by David Savill
‘Why would I be exhausted?’
‘I don’t know. You know. That’s what Dad thinks.’
‘In the pocket of my jeans!’ Kemal shuts the tool drawer and heads back into the bedroom where he throws clothes across the room. ‘Come on.’ Kemal opens the front door. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
The lift is still out of order. He follows Kemal down the stairs of the block, from the warm late afternoon light, to the cold of the stairs, back to the warm light again. At the turn of each staircase, the glass has been smashed. Kemal doesn’t stop for Marko, but jogs down at a methodical pace. By the time they reach the bottom, Marko’s knees are trembling, and it feels as if the playground between the blocks is facing the wrong direction.
‘Where are we going?’ Marko pants.
‘You’ll need to be fitter than that.’ Kemal claps Marko on the shoulder.
‘What for?’
‘When they call you up. It isn’t long, you know. But hopefully you’ll be sitting in the barracks all day anyway.’
Marko pulls a cigarette packet out of his pocket. He can’t seem to walk outside without wanting to light up. They take a cigarette each, sit on the pavement banked above the football pitch and say hello to Mrs Lilic as she passes with her shopping trolley.
‘I think she sells organs,’ Kemal says. ‘On the black market. She’s always shopping. But where does she shop?’
‘What did you want to show me?’
Kemal shakes the arm of his new tracksuit, and looks at his watch. ‘Maybe nothing. Maybe something.’
This could be it, Marko thinks. If Kemal knows, this could be it. They are waiting for the friends who are going to take him away, and beat him up. He watches the boys playing football on the concrete pitch. It couldn’t be them, could it? Marko knows every one of them by name. Burim raises a hand and waves them over but Marko shakes his head and dismisses him.
‘He’ll go with you, will he? Burim?’ Kemal says.
‘What?’ Marko tries to hide the panic in his voice. ‘Go where?’
‘The call-up?’ Kemal says. ‘Conscription. You’re both eighteen this year, aren’t you?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, there’ll be a few of us.’
The game is quick and ruthless. Elvis threads the ball through Samir, through Zurab, through Alexander. An orange Volkswagen Vanagon pulls up on the road right in front of them, roof blocking their view of the goal. It is Bogdan. An older boy and one of Kemal’s closest friends. He has brought a van, and they are going to take him away in it.
Bogdan climbs out of the driver’s door. Wearing the fatigues of the brigade, he walks around the bonnet to the pavement. Kemal stands up to meet him, and Marko thinks about running. But where would that get him? He couldn’t hide forever.
When Kemal and Bogdan shake hands, Bogdan leaves a set of keys in Kemal’s palm and Kemal slips him a note.
‘Enjoy.’ Bogdan looks at Marko. Then crosses the playground, heading for the main road.
When Kemal turns around, he throws something at Marko.
The keys.
‘Happy birthday,’ Kemal says. ‘An early present. I feel bad I didn’t get you anything last time.’
Marko jumps down the bank and onto the road. He doesn’t know where to begin. He paces around the van.
‘We liberated it,’ Kemal says.
Marko looks at his friend.
‘Not like that – it’s all good. Ex-army. We registered a new owner.’
He runs his fingers along the paintwork. Beneath the hot orange, a faint trace of camouflage paint. Kemal opens the driver’s side door. The cab smells of warm leatherette.
‘Diesel,’ Kemal says.
‘How did you get it?’
‘Someone owed us a favour.’
‘You can’t afford this.’
They climb inside. Kemal punches the buttons on the radio and the news comes on.
‘I didn’t need to afford it,’ he says. ‘So don’t worry about it – I told you, the army owe me.’
Kemal opens the passenger door. ‘Drive it. Drive it all the way to Croatia if you need to. Get out of this shithole.’ He bangs the roof. ‘I have to go and meet someone.’
He steps out of the car, closes the door and climbs the bank to the pavement.
He is not going to be beaten up. Kemal does not know. Marko puts the key in the ignition, and turns the engine over. The van starts first time, engine shaking his seat. Kemal has stopped on the pavement, detained by Elvis.
He leans over the seat, and winds down the passenger window.
