So Lars talks. He tells of a nice day at the bookshop with the terrace at Aker Brygge, and the mid-summer sales on Bogstadveien, and ice-cream on some corner of Grunerlokka, and cinnamon buns at the Apent Bakeri across from the new Literature House near the Royal Palace. Rhea follows the circuitous route in her mind and imagines herself pushing a pram.
Inside the pram is her baby, who is between three and four months old. She looks in. It is a boy, and he is sleeping. He sways as the pram sails the city streets. He doesn’t wake when the wheels cross the frequent drainage runs in the sidewalk. It is part of the rhythm of the city, and he was born here. Born here, so far from her home. He both is, and will never be, of this place.
As she listens to Lars, she populates the city with familiar and unfamiliar faces. She matches the clothing styles to the neighbourhoods. She recalls Sheldon mapping the city against New York.
‘Frogner is Central Park,’ he’d said. ‘Grunerlokka is Brooklyn. Toyen is the Bronx. Gamlebyen is Queens. And that peninsula. What do you call it?’
‘Bygdoy.’
‘That’s Long Island.’
‘What about Staten Island?’
‘What about it?’
The boy’s name is Daniel. They pass a toy store and she looks inside the window. Suddenly, she imagines Sheldon standing inside holding a bloody knife.
‘I think we should settle the bill and go to the summer house,’ Rhea says abruptly.
Outside the window, in a white Mercedes across the street from the hotel, Enver’s fingers roll back and forth across the black vinyl of the steering wheel to a rhythm that no one else hears. His trigger finger is permanently stained yellow by old Yugoslavian cigarettes. There is a CD playing the music of a dark and raspy singer strumming a gypsy guitar.
The car’s engine is off. The hood crackles under the sun.
The woman he is watching inside the building is slumped onto her hands, and the man is stretched over his chair. They have been there over an hour as the hot morning sun shines into Enver’s weathered face. The sun doesn’t just set late here: it rises early.
He puts on a pair of gold aviator sunglasses, and inhales deeply.
Soon, his exile from his native land will end. After the war — when Kosovo was still Serbian — he fled. He was wanted and hunted. But now things are different. Kosovo has declared independence. It has been recognised by states all around the world. And there, Enver is not a wanted war criminal. There, in this new state, with new laws, new rules, and a new memory, he will return a quiet hero. Yes, the new state has all the trappings of a modern government. It will be good, of course. It will act in accord with all international laws and treaties. It will be grateful for the support of the kindly nations that have recognised its right to exist. But it will be crafty and wise, too. It will first remember its own. It will protect Enver and his comrades. It will welcome him into its warm embrace. It will learn to justify his past actions in the way that all states celebrate their soldiers.
Before all that, however, there is something that needs to be done here, in this Nordic land. Before all that, he needs to find the boy.
Kosovar independence should have been a time of rejoicing — of dancing and drinking and fucking — a decade of fighting in the KLA against the Serbian scum finally vindicated. His comrades in arms have been living in every God-forsaken land, furtively, like rats hiding from the light. When you fight for a land that has no government of its own, there is nothing to protect you. But now Kosovo is free. And the government knows who helped make it free. And it will be good to its returning sons.
Enver was there in March ’98 when Adem Jashari’s house was raided a second time by the police. He personally put a knife in the soft space between the ribs of a burly cop wearing a flack vest, and stared him down as the life drained out of him, watching the last emotion register on his victim’s face.
Hate. It is always hate. Never remorse. Never regret that this life is ending, or for the beauty that is passing.
Perhaps if he saw sadness — the sadness of final knowledge in all that is still undone, unexperienced, unloved — he could look onto something new in the light of this asylum summer. But it never comes. You cut a man open, and all that flows out is the hate that is inside. It drips from the knife, and sanctions the kill.
He wipes his brow with a white handkerchief.
During the war, the Serbs tried to drive him, his family, his clan, his fellow Albanians, from the land in what the West called ethnic cleansing. But when NATO starting dropping the bombs, and the KFOR soldiers moved in, the tide turned. Enver and his men formed quickly. Their revenge was not random. They targeted the family members of the men who had done this to them. And after the war ended, there was still justice to deliver.
The day that brought him to Oslo began in Gracko. The Serbian boys and men were working the fields. It was scorchingly hot. Enver was lying beside a sickly grey brook with a rifle resting on his fist, looking down the long barrel through the iron sights. The flies on his hair and face made him twitch. They made it hard to keep the farmer covered by the iron pin.
His other men, twelve in all, were in the forest at the edge of the field. Enver had picked the target. It was his mission. The killing would begin as soon as he pulled the trigger.
And he did. But the farmer didn’t fall. Instead, the man turned to his left looking for the source of the small explosion. Perhaps a car had backfired? A stone had hit another stone? An axe had struck a buried brick? Anything but this. The war was over, wasn’t it?
Then the farmer fell, shot by someone else’s rifle — killed in his confusion and tranquillity. Perhaps his last thought was of the peace he lived in and the safety of his family. Enver hoped so. Because then, in the afterlife, he would be ashamed of his final moments. And perhaps this would be the first shame he ever felt. And through that feeling he might come to understand what he and his people had done to others in this life.
Enver was a poor shot. His targets dropped, one by one, at the hands of other men in the team, and his own rage mounted. He couldn’t seem to put a bullet on target. His compatriots would complain that he didn’t do his fair share, that he didn’t earn his fair share of the honour. They would secretly scoff at his manhood — at his failure to avenge his people against the marauders.
Because of flies. The distraction of the damn flies.
With no bullets left, he dropped the rifle and ran into the field to find someone to kill with his bare hands and teeth.
It was dry. His feet pounded on the cracked earth as his heart pumped in his chest. A boy, maybe fourteen, stood like a deer clutching a rake as Enver charged at him. The boy was terrified into paralysis. He peed into the left leg of his trousers like a child. But before Enver was on him, before he could slit his throat, a bullet clipped the boy in the neck, splaying blood over the golden field.
The boy thrashed on the ground, crying for his mother, as Enver picked up his rake and ran towards the farmhouse.
What right did they have, these Serbs? They did this to him in Shala. They created this moment. Wrath does not invent itself. It is the product of the ways of others. We all must brace for the impact of what we put into this
