THE HEART OF DANGER (15 page)

Inwardly, everything was changed. He no longer played basketball

in

Glina, he no longer followed the big matches in the football league

that were played in Belgrade, he no longer worked through quiet

evenings in the vegetable garden at the back of the house, he no longer

talked gently with her. The war had made her Milan a new man. The

war

suffocated Evica Stankovic. She thought the war was her enemy and

she

would not have dared to say it. The war was his life in the waking

hours and the war was with him when he slept because now there was

a

shined and cleaned automatic rifle on the rug over the floor at his

side of the bed. Those meetings in all the waking hours, and her

kitchen often filled, when she came back from the school in the

afternoon, with men from the village who were ignorant and stupid

and

who talked a babble of fire positions and patrol patterns, and her

kitchen in the evenings was a stinking place from the smoke of their

cigarettes and the scent of their brandy. She did not complain,

would

not have dared to. In the sleeping hours, her new man sometimes

rolled

in the bed and cried out .. . She was an intelligent woman, she had

been trained as a teacher at the college in Zagreb and she could read

books in German as well as Italian, and in English, but it was not

possible now for her to get books because of the war, and she did

not

complain. And she was intelligent enough to realize that the respect

now shown to her in the village owed nothing to love, nor to

friendship, everything to the position of her new man. Her new man

dispensed gasoline, and tractor parts, and decided who could enlist

in

the militia and therefore be paid, had control over the quotas of

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agricultural seed. They all fawned in the village to her new man,

and

they all gave the show of respect to his wife .. . She hated the war.

They were on the floor, heaped loose, where he had thrown them. His

back was to them as he sat hunched at the table. With her toe she

nudged the pile of uniform fatigues. They had been left for her to

wash. There were dark bloodstains on them. Milan had not told her, Milan had kept his silence since he had come back, drunk, quiet, the

evening before. She had been told it that morning by the woman who

cleaned at the school, by the wife of Stevo who was the village

gravedigger. She had been told that her new man, Milan, had slit

the

throats of two Ustase who were captured. And his fatigues, on which

were the bloodstains of the two Ustase, were left now on the floor

for

her to wash. On the wall above the stove, hung by thread from the

nail

he had hammered into the plaster, was the bayonet. It was near to

a

year and a half since he had brought the bayonet down from the loft.

The bayonet was rusted and the handle grip had rotted. It was German

army issue, had been taken from the belt of a Wehrmacht trooper and

had

been used by the cousin of the father of Milan Stankovic to stab the

trooper to death. He had brought the bayonet down from the loft where

it had lain undisturbed for forty years, and he had hammered the nail

in the wall and tied the thread on the handle of the bayonet and hung

it. The next morning her new man had led the militia in the attack

on

Rosenovici.

The sunlight played on the window of her kitchen.

She was hurrying and time was against her. In her sink she was

sluicing the earth from carrots from the vegetable patch. She could

see across to Rosenovici, to the ruined church, to the broken houses,

to the disturbed earth in the corner of the field at the end of the

lane.

The sight across the stream, the devastated village, was as a pillow

that was pressed down onto her face, over her nose, blocking her

mouth.

The sight was always with her. When she looked from the window of

her

kitchen, from the window of her bedroom, when she went to get wood

from

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the heaped pile against the shed wall, when she went to the vegetable

patch, when she went to the orchard to pick windfalls, when she went

to

hang her washing on the line, then the pillow was across her nose

and

her mouth. There was no escape from the sight of Rosenovici.

She had had friends, good friends, in the village of Rosenovici, and

she did not dare to talk of them. She scoured the skins of the

carrots. It was since he had come home from Belgrade, since she had

told him of the digging in the corner of the field that he had been,

all the time, foul-mouthed and bad-tempered.

Evica had not told him, would not have dared to, of the change these

last two weeks in the attitude of the school's Headmaster to her.

There

was a slyness from the school's Headmaster, a smugness, a distancing

from her, since the digging. And he would have heard, as she had

heard, the broadcast on the radio. He would have listened, as she

had

listened, to the radio in English, on the short wave, because that

was

the small window they could climb through each day, when each was

alone. Denied books, the radio was her freedom and the Headmaster's

freedom also. It had been the voice of an American on the radio.

'.. . Be identified and put on trial these perpetrators of crimes

against humanity .. ." She saw from her kitchen window the dug earth in the corner of the field. '.. Be treated exactly as were Hitler's associates at Nuremberg .. ." She had not been with those who had

crossed the bridge over the swollen river and who had gone to watch

the

lifting of the bodies from the wet grey-black earth. '.. . Name

some

names, let them understand that over the long run, they may be able

to

run but they can't hide .. She had seen from her kitchen window the

bodies in bags lifted into the jeeps.

She cut the carrots, dropped them into the saucepan.

The war suffocated Evica Stankovic.

The bus was three hours behind schedule when it came through. There

were Nigerian soldiers around her, and there were two men from the

UNHCR office in Zagreb who strutted impatiently and carried a

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print-out

of the list of names. The bus came slow, tucked in behind the

white-painted personnel carrier, towards the Nigerians' checkpoint.

