by Pat Barker
What was missing was the one box he hadn’t come back to label: Afghanistan, 2002.
He heard a man’s voice behind him speaking to Kate. Then she called from the door: ‘I’m just going across to the studio. I won’t be a minute.’
He pulled out the file on Bosnia and looked through some of the prints, recognizing places and people. A chandelier in a devastated ballroom; an old Serbian woman surrounded by icons, scraps of food on the table in front of her; a queue of women and children waiting their turn at the tap; an old Muslim woman, tottering down the street with a milk bottle full of water, the only container she was strong enough to carry; and then, without warning, there she was: the girl in the stairwell.
He gaped at the print, unable to understand why it was there. Obviously Ben had gone back the next morning, early, before the police arrived, to get this photograph. He’d restored her skirt to its original position, up round her waist. It was shocking. Stephen was shocked on her behalf to see her exposed like this, though, ethically, Ben had done nothing wrong. He hadn’t staged the photograph. He’d simply restored the corpse to its original state. And yet it was difficult not to feel that the girl, spreadeagled like that, had been violated twice.
Quickly, he replaced the photographs and went out into the yard.
The long shadows cast by the house and trees were creating an advance guard of deep frost. Chickens, stepping out cautiously on their cracked yellow feet, were pecking about on the frozen ground, where wisps of straw shone like gold. The cock looked up at him with a bright amber eye.
Kate came across the yard, smiling. ‘Would you like to see the ones I had framed? Have you got time?’
Her studio was a taller building on the third side of the farmyard. A narrow door led into a small lobby used to store raw materials: bags of plaster, bales of hessian, yellowing piles of old newspapers. Through another door into a vast barn, one wall made entirely of glass. Outside darkness was falling – only the crests of the hills still caught a glint of light.
The studio was heated by a wood-burning stove whose flames flickered all over the dim interior. Kate switched on the lights. In the centre, partly obscured by scaffolding, was a huge, crudely carved male figure.
‘That’s it,’ Kate said sighing, hands pressed hard into the small of her back, like a peasant woman who’s been doing hard physical work all day. He’d noticed her hands over lunch. They were certainly not glamorous. Thick veins, rough skin, splitting nails – you’d expect to see hands like hers on a building site.
Clustered in the corner was a group of white plaster figures, striding out. Extraordinary figures: frightened and frightening.
Kate, meanwhile, had walked over to the far corner where there was a screen displaying some of Ben’s photographs. He joined her there and glanced across them. As she’d said, these were mainly from the last trip to Afghanistan. One showed a group of boys on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, ragged, thin, peering out at the camera from behind a fence, and flashing mirrors into the sun to blind the photographer. A flash of light had whited out the face of the boy holding the glass, so in a narrow technical sense the picture was a failure. Further along, a man’s face, distorted with anger, one hand half covering the lens. Another was of an execution. A man on his knees staring up at the men who are preparing to kill him. But Ben had included his own shadow in the shot, reaching out across the dusty road. The shadow says I’m here. I’m holding a camera and that fact will determine what happens next. In the next shot the man lies dead in the road, and the shadow of the photographer, the shadow of a man with a deformed head, has moved closer.
This wasn’t the first execution recorded on film, nor even the first to be staged specially for the camera, but normally the photographer’s presence and its impact on events is not acknowledged. Here Ben had exploded the convention.
‘I’d like to use those,’ Stephen said. He was thinking that Ben might almost have taken them for the book.
‘They were sent back after…’
Right at the bottom left-hand corner he saw another photograph, this time of Soviet tanks, disused, rotting, corroded with rust. This mass of military debris filled most of the frame, so that from the viewer’s angle they seemed to be a huge wave about to break. Behind them was a small white sun, no bigger than a golf ball, veiled in mist. No people. Hardware left behind after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan: the last war. But the composition was so powerful it transcended the limits of a particular time and place, and became a Dies Irae. A vision of the world as it would be after the last human being had left, forgetting to turn out the light.
‘That’s a great photograph,’ he said, knowing he would have to find a way to use it.
‘Yes.’ She was struggling with tears again, not looking at it. He wondered if she knew it had been taken seconds before Ben died.
All this time he’d been aware of the plaster figures on the edge of his vision, and when he turned round he felt compelled to count them again. No, still seven. They hadn’t been breeding while his back was turned. He remembered reading that Arctic explorers sometimes suffer from the delusion that there is one more person present on the trek than can actually be counted. He couldn’t see any reason why that would apply here, unless the overwhelming whiteness of the room was a factor.
Everything was white, even the floor. During the day the northern light would bounce off every surface, leaving the room, as far as possible, shadowless. Perhaps that was enough to create a mild form of sensory deprivation. He wondered if Kate was aware of it, whether she too suffered from a compulsion to count the figures.
‘Would it be all right if I came over sometime and looked through the prints?’
She nodded at once. ‘Good idea.’
She sounded cheerful, as if the prospect of somebody working in Ben’s room revitalized her. This had been so much a place where two people lived, worked, talked, squabbled, drank, cooked, made love. And yet Ben had been away for six weeks at a time. She must be used to being alone.
