The Heart of Hell Read online

  Della Torre remembered Vukovar as it had been, a sleepy town on the shores of the Danube. The river was wide and easy-flowing through the fertile land, and poplars stood sentry along its banks. Vukovar’s citizens had always been well off, bourgeois even, under Communism. Much of the town was Hapsburg. Elegant façades had been painted ochre or yellow or robin’s-egg blue, evidence of wealth that had lasted more than a century. The farmland was productive and the factories, including the one founded before the war by the Czech shoemaker Bata, paid well.

  Of course, the Communists had also made their mark. They always did. The Venetian towns along the coast had their brutalist hotel blocks, Zagreb its power-station chimney, and Vukovar its concrete water tower on a prime site on the Danube, near the centre of town. It was a monument to socialist ambition, to remind people that aesthetics were irrelevant in the face of proletarian progress.

  When della Torre had been there last, the tension had been palpable. Back then, the smell in the air had mostly been of fear. Now it was the smell of destruction. And death. The pungent assault of burning plastic, rubber, of rotting meat, more penetrating than raw ammonia, dug its way into his sinuses and into the back of his throat.

  He was shocked by the sight of the wounded trees, their branches severed. A dog loped towards them and then lost interest. Della Torre caught sight of the water tower, which was pockmarked with bullet holes. Farther along, the pretty church had lost a corner of its baroque copper steeple. He stood there for a long moment, his eyes watering involuntarily from the battering his senses were taking.

  “Fuck,” Strumbić said again, retching.

  Then a voice called out from a ruined building: “Plavi? Where the fuck have you been?” Plavi raced towards it and disappeared inside, leaving della Torre and Strumbić exposed on the street.

  “Don’t shoot. We’re friends,” della Torre called.

  “Come over here with your hands up. Slowly. You make any sudden moves and we’ll shoot you Serbs.”

  “We’re not Serbs. We’re friends,” della Torre called over.

  “We’ll be the judges of that.”

  They edged forward, hands up, frightened of being shot from behind or in front or of having a rocket land on them. The constant noise and violence was shattering.

  When they reached the building, the Croat soldiers made them lie belly down on the rough concrete, then took their handguns and Strumbić’s white handbag. Three of them marched della Torre and Strumbić through the rubble-strewn streets, deeper into Vukovar.

  They arrived at the entrance to a cellar. One of the soldiers spoke into the opening: “Captain, we’ve detained these Serb spies. Would you like us to shoot them?”

  “Spies?”

  “They forced Plavi to guide them from the Serb lines.”

  “Plavi’s back?” This was said with a shout of enthusiasm and relief. A man flung himself through the narrow opening of the cellar, both hands grasping the door frame. He was hugging Plavi when he looked up at della Torre and froze. “Captain —” he said.

  Della Torre recognized him immediately, but it took a while for him to believe who he was seeing.

  “Lieutenant Boban.”

  Boban’s face was more gaunt and angular than it had been two months ago, when della Torre had last seen him. His hair was no longer closely cropped, and his clothes were covered in a film of dust.

  Boban let go of Plavi and grasped della Torre with a two-armed handshake.

  Della Torre could see their militia escorts looking puzzled and worried. They started to withdraw, but Strumbić stopped them. “My gun, my money, and my bag,” he said with considerable authority.

  “Lieutenant Boban — or is it Captain? — this is Captain Strumbić of military intelligence,” della Torre said. “My colleague.”

  Strumbić made a cursory nod as he collected his possessions from the men with Kalashnikovs.

  Boban led the way into his cellar headquarters. A dozen men were down there, some sitting, some half-asleep. One was on a telephone; another spoke into a military radio, going through a list in a children’s notebook. The men immediately gathered around Plavi, ignoring Boban’s two guests.

