Page 256 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

A couple of weeks after I got home, I received the picture of the
land and I released the money. A few weeks after that, I received
the documents that said they had bought the land as well as a
handwritten report on the construction of the house – it was pretty
basic and didn’t need an architect even if one had been available –
and I sent the rest of the money they’d asked for. Within three
months they had moved out of the tower block and to safety.
I couldn’t get over the fact that a community that had once lived
peacefully had turned on itself. Seeing the way she had been
attacked like a stray dog has stayed with me, and I am just so glad
that there was something I could do to help.
We moved on to the villages, where we were taken into a
one-room house not much bigger than a Portakabin. I was amazed
to find a woman living there with eight children. The most striking
thing about the place was that there wasn’t any furniture in it: no
chairs, no tables, only a rug on the floor, which is where I sat and
played with the little ones while the interpreter talked to the
woman. The story she told still chills me.
She said she had lived in the village all her life: it was a small
place of maybe forty families and throughout the war things had
been quiet there because it was so out of the way. Then, four
months before, the Serbian army had turned up.
‘There was a huge commotion,’ she said, ‘and people started
screaming that they had surrounded the village. Then the soldiers
marched into the village and started knocking on every door. The
noise was terrible.’
Her children were so beautiful – gorgeous little things – and as
she told her horrible story I just wanted to protect them. The
soldiers then dragged every male over the age of about fourteen –
anyone deemed capable of fighting – out of their homes and into
the village square where they were lined up in front of a wall.
Then, with their children and mothers and wives watching, they
were executed.

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