Marc, who hadn’t said a word until then, took Maud by the elbow.
“Come on, let’s get going. We’re of no use here.”
His voice was calm, and Maud, who was trembling with emotion, only seemed to recover her wits when she felt Marc’s firm hand around her arm. The others also had difficulty tearing themselves away from the sight.
“Safe travels, kids,” shouted Argelos, before returning to his macabre task, “and look after yourselves!”
Once she was back in the truck, Maud began talking. She described the scene, noted the details, commented on things in a way that she herself thought was stupid. But she simply could not stand the silence. She needed to let go of her emotion, to say any old thing, just to talk. She didn’t expect an answer. She scarcely noticed how Marc remained silent, jaw clenched, scowling at the road.
“But still,” she said at one point, “it was weird we’d had that conversation just before.”
Marc glanced over at her and shrugged. His scornful gesture shut her up. She said to herself that he was a soldier, after all, and as such, a man who had killed, too. And she began to despise him.
In the first truck, on the other hand, the mood was one of harmony and forgiveness. As Lionel and Alex were silent, Vauthier began telling them what he had found out while talking with the soldiers. As usual, his companions wanted him to shut up. But what they had just seen filled them with disgust at the thought of violence and hatred. Weren’t they too on the path to murder, even if it was on a much smaller scale, if they began to detest this man? Yes, he was unlikable and perhaps even suspect, and they thought he was vulgar and spineless, but was that any reason to respond to him in a violent manner? They remembered the fight with Marc and told themselves that that was how wars began. And after what they had just seen, they wanted to be better, to distance themselves from the savagery that was inside every man—and inside them, too. Of a silent, common accord, Lionel and Alex made an effort to listen to Vauthier and even to answer him.
Used to being snubbed, Vauthier was initially surprised by their sudden attentiveness. When he realized that his companions’ attitude had changed for good, without trying too hard to understand the reasons behind the change, he, too, adopted a less provocative tone, leaving off the irony and vulgarity he generally displayed in their presence. And before long, the three of them were able to carry on a normal conversation.
“The guys told me that ten kilometers from here,” said Vauthier, “there’s an old abandoned holiday camp. We could stop there for the night.”
“Is it on the main road or do we have to turn off?”
“Apparently we’ll go past a wooden barrier with a thing written in Cyrillic and a drawing of something like two kids holding hands. All we have to do is lift the barrier and go five hundred meters down a little track.”
“Is there a guard?”
“No, he was a Serb, and since we’re in a Muslim zone, he got the hell out.”
“It sounds like a good idea.”
The holiday camp was a long, low building in the middle of a clearing surrounded by tall trees. The rooms on the ground floor faced out onto a broad terrace enclosed by a wooden balustrade. The architecture was modern, dreary, and unimaginative. It was easy to picture the party leaders inaugurating the building, spouting hollow sentences extolling the glory of youth, sport, and socialism. Since then, civil war had come to round out that vision, bringing a final touch to the radiant tableau. The picture windows were shattered, all the furnishings had been pillaged. The looters had even decided to spend an evening round the campfire right there in the middle of the main hall, and the walls and ceiling were black with soot.
By the time they arrived the rain had stopped. A hesitant, shifty sunlight was slipping beneath the gray skirt of clouds, swept along by the evening wind. They went in through smashed French doors and visited the rooms, flashlight in hand. The camp was too big for the looters to ravage it from top to bottom; they had merely set an example with the main hall and other rooms in the front, and some of the bedrooms. But there were over a dozen rooms that still had their furniture, and their windowpanes intact. They went to get their sleeping bags in the truck and each of them settled into his or her own room, which was an undreamt-of luxury. Neither the water nor the electricity was working, but they had everything they needed in the way of light and to cook their meal. There was a source of freshwater in a stone fountain by the parking lot. They heated up an entire tub and shared it out for washing in the collective bathrooms. Vauthier confirmed his good disposition by agreeing to do the cooking again.
With night came the cold, damp air, which spread through the drafty rooms. Following the previous occupants’ example, they lit a fire in the main hall and ate dinner sitting around it on the floor underneath a cloud of smoke. Then they went to bed, trying not to think about what they had seen that day. And, above all, about the gangs of murderers scouring the region.
6
In the lulling warmth of the sleeping bag, Maud fell asleep almost immediately. She had disturbing nightmares she could not remember, but they woke her up. She looked at the time on the phosphorescent dial of her watch. It was 2:30 in the morning. The metal bed frame creaked as she tossed and turned. Finally, she decided to get up and go out onto the terrace to look at the night sky. A strange glow was coming from outside. When she opened the window, she saw it had snowed. There was a thin white layer over the ground and the trees, and it shone in the moonlight. Maud put a quilted jacket over her fleece and went out. It was the first time since arriving in this country that she had felt such a strong pull toward beauty. Snow, particularly when it was the first of the year, was like one of those fashion accessories that make the most ordinary outfit look elegant. Now, thanks to the snow, the gray woods, scrawny lawn, and concrete parking lot had acquired an unexpected charm.
