The Dealer and the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

there were three sets of orphans, but she alone had been awarded that title. Almost, she wore the given name as if it were a medal of honour … and authority.
    ‘Instead of drinking, eating, pretending a corner of a cleared field is a cause for celebration, you should be out there, searching.’
    Her man had been a self-proclaimed patriarch in the village. He had gone out into the early-evening failing light and had not come back. With him had been Petar’s boy, Tomislav’s and theyoung cousin of Andrija. For the last days of the defence of the village she had tried to step into her husband’s boots. He had commanded the irregulars who fought to hold their homes and keep open the Cornfield Road, but she had been elbowed aside – not just verbally but physically – by Mladen. They had not come back. She had been pushed out of the command bunker and sent to the deep cellar, a crypt, below the church where the wounded were, and had not felt the cold November air on her face for four days. She had stayed, buried like an animal, in the carnage hole that was a useless imitation of a field hospital, until Mladen had come to her. He had had to stoop to pass through the cellar and only fading torches had identified for him those she tended, who had suffered horrific injuries. Now the painkillers and morphine were finished.
    He had groped towards her, past the radio that played the live broadcast of Sinisa Glavasevic, who was trapped in the town further down the Cornfield Road. Mladen had knelt in front of her and taken her hands, bloodstained, in his; he had begged forgiveness for her expulsion from the command bunker and had told her the resistance was over. That evening all those who had the strength to run, walk or crawl would go into the corn and try to reach the defence lines at Nustar and Vinkovci. They could not take the wounded. She was told that further defence was suicidal, would achieve nothing, and that the village, with no anti-tank missiles, could not be held. It would be her decision as to whether she stayed with the wounded or went into the cornfields. She had stayed, of course.
    She did not talk about what had happened in the hours after the men and other women had fled under cover of darkness. She did not speak about the arrival of tanks in the heart of the village, and the torches beaming down the steps. She had never discussed the actions of the Cetniks as the wounded – with herself and two other women who had remained – were dragged crudely up the steps from the cellar into the nave of the wrecked church. Catheters, bandages and drip tubes had been wrenched loose, and clothing ripped from bosoms and stomachs. She had keptsilent about what had happened. Forty hours later, a Red Cross convoy had been permitted to evacuate the handful of survivors. They lived as if they were dead. Minds worked, ears listened, eyes saw and feet moved, but souls had been killed. When, seven years later, the Widow had left a prefabricated wooden home outside Zagreb and returned to the devastated village, she had been elevated to matriarch, mother to them all. Nothing passed in the village unless she endorsed it.
    ‘You search for him. You know where to find him. Do I have to take up a spade? Is that woman’s work?’
    As teacher in the village school, her husband had been a man of books. There were more books in their home than in all the others in the village. She had qualifications in nursing. He had been undisputed in his leadership: no bank managers lived there, no agricultural co-operative managers and no priest. His authority had been handed on to the Widow.
    She had stood for an hour in that kitchen, had drunk only water and refused the open sandwiches, cake and fruit.
    An electrician before the war, Mladen lived off a good pension payable to the surviving commander of the village and responsible for its ‘heroic defence’; he had the additional status of widower. Behind him – she thought the boy uninteresting –