Juliana knew nothing about such things. She looked after running the household and was responsible for the laundry; what she did remember was that there was always laughter when Nicola was down in the kitchen, sitting down at the piano with a cigarette between his lips to play the latest popular songs and then grabbing big Drinka by her ample hips and dancing around with her.
All that had been a long time ago. Absent-mindedly, Juliana straightened the tablecloth and looked at the clock. Flowers on the table would be nice. But the crystal vase was too heavy for her to get down from the cupboard now. Should she offer him dry biscuits? Along with his coffee, Nicola used to love having quince cheese with walnuts, sprinkled with caster sugar. But the Albanian who picked the fruit in the autumn had long gone, as had Drinka, who had made them into quince cheese by boiling them with cloves. There was no order anymore, everything was topsy-turvy. When had Nicola left – before or after the war? Did he know about the bomb damage and the great fire? Did he know that upstairs only the salon had survived? She hadn’t set foot in the room for years. The stairs were too hard to negotiate, and it was too sad to see the rain leaking in through the ceiling and the pretty rose-patterned wallpaper gradually disappearing beneath ugly brown water stains. At least here in the kitchen pretty much everything had remained the same – only the pots and pans were no longer gleaming, and the black-andwhite chequered floor tiles had faded with the years.
She opened the large cupboard. The midnight-blue dress hung at the very back between little sachets filled with lavender. The colour suited her. She could have led a different life. With the dowry Uncle Lazarus had promised her, she could have had her pick of suitors. A master craftsman, or even a teacher. But her responsibility lay here, in this house. She had served her cousins, had always been there for them, and that had been the right decision. She had kept the legacy, the little that was left, kept it safe and preserved it.
She tied the belt, twisting the bow on it around to her hips, stepped towards the chest and pulled open the big drawer. She had collected her hair in a casket to make stuffing for a bun, only to be used on special occasions. And this was one of those special occasions, maybe the final one of her life.
Carefully securing the bun in place with pins, she turned her head and looked at her wrinkled face in the mirror. Juliana Spajić, the poor cousin from Kopaonik. The circle was complete, and everything regained its order and meaning. The grandfather clock rattled, about to strike. It was time. Juliana got up. A feeling of great solemnity filled her heart. When she passed Sophia’s chair, she stroked it tenderly and then turned off the light in the larder.
She opened the little door in the gate, stepped over the threshold out into the street and blinked, blinded by the sun. The man who was waiting there had a silver bicycle and one hand stuck loutishly in his trouser pocket. She had never seen this stranger before.
‘Good day,’ she said.
‘Little Juliana?’ the man asked, and made a clicking sound with his tongue. ‘Didn’t the two of us speak on the phone?’
She searched his face for something familiar. His chin was strong, but the mouth and the lips – no, this wasn’t her Nicola. She felt dizzy. So it was exactly as Sophia had always said: all just wishful thinking. She was just barmy.
He stepped a bit closer. She wanted to pull back, when she looked into his eyes, into that grey. He firmly took hold of her shoulders. She couldn’t understand what he said.
‘Nicola?’ she stammered. ‘Is it you?’
19
Milena ran through the list in her mind: she had packed the oranges and apples, along with the goat’s cheese Uncle Miodrag had requested. She had added white bread, cucumber, boiled chicken with tarragon and lovage, and – to aid his digestion – some prunes in Madeira. Not forgetting the customary jug of milk, this time laced with banana rather than cinnamon. Vera insisted on a daily supply of calcium, essential for strong bones, and paid not the slightest heed to Uncle Miodrag’s complaint that the stuff was coming out of his ears now.
The main cause of concern at the moment were the bruises on his coccyx and buttocks from constantly lying in the same position. And if the wounds were to open up…. Nobody was such a doom-monger as Vera; she was forever blowing the whole business up into an utter catastrophe, which could only be averted by a detailed plan of campaign. And implementing it was Milena’s task, as if she didn’t have enough on her plate. She had already quarrelled with Vera over this.
