Free The Ways of the Dead by Neely Tucker Page B

turned to February, they were making love, on her bed, on the couch, on the carpet in front of the couch. He put her on her knees in front of the couch and neither of them lasted long like that. Pillow talk:
    —You like Yugoslav girls?
    —I don’t know that I’ve sampled the lot. But this one, touching the tip of her nose with his index finger, yeah, I like this one. But I thought you guys were Bosnian now.
    —I was Yugoslav when I was born. Tito said we were all Yugoslavs.
    —Tito’s dead. Yugoslavia’s dead.
    —It does not change what I am. You, you’re American. From the south part?
    —Louisiana.
    —What do they do in Louisiana?
Loo-ee-see-anna
.
    —Fight. Fuck. Play football. Fish.
    Giggling, brushing her hair back from her face, propping her head on her elbow, the muslin-thin moonlight streaming across the room behind her. There were the hills in the distance, a deeper dark than the sky above it. He could see them behind her. She was a shadow, a shape, and she possibly had the most beautiful voice he had ever heard.
    —Only things that start with the ‘F’?
    —Okay, okay. They cook. They speak English funny. They go to church, a lot of them, anyway, Catholics and Baptists, not Orthodox. They teach you to shoot before they teach you to drive. Manners. Most of them have manners, unless you’re being an asshole, and then they don’t. Then they really don’t.
    —And your parents?
    —They’re dead. Like Tito.
    —They were Louisiana?
    —Yeah.
    —So you would stop being Louisiana if they called it something else?
    By summer, they had progressed to the point where he’d stay with her when he was in the city. They talked of him hiring her as his interpreter and trying for a visa, issued by UN forces that were running the airport, to come with him past the siege lines. But they both knew that would not work, and the idea sank into the gloom of the apartment in the late evenings. There was nothing but candlelight and books and their conversation filling the long hours. She read Bulgakov, reread Gogol, she got him to read Ivo Andric. She read Günter Grass, she read the García Márquez and the Faulkner he’d bring. She read an Elmore Leonard book in a single evening, trying out the slang, working on her accent.
    She read like this, and made love to him, he believed, because she knew she would never get out of the city as long as the war lasted. She was a Serb living with Muslims and Croats, a living anachronism, a relic of the days of Tito. She knew and he knew she would be detained on the far side of any checkpoint. The Serbs, identifying her as a traitor for staying behind in Sarajevo, would tell her they could not guarantee her safety if she proceeded into Serb territory, which was the nice way of saying they would shoot her in the back of the head if she took another fucking step.
    So she stayed, parentless, without family, like him, and they talked of their lives before and maybe after. The war progressed into the next summer and the following winter.
    —It won’t end until we are all dead.
    —Yes, it will. It will end before then.
    —Your Americans, the NATO, is never coming to help us.
    —Eventually they will. I think they will.
    They were in a pizzeria on the eastern side of town on an August afternoon, a small stucco place in the middle of a block on a narrow street. The location was shielded from snipers and a shell would have to whizz-bang straight down to hit it from the Serb-held hills, an angle that was beyond the laws of physics. There was moderately cold beer. It cost seventeen dollars per bottle. She had eaten two slices and half of another and was still too thin, the stress, the diet pasta and almost no vegetables, her skin breaking out across her forehead.
    —We will be in Paris in a couple of years, he said, and then this will only be the way it used to be.
    —I don’t like Paris.
    —Okay. New York. We’ll go to New York.
    —I don’t like New York.
    —You’ve never