Ulrike Schmidt always felt a numbed despair when she came to the

checkpoint at Turanj to welcome in a bus from behind the lines. Her

father, of course, had known total war and refugee status, and her

father's first wife had been killed when the bombers had come to

Magdeburg. One of the men from the United Nations High Commission

for

Refugees office in Zagreb, smart and smelling of body lotion, made

a

joke to her, as if it were clever to laugh as the bus came through,

as

if it were adult, and she ignored him, indeed she barely heard him.

The

bus neared the checkpoint and there were Serbs standing at the far

side

of the sandbagged position that the Nigerians manned, and the Serbs

would check the print-out list of names against the papers of those

on

the bus. She had never, and she had written to her father and mother

in Munich of this, never ever seen shame on the faces of the Serbs

when

they checked through the new batch of refugees. She knew from the

print-out that the refugees represented the population of the last

village in the Prijedor area to be cleansed. There would be a

village,

small houses and a mosque and a shop and once neat fields and a car

repair yard, that would now be flattened, and the population of the

village were moving away from homes that no longer existed, and they

would not know if a future was left to them. Their village was the

bus, and after the bus their village would be in the corners of the

sleeping rooms of the Transit Centre at Karlovac. And the wretched

fool, the young man from the UNHCR in Zagreb, was still laughing at

his

joke and she could not remember what he had said .. . She saw the

broken windows of the bus. The front windscreen, to the right of

the

driver's vision, was a skein of cracks that radiated from the stone's

impact point, and three of the left side windows behind the driver

had

caved in. She saw the faces of the refugees. The young man was

talking at her again and she did not hear him. So quiet and so cowed, the faces of the refugees, without expression. The stoning might

have

been by the Serbs in Prijedor, or it might have been later in the

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journey, or it might have been when they were in the last Serb village

before the final checkpoint. She had never travelled beyond the

checkpoint, never been behind the lines, and she found it close to

impossible to understand the ethnic hatred that had driven Serb

people

to expel their Muslim neighbours, and there was no shame. She was

a

small woman. Her tight waist was held close by the belt of her

denims.

Her hair was mahogany but flecked now with grey that had not been

there

before she had come to administer the Transit Centre. She wore a

pressed white blouse, open at the throat. She used no make-up,

because

cosmetics might seem to offer an insult to the refugees who came from

the villages of Bosnia, and who had nothing. She set a smile on her

face. She was dwarfed by the men around her. She was smiling

briskly

and going towards the door of the bus. Later, she would hear the

atrocity stories. She would hear who had been raped and who had been

tortured and who had been beaten .. . She saw herself as the symbol

that the past, rape and torture and beatings, was finished. The

young

man was beside her, towering over her and talking fast, like a

cockerel

parading for a hen, and he would, because they always did, offer her

his telephone number for when she could next get to the city and there

would be a promise of dinner, and she would ignore him as she always

did. She paused at the door of the bus. There were Serbs on the

steps

and she stared them out defiantly until the first weakened his resolve

and made room for her. They came down off the bus's steps and made

a

point of brushing their bodies against hers, and behind them were

the

faces, expressionless, of the refugees. There was no shame. The

history of her own country had been only academic to her before her

posting to Croatia. Something taught in secondary-level school by

defensive teachers. The Nazi years, the arrogance of men in uniform,

the brutality of men with guns, the fear of dispossessed refugees,

had

no reality for her until she had come to Croatia. Before Croatia

she

had been among the thousands of young persons living the comfortable

existence of the aid agencies .. . Now it was all changed. The

culture

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of the agencies was to turn the cheek, smile, deflect the insult,

and

that had been possible for her until she had come to Croatia. There

had been little to prepare her for what she would find. A flight

to

Geneva, a job interview, a three-day course, and she had been pitched

into Karlovac. She had learned on her feet .. . She had learned to

hate the men in uniform and their guns. Because there was no shame,

Ulrike Schmidt yearned to see them stamped down and humiliated. She

cried inside for a reckoning day to be delivered to those who felt

no

shame. One day .. . Her father had told her, and he had known because he had been employed as a junior interpreter by the British

prosecutor,

that the guards at the camps in the Neuengamme Ring had taken

photographs of the naked Jewish women running past them towards

medical

inspection, and felt no shame. She thought that the young Serbs who

pushed against her breasts in the doorway of the bus felt no shame

and

thought themselves safe, safe from retribution. The chief guards

at

the Neuengamme Ring of camps had been hanged by the British, but they

had not thought they would be hanged when they took their photographs.

She prayed each morning, after the clamour of the alarm, for strength.

She made warmth in her smile. "What motivates me is my belief that if

war criminals are found to be beyond justice then we are entering

a new

age of barbarism .. ." The man chain-smoked. They had been on the hard chairs in the corridor for an hour. "Bringing men to trial,

to a

court of law, will be difficult, it will take many years, but it is

the

most important thing .. ." The man rested his elbows on the filled desk. They had come through heavy sets of old doors, climbed dark

wide

staircases, nudged their way past heaped and cobwebbed files.