Asylum Road

by Olivia Sudjic

  I thought about how recovery is the opposite of loss, and how the word, in my adopted language at least, contained the two senses – to have returned and to heal – often, though not always, one and the same thing.

  It also occurred to me that it might have been the first time I’d seen Luke at a disadvantage. He did not have a mother tongue with which to exclude me now, except in the native language of his body. Here the scales had tipped a little. It was a new sensation, to know he was reliant on me.

  It now seemed impossible that at one time I could barely speak his language. Long before I met him. Still a child. Or more childlike. I had made learning it the focus of my life. I said so at my undergraduate interview, going full tilt.

  Why English?

  The professors were too awkward to ask much more than that, but I know my English teacher, who’d encouraged me to apply there, must have told them something in her reference.

  Luke went to get the car and I waited for our shared black case. The same bags came past over and over. Round the carousel in a figure of eight. I felt the tiny surge of semantic power extinguished. My thoughts kept looping back to the lost items, regretting having come, then a self-loathing that energised me briefly, before remembering the purpose of the trip. In essence, to ensure life didn’t turn out like this: a lone woman waiting, unable to pay proper attention, her personal property slipping from reach.

  At last our bag dropped down the chute. I made a pact with myself not to bore Luke about the missing things, aiming for temporary amnesia until we made it back to London. Only once I’d decided this did the practical consequences register. I didn’t know my parents’ or sister’s number by heart, or even their address. They’d moved again, apparently, this time back to our old neighbourhood.

  I joined Luke, still negotiating car rental, and asked to borrow his phone.

  Why?

  My parents’ address.

  What for? We’re not going there now, first, are we?

  In the car, he keyed our Dubrovnik address into the map. I said I was feeling more normal again, nausea-wise, and so we decided on the scenic route that twisted round every bay along the coast. Once our route was decided, he passed the phone to me but I couldn’t log into my email. Luke, ever security conscious, had insisted I activate Google’s two-step verification, which required inputting a passcode that was sent to your phone.

  How else can we do this? he said over the satnav’s voice. Is the address written some—

  He was about to suggest my notebook but stopped himself in time.

  We did a second tour of the roundabout by mistake. The obvious person to call would have been my aunt, but again – no contact for her without my phone. I thought about trying to reach one of her children on social media. Luke had quit all his and had pressured me into quitting too, but I knew they could be reactivated.

  The idea filled me with dread. As far as I was aware the two daughters, Diana and Tamara, lived in Dubai these days. Nikolaj, or Calum as he went by now, either did not have Facebook or never sent a friend request. I shrunk from the thought of having to explain myself and why I did not know my parents’ address. Why I was coming back. I didn’t want them to know anything about me. I didn’t want that part of my life to know Luke existed. I thought of his reluctance to hand his phone over again and felt the familiar tug of possessiveness.

  What about friends?

  I blinked and looked down at the phone.

  I could sense the realisation dawning on him that the minutes we’d spent digesting this administrative problem, broached on a Croatian dual carriageway while our overlord barked NEXT EXIT, had occasioned greater insight into my past than we’d managed in the most intimate conversations of our relationship over the previous five years.

  For a long time my sister and I couldn’t go back. First because war was still going on, then so as not to jeopardise our status. My parents became voices inside a beige receiver. One time after I spoke to them, I heard my aunt suggesting to my mother that they join us in Scotland. This was something I’d asked them to do, twice, in a letter and in a phone call; both times it had been dismissed, but hearing it in her mouth made me realise it was a valid question.

  I don’t know what my mother said, but from my aunt’s side it was clearly unsatisfactory. Think of your children. Of Drago. Those people are not your family. You don’t owe them this loyalty. My mother must have said something harsh in response, because the pleading tone changed and the conversation ended.

  By the time I arrived at university, where everyone was away from home, I could imagine it no other way. We continued phone calls – a monthly check-in as unremarkable as menstruation – meaning only that nothing there had changed. I asked them the same litany of questions and if they started to veer off script, I would find a way to cut the conversation short, citing an essay deadline or lecture, some shiny facet of my new intellectual life – the bourgeois exile they’d arranged for me for all their talk of brotherhood and unity. Sometimes I was callous. I didn’t want to hear anything that would make me feel bad. Sometimes I said things to estrange them purposefully, like wishing them a Merry Christmas.

  Mira! I said finally, startling him after a long silence. Mira.

  Mira. OK. Who’s that?

  He turned to me expectantly, but I was busy searching her name.

  Mira was my brother’s girlfriend, his fiancée in the end, and the last time I’d seen her was at his funeral nearly a decade ago. 2008. I was curious to see how things had turned out for her since that year of turmoil. She’d been his age, twenty-six. I was approaching my first graduation and remembered how she gripped my hand as she told me her plans. She was going to move to Belgrade. She had completed a Masters, spoke three languages, but was working as a nanny. I avoided talking about my brother. Her grief felt private, removed from our shared history.

  Her family lived in the same apartment block as mine when the only people we could stay in touch with were our immediate neighbours. Everyone else might as well have been on another planet, though there were only streets between us. We played games in the basement and the hallway when we couldn’t go outside. That group of kids we were part of – all ages – had become family.

