by David Savill
But she couldn’t quite explain it to him. What a drag it was to be discovering she cared for him the way she always had.
Then suddenly William stood up. The boat rocked and a buzz came over the water.
‘It’s heading our way,’ he said.
She looked to where a speedboat dragged the curtain of the lagoon behind it. The swell lifted the flat-bottomed skiff, then at the last second the speedboat turned and circled, unzipping the sea around them. It was the New Zealander from the beach hut. A second man crouched in the back. He was holding something heavy.
‘I’m a dufus,’ the New Zealander shouted over the dying noise of the engine. ‘Realised I sent you out without a full tank. Wrong boat. Should have had the one next to it.’
‘And there are no oars in this boat,’ William shouted over the water.
‘Oh what the fuck! Fatal.’ The man slapped his forehead. ‘Well, we’ll sort you out now.’
Will reached over to help pull in the speedboat. The sounds of the sea were suddenly sharp again; two boats rocking in the lagoon. It was the man with the jerrycan who stood up and bridged the gap between them. He climbed into the rear of the skiff.
‘Take a step back,’ Will said. ‘Balance things out.’
But Anya couldn’t move. The things you think of before they happen. The memories you create for yourself in the anticipation of the event. This had happened before. Kemal Lekić knelt down in the hull of the boat, opened the fuel hatch, uncapped the jerrycan and began to pour the golden liquid in.
Before a tsunami strikes, the ocean may appear to drain away. This is called the ‘drawback’ – the trough of the tsunami reaching the shore. Energy is turning to mass. Within minutes, the wave can reach ten metres in height.
Saturday 9 April 2005
Stovnik
Before they can order, the waiter unloads two green bottles of Tuborg and two shots of šljivovica onto the pressed metal of their uneven table.
‘For your friend?’ he asks Samir.
‘My cousin,’ Samir puts his hand on Marko’s shoulder, ‘has returned to us from exile.’
Marko asks for a Becks, but they don’t have it, so he takes a Heineken. It comes with a shot.
Elvis and Samir raise their glasses. They toast Kemal. Elvis has joined them early, still in the shirt and tie of a job which turns out, when Marko asks, to be something to do with insurance. It is still late afternoon, and the street cafés of the Kapija have caught people on their way home from work. Across the square, a table of women in their office clothes gather around a leaving party with helium balloons. Over the fountain, schoolkids flitter. Girls watching boys watching girls.
‘How does it feel to be back?’ Elvis asks.
Right at this moment, he does not feel like he is back. The last time he was here, he had been one of the schoolkids by the fountain. ‘Things are different,’ he says.
The lager is too sweet. The šljivovica is a warm head rush.
‘To Marko!’ Elvis raises his shot glass. When Elvis sits back down, he has to squeeze himself between the plastic arms of the chair. The body-building muscles of his youth have turned to fat.
Beneath the table, Marko holds his stomach with one hand.
‘You don’t look any different,’ Elvis says.
Marko pauses too long to effectively return the compliment. ‘I know.’
Through the office shirt, Elvis pinches a roll of his own stomach. ‘Look at this fat bastard.’
‘Elvis stopped playing football,’ Samir says.
‘I stopped doing a lot of things.’
‘You look fine,’ Marko says. ‘For a fat bastard.’
‘It’s kids. My wife looks better than she ever has but I eat too well. I eat my food and then I eat their food, and then I sit down all day in a fucking office.’
It takes Marko’s old friends to show him he is not a kid any more. Children! And a wife! They can’t be fathers and husbands. They are schoolboys by the fountain. They play on the five-a-side pitch. The war never allowed any of them to be fat. English kids are fat. American kids are fat.
Elvis asks about England and English women. They talk about the state of Sloboda Stovnik’s defence. They talk about the kids in the square, the war babies who are not like they were, who take more drugs, and of the wrong kind, who don’t want to work, who complain because they can’t get Wi-Fi, and don’t know what it is like not to get water.
