They are Trying to Break Your Heart

by David Savill

  But he can’t remember having ever wept himself.

  He reaches a broken stone wall, separating a field of meadow grass from the road, and sits down, breathless, the city falling away.

  When people in England asked about the war, Marko used to say to them: ‘War is war. What can I tell you?’ He has never known what this meant. Only it stopped a conversation he didn’t want to have. When people asked about the war, he did not see the war at first. He did not see the things people wanted to hear about. He did not see orange tracers unzipping the night over Stovnik. He did not see the mouth of the tunnel beneath the airport in Sarajevo at just the moment before he took a deep breath, and bent down to hurry through. He did not smell the sewage, and the sweat in damp clothes. When people asked about the war, at parties, on the doorstep of a club, around a dinner table, it was Kemal he saw first. Kemal in his bedroom, putting his uniform on. The boy his cousin Samir met on a beach in Bečići, the boy who turned out to be from the next village. The boy who encouraged them to chase the girl who was down by the breakwater. The boy who discovered Vesna. He’d loved Kemal more than any of them. Those friendships were his war. When people asked Marko about the war, he saw Kemal, because Kemal was the one victim of the war whom Marko believed he’d killed.

  A song is playing somewhere. Playing through a cheap radio among the clatter of pots and pans. He hears a mother shouting at her children. A dog barking. The chime of his mobile phone playing along in all this; it is a sound he doesn’t recognise until he feels the phone buzzing insistently against his thigh. He doesn’t make the decision to answer but finds himself pressing the right button, and holding the phone to his ear.

  ‘Hello?’ It is an English voice.

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Sorry – who am I speaking to? Is that Marko?’

  Perhaps William has the wrong number. He almost wishes he has. He has spent the afternoon preparing himself to make this phone call, and now he feels like it needs a rehearsal, a false start. If this is the wrong number, he can try again, get himself into a better frame of mind. Or if this is the wrong number, perhaps fate is relieving him of the responsibility to make the call. Because if this is the right number (and yes, the voice on the other end of the line has just confirmed his name is Marko), he has no business visiting his grief on the unsuspecting.

  ‘I was given your number by the Bosnian embassy in Bangkok,’ William says. ‘As next of kin for Kemal Lekić. I understand you were his – brother?’

  William looks down from his apartment, on to the familiar lights of Sukhumvit at night. It is reassuring to place his hand on the cool glass and remind himself of where he is.

  Marko listens to the English voice telling him Kemal Lekić was his brother, and like a suggestible believer listening to the words of an imam thinks, yes, he was. There is also something reassuring about the English voice. Something of his real life, with Millie, with his business, with his rent and his bills, with all the wonderful dullness of his normal life, far away from the hillsides where he has just assaulted his cousin.

  ‘Who is this?’ Marko asks.

  ‘Sorry. My name’s William Howell. I met your brother in Kao Lak.’

  ‘Kemal?’

  ‘As a tourist. I was a tourist. In Kao Lak. We happened to be together when the wave came.’ There is a pause. Every time William mentions the wave, it’s as if he has to wait again, to stand on the veranda with Anya and Kemal, to watch the tide retreat.

  ‘We were together when the wave came,’ he begins over. ‘And I suppose, I believe, I may have been one of the last people to see him alive. Before the coma.’ William should have begun the entire conversation with his condolences, but it seems too late now. There is no sound on the other end of the line, and when he tries to imagine the Bosnian man who has answered the phone, he realises he is picturing Kemal himself. The voice comes out of nothing, but is close, like a man standing next to him in a dark room.

  ‘You were with Kemal when the wave hit?’ Marko asks.

  ‘We were together, at his bar. We’d just met. But afterwards – ’

  William cannot think why he had imagined this was a story he could tell over the phone to a stranger.

  ‘Afterwards?’ the Bosnian man says.

