over there. We'd done really well to get as far as we had got. No, I don't know how we got jumped, but they were heavy on the ground… Major, that's a bad place.' He thought he had the patter right. Wouldn't be good to show fear, would be good to show thoroughness. All officers shunned fear and adulated keenness. The major was a bureaucrat, seconded at the start of the war from the Finance Ministry, and knew sweet nothing. The major was nodding. The major would get a paper of the route they had taken and the location of the minefields, and of the tanks and the strong points and the major would take it to his colonel. He was useful with bullshit patter. Ham said, in sincere tones, 'I'm really sorry we couldn't do more for those brave lads, I'm really cut up about that. If the objective's important enough then of course we should go back you won't mind me saying it, but if I have to go back I'd request more experienced troops alongside me…' He had rehearsed that line. The last was said looking straight into the major's eyes, good sincerity stuff. They hadn't more experienced troops in 2nd Bn, 110 (Karlovac) Brigade. If the major reported that to the colonel, if the advice was taken, then the Black Hawks would be tasked for the next recce of the artillery guns and the munitions stores, and no way that the super shit Black Hawks would take along a bloody mercenary. If it had just been the major to debrief him then Ham would have reckoned he had done well, but the captain, cold bastard, had said nothing. The captain stared him out, never took a note, looked at him like he was shit. The captain was an intelligence officer, fronting as liaison. 'In conclusion, sir, I'd like to say that I feel privileged to have served with those young men who didn't make it back…' Ham saluted. Best salute. It was the salute he would have given his company commander at the training camp on the Brecons or the operational base at Crossmaglen in South Armagh or at Palace Barracks east of Belfast centre. Bullshit salute. He hoped, dear God, he would never be sent again across that bloody river, into that bloody hell.
Later, when it was evening, when he could slip away and the evening darkness came to the Karlovac streets, he would go to the bar where the telephone was in shadow and behind the screen.
The major said, 'Thank you, Hamilton, thank you for good and resourceful work.'
'For nothing, sir…'
He had woken foul-mouthed and bad-tempered.
Her man had sworn at her while she had dressed, and when little Marko had come into their room to play in the bed he had cursed the child.
For Evica, her husband was a new man.
She had made breakfast, given them bread she had baked the evening before and jam she had bottled in the autumn, and she had tried to accept that her husband was a new man. She had dressed her Marko and they had gone to the school where she taught the third year, and where Marko sat in the second-year class. She had come back to her home at the end of the lane, at lunch time, to make a small light meal for the middle of the day, and she had found Milan still foul-mouthed and bad-tempered. He sat at the table in the kitchen and he had papers spread around him and he made no effort to clear them. She had little time in the middle of the day when she took the hour from the school, little time to waste in clearing the table, and she must waste that little time… There was never a point in arguing with him but the moods, black and foul-mouthed and bad-tempered, were more frequent. Marko sat at the table close to his father, and held the plastic pistol that had been brought from Belgrade, and was old enough, sensible enough, to stay silent. Her former man, the clerk in the co-operative at Turanj, had never been home in the middle of the day and expecting to be fed; it was the new way of the new man… Because she loved him, had loved him since she was a child in the village, the new man that was her husband hurt her. Only the beard changed him, outwardly. Inwardly, everything was changed. He no longer played basketball in Glina, he no longer followed the big matches in the football league that were played in Belgrade, he no longer worked through quiet evenings in the vegetable garden at the back of the house, he no longer talked gently with her. The war had made her Milan a new man. The war suffocated Evica Stankovic. She thought the war was her enemy and she would not have dared to say it. The war was his life in the waking hours and the war was with him when he slept because now there was a shined and cleaned automatic rifle on the rug over the floor at his side of the bed. Those meetings in all the waking hours, and her kitchen often filled, when she came back from the school in the afternoon, with men from the village who were ignorant and stupid and who talked a babble of fire positions and patrol patterns, and her kitchen in the evenings was a stinking place from the smoke of their cigarettes and the scent of their brandy. She did not complain, would not have dared to. In the sleeping hours, her