Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

  She speeded her car.

  A silent little prayer played at her lips that the letter from her mother would be waiting at her apartment.

  Five.

  Sitting upright, uncomfortable, Jovic was waiting. Penn had learned to use the staircase rather than wait for the interminable lift. He paused at the angle of the stairs, and saw the young man immediately. The hotel lobby was filled for the gathering, before the first session, of the Congress (International) of Croatian Physicians. A blend of accents and languages filtered up to him, but he saw the young man immediately. What he had imagined, somehow, was a retired schoolteacher. What he saw was a student-aged young man with a gaunt and pale face and blond hair cropped short and a pair of jeans that were ragged at the ankles and a heavy leather jacket. The doctors, surgeons, anaesthetists flowed around the young man, who seemed not to notice them but sat rigid. It had been an abrupt exchange on the telephone. Yes, he was an interpreter. Yes, he was available. Yes, he would be at the hotel in the morning. There was an aggression about the young man, Jovic, that Penn noted ... it was not possible for him to be without an interpreter. Sharp introductions, an exchange of names. Penn had the ability to look a man in the face. Because he had looked into the eyes, the face of Jovic, because they had not shaken hands, it was a moment before he realized that the right arm of Jovic was taken off at the elbow. The right sleeve of the leather jacket, from below the elbow, hung loose and useless. The circle closed. An amputation accounted for the gaunt and fleshless face, and for the ravaged pallor of the cheeks, and for the blunt aggression. There were reunion greetings around them, the accents of America and Australia, the languages of Swedish and German and Swiss French. Jovic looked back into Penn's face. "Patronizing bastards .. ." 8? His accent was schoolroom English. '.. . coming here to parade their success for the mother country to see, and to write cheques, and wring their hands and play their ego, and get the hell out in the morning." His voice was snarled. Would he like coffee? The young man, Jovic, looked around him and there was contempt at his mouth. He led the way out of the hotel lobby, and he shouldered his way past the uniformed day porter and the bellboy, and Penn followed him out across the street. They walked in the sunshine towards the square with the open cafes. Jovic took a table and he shouted in his own language for a waiter and he ordered espressos without asking Penn if that was what he wanted, and he sat in silence until they were brought, and then he pushed the bill slip towards Penn for paying. He could lay his right elbow on the table, awkwardly, and he could flick a cigarette from the packet and strike a match, laboriously. "How did it happen?" "Have you been in a war, Mr. Penn? No? Then you would not understand how it happened." "Where did it happen?" "Do you know Sisak, Mr. Penn? No? Then you would not know where it happened." "When did it happen?" "When you were safe in your own country, Mr. Penn. Eighteen months ago, Mr. Penn, did you care about the freedom struggle of Croatian independence? No? That was when it happened." Penn went on, "Right, young man .. . OK, Jovic ... If you don't want the job, so be it. I don't have to take shit from anybody. I suggest you go back to whatever corner you came out of, and moan on your own." A big smile that cracked the pale edges of Jovic's mouth. Penn glowered at him. He said that he was an artist. He said that he studied at the School of Art. He said that he had learned of Constable and Turner, but that most he admired Hockney. He said, in a new mood and shy, that he was learning to paint with his left hand. He said, more boldly, that his rate was eighty US dollars a day. He pushed his left hand, twisted, towards Penn for the handshake and there was oil paint on his fingers and grime dirt under the nails ... it was Charles Braddock's money ... A powered grip crushed Penn's fist. He added, quickly, while their hands were still together that if a car was needed then he could get one, and that his rate with the car would be one hundred and twenty US dollars a day. Penn seemed to see the arm, bleeding and hanging loose, and he seemed to see the stampede from a front line position and the bumped ride to a casualty clearing station, and he seemed to see the fresh bandaged stump, and he seemed to see the first tentative strokes of the brush that was guided by a left hand. He nodded, the money was no problem. "Thank you, Mr. Penn, so what is your work in Croatia?" It was why he had hoped that he would not have to trail around with an interpreter, and he started, hesitantly, to talk through what he knew of Dorrie Mowat. Without an interpreter he might as well sit in his hotel room, but it was the sharing that was difficult. The story was personal. It was the story of a woman sitting at a fresh grave with her dogs and with the scent of newly cut flowers. Jovic did not interrupt. He leaned back and he swirled the coffee dregs in the cup, and his mouth had curled, as if the story was a bad joke. Perhaps he tried to impress the young man, perhaps he thought that the young man would be better able to do his work if he knew it all. He was reciting the crimes of Dorrie Mowat, and he felt a sense of shame as he pushed through the litany, and as he talked he looked into the hard eyes that flickered, dulled, back at him. He was dead without an interpreter, and he had tried three times the day before to ring the number given him at the embassy and taken back the gabble of local language and not been understood. Penn wondered what it would be like to try to paint with a left hand. He felt that he had betrayed a trust in the telling to a stranger. He pushed across the table the telephone number given him at the embassy. '.. . She wants to know. I've been hired to write a report. Her mother wants to know how her daughter died. It's why I've come." He watched Jovic's back. Jovic was at the telephone on the bar. When he came back to the table his face was a mask. He picked up his cigarettes and gestured, coolly, for Penn to follow. Penn felt himself an innocent.

