Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

  Eight.

  "Yes, I saw her .. ." It was Jovic's success. The tram ride out to the west of Zagreb, through the old quarter, then out amongst the apartment blocks of the capital's new suburbs. Jovic's success had brought them to the end of the tram route, to where the track ended. Jovic had said that the wood huts used by the construction workers of the last block to be built were now a refugee camp. To Penn it was a desperate place. There had been rain in the night and the puddles glistened in the first sunlight of the morning. The road to the camp would have been gouged out by heavy plant equipment. He stepped carefully, but the mud gathered at the caps of his cleaned shoes. There were children here, but too beaten to play with a football, there were men standing listless and watching their coming. The place had its own aggression. He had seen small gardens carved out of the rubble at the edge of the camp, and thin thorn bushes had been planted round the plots, pitiful little efforts to make a home in a refugee camp. The huts were for communal living. They walked inside, carried more rainwater and mud inside, as others had done before, then into the gloom of a corridor. A line of men waited to use the basins of the wash house, a queue of women waited to use the lavatories. Jovic had given a name, waited, and they had been led by a sullen guide to a bleak and small room. "I had taken food to the cellar in Franjo and Ivana's farmhouse, in the early morning. There had been a halt in the shelling and I was able to go with food. We had only bread to give to the wounded, and the bread was old. It was when I was there, in the cellar, that the firing started again, and I could not leave. I was in the cellar when the village fell, when the Partizans came .. ." Her name was Sylvia. She shared her wood-walled room with her husband, and he lay on the bed with dead eyes, and Sylvia said he was now diabetic. There were two boys, who she said were aged ten years and seven years, and the older boy twitched all the time and the younger sat across his mother's lap and would not be separated from her. Penn judged her close to nervous collapse, and he wondered whether it was worse now, or had been worse when the village was fought for. She chain-smoked cigarettes. "She had come with the boy from Australia, and she would not leave him. Everyone told her that it was not safe to stay in Rosenovici, and she ignored everyone. Perhaps I understood her, because my eldest son was with the fighters, and I would not leave the village. I cannot say whether she realized properly the extent of the danger but she refused to go. It was early on the Thursday morning that I reached the cellar with the bread. My son was in the cellar .. ." Quietly, Jovic told him what she said. Penn wrote the words fast in his notebook. He was humbled. She had lost her home, and she had lost her future, and her mind was turned, and she dragged hard on the filters of the cigarettes and threw half-smoked ends into an old tin. She said that she had been the secretary to the director of the railway station at Karlovac. "She had come, herself, the previous evening, when there was still shooting, to the church where we were hiding and she had taken clothes that had been torn up for bandages and for dressings, and we had told her then that it was dangerous for her to be with the wounded. She never listened, in the month that I knew her, that she was in the village, it was never her way to listen. When I came into the cellar she was bandaging the wound of my son. I can see it. It is never away from me. I see it each night, and it is near to a year and a half ago. I will never forget it. My son had hold of her wrist. She was trying to bandage the wound at his stomach, but he could not be still because of his pain and it was difficult for her to make the bandage stay. I can see it because there was a pi all candle lighting the cellar. My son held her wrist as she tried to make the bandage and I saw his love for her. They all watched her, where they lay, they all watched her and they all loved her .. ." He thought of what Mary had told him, stories and pain. "I knew the village could not fight on for much longer, and there was too much firing for me to go back again to the church. I thought that I would be useful if I stayed in the cellar, and I thought I could help the Partizan soldiers to move the wounded after the village fell. I thought they would want help to move the wounded boys to the ambulances to take them to the hospital in Glina. It was in the afternoon on the Thursday that they came into the cellar, but it was not soldiers. The men who came were from Salika, that is the Serb village across the stream from Rosenovici. I knew all of them. The first who came in was the postman from Salika, and quickly after him was the gravedigger, and there was a carpenter who had made the chairs for our kitchen. They were fierce with us. Most of the wounded were kicked. They were shouting at them to stand up, and none of them could stand and they were kicked because they could not stand. She shouted back at them, I do not think they understood her language, but I saw her punch the postman when he kicked one of the fighters. I thought they had a fear of her, I thought they did not know what to do with her. We were taken up the steps from the cellar and she made the postman, Branko, and the carpenter, Milo, and the gravedigger, Stevo, help to lift the fighters up the steps. He was in the garden of Franjo and Ivana's farmhouse .. ." Tasting the coffee, feeling the warmth of Mary's kitchen, hearing the pain stories. He shut them out .. . "I have shame because I did not have the strength that she. had. They threatened me with a gun, they told me I could not help. I was the last out of the cellar. He was in the garden. They did not know what to do, it was for him to decide what to do. Some of our fighters were kneeling and some were on the grass in the garden, and she held two of them upright, and all the time she shouted at him, and he went to her and he hit her with the end of the barrel of his rifle and she was still shouting at him. I would not say he was a friend, but I knew him well enough, and there were days when I used to accept a ride from him as far as Turanj where he worked and then I would take a bus into Karlovac. She was not shouting at him, pleading, she was shouting at him in anger. I should have called to her, told her not to shout at him, but she would not have listened .. . They made a line of them. There were some who could walk, just, and there were some who were carried, and she helped two of them. They took them along the little road in the village to the square where there was the cafe and the store and the school. They took them past the school and away along the lane that goes to the fields. He gave the instructions, they took them away down the lane because that is what was ordered by Milan Stankovic .. ."