  “We can’t hold out much longer,” Boban said. “It’s coming to the last days. They prod and we push back, but we’ve run out of anti-tank rockets and we’re low on supplies. As soon as they round themselves up, they’ll overrun us. We can hear them planning the assault over the radios; they use normal frequencies and don’t even bother coding their messages. It was fine when we were up against the regular army. The conscripts ran away or hung back during attacks, and we dealt with them. So they just sat back and bombed us. They say we’ve been shelled as much as Stalingrad . . .” Boban shook his head. “But gentlemen, I’m remiss. I haven’t offered you anything to drink.”

  He turned to the nearest man. “Any slivovitz left, Damir?”

  “Sorry, boss, they needed it at the hospital.”

  Boban shrugged apologetically. “They ran out of disinfectant.” With a smile, he added, “Your Irena has been a blessing. I don’t know how many lives she and her British friend have saved.”

  “It must be hard since the convoy evacuated the doctors. Are you managing to get the wounded out under truce?”

  Boban looked surprised. “No,” he said. “The hospital is still functioning. Most of the medical staff elected to stay.”

  “But I . . . I thought . . . the reports said they’d been evacuated.” Della Torre slid into a chair, his knees weakening.

  “The Serb press says all the medical staff left; that way, they can claim anyone remaining belongs to Ustaša. But I can assure you . . . Well, I don’t need to assure you. I’ll take you to see Irena.”

  DELLA TORRE FOUND himself on what had once been a lawn in front of the hospital. The modern square-block building was riddled with bullet holes, and the white paint was smeared black from where fire had licked out of the upper storeys. Most of the windows were bare of glass, their wooden roller blinds unspooled like the tongues of hanged men. The parking lot and the expanse of once-pleasant grassy space had been gouged by shells; the earth was turned over, raw with roots and iron reinforcing rods to which clung clots of concrete.

  “The JNA have done a bit of redecorating,” Boban said.

  Della Torre flinched as the sound of a blast came from the other side of the building. He ran towards the hospital, followed by Boban and Strumbić, handbag over his arm.

  The early evening light was fast fading. The corridor leading from the hospital entrance was crowded and dim: the building was on generator-powered emergency lighting. Della Torre felt lost amid the long row of people waiting to be seen. An orderly shooed him to the side to make way for a gurney carrying an unconscious young woman covered in a pink polyester blanket.

  Boban spoke to a middle-aged nurse whose hair was hidden under a stained wimple. Her eyes were tired and the skin on her face sagged.

  “Is Dr. Irena free?”

  “Ah, Captain. She either works or she sleeps. I’ll see if I can find her for you.”

  The hospital was surprisingly clean and well ordered. Here, antiseptic slightly deadened the general Vukovar smell of rot and shit and burning.

  They waited like the patients. Della Torre’s breathing was shallow. He hated himself for assuming that Irena had long before escaped to the relative safety of Zagreb. And now he was afraid for himself and for her.

  “You know what, Gringo,” Strumbić said, looking around. “The world can be unconscionably shitty.”

  “Welcome to the heart of hell,” said Boban.

  Strumbić shook his head. “Vukovar could teach hell a few things.”

  Della Torre didn’t see Irena arrive. She just appeared at his elbow. She had a boy’s haircut, and she looked wan, drained, thin, her eyes drawn into their hollows.

  “Oh, Marko
,” she said, smiling, a tear running down her cheek. He’d never known her to cry. She hugged him tight, and now he noticed her pregnancy. The swelling of her belly was still small, but noticeable against her thinness.

  Her appearance made him want to weep. What sort of husband was he to have failed her so? Shame rocked him.

  “Irena,” he said, taking her into his arms, kissing the top of her head. How could he have forgotten how tiny she was? Barely bigger than a child. The force of her personality somehow stretched her in his memory. This moment too he felt he was experiencing as memory, even as it occurred.

  She quickly gathered herself together. “Why did you come?”

  “Irena, why did you stay?”

