19 NOVEMBER 1991
ANNA EASED OFF the handbrake when the vehicles around her began to move forwards, all jostling for position as they ran up the precarious steel ramp onto the deck of the makeshift ferry. It was really a floating pontoon, being dragged backwards and forwards through the river’s strong current by a tugboat. As she came up fast towards the boxy Zastava van in front of them, Pierre thrust a palm onto the dashboard.
‘Stop!’ he cried.
Anna hit the brakes hard, halting a body length from the van. She turned to her passenger. ‘Bloody hell, Pierre.’
‘What?’
‘You promised not to do that. I hate backseat drivers.’
‘This is not the backseat,’ he said. ‘It’s the death seat.’
‘Fuck, I swear it’s only …’
A hard whack on the bonnet interrupted their bickering. Through the windscreen, she saw a sinewy man with the cruel features of a storybook pirate. He was yelling and gesticulating wildly. Anna shrugged at him and turned to Pierre.
‘He wants you to move closer to the van,’ he said.
Anna was about to state the obvious, but she held her tongue and began edging the car forwards.
‘That wasn’t a direct translation, was it?’ she asked.
‘No, there were some references to your mother.’
Anna smiled, even as the abusive pirate continued to yell and wave her closer and closer until she nudged the van’s bumper. Only then did the fellow move on to his next victim.
Pierre opened his door a crack and said, ‘I’m going to pop over and have a chat with that army officer we saw back there. Might learn something.’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Anna.
She watched in the rear-vision mirror as he made his way to the pea-green military vehicle with the red star on the bonnet, which had been bumped into the second last row. The driver was a major in the Jugoslavenska Narodna Armija. Pierre had been curious as to why a JNA officer of that rank was travelling alone.
As she watched him greet the officer like an old comrade, Anna found herself marvelling, as she often did, at how completely Pierre had managed to embed himself into the Balkans and become fluent in its dialects. He was the only person she knew who had predicted the collapse of communism and who understood that the process had been well underway in Eastern Europe long before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He had relocated to Zagreb in the mid-1980s and there set himself up as freelance journalist. She recalled that, back in university, he had been obsessed with John Reed, the socialist writer and poet who had travelled from New York to Moscow in 1917, where he witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and wrote his own firsthand account: Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed had been there for the beginning. Pierre would be a witness to communism’s great unravelling.
As that became the story of their time, Anna had returned again and again, with Pierre as her guide, to cover it. They were here now because of the siege of Vukovar which, with its terrible reminders of Stalingrad, seemed set to become another pivotal moment in history.
Anna climbed out of the car and walked to the chains that hung loosely across the front of the barge. It was a clear morning and the low sun felt good on her face. The pirate continued to fill up every inch of available deck space, lashing everyone indiscriminately with his sharp tongue as he pinioned the motley collection of vehicles into neat rows. The army vehicle Pierre was now leaning on, chatting to the major, was some kind of Fiat. Jammed together on the ferry were blunt-ended Yugos, a few Zastava vans, a collection of blackened trucks of uncertain origin, and a late-model black BMW with Belgrade plates and tinted windows. The beemer looked sleekly arrogant in this poor company. Anna knew that carpetbaggers would be among the first on the scene after a ceasefire, and she imagined the hidden occupants would soon be rolling through the ruined streets of Vukovar in climate-controlled comfort with a boot full of deutschmarks, cigarettes, whisky and black-market pharmaceuticals.
Pierre’s old Golf had also been carefully prepared for entry into the war-torn city. Before they set off, they gaffer-taped a single word onto the white bonnet—AUSTRALIJA. To reinforce the message that they were harmless neutrals from Down Under, Anna also stuck an Australian flag on the inside of the windscreen. As a final touch, Pierre taped a toy kangaroo onto the dash in the hope that the marsupial might be a charm exotic enough in Eastern Slavonia to put trigger-happy guards at ease. They carried a laissez-passer from the JNA commander, General Zivota Panic, but some of the troops they had encountered at roadblocks on the Serbian side of the river had lacked either basic reading skills or a clear appreciation of the chain of command.