Marko watches a gypsy girl in a Rolling Stones tour T-shirt beg the leaving-do women. They shoo her away. Kemal liked to give to the gypsies. He said they might be gypsies, but they were Stovnik’s gypsies. He was like that about the refugees too, the people they were taught to call internally displaced persons. Once they were here, they belonged to Stovnik. Stovnik would protect them. Everything Kemal said Marko believed.
Although it can’t be the same prepubescent girl who would beg in the square when they were kids, this gypsy girl tonight looks in every way like the girl who would come to them with her black eyes and the palms of an old woman. It is not that things have changed. Quite the opposite. Nothing has changed. The pink and yellow paint of Austro-Hungarian buildings, the green paint of the iron clock, the beech trees budding over Marko’s head. Every bit of it resembles the town square of his childhood. But it can’t be. All this fresh paint is just fresh paint. The Kapija had been blown to pieces by the shell. A heavy Second World War mortar round had picked up the cobbles and sent them flying through the windows of the cafés; a hard rain of stone breaking the plasterwork, shredding the branches of the beech trees, taking the head of the water nymph in the fountain, lifting children up and throwing them down again, grabbing Samir and hurling him against the wall of the bank where he would feel his right leg for the last time.
That day had blown up Kemal, and with Kemal everything in which Marko believed. He had seen what the shell did. He had arrived minutes later to find the small boy, the adolescent with red hair whose screams were silent like a toddler in the first shock of a fall.
What arm belonged to whom? Whose head was this? In the first few seconds Marko had felt nothing. It was just a puzzle to solve.
‘I think he had this woman in Kletovo,’ Marko says.
‘Who?’
‘I went out to his old place this morning. Kemal’s. There’s a woman living there now. He gave her the house.’
‘Gave it to her?’ Samir asks.
‘Signed over the deeds, the lot.’
Samir is nodding. Elvis looks confused.
‘He was supposed to be marrying Vesna,’ Marko says. ‘But what if he didn’t want to, what if he had something with this woman too?’
Samir claps his hands together. ‘Ha! He was running away from his women!’
‘Did you know anything about her?’
‘Dirty little bastard,’ Samir says. ‘Nothing.’
Elvis surrenders his hands. ‘He never told me about a woman!’
‘Well, well, well,’ Samir says. ‘Now we know.’
A policeman appears behind Elvis, and clasps his raised hands in his.
‘Is this man bothering you?’
Marko barely recognises Bogdan in the forest-green Puffa jacket and peaked cap.
‘Look who it is!’ Bogdan Banović smiles.
Angkor Wat
William reads from the guidebook: ‘Built in the 12th century by the Khmer King Surayavarman II, and the largest religious monument in the world, Angkor Wat stood at the heart of one of the world’s first hydraulic civilisations . . .’
‘Hydraulic?’ Missy says.
William holds the book he bought in Siem Reap. A stone path bisects a flat black reservoir filled with giant lily-pads, the metallic smell of the morning, stored in its cold, stagnant water. When she walks ahead, he can feel the pull of an invisible rope, and when he catches up, the rope slackens.
‘Is this the main temple?’ Missy asks. ‘Jesus, this is crazy big, there’s just so much of it.’
The voices of the other tourists are muffle
d behind stone walls. The book in William’s hand is shaking. ‘The modern name, Angkor Wat,’ he reads, ‘means Temple City or City of Temples. The outer gallery measures 187 by 215 metres, and the walls are 4.5 metres high, with pavilions, rather than gopura towers at the corners.’
He follows Missy through an arch that leads back into the shade of a ruined colonnade. In among the carved vines, figures of women nest in the sandstone, their breasts smoothed by the hands of tourists and hundreds of monsoon seasons.
‘So who are the ladies?’ Missy asks.
William flicks through the pages of the book. ‘These could be Asparas, or Devetas: in Hindu mythology Devetas are celestial dancing girls. It says – In the Mahabharata, Asparas are dancing girls employed by Gods to seduce demons.’
‘Strippers?’
‘The book says . . . the figures are ubiquitous at Angkor Wat.’
