Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West

by GlasOwl

[revised 5/02]

Through the open door of the wharfside tavern where she waited, Kelly Corcoran could see a worn wooden pier and a few gently bobbing fishing boats, a view drawn in extremes of light and shadow by the strong Adriatic sun. Kelly closed her eyes, savoring the bitter taste of her almost chewable coffee. A steady breeze that Jeri said the people of the Yugoslavian coast called the maestral, welcome on a hot June afternoon, drifted through the narrow room, carrying pungent sea smells along with the odor of things cooking in garlic and olive oil.

Kelly opened her eyes to see a shadow break the sunlight that was streaming through the door. Her reason for being in this unlikely region of the world stood framed by light and darkness as Jeri O’Donnell paused to let her eyes adjust to the interior. Seeing Jeri, a pang of pleasure rang through Kelly like the sounding of a bell.

The tall woman reached to the full height of the doorframe. Her long dark hair was wound in braids around her head, giving her an older look than the cusp of thirty. A large canvas bag hung from a shoulder. A tan, mid-calf skirt, another small gesture toward camouflage -- "just get them to overlook you, that’s all" -- and a white shirt with cuffs rolled to slightly above her wrists completed the image of a circumspect, conservative European woman.

The idea that anyone might ever overlook Jeri O’Donnell struck Kelly as absurd. To Kelly, nothing could hide the woman’s striking character; it radiated from her strong features -- deep blue eyes under dark eyebrows, a wide mobile mouth, high cheek bones -- features that were animated by the energy of a complex spirit.

Jeri’s eyes would always give her away. Her gaze was fierce and alert, far too intense for the pretty image she was seeking to project. To have such a gaze turned on you with no softening by affection would be like feeling the lock-on of hostile radar.

Jeri’s glance swept the tavern -- habit, caution. She received a barely perceptible nod from the man in the apron at a back table who continued talking to his companion. Her gaze returned to the room’s only customer: the woman in her mid-twenties with short, honey-blond hair who was gazing at Jeri with obvious adoration. Unlikely, undeserved -- Kelly was a gift from a world that should rather have sent punishment her way; and, perversely, Jeri often felt punishment might be easier to bear. To love was to give fortune a hostage and Jeri was well acquainted with the fickle nature of fortune.

Jeri remembered her first sight of the lost young woman taking on substance in the mountain mists on a roadside in Nepal. Jeri had been there retrieving her life, strand by strand, from the meaning to which others had bent her, determined to shape her days with her own hands. The arrival of Kelly in her life had only deepened Jeri’s resolve, but Jeri, who would dare any risk without a qualm, had learned about fear through Kelly: the younger woman had become so precious that the mere thought of harm to her made Jeri’s heart tremble.

Jeri stood a moment in full awareness of all her feelings and then she lowered the register to a more ordinary range. She let her mouth quirk into a half smile, and playing to Kelly’s stare, she sauntered toward the table, swaying ever so slightly. Hand on her hip, she paused for effect, narrowed her blue eyes, and with the South Boston impudence of her adolescence asked: "Like what you’re looking at?"

A blond head tilted up and green eyes boldly assessed her over a speculative smile. "Oh yes. I do. I really do. Want to hear what I like?"

Jeri would have bet money that she was beyond blushing. She would have lost. Memory and desire combined to her undoing and a surge of heat rushed to her face.

Kelly grinned wide and crinkled her nose, enjoying Jeri’s embarrassment. "Did you find what you were looking for?" Only slightly suggestive.

"Yeah. A bookstore. Here." Jeri reached inside her canvas bag as she sat down and took out a rather thick item. "I think you might like this."

The lit major in Kelly was so hungry that she wanted to lunge for the cloth-bound book. She’d left all her vacation reading in a hotel room in Nepal, abandoned everything except for a worn paperback translation of Dante’s Inferno. Kelly was one of those people who would read milk cartons and cereal boxes if there was nothing else available, and while English language newspapers had filled a little of the gap, she and Jeri had been where the alphabets made even milk cartons inaccessible. When there were milk cartons.

