He could not be certain, but it was his training to know when a tail was on him. The late afternoon and the early evening were spent in his hotel room making sense of the note form of the interviews, and then supper and a beer in the old town. It was when he had stepped off the pavement to give room to a whore negotiating her rate with a client that he had thought he was followed. He had swung, amused, to see better the face of the whore, and her dressed like a housewife, a cardigan and a floral skirt, and there was a shadow moving behind the whore, and the shadow froze when Penn turned full face.
Seven.
'I saw her, when the Partizans came into the village…' The smells were close to Perm's childhood. Eight years old, twelve years old, at harvest time, when the men were in the fields taking in the barley, wheat, maize, and going to the hedgerow and squatting down and wiping between their cheeks with yesterday's newspaper, and the sun settling with the flies on their mess, and the smell. Six years old, ten years old, and the milking cattle in the parlour and the shit running out below their lifted tails, and splattering, and the shut-in heat trapped inside the walls and the low asbestos-sheeted roof. Penn, the boy brought up on the farm, was close to the smells of the Transit Centre. 'It was only chance that I was in the village. You see, I am Bosnian. I am a Muslim of Bosnia. I was trying to take the bus from Banja Luka to Zagreb. I have the cataracts in my eyes. The doctor in Banja Luka said I should go to the hospital in Zagreb. I thought it was possible for a Muslim to travel through the lines of the Serbs and the Croats, stupid of me. The bus was stopped on the Glina to Vrginmost road. The Serbs were very hard on me. I went where I thought I was safe, to the village of Rosenovici. There was a madness around there, but I did not think the madness could last. I thought I would stay in safety in Rosenovici until the madness passed. When it became too dangerous to stay many of the village left, at night, to go through the woods and the hills. Because of my sight I could not go. No one was prepared to delay their flight to help a woman who could not see, it was necessary for me to stay. Men, women, lose charity when they are in flight for their lives. I was there through the fighting for the village, and I was there when it fell…' Penn thought he had started to understand the village where Dorrie Mowat had died. The village life and the farm life had gone away from him and he had taken the exams at the comprehensive school in Cirencester, and the exams had turned his back on his parents and on the farm and on the fields and hedgerows and woods, and on the smells. But he was learning, and the farm life and the village life seeped back to him. 'It was on the third day after the attack had started that the village fell. I think it was the Thursday. It was the second week in December. The village had been preparing for Christmas, their festival. The people had no presents for their children but they had cut branches of green leaves from the holly trees. They had tried to make a joy of their festival…' Penn prompted gently. What had she seen, of Dorrie, when the village fell? Jovic translated. 'I had been in the church. It was the first time I had been in the church of Catholics. They called the place the crypt, and the walls there were thick, of heavy-cut stone. The girl came on the night before the village fell. She came to ask the women who were in the church if they could tear up some of their clothes, their clothes that were most clean, for bandages. I could not see her well, because of the cataracts in my eyes, but there were other women afterwards who said that she was beautiful. She took the clothes that had been torn and cut into strips and she went back to where the wounded men were hidden. She had to cross the front of the church and then go across the lane and then she had to go through the garden of a farmhouse. It was all open, and when she went back there was much shooting, as if they had seen her, the Partizans, and tried to kill her. I know she had a great courage, and she was not afraid when she had the bandages and was about to go back into the open. I could not see her, but I heard her laugh. It was a sweet and happy laugh. You know why she laughed? Some of the women in the church, they had put on all the underpants they possessed and the cleanest were the third or fourth pair from their skin, and she was going to make dressings for the wounded from the third pairs or fourth pairs of the underpants, and some of the women were shy to take off their underpants. She laughed… I did not see her again until it was over…' Remembering Mary's story. The story told in the comfort of the kitchen with warm coffee. Mary speaking without hatred, but from the depths of pain. The dinner party in the Manor House, black tie. The celebration of the elevation of a neighbour to the lofty eminence of Master of Foxhounds, North Sussex Hunt. Banter, silly but cheerful, spilling round the room that was panelled with old oak. Dorrie coming into the dining room, bitter face and holed jeans and a T-shirt too dirty to have been used as a rag for cleaning a floor. 