Maud and Marc took turns driving, not speaking. Conversation the previous evening had made them feel awkward. Maud wondered whether her a companion wasn’t sorry he had revealed so much. She stole glances at him. His expression was tight again, watchful and tense, as if he were on the lookout. In other words, he was his usual self. Maud figured he probably could not loosen the vise of discipline except on rare occasions like the night before. It was frustrating, because she thought she deserved his trust. At the same time, she would not have liked him to use their brief spell of complicity as a pretext to start taking liberties. So since she could not see clearly through her contradictory feelings, she chose to remain silent and observe the landscape.
Unfortunately, it was disfigured by construction. Ever since they had left Italy behind, two weeks before, their surroundings had been drearily uniform. The natural scenery could be beautiful, when it was unspoiled. But everything human beings had built seemed to bear the stamp of ugliness. Day after day, it was the same dismal sight: brick or breeze-block houses with similar four-sided roofs, the never-ending checkpoints thrown together like slums, the brutish faces—all infinite variations on an identical theme of dirt and mistrust.
In the scorching shower at UN headquarters Maud had experienced a moment of relief as she watched the dirt drain away, then combed her wet hair, its softness restored at last. But now she was not so sure that the miracle could happen again. She had reached the conclusion that all this grayness and mud and violence was clinging to her skin too firmly for her ever to hope she could slough it off. She looked discreetly in the mirror on the back of the sun visor. She thought she looked old and damaged. A natural look was what she preferred; for her it was a necessary expression of honesty. But just now she would have liked to paint her face with color, to make her lips shine red. She was tempted to ask Marc what he thought of her. Then instantly realized it was ridiculous, and she abruptly slammed the mirror back up.
Marc was startled. He glanced over at her and smiled.
“Are you getting bored?”
“No, I’m all right.”
“Do you want to drive?”
“Later.”
“That’s what’s so terrible about this country. It’s ugly.”
She looked at him with surprise. Had he read her thoughts, or were they the same as hers?
“it must be better in summer.”
“Not a whole lot. Anyway, in these mountains, the scenery is always sad.”
They went through a village. Houses were splattered with gray mud along the bottom of their walls, and hay carts stood drooping in the farmyards.
“The only thing that adds some color to the scenery here is blood.”
Maud looked aghast at Marc. He was impassive, unsmiling. How could he say such a thing? What was she supposed to think? Was he saying it to deplore the fact, or was this what drew him to the country?
Blood . . . for a while she had considered training to become a doctor, and it was the thought of blood that had dissuaded her. Blood horrified her. But wasn’t it the sight of horror that she, too, had come looking for? Wasn’t it blood that they all had in common: soldiers, victims, aid workers? She felt deeply troubled.
No checkpoint had ever seemed so well situated as the one where they had to stop not long thereafter. Maud was relieved to be able to get out of the truck and breathe freely. But as soon as she was outside, she noticed that the icy air smelled of burning wood. She looked all around. Above a thicket of trees she could see the charred roof structure of a house. She thought it was still smoking, and the paramilitaries seemed very nervous.
They were peasants; they all had the same black moustache, and wore the same sheepskin caps. They looked like they might be cousins; perhaps they were, after all.
From a distance Maud could see that Lionel and Alex were negotiating with them. They must be having difficulty making themselves understood. One of the Bosniaks, more wrinkled than the others, wearing a jacket that was too long, was waving his arms and pointing to the road. He didn’t look threatening—frightened, more like it. Maud went closer.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re not really sure,” said Alex. “They seem to be saying there’s a problem farther along.”
“Are they going to let us go on all the same?”
“That’s what we don’t understand.”
“It’s all set,” Lionel broke in, turning to them. “We can go on.”
Now the peasants were talking among themselves. Some of them did not seem to agree with the little old man who had given the convoy permission to go ahead. The old man was delivering a long tirade in his own defense, and to conclude he spat on the ground.
There was no point in waiting for their quarrel to get worse and have them change their mind. Lionel climbed quickly into the truck and waved to the others to get going right away. The village they went through was deserted. In two of the houses, short flames, pink from the rain blowing in from outside, were licking at the window frames. Outside one of them the front door lay on the ground, torn from its frame. This was all only a few dozen yards from the paramilitaries who had stopped them. Now they understood that it wasn’t a checkpoint after all. Moreover, there had been no obstacles, no roadblock. They must simply have happened upon a group of armed villagers who had come out of the maquis after an attack. Unless they were the ones who had perpetrated it; there was no telling. In any case, the hamlet was deserted, and they wondered where the inhabitants had gone. Had they managed to find shelter? Were they hiding inside the houses? In the muddy roads, packs of mangy dogs were running every which way, sniffing at doors.
