Authors: Gerald Seymour
At the other end of the tap, she sensed the panic. The first search party had gone out. She imagined them, in their black jeans, black T-shirts and black jackets, the gold chains garlanding their necks, coming back and reporting failure - they were sent out again. She was the witness to the growing chaos. All the days in the basement workshop at Ceausescu Towers, and the evenings whiled away with the foremen technicians at Imperial College, the nights curled in her chair with her dog and the electronics magazines, had a value when she played the voyeur. She had no interest in the whereabouts of the boy, it did not matter to her if he was prone on a hospital bed, or had gone walkabout, or was drinking himself stupid in a bar, or was in a morgue on a slab. It was her position as an intruder that thrilled her, did now and had in the past. It was her power to insert herself under her target's skin Those who controlled her walked blind without her skills.
She had neat copperplate handwriting.
My dear Mister,
Tonight a man came to see me. He told me who you were. He described your career as a criminal of importance. I asked his name and how did he know such things and why he told me them, but he did not give me answers.
I hate criminality and its exploitation of the weak, and its very selfishness. Therefore, Mister, I should hate you (I see no reason why the man who visited me should have lied), but .. .
But I think it is impossible for me to hate you.
The man said that you had sought me out as a recipient of charitable goods in order to create an authentic alibi of good works; you used me; you wished to create respectability for your Bosnia with Love lorries which would return to the UK
loaded with the class A narcotic - heroin. That is cause for me to hate you, b u t . . .
But I am a good judge (I hope) of a genuine man.
I see many who come here with insincerity.
Whatever were your first motives for bringing the lorry to the UNIS Building, Tower A, I wish to believe they were replaced by a spirit of true friendship and true affection.
I was not with a criminal in the village of Visnjica. A criminal would not have played cards in the village with the old men, and given them dignity, and would not have held the hand of a child without a father, and given him kindness. A criminal would not have come with me to Gorazde and shown such sympathy for the plight of unfortunates. I was with a man who cared, who had a love for fellow human beings - that is my judgement and it is precious to me.
Perhaps, Mister, when you came here you did not bring sympathy and love. Perhaps you learned them here, in my company (if I am wrong then I am a simple and stupid woman but I think you gained a softness here that you did not travel with)
. . . I think you are a good man. Wherever I go, whatever is my future, I will remember you and your kindness. I had hoped - until this man came and told me of you - to see you each time that you visited Sarajevo, to spend time with you, and to grow close to you. You would have made a light where there is darkness, summer to winter, brought hope where there is despair. You should be proud of what you did, with your decency.
We will not meet again,
With love, and may God watch over you,
Monika (Holberg)
She sealed the letter into its envelope.
March 2001
'You'll meet him in a minute, the foreman, Five-D.'
The Englishman, Barnaby, walked down the hill towards the bunker and the junction where the turning led to Ljut village. His guest, an attentive young man, hurried at his side. The lights shone boldly in the repaired houses of the nearer village and were bright pinpricks across the valley, beyond the river, in Vraca.
Within a quarter of an hour, the sun's strength would wipe out the electricity's glow from the new windows of the houses of the twin villages. Just before the autumn weather had closed in on the valley, the previous year, five and a half months back, the certificate of clearance had been issued for the corridor of land under the line of power pylons, and the engineering teams had moved on to the site. For a further month, into November, the teams had worked inside the narrow corridor of yellow tape, had lifted the pylons and raised the cables and had restored the power. There had been no further accidents. The power had been switched on. Light had blazed, glowed, shone from each home in the two communities that had been reoccupied. The bulbs were never switched off. The German charity World in Crisis paid the bills.
On the two occasions Barnaby had been to the valley to plan the main clearance operation, he had gained the impression, very distinctly, that the Muslims in Vraca and the Serbs in Ljut kept their lights on through the day whether the sun shone or didn't, and through the night whether they were awake or asleep. It was not for him to tell the villagers that the German aid and generosity were running out.