new man sometimes rolled in the bed and cried out… She was an intelligent woman, she had been trained as a teacher at the college in Zagreb and she could read books in German as well as Italian, and in English, but it was not possible now for her to get books because of the war, and she did not complain. And she was intelligent enough to realize that the respect now shown to her in the village owed nothing to love, nor to friendship, everything to the position of her new man. Her new man dispensed gasoline, and tractor parts, and decided who could enlist in the militia and therefore be paid, had control over the quotas of agricultural seed. They all fawned in the village to her new man, and they all gave the show of respect to his wife… She hated the war. They were on the floor, heaped loose, where he had thrown them. His back was to them as he sat hunched at the table. With her toe she nudged the pile of uniform fatigues. They had been left for her to wash. There were dark bloodstains on them. Milan had not told her, Milan had kept his silence since he had come back, drunk, quiet, the evening before. She had been told it that morning by the woman who cleaned at the school, by the wife of Stevo who was the village gravedigger. She had been told that her new man, Milan, had slit the throats of two Ustase who were captured. And his fatigues, on which were the bloodstains of the two Ustase, were left now on the floor for her to wash. On the wall above the stove, hung by thread from the nail he had hammered into the plaster, was the bayonet. It was near to a year and a half since he had brought the bayonet down from the loft. The bayonet was rusted and the handle grip had rotted. It was German army issue, had been taken from the belt of a Wehrmacht trooper and had been used by the cousin of the father of Milan Stankovic to stab the trooper to death. He had brought the bayonet down from the loft where it had lain undisturbed for forty years, and he had hammered the nail in the wall and tied the thread on the handle of the bayonet and hung it. The next morning her new man had led the militia in the attack on Rosenovici.
The sunlight played on the window of her kitchen.
She was hurrying and time was against her. In her sink she was sluicing the earth from carrots from the vegetable patch. She could see across to Rosenovici, to the ruined church, to the broken houses, to the disturbed earth in the corner of the field at the end of the lane.
The sight across the stream, the devastated village, was as a pillow that was pressed down onto her face, over her nose, blocking her mouth. The sight was always with her. When she looked from the window of her kitchen, from the window of her bedroom, when she went to get wood from the heaped pile against the shed wall, when she went to the vegetable patch, when she went to the orchard to pick windfalls, when she went to hang her washing on the line, then the pillow was across her nose and her mouth. There was no escape from the sight of Rosenovici.
She had had friends, good friends, in the village of Rosenovici, and she did not dare to talk of them. She scoured the skins of the carrots. It was since he had come home from Belgrade, since she had told him of the digging in the corner of the field that he had been, all the time, foul-mouthed and bad-tempered.
Evica had not told him, would not have dared to, of the change these last two weeks in the attitude of the school's Headmaster to her. There was a slyness from the school's Headmaster, a smugness, a distancing from her, since the digging. And he would have heard, as she had heard, the broadcast on the radio. He would have listened, as she had listened, to the radio in English, on the short wave, because that was the small window they could climb through each day, when each was alone. Denied books, the radio was her freedom and the Headmaster's freedom also. It had been the voice of an American on the radio.
'… Be identified and put on trial these perpetrators of crimes against humanity…' She saw from her kitchen window the dug earth in the corner of the field. '.. Be treated exactly as were Hitler's associates at Nuremberg…' She had not been with those who had crossed the bridge over the swollen river and who had gone to watch the lifting of the bodies from the wet grey-black earth. '… Name some names, let them understand that over the long run, they may be able to run but they can't hide.. She had seen from her kitchen window the bodies in bags lifted into the jeeps.
She cut the carrots, dropped them into the saucepan.
The war suffocated Evica Stankovic.
The bus was three hours behind schedule when it came through. There were Nigerian soldiers around her, and there were two men from the UNHCR office in Zagreb who strutted impatiently and carried a print-out of the list of names. The bus came slow, tucked in behind the white-painted personnel carrier, towards the Nigerians' checkpoint. Ulrike Schmidt always felt a numbed despair when she came to the checkpoint at Turanj to welcome in