On the other hand, her mother was right: you couldn’t be careful enough, and a stint in hospital for a man of Miodrag’s age was no trifling matter.
Burdened with such thoughts and with bulging bags, Milena leant against the security glass and entered the ward backwards.
The door to the sisters’ station was not fully shut. Milena heard sobbing, and Sister Dunja arguing in her matter-offact voice, ‘I have no way of speeding things up. I’m sorry.’
‘But he’s been waiting for four weeks now.’ There was a quiet sniffle. ‘We’re up against it. He has to go back to work, or…’
Milena hesitated, then knocked and stuck her head through the gap between frame and the door.
Sister Dunja was standing in front of a large metal filing cabinet and letting her fingers walk through the alphabetical register of patients. ‘Of course, what we could do is find your husband a place in another hospital.’ She dropped a slim file into place in the cabinet, pushed the drawer shut with her hips and looked up at Milena questioningly.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Milena said under her breath. ‘It’s the sticking plasters. My mother spoke to you about them yesterday.’ She handed over a box of ten: all individually wrapped, coated with aluminium foil, breathable and made in Germany. ‘By all means, use them on other patients as well if you need to. We’ve got fresh supplies coming next week.’
‘Wonderful.’ Sister Dunja put the box aside, picked up a list and breathed on her biro. As usual, the nervous blinking of the small lamps on the wall board and the dull buzzing were no cause for alarm.
Forlorn, the other woman stood in the middle of the room sniffling and plucking at the sleeve of her jacket, a man’s garment that was much too large for her. Milena handed her a tissue.
‘Thank you.’ The woman smiled shyly.
‘Is there anything else?’ Sister Dunja looked up. ‘Your uncle, Ms Lukin, is keen to see you, I believe.’
He was in his bed by the window, looking out at the trees. Every leaf reminded him that, if he’d been at home in Prokuplje, he ought to be pruning his roses and fruit trees and that the sowing should be done by now. She had not seen him for three days and was shocked at how pale he looked. His mouth seemed smaller, his lips were dry and his eyes were sunk in deep hollows.
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ he groaned.
‘How are you? What have you had to eat?’ She put her bag down and kissed his scratchy cheek.
His only response was to wave his hand in the air. Milena took his pillow, plumped it up and put it back in place again to allow him to sit up in some comfort. Along with the newspaper, she laid down a colourful picture on his duvet. The felt-pen drawing, showing a motorcycle set against a garish background, was Adam’s creation, and was a gift for him.
‘Where is the little rascal?’ Uncle Miodrag groped for his spectacles. ‘Didn’t he want to come along?’
‘If it had been up to him, he would have dearly loved to have skipped the guitar lesson.’ She pulled up the bedside table and started unpacking.
This same scene had been played out for over two weeks now. Mr Popović, the patient in the bed across the aisle, was surrounded by visitors murmuring in a concerned hum and discreetly passing around a bottle hidden in a basket; meanwhile, Mr Stojadin, in the bed immediately next to him, put in earplugs and, wearing a deep frown, immersed himself in a social history of the nineteenth century. It was something of a minor sensation today that the quiet man with the thin moustache was standing in a bathrobe at the window rathe
r than occupying the bed right next to the door, with the sheets and blankets drawn up all the way to his nose. Milena couldn’t remember ever having seen him standing up.
‘I have some news,’ she said, unwrapping plates, cups and cutlery from the tea towel.
Uncle Miodrag put down Adam’s drawing and peered at her over his glasses. ‘You went to Talinovac, am I right?’
‘But not alone,’ she hurriedly interjected.
‘I knew it!’
‘With a friend, an Albanian, who knows his way around down there.’
‘You’re crazy.’ Uncle Miodrag shook his head, though a little colour had returned to his cheeks. ‘What did you do down there?’ He tried to sit up straight. ‘Were you able to find out anything? Did you manage to speak to the police?’
She poured him some milk. ‘First, drink something.’
