by Jane Brittan
I translate and she nods and hangs her head, then gives me a lop-sided smile. Her throat is still blotchy but her eyes are shining.
We huddle together, cold and damp. Now and again fat drips of water from drying timbers spit and hiss on the floor. Little by little, we begin to thaw out and soon Andjela is curled up on a patch of ground and sleeping fitfully. I turn to Joe. He’s sitting with his back against the wall, his hand still cradling his leg. He looks pale.
‘How is it?’
‘Um … OK,’ he says through his teeth.
‘Let’s see.’
He takes his hand away, and I can see at once it’s bad. Part of his trouser leg is torn away, and there are deep teeth marks in the flesh, oozing blood.
‘You need to wrap it up,’ I say.
‘Yeah, maybe.’
We have nothing to bind the wound except the clothes we’re wearing. Without thinking, I take off my jacket and pull my T-shirt over my head.
‘No! Don’t do that, you’ll … shit! What happened to you?’
I pull my jacket slowly back around me and I tell him about what happened and about the letter from my father.
‘It was like a lifeline, you know?’ I say. ‘The thought that maybe after all he did care but not enough. He said – he said love was “complicated”. I guess he loved her too much to go against her. But now he’s gone and I’ve got nobody.’
‘Sanda. That’s not true. You’ve got you. You’re here. You’re alive. Sanda, listen to me. Listen!’
He takes my arms and gently turns me towards him, his earnest face. I hold on to my sobs, choke them back. ‘You’re going to be OK,’ he says. ‘You can survive this. You will. Because, you know when it comes down to it, all any of us have is ourselves, and … and this moment. Now.’
I sniff and nod and make myself listen. Andjela stirs in her sleep behind us. He bends and whispers in my ear, warm breath: ‘You’ve got me.’
It’s so faint that afterwards I’m not sure I heard it right.
He leans back and he’s quiet, and I’m starting to tear the stupid T-shirt into bandages when I see him. There’s softness in his honey eyes, and all at once I know he’s been watching me. I mean really watching me. A bird calls away in the treetops. With his eyes still on mine, he takes the T-shirt from me and puts it down. He lifts his hand and lightly brushes the tips of his fingers across my collar bone and under my bra strap. My skin prickles at his touch. He dips his hand into the hollow between my breasts, and there’s a bolt, a spark from his skin into mine that makes me shudder.
‘Sorry – you’re cold. I …’ he says and goes to help me back on with the jacket.
I stop him and find his hand. ‘No. No … it’s not that … I … please … I want …’
‘Come here.’
He smiles and brings me towards him, and then I see him wince in pain. I draw back at once.
‘Shit Joe. Your leg. Sorry!’
‘No it’s OK. It’s just … shit … actually it’s not. Sorry …’
He falls back against the wall and lets out a long breath. I turn and grab the T-shirt. I pull off a strip that just about covers the wound but won’t go all the way around his leg. I try again with another piece, but in the end, I use the whole T-shirt.
‘Sanda. You shouldn’t have done that,’ he says.
‘What? Why?’
‘The T-shirt. It’s freezing. You’re going to freeze. Anyway, I’m OK. I’m not going to die of a dog bite am I?’
‘Joe, it might have rabies.’
‘Oh right. Yeah. Thanks a bunch. Rabies.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean …’
‘Sanda. It’s OK.’
The stones crackle as he shifts his weight. I dig my fingernails into my palms and I wait. He reaches for my hand and presses it in his. He breathes, ‘Let’s try and get some sleep.’
I smile and suddenly I’m so cold. It crashes on me like a wave. I wrap my jacket tightly about me and button it. Soon his breathing is steady and I know he’s sleeping. And I’m on my own.
I lie awake watching my breath coming and going in misty plumes. I can still feel his fingers on my skin, and inside me, along every artery, in every vein, my blood fizzes and whips like electricity.
