by David Savill
‘You do – whatever it is Chuck Norris does?’ she said hopelessly.
‘Mixed martial arts? Yes. Jeet Kune Do, to be technical. It was very popular in Yugoslavia.’
Anya’s mouth was dry.
‘So. When you were born, the country was Yugoslavia, and then it became Bosnia. That was the war, wasn’t it?’
‘Please. Not the war.’
‘Of course, of course,’ she said. ‘Sorry – ignore me, I’m always putting my foot in it.’
‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the war.’
Anya pressed the can to her lips. It was empty. There was nowhere left to hide. ‘Thank you so much for the fireworks and the party,’ she said.
Kemal took a step back and opened his arms. ‘You aren’t leaving?’
‘I really have to.’ Anya bent over and tried to find a space for the empty can on the littered coffee table behind her. ‘My boyfriend will start to worry.’
‘Ah – of course. Not a friend then. A boyfriend. I understand. What a pity.’
He held her wrist and took the empty can. ‘I’ll dispose of this for you.’
They straightened up together. He let go of her wrist.
‘You never found out my real name,’ he said.
‘Oh – your real name?’
‘Marko.’ Kemal Lekić offered his hand to be shook.
All her courage had suddenly left her. ‘Well – goodbye, Marko.’
‘It’s a very popular name,’ he shouted after her. ‘In Bosnia!’
Anya almost tumbled down the steps of the house. She turned left and skipped at a pace across the beach. Each footfall in the loose sand seemed the effort of two. But the light and noise of the party dimmed. Safer in the dark she began to run, slowly at first, then faster.
Ljuba had run too. The next night. The women decided to run as darkness fell. Whatever lay in the forests beyond the factory would be better than what happened to them there. No one stopped them as they ran across the car park. No one stopped them as they climbed the low wire fence. No one expected anyone would want to leave. They ran along the road by which they arrived. Anya darted towards the shoreline, onto sand that was damp and compact, and easier beneath her feet. Ljuba had told her how it felt, when someone was at your back. To hear the sound of gunfire and not know whether it came from behind you, or in front. In the back of your head, or in your face. Ljuba had dived into the darkness of the trees. It was the last time she saw the other two women.
Anya slowed down, hand over her mouth, trying not to look back. But she did look back. She had to. The distant beach house resembled a ship sitting over the bay, a necklace of fairy lights strung along the veranda and figures floating in a pool of golden light.
Sunday 10 April 2005
Stovnik
Jujube berries float in water turned the pink of dental rinse. Marko is given a sponge from the plastic orange bucket. The imam turns out to be a stocky little man called Munib. He wipes his nose with a handkerchief and appears to have a heavy cold. To Marko’s relief, Munib has washed the excretory organs already. Where the ghusl cannot be performed in full, Munib explains, We must do our best. Munib gives Marko a flannel cloth and tells him to dip it into the silver bowl of water. He must wash Kemal’s hands and arms, three times, from the fingertips to the elbows. The water is tepid. They begin with the right side of Kemal’s body, over the shoulders. Marko can’t shake the idea he is not washing Kemal Lekić, but a statue of Kemal Lekić. Embalming and freezing have hardened his friend’s body. The skin has the quality of wax, and the face, although certainly Kemal’s, has the look of a beaten boxer. Is it something the brain haemorrhage has done? Kemal’s eyes are closed and Marko wants to tell him to wake up, to look at him straight.
‘In cleaning the body we clean the spirit,’ Munib says.
Marko washes Kemal’s feet, his toes. Parts of a body he has held before, parts he has gripped, trapped and pinned. This is all some elaborate joke. Any second now Kemal is going to leap from the table and grab Marko’s wrist, wrench his arm behind his back and pin him to the floor.
To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. It is not the imam, it is Kemal speaking. Not the Koran but the Tao. Kemal circling Marko on the mats.
Look into the eyes of your opponent, the eyes will tell you not where the hand is, but where the hand will be. Learn the habits of your opponent’s mind and you will learn the habits of his body.