  ‘Sorry. I’m calling because I wanted to tell you, your brother saved my life. He picked me up, and put me on the back of a bike, and got me to the hospital. I was almost unconscious.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There were other people too,’ the English man says, ‘in the sea. We found a place, a fire escape which we were standing on. And Kemal stepped down into the water. He was pulling people out. I thought – I thought it’s something someone should know about.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marko says, ‘yes, it is.’

  The first wave turned out to be nothing more than a rehearsal. The ocean had given up, tipping over the car park, water from a spilled glass. As the spill retreated and sucked at their toes, they watched where Kemal’s bar had become a wooden boat, sea turning at the skirts of its veranda. The car park was as far as the first wave came. Where the beach had been, a black lake of umbrellas rocking like buoys, a vending freezer capsized, the seller, standing among his floating stock. People stood waist deep, the panic on their faces slowly turning to relief. Parents held their children above the waterline, chattering voices full of a nervous joy. Some people had even begun to play. He remembers a group of brown-skinned teenaged boys, wrestling in the water, seal slick in the sunlight. Others waded to the road, women holding excited children above their heads. It all happened in the silence left behind after a great noise. The silence created when you take something away. Below the lip of the car park, bobbing on the surface of the black water, floated a sign with the English words No Dog Walking, on a piece of green sheet-metal, and a picture of a small black terrier crossed out with a red line. William has often wondered if Kemal or Anya had said something as they stood on the warm, damp tarmac of the car park. If they had said their final words to each other. But No Dog Walking is all that ever returns to him, the sign turning on the surface before it slips away – slowly at first, gathering pace. Not floating, but pulled. They were standing in a moment where everything that mattered was what couldn’t be seen, what couldn’t be heard. The yawn of the ocean pulling the water back, as the horizon slipped silently towards them. The value of their life reduced to scale; how small they were.

  William has said goodbye to Marko, and with his thoughts, Bosnia retreats to the other side of the world. He lies back on his bed and the ceiling of the apartment tips over him, glowing red and then black, red and then black, the conversation of altitude lights on the needles of Bangkok’s skyscrapers, the cars picked up and gently turned over, a shoal of refrigerators, a washing machine pushing through the window of a shop, the air cracking in their ears. It was not the first wave they had to fear. It was their ignorance. They couldn’t see the first wave for what it was. The kindness of the world. A warning. William read somewhere, in the days when he followed news with the hope Anya’s name might appear, how very few domestic or wild animals were killed in the event. National Park keepers in Burma reported how the earthquake sent their elephants trekking to higher ground. Forest wardens in Sri Lanka reported monkeys which took to the taller trees of the deeper jungle, hours before the wave arrived.

  On Kao Lak beach, even after the first wave made land, children played, and their parents watched. Only humans, with their human arrogance, possess the instinct to stand and stare at what they have never seen before. Because what had happened was not a wave. It had no height, like the hands of water that form from troughs and end in the fingers of crests. It did not reach up, and break in a fist. It was not a wind wave which, however big it may appear to a surfer, is only a brief tantrum of energy, the wind picking up the sea, and throwing it at the shore. The ocean had rolled up like a carpet. The energy of the earthquake had travelled, silently beneath the deep sea, gathering the shallow water from the coast, and pu
shing it onto land. Land which had only ever been a temporary home for humans, land which had for much longer been the seabed itself. The wooden boat of Kemal’s bar simply disappeared inside the second wave. And then they ran.

  It is Anya who finds the fire escape. William follows her up the wooden steps. Kemal behind. They climb to the top where a man in Sponge Bob boxer shorts and a Lakers vest films the swollen river of debris filling the street below. No longer just the force of water, but the weight of what is in the water. A man holds on to the branch of a tree. A woman uses a television as a float. A child hangs on to the saddle of a bicycle. The wave does not drown people. It crushes them first. They are buried beneath brick walls, pinned by cars, torn open by glass. William watches as, on the first flight of the fire escape, Kemal steps into the water and stretches across the torrent with a metal pole. It is one of those poles with a hook, the kind used to close the shutters of shops. The fire escape they stand on is screwed to the side of a two-storey building, but the roof above the last step is more than the height of two men. There is no way to reach it.

