Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil

by Douglas Hurd

  The Warriors moved on to the second village. It was slightly bigger, and a small crowd soon gathered. Mixed Croat and Muslim, Andrew Fairweather said, though Faith was not sure how he knew. Same questions, same negative answers. The track petered out. There was nowhere else for the Warriors to go.

  Andrew had an idea. It might do no good, but it could do no harm. The Warriors withdrew to the edge of the village and each fired pointblank at the rock cliff overlooking the road. The noise and the echo were tremendous. Bits of rock fell. Dogs barked and children shouted. They fired again.

  ‘If they’re around, that’ll alert him and scare them.’

  As if picking up the echo of the fire from the Warrior, a large bungalow on the edge of the village erupted with small arms fire. A thin figure was dodging through the garden, through a fence, sprinting along an irrigation ditch by the side of a vegetable patch. The bullets followed, he threw up his hands and collapsed into the ditch.

  The leading Warrior swivelled and fired into the bungalow, once and again. A Fiat car emerged from a shed at the side and disappeared at top speed towards the main road. Faith found herself scrambling down the side of the Warrior and running towards the figure spreadeagled in the ditch. But Jim was an actor. The bullets had missed him. His only injury was a cut on the head as he fell.

  ‘Bloody Serbs,’ he said when she reached him.

  ‘Brigands, mixed Croat and Muslim,’ she replied, hauling him to his feet.

  ‘Colonel Blimp would have left you,’ said Faith twenty minutes later, seeing he was awake at the back of the Warrior. Jim opened his eyes, stared, understood, began to say something, thought better. He pretended to go back to sleep. The lock of fair hair that fell over his forehead was plastered with blood.

  He edged his body forward so that his knees could continue to give his message.

  10 Home to Vukovar

  ‘Your wife’s pregnant?’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’

  ‘Go, then. Don’t hang around. Go’. The colonel spoke as if he had not on all previous occasions refused the application. He turned back to face the Danube, and raised his binoculars with gloved hands. The woods stretching down to the opposite bank of the river were leafless but for weeks had concealed death. Today the hidden guns were yet again pounding the centre of Vukovar, reducing ruins to rubble. For the moment the Serbs were leaving the water tower alone, and the Croats in this, their crucial observation post, felt momentarily relaxed.

  Perhaps that was why the colonel, a difficult man, had at last given Yaroslav permission so early. Perhaps even the colonel knew that the battle was near its end. Anyway, it was proving easier than he had expected to get away. For weeks he had been summoning up the courage to play the coward. After all, Maria reminded him each evening, he was not a regular soldier. His job in the municipal engineering department had collapsed with the town’s utilities.

  For a few weeks after the siege began he had tried in a desultory way to repair shattered pumps and trailing cables, until his superior had told him he would be more use in the militia. Wrongly, for he was untrained, clumsy and short-sighted. Once in early November he trailed and shot dead a Serb sniper who had been operating from the deserted petrol station on the road south of the town. Sprawled between the pumps the Serb looked in death about seventeen. Yaroslav had thought of taking the lined jacket for it was already growing cold, but there was too much blood on it.

  Now Yaroslav looked at his watch. There was not much time if he and Maria and their two suitcases were to pass through the Serb checkpoint by 4 p.m. That was the hour at which, according to the Serb military radio, their ceasefire along the Zagreb road would come to an end. The Serbs allowed six hours twice a week for Croats to leave the town and find what refuge they could in their own country. The Croatian authorities had at first barred the road, but now no longer bothered. The Serbs had surrounded the town. There was no particular purpose in further fighting. The Serbs still bombarded Vukovar each day because, Yaroslav thought, they enjoyed destruction for its own sake. The Croats held out, not because they had any hope of relief, but because Croats did not surrender to Serbs – they killed and were killed.

  Yaroslav took off his militia cap and threw it into a litter-strewn patch of mud under the water tower. He did not need to hand in his uniform since he had never been issued with one. He propped up his rifle against a trestle table in the observation post, fingering for the last time the single notch which marked the death of the sniper. So ended his military career.

