the villagers, but he would have the opportunity to see for himself the value of his generosity in bringing the Bosnia with Love lorry to Sarajevo. It was to be an important day for her and it would be further fulfilled if he would accompany her – assuming, of course, that he did not have more important business in the city. She hoped very much that he could accept.
'I'd like that,' Mister said. 'I'm flattered. I'm delighted to accept.'
She said she would pick him up in the morning, told him what he should wear – not towels, her laughter gently mocking him – and wished him a good evening.
A minute after she'd gone, the maid brought his laundry and his dried, polished shoes. He whistled as he dressed. It was all compartments. He forgot the Princess, his wife, and in a compartment further recessed in his mind was the man who should have been killed on the grass beside the pavement.
'You no longer have the mentality of a Customs officer.'
'I wonder if I ever had it.'
'You have become a competitor,' the judge said drily.
'I am Joey Cann, the competitor who loses.'
They had brought him to their home. He had helped to push the chair across the bridge and up the steep hill between lines of apartment buddings wrecked by artillery, fire-gutted and covered by a rash of bullet holes. The narrow width of the road would have been the front line. There were no lights above them or in the open windows. They made their way by torch beam, shining it down in front of the chair's wheels so that they did not hit debris and jolt her, and he'd wondered how the judge pushed his daughter up that hill each evening. They had turned into a narrower street and he had seen a heavy concrete mass, what had been the front of the third floor of a block, hanging threateningly over them, but she hadn't looked up at it and neither had the judge. The beam had been aimed at a house. It was half a building, one storey, and half a ruin. A door and a window were intact. The left side of the house had fallen away.
Joey saw the snipped-off rafters, and wallpaper was exposed, still showing a pattern of pink flowers. The beam flickered on to three old pallets covered by a length of sheet metal to make a ramp for the chair.
When the door was opened he had stayed outside and emptied the beer from his bladder. He had gone inside. He had to talk and purge himself.
The room was lit with an oil lamp. The walls were dark with damp stains and cracks ran in the plaster.
There was a cooker attached by a pipe to a liquid-gas barrel, and a sink with clean plates on a draining- board. They had no refrigerator, and no electric fire.
There were worn rugs on bare boards. It was a place of penury. They gave him wine from an opened bottle and he sipped it sparingly because it tasted foul, because he did not need to drink more, because he thought it all they had to offer a guest. She never interrupted her father, but wheeled herself round the table to a cupboard and back, and filled a sandwich for him. He had been given a place on a sofa that was covered by a blanket and propped up by old books.
He thought the judge's need to speak was greater than his own.
The judge sat on a low bed. 'We live, Mr Cann, in an Olympic city. Citius, Altius, Fortius. But there was another motto of the Games. We read about it as we prepared ourselves to welcome the world. In 1908
London was the host. There was a service at your great cathedral, St Paul's, and the Bishop of Pennsylvania was invited to preach to the congre-gation. Sitting there, listening to the bishop, was the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin.
We are told that what de Coubertin heard thrilled him:
'The important thing in the Olympic Games is not so much to have been victorious as to have taken part.'
Not every man can win.'
'I have been a loser enough times,' Joey said. He felt the cold around him, but it would have been rude for him, the guest, to shiver or pity himself. Till the summer, he thought, they would live in the house in their coats. 'I call him, I told you, Target One. He has been too many times a winner.'
'Am I a loser?'
Joey said simply, believed it, 'You are a man of dignity, you are not a loser.'
'And Jasmina, with a broken back? She has no mother. She has no carer but me. It is uncertain what is her future when I am dead. Is she a loser?'
'She has self-respect, she is not a loser.'
'May I tell you a story about what obsesses you, Mr Cann, a story of a winner and a loser?'
'I am in your home. You may tell me what you want.'
Jasmina gave him the sandwich. He did not know whether she wanted the story told or not. Her pale cheeks, sunken set eyes and her mouth, no lipstick, were without expression.
'The story has many characters, but at the end of it there was one winner and one loser… '
'Is it the story that is not to be told to a stranger – about blood?'
'That story, Mr Cann. I broke my rule on involvement, and you have told me that because of you my involvement may be known, and I should take precautions. Very frankly, few are possible… You should know why I became involved, helped you.'
'Please.' He strained to listen and to hold concentration against the waves of nausea.
'My wife, Maria, Jasmina's mother, was dead. She had a backroom administration post at the Bosnia Hotel, but when she was killed she was another mother and wife out in the streets and parks, scavenging. It had rained in the morning and she had come to the Jewish cemetery, near to here, to add to the snails she had collected. If you can find enough snails and take them out of their shells, and you can boil water, you can make soup. She was killed by a sniper's bullet. We had been married for twenty-one years. Jasmina was nineteen. My wife, Maria, was buried in the football pitch of the stadium. I could have left the city, but to turn your back on your wife's grave is, I promise you, difficult. I went on with my work as a teacher in law at the university. Jasmina, the only jewel left in my life, was my student. We managed. She had a boyfriend, Mirko, another of my students. A Serb, what we Muslims call a Cetnik. In the war, at first, it was possible for Serb men to remain in Sarajevo, but later it became hard, and soon it was impossible. There was hysteria, they were thought to be spies for the enemy. Jasmina and Mirko were in love, as I and her mother had been. They had pledged to spend their lives together, as we had. I blessed them. I said they should go, escape the madness.
'There was a telephone engineer who, before the war, I defended on a charge of killing while driving.
My defence was successful. He went free. He was a rogue, he should have gone to prison. He said that if he could ever repay me he would. The telephone link from the main PTT building was cut when the fighting started, but the engineer kept one line open to Grbavica. It was possible if you waited, and if you paid, to use the line. First you called and asked the Serb operator to pass a message, for the person you would speak with to come to the sub- exchange in Grbavica at a certain time on a certain day. The day came, the time, you spoke to them. The engineer is now a wealthy man, he does not have to work. Mirko, with my money, made the calls and asked relatives on that side to help him, if he came over, to leave the country. The guarantee was given. But how to go over?
'There was the tunnel at the airport. It was impossible to use it. The military had it, the government, and they rented it to the gangsters – to Caco, Celo and Serif. They paid two thousand DMs an hour to use it.
They brought in sugar, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, everything for the black market, but between the military and the gangsters there was a stranglehold on the use of the tunnel. I heard there was one other way.
'I went to see Serif. It was an agony to me to go to see such a man. I have to say it was because I loved my child, and she loved her boy. He named the price.
Of course we did not have such money. The price was five thousand American dollars, for him, and three thousand American dollars for the gangsters on the other side. I sold everything I had that was of material and sentimental value, my wife's jewellery, the ring I had given her, and the ring she had given me, even the watch on my wrist that had been my father's, and a loan from relatives, and I mortgaged my pension.
Everything went to pay the thug for Jasmina's and Mirko's freedom.
'I remember the evening. I will never forget it. She took a small sports bag and Mirko had a little ruck-sack. It was all they owned. They had such confidence in a new world, their new life, away from the killing.
When we came near to the bridge I was told to stay back. I kissed them both. I saw Serif. She had the money, all we could raise, and she gave it him, and he seemed to sneer because it was so little to him, and so much to us. I heard him say to her that all the arrangements were made. They went away into the darkness.
