by David Savill
‘Of course.’
They have reached Stovnik’s only roundabout; a hexagon of grass and the old town well at the centre of it. He had forgotten about the game. When a boy at school crossed their path, bullied their friends or offended someone’s family, they would bring him here, and hold him by his ankles over the well. It wasn’t serious. The well was boarded up and full of trash. The drop wouldn’t break a head. It was just a tradition. Just something they did.
They walk single file along the kerb of the ring road, Bogdan ahead. Marko is trying to understand what he is being told.
‘So you knew Kemal was innocent, but you investigated?’
He thinks that Bogdan hasn’t heard him, but then realises his friend is muttering.
‘I had to get a toothbrush and send it to the morgues.’
‘Whose?’
‘For Emina. She went missing in 1994. They never found her. My brother had to find some of her DNA and send it to the morgues.’
‘Who was Emina?’
Bogdan stops to look at him. ‘My sister-in-law. She went missing in 1994. You don’t remember. Lovely girl. Just fucking lovely.’
Marko is about to speak but Bogdan isn’t finished. ‘You forgot, didn’t you? Trouble with going away. Those women at the camp. Their families. They deserved an answer.’
‘What answer?’
‘What answer? No answer. We know they were at the camp. Then they left. Same as everyone else. That was all we could tell them. But we had to tell them at least that. Show them we’d tried.’
Bogdan starts to walk again, Marko on the road and at his shoulder.
‘You were with Kemal, weren’t you? At the camp? Wasn’t that some kind of—’
‘Conflict of interest?’ Bogdan puts his hand against Marko’s chest and stops him. ‘I was with Kemal at the camp, so I already knew he hadn’t done anything. No one raped anyone.’ He puts his arm around Marko and pulls him close. ‘What about England. Don’t you like it there?’
‘It’s all right,’ Marko says.
‘And what’s wrong with here?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with here.’
‘Exactly. Nothing’s wrong with here. It’s a fucking beautiful country.’ Bogdan tightens his grip on Marko’s shoulder.
‘So there’s no way he could have done it?’ Marko says.
Bogdan’s face is close enough to kiss him. ‘What do you think we were doing out there? Playing fucking superman?’ He rests his forehead against Marko’s and breathes, ‘You still a judo champion?’
Suddenly they are grappling, fighting for the kerb. His head in Bogdan’s chest. Bogdan’s arms around his waist. A car horn blares. Marko grapples back onto the pavement. They come up, faces red and a scarlet scratch across Bogdan’s cheek. With one hand, Bogdan grabs the back of Marko’s head, the other pressed against his chest, keeping an arm’s length, grinning.
In the dark, Marko runs his hand over the wall and finds the switch; the basement of the apartment block under fluorescent strip lights; a room of foil-insulated pipes, and the gunmetal generator sitting against one wall. The room is white again. The murals have gone. In the worst days of Stovnik’s siege, families had moved mattresses down here, sofas and televisions. Marko examines the far wall for traces of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee. They had found some yellow paint and some black paint, and drawn their heroes as large as they felt them to be.
He places a hand on the flanks of the generator. It should be hot, conducting all that electricity, taking it straight from the network and channelling it through the apartments over his head. (132: that’s how many families there were.) But the steel is cold. Only this vibration, this low-key hum. Marko closes his eyes.
Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.
In the first winter, Marko had read Kemal’s copy of the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Some people found their religion a comfort in the war, others blamed it and turned away. Some protected themselves by protecting others, bringing the elderly and refugees into their homes. One woman gathered all the town’s stray cats around her. Kemal looked after everyone. Marko shot dogs. Surviving was one thing. The real trick was to find a reason to live. There had been something prayer-like about Lee’s borrowings from Lao-tzu, about the cod Zen bullshit. Precisely because it was such bullshit. They were supposed to have other stories. Historical stories. Stories about patriots, stories about communists. If you listened to the wrong story, the Nazi Serbian story, you were a Chetnik bastard. But Bruce Lee was their own. They didn’t know anything about Buddhism or Lao-tzu. But it had become something to believe in; the lines they would deliver like actors in their favourite films, before they attempted to kick the shit out of each other.
