Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

And her son’s life depended on the twisting potholed road across this wasteland to the airstrip a mile away.

Terry balanced on her haunches; from time to time she placed the palm of her right hand on Miro’s forehead. Her left hand hurt. She had tied the handkerchief in a tourniquet around her palm and the skin on the back of her hand had gone white. The Land Rover lurched from one side to the other, sliding on the road. Miro screamed.

He screamed because he was afraid. Fear and the frigid temperature in the back of the Land Rover could tip his cardiovascular system into a fatal crisis. Terry had imagined before she left London that she might have to insist on minimum standards of transportation when it came to removing Miro from the city and transferring him to the air ambulance. And now they were bouncing along a rutted track on a mechanised wheelbarrow.

She placed her good hand on the boy’s cheek. His temperature was dangerously high. She slipped open her holdall and took a syringe from the topmost inside pocket. She worked mechanically. As she filled the syringe the Land Rover jerked suddenly upward. Terry tried to steady herself. The syringe spouted fluid. She filled it again. The Land Rover jerked again. This is like a slapstick scene from a comedy , she thought, but there was nothing comic about it.

Mrs Pejanović pulled Miro’s sleeve back and disconnected the drip from the valve on the back of his hand. Terry got hold of the cot and then of Miro’s arm and found the aperture on the valve with the tip of the syringe. She loosened her body for seconds so that if the Land Rover jerked she would not jerk with it and stab the child.

She did all this with an image playing like a backdrop to her consciousness and it was the image of Zlatko when she had met him the day before.

She had been preoccupied by the unsatisfactory nature of her arrival and the absence of any apparent preparation for her visit. She was baffled, and into this uncertainty came a bohemian accountant with the sort of philosophical optimism that seemed to compensate for everything.

When she thought about Sanela, Terry felt a knife in her heart and caught her breath. She put the syringe back in the bag. Mrs Pejanović rolled down Miro’s sleeve and whispered to him.

What words could express the immensity of what had taken place? Zlatko lay there in that terrible place.

Mrs Pejanović was crying. She glanced back at the road twisting behind them. All around was violence and noise.

In the garage Jusuf strode over to the spot where the soldier still sat on the concrete floor. He crouched down beside him.

‘How bad is it?’ There was blood all over the man’s face and he was shaking.

‘It isn’t bad,’ he said. Jusuf began to unbutton the soldier’s shirt. The man winced as the wet material peeled away. There was a six-inch gash deep in his back just above the waist. Jusuf could see shards of metal inside.

‘Take him in the car,’ he told Alija.

Alija bent down and helped the man to stand.

Minutes before, Alija had broken the news of Milena’s death to Jusuf.

‘What are you going to do, commander? Are you going to withdraw?’ Michael Baring looked at him expectantly, pen poised.

For a fleeting moment Jusuf felt as though he was above this scene, as though he was looking down at their sad and brutal predicament.

‘We’re going to withdraw,’ he said in an emotionless voice. ‘Go back to the city. It is madness to be here.’

Baring followed Alija’s car out of the garage. The two vehicles moved slowly past the spot where Zlatko had been hit.

By nightfall Jusuf had supervised the evacuation of the last inhabitants, and the orderly withdrawal of his own men to a new line along the River Željeznica.

The Bull was keen to establish that since he had never visited Otes during the fighting he could not share responsibility for the defeat. That belonged exclusively to the commanders on the ground.

‘This isn’t going to reflect badly on anyone,’ the Bull explained at the final conference in the map room at western army headquarters.

The Bull didn’t understand how they had managed to get the civilians across the river and he was careful not to ask, Jusuf noted. He guarded his ignorance with discretion. Jusuf watched him and was impressed. Except maybe for one of his young aides, the Bull was the only one in the room who hadn’t seen the inside of the Otes command centre. He looked each one of the defeated commanders in the eye and said the defeat would not reflect badly on any of them. Jusuf knew he would get another command only with Alija’s help. Alija could get round the Bull and his faction. Alija could negotiate in the ministries.

‘Alipašino Polje,’ he told Alija when they were in the car outside.

There were flashes over Bistrik and Grbavica. No one in the streets, snow thick on the ground. The car skidded on the steep incline opposite the Television Centre and they had to reverse and take a second run at the hill, this time on the left-hand side of the road where the snow had been churned up by an APC.

They climbed the steps to the freezing apartment block and entered the lobby. The boys who had challenged Alija in the morning were absent from their post.

When they got to the sixteenth floor Jusuf took out the key that she had given him but which he had never used. He opened the door.

Inside, they removed their shoes. There was no mat on the floor, just the hall carpet. A pair of Milena’s boots sat on a piece of newspaper next to the shoe rack. Thick black boots with rubber soles for walking over snow.

In the kitchen Alija looked out of the window, drawing back cheap net curtains. Apartment buildings glittered in the moonlight.

Jusuf shone a torch in the bedroom. Milena’s album of photographs lay on the night table. He sat on the bed and opened the album. She had pasted the photos neatly onto the thick pages and covered them with clear plastic. Captions were written in fine felt pen. There was a photo of Milena when she was small. She wore a red dress and white socks and black shoes and she looked at the camera with a solemn face. He leafed through the album: Milena baking with her mother, playing with friends. There were pictures of her at school, wearing the uniform that girls wore twenty years ago, looking earnest. There were pictures of her in jeans and T-shirt when she was twelve years old.

There were wedding photographs and family snaps, by the seaside, in the country at gatherings around a big table beneath a tree. Two people smiling to the camera, together on a sofa.

What did she think about when she was alone here?

Jusuf sat on the bed. He felt as though a great ocean receded into the moonlight across the frigid tops of towers. She had fled here because she was good. This little girl who looked out from photographs with a kind of indomitable joy, she had refused to be tainted by evil.

He sat enclosed by concrete and the pale moonlight holding photographs of a life. He wanted to cry out to heaven. The extent of his loss confounded him.

They heard the sound of knocking outside and Alija opened the front door. Jusuf walked into the small hall.

Mrs Hatibović was startled when she saw them. She stepped back.

‘Where’s Milena?’

Alija moved out onto the landing. Mrs Hatibović carried a lantern, a wax lamp inside a bottle held with a piece of wire. It spread an orange light around her and shadows on the walls. ‘Milena was killed last night,’ Alija said. ‘Shellfire near the TV Centre.’

Mrs Hatibović put a hand to her mouth, a small, tough old woman illuminated by her lamp in the freezing hall. ‘God grant her rest,’ she whispered. And then, shaking her head sadly, she added, ‘May he welcome her in heaven.’