The Untouchable

by Gerald Seymour

  He said, a recitation without feeling, 'I crossed a line. I broke every rule I'm supposed to abide by. I knew the illegality of what I asked for, and had other men who'd no scruples do what I was incapable of. I wanted it to happen.'

  She shrugged. 'So that's all right, then - stop moaning.'

  'What I did, and justified to myself, meant I walked outside my team.'

  'Are you one of these "enthusiasts"? We weed them out at our place. Even if they've fooled the recruitment board, we spot them and chuck them. Their feet don't touch the ground. Don't, please, tell me you're an enthusiast.'

  'You've a good sneer . . . No, I don't think I am.'

  'But it's justified, the nasty work? Right, right -

  you've a sister who died of drugs, overdosed?'

  'No, I haven't.'

  'What's the other hackneyed drop of tripe - oh, yes.

  "My best friend got to be a pusher. That's why I'm a crusader against drugs." Is that it?'

  'I didn't have a best friend on Sierra Quebec Golf,'

  Joey said simply. 'My best friend at school teaches maths in a comprehensive in Birmingham.'

  'So, what justified last night?'

  'Are you listening?' Joey breathed in hard. His mind was a tangle of snipped string, no knots. 'It's about him, who he is - and about me, about who I am.'

  'A winner and a loser is what you told me.'

  'He's the highest mountain. Why climb a mountain? Because it's there. It's there in front of you. It's in front of you, indestructible, and laughing at you because you are so small - pygmy fucking small. The whole team of Sierra Quebec Golf spent three bloody years and they fell off the bloody mountain, they're history. I want to climb the mountain, beat the bastard, sit with my arse on his nose, because it's there

  . . . because he' s there. They say he's no fear, I want to see him scared. They say he's in control, I want to hear him scream and beg. I want - little, small me, and it's the only thing in my life that I want - to bring down the mountain. Is that an answer?'

  Maggie touched his hand. 'I think it's better than most could give.'

  She thought that the clerk in Warsaw, in the shadows when he kissed her, would have said something like that, about mountains, if she'd asked him, and the Libyan boy on the veranda in Valetta's moonlight. She'd wept for them both. God, was that her future, growing old and sad because young men fell off the crags on bloody mountains?

  They were climbing back into the Toyota, made huge by the binocular lenses, and she eased the van forward.

  There were others in her organization, and in every one of the foreign communities camped in the city, who didn't care. She loathed their company.

  With the lorry driver, Monika headed for the village beyond Kiseljak.

  She cared. If she had not then she might as well, as she often told herself, have stayed at Njusford, sheltered by the mountains and overlooking a bay that was classified by UNESCO as a 'preservation-worthy environment'. The bay was on Flakstodoya island, one of the Lofoten archipelago. It was the home she had rejected. Because she had needed to care she had left Njusford, turned her back on the little coral-painted house that had been her home. She had seen in Bosnia everything that brutality had to offer.

  She was toughened to suffering. She would not have acknowledged it of herself - she despised introverted self-examination - but part of her character that was remarkable was the absence of cynicism, and she did not know despair. The reward she found was in the gratitude of simple people - women who had nothing laughed with her and touched her arm or her clothes, children without a future chirped as they chanted her name. All the hours of sitting in officials' rooms and hearing excuses for procrastination were forgotten when she witnessed the gratitude and heard the chanting.

  Bumping along in the lorry as it wove between sheets of ice on the road, she was cheerful, happy.

  The man who had brought her the lorry had caused the lift in her mood. Most, if they had come with a lorry across Europe, would have wanted a photo-call and publicity for their generosity. She thought him the best of men because he had wanted nothing of her.

  She sang cheerily in the lorry cab, not looking at the snow-capped peaks because they would have reminded her of home at Njusford. Thinking of home would have destroyed her mood. In that month, on that day, if the seas were not too fierce, her father would have been out in his boat with her elder brother, and her mother and sister would have been left to gut and behead the previous day's cod catch.

