Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'I laid no mines.' Dragan Kovac jutted his jaw.

'The war is over. We're not talking about blame,'

Barnaby said. 'I work with Muslims, Serbs and Croats as the consultant to both governments. I don't recognize flags – but neither do mines recognize the difference between soldiers and children. I have to know how many mines were laid and over how wide an area. If I have that information I can estimate, only roughly, how many de-miners will be needed, how long it will take, and how much it will cost. Do you remember?'

Dragan Kovac shook his head, looked up at the rainclouds, scratched his ear. 'It is very hard. I was not here all the time, after they attacked and tried to kill us.'

Husein Bekir said, 'You see? I told you the old fool remembers nothing.'

The Englishman had his binoculars up and gazed over the fields. 'I can see the bones of cattle out there.

Extraordinary how long bones survive before they rot down, and they're in the middle of the fields. It's not surprising but it's a bad indication. The middle of the fields is not where the mines would have been buried.

It means they've moved. Rain like this shifts them.

People shift them. Foxes, it's hard to believe, will pick up a small anti-personnel device that's exposed, carry it off and put it down a hundred metres away. Then there's more rain and it's covered over. Even where there were correctly made maps, they cannot be relied upon. The minefield is an organism, it breathes, it has a pulse. There could be ten, there could be a hundred.

It's a big area, it would take many men and much money, and the difficulties of one farmer are not a priority.'

'I don't know, I want to help b u t… ' Dragan Kovac shrugged.

'When will you come?' Husein Bekir tugged the Englishman's sleeve.

'Not soon. I apologize for dragging you out on a filthy day. It certainly will not be next year.'

Husein Bekir stood at his full height and gazed at the Englishman's face. 'If I and my wife, my daughter and my grandchildren, all my neighbours, my animals and my dog make a line, walk across my fields, if we all step on a mine and we are all killed, would you come then, more quickly? Would that make you come?'

'We will come, I promise it to both of you, when we can. We can only do so much… '

Joey pushed himself up from behind the wall of beer bottles that stretched across his table. His legs were rubber soft and gave as he lurched from the table. He grabbed the leather-jacket shoulder of a youth, was cursed and shoved away. He set his sights on the door to the street and swayed as he moved towards his target. The last time he had been drunk, incapable, and it was hard with a fuddled mind to remember it, had been on his fifteenth birthday, which had clashed on the estate with the final afternoon of the harvest.

The tractor men and the baling men had seen the fun of it and had poured rough cider down his throat, which they could handle but he could not. They'd brought him home to his mother then driven away, abandoning him to her piercing anger, and she'd not let him in the house before he'd thrown up into the silage pit. He'd wrecked what should have been a special dinner. He'd been alone, spinning in his bed, while his mother and father had eaten the dinner with his empty chair for company. He stood in the doorway, propped against the jamb, and saw a shrunken, bowed man go past the glass front, disappear beyond it. The man pushed a wheelchair. A young woman was in the wheelchair.

It wasn't the night cold that sobered him.

A man had said, 'You haven't, have you, compromised him?'

Joey ran after Judge Delic and Jasmina. Ran until he caught them.

He heard the knock on the door over the noise of the shower. It was the time the laundry usually came back. He shouted from the bathroom that he would be a moment. He was towelling himself dry. He could have asked the maid to leave the laundry outside the door, but he'd also given her his shoes for cleaning, and he wanted to thank her and tip her when she returned them. Mister fastened one towel around his waist and looped a second over his shoulders, picked up loose change from the desk and went to the door. I le opened it and reached out his hand with the fist of coins.

'I surprise you… ' She rolled her eyes. 'I apologize.'

'Miss Holberg – I thought you were the maid.' He blushed.

'Forgive me.'

He saw the sparkle in her face, its cleanness, and the fun in her. 'I'm not in a state to receive a distinguished visitor.'

'It is wrong of me not to have telephoned from Reception. I did not because I am devious, and I thought it would provide you with an opportunity to refuse me.'

She said that the next morning the VIP visitors would go to the village of Visnjica. It was a one-hour drive from the city. She would be honoured if he would agree to accompany her. She understood that he was shy of personal publicity and that she both respected and admired this. His name would not be given to the visitors or to the villagers, but he would have the opportunity to see for himself the value of his generosity in bringing the Bosnia with Love lorry to Sarajevo. It was to be an important day for her and it would be further fulfilled if he would accompany her – assuming, of course, that he did not have more important business in the city. She hoped very much that he could accept.

'I'd like that,' Mister said. 'I'm flattered. I'm delighted to accept.'

She said she would pick him up in the morning, told him what he should wear – not towels, her laughter gently mocking him – and wished him a good evening.

A minute after she'd gone, the maid brought his laundry and his dried, polished shoes. He whistled as he dressed. It was all compartments. He forgot the Princess, his wife, and in a compartment further recessed in his mind was the man who should have been killed on the grass beside the pavement.

'You no longer have the mentality of a Customs officer.'

'I wonder if I ever had it.'

'You have become a competitor,' the judge said drily.

'I am Joey Cann, the competitor who loses.'

They had brought him to their home. He had helped to push the chair across the bridge and up the steep hill between lines of apartment buddings wrecked by artillery, fire-gutted and covered by a rash of bullet holes. The narrow width of the road would have been the front line. There were no lights above them or in the open windows. They made their way by torch beam, shining it down in front of the chair's wheels so that they did not hit debris and jolt her, and he'd wondered how the judge pushed his daughter up that hill each evening. They had turned into a narrower street and he had seen a heavy concrete mass, what had been the front of the third floor of a block, hanging threateningly over them, but she hadn't looked up at it and neither had the judge. The beam had been aimed at a house. It was half a building, one storey, and half a ruin. A door and a window were intact. The left side of the house had fallen away.

Joey saw the snipped-off rafters, and wallpaper was exposed, still showing a pattern of pink flowers. The beam flickered on to three old pallets covered by a length of sheet metal to make a ramp for the chair.

When the door was opened he had stayed outside and emptied the beer from his bladder. He had gone inside. He had to talk and purge himself.

The room was lit with an oil lamp. The walls were dark with damp stains and cracks ran in the plaster.

There was a cooker attached by a pipe to a liquid-gas barrel, and a sink with clean plates on a draining-board. They had no refrigerator, and no electric fire.

There were worn rugs on bare boards. It was a place of penury. They gave him wine from an opened bottle and he sipped it sparingly because it tasted foul, because he did not need to drink more, because he thought it all they had to offer a guest. She never interrupted her father, but wheeled herself round the table to a cupboard and back, and filled a sandwich for him. He had been given a place on a sofa that was covered by a blanket and propped up by old books.