Anna looked out over the Danube. It was wide at this point and turbulent after the recent storms. She judged the strength of the current by the speed at which a half-submerged log swept past, bobbing around like a drowned man in the swirling water. The river marked the border between the republics of Serbia and Croatia, a border that had become an arbitrary line when the Serb-dominated JNA, the Yugoslavian National Army, crossed it in August to crush the rebellious Croats in Vukovar who had been demanding independence from Belgrade. Only the previous day, after a shockingly bloody three-month siege, the last defenders in Vukovar had laid down their arms and surrendered. Anna and Pierre had been trying to get into the city for weeks, and now was their best chance.
On the other side of the river, Anna could see a muddy landing where a handful of vehicles were waiting to come back. The high dirt walls of the embankment concealed what lay beyond. Somewhere to the north of them was the ravaged city. Anna thought of the horrors she had seen on TV screens, mostly filmed by the besieged inhabitants, and she felt a shivery, bowel-loosening sensation. She clutched at the camera hanging around her neck as if it might provide strength or purpose, or both.
She had overturned her life to come here, and left her daughter behind in the care of her parents. Rachel had just started her last year of high school. The HSC was on the horizon with all the pressure that entailed, but Anna told herself that Rachel would be fine, that she was a resilient girl and proud to have an adventurous mother. Anna had no clear idea how long she would be away. She only knew that this war, which she had forecast in the books she had written, had drawn her inexorably back to a country whose brutal history she was viscerally connected to. It twisted and squirmed inside her like a living thing. She thought again of Rachel: it had given birth to a living thing! The daughter she loved more than anything in this world.
Anna had stayed in Vukovar once before. She had boarded with a Serbian family during a research trip many years ago. One summer’s day, the family had taken her on a picnic to a sandy beach on the Danube. She remembered the father. Andrej? Yes, that was his name. She remembered Andrej teaching his young son, Vlado, an impossibly beautiful boy, to cast a fly with a wooden fishing rod. She hadn’t stayed in touch with them, and could not recall their family name; but now, so close to their warm and pleasant home, she wondered what had become of them, and whether they had survived the conflict.
•
A burly man joined her at the chains. He wore one of those shirts with a little crocodile on it and she wondered if that was his spirit animal. The man lit a harsh-smelling cigarette and stared bleakly over the water. After a while he turned and held the packet out to her. She shook her head.
‘You go to Vukovar?’ he said in English.
‘Yes.’
‘You want my advice?’
‘Would it matter if I didn’t?’
‘Don’t go there.’
The man threw his cigarette into the river, turned and walked back to the black BMW. He stared at her for an uncomfortably long time before climbing in and slamming the door.
•
A battered tugboat, its bruised white flanks stained with rust, bumped so hard against the barge that Anna nearly lost her footing. She looked up into the wheelhouse and saw the captain, an unshaven man with the coarse features of a heavy drinker. She visualised a bottle of slivovic just out of sight below the level of the window.
The pirate leapt onto the bow of the tug and yelled a stream of abuse at his skipper. Anna got the gist of it—Watch what you’re fucking doing, you fucking son of a whore! The pirate wasn’t about to take the blame for shoddy seamanship. Under the hard eyes of his passengers, he swiftly fastened the ropes fore and aft and the tug pulled the ferry out into the river.
Pierre joined her at the car.
‘Shall I take over the driving?’ he said.
‘Oh, come on, Pierre.’
‘No, seriously,’ said Pierre, using his serious voice. ‘The major reckons there are multiple checkpoints from here. I’ll have to do a lot of talking.’
‘Okay.’ She handed him the keys. ‘I’ll take the death seat.’ She nodded in the direction of the red-starred Fiat. ‘Who is he, then?’
‘Army intelligence, I reckon. He’s not saying, but he has the vibe.’
‘The vibe, eh?’
‘I know the type,’ said Pierre. ‘You can almost smell it, like the old KGB cadres in the Soviet army. You talk to them and they always learn more than you do.’
‘Did you learn anything?’
