by David Savill
She raises the question in her eyes. ‘What?’
Vesna and Kemal in the basement of the apartment block. She doesn’t know he was there. She has never known he was there. How can he ask her now? The girl who wants to forget everything? Did Kemal rape those women? Did Kemal rape you? Was everything about our war a lie?
‘Marko?’
‘I saw the guys last night,’ he begins again. ‘Samir, Elvis, Bogdan.’
‘Oh.’
‘Apparently there was an English woman. Some investigation into crimes committed at a camp in Ladina.’
Vesna is shaking her head. She leans forward to crush her cigarette into Tito’s face. ‘And you believe that?’ she says. ‘God, Marko. I would have thought it was a relief to know he didn’t die in the shelling. At least you can stop feeling responsible. He didn’t die in the shelling. Therefore it wasn’t your fault. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’
‘It was never my fault.’
‘Because you were such a good friend to him.’
Her wrist is in his hand. He is holding it over the table.
‘Do you know what happened?’
‘Let go of me, Marko.’
He can feel her pulse at his fingers. ‘I can’t believe you aren’t even going to the funeral.’
She pulls again. ‘I already buried him. So did you.’
Marko lets go. She holds her wrist like someone stung.
‘You still have that temper!’
Marko places his hands on his lap.
‘Well, tell everyone I love them.’ Vesna stands up and gathers her bag. And before Marko can think of what to say, she is standing at the kerb outside of the café, waiting for the traffic to pass.
Poipet
In the hotel bedroom, William flicks through television channels. EuroNews. Stock exchanges. CNN. A pack of hyenas. The screen unwinds a rope of images he can’t quite grasp. He wants something to stop and enter him, to take him over. Whatever it was in the taxi. But nothing is enough. And Anya still isn’t speaking to him.
The dugong. That is what William had been. A cold, heavy mammal, lying in the red earth of the mangrove roots. Except it had taken only one man to pull William out. They had run from the bar. Breathless in the street. Swimming in the street. Drowning. Afterwards, the man picked William out of the mud. He had a bike, a lime-green moped, and when William climbed onto the back of the bike, he was practically naked. They switched around the tears in the road, around refrigerators, the mess of surfboards, the broken hull of a boat. William thought his leg broken, or deeply cut, but would later learn he’d escaped the wave with only scratches. The sensation of pain in his leg was the skin of his calf burning on the hot metal tank of the bike’s engine.
Just a burn, the doctor told him in the hospital. Superficial. You seem to be fine.
Just a burn.
The man who rescued William was taken away on the arm of a male nurse. He had driven the bike thirty-two kilometres down the broken coast road with a straight back and straight arms, and now he seemed incapable of even standing up. A nurse bandaged William’s calf, and gave him antibiotics and painkillers. When he woke on the floor of the hospital corridor, he was only one of many patients sleeping there. A woman came and gave William a pair of tracksuit bottoms – Fila, black with a white stripe down the seam. St Mary’s Immaculate Phuket. Blue words across her yellow T-shirt. William couldn’t move his leg. He couldn’t move. He sat on the floor of the hospital corridor watching the photocopied pictures go up on the walls. ZOLTAN MOLL. 33 years old. 1.89 metres. Hungarian. Khao Lak Resort. The pixelated Hungarian man, already disappearing in his own picture.
It had slowly dawned on William that Anya might become a picture too.
In the bathroom of the hotel, William kneels on the cold floor. Casino Poipet. The words crawling across the tiles. He heaves before he reaches the toilet bowl, steps around the vomit and splashes water over his face.
When he knocks on the door in the hotel corridor, it is not Missy who answers. It is a very short man with pink skin, a monk’s pate and rectangular spectacles over a drunk’s strawberry nose.
The wrong door. Not the door down, but the door up.
William knocks again and Missy opens it, just a crack at first.
‘William?’
‘Would it be possible to talk to you?’