The place was making him uneasy. He went to the window and looked down at the pond, where the last light of evening clung to the water. The overhead lights were reflected in the glass, making him feel vulnerable to the outside world, to the dark hillside. He turned and saw a man standing in the doorway. He was wearing a dark coat and had come in so quietly that he might have been there for a while before Stephen noticed him.
Kate followed the direction of his gaze. ‘Oh, come in, Peter. This is Stephen Sharkey. A friend of Ben.’
Peter was tall, good-looking, with pale, watchful eyes. He nodded to Stephen.
‘I’ve got the hessian, but they only had the really thin stuff. I said I’d take a roll and ask you.’
‘I’ll have a look.’
Stephen and Peter were left alone in the cavernous interior, surrounded by the white figures.
‘So you’re Kate’s assistant.’
‘Yes, I do the lifting. It’s just a temporary job.’
‘I can’t imagine how it happens. I mean, how does that’ – he pointed towards the huge, plaster figure – ‘turn into bronze?’
Peter smiled. ‘The lost-wax method. Just don’t ask me what it is.’
‘You’re not a budding artist, then?’
‘No, I just do odd jobs. Gardening, mainly.’
Kate came back. ‘That’s fine. I don’t mind it being thin as long as the weave’s coarse enough. We could do with another two bales.’
‘Do you want me to get them now?’
‘If there’s time.’
‘No problem.’
He raised his hand to Stephen and went out. A moment later they heard the cough and sputter of an engine.
Kate smiled. ‘I don’t know how he keeps that thing on the road.’
She sounded preoccupied, gazing up at the big figure. Stephen took the hint and went back to the photographs, but continued to watch her out of the corner of his eye. Now that she was absorbed in her work, he felt
he was seeing her clearly for the first time. Not an easy woman to get to know. The rather jolly outgoing manner disguised a formidable inner reserve. If he’d met her at the church fête, or organizing a jumble sale, or whatever women like her – he meant women with that rather clipped, upper-class accent – found to do in the country, he wouldn’t have attributed very much to her in the way of an inner life. Yet obviously she had, and not a comfortable one either. She’d got the chisel out now and was trying to reshape part of the upper thigh, but almost at once she stopped, grimacing with pain. ‘Bugger it.’
The sound of her own voice seemed to remind her she was not alone. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said, with a slight, embarrassed laugh. ‘I’m too tired.’
‘It’s time I was off anyway. I’ll give you a ring, shall I, to arrange when I can come over?’
‘Any time. I’m always here.’
They walked together to the door.
‘What’s Peter’s other name?’
‘Wingrave.’
‘He’s very striking-looking.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘You didn’t like him.’
He shook his head. ‘I haven’t seen enough of him.’
It was acute of her to detect the reserve he’d felt on meeting Peter, though it wasn’t a matter of dislike. He hadn’t asked himself whether he liked him or not – though remembering the sudden, warm smile he rather thought he had – but he sensed instability. He’d been in so many dangerous places he’d learnt to decide on the spot whom he could trust, and he wouldn’t have wanted Peter watching his back.
‘It’ll be nice having somebody using Ben’s room,’ she said, as they walked out into the yard.
‘You don’t use it?’
‘No, I just leave it locked up.’ A twist of the dry lips. ‘Sometimes I think he’s in there, you see, working, and it’s quite a soothing feeling. I’m in the studio, he’s over there, and in a few minutes we’re going to meet and have a drink. And as long as I think that, I can keep going.’ A little self-conscious laugh. ‘I know it’s not healthy.’
‘People survive whichever way they can. I’m quite sure a lot of the things I do aren’t healthy.’ She looked so sad standing there that once again he had the urge to reach out and touch her. Instead he said, ‘I don’t know if Ben mentioned it, but my marriage broke up.’
‘He did. I’m sorry.’
He nodded, and they walked to the car. This time they shook hands, which he found rather touching, a sign that they were groping their way into their own relationship, one that didn’t depend entirely on knowing Ben.
‘See you,’ he said, slipping into the driving seat.
He saw her in his mirror, waving, and then she turned and walked back into the house.
Thirteen
Stephen spent the second week of February at The Hague, covering the Milosevic trial at the war-crimes tribunal.
Whole days dragged past while he stared at Milosevic through the bullet-proof glass that divided the exdictator from the public gallery. There was a flaw in the glass, and, as Stephen moved his head from side to side, the pudgy, truculent features rippled and reformed like a reflection on water.
Milosevic also appeared on a small wall-mounted screen to Stephen’s right, much of the time in brutal close-up. You could see the small patch of shaving rash he’d developed on the left side of his chin. Screen, reality, screen, reality, Stephen switched between the two, the screen image always more informative and in one sense more accurate, since it lacked the distortion of that flaw in the glass.
At intervals the drone of speeches and translations was interrupted as a photograph was displayed on the screens, or a short video recording played. A young, brown-haired, vigorous Milosevic, surrounded by security guards, made an impassioned speech. The grey-haired old man in the dock stared at his younger self and smiled a little ruefully, and for a moment a murmur of fellow feeling ran along the public benches. Everybody had done that. Everybody had been confronted unexpectedly by a younger version of themselves and had thought, My God, where did it all go?
