Dead of Night

CHAPTER FOUR

I wasn’t sure who to follow—those going into the house or those going into the bam—but when Miriam headed to the open doorway of the barn I joined her, my heavy rucksack dangling from one hand. We stood there for a moment, letting our eyes adjust to the gloom inside. I was surprised at the concrete floor of the barn: such an expenditure wasn’t to be expected in such a poor part of the country. Before us were empty stalls, bags of feed and fertilizer, and one area piled up with hay bales. One wooden wall was splintered and broken, like something had battered it fast and with great violence, and on the concrete below the wall hay had been spread around.

Miriam stood by the wall, started toeing away some of the hay. ‘Peter, Samuel,’ she said, her voice as serious as I’d ever heard it. ‘We’ve got bloodstains here.’

Peter started undoing his rucksack. ‘And we’ve got impact rounds in the far wall. Looks like someone got lined up and shot.’

‘Yes,’ Miriam said.

I felt like I could not say a thing. They had been to such places before, had had experiences, had a history with each other. All I had was my own rucksack and my own pitiful tools. I spared a glance as Peter started working, examining the bullet holes in the chewed-up wall, making soft little exclamations of delight as he found empty brass casings on the concrete. Each casing was picked up and placed inside a tiny plastic bag. Miriam worked just as diligently but much more quietly as she gently brushed away the strands of hay covering the floor. Each of them was now wearing latex gloves.

I took out my own tools: a small laptop, a digital camera and a portable satellite uplink station. I powered up everything and when the camera was ready I input the day’s date and time and our coordinates—with the GPS signal they were accurate to a meter or two. Then I got to work also, photographing Miriam and Peter, and then photographing the evidence as well. It was quiet in the large barn as we worked, and I tried not to let my imagination take hold of me. I concentrated on the documentation that was required of me. Miriam was a forensic pathologist, Peter was a forensic analyst, and I was a former newspaper reporter, just trying to keep records of what had happened here. And all of us were UN employees. Not much in the way of peacekeeping, but it was something that had to be done. Peter and Miriam had their own laptops out and talked cryptically to each other about blood spatters, tissue samples, angles of trajectory and round sizes. I tried to stay out of their way and document as much as I could, letting everything exist only within the tiny screen of the camera. Somehow it made matters just a little bit easier.

Twice I stopped and went over to the laptop and uplink station. There I downloaded the images from my camera, sorted them out and made sure that the correct captions were attached. Then they were uploaded and I got a reply within a minute, saying the photos had been successfully received in Geneva. I wiped the sweat that had collected on my brow, underneath the brim of the helmet. The latest in digital and transmission technology, recording for all time—as long as things were recorded in bits and bytes — a type of massacre that had happened on this planet for millennia. I imagined some sour little Swiss bureaucrat in a cubicle somewhere in Geneva, idly looking at what I had submitted and then placing it in some file or e-mail attachment to The Hague. One more atrocity among thousands. We sure as hell still didn’t know how to prevent war crimes, but at least we were experts at recording them.

Charlie came over, his M-16 slung over his shoulder. ‘Break time,’ he announced. ‘Jean-Paul says it’s time for lunch and some debriefing.’

Miriam said nothing but Peter was on his knees with a small flashlight, looking for more shell casings underneath a piece of farm machinery. ‘We’re rather busy here, Charles. Perhaps later.’

Charlie grinned. ‘Nope. It’s now, sir. Like the good man said. Lunch and a debrief.’

After spending time in the barn with the blood and bullet holes and the scent of decay, I couldn’t imagine being hungry, but Jean-Paul had taken control of lunch and had cooked up some sort of broth, with hard rolls and cheese to accompany it. Maybe it was something to do with his unerring ability not to let the job get in the way of being fed. Someone had placed a canvas tarp on the ground and we leaned up against the sides of our vehicles, eating quietly. Overhead a flock of ravens flew to the south, croaking and calling, and Sanjay said, ‘I hate the birds in this country. They are all so fat.’

Karen said, ‘It’s no wonder. There’s so much to eat out in the open now.’

Miriam moved to take off her helmet and Charlie said, ‘Sorry, ma’am. Body armor stays on.’

‘But this place is quiet,’ she said. ‘Nobody is here. Nothing.’

Charlie nodded, his weapon at his side. ‘Nothing we can see, ma’am. It’s the stuff we can’t see that worries me. The helmets and body armor stay on.’