Maud walked out to the balustrade. The railing was round and the snow did not adhere there, so she leaned on it and gazed at the landscape. She could not help but recall the dead bodies in the field. She wondered what they would look like under the snow, whether the snow could make them look somehow lovely, too. Her mind wandered and she lost all sense of time. How long had she been standing there when she saw a figure emerge from the shelter of the first row of trees and cross the pale lawn? She didn’t move, hoping the man hadn’t seen her. Because it was a man, with broad shoulders, walking slowly. Who could it be? Should she wake the others and give the alert? Suddenly she heard her name and recognized Marc’s voice as he called to her in a whisper.
“Is that you?” she said. “You can’t sleep, either?”
He was standing directly below her.
“No, I went for a walk along the road.”
“The sky has cleared; it’s beautiful.”
“From the road, you can see the mountains in the distance. Do you want to go for a walk?”
“Hang on.”
She looked for the stairs and found them opposite the parking lot. Marc was dressed fairly lightly. He had his hands rammed into his jeans pockets to keep warm.
“Do you want to go up and get a sweater?”
“No, I’ll be fine once we’re walking.”
They went through the woods and down a path where the snow had not stuck. Before long they came out on the road. They had to walk a little bit farther to get out of the trees and into a clear area. They were walking slowly side by side.
“You didn’t sleep?” she asked.
“No.”
“Those dead bodies . . . ”
“Yes.”
She was surprised he would admit to his emotion so frankly.
“But you must have seen this before.”
“Precisely.”
They had gone beyond the edge of the forest and before them there was rolling countryside as far as the eye could see. The hills sloped gradually to an invisible valley, then suddenly came up aga
inst the faraway barrier of snow-covered mountains.
“That’s why I left the army.”
“Because you couldn’t stand the killing?”
“Because I couldn’t stand just looking on and not doing anything.”
She was astonished. Not for a moment had she ever thought that there was anything anyone could do to prevent the horror. At best they could try afterward to help the victims. She had been conditioned by the ethos of humanitarian aid work more than she would have thought. Marc had just revealed to her another possibility, something she had not allowed herself to think about until then.
“And what do you want to do?”
He became animated.
“Did you see them? Did you see those UN guys, with their machine guns and their armored vehicles, picking up the bodies, playing nurse or gravedigger? I did that for a while, too. And then I had enough.”
“Argelos was categorical: they don’t have the means to go after the perpetrators. They’d have to arrest everybody. There are criminals everywhere, in this war.”
Marc looked at her, and even in the dark she could tell his gaze was angry and scornful. She was sorry she had contradicted him; she didn’t feel like arguing. She just wanted to understand, and above all, understand him.
“Explain, then,” she said.
In the wan light of the snowy fields, Marc’s face was stripped of its severity, and his features were painted with a shadowy palette. Only his mouth was clearly drawn. Maud had a sudden urge to put her lips there, to feel his breath, the trembling moisture of it, the life in him. She was someone who avoided desire in others, yet now she felt an unexpected dizziness, a whirling inside her, something she had so rarely yielded to. It had taken fear, fatigue, and horror to tunnel deep enough inside her for this sudden flame to catch, from an ember she hadn’t known was there.
“There are criminals on all sides,” said Marc in a dull voice, “and there are victims on all sides, that much is obvious. But we can’t do anything if we leave it at that.”
Maud was angry with herself for not being more interested in what he was saying, for being so focused on the troubling sensations he aroused in her. He seemed not to notice her. He continued holding onto his inner rage, staring straight ahead. But she could not take her eyes off his lips as he spoke.
“At some point,” he continued, “you have to define what is cause and what is consequence. Among all those who are fighting, there are some who have grabbed power in order to crush the others. A clique in Belgrade has confiscated the former Yugoslav Army, and the entire apparatus of state, and the others can only defend themselves.”
Maud had regained some of her self-control and she wanted to show that she was attentive.
“You mean it’s the Serbs who are responsible?”
“Not the Serbs as such. They, too, have their share of poor wretches who have been forced to fight, and honest, sensitive people who are victims. But the Serbs who have hijacked the Yugoslav state, the Serbian nationalists who have taken advantage of the country’s collapse to embark on their project of hegemony—yes, they’re responsible.”
It was all very abstract to her. She had always hated politics—the simplifications, the lies. But she liked the idea that there was a moment when things could have direction, and meaning. Whether he was right or wrong, Marc had taken sides, he refused to succumb to helplessness and resignation. That was the one thing she retained from what he had said. She thought again of the murdered women and children, and of the sterile indignation that had overwhelmed her at the sight of those bodies whose deaths would remain unpunished. Any injustice was better than that injustice.
