There were a lot of questions about the possibility of accidentally setting off the explosives. At first Alex asserted that there was no danger at all. But Marc protested and said they had to be honest, that there was some risk all the same. It was minimal, but not zero: if they were shot at, a possibility none of them liked to envisage, or if there were a fire, they’d have to be very careful. Oddly enough, his declaration seemed to have a calming effect. For a start, it proved that he was playing fair and square, and this enhanced the feeling of trust. Then, more secretly, the presence of danger, however limited, probably made their transgression all the more exciting.
In the end, when all the questions had been dealt with, a sort of peace seemed to fall over the group. Oddly, the tension had waned, and although the crisis ended with Vauthier going off on his own, it had brought the other team members closer together. Lionel seemed unexpectedly content. He had subscribed more easily than Maud had imagined he would to the humanitarian explanation she had given regarding the explosives.
As it was too late to set off again, they prolonged the conversation until dinner. Lionel talked a lot. What he said gave some indication of the reasons compelling him to take on the risk of transporting forbidden cargo. Basically, like many young aid workers, he suffered from a complex with regard to the pioneers of the movement. Heroic gestures in Biafra, clandestine missions in Kurdistan, the adventures of volunteers crossing snow-covered mountain passes in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the Cold War: among the NGOs, these experiences were the stuff of legend, reflecting a heroic era. The youngest aid workers felt a sort of nagging regret—that they had come too late, in an era when missions were less adventurous and more organized. This story of saving coal mines by transporting explosives provided them with a unique opportunity to be part of a grander History, to walk in the footsteps of the movement’s founders. Basically, it was because he was an apparatchik of humanitarian aid, deeply imbued with the culture of the association he worked for, that Lionel had so readily agreed to transgress its rules.
Maud prepared the supper, not even aware whether it was her turn that night or not. Marc went to fetch a bottle of white wine from his things. He did not say what he had been saving it for; no one asked, they all drank some. Except Vauthier, who was still brooding, off on his own.
II
COMMITMENT
1
The early morning was still just as difficult, perhaps even more so, because they’d gone to bed late, and were feeling the effects of the wine. But the sun was out again. As soon as they had left the horrible quarry behind, they found themselves amid russet forests and apple-green pastures. They had a feeling the fine weather wouldn’t last. Thick clouds lurked in the west and would not leave the sky smiling for long. It hardly mattered: it was now that they were in need of optimism and cheer, and they laid in their store of it.
The barrier between the two former soldiers and the rest of the group had come down. Maud noticed during breakfast that Marc and Lionel were speaking to each other, which was unusual. She supposed that in the lead truck Vauthier must be sulking on his bunk at the back, but between the two drivers the tension had eased. Alex, too, was in a very good mood. He did the first stint of driving. Maud managed to find a station on the truck’s old radio. Music coming from who knew where filled the cab with sappy melodies that were in tune with their state of mind, both serene and jovial.
In appearance, nothing had changed. They were driving the same dilapidated vehicles, covered with the same stickers bearing the logo of La Tête d’Or. And yet it was as if suddenly the mission had become their own. They had decided on its aim, and together they were assuming a risk that no one had imposed on them. They did not know any better now than before what to expect, but they sensed that henceforth their experience of events would no longer be purely passive.
Maud in particular was pleased that, thanks to their discussions, she had a more precise vision of the people they were on their way to help. She liked the fact of knowing that the “beneficiaries” were not simply mouths to feed, famished bellies. Their desires were those of conscious beings, they had plans for their future, the will to resist. In short, they were human.
“What does Bouba look like?”
Alex looked at her, surprised. He must be thinking about the people in the place they were headed, too.
“Bouba? She’s tall. To be honest, when I first met her, I thought she was a lot older. I thought she was at least twenty-five or twenty-six.”
“Is she blond, brunette?”
He reached inside his hip pocket and took out a photo. A poor snapshot with worn edges. A ray of sun veiled an entire segment of the photograph. In the middle was a girl with a long face who bore a resemblance—obviously much younger—to the tall peasant woman who had taken them into her house. She, too, had short hair—chestnut, badly cut—and her clothes were unrefined: a cheap nylon shirt, heavy cotton trousers that were too big. But she’d rolled up the sleeves and left her collar open, and her pose was graceful. She was smiling defiantly, as if to say: none of that matters. On the left-hand side of the snap a thick black metal door with rounded corners was visible.
“Is that the oven?”
“Yes.”
“Where did she live before the war?”
“In the town. Her father was an engineer.”
“Is she Muslim?”
“According to the Serbs and Croats she is. But she didn’t know that before.”
“How can that be?”
