Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

Brad lit a cigarette and exhaled. ‘They opened the door,’ he said. ‘They didn’t panic; they did the opposite: they thought they could negotiate. They weren’t overwhelmed by their circumstances, by being surrounded and outgunned. They were over-confident.’ He sipped his beer, and she noticed that he had brought the can so abruptly to his mouth that some of the contents rolled down his chin. He wasn’t looking directly at her but into the middle distance. ‘I thought I could fix it,’ he said. ‘I thought I could reason with the soldiers at the barrier!’

He knew he’d said something wrong, but he didn’t know what.

Anna spoke in a soft steady voice. ‘You said “ I ”. You said “ I thought”.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Are we talking about the French soldiers or something else?’

‘You have to be there,’ he said. He practically whispered, yet even to whisper these words seemed to require an immense effort.

He felt an almost unbearable weariness. He had never spoken about what happened when Wikram told him to drive around the barricade. And now he was too exhausted to sustain the evasion. He was too tired to keep at bay the scene when they returned to the government side of the lagoon. The soldiers hadn’t been able to block the road completely. Brad saw the guns but he was convinced they could talk their way through .

‘You have to be there,’ he said. ‘If you haven’t been there you don’t know.’ He was still looking into the middle distance and he didn’t understand why he was talking about this; all he knew was that he must confront it. ‘Do you think anybody wanted it to turn out the way it did?’ He could have been talking about the road from the lagoon or the road from the airport.

Anna was very still.

Then Brad said, ‘I thought we could get past them!’ He felt the sudden pain of a dressing ripped from a wound, and then in the aftermath there was a kind of relief, a kind of tranquillity. ‘I thought we would go on to Talawila, have dinner and a beer,’ he said softly. There was a moment of absolute silence and then Brad concluded, tying up the memory with a kind of implacable inevitability, ‘I got hit when I got out of the car. When I realised what was happening Wikram was lying on the other side of the road. They had shot him in the back of the head.’

He looked down and drew on his cigarette and sipped his beer and he thought of all the stars in the universe moving through space and how he would have to stop each one of them and make it go back in order to change the course of time and return to that barricade and make a different choice, drive round like Wikram said, drive round and hurry away.

Brad didn’t see Anna standing up. The first he knew that she had moved was when he felt her hand on his shoulder.

Soon afterwards, they went down to the restaurant on the first floor. The only seats available were at a table with Michael Baring.

‘If that sonofabitch patronises me, I’ll wallop him,’ Brad whispered.

‘Mind if we join you?’ Anna asked Baring.

As they sat down, Zlatko came in. A fine layer of snow lay in a ridge across the hair above his forehead, where the hood of his duffel coat had left his head exposed. There was more snow on his sleeves at the elbows. He brushed this away as he scanned the room.

When he spotted them, Zlatko walked over quickly and said to Brad, ‘Can I talk to you?’

‘Yeah, sit down.’

‘I can’t stay. Can we go outside?’

In the hall it was pitch dark. Brad lit his torch and shone it against the wall so that it reflected dimly on both of them.

‘What’s up?’

‘Can you be at the Strand in Ilidža tomorrow morning at half past eleven?’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a guy who’ll talk to you.’

Ilidža, a settlement near the airstrip, was on the other side of the siege line. ‘Brad, he knows who killed the minister. He was there .’

Brad inhaled the freezing dark and let Zlatko explain.

The apartment was warm, which pleased Alija very much. Warmth was a luxury he hated to be without. He moved about the city from public building to public building, visiting offices where there was usually a supply of heat. Comfortable temperatures go with power: in snowbound cities it is warm where decisions are made.

Jurić’s flat was heated by a large stove in the sitting room.

The doctor introduced him to a dark-haired woman dressed in blue jeans and a mauve cashmere sweater with a silk scarf around her neck. She shook hands and greeted Alija politely in English. She was trying hard to appear confident, but there was uncertainty in her manner.

‘This is Dr Barnes from London,’ Jurić said. He watched Alija shyly take the doctor’s hand and introduce himself in English.

Alija allowed a characteristic expression of meekness to cover his face. Jurić recognised this as a mask: Alija’s unassuming persona, his self-effacing attention to other people’s needs, was his way of mastering circumstances. He measured people shrewdly and got a sense of how they were likely to behave.

Alija looked at Terry and said in English to Jurić, ‘I hope you are looking after Dr Barnes.’

Terry answered quickly. ‘Dr Jurić has been very helpful.’

‘Dr Barnes has come to accompany a little boy back to Britain for medical treatment,’ Jurić explained. Then he remarked, without any irony, ‘We are grateful.’

Sometimes she thought they were making fun of her. They were all so polite. She thought of the soldier in Otes who apologised for holding them up when they were ready to leave the shelter, like a taxi driver arriving late to collect a fare.

‘We appreciate the help we have received from other countries,’ Alija said, rather stiffly. ‘It is something that sustains us.’

He spoke, Terry noticed, with the sort of clipped accent that is acquired through diligent study, rather than an accent like Jurić’s, which was easy and confident and obviously the product of lots of practice.

‘Where is the little boy?’ Alija asked.

‘In Otes,’ Terry said. ‘We’re going back for him tomorrow.’

‘You’ve been there already?’

‘Today,’ Terry said.

‘Zlatko drove,’ Jurić explained.

Zlatko was sitting with Sanela in a far corner of the room. He had arrived just ahead of Alija, after speaking to Brad at the Holiday Inn. Alija smiled at them. ‘You’re going back to Otes tomorrow?’ he asked Zlatko.

‘If I’m not too hungover.’

‘Go early!’

Sanela heard the same words and understood them better than her lover. Perhaps somewhere in his easy-going optimism Zlatko also heard the warning in Alija’s advice to go early, but he took no heed.

‘Come and sit down and have a drink!’ Zlatko told Alija.

Sanela watched Alija approach. She disliked the way he turned up everywhere. And now he was at this party, telling Zlatko to go early to Otes.

Sanela wished Alija hadn’t come to Jurić’s. She wished Dr Barnes hadn’t come either. There was an unsteadiness about Dr Barnes.

‘Have you any juice?’ Alija asked Jurić.

‘No juice, Alija, only Scotch! You’ll have to break the habit of a lifetime!’

‘I’d rather not, thanks,’ Alija replied in an easy-going tone that suggested he was accustomed to being teased by Jurić.

‘Juice is a problem,’ the doctor said, ‘particularly in these times of scarcity. Why can’t you drink whisky like everyone else?’

Alija smiled patiently and sat on the edge of the sofa next to Terry.

Terry sipped whisky and smoked and wondered what any of her heart-specialist colleagues in London would think.