Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil

by Douglas Hurd

  TEN MINUTES TO TURN THE DEVIL

  Douglas Hurd

  To the memory of Andrew Osmond

  Contents

  Preface

  1 The Summer House

  2 Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil

  3 A Suitcase Between Friends

  4 Seize the Day

  5 Roaring After Their Prey

  6 Fog of Peace

  7 Sea Lion

  8 Helter Skelter

  9 Warrior

  10 Home to Vukovar

  A Note on the Author

  Preface

  Disraeli finished a full length novel when he was Prime Minister. Since then, for any Cabinet Minister the practice, if not actually forbidden, has become impracticable. But for the junior ranks of ministers the impossibility need not be absolute. The easiest episode of my sixteen years as a minister was certainly the first, when I served for four years as a Minister of State in the Foreign Office under Peter Carrington and then Francis Pym. We Ministers of State were not exactly idle. We sped about the world, explaining, exploring, persuading, listening. But we had virtually no legislation to put through the Commons, and when any matter in our patch reached a certain level of difficulty it could be cheerfully thrust upwards for the Foreign Secretary to handle. Moreover I had in Stephen Lamport a Private Secretary of easy disposition and a literary bent. Together we managed to write a novel, The Palace of Enchantment, and coax it through the watchful examination of our Permanent Secretary. Long distance trains and planes are good forcing ground for a novel, particularly if one has a comfortable seat, a glass of wine and a congenial companion.

  After 1983 the clouds thickened as I reached the upper slopes of the political mountain. Journeys became shorter and more intense, the red boxes multiplied. There was never any possibility of writing another full novel until I started The Shape of Ice after my resignation from the Foreign Office in 1995. But there remained the itch to write something other than minutes and speeches. During these years I began to hatch the short stories published here. The habit has persisted to the present day. Some of these tales are new. Others have appeared in newspapers, but few papers or magazines nowadays find space for short stories of the length which comes naturally to me.

  Short stories, or at least my short stories, tend to originate in a particular episode experienced in a particular place. That episode and place are then emptied of their real-life characters and re-peopled by characters of the imagination, with the events adapted as necessary to fit the new population.

  Thus we came to know from genial dinner parties over a dozen summers the hilltop eyrie that Ian and Caroline Gilmour inhabit above a hidden valley of Tuscany beyond Lucca. The dinner on the open terrace, always enlivened by the sparring of old friends, was preceded and succeeded by moments of acute danger and fear, as the guests navigated the precipitous and winding ascent. There are no Gilmours and none of their friends in the story ‘Helter Skelter’, but, as I confessed to them long ago, the villa and the devilish road are theirs. Rather more daring was the origin of ‘A Suitcase Between Friends’. In the spring of 1991 my wife and I accompanied the Queen and Prince Philip on their state visit to the United States. For us the most memorable part of that visit was the least official, namely the weekend of leisure spent cruising on the Royal Yacht Britannia round the Keys of Florida. This story was published in the News of the World. I felt fairly secure, guessing, perhaps wrongly, that few senior members of the Court relied greatly on that paper for weekly instruction and entertainment. Not that the Royal Yacht or any member of the Royal Family or anyone remotely resembling any member of the household appears in this story of a drug smuggler and a naval patrol. What remains from reality is a picnic on a semi-tropical island transformed into an adventure by a fierce and sudden storm. By one means or another, the Court became aware of the story and recognised the storm; but no harm was done.

  As the years passed the stories started to touch political life and to play with the conflict of ideas. ‘Sea Lion’ flowed from a visit to the Falkland Islands, a place so extraordinary in its landscape and its loyalties that it calls out for a story to be devised within it. Much later ‘Roaring After Their Prey’ was conceived after a weekend at Mala Mala on the edge of the Kruger Park in South Africa. The story stands by itself but it raises a question, unsettled in my own mind, about how far human values can be applied to the care of wild animals in such a resort. ‘The Fog of Peace’ deals with some of the ironies of Northern Ireland, reaching a climax in Hillsborough Castle. ‘Seize the Day’ is a light-hearted account of a European Summit held in Edinburgh; such a summit, much more serious, was to be chaired by John Major in December 1992.

  Latterly some, though not all the stories, have homed in on a particular political problem, namely that of civil wars. I believe that this is likely to be the most persistent and frustrating dilemma for foreign policy makers into the next millennium. How is it that in Europe these horrors still break out between village and village, family and family? We are not watching the barbarities of drunken savages or of Nazis drugged by a creed, but often of civil servants, middle class educated Europeans who have worked together and belonged, in many respects, to the same society. What does it feel like to live and bring up children in such a disintegrating community? Can reconciliation take shape among so much blood and destruction? What can Britain or other countries usefully do? We are not prepared to do nothing, that is to sit inert by our television screens as the blood spreads on the snow and the funeral processions tear the heart. But neither are we prepared to do everything, that is march in with legions, pacify the warring tribes by force, appoint a governor, and annex a province to some new international Rome. Of all the techniques which lie between doing nothing and doing everything, which works best and at what risk? How do politicians justify such risks to their own peoples, and what is the reaction? Faced with Northern Ireland, Bosnia and now Kosovo many of us have made speeches and television programmes, written books, or indeed sent in troops and planes. (We do shamefully less of all these things when faced with the more numerous and bloodier wars of Africa, because they seem distant and, at present, hopeless of cure.) It is certain that our successors will have to go on mixing the brew of policy afresh as each successive tragedy stirs our conscience.

