It seemed to Meli that the soldiers regarded Mehmet as a sort of pet. They gave him an old gypsy stove—"so your mama can bake you bread and make you strong." The Lleshis rejoiced over that old iron stove, Mama most of all. It was an iron box with one side for the fire and the other for an oven. You could make soup or stew on top, or boil coffee—if you had any. Mehmet walked around like a farmyard cock, he was so proud of "his" stove.
Then one day Meli discovered that one of the soldiers had loaned Mehmet his rifle and had taken him into the woods to teach him how to shoot.
"Baba will be angry," she said to him later. "You know how he feels about guns."
Mehmet shrugged. "Baba is the only man I know who hates guns. Someone needs to learn how to defend our family," he said. "And our country."
"Don't even think of joining up," she said. "You re only a beardless boy."
"Once you've been in jail, you're not a kid anymore," he replied, the words sending a chill up his sister's spine. He was no longer the brother she thought she knew. He didn't speak about that terrible time, but it had changed him. He was harder, and he rarely joked or played with his little brothers. Despite his squawky voice and smooth cheeks, Meli knew that he was becoming a man—not the sort of kind, loving man that Baba was, but a secretive man with the sharp and watchful eyes of a blackbird.
So it was a relief to Meli when she realized that no one from the KLA had been around for several days. "They're fighting down below," Mehmet told her. After several weeks the rumor spread around the family camp that there was only a handful of fighters left in the hills. Down on the plains the KLA were waging a major campaign. "We're winning!" Mehmet said. At first that seemed to be true, but by the end of August word came to the camp that President Milosević had launched another offensive. Serbian soldiers were pouring over the border from the north. Before long, the KLA fighters began to come straggling back up the hill, many of them wounded. The soldier who had loaned Mehmet his rifle for practice was among those who never returned.
***
On the hillsides the chestnut flowers had turned into burrs. Before long they would pop open to reveal the nuts they protected, and it would be fully autumn. The days grew shorter and the nights colder. The Lleshis had brought jackets and blankets, but still they shivered. In some ways it was lucky that the tent was so small. They had to sleep close together, which kept them warm. Meli liked the feeling of having her family huddled close. Not only were the younger children's bodies like little stoves, but they slept so peacefully that it helped her relax and fall asleep herself. Mehmet always took the place by the tent flap, a little apart from the rest. Sometimes Meli would wake in the night to see him sitting bolt upright, as though listening. One night in early September, she woke up with the strange sensation that something was wrong. She sat up and looked around. Mehmet was gone.
Meli's first thought was to wake up her father and tell him that Mehmet was missing. But for once Baba was sleeping soundly, and she couldn't bear to wake him only to give him bad news. Besides, Mehmet had probably just gone to the outhouse. She was worrying for nothing. That was it. She was just being her usual anxious self.
She lay down again. Adil snuggled closer. If it's this cold in September, whatever will we do come winter? She turned so she could hear any movement of the tent flap. Whenever she heard the tiniest blap blap, she stiffened, willing Mehmet to come in and lie down, but each time it was only the wind.
Finally, she couldn't hold still another second. She carefully lifted herself over Adil, one knee at a time, and felt the ground cloth along the flap. Then she began to paw frantically along the front of the tent. Mehmet has taken his blanket. She covered her mouth to keep from calling out and crawled through the flap of the tent to stand up outside in the chilled night air.
She felt for her own shoes among the pile of family shoes before the tent. The cooler nights demanded that they all sleep in their clothes, which was a good thing. It meant she could scout around and try to find her brother before the rest of the family knew he was missing. She was sure that if Mehmet had told their parents he was leaving, he wouldn't have sneaked out in the middle of the night.
Fortunately, there was enough moonlight for her to see her way around the makeshift shelters in the family encampment. Mehmet wouldn't be in one of those, she was sure. She took a deep breath and headed up through the trees toward the camp-fires of the KLA. She hadn't gone very far before she felt cold metal poking into her backbone. A flashlight shone in her face, blinding her. "It's only a little girl," a man's rough voice said, and then asked, "Where are you going in the middle of the night, child? Did you miss your way to the toilet?"
