They are Trying to Break Your Heart

by David Savill

  ‘You don’t keep lists of the women you rape,’ Bogdan said. He had chain-smoked Camel cigarettes, screwing them into the ashtray with his yellow fingers. He had arranged to meet outside of his workplace, in a café on one of the estates in the upper town.

  ‘Even if Kemal had done these things he is dead,’ Bogdan said.

  She found him hard to look at. His discomfort catching. On the wall behind him, the face of Tito grinned over the wide lapels of a white suit, teeth biting down on the end of a pipe.

  ‘Even if he had?’

  To Anya’s surprise, Bogdan had only shrugged and told her you could never be sure.

  Washing her hands in Kemal Lekić’s sinks, Anya tried to remember exactly how Bogdan had said this. Exactly what made her think he believed Kemal was guilty. But the moment escaped her. She remembered more clearly how Bogdan had been staring over her shoulder when he told her he had to leave. She had looked to the street outside but seen no one. She didn’t have to see anyone to know he was a frightened man.

  The hand dryer startled her. It was one of the expat women, tipsy in a Santa Claus hat.

  ‘This is a great place,’ Anya said.

  The woman smiled. Ruddy cheeks. In her fifties perhaps.

  ‘We’re on holiday. Are you local?’

  ‘Nurse.’ The woman had a northern English accent that twisted Anya’s nerve for home. ‘Local hospital.’

  ‘Is this place run by expats then?’

  The woman held her wet hands out in front of her like a surgeon waiting for scrubs. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Owner’s from – Balkans or somewhere, I think. Croatia, is that the place?’

  The bathroom door opened, and someone disappeared into the stall behind them.

  ‘Chuck’s place.’ Anya smiled. ‘Which one’s Chuck?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be out doing the fireworks. For after.’ The woman wiped her hands on her skirt, head down and feet planted apart to keep herself upright. ‘You have a good one.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Anya said. But she was already beginning to feel like none of this was her business. She shouldn’t be there unbidden, doing the work of an investigator. The emptiness of the rape-camp house again, telling her she was just a voyeur in all this, a tourist in other people’s lives. When Anya stepped up to the hand dryer, the nurse stopped, and turned at the bathroom door.

  ‘The fireworks are always great,’ she said. ‘If you’re on holiday. Up the beach. You know – I mean, you don’t know. But in front of Chuck’s house. You’ll find it. Follow the crowd.’

  Another couple were sitting at the barrel she had occupied with Will. Will was outside, his face pressed up against the window. He mugged, squashing his nose against the glass, and puffing out his cheeks. Miming drunkenness, Will swayed on his feet, waving the unlit cigarette like a magician’s wand.

  It was almost as warm outside as inside. Beneath the moon and the fairy lights, a choir sang on the beach. Not a bad choir at all but a good choir; expats and local faces, three-part harmony filling ‘Good King Wenceslas’ like a sail. Anya sat down next to William on the top step. Over a black sea, the moon rolled a flickering ribbon of light.

  ‘Go on,’ Anya said to William. ‘You’ve gone to the trouble of buying a lighter.’ He had the cigarette in one hand, the brand-new lighter in the other. She watched as he put the cigarette between his lips and brought the flame to its tip.

  He didn’t cough. He sat up and pulled his chin into his chest. ‘Jesus,’ he finally exhaled, ‘that is not what I remember.’

  Anya took the cigarette. It felt too big between her fingers, and the filter unpleasantly dry between her lips. The smoke was hot. She kept it in her mouth, afraid to take it in. Then she found it coming out of her nose, her eyes stinging.

  ‘I used to do this like, twenty times a day,’ William said, taking the cigarette.

  ‘I don’t think it’s doing it for me.’

  To her surprise, he took another long drag.

  The aftertaste did recall something of her cousin’s flat, the place they had stayed on a pull-out sofa. Her cousin had gone to Warsaw to take an intensive English course. William and Anya had spent long mornings on the sofa-bed. They had curled up through the winter beneath heavy blankets, the cigarette smoke and heat of a portable gas fire.

  ‘That dog!’ She sat up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That dog you were talking about. The Jack Russell with the wheels. I do remember now! We went out into Nowa Huta! For the gas fire!’

  ‘Yes.’ He put his arm over her shoulders and it seemed to draw a silence around them. For a moment she was too nervous to look at him. She looked at the choir, at the sea, then slowly let her head rest against his shoulder.

  ‘I was in Kosovo this year,’ she told him. ‘We’re producing a report on the Serb returnees.’

  ‘Like you did in Bosnia?’

  ‘Did you hear about the riots?’

  ‘No.’ William held the cigarette out in front of him, the filter pinched in his fingertips, the butt pointing straight up. He turned it like a botanist holding some rare flower; idle and happy, full of wonder.

  ‘I wonder what it’s all for sometimes,’ she said. ‘We’re all over the place but when it comes down to it – when it came to the riots no one could actually DO anything.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to do anything, are you?’ William asked. ‘Isn’t that the point? You’re neutral.’

