Tiger Milk

by Stephanie de Velasco

  Someone’s coming I hiss and grab the bag.

  Luckily Jameelah understands what’s happening immediately and we run as fast as possible up the slide and hide inside the play fort. At first I think the person’s just going to pass through the playground but that’s not the case, the person comes straight toward us, limping, goes around the sandbox, past our hiding place, and over to the trees, stopping directly under Amir’s linden tree.

  Jasna, whispers Jameelah.

  What’s she doing here?

  No idea.

  Beneath Amir’s linden tree a lighter clicks and smoke starts to rise.

  Can’t we just get out of here I say, we’re done with the spell right?

  Let’s wait to see if the evil Sorb shows up, says Jameelah.

  Why, I ask, looking around for my shirt.

  So you can throw a rock at his head says Jameelah smiling at me, then you’d finally be even.

  I don’t want to be naked anymore, it’s cold, or maybe it’s not but either way I want to put some clothes on right away. But then Jameelah whispers, shhhh, someone’s coming, but it’s not the evil Sorb, and when I realize who it is I know it’s too late. It’s Tarik I can tell from his gait, he’s the only one who walks like that, with his left leg dragging behind a little. They both limp now, I think, how weird, but then again it’s not that weird since they are siblings after all.

  Keep your head down, whispers Jameelah.

  For a second I think Tarik’s seen us but actually he’s just checking things out. He lifts an arm and motions around at the rose petals. Jasna shrugs and takes a drag from her cigarette, not really looking at him, staring at the ground, looking past him, fidgeting with her hair or whatever.

  Why don’t they just make up, I whisper.

  Jameelah shrugs her shoulders.

  Why can’t they just make up, I think, if for no other reason than for Amir and Selma, but also just because, I mean, at the end of the day you always have to make up. Me and Jameelah do all the time no matter how bad a fight we’ve had and I even make up with Jessi every time. In the end you always have to make up.

  Can you hear what they’re saying, Jameelah whispers.

  Not a single word.

  Shit, she says, shhhh I say, and Tarik says something or other.

  What, says Jameelah.

  Shhhh, I say again, because otherwise you can’t get a word of what he’s saying.

  At one point he says something about family and feet, then something about speaking and helping. Jasna leans her head back and laughs like he’s just told a great joke. She sucks on her cigarette and runs a hand along the bark of Amir’s linden tree, she stands there and then blows out the smoke as if Tarik is nothing more than the air that she’s exhaling. Tarik keeps speaking to her. I can’t understand a word of it until Jasna suddenly interrupts him. Her voice gets loud, Tarik flinches, and she says something about in the past and couldn’t stick up for myself, but now, says Jasna. But Tarik interrupts her and Jasna flicks her cigarette butt away and blows her last drag of smoke right in Tarik’s face. Not your cleaning lady I hear her say and then they switch to Bosnian and it sounds like they are really fighting. Bosnian, Bosnian, Bosnian. It seems like forever until Jasna finally says, I can’t do anything about it, but I can’t understand what Tarik answers. I just see him kick Amir’s linden angrily with his bum leg.

  Man that must hurt, I think, but then I remember that his leg is made out of metal or something.

  You should be ashamed I hear him say, loudly and precisely, like the other day at the pool, only this time it’s Jameelah who flinches. Jasna doesn’t react at all. She just lights another cigarette and starts talking again, so quietly that we can’t catch a single word.

  Then, loud enough for us to hear, she says it’s not fair, and suddenly everything is silent. I see Tarik take a deep breath, I see how his upper body straightens and then relaxes again. There’s a weird calm, though it’s not really calm, not when Tarik is standing there perfectly still, with his arms so stiff you’d think he had razor blades in his armpits. We crouch in the wooden play fort and peek through the gaps between the slats. My knees are boring deeper and deeper into the floor planks and it hurts, and even though I know it hurts I barely feel it, especially when Tarik starts doing something really strange. He turns away from Jasna and walks around the sandbox in big, slow steps.

  He’s completely lost his chador whispers Jameelah.

