'Am I a loser?'
Joey said simply, believed it, 'You are a man of dignity, you are not a loser.'
'And Jasmina, with a broken back? She has no mother. She has no carer but me. It is uncertain what is her future when I am dead. Is she a loser?'
'She has self-respect, she is not a loser.'
'May I tell you a story about what obsesses you, Mr Cann, a story of a winner and a loser?'
'I am in your home. You may tell me what you want.'
Jasmina gave him the sandwich. He did not know whether she wanted the story told or not. Her pale cheeks, sunken set eyes and her mouth, no lipstick, were without expression.
'The story has many characters, but at the end of it there was one winner and one loser… '
'Is it the story that is not to be told to a stranger – about blood?'
'That story, Mr Cann. I broke my rule on involvement, and you have told me that because of you my involvement may be known, and I should take precautions. Very frankly, few are possible… You should know why I became involved, helped you.'
'Please.' He strained to listen and to hold concentration against the waves of nausea.
'My wife, Maria, Jasmina's mother, was dead. She had a backroom administration post at the Bosnia Hotel, but when she was killed she was another mother and wife out in the streets and parks, scavenging. It had rained in the morning and she had come to the Jewish cemetery, near to here, to add to the snails she had collected. If you can find enough snails and take them out of their shells, and you can boil water, you can make soup. She was killed by a sniper's bullet. We had been married for twenty-one years. Jasmina was nineteen. My wife, Maria, was buried in the football pitch of the stadium. I could have left the city, but to turn your back on your wife's grave is, I promise you, difficult. I went on with my work as a teacher in law at the university. Jasmina, the only jewel left in my life, was my student. We managed. She had a boyfriend, Mirko, another of my students. A Serb, what we Muslims call a Cetnik. In the war, at first, it was possible for Serb men to remain in Sarajevo, but later it became hard, and soon it was impossible. There was hysteria, they were thought to be spies for the enemy. Jasmina and Mirko were in love, as I and her mother had been. They had pledged to spend their lives together, as we had. I blessed them. I said they should go, escape the madness.
'There was a telephone engineer who, before the war, I defended on a charge of killing while driving.
My defence was successful. He went free. He was a rogue, he should have gone to prison. He said that if he could ever repay me he would. The telephone link from the main PTT building was cut when the fighting started, but the engineer kept one line open to Grbavica. It was possible if you waited, and if you paid, to use the line. First you called and asked the Serb operator to pass a message, for the person you would speak with to come to the sub-exchange in Grbavica at a certain time on a certain day. The day came, the time, you spoke to them. The engineer is now a wealthy man, he does not have to work. Mirko, with my money, made the calls and asked relatives on that side to help him, if he came over, to leave the country. The guarantee was given. But how to go over?
'There was the tunnel at the airport. It was impossible to use it. The military had it, the government, and they rented it to the gangsters – to Caco, Celo and Serif. They paid two thousand DMs an hour to use it.
They brought in sugar, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, everything for the black market, but between the military and the gangsters there was a stranglehold on the use of the tunnel. I heard there was one other way.
'I went to see Serif. It was an agony to me to go to see such a man. I have to say it was because I loved my child, and she loved her boy. He named the price.
Of course we did not have such money. The price was five thousand American dollars, for him, and three thousand American dollars for the gangsters on the other side. I sold everything I had that was of material and sentimental value, my wife's jewellery, the ring I had given her, and the ring she had given me, even the watch on my wrist that had been my father's, and a loan from relatives, and I mortgaged my pension.
Everything went to pay the thug for Jasmina's and Mirko's freedom.
'I remember the evening. I will never forget it. She took a small sports bag and Mirko had a little ruck-sack. It was all they owned. They had such confidence in a new world, their new life, away from the killing.
When we came near to the bridge I was told to stay back. I kissed them both. I saw Serif. She had the money, all we could raise, and she gave it him, and he seemed to sneer because it was so little to him, and so much to us. I heard him say to her that all the arrangements were made. They went away into the darkness.
They were to cross the Miljacka river at the Vrbanja bridge, it was the no man's land between the front lines. They were desperate, as I was, so we took on trust what we were told. I imagined every stride they took towards the bridge.
'I heard the shots. There were two long bursts of automatic gunfire, as if one for each of them. First it was Serif's men who held me back, then the police came, and they prevented me from going to the bridge. French troops came to the ends of the bridge but they would not go forward because, I heard it a week later, they considered it too dangerous. They were on the bridge, Jasmina and Mirko, through the night. At dawn, a Ukrainian army corporal drove by, and saw them. He walked onto the bridge. The French told him to stop but he refused. The Serbs on the other side told him to go back but he would not.
He brought them back, carried them one under each of his arms. I never learned his name, was never able to thank him. Their lives were saved in the Kosevo hospital. Mirko had stomach wounds, his shoulder was damaged and he cannot run. My Jasmina, my jewel, was paralysed.. . A year afterwards there was another shooting on the Vrbanja bridge, what the foreign pressmen called the Romeo and Juliet shooting when two similar lovers paid to cross, and they both died, were betrayed, but their bodies were on the bridge for many days, exposed to the elements and to the foreign TV. Everybody knows about them, but Jasmina and Mirko were only another statistic of the injured. You will want to know what happened to their romance… Mirko is now in Vienna and has studied to be an architect. We have no jewellery and my pension belongs to the bank.
'I took part, as the bishop said in London that I should. I lost, and Jasmina lost. Yes, Mr Cann, while she was in the hospital, while I did not know whether she would live or die, I went to visit Ismet Mujic -
Serif. He refused to return the money and refused to take responsibility for the betrayal. He said that if I came near him again or made trouble for him he would set his dogs on me, and that he would see to it I never worked again. He had that power. It is the symptom of the loser, you might find it hard to believe it of me, but for nine years I have cultivated a wish to be avenged. There is something in our faith that tells us, one day – however long in the future – the chance of vengeance comes. You walked, in your innocence, through my door. I told you that the man found in the r i v e r… '
'He was murdered,' Joey said, through the last mouthful of the sandwich. 'He was hit, then thrown over the bridge.'
'… was linked to Ismet Mujic – Serif. It was when I thought, for the first time in long years, that I could be the winner… Citius, Altius, Fortius… could run faster than him, jump higher, be stronger – could crush him. I discarded the mentality of a judge.'
'Threw off the uniform.' Joey drained the last of the wine in his glass.