Peter said, ‘How much longer do we stay here, Jean-Paul?’

Our team leader wiped some broth out of his metal bowl with a piece of bread. ‘We stay until the job is done.’

Peter said impatiently, his eyes flashing, ‘I know that. But how much longer?’ He waved a hand. ‘Not meaning to sound crude, but this is one more farmhouse, one more dead family, in a very long and sad list of other farmhouses and dead families in this state and other states. So sorry and all that, but it’s not Site A. Not by a long shot.’

Jean-Paul munched on his bread, stood up. ‘We stay until the job is done. Site A will take care of itself. Samuel?’

‘Yes?’ I said, stepping up quickly.

‘We need you now in the farmhouse, if that is all right with you.’

‘That’ll be fine,’ I said. Peter looked glumly up at me, like the former British police officer he was, being overruled by a superior he didn’t respect. I walked away.

I found it harder going in the house. In the barn one could distance oneself from what had happened, what horrible things had gone on in there among the hay and tools and machinery. Nonetheless, it was a different kind of place, a place for animals and tools. It wasn’t a home. But inside the house there was no barrier, no distancing, nothing that could act as a buffer for what I saw. Among the couches and kitchen tables and bookshelves and television sets, among the day-to-day comforting items of reasonable and safe life, madness had broken in. Madness that had ripped everything asunder, that had left broken dishes and torn furniture and piles of clothing and shattered photos and twisted toys. Some spray-painted slogans had been left on the walls, some of the letters dripping into fresh bullet holes in the plaster, other letters oozing into the spatter of dried blood. The paint was black and the blood spatter was now a dark brown. I paused, holding my digital camera in my hands. Where to start? Where to even begin? Sanjay was by the wall, measuring the distance between the bullet holes. I think he sensed my hesitation, for he looked over at me.

‘I know how it is,’ he said softly. ‘You see this home and you wonder who they were. You wonder what kind of man the father was, you wonder how the mother treated their children. You wonder how old the children were, what kind of games they played, how they lived here. You wonder what it was like when the men with guns broke in. Who they were. Angry refugees from one of the cities? Or angry neighbors, upset that this family had given aid and comfort to those now considered enemies, outsiders? Then you wonder what happened. Was the mother raped in front of the children? Was the father killed first? Were the children taken away? You wonder how men could do this to people who were fellow citizens of their country, who were civilians, simple farmers. Fellow Americans, as they would say. Samuel, you are wondering all this, and you cannot let it happen.’

My words sounded like they were being strangled in my throat before I uttered them. ‘How? How do you do that?’

Sanjay looked around him, looking so serious and proper, even though he was still wearing his helmet and body armor. ‘By doing what we are doing. By remembering them, by paying witness. You do your job as best as you can, but you don’t dwell on what you can’t see. You cannot let your imagination take over. You have to do your job with what is there. Trust me, that is more than enough.’

I just nodded, picked up my camera. Like before, in the bam, I took photos of the living room and the blood spatters and the bullet holes. I went to the other rooms as well, a children’s room and a bedroom for the parents upstairs, where the fires had been set and had sputtered out. The smell of burned wood was nauseating. I made a special point of taking photographs of the few framed pictures I could find: photos of weddings, of school graduations, of family celebrations. I tried to heed Sanjay’s advice not to dwell on the implications of what I was taking shots of. I just made sure that the photos were in focus and were framed properly and had the correct captions. In a narrow hallway I moved between Jean-Paul and Karen in mid-conversation, with Jean-Paul being his usual pompous self:

‘…Agree with Peter, we can’t spend all this time here with no bodies, no additional evidence. Site A is supposed to have more than a hundred bodies and the evidence…’

‘… Won’t ignore this site. So, sorry, Karen, but that’s the way it’s going to be…’

Back in the living room Sanjay was processing some of his own information in his laptop, while I took additional photographs of the bloody clothing that had been left behind. These photographs would go in specially bound books prepared by the International Red Cross. With many records being destroyed in villages and towns here in New York and other places as well, especially those in the immediate footprint of the EMPs from the airborne nukes, these books were often the best source of information left. Sometime, somewhere, some trembling survivors would leaf through these photos and find a baby sock or a man’s shoe or a woman’s frock that they could identify, and one poor family’s fate would be transferred from ‘unidentified’ to ‘identified’. Again, not much of a peacekeeping function, but as record keepers we could not be beat.

