doors opened. A sleek elderly man helped a young woman into a wheelchair, and bumped the chair towards the cairn. He had not seen them at the village ceremony. She held a small posy of flowers. He felt a wearying sadness. A spit of rain was falling.
He took out his notepad again, and wrote down their names: Judge Zenjil Delic, Jasmina Delic.
'We had a choice to make, the present or the future.
We chose to safeguard the future.'
'He bought me flowers… Before we rejected him I showed him the old burial stones in Sarajevo. On one was written, 'I stood, praying to God, meaning no evil, yet I was struck to death by lightning.' It is good that they have put stones here, where the lightning struck… I return his flowers.'
She gave him the posy of alive strident colours. He leaned forward, and down, kissed her cheek, then laid the flowers at the foot of the cairn. He stared at the heaped stones. Some had dried earth on them and some were covered with lichen. He heard the car drive away over the field. He felt a crushing weight of responsibility. They had all told him he was not responsible – the CIO had said it, and the team had clamoured it, and his wife had sought to persuade him of it – but he knew what he had done… Or had there been, in that valley, a young man's fulfilment?
The diplomat coughed, then said quietly, 'If you're to catch that flight, Mr Gough… '
He looked around him. He saw the fields, ploughed and grazed by livestock, and a vineyard of new posts and new bright wire, and the wooded slopes, and the gold of the leaves on a big mulberry tree, and the smoke from the villages' chimneys, and the river, and he thought it a perfect place, a place of peace. He took from his pocket the little knife with which he cleaned the inside of his pipe bowl, and opened it, and knelt beside the cairn. He chose a large stone, scratched the words on it, and wondered how long they would last against the weather.
CANN do – WILL do.
The words, above the flowers, glimmered back at him. He turned on his heel.
