Free Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) by William T. Vollmann Page B

the shells.
    Her face seemed to tighten, although he could have imagined that. She said: And you didn’t come back after ’92?
    No, I didn’t. Once I tried, but we had an accident—
    Well. Near the end of the war, the Serbs didn’t have so much ammunition anymore, but they’d kept these airplane grenades. When they had no more surface-to-surface missiles, they modified the grenades. And these had a very specific sound. We called them pig grenades, because they made a grunting noise. If you were very good, you knew by the sound where it was fired and exactly where in the town it would fall. I remember when we would stop and listen to it for a minute, and then we would say: Oh, it won’t fall here.
    I understand, said the journalist.
    One of those pig grenades fell in front of the radio-television station. It took out four floors.
    The journalist was silent.
    Mortar shells made a hissing sound, said Vesna, hoping to help him feel as well as understand. They were almost like bullets in that respect. You remember?
    Yes—
    But pig grenades, they roared when they came close. You could see the birds fly. You could always know the Serbs were bombing the town when we would see the birds fly, and just after that we would hear the grenades. I remember it. You’d think that the sky was black. Pigeons, crows, just flying into the opposite side of the city . . . Oh, well.
You
didn’t see that.
    No, I didn’t.
    I remember in the beginning of the war people went down into the basement, but it wasn’t really a basement; half was aboveground; socialist skyscrapers weren’t designed for shelters. After two or three months, no one went to the basement anymore. You would have had to be nuts going down eleven flights of stairs to the basement, because the attacks never stopped. But when they developed those pig grenades, we started going down again into the basement. When they took those four floors out by the radio-television building, that was the first time I was afraid.
    The journalist lowered his head. He remembered the fear on her face when the shells were coming in, long before pig grenades. But who could say that his memory was any better than hers?
    He bought her a pack of cigarettes. For the party, such as it was, he took a case of canned beer, the one she recommended because it was cheap.
    Was Enko a particular friend of yours? she asked.
    Well, I liked you better.
    Of course. I’m a woman. Such likings are not important.
    You were important to
me.
    Smiling, she said: I’m sorry, but I still can’t remember you.
    Why should you? It was only for a week or two. And is Enko’s mother alive?
    No. It was after that second massacre in the market, but just now I don’t remember how long after. I must be getting old.
    When Amir came in, the journalist would not have recognized him. Outside the shop of the beer and cigarettes there had been a newspaper kiosk, and beside that a café at the closest of whose tables sat two skinny old men whose hair had withered to grey moss on their skulls, leaning together, clutching tiny white cups of coffee in their claws, watching him and Vesna out of the corners of their eyes. He wondered what they must have seen and heard. Amir could have been their elder brother. He gazed steadily into the journalist’s eyes. Then, very slowly, he smiled.
    You can come over and have a coffee, said Denis, who had been watching Amir’s face. My mother might talk about old times.
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    The old lady said: Sometimes they were looking like falling stars coming one after the other. They were actually yellow, like they had some fire following them. But we knew they were bullets and shells. There were four or five coming at once.
    She showed him the hole in the bedroom door where a shell had come in and nearly killed Denis in his crib. On the knickknack shelf by the television sat the journalist’s old binoculars.
    Those are heavy binoculars