  Like my brother, I’d had a crush on Mira. I gave her my last piece of Cˇunga Lunga, only to discover it had made its way back to him. When I cried he gave the gum back to her, and she to me, telling me I should savour it, divide it into pieces and chew each one until all the taste was gone. I was ashamed of crying and I wanted to show her I could be defiant, reckless like my brother who liked to tease the snipers. I remember her eyes flashing as the bright blue square disappeared inside my mouth.

  She started calling me her sister after that. A ten-year gap meant my own regarded me as a burden on her freedom. Mira, who had no siblings, derived great pleasure from me – braiding my hair and helping to furnish my dolls with clothes – and I preferred to be infantilised by her rather than act grown-up for my actual sister. We played marbles when Drago was reading Alan Ford.

  They began calling themselves boyfriend and girlfriend although they were only eleven. It seemed intoxicatingly mature to me, and at first it had strained basement relations with her parents, hers being less permissive, but Drago was so devoted to her throughout that period, and after as far as I know, that soon they too were in love with my brother.

  It was very chaste, but I heard my mother caution him that she’d had Daria by accident too young and Drago had looked horrified by the insinuation.

  My parents weren’t married when they had my sister. But when Daria was four, Mum proposed to Dad – not long before Tito died. The day after their wedding was spent reading the newspapers and following his state funeral in a stupor. Drago used to remind us both with a haughty look that while Daria and I were mistakes, implicitly the product of erratic lovemaking, he – the halfway mark between both errors – was the only child they had planned, which was somehow less horrifying.

  The marria
ge had been open, though not without jealousy. Even before the siege I’d got used to waiting with increasing foreboding for one or other of them to come home, or being bundled out of bed still in my pyjamas. My mother would take us to one of the neighbours and disappear into the night, or, worse, bring me with her so I could press the buzzer and ask for my father back. One of my earliest memories is coming into the living room in the night only to find a strange man on the sofa with his trousers down, my mother kneeling. Me and my siblings were the go-betweens, delivering entreaties or threats, depending on which of us was enlisted.

  I knew from rare conversations with my sister that Mira’s Belgrade plan had worked out, but still I was surprised to find that she was the first search result returned for Mira Panic´. The one I clicked on first, halfway down, produced a Bad Gateway, but her company profile listed a work email and a direct line.

  Calling felt intrusive. Unnerving for me, too, with Luke sitting there, even if he couldn’t understand. Instead I wrote a short email from Luke’s account before I had time to overthink it, then fell instantly into a deep, remedial sleep, rocked by the winding road.

  When I woke Luke was tapping my shoulder. The car was stationary.

  Passports.

  He looked agitated, indicating a checkpoint several cars ahead.

  We’re about to drive through Bosnia for six miles, he continued as I came round, then out again. I think.

  He cocked his head at the map. We were indeed about to pass through the tiny stretch of BiH coast. Those twelve miles now separate the northern part of Croatia from Dubrovnik.

  On leaving Croatia, the Bosnian officers gave us a cursory glance through the window and waved us through. Luke shifted in his seat, peering at the terracotta roofs and identical sloping foothills as if trying to detect some slight variation. Minutes later, we arrived at the checkpoint to re-enter Croatia again. The Croatian guard solemnly inspected our passports and the details of the hire car for several minutes before allowing us to continue. As we pulled away Luke checked his rear mirror and said:

  That was mad.

  Just symbolic.

  He turned to me, eyebrows raised.

  And mad. Of course.

  Then his phone vibrated.

  I’d forgotten the email I’d sent before falling asleep. Mira was delighted to hear from me. My heart thudded. She explained that she was currently in Belgrade for the book fair that took place in the city every October but would be visiting her own parents (who I may remember had moved to the coast) in two days’ time. Since I’d mentioned that we wanted to travel as far as Kotor, would we consider meeting her for lunch in Sveti Stefan on Sunday? There was now a good restaurant on the island.

  Stefan? OK. How far is it?

  From Kotor? Forty minutes, I guessed. Less.

  I was keen to delay.

  Well . . . sure, I’m up for that if you are.

  After a while we were directed onto the motorway. I prefer a straight road to avoid travel sickness, but also the certainty of it.

  When we stopped for petrol, people asked me for directions, which at first seemed a good sign but then depressed me. Maybe our route was the same as when Daria and me had been going the other way. In the convoy of tourist buses commandeered for evacuations. Most of the passengers were unaccompanied children. A white UN truck like an egg carton had escorted us. When we got to Split there was a ferry waiting in the port.

  Ancona, then England, then Glasgow. 1994, just after the World Cup, the summer the Channel Tunnel opened.

  A woman who met us asked us if we were happy as I unwrapped her crayons from their skins. My sister translated. I had said no. Daria was embarrassed. Though everyone insisted it was not the case – that it had more to do with the cost of the tunnel passes and the need for men, the impossibility of abandoning their neighbours – my mother’s decision to stay behind with the rest of my family, the suddenness of our departure in the middle of the night, the severance from our basement community, had felt more like exile than escaping.