  And all of them, when the boat came in, would have gone in the afternoon darkness to the grave of her younger brother. The black hours of winter, the harshness of the seas, the remoteness of the island and the agony of her brother's suicide had driven her away from Njusford. If she looked at mountains, she remembered. She sang with all of her ingrained enthusiasm.

  They turned off the metalled road and lurched on a stone track towards the village with the charity load brought to her by a modest, caring stranger.

  They were back from the court. For the midday recess, to save money, they avoided the canteen in the basement of the court building and went to his office to eat the sandwiches she always prepared at home.

  While her father ate and concerned himself with the case papers, Jasmina threw her eyes cursorily over the overnight list of police reports. She would not normally have interrupted his concentration on a difficult case, which taxed both his humanity and his legal obligations. The case was murder. The defendant was a woman of twenty-two, already the mother of four children. The victim was a fellow gypsy, the father of two of the children. The weapon was an axe.

  The defence was that the victim had beaten the defendant and she had acted to save her own life. The accusation was that the defendant had bludgeoned the victim nine times because he had found a younger lover. Self-defence or premeditated murder. Freedom or imprisonment. In the old days, before the war, her father would have been assisted in room 118 of the Ministry of Justice by a jury of professionals, but there was no longer the money for that luxury; he sat alone.

  He must decide on guilt or innocence. It was typical of the cases thrown at him, without political overtones but laden with dilemma.

  The fifth item on the police report of last night's incidents bounced back at her from the page.

  She wheeled herself from her desk to the corner of the room, lifted a file and slid the rubber band from it.

  She riffled among the top papers, selected one, then moved to his desk. He looked up irritably as she laid the report in front of him and pointed to the fifth item.

  She waited until he had read it and when he looked up at her in annoyance she placed the page from the file on top of it.

  A cloud seemed to shadow his face. He read the two pages a second time.

  A drug addict, a disabled war veteran, had been savagely attacked in the Dobrinja district. Neighbours had seen nothing, had heard nothing, knew nothing except his name . . . A man of the same name and from the same address in Dobrinja had made a statement to the police on the death of the foreigner, Duncan Dubbs, in the Miljacka river . . . and the statement had been passed to the young British investigator, with permission for intrusive surveillance . . . and the IPTF had made the link with Ismet Mujic, who was the prime crime baron of Sarajevo, and Ismet Mujic was at the heart of his and his daughter's history.

  'Better if I had never been involved,' he said. 'But I am, and I cannot step back from involvement . . .

  There is an English expression - what do they say in English?'

  'I think it is "You reap what you sow."'

  Frank, and all of the team, sat in on the briefing for the new man attached to the Kula station. He was introduced as a senior detective from Dakar, Senegal. The briefing was by the station commander, an intelligence officer from the Public Security Department of Jordan, who used a pointer and a blackboard to emphasize his message. 'We are not colonialists, we do not give out instructions and orders, we are here to advise and help the local police f
orces. Above all else, we must show them that we believe totally in the importance of the law . . . '

  Frank heard the briefing with wavering attention, distracted by a nagging shame. He had tossed through the night, failed to sleep, and had felt his self-imposed reputation of dedication to policing slip through his fingers. He had no friends in Bosnia; he went about his work, struggled with it, without the support of comrades. The only men who greeted him with warmth, on the rare times they saw him, were the cousins who made up the Sreb Four - Salko, Ante, Fahro and Muhsin. He had welcomed the liaison opportunity and had hoped he would grow to like Joey Cann, out from London. But Cann was now the source of his shame.

  The Jordanian droned on . . . Frank had come to Bosnia for many reasons, most to do with the split from Megan, but among them had been a heartfelt desire to help a war-weary community. He detested the crime that ravaged the city but, like his international colleagues, could see no way to fight it. .. He had been dragged down, with his fine ideals, by Joey Cann . . . He didn't want to see him, hear from him, again.