‘Vesna called!’ he shouts.
Kemal looks back at the van.
‘She said to meet her at the Kapija. The New York – seven thirty! By the theatre wall.’
Kemal walks back to the van and hangs over the window. ‘Vesna wants to meet tonight?’
‘Sorry, I forgot. She wants to go down to the square, for the Youth Day thing.’
It is half the truth. He needs the other half himself.
‘I’ll call her and tell her I can’t make it.’
‘No,’ Marko says.
‘Why not?’
‘She’s not in,’ he improvises. ‘Not by a phone any more. At a friend’s. You know. She said she was going round a friend’s to get ready.’
‘Jesus. Seven thirty?’
‘On the Kapija. By the theatre wall.’
Kemal shakes his head. ‘All right.’ Then he leans through the window of the van, and pinches Marko’s cheek harder than he needs to. Pinches his cheek so it will leave a blue bruise which Marko feels half the way out of town. ‘Drive safely.’
He is passing the cooling towers of the electricity plant when he remembers he is supposed to be cooking dinner. But the Stovnik sign feels like a point of no return.
Shithole, he thinks. He has never heard Kemal say anything bad about his home.
Kao Lak
In the past ten years of her profession, Anya had listened to countless victims of human rights abuses. Usually they were voices over the phone. Most often, she heard them through a translator, but sometimes, when a case began to build, she sat and listened to victims of inhumanity, in the cafés and homes of villages in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo. Until now, she had no reason to wonder how it might be different to listen to the story of the perpetrator. Only at The Hague had she breathed the same air as war criminals. And the court was different. The men on trial didn’t begin with the trickle of places and people, of times and dates. They didn’t slowly unwind themselves. The men at The Hague answered only what they were advised to answer, giving up the facts in shockingly dull itineraries of horror. Most of these men had at some point been assessed as psychopaths. She didn’t really believe these assessments, but it was easier to want them to be psychopaths than to believe them to be normal.
This wasn’t a courtroom. Kemal didn’t talk like the men at The Hague. For a start, he was talking; like a man who’d been rehearsing this conversation for years. And as he did, Anya was reminded of something a military police investigator once told her: silence is the best means of interrogation.
It started with how he missed Stovnik, but now Kemal was telling her about a place called Kletovo. He had grown up in Kletovo, in his father’s farmhouse, but his father had died before the war, and then his mother had been taken by Chetniks. Kemal had been made to watch while the Chetniks raped his mother. He tells her this without emotion, with his eyes on the beach, as if he were waiting for someone to appear.
She looks down at her hands.
‘Maybe you think this is what turns a man into a rapist.’ A breeze picks up the smoke of his cigarette and throws it in her eyes.
‘I’m sorry about your mother.’
Of course, he really had been rehearsing these lines. But to what purpose? So when the time came he had a good story? So he could absolve himself with the right excuses? She heard this too in the mouths of lawyers at The Hague, as they tried to build the mitigating circumstances for their
clients; as they tried to construct the story of how a man comes to do the unspeakable.
Now she was the lawyer.
‘I was told by a witness you raped a woman. At least one. At an aluminium factory called PK Musapa, sometime in August 1994. Two other women at that factory went missing.’
Anya hears the words come out of her mouth and feels they do not belong to her. They belong to the ideal Anya. The woman she is supposed to be. And while she knows that her accusation is dangerous, she experiences the thrill of becoming this person.
‘ “At least one”?’ Kemal doesn’t take his eyes off the beach. He leans forward and crushes his cigarette into the ashtray, tap, tap, tapping it down.
‘Ljuba Crvenović,’ Kemal finally says. ‘That was her name, wasn’t it? You spoke to her, did you?’
Jasenica
Marko hasn’t been to Vesna’s house in Jasenica since the beginning of the war. Thirteen years old! They had played in the front garden. He parks the van on the gravel slope, but it begins to roll back. He has to pull harder on the handbrake, frantically forcing the gearstick into first. The van creaks, and holds, just. The terraced lawn he remembers has turned into mire, relieved only by a few rows of vegetables, bamboo tents for beans and tomatoes, stunted peppers under sheets of plastic. The house has only half a roof. Across the white plaster wall, beneath the blue sheets of UNHCR tarpaulin, someone has sprayed:
‘Hello?’ He hears music playing; Bijelo Dugme singing ‘Da te bogdo ne volim’. The porch smells of the stagnant rain water collected in plastic barrels by the front door.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Marko!’
