Act of God

silverware, just the tulip vase and candle and a large brass ashtray like an emperor’s crown with a pair of dry-docks for cigars and more for cigarettes.
    From a jacket pocket, Grgo took out two cigars. “You will join me?”
    “No, thanks.”
    He didn’t ask if I minded his smoking. “This city say I must have my table in ‘Smoking Section.’ If I not sit here, they charge me and I must pay fine.”
    My greeter came over and hit his boss’s cigar, puffs of bluish smoke drifting upward. When we were alone again, Grgo said, “So, you come from Mrs. Rivkind.”
    “Yes.”
    “What you want from me?”
    “How about your last name?”
    “Easy. Radja.”
    “Like the basketball player?”
    “The one the Celtics love to get play for them, but I don’t think so. He make too much money for Italian team. We very distant cousins, I think.”
    You get a person talking, it’s good to keep them talking. “Croatian?”
    “Yes, so. From Zagreb , me. You know the country?”
    “Never been.”
    “You should not go now. It is disaster.”
    “You’ve been back since the war began?”
    A vigorous puff. “Yes, so. When we hear the Serbs attack us, three of my Hrvat friends—’Hrvat’ is what one Croat call another—three my friends from here and me go on plane there to fight.”
    “To fight?”
    “Of course to fight. The Chetniks—this is our word for Serb fighters—the Chetniks attack city of Vukovar across the Danube . We fight so long as we can. One my friend from there, we go school together in Zagreb before I come over here, he is on ambush with me, but I don’t know this before he look at me, he say, ‘Hey, I know you somewheres.’ And Mate and me realize we friends from thirty years before. And so we want to talk, about relatives, friends, but we cannot. The Chetniks come with their trucks and hardened cars—no, cars like tanks?”
    “Armored cars?”
    “Yes, so. They come up the road, and we kill them. We kill first the front car with shoulder rocket, big boom, then the last car, boom-boom, then the Chetniks jumping out from all trucks. We kill very many, but my friend Mate, he killed, too. Thirty years, and he killed after we see each other again five minutes.”
    Radja shook his head and sculpted his cigar ash on the tray. “The Serbs, they are stupid, they celebrate their big holiday, you know what it is?”
    “No.”
    “It is day in year 1389 they lose the big battle to Turks at Kosovo. They lose, they live under Turks five hundred years, and they celebrate. They animals, too, I tell you. Vukovar fall, they come to hospital there, they take three, four hundred people out from hospital. These some Hrvatska— Croatia —soldiers, many civilians, all wounded and no guns no more. The Serbs take them to pig farm, then kill them, bury them in cornfield with bulldozer.” He looked up at me, the hooded eyes moist. “Bulldozer for grave. The Serbs for their own, they build grave houses.”
    “Grave houses?”
    “Yes, so. Little houses like big house you live in, only small, over grave. They put in there things for dead person to use, like radio, refridge, these things. Then they go out, have celebration like picnic at house on the Days for the Dead, but their church—the Orthodox—their church don’t like it.”
    “How long were you in Croatia ?”
    “Two, three months. There was no more bullets for guns, no shoulder rockets, no shells for—what is word, ‘artillery’?”
    “Yes.”
    “No more for that, neither. Croatia get more bullets, I go back.”
    “You think the war will last that long?”
    A grunt. “The war, it last centuries now already. The Serbs and the Croats and the Muslims. I kill your brother, you kill my family. You kill my family, I kill your village. The United Nations think it can stop this? How can you stop war when neighbors kill you, when neighbors you have in your house, Serb friends like I got from school, Peda or Borislav, come kill you? I tell you, in Sarajevo , the Chetnik snipers with the telescope rifles on the hills, they shoot at their own house.”
    “Their own houses?”
    “Their apartment house. You see, that way the sniper know which window Serb, which Croat, which Muslim, so he shoot at the right windows. And the hate, the hate it is passed down to the children like the good silver and the jewels. What the Serbs do to Vukovar, the city is gone. Sarajevo , soon. The worst, though, this is the ciscenje .”
    “ What’s that?”
    “The