by Louise Welsh
*
In March or April – I’m not sure which – Charles began to call more persistently, wanting to know when the website would be finished. “Is something wrong?” he said. Eventually I took the phone off the hook.
I barely left the flat, even to buy food. Instead I ate what the ghosts cooked. They filled my kitchen with the smell of lamb frying in garlic and paprika; then they got distracted, by an argument about politics or ingredients, and burnt the bottoms of my pans. I did sometimes go out, to get things they had forgotten: tomatoes, an egg. But those times were getting rarer. The light was too bright, the people too solid; their voices reached me from a long way away, like sounds heard underwater. I preferred to devote myself to the ghosts: their recipes and whims, their stories.
So I was there when Lejla walked in. Though barely more than a child, she was visibly pregnant. She leant against the living room wall, just inside the threshold, holding her heavy belly in her hands.
“Pass that cushion, dear? Ouf, that’s better. At my age a body has too many bones and they all get closer to the surface.”
It was Tarik’s grandmother again, clutching her eternal coffee pot. “That poor child,” she said. “She’s a Croat, see the dinky gold cross? It’s a wonder she held onto it. I’ve just this minute been chatting to a woman who was locked up with her in Banjaluka. She’s making chicken liver pilaf if you want some later.”
This was Lejla’s story, as told to me by Tarik’s grandmother, who heard it from the ghost in my kitchen, who saw it with her own eyes.
She was a nice girl from a good Croat family, who didn’t decide to get out of the newly declared Republic of Serbia quickly enough. So she was separated from them and held in a makeshift prison camp next to the police station.
At night there were rapes. Guards with flashlights, or just torches made of lighted paper, searched for anyone who was young and female.
They used a knife to cut her dress open. Then they raped her many times in one night. She was thirteen years old. When she became pregnant they continued to rape her nightly.
Eventually they put her in a train waggon meant for cattle but crowded with Croat women and girls. The train travelled south to the foot of Vlašić mountain. When it ran out of track, buses took them the rest of the way up. Lejla joined an interminable line of people: heads down, shuffling, sometimes stumbling, but moving slowly towards free Bosnia, or so they hoped. The road cut into the side of the mountain was narrow, and there were corpses on the rocks below. At some point in the night she tripped and joined them.
*
In my living room, she – Lejla – listened shyly to the music that came from Tarik, the handless guitar-playing boy. She moved towards him so slowly she did not seem to be moving at all. But she was.
“Jimmy Page,” she said quietly.
He frowned. “John Paul Jones.” He had a memorable voice for a boy: gravelly, smoke-scarred.
“Is he better?”
“I prefer bass guitar.”
“I do too.”
It wasn’t long before the Muslim boy with the shell-broken hands was deep in conversation with the raped Croat girl.
She did tell him some of what had happened to her. Shutting her eyes, touching the raised bumps of the wallpaper with one hand. But mostly they talked about rock music. He was enthusiastic about the electric guitar of Plavi Orkestar; she giggled. “They dance like chickens,” she said. “They hug turkeys in their videos.” She mentioned the plangent music of Crvena Jabuka; he thought it was wet. “You may discord,” he said politely. But she did not discord with him, not at all.
I watched her a lot, I admit. She was so young. I worried about how she would cope with motherhood: how could a child look after a child? Sometimes I forgot that they were both already dead.
*
I stopped work on the maritime museum’s website. When I was not watching Lejla and Tarik, I went into the kitchen and helped the older ghosts cook: I peeled their potatoes, I rubbed flour and lard together to make pastry. Or I sat at the breakfast bar and listened to them talk. All the ghosts were keenly interested in the search for General Mladić, the Bosnian-born Serb who had led an army through their country; most of them were angry at how long it was taking.
“He’s in Serbia.”
“He’s not in Serbia at all, he’s in Montenegro.”
“He’s escaped Europe altogether by now.”
“That butchering peasant.”
“What occupies him these days?”
“He used to keep bees.”
“No doubt he still jeers at his goats.”
