The Little Red Chairs

     Where Wolves Fuck. He loomed over it, stared at it, then knelt and smelt it, as if he might guess the perpetrators.

     'It's someone who knows us,' she said.

     'You must deny everything, Fidelma.'

     'I can't...I live here.'

     'I thought I could trust you to be discreet,' he said with a cold contemptuousness.

     'I am discreet,' she said far too loudly, hating the hysteria in her voice, in her being, in her headscarf, in all of her.

     ...'Nothing happened ... no broken window ... no graffiti ... no rendezvous . . . nothing .. . ne ... ne . . . ništa'

     'But we're ...'

     'Start forgetting ... Fidelma.'

     'Forgetting what?'

     'Everything . . .' He was wiping his hands in a gesture of wip­ing her out. No more letters. No communication. No tears. She is a grown-up lady, she can look after herself.

     Then he was gone. Gone to where she would not find him. So this child, this wolf-child, was hers and hers alone to give birth to. Oh Jesus and Mary, she said... Start forgetting Fidelma. No ren­dezvous. No letters. No communication. Ništa.

     …[She] wondered if, after his poetry reading, she would manage a word with him alone. She craved it. She knew that there was to be no further commu­nication and she accepted it, but she hoped, if only for the child's sake, he would be there, at the rim of her existence. She had not yet told Jack. How to tell him. What to tell him. When to tell him. These were the questions that assailed her hour after hour, as she faked good cheer at home…

     'I'm afraid it's impossible because we are heading for a poetry recital,' he answered, quite nonchalant.

     'That will not be possible sir ... we are arresting you,' the sec­ond, more senior guard said.

     'My dear fellow, you must be mad ... arresting me ... you are chasing shadows,' Vlad said, still in total command of himself.

     'You have been living under a false name,' one said, and his colleague, who was not quite so bristling, said that they were just doing what they had been instructed to do, as he held up the arrest warrant for him to see.

     The last image they had was of his tall figure, unbowed but humiliated, starting down the steps of the bus and just as the sun had soaked into the young ash leaves, it now rasped on the bracelets of metal that bound his wrists.

     It happened so quickly, so 'low key' as they said, that they were well nigh lost for words. The fact that he had co-operated and hadn't tried to escape was surely a sign that it couldn't be too serious. Yet the mood had changed, everyone felt uneasy and the driver was sweating and cursing his bad luck. A day wasted. Fidelma regretted that she had jumped up and was touched for the first time with a fatalistic terror.

     On the television [some] spoke of him as the warrior poet, who had always had a mystical conviction of his role in history. He had risen from being an obscure doctor to the global notori­ety that he had always craved and was now on his way to the Tribunal in The Hague, to be indicted for crimes that included genocide, ethnic cleansing, massacres, tortures, detaining people in camps and displacing hundreds of thousands.