‘Yeah, watch out for Chetniks. He reckons they’re out of control.’
They made the crossing without further incident. The pirate dropped the chains and ran up the hill ahead of the cars. Pierre gunned the Golf up the muddy bank to a maddeningly situated tollbooth where people were forced to fish out cash to pay the pirate while their handbrakes strained on the forty-five-degree incline. The cars ahead slewed in the mud and the Zastava almost slid back into them.
When Pierre finally got to the booth, Anna suddenly sang out: ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it!’
Pierre’s hand stopped in mid-air, a twenty-deutschmark note fluttering in his fingers.
‘What?’ he demanded.
Anna replied with a loud chorus from ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman’.
‘Oh, fuck,’ said Pierre. ‘Not funny.’ He shoved the note into the pirate’s hands and accelerated past him up the hill.
‘Chris de Burgh,’ said Anna. ‘Prog rock at its best.’
‘Just don’t freak me out every time we get to a roadblock.’
‘I thought we could use a musical soundtrack.’
‘Sorry, I’m a bit on edge. It’s hard enough dealing with these loonies as it is.’
‘I know, it’s freaky, isn’t it?’ Anna said. ‘The Danube as the Styx; that pirate as Charon.’
‘Next stop Hades?’
‘Feels like it.’
•
It was grey and cold when they reached the southern outskirts of Vukovar, passing slowly through the Serb lines. Out the grimy window, Anna saw massed formations of JNA tanks and armoured vehicles and thousands of listless troops held in reserve. They passed vast dormant artillery positions arrayed in flattened cornfields. From such places, at the height of the bombardment, twelve thousand rockets and shells were poured into the city each day.
‘I stayed here once,’ said Anna, thinking again of the gentle family and their angelic son.
‘It was a beautiful place, wasn’t it?’ said Pierre. ‘I used to come here a lot. The closer we get, the sicker I feel.’
Pierre managed, almost miraculously, to talk his way through checkpoint after checkpoint, employing Serbian dialect and self-deprecating humour to underline the fact that the two of them posed no threat. At the final checkpoint before the destroyed centre, Anna caught a sulphurous whiff of the madness that had engulfed the city.
Pierre pulled up at a boom gate adjacent to the roofless shell of a bombed-out building. In its rubble-strewn courtyard, two men were twirling around on a battered motorcycle that spewed black smoke into the fetid air. The riders whooped as it kicked up dust and stones in the tight turns. A crew of armed thugs in ragtag outfits watched on, shouting encouragement and tossing around liquor bottles like drunks on a hunting trip. None of them ducked when the passenger on the spinning bike began shooting his pistol into the air.
‘Jesus!’ Anna cried.
‘Chetniks,’ said Pierre. ‘Looks like they’ve been boozing since the surrender. Hey,’ he warned when she leant down to the bag at her feet, ‘don’t touch the camera. It’ll make it worse.’
A man with a hawk’s beak of a nose above a thin moustache unslung his weapon and came towards them. Clamped onto his head was a conical black subara with a silvery badge on the front. As he got closer, Anna saw on the badge the Chetnik emblem—the Serbian crown and twinned eagles above a skull and crossbones. Bandoliers of bullets crisscrossed the man’s chest. A gingery fur stole was draped over his shoulder, an obsidian-eyed fox biting its own tail. The Chetnik levelled his Kalashnikov at the open window and barked a question. When Pierre tried to hand him their papers, the fellow unleashed a long torrent of abuse in which Anna recognised one phrase.
Popushi mi kurac!
Suck my dick!
Pierre responded sharply to the insult and the Chetnik’s intoxicated eyes widened for a moment until, to Anna’s surprise, spluttering laughter erupted from his broken-toothed mouth. Now that it seemed he was no longer about to be shot, Pierre rapidly explained something.
At first Anna was relieved when the Chetnik lowered his weapon, but then he stuck his ugly mug through the window. As the fellow scrutinised her, his toxic breath filled the cabin. Anna held her own breath and stared straight ahead as he reached across Pierre into the car. She stiffened, but it turned out she wasn’t his object after all. The Chetnik plucked the stuffed kangaroo off the dash and shoved it inside his tunic, so that its furry head stuck out above the bandolier, the fox and the marsupial competing for pride of place. Then he raised the boom and waved them through.
