Waking Gods
Page 24

—I only have a few more questions…for security reasons.
—No! You don’t. You ran out of que…questions four hours ago. Can I get some coffee?
—Soon.
—You keep looking at your watch. Are you waiting for someone?
—He is waiting for me…He did not offer you anything to drink because you would not be allowed to leave this room and he did not want you to soil yourself.
Thank you, young man. You can leave us. I know I need not remind you that you may not discuss your encounter with this woman with anyone. You can, however, discuss your promotion with your superior when you exit this room.
Alyssa Papantoniou. You do not seem surprised to see me.
—I had a feeling you might be coming.
—New passport? Antoniou. I am impressed.
—They told me to make the lie as cl…as close to the truth as possible.
—Why Marina?
—My…my mother’s name.
—Hard to forget. The Russians taught you well.
—They also told me you’re t…trying to frame me for the Sre…Srebrenica massacre. Don’t you think that’s overreaching?
—Is it?
—You think I would kill people for some…outdated notion of ethnicity?
—To be frank, Ms. Papantoniou, I have absolutely no idea what you believe is worthy of torture or death.
—Torture? I would never purposely inflict p…pain on anyone. You really don’t know me at all.
—I am the first to admit it. I do not. But you had no compulsions about submitting Ms. Resnik to, shall we say, very unpleasant procedures.
—I never wanted her to suffer! I’m not some psychopath who burned ki…kittens as a child. I never took…pleasure in hurting anyone.
—You are telling me you had absolutely no part in the events at Srebrenica?
—How can you…? Do you know what happened during the Bosnian wars? Or did you just watch the new…newspeople get all the names wrong?
—I have no firsthand knowledge of the Bosnian war. I was present during the Kosovo war.
—So you know the difference between a Serbian and a Serb, a Bosnian and a Bosniak—
—Croatians and Croats. I am aware of the difference between nationality and ethnicity. What does this have to do with your involvement in ethnic cleansing?
—My parents, they were s…scholars. They met at a conference. My father came from Orthodox Serbs. My mother was Romanian, Catholic. Somehow, that made her a Cr…Croat in the eyes of everyone in our town, except for the Croats, who called her a Gypsy. My sister had a Mu…Muslim boyfriend. I was an atheist. We were all Bosnians.
—Your point?
—I wouldn’t have known which side I was on.
—You were unemployed for over a year at the time of the massacre, yet your lifestyle never suffered.
—Is that wh…what bothers you? I was supposed to be a geneticist. There was no research anymore. People weren’t getting paid. I was tired of seeing m-m-mutilated people die in front of me, so I quit the hospital. My parents had ju…just died. They left me some money.
—Then I suppose I will have to be content watching you be tried in the United States. It says here you had a layover in New York, on your way to Puerto Rico. Why were you going back there?
—Nothing that concerns you.
—I realize we do not know each other very well, but you must understand that you will eventually tell me all that I want to know. Why not save yourself the added discomfort?
—Now who’s talking about torture? What are you so ang…angry for?
—We both know what you did. If you do not remember, I am certain you will be reminded many times during your trial.
—I only did what needed to be done. Someone had to, even if you didn’t have the sss…stomach for it.
—Removing ova from Ms. Resnik against her will is something that had to be done?
—It would have been better if she had volunteered, but she didn’t.
—…
—Yes…It had to be done!
—It did not have to be done there and then. You could have waited until she volunteered, or until the circumstances called for more extreme measures.
—No! I couldn’t have! You can’t wait. You can’t worry about other people’s feelings. You can’t com…compromise, hope for the best. Or people die.
—You seem agitated all of a sudden.
—Have you ever seen a village being raided?
—I have not.
—Me neither. Bu…but my father told me. I was still in Sarajevo when the siege began. The whole country went c…crazy. Everybody fought everybody. The Serbs fought the Croats. Everyone f…fought the Muslims. Villages were being raided all the time. Then one day, they came into our village.
—Who did? Serbs?
—It doesn’t matter. Bosniaks and Croats killed plenty of people too, but yes, they were VRS. Do you know how many men it takes to terrorize a town of ten thousand people?
—Fewer than one would think.
—You can probably do it with fifty men. There were a lot more that day. Two hundred VRS soldiers raided my town while I was away. We had all heard of the atrocities. People knew what the VRS did. The villagers weren’t defenseless. They had weapons, p…plenty of them. People could have fought back. Ten thousand against two hundred. They would have been overwhelmed in minutes. But they didn’t. The town leaders called for everyone to remain calm, stay in their home. Don’t p…provoke them! Don’t make things worse! They thought offering no resistance would make things easier.
—Did it?
—Maybe it did. They only killed twenty-seven people that day.
Two hundred men…Fffewer than that, because a dozen of them were taking turns raping my…raping my sister to death. They made my parents watch, then they killed my mother, let my father live…because he was a Serb. They raped and killed a whole lot of people that day. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred men left on the street, in the whole town. No one did anything. No one tried. Everyone just…hoped for the best. My father killed himself a week later.
That’s what happens if you don’t do what needs to be done. Vincent and Kara were in their midtwenties. That meant they could be eff…efficient for another t…twenty years at best. They could have died. They could have got…gotten sick. I thought there was a good chance their children could operate the robot, but it would take years to find out…