Because all of the donors were now scrambling to turn their backs on the country, and the funding for the de-mining gangs was drying up, Barnaby had brought the journalist to the valley. Fenton, from a London broadsheet with a daily circulation of less than four hundred thousand readers, was the best recipient Barnaby could find. The work had barely begun, the funding for mine clearance was required for another two decades, minimum. He needed journalists from mass-circulation newspapers, and he needed politicians to tramp down that lane and a thousand others, but they were beyond reach. Instead, he had Wilf Fenton. He always tried to be cheerful when he brought a guest to a minefield.
'Why do you call him Five-D?'
The way Barnaby told it, there were Five-Ds on a hundred sites. It was a regular part of his introductory patter. He knew, from his dogged persistence in seeking out funding, that anecdotes played better in journalists' copy than statistics.
'All the Ds. He was a De-miner, and was blown up, and damn lucky. He became a Driver, ferried others around but didn't go into the field. He was bored, and went back to De-mining. Was blown up again, was even luckier, didn't lose his leg. Started again at being a Driver. Couldn't beat the boredom so he's at it again, De-mining. That's the five Ds - got it?'
Fenton shuddered as he walked and was eyeing the yellow tape suspiciously, staying on an imaginary line that ran down the exact centre of the track. 'Once would have been enough for me.'
'There's so much shrapnel in him . . .' It was another line from Barnaby's regular patter. All the foremen supported his story ' . . . that we always test a new metal detector by holding it up against his backside. The lights flash and the buzzer goes full blast.'
'God - and that's the extent of what you've got to cover, is it?'
'Yes, that's the valley. That's the Bunica river valley.'
It was laid out in front of them. A hawk hovered over the flattened dead weeds of the old arable fields, fluttered on to hunt across the dull weather-stamped grass of the old grazing fields, then soared in the light wind and flew towards the fallen posts and dropped wires of the old vineyard. There was no beauty to it.
The green growth of new grass shoots would come in the next month and the flowers would make their carpet in the month after. It was as though the place had lost its soul, Barnaby thought. There was a long, seemingly endless line of yellow tape that marked the extent of the fields, running along the edge of the wooded slopes.
'How long will it take you to clear it?'
'Seven months, eight. That's twenty men working five days a week.'
'How many mines are there?'
'We don't know, the records don't exist.'
'Would you walk there?'
Barnaby shook his head resolutely, 'I wouldn't step an inch over the tape. I am fifty-six years old and I have been working with mines for twenty-four of them. I've learned to respect them.'
He told the stories of the foreman, the grandmother and the son in law, and Fenton scribbled busily.
They had reached the bunker. The yellow tape was all round the squat construction of stone and damp tree trunks. The paint was cracked on the red surround and had peeled from the skull shape and the crossed bones. Barnaby took Fenton inside and the journalist flashed his Marlboro lighter, turned it up to full. There were scribbled numbers chalked on the walls, the remnants of an old occupation. Did Barnaby know what they signified? He didn't. Fenton said they looked like the bookies' lists you'd find pinned up on a wall of a betting shop. The last date, where the chalk line erased the list of odds, was for a summer day seven years earlier and above the dale was the word: Rado.
T can't help you,' Barnaby said. ' I don't know what it means.'
'A pity, sort of interesting, isn't it? About ghosts.'
They went out into the sunlight, and blinked. The lights in the Ljut windows and the pinpricks across the river were now burned out. A column of de-miners tramped down the track in front of them, the weight of their boots thudding on the stones.
'What are the boots? They look pretty solid.'
'They're supposed to be proof against an anti-personnel mine, or what we call a nuisance mine.'
'That's comforting.'
'Not really - they have rigid soles. They're all right on the flat but they're a liability on a stone slope. You fall over in them, reach out to break your fall, then your whole pressure is on your hand, and your weight. It takes five kilos of pressure to detonate a PMA2. If they're working on a gradient, like the vineyard, they'll kick the over-boots off.'
' C h r i s t . . . why do they do it?'
'For money, so that they eat and their families eat.'
'How do you hold up morale, after an accident?'
'Hunger does the job. Usually, when a de-miner's been hurt, or killed, at least two of them jack it in -
they don't eat, and their families don't.'
'You're showing me a bloody - excuse me - brutal world.'
'Feel free to quote me.'
