It was smarter than whatever I’d pictured. We scanned the menu, presented to us in English, Luke laughing at forgotten vegetables and deciding it must mean heirloom.
I like it, he added thoughtfully, looking around as if surprised. Here, I mean. Mira must be doing well for herself.
My head began to hurt – a sharp and insistent pain. I put one hand to my temple.
What does she look like? Mira.
Most of my childhood memories had her in them. I searched for her adult face and found it at the funeral; the doll eyes dead, face white and wet, but even then Mira was beautiful. Her face was like the Fornasetti woman’s. She was the type Luke found most attractive. Dark hair, thin arms, oval face, no make-up.
On an early date, I’d asked him about his type and he’d claimed he didn’t know or didn’t have one. I’d pressed harder and he’d said: just not an English rose I guess. Foreign-looking, that was his thing. He looked at me as he said it, shrugging. My infiltration of his browsing history contradicted this.
As we waited I felt increasingly nervous, as if someone might be playing a massive trick on me, my headache getting steadily worse. I got up to pace around, saying I wanted to look at the view from the other side of the square, away from the shore, and found a tiny chapel tucked away there.
What about here for the wedding? Luke was suddenly behind.
I didn’t turn around. I doubted he was serious anyway. The way he’d said here, I decided, was as if he’d used quotation marks. Since Cornwall, we’d not mentioned weddings.
A woman’s voice could be heard talking animatedly and we returned to the table. Mira was there smoking, seated in the only chair not in full shade. She wore dark trousers and a black sleeveless tunic so that her bare, brown shoulders were flecked with sunlight beneath the trees. She turned to us, smiling, stubbing her cigarette in the ashtray as she rose to her feet. Slowly she came toward me and gripped both my wrists, staring at me with her large eyes for a moment, then pulling me in to her chest and whispering things I couldn’t entirely make out so close to my ear.
It’s lovely here, she said, reverting to the English of our emails as she shook hands with Luke.
It was jarring when she first did this, a betrayal of our former closeness somehow.
And you have to imagine Tito’s poodles trotting around.
He laughed.
Yes, she said seriously, nodding as she lit another cigarette. He came here. Lots. And now they’ve made it smart again. It’s very popular for weddings. Djokovic, you know the tennis guy? He got married here.
Oh!
She spread her hands to where we sat on either side of her – I must give you my congratulations!
This was the first time anybody had said this and I hadn’t felt like I’d been caught out in a lie. But I felt another kind of guilt. She wore large, chic rings on most fingers but Daria had never mentioned Mira getting married.
Luke pursed his lips and rounded his shoulders in a self-effacing way, looking from Mira to the table.
Did this belong to him then, this island?
She gestured behind her in the direction of the beach. That was his summer palace.
Not bad for a communist.
The waiter came and stood rocking on his heels to list the dishes of the day. Mira asked for a bottle of wine by name, without deferring to Luke as I usually did, then removed a pair of angular black glasses from her bag and began to read with great attention. With the glasses on she looked older and I realised she must be thirty-six or -seven now, if I was thirty-one. The age my mother was when the war started.
She told us her father had briefly worked on the island after Tito turned it into a hotel. That hotel predated this one, she explained, but it had, many years ago, been full of Hollywood stars.
Then, of course . . .
She made a swooping motion with her cigarette to suggest a steep decline.
He was an assistant to the manager, I think. That’s why I like coming here. When he went back to Montenegro with my mother, ten years ago now? No. More. It was just when the owners had leased the island and were having it restored. He’s pleased with the refurbishment I think, though he can’t afford to come. They’ve redone the rooms inside, or made under, as you say, very monastic, much more basic than they were before and so naturally more expensive, but outside all the details are the same.
I looked at Luke, who looked at Mira with rapt attention.
I worked in a hotel once, she added. A horrible one in Belgrade, when I first moved there. I worked nights. On reception. Not for long. They fired me after I placed a wake-up call to the wrong room. I remember the man answering in a panic and apologising for having been asleep. Then of course he came to and was very angry with me. I’ve never been good at them, she laughed, wake-up calls.
The waiter returned. Mira asked if we would like her to order for the table and we agreed. It was exhilarating to see Luke’s usual dominance checked as she pointed out antipasti and several mains. My headache was subsiding.
I remembered, she whispered with a confiding smile, still speaking in our language. No tomatoes.
I was moved by this, but also embarrassed that she could still recall the tinned pineapple incident. Whenever my aunt told me to think of children still in basements dreaming of tomatoes or cultivating them on balconies, keeping me at the table until every last one had been eaten, I would think of Mira. Having logged so many hours slumped in my chair after my cousins had left the room – trying to think of good places to dispose of them – tomatoes, then all fruit, became the manifestation of my survivor guilt. To avoid tomatoes, which felt childish, I now claimed to be allergic to nightshades, but then I had to be devious about potatoes, which I love.
The waiter returned with the wine and another came with fancy varieties of bread. Mira poured the oil into a dish then added an apostrophe of balsamic to it. It floated for a second, held in tension, before settling as a black dot on the bottom. Everything she did was mesmerising, and I saw Luke grow less reserved. It suddenly reminded me of spending time with her and my brother.
