After three hours, the light began to fade. I left the path and waded through dense undergrowth until I found a place where a ledge of rock protruded from a steep, peaty bank. I eased myself up to the ledge and opened tins of beans and fruit. There was a huge oak tree here, with a deeply riven trunk that had the girth of ten men and lower branches zigzagging out thirty feet and more on all sides. Attracted by the smell of food, a mob of squirrels arrived and started crashing through the boughs. I flung the remnants from the tins away down the slope and they scuttled after them. Then I lay down to sleep.
A few hours later I came hard awake. Aircraft droning overhead, the air vibrating with the weight of their engines. I climbed a few branches of the oak until I got clear of the undergrowth. I could just make out the cross-frames of the bombers, like pale dimples in the blackness of the sky. They skimmed smoothly into the east and started to unload. Flashes of sheetlight popped and flared, low growls stammered over the hills. The fires caught, a corona of sooty orange brimming over the horizon, and the bombers banked away to the north, bay-doors sliding shut.
Our planes, our bombs, I thought, reaching out to kill across the great gulf of the sky.
I entered Maria’s restaurant at midday.
‘James, you look so much better. You are tired, but the trouble has gone from your eyes. Well, some of it has, anyway. I thought it never would.’
‘Leonard Cohen,’ I said. ‘“Famous Blue Raincoat”.’
‘See, you learn one thing good in my restaurant!’
‘More than one,’ I said with feeling. I hugged her hard and told her I was going back to England.
‘Not before lunch,’ she said.
She fed me without further comment, then sat at my table and said: ‘You are sensible to go. But Karela deserves better. You must invite her to stay with you in England. You do not have to marry her.’
‘That’s good to know.’
‘But anyway it will make her happy. You do not have nice memories of Skopje, but you must come back and see me, please, and the children?’
I told her I would always have nice memories of her and the restaurant and her bumptious offspring. Then we hugged again.
I called Eleni’s apartment, and she answered.
‘Can I come over? I need to talk to you.’
‘James, what has happened? Are you safe? We have worried non-stop—’
‘Is Anna there?’
‘She has taken Katya for a picnic in Vodno. Come to visit us – at six o’clock?’
‘It has to be now,’ I said. ‘Can you and I meet?’
We agreed a rendezvous, and I was shamefully relieved that Anna and Katarina would not be there. I felt guilty about pitching Katarina into the hands of child traffickers, of course. I still do. And I had kept so much hidden from Anna, and had my subterfuges exposed so often, that I felt I had lost the right to her company. In short, I had estranged myself from her – courageous, trusting, generous-hearted Anna, with her graceful intelligence and humour, and her painful integrity that was such a contrast to my own confused disingenuousness. That estrangement was a heavy part of the burden I bore for the years that followed.
So I met with Eleni and made her the receptacle for a garbled account of my return to the refuge, and she listened and interjected with frequent expressions of horror and sympathy, and then I left the poor woman to bear this awkward sort of ending back to her apartment and pass it on to Anna and Katarina as best she could.
I got a taxi to the airport and took the next flight back to London. I was detained at Heathrow. In the privacy of the interview room, I started a fight with two and eventually five security guards. It ended with me lying in a hospital bed, heavily sedated and with plenty of bruising to keep my mind off other things.
Andy Hillson came to my rescue. The charges were dropped and I was released into the world on the strict understanding that I reported to him weekly.
‘What will you say to me, sir, do you think?’
‘Apart from stop being such a bloody prima donna? I haven’t the faintest idea. You may as well know that there’s a move to get you back into GCHQ.’
‘A spell on the naughty step, before I’m let back into the playpen?’
He declined to answer. I went to Lowestoft and rescued the Jack Taylor from the golf club near the harbour, then took it back to the ramshackle garage in Norfolk. On the way, I returned the money I’d stolen from the honesty box. That pretty much completed the task of putting right the wrongs I’d done – or at least, the revocable ones.
I spent the next year engaged in a low-level war with Iain Strang and Clive Silk. All I sought was to clear my name – not in public (none of this was in public), but in the annals of espionage, where falsehoods accumulate and feed on each other like rats in a dump. Silk was terrified of what might come out, but Strang was made of sterner stuff. He had his video of me in the brothel with an underage girl on the bed beside me, his (well-founded) suspicion that I’d killed two men in the back of a van in a cul-de-sac off Syrna Street, and his inviolable sense that the world must dance to his tune or dance not at all. I won that skirmish eventually. . . But that’s another story. Hillson kept out of it all, sensible man that he is.
In the meantime, I kept in touch with Father Daniel, and Anna, Eleni and Maria. Karela came to stay and was happy and did not require or even want me to marry her. Then I got the email from Eleni about the incident at the bus stop in Pristina, how Katarina had lashed out at a man who groped her and put him in a coma. How she’d been wearing the knuckleduster I had taken from the Bura HQ and left in the playground, where Anna found it and used it to clout the man attacking her brother-in-law Piotr.
