Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  It came from Sarajevo, but still lacked something. The Sarajevo system had begun with the men: the domesticated type out buying bread, sausage, if there was any, or the morning newspaper, or a toy. But the women eventually learnt not to go to their husbands, dying in the sun. There would be children to look after. Recklessness in these circumstances was selfishness. One was just one, and often none at all, as the men kept to the safe places. So they had switched to the women for the first, the maiming shot. What Slav, Orthodox, Catholic, or Muslim would not go to his woman, lying writhing in the street, a bullet in her thigh, or shoulder? ‘No, no,’ they would cry, craning back across the cobbles, to the dim shapes crouching beyond, ‘please don’t come, please don’t come.’ But of course they would come, and one would become two. And, naturally, two – a refinement was to also avoid killing the husband with the first shot – was an even bigger draw than one. Which brother, or son, or uncle, or friend could leave two they loved dying out on the cobbles, blood working its way slowly, methodically between the stones? And so two had a very good chance of becoming three. Perhaps then evening would come, and three would still be three.

  When the idea reached Mostar it was becoming a little stale. And the hate of Mostar, the hatred of Croat for Muslim and Muslim for Croat, craved piquancy just as much as the other hatreds to the West and North and East.

  The Mostar variation used, of course, a child. Begin with a child; take the mother; take the father. Always at least three, easy as shooting pigs in a yard. And the child would still be there, bleating like a lamb to draw more lions. Skill and care were needed with the child. An adult shot in the gut could live for three hours. Could, but only a fool would risk it. Thigh or shoulder, much safer. And no one runs away when they are shot in the thigh or the shoulder. You lie down and you cry like a baby and eventually you die from shock and blood loss. But a child shot in the thigh or the shoulder might die very quickly. Ten minutes. Not long enough. True, you might pick someone up making a dash just to see, but the percentages weren’t in it. What you wanted was a shot to the ankle. Asking a lot at a thousand yards. Asking too much, many said. Why are we making sparks, referring to the microsecond of brilliance when the bullet hit the cobble, said one wit, when we should be making widows? But it was an investment, said others. One makes two makes three makes four makes five. Capitalism! Remember, we’re capitalists now! Speculate to accumulate!

  Training was thought to be the key, but that thought was wrong. You could train a farmer, or a man who worked a lathe, to be a good shot. It took a month, and used up a lot of bullets, but at the end of that month, he could hit a cow’s head set up on a stake three hundred yards away seven times out of ten. But an ankle? A child’s ankle? A child’s ankle at a thousand yards? Training couldn’t do that. Something inside made the man or the boy who could do that. Something that made him calm and still, and able to feel the beauty of the moment, and so gentle with his touch that he could move the hair from the face of his sleeping lover without waking her.

  The boys. It was always the boys. They would go to the streets, to the junctions that they knew were dangerous, overlooked by the ugly high tower blocks, or dark, impenetrable tenements. And they would run. The joy of it was to hear the pretty sound of the bullet as it glanced off the road behind them. They knew that it would mean a twisted ear from their mothers. Worse, much worse, from their fathers; those that had them still. A thick leather belt, and how many cracks on the bare arse? Five? Yeah, in your dreams. Ten? If you’re lucky. And there was always a busybody to tell. Some old bitch in black, or a kid sister, trying to buy herself a favour, or the fucking old station master, with nothing better to do now there were no trams.

  He had new trainers. They’d come from Germany. He had an uncle there and God knows how, but a parcel had got through. Trainers had always been totemic in Mostar. Only the best athletes, on the books of one of the state athletics bodies, when such things still existed, would have decent trainers. Even the crap ones made in East Germany or Czechoslovakia, from plastic, and not even good plastic, but shitty plastic, lumpy and sweaty, were valued here, in poor Mostar. But oh, a pair of Adidas, or Nike, or Puma! Even the simple recitation of the names was enough to get a shudder, like a milting stickleback down in the Neretva, from any boy. And that was before the fighting. Now boys wore their brother’s old shoes, or their father’s, or sometimes no shoes at all.

