The Skeleton Road

  Mitja was never home for more than a handful of hours at a time. Humanitarian aid was finally coming in from the sea, thanks to a fleet of civilian vessels. As well as aid, they brought protesters and supporters, and when they left, they carried refugees; people who had lost their homes and who wanted nothing more than a night’s sleep without being in fear for their lives. The negotiations and organisation of these arrivals and departures took phenomenal effort; the Yugoslav navy was always teetering on the point of action against anyone delivering medicines and other basic supplies to the beleaguered city. Mitja spent long hours horse-trading and bargaining to keep the aid effort afloat.

  When the first convoy was on its way, Mitja tried again to persuade me to leave the city. But again I refused. I was young and idealistic; I was also head over heels in love for the first time in my life. The idea of sailing away without Mitja was intolerable. I wasn’t afraid that our love would fail the test of separation. I simply didn’t want to be apart from him. I made him promise he would stop asking me to leave and I redoubled my efforts to make myself valuable to Dubrovnik, both at home and abroad.

  The November respite had reassured us all, mostly because we had very little idea of how grim things were in other parts of Croatia. We thought because the bombardment against us had eased that the Serbs had come to their senses and realised there are no winners in a war like this. What we had no way of knowing was the degree of savagery being endured by innocent civilians elsewhere. But our innocence was shattered at the beginning of December.

  It began with gunfire, peppering the streets of the Old Town. Then the shelling started. Mortars, shells and missiles rained down from dawn for six hours at a time. The air reverberated with the terrible impact of the bombs. The noise was deafening, so loud it seemed to vibrate in my chest. Our flat was close to Stradun, the central promenade of the Old Town, and the constant hammering of the artillery throughout its length terrified me. Tessa Minogue’s flat had been hit the day before, and she huddled with me under the heavy oak dining table where we shook with fear.

  When Mitja came back that night, he reported that thirteen people had died. It’s unforgivable, but at the time we almost felt relieved. I remember thinking so few deaths was a miracle, given the visible devastation left by the attack. Later, we discovered that the IUC library had been destroyed; twenty thousand books shredded. It felt like an assault on the future.

  I remember Mitja shaking with rage when he described what had happened at the Libertas Hotel. ‘The hotel was one of the first targets, and of course it ended up in flames. And because our people refuse to lie down and die, the city firemen turned out in spite of the bombardment and started putting out the fire. And what did those bastards in the JNA do? They turned their guns on the firemen. It could have been carnage out there if our guys hadn’t taken cover. Who would do such a thing? What kind of animals are they?’ I had no answers then; I still have none. It has always seemed to me that the Balkans are a seething pit of artificial distinctions between people who can’t actually be divided on biological lines. How can ethnic cleansing make any sense when the people you are cleansing are the same as you under the skin?

  Though 6 December was the high watermark of the bombing of the city, it wasn’t the end of the siege. The JNA soldiers continued their campaign of looting and destruction in the Old Town and in the rest of the city till they were finally driven out in the New Year by the Sarajevo Agreement. But even when the JNA fell back and started to focus on bringing the war to Bosnia and Hercegovina, we still felt insecure. Every time I left the flat, I tried to record what I was seeing, to keep track of what had changed, what had been destroyed, what remained. More than half the buildings in the Old Town were damaged. An overwhelming amount of museum exhibits and privately held art simply disappeared. But that was nothing compared to the human cost. The suffering of the survivors still echoes down the years; the scars persist.

  As the siege began to peter out, Mitja was under even greater pressure. In the middle of December, the EU – or rather, the EEC as it was then – agreed to recognise the independence of Croatia in four weeks. I’ve never been sure what exactly an intelligence officer is responsible for, but in the same way as I was cataloguing the streets, he was cataloguing the crimes of the JNA. Making sure there was a record of the testimony of the hundreds of people – mostly displaced civilians whose homes in the countryside around Dubrovnik had been destroyed – who were thrown into so-called prisoner-of-war camps where they were beaten and brutalised and terrorised, where mock executions were used as a form of psychological warfare, where JNA soldiers played out the role of brutal oppressors without compunction.