He obeyed.
‘I wanted to meet Goran Valetić.’ She took his empty glass. ‘You know, I had a gut feeling. Somehow I knew he’d be in Talinovac.’ She started to make a cheese sandwich for Uncle Miodrag, and told him about the stopover at the Albanian wedding party, the youths at the entrance to Talinovac and finally the encounter with Goran, who’d been right in front of her eyes for a few fleeting seconds.
‘And then?’ Uncle Miodrag asked breathlessly.
‘And then he was gone.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘He fled. Legged it.’
‘Because he had something to do with the death of his parents?’
Milena thought for a brief moment and then shook her head. ‘I think he was frightened. Just think – two strangers in the house where his parents had been murdered.’
She spoke about the remote location of the house, almost in the middle of the forest, with broken windows, pipes ripped out of the walls and a huge hole in one wall – in other words, a ruin. And she told him about the icon she’d found at the spot where the encounter happened.
‘An icon?’
‘Yes, a small one. Goran must have put it there.’
‘And there was no candle?’
‘What?’
‘Well, a candle! For his parents, for Ljubinka…’ His eyes filled with tears and his chin trembled.
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ said Milena, clutching his hand. ‘We lit one.’
He nodded, pressed his lips together and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘So,’ he asked in a hoarse voice, ‘do you have a lead?’
She put a piece of chicken on his plate. ‘You know, Enver and I got into a bit of a tight spot later on, and I looked right into the face of these people.’
‘What tight spot?’
She handed him a fork. ‘That’s when it dawned on me, I think: it wasn’t really Miloš and Ljubinka Valetić who were murdered. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? It was a murder of two Serbs who had dared to try to settle in Talinovac. They had to die – they represented all those unwelcome returnees.’
Uncle Miodrag pushed back the plate. ‘Those bloody Albanians.’
‘Serbs have no business being in Kosovo anymore. I get it now.’
‘And you say you looked into the faces of the murderers?’
‘Well, let’s just say that the men who were gathering outside our inn could well have been the murderers. And if you ask me, they know who the actual perpetrator was – even if they’ll never divulge his name.’
‘What kind of world are we living in?’
‘Not a good one, Uncle Miodrag. This situation has been festering for years, even decades. Something’s really gone haywire where the business of Serbs and Albanians living together is concerned…’
‘I always thought it was just politics, that Albanians are really our friends. But do you know what I think now?’ Uncle Miodrag clenched his fists.
‘Don’t, Uncle Miodrag.’
‘For me, the Albanians are animals! Simply animals – nothing else!’
Shocked, Milena looked up. The man who had been leaning against the window the whole time suddenly appeared like a dark shadow beside Uncle Miodrag’s bed. Against the light, she could not make out his face as he pressed the words out between his lips with some effort.
‘We’re human beings,’ he uttered. ‘You understand? Human beings, like you… Serbs!’ Clearly agitated, he spat out the words, then started to falter and almost lost his balance. In a single bound, Milena was at the man’s side, but he raised his hand to fend her off.
Unassisted, he made his way to the foot of the bed, grabbed the rail and gasped, ‘If we are animals, then it’s you who have made us that way.’ He continued to make his way along the rail, hand over hand. Mr Stojadin briefly looked up from his book, then turned the page and immersed himself again in his reading.
‘Damn it,’ Uncle Miodrag whispered. ‘The guy’s an Albanian.’
Milena felt numb. Now she remembered where she had seen the man before. She was pretty sure he worked in the market, at the herb stall, if she was not mistaken. ‘Did he have a visitor today?’ she asked quietly. ‘A woman, in a man’s jacket that was too big for her?’
Uncle Miodrag nodded. ‘They kept whispering to one another, and I think she was crying.’ He lifted his head carefully and looked past Mr Stojadin at the Albanian’s bed. ‘His wife’s visit really knocked him sideways.’
‘And we’ve just finished him off.’ Milena piled cheese, chicken, bread and cucumber on the plate.
