Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

  When he had gone past the farmhouse where the troops who guarded the front line were billeted, he looked back. The boy was walking down towards the farmhouse and with his bowels cleared the boy whistled. He wondered whether he could have knifed the boy. Just a shy boy, just a pack of farm dogs, and Penn understood what Ham had told him ... a fucking dumb place to be.

  He made ground, went hard, had to cover good distance before the daylight settled.

  It was a response to the rejection.

  The rejection was of him, not his wife, which made it wound the more. For his wife there was normality in Salika village. She was the nurse. She could still move amongst the people of the village, visit the elderly, examine the children, weigh the babies, while her husband stayed at home with his books and his loneliness. Each of the days that she had gone out, since his challenge at the school and his beating, the Headmaster had asked her what was said of him, how he was spoken of... She had thought she, too, would be rejected, and she was not, his wife could go into the homes of the village and talk, gossip, advise and drink coffee .. . and she answered him straight, always had spoken to him in frankness since the youth of their marriage. Simply nothing was said of him. It was as if, she had said the night before and that morning as she hurried his breakfast, he did not exist in the life of the village. His wife had gone to visit the two sisters who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, to offer them comfort instead of drugs that were no longer available. He was alone in his house. He was with his loneliness and the books that he could read when he held them as far as his arm would stretch in front of his face and when he sat close to the light of the window. 11 The Headmaster believed there were two women and one man who had cared about him, and the two women and the one man had now rejected him.

  Evica Stankovic had taken over the running of the school and used his office as her own.

  The Priest had missed another evening when he might have called by. To counter the agony of his rejection the Headmaster determined, that morning when there was still insufficient light for him to sit in his window and read, that he should pray to the good God, if the good God was there. He did not believe that the good God was known to his former friend, the Priest who rejected him. Their bond had been intellectual, not religious. He resolved that he would struggle in his own way, to find the necessary words of prayer. He was a communist, of course, and he would not have been elevated to the Headmaster's position if he had not been a member of the Party; he did not know the way of prayer. His mother and his father, dead so long, knew of prayer and he would try to summon the memory of them. He would go in darkness to that place of evil. He would pray alone where evil had been done. He would pray in that place of evil for guidance as to how he should utilize the secret he held. If they had not been sitting on the track, if they had not been squabbling over cigarettes, if they had not been scuffling for the bottle, Penn would have walked into the patrol, into the arms of the five militia men. But they were sitting on the track and one yelled as he snatched the cigarettes and one shouted as he grabbed the bottle. First statue still, rock still, stone still, then retreating back along the track, cat careful, cat cautious. He edged back up the track from them, testing each footfall, looking behind him to be certain there was no dried wood that he might step on. He slunk away from the track and into the depth of the trees, and he lowered his weight down slowly and then he knelt and then he lay on his stomach and there was a thick bush of holly between himself and the track. He heard their laughter and their cursing. They were moving again, coming to that part of the track closest to where he lay. Not daring to move ... He could have been pitching up for work at Alpha Security, first in and climbing the stairs to the office above the launderette, he could have been hearing the wail as the shutters went up on the shops beside the launderette. He could have been going to work with the smell of Jane on him, and the taste of Tom's food from the kiss on the cheek. He could have been going in to collect the Legal Process to serve, or going in from the night-time watch on a husband's cheating, or going in to meet a builder whose competition knew the contracts he was bidding for ... Not daring to move, and seeing the young faces of the militia men. Ham hadn't told him what to do if he were bounced. Ham hadn't been through the capture bit. Each one of them had a knife at his belt. They went by him close enough for him to see that. They went off down the track. He had almost walked into them. He felt a true excitement. The excitement was an exhilaration. Truth was that he had never before known such excitement. The blood pumped in him. They wouldn't have known what he meant, about the excitement, at Alpha Security, how it coursed in him and lifted him. The excitement was danger. They wouldn't have known what he meant in A Branch. The excitement was his own. He would move for another hour, and then rest up till the dusk. "Nothing I can do for you, Mr. Jones. It's the pressure of space .. ." The Danish woman in Administration (Property) deflected him. "We all have our little crosses, Mr. Jones. Better we learn to accept them and live with them .. ." The Libyan man in Administration (Headquarters) put him down. "Can't help you, Mr. Jones. My good fortune, I don't have a dog in that fight .. ." The Canadian man in Administration (Finance) moved him on. "It's sardine time here, Mr. Jones. You're lucky to have what's been allocated you without sharing .. ." The Swiss woman in the Civilian Affairs Office (Central Directorate) dismissed him. "The question is one of protocol, Mr. Jones. Protocol dictates container accommodation as suitable for your work .. ." The Ethiopian man in the Civilian Affairs Office (Deputy Director) was contemptuous. "You people, your job, your end game it pisses' me off, Mr. Jones. If I put it bluntly then perhaps you'll understand me better .. ." The Irish man in the Civilian Affairs Office (Director) kept a pleasant smile and spat through his teeth. It had taken Marty all morning to get that far. He had been shuffled up the ladder, and with each put-down he could have tossed in the towel and gone back to the ovenlike container on the far side of the parade ground at the Ilica barracks. But not that morning, no sir ... There was a big photograph on the wall of the office of the Director of Civilian Affairs. The photograph was labelled as "Co. Cork Where God comes to Holiday'. The Director liked to show the photograph to his visitors, show them where he was reared and where his parents still lived. Marty thought the seascape of cliffs and the Atlantic was second-rate compared to the mountains and fiords of Alaska. He had not come to talk about Co. Cork, he had come to demand better accommodation for his work than a pressure cooker steaming goddamn freight container. He had been told outside by the willowy German secretary to the Director that there was no possibility of entry without an appointment, and when the meeting inside had broken he had simply elbowed his way inside, sat down, challenged for attention. '.. . You, your work, Mr. Jones, is an obstruction to what we attempt to achieve." "I want a proper room. I am integral to the United Nations' effort in former Yugoslavia. I want decent accommodation." While he had waited outside there had been a multinational bicker in the English language between the secretaries with German, Swiss French, Scandinavian and Indian accents, about desk space. He had filed an affidavit the last evening, from an eyewitness, who had seen prisoners of the Serbs beheaded by a chain-saw. Rome was not built in a day, that sort of crap, but sure as hell the UN empire was putting in a spirited challenge. He had transferred to disk the statement, the last evening, of an eyewitness who had seen a man castrated after a cable had been tied between a motorcycle and his scrotum, and the motorcycle had been ridden away, and the man had died from blood loss. The secretaries had air conditioning and they had window light. His work was pissed on. The goddamn secretaries were looked after and he was not. "I am a busy man, Mr. Jones, so do me the favour of bugging out of here and going back to your quite adequate work area."