Pierre drove on slowly, glancing in the rear-vision mirror as the checkpoint receded. Anna put a hand on his trembling arm.
‘He told you to suck his dick, didn’t he?’
‘He did.’
‘So, what the hell did you say?’
‘I said, Sure, but I’d have to take my teeth out first.’
‘Fuck,’ Anna laughed. ‘That’s high-risk humour.’
‘It just came into my head.’
‘We lost the poor old roo.’
‘I told him where we come from the kangaroo is a talisman against evil.’
‘Should have brought a boot full of them.’
Pierre drove on slowly towards the centre. He weaved around piles of masonry and the burnt-out shells of passenger vehicles. One skeletal red car had been blown through the window of a pharmacy. They passed a long row of eighteenth-century baroque houses with arched verandas, built when the city was an outpost of the Habsburg empire. It was now bombed beyond repair.
‘Barokni Grad, the Baroque Centre,’ said Pierre. ‘Completely fucked. They’re killing history as well as the people.’
Soon the road became impassable and Pierre pulled over.
‘We could try another way, but I think we’re close,’ he said. ‘We’ll walk from here.’
Anna got out, and a few metres from the car she almost stepped on what looked like a bundle of old clothes. Under a layer of dust and rubble was the body of a man. She had seen dead people before and had prepared herself for what she would find in this place; but it is one thing for death to exist in the imagination and another altogether to have it in front of you. The dead man lay face down, his feet twisted at unnatural angles. On his scuffed slipons, she noticed the Bata brand. The old fellow was wearing shoes made in Vukovar.
Patches of waxy skin on his ankles, on an exposed arm and on his upturned cheek brought back her earliest memories of a dead animal—a formaldehyde-drenched rat put on her school desk one day during science class. Every kid had got one of these pale, cold things splayed belly-up, spread-eagled, limbs pinned back, ready to be dissected. The stench had stayed in her olfactory memory and she fancied she could smell it now. Her eyes pricked with tears. She went to raise her camera, but she found herself immobilised and cold, as if the blood had stopped moving in her body. She felt hollowed out.
‘You all right, Anna?’
‘Yeah, it’s just … He looks like garbage someone tossed in the street.’
‘Do you want to go back?’
‘His head!’
‘It’s horrible. Let’s go,’ Pierre said.
‘Not yet.’
Anna forced herself to see the body through the camera lens. The old fellow’s yellowish-grey hair ended in a bloody tonsure, where the top of his head had been neatly removed like a breakfast egg. She took a series of shots working around the body, including a close-up of the imitation Fair Isle pattern of his jumper and ending where a piece of metal had torn through it into his back.
They walked on silently. Anna lit a cigarette to stifle the smell of death. The rattle of unseen automatic weapons was the only sign of life. It prompted another childhood memory: of cracker night in Sydney, when the explosions in suburban neighbourhoods near and far were a cause for tingling excitement rather than fear.
An ancient couple came shuffling towards them. The old man wore a beret. In one hand, he carried an overnight bag. He used the other to help his wife, who was hobbling along with the aid of a stick. As the couple moved past Anna’s camera, blind to its lens, rain began to fall. Up ahead was a multi-coloured cluster of Yugos, blown apart where they’d been parked. Rainwater pooled in their crushed and rusting bonnets and roofs.
More civilians emerged from basement shelters, seeming not to notice the rain. Their synthetic winter clothes were quickly drenched. Further on, a skinny man, naked but for blue underpants and white socks and seemingly oblivious to the cold rain, was being prodded along by a Serb soldier. Long, filthy hair forced its way out under the soldier’s helmet like a fungal growth on a dying tree. Other young soldiers watched impassively. Some, Anna noticed, had surprisingly delicate faces under their shining bell-end helmets.
