Checkpoint

by Jean-Christophe Rufin

  In the lead truck there was a quick discussion about whether to stop there for the night or keep on going. The shadows were beginning to lengthen. In less than an hour it would be completely dark. Marc suggested they should pitch camp right away.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll be in the Croatian zone,” objected Lionel. “If they suspect we spent the night here, they might search us from top to bottom.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “They’re getting more and more paranoid in this part of the country. And the French have a reputation for supporting the Muslims. They’ll never believe we stopped without a reason. They’re bound to think we’re hiding guys who want to get out of the zone.”

  “But if we try to go through at night, that will seem even more suspicious.”

  “Convoys often a cross at night, and if we hurry up, it will still be daylight.”

  Lionel would not budge. In the end, Marc gave in; they decided to keep going.

  According to what a peasant had told them, they had to leave the little valley and cross the pass they could see higher up, where they would reach the Croatian checkpoint. And yet when they reached the summit they didn’t see anything that looked like a roadblock. The enclave must be bigger than they thought. Night fell, moonless. The truck’s headlights were splattered with mud and lit the road poorly. They had to drive slowly. They began their descent. One hundred yards further along they heard the first shots, fired right at them. Maud had never heard actual gunshots, other then deep in Alpine fir forests during hunting season. She did not immediately make the connection between the cracking sound she heard in the distance and the whistling near the cab. She only realized when they heard a louder detonation, which was the sound of a tire bursting.

  But Alex knew exactly what was going on. He opened his door and grabbed her by the arm. She found herself lying on the damp ground, in a ditch.

  Once the firing had stopped, she heard Lionel shout, “Pomoć!” Marc, who had slightly more vocabulary, said something in a loud voice. There was a long silence, disturbed only by the faint sound of liquid trickling somewhere. Then they heard footsteps on the road and understood that the paramilitaries were coming closer. First they saw their boots under the truck, then they saw them standing above them, guns pointed at them.

  They got slowly to their feet and stood in a line in the middle of the road, their hands above their heads. The beam of a flashlight lit their faces one by one. They could still hear a little trickling sound, from somewhere near the trucks.

  “The fuel,” murmured Alex.

  A cylindrical barrel with an extra supply of diesel was fastened to each of the trucks. A bullet must have hit one of the spare tanks. But which one? In the darkness it was impossible to make out whether the leak was under the first truck or under the one carrying the explosives.

  The patrol that had stopped them consisted of three men. There might have been others nearby but they couldn’t see them. The paramilitaries kept their weapons trained on them, unmoving. They seemed to be waiting for something or someone.

  2

  Their eyes were getting used to the dark. The paramilitaries were three fearful young boys, wearing black woolen caps with the edges rolled up. Each one had his finger on the trigger of his weapon, submachine guns that could fire a blast of a dozen shots at the slightest pressure.

  The fuel was still dripping and the puddle on the ground must have been fairly big because the trickle of fuel was now a steady flow.

  Finally they heard footsteps on the road. Someone was coming, slowly, his hobnailed boots ringing on the asphalt. The paramilitaries moved to one side without lowering their weapons, and the newcomer stood in front of the five foreigners. As they could tell in the dark, he was a very old man. He was bald, with a ring of white hair, and his face was deeply lined. But he held himself very straight and gave an impression of strength and authority. He was probably one of those retired officers whom the Croats, lacking in men and experience, had called back up to train the makeshift army they had thrown together at the beginning of the war. In any case, in this place and at this moment he was the boss. If there was hope to be had, it would come from him.

  He asked the boys with the guns something, and one of them said a few words. And then Marc chose to speak. He came out with a long sentence, in a calm voice. Maud recognized the language: she had studied Russian in high school for two years but could not speak it.

  The man came forward and stopped in front of Marc. There was a moment of uncertainty. He had a hostile, almost outraged expression on his face. Maud got the impression he was going to hit him. Marc stood there, motionless, staring straight ahead, with no insolence this time.

  Finally the man spoke. He asked Marc if he was Russian and when he answered that he was French the man laughed and the tension eased. Most of the officers in the Yugoslav Army, particularly the generation that had fought in the Second World War, had been trained in the Soviet Union. The similarity of the two Slavic languages made it easy for them to learn Russian. Marc and the man began to converse, because Marc also spoke quite fluently.

  But he did not relax for all that, and kept his hands obediently above his head.

  His explanation seemed to satisfy the officer, because he ordered his men to lower their weapons. He took a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lit it. He was about to throw the match onto the ground when Marc pointed out that he was standing in diesel. The puddle had spread down the slope of the road until it reached the place where they stood. The old man recoiled. One of the paramilitaries beamed his flashlight onto the puddle and followed it back to the leak. The hole was located fairly high up in the tank, which meant that the flow had slowed now. Marc asked for permission to plug the hole and the officer gave it to him without quibbling.

  “Vauthier can fix it for us in no time,” said Marc.

  Vauthier was furious, but given the circumstances he had no choice but to obey Marc. The old soldier said something in Russian.