He follows as she treads carefully over the broken flagstones, her fingers tracing the reliefs. ‘I want to stay here – the stone’s so cold,’ she whispers. ‘It’s like natural air conditioning.’
They step through a rectangular stone frame, a place where a door should be, out into the light and back into the dark again. Ahead of them a series of these broken picture-frames extend like one mirror into another. Where the colonnade roof has fallen in silk trees seem to grow out of walls hardly strong enough to take their weight; long, pale fingers of roots curling around and underneath, or shooting straight up to form a slatted canopy above their heads.
‘I think if we turn right at the next path, we’ll find the central courtyard,’ William suggests. But turning right only brings them out into a hot place resembling the one they have just left – a courtyard path around an empty, moss-covered basin. It might have been a bathing pool; flanked by stone gopura, black flames of sandstone where vines have died and left their shadow.
‘It’s an entire city,’ Missy says.
‘Like Pompeii.’
The paths from the courtyard extend in four directions, on to farther colonnades, where flashes of pastel colours are tourists passing through.
‘You’ve been there?’ Missy asks.
‘When I was a kid.’
Missy points at a new statue carved into the stone walls. ‘Who are these guys?’
The relief is a man taller than William, stern face beneath elaborate headdress, hands knotted around the hilt of the sword between his legs.
William flicks through the pictures of the guidebook. ‘Dvarapala – generally depicted with lances or clubs, their function is to guard the inner temples.’
‘Here,’ Missy hands him her phone. ‘Take a picture.’
There is no path up to the guardian, only boulders that have fallen out of the temple structure. Missy skips over them, and climbs onto the sandstone lintel beneath the statue. She pushes her chest out, leaning onto an invisible sword and adopting the guardian’s stern face.
‘How do I get the camera up?’
‘Oh – OK.’ Missy skips back. He has never been this close to her. Hair sticks to her neck. Sweat pools at the base of her throat. As her fingers manipulate the phone, the small movements of her collarbone are like something slipping just beneath the surface of water.
‘Here.’ She hands the phone back to him. The screen has become a camera. The first picture he takes is blurred. Missy is a red buzz in front of the green rocks.
‘Hang on.’ He takes the phone in both hands, and tries to keep her still. How many times had he taken a photograph of Anya like this? How many times had he held her safely in a camera’s eye?
William had slept in the taxi from Poipet, waking to the noise of Siem Reap. The coach was entangled in the deadly charm-bracelets of tuk-tuks, the weary fart of mopeds sacked with families, the volleying yelps of street merchants. From an air-conditioned glass cube on the main street, they bought their temple passes and a guidebook. Walking back out into the heat, William was gripped by a headache. At a hole-in-the-wall next to a Western Union, he asked for paracetamol and was handed a Spanish brand of something in a gold box. Missy said it was good. A kind of ibuprofen and paracetamol combined.
‘You only need to take one,’ she said. And gave him a bottle of Mountain Dew to wash the pill down.
They boarded a bus to the temple. Not one temple, it turned out, but a jungle full of stone ruins and a city bigger than Siem Reap itself. When they disembarked next to the first reservoir, Will’s head felt no better, and he slipped himself another of the pills.
Now he feels empty of any other purpose but to follow Missy. To follow her legs as she climbs over the stones, up steps, over walls. At the edges of the main temple, the muffled noise of tourists recedes, and the trilling of cicadas rise where the canopy of palms thickens. They are in a place where great slabs of the sandstone lean together to form some kind of mausoleum, out of which grow the hands of silk trees. Over the dark mouth of the mausoleum’s entrance, the stone has been shaped into one of the giant faces of Buddha that are everywhere in the temple city; the beatific smile, never a single variation, as if it is actually the same face magically reappearing in the stone of the temples, always ahead of them, reassuring. Come this way. You are on the right path.
William sits down on a cool boulder before the shallow broken steps of the building, leaving his head hanging somewhere over him. Missy walks into the mausoleum. The darkness claims the upper half of her body first, for a second leaving only those pale, shining legs, before she takes another step, and they too are swallowed.