  Although there was a lull in the shelling, Yaroslav took his ancient Volkswagen round through the suburbs, rather than directly home to his village through the vulnerable centre. He passed solid houses with gardens, then two blocks of flats built in the 1960s, already streaked and crumbling by reason of weather rather than war. This part of Vukovar was lived in mainly by Serbs, as the Serb gunners across the Danube knew. Little damage had been done. Yaroslav accelerated, dodging potholes, because he wanted to get home quickly, not for any fear for his safety. These Serb civilians seemed to take little part in the war. No doubt they would line the streets and welcome the Serb tanks when finally they rolled into the town centre; but meanwhile they spent most of the time in their cellars, neither helping nor sabotaging the town’s haphazard defence. Yaroslav had worked with several Serbs in the municipal engineers office, solid experienced men each looking to a reasonable pension. They had been irritated and bemused by the propaganda from Belgrade urging them to live and fight for the historic rights of Serbia. Yaroslav himself was no zealot, and Maria, being a Ruthene, was even further removed from the broadcast spasms of half-truth from both sides that fanned the fighting. Vukovar was in Croatia because Tito had put it there, though just under half of its inhabitants and most of those in the surrounding villages were Serbs. Yaroslav knew well this jumble of different churches, political parties, even alphabets, which made up Eastern Slavonia. He knew it was not possible to find a line on the map that would neatly divide Serbs from Croats, not to speak of Ruthenes and Jews. Either they lived peacefully together, as they had under the Hapsburg Empire, under the Yugoslav Kingdom, even under Tito – or else the stronger coerced the weaker into subjection by force of arms. Living peacefully together was possible, as history and Yaroslav in his own short life had proved; but every now and then politicians miles away decided that it was impossible, and set the killing machines in motion again. Yaroslav’s grandfather had been bayoneted to death fighting for the Hapsburg Empire on the Italian front in the first war. In the second war his father had been shot by Serbs for atrocities committed on behalf of the Gestapo by Croat Ustachi militia. No one had seriously tried to prove that his father was himself guilty of herding thirty Serb women and children into a mountain cave and suffocating them with a fire lit at the entrance; he wore the Ustachi uniform, and that was proof enough.

  ‘We can go,’ he said, as his wife opened the door. It was enough to see her face light up. It had often lit up like that a year ago when they used to walk by the river in the evening, gossiping, in love, planning marriage, watching the old men fish and the swallows dive. There was no time now for gossip and love. Maria had managed to see the doctor once in her pregnancy when there had been sudden pains. The doctor had said that she was to rest every afternoon and above all lift nothing heavy. So Yaroslav packed the three suitcases. Clothes, the tins of food they had hoarded for this purpose, the gilded wooden Madonna from above their bed, his framed engineer’s certificate. Much had to be left, in particular the sticks of furniture inherited from his parents. From the bedroom window Yaroslav looked down the stone path lined with herbs which led to his tool shed, lovingly built alongside the boundary fence. A happy home, a happy garden, the house of his childhood, which for these short months had kept the latest war at bay.

  As Yaroslav loaded the suitcases into the Volkswagen, Maria slipped down to the Ruthene Catholic Church at the end of the street. Of yellow stone, it proudly carried the date 1907 on its tall plain f
acade. The priest had left weeks ago, lamely pleading new duties in Zagreb. The church waited for whatever fate the next wave of fellow-Christian conquerors would inflict. Maria prayed briefly for the coming baby, for Yaroslav, for herself.

  ‘You can’t take these.’

  ‘I’ve decided.’ Yaroslav did not often say this, but when he did there was no point in arguing. He packed the almost new garden spade and fork into the back of the car alongside the suitcases. ‘Wherever we go there will be soil. We shall need vegetables.’ With the tools in the car and Maria beside him, Yaroslav felt reconciled to abandoning their home.

  They reached the Serb checkpoint half an hour before the daily local cease-fire ended. Yaroslav did not know what to expect. At the beginning the Serbs had laughed at Croats leaving the battlefield of Vukovar and there had been cases of pillaging. Yaroslav covered the spade and fork with a strip of sackcloth brought for the purpose. But either new orders had been given, or the Serbs had begun to respect the gallantry of the hopeless defence of Vukovar. The Volkswagen was stopped, papers cursorily inspected, the family waved through.