  "What happened to Dorrie Mowat?"

  He watched her. The tears streamed on her face. Her fists were clenched and he thought she might hit him. He knew he reopened the wound. He understood why the shame held her. She had been allowed to stay in the garden of the farmhouse. She would have seen the back of her son, walking or carried or supported, and she would have seen the bobbing head of Dorrie between the two young men that she held upright, and she would have seen the guns and the knives, and she would have known. Her words were a torrent breaking on Penn.

  "I saw them until they were at Katica's house. The lane bends after Katica's house. I could not see them after they went past Katica's house."

  He said, flat, "Who killed them, your son and her boy and Dorrie Mowat?"

  Jovic said, "She told you, she saw them taken as far as the old lady's house. She does not know what happened after they had passed the house. She told you that Milan Stankovic gave the order for them to be taken along the lane, past the old lady's house, towards the fields. She told you what she knew ..."

  "But it is correct that she did not see them killed?"

  A bitter flare in Jovic's face. "She buried her son four days ago. Can you not comprehend what these people have suffered, what you make them endure again for your report? She did not see them killed, correct."

  A quiet in the room. The husband had not spoken, lay on his back, defeated. The children held their mother. The woman, Sylvia, looked with bruised eyes, into Penn's face.

  Jovic said, "She does not understand why it is important, who shot them, who beat them, who knifed them. She says that Katica was in her house when the village fell. She knows that on the previous day Katica's husband went out to the yard to get wood and was shot by a sniper. She k
nows that Katica was in her house, with the body of her husband. She knows that Katica was not brought out of the village with the others who survived. She has not seen Katica since .. . Does anybody care what happened to them or who did it, she says, does anybody?"

  He said, grimly, "Would you thank her for her time .. ."

  "She says that she has only time left to her. She says, and she says it is what they all said, she says that the young woman was an angel .. ."

  He blundered out of the room and away down the corridor. He shoved his way through the queue of men and women lined up for the wash house. There was a cockroach crawling amongst the feet, going slow because it was already damaged by kicks, and then it was stamped upon by a bare foot. He saw the slime of the destroyed creature. The cockroach was forgotten, the feet tripped past it. He saw himself as the creature, insignificant, gone from memory .. . but Dorrie was remembered ... He could write his report, embellish it for effect, take the money, be a creature squashed and slimed. Perhaps, in life, there was just one chance .. . Penn felt humbled ... He walked fast out of the camp, and Jovic had to scurry to keep at his shoulder, towards the waiting tram at the end of the track.

  She came in from her shopping.