  "Choked me, but nothing we could do. I took responsibility, I said we had to leave them. I'll remember that bastard, that Stan-kovic, if I ever get him in my sights. But Special Forces can't hang about ... It really choked me to leave them."

  Ham was rested, and it was good patter. The patter had been laced with what 3 Para would have done, and he gave the cocktail body by telling the major and the captain in the first-floor room of the old police station that not even the RLI, nor the SADF's Recce Commandos nor their 44 Para Brigade, would have done it different. He had learned the patter when he had been with the Internationals and there had been jokers from the Rhodesian Light Infantry and guys who had fought with the South African Defence Force. There had been jokers and guys then who had done the rounds, done time as Warriors of Principle and Soldiers of Conscience, and Ham had learned enough from them to give good patter.

  Ham said, "We couldn't have moved better. The "Black Hawks" wouldn't have done it different. I don't know how they got to jump us. Never saw anything before we were jumped. Goddamn shame, because we weren't that far from the position, but once they'd jumped us then it was like the place was heaving with them. If we'd tried to shoot it out then we were all stiffed. We did what we could, and you can't ask more than that."

  That was great patter to have thrown in the Black Hawks, because they were 'claimed' as the elite of the Croat army, and he had seen the major take a note with his pencil. Ham thought they would all get called in, the survivors from Sector North, but he was happy to have been called in the first. It had been a crazy dumb idea to send six jerks pushing across the Kupa river and beyond the lines into Sector North of occupied territory, and it was good that the major and the captain should understand that, too right.

  "I wouldn't want you to think, major, that it was wasted effort. I'll have it for you tonight, my appraisal of the route in and the route out, total detail of minefield location, what strong points we saw, general movement of TDF, location of hull-down armour .. . You'll have it on your desk tonight, major .. . Major, what I'd like to say, it's rough over there. We'd done really well to get as far as we had got. No, I don't know how we got jumped, but they were heavy on the ground .. . Major, that's a bad place." He thought he had the patter right. Wouldn't be good to show fear, would be good to show thoroughness. All officers shunned fear and adulated keenness. The major was a bur
eaucrat, seconded at the start of the war from the Finance Ministry, and knew sweet nothing. The major was nodding. The major would get a paper of the route they had taken and the location of the minefields, and of the tanks and the strong points and the major would take it to his colonel. He was useful with bullshit patter. Ham said, in sincere tones, "I'm really sorry we couldn't do more for those brave lads, I'm really cut up about that. If the objective's important enough then of course we should go back you won't mind me saying it, but if I have to go back I'd request more experienced troops alongside me .. ." He had rehearsed that line. The last was said looking straight into the major's eyes, good sincerity stuff. They hadn't more experienced troops in 2nd Bn, 110 (Karlovac) Brigade. If the major reported that to the colonel, if the advice was taken, then the Black Hawks would be tasked for the next recce of the artillery guns and the munitions stores, and no way that the super shit Black Hawks would take along a bloody mercenary. If it had just been the major to debrief him then Ham would have reckoned he had done well, but the captain, cold bastard, had said nothing. The captain stared him out, never took a note, looked at him like he was shit. The captain was an intelligence officer, fronting as liaison. "In conclusion, sir, I'd like to say that I feel privileged to have served with those young men who didn't make it back .. ." Ham saluted. Best salute. It was the salute he would have given his company commander at the training camp on the Brecons or the operational base at Crossmaglen in South Armagh or at Palace Barracks east of Belfast centre. Bullshit salute. He hoped, dear God, he would never be sent again across that bloody river, into that bloody hell.

  Later, when it was evening, when he could slip away and the evening darkness came to the Karlovac streets, he would go to the bar where the telephone was in shadow and behind the screen.

  The major said, "Thank you, Hamilton, thank you for good and resourceful work."

  "For nothing, sir .. ."

  He had woken foul-mouthed and bad-tempered.

