by David Savill
‘And this,’ Anya picked up a second thing in the bag, ‘is – a Chairman Mao wristwatch!’ She broke into the plastic packaging. ‘I didn’t think Thailand ever adopted communism?’
‘And I don’t think Roosevelt ever set foot here.’
‘So what better gift from Kao Lak?’
‘Exactly.’
It was the first real silence between them. Will began to clear the half-eaten food. On her wrist, Anya fiddled with the strap of the watch. She knew the silence was too long to be comfortable. He hadn’t yet asked where she had been that morning. She thought about telling him but worried that if she started out on the story of Kemal, its pieces would somehow fall apart. He would think work was getting in their way again. But getting in the way of what?
‘What are you looking at?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ he said, then ‘you.’
She turned her head, looked into the twisted mangroves, and tried to hide her smile. ‘I love that we can hear the sea.’
‘Bosniaks and Croats consider the first casualties of the war to be Suada Dilberović (a Bosniak) and Olga Sučić (a Croat), who were shot after the declaration of independence, on April the 5th 1992, by unidentified Serb gunmen. Serbs consider Nikola Gardović, a groom’s father killed on the 1st of March in Sarajevo’s old town . . . to be the first victim of the war.’
Robert J. Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography
July 1991
Kletovo
Marko, Kemal, Samir and Vesna, lay on the steep garden of Kemal’s family home, upside down in the tall grass, feet higher than their heads and the distant cornfields hanging over a purple dusk. Who would be the first to chicken out with a head full of blood? Vesna? Kemal? Samir? Marko? Somewhere in the house Jim Morrison was singing about enterprise and destiny and how stoned everyone was.
‘I feel dizzy,’ Vesna said.
‘You are dizzy,’ Kemal replied.
‘It’s your Croatian blood. If the world was always upside down,’ Samir tried to control his laughter, ‘our blood would have to pump up to our feet and we wouldn’t walk on our heads but—’
‘But we would constantly be shitting ourselves.’
‘But gravity would be working the other way,’ Vesna said. ‘If we hung from the earth, you know, like spiders, we’d be sticking to it because that’s what gravity does.’
‘We are like spiders,’ Kemal said. ‘The earth is round. We are sticking to it – just upside down.’
Vesna moaned dramatically, ‘Oh fuck – but now I really am upside down – so does that mean, I’m the right way up?’
A willow tree dangled in the sky; a willow tree holding a tyre that floated on the end of a rope, like a helium balloon on a string. Marko dug his fingers into the cold roots of the grass, closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the party and the brook rippling impossibly over the rocks. Perhaps there was no such thing as upside down. Or the concept of being upside down was actually relative. But relative to what? Everything was upside down now. There would be no holiday in Bečići for the friends this year, where the beach days were long and the promenade nights longer. Family holidays together were the first thing the war had taken from them. Unless you counted Kemal’s father. How could a boy live when his father had died? How could a boy talk and make jokes and kiss a girl – kiss Vesna? How could a boy whose father had died throw parties? Kemal’s mother was away for work and they had all been drinking plum brandy since the middle of the day. Earlier that afternoon, someone had given Marko something to smoke. Kemal had taken it out of his mouth, smoked some of it himself, put it back in Marko’s mouth and clapped him on the shoulder. Marko had never felt more like a man. The revolving rooms of the house. Bodies on the floor. Bijelo Dugme on the stereo singing ‘…all of that, my dear, will be covered in rosemary, snow and reeds’, a conversation about Slovenian women that never seemed to end. In the garden someone picked out notes on a guitar, and the war was still in Croatia.
‘I’m done,’ Vesna said. Abruptly she rose from the grass next to Kemal. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
Marko watched as upside down, hanging from the earth, or whatever it actually was, Vesna held her head in her hands. If she didn’t hold her head it would fall off and drop into the sky. Kemal sprang up next to her and placed an arm around her shoulder and Marko felt something in his gut as sharp as the stubble in the meadow grass. He closed his eyes again. What Marko had heard was this: Kemal’s father had been watching the television; the famous game between Zagreb Dinamo and Belgrade Red Star. The fans in the stadium had begun to fight, the policemen in the stadium had begun to fight the fans, the Croatian policemen in the stadium had begun to fight the Serbian policemen and Kemal’s father had stood up, punched the air, told the world it could go to hell, then dropped down dead on the carpet. Just like that.
