by Jeff Spence
Perhaps it was this, as well, that had Ben feeling older than his years. The age difference hadn’t seemed like much when they’d been roaring through the Levant on motorcycles, or rolling through the sheets in the nights since – but that day, hauling himself up the slanted jet way at Gatwick airport, it seemed to him a lifetime lay between them.
He saw her restlessness. He was aware of her troubled past, though not all of the details, and he wondered, not infrequently, if the life of a Midwest professor, however exciting it had been during the scroll adventure, would ever be enough to keep her interested in spending her remaining years at his side. Hell, he’d even go for a couple of good decades and an amicable parting as friends in his golden years. It was more time with a woman like that than he’d even hoped for, despite the success of his first marriage. Prior to Donna’s illness, that is. Maybe he wouldn’t have had a good run with her, either. Death sometimes solves as many uncertainties as it stirs up.
“Damn, Ben,” he whispered to himself as he stepped onto the escalator and pulled his roller-board to an upright position behind him, balancing on the narrow metal step, “You are one gloomy bastard today.”
It was probably the exhaustion. He’d spoken in L.A., then flown to Tokyo for a two-day stint, then a day in Singapore — no hotel there, just a night on a plane — and then a whirlwind tour of European cities, five days’ worth without a break, and no recollection of where he’d been, the accents and cuisines had been too diverse and blended at each stop for there to be an obvious difference between any of the speaking engagements. He’d signed… he didn’t know how many books. He’d shaken thousands of hands. Even signed a few autographs, a surreal enough experience in itself.
Now he was finally on his way to Oxford. A night in the hotel in London, a quick ride in the morning to Trinity College, and what had been lauded as the best breakfast to be had west of London.
All he really wanted at that point was the bed.
Sleep.
And when it was all over, a non-stop flight back to the woman who waited for him in the little, windowed apartment that was, according to everything she’d said to him, more than enough for her to be happy, so long as he was there with her.
What had he ever done to deserve such a second chance?
No good answer came to mind.
Marina jerked her eyes open, cringed away from the far side of the bed, and almost slid off onto the floor. A quick grasp of the headboard kept her there, on the sweat-damp sheets, catching her breath and senses.
Another nightmare. Too often of late. Damn. She’d have to find some way of working out that negative energy. The irony was, her life seemed to be getting better, but the nightmares worse. They were always more intense when Ben was away, and far more frequent. In fact, he’d been home for a month straight just after the holiday season, and she didn’t think she’d had a single one. Unheard of.
But temporary.
Ben had left for his speaking tour that morning, more than a week ago, after a quick meal at Denny’s. They had intended to spend the morning together, grab breakfast somewhere and then linger over coffee before he had to line up and move through the gate, like one of many willing cows, all lowing softly and shuffling along between the straps and short pillars that served as lightly camouflaged people-fences.
They’d slept in, though. Loving departure had turned into a rush. A sharp word or two. Then an apologetic but awkward breakfast with eyes on the time.
She thought for a moment, worked out the time in her head. It was Wednesday now. He’d have lost a day in transit, spoken Thursday evening in Barcelona, and soon be launching into his busy day of triple-lectures in Oxford. Six hours ahead of Indiana time… ten forty-five already. Damn, she’d missed him. He’d be out and about already.
She grabbed her phone. A quick text: Sorry I missed you. Knock em dead (sea scrolls). Lol! And a lips emoticon.
She didn’t like that she’d missed him. She had a feeling of foreboding, and imagined young British graduate students, wide-eyed, batting their lashes in worship at the famous professor – “The Real Indiana Jones,” the Bolt Gazette had called him the day before. He would have opportunities, to be sure; her battle was in wondering if he would take advantage of them. Maybe she should have gone with him. At least she wouldn’t be moping around the house stressing and shrugging off nightmares.
A coffee and a seat at the window would do her good. She dropped the paper into the recycling and went to the machine.
The dream had been of something still as sharp in her mind as if it had happened the day before – but with a new twist. She’d been back in Kosovo, somewhere in the rugged regions between Trebinje and Dubrovnik, working her way southward and to freedom. She saw the ragged girl at a distance… the girl she had been, the one that still lived somewhere inside her, ignored for the most part, but her presence never completely forgotten. The memories played across her sight like a film.
The girl moved mostly at night, and hid in hollows and caves in the daytime to avoid being seen by patrols. If she happened upon a trackless area, she’d push on throughout the day as well, trying to store up what little warmth the winter sun had to offer. It was not much. Trackless areas were harder going, but meant no patrols. At least she’d hoped so.
It was after a long night and day of scrambling up and down the crags, crossing deep ravines with rapid waters shooting beneath ice of unknown thickness down below, that the sun began to descend and, with it, her coordination and ability to choose a safe trail. Bratislav had taught her about hypothermia. “Sickness of the cold,” he had called it, “When the wind seeps into your bones and your heart struggles to push it back out again. In such conditions the only hope is to stop. Do not trust your body to tell you your limits. It will be fooled, or lie. If you feel yourself getting clumsy, it has already begun. Get home. Get warm.” He’d made her promise.