  Jasna leans against Amir’s linden tree and smokes, staying very still, just her cigarette hand moving up to her mouth and back down, just her eyes following Tarik like she’s watching a wild animal, the kind of animal you’re not sure has rabies or not. When Tarik is standing in front of her again he puts his hands up to his eyes and his whole body starts to shake.

  Is he crying whispers Jameelah.

  Jasna lets her cigarette fall to the ground and stamps it out thoroughly. She goes to hug Tarik but he won’t let her. There’s no way to hear what he says to her, the words spill out of him half spoken, half moaned. All I catch is fate and goodbye and Jasna nods. It’s so quiet that you can hear her fingernails tapping on the bark of Amir’s linden and then Tarik steps over to Jasna and pulls her tightly to him.

  See, I whisper, in the end you always have to make up, but Jameelah doesn’t react. She’s staring down at Jasna and Tarik as if she’s in a trance. Jasna has her hands on Tarik’s back and Tarik has his on hers. They sway slowly to a rhythm only the two of them can hear, back and forth.

  Are they dancing?

  I think so.

  Jameelah giggles softly.

  See, he can dance. I mean, it’s not the lambada, but still.

  Tarik and Jasna dance and they both start to cry, practically groaning, and it’s not a happy sound – it’s more like they’re saying goodbye forever. Who knows, I think, maybe Jasna is leaving and they’re never going to see each other again. And even though I’m relieved I suddenly get very sad because all sorts of memories race through my mind, memories of earlier times.

  Tarik’s entire body is still shaking and he doesn’t seem to want to let Jasna go and he keeps stuttering – to be honest it looks really odd and Jasna keeps groaning louder and louder, so loud that I think to myself that’s weird, but then again they were all weirdly loud back when their father died, too, the whole family and all the relatives, all sorts of men with strings of beads in their hands and all of them howling like wolves all day and all night so loud that everyone up and down the street could hear them. Frau Stanitzek wanted to call the cops but Jameelah told her that’s what they do when someone dies and anyway it would be over soon enough but suddenly Jasna turns to the side and holds her hand to her stomach. I can see that something is dripping from her mouth and then she keels over. She just falls over and not like a person with arms and legs but like a statue, lifeless, like a statue falling off its pedestal. That’s the way she hits the ground too, she smacks the ground and lays there as still as a stone.

  Tarik looks around in a panic. I want to jump up and tell him we’re here and say yeah we’ll explain later why we’re naked but let us help now but as if she senses it Jameelah puts an ice cold hand on my shoulder and yanks me to the floor and shoves her other hand over my mouth. I want to tear myself away from her and scream but Jameelah just holds me tighter.

  His right hand, whispers Jameelah, look at his right hand and then all I hear is her terrified breathing rasping in my ear. Tarik bends down. He stays there for a while squatting next to Jasna, a knife in his right hand. Then he stands up and starts to back away first really slow and then faster and faster until finally he turns around and limps off as fast as he can go. My head, my heart, everything is pulsing like crazy, my mouth is so dry it feels like I’ve smoked a hundred cigarettes. Jameelah is still holding me down.

  Let go of me I whisper.

  Slowly she loosens her grip. I stretch out my legs, which have fallen asleep, and push them against the opposite wall of the play fort. In the old days
people bit down on a piece of wood to deal with pain, that’s what Herr Wittner said one time, and that’s what I try to do now with my whole body, wedging myself between the walls of the play fort and pressing until I realize I’m too big to stretch out in here anymore, I can’t sit inside the fort and stretch my legs all the way out the way I have for my entire life up here in this fort at the top of the slide. I’m too big now.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  I have no idea how long we sit up there. Time and concepts like up and down have ceased to exist, it’s like we’re in space, the play fort floats through the great beyond with us inside, there’s not a sound, no nightingale no nothing, just Jameelah’s voice whispering fuck fuck fuck as regularly as if she’s counting off a game of rock paper scissors, just that and her breathing and her chest going up and down, just our naked bodies, our skin, and beneath it the fear coursing through our veins like blood.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  Jameelah jumps up.