The purchase had been an impulse on Jeri’s part as she waited to meet her contact at the bookstore. Watching Kelly take the volume in both hands and marvel at its feel, its weight, she decided the impulse must have been inspired.

"I’ve never heard of this," Kelly said, one finger reverently tracing the faint indentations of the title words. The ink of the print had long ago worn off the dark red cover. "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,’" Kelly read aloud, "by Rebecca West."

"It could be on any list of the best books of the Twentieth Century. West still sets the standard for understanding the Balkans."

"It was written before World War Two."

"True -- but by a woman who knew how to see a connection between the railroad she was riding and the old Roman Empire road it was built beside. Americans don’t often understand how long memories can be in other parts of the world -- how much the past feeds the present."

Kelly nodded absently, paging through the book, and then looked up. "Jeri, what is happening here? And what does it have to do with us?"

"That’s two questions. I want a drink first." Jeri called something in a language Kelly didn’t understand to the men at the back table as she went behind the bar.

Kelly had no idea why Jeri O’Donnell had brought her to Yugoslavia. They had been in India when Jeri said they had to leave for Dubrovnik that night.

"Is that a country, state or city?" Kelly had asked. Her geography, usually good, had failed her.

"City. On the Adriatic Sea -- which is between Italy and Yugoslavia."

They had arrived in a seaport north of Dubrovnik a few nights ago. Kelly’s sense of distance and direction had been completely confounded by a combination of old trains, buses and boats, and far too many hot, jolting, noisy, canvas-covered trucks. Still, whatever the transportation lacked in comfort it made up for in its ability to avoid officialdom. Not once during the entire journey from India had they been asked for their fake passports.

Unfamiliar place names had continued to accumulate for Kelly as Jeri explained that they were in Dalmatia, the seacoast region of Croatia which was a republic in the federal state of Yugoslavia. Kelly heard Dalmatia and started looking for spotted dogs. Jeri somehow acquired a battered Yugo -- probably from the same place that she got odd messages and fake passports -- and said that they would drive through Dalmatia to Dubrovnik. The road south produced a delight of sun-drenched views of blue seascapes and green, inland ranges, but look as hard as she could, Kelly saw not one spotted dog.

"There!" Kelly had pointed to a fruit vendor at the side of the road.

"What?" Jeri was startled into braking the car, narrowly missing a convoy of military trucks going in the opposite direction.

"That’s the hundred and first Dalmatian I’ve seen!" She really didn’t understand why Jeri was upset. She was sure she’d kept an accurate count.

They reached Dubrovnik that evening, just as a setting sun was turning the pale marble walls of the inner city to a creamy rose. Jeri parked at the edge of the road overlooking the city so they could watch the drama of sunset proceed.

"Dubrovnik is on the UN list of world heritage sites," Jeri said, taking hold of Kelly’s hand.

Even exhausted to the point of goofiness, Kelly could see why. The city glimmered like a heaping of pearls in the twilight.

Voices strained by argument brought Kelly back to the present and she glanced toward the rear of the tavern where the man in the once-white apron was speaking intently to his companion. Kelly had heard a number of voices taut with anxiety and anger since arriving in Dubrovnik: these men, hotel clerks, some people near the newspaper kiosk where she’d paused after her morning run.

Kelly might not know the purpose of Jeri’s journey to Dubrovnik, but she was beginning to think that the summer of 1991 was not the best of times to be in Yugoslavia.

Kelly had a vague memory of some fairly recent TV coverage about Yugoslavia. She and Billy would watch the nightly news on successive channels, a ritual to take them from one day to the next. But two weeks before he died, Billy began watching game shows instead. Kelly couldn’t recall any of the stories about Yugoslavia, but she did remember feeling dismayed at seeing tanks rolling through a town that looked so very like the one where she’d grown up in Ohio.

When she had asked Jeri about the tension she felt in the streets, the reply had been: "It’s complicated."

