They are Trying to Break Your Heart

by David Savill

  The woman’s eyes didn’t move. They were fixed on the space between her legs. Her mouth hung open and her lips were black. Her skin was as white as flour. The baby’s head had split her in two, its face closed as tight as a fist, one shoulder loose, black with dried blood. The floor danced in neat, sudden squares. Flies. Marko sank down until he squatted in the grass next to Vesna, his eyes level with the woman. No woman at all. Little more than a village girl, a faint moustache of puberty on her upper lip.

  Marko took Vesna’s hand and pulled her up. Stumbling back to the coach he was falling; falling and Vesna trailing after him. The feeling he had diving off the cliffs at Lake Borače.

  They would tell Coach Edo. There was nothing to be done for the girl but someone should be told. Tripping onto the steps of the bus, Marko opened his mouth but instead of anything coming out, his ears were filled with the din of wolf whistles and whooping.

  ‘Nice move, Marko!’ One of the boys led the calls.

  They clapped him on the back and pushed him down the aisle.

  ‘You guys deserve the back seat!’

  ‘Hey – Marko – Kemal’s going to cut your dick off!’

  A wave of arms pushed them to the rear of the coach, the team crowding in and clapping, stomping a rhythm until Edo told them all to sit down and shut up. Marko tried to swallow what he had just seen but it kept coming back. Vesna shuffled to the end of the rear seat and pressed her face up against the window. He stared at the seat in front of him. Zurab’s eyes appeared between the headrests, offering a fraternal look of sympathy. Marko turned away.

  The engine shuddered, and the coach turned around. They were back on the road, the hills moving like slow ships, taking the dead woman away.

  ‘The radio!’ one of the boys shouted. ‘Music! Give us music!’

  Christmas Night, 2004

  Kao Lak

  Anya sat in the sand. A firework glittered across the sky and popped, falling flashbulbs turning to smoke and drizzling into the sea. The last time she was at a fireworks night, it had been an English November, where explosions lit the bellies of grey clouds. Had she been with William then? She couldn’t remember. So much of her life had been with William, and being with him again seemed to erase the years alone. Time didn’t go forward, it concertinaed. All those years without William drawn out, and then pushed together. Anya was rushing to meet her past. No wonder it had ended in a collision. She had been in the kitchen filling a glass with water when he kissed her neck. She dropped the glass and it shattered in the sink.

  What are you doing?

  It didn’t seem to matter that it was what she wanted. These were the words which came out of her mouth. She didn’t move. He grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled. His hand slipped into her shorts but she stopped him.

  You don’t get to have this.

  His mouth felt like the mouth of a stranger. His neck a stranger’s neck. She turned around. It was the look on his face she wanted to see. She wanted his anger. She thought about walking out, telling him she needed to shower. He knelt down in front of her.

  What do you think you’re doing?

  On the beach, Anya sat up and held her knees. Colours shimmered on the water, magnifying the light in the sky. The night turned red. Then yellow. Then orange. Then a white so bright she had to shade her eyes.

  She didn’t quite have the willpower to hold him off. He bent her over the bed, face down. But something was wrong. He was fumbling between her legs, he was taking too long. She turned over and pulled him on top of her, determined if it was going to happen, it would happen on her terms. Then it had all gone wrong. When she pulled his cock from his trousers, it had flopped out like something shy of the light, some nervous creature disturbed from its sleep beneath a rock. The life went out of their kissing. He made an excuse to go to the bathroom. He took so long she almost thought it might be more polite to leave the bedroom.

  When he came out, he asked if she wanted a drink, and eventually she found him sitting in the lounge area, both glasses made up on the wicker coffee table, flicking through her copy of the New Republic.

  ‘I’ve lost touch with what’s going on in the world,’ he said. ‘You used to keep me up with current affairs.’

  Anya really didn’t mean to, but the innuendo was standing right there in front of them, bold as a naked man. Keeping him up. She held her hand over her mouth to stifle the laugh.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Really. It’s nothing.’