It was being a policeman that killed Kemal’s father. This is what the mothers had said in the kitchen. As if being a policeman were like cancer. But all their fathers were policemen. That is how they had met, after all. And now Yugoslavia’s policemen were being killed at barricades all over Croatia. Men like their fathers; twelve last week in that town not so far from the Sava. Not so far from the actual border. On the news they said the men had been found with their ears cut off. And what was left when you cut off an ear? Could you see the skull? Or could you see into the brain? Did the dark tunnels of the ear worm right into the brain?
Marko feels the pressure of a warm hand on his forehead.
‘He’s still alive.’ Kemal’s voice. Kemal upside down when Marko opens his eyes. ‘You win.’ Kemal offers his hand.
‘I think I passed out.’
When he gets up, Marko isn’t ready for his legs. He scrabbles around to face the brook and the bottom of the garden where the willow tree is a stain in the inky evening. Girls are yelping and giggling and there are candles in the grass. Somewhere Van Gogh are singing the ballad about a sinking precious stone and the girls have waded through the shallow brook to sit up against a tree where they hold their knees and watch a boy standing in a tyre as he swings across the stream, whooping like a baboon.
Samir the baboon.
‘I’m going to jump it,’ Kemal says.
Marko takes Kemal’s hand again. Finding his legs, he stands up in the righted world. ‘Jump what?’
Kemal nods in the direction of the brook and before Marko can say anything, his friend is running, or trying to run; the steep slope tripping up his legs until he falls over himself. Marko follows, but by the time he sees Kemal fall it is too late.
When he lands, the water isn’t deep enough to completely cover him. Standing up, he is soaked through. Marko drags his heavy legs to the other side where Kemal kneels on the bank. He pulls off his wet T-shirt and throws it into the grass. And for some reason he doesn’t think about but only feels, Marko wrestles Kemal to the ground.
Kemal is the taller boy. At seventeen he has three years on Marko. In a fight with fists there is never any doubt Kemal will win. But Marko has won every category of the region’s judo competitions since the age of eleven and now he manages to knock Kemal’s feet away. They roll on the hard edges of the bank until Marko finds an arm, locks it and pins Kemal, face down, to the ground. Pure skill. Kemal goes limp. He is not fighting any more. And Marko doesn’t even know why he has started it. Except that the girls are watching. Except that he wants to say something.
I met Vesna first. (This is what he wants to say.) Last summer, on the beach in Bečići, she spoke to me first. Vesna is my age. Not your age. Don’t you have other girls – other girls your own age?
But Marko says nothing. Instead, he takes his knee out of Kemal’s back and stands up to offer a hand which Kemal shakes. He embraces the younger boy and Marko can say nothing because in truth, even though he had met Vesna first, even though they are both fourteen, he had not noticed her until she stood in Kemal’s arms. In Kemal’s arms Vesna’s body seemed to take on a different shape. The stupid thing was Mar
ko had never thought about Vesna as a girl to kiss until he saw Kemal kissing her.
Friday 8 April 2005
Sarajevo
He lay awake on the springs of what was little more than a camp bed, and listened to the market waking up with him. It was a small, low-ceilinged room, dim orange light of curtains over a porthole window. Samir’s bed and breakfast occupied four of these rooms, carved out of the two which had been above his uncle’s shop. It was Friday. Marko should have been in the swimming pool at Cherry Hinton. Three times a week he needed to beat the water. Millie said she could always tell when he hadn’t been for a swim.
You’ve got your bad head on.