“The ones he named Major and Mitterand and Kohl?”
“Yes, after those Western politicians he so despised.”
“His health too must be much on his mind.”
“He’s old by now.”
“So would I be, but for him.”
“So would we all be.”
At first the ghosts were easily distracted from the manhunt. They compared the size of their gardens, or the size of the peppers they had grown in their gardens. They had aimed to sit on a porch swing through summer evenings, but into their modest ambitions had blundered Mladić. He had shelled their houses and mined their vegetable patches. He had said: “I shall be vindicated by history.” They were his dead.
Then, last Thursday, I came downstairs to find all the ghosts clustered round the television, jostling each other for the best view. As I watched, the screen fizzed and spat, and my husband appeared. It was definitely him: his pointy elbows, moley hair. The ghosts nudged me slyly, but then the picture flickered and Jon was replaced by a man with a polka-dot tie and greased-back hair. “Kruno Standeker, the journalist,” Tarik’s grandmother whispered to me. “He was killed by a road mine near Mostar seventeen years ago.”
“Ratko Mladić,” intoned Standeker, “was born in Bosnia in 1942. He went to military school in Serbia and entered the Yugoslav army, rising to the rank of Colonel General. When Bosnia declared independence in 1992, he blockaded the city of Sarajevo and shelled it for four years. In 1994, he allegedly ordered the genocide of over eight thousand Muslims in Srebrenica.”
The screen filled with soundless black-and-white footage. The war was over, and Mladić – ears sticking out beneath his peaked cap – was retreating to Serbia, where he lived in army barracks, going openly to football matches and horse races. Then the political atmosphere turned against him and he was on the run in Han Pijesak and New Belgrade, moving every two or three weeks between housing estates whose walls were covered with spray-paint vampires and signatures like coils of barbed wire. Serbia put a price on his head; international arrest warrants were drawn up. He left the overpopulated cities and went to live in the country, in a village of plum tree orchards and pepper fields, in a farmhouse made from clay bricks. He had mistaken boredom for safety; he thought no one would look for him there. Even so, he went out only at night. It was as if he had become one of the graffiti vampires from the housing estate walls, as if light petrified him.
For as long as he could remember, Mladić had been a skilful chess player, winning games across the length and breadth of Bosnia: in prison camps, at military headquarters, on the front lines. Now he sat before the chessboard, hour after hour, while an invisible foreigner, a man with electronic eyes and ears, chased his pieces across the black and white squares.
Mladić lived, fortified by obscurity, with cousin Branko, his Glorious Defender: his castle, of course. But most of his pawns – the army, the police, the secret services – had already been taken, the treacherous bastards, they’d gone over to the other side. And now his queen was under threat, his wife Bosiljka suddenly detained and questioned; harassed, beset, while he, helpless, fumed. Even his son – his slick-wheeled, Dacia-driving knight – was closely watched: it was too dangerous to see him much.
The screen spurted into Technicolor, revealing a woman sitting upright at a virtual desk. “DAWN RAID,” she reported, and the ghosts inhaled a collec
tive gasp. They’d been channel-surfing since the news broke – they knew the story off by heart, in all its permutations – but this was their favourite part. “MEN IN MASKS MOVE IN,” they mouthed in perfect synchronicity with the woman on the screen, working their mandibles hard. Ten plain-clothed policemen or twenty special officers, armed or unarmed, depending which broadcaster you picked. Mladić was on his way to the garden for a pre-dawn stroll, or he was sitting in his front room wearing a tracksuit. He was handcuffed or he was not handcuffed; he was made to sit in the yard or he was taken into the house. He definitely offered his captors some home-made plum brandy. “Checkmate,” he conceded politely. “Which one of you is the foreigner?”
I started to understand.
“High-tech surveillance and tracking techniques were behind this operation,” the reporter was saying primly. “The British and American intelligence services have been formally thanked for their assistance. Also Bakir Izetbegović, the Muslim member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, has announced that the arrest was completed with the support of Bosnian security agencies.”