The man, who by now had reached his own bed, lay down on his mattress, which had shifted and was sticking out at the foot end.
‘I’m sorry,’ Milena said in a soft voice.
His lips under the thin moustache were only a line, and his eyes were closed, but his lids were fluttering.
‘I’ve come to apologise. I’m truly sorry.’ She carefully set down the plate on the bedside table. ‘You know, we were just talking among ourselves, pretty stupid stuff. We didn’t mean to offend you or your fellow countrymen.’
‘To be treated like human beings,’ he mumbled. ‘That’s all we want.’
‘Do you need anything?’ Milena enquired. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘A Serb? Wanting to do something – for an Albanian?’ He grimaced as if the absurdity of the thought was about to make him laugh. ‘This is getting better all the time.’
Milena didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, for starters you could give me a new hip, and put it in properly. Just a stupid bit of plastic – I’m not asking for anything else. And I swear on my mother’s life: I’ve never asked for anything in my life.’
‘You’ll get your hip replacement,’ Milena tried to reassure him.
‘Then I’ll be gone, and this place will hopefully never see me again.’
‘It’ll all work out.’
‘Give it a rest, will you? You don’t know what you’re talking about! We work ourselves to death, and when we need something from you we’re not even worth a kick in the arse. We are worth less than the damned dirt under the sole of your shoes.’
‘Nonsense!’ Milena was shocked. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Get lost. What are you waiting for? Stop staring at me. Leave me alone.’
As she was driving back from the hospital, she had to admit to herself that the man, for all his bitterness and self-pity, had a point. Albanians in Serbia were not denied hospital treatment but they had to wait and wait, suffer pain and resign themselves to always being at the back of the queue. Every emergency case, every private patient, every patient of Serbian nationality or heritage took priority. And, as Sister Dunja would probably have said, this situation was ‘not discrimination but totally normal’.
From one set of lights to the next, the traffic grew denser, the billboards more numerous and the shop fronts bigger. Businessmen were carrying briefcases in one hand and paper cups in the other. Women hurrying from their office doors to the tram station demonstrated how fast you could run in heels. Youths with uniformly low-slung trous
ers gathered outside the entrance to an Italian fast-food joint. Here and there you could catch sight of the odd shopping bag from a Swedish or Spanish fashion chain. Milena indicated her turn, let the pedestrians cross and mused on the fact that there was something crucial missing from this scene.
She turned into King Alexander Boulevard, passing a variety of large and small shops. The sweet shops that had been so much in evidence here once upon a time had all disappeared, and with them childhood dreams of jars full of bonbons, candied fruit, lollipops and liquorice sticks. So too had the Albanian bakeries, with their sweet tarts made from shortcrust or puff pastry and decorated with sticky blobs of jam and chopped walnuts. Where on earth, Milena wondered, would you now find a glass of boza, that thick, sweet and slightly sparkling fermented millet drink, which in the past had been on sale here at every corner? It hadn’t been that long ago that a boza seller could have been seen wandering the streets with a huge carboy in a basket on his back and glasses dangling from their handles on his belt. He was easy to spot from a distance, thanks to the fez he wore, made from dark red felt of a typical hue. On the crown, where the black silk tassel hung down, it was bleached by the sun; further down, around the forehead, the felt was darkened by sweat. For the most part, though, ordinary Albanians like the porters and the coal deliverymen had always worn bowler hats, and when the men gathered for a chat on a street corner in the evenings, some of them would wrap a colourful cloth around their headgear. In the autumn, one also used to come across the Albanian who sold chestnuts on Prince Michael Street, roasting them over charcoal and dispensing them in cones of rolled-up newspaper. And where were the Albanians who would just quietly spend their time sitting cross-legged on the ground smoking their long pipes? As she recalled these memories, these sentimental images, Milena could once again smell the sharp tobacco scent. She was driving at walking pace now. She let a tram pass, clicked her indicator and manoeuvred the car into a parking space.
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