by David Savill
Maybe it was because Kemal had no real family left; maybe the same qualities that made him a brother for Marko and a second son for Marko’s mother made him the natural head of this new family of foreigners. There were others who were supposed to do the job – the pallid politicians and their sons. But no one else had Kemal’s gift for getting things done. No one else seemed to enjoy the war as much as Kemal. When he wasn’t out with the army, Kemal was at the tables of the Kapija, tables which were pulled together to accommodate an ever deepening pool of foreigners, none of whom conformed to their stereotype. The Scandinavians were irreverent. The French were not at all patriotic. The Italians were cool intellectuals, not warm-hearted peasants. And the Germans were hard drinking and fun. Whatever they were, Kemal could accommodate them. With no family of his own, he could fit into anyone else’s. He could also introduce them to Marko’s father and the other important men of the town. Like Marko, Kemal had always been good with English, the language all the foreigners used to communicate, and when the foreigners’ needs became too many, Kemal introduced them to Marko, and then to Vesna.
Marko and Vesna were both sixteen in that first year of foreigners, but when they learned how much the Scandinavians were willing to pay them as interpreters, they didn’t mind being eighteen on paper.
The snow rushed at the windscreen of Lorens’s car, and Marko thought about how cold it had been in the school. About the dirt under the fingernails of their last interviewee. They had returned to the school because Lorens had forgotten to ask the woman two of the pro-forma questions on his spreadsheet.
Could she give a physical description of the soldiers who entered her village?
Did she know any of the names of the soldiers who had met her party in the forest?
The din of the Toyota’s heater filled his ears. The familiar streets of the town had been made new with snow; car pushing through the ring-road blizzard of snow, Marko trying to look to the peaks of Majevica where the edge of the known world had grown with snow.
‘The pattern is getting stronger, especially around this town we heard about today,’ Lorens said. ‘And the evidence is getting stronger. We’re getting names.’
Lorens was full of it. Excited. He got like this sometimes, despite his attempts to remain sombre.
‘But we know what was happening,’ Marko said. ‘All of them tell us the same thing. They have told us the same things for months.’
‘These names – they mean that in the future someone can be punished for these crimes. And you’re going to be a part of it!’
Punished for war. Marko didn’t know what he thought about that.
The freezing glass of the passenger window numbed the tips of his fingers. He understood the Swede’s logic. It wasn’t their job to intervene; it was their job to gather evidence and persuade people who could intervene. In the end, people would be punished. The world would be held to account. History would be written. But the more Marko heard about what was happening, the less he understood what the punishment was for. It was a civil war. There was no wrong or right any more. And it was happening now. Not in the future. Sometimes, Marko felt secretly relieved he was too young to fight. He watched the news of the villages burning in the plains and thanked God for the mountains surrounding them, for the siege which had turned into a stalemate no one wanted to break. Then on days like this one, with the woman who had watched her children burn in a house, he wanted to be out there with Kemal, in the mountains and the snow, killing people. Anyone could kill a man.
Lorens turned onto the estate and Marko jumped down from the car, ankle deep into the pavement snow. The Land Cruiser’s fan blew hard, tyres scrabbling for purchase, the whining sound of the engine’s heater disappearing in the drifting snow. The quiet of the estate was so sudden it was like a fall – an endless white fall. The snow was virgin; not white now he walked into it, but sparkling blue beneath the dim evening sky. Over the playground in front of the flats, Marko crumped through the snow. There should have been snowmen, and rolled carpets of snow, but no one had been out today. The seats of the kids’ swings were tall with snow, the basketball hoops wore hats of snow. On the other side of the playground, no one had cleared the steps to Marko’s block, but someone’s feet had been here; small footprints trailing back along the pavement by the flats. He found the door to the stairwell wedged in the groove it had made in the concrete floor.
Vesna sat on Marko’s step. ‘They don’t stop coming – do they?’ she said.
She meant the refugees. He sat next to her, and the sleeves of their padded jackets rubbed together. Feeling in his pockets, he found the new packet of Camel Lights that Lorens had given him. Vesna told him she had come to see his father but no one was home.
‘They’ve gone to Živinice,’ he told her. ‘You should have asked me. They’re bringing my uncle in.’