  If truth were told he hadn’t liked the trainers. They were too flashy: they tried too hard. Too many colours, too many stripes. The sole had a pointlessly thick heel of sponge for extra bounce. He liked a simpler shoe, one that just said, yeah, I can run, not look at me, I cost more than you earn in a month. But the other boys didn’t care about that. They all wanted to touch them, smell them, even taste them. One said he’d let him feel his sister’s tits in exchange for a go. Others offered food, cigarettes, vodka. But he was thirteen and didn’t smoke and didn’t drink and still thought (but only just) that there was something effeminate about wanting to be near girls and kissing them and all the rest of it.

  It was to quieten the other boys down that he agreed to do it. The traffic lights were long dead: the power cut off, the lights shot out for practice. But they provided a focus for sport. Run the lights, sixty metres, one side to the other. Ten seconds, perhaps, for a quick boy, with time to gather speed in the cover of the eastern approach.

  The block that overlooked it from across the river was pitted with shell marks and bullet holes. Its windows were almost all gone on this side. But it was where the best of them lay and waited. How many? Three or four marksmen, perhaps, with their scoped, single-shot sniper rifles. Another twenty or thirty in support, casually sitting around and smoking, playing cards, listening to the radio, their Kalashnikovs and heavy machine guns balanced against the walls and concrete pillars. A handful of families still lived in the rooms facing away from the river.

  Midday, they thought, was a good time to do it. A proper challenge. The sun was high and fierce, the shadows short. There were four of them. One of the other boys made him take a gulp from a bottle of aquavit. Another stuck a useless cigarette behind his ear, for later. He hadn’t worn the trainers on the walk there, just his old boots. Now he pulled them on, drawing the intricately tied laces tight. And he had to admit they felt good. Soft, and yet they held the foot properly, supported the arch. He couldn’t hear what the others were saying. He was quite calm, but knew he would never do this again. He had grown out of the game. Whatever his father said, it would soon be time to take a place in the line, defending his family, his people.

  A standing start. He had always been fast out of the blocks. It might add a second to the time, but what was a second? He squatted down, to some jeers: look at him, you’d think it was the Olympics. Those trainers have gone to his head. Joining in the joke, he asked for a starting pistol, for one of the boys to shout bang.

  Bang.

  There were people around, further down the street. At the shout and the laughter they looked. Madness. But boys will be boys. And look at that one run across the junction, through the old lights. Long legged, starting low, now growing. Good-looking boy, too. And see those shoes of his. Cost a pretty penny.

  He was flying now. Five metres. Ten. Fifteen. He took his first breath. Almost into the shelter of the buildings there.

  It wasn’t the shout of ‘bang’ that made the sniper concentrate. He’d been concentrating all the time. He was dry, though the men around him sweated in the heat. His pattern was five minutes looking through the sight, five minutes gazing above it, for a wider view.

  The trainers caught his eye.

  The boy was a little old for the technique. He thought about nailing him in the chest. Or a head shot. The deliberation cost him two seconds. No, those trainers were too tempting. He tracked the runner, and smoothly moved the cross hairs down the slender torso, down the moving line of the thigh to the knee; down further to the ankle. A breath. Squeeze. A breath. Look over the sight.


  He didn’t hear the shot. The shooter was too far away. At first he thought, with a curse, that he’d tripped, that something had caught his foot. He was spread-eagled on the road, looking and feeling ungainly. The boys would laugh, spoiling everything. He tried to get up, but his leg wouldn’t move. And then, after a heartbeat, the pain. He looked down. He saw that his trainer had come off. Wildly, he searched around, and was relieved to see it a metre away. Thank God. He looked back to his foot. It was all wrong. The bottom of his trouser leg was bloody and torn. His mother would kill him for that. They were his best jeans. And his foot, his ankle. Just a mess. Flappy bits of skin. Some jagged white bone, so white, so clean. He tried to drag himself towards the buildings, ten metres away. He was so heavy, so tired. And it hurt so much. And then the unmistakable sound of a bullet hitting the road centimetres in front of his face. Lie still, it said. He lay still.

