Testimony

by Scott Turow

  Aside from Goos and me and the police, there was another small car in the cavalcade, containing three laborers Goos had hired from Attila’s company. Accompanied by her driver from last night, Esma arrived last. She was still dressed like a lady, her lone concession to the landscape a pair of flat-heeled boots.

  Once we stopped, all of the police officers left their vehicles to light on their fenders. Goos had it right. They were here to spy.

  I approached the captain. After several minutes, I convinced him that the protocols established between the Court and the Bosnian government required us to work unobserved. Even then, Esma insisted that Ferko would also be unwilling to speak in front of the three laborers, whom we ended up dispatching to Vica Donja, the nearest town, to find a coffee, which you could seemingly obtain on even the remotest mountaintop in Bosnia. Only then did Esma take out her cell to summon Ferko, whom she had called earlier and now had waiting nearby.

  He appeared about ten minutes later in a red wreck of a car, an Opel sedan, perhaps from the 1990s, with a rust hole in the front fender and a line of duct tape applied vertically to hold on a rear door. Unfolding himself from the red car, Ferko seemed taller and thinner than I had recalled against the stark landscape, especially next to Esma, who, without her high heels, proved rather short. Esma gripped his arm at the elbow, almost as if she were escorting a prisoner. Ferko had on a pair of plaid pants, the same vest and hat he had worn to testify, and beneath his open winter coat, a large-collared orange shirt. Goos stepped forward to welcome him, but Ferko was still speaking to Esma with wide gestures and Goos, in a purple windbreaker, stopped and peered back at me with something of a vexed look.

  At last, Ferko was ready and the four of us tromped across the stones and swales of Barupra as Ferko relived his narrative. He showed us where the lean-to he called a house had stood, about a hundred yards into the camp, and then across the village the outhouse in which he’d hidden when the masked raiders arrived. For whatever reason, I had imagined a wooden structure, but what remained had walls of cinder block, meaning it was the lone structure still standing, even though the roof and door were gone after more than a decade. He then pointed out the spot where Boldo and his son and brother had been slain.

  After that, Ferko led us to the back of the camp, overlooking the village, where he’d watched the destruction of his family and everyone he knew. The mine plunged down dramatically below us, a steep drop of several hundred feet. I had never been a fan of heights, and the falloff left me feeling somewhat imperiled, even as I appreciated the majesty of the vista of the surrounding green hills, which wore hats of white at their upper reaches. The wind flapped Ferko’s wide trousers as he gestured to the switchbacks on the gravel road below. Perhaps a quarter of a mile down, a slope of dark coal and lighter-colored rock lazed over what had once been the Cave and was now a secret burial ground. Staring out solemnly, Ferko delivered a single shake of his head.

  We hiked back into the former site of the village. Ferko showed us the approximate location where his son and he had concealed themselves following the murders. Finally, he again led us slowly toward the road until reaching a depression where he said he’d buried the bodies of the three men who had been gunned down. He had built a cairn of white rocks to mark the place. It had been kicked over by passersby or playing children, but several stones were still massed there, making him sure this was the spot.

  Goos stooped to examine one of the rocks and kept it in his hand. He gave Ferko a surprisingly hard look.

  “Long way to drag three bodies,” he said.

  As soon as Esma translated, Ferko stomped one of his running shoes on the ground to bolster his point.

  “He agrees,” Esma said, “but it was not easy to find a place soft enough to dig.”

  Ferko already had taken a few steps back toward the red car that had delivered him.

  “How far down are the bodies?” asked Goos.

  Esma and Ferko had a bit of an exchange.

  “He says he only dug far enough to keep the bodies from being consumed by animals. No more than two feet, probably less. With the wind over ten years, it may not be much more than a foot to the bones.”

  Ferko raised a hand weakly then and turned his back on us. Esma walked along with him.

  I sidled close to Goos.

  “You heard something just as he arrived you didn’t like.”