13
The next thing I know, light is pouring in through windows and the thousands of little holes in the wall. My body just doesn’t want to move. It’s so broken from the beating that I can’t lift myself up for a while. And when I do, the pain makes me gasp. An old tractor passes down the lane. The driver, a fat-faced man with hair the colour of straw, is chomping on a sandwich. I look down at Joe. My T-shirt bandage is wet with blood. He’s awake though, and staring at the ground.
‘How you feeling?’ I say. ‘Did you get any sleep?’
He shifts his weight and groans. ‘Not much. I’m OK. Just hungry.’
He turns his head away from me. I force myself to talk. ‘Look, we need to eat and we need to get that looked at. I think we should try to get away from here, to a village.’
‘Makes sense,’ he mutters. ‘Are you OK?’
I nod quickly. ‘I’m fine. Can you walk?’
‘Of course. It’s just a scratch.’ He smiles. ‘Look Sanda … about last night –’ I’m about to say something when he looks behind me and his eyes widen. ‘Where’s Andjela?’
‘What?’
I turn. She’s gone. He looks at me for a long time then says, ‘How well d’you know her?’
‘What?’ I snap.
‘All I’m saying is … can you trust her?’
I look at him. ‘You –’
We’re interrupted by a rustling in the weeds outside the house. We instinctively crouch into the shadows. A hand over the window ledge, and then a face: Andjela.
‘Where have you been?’ we both say at once.
In answer two loaves are thrown over the sill, and she climbs in after them.
‘Andjela!’ Joe cries, although he doesn’t meet my eye, ‘You’re a genius! Sanda, what’s the Serbian for genius?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘but you can say “hvala”, it means “thank you”.’
‘Hvala, Andjela. Cheers!’
She’s delighted, laying the loaves in front of us, like a cat bringing in a mouse. We all tear into the bread. It’s delicious: fresh and yeasty, all crusty on the outside and warm and soft when I bite in. All through our feast, I try to find out where she got them. We have no money, so she must have stolen them. Maybe she isn’t quite as institutionalised as I’d thought.
We rest for a bit after our meal, but when I look at Joe I know we have to get moving. He doesn’t look right. He’s pale, and in spite of the cold, he’s sweating like he has a fever.
I think about what happened last night. I tell myself that he hadn’t meant anything, he was feverish, hallucinating. I take it all – his fingertips, the pulse of electricity inside me, how he made me want him – and I ball it up and tuck it away in a corner in my head and tell myself never, ever, to go in there.
His wound needs treating properly. When, with our help, he gets to his feet, he looks even worse. Andjela disappears again and after a few minutes comes back with a large twisty stick.
I leave our little shelter with mixed feelings.
We head back into the cover of the pine forest. At one point, I hear a distant siren wailing and I wonder if it’s for us. We decide to stay out of sight but to track the road. We limp through the undergrowth, Joe leaning on his stick, and Andjela helping me. With some food in me I feel better, and I’m able to think over what has happened. I still have the paper in my sock. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but I don’t think I want to just yet – the stakes are too high – and I’m terrified of what I’m going to find in it. The girl in the window is bothering me. She’s about me – she’s a part of this. I have to know. I have to go back there but I just don’t know how, or when, or more importantly, how I’m going to break it to Joe.
We come out onto the roa
d and walk alongside it for miles, all lost in our own thoughts. Now and then, a car or truck goes by, and I feel a bolt of fear. Joe’s looking rougher by the minute. We’ve taken off the T-shirt to allow the wound to dry, and although the blood is crusting, it looks red and puffy. I look back every few minutes to see if we’re being followed. I’m exhausted but I know we can’t stop. I won’t let us stop. Then Andjela, who’s in front, turns around and points into the pines. I peer through the pines and see a curl of smoke. We turn in towards it and a little further on, a path from the road appears, winding up through the woods: two chalky tracks. We stop where the path forks and look at one another. To the left, in the distance, at the end of the track, is a house. Whitewashed, with a red tiled roof, it stands on its own, and behind it, beyond the dense trees, the white mountains loom.
‘This is a mistake,’ says Joe.
‘I’m hungry,’ I say, ‘and you need help with that leg, Joe’
‘Don’t make me the reason,’ he snaps.