Well, yeah, complicated; Kelly had heard of the Balkans. She couldn’t name all the countries that referred to, but she knew that Yugoslavia was definitely one. The Balkans were a historical rumor with a bad reputation, less a location than an adjective for things fragmenting with unpleasant consequences. Complicated indeed.

Jeri returned with a bottle of beer for Kelly as well as herself.

"I have a friend from Yugoslavia," Jeri began, choosing her words as carefully as she’d choose her footing while walking through a minefield. "Rafi. He’s in prison. Not in this country. He’s been trying to get a message to me for a while. I finally got the word in India but I had no idea what he wanted until this afternoon. We -- I owe him -- he saved my life during training."

Training. The only training that Kelly could imagine would have been for the IRA, the Irish Republican Army. "Someone in Yugoslavia was in Ireland?"

"No. We were both in another country."

That would have been before the Berlin Wall came down. When there was still an Iron Curtain. Catching sight of a murky international underworld where terrorists merged with revolutionaries and criminals -- and some claimed there was no real distinction -- made Kelly a bit queasy. Maybe that wasn’t what Jeri meant. Maybe it was. Nepal had been easy compared to the possibilities here. In Nepal, Jeri had no history that mattered on a gut level to Kelly, but here, the European familiarity that Kelly found so comfortable also returned her to conventional lines between right and wrong. Her own sympathies had always been vaguely on the left end of liberal, along with some radical thinking that had never led to action, but Jeri had crossed the line between thinking and acting. Kelly wondered how much of Jeri’s history she was going to have to deal with.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend?" Kelly asked, thinking of the Cold War implications of being an enemy of England.

"Maybe for the command types. For us -- for the troops, say -- it’s different. You have nothing but each other. All the legitimate powers consider you the worst kind of outlaw, monsters really, and your own leaders have to think of you as expendable: sacrifices, experiments, symbols, martyrs. So down in the trenches, it’s just the guy next to you who cares if you stay alive or not. Sometimes. If there is someone next to you." Jeri’s voice drifted. "Unless you’re a true believer. Then you just always know you’re right."

Kelly understood she was being given a glimpse where Jeri herself rarely looked. "Were you lovers?"

Jeri considered the idea before answering. She recalled a slight young man with a dark-elf charm. "Not really. We tried sex, but it never took. We just hit it off when we arrived at training camp about the same time. And we both had a talent for the work." Jeri remembered how the instructors had liked her talent for languages. Rafi’s talent was for acting.

"They sent us into one of the Soviet republics to infiltrate an anti-government group. The thinking was that I’d learn a lot about the mistakes that kind of organization can make and it would help when I went back to Ireland. Unfortunately, that group didn’t make too many mistakes and they figured out I was a wrong one pretty quick." Jeri paused, remembering to the taste in her mouth how she’d felt when she looked out a window into an empty street and knew that in a matter of minutes she would be dead. The group could afford no mercy for traitors.

"He should have left me," Jeri said to Kelly. "Those were the rules, and good rules, too. He was safe and there was no point in two of us going down, but suddenly, from an empty street, I hear this drunk yelling." Rafi had read the street stake-out and seen a way for Jeri to escape. He didn’t yell to her, he yelled to a "girlfriend" in another building. What sounded like a drunk who couldn’t decide whether to pledge love or scream abuse was actually directions telling Jeri how to escape.

"He took such chances," Jeri remembered, shaking her head. "Want to guess the supposed girlfriend’s name?"

"Tell me."

"Stella. Actually, the way he yelled it was more like ‘Stay-la!’ He just couldn’t resist the opportunity to yell for Stella."

"What does he want us to do, Jeri?"

Jeri smiled, acknowledging the "us" that Kelly had used. "His father just died. I think his mother died years ago. He wants me to get his sister from his home town, a place called Vukovar, and take her to a cousin in Sarajevo. He thinks she’ll be safe once she’s out of Croatia. He used to talk about her as if she were a child but I think she must be a teen-ager by now."