Then I found myself alone on the front steps of the house, having downloaded and uplinked the latest photographs and captions. I found I could not spend another second in that dead place. My hands were threatening to shake so I clasped them in my lap. Outside, Charlie was leaning against the fender of one of the Toyota Land Cruisers, sipping yet another cup of coffee. He looked over at me and then went back to his coffee. Behind me the door swung open and Jean-Paul sat down next to me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Taking a quick break, eh?’

I just nodded, fearful that if I opened my mouth I might throw up. Not a way to impress one’s supervisor, even if it was just Jean-Paul.

He reached under his parka, took out a packet of Gauloise cigarettes. He lit one and asked, ‘A smoke, Samuel?’

‘No. thank you,’ I said, grateful that I could get those words out without choking on them.

The smell of the harsh French tobacco was almost comforting and Jean-Paul clasped both his large hands together, holding the cigarette in his rubber-gloved fingers. He said, ‘The first time is always the worst. Always. No matter what you see in the future, this will be the worst of the lot. That should give you some comfort.’

‘It doesn’t,’ I said.

‘Don’t blame yourself, then.’

‘Sorry, I do,’ I said, my voice getting stronger. ‘Hell, there aren’t even any bodies in there, but I still feel like puking on my feet. And some of my photos suck, because my hands are shaking so much that the pictures come out blurry. A hell of a thing to be doing. And compared to what you guys do…’

Jean-Paul took a puff of his cigarette. ‘We have you, and that is fine. And still, despite everything you’ve said, here you are.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t think I’m doing shit.’

‘No, that’s not true,’ he said. ‘What you are doing is important. What we all do here is important, but you are the record keeper. Months and years from now, our reports with their formal and stale language about bullet holes and decomposed bodies and clothing identifications will be forgotten. But your photos and your reports and your journals will be read for ever, to show the world what has happened here.’

‘Why? So it doesn’t happen again? Faint damn chance of that, and you know it.’

Another puff of his cigarette. ‘If there is to be any progress, we cannot ignore what has happened. Sometimes we can prevent the atrocities, and sometimes we cannot. And when we cannot, we comfort the survivors and prosecute the criminals. A little thing, perhaps, but better than doing nothing at all. We are not a perfect organization, the UN. We never have been. But we are a start.’

‘True… but this is different. I’ve been in the States, many times. To come here like this, to see them like this…’

‘I know. In some ways it is the hardest, eh? As so-called civilized men, we believe in “the other”. That only bad things can happen in certain backward places. In the Sudan. In the Balkans. Not the Adirondacks. But under pressure—after the spring bombings—even the most advanced places can collapse.’

I rubbed my hands together, not sure what to say next, and Jean-Paul said, ‘I know your father. How is he?’

‘All right, I suppose. Where did you know him from?’

‘In Mogadishu.’

‘Oh,’ I said, not wanting to say any more.

Jean-Paul dropped the cigarette butt on the brown grass, ground it out with his boot heel. ‘If you write to him, tell him I said hello, will you?’

‘If I write, I will.’

‘Another thing—but not to be mentioned in any letter to him.’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘The thing that happened to him after Mogadishu… Not his fault. For what it’s worth, I think what happened to him was unfair. All right?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But you’ll excuse me if I don’t agree with you. It was his fault. From start to finish. He was the CO. Period.’

‘And that will have to be discussed at another time,’ Jean-Paul said, opening the door. ‘Look. Take some more time off. Go for a little walk. Keep in view of the farmhouse and Charlie and don’t go into the woods. But clear your head some, all right?’

‘Sure,’ I said, and when the door slammed behind him, I looked out again to the little dirt driveway and Charlie still standing there, our coffee-drinking sentinel.

I followed Jean-Paul’s suggestion and got up and walked around the muddy yard, looking at the empty clotheslines, the thin ropes moving slightly in the breeze, and at an overturned tricycle, and a picnic table with peeling green paint. The woods were mostly pine, about fifty meters away from the rear of the house, and it just seemed right to me that the men with guns had come out of these woods sometime during the night, for that was when they preferred to work. At night, when everything was dark and everything was permissible, especially if you were from far away, you were hungry, and you wanted to take what you didn’t have.

I went behind the barn and saw that the fog had burned off so much that I could make out a rise in the land, some distance away, and two other farmhouses on the crest of the ridge. Woodsmoke eddied up from chimneys at each of the houses, and I wondered who was in those two homes. Were they local refugees, back home now because of the accord and because of the UN force? Or were they survivors of what had happened, only now emerging from root cellars and hidden shelters in the forest, having been terrorized here after fleeing one of the big cities?

