Checkpoint

by Jean-Christophe Rufin

  ALSO BY

  JEAN-CHRISTOPHE RUFIN

  The Dream Maker

  The Red Collar

  Europa Editions

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2015 by Editions Gallimard, Paris

  First publication 2017 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Alison Anderson

  Original Title: Check-point

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover photo © Philipp Nemenz/Gallery Stock

  ISBN 9781609453732

  Jean-Christophe Rufin

  CHECKPOINT

  Translated from the French

  by Alison Anderson

  “God created men, Sam Colt made them equal.”

  CHECKPOINT

  PROLOGUE

  Central Bosnia, 1995

  Marc stopped the truck, with no explanation.

  “Give me the binoculars.”

  Maud took them out of the glove compartment and handed them over. He got out and stood at the edge of the road. She watched as he stared for a long time at the horizon.

  Suppressing her pain, she managed to sit up and wipe the condensation from the windshield. From where they had stopped you could see a vast panorama, and if the weather had been better, they might have been able to see all the way to the Adriatic. With the falling snow they could still see most of the high plateau they had crossed. Without binoculars Maud could make out only a white expanse for miles around. Sometimes the road dipped into a hollow, and then it rose up again. They were stopped on a high point. To the south, the ruined towers of a medieval castle stood out against a leaden cloud filled with snow. Marc came back and tossed the binoculars onto the dashboard. More tense than ever, he turned the key in the ignition.

  “What did you see?”

  “They’ve been through here.”

  Maud didn’t say anything. She could hear the spite in his voice. She was angry with herself for being injured and unable to drive. If their pursuers were able to take turns driving, Marc on his own would not be able to keep up the pace. He was certainly aware of this and must have been evaluating the consequences of their failure: the inevitable confrontation, the discovery of the cargo, perhaps even death.

  Maud tried to move but it was hopeless. As soon as she held out her arms, she felt the pain in her back, so sharp she wanted to cry out.

  “How far ahead are we, do you reckon?”

  “Barely six hours.”

  “What can we do?”

  He didn’t answer and this angered her. As if she didn’t matter. He seemed so hostile she could not help but recall what she had thought during the night. When it came to action, he was alone. It was the hidden side of his strength, the rules of the game in his world.

  Maud felt like crying, and was annoyed with herself.

  They drove in silence for almost an hour. Suddenly Marc stopped the truck again. He gave no explanation and without a word he went back out onto the road. First she saw him squat down in front of the cab and touch the frozen ground. Then he went out of sight, around the back. When he returned, he was covered in snow. It was coming down hard now, and in the space of a few minutes the windshield was covered in a white film.

  Marc switched on the wipers and the landscape reappeared. It was then that Maud then saw the narrow track leading off to the left. It was covered in snow and she had not seen it initially. It was surely because of this track that Marc had stopped the truck at that particular place.

  “Do you want to go up that way?”

  He didn’t need to answer. He had already turned the wheels to the left and was heading that way. The track was fairly steep for a few yards and the truck struggled. Then it rose more evenly. It was certainly a dead end, leading to a field or a barn.

  “Do you think the snow will cover our tracks? Is that what you went to check?”

  He merely nodded.

  Then suddenly the track seemed to fade away. They were surrounded by whiteness and there was no indication of where they should go. Unfortunately they had not gone far enough from the main road to stop. Marc got back out and walked through the snow to try to determine whether it was possible to drive farther up. Maud saw him disappear behind a hedge that the snowflakes were covering in white pom-poms.

  She was at her wits’ end, filled with a sort of rage, and she did not know whether it stemmed from despair, anger, or shame. She felt as if she had been making the wrong choices for a long time; perhaps she had always been making the wrong choices. She should never have followed this man, should never have made an exception for him to the caution that had always protected her from humiliation and suffering. And now she was here, injured, betrayed, cast adrift. She screamed.

  Her long cry, initially shrill, then fading to a deeper note, gave her some relief. She tried again, but it wasn’t natural anymore. She felt self-conscious. Her determination was coming back, if not her strength. She would not give in so easily.

  Not long thereafter, Marc reappeared. At first he was only a shadow in the white shadow of whirling snow. Then she saw him, covered in snow, and he opened the door.

  “Did you find a way through?”

  As he did not answer, she ignored the pain that was searing through her back, and slapped him.

  I

  MISSION

  1

  This was the time in the truck that Maud liked best. The autumn evening was gently coming on; the cool air did not yet oblige them to roll up the windows. The Bakelite steering wheel was so wide you had to spread your arms to turn it. It transmitted the vibrations from the engine, and when she drove uphill Maud felt as if she were clinging to the neck of an enormous beast.