The imam begins to mutter something, a prayer Marko doesn’t understand. If Marko didn’t know why Kemal had run away, who would know? Who could better anticipate Kemal than he could? Marko is not sorry Kemal survived the shelling. He is almost happy to see his friend lying here, reassembled. He is glad Kemal kept his body and walked around in it, lived another life, lived another future. He deserved a future. How could he blame Kemal for running away? To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. What hurts is to know this future didn’t include him. What hurts Marko is to know Kemal could let him grieve for no reason. The years spent blaming himself for a death that never happened.
‘We will wash with camphor,’ the imam says. ‘After the water.’
The mortuary hums. Its refrigeration units have a rhythm, and every minute or so there is a sound like a distant tide pulling over stones; a reminder the mortuary’s body bags are still full of bones from the war. There is no mystery to the smell. The room is a freezer full of rotting things.
‘Is this the first time you’ve met Kemal?’ Marko asks.
The imam gives him the cloth soaked in camphor. ‘Yes – but of course I knew him by reputation.’
Marko wipes the rag over his dead friend’s shoulders. He only thinks of the tattoo, because the tattoo has gone. It is an absence. A missing piece of their past. There is a grey patch of scarred skin where the Bosnian lily of the brigade used to be. The patch left speaks of nothing, and everything; something from the life Kemal had after the war, after Marko. Samir had told him, you believe what you want to believe. He had told Marko he was there, at the camp, and that he knew Kemal did nothing. The ceremony is supposed to be about the forgiveness of Kemal’s sins. But it is Marko who needs forgiving. He needs Kemal to open his eyes, sit up and forgive him. Forgive him for not believing. Forgive him for running away. Forgive him for Vesna.
Marko pulls the cloth over Kemal’s face and it catches on the bristles still growing in his cheeks.
‘It’s a humane thing.’ Marko is stopped by the sound of Kemal’s voice in his head. ‘To put them down, Marko. You are stopping the suffering.’
Bangkok
The field on the other side of the carriageway becomes a central reservation. Headlights sweep by, and out of the night, white lines shoot from the road. The scrub turns into a metal barrier, a fuchsia-coloured taxi overtakes, a late evening coach travels east, a limousine joins the airport road and distant downtown lights the clouds. Bangkok.
Leaving the border, Missy had attempted to start some kind of conversation. But William had held himself in. They had stopped to pick up some water (Dr Pepper for Missy), and afterwards she had wheeled her seat back and fallen asleep. Since then he has been alone at the wheel, dreaming the road.
The flyover carries them over suburb shacks.
Stratton, Stratton, Stratton. The joins in the concrete finally wake her.
‘Good morning.’ Missy wipes her mouth with the back of her arm. ‘Or good evening.’
He hears her nails scratching at an armpit. He asks her where she would like to be dropped and she tells him any Skytrain station is fine.
The road rises past the glowing red neon of the Don Muaeng airport, where lights blink on the runways. William thinks about Anya’s suitcase, about turning off and asking Missy to wait while he goes inside. At some point he will have to let her go. But not yet. They have passed the turning. The rear-view mirror is bright with headlights and billboards loom over them again; a pretty Thai girl in secretary’s clothes ridi
ng a scooter right out of the picture, Samsung, INTOUCH mobile, a billboard with an extended, gold frame like a baroque mirror, containing a portrait of King Rama IX.
World Wide Girls Go! Go!
Wild West Boys. Boys. Boys.
The Sheba Club! The Sheba Club!
The toll road sets them down beneath the Skytrain tracks, the car washed red, blue and green in the din of the clubs. They squeeze into the traffic, among the pastel taxicabs and riots of tuk-tuks.
‘Right back where we started,’ Missy says.
A blinking red river of traffic carries them into the colder light of the business district where the signs mean even less; Verstec, Zuellig, Translation, Bonnavure; past the steps to the station at Si Lom, the junction in all directions and a stone elephant, dwarfed by the concrete pillars of the tracks. The elephant stands in the central reservation, raising its trunk in a gesture utterly futile.