Or maybe they were collaborators or former members of the militias, who had kept watch on their neighbors all these years so that when the night fell after last spring’s attack and the knives and guns came out they could so efficiently do their work. How could they still be there, I thought, just hundreds of meters away from this massacre site? Hadn’t they seen the men with guns come across the fields, or drive up in pickup trucks and cars? Hadn’t they heard the shouts, the screams, the gunshots? Hadn’t they seen the muzzle flash of gunfire, the flames coming out of the windows, the smoke billowing from the house?

Hadn’t they noticed a damn thing?

Out behind the barn the tilled earth stretched away, and I walked for a while in the muddy soil, remembering again the farms back home in Ontario, farms larger and better maintained than this one. But, even then, I felt a pang of homesickness as I trudged across the field, trying to clear my head. My fingers ached from working my equipment and my head ached from the helmet and my shoulders and back ached from the body armor, and for about the thousandth time since I came in-country I wondered why in hell I had volunteered.

Then I tripped and fell into the mud.

I stood up. ‘Moron,’ I said to myself, and I looked down, wondering what I had tripped over. Something in the dirt. I nudged it with the edge of my boot.

A woman’s shoe.

I stepped back as if the damn thing was electrified. I looked around this part of the field and saw that something was wrong, very wrong.

The dirt didn’t make sense.

All across the field were muddy furrows, running straight and true from the rear of the barn to the nearest fence. But in this place, where I had tripped, the dirt was different.

It had been disturbed, and recently.

I turned and ran back to the farmhouse. Halfway there my chinstrap came loose and I had to hold on to my helmet with a free hand while the mud stuck to my racing feet.

Peter frowned as he moved the thin metal probe up and down in the dirt. ‘Looks like we’ve got something here, Jean-Paul. Dirt’s moving around easy enough, and I’m getting soft resistance at the other end.’

Jean-Paul had another cigarette between his fingers. ‘Good. Miriam?’

She was on her knees in the mud, gently probing with a flexible thin hose that she dipped in and out of the dirt. The clear plastic tube ran back to a small open case, which she examined. There were dials and digital readouts and I stood there, still breathing heavily from my burdened run back to the farmhouse. Karen and Sanjay and even Charlie were standing nearby, in a semicircle. Karen and Sanjay looked angry. Only Charlie looked calm, but with him I would never think that I could guess what was going on behind those quiet eyes.

‘Decomposition gases,’ Miriam said. ‘There’s decaying flesh under here. Less than a meter, I’d guess.’

Another nod from Jean-Paul. ‘Very good. Peter, are there shovels in that barn over there?’

Peter stood there, the probe resting on his shoulder. He was staring down at where Miriam was working.

‘Peter?’ Jean-Paul asked. ‘Did you not hear me?’

At first Peter’s voice was so quiet that I almost didn’t hear him. ‘…Difference does it make, Jean-Paul? You know why we’re here, why another half-dozen teams are out wandering the countryside. Looking for Site A. Does this look like Site A? Does it?’

Jean-Paul took a drag from his cigarette. ‘No, it is not Site A. But it is something. We will do what we are tasked to do, and continue our work.’

‘But it’s a waste of time!’ Peter said, and I could make out Karen and Sanjay nodding in agreement. ‘We’ve got a week to find Site A, and we shouldn’t be wasting our resources here.’

Jean-Paul’s voice was quiet and firm. ‘You’ll have us leave them here, forgotten and in the muck?’

Karen spoke up in Peter’s defense. ‘No, we won’t forget them. Make a report and list this site for further excavation. We should leave here and get to work on finding Site A. This is just one more farm family, Jean-Paul. You know how important Site A is to the High Commissioner.’

Jean-Paul looked at all of us through his black-rimmed glasses. ‘Yes, I do. Perhaps better than the rest of you. And if any of you are someday assigned to supervise a field team, then you can do as you please. But this field team is under my direction. And I direct that we begin the excavation. Now. Understood? No more time for questions. No more time for back talk. Or you will be relieved of your duties and will be sent out on the next chartered flight to your respective home country. Understood?’

I wasn’t sure but I think Charlie was enjoying this little demonstration of the UN in action, for he turned away for a moment, as if to hide the amusement on his face. Peter muttered something under his breath, jammed the thin metal probe back into the ground, and strode over to the barn. After a minute or two he came back, carrying two shovels under his arm. He tossed one at me—which I caught, thankfully—and glared at me.

