"But I'm hungry now," his little sister protested.
"Everybody wants flija now," said their father, "but it doesn't hurry for anybody. Now go help Mehmet find more firewood while you wait."
When the first layer was cooked, Mama took a forked stick and carefully lifted the lid of the pan, added another layer of batter, replaced the lid and the coals, and then sat back to wait until this layer was done. Each time the lid was taken off, one of the children rushed up to see if it was time to eat, but it never was—not until the middle of the day, when the many-layered flija was finally fat and brown. Mama cut two pieces and put them on a plate with a bit of the precious jam. "Take these to our new neighbors, Meli, to thank them."
***
With cheese and Mama's flija topped with honey, that first full meal at the hillside camp felt a bit like a celebration, but as the days wore on, there was very little to celebrate. So much they had always taken for granted was missing—electricity, a proper stove, a washing machine, running water, an indoor toilet. The fresh eggs and butter and milk that Auntie Burbuqe had given them were quickly gone. Each morning, while Meli and Mama went out to fetch water from the stream, Mehmet and Baba gathered sticks for the next day's fire. Their new neighbor had advised this: They should never let themselves run out of firewood, he had said. "And don't let the children wander too far up that way," he had added, waving toward the top of the hill. "That's where the military camp is. It's off-limits." So that's where the KLA hide themselves. It was a thought that both thrilled Meli and frightened her.
"Do you have children?" Baba had asked the man that first morning. It was simply politeness speaking, but the man stiffened. "I had two sons. The elder, Visar, was slaughtered before my eyes, and the younger..." He paused. "Someday he will come home again. Inshallah. "
Baba had touched his chest in the traditional gesture of sympathy. "May the Lord leave you healthy," he had said.
"May you be healthy," the grieved father had answered, and sighed deeply. "God wrote it in his book before any of us were born. What can we do? We must reconcile ourselves to it."
Reconcile yourself to your son's murder? How was that possible? If Mehmet had died, would any of them ever have been able to reconcile themselves, Meli wondered. As for the neighbor's second son, was he in these hills—or some other hills—plotting vengeance for his brother's death? No one asked that question.
Each morning when they came out of their tent, they could see that other families had come to join the makeshift camp. There were no more proper tents, so the new arrivals had to make do with plastic sheets hung over chestnut tree branches and propped up with sticks. It made the Lleshis crowded tent seem almost luxurious. Every day Meli hoped that a car
coming up the steep, curving road would bring Zana, or someone she knew from her old school, but they were all strangers.
"How do you stand it up here?" a new girl asked her one day. Looking at her clothes, Meli realized that the newcomer was used to a much more comfortable life than even the Lleshis had known. She felt a pang of pity for the girl, her clothes not yet stained and torn, her face untanned.
"I try to pretend I'm on vacation," Meli said. "If the family is on a camping trip, everyone thinks it's fun to fetch water and cook over an open fire, don't you think?"
The girl sneered. "I'm not on vacation," she said. "And it's not fun. Though maybe for you villagers..."
Meli didn't reply, but she wished she could tell Zana: That girl didn't even have a tent to sleep in, but she thought she was better than me because her father wasn't born on a farm.
There were advantages to never having been rich, Meli decided. Though, at that moment, having a bed and a roof and warm water to bathe in seemed like the height of luxury.
***
The KLA soldiers who appeared through the woods almost daily to inspect the family camp didn't look like much of an army to Meli. They wore ragged clothes with a makeshift double-eagle insignia sewn on the back, and they carried ancient guns, which Mehmet identified as cast-off Chinese or Russian weapons, some of them dating back to the fifties. "It was better at my other camp," he said. "They had weapons smuggled in from America." Meli found that hard to believe, but she didn't try to argue. Like everyone else in the hill camp, the soldiers had trouble keeping clean. Baba's once handsome mustache was now just the top of a scraggly beard. All of the men grew beards, because that was easier than trying to shave. Mehmet couldn't have grown a beard to save his life, but, like the older boys who could, he hung around with the soldiers as much as possible.
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 Milosevic 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.