She asked the attendant to fill the tank and gave him a tip, which prompted him to throw in a free windscreen wash. The toilets in the kiosk were surprisingly clean, and the cappuccino she ordered at the cafeteria bar wasn’t half bad. She bought cigarettes and a map, and returned to her car.
It was warm, there was a gentle breeze and the sky with its puffy clouds looked even bluer through the freshly cleaned windscreen. Milena enjoyed the changing landscape en route: rolling hills turned into real mountains, and small brooks became torrential rivers. High up on the cliffs, she spotted an old castle that had been built by the Ottomans. For a moment, she lost herself in the scene and forgot that she was on her way to the spot where just a month ago two people had been murdered. She was driving through an area called Toplica, which was steeped in history and which would presently give way to Kosovo and then later, approaching Albania, to a region known as Metohija. Around 1100, the first Serbian national state had emerged here, finally collapsing in 1389 after its defeat by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo. It was not until 1912 that the Serbs were able to break the hold of the Ottomans and win back their lost territory in the First Balkan War. A hundred years had passed since then, and the Serbian state had thrown it all away with its arrogant and narcissistic political adventurism. For the first time in history, Kosovo was an independent state recognised by the US, Germany and many others. Albanians were the dominant majority there, while Serbs were an unloved and in some places even deeply reviled minority.
The border check on the Serbian side of the frontier was cursory; the official checked Milena’s ID with studied indifference and handed back her document without bothering to look her in the face. The traffic jam only began when she approached the Kosovan border post.
For ages it was stop-and-go, as Milena inched forward between lorries from Bulgaria, Romania and Austria. The cars that jumped the queue in front of her all had Serbian number plates and were almost all heavily laden, weighed down with overfull boots and roof racks piled high with electrical goods, building materials, boxes and suitcases. But at the checkpoint it was Milena who was pulled aside by the guards in their black-and-red uniforms. She opened her window and handed over her papers.
‘Please step outside your vehicle,’ she was told.
She complied. While one guard leafed through her passport, two others walked round her car, inspecting it. One of them, who had a moustache, ordered her to open the boot.
Between the spare tyre and a bag of cat litter stood the bucket and the old mop that Vera and she had used last Saturday, like they did every year after the winter, to spring-clean the headstone on her father’s grave and get everything shipshape again. Among the rags were two bottles of water – a gift from Siniša – for the windscreen. The moustache looked at everything with a perplexed expression and asked her, ‘Are you carrying any weapons?’
Milena shook her head, relieved that she didn’t still have the papers relating to her postdoctoral thesis in the car that she’d taken to be scanned the other day. The title of her thesis was ‘The Criminal Prosecution of War Crimes in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia from 1990 to 1999’.
She was allowed to close the boot again, and the moustache asked, ‘What is your final destination?’
Milena thought for a split second before replying, ‘Talinovac.’
‘And the purpose of your visit there?’
‘I’m going to see… a friend.’
Her hesitation seemed to irritate the officer. ‘Name?’ he enquired.
‘Milka Bašić.’ Milena brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. She couldn’t think of anything better off the top of her head.
His colleague closed her passport and said, ‘You don’t have valid car insurance.’
‘What?’
‘If you want to enter Kosovo you have to get insurance.’ He nodded in the direction of a hut with barred windows where people were standing in line.
Twenty minutes later, Milena affixed an insurance disc to the inside of the windscreen, ensuring it was clearly visible for inspection. The whole rigmarole had cost her twenty euros, a completely spurious money-spinning scam. On the other hand, where was a small state like Kosovo, dirt poor, with an estimated two million inhabitants and with no industry or infrastructure to speak of, supposed to get hold of foreign currency otherwise? She fastened her seat belt and drove across the frontier. A sign with the coat of arms of Kosovo welcomed her: gold stars on a blue background.