  “Ah yes.” He bowed to the memory. “They were jabbering in Romany, but he used a word or two of Serbo-Croatian for emphasis. Ste obecali. ‘You promised.’ Kept saying that. ‘I want what you promised.’ Better not be that she’s paying him on the side, Boom. His evidence isn’t worth a thing if it’s bought.”

  I promised to raise the issue with Esma later. As soon as Ferko was gone, Goos called the diggers back. While he was on his cell with them, another problem suddenly struck me.

  “We can’t really just scrape up this ground, can we, Goos? Don’t we need a forensic anthropologist to do this right?”

  He’d been half turned from me, to shield his phone from the wind, but he revolved in my direction at an inching pace, his thin mouth slightly parted.

  “Mate,” he said at last, “I am a forensic anthropologist.” Ordinarily easygoing, Goos had grown increasingly sour this morning for reasons I did not understand, and now he appeared totally disgusted with me.

  I wanted to say the obvious: No one told me. That was true, but we both seemed to recognize a deeper insult, the implication that I’d somehow not taken him seriously enough to find out.

  He turned away to await his crew.

  In the small hollow that Ferko had brought us to, a few spots of snow remained, latticed with grime. Beside them, the inspiring green sprigs of some early grasses had nosed out of the earth. Goos’s crew arrived with shovels and canvas bags apparently bearing other tools. He unzipped a bag and stepped into white coveralls and donned a surgical cap and plastic gloves. Then he crouched over the low point, studying the spot as if it contained something metaphysical, pushing through the loose earth until he scooped up a handful of dirt, which he deposited in a sealable plastic bag.

  I asked what his purpose was.

  “So we can check the mix of subsoil and topsoil.” He was still grouchy and answered in a bare grumble. He looked down into the duffel and extracted a small video camera, handing it to me.

  “Make yourself useful. Record the dig so nobody can say we planted evidence.”

  It took me a while to master the buttons, but Goos got to work at once. He started with a stainless steel T-bar, three feet long and with a pointed end, which he hoisted over his head and then suddenly stabbed into the ground. He called for a measuring tape, which he used to determine the depth of his probe, making a notation in a little spiral notebook he kept in his back pocket. Then he motioned for another tool, as long as the first but with a pair of vertical lips near the bottom. He twisted it into the ground to extract another soil sample, which he levered free with a simple wooden chopstick, like the kind that comes with Chinese carryout. He said nothing to me except for calling out measurements loudly enough for the camera to record them.

  Eventually, he had the laborers spread four large blue tarpaulins on all sides of the depression. He gave each worker a small garden spade and demonstrated how to scoop shallowly, depositing the diggings on the tarp. With his chopstick, Goos picked through what they uncovered.

  I’d been silent a good twenty minutes, when I finally asked what he was searching for. It still took a second for him to answer.

  “Bullet fragments for one thing,” he said. “They slip out of the bodies as they decompose. If we recover any, we’ll want to do ballistics.”

  With the small tools, the dig went at a laborious pace, but finally, after another quarter hour, Goos abruptly raised his gloved hand and snapped a halogen light on an elastic band over his forehead. He loosened the ground with a new set of chopsticks, then used a small brush, sweeping decorously until I could see a brownish lump the
color of a toadstool. I realized he was excavating a hip bone.

  These remains, just the first sight of them, affected me more strongly than I had been prepared for. Lawyers—all lawyers—live in a land of concepts and words, with precious little physical reality intruding. In the years I was a prosecutor, hearing a judge pronounce sentence and watching a US deputy marshal clap cuffs on the defendant and lead him to the lockup tended to distress me. It was only then that I seemed to fully appreciate that my efforts were aimed not simply at accomplishing that abstraction I called justice, but more concretely, at caging a human being for a good portion of his remaining life.

  Goos had exposed most of the pelvis and the top of the femur, when Attila’s A8 bumped down the road, raising dust as it came. I was relieved to have a reason to leave the gravesite and handed the camera to one of the day laborers.

