One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [5]
No help there. Want to know them? Play soccer.
Xavier plays delicately at first, kicking the ball as though it were made of glass. He lets the others charge in, lets them do the slide tackles. When the ball goes wide, he’ll chase it and bring it back toward the group. They cluster in front of him as he approaches, all defenders, no allies in attack. He charges right in, daring the whole pack of them, trying to come through the other side in control of the ball. Now he throws elbows, now the grunts and shoulder-shoves. That’s the game. You get the ball and you try to keep it. Xavier gets the ball and goes into the pack, goes looking for trouble. One doesn’t avoid trouble in this game; safety is not the goal. Risk, that’s the game. Get the ball and hazard losing it the moment it’s yours. It’s a game of constant loss.
I shudder with a thought about little Xavier, who must be about fourteen years old, who plays soccer in flip-flops, whose skinny legs poke out from his ragged shorts, whose Adidas T-shirt is torn and far too big for him. I wonder how many people he has killed.
Paul is always in the fray. He’s about four feet tall with big brown eyes. He has the looks of a boy who could play the cute little brother with the snappy comebacks on any sitcom. He shoves like the rest of them, but he smiles widely, his teeth glowing white (these children have no access to dentists, but they have no access to candy either). When others fall, he helps them up. He makes sure everyone gets to play. He’s thoughtful of me, trying to make sure I get the ball from time to time, trying to make sure I obey the amorphous rules—sometimes touching the ball means the game stops and you surrender it, sometimes you touch the ball and whoever kicked it has to be the monkey in the middle, sometimes it means nothing and the game just goes on and on and on. Paul is an excellent guide, a first-class soccer mentor for me. How did he end up here and not in school or on the set of a sitcom practicing his smile for adoring fans? What does he see when he closes his eyes at night? What does he hear?
Another soccer game, a continent away.
I nearly kick a soccer ball into a passing NATO truck with a machine gun mount. The gunmetal shines in the sunlight. The flag on the side suggests it’s the Swedes. We hold our breath as the ball soars toward the armored vehicle. It arcs over the grass, bounces once and careens into the road. It misses the truck by a few feet and the soldiers keep driving. The truck leaves a trail of dust that takes half an hour to settle. The Serb elementary school students around me laugh and sigh with relief, and the oldest among them, Marko, twelve, runs off after the ball with a roll of his eyes. The kids had been chasing my missed kicks all afternoon. It’s a steaming July day. I don’t just sweat. I lose water in buckets. Kosovo, 2004. The children all ask me the same question.
“Do you know the Battle of Kosovo?”
Marko was the first of these children to ask it, perhaps because he was the biggest, the most handsome, the best soccer player (except perhaps for Katja, who is surgical with her kicks and dazzling with her footwork, but she’s a girl, so doesn’t count, as the boys explained to me privately).
“I saw Kosovo Polje on my drive here,” I answered, citing the field where the battle took place. The field was speckled with daisies and buffeted with high voltage power lines. It did not strike me as a likely place for events of great magnitude. It could have been any number of fields dotting Kosovo. It looked, in fact, like any roadside field in middle America. Flat and slightly sun-scorched, stuck between two major routes, north to Mitrovica and west to Peja (Peč in Serbian—the names matter). The only remarkable thing about this field was that everyone with whom I spoke brought it up. When I asked about the conflict between Albanians and Serbs, they would say, like Marko, “It’s the history. Do you know