“People from the cities are often very mixed. Her mother is from Sarajevo. She’s the daughter of a Muslim and a Croat. On her father’s side there’s a bit of everything, even Albanian. Under Tito, no one asked them to choose. They were Yugoslav and that was enough. At the beginning of the war they had a neighbor they’d fallen out with because of some shadowy business about an adjoining barn wall. The neighbor joined the Ustashe, the Croatian nationalists. As soon as the fighting started, he fingered them as mixed race. Their house was one of the first to burn.”
“And did the neighbor get the barn?”
“I suppose he did. In any case Bouba’s family had to flee in the middle of the night. The only shelter they could find was at the mine. I suppose the others would eventually have killed them if the peacekeepers hadn’t arrived.”
“Where did you and Bouba used to meet?”
“We would walk around the factory together. Like I said, I wasn’t allowed to take her into the military buildings, and around her family we had to behave properly. So we used to go for walks. Even that was dangerous. If we got too close to the barbed wire surrounding the zone, there would be boys on the other side shouting insults at her.”
“Did you know any other peacekeepers who got involved the way you did?”
“Not in Kakanj. Most of them are sappers, real yokels, you know, the type of guys who parade on Bastille Day with their leather apron and their sledgehammer over their shoulder. What they’re after is whores. They wait till they’re on leave then they go find them in Split.”
“Marc, too?”
“No, on the contrary. He even stood up for me, when the others were calling me a fag.”
Alex gave a long, sad laugh. Silence fell. Maud decided to speak because she could sense that Alex was in the process of slipping gently into a sorrowful melancholy.
“What do you think you’ll do later, with Bouba?”
Alex took his time to answer. There was a big pothole in the road, an enormous cavity full of mud. He steered around it, carefully.
“I want to live there with her,” he said, not looking at Maud.
They remained silent after his confession. It was surely the first time that Maud had observed love so close up, the kind of love that made you take risks, cross continents, forget your own self. For a long time she had believed in that sort of love. She eventually concluded it didn’t exist.
They caught up with a long UN convoy and followed the brand-new white tractor-trailers. It was slightly after 2 P.M. when the UN vehicles stopped to go through the necessary procedures for entry into Republika Srpska. Serbian soldiers were inspecting the trucks. They were in full uniform and their weapons were in good condition. The checkpoint looked patently more like a border worthy of the name. It was, to be sure, a wartime border, with old Soviet tanks in firing position and the barrels of machine guns peering out of guard posts. But it was all organized and disciplined. It was more serious, but also more reassuring, because there was no need to fear that some jumpy paramilitary, alone with his reactions and prone to irrational behavior, might suddenly lose it.
Most of the procedure was administrative: they had to produce documents that were in order, which theirs were.
The UN convoy was allowed through. Lionel moved his truck up to the barrier. The road was blocked by an actual metal barrier painted red and white, not just an improvised roadblock or even a simple rope stretched across the road, of the sort found at little country checkpoints.
The soldier who had taken their documents went into a house with a burnt roof, where an office had been set up on the ground floor.
While they waited for him to come back out, they chatted, except for Vauthier, who stood off to one side smoking. There was a strange atmosphere. They were in great danger, and they knew it, but the fear was gone. Perhaps this was due to the roadblock itself, which was quiet, or to the soldiers manning the checkpoint and their professional attitude, dolefully carrying out their duties without a hint of aggression. But Maud had another feeling, and she could have sworn that the others shared it: she felt strong. She felt as if she had found her place in this war, and though she might be doing something risky, it was meaningful.
As a child, she had spent almost every July at her grandmother’s place in the Berry. She had often gotten her to talk about the demarcation line that cut through the countryside during the war not three kilometers from there. Her grandmother had been roughly her age then and from the photographs she had shown her, they looked alike. The young woman crossed the line almost every day on her bicycle, on her way to her sewing classes in Bourges. The Resistance often entrusted her with messages. She had been decorated for her work at the time of the Liberation. Maud hadn’t been interested in details—about the resistance network, or political issues, or the development of the conflict. What she wanted to know was what her grandmother had felt when she rode up to the soldiers and stopped her bike to show them her papers. The old woman found her question awkward. She searched her memories and said, “Nothing.” Now Maud understood.
And if someone were to ask her what she felt right at that moment, she would say, “Nothing.” For her fear had left her. She had felt it over these last few days, but now that she was looking for it she could not find a trace of it left anywhere inside her. Her mind and body were calm. Her heart was not beating any faster, her palms weren’t sweating, she wasn’t the least bit impatient or tense. At the most she got the impression that colors were more vivid, even the khaki on the armor plating, or the shiny black of the well-oiled weapons. And sounds seemed to come from farther away, like those birds chirping in the scraggly elm tree that stood a hundred yards or so from there, by the edge of the road. She tested herself, thinking, I am in a war zone, transporting explosives. But the thought did not elicit any sense of panic. Obviously, they weren’t high explosives, and in fact the risk was minimal. Still, they’d abandoned the clear conscience of the aid worker, and it was an act that was close to the early stirrings of resistance. She was proud of it.