  Esma, who’d also kept her distance, approached me.

  “Finding anything?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t like blood or bones,” she said.

  “I’m with you,” I said.

  She laughed and threw her arm through mine as we moved up toward Attila. I made introductions.

  “The famous Attila,” said Esma. Her driver, seemingly like half the working people in Tuzla, was in Attila’s employ.

  “Not half as big a prick as they say,” she answered. “If you ask me.”

  “On the contrary, you’re very well liked.”

  Attila beamed. Being shunned so often had undoubtedly left her vulnerable to any compliment. After a minute, Attila, with her rolling, slightly pigeon-toed walk and her oddly erect posture, strolled over to the gravesite to confer with Goos, just to be sure he was getting the help he needed. While she was gone, I had an inspiration for something useful I could do that would get me away from the boneyard.

  “Esma, didn’t you tell me that you first heard about Ferko in a Roma village?”

  “Indeed. I’ve been back now and then.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Lijce? I’m not sure.”

  Given the closed circuitry of the Rom community, I thought we were likely to find the best information about Barupra there. When Attila came back, she said the town was no more than twenty minutes and offered to drive me.

  I returned to Goos. He’d already felt his way to a second skeleton, but at the moment he’d fixed a fine tungsten carbide needle to a hand pick to loosen the dirt on the first set of leg bones, examining them for signs of trauma.

  He listened to me long enough to agree with the plan. As I turned away, Goos said behind me, “Wasn’t trying to up myself on you, Boom.” He was apologizing for being pretentious.

  “Hardly,” I replied. “Fault was all mine. I should have known.” He nodded, apparently satisfied by that answer.

  When I returned to Esma and Attila, I found that Esma was preparing to dismiss her driver and come with Atilla and me. All Roma were her people, to whom she had a proprietary connection, and Esma was known in Lijce. Even so, I was reluctant to have her present, since confirming Ferko was one principal reason to go. I drew her aside to explain that.

  “Do you speak Romany?” she replied. “Because many of those people are fluent in no other language.”

  She had me there. I checked back with Goos, who thought overall she could help more than hurt, at least on an exploratory visit. We could always come back with our own translator later.

  11.

  Lijce

  Attila drove us back to Tuzla, since Esma wanted to stop to buy small things for the children in Lijce.

  “They are so desperately poor,” she said, “and it will also make the gadje more welcome.”

  In the meantime, Attila walked me a few blocks to a steel bridge over the highway to point out Lake Pannonica, a local curiosity. Late in the twentieth century, the hundreds of years of extracting the briny water beneath Tuzla in order to produce salt took its toll and the downtown area began to sink. Salt production ceased, but after the war, the former pools, where the subterranean waters had been stored, were turned into a recreational facility, becoming a network of saltwater lakes, an inland sea with graveled shores that were thronged in the summers.

  When we returned to the main square, Esma was waiting with two bulging plastic bags. We drove from town, passing the immense site of Tuzla Elektrik, with smokestacks in the sky like the arms of a cheering crowd, and hourglass-shaped vents, stories high, wafting steam.

  Soon we were ascending again. It was a lovely country of green mountains. Haystacks, with the silage spun around a pole, lay in some of the fields looking like huge tops. Esma, far shorter than I, had volunteered for the backseat. She leaned forward to hear Attila, supporting herself when we sped through the switchbacks by applying her strong hand to my shoulder.

  “Salt mine,” Attila said, pointing right, where large white storage tanks loomed on a hilltop. Two narrow pipelines, yellow and green, ran parallel to the road.

  In another twenty minutes, we turned down a yellow dirt path to enter the Roma town of Lijce. We had barely reached the first house when a little boy recognized Esma, whose prior largesse obviously had made an impression. He let loose a joyful shout, which brought more than a dozen kids running our way, preventing Attila from driving farther. The children were waifish, dusty from playing in the street and dressed in ill-matched faded old clothes, but seemed nourished and happy, leaving aside one boy who had an open sore on his face, rimmed in green. The boys wore shorts and a variety of footwear, mostly open plastic sandals or Velcroed running shoes, none with socks.