Was that what my husband had been doing? Hunting down the butcher of Srebrenica, bringing the man who called himself God to justice for crimes against humanity? Of course – it must be. Why else would the ghosts have come here?
All day long my guests were jubilant: they twittered and squeaked. They wanted a banquet, a celebration: they wanted, when it came down to it, a wake. Most of them also wanted to keep watching television, so although I’d have liked to see if Jon reappeared, I offered to help in the kitchen.
The first thing we made was bosanski lonac, as this would take five hours to cook. We layered chunks of lamb and potato with vegetables including cabbage and peppers, added garlic cloves and chopped parsley, seasoned it generously, and poured white wine and stock over the top. I turned on the gas and brought the oven up to temperature, then placed the stew carefully on the bottom shelf.
The ghosts showed me how to make sarmas while the stew was cooking, rolling grape leaves around tiny portions of rice and meat. Once or twice someone opened the oven, and the kitchen filled with the warm, heavy smell of lamb and the floury sourness of half-cooked potatoes. Whenever that happened, cigarette-smoking soldiers appeared in the kitchen to ask how long it would be. The cooks shooed them out. They made baklava ahead of time: spreading honey onto filo pastry and adding rosewater to crushed pistachio nuts. The air filled with a back-of-the-throat sweetness and another smell I couldn’t identify, which made me uneasy.
I went into the living room to get away from this smell, and also to check what was happening on the news. It’s a good thing I did, because soon after that there was an almighty crack as the oven exploded in the kitchen. I remember being lifted off the ground by the force of the explosion, and the sound of glass smashing; then nothing until the siren-scream and epileptic blue lights of the ambulance.
*
So that’s it. I am in bed in a private room in Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. I have concussion and two broken ribs, and the doctors put me on a drip when I first came in because I was badly emaciated. They said that firemen had been over the wreckage of my kitchen and found nothing but a few pieces of an empty pot in the oven; they suggested I had barely eaten for weeks or months. I know they wanted me to concede that I let the gas build up to dangerous levels on purpose, triggering the explosion in a cry for help. But I survived because I was in the living room not the kitchen, and gas doesn’t explode by itself. It must have been a spark from one of the soldiers’ cigarettes: they kept looking in the oven to see if the stew was done.
When I pointed this out to the doctors, they said it might help if I wrote down what I remembered of the last few months. I’ve been happy while doing this. The ghosts were always telling me their stories, so I think it is what they would have wanted, too.
And now I’m told my husband will be coming back from Bosnia soon. One thing is certain: Jon won’t see the funny side of me being the one to get blown up. When he goes away he says be safe, by which he means safer than normal, because if something happens to me he won’t be here.
THE FESTIVAL OF THE IMMORTALS
Helen Simpson
Helen Simpson (b.1959) was born in Bristol. She has published five collections of short stories, including In-Flight Entertainment (2010). Simpson read English at Oxford University, where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce. She then worked for five years as a staff writer at Vogue before becoming a freelance writer. Her awards include the E.M. Forster Award (2002) and The Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship (2006). Simpson lives in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The Daniel Defoe event had just been cancelled, and as a consequence of this the queue for the tea tent was stretching half way round the meadow. Towards the back, shivering slightly this damp October morning, were two women who looked to be somewhere in the early November of their lives.
“Excuse me, but are you going to the next talk?” one of them asked the other, waving a festival brochure at a late lost wasp.
“Who, me?” replied the woman. “Yes. Yes, I am. It’s Charlotte Brontë reading from Villette, I believe.”
“Hmm, I hope they keep the actual reading element to a minimum,” said the first, wrinkling her nose. “Don’t you? I can read Villette any time.”
“Good to hear it in her own voice, though,” suggested the other.
“Oh I don’t know,” said the first. “I think that can be overdone. Some curiosity value, of course, but half the time an actor would read it better. No, I want to know what she’s like. That difficult father. Terribly short-sighted. Extremely short full stop. The life must shed light on the work, don’t you think. What’s the matter, have I got a smudge on my face or something?”
