by Jane Brittan
I can’t really say why but I don’t like the look of him and I’m seriously beginning to think we were crazy to come here.
I whisper to Joe, ‘They’re going to hand us over, Joe. I know they are. I can see it in his face. That’s what they’re talking about.’
‘He’s all right,’ he says. ‘He’s just a farmer. Anyway, he’s the best we’ve got right now.’
But still I feel anxious. We’re trapped in the little room. There’s no back door that I can see. The only way out leads through the kitchen. I pinch back the net curtains. The windows are far too small even for Andjela to crawl through.
‘Shit.’
Boots on the flagstones. He’s coming back.
He says in English, ‘You are lost? Yes? You are English?’
Joe nods, ‘We … yes, we’re lost. Can we use your telephone?’
He ignores the bit about the telephone. ‘You on holiday?’ he says looking at Andjela with narrow eyes.
He hoots with laughter then and when he throws his head back I can actually see the undersides of his teeth.
‘Er … No,’ says Joe. ‘We just need to use your phone to …’
The man raises a hand to cut him off, then turns to me, ‘And who are you?’
‘I’m Sanda. We just need …’
‘Sanda is Bosnian name. You is Bosnian? Not English?’
‘I grew up in England. My parents are from Serbia.’
He screws up his eyes and studies me. ‘Your father and your mother Serbian?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. Truth. Where have you come from?’ he says.
I look at Joe and take a breath. ‘The orphanage on the mountain. Zbrisć.’
His wife claps a hand across her mouth.
‘Madame Milanković?’ he asks.
My palms prickle with sweat. Joe’s eyes are wide.
‘You know her?’ I ask.
‘Of course,’ he nods briskly, ‘everybody knows.’
Joe says quickly, ‘I think we should be going. The police will be looking for us. Come on Andjela.’
I don’t know whether or not she catches the panic in his voice but she gets to her feet and moves towards the door.
‘You stay,’ says the man, ‘I telephone for you.’
Joe is standing by the door to the kitchen; he jerks his head in the direction of the front door: ‘Let’s go.’
He grabs me by the hand and starts to make for the door. Andjela slips past too, but I can see at once it’s not her they want. Joe’s pulling me on but something’s stopping me.
I can’t go.
I have to finish this, to see it through and I know it’s stupid but I tug my hand free and shake my head. Andjela’s already outside.
Joe looks at me in confusion, ‘Sanda, come on!’
‘Joe, just go! Go and get help! Please!’
We’re in the kitchen. He’s caught for a moment in the front doorway. The man grabs at his clothes but Joe’s too strong. He throws him off and aims a punch at him. The man staggers back nursing his jaw.
‘Sanda!’
‘No,’ I say evenly. ‘I have to go back. This is my fight.’
I know I’m hurting him; I can only hope he’ll understand. Then he’s gone.
From the kitchen window, I watch them stumble across the farmyard, Joe leaning on Andjela.
They make it to the lane and disappear into the undergrowth. I knit my arms tight across my chest.
I will not cry.
14
The man goes back into the little room. I hear him cursing to himself, then a muffled phone conversation while the woman stares at me like I’m something she’s found under a drain cover. When he comes back into the kitchen, he doesn’t look happy.
‘Sit down!’
I sit at the table. I say in Serbian, ‘It’s OK. I’ll go back. I know you called them.’
For the longest time he stares at me, then he says something to his wife and she goes to the sink. To the sounds of clatter and running water, he sits down on a little wicker chair by the fire in the range that creaks under his weight. He puts his hands on his knees and leans back and sighs.
‘Your friends are very bad,’ he says in Serbian now, ‘very bad. If she catches them she’ll send them to the House.’
‘The house? What house?’
He scratches his thighs and the fabric squeaks and winces under his fingers.
‘The House: a place where bad children go to learn to obey; children who can’t behave, children like you who run away.’
‘You mean Zbrisć?’
He shakes his head: ‘Another place. In the woods.’