At the reception desk he searched the Internet while Samir boiled coffee. In a full ghusl ceremony, they would have to begin by washing the ‘excretory’ organs of the dead body. Three washings with juniper water, camphor and then fresh water. Incense sticks, incantations. All that shit. It was a ceremony associated with the ‘cleansing of sins’. But what were Kemal’s sins? Kemal used to leave his dirty clothes on the floor of the bedroom and never remembered to open the window after using the bathroom.
But he had never crossed anyone in his life.
‘Where does Vesna live these days?’ Marko asked.
‘And good morning to you too,’ Samir said.
In Dobrinja, the sun rises behind the blocks of the estate. Marko crosses the playground of child-safe matting. The matting is new; the Day-Glo climbing frames too. During the winter of 1993, the people of the estate had broken up the old wooden climbing frames for fuel. With Vesna, Marko had come to Sarajevo during one of the war’s last ceasefires, entering the city by bending double in the tunnel underneath the airport.
Samir said that after the war, Vesna had left Stovnik and come back to Sarajevo, but he’d never seen her again and he didn’t know where she lived.
Vesna’s father might still have the place in Dobrinja.
On the walls of the stairwell, Marko can smell the new paint, a bifurcation of pink and aquamarine, the colours of his childhood school, his father’s police station and all the institutional buildings of his youth. Black telephone lines, yellow Internet cables, potted cactuses guarding the front doors to apartments; Marko has climbed to the twelfth floor by the time he even thinks of the lift. He is not quite sure if this is it. There had been a windowless frame in the stairwell, where with Vesna’s cousins he had shot at the ‘PTT’ hoarding on the roof of the building opposite. Now the window is double-glazed and the billboard advertising the postal system of Yugoslavia has been replaced by the neon pink tubes of the legend, ‘T-Mobile’.
He knocks on the door. A light appears in the peephole, quickly darkened by an eye.
‘The Knežević girl?’ The man who opens the door wears a handlebar moustache. Silver hair touches the emerald-green tracksuit over his shoulders. It is not Vesna’s father.
‘You’re after the Knežević girl?’
‘Her father used to live here.’
‘Who are you?’
This question proves more difficult than he thinks. He starts with his childhood friendship, his years away, but the man dismisses him with a wave.
‘I have something here,’ he says. ‘Come in.’
From the apartment a loud cheer explodes. It is football on a television.
‘I’ll find it.’ Barefooted the old man pads over the creaking parquet with a slight limp. Cigarette smoke curls into the corridor.
‘My son,’ he gestures through the glass doors to the living room where a man younger than Marko sits on an old sofa in his boxer shorts, legs spread in front of the screen.
The communal areas of the building might be clean, but this apartment isn’t. It smells of damp and machine oil and a motorbike engine sits on the floor like something that has fallen off a spaceship and landed on earth. Apart from the sofa, the television and old dresser, there is no furniture.
‘Two–one at forty minutes,’ the boy tells him.
‘What did you bet?’
‘Three–one full time.’
Vesna’s grandmother had been sleeping in here, on a threadbare divan next to the wall. There had been a dining table and chairs, and net curtains. The parquet floor Marko slept on the weekend of the tournament had been polished within an inch of its life.
They watch Stankovic pass long to Haag, and Haag thread the ball skilfully through the defenders.
‘Only problem now is they play too fucking well.’ The boy throws Marko a pack of Drina.
When the older man limps into the room, he is holding a bunch of envelopes. The door of Vesna’s father’s bedroom is open. There is a single camp bed on the floor. In Vesna’s day, five people slept in there. The bedroom on the side of the apartment not facing the snipers.
‘Right.’ The man sits down on the sofa and shuffles through the papers. ‘You said you were a friend of the family?’
Marko picks up a lighter from the table.
‘Not a debt collector then?’ The man is half-joking, but suddenly Marko feels the need to justify himself.
He tries to tell them about the trip, the judo competition, the airport, remembering as he does, how little he likes to talk about things that happened during the war, how little he has had to talk about them. He can’t stop looking at the old man’s right eye. Its black pupil swims like a glassy fish in a dirty pond.
