Gerald Seymour: The Untouchable

'I just need a signature, sir, for the hospital and the pathologist.'

Taking an age, the judge filled out the form. Back at home the work would have been done by a brisk, competent official in a quarter of the time. He wondered where they had dug this old fool out from, which stone they had lifted.

There had been no identification on the body, and no hotel security card. His starting point would be the better hotels in the city. The clothes carried designer labels: an Italian suit, a French shirt, an Italian tie, German shoes, and brief tight underpants of silk with a London l a b e l… silk.

Autumn 1991

He was watched. He had been watched all through the day from the early morning. It was late afternoon now, the sun was low over the golden outlines of the trees on the hills to the west of the valley, and he turned his slight body on the tractor seat to stare back hard at the big man who sat on a wooden chair by the door to the house. The tractor's wheels caught a rut in the field and jolted him, shook his spine through the thinning foam cushion on the iron seat. He lost sight of the hard eyes gazing at him from past the grazing fields, the big mulberry tree and the fencing close to the house that he had put up the previous spring.

They were two old, obstinate and opinionated men, and each in a moment of privacy would have called the other a valued friend, grudgingly, but times were difficult and changing for the worse, and on that day neither had called out a greeting or waved. They lived on opposite sides of the valley, separated by the Bunica river, and the events of the summer, now slipping away to autumn, had seemed to widen the differences of politics and culture; no wave and no greeting cry. Each would have thought it the role of the other to make the first gesture.

Above the noise of the engine he whistled to his dog. Years before he could have rounded up the cattle in the morning and the sheep in the afternoon on foot, but age had taken a toll of his knees and hips and he relied now on the tractor and the dog's skill. When the dog looked back to him for instructions he pointed towards the ford. In the morning, with his dog, he had brought the cattle back from the grazing fields, crossed the river with them, and driven them back to the fenced corrals by his barns; now he brought back the sheep. The grass was exhausted, the weather was closing for the winter. His dog harried the flanks of the column of sheep and stampeded them towards and into the river at a place where his father and grandfather, and his grandfather's father and grandfather, had dumped cartloads of stones to create the ford. Husein and the man who watched him had only been away from their own villages, in a whole life-span, for the two years of conscripted military training, and that was more than forty years ago.

He looked back at the valley floor across the riverbank. He saw the good grazing fields and the arable fields where the summer's maize crop had been harvested, the vegetables grown in strips had been lifted and the stark lines of posts linked with wire above the cut-down vines. He looked beyond the yellowed grazing fields, the ploughed arable land and the weeded corridors between the vines, past the mulberry tree from which the leaves were flaking, and the house with the shallow porch from which Dragan watched him, and up the hill track, by the well, towards the other village where smoke bent from chimneys, and over the ochre of the trees that caught the last of the sun's strength. His hearing was no longer keen, but he thought he had heard strident voices coming from north and south, warring in the few seconds that his tractor had stalled. But with the engine now straining to carry him up the far bank such sounds were blotted out. As the wheels spewed water and slithered on the mudbank, he saw the pool upstream and the fine trace of the wormed long line he had left out for trout.

It was the fault of the radios. The radios that played in his own village, Vraca, spat out poison, as did the radios in the other village, Ljut. Against the tractor's engine, they were dead. He braked. He allowed the dog to take the sheep ahead. He stood up, to his full short, wiry height. He lifted his frayed cap from his sparse hair. His mouth, filled with ragged teeth, was set in a weathered walnut face below a greyed, drooping moustache. It was, Husein thought, ridiculous to the point of evil, that the radios' poison and hatred should destroy an old grumbled friendship. He waved his cap and shouted, 'Dragan Kovac, can you hear me? Heh, I will be back in two days, if the river has not risen, to plant the apple trees. Heh, can we take coffee? Maybe we take brandy. Heh, I will see you, in two days, if it does not rain.'

He waited to see if his friend would wave back and strained for a far-away call in response, but he saw no movement, heard no answering shout.

For two centuries the ancestors of Husein Bekir had bought land from the ancestors of Dragan Kovac, paid over the odds and bought every scrap, every parcel, every pocket handkerchief. Christian land was now Muslim owned. To Husein it was incredible, as it had been to his grandfather and his grandfather's grandfather, that the Serb village was prepared to sell precious land to a Muslim village for short-term gain.

He understood that the Serb people prized a uniform more highly than hectares of grazing and arable ground, orchards and vineyards. The Serbs were bus drivers, hospital porters, clerks in the Revenue, soldiers, Customs men and policemen. Dragan Kovac had been a sergeant in the police before his retirement.

They sought the status of the uniform and the security of the pension, not the scarred hands and the arthritis that came from working the land. Husein himself had bought the pocket of land right under the home of Dragan that included the mulberry tree and the field where he hoped next week to plant the apple trees.

There was no more land left to buy, and the radio from Belgrade, listened to in Ljut, said each morning, afternoon and evening that Muslims had stolen Serb fields.

The radio from Sarajevo, heard on the transistors in Vraca, said every day that Serb tanks, artillery, and atrocities in distant Croatia would not intimidate the Muslim leaders from the prize of Bosnian independence. They killed old friendships.

His wife of thirty-nine years, Lila, chided him for not wearing a thicker coat as protection against the evening chill and his grandchildren, wild little mites, charged excitedly to fence in the sheep. There was a rumble of thunder as grey dark clouds chased the sunset.

The first splatter of rain fell on Husein Bekir's face.

He climbed down stiffly from the tractor.

The sun still shone on the far side of the valley, on the land he owned that stretched from the riverbank to the scrub-covered slopes that rose to the tree-line and the other village. He was a simple man: his formal education had finished on his fourteenth birthday and he could read and write only with difficulty. He claimed that political argument was beyond his comprehension and he followed the simpler instructions of the mullah in the mosque. He knew how to train a dog. He knew also how to work land, and get the heaviest possible weight of crops from the arable fields and grapes from the vineyard. He knew how to catch a trout that would feed five people. He knew how to stalk a bear and shoot it for its skin, how to track a deer and kill it for its meat. The valley was his place. He loved it. He could not have articulated that love, but it burned in him. Because of what the radios said, from Belgrade and Sarajevo, he did not know what was its future.

He thought that Dragan, the retired police sergeant and a monument of a man, separated from him by politics and religion, shared the same love. He walked awkwardly up the hill towards his home. At the door he paused. The sun dipped. The rain came on harder.