‘Yes,’ she says. She winces in the light. He has woken her. ‘Give me a minute.’
The door closes, leaving him with only the buzz of a soft-drinks machine. When Missy opens the door again, she shuts it behind her and stands in the corridor doing up the buttons of her shorts.
This is not what he meant. Not here.
‘I haven’t talked to anyone before,’ he says.
‘Right. You want to go to your room?’
He thinks about the mess in the bathroom. ‘What about yours?’
She looks at him. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Wait right there.’
She closes the bedroom door again, and for a moment there is still a chance to walk away, but then the door opens and he is stepping in. The bed is neatly made, as if the place had never been occupied. There is a faint smell of sick in the air. When he sits on the dressing-table chair, William realises the smell of sick is him.
In one swift knotting, Missy climbs onto the end of the bed, bare feet on the purple duvet, and knees beneath her chin. The knees are distractingly pink.
‘About the tsunami?’ she says.
‘It took me by surprise.’ William finds himself smiling at the mistake. ‘Not the tsunami, I mean, obviously that. But I mean I hadn’t spoken to anyone about it until tonight. It took me by surprise.’
‘Right,’ Missy says.
He looks at her toes, how long they are. Her strangeness. How utterly alien she is. Her otherness.
He doesn’t know this woman at all.
‘It feels like—’ He pushes his eyes into the heels of his palms. ‘There are things I don’t want to forget.’
‘You didn’t tell us much – I mean, you talked about the man rescuing you but you also mentioned your girlfriend. And you didn’t really – talk about that.’
William shakes his head. ‘I couldn’t find her, afterwards. I think I fell asleep in the hospital, for almost twelve hours. Apparently it was the shock.’
‘She wasn’t in the hospital?’
‘I thought the man who found me might have seen her. But it only occurred to me afterwards, after I’d been back to the resort and to the temples. You see, I think the guy who rescued me was this guy Anya had been with on the beach. This guy at the bar. But I never went to the hospital to find him. I should have done that. Maybe he knew what happened to her.’
‘You said you went to look for her, at the temples?’
‘That’s where they were keeping the bodies they found.’
‘And the man wasn’t in the hospital?’
‘No.’
William is about to explain when something shatters. Glass falling on a hard floor. He startles, but it is nothing in the room. The noise has come from the bathroom. Missy’s eyes are pinned on William, unsure whether to acknowledge the sound. Then her face screws up, a child who knows she has done wrong. ‘Sorry . . .’
The bathroom door opens. It is Henry.
‘Sorry.’ Henry tiptoes around the bed, naked from the waist up, holding his hands in the air like a surrendering cowboy. When he has closed the bedroom door, Missy apologises again.
‘What is everyone saying sorry for?’
‘Just go on,’ she pleads.
But he can’t.
On official visits Tito was known for asking children, ‘do you work hard in school?’ Born into communism, the children of Yugoslavia were its new people, unburdened by the past.
‘It is only the dead who do not lie, but they have no credibility.’
Dubravka Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies, translated by Celia Hawkesworth
14 September 1994
Stovnik
Most of them knew the Panorama Bistro from childhood weekends spent walking in the hills. They remembered ice cream in tall glasses, and mutton sandwiches from a roasting spit. The restaurant marked the closest to Stovnik the Chetniks had ever come. But none of them had seen what the Chetniks had done. They saw it now, as the coach slowly rounded the hairpin curve in which the restaurant was caught.
Only a single concrete wall remained, bones of twisted steel breaking from the top. The wall stood on the concrete foundations where the restaurant used to be. All that remained now – an oven door, broken chairs and the frames of windows scattered in the surrounding trees, as if a giant’s hand had reached out of the forest, and dragged the building away.