  By the middle of January, the siege was effectively over. It was possible to communicate with the outside world. There was food, water and electricity again, though such normality felt like a strange counterpoint to the damage I saw everywhere. Melissa, my supervisor, was eager that I should return to Oxford. ‘You can do some teaching this term,’ she said in one of the first emails I received after the electricity supply was restored. It wasn’t a request, it was an instruction. The subtext was that if I didn’t come back now, there might no longer be a job for me. ‘And you will have so much to write about. I almost envy you the experience.’ Probably the most tactless thing anyone has ever said to me.

  I told Mitja about the email late that night as we lay curled round each other in bed. ‘I’m going to stay here,’ I said.

  ‘No. It’s not a good idea, Maggie. There’s more and worse to come here. It was different during the siege. I had the perfect excuse to stay here. But I can’t sidestep my responsibilities and I can’t take you with me.’

  I could feel tears pricking my eyes. ‘I don’t want to be without you,’ I blurted out. ‘I don’t care if we can only snatch little bits of time together, I’m going to stay here.’

  ‘And do what? The IUC is destroyed. There’s nowhere to teach. Look, Maggie, Dubrovnik needs things you can do better from Oxford than here. We need people to raise money to rebuild the city. To mend our roofs, to restore our walls. You can’t do this here. And you have a voice in England. You can write for newspapers and magazines, you can tell the story of the siege from the inside. You can make people pay attention.’

  ‘You want me to go? You want rid of me? I thought you loved me.’

  ‘Of course I love you,’ he protested, tightening his grip. I could feel each finger pressing into my back. ‘That’s why I want you out of here before it all turns to shit. Maggie, I promise you we’ll meet whenever we can. Come back in the vacation time and wherever I am, you can be close by. And I will be in London or Paris or Berlin sometimes, talking to government people. We can meet then.’

  ‘You’ve already worked all this out.’ It came out like an accusation.

  ‘I’ve thought a lot about it. The war won’t go on for ever and then we get our time. You and me, time and space.’

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘I know. But you have to. Dubrovnik needs you now more than ever. But it needs you somewhere else.’

  31

  ‘Jesus Christ, what happened here?’ Karen pulled up at the side of a small meadow of mown grass by the single-track road they were driving along. A circle of more than a dozen white wooden crosses surrounded a stone plinth displaying photographs of children.

  ‘A massacre, at a guess,’ Maggie said, her voice as bleak as her expression.

  ‘But they’re all kids. Little kids.’ Karen got out of the car and walked towards the memorial, her throat closing in pity. She counted fourteen crosses. There were no names on them or on the plinth, just the photographs encased in blocks of Perspex sunk into the pale stone. Dark hair, big eyes, gap-toothed smiles, no inkling on those cheerful open faces that death was round the corner. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, a detached part of her brain wondering why atheists like her still invoked a deity in moments of extremis. She stood in silence, wondering at the stages on a journey that brought a man to
a place where slaughtering children became a valid response.

  Maggie joined her after a couple of minutes, her expression grim, map in hand. ‘We’re only a few kilometres from Podruvec,’ she said, pointing to their position. ‘It’s the nearest village to here. The children might have come from there.’

  ‘This is terrible,’ Karen said.

  ‘A lot of terrible things happened here in the nineties. Seeing media reports doesn’t prepare you for the reality. Because we drove down on the motorway, you didn’t get a sense of the countryside. I didn’t give you the commentary. “This village was shelled, this place lost its menfolk, the women here were gang-raped.” That’s what a journey through the Balkans can turn into.’ She walked round the memorial, studying it as if she was etching it on her mind. ‘One of my doctoral students has written about the massacres that happened in all three wars. How those deaths embody the geopolitics of the region. Me, I see them as emblems as well as embodiments. You see something like this and you never forget how easily we lose our humanity.’