  He began to dream - the Irish bar at the weekend at the top of Patriotske lige, fried breakfast-lunch, wearing the red shirt and the dragon, the pint of Guinness, and the satellite relay of the international match from home, and the shame gone . . . but only if Joey Cann didn't ring him.

  November 1996

  Headlights speared against the plastic that covered the windows and interrupted the feast and the celebration. Alija, the son-in-law of Husein and Lila Bekir, had come to Vraca for his week's leave from army duties.

  Their daughter now lived with the old couple. For ten months she had been with them and taken off them the weight of caring for their grandchildren, but it was good that the little ones' father was there. He had come the night before, dropped off by an army truck, and he would be with them for a week.

  The family, reunited, sat in the candlelight around the table in the one room of the house that was dry and sealed against the cold, and they ate, laughed, sang and put aside the disasters of the past years. In their own bed, the night before, cuddling each other against the chill, Husein and Lila had heard the heave of the rusted springs in the next room, through a wall weakened by old shell fire. They had chuckled and predicted the arrival of another grandchild, and they had each, in their own way, prayed that they would be there to see its birth. There was little enough for them to look forward to, and much for them to forget.

  Half of the population of Vraca had now returned.

  Each day there was the beating of hammers, the scrape of saws and the crack of chisels reshaping the old, scorched stones. For that year, it was their aim that the returned families should have at least one room that was proof against the weather. No electricity, no water other than from the river, but protection against the elements. As patriarch of the community it was the role of Husein Bekir to decide who was next in the queue for help with the necessary repairs, and to assign the labour. It was slow work.

  Those who had come back were the elderly; the young men would not return. If the young did not come back he doubted their community could ever achieve vibrant life - but that was for another day's thoughts, not for an evening of celebration, with a feast before the family.

  Under the terms of what the foreigners called the quick-support grant, Husein had been given a pregnant cow, which would give birth in February of next year, and through the income-generation grant they had been given tools, nails and sacks of cement.

  The foreigners brought them food, heating-oil, plastic sheeting for the roofing not yet repaired, and packets of vegetable seed. Without the gifts they would have starved. There was a little sour milk to be taken each day from the goats but, in truth, they had nothing.

  They were dependent on the foreigners' charity. They had hoed strips of ground near the village to plant the vegetable seed but the crop had been minimal.

  The good ground was across the ford over the river.

  There was no sign left of the fire that Husein had lit to clear the grass, the weeds and the mines. He could not look across the valley from inside his house: he had no glass for the windows, which were screened with heavy nailed-on plastic sheeting. Each time he had stepped out of his house - through the successive seasons of the last year - he had thought that his fields beyond the river mocked him. The ground on his side of the river made poor grazing for the few sheep and goats his dog had rounded up from the woods, and the pregnant cow, and he had no fertilizer for the ground where he had sown the seeds.

  They had gone out that morning, at first light.

  Pelted by rain Husein - in the old overcoat that he lived in, tied with bale twine - and his son-in-law had gone down to the riverbank. Husein had started to explain where he thought mines had been buried, scratching in his memory, but Alija had gestured with his hand that Husein should not speak but let him concentrate. Unless it had been pointed out to him, Husein would not have seen the small round grey-green plastic shape lying in a run of silt in the arable field a dozen paces from the far bank. Directly opposite the point where the PMA2 mine had surfaced, Alija stripped off his boots and clothes, shed everything except his undershirt and underpants.

  Then, not seeming to feel the cold, he unknotted the twine from Husein's waist. He unravelled it, then tied the strands together to make a long thin length of more than thirty metres. He said he knew about mines from his army training. The strands that made a slender rope were all he took with him when he went down the bank and swam the width of the dark pool.

