It's close to the end of a difficult summer and, apart from waiting for my wife to come home, I'm lost for something to do. I won't listen to music, there's nothing on radio, less on tv, and I've read every word in the house until I'm sick of the sight of them. So it's without much expectation that I shut my eyes and select a video from the pile I've recorded and not watched during these slow months.
- Like its companions, it has no label and I feel a buzz of anticipation as the title appears and I realise this is a documentary networked last week, one I was uneasy about watching then. It's a follow-up to one I saw in April that was distilled from a home video that someone smuggled into freedom. The village they're revisiting had seemed alive then - chimneys smoking, washing billowing on lines, a child's pedal car waiting outside an open door. But that earlier film misled - the houses were empty, their occupants fled or dead.
- Tonight's is a professional production with a full crew and a UN interpreter. They're waiting for the village people to come home.
- Meanwhile their camera tells a story of sorts. The neat red and grey houses of spring are roofless summer shadows, stark in the unforgiving sun. We see shell-shocked, bullet-pocked walls marked with fading rufous stains. The camera picks out an occasional skull, a scattering of ribs; pulverised human rubble merged with that of concrete and brick.
- There's a switch of scene to an eleven-year-old boy down from the hills. He has a toy pistol in his belt and a real-life Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. His eyes reveal the wariness of the hunted, his concave cheeks the rigours of starvation.
- I wonder what and whom he's had to kill, how many notches are on his gun.
- My daughter Lizzie breaks the spell. Her dark eyes are wide, staring.
- “Daddy, there's a rat in my house.” For a moment the little girl I once knew peeps out of this matter-of-fact young woman and something snaps inside me.
- Lizzie lives, self-contained, in a converted dairy behind our farmhouse. I follow her there and she points to a half-glazed door leading to a brick and timber lean-to used to store junk. Shining a torch through the panes, I play its beam over a mess of bags and boxes. There's a brief movement, a glimpse of sinewy tail and at the bottom of the outside door I see a recently gnawed hole the size of my fist.
- Lizzie shudders. “I wish Mummy was home.”
- Her face says she needs a cuddle, but I know she'll shy away. “Me too, darling,” I say. “Me too.”
- Without Danica, Lizzie is more solitary than usual and the house feels like a mausoleum. Danica brings passion to our lives whether it's for us or against us. I miss the laughter and the tears. And the love. I miss the endearing cadences of her speech and I miss her singing, her sweet soprano with its perfect pitch.
- Her opera cds are all neatly stacked, arranged by composer and title. I've tried playing some but didn't feel comfortable listening alone, even though I've wished I could at times when I was revelling in Jussi Björling and Danica insisted on helping him with an impromptu duet.
- On the premise that the rat will want to go outside sooner or later, I butt a galvanised trap up to the hole in the lean-to's door.
- Lizzie asks can she sleep in the house tonight and submits to a hug as I say, “Of course.” I pour her whisky and tell her not to worry. She sinks into an armchair.
- The video has long ended so I rewind it and we settle down to watch.
- “What's the film about?”
- “A village not far from where Granny lives. Close in miles but a world apart in everything else.”
- Lizzie nods but her eyes seem unfocused. “Kilometres, not miles,” she says then sucks her thumb, a three-year-old child again.
- The boy with the Kalashnikov leads the reporter through the rubble. “This was my family's house,” he says. No tears, a deadpan statement of fact. The camera focuses on a broken wheelchair resting amidst fallen plaster. “There is Uncle Mahie's chair,” says the boy. “I hope he comes home soon.”
- The reporter doesn't meet this boy-man's eyes. I guess he can't get his head round the reality of the AK47 on the boy's shoulder, and his childish belief that whatever bits of Uncle Mahie were left intact are still alive in never-never land.
- Suddenly I can't meet the boy's eyes either.
- I hear a sniffle from the chair beside me. Lizzie's eyes are brimming too. “How can we hate them so much?” she asks and I wonder about her choice of personal pronoun.
- I am saved by the chirping of the telephone. It is Danica, to say she'll be home the day after tomorrow. She must detect the relief in my voice.
- “Are you two still coping?” she asks, with a tinkle of amusement, and I imagine her eyes, darker than Lizzie's, shining as she speaks.
- “We're fine, but missing you.”
- “Forty more hours,” she says, “and I'll be home. Surprise me with something.”
Twelve long, long weeks almost over. Danica was originally visiting her mother but the bombing spoilt all that so she flew to her sister in Italy instead. Each day since peace arrived I've been afraid she might change her mind.
- I pass the phone to Lizzie. “Mummy?” she says, eyes dancing now, her question to me forgotten.
- We spent Lizzie's twelfth summer in Danica's hometown. Her mother's flat was tiny so we stayed with Danica's brother Teodor, a rumbustious oaf who was something in the local police. He had a daughter Asja, a girl of Lizzie's age who knew how to charm with a smile.