"I'm looking for my brother." She couldn't help the quaver in her voice, even though she told herself that the fighters wouldn't hurt her. Indeed, the gun was no longer on her back.
"How old is your brother?" the voice behind her asked.
"Thirteen."
"Oh," said the voice. "I thought you meant little brother. Don't worry. Your brother can take care of himself. Now go back to your tent like a good girl and don't go prowling around where you don't belong."
"His—his name is Mehmet Lleshi. If you see him, will you tell him his family ... his family is anxious about him?"
The flashlight was lowered, and the voice behind it said gently, "Really, there's no need to worry. Your brother is fine, I'm sure. Go on back now, child, and get some sleep."
It was useless to argue. She turned back toward the family encampment and crept into the tent. Isuf and Adil had rolled over against each other. She pushed them apart as gently as she could and lay down again between them.
"Meli?" Of course Mama would wake up.
"It's all right, Mama. I just went out to—to relieve myself." She heard her mother roll over, grunting a bit as she did so.
It was impossible to fall asleep again. She tried to keep from tossing and turning in the narrow wedge between her brothers. The night stretched on and on, until at last morning pierced the cracks around the tent flap and surrounded the canvas with its weak warmth.
Baba cleared his throat, got to his feet, and—hunched over so that he wouldn't brush the top of the tent—stepped carefully over Isuf, Meli, and Adil, pausing briefly at the empty spot that should have been Mehmet. Then he raised the flap and went outdoors. Meli got up and followed him out.
"Mehmet's gone," she said.
"So I see," he said.
"He took his blanket."
Baba nodded. "Tell your mother to start the fire and feed you. As soon as I gather the firewood, I'll go look for him."
Everyone wanted to know where Baba and Mehmet were, but Meli just told them that Baba had said they were not to wait with breakfast, that the two of them would be back soon. Mama gave her a questioning look, but Meli just shook her head.
It was a quiet meal, and because there was not much to eat, it was over quickly. Meli left the cleaning up to Mama and took the pot to the stream for water. They always needed more water, and if she was alone she wouldn't have to deal with any more unanswerable questions.
It was midmorning before Baba returned, a glum-faced Mehmet trailing several steps behind. At least Mehmet had enough respect for Baba not to defy him, Meli thought. That was a relief.
She didn't speak of his disappearance until later that afternoon, when she found Mehmet sitting under a chestnut tree at the far edge of the camp. He was ripping up little clumps of grass and pitching them down the hill. He didn't even glance at her when she sat down beside him. She had practiced in her head several things to say, but finally she simply blurted out, "I'm glad you re back."
"When I'm fifteen I'll join up, no matter what Baba says."
She hadn't practiced an answer to that, so she said nothing and comforted herself with the knowledge that it would be more than a year before her brother turned fifteen. Surely the war would be long over by then.
***
Meli slept hard that night, untroubled by the anxieties of
the night before, but when she left the tent in the morning, she saw only Mehmet coming from the trees carrying firewood. "Where's Baba?" she asked.
Mehmet shrugged. "I don't know. He was gone when I woke up. Mama said he left the message that I was to be in charge, so you re going to have to listen to me for a change." He sounded almost like her bossy older brother again. "It's past time to eat. Where's Mama? Why doesn't she have the fire made already?"
Meli went looking for their mother and found her trying, as cold as it was, to wash herself behind the tent. Mama was such a modest woman; it must be humiliating for her to have such little privacy. Indeed, when she saw Meli, she blushed and began hastily to pull her dress on over her undergarments.
"Excuse me, Mama, but I have to know where Baba's gone." It was too much to bear, first losing Mehmet, now her father.
"Shh. He's gone to fetch Uncle Fadil."
"But it's miles—"
"He got a ride partway." She buttoned her dress and put on her big sweater and then her overcoat. "We ve got to leave here, Meli," she said quietly. "Before we lose your brother."