‘So –’
He stops me. ‘No more,’ he says. ‘Tell me what you were doing at Zbrisć.’
‘I was taken,’ I say, ‘by force. Taken from my home in England.’
I tell him what I know and what I think I know. He listens carefully and picks at his eyebrows.
‘War is difficult,’ he says.
‘War? What d’you mean? This isn’t about the War.’
He shrugs. ‘Everything is about the War.’
He falls silent and we both gaze into the fire. His wife quietly leaves the room.
After a while, I pull out the damp pages from my pocket and hand them to him.
‘I think that’s me.’ I lean across and indicate. ‘I think that’s me and my … my twin. My sister. I think she’s at Zbrisć and I want to find out why.’
And my mind takes me back to Andjela’s drawing on the wall. She was trying to show me my sister.
He turns the papers over in his hands.
He bends to stoke up the dwindling fire and I see the top of a tattoo on his neck – two black pincers curling upwards towards his left ear. They remind me of the crab tattoo I saw on one of my abductors. Then I realise with horror that it isn’t a crab, it’s a scorpion. And in the same moment I recall the scar on my father’s neck. He always said it was a dog bite. Could that have been the remains of a tattoo that was removed?
He sees me looking. ‘Škorpioni,’ he smiles. ‘Yes. We don’t like trouble.’
Without a word, he crumples the pages into a ball and throws them onto the fire. I stare in disbelief as they burn down to tiny ashes and rise like black butterflies up the chimney. The photograph blackens and shrinks in the embers.
‘What are you doing?’ I shout. ‘What?! Why?’
He looks at me, flicks his tongue over his teeth, gets to his feet and says, ‘It’s best for you to go back to Zbrisć. No more questions. Do as you are told.’
He gets up, goes into the other room and closes the door behind him. There’s something in his manner that I can’t place. Sure, he’s brusque and dismissive but there’s more. I think he’s frightened of something.
I hear them talking in urgent voices. The door opens and it’s his wife. In trembling hands she holds a shotgun. I hear him on the phone in the background.
I try to smile at her – I don’t want her pulling the trigger by accident – but I find all I can manage is an odd kind of leer. He comes back into the kitchen and takes up the gun.
He says, ‘They’re coming for you. Madame Milanković. She’s a good lady. She’ll look after you very well. You will be safe there. No police.’
They do come for me of course. A battered Fiat sputters up the lane and we go out to meet it. I know it from the orphanage. Milanković is driving, and two women I haven’t seen before are seated in the back, arms folded, looking stern. Before Milanković even gets out she’s bellowing at the man. She’s not talking about me this time, but about Joe and Andjela. He nods, goes back into the house and returns, shotgun in hand. I know that soon after we leave, he’ll be hunting them on her orders. I pray that they’ve had enough of a head start.
He hands me over with a warning look. I go meekly enough and squeeze into the back of the Fiat on the torn seats, between my guards. I try to tell myself that Joe and Andjela are well on their way by now, probably at a police stat
ion telling them where I am.
As for me, at least I now know what I want. I want to find Senka. My father, or the man who called himself my father, is dead. Another thread has been cut. And my mother? Were they both lying to me? I want to know my story. I want to know where I fit.
Milanković is very tight-lipped on the way and as I can look neither left nor right because of the women on either side of me, I spend the journey staring at the back of her neck. It’s greasy and pitted with scars, and there are fine ridges of grime where it hasn’t been washed. The smell in the little car is pretty rank all over and it can’t just be my companions – I try to remember the last time I had a proper wash, in hot water with soap.
It’s weird how quickly we get back. It seemed so long on foot. I sleep in a locked room that night. And as I sleep, I dream again of hands holding me, gripping me tightly, but this time we’re moving. Someone’s driving me away from where I want to be, and the hands are holding on to stop me falling or running away. I’m on the back of some kind of open truck. I see canvas flapping, the woods and the glittering road, and hear the creak of the boards. I wake up shouting.