So there, in a jagged cleft in the rock, with no roof and only a thin patch of frozen moss to lie on, she made a small fire and allowed the waves of it to hit her, to bounce off the rock and warm her back as well. The heat flew upward quickly, but the pocket of warmth grew as the dark hours passed, and she felt her eyelids lower and close against her will and contrary to her command.
The men had come on her in the early light of dawn.
Dry wood to start it, then a line of increasingly wet fuel across the opening of the cleft. As the initial twigs crackled into coals, the larger ones beside them would be dried and continue the reaction of flame. Beside them, the deep-wet fuel for the small hours when she’d likely be asleep. With some luck, she would awaken to a warm bed of coals, and she could rest there, in the warmth for a day if she wished. Maybe find some food. That had been the plan, and would have been a good one had she been out pleasure-camping. If her intention had been casual relaxation, and no other needs were more pressing than the heat and life of the fire.
But those times did have greater concerns than comfort.
In the early hours the wet wood had indeed begun to burn, but the greenness of it produced smoke as well. Not a lot. But enough. The three men had spotted the tendril rising from near the cliff face to dissipate in the low winds, and they had come to investigate. By then they all knew about the ethnic cleansing, the rape camps.
Rape has always been a part of the sickness of war, but this conflict was the first in which it was an official policy, an overt tool of conflict. Bosnian women and girls of all ages were rounded up and men assigned to them, to assault them on a regular schedule. Once impregnated, and well along in the process, they might be freed. The resulting children would no longer be Bosnian stock, at least in the minds of their attackers, no longer Muslim or Arab. They would have Serbian fathers, Catholic of descent if not inclination. Children sired by the conquerors, their Bosnian lines cleansed from the land. With such an official policy in place, the unofficial acts of violence went unchecked and unhidden, rape a part of everyday life, both in public and private circumstances. Me
n who might otherwise be cowardly, or who tended to fly against the face of authority, instead volunteered for military patrols. Home raids. Skirmishes of any kind that might involve… certain opportunities. Always with comrades to back them up if some bystander decided to be a hero. They seldom did try to interfere; the price was far too high.
Her first awareness was of the world being yanked away from beneath her, as if she had stayed still and the rock face had suddenly lurched out of sight. In reality, of course, it was the girl who had been disturbed. They had grabbed her by the ankles and thrown her out onto the little open area below the ridge. One of them hit her in the face, hard, and her world spun again as she struggled for her senses. In a moment, she could see again, and turned her eyes on the patrol.
The men were playing ‘rock, paper, scissors,’ a children’s game, to determine who got the privilege of the first violation. They would each take her though. By the time the third had finished, the others might well be ready again. Many did not survive such ‘opportunities’ of the soldiers. As the winner was determined and cheered himself on, the other two laughed in mock anger, knowing that they would enjoy their time with her, even if it were not first turn. She was a good-looking girl.
As the winner approached her, she at last willed the world to stop spinning around her, stilling it to a slight waver. It was enough.
The first two shots went into the chest of the oncoming man, the third into his left shoulder. He looked confused as he sank to his knees, his hands still fumbling with the opening to his pants. The fourth and fifth rounds were aimed at the second man. The first missed, the second caught him in the thigh and he sank to the ground, grunting in pain and clutching at his broken femur.
She then aimed at the third as he fumbled for his weapon. She pulled the trigger again and again, but her mind could not accept what she heard. What she didn’t hear.
Click, click, click…
No Bang.
The chamber rolled around, the hammer cocking and pin dropping on round after spent round until her tiny finger slowed with exhaustion.
The soldier ceased his motion, his pistol now free of the holster but frozen mid-way up. He smiled.
“You okay?” He asked the man who clutched at his leg. No point in addressing the other.
“Kill the bitch!” He was struggling to stop the bleeding. Staring down in shock and horror.
“I’ll take care of her. You just hang on a minute.”
She tried to fight him. She clutched and tore at his back, but his jacket absorbed her fury and fear. He tore at her pants and the threadbare fabric ripped from her body, leaving her fully exposed to him. He pressed her onto the ground and forced himself into her, the pain a new and tearing horror, the ice sharp like a thousand tiny razors against the bare skin of her back. She cried out in pain at first, then sank into silence and despair, grunting involuntarily with the force of his thrusts.
“That’s it, you little whore! She likes it, Goran!” he laughed and butted his head against hers, nearly knocking her senseless. Her arms went slack for a moment as she pushed back the blackness from her vision.
Her hand fell on something on the ground. A rock. Sharp, like a spearhead.