  “Because we’re needed. Don’t worry. They might be targeting the hospital with their bombs, but we’re fine in the basement. We do the operations in the bunker. They’d have to drop an atom bomb to get us there, and that’s where I am most of the time.” She smiled fondly at him but held him at arm’s length. “David has been good to me. We’ve been a very effective team. I didn’t know you were here or I’d have woken him.”

  “No, please, let him rest. But you’ve got to get out. The Serbs will overrun you in the next day or two.”

  “We’ll be safe here. What could they do to a hospital and patients? We’ll be protected by the Europeans. They’ll send observers. Besides, you forget I learned to shoot. What was the line? ‘Optimists learn English, pessimists learn Russian, and realists learn how to use an AK-47.’”

  A nurse came up and spoke a word into her ear.

  “I’m sorry, Marko, I have to go back down. It’s a tricky chest wound. David’s sleeping, so I’m the only specialist. I’ll be done soon and then we’ll talk.” She turned away from him.

  “Wait, Irena,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, but is . . . is it mine? There was that night in the summer . . .”

  He’d come to her apartment looking for painkillers for his shattered elbow after his supply had run out. She had just finished a two-day shift and was exhausted. They’d drunk some wine and fallen asleep in her bed. Neither was willing to think about or discuss what had happened in the night.

  She put her hand on his forearm and smiled.

  To look at her, to see her, made him ache in the small of his back and deep in his belly; it bound his chest so that it almost hurt to breathe. He realized again how deeply he loved this tiny woman, if he’d ever really forgotten.

  “Irena . . .” He didn’t know how to say what needed to be said. “I’m sorry for making such a disaster of our lives. But . . .”

  “People are much more resilient than they think,” she said. “I’ve discovered that here, in Vukovar. People are as strong as the ancient gods. Your father endured when your mother died. And so did you. We’re both still young, Marko. There’s a lot of life beyond what our small imaginations allow us.”

  He shrugged, the pain obvious in his eyes. In a place so full of death, she seemed to him the very essence of life.

  “Those aren’t just platitudes, Marko. It’s true. We’ll talk about it when it’s over. We’ll talk, I promise,” she said. And then she disappeared.

  Della Torre turned to see Boban in conversation with one of the orderlies. He’d turned away, looking for an excuse to give della Torre and Irena a semblance of privacy.

  But Strumbić had watched. Cool, thoughtful, but making no judgement. “Gringo,” he said, “if we’re to make an escape before the Chetniks come, we’re going to have to find that place of Dragomanov’s.”

  Strumbić had collected himself. He’d absorbed the shock of witnessing Vukovar’s horrors; he flinched as the bombs exploded, but he’d controlled the naked fear.

  Strumbić turned to Boban. “Captain, two things please. Do you have someone who can show us how to get to a house in Vukovar . . . Where is it, Gringo?”

  “Fifty-two Dunavska.”

  “It’s dangerous there, on the river, in sight of the Serb gunners and snipers on the other bank,” Boban said. Della Torre suspected, from the way Boban spoke, that it would be suicidal trying to get there. “Plavi’s the best person. If there’s a way there without getting killed, he’ll know. We’ll ask him when we get back.” He paused. “He’s an odd fish, that one, but the bravest I’ve seen. He thinks dressing like a girl will save him. What else was it that you wanted?”

  “Second, how do we get out of Vukovar?”

  Boban laughed. “Alive?”

  “Captain, not only alive, but with my teeth and all my limbs intact.”

  “We’ve been slipping our militiamen out. I hope the Serbs leave the civilians alone. I think they will. But they’ll execute anyone who’s holding a weapon at them. It’s not easy slipping out. We take groups early in the morning. I’m making a trip tomorrow.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  Boban smiled, but his expression showed deep exhaustion, running near its limits. Like Irena.

  “No, I’ll come back. I won’t leave just yet. We still need a few people around to keep the hoi polloi out.”