  She told William she was going to the fireworks display, but he said he didn’t fancy it. The way he turned the pages of the magazine was a mark of disapproval, and the perfect example of everything that had started to go wrong with their relationship. Not the beginning, but the end. The William who assumed his decisions would also be hers.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said. ‘If you’re still up.’

  A young couple lay among flares stuck in the sand like some ridiculous advertisement for mobile phone networks; the boy handsomely bare-chested, the girl wearing just a light shift over her bikini. Anya wrapped her arms around herself. She was cold, and old. A small fishing boat floated in the bay, disappearing in the dark, appearing again, curtained and then reborn as the smoke died over the water; Kemal Lekić lit the fireworks from its prow. Every now and then, Anya saw him stand up, bend down or walk aft, presumably to unbox another rocket. A lopsided yellow ring exploded above the bay. Another bigger, bigger still. Something dark passed through the circles, crackled into a white spray and left the glowing embers falling over their heads.

  Anya stood up and stepped back in the sand, upsetting her ankle on something. Someone’s leg.

  ‘Sorry!’

  There could have been thirty, perhaps forty people on the beach, all lying on a narrow strip of sand between the shallows and a pitch-roofed beach house on stilts. She recognised a man with a white beard from the bar, and the English nurse from the bathroom. Most of the crowd were expats, but some local boys sat in the sand on the edges of the group, and farther down, along the curve of the bay, an older Thai couple drank something steaming in paper cups. She wandered over to the steps, leaned against the wooden banisters and found herself standing over a dark-haired man in combat shorts and an orange cycling mac. A rocket whistled up. The crowd oohed. In the blue flash, Anya looked back along the beach for any sign of William. But the only silhouettes belonged to the shock-headed figures of coconut trees. When the sky darkened again, the lights of the hotel resort on the headland seemed farther away than the fifteen minutes it had taken her to walk.

  ‘Are you English?’ It was the man sitting on the step, the one in the orange cycling mac. He sounded German. ‘Do you want to sit down?’

  Anya shook her head. The sign on the banister pointed up the steps. ‘Toilet’, and next to it a sketch of the item in case there should be any confusion.

  Kemal Lekić’s toilet was in a shed on the veranda behind the house. Anya closed the door behind her, and had to open it again to find the light switch on the end of a cord. In the dim light of the naked bulb, she locked the door, sat down on the closed lid and felt her heart beating big in the small room. It all belonged to him: a toilet-paper holder, an air-freshener Buddha hanging over a small stone sink, a broken shard of mirror. She sat and listened to the fireworks shudder, the booms ricocheting through the mangroves at the back of the house. When she was a schoolgirl, Anya had trespassed on the playing fields, on a Sunday. She had climbed onto the roof of the school with a boy called James, who was from the Catholic secondary. She had always retained an absolutely perfect memory of climbing the fire escape at the side of the school building with James, before realising they would be completely visible to anyone walking down School Road or the great number of people who walked their dogs on the playing fields. On the roof, she had been using James’s penknife to scratch her name into one of the air-conditioning units when the caretaker had discovered them. This was no schoolgirl prank, but when she tried the door h
andle at the back of Kemal’s beach house, she almost expected the caretaker to catch her again.

  The door to Kemal Lekić’s house opened. Anya was entering, if not quite breaking.

  For what felt like a long time, she stood, pressing her back to the door. She watched the fireworks light the walls of the room. A red flash of bookshelves, yellow flash of a surfboard, blue flash of the beaded curtain on to a kitchen. She knew the plausibility of her excuses diminished with every step, but her feet were moving, and had found a deep-pile rug between the sofa and the chairs of a lounge. A door to her right opened on to another pitch-black room. It sounded as though the fireworks were in the house, and even when they stopped, the echo fooled her ears.

  ‘Hello?’ she called out. ‘I’m looking for the toilet – I may well be completely lost. Hello?’