  She played back the answer phone and there was a message advising the date of the next meeting of the south-eastern branch of the Save the Children Fund, and a query on the availability of the marquees for the garden party at Whitsun in support of leukaemia research, and the secretary who did two days a week would not be coming in the morning because of influenza. She let the tape run. She did not hear the voice. The voice, crisp, competent, was absent from the tape. The dogs were scratching at the kitchen door. She let them out and they jumped at her, happy. Maybe it was just a folly. Maybe she had no right to know. Maybe the dead should sleep. Four times now she had telephoned the number of the hotel in Zagreb, four times in growing annoyance she had left her message and four times in increasing loneliness the message had not been answered. She left her shopping on the kitchen table. She took the leashes from behind the door. Mary walked her dogs through the village. She walked on the drying grass. Next week they would take the flowers away from the grave. She laid her coat on the grass and sat on it. Next week she would bring more flowers. The dogs hunted out fallen wood and lay beside her and chewed and spat the morsels clear. She heard herself, her own words, saying, calmly, that she enjoyed winning, and she wondered what he thought of such stupidity. She heard herself, her own voice, saying that her daughter was a horrid young woman, and she wondered how he had taken such betrayal. Shared her secrets with him, given her secrets to Penn, wretched little private detective, opened herself to him, stupidity and betrayal. For nothing, Dorrie, should have allowed your rest .. ." He walked with Jovic. Jovic showed him the big German cars speeding on the cobbles and said they belonged to the new elite of racketeers. Jovic said that the country was rotten and that the profiteers fed from the carcass .. . And every few minutes Jovic would stop, hold out his hand for telephone money and be gone into a bar, and then be back, and not offer any explanation .. . Each time he was left on the pavement he gazed around him. The city was at ease. The war was forgotten, tucked and hidden behind the cease-fire line that was thirty minutes' drive away. He had never seen a tram before Zagreb, clanking and swaying monsters with raucous hooters to announce their coming, with the passengers clinging inside to the straps, and the lines running polished amongst the worn and smoothed cobbles.

  He watched a flower seller. . Jovic showed him the great circular plaza. It had been the Square of the Victims of Fascism, now it was the Square of Croatian Celebrities .. . Jovic showed him the Historical Museum, closed for reconstruction, indefinitely .. . Jovic took him into a yard behind a building and in the yard weeds grew amongst the mighty toppled statues of the former regime in Stalinist bronze, and Jovic said the statues would be cut up and melted down, destroyed as historically incorrect .. . Jovic said that it was necessary for history to be rewritten in new nationhood, said it and grinned sardonically. Jovic took him to the Tourist Bureau and there were no new guidebooks of the city; the old ones were all recalled for pulping, and the new ones would carry no reference to the Ustase fascists .. .

  A new bar, more money for the telephone, Penn waited outside.

  The rain had started again.

  The artist said, "There is no record of her coming out. There is a database for refugees who have left the occupied territory, and she is not listed. She is classified a missing person. The detail is small. She is Katica Dubelj, she is eighty-four years old. She was in her eighty-third year when Rosenovici fell. If she had died between then and now, it is the sort of matter that is discussed at the liaison meetings, if her body were returned for burial here then it would have come through the Turanj crossing point, escorted by UNHCR. I cannot help it, but she does not appear on the database .. . There are a few old people who still live across there, perhaps in the woods, perhaps they are tolerated. She is beyond your reach, alive or dead. It is the end of the road, Mr. Penn. I think you should be satisfied. You know the last weeks and the last days and the last hours of the life of Miss Mowat. Only a few minutes have escaped you .. . Satisfactory, yes? Do you want me to book the flight for you?"

  Penn said he wanted to be alone.

  "Shall I come tonight for my money, or in the morning before you fly?"

  Penn took out his wallet. He counted out the notes, American dollars. He took the scribbled receipt written on the ripped paper from Jovic's notebook. "I think we did well, I think you will write a good report." Penn shook his hand. "I think that by next week you will have forgotten us, Mr. Penn. We are easy, with our problems, to forget .. ." Penn had no pleasantries for Jovic, and he saw the surprise of the man. For the moment he believed he had, at last, unsettled the artist. No banter, no chat, no laughing, and no thanks, as if he had no time for them. There was a confusion on Jovic's face, but he was proud. Jovic, Penn thought, would not have known how to grovel, and was gone, skipping away across the road through the cars, lost in the pedestrians on the far side, never looking back. He had finished, or he had not begun. Finished, not begun, it was Penn's decision ... A light rain fell and it brought a dust with it that lay on the cars, and it settled on the shoulders of his blazer. He made room on the pavement for two young men who swung theirjweight on crutches, war amputees. He was the intruder. He prised himself into their lives, into the life of the city, into the lives of the camps. It was Penn's decision on whether he had finished, or whether he had not begun. She had had everything and he had had nothing. She had had privilege and advantage and abused them. She could have walked into college but she declined to. He would have called her, to her face, if he had met her, 'selfish little bitch'. Had had everything while he had had nothing, had been free, and he had never been. It was as if he should have been warned away, kept safe distance. And he had prised, beaten, kicked his way into the life of Dorrie Mowat. "I told you, and you cared not to hear me .. ." Charles barking and the gin spilling from the glass rim. '.. . I told you that you were wasting money, but you cared not to listen." "I just wanted to bloody know .. ." Mary walking the lounge, spinning, like a caged creature, and smoking which was new for her. '.. . Don't I have the right to know?"