FOČA

1995

They came into the town from the south, off the ridge, moving along the tree line where the road curved down toward the river. It was after two in the morning. The town was quiet. Not the quiet of sleep. The quiet of occupation, which is a different thing — hollow in the way that a thing is hollow when what was inside it has been removed or has fled or has learned not to make sound.

Some windows had light in them. Most did not. A dog somewhere across the river. Nothing else.

There were four of them. Johnny was on point. Weaver behind him, then Rask, then Coletti covering the rear. They moved without speaking. They had the address. They had the map. They had done the work in the twelve hours prior, and now the work was a different kind of work and they were doing it.

Bosnia-Herzegovina had been one of six republics. Tito had held it together by force of personality and state machinery and the careful management of memory. Tito died in 1980. The machinery ran for a decade on its own momentum. Then it stopped. In April 1992 the Serb forces began the siege of Sarajevo. Eleven thousand people would die in that city before it was done. More than a thousand of them children. In the towns of eastern Bosnia the work was different — Foča, Višegrad, Prijedor — and in those towns the word for what was happening was a word that had not yet been said aloud in any international court, though it would be said, in time, by judges who had reviewed the documents and heard the testimony and arrived at their findings.

Johnny knew the word. Weaver had briefed him four days prior in a room in Split with no recording equipment and no written orders that would survive the week. Mujo’s intelligence had located the house. The detail was specific. An address. Seven guards. Women inside. Johnny had listened to Weaver and then he had sat for a moment and then he had said, All right, and that was all either of them said about it.

They moved through a side street parallel to the main road. The buildings were three and four stories, stone and concrete, shuttered. A car with a smashed windscreen sat against a wall. Someone had written something on the wall above it in paint that Johnny did not read. He was reading the street. He was reading the geometry of doorways and corners and the distance between the streetlamp and the dark beyond it. His body was doing most of the reading. Fort Bragg had given him that. The years after Bragg had confirmed it. A building is a problem with a specific structure and you solve it the same way you solve any problem with a specific structure — you know the shape of it before you go in, and then you go in, and your body solves it faster than your mind can follow.

He saw her on the far side of the street.

Not her. A woman the right height with dark hair cut to the shoulder, moving along the wall on the opposite side of the street in the same direction they were moving, maybe forty meters ahead. She moved the way Anastasija moved — not the walk exactly but the quality of the walk, the way the weight was carried, something in the uprightness of it. He knew it was not her. He did not slow down. He filed it where he filed things — the specific fact that in a town in eastern Bosnia at two in the morning, moving toward a house where seven men were doing what seven men were doing, he had seen the quality of a woman he had met in Vienna in a hotel bar six months before, because she was alive and present and specific and because this is what it meant to carry a person inside you — not a letter, not a name, not the memory of a particular hour, but the involuntary recognition of their quality in strangers, in the dark, in the worst places. He filed it. He kept moving.

The woman turned a corner and was gone.

The house was on a street of similar houses. Two stories. A light on the ground floor, curtains drawn. A man outside the front door, standing with a rifle slung and a cigarette. Johnny took him from behind, quietly, and lowered him. Rask was already at the rear. They went in through the front and the rear simultaneously, which they had discussed and which they did now without discussing it again.

What was in the house was what they had been told would be in the house.

The front room was empty. Two men at a table in the kitchen. Johnny took the room in half a second and then took the two men and they did not have time to stand. Weaver was already going up the stairs. Johnny heard Rask come through the back. He heard two doors on the upper floor. He heard Coletti in the hall. Nobody fired. They had not wanted to fire if they could avoid it and they had been able to avoid it.

Johnny went upstairs.

There were two rooms on the upper floor. He went into the first one. He looked at what was in it. He understood what he was looking at in the way that a man understands a thing he already knew before he saw it, and the understanding does not make it easier to look at. The room smelled of what the room smelled of. There were women chained and bound and in a state of undress. Johnny looked at them once. He took a breath through his mouth. Then he did what came next, which was to move to the second room and clear it, because the job was not done, and the job was the only thing that would help anyone in that house now, and so he did the job.

They moved the seven men outside. Three from the upper floor, two from the kitchen, one from a back room on the ground floor, one from outside the front door who had been laid against the wall of the house. They moved them into the narrow yard behind the house where there was a low stone wall and darkness beyond it.

Nobody spoke. The men understood what had happened. The thing they had assumed was protected had come apart, and they understood this without being told.