They had stopped and she was standing right in front of him. Their faces were very close. She could feel his breath. She parted her lips and he took them.
He held her close; she ran her hands impatiently over his woolen shirt; she could feel his muscles. Their kisses were rough, avid, as if in this clinch they had found a way to express all the rebellion and passion, all the rage and despair which only moments before had been silently eating away at them.
“Come,” he murmured, standing back and taking her by the hand.
They retraced their own footprints in the snow, but their new footprints mingled because they were walking with their bodies held close together. They climbed the stairs to the terrace, bumping against each other, and then went up to the floor where there were big dormitories. There were no more obstacles to their desire, just the sensual resistance of their clothes: they pulled them off each other with clumsy, feverish gestures. The cold air in the dormitory, the rough cloth on the mattress, and the iron frame of the narrow bed merely enhanced their ardor. Their disorderly embrace was not unlike a struggle, but one where no one conquered or was conquered; the ultimate goal was to be as one body, set against the violence of the world outside.
Maud had never wanted to subject herself to this ordeal, because she regarded it as an unbearable humiliation. In all the boys who had ever approached her she had sensed the same impatience to gain power over her, by inflicting this wound upon her, and she had never felt enough love for any of them to submit to it. She was a virgin out of pride, out of defiance. But here, in this place she could not have given a name to, in the discomfort of a devastated house, she welcomed the intimate pain without fear, because she desired it intensely. And the man who was introducing it to her was like the instrument of a force that surpassed even him, a force with which she wanted to fill herself. She could feel the blood flowing from her, and she could picture how in daylight the gleaming stain would shine in these grim surroundings. They were sharing her blood the way they had shared the blood of the murdered women. But hers was the blood of vengeance and combat, of life and pleasure. She cried out.
They stopped for a moment and listened for any sounds from the floor below. But nothing disturbed the silence, and they returned to their lovemaking.
When at last they had no more strength, they lay entwined, but the cold returned, quickly chilling the sweat on their bodies. Marc covered her with his shirt and silently crept downstairs to get a sleeping bag. He opened it out and they spread it over themselves.
He stroked her wild hair and gazed at her face, where the glow from the snow through the picture window seemed to dust her with a fine bluish powder.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said.
And she believed him. When it came from others, she always rejected this compliment as an indiscreet judgment, but now, from him, she accepted it, and she wanted to be worthy of it, always.
She kissed him full on the mouth again. With her fingertips she caressed the tattoos on his arms, dreamily, those same tattoos that had initially inspired her disgust but which now, in the semidarkness, looked like the damask surface of a priceless fabric.
At one point he leaned on one elbow and looked at her, his expression grave.
“You have to know.”
“Know what?”
For an instant she thought he was going to tell her about some irrevocable commitment that would make their love impossible, and she was afraid. But he had gone back to his obsession, to his struggle.
“In the trucks—”
“Yes?”
“I didn’t put explosives for construction.”
“No? What did you put, then?”
“Fifteen kilos of military explosives. Real ones, with detonators. Enough materiel to blow up a bridge a hundred meters long.”
She didn’t want him to speak to her of love. This was their love: shared secrets, danger, combat. He had the grave expression of a serious child as he waited for her response. She looked at him without saying anything. He saw a smile pinned on her face, and he was worried he might not understand the meaning of it.
At that moment, she had a vision of everything. She understood that the most important thing for him was this plan, his mad dreams, the ra
ge that inhabited him, while she did not know where it came from. All the rest, even love, would come after. It was enough to fill a person with despair, and yet she sensed he liked it that way. She slowly reached out one arm and moved a lock of his hair to one side; it was heavy with sweat, falling over his brow.
“I love you,” she said.
He kissed her and their desire returned.
They were woken by sooty dawn, filtered through gray trees the wind had stripped of snow. They hurried back to their rooms to lie in their own beds, in their own cold sleeping bags. The others were still asleep and did not notice.
Only Vauthier, lying on his back, parted his lids when Marc walked past the open door of his room. Their eyes met in the gloom.
III
PURSUIT
1
For several days Marc had been thinking of leaving the convoy. He was convinced Vauthier knew more than he let on, and that he was about to act on his desire for revenge. The next evening he suggested to Maud that they should run away.
“Run away? But how?”
“In our truck.”
“They’ll follow us.”
“Not if we make a good plan.”
It was a fairly terrifying proposal. Running away would mean severing all ties with the association and subscribing to a logic of theft and war. There would be no going back. But wasn’t this the ineluctable consequence of having stowed explosives on the truck? Events were unfolding too quickly for Maud to think things through properly. There had been the massacre, and then this unexpected, intense night, and now, the prospect of flight. It all seemed to be obeying some powerful, implacable mechanism that she could not grasp.
“And what about Alex?”
“He doesn’t know. He still thinks I put his construction explosives in the load.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“No.”
Maud was fairly tempted by the idea of running away. But she didn’t like leaving Alex behind.
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