Kara’s Game. Gordon Stevens

and squeezed the trigger.

      ‘Thank you,’ Kara began to say and heard the crack, flinched and turned. Adin was falling backwards slightly, his fingers clutched at his chest and the pain and fear and bewilderment frozen on his face.

      No … she was screaming, no sound coming out. Please God, no.

      Adin was already crumpled on the ground. She crouched beside him, held his head in one arm and the hands clutching his chest with the other.

      The doctor ran – away from the safety of the door and down the street. Sniper, someone shouted at him and grabbed him into a doorway. ‘It’s all right,’ Kara was whispering to Adin, to herself. ‘The doctor’s coming, soon you’ll be okay.’ He was trying to push her away, trying to tell her to seek shelter. She was pulling him, dragging him across the ice towards a doorway. Someone grabbed her and pulled her inside, someone else hauling Adin behind her and slamming the door shut as the sniper aimed again. The room was dark and cold, the people inside staring at her. The doctor came in through a door at the back and knelt down, pulled Adin’s coat open and checked the entry area in the chest, then nodded to the others to move Kara from the room. She was screaming, protesting; they held her and dragged her out. Only then did the doctor turn Adin over and take off his pack. The back of the coat was shredded and oozing thick blood where the bullet had exited. Christ what a mess, someone whispered. Still a pulse – the doctor checked. ‘Help me get him to the hospital.’ Three of them lifted Adin, and squeezed through the door at the rear, ran through the side streets – two holding his arms and one his legs – and into a door at the side of the hospital.

      Kara ran with them, followed them through the door and down the corridor, heard them shouting for people to get out of the way. They turned left then left again, into an operating theatre. The doctor was already giving instructions and a nurse was cutting through Adin’s clothing, more doctors and nurses arriving. One of them took Kara by the shoulder and led her away, closed the door behind her and sat with her. Isn’t this the man who led the digging for the children? another asked. Didn’t he lose his son yesterday?

      Stay alive, Kara prayed. The panic swept over her in waves: the cold and the fear and the sudden abyss.

      Pulse, the first doctor pleaded; come on, where are you? Not much they could do about the wound anyway, they all knew, hardly anything they could do to counter the internal damage. Doesn’t matter, the doctor whispered to himself. I can do it, we can do it. Come on, my friend, he urged Adin. For Chrissake come on. No pulse – he was still checking for it. Perhaps there hadn’t been anyway, perhaps he’d felt it because he wanted to. Perhaps the pulse he’d felt was the last draining of Adin’s blood from his body.

      Don’t leave me, my dear precious husband. Don’t leave me ever, but don’t leave me at the moment I need you the most.

      Come on, the doctor was still saying, almost shouting. Don’t die. You haven’t died. You’re okay, you’re going to be okay. For Christ’s sake don’t give up, don’t stop your heart beating or your lungs breathing. For God’s sake help me to help you.

      Not you, my wonderful Adin. Not you who was such a good father, such a great man. Not you who gave so much to so many. Who loved the flowers in spring and the snow in winter.

      A nurse was still tying the lead surgeon’s face mask, the man bent over Adin. Slowly he stepped back from the operating table, peeled off his gloves, and shook his head.

      

      When they carried Adin Isak to the hillside that night the moon was barely rising over the trees, the dark was as cold as ever, and the hole was already dug. Thin and shallow, because the soil was frozen hard and the men had difficulty breaking it open. Perhaps there’s always a hole, Kara thought; perhaps they’re always ready because there are always bodies to bury.

      ‘I’d like my husband to lie with his son,’ she told the men who accompanied her. For some reason there was no imam. Perhaps he was elsewhere, perhaps he himself had been killed.

      They nodded their understanding and carried the body to the place where she and Adin had knelt the night before, then they laid it down and began to remove the soil from the small grave on the crest of the hill. When they came to the shroud containing Jovan’s body Kara lifted it out and held it while the men made the hole bigger. Then she kissed Adin goodbye and helped lay him in the hole, then Jovan, the father’s arm round the boy, as if they were lying together in the summer fields and looking up at the cloudless blue of the sky.

      The moon was above her now, and the night was colder.

      She sprinkled the soil back in, carefully and gently, then stood back and waited till the men had filled the hole, placed the wooden memorial at the head, and left her.

      The snow was falling again.

      From a pocket she took a pencil, and added Adin’s name to the one already on the wood.

      Thirty-six hours ago she had everything to live for, she thought. She had a husband and a son, and Jovan was going to live and Adin was alive and well and at her side.

      Perhaps she should take the road to Maglaj tonight, perhaps she should wait till morning as she and Adin had waited till morning. But then perhaps the sniper would be waiting for her. Not that it mattered any more or that she cared any longer.

      ‘Goodbye, my husband. Goodbye, my son.’

      She left the graveyard on the hillside and took the road to Maglaj. Her hands were frozen and she could no longer feel her feet. Sometime in the next hours she met a convoy coming the other way – men leading horses carrying wounded and injured to the hospital in Tesanj. Sometime, she was not sure when, she passed the turning and the track – hardly wide enough for goats – over the hill called Bandera. Sometime just after the light came up, she descended from the hills and entered Maglaj.

      At ten, an hour before the food kitchen opened, she joined the line already forming outside; at eleven she shuffled in front of the vats containing the beans.

      ‘I’m sorry, I’ve just come back from the hospital at Tesanj and I don’t have a bowl.’

      One of the women serving the beans shrugged, as if the problem was not hers.

      ‘Did Adin find you?’ another asked. ‘Where’s Jovan?’

      ‘Adin and Jovan are dead.’

      The second woman gave her her own bowl and poured the beans for her, broke the bread for her and led her to a corner where she might be warm. At least where she might be less cold. When she finished the soup Kara thanked the woman, returned the bowl to her, and went outside.

      I saw you running across the bridge the other day – the Canadian MacFarlane remembered her, even though in some ways he barely recognized her now. Her face was ashen, her eyes were dead, and she crossed the bridge slowly, almost numbly, as if she was immune to the sniper who might be waiting for her in the hills; as if she was challenging him to shoot her.

      The bridge was behind her. She walked in a trance through the rubble of what had once been the old town, and climbed the hill to the house. Stood still and looked at it. Began to cry.

      The roof had been blown apart and the walls were sagging, the windows and doors gaping open and the snow falling in.

      She went through the garden and pushed her way into what had once been the kitchen. At least she would be able to live here, she told herself, at least this part of the house would be secure.

      The furniture was wrecked and ice hung from the ceiling, the holes gaping in it.

      She was aware of the cold again now, not aware of her physical actions. Slowly she searched through the rubble, found the tin in which she and Adin kept any deutschmarks they had been able to save; found the photograph of Adin and Jovan which had stood on the dresser, found the remnants of one of the food packs Finn had left them.

      She could go to the new town, find a space in a basement and sit there for the rest of the war, sit there for the rest of her life. Her thoughts were as numb and automatic as her movements.