Vesna wanted Marko’s father because he was one of the few in the civilian population with a military handset. If Kemal could call, it would be on the field phone Marko’s father kept. But Kemal hadn’t phoned in a week and Marko had been trying to avoid telling Vesna this.
He sat down on the step next to her.
‘Three weeks! No fucking phones.’
He told her everything would be fine.
‘How do you know that?’
The lie left Marko’s mouth before he even knew it was there: ‘He did phone – this morning.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me!’
‘I forgot.’
‘You forgot!’
‘Sorry.’ Marko put his arm around her.
‘I don’t want to fucking,’ she started, ‘I don’t want to fucking sit at home waiting for someone to call.’
With his hand on Vesna’s back, Marko felt he was touching the very centre of the world. He could feel her breathing beneath the cold material of the padded jacket. But every time he came this close, he could only think of her in the basement with Kemal.
He had seen something like it before, after school, in the concrete pipes by the waste ground of the old railway station where the older girls lined up and did it with younger boys as if the whole business was some kind of co-ordinated exercise routine in a gym class. There had been an intense kind of quiet disturbed only by a sound like men trying to walk quietly through mud. Hands up skirts. Before the war, Senka Janković from year seven had allowed Marko to get his fingers wet. But that was as far as he had got.
In the basement, Kemal and Vesna weren’t standing up like the boys and girls in the pipes, they were lying down. Vesna’s vest had been pulled up over her breasts. Vesna’s breasts! Was there anything in the world he wouldn’t have given to see them? How many times had he taken the outline suggested by her clothes and revealed them in his imagination? But when they appeared to him, Marko had found himself numb with shock. As she lay on the floor of the basement, Vesna’s breasts trembled, no more shape than his mother’s lemon mousse. Her skirt had rucked up, rolled into a rope around her waist, her back on the concrete floor, and the bone of her hip showing like the bodies thrown into shallow graves. Watching Vesna and Kemal, Marko had wanted to jump out from his hiding place and make it stop.
Against his shoulder, Vesna sobbed, their jackets rubbing like two sleeping bags. ‘What did he say? When did he call?’
To Marko’s disappointment she sat up, wiped her tears and abruptly ended her crying in that shocking way girls can.
‘Who?’
‘Kemal – when he spoke to your father, what did he say?’
‘I don’t know.’ Marko felt his face flush. ‘He said they were digging in. And it was quiet. And they hoped to be returning when the road was clear.’ From the conversations his father had with other policemen, Marko felt this last part stood a decent chance of being true.
‘Good,’ Vesna said. ‘Good.’
She took a hold of Marko’s knee and squeezed it hard. He felt every muscle in his body come alive. ‘Sometimes I forget you aren’t his little brother.’
&n
bsp; Christmas Night, 2004
Kao Lak
‘Doesn’t this place combine some of your worst fears?’ William asked.
They sat at an upturned wine barrel on the last available stools, plastic crabs caught in fishing nets over their heads. Anya scrutinised the room. It was popular enough. Full of expat Christmas parties. The bar itself seemed to be fashioned from the hull of an upturned boat.
‘I mean, expats – tick,’ William said. ‘Nautical theme – tick.’
‘Maybe I’m confronting my fears,’ Anya said.
‘Are they actually playing E17?’
Somewhere, in the fairy lights and Christmas twinkle, she heard a familiar chorus.
‘I could do that again.’ Anya held up her empty cocktail glass. All the alcohol seemed to sweat out anyway.
‘All right.’ Will got up for the bar. ‘Then you shall.’