  “He wants me to go with him to check our papers,” Marc translated.

  Lionel went to fetch them in the truck, then handed them to Marc, who followed the officer and disappeared with him into the dark.

  In the meantime, still watched over by the paramilitaries, the others got out the spare tire and jack and began changing the tire. The truck had come to a sudden stop, swerving sideways across the road, two wheels halfway into the ditch, and this complicated the lifting maneuver. It would probably take a while. Maud waited, sitting on the embankment. She offered to help with the repair but they replied curtly that they didn’t need her. As Marc still hadn’t come back, she was beginning to get impatient.

  “I’ll go see what he’s doing,” she said to Lionel. “It shouldn’t take hours to check papers.”

  Using sign language, she explained to the soldiers that she wanted to go to see their officer. They spoke among themselves and designated one of them to go with her. They had only one flashlight and they kept it. Maud and her guardian angel walked side by side in the dark. The boy smelled of sweat, and the ditches gave out an odor of vegetal mud. They walked almost all the way up to the little pass. The checkpoint was above all a sort of outpost, camouflaged by the fir trees that covered the ridge. It was a fairly long stone building, probably once a sheepfold. It was completely dark, but just as Maud and the young fighter drew near, a ray of light appeared under the door. The boy knocked three times and a voice shouted to come in.

  The interior of the building was lit by an oil lamp. The furnishings were ludicrous. A modern, sixties-style sofa was set opposite an oval glass coffee table. Across from it were two upholstered Louis XV armchairs. Along the stone walls around these rather urban furnishings, no doubt the spoils of a raid on a house in the region, were mangers still full of hay. Marc and the old officer sat chatting comfortably over a bottle of šljivovica.

  “There you are,” s
aid Marc. “Come in. Are they done changing the tire?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then sit down with us while you wait.”

  He translated his suggestion. The military man nodded, got up, and showed Maud where to sit, gesticulating with a silent gallantry that merely annoyed her.

  “Apparently the day before yesterday there was a major skirmish here during the night. We’ve just had a close call, because when they saw us coming, they thought it was starting up again. We were lucky their machine gun jammed.”

  Marc laughed and the officer, who looked considerably tipsy, seemed to feel obliged to do likewise. He was missing a tooth at the front of his mouth.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go any further tonight,” said Maud gravely.

  The old soldier was eyeing her, his expression ribald: she felt uneasy.

  “That’s just what he was explaining to me. There’s a terreplein in front of the post. He said we can pull in there to sleep.”

  “I’ll go tell the others.”

  “Wait, he’ll be upset if you don’t taste his plum brandy.”

  The Croat handed Maud a chipped glass he had filled almost to overflowing with a straw-colored liquid. She took it and sat down in one of the armchairs. The springs were completely gone and she felt as if she were going to tip over backwards; her knees were almost level with her chin.

  The two men had started talking again. The paramilitary who had come with Maud sat smoking on the windowsill. He was a very young boy; she thought he couldn’t be older than fifteen. He had pulled off his cap. His curly black hair grew low on his forehead. He was looking up at her from under his eyebrows. The officer, too, did not stop glancing over at her, with a salacious gleam in his eyes she’d noticed the moment she arrived. As for Marc, he seemed very much at ease. He was talking calmly and seemed to have a genuine liking for the paramilitaries.

  Maud took a few sips of the alcohol, trying not to cough, because she could see that the soldiers were anticipating her reaction and wanted nothing more than to burst out laughing. When they saw that she managed to swallow their rotgut without letting anything show, they seemed a bit disappointed, and the officer went on conversing in Russian.

  She might have swallowed the alcohol, but on her empty stomach it made her head spin. She could pick out words but didn’t understand them. Before long she was gazing at the scene in a trance. To avoid looking at the officer, she stared at Marc. He filled her with contradictory feelings. On the one hand his severity, his unflinching self-control, and his restrained violence made him difficult to like. But at the same time, there was something reassuring about him. In the dangerous world they were in now, he was the only one who naturally inspired trust, who gave her hope that they were in with a chance to make it through. He really was an unusual person. Maud remembered what Alex had said about his generosity. This was a quality she ordinarily associated with a certain gentle side, and yet Marc didn’t seem to have anything gentle about him. Where did his muscular physique come from, his coarse mannerisms, his Spartan habits? Had he cultivated them, or had life imposed them on him? Why had he become a soldier? Was it out of idealism, obligation, or in spite of himself? She got the impression that for all he was a soldier, with a soldier’s habits and appearance and ideas, his soul was not that of a soldier.

  These thoughts came into her mind one after the other but she realized she could not control them. The fact that they were speaking a foreign language around her enabled her to focus, rather, on their gestures and facial expressions. She observed Marc and tried to imagine what he’d been like as a child. What he’d inherited from his father, or his mother. She wondered where he got his blue-black hair and his slightly swarthy skin. She projected him into landscapes in North Africa, the Middle East, Greece, Latin America, and she tried to guess which setting would have been the most natural. Before long she was completely raving. Would he have dived with her from a height of thirty feet . . .