Before long the soldier came back with their papers duly stamped. They climbed into their cabs and set off again.
That evening at their camp Lionel proved to them that he, too, had changed. He spread out the map which up to now he had jealously kept folded in the door of the truck, and told them what he knew about the next roadblocks. He even went so far as to ask the team for their opinion regarding the route they should take. There could be only one reason for this sudden conversion to democracy: in his opinion, the essence of the convoy had changed. It was no longer the docile instrument of an organization he represented, something that obliged him to take decisions on his own and impose his point of view. Or at least that was what he thought, because it was surely how the leader of his first convoy had behaved, when he, Lionel, was still a simple driver. From now on this expedition, given the particular nature of its cargo, required teamwork, and they had to run it together. Lionel had never felt very comfortable acting the boss. The harsh way he’d gone about his duties was surely the result of his uncertainty. The business with the explosives, even if it was hardly what he would have asked for, provided him with an unhoped-for pretext to share the burden of his responsibilities.
“From now on,” he explained, “the situation will change every day. We still have thirty kilometers in the Serbian enclave where they’ll leave us alone, but after that we’ll come to Croatian and Muslim pockets, and it will change all the time. Central Bosnia is a real patchwork.”
“Is there fighting?” asked Maud.
“All the time. But nothing major. The ethnic zones are all mixed up. One day they advance by three houses, they take a field, sometimes an entire village. And then the next day the others take it back.”
Marc no longer kept to himself. He had left off his menacing tone now that Lionel had agreed to open discussions, and especially since Vauthier was no longer around.
“Could you show us the complete route you want us to take?”
Lionel spread his hands over the map to smooth the folds, then followed a little gray ribbon with his finger.
“This is our route.”
“It’s a secondary road,” said Maud. “Why didn’t we take the main road along the river as far as Tuzla?”
“Good question,” said Marc calmly. “To be honest, Lionel, we’ve been wanting to ask you for a while now. We don’t understand why you headed south before Bihać, we don’t get it.”
“It’s the most direct way to Kakanj, isn’t it?”
“It is, if you want direct, it’s direct! Unfortunately, something is missing on your map.”
“What?”
“The relief, for Christ’s sake. Why do you think we’ve hardly run into anyone since we started on this road?”
“We followed the UN convoy a while ago.”
“If we had stayed on the main road, it’s not just one convoy we would have followed, it’s one hundred and fifty.”
Lionel was smoking nervously.
“You should have told me sooner if you didn’t like the idea.”
Marc ignored the bad faith of his reply. They all knew they’d had no say in the matter.
“We figured you had your reasons,” he said.
“Actually there’s nothing wrong with going this way, there are fewer roadblocks than on the main road,” added Alex.
“So you should be grateful, then?” sneered Vauthier.
They all jumped. No one had heard him come over. Everyone thought he was still by the trucks.
Marc turned around quickly and stared at Vauthier. His look was provocative; it expressed defiance, scorn, a desire to fight. Until now, all the hostility had come from Vauthier, and Marc, who had been well aware of it, had been careful not to react. But ever since the mechanic had squealed on them, Marc no longer tried to hide what he thought about Vauthier. Maud was fascinated by how quickly Marc could change his mood. When faced with an adversary, he showed an almost
animal strength. His features, his clenched jaw, looked downright cruel. But perhaps because now she knew his other side, she saw a certain charm in his ferocity.
Whatever the case might be, Vauthier’s appearance had put an end to the discussion.
“We’ll decide tomorrow,” said Lionel.
He folded the map and they split up for the night as usual.
The drive through Serbian territory was uneventful, as Marc had predicted. They saw almost no convoys, and in the villages they always found things to buy. There was little destruction in the zone. The countryside went on living as usual, to the rhythm of the farm work. Their last day in the sector fell on a Sunday. The Orthodox churches with their brick walls and onion domes drew crowds of worshippers, who arrived on tractors, in carts, on foot, or on muleback. Cars and trucks seemed to have vanished, no doubt requisitioned for the purposes of the war, unless there had never been any cars and trucks to begin with.
They left Republika Srpska behind them as night was falling, and went through a checkpoint very similar to the one where they had entered, but not as busy with military vehicles. On the other side, after a no-man’s-land, they found a tiny agricultural enclave. At first they couldn’t figure out what ethnic group it belonged to and then on the way out of the village they saw a minaret. The peasants looked exactly the same as in the Serbian zone. For Maud, this was yet another odd thing about this war, which opposed people who spoke the same language, lived on the same land, and went about their daily lives in the same way.
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