Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

Anna grabbed a helmet from the floor and put it on top of her ringlets. Brad accelerated. Anna bent down again and produced two more helmets. She thrust one at Terry and placed the other on Brad’s head. The Land Rover raced onto the flyover.

Terry began to shake. She was embarrassed by this. She didn’t normally respond to pressure in this way. She was normally calm. But everything that was happening to her now was new and strange. She could not know how she would react. All she could process in her untidy thoughts was that she was frightened and she was ashamed because of that.

Once on the flyover they were exposed. She looked ahead. The road led into a depressingly similar district: burned, roofless buildings.

Brad slowed the Land Rover at the bottom of the bridge and turned around sharply, doubling back the way they had come and moving onto the main road.

‘Keep your head down,’ Anna said gently, fear inducing a sort of intimacy. ‘Now we have snipers on both sides.’

‘Remind me –’ Terry could hear embarrassment in Brad’s voice, as though he had forgotten someone’s name at a dinner party. ‘Which side? Left or right?’

‘On the left as far as the barricade and then onto the right! Go fast here!’ Anna’s voice was hard-edged again.

Brad accelerated. Terry felt the forward momentum. She ventured a sideways glance. On her right was the skeleton of what had once been an office block. It was partially entombed in a vast mountain of shattered concrete, with strips of steel, like congealing spaghetti, hanging from the edges.

‘That’s the newspaper building,’ Brad said, as if pointing out a popular landmark on the road to a resort hotel. ‘They’re still working in the basement.’

Terry looked at the building again. Then she looked ahead. Two buses were parked across the main road, blocking their path.

‘Do I go right here?’ Brad asked.

‘Right!’

‘Just kidding!’ Brad said, but Anna didn’t laugh.

He swung the Land Rover off the road and onto a cobbled tramway that ran down the centre of the avenue. Then he turned left again, round the barricade. Ahead was a vast white thoroughfare – frozen and completely empty.

Milena watched from the bar as the two men who had been arguing suddenly got to their feet. A chair fell over, but it wasn’t the clatter that drew the room’s attention, it was the sound of safety catches being released. The men stood face to face, lifting their weapons. Milena watched along with the others, transfixed by a scene that unfolded as though in slow motion.

Jusuf stood up and walked almost casually towards the altercation. The slow motion movement of weapons halted. People in the packed room made way for him. When he reached the confrontation he stood, very close and calm, between the two men. He could have reached out and stopped the upward arc of the weapons. Perhaps the fact that he could have done this made the action itself unnecessary. Jusuf said nothing, but simply placed himself between the two drunk men. They lowered their weapons. Friends stepped forward, gingerly at first and then with decision, and the weapons were taken away. There was a murmur of conciliation. The standoff ended and the anger seemed to vanish.

When the room had returned to normal, Jusuf came over to the bar and threw a packet of Marlboro on the counter. He put a cigarette in his mouth and Milena held up a match.

They left soon afterwards and began to trudge through the freezing air and the newly fallen snow. It was so cold. Milena wore five layers of clothing. Her best winter clothes she’d left behind in Foča.

She held onto Jusuf’s arm tightly. Every step they took was another step from Milena’s town. He made her feel the memory of warmth in the deep dark.

‘That was crazy… to get in the middle like that,’ she said, an oddly gentle indignation in her voice.

They skirted a shell hole, filled with black water and ice.

Two blocks from the presidency they climbed through an ancient stairway, black as pitch. Jusuf struck a match. He led and Milena followed, holding onto his coat. On the first floor he turned the key of a heavy door that opened easily on well-oiled hinges. They stepped inside and Jusuf lit a candle.

This was not Milena’s home. The flat where she lived in Alipašino Polje was not her home either. Milena came from a town far away in the east. She would never go back there.

‘The guy with the pistol, the one with the glasses, he’s caused trouble before,’ she said. ‘Haris or Hamza, something like that. He started a fight last week, nearly ended the same way.’

‘He was a schoolteacher before the war,’ Jusuf said, puzzled.

They took off their shoes, fumbling in the candlelight. There were two pairs of leather slippers beside the door. Jusuf lit another candle and set it on a low wooden table between two armchairs in the sitting room. A long sofa filled the end of the room, next to a grand piano.

The owner of the apartment was a colonel who had joined the Rebels at the start of the conflict and decamped to the other side with his family just a few days before the fighting began. Jusuf moved in when the place was commandeered for military accommodation. Milena stayed sometimes.

Jusuf lit an oil lamp and placed it near the door to the kitchen.

The room was filled with an eerie light, the straight lines of heavy dark furniture made soft by shadows and flame.

In the kitchen he began making coffee while Milena opened the piano.

She loved this instrument. On such a cold night every note was clear as crystal, and it was as if the snow and the darkness outside pressed against the walls and sealed the room so that nothing but music could be heard. This piano sounded to her more beautiful than any she had ever played.

She struck one high note and then another, with a soft sure touch.

Jusuf watched. She sat with her back very straight, looking across the room at the dull light from the kitchen where Jusuf, grinding coffee, cast a shadow. The music cut grooves of sound in the snow-cased silence of the big shadowy apartment.

It was necessary to hold the bottom cylinder very firmly where the ground coffee collected and the top cylinder where the beans were crushed. Jusuf’s hand hurt. The metal became hot with the friction of the grinder. He watched Milena and listened to the melody she played.

The apartment was filled with paintings. Once, Jusuf would have retreated from the expensive art on the walls, conscious that he lacked the education to admire another man’s paintings. But now he lived in the other man’s home. His woman played the other man’s piano. He found himself assessing the other man’s art. Among the figurative scenes was a picture of the city market eighty years before, the men in puttees and red fezzes, the women in shawls and veils. Jusuf liked this picture. It hung between the two large windows overlooking the street. Now it framed Milena’s head as she played.

He listened to her play and watched as she bent forward, concentrating on the keys. If he’d spoken she would have looked up and listened. She didn’t become so absorbed in the music that she was lost to her surroundings. She was like that in everything. She never seemed to go below the surface. Jusuf had never tried to go further. He didn’t know about her past. He never asked her about her family. He only knew now. And now Milena was in his sitting room playing music that was beautiful. Perhaps she was a dream. He was aroused by her beauty and by the fact that this beauty was close enough to touch. Yet he did not believe that her soul could ever be possessed.

By the tall windows there were hundreds of books, a handful picked out on the thick shelves by the flame of the lamp and candles.