The Small Boat of Great Sorrows Read online

  “Maybe it is not something to report,” Tomas said, knowing as the words left his mouth that he was wrong.

  Vlado’s answer seemed to take them both by surprise. “I think maybe you’re right. Let’s make sure it’s worth reporting. Let’s investigate.”

  A half century earlier such disobedience would have earned each of them a bullet in the head. Now, labor rules being what they were, the consequences would scarcely exceed a tongue-lashing as long as everyone’s immigration papers were in order. Few Germans would work for these wages anymore, no matter how high the unemployment rate, which is why thousands of Poles, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Russians, and others streamed every morning to this grand amphitheater of mud. Bodies had become too valuable to spare on this front line, especially with companies like Sony and Daimler waiting eagerly to move in.

  So, Vlado and Tomas climbed aboard their machines and went back to work, grinning as they heaved and shoved at the earth to expose more of the slab, fighting down a panicky sense that they might be stopped at any moment. Within an hour they uncovered the top of a door. An hour later they reached the bottom, and by 1 p.m., having forgotten about lunch altogether, they’d completed a sloping trench that would let them reach it on foot. It was then, with stomachs growling, that they finally shut down their engines and dismounted again, sweating in the cold, stunned by the sudden silence.

  They glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then descended the mud passage and pushed against a heavy steel door— once, twice, then a third time, ready to give up until it began groaning open against the concrete floor. Leaning with their shoulders, they pushed it further ajar, the air issuing from it like the stale breath of a tomb. Then, breathing rapidly, they stepped into the damp chill of May 1945.

  Vlado flicked his cigarette lighter to reveal a mural on the opposite wall, as bright and fresh as if it had been painted the day before. The flickering light played across the faces of rugged SS men, dapper in pressed uniforms, standing watch over blond wives and blue-eyed children, a sunny tableau of Aryan comfort for this gray day in November.

  Vlado and Tomas might well have spoken, but their new language tended to fail them at moments like this, as if they’d misplaced the manual for some particularly unwieldy tool. But both knew they’d gone far enough, and Tomas strode off to fetch the foreman. Vlado waited in silence, wondering what sort of ghosts might yet lurk in a place where the concrete walls still smelled wet and new after half a century underground.

  He took a deep breath, then, flicking his lighter again, walked across the floor into a second room, where he found a row of low iron beds with thin mattresses. Steel lockers lined the opposite wall, but Vlado’s eyes were drawn to a yellow-and-black inscription on the door, a lightning-bolt insignia of the SS. Above the door were German words in Gothic script. It took a second for him to translate: THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE, BUT FEW GOOD MEN.

  Vlado stepped slowly, as if there might be someone asleep just around the corner. None of the noise from above could make its way down here, and he felt a weight on his chest, a change in air pressure, or perhaps it was all in his head. His flannel shirt was damp with sweat, cooling against his skin.

  There was one last room, and he stepped inside. It was emptied of furniture, with a mural on the wall, only this one was a map, a meticulous paint job of the Nazi empire at its zenith. Germany lay at the center in red, her spidery borders encompassing Austria and Czechoslovakia and half of Poland. Beyond it, slanting red stripes covered captured lands—Hungary, Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as much of France, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans. He found his own land, the old name “Jugoslavia,” and, to the upper left, “Kroatien,” for the puppet fascist statelet of wartime Croatia, its borders encompassing most of what was now Bosnia. His home city merited a black pinprick, and he touched the careful lettering for “Sarajewo,” the concrete chilly, its surface just bumpy enough that he could imagine the mountains themselves were beneath his fingertips. How odd to feel a stab of homesickness from this map of conquest, yet, if he closed his eyes, he knew he would see old women in kerchiefs and long dimije skirts scuffing down dirt lanes, bent men in wool caps seated atop mule carts piled with hay, wheels creaking. For the most part Vlado had been raised a city boy, but farms and villages were always only a valley away, and they were the places that called to him now. Strange, he knew, especially down here in this well of captive darkness. Enough to make him feel like a homesick old peasant who’d never been five miles beyond the milking shed.

