The Factory

My car in blowing snow in Romanija turns a pirouette in the ditch, already small hands knock at the windows, men in wolfskins and Puma tracksuits, they wrench me out, we don’t know you, they say, and lead me to a homestead not far off the road, yeah, yeah, the car, they say, tomorrow, we’ll see, they heat water for tea on an open flame, feed me Mars bars, and the tea smells of sheep.

We’re the shepherds, they say, we are. 

I say thank you, I’m warm, nothing hurts.

The shepherds’ eyes large, they don’t want to know anything.

Maybe he’s here because of the factory, they say.

Just passing through.

Because of the factory, say the shepherds, there, behind the firs. They point to the window, the window is fogged, and the smallest shepherd stands on tiptoes and wipes an arm across the glass, and anything that might be seen, the snowstorm covers.

The factory, they say, cleared its throat a long time ago.

What does that mean, I ask, how do buildings clear their throats, is that a joke?

We heard it, say the shepherds, we were there. Under the windbreak of the walls we played cards. They are glad to show you what the throat-clearing sounded like. Harsh and steely, they say, harsh and steely, they buzz through the funnels of their hands, and from it you can imagine nothing.

The shepherds’ life lines full of earth and dirt.

Since then the factory has hesitated, say the shepherds. Since then, the plateau waits, the mist and the wind wait, we and the snow wait for something else to come.

They say: we’ll bring you to her.

To whom? I ask.

To our factory. 

I’d rather not, I say.

The shepherds dunk Mars bars in the tea. Confer behind hands. The smallest shepherd sits on my lap. He sings softly and plucks at my collar. It’s a nursery rhyme, one of the old, the brutal ones, with blame and punishment, and when I join in the refrain, he breaks off and shows me his eyeteeth.

The shepherds put on their caps, already we’re trudging through the snow, the dogs plow ahead, the sheep trot behind, the warming clink of their bells.

Wind, wind, wind, I lean myself against its snowy forehead, the weather seems to bother only me, the shepherds simply lay their hands across their eyes. On the bleak highland there is always wind, they lie, and in it the breaths of every Serb and Bosnian and Croat who ever sighed, loved, mourned in Romanija, woven together for all of time.

They don’t say it quite like that, the shepherds.

In the woods it is easier, the trees comb the wind against the grain, firs, black and unwoundable like the nursery rhyme. I ask the shepherds whether there are land mines here, and one hits me with a snowball so hard I can feel my heart.

The shepherds’ beards of fir boughs.

In Romanija a building cleared its throat and has hesitated since, big and rectangular, it stands on the edge of the wood, naked concrete walls behind a wire fence, loose boards, two, three sacks of gravel burst, a rusted saw, a bucket full of holes. In the rubble a radio is silent.

The smallest shepherd runs on snow as if there were none, whoops, maybe out of joy, maybe anger, disappears in the walls.

The shepherds’ eyebrows of ice crystals.

One sees to the dogs, frees their feet with milking grease from ice.

The shepherds explain: water was to be bottled here and sold. The sheriff found two springs nearby, applied for EU funds and got them, for the land, and the wells, and the bottling facility, and, and, and. Sheriff, because he always wore a hat and jeans, American, they say, Croat, they say.

With a lady, says one, breasts.

The shepherds’ smiles of cavities.

Just after the war that was. Construction contract went to a local firm, the sheriff hired workmen personally from the surrounding villages. Jobs, capital, economic revival, the shepherds enumerate in chorus, and while they enumerate and explicate, the snow around us melts. Punctuation marks flurry in this improbable green.

And one morning the foreman does not appear at the worksite. And the workers no longer receive their wages. Nor the farmers the rent promised for use of their land. Nor the construction supplier, who saw only a miserable first installment and no more. The sheriff stopped taking calls, the line went dead.

The shepherds spit, the shepherds’ spit chocolate brown. 

A few weeks after his disappearance the EU came by in person to get an idea of things. The shepherds had arranged the factory for their card games, sheep feasted on the greenery that grew richly here, as if a benevolent god had fertilized the land their own had pawned for debris. They greeted the EU properly—their sheep blocked the access road for hours. The EU politely declined Mars bars and drove back to the EU, appalled.

The sheriff received four of six installments before the payments were stopped. The shepherds indicate the size of the sum, in that each chin is rubbed by thumb and index finger.

The smallest shepherd unwraps a Mars bar, his face furrowed like fir bark. He waves me over to him and leads me through no door into the factory. We enter a buzzing hum of warm air, flies whir, the shepherds lay down their pelts.

Where a floor should be, earth. Vines, where pipes should wind; a factory stands unfinished in Romanija and hesitates. For the shepherds and their animals it is shelter from the storm, a plastic table on which they play rummy, something solid worn away for this and every shepherd’s edifice.

The shepherds’ eyes: look around you, stranger.

In the masonry migratory birds have knitted nests. A lizard encircles a lizard. In the middle of the factory two shepherds make towers of stones, giggling like lovers. Or do they cry? I ask, and they say, the first settlers to look down on the world from the plateau were Illyrians, shepherds like us, tough and true.

They don’t say it quite like that, the shepherds. On lean necks they sway their heads.

The smallest shepherd climbs my shoulders. There is not one spring, he says, we do not know. You’d have to be strong water to bash through our stone to the top, and clever, too, for us not to have found you long ago.

He smells so strongly of chocolate, I have to put him down. He takes my hand, leads me to the rummy players. In undershirts they fan each other with playing cards.

Maybe the shepherds cleared the snow. But where is this heat coming from?

Maybe the factory produces seasons.

In the forest, sheeps’ bells gently clink.

A shepherd is watering potatoes in the corner. Seventy-three years ago today, he yells, my grandfather, with the First Proletarian Brigade, was surrounded here by the Germans. So the Brigade marched through snow and ice, over the plateau and farther, over cruel Igman in minus thirty centigrade. A singing convoy of Partisans, says the shepherd, and another asks, how does he know there had been singing.

The shepherds’ cell phones with homemade aluminum antennas and excellent reception, mine with none.

And the smallest shepherd climbs a ladder singing, he sings louder than before, the voice of an old woman, mild and raw:

On a chilly winter’s night, high upon the heights,
the little brook is frozen, it lies beneath the snow.
A rabbit seeks the little brook, he searches everywhere,
if it is gone, it is the end, as certain as the snare.

So weeps the little rabbit, for his little brook,
doubting now forever, the heart these tears have shook
asks, was it ever there? He feels himself betrayed.
Has it gone south with all the birds, for winter flown away?

The smallest shepherd sits on the highest rung and prunes a climbing rose. They have given up on me. I speak the language of the shepherds, but I do not understand what they understand.

Between clods of lime and dry-stone barrows, graves for Illyrian shepherds and Yugoslav Partisans, a factory stands. She has produced a few humble dreams. The shepherds overheard her clear her throat, and they tend her hesitation.