Of course, the landscape did not change immediately after the border post, nor did the sky darken from one minute to the next. Most likely it was the street dust, the smoke from burning rubbish bins and the stench of the fires that contrived to put Milena in a melancholic mood – plus the view of desolate houses with boarded-up windows, obviously uninhabited and in some cases ransacked, half-tumbledown or reduced to a heap of rubble. Signs with Cyrillic letters indicated that this area close to the border had once been inhabited by Serbs, but the bakery, the ironmonger and the other shops had been forced to close. An old woman was leading a cow along the road by a rope around its neck. Stray dogs were fighting and frolicking by the roadside, oblivious to the traffic snaking in a long line along the motorway towards Priština. The checkpoint at the first junction consisted of a corrugated-iron shack, sandbags and an armoured vehicle manned by bored soldiers of the international security force. With their machine guns slung over their shoulders, they were as much part of the landscape as the derelict vehicles on the verge, which doubled up as adventure playgrounds for children.
The further inland that Milena drove, the denser the settlements became, though almost every building was unfinished, the ground floors just skeletons of iron girders, roofs only provisionally covered and external walls without plaster. These makeshift houses, so-called ‘stone piggybanks’, were typical of a young state but were a major problem – not only because they were blots on the landscape and caused towns to expand beyond their natural limits, but also because these shabby conurbations all began to merge into one another. Most of the dwellings had been put up without permission or any regard to the infrastructure that was required to support them. But the greatest damage was actually the loss to the economy of private capital, sent home by relatives working abroad and turned into these ramshackle constructions of bricks and mortar instead of productive investments. Milena looked at her rear-view mirror.
Perhaps Tanja and her scaremongering had spooked her, but she couldn’t help noticing that a little mustard-yellow Fiat 500 had been behind her for quite some time. Occasionally it disappeared from view, and she thought that it might have just been her imagination, but then it promptly reappeared behind her. Normally she would just hit the accelerator and pull away, but the dreadful state of the road here prevented her from doing that. She decided to put her hunch to the test. She turned off the road to Priština and – although it meant a detour – headed instead in the direction of Ferizaj, formerly known as Uroševac. Just as she feared, the mustard-yellow car followed, eagerly flashing its lights. Suddenly the road was empty ahead, so she accelerated, and the old Fiat fell back.
She thought what she did next would be a smart move. Beyond the next bend in the road, she rolled off onto a tarmaced area and drove past some fruit-and-vegetable stands before parking right at the back of the plot, where her car was shielded by a line of trees. A little further on, there were some wooden shacks and a pergola selling shashlik kebabs and beer. Milena disengaged the clutch and in her rear-view mirror noticed the Fiat parking behind a cabbage stall. She cursed silently. Her manoeuvre had achieved nothing.
She left the car, locked the doors and dashed past the folding tables and chairs, following signs for the toilets. From there, she observed quite a large man getting out of the little Fiat, tucking his white shirt into his dark trousers and purposefully going over to her car. He brazenly peered through the window and calmly inspected the vehicle’s interior. Then, scanning his surroundings the whole time, he made a call on h
is mobile phone.
Milena hid behind the wooden door. She’d never seen this man before in her life. Was he a policeman in civilian clothes? Someone from the Serbian secret service? But how could anybody have latched on to her so quickly after she crossed the border? It was insane. And in a car like that!
‘Just walk over and speak to the guy calmly and collectedly,’ Milena told herself. She washed her hands. She didn’t want to drive herself crazy, but on the other hand nor did she want any trouble with people who were out to harass her. All she wanted was to get to Talinovac and then return home without more ado.
The man disappeared under a pergola, and in that moment his car was blocked by a delivery van. It was a stroke of fate, and she spotted her chance.
To be on the safe side, she took a different route back to her car, clambering over some drinks crates and squeezing past wheelie bins. Children were beating bushes with sticks and chasing cats with plastic machine guns. She got in, started the engine and carefully let the car roll back a bit, before putting it in gear and accelerating hard.
