struggling to recall the valley, more blurred now than the previous month, more hazed than in the winter, that Husein stayed alive. There were others, who had come from similar valleys and been displaced, as he had, who had given up the fight to remember and were now buried or lay on the damp mattresses against the tents' walls praying for death. Husein had promised himself that he would return, with Lila and the grandchildren, to the valley. He heard nothing on the radios that blasted through the avenues between the rows of tents that gave him cause to believe his pledge could be redeemed, but his fierce, awkward determination kept him alive…
… A wind came off the Ostsee and beat at the high windows of the block.
With two other families, Dragan Kovac had been dumped in a twelfth-floor apartment on the outskirts of the town of Griefswald. All day, each day, he sat by the window and stared out. That morning he could see little because the wind carried loose flakes of snow from dark low cloud. The arthritis in his knees, worse through lack of exercise, would have made it hard for him to walk outside, but he yearned, even with the pain, to stumble forward into clean air so that he could better remember his home and the village of Ljut. He was trapped in the building. The twelfth floor was his prison. It was forbidden for him, as it was for the other refugees housed in the block, to leave it.
From his vantage-point he could see the police car parked across the street from the front door. Engine fumes spewed from its exhaust. A police car was always there now. The food they needed was brought to them by earnest social workers. The imprisonment of Dragan and the other refugees in the block of the Baltic town had begun five weeks before when the crowd had gathered under cover of darkness. Rocks had been thrown to break the lower windows, then lighted petrol bombs had rained against the walls, and there had been the shouted hatred of the young men with the shaven heads, the screams of old slogans. He had thought that night – as the yelling of the skinhead nazis had beat in his ears – and every day since that it would have been better to have died in his village when the 'fundamentalists' had attacked, better never to have left his home. But he had not stayed: he had been one of the few who had escaped.
He had lumbered as fast as his old legs would carry him, flotsam with the flight of the soldiers, away from his valley, without the time to pack and carry with him even the most basic of his possessions. He had been put with many others onto a lorry that rumbled into Croatia, then onto a train that had wound, closed and with the blinds down, across Austria and into Germany then had traversed the length of that huge country. His home was now – and he had little understanding of great distance – some three thousand kilometres to the north-west of the house with the porch and the chair, and the view to the farm of his friend. The two families who shared the apartment with him showed him no respect, and said he was lazy and a fool and that he, the former police sergeant, was responsible for what had happened in their land.
Tears ran down his cheeks, as the snow melted and slithered down the glass of the window. It was so hard for him to remember the valley, but he thought – trying to see the image of it – that it would still be a place of simple beauty.
Neither of these old men, abandoned to live as statistics, sustained by grudging charity, protected from the fascist gangs, knew of the harsh realities of the valley that was their talisman of survival.
Neither remembered where the mines had been sown; neither could have imagined that those little deathly clusters of plastic and explosive would have shifted. They remembered only the good times, before the mines had been laid, when the valley felt the sun and was a bed of bright flowers, and the Bunica river was low enough to be crossed and they could meet and talk. Good times before the madness had come.
They used the hotel restaurant. Atkins had asked Mister if he wanted to go out, said Reception would recommend a restaurant, but he'd shrugged away the suggestion. It was a slow meal, poorly cooked and ineptly served, but that didn't matter to him. He'd ordered mineral water with his food and the Eagle had taken his cue from him, but Atkins had a half-bottle of Slovenian wine. He didn't have to tell them that he was tired, had no interest in talk. The restaurant was on the mezzanine, three floors below his bedroom, and close to empty. He used the meal-time to think about a riposte to the insult he had received from a man too busy to meet him. It was not in Mister's nature to turn the other cheek. Weakness was never respected. Atkins told the Eagle about the hotel's history in the war: it had been the centre for journalists and aid workers, it was continually hit by artillery fire; only the rooms at the back were safe for occupancy; for weeks at a time there was no power to heat the building, but it stayed open, staff and guests living a cave-dweller existence. Pointing out of the big plate-glass windows and down at the wide street that had been Snipers' Alley, to the dark unlit towers of apartment blocks beyond the river, Atkins told the Eagle about the marksmen who had sheltered high up there and fired down on civilians going to work or queuing at bread shops and water stand-pipes, trying to get to school or college, and the callous disregard of it. The Eagle's face showed that he wished he was anywhere other than in that restaurant, in that city.
Mister ate only what he thought was necessary for sustenance. Each plate brought to him was taken away half finished. The insult, and what he would do about it, consumed him. Out of an insult, and its answer, came strength. The insult provided an opportunity for him to demonstrate his strength. When he was twelve years old, a teacher had called him 'an evil little swine, a thief' in front of the class; he had followed that teacher home after school, put on a balaclava, punched the man to the ground and kicked him again and again; charges could not be brought, the teacher could not make an identification; he had become king, much feared, among the twelve-year- old kids. As he'd grown older he'd left a trail of the same fear behind him, in gaol and on the streets. The man running Hackney and the east when Mister was climbing the ladder's rungs had said that Mister was a Tittle shite with no future' and was now walking on sticks because pistol bullets had disintegrated his kneecaps. A man in Eindhoven, a dealer who was careless with buyers' money, had fled naked during the night with his wife and two children from a house that had cost him a million and a half Dutch guilders while the fire that destroyed it blazed around him. A man who had hacked him off in a pub, who now had no tongue and no fingers, might today have died.
Mister was experienced in answering insults. He had considered his problem, decided on his response.
He didn't wait for coffee.
In his room he felt safe, in control. He knew of nothing that should make him feel otherwise. A full day awaited him in the morning. He was soon asleep.
Under his room the city's late-night traffic prowled and did not disturb him.
'Is there anything more about that lorry?'
It was late evening and Monika Holberg was just back in her office in the UNIS building, Tower A, and she was tired, which was rare for her, and irritable, which was rarer. She had been on a field day out in the country, west of the city. She kicked off her muddied hoots and slung her heavy anorak at the door hook.
Whether she was in the city and trawling through office appointments or away in the country villages, she wore the same anorak and boots. She had no other life in Sarajevo other than her work for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. She was tired because her driver had gone sick, there hadn't been another available so she had driven herself, and on the way back – on the mountain road from Kiseljak
– the rear right tyre of the Nissan four-wheel drive had punctured, she'd had to change it herself, and the nuts had been hell to shift. She was irritated because the village she'd visited beyond Kiseljak was light years from being ready to receive and impress the visitors she would be escorting there next week. She was a driven woman. It was not in Monika's character to accept that second best was enough, whether in vehicle maintenance or visit preparation. Her secretary was on the other side of the thin partition that separated their cubicles, brewing coffee and making a sandwich.
'What lorry is that, Monika?'
'The lorry from those British people. What do they call themselves? 'Bosnia with Love'? Isn't that what they call themselves? I need that lorry.'
'Maybe Ankie took the call – when I was at the meeting or at lunch.'
Monika rolled her eyes. Her secretary was not a driven woman. Her main concerns were what she was earning in salary and living allowance from UNHCR and what a sacrifice she made, and how she hated Sarajevo. She was fat on the city's back and her hair was always freshly styled. The desk was littered with small squares of sticky yellow Post-it notes, fastened where there was space among a haphazard strewn-paper sea. She was bending over her table, skipping the secretary's messages and identifying those of Ankie, the Dutch girl, who fielded her phone when it rang unanswered.
'There isn't a message from Ankie about the lorry.'
'Perhaps there was no message – can we talk about it in the morning?'
She was brought the sandwiches and the coffee.