  Husein had stood very still and watched. Alija crawled up the far bank and slithered through old grass and dead nettles towards the mine. Husein had thought it bravado, and madness. He would be blamed by Lila and his daughter, by the tears of his grandchildren, if the mine exploded because he had complained they had no food worthy of a feast and a celebration. Very carefully, Alija scraped away with his fingers the silt earth in which the mine lay, then lifted it clear of the ground. Husein had gasped. It was so small. Alija tied the end of the strand of twine to the mine's narrow neck, between its body and the little stubbed antenna, and had called softly to Husein to lie flat and put his hands over his ears. He had been on the ground, pressing down into wet grass, when Alija had tossed the mine casually into the river pool. There had been a thunderous roar reaching deep into his covered ears, then water had rained down on him.

  They had returned to the house with two pike, the largest more than five kilos in weight, and three trout, all heavier than a kilo. Poached in an old dish, with rich flesh to be handpicked from the bones, the trout and the pike made a feast for a celebration.

  The headlights against the plastic were cut, and the growling engine of the jeep died. There was a rapped fist at the timber door.

  They always welcomed the young Spanish officer.

  They stood around the table long enough to embarrass him. He was introduced as their benefactor to Alija, and Husein's daughter offered him a chair at the table, but he refused it and sat on an upturned wooden box. The officer apologized for his lateness, but the supplies were now being unloaded at the building that had been a schoolhouse. They had no alcohol to offer him, but Lila sluiced the plate in the bucket of river water, wiped her hand on her apron picked the last of the trout and pike flesh from the carcasses and set it before the officer.

  'I congratulate you,' he said. 'You are successful fishermen.'

  They had no lines in the village, no hooks, and no money to buy them. He was told how it had been done.

  The frown cut his forehead. 'That is very dangerous. I cannot encourage that. Until it is cleared I very much advise that you do not go across again.'

  Husein squirmed. He would have been responsible.

  He challenged, 'We are trapped here. The valley was our life. Without going across the river, how can we live, what life do we have?'

  The officer said, as if he believed none of it, 'A committee has been set up in Sarajevo, a mine-action centre, and they are now examining the pl
aces where it is known mines were laid. They are drawing up a list for the priority of clearance.'

  'Where would I be in that priority?' Husein persisted doggedly.

  'I would lie if I said you were high on it. The cities come first. Sarajevo is at the top, then Gorazde, then Tuzla. There is Travnik and Zenica, and the whole of Bihac province. It is said there are a million mines laid in Bosnia . . . but you are on the list, I promise you.'

  'At the bottom of it?'

  'Not high on it.'

  'How long before we are high on the list?'

  'At an estimate, there are thirty thousand places where mines were put. I think it is a very long time before you are high on the list.'

  Husein knew he had destroyed the pleasure of the evening, but could not stop. 'How many mines do you believe are in my fields?'

  'I don't know. You ask me questions that I cannot answer . . . It could be ten, it could be a hundred, it could be the last one that went into the river to kill the fish . . . I don't know.'

  Husein clutched the straw. 'It might have been the last one?'

  'I cannot promise it - it is a possibility, not more.'

  'You are blessed with the privilege of education, you are an intelligent man. If you were me, what would you do? How would you live?'

  'It is my duty to urge you to be patient . . . I have some interesting news for you. The first from across the valley is coming back next week, to the other side.

  We have to escort him.'

  'Who is that?'

  'An old man, a retired policeman. He has the house over the river that is nearest to your house. He has been in Germany, but the Germans are pushing out the refugees. He will be the first of them.'

  Husein thought it was said to cheer them. The officer had eaten none of the fish laid in front of him. The wooden box scraped back, and he stood. He was apologizing for his intrusion. Husein thought momentarily of the return of his friend, of the chance again to argue, bicker and dispute, to play chess in the shade of his friend's mulberry tree - if he crossed the ford when the river was slow in the next summer, and if the track to Dragan Kovac's house was clear, clean, safe. The officer was at the door.