  Karen looked away. On their long drive, she’d learned much more about Maggie’s relationship to this landscape that hid recent horrors beneath its tranquil beauty. ‘I don’t know how you were able to keep coming back, knowing what you knew, seeing what you’d seen.’

  ‘It was complicated, and not all of it virtuous.’ Maggie crouched down to take a photograph on her phone. ‘I thought it was important to witness what was happening here. And I was ambitious enough to understand that I was getting the inside track on a historic conflict that would provide me with a career’s worth of research material.’ She caught the swiftly suppressed look of distaste on Karen’s face. ‘I told you it wasn’t all pretty.’ She sighed. ‘I also wanted to help. So I got an LGV licence and every time I came back, I came with a truckload of medical supplies. But if I’m totally honest, I might not have done any of it if it hadn’t been for Mitja. I loved him, and he had a job to do. Well, a series of jobs, as it turned out. So if I wanted to be with him, I had to steel myself and come back.’

  Karen shook her head. ‘I love my partner, but I’m not sure I love him that much.’

  ‘Karen, I don’t know you very well, but I think I know you well enough to say that you’d probably surprise yourself.’

  Karen looked around her, at the green woodland and the rolling hills, the emptiness of the landscape and its beauty. It wasn’t that different from parts of Perthshire, she thought. The vegetation was different, but they felt similar. Except she couldn’t imagine the people of Tayside rising up against their neighbours in the Highlands in bloody conflict. Even at its ugliest, Scottish sectarianism would stop short at this. Wouldn’t it? And if it didn’t, could she love a man caught up in the thick of it?

  As if reading her thoughts, Maggie said, ‘He wasn’t a fanatic, you know. He loved his country but he hated what the nationalists on both sides stood for. That’s why he ended up working for NATO and the UN. Because he could see there was no future in the fighting. He’d have been pleased to see this next generation of kids talking to each other online, realising there’s more that links them than separates them.’

  ‘Whatever he was, it got him killed. And it got him killed on my patch. The first rule of investigation is supposed to be getting to know your victim. So I suppose I should be grateful for seeing the likes of this.’ Karen turned away and walked back to the car.

  Maggie joined her and they set off in silence. A kilometre up the road, Maggie peered at the map and said, ‘It’s just ahead, round the shoulder of the hill by the looks of it.’

  They rounded the bend and almost immediately a crooked sign by the side of the road said ‘Podruvec’. Karen slowed down as they arrived at cluster of houses and outbuildings that straggled along the narrow road. As they grew closer, they could see many of the houses were deserted, their front doors hanging from broken hinges, their windows smashed, everything covered with grime and stained by weather. The only café was a ruin, one wall entirely missing. A church with a lopsided tower huddled behind an overgrown graveyard.

  At the sound of their car, a handful of people materialised in doorways and outside the outbuildings, suspicion outweighing curiosity on their faces. It was, Karen thought, like something out of a post-apocalyptic indie film. ‘Eat your heart out, Sam Peckinpah,’ she muttered under her breath, falling back on the Scots tradition of black humour as the antidote to fear, distress or upset. She pulled up on a concrete pad next to the ruined café. ‘What now?’ she said.

  ‘We get out and say hello,’ Maggie said. She got out of the car and smiled a greeting, sketching a wave at the watchers.

  ‘In for a penny,’ Karen said and followed her.

  Maggie was heading for a woman who could have been any age between forty and eighty. Her weathered skin was the colour of an acorn, puckered and scored with lines. A black headscarf covered most of her iron grey hair. A black cardigan and a dark red skirt covered her ample bosom and broad hips. Her arms were folded across her chest and her mouth was a grim inhospitable line. Karen, who had wandered into plenty of Greek hill villages in her time, was surprised not to be greeted more warmly.