But then the screens filled with other images and there were no more smiles.
‘This,’ said the prosecuting counsel, ‘is a corpse exhumed from a mass grave in Kosovo.’
The decomposing head of a young man appeared on the screen, blindfolded, his mouth open in what was difficult not to identify as a scream. It might well have been a scream. Some of the men had been castrated before they died. Blindfolded, not because he might identify his tormentors – they were going to kill him anyway – but because it’s easier to torture a man whose eyes you can’t see.
‘And this,’ said Milosevic the next day, embarking with some enthusiasm on a gruesome game of Snap, ‘is the severed head of a Serbian child lying on a pavement in Belgrade.’
You had to take the child’s nationality on trust, though it might equally well have been the head of a Bosnian child lying in the market place in Sarajevo. It wouldn’t be the first time the dead had been made to work overtime, appearing as victims in the propaganda of both sides.
The child’s eyes stared up from the pavement. People shuffled their papers, coughed, turned pens round and round in their fingers, ashamed of their inability to go on feeling. Then the child vanished and was replaced by carbonized corpses in a railway carriage, baked faces set in lipless grins, leaning towards the windows as if waving goodbye to friends and family on the platform.
None of this had been visible at the time. Not even to the pilots who dropped the bombs, still less to the audience watching Pentagon briefings on television in their living rooms. On the screen set up in the briefing room, and on the television screens, puffs of brown smoke appeared underneath the cross-hairs of the precision sights. Doubly screened from reality, the audience watched, yawned, scratched and finally switched channels. Who could blame them? War had gone back to being sepia tinted. Sanitized. Nothing as vulgar as blood was ever allowed to appear.
And all the while, under the little spurts of brown dust, this. A child torn to pieces. Human bodies baked like dog turds in the sun.
In the bar that evening, Stephen glanced up from his newspaper and saw his old friend Ian Brodie, wearing his trademark black trench, come in through the swing doors – a silhouette as unmistakable as a stealth bomber’s. Stephen jumped up, greeted him, offered him a drink, and got two pints from the bar while Ian took off his coat.
They managed to find a small, relatively quiet table in the corner. On the sofa directly opposite a Serbian politician was being interviewed on camera. From the next table, where a young man was editing another interview, came the chipmunk chattering of voices on fast-rewind. Stephen looked round, wondering if he missed all this. How much he missed it.
Ian sat down, his bullet head covered with hair so thin it looked like gosling down, bringing a smell of clean air in on his clothes. They spent the next hour swopping gossip: who was here and for how long. Pity the poor sods who’d landed this as a long-term assignment, Ian said, because it was going to run and run. ‘Slobo’ll die of old age or a stroke,’ he said, ‘before we get a verdict.’
They all called him Slobo – it sounded affectionate but wasn’t.
‘At least they’ve nailed the sod,’ Stephen said.
‘Victors’ justice.’
‘Is it?’
A gleeful cackle. ‘Well, he sure as hell wouldn’t be here if he’d won.’
‘Yeah, OK. Yeah, I know. But it still matters that he’s here. Raison d’état? No, sorry, mate, you’re a crook.’ Stephen leant forward. ‘I love it.’
The bar was filling up. Stephen could put a name to everybody in the room. One or two had that curiously rubbery look of people seen mainly on television. Others were old friends. It was a travelling village.
‘You know I’ve resigned?’
‘Yeah. Finishing a book? How’s it going?’
‘Slowly. It’s taking a bit longer than I thought it would.’
‘They always do.
But you’ll come back?’
‘I don’t know.’
Ian raised a yellow-palmed hand – somewhere on the long road from Glasgow to Wapping he’d picked up the old soldier’s habit of smoking with a fag concealed in his fist – to attract the barman’s attention. ‘Why’s that?’
‘I’ve had enough.’
‘Couldn’t you just take a year off?’
‘No, I think it’s decision time. I’m forty this year. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trotting off to other people’s wars till I’m only fit for the knackers’ yard.’
Ian bent to lick the head off his pint with a grey and felted tongue. ‘Like me, you mean?’
Stephen said awkwardly, ‘You know I don’t.’
They left it there. Ian began reminiscing about the time they’d spent in Sarajevo during the siege. Stephen ordered another round of drinks. They laughed a lot, drank a lot and ended up talking about Ben.
‘I saw him,’ Stephen said, ‘in London the day before he left. I was going out a week later. He had a bad feeling about it. Almost a premonition. I’ve gone over that conversation so many times – I wish I’d said, “Look, if it doesn’t feel right, don’t go. Let somebody else go.” Because if you’ve been in the game as long as he had you do develop an instinct.’
‘Definitely.’
‘You know that little amulet thing he used to wear? He kept fiddling with it. The catch was loose and he wasn’t going to have time to get it mended. And that really bothered him.’
Ian nodded. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if you had said something. He’d have gone anyway.’
‘Yes, I know. But I still wish I’d said it.’
Around midnight, still to all outward appearances sober, Ian glided to the door, keeping his head very still, like a bride who fears her tiara may not make it down the aisle.