In the morning, I wait in the room. I walk up and down, occasionally stopping to bang on the door and call out for someone. Nothing. Judging by what sun I can see from the window, it’s mid-afternoon before I hear the heavy door being unlocked. The two women from the car march me down to Madame Milanković’s office and stand me outside while they knock. I wonder if they’re new. One of the women is skinny with a wheezy chest and the other looks like she’s trying to grow a beard. They both look nervous. But me – it’s odd because I’m not scared any more, I’m furious. I want answers and I want to see the girl I think is my sister. In fact, I don’t think I feel afraid of anything or anyone any more.
Waiting outside that room, I feel like the fucking Terminator.
But inside, I don’t have the showdown I’ve just seen unfolding in my head, the one where I thump the table and demand my sister be brought in. And that’s because, sitting in a low armchair in the corner of the room, is my mother.
She’s wearing a thin grey turtle-neck jumper, tight jeans and rubber boots. Her hair is tied in a loose pony tail. She’s lost weight and the bones in her face are sharper than ever.
‘Mum?’ the word hurts.
She gets up, awkwardly somehow, her arms hanging at her sides. Her face is hard. She moves across to the window and hooks a wisp of hair back over her ear.
Milanković is hunched in her desk chair, smoking. She has a strange smile on her face. ‘Yes. Your mother is here,’ she says.
‘Mum, what have you …? Why did you …?’ I’m crying now but she turns and looks out of the window. ‘Mum?’
Milanković sits up, blinks like a toad. ‘Your mother has come to take you.’
‘I’m not going anywhere without Senka.’
‘No. You will go. It’s arranged. It’s time.’
‘I want my sister! Get me my sister!’
My mother speaks, her face still averted. ‘She’s not here.’
‘Then where is she?’
Then she turns and looks at me. Her lips tighten against her gums.
‘You never stop,’ she says. ‘I am sick of you. Always asking questions. You want to see this girl? You want to see her? Don’t worry. You’ll see her. And you’ll see what she is. She’s a pig. Dirty and stupid, like all of you.’
I stare at her. ‘All of who?’
She waves a hand at me and glances at Milanković.
I say again, ‘All of who?’
I’m shouting now. I’m aware of the door opening behind me but Milanković bats away whoever it is. An image looms up at me from the past, hazy then clear: those hands around my waist. I’m finding it hard to get my breath.
My mother walks back to the chair, perches on the arm. She crosses her legs and inspects her fingernails. Milanković gets up and offers her a cigarette. She takes it and lights it slowly.
I breathe, ‘You lied to me. All my life you lied.’
She says nothing, only draws on the cigarette, squinting as the smoke balloons about her. I swallow hard. Milanković comes towards me but I’m too quick for her. I bolt from the room and into the hall. ‘Senka! Senka! Where are you?’
I tear along the corridor and into the quad outside where I scan the windows at the back and call again: ‘Senka!’ No reply. I’m about to go back inside but my tiredness and racking pain get the better of me and I sink down on the kitchen step and put my head in my hands.
Then I hear Milanković’s voice up close: ‘We told you she’s not here.’
‘No!’
I’m still screaming and kicking as the two women manhandle me through the building and into the back of a waiting car. They have a last conversation and a brief, cold embrace holding their faces away from each other, and then my mother gets in the driving seat and the bearded lady gets in next to me.
‘Let me go!’
My mother says nothing. I reach over the back of her seat to grab at her hair but the woman holds my hands in an iron grip.
My mother, sitting upright at the wheel, turns the car down the drive. I’m a prisoner again. All I can hope is that Joe and Andjela are safe.
I say, ‘Where are we going?’ No answer. ‘Where are we going?’
The car lurches and jolts over pits in the road. I try again: ‘You know what they did to me? Back in London? Back in the house? They drugged me and threw me in the back of a truck. Did you ask them to do that? Did you want them to do that to me? I don’t understand. My friend Joe was –’
She glances in the rear-view mirror: ‘They thought the boy was –’
‘Working for someone looking for me.’
‘Looking for you,’ she says. ‘Yes.’