I turn to Andjela. ‘Andjela?’
‘I think yes,’ she says, and leads the way.
The first thing I notice is the smell. The sickly sweet aroma of pig shit. Right next to the house – a bit too close for comfort – is a large pen full of pigs. They’re mashing about, snorting and snapping at each other. Joe and I stop to look for a moment, but Andjela goes straight up to the door and knocks. We cluster around her then and I try to look helpless. I don’t have to try too hard.
The door is opened by a middle-aged woman with sagging breasts and hairy arms. She’s wearing a headscarf with sketches of the Eiffel Tower on it. She folds her arms and eyes us suspiciously. Andjela and I set about pleading our case. We point to Joe’s rolled-up trouser leg and the angry gash, and I give her what I hope is an eager smile. She grimaces and closes the door on us.
‘Well?’ says Joe.
‘Wait,’ I say. I can hear the woman talking inside. We wait, stamping our feet on the frozen ground to keep the cold out. After a while, the door is opened again. She gestures to us to come in. We step over the threshold with nods and ‘thank you’s’.
The door opens straight into a kitchen. It looks warm and homely: a large old black cooker with a chimney, a fire going, and in the middle of the room, a big table covered in a flowery plastic sheet. Every surface is covered with bits of lace, and the only things on the walls are a clock and a crucifix. I can hear the sound of a telly coming from another room.
She sits us down at the table, produces three chipped bowls and goes to the stove. My stomach is instantly on standby. Into the bowls, she ladles a lumpy stew. It smells good and it’s hot and right at that moment I could’ve kissed her on the lips. As we eat, she sits with her red elbows on the table, and watches us. After we’ve eaten, she attends to Joe’s leg, tutting and muttering to herself. She washes the wound in hot water, puts some kind of paste on it, and wraps his leg in a clean strip of sheeting.
Then I ask in Serbian, ‘Can we use your telephone?’
She gives me a look. ‘Later.’
She says we can stay until her husband comes in. She shows us into the other room and goes outside. We sit together on the floor and watch a kind of game show on the little telly. I can feel myself nodding off then Joe suddenly nudges me sharply in the ribs.
‘Hey, Sanda! Something about the Scorpions …’ he whispers.
I come to and focus on the screen. The game show’s over, and we’re watching a lady in a purple suit reading the news. Our host is back in the room knitting fiercely.
The report is about a man’s body that’s been found in a car at the side of the road with a bullet in its head.
There’s an image of the man, a little inset at the bottom of the screen: my father.
They say it had the look of an organised killing: Škorpioni.
There are photos of the car, parked at an angle on a lonely road at dusk, the arc lights of the police and TV crews throwing long shadows.
They know him.
The name they give him is the one from the newspaper cutting I found in the loft.
There are other pictures too, of yellowing corpses heaped on roadsides, of emaciated men staring out from behind barbed wire, of refugees tracing their way across fields with tanks and armoured cars at a sinister standstill in the background. The War.
Nothing is what it seems.
I close my eyes and I see him coming up the stairs at home in London. He looms and fades and liquefies. A heavy hand on my shoulder, the flicker of his eyes, they’re all I have of him. All there was between us. A glance, a touch, the rank sweetness of garlic on his breath, all I can find to make the man I grew up with.
I realise I’m shaking. The woman mutters something I don’t catch and turns back to her wool.
I feel for Joe’s hand and sit very still, trying to stop my shivering. I get to my feet and ask for the toilet. The woman looks up and points out through the window.
I cross the yard to a freezing wooden shed that houses a toilet with no seat and no paper. It’s plumbed straight into the ground and weeds are growing up around the bowl. I switch on the light, find a plank of wood, put it across the toilet and sit down. I take out the papers from Milanković’s room. They’ve disintegrated in parts, but the name is still clear: Hadžić. Senka.
I take a deep breath and peel them apart. There are just two: the first is a certificate with the orphanage name across the top and a copy of the photograph I found in London stapled to it – the little girl.