‘I may as well drive you home,’ William says.
‘From here? Probably it’s going to be quicker on the train.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Sukhumvit. Down around soi forty-two.’
William takes the left, skirting Lumphini Park where the traffic is eased by the three lanes of Rama IV. After a few streets, Missy directs him left again. They cut over to Sukhumvit, down one of the narrow soi of walled houses, where nighthawkers line the pavement, their stalls beneath tired beach umbrellas.
‘Angkor was just awesome,’ Missy says, seeming to warm up with the relief of home, ‘and this whole thing, however the school fucked up with the visa, I’m really grateful for how you’ve handled this. Hey. We turned a disaster into an adventure!’
Why does everything she says make him bristle? And why does he suddenly not want her to leave?
‘Over here,’ Missy says.
He pulls the car up by a tarpaulin-covered food court opposite one of the local hospitals. Strip lights hang from wires, over steaming mobile kitchens. There’s a 7-Eleven and a soup stand. The covered court is full of nurses in their pink T-shirts and blue trousers.
‘Here?’ he asks.
‘Well, I’m literally round the corner, but it’s not good to stop at the next junction.’ Missy opens the glove compartment and takes out her passport, complete with new visa. ‘Don’t want to forget this!’
He expects to hear the car door open, but she shifts in her seat. ‘I’m sorry about what happened at the hotel, that’s not really me.’
‘Why does everyone keep apologising to me?’
‘Sorry.’ Her tone changes. ‘I mean. No, I guess I’m not sorry.’
‘If you want to fuck strangers, what business is that of mine?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Maybe your boyfriend’s business, but not mine.’
‘My boyfriend?’
‘The one all over your phone.’
If William takes his hands off the steering wheel, they will shake.
Missy looks at him, speechless, like a child slapped around the face. He wants to put back what he has just said but the anger he suddenly feels is boundless.
‘Goodbye,’ she says.
When she opens the door, it seems incredible to him she is actually going; offensive the chatter of the food court flooding in. She stands on the broken pavement with one hand on the open door, and lowers her head. ‘I was not apologising for my actions!’
Then William is slammed back into the silence of the car, and Missy is walking around a party of motorbike couriers, into the night. He can’t seem to let go of the steering wheel, can’t lift his foot off the brake. His arms and legs feel weightless. As useless as he had been in the bedroom with Anya.
The car door opens. Missy is back. She sits down with a sigh, closes the door carefully and reaches into her back pocket to take out her mobile phone.
‘This is my brother Ricky.’ Her hands shake when she holds up the phone. She shows William the picture of the man on her menu screen, before returning it to her lap and flicking through to the gallery. ‘He came to Thailand a couple of years ago. We came to Thailand, I mean. It was the first time I came, with Ricky. That’s when I decided I wanted to come back and work here.’
At first, William thinks Missy is looking for a particular picture, but then he realises she is just thumbing through them, a tenderness in the gesture – adjusting here, stopping there. She shows William the picture of her brother on a river taxi floating past the Grand Palace.
‘Angkor Wat was on Ricky’s bucket list,’ Missy says. ‘The Far East. But we had to choose between Angkor Wat and Singapore in the end, and we went to Singapore.’
‘I’ve never been to Singapore.’
‘It sucks – I mean, it’s prettier than Bangkok but compared to here? Dead.’
When he looks into her eyes, her face takes on a different shape. The point of focus has shifted. He sees a completely different painting.
‘We did Bangkok, and went to Singapore, and Malaysia, and then we hopped the islands down to Australia. Our parents gave us some of the money, but we ended up so completely broke on our last days in Sydney, living off these cheap tins of hot dogs – I never want to eat another hot dog in my life!’
‘I was never a hot dog man.’
‘Oh, I used to eat hot dogs. Believe me I could eat hot dogs.’
‘It’s a New Jersey thing, isn’t it?’
‘Not so much, more Manhattan.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Missy takes a breath. ‘Never mind that you were looking through the pictures on my phone.’
