Body Surfing

already been disturbing stories of Muslims being driven from eastern Bosnia by the predominantly Orthodox insurgents. Ileana’s family was Roman Catholic. They hoped this would be enough to protect them, but they kept a few bags packed in the front closet, just in case. Bihac lay on the River Uni, just inside Bosnia’s western border. Safety was just a few miles across the river.
    But all that was a world away to the nineteen-year-old who donned her prettiest yellow dress for her weekly English lesson with a young man recently returned from college in Canada. Slavs are pessimistic by nature, and Balkan Slavs, whose tiny corner of the world has been the battleground in wars involving every empire from Rome to Byzantium to the Ottomans to the Nazis, are the most pessimistic of all. But the young man had filled Ileana’s mind with hope for the future. Perhaps it was just her heart he was filling. He was twenty-one, after all. Lean, articulate, worldly. A poet! Now, sadly, she couldn’t remember his name, but at the time she would have believed just about anything he said, especially if he was touching her hand while he said it, or tucking a lock of hair behind her ear.
    She’d just passed the ruins of the Hotel Sunce, destroyed in World War II by the Germans or the Allies, no one remembered. Ileana didn’t give the hotel a second glance, let alone a second thought. Most of her attention was devoted to turning the wheels of her Communist-era bicycle, a rusting steel contraption that weighed nearly as much as she did. She had to stand to turn the pedals, and the stiff gears whined like a mechanical dog. She only stopped because she was starting to sweat, and she didn’t want to be sticky and gross when she arrived at the poet’s house. Only then did she notice everyone around her had stopped as well. The old men had turned from their fishing poles, the old women carting water home to flush their toilets had set their buckets on the cobblestones. Everyone stared toward the southeast, where—Ileana’s throated tightened, for a minute she couldn’t breathe—a thick haze of smoke clung to the horizon beyond the trees.
    Ileana straddled her bicycle, her yellow dress riding up her thighs and fluttering in the breeze. She would always remember that breeze, the quality of the air. Warm. Clean-smelling. The scents of spring: flowers, the sun-baked river. It was a day to pull fish from the water, to plant tomatoes and beets or learn English words like “supply and demand” and “free market economics,” maybe share a cigarette with a cute boy, or a kiss! But the vibrations she felt through her sandals told her that wasn’t going to happen now, and probably not everagain. The water in the buckets quivered with a regular rhythm, the fishing rods driven into the muddy banks of the Uni twitched like the antennas of giant insects emerging from the ground. Ileana had never heard an artillery column before, yet somehow she knew that’s what it was. The faint sound of gunshots a few minutes later was unnecessary confirmation—by then Ileana had turned her bike around and was pedaling for home as fast as the whining gears would let her.
    The Zanices lived in the remnants of a collective farm on the edge of the city. Just the house was left, along with one small barn and the ice shack, which they used in lieu of a refrigerator. The beet fields had long since grown in with a grove of alder and aspen bisected by the mile-long stretch of the Zanices’ driveway. In the summer the narrow drive turned into a shadowy green tunnel, and as a little girl Ileana had often pretended it was a magical path that took her to the past or the future or some other imaginary place. But it was still early enough in the season that the noon sun beat down through the branches, illuminating wide tire tracks gouging the gravel. Those tracks were anything but imaginary, anything but magical. Ileana was hardly an automotive expert, but even she could see these were big tires—the kind on a truck, or whatever they were called. A personnel carrier.
    All at once she noticed how quiet it was. No birds singing, no squirrels chattering as they leapt from one swaying branch to another. Only the whine of Ileana’s bicycle, which suddenly seemed shockingly loud. She dismounted and pushed the bike the last hundred yards. The chain creaked, the gravel crunched beneath her sandals, but no one seemed to hear her approach—not even Maja, the family mutt, who