  Through history there has been a place for fiction in political debate of such matters. The novelist can use the imagination to press home a point or argue passionately for a particular outcome. Or, (more relevant in my case) he can point to a predicament of human behaviour without being compelled, as a politician or a leader writer is, to point a dogmatic way out of that predicament.

  Some critics who noticed my stories on Bosnia wrote that they seemed acts of penance; with hindsight, they thought, I was showing that we could all have done more to arrest that tragedy. This is not quite so. I cannot be sure, no one can be sure, whether other policies would have worked better, or whether eventual policies could have been put into effect earlier without disaster. It would be perverse to be dogmatic about this either way, though I am clear that some of the alternatives proposed, such as relaxing the arms embargo on the parties, would have prolonged rather than curtailed the disaster.

  When Kosovo reached the point of crisis, new ministers in many western countries proclaimed that they had learned from the mistakes of Bosnia. I hoped that was so, for certainly there were grievous mistakes. But as we yet again watched the trail of refugees, the maimed and the bereaved, snipers posing for the camera, a château filled with negotiators, the warring factions barking at each other, as we yet again read editorials pressing for quick decisive intervention, but of course without pain or risk to ourselves, we realised that not all that much ha
d changed.

  The fundamental questions remain unanswered. That is why I wrote the four stories here about Bosnia and Croatia, and returned in 1997 to the theme in the full novel The Shape of Ice by imagining a civil war in Russia. Of all these short stories I return most often to ‘The Summer House’, which was published earlier under a different title ‘The Last Summer’; and ‘Home to Vukovar’, which I wrote after visiting the UN in East Slavonia while making the BBC documentary The Search for Peace and the book of the same name.

  Historical analysis and imaginative fiction are not enemies, as the flood of excellent recent writing of both kinds about Ireland clearly shows. Indeed both may be necessary for the sort of understanding which has to precede reconciliation. To understand is certainly not always to pardon, but outsiders can hardly be effective in helping forward a peace process unless they understand both the authors and the victims of a war.

  I hope this does not sound too portentous a note as the opening to a collection of short stories. They aim to entertain in their own right both those who have read this foreword and those who have skipped it.

  1 The Summer House

  ‘Turn off that rubbish,’ said his wife, and Borisav obeyed.

  ‘Where is this place Vukovar?’ she asked, for that had been the main story on the TV news.

  ‘In Croatia somewhere.’

  ‘A long way from Sarajevo, anyway. Such stupidities, shooting and killing, and for what? We don’t want any of that here.’

  Borisav was not sure. In the Forestry Department where he worked the Muslims and Croats were beginning to talk of independence for Bosnia, whatever that might mean. Serbs like Borisav remained silent. Most of them had worked together for years. Promotion, salaries, houses and schools, the occasional foreign trip, these were what they talked about.

  Borisav looked through the sitting-room window at his dusty garden. The narrow strip of land, a hundred yards long, stretched down to an outcrop of rock, below which the land fell steeply away to the red-tiled roofs of the village. A large Yugoslav air force transport plane rose from the airport five miles away. The Forestry Department had done well to build these small, two-bedroom houses for its senior employees 20 years ago. Borisav was fond in particular of a gnarled apple tree at the end of the garden, now heavy with unripe fruit, which must have belonged to an ancient orchard demolished when the houses were built.

  His other pride was the wooden summer house which he and his neighbour, Mr Tomic, had built with their own hands, straddling their boundary fence. The effort had taken the two of them almost all their spare time last summer. They had held a great picnic in September to celebrate its completion.

  Mr Tomic used to smoke his pipe there of an evening, looking out over the village. Sometimes Borisav joined him, preferring a cheap cigar. They were both Deputy Directors, though in different sections of the Forestry Department, Borisav being concerned with plant diseases and Mr Tomic with accounts. They had not been close friends, but the project of the summer house had brought them together.

  Borisav’s only son, Ivan, aged 13, was meant to use it for his homework. The homework was particularly heavy this term as his form had switched from Russian to English as their second language. But Ivan was an ungainly lad, without many friends, given to kicking a football aimlessly round the garden when not slumped in front of the television. Indeed, Borisav could see him now, hands in the pockets of his jeans, raising clouds of dust as he trundled the ball under the apple tree. Borisav opened the windows to call his son in.

  As if galvanised by the sound of the window latch, Ivan gathered himself together and gave the ball a powerful kick. It cleared the fence and struck Mr Tomic’s window, but its force was spent and nothing was lost – except Mr Tomic’s temper. He burst out of the house by the back door and yelled at Ivan, ‘You bloody fool. You Serbs are all the same, good for nothing except breaking other people’s property.’

  Mr Tomic’s belly protruded over the undone top buttons of his trousers. He had a red face, a big moustache which turned down at the ends and a temper which heated and cooled quickly. Mr Tomic was a Croat, but this was the first time that Borisav had heard him swear at Serbs.