  The sound of a voice made him jump. A column of chattering men was approaching the door down the slope of the muddy trench, and he retraced his steps to the bunker entrance just in time to see a foreman in a hard hat squeezing through the opening, looking hurried and embarrassed, chattering rapidly in German, loud voice going hollow as he entered. Accompanying him was a tall, balding man in a suit, shod in Italian loafers caked with mud. Tomas was behind them, looking scolded, saying nothing. The second man unrolled a blueprint in the beam of the foreman’s flashlight, everyone’s breath misting in the ancient air. The man needed merely a glance before he found what he was looking for. He poked at an upper corner of the map while shaking his head slowly as if disappointed in them all.

  “Ja,” the construction boss said. “Hier.” And from their expressions Vlado gathered this was a well-known place.

  “Der Fahrerbunker,” the man in the suit mumbled.

  “Führerbunker?” said the foreman, eyebrows raised in panic. He looked ready to flee.

  “Nein, du blöder Idiot! Fahrer.”

  Drivers, in other words. Chauffeurs. This had been the home for the SS men who drove around the generals and the chiefs of staff. But with nowhere left to drive in the springtime rubble of 1945 they had mostly stayed here, awaiting the end. Vlado had heard of the place. It had been unearthed a few years ago and resealed, lest it become a shrine for neo-Nazis. This was not the sort of tourist attraction the locals wanted in the heart of the new Berlin.

  “Bury it,” the man announced in German, rolling up his blueprint with a disdainful flourish. “And next time,” he said, eyes aimed straight at Vlado, “come to me before you go this far. We already knew of this place. There was no need for all this.”

  They plodded back to the surface in single file, Vlado reluctantly. He had wanted to stay a while longer, not just to poke among the relics but to get a handle on the climate, the atmosphere. Such readings seemed important when you had recently lived through two years of a siege, with death dropping from the sky like cinders from a chimney. He and his neighbors had somehow made it through, subsisting on the world’s handouts of bread and beans—two winters without heat, two years without electricity or running water or glass for your windows, coffee for your breakfast, salt for your food, soap for your bath, candles for your darkness. Two years without a wife and child to keep you company. And down there in the bunker he had suddenly seemed very close again to the feel of those lonely nights, to the mood of a city where even a funeral became an invitation to gunfire from snipers who might have once called to you by name.

  Surviving that qualified him as something of an expert on man-made disaster, he felt, and what better place to take comparative readings than in that damp hidey-hole. Check the barometric pressure, the relative humidity. Collect the motes of dust. How could you possibly draw such air into your lungs and not be changed in some small way, and who knew where that might lead?

  Or maybe this was just the wishful thinking of a man who, for all his joy and relief in escaping a war and rejoining his family, ached to return home, or, at the very least, ached for change. Four years, ten months, and counting in this land of flat horizons, doing work that numbed him to the bone. The mountains of home had begun to seem like something out of a dusty old atlas, a fairy tale of a place, with all its crabbed problems snagged in the creases of the hills.

  But as the foreman departed, Vlado felt a giddy sense that perhaps change was in the works at last,
that a day already so different from all the others would only become more so.

  Within an hour they had regraded the mud into a neat, level surface above the bunker. Then other workers poured a layer of new concrete, the foundation of yet another high-rise. Vlado and Tomas watched in chastened silence as they belatedly ate their sandwiches, marking the location by other points of reference, mapping it in their heads for posterity. No matter what rose here, they’d always know what lay underneath, like a dormant cell of some once virulent plague.