  Fuck she says are we fucking crazy? Let’s get out of here.

  She throws me my tank-top and my fingers are ice cold I realize as I slip it on. We cautiously climb down the slide, everywhere rose petals, rose petals all around. We walk hand in hand across the lawn.

  Jasna is laying there. The light from a streetlamp falls on her face. The left side of her body is all red, everything soaked with blood. Something is dripping from her mouth but it’s only when we get near her that I can see what it is. Vomit.

  Careful whispers Jameelah, don’t step in anything.

  She’s dead I whisper, really dead.

  Jameelah nods.

  She’s dead, you can see it in her eyes. They’re not looking anywhere, they’re gone, no longer on earth. It’s like in that YouTube video where a group of men hunt down a woman and kill her in the street in some hot country, they used a knife, too, and now Jameelah and I are standing in front of Jasna exactly the same as in that video, except we don’t have a camera.

  The engagement ring is on her finger.

  The ring, I say.

  Jameelah continues to stare at Jasna’s dead body. She’s still holding the container of Tiger Milk in her hand. I wonder how she managed to get down the slide holding the Tiger Milk and the bin bag. A nightingale sings up above us somewhere and it sounds horrible.

  The ring, I say again.

  Shut your mouth says Jameelah and then she bends down and with trembling fingers takes the hairband out of Jasna’s hair and drops it into the Tiger Milk.

  What are you doing I ask.

  Don’t ask just help me, she says, then she brushes Jasna’s hair back and reaches behind her ears and undoes the giant gold hoop earrings and drops them into the Tiger Milk.

  Come on says Jameelah, her watch, her bracelets, her rings, all of it, put it all in the container like we always do, that’s cheap, real cheap, got it?

  I don’t ask. I squat down next to Jameelah and carefully remove a gold bracelet and then another and another, dropping one after the other into the Tiger Milk. We work silently and one piece of jewellery after the next plunks into the Tiger Milk until Jameelah looks away for a second and I take the engagement ring off Jasna’s finger. It comes off easily because it’s too big for her. But it fits me. It fits me perfectly.

  Come on, says Jameelah, let’s get out of here.

  We stumble down the dirt path to the entrance to the yard, the clip-clop of our flip-flops echoing behind us. Why didn’t anyone ever tell us this could happen here I ask myself, why didn’t anyone ever tell us it could happen here.

  As I put the key into the lock I noticed how much my hand was shaking. I was so scared that Jessi might hear us – that she’d be standing in the hall with her giant puffy slippers asking us questions – so I stuck in the key and opened the lock as quietly as I could. Jessi had laid down on the sofa with Mama, all four of her limbs splayed out. She had on her bathrobe and her puffy slippers and Mama was snoring softly.

  We went into my room and put on our pyjamas.

  I’m cold Jameelah said so I went into the kitchen and warmed up some milk. While I was warming the milk I kept thinking I had dried blood on me but it was just my imagination. It’s just that it seemed so real because of the tiny red hearts all over my pyjamas. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands two or three times and then the milk was warm and Jameelah and I drank it in bed.

  I didn’t sleep I just pretended I was asleep and Jameelah didn’t really sleep either, I know because she laid there too still and too compact, different from the way she normally slept. I did it to try to calm Jameelah and I don’t know but I bet she probably did it for the same reason.

  At one point I went to the bathroom even though I didn’t need to go. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and stared at the ring. The green stone in the middle wasn’t really green it was dark-green, almost black, though I guess it could just be its age – maybe gems were like people and if you hadn’t seen them for a long time you didn’t recognize them at first glance. I wanted to take the ring off and put it in the little basket on the shelf so Mama could find it but it wouldn’t come off so I ran my finger under the tap and used soap to pull it off. But then I put it back on.

