Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

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 places 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.

'It is a possibility that was the last mine?' He said it so quietly that the officer did not hear his question and was gone out into the night.

'How are you settling in, Mr Gough?'

'Not badly.'

'That's good news. I don't suppose you're fond of London.'

'I'll survive it.'

In the late afternoon Dougie Gough and the chief investigation officer, Dennis Cork, slipped out of the Custom House and on to the embankment path beside the river. Ostensibly they left the building so that Gough could light his pipe. Unspoken was the desire of each man to be clear of the building, away from the eyes and ears that might watch or listen to them. Gough, face wreathed in pipesmoke, wore his old raincoat and a thick knitted scarf over the tweed suit. Cork was wrapped in a dark camel coat with a spatter of dandruff showing on the collar. The small-talk, conversational, was for the corridor and the knot of smokers on the outside step. Yes, Gough was settling, surviving; it was what he had told his wife in a phone call to Glasgow. She hadn't commented, seldom queried his work duties. He'd said the same thing to his son, Rory, and to his daughter-in-law, Emma, whose back bedroom in their south-west London terrace home he now occupied. He hated London and yearned for escape to