  So this is what becomes of the ruins of war, Vlado mused, staring at the wet concrete, and he wondered if his home in Sarajevo had already been torn down and rebuilt in his absence. Or his favorite café. The house where he’d grown up. His office? That would be fine, considering the way so many people in it had ultimately betrayed him. Then he thought of friends, some of them dead, and of a woman he had barely met yet whom he felt he knew quite well. And as he sat on a curb to clean his boots in the gathering dusk, he took extra care in removing the day’s mud. Then he brushed off his hands and walked a half mile to the long stone platform of the Unter den Linden S-Bahn station. He boarded a rattling commuter train for a forty-minute ride to the eastern reaches of the city, out to where, if you kept walking, the plains would take you all the way to the forests of Russia.

  By the time he reached his stop it was dark, and it took a brisk twenty-minute stroll to reach a tall, gray high-rise where he rode an elevator to the eleventh floor. He opened a door at the end of the corridor to find an American in a suit waiting for him on the living room couch.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “He has been here for an hour,” Jasmina whispered quickly as Vlado shut the door behind him. “I’ve made coffee twice. I ran out of things to say twenty minutes ago.”

  She was flushed, wiping her hands briskly on a dish towel. Their daughter, Sonja, was nowhere to be seen. Across the room on the couch, the American visitor put down a German magazine and looked toward them expectantly.

  “Did he say what he wants?” Vlado whispered. “Who he’s with?”

  “Nothing but small talk. Family and jobs and the lousy German weather. Said he’s here on business and left it at that.”

  The man’s gray suit said government, but nothing else did. He was all elbows and knees, folded into place like a jack-in-the-box, and on closer inspection even his uniform wasn’t what it had seemed. The suit was wrinkled, the shoes were scuffed, the tie was knotted with the slapdash skill of a groom late for his wedding. His face was impassive, probably as intended. But the eyes gave him away—an expressive gleaming brown, lively and eager. If he had a tail, it would be wagging, and Vlado wondered why. And why an American?

  The authorities, both national and international, had long since lost interest in Vlado following his sudden arrival nearly five years ago. He had shown up unannounced at an American military base in Frankfurt on a cargo plane from Sarajevo, spilling from a wooden crate like the misloaded parcel he was. As a homicide detective who had smuggled himself out of a sealed war zone with a sheaf of incriminating documents, he had been something of a sensation at first. Not the sort that made headlines—just the opposite, in fact, for the results of his work had been an embarrassment for more than a few international agencies. So, he had attracted various men in gray from miles around, fretting over what secrets might have been blown, who might have been compromised, whose credibility might need to be rebuilt.

  Just about everyone had wanted to hear the story he’d unearthed, a tale of theft, smuggling, murder, and corruption that might have been impossible to believe if not for the packet of evidence in his satchel.

  He’d been debriefed by everyone who seemed to count in this part of the world—the UN, NATO, the Council of Europe, Interpol, and half the embassies in Germany. Protocol demanded that the Germans go first. Then came a tag team of Americans and French, arguing loudly over who had precedence. Next came the British, the most polite but somehow the most frightening, with the cool clipped manner of executioners. The parade seemed as if it would never end, and everyone spoke the careful language of damage control.

  Some played it friendly, offering cigarettes and jokes. A short, jolly American talked Yugoslav basketball for a while, biting off half his questions with inappropriate giggles, lunging forward every time he came to a key point. Vlado, who knew a thing or two about interrogation, figured the man was probably proud of his style. The ones who weren’t good at it usually were.

  The French and Germans were icy, unyielding, seeming to frown at his every word. An intense chain-smoking German named Rolf kept asking about another German named Karl, who, judging from the line of questioning, must have been a Balkan smuggler of some success. Pleading ignorance of Karl only earned a raised eyebrow from Rolf, followed by an unconvinced smirk and a slow release of cigarette smoke.

  The whole thing lasted four days, hours on end in a small, windowless room under a cool blaze of fluorescent light. Mornings brought lukewarm coffee in chipped mugs that left sticky rings on white Formica. Cold lunches arrived on a wobbly cart. Then more questions, followed by a bland, overcooked dinner and a night of poor sleep in a steel-frame bed down the hall. A guard outside the door turned the pages of newspapers throughout the night while Vlado tossed in his sleep, trapped in dreams of long walks through ravening crowds, awakening exhausted and sweating to the knocking of a radiator before the whole business started again. He could only guess what the fallout had been back in Sarajevo—a few less bureaucrats to worry about, perhaps, but probably little else.

