Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

Suddenly, he was looking into the valley. There had been a fine rock in front of him, weather-smoothed and lichen-coated, and the rock had blocked the valley from him. Past the rock, and he saw the valley. There was a stream going fast, well swollen, that cut the valley into halves. Two tractors worked in the grass fields on the far side of the stream from him, and both pulled old laden manure spreaders. The fields on his side of the valley were unworked and weeded up.

He saw the contrast, and he understood.

His eyes tracked the progress of the stream past a pool where the water ran slower with the white spume giving way to dark depths, and he thought it would be a place for trout. Beyond where the tractors heaved out manure there were cultivated strips and he saw women working, dark shapes in the early morning mist wrapped in thick coats against the cold and bent over hoes and forks. On his side of the stream there were no cultivated strips, no women, nothing planted.

His eyes moved on, attracted to the soft colours further down the valley. The apple trees were in blossom, there were cattle grazing across the stream and children played amongst routing pigs and a dog drove sheep along a track, and it was all on the far side of the stream.

Yes, he understood.

He saw the smoke climbing from the chimneys of the village across the stream, and when he squinted his eyes and shaded them from the low sun he could see the shape of the houses and the block of the church and the brightness of flowers. He saw a car pass another car. His gaze roved across from Salika, over a linking bridge, rested on the twin village that was his side of the stream. He saw at first the mirror image, then the reality came. The broken church, the small houses without roofs, the foliage of brambles and nettles growing high in a lane. It was difficult for him at that distance, more than a mile, to see the detail of Rosnovici. But he saw that one village lived and one village had died. And at the edge of his vision, blurred by mist coming off the dew on the grass, he thought he saw a grey-black scar in a corner of the field that was immediately before the village that had died.

A cock pheasant faced him.

He saw nothing that was danger. The valley was at gentle peace. He knew the fox would have thought the chickens' cage was a place of gentle peace until the birds screamed and the gun came and the dogs were loosed. It was where Dorrie Mowat had been… and where Dorrie Mowat had been knifed and bludgeoned and shot to death.

The cock pheasant rose up on its clawed feet, beat its wings, shouted the warning.

He looked again across the stream to the ruin of Rosenovici. He had taken the money, and when he had taken the money he had given his commitment. He wanted to earn his own pride… He sat in the shadow of the big rock, where he could see down the valley, where he would wait through the day. When he could no longer see the apple blossom, and when the tractors had driven back to the living village, and when the women had trudged home, and the children, then he would move again and work his way under the cover of coming darkness towards the village that had died… He wanted to make a report that would earn his own pride.

The cock pheasant careered away in noisy flight down the length of the valley at gentle peace.

So nearly… First would have come the crows, and after the crows had taken carrion there would have come magpies and jays, and after magpies and jays there would have been rats, and after the rats there would have been crawling insects, and the worms would have come for the final feast. The jaws seemed to laugh at Penn, the eye sockets seemed to stare at him. He had so nearly stepped on the skull. Two winters and a summer, he thought, had given every chance for the birds, rodents, insects and worms to strip the flesh and muscle and tissue from the face of the skull. The mouth leered, the eye sockets challenged him. Walking a pace to the side of the track in the late afternoon half-light under the tree canopy, his foot poised to drop and take his weight, he had seen the skull in the leaves and brambles. The skeleton was lying on what had been its stomach, but the head was twisted as if the final living movement had been the attempt to see the killing danger behind. The skeleton was clothed in a long dark-brown overcoat, and there were trousers that had also not rotted, but he could see the bones at the ankles, above the shoes, because the man had not worn socks, and he could see also the bones of the hands still clasping a farm sack of rough hessian. He was in the tree line, going towards Rosenovici, and he could see down through into the trees and into the quiet calm of the valley, and there-was a golden light settled on the valley. He had no business with it, the knowledge could not help him, but he bent and he took the finger bones from the neck of the sack and they came away easily. Inside the sack, stuffed in, were the clothes of basic winter necessity, what a man could carry for himself and for his woman. He saw it in his mind… the moment when someone in the doomed village had claimed there was a window of opportunity for flight, and frightened men and women had jumped for the window, taken what they could carry, and tried to smuggle themselves through the perimeter lines of their enemy. He wondered if Dorrie Mowat had seen this man go, wondered if she had wished him well, wondered if she had kissed him or if she had hugged him, wondered if she had told him that she would stay… He had so nearly stepped on the skeleton of the man who had been at the head of the fleeing column.