She watched William being served by a Thai man, or boy – telling the boys from the men in this country was difficult. So far, there was no sign of Kemal Lekić, although according to the New Zealander, the bar was where Kemal Lekić was most likely to be. In the boat-hire hut, he had told Anya if she did recognise his colleague, she’d probably seen him at Chuck’s Place. Because his colleague was called Chuck. And this was Chuck’s place. Now she was beginning to doubt what she had seen on the skiff. Kemal standing up, capping the petrol can and stepping back over to the speedboat. The smell of petrol, an unwashed vest and unwashed skin. When she tried to recall the moment, Anya couldn’t quite see Kemal’s face. She had been unable to move, unable to even speak; the speedboat disappearing, the curtain of the lagoon closing behind it. Afterwards, they had chugged back to the shore, William complaining and Anya unable to explain to him her haste. On the beach, William was busy tying up the boat. She told him she would go ahead and retrieve the deposit from the hire hut. Anya didn’t want William there. She wasn’t yet sure of what had just happened. When the New Zealander appeared from behind the bead curtains, she discovered she had no clue what she was going to ask. She couldn’t very well ask where his colleague was. Even worse to ask him directly who his colleague was. Then she remembered Bogdan, the uncomfortable man in Stovnik. And how far instinct had taken her then.
‘Did I recognise your friend from somewhere?’ she finally said.
In a booth at the windows, a group of expats wearing Santa hats raised a toast. A couple with snow-white hair slow-danced by the saloon doors to the toilets. The place was a local favourite apparently, big with the expats, especially the English and Germans. But if Kemal Lekić owned the bar, Anya suddenly thought – rather than just working here – it didn’t necessarily mean he would be here.
When Will returned with the blue cocktails, he placed a packet of Camel Lights on the barrel top.
‘Oh my God, I haven’t smoked in years,’ Anya said.
‘Me neither.’
She picked up the packet and turned it in her hands. It seemed smaller than she remembered cigarette packets to be.
‘They don’t put the warning messages about a “slow and painful death” on the packets here,’ Will said, ‘so they can’t be too bad for you.’
Anya pushed the cigarettes across the table. ‘You’re really going to?’
Will took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know now,’ he said. ‘They just seemed to call to me from behind the bar.’
‘I always associate smoking with Kraków,’ she said.
‘Me too!’
‘Walking through the botanical gardens in the middle of winter and trying to take arty photographs. Do you remember I took a whole series of photos just of feet?’
‘I remember you developing them back at university.’
‘Actually developing film!’
‘When I think of smoking, I think of the apartment – your cousin’s place.’
A silence fell as they shared the memory. His head at one end of a pillow, hers at the other. It could have been any number of pillows in any number of places they lived.
‘It’s good to see you, Will,’ she said. And she thought of telling him everything then; of telling him about Ljuba Crvenović, and the policeman in Stovnik, and her visit to Vesna Knežević, her bumbling mistakes, and how they nearly put a man’s life in danger. But that was her work. And wasn’t it her work which had come between them? Instead, she excused herself, and stepped around the dancing couple on her way to the toilet.
Anya slipped off the holiday Havaianas, felt the cool tiles beneath her feet, found her posture and focused on the centring technique she had been taught in a class Dignity Monitor provided for employees on an away weekend. It hadn’t been long after the split with Will when the stress started to show. They said she was working too hard. She shouldn’t have allowed herself to take on too much. The incredible thing was she hadn’t connected it to William. The split itself had been something they both decided on, a decision she had partly made (although she suspected it was more his). They agreed on much. They had been together as long as many a married couple, and from such a young age too. They had changed so much in that time. They were not the same people they were when they were eighteen. The year of their break-up had been the same summer she visited Bosnia. The same summer she visited Ljuba and began to fuck things up. Anya was a researcher, not an investigator. But her country expertise had begun (somewhat serendipitously) with a master’s dissertation entitled: ‘Rape as a Weapon of War: The Balkan Conflicts – 1992–5’. She had intended to study child soldiers in Angola, but the Conflict Resolution professor at Cardiff had a research project plugged into the war-crimes tribunals at The Hague, and said he felt better qualified to assess something with a Balkan orientation. As the trials at The Hague began to unfold, there had been an urgency in studying the social psychology of specific war-crimes. ‘The systemisation of rape in brigade cultures and their impact upon strategic military success in war. Case studies from the Bosnian conflict, 1992–5.’