  They had left Lyon ten days earlier. One day had followed another, each one much like the next, despite the variation in the landscapes. After the Mont Blanc tunnel they had driven through the Aosta Valley, then followed the plain of the Po down in its entire length. The late autumn gave a certain luminosity to everything far in the distance and emphasized the little black arrows of cypress trees against a deep blue sky. After Trieste the landscape became more mountainous, the colors drab. When they reached Croatia, Maud hoped they would stop in Zagreb. Before leaving, she had read a guidebook from the 1960s that her parents had bought when they went to Dalmatia on their honeymoon. She wanted to see Saint Mark’s Square and the medieval buildings. But they drove around the outside of the city without going into the center and she kept her disappointment to herself. In Italy, Lionel had put her abruptly in her place when she asked to stop off in Bergamo. “We’re aid workers, not tourists.” He was in charge of the mission and he never missed an opportunity to remind her of the fact. The humanitarian organization in Lyon, La Tête d’Or (which got its name from the park nearby), had put him in charge of the convoy. And there, in Bosnia, the war was waiting for them.

  Maud took her turn driving just like the boys. They had stopped joking about her driving already long before. It had been enough for Lionel to scrape the corner of a house in Italy and make a yard-long tear in the tarp for the men to stop talking tough. Maud might drive more slowly, but she was steady and cautious. The fifteen-ton truck did not risk a thing when she was behind the wheel, and the others knew this.

  On the bunk behind
her Vauthier was asleep. From time to time he gave a snort. The others all used their first names but he preferred to go by his last name. He even referred to himself as “fat Vauthier,” no doubt to dispose them favorably to him. He wasn’t really fat, and you could see more muscle than flab emerging from his grimy T-shirt. But he had a large square head, framed by ginger sideburns, and a flat nose, which gave him a countrified look that clashed with Maud and Lionel’s student allure. He had introduced himself as a Parisian courier, convalescing after a traffic accident. They didn’t really believe what he told them. But one thing was sure: he was much older than the others. Lionel thought he must be forty, and Maud, all of twenty-one, thought he was really old.

  Lionel was rolling a cigarette in the front seat, not speaking. The cab smelled of fuel and dirty motor oil. Maud considered herself lucky all the same, because she was driving the lead truck and at least they didn’t have to inhale the blue exhaust from their other vehicle. They were both secondhand trucks, roughly the same model, which La Tête d’Or had bought on the cheap. They were nearing the end of their useful life, worn out by generations of delivery drivers who had not treated them kindly.

  “We’re coming to the Serbian zone,” said Lionel, handing her the cigarette he had just lit.

  Maud took a quick draw on it then handed it back.

  “Did you put something in it?” she asked, making a face.

  “Tobacco.”

  Tall and thin, Lionel had a long and slightly crooked nose, and a pale, angular face. It was the sort of face that reminded you of many others, and a witness would find it difficult to give any precise description if called on to provide an Identikit. He must have known as much, and he tried to distinguish himself by wearing a silver loop in his right eyebrow. He and Maud had worked together in Lyon for three months. He had always treated her somewhat condescendingly, because he had more experience, and she was only a recent recruit. He was never very talkative, and when he did talk it was to bark an order. Those who were in the group knew he smoked joints from morning to night. It was not exactly that they minded, but no one smoked as much weed as he did. He was the group’s dealer, and he kept his baggies of weed in a round box labeled “condensed milk.”

  The hilly countryside was increasingly poor as they drew near the Krajina. They went through deserted villages, strings of brick or breeze-block houses along the road. Piles of manure and rusty farm machinery filled the farmyards. From time to time, in the midst of the farms, a white church with a pointed steeple gave a hamlet a passing resemblance to an Austrian village, although drearier. They had not seen any traces of fighting yet, other than the struggle mankind has always waged against nature for survival. And yet they had known since the previous day that they were getting closer to the war zone.

  “Shouldn’t we be seeing checkpoints soon?” asked Maud, never taking her eyes from the road.

  Lionel nodded.

  “Yes, it shouldn’t be long now.”

  Up to now they had crossed borders—in other words, the official limits between states. Checkpoints were something else: unpredictable and shifting separations between ethnic zones that were under the authority of small local warlords. Those among them who had already been to Bosnia talked about them every evening. They didn’t use the French term, “point de contrôle,” which might have made the thing seem almost normal. The stateless word in English, “checkpoint,” used by everyone in the field, was a more apt representation of the improvised, disorderly, unpredictable, and dangerous aspect of these roadblocks. Maud was fairly eager to see what they were like.

  The truck was struggling up the switchback road. It was six o’clock in the evening and the shadows were getting longer. It was time to find a place to spend the night. As she was coming out of a long bend, she heard a horn behind her. She looked in her big square rearview mirror, holding it to stop the vibration. An arm was waving from the door of the other vehicle, pointing left toward a big sandy entrance to a large deserted lot. It was plowed with ruts and must have been used as a construction site. An old pile of gravel in one corner had been invaded by wild plants. Maud braked, turned into the lot, and pulled over to the edge. The grass around the parking area was white with dust. Lionel got out to inspect the place.