When he went forward, edging his way, he found the others. All skeletons, all dressed against the cold. The skeletons lay in a straggled line. There were the remains of women and of children and of babies. There were bulging suitcases of rotted cardboard and decaying imitation leather that were tied shut with farm twine, there were more hessian sacks, there were the heavy plastic bags that had once held agricultural fertilizer. He counted a dozen skeletons in all. In the cases and sacks and bags he found the necessities of survival, clothes and children's favourite toys and the small framed pictures of Christ in Calvary. He supposed a machine gun had taken them, traversing. Some would have run forward at the first explosion of shooting and some would have frozen still and some would have tried to go back. Last in the line was a tall woman and he could see that her body wore three dresses, and there was a bag beside her where she had dropped it and each hand still held a small swaddled bundle and the bone of the third finger of her left hand was amputated, where her wedding ring would have been. He understood what she had carried, what in her death she had not let go of because the two small skulls were close to her boots. He wondered if Dorrie had known them, if Dorrie had kissed and hugged the babies, if Dorrie had told the mother why she would stay to the end with the wounded.

He felt no hatred, because his mind was chilled.

No fear, because his mind was numbed.

He went forward. He had walked half of the distance to the village that he must travel before darkness. Dorrie had been here, in the valley, and would have seen the tractors and the women and the animals, and Dorrie had stayed to the end… She pulled him forward. It was as if she had taken Penn's hand, and there was mischief in her smile, as if she taunted him, as if she dared him to come closer to Rosenovici. He did not think there was anything in his life before that had been worthwhile. She had captured him, with her taunt beckoning, with the laugh of her lips and cheeks. That horrid young woman, he would have loved her. Penn wanted to be near to Rosenovici before darkness. That angel, he would have loved her. He had put down the book because there was not enough light through the window for him to read more. He was still cold. The Headmaster sat in his chair. He was hunched, bowed, with a blanket of thick wool across his shoulders, and he rubbed hard at his upper thighs to put warmth in them. All through the day he had been cold. His trousers, soaked from the wading of the river at the ford that was not guarded by the scum boys of the militia, could not be hung on the line to dry outside in the day's spring sunshine. It would have invited suspicion to have displayed his wet trousers for the village to see. His shoes, mud-caked, could be left, discreetly, at the kitchen door because no one from the village now came to their house, that much was guaranteed. The plague was on his house, but his trousers would have been seen from the road and his wife had not complained to him, just laid them wet and filthy over the wood frame in front of the kitchen stove. Although he shivered, he felt a sense of true liberation. It had been good to pray in that place of evil, kneeling in the mud, crying silently for the forgiveness of them all. He did not think it an idiocy, which was what his wife had said it was, that he had waded the ford to go to pray in that place of evil… He made out a movement through the window, the hurrying walk of villagers going towards the crossroads near the church. He stood up from the chair and pressed his face against the cold glass and craned to see where the villagers went, hurrying. He saw the white jeeps stopped near the church, and he saw, in a blur, the Canadian policeman who had promised to bring him books for his school in return for the sharing of his secret, and the Political Officer who was an educated man. He felt his strength because he had prayed in that place of evil, knelt in that muddied pit that shamed them all, and he would wade the ford again that night, ask again for their forgiveness, pray again that the guilty would face harsh retribution. He knew that some, a few, had the courage to stand up because he had heard it on the foreign radio. There were some, a few, who had sheltered and hidden their neighbours, Croat or Muslim. There were some, a few, who had stood against the tide and shouted against the barbarism of the concentration camps and the killings and the digging of graves in the dark silence. It was worth praying for, harsh retribution for the guilty. The Headmaster climbed the stairs of his house. It was right, when he went to see the UNCIVPOL Canadian and the Political Officer, that he should wear his suit. "We have a job to do, and the job is mandated by the office of the Secretary General of the United Nations…" The Political Officer was Finnish, but it was many years since he had lived in the family home at Ivalo, up north by the Arctic Circle, close to the Russian border, and many years since he had served in the offices of the Foreign Ministry, down south in Helsinki. The Political Officer was a United Nations man, had been for seventeen years. He did not know whether he had offended a particular dignitary, whether he had made waves where oil should have been poured, but following an investigation that he had led into the use of United Nations facilities by the families of diplomats accredited to New York, he had been shipped overseas. His wife's home, where she was with the children, was New Jersey. His home, where he was alone, was the spa town of Topusko. Perhaps it was his penance, for digging too deep into claimed expenses, that he was posted to Topusko in Sector North. "When you hinder me, then you hinder the world. It is a great conceit for a little man to hinder the humanitarian efforts of the world community…"