Penn grabbed the cat with two hands. No friendship, no love, he held the cat tight. The cat bit at his wrists and its back claws slashed at his upper arms. Penn held the cat as if his life depended on it, as if his life rested on an antenna wire not being bent over. He tramped in the last light past the antennae, through the final trees, going towards the field with the cat hacking and spitting at him.
He was through the minefield.
Penn threw the cat hard away from him.
He stepped over the barbed wire strand.
The cat snarled, as if its friendship had been betrayed, and stayed back from him, and there were no antennae for the cat to arch against.
'All right, you old bugger, I'm sorry. Please, don't do that to me again, but I apologize.'
The cat watched him. He took a slice of ham from the paper bag in his backpack and tore it into quarters, and flipped the meat towards the cat.
The cat dived for the food.
In front of Penn was the field. He could see the small wall of earth in the corner of the field. He could make out, just, the outline of the broken roofs of the village and the jagged rise of the church's tower.
It was what she would have seen, where Dorrie had been…
It was warm for the late afternoon.
Benny Stein sweated.
It was hard going, getting the sacks of seed out of the back of the Seddon Atkinson lorry, but best to be in there with the local Knin 'coolies' because that way their sticky fingers couldn't pilfer so bad. Best not to make it easy for them.
A pretty little town, Knin, pity about the people, and when they'd done the unloading then he'd try to find the energy to climb the long zigzag road from the warehouse by the football pitch down on the river and get up to the old fortress above the town. He was good at photography, prided himself, but the Canon with the 125mm lens was back at the hotel in Zagreb, and if he'd pulled out a camera up by the old fortress then the guns would have been raised and they'd have been bawling. It was the people that spoiled Knin, and the people didn't seem to him to have any bloody gratitude for him hiking down their way with his lorry and fourteen others.
He sweated, he heaved a sack of seed. He brought it down from the tail of the Seddy. He carried it to the trailer. They were good guys who worked with him, good crack.
Sweating, gulping, 'Heh, wasn't that the Hun Frau at Turanj? Wasn't that the Frau there?'
A good guy, packed in stockbroking to make five hundred quid a week driving a lorry into Sector North, 'Too old, Benny, you are, for looking at skirt…'
'Too bony for me, the Frau. What was she there for?'
A good guy, a banker who had dropped out of gilts, taken a money cut to run a truck into Sector North, 'Getting fruity, Benny? Getting the hots? She was waiting for a refugee bus…'
'You know what? She had that look, a lot of broads give me that look. Half Hackney's broads, most of Palmers Green's, they have a sincere romantic problem 'cause of me. I take cold baths, I walk away from it, too bloody complicated for me, but she had love. You know the Argie one…?'
The tickle of laughter from the one-time banker and the onetime stockbroker. Benny recited,
'… An Argentine gaucho named Bruno,
Once said, 'There is something I do know:
A woman is fine
And a sheep is divine,
But a llama is Numero Uno!'
'… Well, you know what I mean… Perhaps she's got a big fellow, a big NigBatt guy, and she's pining. There's not a refugee bus scheduled through today… that's all.'
He knew when the refugee buses came through. Refugees were something from Benny Stein's past. He'd had his little laugh from the Frau, and he thought her the grandest woman he had ever met, and when they were not driving, nor doing maintenance, then he would hitch a ride down to Karlovac and head for the Transit Centre, and his last project had been carpentry for the little desks and low stools of the kindergarten… He understood about refugees because his grandparents had walked out of Czechoslovakia fifty-five years before and his father had walked with them, and all they had owned was stacked in an old pram that they had pushed as they had walked. He'd thought, looking at the Frau's face, that it wasn't just a bus arrival she waited for.
He had walked into a gate, and he had ripped the shins of his trousers on fallen wire, and he had cracked his knee on a dropped gravestone, and he had been in the ditch.
It was black dark in the village and Penn had a little chat to himself, waspish.
It was imbecile to be padding about the ruin of the village in the black dark, and he should get a better grip of himself, slow down, stop the charge. Do it like he had done it as a child, when he had gone early in the morning into the top copse where the keeper bred the pheasant chicks in the summer, and sat under the widespread oak and waited for first light when the sow brought her badger young from the sett. Going back to the basics of his life… The only course where he had beaten the graduate intake into Gower Street had been the rural surveillance course and crawling up in the wood's night, so quiet, that when he had put his hand from behind over Amanda Fawcett's mouth she had squealed and wet her jeans. The only time he had won an instructor's praise, and Amanda Fawcett, stuffy bitch with a 2.1 out of Sussex, had had to wear her shirt tails outside her trousers for the rest of the morning, and a fucking malicious grin she'd given him on his last day, coming out of Administration when he'd given in his ID. And Amanda bloody Fawcett, graduate, General Intelligence Group, paper pusher, wouldn't have made it a hundred yards off the river bank
… After the little chat to himself, Penn stood a long time quite still, and he allowed the night sounds of the village to play around him.
The owl's shout, the whine of a swinging door, the creak of a dislodged roof beam, the motion of the stream against the piles of the bridge, voices that were distant and brought on the wind.
He stood in what he thought had been a square and the only building clear to him by its size was the mass of the body of the church. There were lamps lit in the windows of the houses across the stream where a community lived, breathed, and he could see sometimes a wavering torch on the move. There was an occasional small beam thrown up from the bridge, and it was from the bridge that he heard the young men's voices larking their boredom at guard duty. He stood quite still. He thought that when Dorrie had crossed the road, where he was now, with the torn lengths of the women's clean clothes, she would have had flares to light her way, and there would have been buildings burning. He could not see the farmhouse outline where the cellar had been, where she had run to. He had the map in his mind.
When he had calmed himself, then he moved again.
He went slow and he had one arm outstretched in front of his face and his other arm in front of his legs. Twice his fingers brushed into low rubble and once his fingers caught at a lowered telephone wire. It was a rough lane that he took, and sometimes his lower hand flicked against the taller weeds that grew between the ruts of the lane. He tried to make each stride a measured one, and he counted each stride that he took because Alija had told him that the house of Katica Dubelj was 150 paces from the square. There was a new sound catching at him, and he could not distinguish it. A few paces from Katica Dubelj's house, where it should be, and the new sound was there again. He had counted out his strides, and he groped off the lane and his fingers found a fence set around with clinging thistles and sharp nettles. He tracked the fence and he came to the wall of the house of Katica Dubelj. He came to the door. If she were alive she would come back to her home every night, or every third night, or one night in each week, if she were alive… It was what Penn thought, what had brought him to the village of Rosenovici, that there was the small, minimal, chance she would come. It was past the house of Katica Dubelj that Dorrie had been marched to the field, with the wounded, to the grave. He would wait through one night for her to come, if she were alive… His fingers were off the stone, then into the void, then feeling the rough plank surface of the door… It was the sound of a man who cried out. Penn was drawn forward. The words of a man with pain in his mind. At the end of the lane was the broken strut of a gate, across the entrance to a field. He had that sense of the openness beyond the gate that his fingers rested against. He heard the words cried staccato and growing in his eyes was the failing light of the torch beam. The shapes were appearing, gathering strength. The words were of anguish. He saw the earth wall around the pit, it was what he had seen from the tree line in the dusk. Going closer, going in stealth. He saw the shape of the man who knelt in the pit. Penn looked at the grave, at the burial place of