  In the end, the Germans deemed him unsuitable for repatriation—too many enemies on both sides, especially in the middle of a war, when it would have been too easy for someone to kill him. Besides, it turned out he had a family already living in Berlin. They’d been there for two years, in fact, a wife and daughter who were evacuated during the first month of the war. So the authorities did the easy and humane thing by letting him stay, and sent him packing to Berlin with a train ticket, a residence visa, and a work permit. Later he would discover just how rare and valuable such documents were when the Germans began sending home every Bosnian refugee they could find.

  But for all their care with paperwork, the authorities never bothered to inform his family that he was on his way, or even that he had escaped. For all Jasmina and Sonja knew, Vlado was still back in their besieged apartment, biding his time until his next monthly phone call to Berlin, still braving the bombs and the bullets. Which is why when he showed up on their doorstep on the eleventh floor, fresh off the train, he’d been something of a shock, making for an awkward moment or two.

  Since then the international authorities had forgotten him. There hadn’t been a single visit, letter, or phone call, either to thank him or to let him know what had occurred in his wake. It was as if he’d been dropped into one of the holes at Potsdamer Platz.

  Until now.

  The American opened his mouth to speak.

  “Herr Petric?” he said.

  “Vlado Petric. Yes. And please, speak English. Mine is a little out of practice, but it is still better than my German, Mr. . . .”

  “Pine. Calvin Pine.”

  Pine stood, tall and bony, reminding Vlado of the big construction cranes that loomed above him at work, like praying mantises in search of a meal. Being an American, Pine smiled and held out his right hand for a firm shake. The only people who grinned more in this part of the world were Japanese tourists. But the smile at least had a glimmer of mischief at the corners, a boyishness that made it hard for Vlado to feel put upon. His light brown hair was as stiff as broom straw, with various sectors in revolt. And when he spoke, at least he kept his voice down, unlike the noisy Americans you saw rattling down Unter den Linden in bright clothes and running shoes, shooting videos of everything that moved, griping about exchange rates and whatever they’d just paid for lunch.

  Vlado wished he’d had time to clean up, wished he’d shaved that morning, wished he hadn’t just steppe
d from a huge, muddy hole in the ground. He wondered what sort of impression he must be making.

  “You’re from the embassy?” he asked.

  “Actually, no. From The Hague. The war crimes tribunal. I’m an investigator.”

  Vlado knew of only one matter, a single name, that could have brought the tribunal to his door, and it had nothing to do with his work back in Sarajevo, where the criminals he’d dealt with were smugglers and black marketers, commonplace murderers intent on money, not ethnic slaughter. All he knew of the tribunal he’d learned from a Bosnian in Berlin, someone whose name he didn’t wish to utter just now—someone, it now appeared, who had gotten him into deep trouble. If that was why Pine had come, this would be an unpleasant evening indeed, for Jasmina as well as himself.

  “Why do you need to speak to me?” Vlado asked, knowing he must already sound like a suspect. Probably looked like one, too, reaching for his cigarettes and staring at his feet.

  Pine seemed to note the change. He paused briefly before plowing ahead. “Because we need your help. We’ve got a job we think you might be interested in.”

  The answer was a pleasant surprise. Vlado glanced toward Jasmina, as if she might offer a hint of what came next, but she only shrugged. “I’ll make more coffee,” she said. “And Vlado, why don’t you ask our guest to sit. You’ve both been standing for the past five minutes. You look like gunfighters in an American Western.”

  Vlado translated her remark for Pine, who grinned and folded himself back onto the couch. He had that American way of informal amiability, the salesman’s knack for banter, for easing into his surroundings. As they sat, Vlado saw Sonja peeping around a corner.