  I don’t know what she told our distended family about me and Daria leaving, but the first time I came back, that gang of children seemed even closer to one another, and united in punishing those who’d left.

  Luke complained he was hungry. I said I might be able to eat something too now the nausea had subsided, but it was already three and most of the restaurants in the small seaside village we stopped in were closed.

  Guess it’s out of season, I said.

  We found a bar still serving, though its umbrellas and terrace tables had been folded. Half the dishes on the menu were written in English, enclosed inside quotation marks.

  I just feel like they’ll turn out not to be what they claim, he told me, studying it.

  He’d relaxed his pescatarianism since visiting his parents, so I ordered him what promised to be c´evapi (a skinless, garlicky sausage), a basket of bread and a Coke.

  Thank you for driving, I said as the waiter retreated. And sorry, obviously.

  What for?

  For being sick. For blocking the sink.

  Yes, that was quite shit.

  Seeing me cringe, he laughed and leant in, kissing the skin below my eye.

  That last bit was pretty white-knuckle. Good you were asleep. The drivers here are mental. Cliff one side, sheer drop – his hand sliced down – Adriatic the other, and the truck right in the middle of the road. On a bend.

  The waiter returned and ceremoniously laid out cutlery and glasses. Luke thanked him at each stage of the ritual until he went, then asked me to teach him phrases (hello, thank you, goodnight, beer) and in some ways, it was like a holiday, because seeing things through his eyes (the karst mountains and pine forests, the shining path of the sun on the sea) made me feel as if I’d never been to the region and had simply read a crude entry in a Lonely Planet guide.

  He had claimed his main reason for wanting to visit Dubrovnik was that it was a World Heritage Site. I knew what he meant was that the medieval walled city was used as a location in Game of Thrones. Saying he might watch an episode of GOT, as opposed to one in the rotation of series we watched together, was a cue for me to entertain myself, preferably in a different part of the flat.

  As we waited for the bill he asked me about our destination and I reminded him I’d never been. Instead, I took his phone and read from Dubrovnik’s Wikipedia entry.

  In 1991, after the break-up of Yugoslavia ...

  I paused, unwrapping a boiled sweet Luke had saved from the rental desk,

  ... Dubrovnik was besieged by Serbian and Montenegrin soldiers of the Yugoslav People’s Army

  I glided over the blue hyperlinks as if they were merely waves moving in and away on a shore.

  Back in the car I asked Luke to open the windows which were child-locked, and the smell of the pine, the past, hit me full in the face.

  5

  We reached Dubrovnik at sunset. Its aura sunk beneath the roofs of the Old Town, rendering the limestone walls gold then pink then grey. We found the Airbnb easily enough, an apartment in the eaves of a neat, white building with notepads and water glasses arranged on each side of the bed. It was obvious real people did not live there. The man who met us with the keys seemed like an estate agent, indicating a plate of complimentary halva before leading us out onto the small roof terrace to hear the bells that were now chiming. First on one side, then the other, the rhythm of the second becoming tangled inside the first. The first light and quick, the second deeper and portentous. They looped and took after each other like swallows, then began to fade, slow and dissonant.

  Luke showered first, emerging head-shrunk and sleek with his towel around his waist. He stood dripping onto the floor, browsing restaurant recommendations on his phone. I washed my hair, put on a single coat of brown mascara and the one nice dress I’d packed. Looking in the mirror, I saw my colour had returned. That dress gave me something approaching cleavage. I knew Luke liked it, or the way it split the white meat of my breasts so
I gained the little V-shaped shadow.

  I leant closer so that the fur along my jaw glowed beneath the spotlit mirror. I licked my lips. When I came out of the bathroom I tried to hide what I was thinking, but Luke pulled me onto the sofa with my wet hair on his chest. He stared into my face as if he’d asked a question. My response was to bite. Sometimes I need to sink my teeth. I was ravenous suddenly, but Luke said we would be late. That’s how quickly it happens, the power shifts.

  We ran down the stairs and onto the street, my hair still heavy with water, the complimentary shampoo not quite rinsed. There was a chill now, though earlier in the day autumn had felt inconceivable. The limestone paved the streets as well as the walls of buildings. Worn smooth, they shone in the lamp-light like trays of melting ice. The streets were fairly empty, and we held hands, following the blue dot.

  Luke described my appetite that night as carnal. I ate a whole schnitzel, took food from his fork, pretending to bite the hand that fed me, and drank most of a bottle of red wine. I let him catch my foot, which was cold, under the table, wrap it in the stiff folds of his napkin, then feel his way along my leg. Not having my phone, I felt anxiety but also freedom.

  We shared a tiramisu and he shoved in beside me. I thought: How did I doubt him? And then: Here we are. No longer he and I but us.

  Luke was drunk, and the conversation became more word association. He insisted on paying the bill as if I would argue with him over it. My treat, he said.

  That morning I’d had a crust of vomit in the corners of my mouth and then he’d let me snore in the car most of the way here. My treat went back to an earlier stage, before he became my benefactor.