The man in Cádiz had locked her in while she waited for her trolley. He had shown her the passport. ‘Memorize the name,’ he snapped. That’s how he talked. Snapping like a saucepan that splashed as it boiled over. Mary Kwara had looked at the picture of a woman and wondered who she was. ‘Don’t ask,’ he’d snapped. Then her trolley had arrived and taken charge of the passport.
The bus headed into a tunnel. She couldn’t see the end, only white walls and rows of lights in the ceiling. The tunnel lasted an eternity. She glanced at the man sitting next to her. He looked like he was asleep, but she couldn’t be sure. She would do what he said. The man in Cádiz knew who her parents were.
Finally they emerged from the tunnel, and she could see the water. She huddled in her seat. If only I don’t have to get on another boat, she thought, and thousands of lights flashed before her eyes and she couldn’t breathe. The road rose up and she saw the bridge, a huge bridge suspended between four tall towers. And far off in the distance, where the bridge ended, she saw a city. She gripped the armrests of her seat. That’s where I’m going, she thought. Straight across the sea.
She closed her eyes. Sefi would have stayed with the woman with the many necklaces. She would have settled for having food to eat and a TV to watch. Sefi was lazy. She wouldn’t have crept around and found money in the house when the woman was away. She wouldn’t have stolen the money to buy a bus ticket.
God has no time for such trivial matters, Mary Kwara had thought, but she had still prayed for forgiveness, just in case. If she didn’t go to Cádiz, her parents would have to keep paying back the debt, and then Sefi would have to pay, and Sefi’s children as well. And if her brothers ever sent any money home from South-South, they would take that too.
Her heart had pounded hard as she’d sneaked away from that house where she had slept many nights. It had taken several hours for her to find the bus station in Tarifa. It was a small station. She bought a ticket for the bus. When the bus drove up into the mountains, she saw the town far below, like a heap of sugar cubes that someone had spilled out onto the beach. Then the bus turned, and she saw only the countryside all around.
Driving further and further through mountains and fields and forests, passing villages and gas stations, she thought: at least I’m travelling away from the sea. I never want to see it again.
Once, in the night, she’d had a sense that water was all around her, but then she had closed her eyes and decided it was the darkness trying to trick her into seeing something she didn’t want to see. Spirits and waves.
But now it was daytime, and she saw the surging grey-green surface on both sides of the bridge. Only a low railing and a railway track separated her from the deep.
She would have to work hard to pay back the debt. Five years. Maybe ten. Then she would be free.
Then she would have a house with white walls. And red flowers growing in the garden. A house with several rooms and a TV and her own bed.
And some day she would travel back home. This was the first time during the entire journey that she’d dare think about that. What if I go back home? Will there be anyone left who remembers me?
The bridge rose up and turned, balanced between those tall towers. A blue and yellow sign flickered past in all the grey. She could feel the bus shuddering in the wind.
My name is Promise, she murmured quietly to herself. My name is Promise Makinwa-Keizer.
Chapter 21
Prague
Two months later
The white wand slid over my stomach, which was smeared with gel. Something moved in the lower portion of the screen, and I saw the outline of a tiny, huddled body floating in slow motion, a quiet pulsing.
‘The heart,’ said the doctor, pointing with his pen. ‘Look how nice and steady it’s beating.’
I smiled, because that’s what he expected of me, but the only thing I saw was an electronic image. An abstract figure.
‘Would you like to hear the heartbeat?’
I nodded, and he placed the stethoscope against my swollen belly, then handed me the earpieces. I heard a rushing, a muffled flowing and thudding. Like when you try to adjust an old radio — the white noise in the space between the channels where no one is sending any signals. He moved the end of the scope. I felt metal against my skin. Suddenly it was there. A rapid and persistent little tapping, and tears rose to my eyes. My whole chest tightened. I pulled out the earpieces and gave the stethoscope back to the doctor. Turned my head away and wiped my eyes.
