by David Savill
Vesna gives them the finger. Marko opens the door of the van and steps out.
‘Marko!’ He hears her shout. ‘Don’t!’
‘What’s the fucking problem?’ Marko yells at the soldiers.
But they don’t even look at him. Marko is left in a faint cloud of exhaust fumes and sand which clear to reveal an American soldier, and a tank at the side of the road.
Kao Lak
Ljuba’s testimony to Anya matched what Kemal told her. The first time she saw the brigade commander with his red sash was at the roadblock. Over the next two days, she found the presence of the man with the red sash reassuring. He always seemed calm. He was always in control. He didn’t go with the soldiers who manned the roadblocks any more, but stayed behind as part of the team defending the factory. He spent a lot of time with the radio, communicating with the brigade headquarters. When an argument broke out between two women accusing each other of stealing the food rations, it was Kemal who stepped in and sorted out the matter.
Ljuba confessed she had felt safer for the presence of someone like Kemal.
‘We decided to investigate a route to the south-east,’ he is telling her, ‘there were two villages we might be able to use – as staging posts. I had information they were still defended. The idea was we could reinforce those defences and protect the refugees in the houses. But we needed to see first. If we would meet any Chetniks on the way. Send a “probe”.’ He uses the technical word proudly, as if holding up a gem to the light. It is the English he has learned from his expat customers in Thailand. ‘I was away two nights. And when I came back – it was at night.’ He stops. Somewhere else in his mind. ‘Fuck it,’ he mutters, ‘she should have kept still.’
He stops to sip from his coffee but when he puts the cup down he doesn’t start again. Something is in his way. Something in the forest which Anya can’t see. He paws at his face, pulling down on his nose and sniffing.
‘Vesna told me she threw you out.’ He shakes his head. ‘She’s got fire – yes?’
Anya colours. The way she had bumbled around, asking stupid questions. ‘Yes.’
‘Did you meet my daughter?’
‘Your daughter?’
‘Amelia. Did you see a girl called Amelia?’
‘I didn’t meet a girl.’
She looks at Kemal’s hands, as if they will tell her what they have done. ‘When you came back it was at night? What do you mean, she should have kept still?’
He is watching the beach, absent-mindedly scratching at a patch of what looked like scalded skin on his left bicep.
‘I was on the Kapija, you know.’
‘Where?’
‘You can’t hear anything. When a shell hits so close. It’s like an explosion of silence in your head. You can’t hear people screaming. I could see them. But I couldn’t hear them.’
Kemal holds out his hands and arms. ‘How do you explain? Not a scratch. Nothing touched me. Afterwards, my ears were bleeding. Perforated drums. The sound of the shell perforated my eardrums, but the shell itself – the shrapnel. All around me, everyone in pieces. But me? Nothing. How did that happen?’
‘Do you want to talk about what happened at Ladina?’
‘I thought – I should be dead! What if I was dead?’
‘But in Ladina?’
‘I want to go to Bosnia and be in my daughter’s life.’
She is losing him. She needs to take him back. She needs him in that factory. She doesn’t want Kemal the father. She wants Kemal the soldier. Kemal the brigade commander.
‘How did it happen?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Ljuba?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t there.’
This is what he has been trying to pull out of himself. When he picks his coffee up, his hand is shaking.
Just his hand. And then Anya realises. She sees what Ljuba saw. The red sash of the commander on the concrete floor. Just his hand. His wrist. The red sash.
‘When you left the camp,’ she starts, ‘For the probe. You left someone else in charge?’
‘If I was a dead man,’ Kemal says, ‘how could I betray anyone?’
She opens her mouth to speak. Kemal breaks her gaze. He is looking beyond her. He is smiling. He is standing up to greet someone, and when Anya looks around, it is William. He is red-faced. Out of breath.
‘Here you are!’ he says.
And despite all the questions Anya still has, she has never been so happy to see anyone in all her life.