  ‘We report things that have happened, after they have happened. Sometimes I think that’s no good to anyone at all. It doesn’t seem to stop people.’

  ‘Lessons learned,’ William said. ‘At least that’s what you always told me. You help people learn the lessons of things.’

  ‘Sometimes I think they should just sort out their own fucking mess and we should all go back to minding our own business.’

  ‘This is not the woman who lectured me on the global interdependence of our economies and the declining powers of sovereign governments.’ William’s hand had found the small of her back. ‘You haven’t changed, have you?’ he said.

  ‘It’s like Poland. I so desperately wanted to be where it was happening. To be there while history was being made. Anyone who actually lived there wanted to get out. That’s a kind of disaster tourism, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s getting involved. Getting yourself involved with people. I think it’s brilliant.’

  ‘I think I must be sick. A bit twisted.’

  ‘But that’s the worst kind of liberal bleeding heart right there,’ William said. ‘You do a job. I think you should just get on with it. Get stuck in. Doesn’t matter what your motivations are.’

  She had certainly been stuck in with Bogdan Banović. After Stovnik she had heard from him one more time. Her mobile had rung in the taxi between Vesna Knežević’s house and Sarajevo airport. Her head was already filling with the consequences of her amateurism. You were seen with Vesna Knežević, Bogdan said. The fear in his voice. Didn’t Anya realise how difficult this could make things? Didn’t she realise people would connect her visit to Vesna with her visit to him?

  Anya had known Banović was jumpy. She knew policemen charged with investigating war crimes could be put in a very difficult position. But in her ignorance, she hadn’t realised the danger might spread to her. Who had seen her in Sarajevo? How? She had always suspected it might have been Banović himself. If he were really so nervous, it would make sense to follow her, just to make sure she left the country without causing any more trouble.

  Her eyes walked up the path laid by the moon. The more she stared, the more the flickering slowed, like a strip of film spooling to its end. They had their arms around each other again. William and Anya. It was how it always had been. Her fingers hovered with uncertainty above the cotton T-shirt hanging over his hip bone. It seemed too forward to hold his hand.

  ‘William?’

  ‘I used to feel sometimes you forgot about me though. When you were off working. On one of your foreign trips.’
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  He rubbed her hair with his knuckles, like a father who can’t quite express their love for a child. This, instead of a kiss. He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t even sound sad. Just sort of wistful, and nostalgic. Anya closed her eyes. The voices of the choir were so round, so full, she could lean against the sound. When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.

  Saturday 9 April 2005

  Poipet

  In keeping with the intimate scale of the Holiday Poipet, our casino is both comfortable and compact. William reads this on a poster in the hotel lift. You’ll find its oval layout convenient and cosy. The central area gives way to tables where popular card games are played. The type of slot machines changes regularly, and we offer both the classic fruit machines types and the new cutting-edge machines with sophisticated LED displays and sound effects. He drinks up, and in the elevator bin, disposes of the last minibar bottle. There were no trousers his length, but William has bought new underwear, and a new shirt. When the doors open, he walks into a room of soft carpet and muzak. At the desk he asks for the restaurant. The woman tells him there are three restaurants along the corridor. He can choose from Japanese, Thai and Korean. Missy had said she would meet him in the Japanese restaurant.

  ‘Do you have a pen and paper?’ he asks. The receptionist passes him a notepad with the hotel’s letterhead, and he writes:

  ‘The type of slot machines changes’

  Change to: ‘The type of slot machine changes’

  ‘Your copywriters can change this.’ He underlines the incorrect noun, ‘so that the singular form of “machine”, agrees with the singular “type”. And then, keep the plural form of “changes” and “machines”, after the words “cutting-edge”.’

  In the hotel corridor, William passes a hairdresser’s where two Thai women in coral-pink pyjama suits perch on stools. He walks on past an Internet lounge, a convenience store and the doors to the casino. The corridor splits in two, the sign for the restaurants pointing right. When he reaches it, the Japanese restaurant is a large, low-ceilinged hall, with marble floors. Beneath bright chandeliers, an island buffet of gleaming silver domes sparkles next to perfectly set tables.

  ‘Welcome, sir.’ It is a woman who looks exactly like the woman at the reception desk. ‘Please to help you dining this evening?’

  ‘I’m expecting someone.’

  William looks over the empty restaurant and assumes he must be early.

  ‘How many so, sir?’

  ‘Just two of us.’

  The woman seats him at a table facing a Japanese mural of old men in pastel robes. Sensei, William thinks (although he does not know whether they are, or even exactly what the word sensei means). The sensei kneel among mountain boulders, holding out their hands to a sun represented by a balled-up fish hanging over temple walls. Now he is sitting still, William has a feeling everything is moving around him.

  It is the rain streaming down the wall of glass.

  ‘A drink?’ Another woman who looks like the last.