  It was otherwise at the Croat post in a wood half a kilometre further on. There the laissez passer signed by the colonel at the water tower was scrutinised by a private soldier, then a sergeant, finally a lieutenant.

  ‘You should join the others over there.’ A military bus was parked at the edge of the clearing. They could see it was half full. Cardboard suitcases like their own were piled on the roof.

  ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘To Split. Accommodation will be provided there.’

  ‘But I can drive there myself.’

  ‘It is not permitted. The road is not safe. Take this.’

  It was a receipt for the Volkswagen.

  ‘When can I have the car back?’

  The sergeant shrugged cynically. ‘After the war.’

  ‘I need these tools.’

  ‘You will have no use for a spade and a fork in Split.’

  ‘They are mine. I value them.’

  ‘Comrade,’ said the lieutenant, falling back into the jargon of Tito’s time, ‘you have risked your life for Croatia in the battle of the water tower. The Colonel’s certificate clearly says so. Certainly you will not grudge your country the use of these poor tools.’

  They trudged across the clearing to the bus. There was not much talk among those inside, once it was established that all passengers were equally ignorant of what their future held. The bus waited until thirty minutes after the expiry of the cease-fire, then began the long and bumpy journey to the Adriatic.

  ‘Yearning for revenge, would that be right?’

  Yaroslav unloaded the vinegar, salt and pepper from the tray and placed them carefully in the centre of the tablecloth alongside the blue and yellow plastic flowers. He disliked serving journalists because unlike NATO and UN officials they asked questions and his English was not adequate for conversation.

  He had told this large English woman the night before that he came from Vukovar. Heaven knows what she was talking about now. He smiled, shook his head, and laid her place with metal knife and fork.

  Talk about bricks without straw,’ Elaine muttered. It wasn’t as if the food was good either. The war was over, but her paper still wanted human interest stories from the different bits of former Yugoslavia.

  Though rendered inarticulate by suffering, Yaroslav clearly yearns for revenge with every fibre of his being’ she scribbled in her notebook while waiting for the thick minestrone. Not bad-looking either – he would surely agree to pose, napkins in hand, if she brought her camera to dinner. Had he mentioned a baby boy? ‘… born to bleak inheritance of anger and suffering.’

  But Yaroslav was thinking of a different conversation to come, the conversation he must have upstairs once Maria had returned from the crèche and read the contents of the buff envelope which had arrived after she had left that morning. He had long rehearsed his side of the conversation, because the letter had come as no surprise – but he was not sure of Maria’s reaction. It was even more difficult than he had feared.

  ‘We should stay here.’

  The notice in the buff envelope simply stated that following the victory of the Croatian Army the home registered in their name on the outskirts of Vukovar was available for immediate reoccupation. They should apply to the Resettlement Bureau before July 31 for a voucher that would entitle them to the appropriate bus fare and resettlement grant.

  ‘Our home is there.’ How could Maria think that their home could be here in Split, in this tiny hotel bedroom, with the half-efficient stove jammed into the bathroom alongside the stained bath and malfunctioning toilet?

  Maria shook her head. ‘Here I have a job, you have a job. Stefan is well cared for. There we would have nothing.’

  ‘I am an engineer, not a waiter.’ He hated the servility of the job, the long hours, the grubby hotel kitchen full of flies, the foreigners whom he served, not tourists nowadays, but aid officials, UN officers, journalists, all clutching a morsel of information about Former Yugoslavia and supposing it was the whole. But he could not deny the rest of what Maria had said. She cleaned at the school two streets away, was reasonably paid, and allowed to take Stefan, now nearly two years old, to toddle with other babies in the crèche and cram himself with a healthy lunch.

  ‘You will have no job in Vukovar, engineer or waiter. Everyone says the place is still destroyed.’ Everyone was the group of refugees billeted like them in the Hotel Bella Vista. The hotel had been constructed for the lower end of the Italian and German tourist trade and finished just in time for the collapse of that trade when the war began.