Stovnik
By the time they have passed the roadblock, it is almost a quarter past seven. Barely fifteen minutes before Vesna is supposed to be in the square with Kemal, and still they have talked about nothing. Marko pulls away as fast as the van will manage. The engine complains as he racks through the gears.
All Vesna can do is moan. Moan about the van. Complain they’ll be late. The road steepens, and the van likes it even less. He pulls up on a Ford Transit packed with people, and gears down to overtake. When he does, it is a mistake. As they crawl on the wrong side of the road, an old man his grandfather’s age is looking down on them through the window of the minibus, shaking his head.
‘What are you doing?’ Vesna asks.
The grocer’s van is heading towards them. The gap between this and the bus is only just big enough. He twitches at the steering wheel. The grocer’s van takes their wing mirror. Marko applies the brake, and the minibus they are trying to overtake shoots forward.
‘Jesus, Marko!’
‘You wanted to get there on time,’ he snaps.
‘And alive!’
The minibus is slowing now. They are at the junction above town, next to the water-cooling towers of the electricity plant. The bus turns left. Marko turns right. They pass the Stovnik sign, and the abandoned petrol station. Around the bend are the blocks of Marko’s estate; beyond this, the red roofs of the old town, and the Kapija where Kemal is waiting. Where Marko has told Kemal to be.
Marko decides this will be the last time he will see Vesna. And if this is the last time he will see Vesna, perhaps it will be the last time he will see Kemal. He will be eighteen next month. He will move out. Come summer he’ll be barracked with the army anyway.
He pulls onto the gravel verge of the last bend into town.
‘What are you doing?’ Vesna asks.
‘Nice view.’
‘Marko,’ she says. ‘Let’s go. He’s waiting.’
Marko grasps Vesna’s wrist and pulls her into him. Hadn’t it been like this on the bathroom floor? The hard kiss, hard teeth and biting? Wasn’t this what she liked? Wasn’t this what they had shared, wasn’t this the thing only they shared? Or did she share this with Kemal?
Vesna pulls away. When she slaps him it is harder than he has ever been slapped. She has slammed the car door, and is walking over the dirt and scrub of the lay-by towards the edge of the hill.
‘Vesna!’ He climbs out and shouts after her, ‘Vesna!’ Marching now, easy to catch up as she stumbles in her heels.
‘What if I told him,’ he yells, ‘about us!’
She stops and turns around. ‘Tell Kemal?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘Kemal knows, you dickhead. No one has to tell him. He just knows.’
Marko looks at her face. She is crying. He has made her cry, and he feels wonderful and terrible at the same time.
‘Are you going to drive us down?’ Vesna asks. ‘Or are you going to hit me?’
He watches as Vesna wobbles in her shoes, out over the gravel verge, towards the clump of flickering linden trees looking down over the roofs of the town. He thinks she is going to disappear on the path, but then she stops and bends over and a clear vomit pours out of her mouth. When he reaches her, Vesna raises her hand, and shakes her head. She sits down at one of the picnic benches. After a moment, he sits down beside her.
‘Sorry,’ he says.
‘It’s my fault too.’
When it comes,
it doesn’t make any sense, to hear the whistling sound up here. Marko has only ever heard it in the town. He spins around because he thinks a truck is passing by, but the road behind them is empty. A small ‘pop’. Like a tyre exploding. Turning back to the town, a white cloud is already unfolding silently over the Kapija. For a second it might be something else: then its terrible beauty blooms, and it cannot be anything but what it is. From up here, it all happens slowly, silently, as if underwater. With the noise of sirens and screams, the first black smoke unfolds from the white. This is how it must look, to the men who fire the shells from the hills.
Tuesday 12 April 2005
Sarajevo
Samir’s mobile phone does not answer. He is not at the B&B. The reception desk is watched by an elderly woman who turns out to be the shopkeeper from next door. She tells Marko that Samir has gone up to the park. ‘Off Jekovac, you know? Above the Širokača cemetery? He had some idea about getting flowers for Jasmina, I said why don’t you buy flowers from the market? You won’t find flowers up there, unless you plan to take them from somebody’s grave!’ The woman screws a finger into her temple to indicate that Samir is mentally unsound. ‘All the flowers on the market are from North Africa, he says. Spring flowers, he says. They have to be real spring flowers! He’s crazy about them.’ She gestures at the walls and their framed blossoms.