I followed Katarina’s trial. The defence lawyer made great play of her silence. The clinical term is elective mute, he informed the jury, and each of you should take a moment to consider what kind of hurt might make you elect to say not a single word to anyone for over three years. The story he proceeded to tell the court was a pallid version of the truth – like a dark tragedy recast as an edifying bedtime fable. During the summing up, he linked Katarina’s plight with the fate of Kosovo. My client is a symbol of the suffering of our young nation, traumatised by war and the crimes of those who profit by it. Who can hear her story and remain unmoved? Who will dare judge her after what she has endured?
The ploy worked: along with the inevitable guilty verdict, the jury made a plea for clemency. A six-month sentence was apparently the very least she could have expected.
When I’d read through all the trial reports, I took out the manuscript Anna had sent me a year previously, in which she recounted her own experience of what happened. Reading it always made me feel close to her – and then mournful, because we had known each other only during those bleak times. She’d sent me the manuscript partly as a prompt, I guessed: it was her way of asking me to set down my side of the story. I’d never done so, and it wasn’t just laziness. I’d concealed the truth more thoroughly than anyone, and I was nervous about how Anna would take it.
Katarina’s silence. . . and mine. She, too frightened to speak of what befell her; I, too ashamed. I dwelt bitterly on this contrast.
Still, I’ve written it now, and I am glad.
I want to finish by saying how proud I am of you, Katarina. You were clever and determined and brave. You deserve to be back home because you never gave up. It wasn’t your fault that you got mixed up with cruel men and a cruel war, but you kicked and fought and ran your way clear of that and if people say you were lucky, they are wrong: all the luck you had you made yourself, and you were stronger than most grown-ups would have been, faced with the things you endured. Wulfstan and his brothers, and the Bura gang who abducted you; and the big men and women at Rambouillet who feasted on wine and cheese and ordered the destruction of Kosovo because they couldn’t think of anything better to do; and I, who thought it was more important to prove myself to TJ and his crew than to make sure you were safe. . . We can hang our heads in shame. B
ut you, Katarina, you can hold yours up high and walk tall into the future.
Epilogue
From: Dr Eleni Asllani [[email protected]]
To: [email protected]
Sent: 12 November 2002 21:41
Subject: K!
Dear James,
Katarina is talking again! Just last night she suddenly said that she wished we would stop treating her like a silly little girl, because there are not many silly little girls who have spent three months in prison. Since then, it is almost like she is a normal teenager again, which of course means she does not say much and most of it is complaining. But to her mother and me they are the sweetest complaints.
Then this morning she suddenly said she didn’t know why we were always pulling long faces and feeling sorry for her, because in fact she was the lucky one. She was never made to work in Haclan Adjani’s ‘bars’, as she called them, like the other girls.
Very gently, Anna asked her to say more. It seems Adjani said she was being saved for someone special and was not to be touched. They were very frightened of the Boss and would never disobey him. Anna and I then had the horrible thought that this special man might be his brother Wulfstan, and I am more than ever glad that monster is dead.
It was such a relief to hear this that Anna cried and Katarina got cross and ran to her room and banged the door shut, so that is all we know right now, except that her therapist said that people who are spared while others are abused may suffer terrible guilt. We should not forget what else she has endured, either.
Also, James, she said to tell you that the pasta with tomato sauce you cooked was the most disgusting thing she has ever eaten, and she hopes you will do better next time. So you see, the humorous spirit of the Galicas is strong within her.
Anna asked her if she would like to see you and she said yes, she would. So you must come to Pristina, James. Stop whatever you are doing and come here to be with us and share our joy.
With love,
Eleni
A Note on the War in Kosovo
Say a Little Prayer is set against the backdrop of the struggle for an independent Kosovo, which came to a head with the bombing and subsequent occupation of Serbia by NATO forces in 1999. It was the last of the so-called Yugoslav Wars, which marked the implosion of the former Yugoslavia during the course of the 1990s and led to the creation of independent states in Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo.
It was a horrible decade, even for a part of Europe accustomed to horrible decades. The Balkans are cursed by their geography. Whenever empires expand, they trample the Balkans, and this has been going on for two millennia. The Romans and then the Ottomans occupied the region entirely. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan menaced from the east; in the nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire bulged down from the north. In the last century, the Third Reich had its baleful day, followed swiftly by the oppressive yoke of the Soviet Union. Just as the grinding of tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface causes earthquakes and tsunamis, so the geopolitical ambitions of competing empires cause violence and war. We who enjoy life within settled borders cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to know that the history of one’s kinsfolk is one of being repeatedly crushed by marching armies and tyrannical regimes.
The wars of the 1990s were the latest incarnation of this history of conflict. In the power vacuum that followed the death of President Tito and the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Yugoslav state fell apart. The populace quickly redefined itself along ethnic and religious lines – Yugoslavia had only been established at the end of the First World War and commanded little loyalty outside Serbia. As the regional states erupted into civil war, the world watched uneasily. The idea of defining nations by ethnicity was hard to stomach – wasn’t that exactly what Hitler tried to do in Germany?