  A firework cracked in response. The new room flashed green: a double bed behind a mosquito curtain, white sheets rolled back, but no other covers. Shelves ran the length of the wall to her right. No books, just CD cases. She walked along them, reading the spines: Def Leppard, Metallica, Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, Ministry of Sound. Nothing particular or identifying. None of the music she had learned about on her trips to the Balkans. No Dino Merlin or Bijelo Dugme. No nice, corroborating collection of Bosnian folk music. Any farther into the room, and Anya knew she would find the pretence of being lost very hard to keep up. But she was doing this for Ljuba. It was really Ljuba’s right to be here. Ljuba’s right to walk into the home of the man who had raped her, and take whatever she needed. It was not a violation. The violation had already been committed. This man was supposed to be dead.

  Anya did not know exactly what she was looking for – some evidence to verify who ‘Chuck’ really was perhaps – but it seemed to her the man whose house this was had no real right to it.

  The room came to life in a bright, white light and when it fell dark, Anya was absolutely certain the ghost at her back had turned into someone real. Someone standing behind her.

  She spun around to face a girl.

  Cheers and applause rose from the beach. It was her reflection in a mirrored wardrobe. Next to the wardrobe, a desk, and a computer, and the Windows screensaver bouncing slowly from one edge of the monitor to another. She turned around. There were no drawers and no paper in the printer; nothing in Serbo-Croat. She tapped the space bar on the computer keyboard. A photograph unrolled over the screen. A group of men standing in front of a coach. The men wore the white robes of a martial arts team. Four wore the fatigues of a brigade. It startled her to see it. The detail which Ljuba had given her. One of the horrible details which until now, had only been in her imagination. But here it was. The red sash around Kemal Lekić’s arm.

  The background of the picture told Anya almost as much as the subject; the front half of a dirty coach in the Stovnik district. The white and yellow buses she had travelled on herself, and the wooden destination plate by its door.

  Stovnik – Vilnik – Sarajevo.

  Anya tapped the space bar again. A password box appeared.

  She had been too absorbed to notice the fireworks had stopped. But stopped they had. On the beach, people were standing up, some already heading off along the shore, marching with their stakes of fire; at the water’s edge, the beached boat was empty.

  Anya sprinted to the bedroom door, but as she reached the threshold, heard footsteps on the veranda, and voices. Voices terribly close. Panicking, she turned around, faced the bedroom again, heard the creak of the first screen door, fell to her knees and felt along the underside of the bed.

  It was too low.

  She heard the latch.

  They were in the house.

  ‘I made some this year – it’s so good.’ A man’s voice, a flood of chattering and the floorboards of the beach house springing beneath her knees. The light in the next room came on, casting its net over the floor of the bedroom. She crushed herself beneath the desk.

  They were in the room. Two men.

  ‘I have a CD here somewhere,’ the first man said.

  His bare legs stopped at the edge of the bed. His feet moved, pointing away from her.

  ‘Somewhere . . .’ the man repeated.

  It was him. She heard the tick, tick, tick of the CD boxes, falling like dominoes as his fingers worked through them.

  ‘Here,’ Kemal Lekić said, ‘is what I am . . .’ Thoughts finished with the tick, tick, tick of the plastic cases.

  Through the thin walls, Anya could hear the lounge filling with the excitement of a party.

  She would act completely crazy, off-her-tits, fall through the crowd, roll her eyes, drunkenly apologise, run away, down the empty beach.

  ‘Have you found it?’ Another voice. Kiwi. The New Zealander from the boat house. Anya closed her eyes.

  ‘I know I have it,’ he said, ‘I have volumes one and two. But then I’m sure I bought – ah!’

  She thought the silence would kill her.

  ‘Bullseye,’ the Kiwi said. ‘Awesome.’

  ‘You see.’

  She heard the bedroom door close.