It was alive. It was really alive in there.
‘An alert little sparrow,’ said the doctor, tearing off a piece of paper towel and handing it to me. ‘Do you want to know what it is?’
I wiped the goop off my stomach. Sparrow?
‘I mean, whether it’s a boy or a girl?’ he said.
I shook my head. It didn’t matter. Either one would need food and a place to live. Medical treatment, in the worst case scenario. The months left until the birth felt like an urgent ticking, a demand that everything be resolved.
I hauled myself out of the chair, feeling stiff and clumsy.
‘So, I’m going to write down the fourth of May,’ he said. ‘Which means you’re in the twentieth week of your pregnancy.’
I put on my skirt with the elastic waistband and then pulled on the heavy tights.
‘So it’s not … damaged?’ I said, casting another glance at the screen. He had paused the image so the foetus was motionless in the moment that had just passed. A printer was spewing out a hard copy of the image.
‘Are you worried about that?’ He frowned. ‘Did something happen to you?’
‘I think I’m just nervous,’ I said. The memory resurfaced, of bricks and stones pressed against my face, the man lunging above me among the thorny bushes. But I felt nothing. As if it had happened to someone else.
‘You look a little pale,’ he said, then added something about how I needed to eat this or that, but I didn’t understand. I recorded the words in my mind, wanting to look them up in the dictionary that I had in my bag. The language had started coming back to me, but it was barely at the level of a six-year-old.
‘Give this to the nurse and she’ll set up a time for another appointment,’ he said, handing me the black-and-white picture, with the date filled in. ‘And let me offer you my congratulations.’
I went straight to the ladies’ room and got out my dictionary. Bílkovina was protein and žehlicˇka meant iron.
Vrabec really did mean sparrow. A bird longing to fly out. Tapping impatiently.
In the reception area the nurse handed me a form to fill in.
‘I heard that here it was possible to be … invisible,’ I said. I was looking for the word meaning anonymous, but I couldn’t think of it in Czech. The doctor had tried to speak German with me when he heard my halting accent, but that was even worse.
The nurse peered at me over the top of her glasses.
‘I still need a name and date of birth. And we’d like to have a phone number too. Somewhere we can reach you. We won’t give out any information if you ask us not to.’
I stared at the form. There was a place for name, date of birth, address, and citizenship, plus an empty space that sneered at me: Name of father.
I quickly scribbled down the information she wanted.
‘The phone number … I don’t have one at the moment,’ I said.
The nurse studied what I’d written, alarming me with the amount of time she took.
‘Terese Wallner,’ she read out loud. ‘And you were born in 1978?’
‘Mmm,’ I said vaguely, hoping I wouldn’t have to show her my passport.
According to my passport I was born in 1996 and had turned twenty the year before. Ally Cornwall was in her late thirties when she disappeared. I was short, with a nondescript appearance that could be easily changed. With the right make-up, I could look anywhere between twenty and forty-five. That had worked fine with my landlady, and when I applied for jobs. No one
had cared. A passport from an EU country was sufficient. But no one with a medical education would accept that. I was going to have to get a different passport before the birth. I’d have to ask around.
One advantage was that I’d be able to stop dying my hair a Nordic summer-blonde colour, as it said on the package. An unnecessary expense.
I got out my wallet and paid the bill. As the nurse put the money away, I studied the form in front of me.
The father’s name.
Sooner or later I might be forced to fill in the space. I would write ‘unknown’ and claim that I had no idea, but back in the room I’d rented, in the folder in the bottom of my suitcase, I’d stowed away a few small items. My wedding ring. The photo I’d carried with me all over Europe. Some day I would tell my child about Patrick. But only after the child was old enough and had learned to keep quiet about certain matters.
A totally different thought now occurred to me.
‘But isn’t this information registered somewhere?’ I asked.
The word ‘registered’ was ingrained in my vocabulary, at any rate. It was a word you learned as a three-year-old in a communist bureaucracy.