  Esma exited, laughing as the kids jumped around her. She questioned each child about her or his family, and then distributed gifts based on her estimate of needs. Attila rolled down the window, chatting with the kids in Bosnian.

  “What are they saying?” I asked.

  “What would you expect? ‘Give us money.’ They’re bargaining. Just one keim,” she said, naming the Bosnian currency. It was officially half a Euro, meaning the kids were asking for about fifty cents. Attila handed out all the change she had. The boy with the sore insisted that he would accept a bill.

  It was Thursday now, a little after noon, and once Esma was back in the car, I said, “Why aren’t these children in school?”

  She smiled. “Ask. See if you get the same answer twice. Some barely speak Bosnian, though. Throughout Europe, people lament that the Roma won’t send their children to school, but in very few places have the local authorities tried to teach in our own language, or with respect for our customs. After puberty, Rom beliefs require students to separate by gender, which the gadje will not indulge. Because of that, even the children who get some education won’t go much beyond the first form.” Age eleven or twelve.

  Once Attila was parked, I stepped out to view the town. The road ran through two rises on which sat no more than thirty houses, almost all with yards that had become dumping grounds. Hillocks of refuse, including most frequently the rusted pieces of old cars, were piled beside silted-up garbage, old shoes without laces, discarded appliances, bedsprings, used pots, pieces of building material—a remarkable goulash of items, seemingly preserved because they might have some future use. As for the houses, a few looked quite substantial, with stucco or cinder-block bases and frame exteriors, although in those cases the siding was unfinished, as if the wood had been slapped up before anyone arrived to take it back. Beside the bigger places, late-model cars were sometimes parked, and on three or four houses I saw satellite dishes mounted at the rooflines. But most of the dwellings in Lijce were tiny, built of stone or concrete blocks and roofed in overlapping pieces of salvaged corrugated steel.

  After a few minutes, several people ventured a few steps from their houses, staring darkly at us. Finally, one voice rang out, singing, “Ays-Ma,” and with no more, the residents began surging forward. In a matter of seconds, there was a circle surrounding us, all women, usually heavyset with long skirts and colorful head scarves that framed scraps of black h
air and coppery faces. They were clearly intrigued by Esma and, given their prior acquaintance, touched her garments with no hesitation, especially the wooly, fringed lavender scarf around her throat. Esma took this well, laughing and thanking the women for their compliments, before turning to me.

  “Gypsy women,” she said. “They want to know how many children I have, as if the answer might have changed since I was last here a couple of years ago. Also, they wish to know why you have come.”

  “Please tell them,” I said, “that I am here to learn about the Roma who lived in the town of Barupra.”

  The question, once translated, provoked an outcry of high-pitched laments and wide gestures, which Esma did her best to relay, along with Attila, since the answers were in both Romany and Bosnian. Soon the women of Lijce were quarreling among themselves.

  “That woman says they are gone,” said Esma. “This lady agrees and says the army murdered them and dumped their bodies in the river.”

  “Ask which army, please.”

  “The Bosnian Army. With the Americans exiting, the Bosnians wanted the land from the camp back.”

  An older woman appeared irritated by that theory.

  “She says the Bosniaks wouldn’t kill the Roma because the Rom men fought for this country. But the other says that the people in Barupra were Orthodox and to the Muslims no different than the Serbs. And those two women”—Esma pointed—“are laughing at the rest and saying the Americans murdered the people in Barupra because they thought the Roma had helped Kajevic kill their soldiers.”

  I tried to get specifics on what the Roma had done for Kajevic, but the women were mystified themselves.

  I turned to Attila on the other side of the circle for further translation.

  “Most,” Attila explained, “say it was Arkan Tigers sent by Kajevic, although that lady thinks the Barupra people just went back to Kosovo.”