One of the buildings, fairly similar to the others, had a little round tower with a pointed roof and a green metal crescent. It must have been the village mosque. There was a big hole in its façade, and through the wide-open doors they could see that the interior was completely gutted by fire. For a lack of furniture, no doubt, the fire had stopped on its own.
They continued on their way without slowing down and were once again out in the country among pastures and stands of trees. Nature seemed oblivious of human tragedy. But it was a melancholy nature that seemed to convey its own sense of misfortune.
Less than a kilometer farther along, they were stopped once again by soldiers, but this time as they drove closer they saw they were peacekeepers. The UN convoy that had sped past them was parked a few yards beyond the men who were blocking the road. The rear doors of the armored vehicles were open. Inside they could see a few soldiers sitting in a row on the benches, smoking, with their guns between their knees.
They parked the trucks beyond the last APC and got out without turning off their engines. Among the officers wandering around the white UN vehicles, they recognized a few men they’d seen in the corridors at headquarters and, in particular, a chief warrant officer from the Service Corps. Alex, who had played cards with him at the bar, went up to him.
“Is there a problem here?”
“You could put it that way.”
The chief warrant officer had a Parisian accent. As he spoke he raised his visor, the way he would have done with a cap.
“Argelos the medic is over there, if you’d like an explanation.”
“Over there” meant the middle of an unplowed field; short straws left behind by the harvest were floating on the liquid surface of black mud. From a distance all they could see was a khaki-colored cluster and a light blue bouquet of helmets. The four of them headed across the field; Vauthier, as usual, went off on his own. He preferred to stay and mingle with the men by the APCs.
There were soldiers coming and going from the road to the place where they had gathered in the field. Some were carrying stretchers, others were unfolding big black plastic bags. No one was talking but suddenly a loud voice started shouting orders. It was the doctor.
“Watch what you’re doing, guys! If there are bits, try not to scatter them.”
He was crouching on the ground and they only saw him as they wove their way through the soldiers. Maud felt a wave of nausea. On the damp earth there were fifty bodies or more, lying in grotesque positions. Their arms and legs were twisted, their heads lay at a painful angle from their necks, some had their faces in the mud. On the gray mass of bodies, most of which were clothed in dull, drab garments, the only bright color was that of blood.
Scarlet puddles spread across their chests, down their legs and arms, formed halos around their heads, and against the gray landscape and the lowering sky, their blood was a constellation of gemlike spots.
Maud could not tear her eyes away. The disgust she felt was so powerful that it paralyzed her. At the same time, she was fascinated. On this doleful tableau, the only living thing was the blood oozing from the dead.
The damp air diluted smells, and it was the sight alone that seemed to convey a harsh fustiness of crushed flesh and leaking bodily fluids. Maud felt a sudden need to retch. She just managed to turn to one side and throw up.
Argelos got to his feet, still standing in the middle of the slaughter, and he recognized the aid workers in the front row of the circle of the living.
“Ah, look who’s here!”
“We went through the village and saw there had been fighting,” said Lionel, relieved to be able to speak to the doctor, to say anything rather than stand there silently gazing at the corpses.
“Fighting! A massacre, indeed. Don’t you see there are only women and children?”
Maud had gotten a grip on herself and went back to the others. When she heard the doctor, she found the strength to look once more at the macabre group spread over the ground. And because of what Argelos had said, she saw things differently. Initially she had only noticed a shapeless mass of tortured bodies. Now she could make out individual human beings. She recognized the living creatures they had been. These unnatural remains had been women and children who, not long before, had been breathing, walking, eating. One mother was still clinging to her baby. Maud wondered which of the two had been killed first. The infant’s face was nothing but a wound; the bullet that had struck it must have been fired point-blank. But the mother’s body seemed intact.
“Who did this?” asked Maud.
“Who knows. The peasants say it was mercenaries working for a Serbian warlord.”
“Do you know him?”
Argelos had turned around to give orders to two stretcher bearers who were waiting, not daring to put their brand-new stretcher down in the mud.
“Of course we know him. His name is Arkan. He frequently hangs around town, and I’ve even seen him coming out of the colonel’s office at headquarters, on two occasions.”
“So, are you going to arrest him?” said Maud, insistent.
“Arrest him!”
“But if he’s massacring women and children . . . ”
“What proof do we have? If we accuse him, he will say in all seriousness that it was Arabs in the pay of the Bosnian Muslims who were responsible. And he’ll have at least ten people who can testify in his favor.”
“His gang,” added the Parisian NCO, “have neither lord nor master. Like all the other cutthroats hanging around here, he doesn’t belong to any regular army. Officially, no one controls him.”