The mental breath that Kelly released felt like one she had been holding ever since Jeri had told her they were on their way to Yugoslavia. The place names were meaningless to her -- well, not Sarajevo, that’s where the Winter Olympics had been a few years before -- but the request sounded so ordinary. Prison break-outs, assassination, bombing -- Kelly hadn’t known what to expect. Jeri said her life belonged to making up for the violence she had once been part of, but Kelly knew life was rarely that neat. This task seemed simple, too simple to have gone through all the cloak and dagger it had taken to get to

Dubrovnik.

"Where’s Vuko - whatever? I’ve never heard of it."

"Vukovar. It’s a pretty city on the Danube, north of here. I’ve never been there but Rafi talked about Vukovar a lot."

"Do you know why he needs this?" Kelly asked. Asking Jeri for help presumed that there was no one closer who could help Rafi’s sister.

"Some, not all. Obviously he thinks Alenka is in danger."

"Is she?"

"She must be." The high-pitched screaming of gulls fighting over something on the wharf carried into the tavern as Jeri considered the nature of Alenka’s predicament. "Rafi was never what you’d call an alarmist, but he must not trust the people Alenka’s with. I don’t know a lot of details, but I gather his parents were a mixed marriage."

"What does that mean here?" Kelly frowned, caught off guard. Just when you got to thinking a place was familiar, you tripped over some unexpected twist in the culture. "I grew up thinking that meant two people from different religions got married."

"It could mean that here, too," Jeri said. "Most Croatian Yugoslavs are Roman Catholic and most Serbian Yugoslavs are Eastern Orthodox. Or one of his parents could be Muslim. I don’t know. We never talked about that sort of thing."

"Muslim? Here?" Kelly glanced at the Rebecca West book. Maybe there was a reason it was so thick.

Before Jeri could answer, a rowdy group of dockworkers burst through the door, filling the tavern with noise and commotion. It took all of two or three seconds for several of the newcomers to notice the presence of the women, and one of the men headed their way like a bee to a flowerbed. He introduced himself in Croatian, and Jeri answered him in that language, but then she shifted to English.

"This is my cousin, Laura," Jeri said, using the name on Kelly’s passport.

"You are American! I am Nino." Nino was delighted. He was a burly youth, sandy-haired and wearing a t-shirt with a logo that Kelly had seen in several variations since their arrival in the country: a shield with a red and white checkerboard. "This is my friend, Dusko. We work together. I have a cousin in Toronto. That is like America, yes?"

Friend Dusko handed Nino a beer.

"We shall all drink to Croatia, yes? To Croatia." He raised his bottle and swallowed most of it.

Jeri smiled and drank. Kelly took her cue from Jeri and joined in; she was still off balance from the quiet tavern’s sudden transformation into a boisterous bar.

"Your cousin is very brave to stay when the American embassy is telling all Americans to leave Croatia." Dusko appeared less easily charmed than Nino.

Kelly saw Jeri’s eyes narrow and she hoped her own face stayed suitably calm despite the surprising information.

Jeri’s shrug was exaggerated. "Why should she worry? She’s with her cousin."

"Of course! The Americans are stupid. There is no reason to leave. Europeans want a war for the fun of it but Croatia will not fight Serbia. Tudjman is not stupid. You know Tudjman, yes?" Nino’s emotions were clear even if his leaps in reason followed an obscure path.

"Of course she does," Jeri answered. "Everyone knows Dr. Franjo Tudjman, the President of Croatia."

"Do the stupid Europeans think that Dusko and I will fight?" Nino slapped his friend on the back.

Dusko appeared slightly unnerved by Nino’s enthusiasm, but he smiled gamely. "I will get some more beer."

"He is not like most Serbs," Nino said to Jeri, perhaps expecting her to argue with him. "We have worked together on the docks for two years. He says nothing good about Chetniks."

Dusko reappeared with four beers, but Jeri shook her head in good-natured refusal. "We have to go now." She glanced toward the man in the apron who was now working behind the bar and caught his eye. He nodded slightly.