The graffiti on the wall read:
The boys sat back in their seats, Marko next to Vesna. The radio squealed between frequencies. It was the first time Marko wondered whether it was all a good idea. They had come to know what a ceasefire was. Ceasefires were not a silence on the battlefield. Ceasefires were not still moments in which people took stock. Ceasefires were a break in play, the clock still ticking on the ceasefire business to be done. Ceasefires were a time when coaches huddled around to devise new strategies, when subs limbered up, and prepared to take the field. Troops moved in the hills, and reinforced their positions. Politicians, and international peaceniks, used ceasefires to show the world the country was capable of supporting ‘normal life’. The more ‘normal’ a life they could demonstrate, the more the Americans and Europeans pushed for the ceasefire to be maintained. In this particular ceasefire, Bosnia’s district judo tournament would take place. Moreover, it would take place in Sarajevo. The big idea was this: for the first time in three years, teenagers from all over Bosnia would come together, united by the spirit of sport, in the country’s threatened capital. Except so far, for the boys from Stovnik, a journey which should have taken twenty minutes, had taken two hours.
‘Look,’ Vesna pointed out of the window. The forests were suddenly beneath them, mountain peaks flat and unremarkable against a white morning sky. Marko didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking at. Then he saw what Vesna saw. Nothing and everything: Majevica. Their mountain. The humpback whale and foothill tail they had lived and slept and dreamed under. Only now the whale appeared to be turning and swimming away. Staring at the other side of the mountain, the side they hadn’t seen in more than two years, Marko felt Vesna’s breath on the back of his neck, and wanted to kiss her.
‘When you get there, you don’t lose sight of her.’ Kemal had put his hands on Marko’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length. He had called his friend a Croat cunt, and Marko had called him a Muslim pussy. There was something about Kemal these days. His fingers too deep in the tendons of Marko’s shoulders, the jokes with a sharper edge. Kemal had not been himself since he returned from the front that summer. He had shaved his head, lost weight, developed a habit of sniffing and pulling on his nose between every sentence. At first Marko had wondered whether it was drugs. He’d even hoped it was drugs, and not the other thing. Not the thing happening to so many of the older boys he knew. Not the light going out. It was a great sadness to admit to himself. Some small part of him was relieved to be getting out of the same room as Kemal, if only for a few days.
‘Fuck off then.’ As the coach engine started up, Kemal had put his hand on Marko’s head and turned him towards the boy with the camera.
The radio finally found Dino Merlin singing ‘Šta ti značim ja’ and at the front of the bus, the team’s coach joined in. Out of tune, the boys began to follow. When they hit the straight road across the floor of the next valley, the clouds broke, and fields of tall corn opened up on either side of them. These were the valleys where fighting was easy. In the village of Kosočić, the burned-out farmhouses and holiday homes of Bosnian Muslims stood next to the untouched homes of Bosnian Serbs. In Edrava, the burned-out homes of Bosnian Serbs stood next to the untouched homes of Muslims.
‘Sta ti znacim ja!’ The boys in the coach sang, ‘Sta ti znacim ja!’
In the village of Zabor, on every remaining wall, someone had scrawled:
The village of Boronca had been plagued with swastikas, and on the side of the school building, someone had written:
On the flats in Isidor, in surprisingly educated handwriting, the graffiti delivered its joke, on each successive building:
‘Sarajevo!’ the boys sang. ‘Ljubavi moja!’
When they came to the Losa River, the paved road ended in a pile of broken tarmac where the coach turned onto a dirt track, no more than a widened path clinging to the side of a gorge. Around the town of Kacko, the fields were taped off with black skulls and crossbones, warning landmines had been laid in the area.
‘Ljubavi moja!’ the boys sang. ‘Sarajevo!’
The singing in the coach only stopped when they reached a roadblock outside Vilnik, the boys struck by the sight of a tank not in a convoy heading out of Stovnik, or parked at a barracks, but actually standing in the road with the long, dark tunnel of its gun barrel pointed directly at them. UNPROFOR.
Coach Edo told the boys to stay in their seats, and climbed down to talk to one of the blue helmets at the side of the road.
