Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

She had had friends, good friends, in the village of Rosenovici, and she did not dare to talk of them. She scoured the skins of the carrots. It was since he had come home from Belgrade, since she had told him of the digging in the corner of the field that he had been, all the time, foul-mouthed and bad-tempered.

Evica had not told him, would not have dared to, of the change these last two weeks in the attitude of the school's Headmaster to her. There was a slyness from the school's Headmaster, a smugness, a distancing from her, since the digging. And he would have heard, as she had heard, the broadcast on the radio. He would have listened, as she had listened, to the radio in English, on the short wave, because that was the small window they could climb through each day, when each was alone. Denied books, the radio was her freedom and the Headmaster's freedom also. It had been the voice of an American on the radio.

'… Be identified and put on trial these perpetrators of crimes against humanity…" She saw from her kitchen window the dug earth in the corner of the field. '.. Be treated exactly as were Hitler's associates at Nuremberg…" She had not been with those who had crossed the bridge over the swollen river and who had gone to watch the lifting of the bodies from the wet grey-black earth. '… Name some names, let them understand that over the long run, they may be able to run but they can't hide.. She had seen from her kitchen window the bodies in bags lifted into the jeeps.

She cut the carrots, dropped them into the saucepan.

The war suffocated Evica Stankovic.

The bus was three hours behind schedule when it came through. There were Nigerian soldiers around her, and there were two men from the UNHCR office in Zagreb who strutted impatiently and carried a print-out of the list of names. The bus came slow, tucked in behind the white-painted personnel carrier, towards the Nigerians' checkpoint. Ulrike Schmidt always felt a numbed despair when she came to the checkpoint at Turanj to welcome in a bus from behind the lines. Her father, of course, had known total war and refugee status, and her father's first wife had been killed when the bombers had come to Magdeburg. One of the men from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees office in Zagreb, smart and smelling of body lotion, made a joke to her, as if it were clever to laugh as the bus came through, as if it were adult, and she ignored him, indeed she barely heard him. The bus neared the checkpoint and there were Serbs standing at the far side of the sandbagged position that the Nigerians manned, and the Serbs would check the print-out list of names against the papers of those on the bus. She had never, and she had written to her father and mother in Munich of this, never ever seen shame on the faces of the Serbs when they checked through the new batch of refugees. She knew from the print-out that the refugees represented the population of the last village in the Prijedor area to be cleansed. There would be a village, small houses and a mosque and a shop and once neat fields and a car repair yard, that would now be flattened, and the population of the village were moving away from homes that no longer existed, and they would not know if a future was left to them. Their village was the bus, and after the bus their village would be in the corners of the sleeping rooms of the Transit Centre at Karlovac. And the wretched fool, the young man from the UNHCR in Zagreb, was still laughing at his joke and she could not remember what he had said… She saw the broken windows of the bus. The front windscreen, to the right of the driver's vision, was a skein of cracks that radiated from the stone's impact point, and three of the left side windows behind the driver had caved in. She saw the faces of the refugees. The young man was talking at her again and she did not hear him. So quiet and so cowed, the faces of the refugees, without expression. The stoning might have been by the Serbs in Prijedor, or it might have been later in the journey, or it might have been when they were in the last Serb village before the final checkpoint. She had never travelled beyond the checkpoint, never been behind the lines, and she found it close to impossible to understand the ethnic hatred that had driven Serb people to expel their Muslim neighbours, and there was no shame. She was a small woman. Her tight waist was held close by the belt of her denims. Her hair was mahogany but flecked now with grey that had not been there before she had come to administer the Transit Centre. She wore a pressed white blouse, open at the throat. She used no make-up, because cosmetics might seem to offer an insult to the refugees who came from the villages of Bosnia, and who had nothing. She set a smile on her face. She was dwarfed by the men around her. She was smiling briskly and going towards the door of the bus. Later, she would hear the atrocity stories. She would hear who had been raped and who had been tortured and who had been beaten… She saw herself as the symbol that the past, rape and torture and beatings, was finished. The young man was beside her, towering over her and talking fast, like a cockerel parading for a hen, and he would, because they always did, offer her his telephone number for when she could next get to the city and there would be a promise of dinner, and she would ignore him as she always did. She paused at the door of the bus. There were Serbs on the steps and she stared them out defiantly until the first weakened his resolve and made room for her. They came down off the bus's steps and made a point of brushing their bodies against hers, and behind them were the faces, expressionless, of the refugees. There was no shame. The history of her own country had been only academic to her before her posting to Croatia. Something taught in secondary-level school by defensive teachers. The Nazi years, the arrogance of men in uniform, the brutality of men with guns, the fear of dispossessed refugees, had no reality for her until she had come to Croatia. Before Croatia she had been among the thousands of young persons living the comfortable existence of the aid agencies… Now it was all changed. The culture of the agencies was to turn the cheek, smile, deflect the insult, and that had been possible for her until she had come to Croatia. There had been little to prepare her for what she would find. A flight to Geneva, a job interview, a three-day course, and she had been pitched into Karlovac. She had learned on her feet… She had learned to hate the men in uniform and their guns. Because there was no shame, Ulrike Schmidt yearned to see them stamped down and humiliated. She cried inside for a reckoning day to be delivered to those who felt no shame. One day… Her father had told her, and he had known because he had been employed as a junior interpreter by the British prosecutor, that the guards at the camps in the Neuengamme Ring had taken photographs of the naked Jewish women running past them towards medical inspection, and felt no shame. She thought that the young Serbs who pushed against her breasts in the doorway of the bus felt no shame and thought themselves safe, safe from retribution. The chief guards at the Neuengamme Ring of camps had been hanged by the British, but they had not thought they would be hanged when they took their photographs. She prayed each morning, after the clamour of the alarm, for strength. She made warmth in her smile. "What motivates me is my belief that if war criminals are found to be beyond justice then we are entering a new age of barbarism…" The man chain-smoked. They had been on the hard chairs in the corridor for an hour. "Bringing men to trial, to a court of law, will be difficult, it will take many years, but it is the most important thing…" The man rested his elbows on the filled desk. They had come through heavy sets of old doors, climbed dark wide staircases, nudged their way past heaped and cobwebbed files. "Revenge killing is useless. It is necessary to find truth, then justice…" The man coughed thick phlegm to his lips. Penn had been told by Jovic that it was the ministry office for accumulating evidence on war crimes. They had sat a long hour before they were ushered from the corridor and into an office. He had tried conversation to kill the time and failed. "It is necessary to have meticulous preparation of evidence. I am determined we will not move outside legality. If, when, it comes to trials, it would be catastrophe for a prosecution to collapse on technicality.. ." The man talked as if to an audience and the smoke eddied in the wisps of his beard. An hour in the corridor, and now half an hour as the working of the office was portrayed. Penn wrote his notes carefully. He could not complain at Jovic's translation, steady and at a good pace. He had the name of the man, and his title and the notes made good reading. The pity was that the notes were rubbish, they didn't matter. He had tried to steer the conversation, twice, and twice had been ignored because this was prepared speech time for visitors, and visitors were supposed to duck their heads in respect. A secretary had put her head round the door, grimaced at the man. Penn knew the form. The speech would end. Handshakes, farewells, and the man would be sweeping out of the office to a new appointment. "I work in conjunction with the United Nations Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International…" "Rosenovici, in the Municipality of Glina." Penn said it loud. "I receive no money from my own government