The name on the certificate is Senka Hadžić. Written clearly on the dotted line at the bottom left-hand corner of the page is a signature. I recognise the name as the one given for my father in the cutting. It looks like his handwriting too. The paper is dated December 1995. And again my father’s words come back to me: Everything is not what you think. Nothing is what it seems.
I find it hard to feel anything about him right now, hard to be sad, hard to forgive. And yet what he left for me, what he gave me, has at least led me this far. Like a map, or part of a map, a road back to who I am. It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing. And nothing is all I thought I had.
So …
Am I that girl? Am I Senka Hadžić?
The other paper is a letter with the Red Cross logo at the top. There’s a typewritten introduction, but the rest is written by hand in Serbian. Two things hit me: one is the name at the bottom, printed and signed, Branko Hadžić. Branko: the person they thought Joe was ‘working’ for. The person they thought had paid Joe to help me.
The second thing that leaps out at me is a copy of a colour photograph of two tiny girls, dressed in identical frilly party wear, holding hands. But what I notice at once is their eyes. They each have one green, and one blue. The names under the picture are Senka … and Sanda.
Behind them, shielding her eyes from the sun, stands a young, slim woman in a polka-dot dress. I freeze. Images flash in and out of my mind: two little girls. A man’s hands around a waist. The face at the window. Joe at the orphanage saying he’d seen me. And it hits me like a steam train that the girl at Zbrisć might be the one in the first picture. And the other girl might be me.
Not Senka, but Sanda Hadžić?
But if that’s the case then who’s the woman in the polka dot dress? Because she looks nothing like the person I called Mum who left me back in London.
I sit there in that dank shed, my arms around my body, for about five minutes. My thoughts are interrupted by a knocking on the door.
‘Sanda, are you OK in there?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m coming.’
I gather up the papers and stand up. Coming out of the shed, I trip over the step and the pain in my legs is unbelievable, but Joe is there as I fall, and I cling to him for a moment just to feel something real and physical instead of dread and confusion and excitement all mixed into one. He pulls me into him.
Then, ‘Your dad … shit, Sanda, I’m sorry.’
‘I know,’ I say, ‘but I … I …
well, Joe look at this.’
I bring him into the light of the toilet shed and show him.
‘Branko!’ he breathes. ‘Shit. But I don’t get it … So this girl, this is you? You’re Senka?’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so. Look.’ I point to the names under the photo: Senka and Sanda.
He peers at it, then looks back at me. ‘Twins. The eyes.’
‘I know. That has to be me, yeah?’
‘Then that girl at the orphanage. The one I thought was you …’
‘I saw her. I know I did, last night. At a window, when we were climbing the fence. I saw her.’
‘And the letter from Branko. What does it say?’
‘He’s looking for his daughters.’
‘Christ. So it could be … Branko’s what? Your dad?’
I bite my lip. ‘Joe, I have to …’
‘What?’
‘I have to get her out.’
‘No – Sanda, we’ll just go to the police and tell them, and when we get home we can –’
‘Home? I don’t have a home. I have nowhere to go. I have no relatives in England. Not one. Nobody’s going to be looking for me. This is it. She is my family. My sister. And she’s been stuck in that place all her life. I have to.’
‘Right.’
‘What?’
‘I’m thinking,’ he says, then after a moment, ‘let’s get back inside.’
He lopes off towards the house on his bad leg, and I wonder how it’s doing. He seems a little better. But he’s distracted. I follow slowly and I’m way away from all of this. I’m a million miles away, rattling about the earth like a mad satellite.
Back inside, Andjela and the woman are back in the little room talking. Andjela is sitting at her feet helping her to wind wool. They look up when we come in. There are noises coming from upstairs: someone in heavy boots moving about on bare boards, then a creaking on the stairs.
Into the room comes a burly man dressed in a cardigan and trousers that look way too small for him. The material is stretched so tight across his buttocks that I can see his checked underpants peeping through. His teeth stick out like a little yellow shelf. He stares at us all and then grunts at his wife to join him in the kitchen.