  Maggie launched into what Karen presumed to be Croatian. It might as well have been Klingon for all the sense it made to her. Hard consonants and soft sibilants, a slur of vowels. On the drive, they’d discussed the line they would take. But Karen had no way of knowing whether Maggie was sticking to the original game plan. Taking a back seat didn’t come naturally to her, but here, now, Karen had no choice. She had to trust.

  Maggie gave Karen one last glance then turned her focus on the stony face in front of her. She reached back into her memory for Mitja’s accent and launched herself into speech. ‘It’s a fine day,’ she began. It wasn’t just the Brits who used the weather as a way into conversation.

  ‘You’re not from round here,’ the woman said.

  So it was going to be like that. ‘No, I’m Scottish. But I spent a lot of time in Croatia in the nineties. I was in Dubrovnik during the siege.’ Lay out the credentials alongside the linguistic fluency.

  ‘And what brings you here now?’ The woman wasn’t giving an inch. One or two of her neighbours were moving slowly closer.

  ‘I’m looking for Mitja Petrovic’s family. I’ve got news of him.’

  A spark of recognition but no yielding. ‘What news?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s for his family.’

  ‘He doesn’t have any family round here. Not any more. His parents died before the war.’

  ‘I know that. I’m looking for Jablanka. His wife.’

  The woman tried but there was no hiding the shock of hearing that name. ‘There’s nobody here called Jablanka. You’ve had a wasted journey.’

  ‘If she’s not here any more, where is she?’

  ‘Stop pretending you have any proper business here. If you knew General Petrovic, you would know the answers to these questions. Just leave.’ She waved her fingers in a dismissive, shooing gesture as if they were troublesome chickens.

  ‘I’m not leaving till I get some answers.’

  The woman laughed and waved her arm to encompass her neighbours, now standing within easy hearing distance. ‘You think they’re going to talk to you?’ she scoffed, then turned away and went back inside her house. Everyone else melted away except for one man. His dark eyes were fixed on Maggie, his scrawny frame tightly held, hands obvious fists in his pockets.

  ‘Did you know Mitja?’ Maggie said.

  The man nodded. ‘I was at school with him.’

  Maggie smiled. ‘Then you must have known Rado Tomic too.’

  ‘You know Rado?’ He looked wary.

  ‘I had coffee with him in Dubrovnik a few days ago. He works for UNESCO now, but I suppose you know that?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Everybody knew Rado was going places.’

  ‘Mitja too, I’m guessing.’

  A quick, shrewd glance. ‘Look, what she said? If you really knew him, y
ou’d know about Jablanka. So I’m not talking about him, you understand?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Maggie said. It was the last throw of the dice.

  The man’s eyes widened momentarily in shock. ‘Really? I always thought he was a survivor.’

  ‘He was murdered.’

  He stared at the ground. ‘One more death.’

  ‘Did he have any enemies that you know of?’

  A short, sharp bark of laughter and a cynical curl of his lip to match it. ‘If you’re looking for the general’s enemies, you won’t find them here. You’ve wasted your time. There’s nobody here will talk to you about him. It’s been a very long time since he was one of us.’ He uncurled his fists and took a soft pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He tapped one out and lit it with a battered petrol lighter made from a cartridge case. ‘You should go.’ And he stepped around her and walked away, disappearing into a raddled old barn across the road.

  ‘I’m guessing that didn’t go well,’ Karen said.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Maggie said. ‘A place like this, you’d think they’d be proud of their home-grown general. But it’s like talking to a brick wall.’

  ‘Did you tell them he was dead?’

  ‘I told the guy. I was holding back with the woman. I thought she’d spill whatever she knew about Jablanka and Mitja’s sons.’ She gave a dry little laugh. ‘I was married to him and I don’t even know what his boys were called. Fuck, what kind of a woman am I?’

  One who doesn’t want to know the truth about her man. Not so very unusual. ‘So what now?’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. I was so sure I’d get some answers here. You know the kind of thing. The village elder who would sit down with me and pass on a fund of stories about Mitja. And maybe the chance to come face to face with his sons and tell them how much good their father did.’