He simply wants what he wants.
‘Go on,’ said Grace.
I must kill them first, before they kill Anka. But they are three and I am one. Though Fabjan appears unarmed, he might easily be concealing a pistol. It’s a risk I have to take. But before I kill Fabjan I must kill the men who are clearly armed. Which one first? I can try for them both in quick succession, the group is so tight, but of course with the first shot everything will change. These are the split-second calculations I’m making as I hide in the line of trees. A fresh thought comes to me: Anka’s arms aren’t bound. Because she’s an unarmed woman, they don’t see her as a physical threat. When the shooting begins they probably won’t concern themselves too much with her in the first instance, they’ll save themselves. Perhaps I can lead them away, give her the chance to escape. It’s now almost completely dark. I look at the curled strip of the moon: there’s a wisp of cloud across it which will clear in a moment and the small amount of extra light will help me with the shot. I raise my rifle. I decide to take the uniformed man, reckoning the youth probably is the lesser shot.
But something happens first. Anka lunges at Fabjan. If she is to die, she wants to show him what she thinks of him: spit at him, hit him, anything. There is a struggle, the youth loses his grip on her arm, she manages to break free and runs a short way. Anka slips and falls into the mud and comes up more furious. Fabjan is hit in the mouth, perhaps by Anka, more likely by the butt or barrel of a rifle. He swears and I see his hand go to his mouth. He spits something out: saliva and a fragment of tooth. The struggle lasts a very short time and then it is over. The youth is holding onto Anka, like a dog waiting for the command from its master. I shoot him in the forehead. He stands for a moment, teetering, dead on his feet. Then he falls forward onto his face. The uniformed man is the first to react, he shouts and he and Fabjan run for the cover of the trees. I follow right behind them; more than anything I want to kill Fabjan.
They split up and head in different directions. I chase the one I am sure is Fabjan, I can still see well enough. Without his torch Fabjan blunders and crashes through the trees and more than once trips and falls. I’m gaining on him when the first shot comes. Two shots from the militiaman’s pistol, he doesn’t care much if he hits Fabjan. I go down, I keep still. I think of Anka up by the bunker, she will have run. I need to give her more time. I can’t let them have her. I have killed a man and I will kill again if that’s what it takes to keep them away, but now it’s too dark and I’ve lost track of them. So I fire once into the trees, so they know I’m still out here and to keep them on the move.
I wait for minutes, listening. No more shots come, no sound of boots; later I hear an engine. I leave my place and begin to make my way back up the hill. I call for Kos and a few minutes later she is by my side.
There is the dead youth. I turn him over: one eye is a bloody hole, the other sightless. Of Anka there is no sign, which is as I would have expected. My plan now is to follow her and to catch her up, to take her to safety. But the rain and the mud have made things difficult for Kos. During the scuffle the scent lines became tangled, now they cross and recross each other and Kos doubles back on herself trying to follow a single line. We branch out in several different directions before I give up, too dangerous. At any moment the militiaman could come back for me, could bring reinforcements. For Anka, too, who along with me is a witness to all that has happened. As I pass the dead youth I think of disposing of his body the way I disposed of others, over the ravine and into the swimming hole. I have my hands under his arms, I let them drop. What does it matter? Instead I look for his rifle. It is missing.
I stay away from the ravine and the woods for a week or more, two weeks. When I finally go back up there, the bodies have been moved, the earth turned over. Just a few scraps of singed denim.
‘I thought she would find a way to come back. To my house, to my mother’s house. To those people who loved her and would protect her. Or to send a message at least. But she never did. She decided to rely only on herself. She went. There was a moment, after I shot the youth. I remember how she stepped back, she never screamed, simply stepped backwards into the darkness, turned and fled. For a long time, as I waited for her to return, I believed she knew I was there behind the trees and that this was my doing. That she knew I would come. For who else could it have been?’
‘Do you think she will come back one day?’
‘If she survived, if maybe she headed south and not north. But they would have been on the lookout for her. She would have had to circle back on herself. Cross the ravine. And if she forgives us, if she ever forgives us.’
‘What about Javor?’
‘The authorities found Javor, his remains, long after the war, many kilometres away. The militias had begun to transport people to be killed. Then came more wars, so many wars, it took years to find them. We were just the beginning, you see.’
Together we looked at the houses of Gost down below. I said, ‘You can never tell anybody.’
‘Why don’t you go and live somewhere else?’
I shrugged. ‘Why should I? And anyway where would I go? When you’ve seen it and you know nothing is going to change that, you get used to it, like an aftertaste of something rotten. You get used to it, because you have to. Gost is my home. I live here because it’s what I want.’
‘But then you’re reminded, every day.’
‘Yes,’ I said simply. ‘But I like to remember. Not just the bad times, but the good ones too.’
‘And that horrible man, Fabjan?’
‘I like to be sure he remembers too.’
21
Summer is nearly over, that time of year again. Here at the Zodijak it’s still warm enough to sit out and will be for some time. At this time of day the sun is low, it dazzles the drinkers who sit out front. I was in town running my errands earlier in the day, have stopped by as is my habit. The new girl has gone of course, decided life in Gost didn’t suit her after all. On the coast the restaurants will be closing up for the season: umbrellas stowed away, chairs turned upside down on tables for the last time. In the restaurant where I once worked with the Italian chef there was a tank in which hundreds of fish were kept alive. At the end of the season we had to catch all the fish so we could empty the tanks. I’ve been back to the coast. Sometimes I wonder what took me so long. I went to Pag, I drove across the newly renovated bridge, I even found my old hut, which has been done up and is rented to visitors. Wild bees had made their home in the old hives. Sage still grew everywhere. I understand why Krešimir had a dream of a life on the islands: I did once and it was a good life. But Krešimir won’t be going. Krešimir is staying in Gost; we are all staying in Gost: Fabjan, Krešimir and me. We three.
In the last days of their stay I tried to make sure that Laura and the family had a good time, to repair a little of the mood. I told Laura again that Fabjan had been drunk and there would be no repeat of his behaviour. I’m not sure how convinced she was, but later in the same day we shared a glass of wine outside the house and, in discussion about some fittings for the house, she said she’d look in England and bring them out next time — so that’s a good sign. The wine brought some colour back to her cheeks and we talked about the first time we’d met, when I found her looking for the water mains outside the house, and she blushed and laughed. I could still tease her, see.
I want them back.
The last thing I did was take Matthew hunting, as I’d promised. He didn’t do badly at alclass="underline" more nerve than I’d given him credit for, though he flinched at the last moment and we ended up trailing his animal a short way. Zeka did well, considering it was the first time he’d worked alone; his confidence is building. I haven’t started another dog yet, but I will, perhaps in the spring so I can use next year’s hunt season to bring her on. For now Zeka and I, we manage on our own. We miss Kos still. Grace, once I had taught her how to tread more lightly and not to alert every beast for two kilometres around to her presence, turned out to have the eye and the steady hand of a marksman, the ability to concentrate, to go straight to the zone. I’d seen it in the way she worked to restore the mosaics, everything she did from examining a dragonfly’s wing to baking a cake, weaving friendship bands, so I fetched mine from the drawer and let her tie it round my wrist. In the woods, I watched her: the way she cradled the stock, you’d never believe it was the first time she’d held a gun. I thought about Anka and I felt the ember of hope that has burned inside me for years, that Anka is out there somewhere, that she took the boy’s rifle and used it to stay alive, that one day she’ll come back to Gost.