He asked her about Belgrade.
The book fair’s where I’ve just been.
She smoothed her smart black clothes.
It’s always stressful there, but this year . . . she exhaled . . . more so. I wanted to get out of the city and come here, see my parents, you know.
There was a long silence. Mira pressed her bread into the oil and the black dot exploded.
This year’s fair had been decisive for her professionally, she explained, as well as significant in her personal life. One of her authors, a journalist she represented, had written a fictionalised account of the war drawing heavily on her own experiences. Many of the pages dealt with a man whom foreigners knew as the butcher of Bosnia. She’d give us a copy if we wanted, there were dozens in the boot of her car.
I felt Luke’s arousal at the mention. A year ago we’d listened to a series called ‘Most Wanted’ which had featured a few crimes from my part of the world.
Mira fell silent again, chewing her bread with concentration.
Is he the, er . . . the one they found guilty in The Hague?
She continued to chew, her gaze steady on Luke.
Was that last year? He posed as the therapist? Or he was one, first, but then . . . The new age healer, I mean, or – no . . .
He trailed off, self-conscious again.
You’ve read the Edna O’Brien?
He’s seen The Hunting Party.
She looked blank.
With Richard Gere and Jesse Eisenberg.
Oh. Well, you’re thinking of the other butcher. Incidentally that one, the one you mention, yes, he posed as a healer, with his own well-being website and everything as you say, but he was also a poet. She inhaled deeply, reaching for another cigarette.
Karadick! Luke shouted, startling us, his spit landing on my cheek. That’s it. I remember reading about him in the Guardian.
I shut my eyes
. The evening before our flight, I’d found him watching a YouTube film set to Max Richter’s ‘Sarajevo’, the same, trance-like expression he got listening to ‘My Favourite Murder’.
Karadžic´, I corrected.
He came from here, Mira said gently. From Montenegro. He only moved to Sarajevo in his teens. There was a lot of snobbery about him in the city. They dismissed him as a nutty peasant from the hills.
She gave a dry laugh.
A sheep-fucker, my father used to call him. People said he turned up in the city wearing pointy peasant shoes.
I had heard this from my parents too. Kulturni versus nekulturni. It was one of the few elements of their early conversations about the war I’d understood and absorbed – that this man did not come from a city, and that made him somehow less threatening to us.
Mira looked over my head toward two hotel staff members and back to us before lowering her voice.
It was Belgrade writers, literary, academic types, who came up with the ideological underpinning for what he did, Mira continued. And even when he was one of the most wanted men in the world, he published his novel and it sold at the fair in Belgrade! That was before my time, of course. I came the year they finally caught him. By then he was writing under his guru name, with a monthly column for Healthy Living. Promoting vitamins, crystals, and cleansing auras rather than whole villages.
But anyway. The other one, the other butcher – she looked around again – they haven’t sentenced yet. They expect to next month I think. That’s another reason it’s all so fraught right now . . . the conclusion of the Mladic´ trial, the publication of the book . . .
She sighed and folded the fabric of her napkin into a rectangle, then a square.
I’ve had threats at the office. My home address has been put online. It’s not out yet, the book, but I’ve had things sent to me. Awful, disgusting things. My mother had her email broken into, which she doesn’t ever use so there wasn’t much to find in there, but they sent out a load of messages pretending to be her, denouncing me. For a moment . . .
She broke off, raising her eyes to the swaying canopy overhead as the wind picked up, brushing her hair away from her eyes.
Well, I thought the email from you was something to do with it. That morning my assistant rang to say we’d had another phone call calling me a traitor.
Luke was shaking his head, and I reached out and placed my hand very delicately on hers.
But what are you being targeted for? he asked.
Oh, she exclaimed, brightening, for doing my job!
She held up her wine and tapped the glass.
For representing a very talented, very brave young woman.
She tapped again.
For defending her against the trolls who still believe it’s an international conspiracy!
Then blinking hard, as if to correct her vision, she put the glass down and pressed her fingers into the table, nodding slowly to herself.
On the tram, when I got your email, I got this creeping feeling. I had this very real sensation, this hallucination almost, just as the phone buzzed in my hand, that a bullet or shrapnel or whatever had come whizzing into the back of me. I even put my hand there, on my neck. It was like I could feel something hot, like I’d been bitten.
She shuddered and took up her wine again, extracted another cigarette from a new pack.
I’m sorry, I said.
Don’t be, she looked at me, switching out of English, it’s so good to see you.
Both of you, she switched back again, rending the intimacy between us. Here. Nothing could be bad. It’s only . . . a shame, that’s all. To still be stuck talking about this. Even some of the publishing people I know say we should move on, stop making art about it, they say we’re in paralysis, which is true, politically, economically, everything. That the worst books coming out of the Balkans are the ones still going on about war. They’re as bad as the old stories, the folklore, which makes war seem inevitable. But it seems impossible not to talk about it when these people, these revisionists, still exist, even if we’d prefer to forget it.