  At first, William can’t see what Kemal is doing. A hand emerges from the water, and a boy’s naked body flickers in the river, like a dream, a white ribbon, caught on the rear fender of a car which is nosing up against the side of the store. The boy’s free hand catches the pole, and draws it back. Kemal pulls him, grasping the crook of the boy’s arm, and throwing him onto the steps. The boy crawls up. Holding on to the railings and extending the pole again, Kemal jabs at a round, pale thing bobbing against the trunk of the car.

  What did you do?

  The question repeats across the blinking altitude lights of Bangkok. The neon-white skeleton of the Shangri-la Hotel, the green veins of Lumphini Park. The temples of the Grand City piled up, like towers of gold coins, spilling into the bend of the river.

  What did you do to deserve to be here?

  The pale thing in the black water is a baby. The shine of its arched spine and tiny bottom in the air. Kemal uses the pole to poke the baby but it doesn’t respond. It bobs like an apple.

  Things knock together in William’s dreams. In the wave he can swim. When he touches a refrigerator, it spins away. And always, last of all, before he wakes, William is holding Anya’s hand. Her hair fans like seagrass and they float above the reef, the fish showering beneath them, and Anya pointing up at the shimmering light. They surface and pull off their masks, and Anya says, ‘Happy Christmas.’

  Another car crashes hard into the first, as though, accelerator down, someone inside were really driving it. The baby disappears between the teeth of the cars. When the steps fall in the water, William holds on to Anya’s hand. He holds on with both hands, one around her forearm and one around her wrist. His fingertips feel the cheap plastic of her Chairman Mao watch, but she won’t come with him. She won’t come the way the water wants. He holds on to her, but she is stuck and the water is tearing him. Pulling at his legs, the wanting water. He holds on to Anya, but she will drown him. The water will take him up, and Anya will pull him down.

  Sarajevo

  Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality. At the time, Marko and Kemal had thought the mantras belonged to Bruce Lee. They were written in the pages of his martial arts manual, the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, the book which for years was the only one they read; the pages whose drawings they interpreted and followed in the fights on their bedroom floor. Jeet Kune Do was a martial art without form, only an attitude. It combined karate, kick-boxing and t’ai chi. Some of its moves improved upon the positions Marko learned in his judo classes. But really, it was the words that mattered most; the philosophy in which they were trying to train themselves. Bruce Lee stole it all from Lao-tzu. In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water, yet for attacking that which is hard and strong, nothing can surpass it.

  Chuck Norris’s yang to Bruce Lee’s yin. In some ways, Chuck Norris was a more powerful fighter, but his characters fought out of revenge and violent emotion. Chuck Norris sweated. Bruce Lee was style. An expression of emotion, not a slave to it. To watch Bruce Lee was to fall into a trance, into a kind of forgetting. And without knowing it, this is what the boys wanted. The war was asking them not to think, but to become. Into a soul absolutely free from thoughts and emotion, even the tiger finds no room to insert its claws. Marko was a godless socialist, and even though he was born to Muslim parents, Kemal was a godless socialist too.

  I have heard that one who knows how to nourish life,

  On land meets no tigers or wild buffaloes,

  In battle needs to wear no armours or weapons,

  A wild buffalo has nowhere to butt its horns,

  A tiger has nowhere to sink its claws,

  A weapon has nowhere to enter its blade.

  Why?

  Because such a one has no place of death.

  Kemal was a man who had to make use of violence, not a violent man.

  Marko is relieved to find his cousin, not lying face down, but sitting up against one of the boulders, head in his hands. Kneeling, he reaches out and feels the back of Samir’s head. His cousin flinches. There is no blood, but the swelling is the size of an egg.

  ‘It’s good you have a lump,’ Marko says. ‘I’d be more worried if you didn’t have a lump.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  But when Marko looks at his cousin’s face, he sees his nose is out of joint, and there is a pink glow all around it, as if he has left the impression of his fist.