“But still,” Maud continued, “there must be a way you can stop him from doing harm. There are so many of you, you could easily overcome him . . . ”
“What do you think? That we’re at war, too? For a start, someone in New York would have to give the order to bump him off, and that’s not really their style. And if we did go after him, don’t go thinking he’d let himself get caught all that easily. He’s got mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades, everything he needs to make pretty little holes in our windows. You remember my window?”
Marc, who hadn’t said a word until then, took Maud by the elbow.
“Come on, let’s get going. We’re of no use here.”
His voice was calm, and Maud, who was trembling with emotion, only seemed to recover her wits when she felt Marc’s firm hand around her arm. The others also had difficulty tearing themselves away from the sight.
“Safe travels, kids,” shouted Argelos, before returning to his macabre task, “and look after yourselves!”
Once she was back in the truck, Maud began talking. She described the scene, noted the details, commented on things in a way that she herself thought was stupid. But she simply could not stand the silence. She needed to let go of her emotion, to say any old thing, just to talk. She didn’t expect an answer. She scarcely noticed how Marc remained silent, jaw clenched, scowling at the road.
“But still,” she said at one point, “it was weird we’d had that conversation just before.”
Marc glanced over at her and shrugged. His scornful gesture shut her up. She said to herself that he was a soldier, after all, and as such, a man who had killed, too. And she began to despise him.
In the first truck, on the other hand, the mood was one of harmony and forgiveness. As Lionel and Alex were silent, Vauthier began telling them what he had found out while talking with the soldiers. As usual, his companions wanted him to shut up. But what they had just seen filled them with disgust at the thought of violence and hatred. Weren’t they too on the path to murder, even if it was on a much smaller scale, if they began to detest this man? Yes, he was unlikable and perhaps even suspect, and they thought he was vulgar and spineless, but was that any reason to respond to him in a violent manner? They remembered the fight with Marc and told themselves that that was how wars began. And after what they had just seen, they wanted to be better, to distance themselves from the savagery that was inside every man—and inside them, too. Of a silent, common accord, Lionel and Alex made an effort to listen to Vauthier and even to answer him.
Used to being snubbed, Vauthier was initially surprised by their sudden attentiveness. When he realized that his companions’ attitude had changed for good, without trying too hard to understand the reasons behind the change, he, too, adopted a less provocative tone, leaving off the irony and vulgarity he generally displayed in their presence. And before long, the three of them were able to carry on a normal conversation.
“The guys told me that ten kilometers from here,” said Vauthier, “there’s an old abandoned holiday camp. We could stop there for the night.”
“Is it on the main road or do we have to turn off?”
“Apparently we’ll go past a wooden barrier with a thing written in Cyrillic and a drawing of something like two kids holding hands. All we have to do is lift the barrier and go five hundred meters down a little track.”
“Is there a guard?”
“No, he was a Serb, and since we’re in a Muslim zone, he got the hell out.”
“It sounds like a good idea.”
The holiday camp was a long, low building in the middle of a clearing surrounded by tall trees. The rooms on the ground floor faced out onto a broad terrace enclosed by a wooden balustrade. The architecture was modern, dreary, and unimaginative. It was easy to picture the party leaders inaugurating the building, spouting hollow sentences extolling the glory of youth, sport, and socialism. Since then, civil war had come to round out that vision, bringing a final touch to the radiant tableau. The picture windows were shattered, all the furnishings had been pillaged. The looters had even decided to spend an evening round the campfire right there in the middle of the main hall, and the walls and ceiling were black with soot.
By the time they arrived the rain had stopped. A hesitant, shifty sunlight was slipping beneath the gray skirt of clouds, swept along by the evening wind. They went in through smashed French doors and visited the rooms, flashlight in hand. The camp was too big for the looters to ravage it from top to bottom; they had merely set an example with the main hall and other rooms in the front, and some of the bedrooms. But there were over a dozen rooms that still had their furniture, and their windowpanes intact. They went to get their sleeping bags in the truck and each of them settled into his or her own room, which was an undreamt-of luxury. Neither the water nor the electricity was working, but they had everything they needed in the way of light and to cook their meal. There was a source of freshwater in a stone fountain by the parking lot. They heated up an entire tub and shared it out for washing in the collective bathrooms. Vauthier confirmed his good disposition by agreeing to do the cooking again.
With night came the cold, damp air, which spread through the drafty rooms. Following the previous occupants’ example, they lit a fire in the main hall and ate dinner sitting around it on the floor underneath a cloud of smoke. Then they went to bed, trying not to think about what they had seen that day. And, above all, about the gangs of murderers scouring the region.