‘We’re only at Vilnik,’ Vesna whispered to Marko. ‘My father said he’d be at the airport from three o’clock.’
‘He’ll wait,’ Marko whispered.
‘What if it isn’t safe to wait?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll sort things out.’ Marko knew this is what Kemal would say.
Vesna grinned. ‘How will you sort things out?’
Marko smiled. ‘I don’t know!’
And suddenly they were both giggling.
‘Why are we whispering?’
‘I don’t know!’
The doors opened, and Coach Edo climbed back on, to the applause of the boys. The barrel of the gun swung to the side of the road and pointed at the empty fields.
At Vilnik bus station, the boys lined up to relieve themselves in the overgrown grass next to a basketball court in which a Yugo sat, upside down, slam-dunked onto its roof. ‘First one to hit a landmine!’ one of the boys said. Another set the challenge of using their streams to spell Fuck the Chetniks in the air, each boy a different letter.
After peeing, the boys ran to buy chocolate from the stalls in front of the bus station, and Marko sat down at a picnic table to wait for Vesna. The only girl in the group, she had disappeared into the clearing behind the kiosk that used to sell ice creams in the times when day-trippers stopped here. He wouldn’t have noticed this particular graffiti, if he wasn’t waiting. It wasn’t painted three metres high on apartment blocks or sprayed in giant letters across the walls of farmhouses. It was scratched into the edges of the picnic table, among the names of football teams and young lovers:
‘Where’s Vesna?’ It was Coach Edo at the door of the bus. Marko was the only boy not yet on.
‘I saw where she went,’ Marko told him.
The wooden kiosk stood at the edge of the picnic clearing, sides plastered with stickers for Ledo Bears and Sputnik Rockets and strawberry-milk mice. At first sight, the kiosk looked open for business, and as Marko approached, he heard a buzzing sound, as though inside the hut there were some loose electric connection. The glass in the hatch of the kiosk had been smashed, and the sides were splintered with the kind of holes made by a sniper’s rifle.
‘Vesna?’
A breeze twitched the ears of long
grass around his shins. ‘Vesna, the coach is leaving!’
‘Marko?’ Vesna’s voice came. ‘I can’t move.’
Marko stepped into the grass. He had heard enough of Kemal’s stories to know a person who steps on a landmine is dead not when they put their foot on the pressure plate, but when they take their foot off.
Her voice sounded distant. ‘Can you come here?’
Marko looked at the foot he had just planted in the grass. He pressed down. The ground beneath felt solid. He could see a clear patch of soil and placed his left foot into it. There had been none of the tape with the skulls and crossbones they had seen at the side of the road, but it didn’t mean he trusted the earth.
‘What do you mean you can’t move?’ he said.
‘Just come here!’
He couldn’t place it. There was something wrong with the sound of her voice. It was smaller somehow, farther away than it should have been.
‘Now, Marko!’
Marko took another step, and turned the corner at the back of the kiosk.
She was a good twenty metres away, crouched down in the overgrown grass.
‘Have you finished?’
‘Could you come here?’ Vesna wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the back of the kiosk. The grass had been beaten into a path but Marko still took delicate steps.
‘What’s up?’
‘I know I can move,’ Vesna said. ‘But I can’t.’
The breeze picked up again, and the tops of the trees behind Vesna trembled. Marko smelled the vomit, still steaming next to her.
‘You feel sick?’
Then he turned to see what she saw. He saw the woman’s face first. It was sliced by the light through the half-open door of the kiosk; her head resting on her shoulder and her eyes frozen in fear. His first instinct was to hold out a conciliatory palm. He did not want her to be afraid. But he stopped before the words left his mouth. And then the small hand of a breeze pushed open the kiosk door.
She was sitting on the concrete floor, back against the ice-cream refrigerator, and head bent beneath the hatch. Naked from the waist down, the woman held her knees, pulling her legs open as if she had been asked to show herself. The breeze dropped, and the door cast its shadow again.