  It was very quiet now. He could hear the fast-flowing river, almost pick out the sounds of individual eddies and little cataracts. He’d played there so often. They all had. Croat kids, Serb kids, Muslim kids. Just kids, then. No one knew or cared what you were. What counted was who dared swim across, or who could piss furthest into the stream.

  How long did he lie there? His perception of time kept stretching and contracting, so it could have been days or seconds. The road was warm against his face, but his body felt cold. There was a quick pattering of feet. One of his friends was beside him, lying flat. Insane courage, he thought. Can you move? the boy asked. No. Go away. They’ll kill you. Come on, try. Go away, please go away. They’ve gone for your family. Come on, please try. I can’t. Go away. The other boy was crying. Run now. Before they shoot you. But he knew it was already too late; the surprising thing was that they hadn’t nailed him already. And then the boy was away, scampering, zigzagging furiously. Waste of time. They’d be up there in the flats, laughing about it, three scopes on him. More bait. But no. He was safe. Why?

  Perhaps, he thought, the war is over. He remembered his father telling him about when the Herzegovina Croats had tried to get more independence back in the early eighties under Tito. The Marshal, he’d said, came down and knocked heads together. Compromised with those who were prepared to compromise, chucked out the ones who weren’t. That was his way. That was how Yugoslavia had stayed together, no fighting, no real trouble. Compromise, allow self-determination and autonomy within the federal structure, but back it up with an iron fist. But the Marshal was dead. And the world he made, putting two fingers up to East and West, was dead with him.

  No one could stop his mother. She ran all the way from their flat to the junction. A mile, in ill-fitting sandals and her housework clothes. She was always so careful about how she looked when she went out. He was proud of her. Some of the boys said they thought she wasn’t bad for an old lady. He had a fight with one boy who said he’d fuck her if she asked nicely and gave him cake. She ran, and she lost one of the sandals, and so when she reached him she also had one bare foot. She hunched her body over him, protecting him from the sun, from the bullets, from the war.

  They all belonged to the marksman who tagged the first one: that was the rule. Sure, if things got hairy, or if circumstances demanded it, then anyone could join in, but the basic law was that they were yours. He’d let the other kid go because he wanted the family there. Could there also have been something in him that admired the courage of the little one, so scrawny, yet prepared to dash out like that, right under his nose? Or did he know him, from before? No. Nothing cluttered his thinking. He was pure, pellucid.

  The bullet entered the mother at the collarbone. It travelled down through her body, through heart, lungs, intestine, liver, bladder; slowed and stopped somewhere near the base of her spine. She was dead before her full weight landed on her son.

  His father got there minutes later, with two of his friends from the factory. He was a strong man, broad across the chest. He’d refused to fight. He blamed the trouble on the local bigwigs who wanted to grab as much power as they could from the crumbling wreck of Yugoslavia. They were all the same: all crooks and con men. He wouldn’t join the jackals in tearing apart the carcass. They’d tried to bully and scare him into joining the militia, even threatened his family. He’d nearly killed one of them with a wrench, and after that they didn’t bother him.

  He could see that his wife was dead. The boy had rolled her off him and was stroking her hair. He knew that if he went out there he had very little chance of getting back. He was the real prize: a man, not that slender boy, or the woman. It was two o’clock now. Six hours till it was dark. The boy might be dead by then as well. He turned his back on the scene.

  Ten minutes later he returned with the Lada. It belonged to a neighbour. He’d explained what the situation was and the neighbour handed him the keys without question. There was no point driving it out into the junction. If the sniper didn’t get him, they’d machine gun it, or hit it with one of the 40mm anti-aircraft cannon they had up there. That’d make a mess of the Lada, hunk of crap that it was. Not even Yugoslav crap, but Russian crap.