  Her man had sworn at her while she had dressed, and when little Marko had come into their room to play in the bed he had cursed the child.

  For Evica, her husband was a new man.

  She had made breakfast, given them bread she had baked the evening before and jam she had bottled in the autumn, and she had tried to accept that her husband was a new man. She had dressed her Marko and they had gone to the school where she taught the third year, and where Marko sat in the second-year class. She had come back to her home at the end of the lane, at lunch time, to make a small light meal for the middle of the day, and she had found Milan still foul-mouthed and bad-tempered. He sat at the table in the kitchen and he had papers spread around him and he made no effort to clear them. She had little time in the middle of the day when she took the hour from the school, little time to waste in clearing the table, and she must waste that little time .. . There was never a point in arguing with him but the moods, black and foul-mouthed and bad-tempered, were more frequent. Marko sat at the table close to his father, and held the plastic pistol that had been brought from Belgrade, and was old enough, sensible enough, to stay silent. Her former man, the clerk in the co-operative at Turanj, had never been home in the middle of the day and expecting to be fed; it was the new way of the new man .. . Because she loved him, had loved him since she was a child in the village, the new man that was her husband hurt her. Only the beard changed him, outwardly. Inwardly, everything was changed. He no longer played basketball in Glina, he no longer followed the big matches in the football league that were played in Belgrade, he no longer worked through quiet evenings in the vegetable garden at the back of the house, he no longer talked gently with her. The war had made her Milan a new man. The war suffocated Evica Stankovic. She thought the war was her enemy and she would not have dared to say it. The war was his life in the waking hours and the war was with him when he slept because now there was a shined and cleaned automatic rifle on the rug over the floor at his side of the bed. Those meetings in all the waking hours, and her kitchen often filled, when she came back from the school in the afternoon, with men from the village who were ignorant and stupid and who talked a babble of fire positions and patrol patterns, and her kitchen in the evenings was a stinking place from the smoke of their cigarettes and the scent of their brandy. She did not complain, would not have dared to. In the sleeping hours, her new man sometimes rolled in the bed and cried out .. . She was an intelligent woman, she had been trained as a teacher at the college in Zagreb and she could read books in German as well as Italian, and in English, but it was not possible now for her to get books because of the war, and she did not complain. And she was intelligent enough to realize that the respect now shown to her in the village owed nothing to love, nor to friendship, everything to the position of her new man. Her new man dispensed gasoline, and tractor parts, and decided who could enlist in the militia and therefore be paid, had control over the quotas of agricultural seed. They all fawned in the village to her new man, and they all gave the show of respect to his wife .. . She hated the war. They were on the floor, heaped loose, where he had thrown them. His back was to them as he sat hunched at the table. With her toe she nudged the pile of uniform fatigues. They had been left for her to wash. There were dark bloodstains on them. Milan had not told her, Milan had kept his silence since he had come back, drunk, quiet, the evening before. She had been told it that morning by the woman who cleaned at the school, by the wife of Stevo who was the village gravedigger. She had been told that her new man, Milan, had slit the throats of two Ustase who were captured. And his fatigues, on which were the bloodstains of the two Ustase, were left now on the floor for her to wash. On the wall above the stove, hung by thread from the nail he had hammered into the plaster, was the bayonet. It was near to a year and a half since he had brought the bayonet down from the loft. The bayonet was rusted and the handle grip had rotted. It was German army issue, had been taken from the belt of a Wehrmacht trooper and had been used by the cousin of the father of Milan Stankovic to stab the trooper to death. He had brought the bayonet down from the loft where it had lain undisturbed for forty years, and he had hammered the nail in the wall and tied the thread on the handle of the bayonet and hung it. The next morning her new man had led the militia in the attack on Rosenovici.

  The sunlight played on the window of her kitchen.

  She was hurrying and time was against her. In her sink she was sluicing the earth from carrots from the vegetable patch. She could see across to Rosenovici, to the ruined church, to the broken houses, to the disturbed earth in the corner of the field at the end of the lane.

  The sight across the stream, the devastated village, was as a pillow that was pressed down onto her face, over her nose, blocking her mouth. The sight was always with her. When she looked from the window of her kitchen, from the window of her bedroom, when she went to get wood from the heaped pile against the shed wall, when she went to the vegetable patch, when she went to the orchard to pick windfalls, when she went to hang her washing on the line, then the pillow was across her nose and her mouth. There was no escape from the sight of Rosenovici.