- Teodor shared Danica's love of opera and he'd play a scratchy old Tosca recording over and over again. He, with his wavering baritone, fancied himself as Scarpia and liked to dress up for the part in flamboyant clothes that made him look like a brigand. He'd bully Danica into playing Tosca. Teodor's party piece was Tosca, finalmente mia and he'd insist on Danica stabbing him with a child's retractable dagger. Scarpia's death scene and Tosca's suicide were always abandoned and they'd fall about on the floor, giggling, recounting childhood pranks. Asja would grab Lizzie's hand then and they'd join in the fun, whooping, jumping on Danica and Teodor while Granny chuckled away in her chair and I wished I wasn't an outsider from England.
- There was so much laughter then, a deal of kissing, everyone loving their neighbour.
- Yesterday's rat shrieks as I approach, runs wild, pushing its nose at the steel bars of the trap.
- I aim the rifle; tighten my finger against the trigger. The rat becomes calm. I wonder if it's the same with people, if it was like that in the village.
- When it is done, I gaze down at the rat's body. Sightless eyes like beads of jet, neat .22 hole in the dead centre of its skull. That flesh-creeping tail. But those pink feet look almost human, with miniature fingers and toes and for a moment I remember what guilt feels like. Then I think about protecting Lizzy and imagine the rat's forefeet clutching the throat of a harmless old man in a wheelchair.
- Lizzie is cocooned in her own place, rat-free, viewing Friends and it is safe for me to play the video.
- The village people are coming home. Along the dust-blown road from another country they arrive: women, children and a handful of men. They travel in beat-up Mercedes, wheezing trucks, Popping Johnny tractors, even horse-drawn carts. The boy with the Kalashnikov stands like a sentinel, scrutinising each incoming face. As the last vehicle empties, his lips begin to quiver. Some boys about his age approach him, bright-eyed, and touch the rifle on his shoulder. They call him Artan. He stares at them, unspeaking, then turns abruptly and marches towards the hills. The boys watch him for a while then join the other children, who are chasing each other around their ruined homes as if they never meant anything to them.
- The adults have congealed into a hushed group. With stolid glares, the men survey the ground beneath their feet while bewilderment distorts the women's faces. Moments later the wailing starts. It's an unworldly sound, this wailing of women. I screw my eyes shut, wish I could do the same with my ears.
- These women look as if they've always been old. There's one exception. She says something to the others, but they turn their backs. The reporter asks “Why?”
- “They say she has no future here,” his interpreter says.
The shunned woman stands alone. A haunted expression spills over her smooth oval face, which is framed by the blackest hair I have ever seen. Threadbare clothes flap about her thin body.
- The camera concentrates on the few houses that remain intact. When the television crew move inside them it becomes evident that their occupants left in as great a hurry as their erstwhile neighbours.
- In one house indicated by accusing fingers, the reporters find a video camera, recorder and tapes. They play one to the assembled villagers.
- It shows four men at a party, drinking, singing a nationalist anthem. One, with a scarlet bandana around his head and his back to the camera, makes a rude sign. He shouts some crudity then turns around and grins and the sight of his face knocks the breath out of me.
- The village women begin to chant his name. “Teodor, Teodor,” they accuse as I wonder how I can ever tell Danica.
- The women turn to cast withered eyes at someone off screen. We hear shuffling then the camera pans to fix on the woman the village has disowned. She is pointing at the man with the bandana. Her hand is shaking. As her face begins to crumple her mouth opens in a silent scream. She finds words, “It was rape, rape,” she cries in her own tongue then sinks to the floor and sits like a rag doll, head lolling.
- But the women jeer at her words and their men spit on the floor. And I wonder how, after all their own sufferings, they can reserve one category of crime for which the victim is always to blame.
- I go outside to seek cleaner air. Mist droplets twist in anti-clockwise spirals along the beam from my Mag-lite as I cross my meadow. Leaning against its perimeter fence I look over the ditch to the field beyond. On a ridge of newly harrowed soil my torch finds yesterday's rat, resting where I flung it. Its pink fingers and toes are turned reverently skyward.
- Satisfied that one rat at least will terrify young women no more, I return to my armchair, my video, and a lazy fire.
- The men in the movie are traced to a small town. We follow a reporter up a herringbone path to a blue front door, which is half-open. A podgy young woman peers around it, rising on her heels to look over the reporter's head. The camera must be well hidden, because she relaxes.
- “Yes, I am his daughter, but he has not visited here in months.”
- She smiles. It is a beguiling expression I once captured on film myself.
- When the reporter leaves, the camera remains focused on the young woman. She shouts into the house and a man's voice answers. The door opens wide and there he stands, gazing up and down the street and, for a time, directly at the camera. He wears no bandana today, but the face is unmistakable.
- As the film credits roll it strikes me that if Danica had caught the wrong plane, she might have been the one to answer the knock on the blue front door.
- The recorder switches to TV as the tape rewinds. An announcer says that L'elisir d'amore is about to start. Gheorghiu and Alagna. Danica and I saw them perform it at Covent Garden and my heart lifts. It was my first time at live opera and Danica was radiant with excitement. We squeezed hands through each scene and cried at the happy ending.
- And she will soon be home. “Surprise me with something,” she said.
- I unwrap a new videotape but as I do, I am aching for the joy that is Danica's smile. I think of Lizzie and what might happen to us all if I were the one to destroy it.
- I push the old tape back in the machine and record Donizetti's love potion over the young woman with the silent scream, her hair blacker than Danica's, over yesterday's rat in the red bandana.