  "A dog couldn't work in there."

  But he was an Anchorage boy. Anchorage bred them stubborn. What he had learned from twenty-two months in New York, turning round paper on member nations' subscription debts, and what he had learned in Zagreb had given him a deep-running hostility to
the fast-created empire. They had the good apartments, and the good allowances, and the good life, while Marty Jones survived in a stinking hot goddamn oven.

  "Maybe a dog would be doing something more useful than your war crimes shit. Let me tell you a few facts of life, young man. War crimes talk is just a sedative for the poor punters outside of here who've joined the "Can't We Do Something Brigade". There will be no war crimes tribunal. You may want to jerk yourself off each night at the thought of Milosevic, Karadic, Mladic, Arkan or Seselj, standing in the dock without a tie or a belt or shoe laces it won't happen. Like it or not, and don't patronize me by thinking I like it, it c?nnot happen because I need those bastards, and all the rest of the grubby little murderers that walk this godforsaken corner of earth. I need them to sign a peace treaty for Bosnia, then a peace treaty for occupied Croatia, and I'm not going to get them to sign if there's a sniff of handcuffs in the wind .. ."

  "Then you give the world over to anarchy, intolerable anarchy."

  "I need a lesson from you? Where have you been? You have been fucking nowhere. Peace between Egypt and Israel if the Brit buggers were still hammering for Begin to be tried for terrorism, for Sadat to be tried for making war? Peace in Namibia if half the South African Defence Force were to be wheeled in front of a court on genocide charges? I know reality because I have faced reality .. ."

  "Your argument is morally bankrupt."

  He faced the big, gross-set Irishman. He would screw him down, screw him down hard, if the opportunity ever came his way. Screw him down so that he screamed.

  "And your office is a converted freight container, so fuck off back there .. ."

  Marty went back in the sunlight across the parade ground, back to his video and audio tapes and his computer disks.

  The gravedigger, Stevo, had been on the expedition to the church at Glina, but it was not personal to him.

  It was personal to Milan Stankovic and the postman, Branko, and the carpenter, Milo, but not to him because no one from his family had died in the fire of the church.

  They were ahead of the buses, it was usual for Milan to have a car when he needed it, and the fuel to go with it. Before the war, before the rise of Milan, they would all have been on the buses for the annual journey to the church at Glina. Since the war, the gravedigger had not been able to make the particular long journey that was personal to him. His own mother and father had been murdered in the Crveni Krst concentration camp that had been sited at Nis, near to Belgrade. He knew that Milan, and he was grateful that Milan had tried, had last year attempted to arrange the long journey for him, but there had been shelling on the road that week, near to Brcko, and all traffic had been halted. His father had died in the big breakout, 12 February 1942, from the camp at Nis, machine-gunned against the wall by the Croat Ustase guards, and his mother had died at the hands of the Croat Ustase killing squads on the hill called Bubanj that was near to Nis where a thousand were killed each day, and they were buried now, together, amongst the trees on the hill called Bubanj.

  The buses would be far behind them now, and the old Mercedes with in excess of 150,000 kilometres on the clock powered them home. He knew it was not the ceremony at the ruin of the church that affected Milan. It was not the ceremony and the prayer and the singing of the anthem and the reciting of the poem of the Battle of Kosovo that left Milan sullen and quiet, because he had been that way for too many days since the digging in the field at the end of the lane in Rosenovici.