They were not monsters in appearance. This was the true thing and Johnny noted it without assigning weight to it, because it was always the true thing and he had known it would be the true thing before he arrived. They were wearing ordinary clothes. Work trousers. Shirts. One of them had on a football jersey, European club, the crest on the chest faded from washing. One of them was young — twenty, twenty-two, a thin face and light-colored eyes and the particular stillness of someone who believes that what is happening to him is a mistake that will be corrected when the right person is informed.

Johnny noted his age and the fact that he looked like a creep named Billy, who had attended school with him and was probably a rapist, and noted the weak, light-colored eyes and filed them in the place where he filed such things, which was a place he had been building his whole life without knowing it was being built.

He thought about position and timing and the next correct action.

He thought the way his father had thought in the jungle outside Phnom Penh in 1970 with the carbine and the darkness and the specific mathematics of that moment.

He thought the way his grandfather had thought in the limestone depression on Peleliu in September 1944 with the .45 Colt in his hand and the Japanese officer coming through the smoke and the decision that had to be made faster than a decision can be made, which meant it was not a decision but a different kind of action entirely.

The thinking that precedes action in these moments is narrow and clear and sufficient to the task. It does not include anything that cannot be used.

It is not ordinary thought.

It is something older than ordinary thought. It lives in the body the way certain knowledge lives in the body — not learned, not chosen, already there, waiting.

All seven. In the back of the head.

Johnny did not think about this while it was happening. Then it was done and he thought about the next thing, which was the evidence and the protocol and the movement out.

When the team left the house, the women were no longer in the house. This is what happened and it is stated as what happened. Where they went and how they got there is not a part of this telling. They were no longer in the house when the team left.

The team moved out the way they had come in — south along the side street, up toward the tree line, off the ridge. Nobody spoke. The town was the same hollow quiet behind them. The dog across the river had stopped. It was approaching four in the morning.

Nobody ever spoke about it again.

Not on the extraction, which was a Land Rover and then a helicopter and then a transport aircraft out of Mostar in the gray early morning. Not in the debriefs that took place in the following days and then did not appear in any filing system that would be accessed by the wrong person. Not among the four men of the team who had been in those rooms together and who had seen each other’s faces in those rooms and who had all understood what the orders meant before the orders were stated.

In the years that followed, none of them contacted each other. This was not unusual. Johnny had understood from the beginning that these men would not keep in touch — it was a feature of this kind of work, not an accident of personality. But there was a specific quality to the not-keeping-in-touch of men who have done this particular thing in this particular place. It was different from ordinary compartmentalization. Compartmentalization is a professional discipline. This was something else. It was a compact made without words, never discussed because discussing it would require saying what it was a compact about, and saying what it was a compact about would require looking at it directly. They had all agreed, without agreeing, to hold it in the place where such things must be held.

Johnny knew where that place was. He had been born into a family that had been building that place for three generations. His grandfather had carried Peleliu in it for fifty years and had never once taken it out to look at it in the light. His father had carried Cambodia in it and had gone to his grave with the weight distributed so evenly that you would not have known from looking at him that he was carrying anything at all. Johnny understood this as a form of knowledge passed down without being spoken. A structural inheritance. The place inside a man where the weight goes when there is nowhere else to put it and no language sufficient to what must be held.

He was home in Niagara Falls by the end of August. He went to the 56th Street dock one evening in the early fall when the light on the river was horizontal and orange and the air was beginning to have the first edge of the season’s change in it.

He was not thinking about Foča. He was thinking about the current. He watched the way it moved in the upper river above the falls — the specific acceleration that happens when the depth decreases and the speed increases, the exact place where the surface of the water changes character, flattening and quickening at once, going smooth and fast and purposeful in a way that is different from how it moves upstream where it is still only a river. His grandfather had stood on the bank above the upper rapids one October evening in 1945, four months home from the Pacific, and had looked at this same change in the water and had understood that he was going to be all right. His father had told Johnny this once, only once, without elaboration, the way his father told the true things.

Johnny watched the current now. He watched the line where the river stopped being a river and became what it was about to become — not the falls, not yet, but the thing that is already committed to being the falls, the thing that has already made the only decision available to it, moving with a perfect and absolute attention toward the edge.

The light went off the water the way light goes — all at once, without announcement, and then it was simply gone, and the river was still there, moving in the dark, doing what it did.