by David Savill
You were seen visiting Vesna Knežević.
Anya should have spoken to the regional office of the International Criminal Tribunal. She could at least have mentioned the rumours about Kemal. She could have asked the investigators there to scrutinise the findings of the Stovnik police. But she hadn’t even reported Bogdan’s behaviour. She had failed then, and if she did not report Kemal Lekić to the relevant authorities, she would be failing now.
In only a few weeks’ time, those authorities would no longer be the International Criminal Tribunal but the War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia. This transfer of duties might play into Ljuba’s hands. The country was being asked to clean up its own shit now, and by all accounts, there was a political willpower to do so. Cases like this, stalled by local authorities who had been reluctant to investigate, might be exactly the kind of case the new War Crimes Chamber would be eager to pick up. To not report what she had discovered would not only be a failure of Anya’s function, but might be considered aiding and abetting a man wanted for questioning.
The mangroves leaned in on her hangover. On the treetop walkway, the day was so bright, and so hot, the events of the previous night seemed only more impossible.
‘Have you seen my giraffe?’
It was a little girl suddenly at Anya’s knee.
‘Wow, that is a beautiful giraffe.’ She smiled, and tapped the inflatable animal under the girl’s arm.
‘His name,’ the girl announced, ‘is Scarf. But Daddy said he will only get smaller and smaller.’
‘Oh,’ Anya said, casting around but seeing no parent. ‘Smaller and smaller?’
‘He was really big. But today he is really small.’
‘I see.’ Anya looked back past the cabin, down towards the beach. There was no one in that direction either.
‘It’s because of the hole,’ the girl said.
‘Are you on your own?’ Anya asked.
The girl looked at her. Her mouth seemed so tiny and pink. ‘I have a brother, a mummy and a daddy, and a baby sister. And lots of friends and cuddlies. And a Night Garden game. I can show you if you want to?’
‘Are they all at the resort?’
The girl nodded. ‘Daddy said the hole is very funny, isn’t it, because it is in the giraffe’s bottom.’ She presented Anya with the giraffe’s rear. It was patched over with rubber from a puncture repair kit. ‘This stops the air coming out!’ the girl declared proudly
‘Oh – that’s very good,’ Anya said. ‘Where are Mummy and Daddy?’
‘We’re on holiday,’ the girl said. ‘Are you on holiday?’
‘Yes – just like you.’ Anya felt breathless, it was so bloody hot. ‘And you – you’re staying in one of these cabins, do you know which one?’
The girl picked at the patch on the giraffe’s bottom, but said nothing.
‘I think we need to find Mummy and Daddy,’ Anya said.
But all of a sudden, the girl turned and fled, giraffe bumping along behind her.
It was only when Anya reached the hotel’s reception that she remembered she hadn’t left a note for Will.
The presentation of facts in the advocacy of the victims of human rights abuses. Fact: Ljuba Crvenović had accused Kemal Lekić of rape. Fact: the parents of two other women wanted the Stovnik brigade questioned over the disappearance of their daughters. Fact: the Stovnik police had investigated the accusation and found no grounds for indictment, partly because Ljuba was the only named witness in the event. As for the missing women, the Stovnik brigade had logged their presence at the camp, and claimed not to have seen them after its disbandment.
Kemal Lekić could only be a wanted man if he was alive. But even then, Ljuba’s case might go nowhere.
It all came back to the same thing. If Anya had any grounds to believe the case should be reinvestigated, the time to make use of them had been after her visit to Vesna, when the job should have been handed over to someone who knew how to build a case. Fact: Ljuba Crvenović had not explicitly asked Anya in her capacity as a researcher for Dignity Monitor to advocate on her behalf. For Anya, Ljuba Crvenović’s story was only a fact in as much as it pertained to the report on problems for returnees. The rest was not her job.
But was it a duty?
Anya lay face down on the massage table. She closed her eyes. The affectionate patter of a bongo. Plucked strings, skipping with the rhythm of stones over water.