The rain was easing when Pierre diverted her into a narrow lane. It was full of bodies. Dozens of dead civilians had been laid out in lines, some wrapped in blankets, some in sheets of clear plastic. A man was inspecting them, delicately lifting the edges to peer at one face after another. He told Pierre that pigs and chickens had been eating the abandoned corpses.
Anna stepped carefully around the desecrated dead; to steady herself, she put out a hand towards the broken cement wall strung with electric wires. It was just a lane between buildings, and she imagined it was a shortcut kids used to take when walking to school.
They heard boisterous shouting ahead and soon came into a large square where a gang of Serb militiamen had gathered for a spontaneous victory party. Most had strips of white cotton tied to their epaulets to identify them. As what? she wondered. Liberators? Murderers? The privileged few who should not be shot on sight? Whatever they were, these carousers were on multiple highs, mugging for a Scandinavian TV crew, which was filming their celebrations.
Anna noticed there were women among the fighters and she approached a sharp-faced platinum blonde with a hunting rifle slung over her shoulder and a khaki beret set at a jaunty angle. As Anna began to photograph her, the woman greeted a tough-looking, angular young man and gave him a long kiss. Then the pair paraded for the camera, arm in arm. Anna thought they must see themselves as romantic heroes, like volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. She wondered what Orwell would have made of this lot.
Another man stared silently into her lens, striking the studied pose of the hardened veteran and taking a long drag on his cigarette. He was strung about with trinkets and charms, like a murderous Christmas tree. He handled his still-warm weapons with fingerless gloves.
Another young woman, not much older than Rachel, rushed over to get her photo taken. She was slim under her bulky camouflage vest and sported a red beret and large-lens purple sunglasses, like a model in a fashion shoot. Her sensuous lips parted to reveal a big gap in her front teeth. As Anna snapped a close-up, a line from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale came to her: Gat-tothed I was, and that bicam me weel. Quickly bored, the lusty creature pirouetted before the TV camera, which had bustled over, drawn in by her strange magnetism.
‘This will be a Serbian town,’ she told the camera in drug-affected English. ‘It’ll be ours. No more Ustasha. No more fascists. Fifty years we were waiting and hating each other. Waiting and hating.’
When someone put a boom box on top of a wrecked car, the young woman stopped talking and danced without inhibition to a folk tune, swinging a Kalashnikov in her arms like a lover. A man with a shotgun gyrated his hips and green grenades on his belt clanked in syncopation. More bearded Chetniks joined in, including a Mad Max extra with live mortar rounds on his back.
One of them broke away and made for Anna.
‘I’m from Nis,’ he told her. ‘Take my picture. Chetnik, Seselj’s party. Heard of it? We’re doing the liberating. The fucken army’s doing nothin’.’
Behind the man from Nis, a Croatian flag was splashed with fuel and set alight. Pierre pulled Anna over to the side of the square where three young men in blue jeans and ski jackets sat slumped against a wall catching a sleep, she might have thought, if it were not for the bullet holes in their heads. Anna reeled away. It was hard to think of them as men. They could have been Rachel’s schoolmates. Down a side street, Anna saw more bodies lying in clumps, dragged from their cellars, she imagined, and very likely dispatched in the street by the same Chetniks who were now chanting a song under their ominous black flag with its piratical skull and crossbones.
Slobodane, Slobodane, salji nam salate, bice mesa, bice mesa, klacemo Hrvate.
When she asked Pierre to translate, he said: ‘You don’t want to know.’
She urged him again and he relented.
‘Slobodan, Slobodan, send us some salad, for there will be meat, there will be meat, when we slaughter Croats.’
•
There were frequent volleys of gunfire coming now from streets near and distant, and she knew ‘cleansing’ continued even as the murderers danced and sang. Pierre took Anna by the arm.
‘We’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘Before they realise we’re witnesses to this.’
As they tried to leave, a red-bearded man leapt in front of them. He sculled from a bottle of brandy and threw up a two-fingered victory sign.
‘We fight because they kill kids,’ he yelled. ‘You seen a two-year-old kid dead and pigs is eating from his chest? You ever seen that? No? We only fight. To the last bullet.’
