When Enver is close enough, Gjon whispers, ‘You heard about Kadri?’
‘What have you got to eat?’
‘Huh?’
‘What do you have to eat? What did you bring? A sandwich? What?’
Gjon and Burim look at each other and then at Enver. ‘We don’t have any food. Why would we have food?’
‘You were supposed to bring food.’
‘Kadri was arrested. I don’t know what he did,’ says Gjon, ‘but he was a few blocks from the apartment when he got picked up.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I was waiting for him outside the flat,’ says Gjon. ‘He went in to look for the box and told me to…’
‘Told you to what?’
‘Well… I suppose he told me to pick up a few sandwiches.’
‘Right.’
‘Yes. But then I ate them.’
Enver says nothing. He just stands and looks at the two of them.
The impulse to stand straighter, to stop leaning against the car, comes over Burim, but he suppresses it.
‘I didn’t know they were for you. I figured one was for Kadri and the other for me. And then the police went inside and, when he came out, he walked right past me. So I ate them both.’
Enver still says nothing.
‘I called him first and told him that the woman cop was there,’ Gjon adds.
‘Who else is coming?’ Enver asks.
‘And then Kadri was the only one out.’
‘Who the fuck else is coming?’
Burim speaks for the first time, ‘No one.’
‘Give me the rifles.’
Burim and Gjon look at each other and hesitate, too long.
‘There are no rifles. You didn’t bring those either. No food. No weapons. No soldiers. Why did you bother coming at all?’
‘Enver, it isn’t like back in Kosovo. You don’t find AKs under every pile of hay. In ’97 we looted millions, billions, of rounds of ammo. Here, you need to take classes and get a licence to shoot ducks.’
‘There’re rifles behind the counter at Intersport on the main street.’
‘But you need a permit to touch them. And if you buy one they can track us, because we need to register them.’
‘So instead of doing your job, you decided to protect yourselves from possible future paperwork. And the men?’
‘You’ve crossed a line, Enver,’ says Gjon. ‘You killed the mother of your child. Some think you’re cursed.’
‘But you’re here,’ Enver says to Burim.
He was here, but Burim had not wanted to come. He’d explained to Adrijana about the missing boy and the old man, and she’d listened very carefully. She didn’t raise her voice or begin a new and complex lecture. She just listened, and when he was finished she said, ‘I don’t know anything about this. If someone I knew had them, or was even looking, I’d have heard.’
‘But you’ll ask your people about it,’ Burim had said.
If Kadri was really threatening to expose their romance, he wanted it over. He wanted the threat lifted.
‘I can’t believe you just said, “Your people.” Is that really where we are?’
‘We’re in danger.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Adrijana had said.
When Burim got the call from Kadri, he knew he had no choice but to go and pretend that everything was fine. Show that he didn’t suspect he was suspected.
Burim reasoned that there was only one way through this. And that was for Enver to leave the country. Kadri was a punk and a drug trafficker, but, as far as Burim knew, he wasn’t a murderer. Though maybe he was. Stories from the old country blew north like leaves on a wind. There was no telling one from another. No way to know where each one came from.
There was another way, of course. It was for Enver to be arrested — to be locked in a cage where he belonged and leave everyone alone. But they’d still keep calling in favours. Keep saying that Burim’s family owed him. That Burim was a soldier and needed to step up and serve the country.
And there was a final way, though he was afraid to even think it. Enver could die.
Burim was afraid to even harbour these sorts of thoughts. He never had. It was just that one small favour, one peculiar but insignificant request, had morphed into larger ones. They grew and expanded, until last year he was holding half a kilo of heroin in a box that he’d placed in the middle of the kitchen table, and just stared at it. It was worth tens of thousands of kroner, this brown lump from Afghanistan — a country where a bunch of tribesmen grew poppies in open fields as helicopter gunships sniped at them by day, and the Taliban came by at night for their cut. And there it was on his kitchen table, by the salt and pepper shakers, embraced in a cute little pink-and-blue hug that Adrijana had just bought at some fancy kitchen store at Oslo City near the train station.
Then, a few days later, Kadri called and asked for it. So Burim brought it to the Apent Bakeri in an orange JanSport backpack that Adrijana would eventually find missing and wonder how she could have been so dumb as to lose. He handed it to Kadri and then — as though a malignant tumour had been excised — the brick of brown terror was gone.
Later, there was not a trace of it except for the fifteen thousand kroner that Kadri eventually gave him. So Burim went to Paleet and bought some books for Adrijana, subscribed to eMusic.com for two years at their discount price, bought a new winter jacket for himself, and put the rest in their savings account.
He remembers walking out of the bank that afternoon near Majorstuen, arms laden with purchases, wondering what had just happened. He didn’t quite understand, but some part of him knew that he’d just signed a deal with people who didn’t keep their promises. And the idea had filled him with dread.
Gjon gets on one knee on dry dirt and opens a small green sack. He removes three large Bowie knives with wooden handles and brass hilts.
Enver is on the phone making a call. He does not tell them whom he is calling. When the call is over, Enver looks back at the man who was once his friend.
Gjon hands the knives to Burim and Enver. Both regard them with some confusion, each for different reasons.
Enver asks the question that Burim is also thinking. ‘What are we supposed to do with these?’
Gjon stands up, unlocks the trunk of the Mercedes, and puts the green bag back in place beside the spare tyre and the bucket of cleaning materials.
Burim then hears Gjon answer in a way he’d never heard before.
‘Whatever the hell you want, Enver. This is your mess! I want this done with. And then I want you and your bastard kid to fuck off and never come back.’
Burim takes a step back with his knife.
Enver is motionless. Then he nods. Just nods. Then he asks Gjon for a cigarette. Gjon’s shoulders droop slightly, and he reaches into his pocket to take out the soft pack of Marlboro Reds that was almost empty, and taps the pack against the first joint of his left hand to shake one loose.
American soldiers, he saw, used to pack their cigarettes. They’d take one out and bang the filter against a table, or rock, or a friend’s helmet so that the tobacco would compress and the white cigarette paper would form a hollow funnel at the end that used to burn fast and bright before the soldiers took their first drags.
Russian soldiers did the opposite. They rolled the cigarettes between their two fingers and thumbs so that the tiny leaves separated and crinkled. Whatever the weather, the Russians soldiers cupped the matches between their two hands from the bottom, and shielded them so the winds wouldn’t blow out their precious flames.
He hands one to Enver, who puts it in his lips.