'It was the irregulars, their militia, that came into the church. We knew that a white flag had been raised at the store, and we knew that most of the fighters, those who were not hurt, had already gone. We were taken out into the afternoon light. I remember that it was afternoon because the sun was low above the hills and it was into my eyes. We were made to form a line. 'We were standing in front of the church and they took anything that was of value from the women, and from me. We had nothing that was special, only sentimental, but they took it. I heard her voice. She is only a small girl, but she had so big a voice and she was shouting from inside the farmhouse that was across the lane from the church. They had their guns, and she was shouting as if she had no fear of them…' Hearing the story, Mary's pain. Dorrie coming into the dining room and holding the jar of tomato puree. The quiet falling on the dining room and the cheerful joking killed. Dorrie marching to the Master of Foxhounds and shaking the jar and unfastening the lid. Dorrie pouring the rich red of the jar onto the head of the Master of Foxhounds. The tomato puree dripping from the bald scarred scalp and down to the white of his tuxedo jacket. 'She was brought out of the farmhouse. All the time she was shouting at the Partizans. And she had her arm around the waist of one of the wounded fighters, and she had the arm of another of the fighters around her shoulder to give him support. It was near enough for me to see. Not easily, but I saw… I saw her hit. He was a big man, and he had a beard, long, dark. I saw that man hit her and she could not protect herself because she had the wounded fighters to help…' There was the noise of the Transit Centre around Penn. Crying voices and the clattering of metal pots, the beating of hammers, and the wail of radios. The name of the woman was Alija. Her eyes watered, but he had the feeling it was from medical drops and not tears. He thought she was a flotsam of war, that she would be far down any list of patients requiring a cataract operation. She held a ragged handkerchief in her hands and pulled and tugged at the edges. He heard the hoarseness of his voice, as if his throat was blocked. 'What happened to her, what happened to Dorrie Mowat?' She shrugged. She looked away. She murmured. She shrugged again. Jovic said, 'She has told you all she knows. The women who had been in the church, they were taken away. She does not know anything more.' Penn stood. It was a reflex, done without thinking. He bent forward and he took the head of the woman in his hands and he kissed her forehead. The hands that had held the handkerchief were dug now into the material of his blazer. She was gabbling at him. There was the foulness of her breath close to his nose, and the smell of her clothes. He thought he might vomit and he dragged her fingers clear. 'The women who were with me, they said she was so brave. The women said she was an angel… It was what they said…' He was away from his chair. He reeled, as if drunk, from the room with the damp peeled plaster. He was out in the corridor. He leaned against the wall of the corridor. There was the grin, sardonic, cold, from Jovic. It had been Jovic's style to hire a car and have him drive, without explanation, down the wide road from Zagreb to Karlovac, and to direct him to the Transit Centre where the Muslim refugees waited for onward passage to the safe havens and the new lives in 'civilized' Europe. Jovic, he thought, played him like a marionette. Jovic said, 'Good stuff, yes? Good stuff for your report, yes?' Penn snarled, 'Just shut your bloody mouth.' Doubt crawled in Penn. He thought himself so insignificant. Once, two and a half years back, maybe three, he had been shuffled for a morning to a ministry to do a positive vetting on an architect who would be working on R.A. F station bunkers, and the architect had been in a wheelchair and so damned cheerful. The architect had said that the best thing about spending time in Stoke Mandeville spinal unit was getting to know that however bad his situation was there was always someone, in the next bed, who had it worse… Penn was the little bureaucrat, the little man whining about a job and a mortgage and a marriage. He thought of the scale where his problems stacked against those of the woman, Alija… Penn thought of what Dorrie had done, and how she had achieved love. The feeling of insignificance, it hurt. The German woman was in the doorway of the room. She smiled, friendly, at him. She was slightly built and her face was washed clean and there were sharp lines of tiredness at her eyes. The German woman had led him and Jovic to the room where they had found Alija. 'Right, Mr. Penn, now I will show you around the Transit Centre He was like all the others who came from abroad. He was like the men from the national delegations of the Red Cross and like the television crews. She was sure the place frightened him, the place that was her kingdom. They were all the same, the ignorant, they wanted to be gone before it was decent to leave. There was a wedding ring on his finger. He would have a wife at home, probably a child. He would live in a home that was small, safe, protected, just as were the homes in Munich. She did not think