  I couldn’t fall asleep forever and all I could think about was how often Jasna had given me cigarettes or gum, how she gave me a henna tattoo once, how we dunked our hands into the warm red liquid and it squished up between our fingers. I laid in bed and wondered again why nobody had told us that it could happen here, and how it would have been easier to bear if Jasna had screamed. Then I would have known that it was Jasna and that her scream could shatter the world like so much glass. There were people who could do that, I’d seen it on TV, but Jasna hadn’t screamed she’d just moaned a little. I realized that ever since I was a little kid I’d thought that death was something loud, like in the movies, blood spraying, screams, pieces of flesh flying, but none of that is true. Death is silent, it doesn’t make any noise at all, and it smells of rose petals. Death takes you in its arms and softly moans goodbye.

  Jameelah fell asleep at some stage but not me, because every time I thought of Jasna I also thought of Tarik. A thousand things popped into my head all at once, even more things than when I thought of Jasna, and not just the lambada and the way he always mimicked MC Hammer. No, also the way he sometimes played with me and Amir, the way he played made-up games with us like plane crash in the Carpathians or left for dead in prison, the way he told us how to lick the moisture off the walls of the prison so we wouldn’t die of thirst, or how you could eat the flesh of dead passengers to survive, how that was okay in a situation like a plane crash. And then I remembered how he gave me a belt for my birthday once, a pink leather belt with rivets. He’d added the rivets himself he said, ten rivets, each with a big glittering stone on it, a happy birthday for each year, Nini, he said, and as all of this flooded into my head I realized it wasn’t just Jasna who was dead but Tarik, and that because Tarik had killed Jasna he was even more dead to me than Jasna and then I ran to the bathroom again even though I didn’t need to pee, I just needed to cry.

  I didn’t fall asleep until it was light outside and even then I kept waking up, once because the room smelled so weird, like blood and milk. You’re imagining it again, I thought, just like the hearts on my pyjamas, but then I noticed that the Tiger Milk container was sitting on the nightstand and that the smell of blood and milk was coming from there, from the metal jewellery, so I shoved it under the bed next to Amir’s box and when I saw Amir’s box I thought for a second I should just open it.

  I wake up at one. I go to Kaufland and buy cornflakes. Back home Jameelah and I eat cornflakes in bed. Jameelah just stares at the wall and shovels cornflakes into her mouth and she reminds me of Mama with her blank hazy look, and just like with Mama I’m afraid to ask what she’s thinking about and I just rub my eyes and figure she’ll say something at some stage, probably something about the jewellery or whatev
er, but she doesn’t and there’s just the murmuring sound of cornflakes crunching.

  What are we going to do now, I ask at some point.

  Just wait, says Jameelah, believe me I know how to act in a situation like this.

  I don’t really understand but Jameelah calmly drinks the milk out of her cereal bowl and then says you can’t rush into anything, you can’t make a move without considering it carefully do you understand, she says, normal thinking doesn’t apply anymore, one thing following from another, waiting to see what happens, no way. Now you have to stay out ahead, your thoughts galloping out in front of events, always a step ahead.

  I nod and keep eating my cornflakes.

  Time ticks away and we lie in bed without saying a word. At some point I lean down and pull the Tiger Milk out from under the bed and put it on the nightstand.

  What’s the story with this stuff, I say, do we go to the cops with it?

  No. We have to get rid of it, all of it.

  Get rid of it why, I ask, why did we even take it?

  I don’t know.

  What do you mean you don’t know, you had a plan for the jewellery.

  No I didn’t.

  Yes you did.

  No, I did not. It was just an impulse.

  Impulse, I shout jumping up from bed, you had an impulse? You’ve lost your chador I shout. Why did we take the fucking jewellery, tell me right this second why we took it!

  I don’t know says Jameelah quietly, burying her face in her hands, and anyway you did it too.

  No I only did it because you did, because I thought you had a plan.

  What the hell kind of plan was I supposed to have had?

  I have no idea, maybe something to do with your beliefs or whatever, or maybe to take the stuff to the police to prove something or other.

  What fucking beliefs screams Jameelah, since when do I have beliefs and why am I always supposed to know everything and have a plan?