Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

She thanked God her only son was safe with his family in Zenica. His wife was a good woman. She had earned Mrs Nurudinović’s confidence. Mrs Nurudinović had two grandsons, teenagers now. If those boys were taken to the army she would stop breathing.

Mrs Nurudinović and her neighbours had to organise and they had to be sharp, just to survive. A man from the fourteenth floor brought her firewood. His name was Mido. He usually came on a Tuesday. Mrs Nurudinović paid him and served him a glass of brandy. She could imagine her husband and Mido sitting at the table chatting. But now it was an effort. He was a kind man, Mido, but she thought of all the kindness in her life, she thought of sixty years of kindness and kind people and she knew that she was too old and tired to make conversation with Mido. It was the same with Amela, who collected Mrs Nurudinović’s twice-weekly ration of humanitarian aid from the community centre. Mrs Nurudinović paid her a little, which she knew Amela needed because she had three children and no husband. She wished she could be kinder to Amela. She wished she could like her more, yet she didn’t have the energy, she didn’t have the reserves of tenderness and care.

But Milena. Maybe God had sent Milena to them. Milena needed her neighbours, Mrs Nurudinović knew.

And today her neighbours needed Milena.

Stanislav arrived as they drank coffee. When Milena used to see Stanislav, on the stairs or in the street outside when he was coming home from work, she wanted to cheer him up. He had such a sad face. He was slightly cross-eyed, which didn’t make him look any more cheerful. He had a round face and drooping heavy cheeks. Milena supposed that most girls would be put off by that hangdog air.

Stanislav was very polite. Mrs Nurudinović was amused because she could see that he was in awe of Milena. He was grateful to her too.

‘Shall we go now?’ he asked Milena nervously.

She gave him a charming smile. Mrs Nurudinović liked the way Milena put Stanislav at ease.

Milena and Stanislav walked down to Stanislav’s apartment almost in silence. The stairs were dark and in several places the thick glass had been smashed and it was possible to see far below to the car park, full of wrecked cars. A small child could have fallen through one of those holes in the glass. It made Milena shiver just to think of it. The stairs were dirty and filled with a sharp, icy odour.

Sometimes she was scared on the stairs. She hated looking through the holes in the glass.

Stanislav unlocked the door of his apartment and they stepped inside. The hall was cold, but the kitchen was warm.

‘Hello, Nina,’ Milena said brightly.

The little girl wore a blue velvet dress with a white collar, and her hair had been tied up at the back, with a handful of ringlets curling around the side of her face. She was beautiful. Milena knew that Nina was nervous about going to the concert with her. They had only spoken once before. She wanted Nina to enjoy herself. She wished she’d had some chocolate or sweets to bring, but chocolate was harder to come by than cigarettes.

Nina said a shy and ladylike hello.

‘Ready to go?’ Milena asked.

Nina nodded and stood up. Milena helped her on with her coat and she went out and put on her shoes.

‘I’ll be there for your song,’ Stanislav said.

They went into the freezing stairway. Outside it had begun to snow. ‘Do you know the way?’ Nina asked. She held Milena’s hand, their gloves meshing.

‘Yes I do.’

They walked together across the icy ground.

When Terry saw and heard a tank shell explode she was shocked. It was like a giant hammer hitting the side of a building, fast and vicious and indescribably loud.

They could see where the impact occurred, on the side of a farmhouse. That morning she had peeped out of her hotel-room window, in vain, trying to identify where the sounds of explosions were coming from. Now she saw clear and close what she’d been looking for.

For a long moment she dreamed. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. Her senses and her thoughts took an age to catch up with what she witnessed through the plastic windows of the car. She wasn’t prepared for the noise, and she wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming sense of force.

She glanced at Zlatko: he was frightened too, she could see. She turned away and looked through the clear plastic at snow and trees and low buildings. She didn’t want to look for long because she thought that gazing out of the car was tempting fate and she didn’t want to be shot in the face.

Zlatko feared the car would come off the road and get stuck in the snow. He had an idea where the garage was, the point he’d been told to try and reach. He pressed on, thinking that if the gunners directed their fire at the car then he and Terry would die.

She was clearly scared, but she was calm and he was grateful for this. Whatever happened now, it would happen to both of them.

Zlatko, his thoughts sliding with the uncertain movement of the car over new snow, didn’t fully understand why he was there. He hadn’t chosen to be here, but he hadn’t avoided it either. When he was asked to bring her he agreed. Partly he was there simply because he was curious – he had a passion to know what was going on.

They passed close to the house where the tank shell had hit. Smoke rose from the wall; debris was still falling from the eaves. Then, with the same unspeakably loud crash, a second shell exploded against the same wall. There was a sighing in the air. Shockwaves hit the car.

Zlatko leaned over the steering wheel and accelerated, but the car still seemed to both of them to move over the snow very slowly.

‘It’s half a mile further down the road,’ he told her. ‘We have to carry on. There’s nowhere to turn.’

He must have considered turning back, she thought, and this brought her very close to panic.

Then they heard bullets.

Zlatko accelerated again. He didn’t do this because he judged that it would give them a better chance. He did it out of instinct. Getting up speed wouldn’t make them any safer from small-arms fire. In fact it might increase the danger. They began to slide off the road. He slowed down and speeded up again, creating a skid that he managed to control. He was holding the steering wheel very tight. They’d been foolish to try to drive into Otes.

A bullet spun across the bonnet of the car. They could hear it drone, like an insect. They could hear mortar explosions where they were heading.

‘Shit,’ Terry said.

‘They’re shooting at us!’ Zlatko remarked, as if this surprised him. If they were going to be killed then they would be killed, he thought. If they were going to survive, they would survive. There was little he could do other than drive as fast as possible towards the centre of the settlement.

The road became less potholed. They began to put more distance between themselves and the house where the tank shells had exploded. Terry looked ahead and tried to breathe steadily. Zlatko was under a greater strain. He had to focus on the road. She glanced at him again. He was crouched over the steering wheel, peering ahead bravely, like a little boy driving a dodgem at a summer fair.

He had put himself in this danger so as to bring her here. She had not properly considered this before now.

Then Terry’s rational meditation was interrupted by terror.

A bullet flew towards them and – quite abruptly – stopped droning.

It tore through the chassis above the front wheel and hit the engine.

The car lurched forward. Zlatko pushed himself away from the wheel and pressed his foot down, as if that would compensate for damage to the engine. He gave up thinking about the road and the snow and the possibility of skidding, and raced the car towards a cluster of buildings fifty yards away. The engine whined.