Jekovac is the street winding up above the market, above the noise of street sellers and vans in the tight market lanes, above the hammering of metal beams in the old Austro-Hungarian buildings that seem to require endless renovation. Marko has walked down one side of the valley today, and now he is climbing up the other. Jekovac rises on a cliff, above a hook in the Miljacka, and when the road turns, he can see over a crumbling wall, down to the green river. He stops to catch his breath. He has been smoking for the first time in years and hasn’t eaten.
He is above the Širokača cemetery now, where the white obelisks of graves pour down onto the terracotta carpet of the city’s roofs. The sun is beginning to set at the western end of the valley, drawing the eastern end beneath a curtain of cool shade. The black glass monstrosities of the Unis towers strike twin silhouettes. Momo and Uzeir. These were the names they gave them. One tower Bosnian, one tower Serb; a local legend of which the liberal politicians liked to remind the population during the war. As long as Momo and Uzeir are still standing . . .
And nationality hadn’t mattered to them, it really hadn’t mattered. Marko’s father was born in Serbia, his mother in Croatia. So what did that make him? A boy born in Bosnia of Serbian and Croatian parents. They had lived in Bosnia, that was the point. Kemal’s parents were born in Kletovo, and were Muslims both, but none of the family went to mosque. Samir’s parents had Slovenian, Serbian and Hungarian blood. But no one in Stovnik really talked about where they came from, or who went to mosque and who went to church. They were better than all that. They were proper socialists. They were better than the idiots of the villages who did what they were told. They were better than the politicians in Serbia who destroyed Tito’s communism and grabbed the army for themselves. In Stovnik they were better. In Sarajevo they were better.
How could you believe that about Kemal? In the garden Vesna’s eyes had accused him.
Them, she had said. When Kemal told her about Ladina, she had told him about the English woman who was on to them.
Marko follows the steep road around the back of the cemetery until it splits at the tall walls of the yellow stone bastion, an octagon tower that rises two storeys. He is confused. He is not sure where this ‘park’ is supposed to be. There is a small patch of land planted with plane trees on the bastion, but up the cool stone steps of the tower, he only finds a few teenagers, and schoolchildren sharing cigarettes; aimless boys throwing stones at the trees; lovers sitting with their knees up, toe to toe on the wall, so their raised legs strike the shape of half a heart. The city spreads to the west, and climbs the hills to the north and east. But on the south side of the bastion, the hill drops precipitously from the road, and there is a single sandy pathway through the woods.
How is he supposed to find Samir here? He should have waited at the B&B, or gone back to his cousin’s house. Jasmina would be cooking. Above the city, the early evening air is filling with the smell of frying peppers. The sinking sun sharpens the lines of the cliffs and hills. Why did this country have to be so fucking beautiful?
He sits down on the old wall of the bastion, and closes his eyes to the sun; the kids’ voices swim around him, punctuated only by the hollow bell of stones striking the tree trunks. In England, he had once been taken to a cricket match, where the man who took him talked about the sound of leather on willow – the English sound. When he opens his eyes he is not in England. Two men in caps are laying prayer mats on the balding grass. Like a siren the call to prayer begins.
‘It was Samir he didn’t want to see!’ Vesna told Marko of her conversations with Kemal. ‘Samir and the others. That’s why he didn’t want to come back. He couldn’t stand to look at them. Neither can I. Not even for Kemal’s funeral. He came around here once, your cousin, wanting to know where Kemal was. I couldn’t let him in the house.’
Marko faces Mecca and closes his eyes. He listens to the call to prayer. He is not observant, never has been. It is not his religion, but the sound is something like a childhood lullaby. When it is over, he drops down from the wall, and at that same moment, his phone rings.
‘I had a missed call,’ Samir says.