You found this spot,’ he said. ‘Least you could do is start digging.’

I said nothing, just took the shovel and got to work. A few seconds later Peter joined me.

The digging was hard going, even though it was clear that the soil had been freshly turned over. The earth was thick and muddy and wet, and large chunks of it stuck to the shovel blade. I found that after just a few minutes of work I was sweating underneath the body armor and my helmet. My hands began to get sore, and the sounds—the sickening squishing and plopping noises as chunks of mud were piled up to the side — were obscene. As Peter and I dug we kept quiet. Then Karen and Sanjay went to one of the Toyota Land Cruisers and came back, each carrying a long dark object, which they unrolled on the wet ground, speaking not a word. Rubberized body bags, in two sizes, for adults or children. How thoughtful.

I dug and dug, my wrists and hands aching, and I wished for a break. But I wasn’t about to give Peter the satisfaction of seeing me give up first, so I concentrated on the digging and every now and then raised my eyes to see what was going on around us. I saw Karen and Sanjay laying out the body bags. I saw Miriam looking at the readouts on her black box. I saw Jean-Paul and Charlie talking to each other in low voices. I saw another flock of ravens going overhead, croaking at us as they flew to sit in the nearby pine trees, to watch what we were uncovering for them.

‘Time for a break,’ Peter gasped, and I shoveled two more loads of muck out before agreeing.

‘Sure,’ I said, feeling good that I had outlasted our moody Brit. ‘Time for a break.’

Peter got out of the hole, walked to the side of the barn and leaned back against the dark wood. I stayed in the hole, toying with the soil. Miriam came over and said, ‘How are you doing, Samuel?’

‘I’ve had better days,’ I said.

‘Look, you see that?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Those white streaks, in the soil. Not good, not good at all.’

‘What do you mean?’

She shivered and then hugged herself. ‘Lime. Helps speed up decomposition. The militias do that to hide the evidence.’

I suppose I should have waited for Peter to return, but Miriam was looking at me and I felt like I had to do something. I started digging again and then it was as though the earth beneath me belched, for something foul and sour started wafting up. I gagged and clambered out of the trench, and Miriam called out, ‘Jean-Paul, we’re getting close now, very close.’

She reached into her coat pocket, took out a small container of a white salve. She unscrewed the top and said, ‘Over here, Samuel. Just for a moment. For the smell.’

Miriam delicately inserted her index finger into the open jar and pulled out a dollop of the salve on the end of her finger. She gingerly smeared the gunk on my upper lip, right under both nostrils, and a blast of peppermint seemed to roar right through my nose and into my head. I looked at the jar. Vicks VapoRub. She managed a smile and I smiled back at her, standing in a muddy field with the odor of decaying flesh now all around us, and the moment was so intimate that I wished I didn’t have to move.

But now Jean-Paul was there and he said, ‘Peter! Please join us.’

I grabbed the shovel and went back into the hole, feeling emboldened now. I didn’t know who I was going to uncover, what I would find or how I would react, but Miriam was there, Miriam had prepped me. It would be all right. I carried on digging, the stench now trying to overpower the peppermint still wafting through my nostrils, and then I winced and my stomach heaved as the shovel struck something soft and yielding.

Now Peter was there, saying, ‘Hold on, try this,’ as he passed down a long-handled spade. Everyone was clustered around the hole, blocking most of the light, but I didn’t care. I was the center of attention, I was doing something real, doing more than just record words or images, and I kept those thoughts in the forefront of my mind as I moved the spade around carefully, scraping away more of the dirt. I silently said a prayer for whoever I was uncovering, and I pledged the pledge of the young and innocent, that I would help make the guilty pay for what they had done to the people in this little farmhouse.

‘I’ve got a head here,’ I said. ‘Give me some more light, please.’

The crew backed away and I felt an irrational sense of accomplishment, because they were doing as I requested. I worked on as painstakingly as I could, uncovering the eyes, the long heavy nose, the rest of the short-bearded face, and—

I said something loud, dropped the spade and recoiled, trying to get out of the hole. I fell back into the mud. The crew clustered around, looking at what I had uncovered as Peter grinned down at me.

‘Congrats, Sammy,’ he said in a sarcastic tone that I didn’t like. ‘You’ve dug up a bloody cow.’