‘After her father died, the girl couldn’t afford the loans on her own.’ The man finds what he is looking for. ‘This arrived not long ago.’
It is the handwriting of Marko’s father, and seeing it here, is like meeting him in an unexpected place. Although they had no intention of returning to Bosnia, his parents had paid for Kemal’s funeral and made all the arrangements. This is her invitation.
‘You don’t know her new address?’
‘That’s how it came.’ The man reaches over and raps his knuckles on his son’s knee. ‘We couldn’t find the address. Could we?’
‘Couldn’t find what address?’
‘The new address – of the Knežević girl.’
The boy doesn’t take his eyes off the television. ‘We don’t know where she lives.’
‘You want a coffee?’ the father asks.
‘Did you meet her? Vesna?’
‘Good-looking girl,’ the father says.
‘Is she still in Sarajevo?’
The man shrugs, showing Marko the cracked pads of his palms. ‘I met her when we bought the flat – not since then.’
‘Tourism,’ the boy says. ‘I think she was working for some tourism company.’
‘She travelled?’
The boy shrugs.
‘I told you – we only met her once,’ the father says.
Marko knows it is a dead end. But he doesn’t want to leave. Not yet. He asks if he can use the toilet.
Word of the funerals had gone out the evening after the shelling. People had left their homes just after midnight: fifty-eight coffins for the dead and the missing, most of them lighter than they should have been, and not just because they were constructed from recycled crates. The shell had left the kids in pieces, and some bodies seemed to have disappeared altogether. A number of coffins carried that night had been filled not with bodies but stuffed toys, favourite football shirts, or the guitars and violins the children played at school. Marko placed Kemal’s medal and fatigues in the coffin. Before they closed the lid, he remembered a German porn mag beneath the bunks in their bedroom, and searching for it, found the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. The Tao. Their martial arts manual, the only book they both read, read again, and then read again until they had a store of its wisdom to carry around in their heads. They had annotated the margins and practised the book’s moves together. Kemal drew pictures of Chuck Norris on the right-hand corner of each page, so that when you flicked through the book, the figure performed a flying roundhouse. They would always fight over who played Bruce Lee. Chuck Norris vs Bruce Lee; it was what they called their training sessions. Only as he seale
d the coffin did Marko realise he would never fight Bruce Lee again. In the plywood crate, Kemal’s last things slid about like loose change as Marko, his father, Samir and Vesna carried it through the town, a shoulder at each corner. The absence of the body should have given them hope. But they had all seen the town square after the shell.
As they carried the coffin, Vesna had sobbed for the man she was supposed to marry. Like all of them, Vesna had believed Kemal was dead. Hadn’t she?
When Marko opens the toilet door, the teenage son is waiting in the hall.
‘You were here in the war?’
Marko nods.
‘Will you tell me something?’ The kid leads him into the room on the right. Vesna’s old room. ‘Know why they did this? We were going to paint over it. But I sort of got used to it.’
The posters of Annie Lennox are gone, and the walls are bare except for Vesna’s mural, tied together by the red line. The line loops up and down, painted in places to make the peaks of mountains and dotted with childish drawings of trees and villages. Marko explains to the boy that the wobbling red line had joined the bullet holes in the plaster. He points to the lowest ebb of the line, where a blue river runs through a forest. The bullet holes here have joined together to form a tear in the wall. Where the sniper had trained his aim, once, twice, three, four times. Whatever angle he was working, he couldn’t aim any lower.
‘She knew it was safe to sleep below this line,’ Marko tells the kid. ‘If they put the mattress on the floor.’
At the bottom of the stairwell, Marko doesn’t stop at the ground floor, but finds himself down at the entrance of the basement service area, looking for something. The first thing to present itself is a recycling skip on wheels. He grabs it, pulls it out and pushes it into the opposite wall. Where the skip had been there’s a broom, which Marko picks up and throws. When it doesn’t break he retrieves it and snaps it over his knee. It is only when he punches the skip that he stops.
Outside, Samir is waiting in the car.