‘Where are you?’
‘Most people don’t even know these are orchids,’ Samir tells him.
They are standing beneath the cool canopy of the wood, beneath the bastion. Trees cling to the sides of a steep hill, roots like long fingers scrabbling in the rock and earth. In places, the land here falls away to a sheer cliff. Marko found his cousin on an outcrop, before a small tumble of moss-covered boulders, over a drop thick with tangled bushes and stunted trees. Samir holds the flower out, stem in one hand, head laid over his palm like a market seller presenting a fine cloth.
‘Cephalanthera longifolia, a common white orchid in Bosnia, usually flowers in late May or June, but this year? I blame climate change.’
He lays the flower with a small pile by his feet, and kneels down with his prosthetic leg to clip another with a penknife. A breeze brushes the heads of the trees, the forest whispering.
‘Cut it right, and they grow again.’ He clips another, and places it with the bunch before using his good leg to push up, dragging the prosthetic until he can flip it straight. This is done in one seamless action that still elicits Marko’s admiration. The descent into the woods had been hard enough on two legs.
‘We spent so much time in forests,’ Samir says. ‘As soldiers. You wouldn’t think I would want to spend another minute in them. But it’s funny. There’s something I like about being here. I think it’s where I started looking at things differently. You know – “nature”. And human nature.’ He reaches over to one of the lichen-skinned boulders, touching a flower Marko hadn’t even noticed. It grows in a green cup between the stones.
‘This one is Neottia nidus-avis,’ he says. ‘Because of the bell-shaped heads and the lighter colour. Usually I find these, and they have quite brown petals. But this one seems very yellow.’ He cups the flower like a lover’s neck, but doesn’t cut it. ‘Maybe because of where it grows.’
‘The Bosnian lily. Kemal had burned the tattoo off his arm.’ Samir doesn’t seem to have heard him. ‘I saw Vesna again. She had Kemal’s daughter. But you knew that.’
‘I’m going to leave this one.’ Samir removes his hand from the orchid.
‘You knew Vesna had been to see him in Thailand.’
Samir has his back to Marko, looking up over the boulders and into the canopy of the woods. ‘It’s good to know, that there is no one hiding behind these trees. I’m not sure you can understand that.’
‘Kemal contacted her three years ago.’
Marko is aware of
taking a step towards his cousin, but not aware of the decision to place a hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s a victory for me. To come back into the woods,’ Samir says.
Marko tightens his grip, but Samir slips it off. ‘You were quite a naive kid, Marko. What made you think we were so fucking virtuous? We weren’t. We were stupid fucking kids like everyone else. And you didn’t have to face up to that, did you? You could just run away, and leave us to face up to it like you owed nothing. Maybe you did owe nothing.’
When his cousin finally turns around, Marko punches Samir square on the nose.
Samir steps back, holding his face. The blood comes quick between his fingers.
The trees dance around them.
‘Done?’ Samir says.
Marko waits until his cousin looks up again. Samir wipes his face so the blood paints his cheek, puts his hands on his hips and presents the other side like a target. ‘There’s more than that. Isn’t there?’
Marko has taken his shot before Samir even finishes. This time his cousin goes down, falling back, over his good leg. Marko isn’t sure whether he hears, or sees Samir’s head hit the boulder. He grabs the collar of his shirt, picks him up and punches his face like a pillow. He doesn’t know how many times he does this before he stops.
Up the path and over the outcrop, the trees marching with him now. He knows if he stays there will be more. He can feel it in his fists, it is what the beat of his heart is telling him. He knows he will not stop.
The path meets the road, and offers him a choice he is not ready for. Down to the town, or up into the hills. He follows his feet up, because it is harder this way, because this way there is more energy to spend. Samir helped carry Kemal’s coffin up the hill of Lovers’ Park, when he knew Kemal was not dead, but on his way to Croatia. Kemal was out of the country, out to wherever he would no longer have to look at the faces of the men who let him down. Marko tries to remember now if Samir had wept. If he had ever seen Samir weep.