  ‘We’ll have to tell Jasmina you fell and broke your nose.’ Marko hooks his hands under Samir’s arms. When he pulls him up, the artificial leg is left behind.

  ‘I never fall,’ Samir leans up against the boulder. Marko hands him the leg.

  ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Samir says. ‘He was ashamed of us. He blamed himself. Me. Bogdan. I felt sorry for Bogdan.’

  Samir fixes his leg, and tries to pick up the flowers, bending down, one hand reaching for the back of his head. ‘Jasmina had her second scan today,’ he says. ‘All clear. These flowers were supposed to be for her.’

  Marko places a hand on Samir’s chest, and stops him. He picks up the flowers and shoves them into his cousin’s arms.

  ‘You fell,’ he tells him. ‘You say that you fell. That’s all.’

  Boxing Day, 2004

  Kao Lak

  The water has made a river of the street. The river lifts the cars and they come to life, drunk on their freedom. One noses into the wooden struts of the fire escape and the platform beneath Anya’s feet creaks. William is on the step below her, and Kemal is on the bottom step, at the end of their human rope. Letting go of William, Kemal grabs some kind of metal pole and extends it into the rushing water. The boy catches on it like a wet rag. Kemal pulls him in, this naked thing. This naked thing slips out of the wave like a birth, crawling up the steps with the instinct of an animal, until he reaches the top, until he reaches Anya.

  Face in Anya’s belly, the boy breathes, back heaving, the knots in his spine tightening. He coughs. He begins to choke. Anya hooks her arms beneath the boy’s and pulls him up. With her fists she pounds on his back. She pounds on the boy’s back and the water pours out of him. He is on his hands and knees and still the water pours. So much water it will drown them all. Then the fall, the fire escape collapsing, and the water full of salt. The sea cannons in her ears. The flapping of a bird’s wings. The pigeons scrapping on the scaffolded tower of Our Most Holy Redeemer. The peeling bitumen beneath her feet. She couldn’t hold William’s hand. It lay there between them, a lost glove. The masseuse opening Anya’s palm; and slowly but surely pressing down on her back, a sharp pain in her breasts, the air pushed out of her lungs; then music like stones skipping over water and the moon laying a carpet of light over the rolling sea, and the voices of the choir filling like a sail and – three years.

  ‘Hello, what have you been up to?’

  The f
ire escape leads to the school roof. The steel boxes of air-conditioning units. Little white mushroom caps with spinning fans. White plastic domes glowing in the ceilings of classrooms, and down there, on the other side of the earth’s curve, patterned with rotten leaves stuck fast where in Algebra classes she stares, and out of the leaves worlds appear.

  She lies on her back. The bright sky blinding them. The boy from school resting his head in her lap, the weight slightly uncomfortable, pressing on her – what had they called it in class? – her pudendum. The gloved hand inside her. Not taking the thing away. Only checking. It will be a pill. It will be a word she cannot say. Mifepristone.

  Mifepristone. Above them, the clouds break into creatures. The creatures unfold into animals. A burning pig. The blue sky giving birth to an elephant. The cramps, like giving birth to a death. She closes her eyes and waits for the elephant to cover the sun. For the world to darken. And when she opens her eyes, the boy from school has gone.

  Gone. The absence a sound like a bell. Anya gets to her feet. The ocean is deep and meets the roof of the school, surface a mirror, black in the dying day. Like hands, treetops reach out of the water. William. The Bosnian man. He is kneeling before one of the metal boxes housing the air conditioning. Scrape. Scrape.

  Scrape, with a penknife. Not William. Not the Bosnian man. The boy from the river, crouched in a puddle, wet spine of knots. Slipping out of the sea. Slipping into the sea, chain of a boat’s anchor released. Scratching his name into the tin panel with a knife.

  A knife in her hand. Anya has never done anything like this before. She has never trespassed the school grounds. Never left her mark on the world. Kneeling, she scratches her name in the metal: A N Y A.

  ‘Anya!’ Her mother is calling from the porch, ‘Come in now – you’re late!’