People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

then?”
    He moved so that my hand fell away from his. “At the ceremony, yes.”
    “And after?”
    He shrugged.
     
    We’d spent three nights together at Sweet Corner, but he hadn’t said a single word about the wife who gazed at us from the painting. Then, on the fourth night, I’d woken up a little before dawn, because the pastry chef was clumping around, firing his bread ovens. I’d rolled over and found Ozren wide awake, staring at the painting. He had a haggard look, very sad. I touched his face lightly.
    “Tell me,” I said.
    He turned and gazed at me, taking my face in his hands. Then he got up off the mattress and pulled on his jeans, throwing my clothes from the night before over to me. When we were dressed, I followed him downstairs. He talked to the pastry chef for a few minutes, and the guy tossed him a set of car keys.
    We found the battered old Citroën at the end of the narrow alley. We drove in silence out of town, up into the mountains. It was beautiful up there; the first rays of the sun turned the snow golden and pink and tangerine. A powerful wind tossed the pine boughs around, and the smell brought incongruous memories: the resinous tang of Christmas trees, the scent of their sap so strong on the heat-wave December days of Sydney’s midsummer.
    “This is Mount Igman,” he said at last. “It was the bobsled run during the winter Olympics, before the Serbs moved in with their high-powered rifles and their telescopic sights and turned it into a sniper pit.” He put out a hand to grab me as I moved toward the pit. “There are land mines everywhere up here, still. You have to keep to the roadway.”
     
    From where we stood, there was a perfect view down into the city. They’d taken aim at her from here, as she stood holding her infant son in a UN water line. The first bullet had severed her femoral artery. She had crawled, dragging the baby, to the nearest wall and thrown her body across her son. No one dared to help her, not the UN soldiers, who stood by as she bled to death, or the terrified civilians who scattered, wailing, for whatever poor hiding places they could find.
    “The heroic people of Sarajevo.” Ozren’s voice was tired and bitter, his words hard to hear as he spat them out into the teeth of the wind. “That’s what CNN was always calling us. But most of us weren’t so heroic, believe me. When the shooting started, we’d run just as fast as the next person.”
    Aida, wounded, bleeding, had been an irresistible target for the Mount Igman murderer. The second shot pierced her shoulder and hit bone. The bullet shredded, so only a small fragment of metal passed through her and into the baby’s skull. The baby’s name was Alia. Ozren said it in a whisper, like a sigh.
    The initial insult —that’s the technical neurosurgical term. When I was a teenager, I’d overhear my mother, on the phone, taking the calls that often came as a welcome interruption to our dinner table arguments. It would be some nervous young resident in the emergency room. I’d always thought “insult” was a pretty apt term for something like being shot in the head or whacked across the skull with a bit of two-by-four. Hard to get more insulting than that. In Alia’s case, the initial insult had been compounded by the fact that Sarajevo had no neurosurgeon, let alone a pediatric specialist. The general surgeon had done his best, but there’d been swelling and infection—a “secondary insult”—and the little boy had lapsed into a coma. By the time a neurosurgeon got to the city, months later, he’d declared that nothing further could be done.
    When we came down from the mountain, Ozren asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, to see his boy. I didn’t. I hate hospitals. Always have. Sometimes, on weekends, when the housekeeper had the day off, my mother would drag me with her on rounds. The bright lights, the sludge green walls, the noise of metal on metal, the sheer bloody misery hanging