Cover Him with Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

a pen from his inside pocket, he scrawled on the back of the business card he’d shown me earlier. “I hope your father’s going to be okay, but if there’s anything I can do to help…call me.”
    I looked at his name, Egan Kansky , and the cell phone number beneath. “Don’t you need the card to get to your lodgings?” I asked.
    â€œNot anymore.” He grinned. His eyes under the airport strip lighting were gray blue, broken up by little flecks of gold. “I’ve had expert tutoring.”
    After landing in Podgorica, our journey was only half over. We took a bus out north from the capital, spent the night dozing over a table in a cafe in NikÅ¡ić before changing to another local bus, and drove uphill for several hours—along good roads, but through increasingly wild country where the sheer limestone crags and their clinging black pines looked like something from an eighteenth-century Romantic etching. At the tiny town of Å avnik we hired the nearest they had to a taxi service, bouncing along an unpaved track in the back of a truck, up a nothing road into the Durmitor mountains, beneath beetling cliffs. I was glad it was summer; the upland meadows were a riot of Alpine wildflowers, but in winter the road to the village becomes impassable.
    It was so strange to see the familiar landscape with fresh eyes. It looked incongruously Heidi in parts, cute little haystacks and all. And I realized how much I had missed the mountains, with their great green flanks and their jagged bare peaks and their deep sudden gorges cut by rivers. Patches of snow clung to the shadowed places by the road, even now in August when the direct sunlight felt scorching hot. It was a beautiful land, but cruel too. There were miles and miles of rock and grass and nothing else. We were nearly scraping the bright-blue sky overhead, it felt. And once above the tree line, the lush wildflowers gave way to thinsheep-cropped turf through which the white limestone jutted everywhere, like bones through peeling skin. This terrain was something other than picturesque—to me it had a quality of terror, as if the secrets it hid were unspeakable.
    The village itself had changed, I thought, as we dropped into the valley and drove into what passed for the central square and the dogs ran around barking with excitement. There were more abandoned houses, and the ones that were still occupied had huge satellite dishes on the corrugated metal roofs that had replaced the old wooden shingles. But I had changed far more than Stijenjarac. I could see it reflected in the stares of the others as I climbed down from the vehicle: me with my tight jeans and my makeup, with my sunglasses and my looped plastic necklace. Even Vera, with her short red-dyed hair and her bright pink Versace handbag, looked out of place here, though she waved and strutted and called out to people as if she’d last seen them only a few weeks and not decades ago.
    The place reeked of sheep. I’d forgotten that particular detail.
    The old women clad in headscarves took us indoors, tutting at me and muttering to each other just as if I couldn’t understand the things they said. I cast one last look up the mountainside to the distant white blob that was our church, before following them.
    Father wasn’t even in his own bed: he had collapsed in the village and it had been impossible to take him up the long climb to our isolated house. Now he occupied a borrowed sofa in someone’s back room, under twin pictures of St. Sava and His Holiness the Patriarch. Father had changed too: his big black beard was gray now, his face thin and bony. I was shocked: he was only sixty, but in this country he was an old man.
    I cried when I saw him. I buried my hands under his thin ones and kissed his cheek, horrified that we had lost so much time between us. His skin felt loose on his bones.
    â€œMilja,” he said, squeezing my hand with a ghostly echo