  He got the men to push it from the side street, building up enough momentum to reach the boy and the woman, with him running crouched behind it. There was a slight incline there, and it should be enough to keep the car moving. His plan was to grab the boy, staying behind the car, and carry on until they reached the other side of the street. The other men had told him, once, not to do it. He said he would, and that was that. They all knew that they’d do the same, in his situation, and he knew that he would have tried to talk them out of it.

  He slipped the brake and they all pushed, eight of them now. Soon they were running flat out. A metre before the safety of the buildings gave way to the lethal space, they gave one last push. He tried to steer through the open door, but it was tricky with the car going so quickly. The last thing he wanted was to roll into the two figures, lying together, one dead, one alive. The police would call it a road accident and have him for dangerous driving.

  It was going well. They were lined up just right. He’d only have a second to swoop and pick up the boy; but he was strong and the child weighed nothing. He didn’t think about his wife, the woman he’d loved for twenty years, loved through the years of passion and fury, through the years of hardship and toil, with her nagging him about his dirty boots and getting drunk. He’d had his chances with other women, and yes, he’d wanted them, but the thought of her rage, and worse, her sorrow, had always stopped him, kept him clean. Well now her toil and fury and rage and sorrow were all gone. But the boy lived, and the boy must go on living.

  He saw his father running, crouched low behind the boxy Russian car. He’d always known he would come, always knew he, the famous joker, would think of a trick. He’s here, Mum, he said, he’s here. He’s come for us. It’s all right now, it’s all right. No need to cry.

  The car was level, its bald tyres hissing on the tarmac. Almost without pausing, he scooped his great strong arm under the boy, and pulled him close. He didn’t look at his wife. He looked straight ahead to where the buildings were casting their protecting shadows.

  The boy’s eyes changed when he saw that they were leaving his mother behind. Dad, he whispered. There’s Mum. You’ve forgotten Mum. Don’t leave Mum. The man looked at his son. No, of course he couldn’t leave Mum behind. He turned and sprang back, still holding the boy. He reached out and grabbed his wife by the hand: he would run dragging her behind him. It would be hard but he could do it. As he began to move again, the last few inches of the car’s boot slid beyond him. He would catch up with it in two strides. He stood taller to move more quickly, dragging the woman, carrying the boy, and the one waiting, the one calm and nerveless at the window, shot him in the head.

  Of course no one would go out there now. No choice but to wait for darkness. But the men who had seen, and the men who had heard about, the incident decided that it would not happen again: not from that block of flats. The assault began two days later. They got some
old artillery pieces from somewhere, Second World War stuff, from the look of it, with just a few shells, and half of them didn’t explode. But it was enough to give them courage. A hundred men stormed the block. Twelve died on the flat ground before they reached it, falling and spinning like seeds from a great tree. Five more died as they worked their way up the floors, grenading each room. Any man taken alive was castrated and then disembowelled, left to froth and moan on the floor. They found two women and five children. They slit the children’s throats in front of the mothers and then raped the women. It was joyless work; there was no frenzy. The hatred burned cold and deep. Every man there felt the justice of this. When they had finished, the women were given a bullet in the head out of charity for what had been done, and what might still be done.

  NINETEEN

  The Sadness of Everything

  The old woman’s story ended. It had taken an hour to tell, with several digressions on subjects ranging from how long to soak kidney beans to the way to make a child look happy as it lies grey and bloodless in a coffin, its throat slit, or its jaw shot away.

  Alice closed her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘So the boy, the one who was shot in the leg, that was Matija. And his mother and his father. To see them die like that. The horror of it is … beyond me.’

  The woman froze suddenly.

  ‘Shot? Are you mad?’ She stood up. ‘My Matija was never shot. There was no bullet swift enough to catch him.’

  The burning passion that Alice had seen no longer looked like rage. It now seemed, perhaps it had always been, a kind of joy.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Alice, cowering now, as the fierce old woman stood over her.

  ‘Don’t understand? Don’t understand? My boy, my Matija, he was the best of all of them. He was the one they all wanted to be. He was the finest shooter. He was the most calm, the most serene. He killed more Croat dogs than any man, and he was only a boy.’