Samir said not to listen to Bogdan. Bogdan was twisted. Marko didn’t know it because Marko hadn’t been around. But after the war some people had gone that way. And they weren’t always together at the camp. Bogdan hadn’t seen everything Kemal did for the refugees. He was angry about being sent out to defend the hills. The brigade had split, taking it in turns to man a line in the forest and defend the perimeter. Kemal sent Bogdan. And did Marko think Samir wouldn’t know? Did he think he wouldn’t have seen the women? Did he think he wouldn’t have seen the change in Kemal? Why was he picking at this scab anyway? It was masochistic, that’s what it was. Samir said Marko was picking at a scab because he wanted to hurt himself. Because he had his own guilt to deal with. They were burying Kemal tomorrow. They were burying their friend. They owed him that at least. And they owed him their belief.
Marko kneels down in front of the generator. It had been here, through this gap in the piping. This is where he had seen them. Vesna and Kemal. Vesna underneath Kemal. Over in the far corner of the basement room, fucking beneath a ping-pong table looted from the front.
Angkor Wat
It is cold inside the mausoleum. A shiver runs through William’s shoulders. There is a stench of urine so strong he feels like he has to step around it. Visitors should be warned the temple city is home to over 200 species of bat. Through another stone doorway, the sun is blinding, and the heat a thick curtain. He looks down on a clearing in the jungle, busy with tourists, street sellers beneath sun umbrellas and the barrows of ice-cream refrigerators.
‘Hey, William!’ He hears Missy’s voice but cannot see her. A Chinese family in sanitary face masks stands for a picture. They are lined up in order of size like Russian dolls.
‘Hey, William, you have to see this!’
The steps down from the mausoleum are bigger than he anticipates. He stumbles. The orange robes of the monks float past.
‘William!’
Her voice through the crowds, through the tourists queuing to buy bottled water. Anya or Missy, he doesn’t know.
‘Over here!’ Past the straw shack selling plastic dioramas of the temples, and back into the shade of the palms. Missy stands on a rope walkway inches above a mould-green swamp. The trees grow out of the water, bark as pale as cold skin.
‘Check it out.’ She beckons him with her phone.
The planks over the swamp spring beneath his feet.
‘Have you ever seen a girl in a bucket with a snake?’ Missy asks.
When she steps back he sees. It is what she says. A plastic blue bucket floats on the water. The bucket is about the size of a laundry-day pail. The girl sits in the bucket, and the rippling pale-yellow belly of the snake curls around her neck.
‘What does she want?’ Missy asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I gave her some money just so I could take a picture.’
He sees now, there are notes in the bottom of the girl’s bucket. She is looking up at him with smiling black eyes, lifting the snake off her shoulder as if he might want to take it. On the girl’s T-shirt there is a picture of the pop-band Steps.
Missy holds the phone out and is pointing it at him.
‘William,’ she says, ‘would you like to introduce yourself?’
; He doesn’t understand.
‘It’s video,’ Missy says, ‘I send these travelogues to my mom.’
He resists the urge to grab the phone and throw it into the swamp. ‘Oh.’
‘Well?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Introduce yourself!’
‘I’m William.’
Missy motions like he’s a car in her way. ‘And . . . ?’
‘I am – here in Angkor Wat.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Tell her who you are, or she’ll think I’ve just met some guy.’
‘I’m Missy’s – I manage the school where Missy is going to work.’
‘And what are we observing today, William?’
‘We’re at Angkor Wat. Cambodia.’
‘And?’
Missy points at the girl, but William doesn’t know what to say to the phone, and she quickly gives up on him, turning the camera on herself.
‘On a swamp, Mom. We have a girl in a bucket with a snake. Floating on a swamp. Welcome to Cambodia.’
When they travelled, it was William who read the guidebooks. Anya said she just liked to experience a place, not be led around it. When they visited Kraków, they had slept in the living room on a pull-out sofa, and he had read late into the night. William had started to tell Anya about the Soviet history of Nowa Huta. He suggested they visit the Church of the Lord’s Ark which, the guidebook said, was unique as a Catholic church built by Soviet architects. But as William began to describe the concept of the building and the artwork it contained, Anya shifted uncomfortably beneath the sheets.