  In the cab, Maud leaned her head back to relax her neck muscles, strained from driving. Because the driver’s seat would not go any farther forward, she’d had to put a big cushion behind her back in order to reach the pedals. She had stopped growing at the age of thirteen. Even though she was twenty-one now, she had never become reconciled to the fact that she wasn’t taller. Little women are the object of ridiculous solicitude on the part of men, and she hated being treated like a bibelot.

  “Okay,” said Lionel when he came back, “we’ll spend the night here.”

  Maud turned off the ignition. After several more intense shakes, the vibrations suddenly stopped. She relaxed. For her this was always a moment of complete contentment, an almost physical delight. The return of silence, while her body was still throbbing from the juddering of the diesel, was a true rebirth. The surrounding world was no longer a landscape but a place, with faint sounds and birdsong coming in the open window. The mass of metal cracked and let go, like a horse given free rein at last. It seemed to her she had desired nothing else when she chose this strange life her family failed to understand.

  She opened the door and got out. This was the second moment of delight in the evening: stepping onto solid ground, the blood flowing in her legs again as she walked about, the subtle smells of nature as soon as she got away from the engine that stank of fuel. She took off her glasses and wiped them slowly with a corner of her fleece jacket. They were big, tinted glasses with thick frames that covered half her face. She had chosen them on purpose to hide her blue eyes, which had always earned her as many jealous remarks as compliments.

  Over the final kilometers the road had climbed considerably and below them lay the plain, covered in thickets, which they had crossed. Around the parking area the grassy moor was scattered with huge white rocks. There were numerous flat spaces where they could pitch their tents.

  Vauthier had woken up with a growl, and now he got out in turn, wiping his hand over his bald head. He always looked as if he were in a bad mood, probably because of his thin lips and drooping eyelids. But his little black eyes were in constant movement, searching everywhere, and they were all wary of him. Because it wasn’t only his gaze that was searching. He couldn’t help nosing around, eavesdropping on conversations, and whenever they stopped in a town he would disappear, then come back with a summary of all the little secrets in the place. The others were convinced he was going through their belongings, too.

  Alex and Marc, the drivers in the second truck, came over slowly, stretching.

  It was always an awkward moment when the two teams met up again. Right from the start of the trip, a heavy, hostile atmosphere had reigned in the group. It was a gross understatement to say that the five members of the convoy did not get along. Things did not improve with the passing miles. Clans of convenience were formed. In the lead truck, because they knew one another, Maud and Lionel made one team; Alex and Marc, the two drivers in the other truck, were another. Vauthier did not hide his dislike for them. Every evening their reunion was tense.

  “We’ll be fine here,” said Alex, looking at the area just beyond the parking lot.

  Marc was inspecting their surroundings with a wary gaze.

  Both of them were former soldiers. They were roughly the same age, no older than thirty, but they were very different. Alex was mixed race, with big, rather slanting eyes and a small nose. No one had asked him where he had gotten his copper skin and frizzy hair. Maud thought he was handsome, but she didn’t want him to know. Marc, too, was sporty, but taller than Alex and with a massive build, broad-shouldered with a muscular chest and square jaw. His skin was olive, his hair very dark. He always seemed to be
on the lookout, but he affected a calm, virile manner, and this had made Maud feel instantly uncomfortable. Alex had the lively elasticity of a tennis player, whereas you could picture Marc taking part in activities that called for strength, like rugby or boxing. But they shared a deliberate mannerism in their way of walking, of standing very straight and keeping their heads high. No matter how they tried to adopt the casual NGO style, wearing baggy jeans and faded T-shirts, they looked out of place. Military discipline had shaped them on a deeper level. You could still see the soldiers inside them.

  The evening ritual had been the same since departure. The camping stove had to come out of the truck Maud was driving, and pots and pans out of the other truck. They had stocked up on canned food in Lyon, and it was stored in crates. They bought fresh produce along the way when they could find it. Since leaving Italy they hadn’t found much other than eggs and milk, which the peasants poured out of big metal containers. Not far from Zagreb they had found fresh cheese; it was bitter, but Maud preferred it to canned cassoulet.

  Every evening Vauthier would light the camping stove or build a fire, something he seemed to like to do. They took turns with the cooking chores. From the start they had understood it was pointless trying to leave these chores to the only girl in the group. Lionel had tried to joke about it, pointing out to Maud that it wasn’t very charitable of her to let four men struggle with saucepans, but she had bluntly put him in his place. In reprisal, when she had difficulty putting up the tents, on the days when it was her turn, he made no attempt to stifle his sniggering.

  This was not the first time Maud had had to deal with this sort of behavior. She had an older brother who had not spared her his sarcasm. She hated such stupid remarks, but over time she had come to anticipate them, as a kind of stimulus. The rage they inspired was a driving force. Very early on she had decided to show her defiance. Her truck driver’s license had been her first major victory in this respect.