Nino managed to look momentarily sad as he took an extra beer from Dusko, but he was hardly downcast. Kelly slid the Rebecca West book into her nylon day pack. As the two women left the tavern, a song broke out behind them, one that started with one or two voices but quickly swelled to a rousing chorus.

"What’s that?" Kelly asked. They had paused outside the door to let their eyes adjust to the light. The day was slipping into early evening.

"The song? Something about Croatia uber alles. Unfortunately, for having such a bad beat, far too many people want to dance to it." Jeri shook her head. "Come on, I have a place I want to show you."

"Jeri, why are Americans supposed to leave?"

"Word is that Croatia is going to declare its independence from Yugoslavia any day now and I suppose the US State Department thinks there’ll be civil war if that happens. That’s probably why Rafi called me in. A lot of people are going to wake up some morning soon and find out that the person next to them has just become an enemy."

"Like Nino and Dusko?"

"Exactly."

Jeri directed them away from the waterfront, casually pointing out interesting places as they walked. Acting the guide was part of her disguise as a native Yugoslavian -- Croatian -- showing off her city to an American cousin. "The cover will fall apart if anyone tugs," Jeri had said, "but it should fool a casual observer. Anyone else will be looking for us specifically and we’ll need to see them long before they can get close enough to see through the camouflage."

There was a lot to point out in a city that was over 1,300 years old.

"Dubrovnik used to rival Venice for riches," Jeri said. "Before Columbus discovered America and made the Atlantic more important for trade than the Mediterranean, Dubrovnik was on a direct line from Rome to Constantinople. That’s the Pile Gate up ahead and it will take us into the Old City."

Jeri’s commentary allowed Kelly to begin to fit this region into the more familiar narratives she knew of European history. Before Columbus, the main trade routes had been east from Italy to Constantinople and the fabled places of Asia. Besides, Kelly liked hearing Jeri talk. She could almost see the tall woman drawing her thoughts from a deep well of feeling and knowledge, combining fact and commentary, and then speaking in a voice that was a rich, dark contralto. Jeri liked lecturing, Kelly could tell, liked sharing what she knew. The woman had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford until the Troubles of Northern Ireland sucked her in and spit her out into a prison. They walked through the Pile Gate and Jeri led the way to steps made from marble and polished by centuries of passing feet.

The view from the wall was stunning. Kelly reached for Jeri’s hand instinctively.

"What do you think, Kell?"

Kelly thought she would like to pluck this moment out of the flow of time and wrap it for a keepsake. The marble-paved squares, the narrow, cobbled streets from which motor traffic was banned, the jumble of ancient buildings -- even the cats that seemed to watch from every shadow and corner -- all combined like some marvelous legend come to life. And Jeri had just called her "Kell." She had never told Jeri how much she loved to hear that name. Only her brother, George, had used that name and she’d thought of it as her secret name and thought never to hear it again after he died.

"I think I love you past bearing," Kelly said.

Jeri squeezed Kelly’s hand, understanding how all deep feelings spring from a common source. "Well," she drawled, "if you get too choked up, that church over there belongs to St. Blaise. He’s the patron saint of the city."

She waited for Kelly to get the joke, and got a swat on the arm when she did. "Serves you right for the hundred and one Dalmatians," Jeri said with a grin.

Any kid with a Catholic background would recognize the saint who could protect you from ailments of the throat, particularly if you choked on a fishbone. If Jeri remembered right, February 3rd was the feast of St. Blaise and the day you got your throat blessed with candles. She could remember her mother taking her and the other kids to the front of the church, up to the communion railing where a priest placed chilly candles to either side of her neck while his chanted prayer for her health echoed in the cavernous space. It was a wonder what got into your memory and never left.

Jeri and Kelly walked seaward along the wall until they came to a place where they could sit and watch the sun set over the Adriatic. They could also see anyone who was approaching from either direction. Gulls wheeled overhead. An elderly husband and wife walked slowly by, arm in arm. Two women who appeared to be Scandinavian, dressed in tourist khaki and denim, consulted a guidebook as they passed. A young man with a cycle helmet, and his girlfriend, strolled along hand in hand. A thin trickle of people for such a spectacular view in a city whose existence depended on tourists.