A grinning man appeared behind them, slid a dagger across his own throat and then, egged on by his drunken girlfriend, he put the blade between his teeth. Anna saw that they really wanted her to photograph them—to be captured in this moment of delirium, to perform and to pose, anything for the cameras. It seemed that the blood and the killing were stimulants; there was something darkly sexual about it. She continued to capture these images, appalled by what they revealed about a hidden corner of human nature and yet somehow excited herself to be recording a truth so raw and repulsive. She leant in close to Pierre.
‘You’re right, let’s get out of here,’ she said. ‘We should try the hospital—the Red Cross should be there by now.’
•
Keeping the Danube to his right, Pierre navigated the Golf through the broken city to Vukovar Hospital, which he knew to be north of the centre, close to the river. They found it surrounded by tanks and roaming packs of troops still looking for people to kill. Pierre cleared their passage with a JNA officer and they drove on into the hospital grounds, coming first to a pulverised wing that had once faced the distant artillery positions. All the windows on that side were burnt and blackened sockets. They passed it slowly, following the road to a cul-de-sac at the hospital’s entrance, where the abandoned wrecks of two shrapnel-wracked ambulances sat slumped on their axles.
From the scorched remains of an ornamental garden the twisted black corpse of a tree rose above the deceased vehicles. Anna could not imagine how the hospital had continued to function during the bombardment that caused this wreckage. Pierre explained that they had shifted all the operating theatres and beds into the basement.
In the aftermath of the siege, the hospital was still in chaos. When scores of family members had come to find their wounded relatives, the military had forced them to wait outside, and now they milled anxiously at the base of the stairs, unable to get answers from the armed men who were coming in and out of the hospital unhindered. Anna had learned the previous day that the Red Cross was negotiating with Serb commanders to allow them to send in a convoy to evacuate the hospital; she guessed these civilians were considered a hindrance.
Anna and Pierre were able to walk into the hospital simply by flashing their media credentials at the armed guards at the entrance. They followed a pair of women in white coats down a set of stairs into an underground corridor crowded with beds and drip stands. Dozens of men, the walking wounded, limped about among the nurses and doctors tending them. The long corridor was the basement’s main thoroughfare and its low ceiling was strung with water pipes and electrical wiring. Off to the left and right were makeshift operating theatres and emergency rooms, and beds had been pushed into every spare corner.
Anna found an English-speaking doctor who was busy examining a bearded man in a brightly patterned ski jumper.
‘One moment,’ he said in an exhausted voice. His patient’s arm was swathed in plaster, shattered bones held in place by a metal brace. When the doctor found time for her, Anna learned that a serious problem had developed.
‘The army want to separate fighters from civilians,’ he said, drawing deeply on an American cigarette from the pack Pierre had gifted him. ‘They say the ones here cannot be evacuate by Red Cross. They say they must keep them as POWs to make exchange for Serb prisoners.’
‘But there was a deal with General Panic,’ said Anna. ‘It was negotiated as part of the surrender.’
The doctor gave a Balkan shrug, suggesting he’d seen too much to believe that civilised rules might apply at this time, in this place.
‘You must know more than me,’ he said. ‘I do know Red Cross convoy is held up outside city. They cannot enter.’
He looked around to see if anyone was listening, then lowered his voice and leant in closer to her.
‘Also, Chetniks came in here to tell us they will kill anyone who tries to evacuate Ustashi. That’s what they call all the fighters—fascist Ustashi.’
‘Do you know any of the fighters?’ asked Pierre. ‘We’d like to talk to them.’
The doctor looked around in the crowded corridor.
‘That man there in the blue robe,’ he said, gesturing to a young man leaning on a set of crutches. The man’s grubby pyjamas were cut off halfway down his left leg to accommodate a plaster cast. ‘He’s Frenchman who came here to fight with the city’s defenders. A brave man, maybe he will talk to you.’