Suddenly, the white shirt was right in front of her bonnet. She only just managed to brake in time. The shock made her exhale audibly. Flinging the door open, she screamed, ‘Have you lost your mind? I almost ran you down! Who the hell are you, and what do you want?’
‘Thank goodness I found you.’ The man had dark eyes and bushy black eyebrows. He raised both hands in a gesture of submission. ‘My name’s Enver Kurti. I’m here to look after you.’
13
Maybe it was down to the music he was listening to on his headphones: Goran felt like he was in a film, and the scene was brightly lit. He was on his way to the ‘Serbs’ Houses’, as the Albanians in the village had called them derisively before spitting at his feet. Goran had said ‘thank you’, and left it at that. Those people were like animals, they could smell who was one of them and who wasn’t, and he held them all collectively responsible for his parents’ death.
The Serbs’ Houses, all five of them, were dilapidated and seemed to huddle together timidly. There was no one in sight. When a curtain twitched, he knocked on the door until someone opened. The man pointed a gun at him and yelled, ‘What do you want?’
He had almost forgotten: he wasn’t in a film, he was in a country of mad people.
‘I’m Goran Valetić,’ he said, ‘the son of Miloš and Ljubinka Valetić, and that’s God’s honest truth.’
The guy lowered the gun. His wife wiped her hands clean on her apron and asked him in. The man was eyeing him with suspicion, the gun always to hand, while his wife apologised over and over again until Goran said, ‘Enough!’ In case that had sounded too sharp and curt, he quickly added, ‘Thank you.’
He watched as she spread a tablecloth over the plastic one, got out the good china from the cupboard and fetched fruit in sugar syrup to go with coffee. Vuk, the man with the gun, poured his homemade schnapps into little glasses, glad to be given the opportunity, and explained that his past experiences had made certain precautions and codes of behaviour necessary. He launched into a rambling tale, while his wife, Vesna, stared blankly out of the window and muttered an injunction not to start banging on with his old stories again. This whispering and fear – it was like mildew descending on everything, and Goran knew it all too well. He stirred his coffee. It was hard for him to listen. He hated all this claptrap, that the Serbs here had to stick together, that his parents had been determined to start their new life here, never mind the fact that they – two such cultivated, noble people – were surrounded by scumbags.
Goran smiled and nodded sadly, the way one did when speaking about the deceased, especially about one’s parents who had just died. But the more they talked, the more he felt the silent reproach that he, their son, hadn’t taken care of his parents, that he hadn’t been there when the threats increased and the fear grew and grew. Yes, he was a coward, and he didn’t dare ask this couple whether his parents had told them that their return had been his idea, that it was he who had sold them the notion of these foreign parts as a homeland and had talked them into their new life, and had not let them rest until they finally signed the forms and packed their suitcases. Maybe his parents had cottoned on to the fact that he’d received a commission from the agent for persuading them, a huge sum in his eyes. He suspected that his parents had tacitly accepted that he was selling them, that they had been willing to make the sacrifice for his sake and that they had known that if something were to happen to them when they got to their new home it would be on his conscience. And that was exactly what had happened. He would be punished until the end of his days for what he had done to them.
Even so, he refused to believe that his father, that old curmudgeon and surly bastard, had resigned himself to his fate here, in foreign parts, like these two had done, Vuk and Vesna, sitting there across the table from him with their wrinkled, resigned faces, in silent submissiveness, the very epitome of Serbian suffering. He wanted to throw up.
Silence had descended around the table. Goran blinked. In front of him lay the little suitcase, that pigskin thing that had belonged to his father. Vesna nodded in his direction.
He felt embarrassed opening the suitcase in front of Vuk and Vesna. But he got the impression he was expected to do so. He was in a film and had a role to play; he was the son, and he did what was expected of him. He pushed the little brass knobs and opened the lid.