To remain impartial. To apply objectivity. To gather testimony and frame it for the record . . .
To take people at their word, and organise points of view for reports which made recommendations at a policy level . . .
This did not necessarily mean working with facts. It meant working with truth. Truths as people wanted to tell them. The truth of the world as they saw it. For Ljuba, in her apartment now, folding the ends of a toilet roll, getting her husband’s dinner ready, the truth was this: Kemal Lekić was dead. The man who raped her was dead, and the fate of her friends would be forever unknown, and there was nothing more to be done about it. For the husband at work, looking forward to his dinner, his wife had survived the war unscathed, they had both survived, and now he had three children, and a good job, and an apartment in Belgrade. For those children, the truth was this: their parents survived the war. They lived in a happy family. Their mother was an angel who kept their bedrooms tidy, and folded the toilet paper, and read them stories every night. She was not a woman raped by Bosniak soldiers, who feared going home because of the men who treated her with less dignity than a goat.
So who was Anya to upset these truths with her facts? If she disturbed Ljuba’s case, if she told Ljuba that Kemal Lekić was alive, would the new truth be better than the old?
The brace at the head of the massage table was tight. She heard the handle of the door, the door closing, the slippers of the masseuse over the tiled floor, a tap running, the sound of stones knocked together in a pail and the wheesh of steam. For the briefest moment, Anya felt all the hairs on her body stand to attention. She had the sensation of her skin lifting, a premonition of touch, before the first brusque hand prepared her back with the oils.
Kemal Lekić had touched her. He had held her wrist, as he held the wrist of Ljuba Crvenović. He was alive now, but only for Anya. Anya who had only ever had the power to present truth, but now had the power make it.
‘That’s amazing,’ Anya said more because she needed to make a noise than anything else. The hot stones seemed to open her, to make new acres out of the muscles in her back. A path of stones cut through grass silvery and thick, like a dog’s fur.
It was springtime in the Brecon Beacons. With William she was walking over the hills. They broke over the tops, and one beacon looked on to another, like giant dogs watchful over the steep valleys. They stood on a summit, by a pile of slate stones marking the place where a Wellington bomber had crashed at some point during the Second World War, Will picking over the ribcage, rusted almost to nothing. It was a surprise to find the skeleton wreckage, left all these decades as a memorial. On a plaque, there was a story. It was something about a Canadian flight crew who had crashed in foul weather. Beneath them the shadows of clouds sailed over the valley. Will told her to face the blustering wind and open her mouth. And so she had. They had both opened their mouths and let the warm spring wind fill them like balloons. And when they were full, they had turned from the wind, and let it pour out of them like water.
‘I’m pregnant,’ Anya had gasped, bending over and holding her knees.
I’m pregnant. The words didn’t feel real because they were words a woman rehearsed all her life.
The masseuse paused and positioned one hand on each of Anya’s shoulder blades. Slowly but surely she pressed down, and Anya felt a sharp pain in her breasts as the air pushed out of her lungs. She sighed, but the pressure kept building. As her breath leaked out, Anya felt the world rushing in; the room first, then the buildings of the complex, then the mangroves, the island and the ocean surrounding the island, all su
cked up into her empty chest.
Anya was an only child. She had never been good with children. Never had a chance to understand them. What use would she really have been at the age of twenty-four with a child? She still had her PhD to finish, a career to start. They said it would be fairer on the child this way. Those were the words they kept returning to. The mantra they repeated. Fairer on the child. The decision made together three weeks after that day on the hills. Fairer on the child.
The world rushed out again. The masseuse removed her hands and Anya felt as though she were being lifted; as though she were beginning to float above the massage table. She needed to know Will remembered. She needed to know he remembered the thing neither of them wanted to remember. How after the abortion they had never really been the same.
She couldn’t bear it all herself any more.