The door unbolts. Edita’s face appears in the crack.
‘Mrs Knežević!’ Marko smiles.
‘You!’ she says. ‘My God, look at you.’
She is shorter than he remembers. Or he is taller. Her face is thinner. Her black hair threaded with white.
‘Who did this, Mrs Knežević?’
Vesna’s mother shakes her head at the graffiti. ‘Oh, some kids – local – years ago.’
He follows her into a hallway of bare concrete floors. The walls have been recently set and have a clayey smell.
‘My parents were Croatian of course,’ she says. ‘So apparently this graffiti is hilarious.’
The kitchen is bare; walls half-skimmed, pale shadows where the kitchen units used to stand. The only furniture is a table in the middle of the room, where a camping cooker is hooked up to a gas cylinder.
‘Vesna told me Kemal was coming to collect her at seven thirty.’ She picks up two coffee cups and puts them in a washing bowl.
‘He couldn’t,’ Marko lies. ‘So I’ve come to get her while I can.’
‘Well. She’s upstairs getting ready. Which means you may be here for weeks.’
‘You should have told us about this graffiti,’ Marko says.
‘Us? Told you?’
‘I know people,’ Marko says. ‘We could find those guys.’
Vesna’s mother laughs, and wipes the coffee cups with a dishcloth. ‘And that’s how it all starts, isn’t it?’
Marko offers her a cigarette.
‘Now let me see.’ She takes the packet. ‘What is this?’
‘Real Marlboros, from Denmark – I get them from Lorens.’
‘Lorens? The man you work for, is it?’ She takes one of the cigarettes and smells it, knuckles like cracked acorns. Leaning over the table, Marko lights the cigarette, and Edita’s lips print a plum ring around the filter. She blows the smoke at the ceiling in one long plume, like a whale shoots water for the joy of it.
‘It was just some kid’s joke,’ she says. ‘Welcome to Zagreb. But we can’t get it off, and we’ll have to paint over it, and no one seems to have any yellow paint. I want yellow this time. I want a change.’
‘Have the packet.’ Marko offers her the cigarettes.
‘Marko!’ Vesna stands in the empty frame where the kitchen door used to be, barefooted, in a sleeveless white dress, which describes her figure so perfectly Marko is speechless.
Kao Lak
Kemal remembers Ljuba. She arrived on the second day. Her party walked out of the woods. With a team of four soldiers, Kemal manned a roadblock of overturned cars. The refugees were directed to the factory. They came in small groups at first. Each one of them approached the block, in the sights of the soldiers’ guns, arms and hands raised above their heads. Refugees had been used as Trojan horses before. At Gruvo Brdo, six of the 3rd brigade were killed, along with twelve refugees who approached a roadblock. The Chetniks were sitting in the trees behind the refugees, forcing them out. Kemal didn’t want anything like this to happen to the 2nd brigade. He hated forests. More than anything he hated forests.
The men with him at the factory were not in good humour. The brigade had been split by Chetnik troops attacking the valley from two sides. On the west flank Kemal and his men seemed to have pushed them back. But his troops in the east had not been so successful.
During the night, shots echoed over the eastern hills, where his men tried to hold off the attack, fighting their slow retreat to the factory. These men were supposed to regroup with the troops commanded by Kemal, but had been cut off.
There was no shelling in the area, but if the Chetniks brought shells in, the factory in which they were taking refuge would make a clear target.
What to do? It was Kemal’s decision. He didn’t trust a flight to the west. Perhaps they really had managed to push back the Chetniks there. But only two roads were passable, and he knew they were manned with roadblocks. The more difficult routes might prove too slow, giving the Chetniks time to outflank them. The south wasn’t an option either because eventually, they would meet the river, and if they couldn’t cross it, they would be trapped. Besides, the 2nd brigade had been chased into the valley from the south, and he had no intelligence on whether this threat was still present.