It soon became clear that the various conflicts were being fought out against a backdrop of persecution punctuated by appalling incidents of ethnic cleansing – most notoriously the genocide of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces at Srebrenica in 1995. Muslims and Christians who had lived as neighbours for centuries became sworn enemies, and pockets of peaceful diversity became focal points for the ugliest fighting. To enshrine these religious and ethnic differences in the redrawn map of the Balkans seemed like a counsel of despair – although this is for the most part what happened.
The empire of the West, represented by its military wing (NATO) and countless civilian bureaucracies, played its own hand in the Yugoslav Wars – animated by a hotchpotch of motives which are hard to disentangle. The Western appetite for capitalising on victory in the Cold War was far from sated, and to this extent, Serbia – under Moscow loyalist Slobodan Milošević – was ‘the enemy’. There was also an understandable determination not to allow the conflict in this dangerous area of Europe to fester. And given the humanitarian crisis, the justification for intervention could be couched in moral terms, which suited everyone – especially the self-styled moralist British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who described the wars as ‘a battle between good and evil’.
However, the role of the Western powers was badly tainted by a child-trafficking scandal, which is referred to several times in Say a Little Prayer. A private security company called DynCorp had been hired to provide peacekeeping services for the UN-sponsored International Police Task Force (IPTF) in Bosnia. A DynCorp employee called Kathryn Bolkovac discovered that IPTF and DynCorp personnel – including some of the most senior and powerful men in the organisations – were regular customers of brothels selling trafficked women and children. Furthermore, the worst offenders were complicit in the trafficking itself, buying women and supplying forged documents to make it easier to move them around Europe. Rescuers by day, clients by night, is Bolkovac’s bitter assessment. The extent of the corruption was such that it took years of vigorous whistleblowing before the brave and resourceful Bolkovac got her story heard, and to this day efforts to bring the culprits to book have been half-hearted at best.
This scandal was the tip of an iceberg. It has been estimated that more than 200,000 women and children from Eastern bloc countries were being trafficked annually. Bolkovac notes in her book The Whistleblower that nothing in Bosnia at the time worked as smoothly or efficiently as the people-trafficking business. In Say a Little Prayer, it is fear of a similar disgrace in Kosovo – and its potential to derail the Rambouillet peace talks – that the UK intelligence services believe justifies taking such radical steps to cover up the scandal of the Vegas Lounge – though of course this is all fiction.
The Dayton Accords of 1995 brought the worst of the fighting to a close, but the agreement ignored the situation in Kosovo, which was trapped in a cycle of increasingly violent protest and increasingly cruel oppression.
The population of Kosovo is over ninety per cent Albanian and Muslim (Kosovar), but to Serbs it is their historical heartland, which they defended to the last man against the advancing Ottomans in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Both armies were annihilated and the Ottomans soon took over the territory anyway, but nothing inspires nationalistic folklore like a heroic defeat.
The territory was under the formal government of Belgrade, but for much of the 1990s, the situation was kept calm by the wisdom and skill of Ibrahim Rugova, who established a parallel Kosovar regime which, although lacking real power, commanded widespread support. Rugova preached peaceful protest, but towards the end of the decade the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) became increasingly active. Kosovo was descending into war, and the Kosovar population reacted the way peaceful civilians do when they see their livelihoods and communities destroyed and sense that worse is to follow: they left.
The Western powers called the Serbian and Kosovar leadership to the negotiating table (though Milošević refused to attend), and in February 1999 they met at Rambouillet outside Paris, where Anna’s narrative in Say a Little Prayer is partly set. This may be the only peace conference in history that was conducted
under the threat of war – not from the parties to the negotiation but from its organisers: the NATO Activation Order that authorised the use of military force in Kosovo had been in place since October. Despite the seriousness of its objectives, the conference was somewhat farcical – many of the details I have used to describe it are based on fact, and there are plenty more to choose from. The negotiations never really advanced beyond the tautologous statement with which they began, which proposed granting autonomy to Kosovo while respecting the territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The conference stumbled to an end, and reconvened in Paris a few weeks later, where the Kosovar leadership signed the Rambouillet Accords. The Serbs did not – and their refusal paved the way for the NATO bombing campaign, called Operation Allied Force, which began on 24 March.
In Say a Little Prayer, Anna and James come to believe that the powerful men and women who preside over Rambouillet actually want to bomb the Serbs into submission, or at least regard it as an acceptable solution. This was the view of many at the time. Ex-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote: ‘The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing.’ And State Department adviser Strobe Talbott thought that ‘it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform – not the plight of the Kosovar-Albanians – that best explains NATO’s war’.
What is not in doubt is that the NATO bombing campaign, far from averting the humanitarian crisis, turned it into a catastrophe. As the bombers appeared in the skies over Kosovo, people were leaving at a rate of 20,000 per day. An inquiry by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe noted ‘the vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage once the NATO air war began on March 24’.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 36