You took life as you found it, Kelly knew. Her brother, George, had never anticipated the existence of AIDS, but he never denied the road that took him into that illness. Kelly could only hope for the courage to walk her own path as clear-eyed and steadily as George had managed. You took life as it found you. If you were on leave from teaching college literature and composition in Ohio, and you discovered a woman whose eyes saw into your soul on a mountainside in Nepal, and you understood you wanted to stay with her forever no matter her past -- so be it.

Kelly clutched the plum-sized crystal from Nepal she carried in her pocket. She had acquired the stone on the day that Jeri came to her hotel room to say good-bye, the day she’d known that she belonged at Jeri’s side and -- most important -- had made Jeri believe it, too. Almost oval, with an inner brightness as clear as the high Himalayan air, each of its six uneven sides gave a different view of an interior where tiny pastel rainbows played hide and seek. Holding the crystal was like holding an anchor.

"Maybe they’ll quit looking for you," Kelly said, thinking of the British. Jeri’s pose appeared relaxed but Kelly saw the vigilance with which she scanned everyone passing. Kelly had been hoping that Louise Bolingbroke, the UN official and British citizen they had helped in Nepal, could derail the official pursuit of Geraldine O’Donnell, late of the IRA, or at least slow it down.

"They can’t. Too much reputation rides on getting me." Jeri’s voice was devoid of emotion as she added: "Now they’re looking for you, too, Kelly. Don’t ever forget that."

A family group of at least three generations walked slowly by, but they looked so somber that they appeared out of place. Even the small children seemed downcast.

Jeri sighed. "Dubrovnik is already getting refugees from the border areas."

"I still don’t understand what’s going on."

Jeri frowned thoughtfully. "The quick version is that Yugoslavia is about to come apart. It’s a federation made up of six republics like the US has fifty states, but each republic is a nation with its own history and primary ethnic group and religion." Jeri held up a hand and counted off on her fingers. "There’s Croatia -- where we are -- Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia -- also called Bosnia-Hercegovina -- Montenegro and Macedonia."

"Got it. As long as I don’t have to name them back."

"No tests," Jeri grinned, "but do you remember Tito?"

"He was a Communist who ran Yugoslavia after World War Two, right? But we liked him because he kept the country independent of Russia, not like other Eastern European countries."

"Sister Mary Mary would have to send you to the head of the class, love. And while Tito was running the country, he managed to keep the various nationalisms in check -- he made it illegal to be nationalistic about the republics -- but since his death, the federation has been cracking into the old ethnic nations, and each section is grabbing for power and territory."

"Where’s the problem? Can’t the republics just separate if that’s what they want?"

"The problem is that the borders don’t mark clear ethnic divisions. For example, there’s a section -- the Krajina -- here in Croatia that belongs to Croatia but it also has a large population of Serbians. The Croatians in the Krajina want to be part of Croatia, of course, while the Serbians want to be part of Serbia if Croatia secedes. Croatia won’t let that happen because, obviously, it wants to keep its own land."

"Sounds like Northern Ireland all over again" Kelly said. "Two populations with different ideas about whose country it is."

"Sounds like a lot of places. Especially now that the Soviet Union is about done for, more ethnic groups and once-upon-a-time countries that the world hasn’t heard of for a century will want to run their own lives again. I don’t know if there’ll be a war but do you remember the boxes we hitched a ride into Croatia with? They all contained guns and ammunition. That’s part of why the US embassy thinks there may be a war."

A bank of clouds lay low on the horizon, edged in rose and gold as in some dramatic painting by Titian or Raphael. Below the clouds the sea was afire in shimmering red and purple. Inconceivable. Gulls wheeled in a painted sky. The distant sound of a motor boat, the evening smells of things cooking in olive oil and garlic, laughter from somewhere, radio music from somewhere else.

War was inconceivable.

Continued in part II