She grasped the jagged thing, erupting in such a primitive shriek that the man atop her paused a moment in shock and lifted his head to look at her face. A moment later he was lurching sideways, clutching at a wound at the base of his neck. She hit him again and he toppled from her. Again, and he sank back onto his shoulders. Again and yet again a fifth time until her arm was slick with blood and her muscles unable to raise the makeshift again. Her fingers were locked onto the stone. She used her other hand to pry the thing loose and it hit the ground with a clatter. Both hands shook and trembled, though she no longer felt the cold.
She turned. The one man, face-down in the snow, was obviously dead. She looked to the other. He was slumped off to the side now as well, a broad patch of crimson, like a colored rug, in the whiteness of snow around him. In her memory, he was dead, the blood flow too much for his body to sustain, and she had run from the scene to the relative safety and cover of the trees.
In her dream though, she walked up to him. He sat up. Smiled.
It was Ben.
That was the point at which she’d awoken from the dream. Shocked. Sweat-soaked. Shaken.
And alone.
The girl in her memory had fled the moment she could make her feet move. Naked, but for her jacket, shirt and boots, she had left the grisly objects behind. She had scooped up Bratislav’s revolver in her left hand and run into the bush, leaving ammunition and supplies behind.
Some hard days after that. Winter was breaking, but it was still cold in the mountains. Her shirt didn’t make for much protection, but she’d made a sort of skirt of it. Kept some of the wind off, at best. The jacket kept her core from deadly cold, at least in the daylight hours. In the night, she sat in half-slumber, leaning wearily over the coals, watching the wood, making sure that there was no more green. Hard, and dry at the core. Like she herself felt. Hard. Dry. Dead in the middle…
The wind outside brought Marina over to the window of Ben’s apartment, the smell of the coffee rising from the rim of the mug. She looked at the sky above the houses across the street.
Storm coming in. Good. She liked storms.
TWO
On his last day of freedom, Ben had the tea.
When in London, he reasoned, do as the Londoners do. Besides, the aromatic liquid brought back all kinds of good memories from his time living in the UK. Among the best years of his life, despite the hard work. Maybe even because of the hard work. He remembered sitting at the little metal sidewalk tables, cafés with packed interiors and only he sitting outside in the chill wind, letting the cold keep him alert as he read, fifteen hundred pages a week or more, studied vocabulary from the heavy bundle of cards he insisted on using, despite the many flashcard programs he knew existed at the tip of his fingers. Something about the feel of the paper, the flap of one card against another as he stuffed them happily in the ‘known’ file, or slapped them onto the back of the ‘redo’ set. He’d felt like a real scholar. Like the old-school heroes he held in such regard. So few were like that anymore. Maybe they had never been, even in the old days, but he liked to keep his heroes holy. It was that sense of romance that had kept him going in those days, pressing through, long into the night.
His ride was a little late, but no matter, lots of time. He’d checked out, using the automatic system in his room, and took the time to stroll up and down the walkway in front of the hotel, watching the Londoners heading off to work. He had always liked the city, though more for a visit than a home. He could live there, yes, but it would take a lot more money than he had ever made before, to make it comfortable.
Not for the first time he paused, smiled, and realised that it was now possible, that he’d made enough in the past year to set the two of them up in style, wherever they chose to go. Not opulence, maybe, but definitely something comfortable in a very pleasant area, even as expensive as London and Oxford were.
He wondered how Marina was doing. Probably just fine. She had her demons, but she was tough as nails too. If anything, he wished he could see more of her soft side, her vulnerabilities… if she had any. He smiled again. He was proud of her strength, even teased her about her reluctance to just relax and let her guard down for a while.
He glanced at the time on his phone. Best wait in the lobby, the driver would be there any minute. He was.
There were peanuts and potato chips in the car. “Crisps?” the driver asked, handing them over to Ben with such eagerness that he thanked him and munched away as they drove. “We’ll have to go the long way this morning, some traffic holdups I’m afraid.”
“We’ll still be there on time?”
“Yes, should be. The schedule factors in some time for delays, and things are always a bit late when it comes to these events, so you should be fine.”
Ben smiled
. Nothing revelatory there.
The driver pointed to a couple of bottles of water, and Ben accepted one gladly, washing the salt from his lips and tongue. His seat was comfortable, the driver a man of few words, and the familiar countryside green and pleasant.
The trees passed through his view. Lone houses or clustered homes and outbuildings, nestled among trees, or perched on bare hilltops. His eyelids were heavy. He felt a hint of nausea at the back of his throat and looked over at the driver. He looked back at Ben and smiled.
“It’s okay, you sleep. Jet lag. I’ll wake you when we get near Oxford and give you a minute or two to prepare yourself. You just sleep.”
Ben attempted to say something, but his tongue felt thick, and too heavy to lift. The taste of egg in the back of his throat. Maybe mayonnaise… An effort to look ahead, but his eyes swung too far, out the side window. His neck felt like rubber. The ditches angled and warped. He blinked once to steady his sight, barely got his eyes open again. Another blink, but when his eyelids touched together, the floor of his consciousness gave way, dropping him down into darkness like a well. The sounds of traffic and the radio echoed above him, and then he was gone.
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