There were documents inside, papers in those bloody clear plastic folders his father had loved so much. And beneath them, something else. Goran pulled the tissue paper aside. The painting which became visible, that countenance, was deeply familiar to him. Once upon a time, the White Angel of Mileševa had hung on the wall of their living room, right above the sideboard. He had no idea that his mother had taken the icon with her when they fled and kept it safe through all the hard times.
He looked at the angel, seemingly unscathed by the ravages of the past twenty years, but the face meant nothing to him. Instead, it brought other images to mind, totally absurd ones: the soup terrine with the crack, which always appeared on the table on Sundays. The shoehorn made from ivory, which no one was allowed to use because it had belonged to their great-great-grandfather. The pipe stand on his father’s table, the wooden clogs belonging to his sister, for which he had envied her as a little boy. Where were all those things now? Destroyed, burned or being used by other people, Albanians, who had no clue where they had come from and whom nobody had told that the terrine was only to be used on Sundays and the shoehorn not at all?
Under their breath, Vuk and Vesna told the story of how they had rescued the suitcase from the Albanians and removed it from the house, how they had risked life and limb to do so and how brave they had been. But they had done it all the same, for him and his sister – in memory of their parents, God bless them. Vesna made the sign of the cross and Vuk copied her every move.
Goran turned the little oil painting in his hands. He dismissed the uncharitable thought that these two might have rummaged through his father’s suitcase and removed his coin collection, plus any cash or jewellery. He closed the suitcase. So what if they had? If the boot had been on the other foot he would have done the same.
He took the route they had suggested to him, along the path and up the hill. When he reached the wood, he was supposed to bear left and then he’d see it. In the land of crazy people, he himself was now crazy too: a deranged man with an old suitcase containing the icon of the Angel of Mileševa, like a pilgrim trudging towards a shrine. He had to go to the house where his parents had been murdered, see the place and then decide what to do. And no matter what the decision, if he needed money to execute the plan he could sell the icon. That kind of stuff was easy to flog. Otherwise, he would have just chucked the Angel away or discarded it at the base of the next suitable tree.
It was curious how isolated the house was. One thing was certain: his father would not have appreciated such a location, he’d have lodged an official complaint, su
bmitted a detailed drawing and a map. He’d have gathered evidence to back up his claim to the authorities and support his appeal. Goran’s mother would probably have tried appeasing his father, tried to see the positives in the situation: the beautiful view, the fertile land, the pretty garden. She always found something. Goran sighed.
Who was he to consider himself superior to his parents, even after their death, even after all he had done? His father was a smart-arse, a know-it-all, but he – Goran – what was he? He was a conformist, he’d sucked up to authority, failed as an athlete, worked as a bouncer, and become an eternal refugee who didn’t even speak proper English, lived beyond his means, was indebted to his sister and had stolen from his girlfriend – his ex-girlfriend, mind you, who had sent him packing when she’d twigged that he had been dreaming of a middle-class life with a house, a car and a garage, just like the famous Mr Minister-of-State, who retired most evenings in his woolly cardigan to his shed behind the garage to watch porn there.
Exhausted, Goran halted and wiped his brow with his sleeve. He looked up at the sky and along the path to the forest – at least another three kilometres to go. And although he hadn’t smoked anything strange, he suddenly had a vision: his mother, turning around and looking at him, both scoldingly and lovingly, as if he were a child, and asking him, ‘What are you doing? Moaning, sinking ever deeper into self-pity, I can’t stand it! And what are you doing with our Angel? Take the icon to where it belongs and then that’ll be that. And then go and get on with your life.’
He saw her petite figure, her girlish gait, a little uncertain, even wavering. He walked faster, hurried up the hill and ran through the forest.
The house shimmered through the trees in the bright sunlight; its location was idyllic, a dream, with the little clearing and the old trees, with bits of striped plastic fluttering in their branches – the remnants of the police cordon, ghostly reminders of a incident involving the authorities, of something dreadful that had happened there. Carefully, he climbed the steps and gently pushed the door. It had been left ajar.
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