  They made their way back to Boban’s command post, only a few blocks away. Shells rained down remorselessly. Sometimes they sounded like express trains rushing through a provincial station, at other times like lengths of fabric being torn. Della Torre watched rocket-propelled grenades crease the air so that it looked like a fold of gelatin. He no longer heard the individual explosions; instead he felt them as a constant tremor, one melding into another. He trotted, hunched over, his eyes stinging from the dust in the air.

  Plavi was still being feted when they got back. Someone had found a bottle with a couple of fingers of slivovitz and it was being passed around. Plavi looked small in that rough company.

  He agreed to what was asked of him. Boban said he always did. All he needed was a working flashlight.

  He led them through the darkening streets to one of Vukovar’s nineteenth-century apartment houses. The door had been blown open and the windows were all smashed, but the interior was surprisingly untouched. Its walls were at least a metre thick at ground level.

  As they made their way through the building’s hallways, a framed portrait of Tito caught della Torre’s eye. He supposed it shouldn’t be that surprising. It wasn’t long ago that every public building had a portrait of the dictator. But this image was different. The photograph was taken during the Second World War, when he had been relatively young, spare, his features chiselled; he looked heroic in his simple uniform.

  And in that moment, della Torre thought of the utopia Tito had intended: a nation cleansed of ethnic rivalry and animosity, dedicated to building a proletarian ideal. And now here he stood in the wreckage of his failed experiment, looking down at them from his perch high on a wall.

  “Tito,” della Torre said. And then he felt foolish for having said anything.

  They hurried down the stairs to the building’s central courtyard and passed what must once have been a big tree, now agonized in the strange light of flashing explosions and fire, its limbs splintered, still standing amongst fallen tiles and broken glass. They went through another doorway, where a long hall opened to an alley and from there into another townscape with simpler, wood-framed buildings. Gaunt, gutted carcasses of barns, dating back to when Vukovar was a smaller farming settlement, still smoked from fires set off by the previous night’s rocket attack.

  Plavi pointed to a battered blue sign with white lettering, fixed on the side of a ruined old building, that said Dunavska 15. The buildings all around had suffered heavy damage, and Plavi was careful to hurry della Torre past the gaps between them, through which the pewter-coloured Danube could be glimpsed.

  “Snipers,” Plavi said by way of explanation. Della Torre’s heart pounded. He knew they were in danger not only from the Serb snipers and the JNA field guns but also from frightened Croat defenders.

  They finally fo
und the house. Someone had cleared the front of rubble, piled it neatly in the street. The windows were sealed with strong green shutters and the door was intact.

  Della Torre knocked, instantly feeling ridiculous for doing so. He thought he’d heard the sound of voices from inside, and then another noise, something falling over or a sliding tile. He tried the door handle. It turned. He opened the door and then heard another sound, a heavy metal slam. It was the sort of noise a shell fragment made hitting a big railway tank car, but there wasn’t the accompanying sound of an explosion or of more shrapnel.

  “Hello,” della Torre called. The house was empty and dark. Amid all the usual Vukovar smells was the strong odour of kerosene.

  “Thank you, Plavi. If you can spare the flashlight, we can make our own way from here. You should go back to the bunker and get some rest,” he said, taking the boy’s flashlight. The boy shrugged and turned away.

  Strumbić pulled out his plastic lighter and struck it with his thumb. Its flickering glow was wan in the gloom, but it was better than nothing.

  “I think the garage is through there. Might be some stairs to a cellar or bomb shelter,” Strumbić said. “I’ll take a look. You see if there’s anything in the rest of the house. Give a shout if you find Zidar.”

  Della Torre went farther inside. “Hello,” he called again, uneasy.

  He pushed open the nearest door. He could see the room had once been a living room but was now used for storage. The middle was filled with stacked furniture covered with sheets. One wall was completely taken up by a heavy wooden bookcase. On closer inspection, the books were double and triple stacked, and several shelves were filled with stamp albums. Another wall had industrial metal shelving piled with canned and boxed food and perishables in big plastic boxes. Della Torre stepped back into the hall.