‘No, it’s just for us here in the office,’ said the nurse. ‘So we won’t get our patients mixed up.’ She gave me a look that said we were all alike, all of us women with the swollen bellies.
‘I mean … later, at the hospital.’
‘If the child is born in the Czech Republic, the birth is registered, of course.’
‘The father’s name too?’
‘Certainly.’ The woman stapled the form to the black-and-white ultrasound image. ‘Provided you know who he is, of course,’ she added.
‘How was it done in the past?’ I asked, ignoring her remark. ‘Under the Communists, I mean. Under Gustáv Husák … in the seventies? Was everything registered back then too?’
The nurse burst out laughing.
‘Are you kidding? They registered who you met, what you ate for breakfast, and which books you read. So naturally they would register the name of a child’s father.’
Just then the little bell rang and a woman came in, her belly huge, her eyes on the floor. She was wearing a veil.
Terese Wallner was given an appointment for the following month.
I came out onto the street outside the doctor’s office, which was hidden away in an ordinary apartment building on Malá Strana. December had arrived in Prague with bitter cold. I blew on my hands to warm them up and wrapped my coat more tightly around me. It was a shapeless man’s coat made of wool, from a second-hand shop. I figured I’d be able to wear it until the birth. I stuffed my hands in the pockets and began walking rapidly towards the river.
It had worked today too. I was Terese. A young Swedish woman visiting Prague for an unspecified length of time.
I’d practised speaking with a lilting Swedish accent, slowly getting used to sounding like someone from the Muppet Show. If anyone asked, I had learned Czech from my maternal grandmother who was born in Bohemia, though I wasn’t sure exactly where. We’d lost contact with that side of the family. That was why I was here in Prague. To improve my language skills.
So far I’d been lucky and hadn’t met any Swedes. But a man where I worked had shouted at me one day when he was even drunker than usual, accusing my people of stealing the Silver Bible. I fled before he demanded to have it back.
Alena Cornwall was presumed dead.
From a purely legal point of view, she could not, of course, be declared dead, since her body hadn’t been found, but the tragic story had been made public.
Occasionally I would go to an Internet café, though never the same one twice, and read what was being written.
The day after Patrick’s funeral, Richard Evans had posted an editorial on the web version of The Reporter, in which he heralded Patrick Cornwall’s journalistic career. He also wrote about the courage of Patrick’s wife, Alena Cornwall, who had disappeared a few weeks after her husband’s death. A suicide note, which had been sent to her assistant, indicated that she’d taken her own life, drowning in the fierce sea of sorrow — the same deadly sea that had robbed Patrick Cornwall of his life.
Evans had printed our wedding photo with the editorial, and Benji must have been contacted, since there was a quote from my last letter to him: ‘I have no wish to go on living. I hope you find love and if you do, Benji, hold onto it every second.’
A month later Patrick’s name appeared in the entertainment sections when George Clooney said that he was involved in producing a film. He had been touched by Patrick Cornwall’s passion for justice, and he wanted to tell the true story. After that, only silence.
Alain Thery had slowly vanished from the news feeds. During the first weeks the murder in Puerto Banus had shaken half of Europe and made big headlines. One of the charred bodies had worn handcuffs, which indicated premeditated murder. Although another possibility was a terrorist attack aimed at the jetset culture, so symbolic of the despicable lifestyle in the West.
Alain Thery’s body was quickly identified. He was described as a prominent businessman and a well-known figure in social circles in both France and on the Spanish Costa del Sol. Many mourned his passing. Even the French president made a statement, saying that such an attack exhorted Europe to undertake a vigorous effort to counter criminality and terrorism.
But no suspect was found. The terrorist theory was dismissed as weeks passed without anyone stepping forward to claim responsibility. The last article I read said that the murder must have been committed by a lone individual.
I’d never seriously worried that the police would connect the murder to Alena Cornwall. But there were others who might: the man who had raped me in Tarifa, and the network that stretched across all of Europe and even beyond.