The food arrived. Conversation turned to her non-work life in Belgrade. She had a nice life there, she said, a new apartment, nice new friends. I wanted to ask whether she still saw the old ones – the ones from our building, all adults now – and did they still call one another comrade?
She told us that until recently she’d shared a flat with a not-so-nice boyfriend, but thankfully he was not around anymore.
My stuff’s only just come out of storage again. I wore this uniform every day at the fair, pretty much, because right now everything is everywhere – except for what I need, which is nowhere.
She laughed.
I just want to throw it all out and start again, really. It’s not until you clear out rooms you’ve lived in for a number of years that you start thinking about – or begin to come to terms with – how you’ve been living, you know? In what filth and confusion, in my case. How did I function with all this stuff everywhere? And beyond that, you think about the choices you made – when? How did it all get here? Greed? Distraction? Did I carry it back bit by bit or did others bring things for me? Either way I want to be rid of it. Even my books mostly. I’m done with them. I need a change.
She flicked her hand as if knocking something off a shelf and into oblivion.
The world just becomes this mystifying accumulation when you start seeing things that way. Of people and street names and, like, all these buildings and political parties and front doors and plastic cones, all these posters that are ripped down and then pasted over. Putin, by the way, stares at me from every billboard in Belgrade right now. There’s one eye level with my kitchen. Everything razed and then repaved, so that after a while you don’t even recognise where you are anymore. But someone must know! Who is putting all these things everywhere in the first place and where, in the end, does it go?
Mira turned and signalled to the waiter. Luke widened his eyes at me and made a gesture against his nose, which seemed to mean is she on coke? I ignored him and returned my gaze to Mira, fixing it there, willing her to go on.
The other day I was sitting on my old sofa in the new apartment when I felt something sharp, sticking up through my tights. Guess what! It was Andrej’s – my ex – his toenail poking right into my thigh. This thick, calcium . . . what’s the word?
She made a motion like the Grim Reaper.
Scythe, Luke supplied.
That’s it. I thought about putting it in a little clear bag, you know? Like with evidence from a crime, and sending it back to him with all the other things I keep finding that aren’t mine. Whenever I change my sheets, I find little curls of his fucking hair. Woven into the duvet I mean. From his body. Not even his head. They’ve got themselves into the static. I thought to myself: for fuck’s sake, get out! And I set about unpicking them until I started to get a pain in my neck from crouching over like some old spinster. I always say I’ll stop and finish another time, but the task is never finished. I should keep them all and make some kind of quilt. Did you see the tapestry in Kotor? A medieval woman made it with her hair for her lover who was at sea.
She looked up at the trees for a while.
I think I’d like to be at sea maybe.
The waiter arrived with more wine and poured two large glasses for me and Mira. Luke put a hand over his.
It sounds like you’re better off without him, I said.
Mira rolled her eyes. That’s why I hate breaking up. It reduces everything to this single, frozen moment when it ended, and everyone picks sides depending on the version of history they heard first and who told them.
A young couple emerged from one corner of the piazza, holding on to each other in a way that suggested they were on honeymoon. Mira watched them and took out another cigarette, then offered the pack to each of us. Luke declined. I declined, then accepted, letting her put it to her mouth and light it first.
How come you broke up? I asked as I took my
first drag, feeling an immediate rush.
Luke looked around then abruptly left the table. I assumed to find a bathroom, but there was something about his gait that made me watch his back as it retreated.
I couldn’t sleep, Mira finally answered. I had this techno track going around in my head all night. It was driving me mad. I don’t even know who it’s by or what it’s called, so I can’t listen to it and scratch the itch, so to speak. There’s no lyrics, so how could I find it? It’s literally stuck in my head. And then, when I couldn’t bear the broken record anymore, I’d switch to rearranging the furniture in the flat, mentally, imagining Andrej had moved out and I could put things wherever I liked with all the new space he’d left. Then when I couldn’t rearrange the mental furniture anymore, I’d switch to the techno again. It fried my brain.
I haven’t had that, she hesitated, since . . .
And I knew before she said it that she meant since Drago died.
She blew smoke up into the air and I felt the wine tip a scale in my head, the smoke clouding, something dilating.
After he’d died I’d had dreams in which he hadn’t, in which I couldn’t understand where I’d got that macabre idea, had worried there must be something wrong with me. That’s when I started recording my dreams – as a rite like confession.
I hate giving up, Mira continued, so it took ages, and after I ended it I kept going back. Then that cycle . . . I just went back and forth in these figures of eight when I lay in bed at night with him snoring, weighing things up again, subtracting, starting over as if I’d missed a decimal somewhere. But each train of thought came right back to where I started. I tried massage, yoga, acupuncture. All to get rid of this compulsive self-narration I can’t help. The dissociation – do you get that? And I did lie there and try to think about where my pelvis was poised in space – but in the end I decided the only solution was to explode it, otherwise I was going to spend my life that way, missing my exit, my opportunity to escape. So, here we are. Thirty-six. Single. Great.
Luke had been gone a long time. I remembered the weekend we’d memorised each other’s numbers in case of emergency. But I couldn’t remember the number now, only the fear.
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