Gerald Seymour: The Dealer and the Dead

The translator asked, ‘What happened here?’

‘I drove the tractor with the plough. For nineteen years this ground has been mined. We have been told it is cleared. We looked for the bodies.’

‘You knew bodies were here?’

‘We knew that here, where it was mined, was where our men had been. They waited on the path.’

‘On the Cornfield Road that linked Vukovar to Vinkovci?’

‘They were on it.’

‘Who was there?’

‘Our schoolteacher. He had gone out three weeks before to buy weapons. We received nothing from Zagreb. We were betrayed by Zagreb.’

The priest tutted but received an acid glance from the American, muttered, hung his head and was quiet.

‘Continue, please.’

‘Everything we owned in the village was collected and given to Zoran, the teacher. He asked for our trust. What we collected was taken to a meeting and given to a supplier of weapons. A deal was made. That night, Zoran went with three others to receive the missiles and launchers that our valuables had bought. Everything was given as payment. We waited for their return. They would have been heavily burdened by the weight of the weapons. They didn’t come. There was mortaring in this area but that was near dawn and they should already have been long back. With those weapons we could have kept the Cornfield Road open. Their tanks cut it. We lost the road through the corn, we lost the village and Bogdanovci, and a week later we had lost Vukovar. The teacher had sworn to us that the man he had met and paid was honourable. We know now that the lorry with the weapons never reached the far end of the Cornfield Road. Some say it never loaded or left the docks at the harbour where they were supposed to be landed.’

As he spoke, Petar saw that Mladen, who led the community, bit his lower lip, and the Widow, in black blouse, black skirt and black stockings, with brilliant white hair, stood erect and gazed high over the American’s head.

‘How many were with the teacher?’

Petar said, ‘He had taken with him my friend Tomislav’s boy, my friend Andrija’s cousin… and my only son.’

‘If there was guilt we’ll find it, and I’ll work to name those who should face justice.’

From the back of the Land Cruiser, the professor and the young woman took long rolls of tape and circled the raised arm. The professor told the people of the village that he would sleep in the back of the vehicle and that the dead would not be alone. Petar walked back to his tractor, started the engine and led the way back to the village.

Before they had gone far they heard the chugging beat of a small generator and lights lit the place. They had a man’s promise. He could picture his son, Tomislav’s, Andrija’s cousin and the teacher. It was owed them that the guilt should be uncovered and punishment meted out.

He thought it would be quick and without pain. He thought it would end the misery. It was two years since Andrija had last tried to end his life. He had waited until his wife had gone down the village street to the shop, then had hobbled to the far end of the garden, put a pistol into his mouth and pressed the barrel to the roof. He had squeezed the trigger, depressed it, and… nothing had happened. He was not dead and he had wet himself.

His pistol had jammed. The malfunction in the mechanism would have resulted from inadequate maintenance, cleaning and care. He had allowed corrosion of the metal parts to spread internally.

Now Andrija was ready again.

He lived on the northern edge of the village, one of the last houses on the tarmac road towards Bogdanovci. He was now at the bottom of his garden, shielded from the house by a row of bean plants that had reached the top of the hazel poles. He could see the tip of the spire of the rebuilt church at Bogdanovci, and he could remember: they had gone from here. On a November night, in light rain and total darkness, the schoolteacher had led, Petar’s boy and Tomislav’s had followed, and his cousin had been at the back. They had taken with them the pram chassis, two wheelbarrows and the handcart from the farm. The guilt ate at him. It had grown more acute with each hour since the lone arm had been turned up by the plough, and had been agonising as the grave workers had excavated the sodden, shapeless corpses. He wanted it ended. This time, Andrija believed his wife was in a front room and wouldn’t have seen him go out of the open kitchen door at the back. She would know nothing until the explosion.

He laid his crutch on the grass, wet from the night’s dew. Soon, as the sun rose, the moisture would be taken from it. There was shade thrown by the beans, and the grass was fresh and cool. He bent his one knee and subsided; the right leg was off just above the joint. He had steadfastly refused a prosthetic limb. Getting down on to the grass jolted his spine, hurting him, and he winced. He reached into his jacket pocket and took from it an RG-42 hand grenade, the fragmentation type. The ring rattled the canister as he moved it. Inside its casing were – Andrija knew weapons and how to handle them – 118 grammes of high explosive. A similar amount, packed into an anti-personnel device, had all but severed his right leg.

In the breakout, the women and the wounded left in the cellar below the church, he had managed to get some two and a half kilometres clear of the village – a third of the distance to the safety of the forces round Nustar or Vinkovci – and then had triggered a POMZ-2 anti-personnel mine fastened to a stake, with a fine trip-wire in the long grass to activate it. He had already been in the corn for sixty hours and was dehydrated, famished, exhausted. He was alone, with no comrade to help him. He had made a tourniquet above the wound from the laces of the boot on his right foot, now useless, and had dragged himself a little more than five kilometres. It had taken two more days to reach the lines. He could remember the dawn breaking over the cornfields when the teacher, the boys and his cousin had not returned. He had lain in cover with his sniper’s rifle and waited for sounds of them approaching, ready to give covering fire…

The grenade had a delay on the fuse of four seconds from the pulling of the pin. He would not be the first of his village: two men had used a grenade in the last year to end the torment. There had been three from the other villages, more from the town. Two years before he had thought it would be easier with his handgun. He held the grenade in his hand, a big hand, the grenade snug in it. Before the war he had delivered post in the three villages, a good job that offered status, security and a uniform. He had not worked since they had come back to the village.

He heard his name called, three or four times, with rising impatience. His wife, Maria, had a strong voice, a short temper.

Since they had come back to the house, thirteen years ago, and rebuilt it, they had not slept together as man and wife. He had not penetrated her; she had not opened herself to him. She had never told him how many had raped her. A section? A platoon? Regular troops from the JNA? Cetniks of Arkan, the terrorist? In 1991, when the village had been held and then fallen, Andrija had been twenty-three, a star athlete and handsome, so women had said. Maria had been twenty-five, a beauty and raven-haired. Now he was crippled, disabled and destroyed, and she was haggard, her hair grey, without lustre, and cropped short. They were removed from each other, ate their meals in silence and slept so that they did not touch. Many in the village were scarred by the siege and the defeat.

He rolled on to his stomach. The grenade gouged into his belly and the index finger of his left hand was inside the ring. He could pull it. He could end it.

He considered what his life consisted of. There was no joy and everything was a burden. He ate with her, cleared the plates, then sat on the porch and watched cars and lorries go past. People who walked by would call to him but he would seldom answer, only sucking at a cigarette. In the middle of each morning he would head down the road to the cafe, swinging on the crutch. There, he would be with Tomislav and Mladen and they would fight again the battles on the different pinch points of the perimeter. They could take two hours to re-create the moments when the last RPG-7 round had been fired against a slow-moving tank, and two more hours to chew on the killing, with the Dragunov sniper rifle, of a major whose death had stalled an infantry advance. They took a minimum of two hours to talk over the bayonet battle at close quarters on the far side of the village when twelve had stopped forty in their tracks. They were never defeated, never found wanting in tactics or strategy as they sat in the cafe, toyed with the coffee and smoked. Always they were betrayed – by the government, which had not allocated resources and fresh men, and had not broken the siege of the town and the villages – but they had also suffered the treachery of the weapons paid for but not delivered. Betrayal. Treachery. Every day in the cafe they blamed defeat on the two evils.