slept in snow-covered woods, huddling together for warmth, and in ruined homes and in the wrecked outbuildings of farms and among cattle and pigs and in the hall wells of apartment blocks in the towns. They had eaten grass and rotting cabbages that were scraped from ice-locked earth, and they had begged for food. A week before they had sold Lila's ring, given her on their marriage day, the last thing they owned of value, and had bought smoked ham and potato broth, enough to fill a bucket.
Eight kilometres short of Vraca, at the cafe where in the old days they had stopped for coffee and brandy on the way to the cattle-market, they had found a building without a roof and a platoon of Spanish troops. Lila had said to him that, last night, it was only because of the grandchildren that the foreigners gave them shelter and blankets and promised to take them on in the morning.
Every muscle in his body was stiffened from the journey. He stood and gazed as the pain dribbled through him, and she clung to his arm. It was a bright, sunny winter morning, and long shadows thrown from the bare roof beams of the village houses caught his face, and his wife's and the grandchildren's faces, to accentuate the thin skin covering their bones, and the sunken eyes. If Lila had not been holding his arm he would have stumbled forward and fallen through exhaustion and hunger. It was all as he remembered it.
The officer, with an interpreter, hovered behind him.
The baker's, the blacksmith's and the engineer's houses were all as he had last seen them, gutted by fire from the artillery, open to the skies, displaying the wallpaper and the carpets in the upper rooms where the outer walls had been holed. The minaret was down, felled by a direct hit from a tank shell, just as it had been. The weeds grew on the cobbled village street. He tottered a few short steps forward, past the end of the building that had been the village meeting-hall and the school for the smallest children before they were old enough to go on the bus, and he saw his own home. A tree, without a leaf to decorate its branches, grew through the missing tiles of the roof
… There was a piteous crying. His hearing was poorer now and he heard the sound faintly, and with the crying was a cringing whine. The cat came. He heard Lila's gasp, then the excited screams of his grandchildren; for three years he had not heard them scream in happiness. The cat broke from shadow, white, black and brown markings, and slunk in a belly scrape through the weeds towards them. The grandchildren ran to it and it stopped, its back arched, nuzzled their legs before they swept it up in their arms, held it close and passed it between them. The tears ran in his face and through his stubble beard.
Then he saw the dog. He could not have taken it with him. Each morning or evening, in the hellish heat of the tent or in the numbing cold, he had thought about the dog and said silent words of apology; he remembered the stones he had thrown at it to stop it following them out of the village. The dog was so thin and it crawled near to him, cowed. He had thrown stones at the dog and shouted at it to be gone and he had heard it yelp when a stone had caught its stomach, but to the last it had obeyed him and gone back to the deserted home. He shook with weeping and bent down awkwardly, rubbed his hand on its ribcage and saw the fleas scampering on his fingers.
Through the interpreter, the officer said, 'It is what we are supposed to do, to escort people back to their homes. It will be difficult for you to live here. It is against my judgement to let you stay.'
'I will not leave. Are you prepared to shoot me?'
'We will do what we can for you. We will leave bread and milk, and a little meat. We will come again with more.'
'I say to your God that he should look after you.'
'My great-uncle fought in a civil war in my country.
I understand that people have to go home, and start again, and forget.'
'It will be hard to forget.'
'If you do not forget, it is what my great-uncle told me – and forgive – then no sort of life is possible.'
Husein looked past his house, and the well, and down to the track to the ford, and over the river. He saw his flattened yellowed fields, topped by black dead thistles and brown dead cow parsley and grey dead ragwort, and he saw the toppled posts in the vineyard. He looked for coils of new barbed wire.
'It is my land, they put mines in my land. Do you know where they put them? Are they marked?'
'They left two weeks ago. The Serbs told me the track was safe. The commander said he did not have a record of where the mines were laid, so they are not fenced. Even if they were fenced it would be difficult to know their position. Mines swim in the ground. It is a strange word to use, but it is what happens. They can move many metres. The commander would give me no information.'
'Do I forget that? Do I forgive them for it?'
'If you do not then you have no life – I can give you some heating-oil and some blankets.'
'And I will need matches. To light fires I will need many boxes of matches.'
'You will have matches. Also I can give you candles.'
'When did it last rain?'
'We have had no rain for a month, so the river is low. Use the river for water, but boil it. I do not know if those people came across and sabotaged the well.
The graveyard is desecrated. It would be wise to assume the well cannot be used.'
'May your God watch over you.'
Husein stood at the top of the track with the pile of blankets and the cardboard box of food and milk, and the plastic bag of match cartons with the candles and the jerry-can of heating-oil. The wind on his face was from the west. The ground under his feet was rock dry. The dog licked his hand when he bent, creaking joints, and felt the grass and found no moisture there.
He went back to his land, down the track, and waded across the river at the ford. The water flowed above his knees and the stones under his shoes were slippery as glass, but his will helped him m a k e the crossing. In his hands were the jerry-can of oil, the bag of matches and the candles, kept dry and h e l d high even when he stumbled. On the far side of the ford he looked up at his friend's house and wondered how he did and where he was, whether he was dead and in an unmarked grave, whether he was in a distant camp and still dreaming of the valley. On the track, near to the home of Dragan Kovac, the water sloshing in his shoes, he reached to snatch up handfuls of dry grass, made little heaps of it then spilled heating-oil on them. The wind came harder on his back and he welcomed it. He could see, ahead of him, the ribcages of his animals, and a hawk circled above him. When he had made a dozen small mounds of dried grass, buried halves of the candles in them and splashed them with the oil, he lit the candles' wicks.
The fires raged then guttered, then took. He had heard in the camp at Tuzla that fire destroyed mines.
A crackling wall of flames slowly advanced across his grazing fields and moved towards the ground which, in years gone, he had ploughed to grow vegetables and maize. A great smoke pall hung over his valley and was carried on the wind beyond the line of fire. He believed what he had been told in the tent camp. The proof was there in the explosions.
Seven times the ground broke and was thrown upwards by detonations; and the shrapnel sang over his head. The wind lifted burning grass tufts and wafted them beyond the extent of the line, spreading the fire. To his right, far out towards the line of the fire, there was a grass island circled by black scorched ground. The flames moved on and left the island behind.
Husein Bekir had heard in the camp that fire exploded mines. He had not been told, by experts, that only the mines nearest the surface would be affected; others would smoulder but would not explode; some would have their stakes burned through and would fall over but would not explode; some would have their nylon trip-wires melted but would stay in place with their antennae still lethal; and some had metal wire that the fire would not sever.
Each time a mine detonated he felt a wild sense of excitement, as if his youth returned to him.
A young boar broke in a panic run from the grass island. It ran back over the ground that the fire had covered and headed for the track where Husein stood.
Its stampede had covered twenty-five metres when it was lifted high by the flash of light and the crest of smoke. He saw the blood spurt while it was in the air and its right leg flying free as it fell.
Husein Bekir turned away. He thought he had wasted half of the heating-oil, half of the candles, and two cartons of matches. He went back across the ford.
Joey had lost himself in the late-evening darkness, had gone to his rendezvous.
When she was out on the street, or in the van and trailing, Maggie dressed up-market. When she was parked in the van, in the back of it, with her earphones for company, and her book, she was dressed down.
