The House At Sea’s End

When she gets to her cottage, she carries Kate in, opening and shutting the door soundlessly. She knows from experience that, though Kate can sleep through any amount of radio programmes about experimental drama, the smallest unexpected sound will wake her up. She once cried for half an hour after Ruth sneezed. She lifts Kate out of the car seat and carries her carefully up the steep staircase. ‘You can’t have a baby in that house,’ her mother had said, ‘the stairs are a death trap.’ But Ruth successfully negotiates the hazard and lays Kate down, still fast asleep, in her cot. There is a spare room but it is tiny and full of junk so, at present, she and Kate are roommates, a situation which she can see lasting until Kate is about eighteen.

The phone rings as Ruth is switching on the baby monitor. She races downstairs to stop the dreadful clamour. Her ears strain to hear if Kate has woken up but there is silence from the bedroom.

‘Yes?’ whispers Ruth into receiver.

‘Ruth. It is I. Tatjana.’

Of all Ruth’s friends, the very last one she expected.

July 1996. Bosnia. The hottest summer on record. Ruth flew to Srebrenica as part of a team from Southampton University, led by Erik. They stayed in what had once been a four-star hotel but had been bombed so badly that the top three storeys had been destroyed. The remaining rooms were a nightmarish mix of erstwhile luxury and recent necessity. Camp beds were ranged, four deep, in the ballroom, the chandeliers, miraculously undamaged, swayed crazily in the wind that blew through broken window panes and ripped-up floorboards. On the stairs the red carpet was ripped and, in some cases, charred and bloodied. The double doors in the lobby had been replaced with corrugated iron, most rooms had at least one window broken, and in the Grand Dining Room the Red Cross had set up a medical base where starving women and traumatised children waited on spindly gilt chairs and viewed their scared reflections in floor-length mirrors.

‘The Shining,’ said one of Ruth’s colleagues, as soon as he saw the pock-marked corridors of The Excelsior, and the joke stuck. ‘He-ere’s Johnny,’ the archaeologists would say, returning to the ballroom at night and making grotesque shadows in the light from the oil lamps (there was no electricity or hot water). One of the doctors, Hank from Louisiana, perfected a Jack Nicholson impression so lifelike that the Bosnian interpreter screamed whenever she saw him.

Thinking back, Ruth doesn’t really remember feeling scared, though a lot of the time she was. She remembers more adolescent emotions: feeling left out (the other volunteers were all older than her and veterans of disaster scenes), feeling unsure, lonely and, above all, uncomfortable. She will never forget, though, her first sight of the graves in Srebrenica. So many bodies, contorted, grinning, arms and legs twisted over one another. The bodies on the surface decomposed quickly in the hot sun but lower down, below the water table, they found men, women and children miraculously preserved. The heat and the stench were almost unbearable. They spent days in those hellish pits, exposing body after body, using trowels, spoons and even chopsticks to pick up every minute fragment of bone. ‘Lose one tooth or even a foot bone,’ one of the anthropologists used to say, ‘and you’re an accomplice to the crime.’

There were tensions too. The authorities just wanted the graves exhumed as quickly as possible but the archaeologists wanted to identify as many of the dead as they could. ‘To know our dead,’ declared Erik, ‘is a fundamental human right. It is why the Egyptians built pyramids and the Victorians built mausoleums, why even the most primitive man buried his ancestors in a sacred place alongside his pots and spears.’ But the War Crimes Tribunal did not want to know about the Egyptians or the Victorians, they simply wanted the evidence recorded and the guilty brought to justice. ‘But who is guilty?’ Erik would say at night in the ballroom, the lamplight glinting on his long, silver-blond hair. ‘In war it is the victor who writes the history.’

Tatjana had been one of the interpreters, but it soon emerged that she had a degree in archaeology from an American university so she joined the forensics team. Ruth was drawn to her from the first. Tatjana was quiet but composed. She wasn’t scared to make her opinions known and Ruth admired that. She was attractive too, with straight dark hair cut in a fringe and large brown eyes. Ruth and Tatjana began spending time together, working side-by-side in the field by day, and at night, they moved their sleeping bags to a quieter corner of the ballroom, away from the American group with their guitars and games of spin the bottle.