They followed the de-miners down to the ford. The water was in spate across it. Barnaby pointed to a distant farmhouse and spoke of some recent family-history: an old woman who moved on crutches and a young man whose skeleton body would not be re-covered until the end of the summer because of where it lay, and of an old farmer who survived senility in the belief that he would reclaim and work his fields.
He was not yet out of his bed - and that was a greater mercy.
They stood at the side of the track, close to the river.
Parallel lines of yellow tape strips ran from the track out into the fields, each wide enough for two men to walk alongside each other. Between these stunted corridors were wide expanses of grass and weed, but the two men in each corridor did not walk, they knelt, their visors down. They probed with thin sharpened steel prods. Fenton said that it was like watching paint dry. Barnaby said, drily, that the chance of losing a leg when home decorating was slight. Fenton saw the dog, and his face lit. A heavy German shepherd, shaggy-coated, was in the longest grass in a corridor between the yellow tape and twenty-five yards from the track. A long thin cord linked the dog to the handler.
'That's what I need.' Fenton raised his pocket camera, aimed at the dog. 'Tell me about him.'
'He's Boy. Nine years old. He's the best, a prime asset. He was trained first by an American de-mining company. They worked him in Angola, then Rwanda and Croatia. They sold him to us. He's going to work out his time here. He scents the explosive . . . Not everybody trusts a dog. If he misses a mine he won't detonate it, but the handler following him will. Many prefer to put their trust in the prodder. We argue about it. But Boy is special. When a dog's done its useful work, it's shot. Boy won't be, his handler'll take him home.'
'That's wonderful. Can I go closer?'
'Sorry, no. Mr Fenton, you have to understand that we're in the first week of the season. The men are rusty. They haven't been in the field for four or five months. It's a time of maximum danger for them.'
'I've an angle now, I'm going to write something positive,' Fenton said enthusiastically. 'Something, about brave men, and Boy, working to bring a proper life back to two communities in the valley. I like it, I've got the buzz - the valley where the peace will never again be broken.'
'Would you all like a cup of tea?'
It was what the Princess's mother had always done each time the old Bill had come visiting at dawn in their Ilford house, when she'd been a child.
'It's no trouble to me, easy enough to put the kettle on.'
Except when her father was locked up, the old Bill had been regular early-morning visitors. Her mother, Clarrie Hinds, always brewed up a big pot, and cleared the cupboard of mugs for the tray; if there was a senior man among them she'd usually have sliced up a lemon, just in case. She'd always put a plate of biscuits on the tray, opened a fresh packet for them.
Like mother, like daughter. Her mother said it helped to make a bad experience more pleasant, and also said that tea and biscuits and talk about the weather -
would it rain or wouldn't it? - was distracting for the searchers.
This was a sour lot. Tea declined, biscuits refused, small-talk ignored.
It was now nine months since the last time the Princess's home had been 'visited'. They'd been polite enough then. No sledge-hammers, no shouting, no blue lights flashing, and no sirens when they'd driven Mister away. He'd been given at least ten minutes to get himself dressed, and they'd been discreet when they'd taken him out through the front door. It had only been afterwards that she'd heard from Rosie Carthew, Carol Penberthy and Leonora Govan that the house had been surrounded by armed police crouching in their gardens; the Princess hadn't even seen them. The last time, Mister had gone off as if a few golf friends were shipping him to a far-away course - but Mister didn't play golf. This lot were cold, correct, silent.
They knew the house. They'd have been working from the pictures taken when the house was 'burgled'
a year back. They'd each been assigned a room. The oldest man among them had an unlit pipe stapled in his mouth. She'd seen him look around from the moment he'd come in through the front door. There were no ashtrays in the Princess's home. She thought he yearned to produce his matches and scratch a flame, but he didn't ask her. The old Bill always asked if they could smoke, and her mother had always produced an ashtray for them. This man wandered between the rooms, took on the role of a supervisor, and the Princess followed him. They went into the kitchen, the sitting room, the living room, her snug where she did her post, the dining room that was never used, and up the stairs to the bedrooms and the bathrooms. She tracked him like a suspicious dog.