•
They agreed that Pierre would do the talking. Anna’s French was passable, but his was fluent. After a friendly greeting the man identified himself as Jean-Michel Nicholier from Vesoul, a town in central France near the Swiss border. Pierre had lived in Switzerland as a boy and, when he explained that he had been to Vesoul, the young man was delighted by this slim connection to his life in France. Anna studied Nicholier as he chatted with Pierre. He was good-looking with a frank, expressive face, a ready smile and large brown eyes. He had an elfin quality, which seemed misplaced in a man who had been caught up in the most vicious street fighting since Stalingrad. His bright face darkened when Pierre asked him about the Serb militias.
‘They arrived in the villages,’ he said. ‘They killed all the men. They took all the women with them.’
‘Did you see that?’
‘Yes for sure, for sure, in the small villages on the outskirts of Vukovar. When they reached the city, we had nothing left to defend ourselves with. I rang my mother in Vesoul. I told her: “We need help! We need help! No one is listening to us.” The world left us to be crushed like animals.’
‘And what will you do now? Do you want to go back to France or stay and fight for the Croats?’
‘I’ll go to Zagreb first and see if it’s okay, and, yes, perhaps then I’ll return to France and spend some time with my family because they don’t have any news of me. But then I’ll come back to the front. I volunteered to be here for better or worse.’
‘It seems like it’s for worse in Vukovar,’ said Pierre.
Nicholier nodded and smiled again, but Anna saw that his smile concealed a great deal.
‘It’s a slaughterhouse,’ he said and shook his head slowly. ‘Slaughterhouse, slaughterhouse.’
•
As they were talking, two Serb soldiers pushed their way into the crowded corridor, shoving Nicholier aside roughly as they went. The first one gave the Frenchman a hostile glance. The second soldier—unshaven, angry, gripping a short-barrelled automatic weapon in a tight embrace—stopped and stared at Nicholier before muttering something to the friendly doctor, who quickly came across and told Anna and Pierre, ‘He said you have five minutes only.’
Anna turned to Nicholier, deciding to trust her French.
‘Do these ones scare you?’
‘No, I’m not scared. They are soldiers. I consider myself a soldier. But of course I know there are stupid people on both sides.’
‘What do you think will happen to you? Will you be evacuated?’
Nicholier laughed and his face lit up again with surprising insouciance.
‘I hope so. I hope for evacuation. The Federal Army are supposed to arrange this. If it goes well, they say that tomorrow we should leave for Zagreb. So, tomorrow I will go …’
Anna was reluctant to blunt his optimism. She was trying to think how best to warn him that things were not going well on that front when he interrupted her with a question of his own.
‘And you? Where are you from?’
‘Australia.’
‘You know there was an Australian fighting with us? He was famous among the defenders. He was the commander of a small group who would go out and destroy Serb tanks. That is how we held them off for so many months.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘No, but many volunteers don’t use their real names. This man had a nom de guerre. They called him Cvrčak.’
‘Cicada?’ she said, reverting to English.
‘Oui, la cigale … Cicada, cicada.’
Anna felt a sudden chill that came from deep within her belly and seemed to spread out through her limbs. Pierre was oblivious to her change of mood. He was staring anxiously over Nicholier’s shoulder and she followed his gaze to see the angry Serb soldier now shoving his way back through the crowded corridor, moving in their direction, shaking his head.
‘Anna!’ said Pierre.
She ignored him, holding the Frenchman’s attention. ‘This man, the Cicada,’ she asked. ‘What did he look like?’
‘Anna! We’ve overstayed our welcome.’
Nicholier looked at Pierre, confused.
‘What did he look like?’ she persisted.
‘A big man,’ said Nicholier. ‘He had green eyes.’
At that moment the soldier shoved Pierre out of the way and grabbed the Frenchman’s shoulder.
‘Is he still alive?’ cried Anna.
‘I don’t know.’
Nicholier’s eyes were on Anna’s, as if he understood this was no normal question. The soldier pulled him back down the corridor and he stumbled, trying to stay upright on his crutches. The doctor, who had been hovering nearby, came and took Pierre’s arm.
‘You should leave here, my friend,’ he said. ‘While you can.’