  ‘There is the church waiting for you.’ There was no Ruthene Catholic Church in Split that could provide Maria with the sonorous chants which had meant so much to her. But she simply shrugged.

  He had shot his bolt. The things that meant much to him in Vukovar, the sweep of the Danube, the swallows of mid-summer, the path of herbs to their back door, his vegetable patch, the shed where his father had sawn logs, his mother’s kitchen, all these were nothing to Maria.

  ‘Let us at least go and have a look.’ But it was a feeble suggestion. Both of them knew that if they left their room even for two days it would be occupied at once by other still homeless refugees.

  ‘I will stay here,’ said Maria. To him her tone was conclusive. He would have to stay too.

  That evening the hotel manager told them that the hotel was to be refurbished for the expected return of the tourists next spring. Since Yaroslav was now listed as having a house to return to in Vukovar, he and his wife were required to vacate Room No 504 within seven days. So the argument between husband and wife had been pointless, and their wishes irrelevant.

  Their own house was swept, empty, unscathed. To Yaroslav, at one level this was a great relief, but at a deeper level he knew that the house would not quickly become a home again. That would need more than the re-hanging on the wall of the wooden Madonna and the certificate from the engineering college. The break with the past was absolute; he and Maria and Stefan would have to start again.

  The house next door was a charred ruin. Beyond that the Serb school teacher had remained, a widower of few words.

  ‘What happened to the Kostic family?’ asked Yaroslav, pointing to the ruin.

  ‘They went like you, a few days later.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘They came back. Three weeks ago. Also like you.’

  ‘But – they could not live in that,’ pointing to the charred beams and collapsed roof.

  ‘The house was fine then.’

  ‘But what happened?’

  ‘Later there was a fire. There have been several fires. In houses to which Croats have returned. They have been unlucky.’ The spectacles of the school teacher glinted sardonically.

  ‘And the Kostic family?’

  ‘No one was hurt. They left again.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  The schoo
l teacher shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have no idea. Croats are not welcome here.’

  Yaroslav digested this. After the last five years little was a surprise.

  ‘And who lived in our house?’

  ‘A Serb family, from Knin. He was a farmer.’

  Yaroslav understood by now the merry-go-round of ethnic cleansing. Knin was in the south-western part of Croatia where many Serbs had lived. In the last months of the war the Croat army had swept back into Knin, pushing before it a throng of fearful Serb refugees. It was natural that many of those Serbs should find refuge in the houses in Serb-occupied Vukovar from which Croats had fled months earlier. Now the UN and NATO said that both sets of expulsion had all been wrong and everyone should go back to their own homes. The Serb and Croat governments had agreed, having no choice. It must look fine on paper, Yaroslav thought. Here beside the wreck of the Kostic family home, and the comments of his neighbour, it seemed not so easy.

  That farmer who lived in my house – what became of him?’

  ‘They were told to go. Back to Knin, I suppose.’ He paused. ‘So it goes on.’

  The next days were not easy. The resettlement warrant given them at Split entitled the family to a certain quantity of food and fuel on return to Vukovar, financed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. A ticket annexed to the warrant gave the address and time fixed for an interview for Yaroslav at the Employment Bureau. But this bureaucratic precision proved to be a myth. The premises at the address given had been converted into a bar. Yaroslav walked through Vukovar street by street in search of a job. The trees on the hill and by the Danube had survived the siege better than the buildings. The town was still two-thirds destroyed. Two years of peace had brought little repair or reconstruction but a crop of flowering weeds and bushes, also food stalls and soft drink stands, among the ruins. The warm sun and full summer foliage brought cheerfulness to the scene but Yaroslav could imagine the bleakness of winter. Two restaurants and a hairdresser had reopened, and a string of prefabricated huts beside the gutted opera house housed the school. On the hill the handsome yellow pediment of the old Academy still carried the Latin inscription that recorded its opening in the reign of the Emperor Franz Josef; but the classrooms behind that entrance where Yaroslav had studied were past repair. Swallows rested in the shattered roof; rats scurried in the rubble. Beyond the Academy, the rusting skeleton of the water tower dominated the horizon. Carnations were laid at its foot to commemorate the gallant defence of 1991.