Free The Ways of the Dead by Neely Tucker Page A

tremors were almost gone.
    He went back inside, got the bottle and went upstairs. The shelf in the closet held the box, the kind of storage box law firms used to use for case files. He took it to the bed, unwrapped the silk drawstrings, turned it upside down, shaking it out onto the top of the sheets.
    Pictures, old passports, documents in foreign languages, wrinkled currencies in faint shades of blue. Nadia’s scarf. He climbed on the bed, propping the bourbon against a pillow. There were several sets of pictures from Bosnia, bound together with a green rubber band, and he sorted through them until he found the packet he was looking for. He pulled the rubber band off and the pictures spilled out. They were taken at the school and they were poorly lit and Nadia wasn’t the subject of most of them because he did not know her then.
    The story had been about an elementary school that was functioning in the basement of an apartment building during that first winter of the war, populated by children of parents who’d stayed behind by choice or necessity now that the routes into and out of Sarajevo were blocked. The siege had a surreal quality to it. The drudgery of the war, the intermittent shelling, the bread lines, the snipers, gasoline at a hundred dollars per gallon, twenty-five dollars for a bar of chocolate, had not yet settled in.
    The school was composed of fifty-six children from six grades, being taught—if that was the verb—by three teachers. It seemed to Sully more like a lesson in crowd control. The children were aggressive, loud, anxious. They stood when they were supposed to sit, they ran when they were supposed to walk, they threw things. They were wildly energized by a foreign reporter dropping in, and this gave cause for more noise and frenzy. Children had never done much for him, and Sully had been of a mind to pop them upside the head and tell them to pipe down. His old man hadn’t been wrong about everything.
    The two other teachers were older, maybe early forties, and Nadia, a decade younger, was the quiet one who didn’t say much. She taught the youngest children. He had been struck, immediately, by her genuineness and warmth (well, her eyes, too, a deep, honeyed shade of brown) and, after a few minutes of conversation, the sly wit, the rough voice (she smoked).
    That first day, snow had just fallen. Where were the pictures . . . ? Here. Here she was, blue cable-knit sweater, jeans, boots. Black hair, loose, free. The kids surrounded her, excited by the camera, mugging. A kid named Sasha put his head on her shoulder as she sat at her desk. Here she was in teaching mode, writing on a whiteboard, one arm drawn across her chest to keep her coat close in the near freezing air.
    A month passed before he saw her again. He took her a copy of the story, a version that had been picked up and run on the front page of the
International Herald Tribune
. By then four kids in her class were dead and they had moved the classroom twice. He saw her in the Merkale Market, too, just long enough to say hello. Two weeks later, he saw her there again. She lingered, standing outside next to a table scattered with anemic vegetables, a pale winter sun barely over the mountains, her skin white as parchment, a cigarette in her left hand. His voice nervous, he couldn’t help it he said hi and hello and then just did it.
    —So maybe could I take you to dinner or something sometime? I could—
    —Nobody goes to dinner. Only foreign
novinari
and UNPROFOR.
    —Okay. I wasn’t trying to—
    —You can come over if you want pasta.
    —’m sorry?
    —Pasta. Do you eat it?
    —Yes, yes, but—
    —Is English one of your languages?
    —Yes.
    —So you know, come over, eat pasta.
    Teasing him in that Balkan accent, that world-weary Euro air, looking at him now, those eyes.
    —Yes. I can. I can come over. I got two bottles of red from duty-free.
    And so it had proceeded in the speeded-up hyperreality of war. Before the calendar