FIVE A School in the Hills
WITH BABA GONE, THERE WAS MUCH MORE WORK FOR the rest of the family. Everyone missed him. When Adil or Vlora asked about him, Mama would say something like, "Well, a good son has to visit his old mother, you know."
Meli realized that she was the only other person who knew the real reason Baba was gone: to fetch Uncle Fadil and his car to take them all back. She didn't know, of course, where "back" was anymore—back home, where the police might arrest Mehmet again? Or back to the family farm, which was probably already crowded with Uncle Fadil's own daughter and grandchildren?
But anywhere, she told herself, would be warmer than these hills. At least they were not farther up. The mountain heights above them were covered with snow now, and below the alpine meadows and evergreens the leaves of the great beech trees had turned to gold. Mama made everyone sleep so close together that Meli spent every night with someone's foot in her mouth or fist in her eye, and the younger children still cried out from the cold. At first Mehmet objected. It offended his "dignity as a man" to curl up against his siblings like a puppy in a litter, but as it got colder, he stopped complaining.
As she lay awake every night, shivering, praying for sleep to come, she imagined she could hear the rattle of Uncle Fadil's Lada. But then the sound would turn out to be one of the old cars used by the KLA, or the arrival of another family seeking refuge—or just her imagination. It was never Baba coming back.
Summer seemed a distant dream. The chestnuts were ripe now, and she had eaten so many she felt as though she might turn into one. But when they were gone, it would be winter in the foothills as well as up on the mountains. Meli kept thinking longingly of home, of the old house that had been school, and of her friends, especially Zana. There was an old saying: "You never really know someone till you've eaten a sack of salt together." Zana and she were too young to have eaten that much salt, that many meals together, but they had shared so much—their worries about school, about growing up—as, she supposed, girls anywhere might. Over and above these ordinary thoughts, they had agonized about their land and its people. What was to become of them if the Serbs kept pressing them down? It had been a comfort to talk to each other about their fears without any adult seeking to quiet them. More than the shared fears, though, there was the shared laughter. Even when the world about them was grim, they could always find something to giggle about.
But whenever she thought of Zana, she couldn't help but remember that horrible day when the two of them had misbehaved, causing Mehmet to disappear. If I had just not drawn that stupid picture of Mr. Uka looking like a pelican, Mehmet wouldn't have been arrested, and we would all be warm and safe in our own beds right now.
The hills were filling up with families who had fled cities and towns below. Surely their being here was not all her fault. Indeed, each family seemed to have its own reasons for hiding in the camp, none of which had anything to do with her. She tried to comfort herself, blaming everything on Milosević and the Serbs, who wanted to get rid of everyone in Kosovo who wasn't Serbian, even though the Albanian Kosovars far outnumbered the Serbian ones. She had been born into a Kosovo that had, if not true independence, at least a degree of self-government as part of Yugoslavia. Baba, peace-loving Baba, had served his term in the Yugoslav army. Then Slobodan Milosević came to power, and he took away whatever independence the Kosovars had enjoyed under Tito. Milosević is scared of us. There are too many Albanians poor and out of work in Kosovo. He sent his army and police down from Serbia to keep us under control. Yes, it's not my fault; it's his fault that we are here in the hills, cold and running out of food. There were terrifying reports now of whole villages being slaughtered by the Serbian security forces, and rumors that the United Nations would soon be involved.
"Why don't the Americans help us?" she asked Mehmet. Despite Mama's disapproval, every day Mehmet would sneak over to the military camp and get the news. The KLA had a shortwave radio. If Meli wanted to know what was going on, she had to ask her brother. "I thought you said that the Americans were going to help us."
He made a rude noise with his mouth. "The Americans won't do anything. They re too busy trying to get rid of their president to pay attention to us. "
***
Then one cold morning Mama made everything a little better. She had taken from her dwindling stores the last can of goulash. Meli's mouth watered as she watched Mama's strong fingers rip open the tab and plop the contents into the pot on the stove. When it was warm, Mama handed a spoon and the whole potful to Mehmet. He gobbled it down like a starved puppy. He might have shared was Meli's first thought, and then she realized that Mama was up to something.
