Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

‘That’s the hospital,’ Sanela said.

The hospital’s facade was wrecked by shell holes. Scars were cut into the concrete; windows hung open; the walls on the top floors had been blasted away.

‘We are safe now,’ Sanela said. She examined Terry’s face for more signs of fear. Then she pronounced, ‘You will be fine, I think. You are not uncomposed.’

Terry felt oddly pleased, as though Sanela had given her the one compliment she wished for more than any other.

At the entrance to the hospital, Sanela hurried again. ‘This too is a sniper area,’ she said and raced towards the main gate. Terry ran after her.

Inside the small compound at the front of the hospital two cars had drawn up and two women were helping an elderly man out of one car. Blood ran from a gash in his head, across his face and onto the dirty white coat he wore over black trousers.

They walked past the injured man into the building. Two men cradling machine guns sat by a small table in the dimly lit lobby. Sanela addressed one of them. Terry wasn’t able to decipher even a word of the exchange that followed.

‘Dr Jurić is in Casualty,’ Sanela translated. ‘We may have to wait.’ She spoke to the guard again and he replied. Sanela nodded. ‘We can enter.’

They walked along a corridor where a dozen people sat on a long bench. Some were bleeding. Terry glanced through an open door and saw the naked body of a middle-aged man stretched out on a trolley. Two orderlies were preparing instruments for surgery. There was mud on the floor.

Sanela quickened her pace at the end of the corridor and called to a man ahead of them about to walk through a set of heavy swing doors.

He turned. Terry assimilated the scene in the operating room they had just passed: the orderlies, the instruments, the mud. It was as if familiar images had been placed together in a weird and very ugly collage. The temperature in the corridor was near freezing.

The doctor that Sanela was speaking to had a capable but weary manner. He replied brusquely and then he looked at Terry and smiled an unexpectedly cheerful smile. He extended his hand and said in English, ‘I am Dario Jurić. I was to meet you at the airport, but it was not possible. I am very pleased to meet you now.’

‘How do you do,’ Terry said. Her voice sounded small. This was not the impression she wanted to make. ‘Can we talk?’ she added more firmly.

‘Yes, of course, but I have surgery all day. We can meet this evening. Where are you staying?’

‘At the Holiday Inn.’

He seemed to consider this and then he said, ‘It’s better. We had thought to put you up with one of our staff but her building was damaged last night. I’ll come to the hotel at seven.’

An agitated voice from the other side of the doors called out. The doors swung open and a small, fat man smoking a cigarette looked up at Jurić and berated him.

After several noisy seconds the small man stormed off. ‘Our director,’ Jurić explained. ‘I must leave you now. We have a child – an amputation.’

He walked away. ‘See you this evening,’ he shouted over his shoulder.

Back in the lobby as a stretcher case was being brought in amid shouts and gesticulations, Sanela turned to Terry and said, ‘I have to go to the presidency. Can you find your own way back?’

‘Of course,’ Terry said, feeling uneasy.

Sanela walked with her as far as the road. ‘Don’t slow down,’ she said. ‘Go the same way we came.’ She examined Terry’s face again and then said, with an impatience that surprised and annoyed Terry, ‘Straight to the second road on your left. Turn there and you see the hotel ahead of you.’

Terry said, ‘I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.’

Sanela had already begun walking in the opposite direction.

Terry was adrift, without her routine, without the structure of her hospital at home with its rules and hierarchy. But even there on home ground she realised she was often adrift. Now, she felt as though she had brought her insecurities along with her. Again, hopelessness.

She looked ahead. There were few people on the road. They scurried over the ice. The sky was heavy and she felt chilled. At the first turn-off she saw a man run across the road. She did the same. She moved quickly but found that running made her feel more afraid. At the next corner she experienced a new wave of anxiety. She could see the hotel ahead, but no one was walking on the road that led to it. She began moving down the hill.

She didn’t want to die in this frozen waste.

At the end of the road she plunged forward.

‘Shit,’ she muttered when she realised she was running over fresh snow. Sanela had taken her by a path already beaten into the snow. She spotted the path and made towards it. Cold slivers of ice spilled over the tops of her boots.

And then she heard a sound that was both familiar and alien. It was like the sound of a thick elastic band used as a catapult, a thrumming and humming through the frozen air. Terry had heard the two bullets hitting the reinforced glass of the Land Rover after they left the airport; they made a sharp clatter. This sound was more immediate and more powerful. It was deadly. She understood this in the millisecond it took to hear the thick elastic band scraping and stretching the air around her. She uttered some sort of primordial exclamation as she bowed down and pressed forward. She wanted to vomit. In the corner of her eye she saw a puff of powder snow thrown up by the bullet’s impact. She heard a voice. She was no longer seeking the path, but simply floundering across deep snow. She saw the yellow facade of the hotel. She understood space and direction and sound and sight, but only as disconnected elements of terror. The man who was shouting was twenty yards away. He was signalling that she should run faster. Just before reaching him, Terry lost her balance and fell. She hit the concrete beneath the snow hard enough to break bones. She lay for several seconds. From ground level she looked towards the entrance of the hotel and saw a cockroach scuttling away from her.

The man who had shouted pulled her to her feet. He said something Terry didn’t understand and then, in English, ‘The other side! You must use only the other side! Don’t you know this is a sniper area!’

Sanela’s boyfriend, Zlatko, wore a heavy black coat and an enormous red scarf around him, one end thrown over his shoulder. Zlatko believed this made him look like Lord Byron. It did convey a certain elegance.

Sanela, Zlatko and Brad entered the bar – one of the last still operating – on the ground floor of an old Habsburg courtyard. They found a seat near the window, vacant because, despite the sandbags, it offered the least protection should a shell explode in the courtyard.

Sanela and Zlatko had the easy confidence that young people have when things in their world are as they expect them to be. The city was shot to pieces but they weren’t. They both spoke good English. They were in demand as interpreters and fixers.

‘You are a foreigner, Brad,’ Sanela told him with mock seriousness. ‘You must learn about us, learn our ways!’ She turned to Zlatko and said, ‘He’s one of them , not one of us .’

Zlatko put his arm around her. She leaned into him and took hold of his hand for a second. Her fingers were warm. Then she let go again.

‘She believes you are a secret agent, Brad!’ Zlatko said. ‘What can we do to persuade her that you are on the right side?’

‘You could pay for the drinks,’ she suggested.

‘I always do!’

‘And that’s as it should be!’

They carried on in this vein, and as they joked and drank, Brad tried to match their mood. He had an hour to kill before the evening briefing at the residence of the UN commander.