It was a PhD title she had spent endless tutorials refining. Towards the end of her study, she had made her first field trip to Bosnia, to the site of a ‘rape camp’ which turned out to be an unremarkable-looking home in the coal-mining hills outside Foča. Weeds grew tall in the slopes of the garden and the noonday sun made mirrors of the windows. Sitting in a small field above a farm road, the house looked like any one of the hundreds-of-thousands of homes dotting the slopes of Bosnia, but as she reached the end of the path beaten in the grass, Anya noticed the glass in the windows was cracked, the ‘curtains’ no more than cloth and rags, strung up as if to hide a shame. The black marks of a recent fire licked the frame of the front door. Someone had made a pathetic attempt to burn the place down.
In 1992, the Muslim owner of the house had lived in Germany. When the Serbs of the village organised to kill and expel the Muslim population, Nusret Karaman’s home was one of the many properties appropriated by Chetnik soldiers who ran their operations from the motel just down the road.
Anya would never forget being in the house. She would always be able to smell the bad breath of the fire’s destruction, the air which felt as if it had most of the oxygen sucked out of it. Beyond the ground floor, the walls and floors had survived. An abandoned fridge against the unplastered walls. A room of broken parquet where tartan rugs and Turkish carpets were lined up in military fashion over the floor, as if the bodies sleeping on them had only just left. A kitchen unit covered with vinyl table cloth, and empty plastic bottles knitted together with spider’s webs. A frying pan on the floor.
The women had been forced to cook and clean. When there were jobs in the village to be done, a room to be painted, sheets to be washed, they were taken from the house under supervision, and returned again at night. If they did not follow their orders they were beaten. Some of the women were not women. They were twelve-year-old girls, taken from the local school and shared among the soldiers. Testimony at The Hague told of how the soldiers liked in particular to identify mothers and their daughters – how they liked to sw
ap them between each other.
When Anya stepped out of Karaman’s house, the sloping field seemed to scroll beneath her feet. She thought she would never reach the road. When she did, she doubled over, hands on her knees, waiting for her balance to return. The sun burned on her neck. When she could stand straight again, the house was still standing. It was just another house in white plaster, three floors and a red tile roof. Like the one no more than fifty metres away. People lived next door to this house and knew. It was the silence that had spooked her. Inside the house was a terrible silence. Inside the house nothing but her own breathing.
There were plenty of witnesses at The Hague. The UN staff working in the region had called Karaman’s house the ‘Miljevina Bordello’. The women here, the women at the Partisan Sports Hall right next to Miljevina’s police station, and the women kept at a number of other houses in these hills – what happened to them had happened beneath the same bright sun hanging over the village that day of Anya’s visit. Before then, Bosnia had only existed in the shimmering and colourless images of deteriorated video-cam footage viewed in a library. Footage which made another world of a place which belonged to this. It had taken Anya four hours to get to Miljevina from Heathrow. The taxi driver from Sarajevo had asked her whether she knew the Spice Girls. It had all happened four hours away. And as the taxi drove her back to Sarajevo through Bosnia’s green and beautiful hills, every white plaster house with a red tile roof seemed to look at her with the same black silence.
A toilet flushed. Anya opened her eyes to the clam shells stuck in the flimsy planks of the toilet stall. Taps running. The washing of hands. She shouldn’t have interfered. It was not her job to pursue allegations of war crimes. In Bosnia, every town, even Sarajevo, was a small place. Everyone knew everyone’s business. Ljuba had been through the channels available. She had reported the crime to the Serbian police, and the Serbian police had requested the assistance of Stovnik’s police. Stovnik’s police had returned no evidence for indictment, the missing persons’ case had been logged and there it was. Done. If Anya could do anything more, it was to report Ljuba’s story, with her consent, to an organisation compiling data on such events. There had been no need for Anya to drop in on the investigating policeman, and the first conversation she had with Bogdan Banović should have persuaded anyone, with any sense, to steer clear of the whole mess. She did not doubt Bogdan’s sympathy for Ljuba’s situation. He had explained how Emina, his sister-in-law, was herself registered missing, his cousin’s wife too. Bogdan told Anya he had offered every assistance to the Serbian police, and interviewed all the members of the brigade who had been at the aluminium factory where Ljuba alleged the offences took place. The brigade had even kept a list of all the displaced individuals who passed through and entered into their protection over those four days, and Ljuba, along with the missing women, was on that list. But Bogdan was a deeply uncomfortable-looking man. Everything about him seemed to resist what he was saying.