William takes his hands off the steering wheel but doesn’t know where to put them.
‘Sorry. It was an accident.’
‘The bucket list thing,’ Missy says. ‘What I mean is, at least I got to do that with Ricky. He was supposed to, like, die three times, but the treatments kept working so damn well it was almost a joke with us. You know? So Ricky, we’d say, how many more months this time?’
William can’t look at her. He looks out of his side window at a woman rooting through her clutch bag. She has walked out of the 7-Eleven, one of those miracles of Thai womanhood; clean black hair, perfectly fitted black dress and polished cream heels on a cracked pavement littered with food waste and plastic bags.
‘With you. It must have been, almost the opposite,’ she says. ‘You didn’t know like that. One minute your girlfriend is there and then—’
‘She wasn’t my girlfriend. I mean she was,’ William begins. ‘And she was more than – girlfriend just doesn’t sound right.’
‘I understand.’
‘I don’t know why she wasn’t just in bed. In the bungalow. If she’d been there, we wouldn’t even have been on the beach when the wave came. But she’d gone out that morning, back to the beach bar. I found her talking to this guy. We were all together when the wave came, at the beach bar. The same guy picked me up and drove me to the hospital. But I couldn’t find him afterwards.’
The silence of the car is the reply he is used to. The silence in his head when he asks himself what happened. ‘Not that any of it matters now.’
He watches the woman on the pavement clip her bag together and walk down the shattered street as if she were walking down a red carpet for the premiere of a film. He had never met another woman like Anya. He had never admired another woman as much. And he had thought when he called her in London that he wanted her. He did, he did want her. He just didn’t know she was his best friend, not his lover.
‘It does still matter,’ Missy says, ‘what happened matters. I think if that guy, the one who rescued you, if he might know what happened to her – Even if he just, shared that experience with you, you should try and find him at least.’
‘I don’t know where I’d start without a name,’ William says. ‘And I’m sorry about your brother. About the phone.’
Missy doesn’t reply. They are both with their ghosts.
‘You know, I would still like to start work on Thursday,’ she eventually say
s. ‘I hope that won’t be a problem.’
In the hours before the Boxing Day Tsunami, people reported seeing flamingos, elephants and other wild animals, heading for high ground. Domestic dogs and zoo animals refused to leave their shelters. Approximately 283,000 people were killed, but very few animals were reported dead, or missing.
Boxing Day, 2004
Kao Lak
Anya eased herself up against the head of the bed and looked down on Will’s long back, on the dimples of Venus. He coughed in his sleep. His right leg shifted, pulling the sheet down with it. A hand came out from beneath the pillow, bunching it under his head. She waited until the burr of his sleeping breath returned, and was about to step down from the bed, when something on the side table caught her eye. A drawing. The notebook was open. Not a proper sketchbook like the ones William would leave around their various homes, but something cheap and lined, with a picture of the Lion King on the cover. Not that it detracted from the skill of William’s familiar hand. It was the skiff they had been on the day before, a few lines making the hull sit perfectly in the water, transforming the paper into the ocean. The boat balanced near the horizon, only two small smudges suggesting the figures occupying it. She put the notebook back, wishing now that she had woken him in the night.
Slipping off the bed, Anya showered quickly, and put on her bathing suit with the resort’s robe. Before she left, she took one last look at him, soft, behind the mosquito curtain, like an aged painting.
Finding facts. It was in her job description. The presentation and analysis of facts. Fact: Kemal Lekić was alive. Fact: Kemal Lekić had been accused of rape, implicated in the disappearance of two women, the abuse of his military role and at least one breach of the Geneva Convention.
The analysis of facts in the advocacy of the victims of human rights abuses, this too was Anya’s job. Ljuba Crvenović’s human rights had been abused. She had related the circumstances of her case to Anya, and Anya had established facts in the case which were not known to the authorities in the country where those abuses took place. Wasn’t this exactly Anya’s purpose? Wasn’t it her ability to do this job, and do it well, which had been the reason for the Stovnik policeman’s call to her that afternoon in Sarajevo?