  Ljuba Crvenović’s face had been held to the floor. Hand at the back of her head, pushing down as if it would never stop. As if the force didn’t know her head could go no farther. Concrete. Not the floorboards against which Anya breathed in the bedroom of Kemal’s beach house. The soldier held down the mother of two small children, and entered her from behind so he couldn’t be seen. Her friends were close. Close enough for Ljuba to feel the spit of their breath, faces squashed against the floor like rotten fruit, all the goodness, all the life being squeezed out of them. At first Ljuba had closed her eyes with the will of a child who believes the world disappears when they can’t see it. But her friend’s screams opened them. The faces of her friends, the boots of the men. Who dared do this to them? The hand of the man appeared before her eyes, palm down, pressed to the floor, knuckles white, fingers grasping a cheap plastic bag, like the kind she would use to carry vegetables home from the supermarket. Before the bag was wrapped around Ljuba’s head, the red sash fell to his wrist. The red sash of the commander.

  The red sash of Kemal Lekić.

  The red sash in the picture on the computer screen.

  A bass rhythm broke out in the room next door. Anya listened to the music and voices, and tried to control her breathing. The quicker the better. She was on her knees. She was standing up. She was at the bedroom door with the wooden handle in her hand.

  ‘That is not the toilet!’ she announced, bursting into the room. But no one turned. No one appeared to even notice her entrance. A man wearing a baseball cap leant against the wall next to the bedroom door.

  ‘Do you know where the toilet is?’ she asked.

  The man looked her up and down. A small group had gathered around him. She had interrupted a story.

  ‘I’ve never been here,’ the man said.

  It seemed as if half the beach had emptied into the house. She pushed past the group next to the wall, and saw the German in the orange cycling mac, looking at her hopefully. Turning back, she wheedled into the middle of the room, where a gap had formed around a glass coffee table, and a man unloaded an armful of canned beers. Taking one, she opened it, drank from it and couldn’t stop drinking. It was warm. Her hands were shaking. She drank again. She tried to hide her smile with the can. She had done it. She was safe.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I rescued you,’ he said when she turned around.

  Anya tried to keep a fixed face. ‘I’m sorry – you’re . . . ?’

  ‘From today,’ he said. ‘The boat.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Chuck.’ He offered her a wink instead of a handshake. In one pupil a silver fleck floated. Hypnotised by it, she wondered if something wasn’t stuck in her own eye.

  ‘Chuck,’ she repeated.

  ‘But I don’t know your name.’ He pointed with the can, knuckles white in his tan. The fist Ljuba Crvenović had seen.
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  ‘And your name?’

  ‘Anya.’

  ‘Anya. It’s a good name. I knew a Dutch girl called Anya.’

  ‘Chuck,’ she said. ‘Chuck. Is that a real name? I mean – I know it’s real,’ she chattered through her nerves, ‘but I never heard of anyone called Chuck, and I guess it’s American and you don’t sound American.’

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘No, there’s something—’

  ‘Is not America the land of all nations?’

  He was flirting with her.

  ‘Yes, of course, I’m being – rude. But I would have to guess you weren’t born in America, even if you lived there.’

  ‘You would guess right.’

  He looked around the party now, as if missing somebody. He was a big man. Broad. Hairs beneath his vest. His chest met the level of her eye. When she looked up, it was the muscles of his neck and shoulders that impressed her first. She felt sick.

  ‘So where is it?’ Anya asked. ‘Where are you originally from?’

  ‘Is your friend here?’

  ‘Friend?’

  ‘Your friend on the boat?’

  He meant William. ‘Oh yes. No. No, he’s not. He had an early night tonight.’

  ‘I never lived in America actually.’ He smiled. ‘I was born in Bosnia.’

  In the suitcase in her apartment, Anya had a photograph taken at this man’s funeral. Whatever she expected from a dead man, she did not expect the truth.

  ‘Do you know Bosnia?’ He saved her from her muteness. ‘It is a small country next to Croatia and Serbia, which are next to Italy, on the beautiful Adriatic Sea.’

  ‘So your name isn’t really Chuck?’

  He laughed, his fingers brushing her wrist. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But it’s what people call me. Like Chuck Norris. I used to be the big fan of Chuck Norris.’ He made karate hands and a drop of beer jumped from the can onto her shoulder. He reached over and brushed it off. ‘Although I would rather be Bruce Lee. I didn’t like the name Bruce. Not so much.’