Kemal thought they should wait until they could gauge the Serbs’ next move. Until headquarters could give them better information on the radio. When the radio worked.
They were thinking about pushing on north, when the refugees started arriving from that direction too, bringing with them news of what sounded like a large Serbian presence.
‘That is one place I would not go back to.’ He looks over the beach. The clatter of cutlery surrounds them, the laughter of a child, the soft voices of lovers and the tinny noise of a radio drifting out of the bar.
‘I remember Ljuba arriving,’ Kemal says. ‘Because she came with the other women and they were pretty. Eight of them including Ljuba, you are right. Younger than most of the others. They kept close. Slept together on the floor.’
Kemal paws at his face. He rocks back on the legs of his chair. Rocks forward, and brings his big hands down onto the table, palms flat.
‘You know what I thought when I saw those women? I thought, here’s trouble.’
Stovnik
It is nearly seven by the time Vesna is ready to go. Kemal will be waiting in the square at 7.30. They have half an hour. Marko has so much to say, but when Vesna climbs into the van, he is paralysed by the sight of the gold zip that runs all the way from the dark pit of her arm to the nut-brown skin above her left knee.
‘I thought you said you had a new car?’
Marko doesn’t understand. His head fills with hairspray. Vesna pulls down the passenger visor, but there is no mirror. She opens the gold handbag on her lap and takes out a compact. ‘Whatever this thing is. Are you going to drive it?’
The van jumps. Vesna’s hair falls about her face. He takes the engine out of gear and tries again, letting down the awkward handbrake as smoothly as possible. They descend the hairpins over the valley at Jasenica. The only road barrier is the flickering yellow tape indicating a mined area. The van clatters over the potholes. Vesna says nothing. When they turn onto the Zagreb road, the indicator doesn’t cancel itself, and when he tries to turn it off, it switches in the other direction,
then back again, before mysteriously stopping.
On the way to Vesna’s, Marko had sailed along, the windows open, the invigorating smell of fertiliser in the air; the sedimentary layers of the mountains on either side of the valley were speed stripes. He had been full of confidence. He would get to Vesna first. They would finally talk about what happened. He would let her know he wanted her, and that what had happened in Sarajevo couldn’t just be ignored.
Now the van climbs through its five gears at an excruciating pace, and every change seems to mark the distance between Marko and the girl sitting next to him. Trapped in the cab, this is the closest they have been since Vesna’s bathroom floor, since Marko so painfully found his way inside her. But they couldn’t be further apart.
He winds down the window, and rests his elbow in the cool running air, free hand feeling in his pocket. Then he remembers he gave the cigarettes to Vesna’s mother.
‘Do you have cigarettes?’
‘I’m giving up.’
‘Giving up?’
But she doesn’t answer. Out of the passenger window, she watches the blackened frames of Tinje’s houses sail by. An army transporter is suddenly in front of them, and Marko has to slow behind the open tailgate. Inside the men sit on benches holding their rifles. The wheels of the truck ping small stones against the van’s paintwork and windscreen. Marko tries to drop back.
‘When are you drafted?’ she asks.
‘June,’ Marko says. ‘Probably. I don’t know yet.’
‘What do you think about Kemal?’
‘I don’t want to talk about Kemal.’
Marko feels he has taken a real step with these words, but she seems to ignore him.
‘Do you think it’s a kind of shell shock? His mood?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He isn’t himself. Seems to want to spend all of his time in that garden.’
‘Yes.’ Marko realises he is going to have to placate her. ‘He took a bath today.’
‘So?’
But he doesn’t get to finish the story. The army truck in front suddenly stops. They brake sharply. Vesna bounces forward. She has her hands on the dashboard. When the dust clears, the boys in the truck appear to have taken notice. One of them comes to the back and stands with his arms hanging from the metal frame of the tarpaulin roof. The soldier sways forward, and says something Marko can’t quite hear. Another soldier appears at the shoulder of the first, shapes a cock out of thin air and mimes his masturbation.