Magic tricks. Maybe that’s how it was for the people who made the Buddha’s face. Magic in repetition; the same urge behind our desire to see a Starbucks mermaid in every town. William tries to remember the last thing he ate. The world is retreating from him. The land moves around the sea, not the boat moving on the water.
Juchinar
Cairo
Stoke Newington
Birdsong breaks over the insistent rhythm of cicadas, suggesting the depths of the jungle. He breathes into his hands. A steady rhythm. Sweat prickling the hairs of his thighs.
Stratton
Hula Hoops
Bosnia
He might find Missy in the dark. Find her small mouth. He might kneel, cup her calves and push his hands up her legs, pull off those shorts; the miracle of finding himself inside her. Wasn’t that where this was leading? Not a rope. Not the promise of the dead. Sex. How stupidly simple was the answer to grief! Fucking. How easy to make someone disappear again. Fuck it all out of existence.
Stratton
Hula Hoops
Bosnia
Bosnia. Had Anya really been in Kao Lak to work? Or had she made it all up? Had her heart really leapt like his when she received his first call? Wasn’t that what he had wanted her to feel? Hadn’t he wanted her to be thinking about him when she put the phone down? To be thinking about him until thinking wasn’t enough? Hadn’t he wanted her to feel the same way he did? And how was that? How did he really feel? He was scared. He was reaching the middle of his life, turning around like the boat on the ocean. But he didn’t know whether it was the boat turning, or the ocean turning, and all of a sudden it was better to head for the shore he had come from than the shore he couldn’t see. He wasn’t thinking about Anya at all. He was thinking about himself. And when Anya had wanted him, really wanted him, when she had tried to take him in the bedroom that night, he had failed so desperately to do something she wanted. To play her game.
William spits into the sand between his feet. He retches. The metallic taste of the painkillers in his mouth. Then something behind him moves. A scratching sound. When he stands up and turns around, his head trails after his body, filling like a kite. It is at his heels. Black and enormous, growing out of the dirt. The red beady head of the chicken reveals itself, and then the feathers shuffle free. Not one, but two black chickens scrabbling in the sand.
Stovnik
‘Didn’t Samir tell you?’ Bogdan smokes and brings his yellow fingertips to his lip
s. They are walking home drunk in the closing time crowds, Elvis and Samir ahead of them, arm in arm. Teenagers are slipping away to bars in the suburbs with late licences, or heading for the hills to drink homemade vodka from soft-drink bottles. The children are going home to their parents.
‘No.’
Bogdan says nothing.
‘Why you?’ Marko asks.
‘The police in Belgrade. I volunteered to co-operate. Why not? Nothing to see here? Move along! Most people who call themselves policemen – they wouldn’t do anything. The ICTY. They wouldn’t do anything. It wasn’t genocide, was it? Not big enough for them. But I thought we should be fair.’
‘You investigated?’
‘Statements. I took statements. Made a report.’
‘What did it say?’
‘I did my job.’
Marko watches his feet over the new cobblestones. They have come to the head of the high street where the crowds thin out, but instead of the old fish market he expects to see, they are met by a car park. A small building shaped like a boat is marooned among the parked cars.
‘What do you think?’ Bogdan asks.
‘What is it?’
‘Ta-da! I give you the Ethnographic Museum of Stovnik.’
The concrete boat is lit with a floodlight. Where the mast of a ship would be, the flag of the canton rests limp from a flagpole.
‘Why does it look like a boat?’
‘It’s supposed to remind us of the old fish market. Personally I preferred the old fish market.’
They follow Elvis and Samir through the cars, back onto the old streets, into the coral white light of ćevapi shops and kebab houses. Men in dirty white coats cut and chop behind the counters. It is Saturday. Marko should be at Husni’s.
‘It wasn’t a problem?’ he asks Bogdan, ‘your being in the brigade?’
‘I interviewed everyone. We’d kept a list of all the people who came through the factory. There were no witnesses.’
‘And the missing women?’
‘They were there. In the camp. We had their names. They left like everyone else.’
‘And you were there?’