The masseuse gripped her left ankle, and the other hand began to pull at each of her toes – click, click and click. She bent Anya’s leg forward and forced her foot into an arch against the starched breast of her uniform, and when the hot stone was placed into the cracked sole of her foot, Anya almost cried in alarm.
‘You would like to turn over?’ The masseuse had finished with the second leg.
Sometimes she thought Will had wanted the child. Sometimes she thought the decision had been her own. That she had lacked the courage to make any other. But now a parent, not a child, seemed to be growing inside of her, and asking for more of her every day.
Anya pulled her sweating face out of the brace, peeled her body from the table and blinked into the silk ceiling-swag of the dim room. Somewhere a tap was running, the sound of steam again, the feet of a stool as it glanced the tiles and the presence of the masseuse, sitting down by her head, taking a hold of her wrist and in her lap opening Anya’s palm. It was nice to be holding someone’s hand. Anya wanted to turn over and hold the strange woman in her arms. To be held by her.
But the masseuse replaced Anya’s hand on her chest, and picked up the chair. And as she did so, Anya felt something. Not the masseuse. Not anyone but some thing, bigger than them both. It was the bed. The bed trembled, bottles rattling on shelves, stones rattling in their pail.
The music stopped.
Monday 11 April 2005
Bangkok
What if he did try to find the man who had rescued him? Where would he begin? What would it change?
William wakes after a sleepless night. It is still dark. The lights are green as he joins the traffic on Nonthaburi, through the tuk-tuks bringing tourists back from the night market, through Nana junction where backpackers stream over the pedestrian crossing and a giant neon-green bottle of Chang pours LCD bubbles into a glass. The traffic crawls on this stretch; a golden shrine to Mitra at the steps of the Ocean Mall. Starbucks. Polo. Two lanes of taxis. A carpet laid out on the pavement. A waving wall of lucky Japanese cats.
He had felt the earthquake a good hour before the arrival of the wave. As if it were no more than the idling engine of a truck. Like the trucks which used to stop at the traffic lights outside the bedroom window of William’s childhood. His eyes opened on Boxing Day in Kao Lak, not on to his bedroom in Stratton, but on to the beach bungalow; the shadows of a strange room, the mist of mosquito nets. The heat smothered him, pinned him to the bed.
When William woke again, the clock on the bedside table told him it was half past nine.
Half past nine. Anya not in her room. Anya’s bed still made, not even slept in. The room still and empty. The distant sound of voices on the beach.
He pushes into the right-hand lane. Two blocks and right again. Up onto the Don Muaeng tollway, Stratton, Stratton, Stratton. The purple billboards of Air Phuket, the liquid green glass of the Eastwater building and the fleets of little Korean minivans, black windows, no drivers.
The traffic slows at the exits for Don Muaeng airport, robot vans piloting themselves off the road. At Short Stay Arrivals, pink taxis line up.
William turns into one of the car parks, and takes a ticket at the barrier. The low feeling of the car-park ceiling, of being crushed. He has no idea it is past eleven in the evening until he enters the airport and, looking up, sees the flickering arrivals board.
Sydney
Shanghai
Singapore
Auckland
London
Dubai
Moscow
At the check-in desks, rows of yellow-shirted agents are busy doing nothing. The floors of the hall have been buffed to a watery reflection. It is a softness – the air of expectation – which fills an empty hall built for thousands. There must be some odd pause in the stream of international air traffic, the world taking its breath. The wave moving silently, unseen beneath the sea.
Currency Exchange
Information
Taxis
Lost Luggage
9.45 a.m., and the wave already on its way.