  Ivan slouched off, hands back in pockets. Mr Tomic saw Borisav for the first time, and began to relax.

  ‘It’ll all be better after independence,’ Mr Tomic said. It was meant as a joke.

  An hour later, just before darkness fell, Borisav wandered down the hill to a little cemetery that lay at the old boundary of the village, separating it from the houses built by the Forestry Department higher up the slope. He often came there because his own house, containing a talkative wife and sulky son, was not the best place for thinking.

  A bronze partisan had been erected at the entrance, with fierce eyes and a jutting chin, for ever on heroic patrol through the mountains of Bosnia during the 1941–45 war. On the plinth below was a list of local resistance martyrs. Borisav had lived in the village only ten years, but had heard enough to know that some of those named had died killing each other. There was no point in going into all that. So many lies were told. It was all history now, or so Borisav believed.

  Further into the cemetery was a little circle of olive trees that Borisav particularly liked. Under each had once stood a stone, but most of the stones were split and the names illegible. These were the fighters in an earlier war, of which Borisav knew only vaguely. There had been Serbia of course (there had always been Serbia) and the Empire run from Vienna and Budapest, and perhaps Turks, though they had been earlier. He thought of Mr Tomic’s remark, about his neighbour of ten years, his fellow Yugoslav, his fellow-builder of the summer house. Was history coming back? But that was absurd. In 1991 reality was the Forestry Department, the journals on plant disease, the intrigues for promotions and postings, Mr Tomic’s accounts, Ivan’s football matches. Borisav turned his back on the bronze partisan and walked home to his supper.

  A year later nothing seemed too absurd. Borisav had watched his country disintegrating every night on television and finally the soldiers had come to his house. They had been there for two hours, six of them, first joking with Borisav, then shouting at him, drinking his brandy, stamping about his house. It was past 10 in the evening before they left.

  ‘Of course you should take no notice,’ said his wife. She had been silent while the men were in the house.

  Borisav sat miserable in the chair that looked over the garden, twisting a piece of paper in his hands. It was an order, signed on behalf of the President of the Bosnian Serbian Republic, requiring Borisav Mikovic to register at once for military service. The stamp on the order was smudged and the signature illegible. They had left a peaked cap, khaki jacket and trousers in a heap in the corner of the room; also a scuffed pair of boots and an empty ammunition belt. His wife picked up the jacket.

  ‘Poor stuff,’ she said. ‘It won’t even fit you.’

  ‘Where’s Ivan?’ he asked.

  ‘Working in the summer house.’

  His mother always assumed the best of the lad. They both looked and could see that the summer house was empty.

  ‘About the village somewhere,’ she amended.

  Borisav could not talk it through with his wife. For years there had been nothing much to talk through. She wanted only to resume their dull adequate routine as civil servant and civil servant’s wife, to worry again about the state of the road outside their house, her son’s clothes, and the rude girl at the supermarket counter. For some days after the fighting began he had continued taking the bus to work in Sarajevo, but the service had stopped and anyway the Forestry Department had closed indefinitely

  There had been no fighting yet in their village, only intermittent mortars and artillery from around the airport. There seemed no rhyme or reason, no campaign, no advances nor retreats. There were rumours, of course, by word of mouth in the village, and by endless radio bulletins – rumours of Serbs massing for a final assault on Sarajevo, of a Turkish army parachuting in to save t
he Muslims, a Croat force a few miles to the West – but nothing came of any of these. His father, a bank clerk, had told Borisav that the history of Yugoslavia was 60 per cent heroism and 40 per cent lies. In these days Borisav juggled the percentages about in his head.

  But another feeling had also begun to form in his mind. It all had to end somehow, and he could not imagine it ending except in success for the Serbs. Others had come later, and of course they had their rights, but at heart this was Serb country and Sarajevo ought to be a Serb city. Borisav was a Deputy Director of Forests, a family man, a man of peace, but peace would not come again until the Serbs too had their rights, and Serb rights were special. He needed a walk to think further.

  ‘You won’t do anything stupid?’ said his wife, standing between him and the pile of military clothes. That blue dress made in Milan with the silver braid at the neck had once been her best many years ago, but now she used it for housework.

  ‘No, I won’t go a-soldiering,’ said Borisav. ‘And anyway the uniform doesn’t fit.’

  Outside he almost collided with Mr Tomic, who had lost weight since he had sworn at Ivan 12 months ago, and today was pale and puffy with alarm.

  ‘I was just coming to see you. You must do something about your friends before they kill us all.’

  They’re trying to make me turn soldier, but as for killing, I don’t think …’

  ‘Look, you silly man, look …’

  A truck swung round the corner of the road on which the two houses stood, then another, then a third, close enough for the Serbs on board to be singing the same chorus. There were four or five in haphazard uniform, standing or sitting on the open back of each truck, crowding round the mortar. The mortars were not bolted down, but slithered noisily as the trucks took the corner. Then there was only dust, and Mr Tomic clutching his elbow.

  ‘They’re up at the Director’s house. It’s swarming with drunken bandits.’