  She had had friends, good friends, in the village of Rosenovici, and she did not dare to talk of them. She scoured the skins of the carrots. It was since he had come home from Belgrade, since she had told him of the digging in the corner of the field that he had been, all the time, foul-mouthed and bad-tempered.

  Evica had not told him, would not have dared to, of the change these last two weeks in the attitude of the school's Headmaster to her. There was a slyness from the school's Headmaster, a smugness, a distancing from her, since the digging. And he would have heard, as she had heard, the broadcast on the radio. He would have listened, as she had listened, to the radio in English, on the short wave, because that was the small window they could climb through each day, when each was alone. Denied books, the radio was her freedom and the Headmaster's freedom also. It had been the voice of an American on the radio.

  '.. . Be identified and put
on trial these perpetrators of crimes against humanity .. ." She saw from her kitchen window the dug earth in the corner of the field. '.. Be treated exactly as were Hitler's associates at Nuremberg .. ." She had not been with those who had crossed the bridge over the swollen river and who had gone to watch the lifting of the bodies from the wet grey-black earth. '.. . Name some names, let them understand that over the long run, they may be able to run but they can't hide .. She had seen from her kitchen window the bodies in bags lifted into the jeeps.

  She cut the carrots, dropped them into the saucepan.

  The war suffocated Evica Stankovic.