  ‘I would, yes – maybe a beer. A Tiger?’

  She leaves him. He closes his eyes for a second. It had all seemed like a nightmare, but now he can count it as an achievement. Something he has survived. The drive, the border, Angkor Wat, the taxi and the rain. Today he left Thailand and visited one of the great wonders of the world. He walked among thousands of strangers. He allowed himself to be driven through a monsoon. All thanks to an American woman without a visa. Perhaps he even made the clerical mistake deliberately, left something undone in his work, some loose end to trip himself up; his subconscious looking desperately for a means of slapping him in the face. William is drunk. And it feels just marvellous. He opens his eyes. The window of the restaurant looks on to a courtyard of some kind. Soft lights spot a limestone path and the branches of a small tree rock in the wind. Across the courtyard, he can see the glass wall of another room, not empty but full; a bar, coffee tables, sofas, sulphurous light. The rain on the glass keeps rearranging what he sees, dribbles people, drops them, runs them together. He has always found comfort in rain. Because of the rain, they are still in Cambodia; the road was a rapid and the cars crawling. Something had come over him afterwards, in the back of the taxi, his clothes sticking to him. Something had mysteriously left him, like it had on the beach that first day after the wave. Not a moment of horror, but a moment of wonder.

  The rain had lifted and given them some hope of reaching the Visa Office on time; traffic gathering speed as they reached the shacks and boathouses on the edge of Poipet. But as they neared the Visa Office the taxi stopped. There was a wide load ahead. A long white bone on the truck bed. Like a dinosaur find. A mammoth’s tusk. Although no mammoth was ever this big. When it eventually turned off the main road, the vehicle became stuck on the turn. Not a truck, but a long, open trailer bed. Three, six, nine – William counted – twelve sets of wheels.

  ‘Wind turbine,’ Missy said. ‘You see them going through Jersey to the coast.’

  When the turbine finally resolved the turn, the rain started again, and by the time they reached the town, the Visa Office had closed. They would not be returning to Bangkok tonight. In his room, William had started drinking.

  He wipes at the window with the back of his arm. But of course, all the water is on the other side of the glass and he can make things no clearer. Where is Missy? They are supposed to be meeting for dinner. He had finished three bottles from the minibar to get himself through it.

  ‘Your beer, sir.’ The woman places a paper napkin on the table, and the cold beer on top of it. ‘To buffet please help yourself.’

  William stops himself from correcting her. ‘What’s that?’ He points across the courtyard. ‘Is that another restaurant?’

  ‘The bar. The restaurant is closing twenty minutes sir – last service only.’

  William touches his wrist but there is no watch. No mobile phone in his pocket either.

  ‘But what time is it?’ he asks the woman.

  ‘Nearly twelve, sir,’ the woman says. ‘We close at midnight.’

  Sunday 10 April 2005

  Sarajevo

  While waiting on the street in Sarajevo, Marko turns on his phone for the first time in two days. Texts from Emeka. Cover to be arranged for tomorrow. T-Mobile roaming charges. Three missed calls from Millie.

  He watches the windows of the travel company across the street, and dials her.

  ‘There you are,’ Millie says. ‘I thought you’d gone AWOL.’

  Her voice is perfectly clear, no distance, just as if he were calling her from the other side of town.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘OK. I know you can look after yourself.’ He can hear her breathe. She is walking.

  Over the road, something catches Marko’s eye. He has been here for twenty minutes, and now he sees her. It is a woman in the tourist office. She has dyed red hair. She is working a photocopy machine.

  ‘So how is it?’ Millie says. ‘Bosnia? Like you remember?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s the first time you’ve been back, isn’t it? What about your friends? Your cousin – did he meet you?’

  ‘Samir.’

  ‘The hero’s return!’

  ‘I’m not a hero.’

  ‘No – I don’t mean it like that. You know what I mean.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re walking somewhere.’

  ‘I’m just along the Backs.’ She has stopped. He imagines her beneath the long avenue of tall trees past King’s field, the walk from the English library to the bridge at the College. The iron gates thick with coats of black paint that have been applied one over the other, year after year after year.

  Across the street, the woman with dyed red hair has finished with the photocopier. It might be her. It is definitely the right company, the one on the website. BHTourism. It had taken him a moment to realise the hoardings are in English, not Bosnian.


  Bosnia, The Heart-Shaped Land.

  ‘Guess who I saw today,’ Millie is saying.

  ‘The funeral’s tomorrow,’ Marko says. ‘I should be coming back after that.’

  ‘Should be? Tempted to become a fully paid up Bosnian again?’ She is joking, but there is a nervousness too.

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘I’m only joking,’ Millie says. ‘The chicken we bought last week goes off on Tuesday, I wanted to do a proper dinner with it. I hate cooking for myself.’

  He could kiss her. ‘And I can’t miss my Tuesday class,’ he says.

  ‘It’s only two hours, isn’t it? I keep telling myself that. And it’s not dangerous any more. Is it?’