I remembered that voice in the vacant lot, as I lay on the ground with my face in the thorny bushes, curled up and waiting to die. ‘ … don’t try to hide. We can find you anywhere.’
So I’d let her die in the sea.
When the steep drop-off ended, and I felt solid ground under my feet — sand and sharp rocks — it was like being born again. I crawled the last part of the way, freezing cold and exhausted, and found myself on a deserted beach outside a tennis club several kilometres from Puerto Banus.
The flames were still visible way out in the water. A couple of boats with searchlights were on the scene, but keeping a safe distance from the burning yacht.
I curled up under some bushes until dawn arrived. And when the tennis club opened, I slipped inside and used a blow dryer in the ladies’ room to dry myself off. Then I plucked the plastic bag of banknotes from its hiding place and took out two damp ten-euro bills. I stuck the rest in the waistband of my panties and left the club to head up the road. Barefoot, I kept on walking until I came to a bus stop.
At the bus station in Marbella, I went to the locker where I’d left my belongings, and changed into jeans and a shirt and sneakers. I stuck Terese Wallner’s passport in my pocket. I stuffed the Armani clothes in a plastic bag and tossed it into the trash. Then I got on a bus to Madrid and didn’t wake up until we were far inland in the Spanish countryside.
Only then did I dare think about where I should go. Definitely not north, in the direction of France. And to the south was the outer border of Europe, where I’d be forced to show my passport. It occurred to me that since I’d already started remembering some French, then probably the Czech language was also buried somewhere in my memory. Being able to speak the language would make it easier to hide in the crowds, and the Czech Republic was both an EU country and in the Schengen zone, with no internal border controls.
‘They don’t even bother to look at passports,’ the man named Alex had told me. I had asked about him at the Blue Heaven Bar, and an hour later he had appeared. Self-confident and attractive in a rumpled sort of way. And yes, he did have a passport for sale. The age wasn’t right, of course, and we didn’t look much alike, but he said that wouldn’t matte
r. ‘Blonde and Swedish and an EU citizen. That’s enough. All you have to do is dye your hair, and you can go to any country you like.’
Each time I crossed a border my heart had pounded, but nowhere did anyone ask to see my passport.
I had no sense of coming home when I got off at the station in Prague. I needed a job and a place to live. Everything else was irrelevant.
I spent seven nights sleeping in a youth hostel near the School of Economics before I heard about a room for rent. The landlady was over seventy and lived alone in a seven-room apartment. I shared a kitchen and bathroom with two students from Dresden. I said ‘good morning’ and ‘goodnight’ to them whenever we met. Soon I’d have to find a different place to live, preferably my own apartment, but it was hard to find anything cheap. The landlady had made it clear that she didn’t want any baby crying in the apartment. She missed Husák, she said. The old days when order reigned. Back then she hadn’t needed to take in lodgers to make ends meet.
I never talked to anyone longer than necessary, not even in the shops. I was always aware of the risk of being discovered. The only solution was solitude.
Sometimes I felt such an urge to call Benji, just for the joy of saying: Hi, it’s me.
But the network could trace phone calls and find people that I’d known. Under no circumstances could I contact anyone from my old life.
Occasionally I would think: There is one person. If he’s alive. Someone that nobody would connect with Alena Cornwall, because even I didn’t know his name.
But his name was in the public records.
Not now, I thought, but maybe someday. When I can devote my time to digging through dusty archives. When I can afford to think about myself.
I hurried as fast as I could down the sloping streets of Malá Strana. I hadn’t been to this part of town before. In a dingy little bar I bought a hamburger to eat as I walked. Bílkovina and žehlicˇka. Protein and iron.
Over by the river I stopped abruptly. On the other side Nové Mesto glittered with Christmas decorations. The air stood still in the cold, and the water moved as slowly as sluggish oil.
The Forgotten Dead Page 34