  The bus was three hours behind schedule when it came through. There were Nigerian soldiers around her, and there were two men from the UNHCR office in Zagreb who strutted impatiently and carried a print-out of the list of names. The bus came slow, tucked in behind the white-painted personnel carrier, towards the Nigerians' checkpoint. Ulrike Schmidt always felt a numbed despair when she came to the checkpoint at Turanj to welcome in a bus from behind the lines. Her father, of course, had known total war and refugee status, and her father's first wife had been killed when the bombers had come to Magdeburg. One of the men from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees office in Zagreb, smart and smelling of body lotion, made a joke to her, as if it were clever to laugh as the bus came through, as if it were adult, and she ignored him, indeed she barely heard him. The bus neared the checkpoint and there were Serbs standing at the far side of the sandbagged position that the Nigerians manned, and the Serbs would check the print-out list of names against the papers of those on the bus. She had never, and she had written to her father and mother in Munich of this, never ever seen shame on the faces of the Serbs when they checked through the new batch of refugees. She knew from the print-out that the refugees represented the population of the last village in the Prijedor area to be cleansed. There would be a village, small houses and a mosque and a shop and once neat fields and a car repair yard, that would now be flattened, and the population of the village were moving away from homes that no longer existed, and they would not know if a future was left to them. Their village was the bus, and after the bus their village would be in the corners of the sleeping rooms of the Transit Centre at Karlovac. And the wretched fool, the young man from the UNHCR in Zagreb, was still laughing at his joke and she could not remember what he had said .. . She saw the broken windows of the bus. The front windscreen, to the right of the driver's vision, was a skein of cracks that radiated from the stone's impact point, and three of the left side windows behind the driver had caved in. She saw the faces of the refugees. The young man was talking at her again and she did not hear him. So quiet and so cowed, the faces of the refugees, without expression. The stoning might have been by the Serbs in Prijedor, or it might have been later in the journey, or it might have been when they were in the last Serb village before the final checkpoint. She had never travelled beyond the checkpoint, never been behind the lines, and she found it close to impossible to understand the ethnic hatred that had driven Serb people to expel their Muslim neighbours, and there was no shame. She was a small woman. Her tight waist was held close by the belt of her denims. Her hair was mahogany but flecked now with grey that had not been there before she had come to administer the Transit Centre. She wore a pressed white blouse, open at the throat. She used no make-up, because cosmetics might seem to offer an insult to the refugees who came from the villages of Bosnia, and who had nothing. She set a smile on her face. She was dwarfed by the men around her. She was smiling briskly and going towards the door of the bus. Later, she would hear the atrocity stories. She would hear who had been raped and who had been tortured and who had been beaten .. . She saw herself as the symbol that the past, rape and torture and beatings, was finished. The young man was beside her, towering over her and talking fast, like a cockerel parading for a hen, and he would, because they always did, offer her his telephone number for when she could next get to the city and there would be a promise of dinner, and she would ignore him as she always did. She paused at the door of the bus. There were Serbs on the steps and she stared them out defiantly until the first weakened his resolve and made room for her. They came down off the bus's steps and made a point of brushing their bodies against hers, and behind them were the faces, expressionless, of the refugees. There was no shame. The history of her own country had been only academic to her before her posting to Croatia. Something taught in secondary-level school by defensive teachers. The Nazi years, the arrogance of men in uniform, the brutality of men with guns, the fear of dispossessed refugees, had no reality for her until she had come to Croatia. Before Croatia she had been among the thousands of young persons living the comfortable existence of the aid agencies .. . Now it was all changed. The culture of the agencies was to turn the cheek, smile, deflect the insult, and that had been possible for her until she had come to Croatia. There had been little to prepare her for what she would find. A flight to Geneva, a job interview, a three-day course, and she had been pitched into Karlovac. She had learned on her feet .. . She had learned to hate the men in uniform and their guns. Because there was no shame, Ulrike Schmidt yearned to see them stamped down and humiliated. She cried inside for a reckoning day to be delivered to those who felt no shame. One day .. . Her father had told her, and he had known because he had been employed as a junior interpreter by the British prosecutor, that the guards at the camps in the Neuengamme Ring had taken photographs of the naked Jewish women running past them towards medical inspection, and felt no shame. She thought that the young Serbs who pushed against her breasts in the doorway of the bus felt no shame and thought themselves safe, safe from retribution. The chief guards at the Neuengamme Ring of camps had been hanged by the British, but they had not thought they would be hanged when they took their photographs. She prayed each morning, after the clamour of the alarm, for strength. She made warmth in her smile. "What motivates me is my belief that if war criminals are found to be beyond justice then we are entering a new age of barbarism .. ." The man chain-smoked. They had been on the hard chairs in the corridor for an hour. "Bringing men to trial, to a court of law, will be difficult, it will take many years, but it is the most important thing .. ." The man rested his elbows on the filled desk. They had come through heavy sets of old doors, climbed dark wide staircases, nudged their way past heaped and cobwebbed files. "Revenge killing is useless. It is necessary to find truth, then justice .. ." The man coughed thick phlegm to his lips. Penn had been told by Jovic that it was the ministry office for accumulating evidence on war crimes. They had sat a long hour before they were ushered from the corridor and into an office. He had tried conversation to kill the time and failed. "It is necessary to have meticulous preparation of evidence. I am determined we will not move outside legality. If, when, it comes to trials, it would be catastrophe for a prosecution to collapse on technicality .. ." The man talked as if to an audience and the smoke eddied in the wisps of his beard. An hour in the corridor, and now half an hour as the working of the office was portrayed. Penn wrote his notes carefully. He could not complain at Jovic's translation, steady and at a good pace. He had the name of the man, and his title and the notes made good reading. The pity was that the notes were rubbish, they didn't matter. He had tried to steer the conversation, twice, and twice had been ignored because this was prepared speech time for visitors, and visitors were supposed to duck their heads in respect. A secretary had put her head round the door, grimaced at the man. Penn knew the form. The speech would end. Handshakes, farewells, and the man would be sweeping out of the office to a new appointment. "I work in conjunction with the United Nations Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International .. ." "Rosenovici, in the Municipality of Glina." Penn said it loud. "I receive no money from my own government .. ." "There was a battle in December of 1991 for the village of Rosenovici, in the Municipality of Glina." Penn battered on. "The material I gather will go to the United Nations Commission for the Prosecution of War Criminals .. ." "Yo
u are a busy man, I am a busy man .. ." Penn saw that Jovic queried him and his eyebrow was lifted in trifled amusement. '.. . I am not interested in war crimes. I am not concerned with the prosecution, or freedom, of war criminals. I want to know what happened in Rosenovici in December of 1991 when Miss Dorothy Mowat was murdered. I apologize, but that is all I am interested in." He saw the annoyance furrow the head of the man. "The greatest human rights abuse in Europe for fifty years, you are not concerned?" "I want to know what happened in Rosenovici in December in 1991 when Miss Dorothy Mowat died. Point .. ." He saw the sneer creep over the man's mouth. "You cross the great continent of Europe, You visit our poor and humble country. You arrive late after the war in which my poor and humble country has fought for its very survival. You come when the finest of our young people have made the ultimate sacrifice of their lives, after our old men have been tortured, disembowelled, after our old women have been beaten, raped, after our children have been slaughtered .. . But you want only to know how a young Englishwoman was killed .. . You are not concerned with law and justice, but with making a report .. ." Penn said evenly, "I have been paid to make a report on the circumstances of Miss Dorothy Mowat's death." The sneer played wide. "And she was precious, and the thousands who have died were without value? To make her so precious, was she a queen?" There was the scrape of Jovic's chair beside him. It was the end of the interview. Penn stood. He felt so damned tired. It had been time wasted, as time had been wasted at the embassy. Penn said, "From what I heard, what I was told, she was a pig of a woman."