  Suddenly she gave a start. Someone was shaking her shoulder. And on waking she realized that the alcohol had knocked her out.

  Fortunately they went out almost at once to join the others, and she didn’t have to put up with the two paramilitaries’ ironic smiles for very long.

  The tire had been repaired and Vauthier was grumbling as he put the jack back under the chassis. The other two were inspecting the trucks, taking stock of the damage. One bullet had gone through the tarp on the first truck, and the second truck had been shot up front: the bullet had ricocheted on the hood of the engine and fortunately not caused any damage.

  And yet the atmosphere had changed. When Marc mentioned it, they had not taken seriously the possibility that their cargo might come under fire. Now they had to face facts: they had the proof that it was not an improbable conjecture. What would have happened if the explosives had been hit? Or if the diesel had caught fire, directly beneath the cargo? No one said anything, but they were all thinking about it. Lightheartedness gave way to fear.

  “We’re going to spend the night here,” said Marc. “There is no point in taking any additional risks tonight.”

  Lionel shot him a dark look.

  “Is there somewhere to pitch our tents?”

  “A bit higher up, outside their camp. We’ll leave the trucks here; they’ll be fine. We may as well avoid backing up in the dark and ending up in the ditch.”

  “Okay.”

  The fresh air had sobered Maud up and suddenly she panicked. She grabbed Lionel by the arm and took him over to one side.

  “Tell me one thing: do I have to sleep in the cab?”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Didn’t you see the expression on those guys’ faces, and the way they kept looking at me?”

  “Don’t worry. We’re here.”

  “Here where? Two hundred meters down the road?”

  “If you call us—”

  “If I call you once they’ve each had their turn? Thanks a lot! I’m not at all afraid now.”

  Marc and Alex had already set off for the camp, with their packs on their backs and their arms full with the tents and sleeping bags. Vauthier was following some distance behind.

  “What do you suggest? There’s only room for two in the tents.”

  “I’ll sleep with Alex and you stay in the cab.”

  “You’re going to sleep with Alex!”

  Lionel’s reaction was unexpectedly abrupt. Obviously, he couldn’t know that Alex was in love with someone else and thought about no one else. Maud figured she ought to tell him. But she didn’t. Alex certainly wouldn’t want everyone to know his life story. Besides, it wasn’t really the moment to start divulging intimate secrets.

  “He won’t touch me,” she said. “We know each other.”

  Lionel hesitated. Should he refuse, or suggest rather that she sleep with him? Her gaze was hard, and he was afraid of her reaction, whatever he said.

  “Do what you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  Maud was afraid, simply afraid, and what mattered to her was to be somewhere safe for the night. She climbed into the cab, found her things in the dark, haphazardly, then headed toward the tents, not turning back.

  Lionel sat down on the truck’s running board, ran his hand through his hair, and shook his head. There was only one thing to do: roll a big one.

  In the tent Maud talked with Alex for a long time, because neither one of them could fall asleep.

  He explained to her that in Kakanj Marc used to hang out with the Croatian soldiers who were in control of the enclave.

  “You mean the same ones who want to kill Bouba and her family?”

  “That’s the way things are in this war. It doesn’t always make sense.”

  “And yet the two of you are friends?”

  “Marc doesn’t have prejudices. He may seem rough and antisocial, but he gets along
easily with everyone. I mean, he inspires trust and respect. In Kakanj he was just as comfortable around the refugees as with the people who are keeping them prisoner. And he knows very well that I’m in love with a girl who lives in the ovens.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  Alex thought for a long time before replying.

  “You know, he behaves just the way the people in this country used to do before the war. They lived together, intermarried, went to school together.”

  “Yes, but since then, they’ve had ethnic cleansing and massacres. You can’t pretend nothing has happened. This isn’t Care Bear country.”

  Alex burst out laughing.

  “Marc isn’t like that at all! On the contrary, he’s very committed.”

  “Committed to whom?”

  “You can ask him about it if you want. I think he’ll tell you.”

  Clearly Alex didn’t want to say anything more. Maud didn’t insist. These scraps of information helped her understand why Marc had been well received by the officer at the post. He must have told him about his Croatian friends, and maybe they even had some shared acquaintances.

  Thanks to which, for once they had breakfast indoors, sheltered from the cold. But it was actually worse than usual. The Croatian officer got coffee for them, but he insisted they wash it down with big glassfuls of šljivovica. In the daylight, the guardhouse décor had lost some of the romantic allure the oil lamps had given it the night before. It was a sordid, stinking hole. The sofa and armchairs were covered with stains. On the wall, under the mangers full of hay, a portrait of John Paul II hung opposite posters of naked women splattered with fly droppings.

  The Croatian officer seemed to enjoy their company. He gave them fairly precise information about the region. Above all, he hinted that an offensive was being prepared in the vicinity of the next checkpoint, and that they would do better to skirt around the zone by taking a forest track that headed off to the right.