The flour for making bread was almost gone, so for the rest of them Mama was making a sort of gruel from pounded chestnuts on the gypsy stove. As she stirred this strange concoction, she said, "Mehmet, I think you should start a school for the younger children. All they do is shiver."
Mehmet shrugged. "I don't have paper or pencils, much less books."
"You can clear a place where it's flat near the fire and write in the dirt," Mama said. "At least you can help them with their letters and numbers."
It wasn't much of a school, with Mehmet writing words in the dirt while a dozen shrill voices screamed out the sounds and a dozen small bodies jumped up and down to keep warm. He pretended to hate it, but it was plain to Meli that he relished being in charge. He was almost as proud of being "Teacher" as he was of the caterpillar fuzz that had sprouted from his upper lip about the time of his fourteenth birthday in October. He even borrowed a ball from the military camp and found an almost level spot lower on the hillside where the boys could play soccer. Naturally, girls were not allowed to join in, but Mehmet permitted them to watch and to chase the ball when it rolled downhill away from their playing field.
To Meli's surprise, children flocked to the makeshift school. They may have been shivering in the weak sunshine, but they still seemed to be listening to Mehmet. Even the smallest ones tried hard to write in the dirt the words he was teaching them.
"I teach only Albanian words," he said proudly. "When the revolution is won, there will be no need for Serbian obscenities."
Finally, one day Meli heard a rattling sound that really did turn into Uncle Fadil's Lada. A tired Baba and a weary Uncle Fadil climbed out. She ran and threw her arms around her father's neck. "Oh, Baba. I thought you were never coming back."
He patted her head as though she were Vlora's age. "Don't fret, little one," he said. "First we had to bring in the harvest. A farmer can't leave his fields at such a time, you know. And"—he paused and looked around to make sure his younger children were not in earshot—"Milosević has called back most of his army. It's safer to travel."
It didn't take long to pack, for they had far fewer goods than they had had when they arrived. Only Mehmet seemed reluctant to leave.
"I'm ne
eded here," he told his father. "I—I run the school. All the children count on me."
"We need you too, my son," Baba said. "We can't risk losing you again."
"Next year I'll be fifteen," Mehmet muttered to Meli, but he climbed up over the front seat of the car and into the back to sit down between his brothers. He was grimly quiet the first several miles as they wound their way down the hill away from the encampment. "He still treats me like a child," he said to Meli over Isuf's head.
Meli couldn't say what she wanted to: But you are a child. It would only have made him angrier. So instead she said, "Baba knows best, Mehmet. You know he only wants what is best for each of us."
Mehmet gave his horse snort. How she hated that insolent noise! He used to worship their father, and now ... But everything would be all right again, she told herself. Baba had come, and he and Uncle Fadil were in charge. They were taking the family away from the mountains. Baba knew the mountains were no place for a boy so obviously thirsting for Serbian blood.
But what had happened to her big brother—the person she had alternately adored and resented all her life? What would become of him, poisoned as he was by such bitterness?
SIX At Uncle Fadil's
THE DOOR WAS ALREADY OPEN WHEN THE LADA PULLED UP in front of Uncle Fadil's house. Auntie Burbuqe was standing there, her arms wide open to welcome them. But it was, as Baba had predicted, a crowded house. Meli had never seen such a pile of shoes at a door before. Granny was there, of course, sitting next to the stove, her head wrapped in her traditional scarf, her shawl pulled tightly around her narrow shoulders, and wearing her Turkish-style dhimmi trousers that came clear to the ankles. Nexima came out of one of the back bedrooms. She had indeed come home, bringing her three-year-old son, Elez, and her twin babies. Hamza, her husband, was nowhere to be seen, and no one spoke of him—which could only mean, Meli thought, that he was in the KLA. She had come to realize on the mountain that if a man had been killed, he was mourned aloud, and if he had disappeared, people worried about him, but if he was with the KLA, no one even breathed his name.