‘Are you OK?’ It is Missy.
The rice paddies whip by.
Anya had shifted uncomfortably beneath the sheets and she had murmured something into her pillow.
‘Do you have 3G?’ Missy asks. ‘I can never fucking get my 3G to work.’
‘I haven’t brought my phone,’ William says. ‘Remember? I had to borrow yours.’
The taxi passes two backpackers walking out of Siem Reap. They disappear behind them like litter caught in the wind. His memory of Anya has gone. An air-freshener depicting Buddha swings from the rear-view mirror of the taxi. Every now and again the mirror is lit by the whites of the driver’s eyes, but William can’t work out if the driver is looking at him, the traffic behind or Missy’s legs. She sits with her back to the passenger door, bare feet on the seat, blackened toes smelling not faintly of trainers. Eventually she puts the phone away, gives up on the business of uploading the video to her mother, and takes a tray of noodles out of the bag of snacks she insisted on buying before they left the temple.
When was the last time he ate?
‘. . . not even any freaking chopsticks,’ she says, rooting around the bag.
William presses himself up against the door of the old Mercedes, head against the glass. The window speckles with something like a sea mist. The heat coming with the clouds. When they climbed into the taxi, William had thought he heard thunder.
Close beneath the sheets. Anya murmuring into her pillow.
He looks around and Missy is dangling noodles into her mouth.
‘Do you mind if my colleague eats?’ he asks the driver.
The driver’s eyes flash in the rear-view mirror. ‘Of course, she’s welcome my friend. Mi casa su casa.’
Missy almost spits the noodles. ‘My God, are you American?’
‘Thank you,’ the driver smiles. ‘But no, I studied in Minnesota. I have family in St Paul.’ He turns and looks at them over the cigarette tucked into the fold of his short-sleeved shirt, ‘New Jersey, yes?’
‘Asbury Park, my friend. Garden State, baby.’
‘I never went to the East Coast, always flew over it – I have to go to New York one day.’
William wonders what would happen if he opened the door and fell out of the car. What difference would it make?
‘So what if he’s American?’ he snaps at Missy and for once she is speechless.
‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘I’m just interested.’
William feels his face flush. The driver has turned back to the road. The sound of the rain fills their awkward silence. It is a slowly burning tinder, then suddenly, a conflagration. The storm has leapt upon them and the car brakes into red tail-lights which dribble down the glass, windscreen wipers juddering. They halt behind the tall trailer of a truck, and the taxi driver tells them they are better off staying put until it passes. Where his arm rests on the sill of the window, William begins to feel cold water pooling against the glass.
‘I love a monsoon,’ Missy says to herself.
William opens the door of the car, feet in the crap-coloured topsoil. The rain bites through his clothes and within seconds it has consumed him, in his eyes, filling his shoes. The mud washes in a stream down the sides of the road, washes beneath the tyres of the taxi and pours into the rice paddies. He slams the car door and stands with his hands on his hips, feeling the weight of the rain, its heavy fingers drumming on his scalp, relieving, for the first time that day, his headache. He looks up for one moment and tries to open his eyes, but the rain pokes at them. If he had seen her. If he knew that she was dead. That she was up there somewhere. The power of the dead over the living is that they are watching us.
But what about the missing? What were they doing?
‘If you take these people, you are an accomplice to ethnic cleansing. If you don’t, you are an accomplice to murder.’
Mme Sadako Ogata, UN High Commissioner for refugees, 1993, on the dilemmas of taking refugees from the Balkans, and of the internal displacement of ethnic populations into designated ‘safe havens’
December 1993
Stovnik
The wind picked up the snow and blew it across the window. Marko watched from inside the Hotel Stovnik. In his daydream, the building was flying, breaking from its concrete foundations, hurtling past the school and over the Kapija, over the roadblocks, on down the valley to the border, down to the coast where the sun struck the sea. Flying buildings. He had seen it in some sci-fi movie, in the days when the cinema in Stovnik didn’t house refugees. The wind dropped. The falling world of snow returned; the abandoned buses and a yellow post-office Golf in the car park. There was now so little petrol the cars had been abandoned.