“It’s not…?” said the other, gazing at her wide-eyed. “It’s not Viv Armstrong is it?”
“Yes,” said Viv Armstrong, for that was indeed her name. “But I’m afraid I don’t…”
“Phyllis!” beamed the other. “Phyllis Goodwin. The ATS, remember? Bryanston Square? Staining our legs brown with cold tea and drawing on the seams with an eyebrow pencil?”
“Fuzzy!” exclaimed Viv at last. “Fuzzy Goodwin!”
“Nobody’s called me that for over fifty years,” said Phyllis. “It was when you wrinkled your nose in that particular way, that’s when I knew it was you.”
The rest of their time in the queue flew by. Before they knew it they were carrying tea and carrot cake over to a table beneath the rustling amber branches of an ancient beech tree.
“I’m seventy-eight and I’m still walking up volcanoes,” Viv continued, as they settled themselves. “I don’t get to the top any more but I still go up them. I’m off to Guatemala next week.”
Eager, impulsive, slapdash, Phyllis remembered. Rule-breaking. Artless. Full of energy. In some ways, of course, she must have changed, but just now, she appeared exactly, comically, as she always had been, in her essence if not in her flesh. Although even here, physically, her smile was the same, the set of her shoulders, the sharpness of nose and eyes.
“The first time I saw you, we were in the canteen,” said Phyllis. “You were reading The Waves and I thought, ah, a kindred spirit. I was carrying a steamed treacle pudding and I sat down beside you.”
That’s right, thought Viv, Fuzzy had had a sweet tooth-look at the size she was now. She’d had long yellow hair, too, just like Veronica Lake, but now it was short and white.
“I still do dip into The Waves every so often,” she said aloud. “It’s as good as having a house by the sea, don’t you think? Especially as you get older. Oh, I wonder if she’s on later, Virginia, I’d love to go to one of her readings.”
Viv knew many writers intimately thanks to modern biographers, but she was only really on first name terms with members of the Bloomsbury group.
“Unfortunately not,” said Phyllis. “That’s a cast iron rule of this festival, a writer can only appear if
they’re out of copyright, and Virginia isn’t out of it for another five years”.
“But she must be, surely,” said Viv. “Isn’t copyright fifty years?”
“Well it was, until recently,” said Phyllis. “And Virginia was out of it by the early nineties, I happen to know because I was at one of her readings here. Oh, she was wonderful. What a talker! She kept the whole marquee in stitches – spellbound – rocking with laughter. But then they changed the copyright law, something to do with the EU, and now it’s life plus seventy years, and she went back in again. So she won’t be allowed to return until 2011 at the earliest. Very galling as we might not still be here by then.”
“Oh I don’t know,” said Viv. “Aren’t you being rather gloomy? Seventy-eight isn’t that old.”
“It is quite old, though,” said Phyllis doubtfully.
“Well I suppose so. But it’s not old old,” said Viv. “It’s not ninety. Come on, now, Fuzzy, we’ve got some catching up to do.”
In the next few minutes they attempted to condense the last half-century into digestible morsels for each other. Viv had put in a year at teacher training college then found teaching posts through Gabbitas-Thring, while Phyllis had taken a secretarial course at Pitman’s College in Bloomsbury followed by a cost accounting job at the Kodak factory where she lived, totting up columns of figures in a large ledger at a slanting desk. At some point between the Olympics being held at White City and the year of the Festival of Britain, they had met their respective husbands.
“All this is such outside stuff, though,” said Phyllis obscurely. She was supposed to be writing her memoirs, spurred on by a local Life-writing course, but had been dismayed at her attempts so far, so matter-of-fact and chirpy and boring.
They ploughed on. Viv had settled just inside the M25, before it was there, of course, while Phyllis lived just outside it. They had had three children each, and now had seven grandchildren between them.
“Two girls and a boy,” said Viv. “One’s in computers, one’s a physiotherapist and one has yet to find his feet. He’s forty-eight.”