‘For Branko, for my father, my real father – the man who’s looking for his daughters.’
Her face stiffens at the mention of him. ‘Yes. Your real father.’
‘I know he’s looking for us.’
She slows the car to a halt and twists round, her elbow in my face. ‘You think you know everything, don’t you? You think he cares?’ It’s like a punch in the head. ‘About you? About the other one? He doesn’t care about you. It’s not you he’s looking for, it’s me.’
I feel sick. My throat is dry. I can’t swallow.
She thrusts the car into gear and takes a turn, which takes us up into the mountains. There’s salt in my eyes and throat, and a pinching in my chest.
I say quietly, ‘Please?’
She ignores me and shifts in her seat as she looks ahead. ‘You’re just like him. Selfish.’
‘You’re lying,’ I say. ‘He’s not … he wouldn’t …’
‘You wait and see.’
‘Just tell me!’
‘You shut up! You shut up your stupid mouth or I hit you! Shut up!’
It’s then that I realise I hate this woman I called my mother.
And I begin to wonder what she did in the War.
15
With the sun sinking behind us, we go down country lanes, along freezing, rutted tracks, always going up. We pass farmhouses, strange and square, with tall pyramid roofs, now and then, we see a solitary white stone church.
We follow a road along a wide river to a cobbled bridge. At either end of the bridge stands a tiny church, wedding-cake white with little arched doors. As we cross the river, we see lights, and a small village comes into view. A few crooked stone houses with red roofs, a well with a fountain in the square, and an inn with a black slate roof and a high wrought iron balcony jutting like a lip over the river. The inn is called брод, which means The Ship.
My mother parks the Fiat and pokes Beardie awake. She gets out and locks the doors, brings out her phone and dials. I watch her going into the inn, snapping angrily into her phone. Beardie and I eye each other warily.
Minutes later she comes out, rubbing her arms. ‘We’ll stop here to eat.’
Inside the inn, it’s lo
w and gloomy but there’s a fire burning in the hearth and a smell of wood smoke and roasting onions. Mum has to stoop to go in through the door, straightens at once and gets out her phone again. We all go to the chairs by the fire. I lean in and the heat licks around me.
The bartender seems nice. He’s a tall man with a ginger beard, and he wears a striped apron round his waist. He brings us each a bowl of steaming meat stew and a hunk of bread. I could refuse it to make a point but I’m so hungry and so cold, I decide to give myself a break. As he puts the stew in front of me, I accidentally knock the bread onto the floor. He crouches down next to me, picks it up and stuffs it in his pocket. He pushes himself up and goes to the kitchen. In a minute he’s back kneeling beside me again with a bigger piece of bread. He places it in my lap and smiles. It’s crusty on the outside, freckled with flour, and as I tear it apart the warmth of it sends a yeasty tingle springing into my nose and mouth. He watches me eat and in that moment something passes between us and I know this man has a heart.
I watch my mother eating. Not for the first time I wonder how she lost her teeth. I finish in no time and he’s there with a second bowl and more bread for me. My mother goes outside again, pacing up and down, talking on her phone. I see her come and go past the window. She seems angry and agitated.
I smile at the innkeeper and he smiles back.
Over the fireplace, is a mirror. I haven’t seen my reflection in days. It’s like looking at another person. My face is thinner and I can see the bones of my skull. My skin is dry as paper, and my hair is frosted with dirt.
Stay alive, Sanda. Stay alive.
I’m coming back from the bathroom a bit later, when from a shadowy corner I hear, ‘Hey.’
It’s the innkeeper, his bulky form pressed against the wall of the passageway. My mother’s back inside now; I can hear her barking into her phone about ‘arrangements’ to be made.
I step towards him. ‘What is it?’ I ask in Serbian.
‘Are you OK?’ he says in a throaty whisper.
‘I … I’m …’ It’s hard to know where to begin.
‘You seem …’ He hesitates. ‘Stop me if I’m interfering, but I thought you … who’s that you’re with?’