Sarajevo
Samir’s house is perched over the old Sarajevsko beer factory, on the hills above Baščaršija, where the wooden shacks lean into each other as if they are trying to hide. But the house itself is a giant thing of unpainted concrete, three times the size of the old shacks. He shows Marko onto a balcony big enough for ‘a dining table and a small jacuzzi’. While it is certainly big enough for those things, there is nothing here, just a plastic orange barrel containing dry concrete, and a yardstick set into it. The house is half finished, no carpets, wires sticking out of the electric sockets and a carpenter’s bench with a circular saw covered in blue tarpaulin. He shows Marko the view over the tumbledown roofs of the neighbourhood, where minarets light up the beautiful early-evening mess of Sarajevo. The night smells of fried onions, meat, and all the things he really misses about Bosnia. Marko had forgotten what home felt like until he came back to it.
‘You don’t own a house until you’ve built it yourself,’ Samir says. ‘Five years I’ve been at this. How much would you pay for this space in a city like London?’
Marko tells Samir you couldn’t get this much space in a city like London.
‘One hundred and eighty thousand dinar,’ he tells him. ‘That’s no more than twenty thousand euro.’
Jasmina walks out of the tarpaulin sheets that do for the windows of the empty lounge. She is barely out of college; the square frames of her glasses and a roll-neck sweater. Her kisses glance Marko’s cheeks, and when she puts her hands on his shoulders, he can smell the garlic of her cooking.
Samir digs his fingers into Marko’s neck and guides him towards the kitchen. ‘See, you do the important rooms first,’ Samir says. ‘The kitchen, the bathroom. The rest can wait.’
An electric generator hums behind their conversation. Jasmina serves lambs’ necks, and they talk about the funeral. What a send-off Kemal had. Possibly the only man in Bosnia to have two graves. The council hadn’t dug up the old one. They had placed Kemal in a small crypt of white marble, farther up the cemetery, next to Lovers’ Hill. His reputation had grown with the years, not diminished.
‘They have money for nothing,’ Samir had whispered in Marko’s ear. ‘But when it comes to burying people, they throw it away.’
This time the coffin had the weight of a man. Bogdan on one corner, Elvis, Samir and Marko. Marko’s feet sank into the fresh white gravel of the path.
The soldiers in new uniforms. Gun salute. Soil landing on the Bosnian flag.
Marko had looked over the grave and seen Sabina, the woman from Ladina.
‘How many people would you say there were?’ Samir is asking.
‘Hundreds, maybe five hundred.’
‘More than that,’ Samir said. ‘Nearer a thousand.’
It had been a strange carnival of faces. School friends wearing the masks of age. Another hand. Another arm around his shoulder. Another voice telling him what a great man Kemal was. Another story about Kemal’s kindnesses. And How is your mother? And When will we see your father again?
‘Are there really so many Negroes?’
‘Negroes?’
‘Africans. In Britain. I saw this programme about London, and it was just full of Africans.’
‘Yes,’ Marko says. ‘Yes. There are.’
Samir pulls the meat off the bone, looking as much like Marko’s own father as Marko’s uncle. Jasmina asks if he wants any more lamb. He tells her he is full.
‘Marko,’ Samir says. ‘I want to show you the rest of the house before you go.’
Marko has Samir alone now, but his cousin is too busy talking for him to raise the subject he wants to discuss. A spiral staircase leads off the empty lounge and upstairs Marko is surprised to find carpet. Here, the rooms are almost complete. The master bedroom looks over the balcony. The view of Sarajevo glittering in the dark. There are two more bedrooms, empty and half the size of the master, a large bathroom with a shower and whirlpool bath. Marko is finally about to ask what he has to ask when his cousin shows him a third bedroom, painted pink. There is a Moses basket in the corner.
‘You didn’t notice,’ Samir says. ‘You insult me! She has a bump already – what did you think, my wife was fat? We’re having a girl.’
Bangkok
The entrance to the lost luggage desk is through a glass door below a tall escalator. The door closes behind him, shutting out the tannoy announcements. William presses a doorbell that is loosely taped to the counter and it chimes like the doorbells of his childhood. The man who emerges from the aisles of racks could be a car mechanic, blue overalls and black hair in oily curls. He takes the passport.
‘I don’t have the card posted to me,’ William says.
‘You need card.’