They were right, and he knew it… but he could not admit it to them.

Petar’s boy had started, had nagged at it, then Tomislav’s son had taken it up, and now it was Andrija’s cousin who voiced the obvious. ‘We are here too long, sir… We should have been well gone… Sir, we have to accept it. It is in our faces and an idiot could see it.’

The respect they showed him waned with each minute they stayed huddled and bent low, trying to find some minimal shelter from the rain. The corn, which had ripened two months before and had not, of course, been harvested, offered no refuge from the cold and wet that engulfed them. They respected him because he had taught them basic lessons at the village’s school, adding and subtracting, writing and reading, with a degree of discipline. He sensed that their respect had almost run its course – but he would not admit to them that they were right and he was wrong.

‘We stay,’ he said. ‘They will come. They promised they would. I have their word.’

As the schoolteacher in the village, Zoran was a person of status. If there had been a resident priest, the teacher would have had second place, but they shared a priest with other small communities. If the land around their village had been administered and worked by a collective, Zoran would have lagged behind its manager, but the strip fields had escaped the centralisation of the old regime and were farmed by individuals. They waited on a path between Petar’s crops, near to the Vuka river.

Zoran was wrong because now he could see the men who challenged his authority – not clearly, in detail, but he recognised their shapes and shadow movements. He knew which was Petar’s son, and Tomislav’s, and which was Andrija’s cousin. He could see them because the dawn was coming – slowly because of the deluge of rain. They should not be on the path after first light. They called it the Kukuruzni Put, and knew it was an act of suicide to be moving on the Cornfield Road without the cover of darkness.