A smoke ring broke on Marko’s nose. The smell of coffee, chewing gum and tobacco.
Vesna sat opposite on one of the low leather sofas, bored as their employers chatted. She stuck out her tongue and took a handful of pistachio nuts from the ashtray on the glass coffee table.
‘What I cannot understand,’ the blond-haired Dutchman sitting next to Vesna said, ‘is how they get supplies for a nightclub when they cannot get the supplies for a hospital.’
The Swede sitting next to Marko murmured his agreement. He was looking at a flier for the disco in the hotel. ‘Or run a disco out of a generator when there is not one at the school.’
‘Your leg,’ Vesna said in the Bosnian they kept for themselves.
Marko looked at his leg. His left knee was pumping like a kid desperate to piss, and he wasn’t sure how to make it stop. ‘Too much coffee,’ he said.
Vesna shifted in her red padded jacket. It was too cold to take off their coats, and the sofas in the Hotel Stovnik were so low, it was hard to move out of them. ‘You should smoke one cigarette with every coffee.’ Vesna pushed a packet of smuggled Camel Lights across the table. ‘A coffee without a cigarette is like a mosque without a minaret.’
Marko took one of the cigarettes.
‘Actually, it’s biology – coffee raises your blood pressure and nicotine lowers it. So you achieve,’ she waved her cigarette like a wand, ‘perfect balance.’
Joachim had called an end to his day with Vesna, but Lorens wanted to go back to the school with Marko.
‘Maybe we should take them to this disco,’ Marko suggested. ‘Get Lorens to “chill the fuck out”.’
‘ “Chill out”.’ Vesna savoured the recently learned English words. ‘Just chill
. . . man.’ She tipped the emptied pistachio shells into a separate ashtray and turned her coffee cup upside down on its saucer. ‘You can read my future.’
While the Scandinavians compared notes on the IDPs, Marko and Vesna waited for the grains to mark the sides of her cup. Marko enjoyed these moments. The moments they had learned to share as they worked together. Talking to girls had never been a problem. He knew the things to say. He knew what to do to make girls laugh, to make them mad, to make them look at him in the right way. But Vesna was the first girl with whom he could really share silences.
The jobs were Kemal’s idea. He said it was better than killing dogs. During the first ceasefire of 1993, foreigners began to arrive in Stovnik. First, the brusque, grey-suited officials from the United Nations who arrived on a Friday and left on the Monday; then the politicians from Italy and Germany, even an Australian came. No one knew exactly why this particular Australian minister visited Stovnik, but the blond, barrel-chested presence of this small man had been welcomed like an unexpected national holiday: the Australian visiting the schools housing refugees, the Australian toasting with the Mayor, the Australian always laughing, white teeth against tan skin. Perhaps it was his laughter and his tan they loved. The feeling of sunshine he brought to the town. The Australian declared Stovnik should be a ‘safe haven’ and a ‘shining light of multi-ethnic harmony’ in dark times. He said they should be proud that here, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs had defeated the evil of ethnic cleansing.
And then the first road convoys appeared; trucks that had been expected months earlier, their canvas sides black with the dirt of the road, and the metal of their cabs chipped with bullet holes. This was the ‘aid’ they had heard about on the news; lorries driven by dreadlocked British men with tattoos and two-week beards, women in vests who hadn’t shaved under their arms. These were the trucks they had seen on the television, backed up in fields on the other side of the Sava, stopped before the blown bridges. With the lorries came whole fleets of battered transits and bent camper-vans, and then, a few weeks later, a different class of foreigner; the sensible Volkswagens and Land Cruisers of the Dutch and bespectacled Swedish; young, serious-looking men and women, in new but sensible outdoor clothes, who would stay and pay good rent for houses that had already been abandoned by those families who left before the war and would never return. This was Europe in action. Europe in all its glory. A scruffy army of technocrats, of the unemployed, of students and the politically disaffected.