by David Savill
‘Find her?’
Marko picks up Samir’s leg and sits down in the passenger seat. His chest is still tight. ‘Moved on.’
They drive off the estate, and straight onto the dual carriageway which carries the cars of the valley, north-east, past the first signs for Stovnik. Samir turns the radio on to some happy euro-pop. They glide over the railway station and its rusted lines, the grey basin of the Olympic Stadium, the apartment blocks of the Athletes’ Village steepling the hills behind it.
‘Apparently she works in tourism now.’ Marko holds his right fist.
Samir turns the music down. ‘Vesna? What? You think she was going out to Thailand?’
‘Maybe.’ Marko opens his bruised fingers. ‘Maybe she was in Thailand.’ The road crests a hill and Sarajevo drops behind them, the high valley and its hamlets, blinking in the morning.
He tests the splinter in his palm. Samir had told Marko not to visit Vesna. Not to dig around in case there was anything he didn’t want to find. It wasn’t just the missing women. There had been a woman in Serbia. A woman who accused Kemal of rape and asked for an investigation.
‘None of it stood up,’ Samir said. ‘The rape. No evidence at all. The police – they asked everyone, and everyone told them the same story. The women were at the camp. And then they were gone. I know it myself.’ Samir had been there. Nothing happened. Kemal wasn’t capable of those things.
But still, Marko had wanted Vesna to tell him it wasn’t true.
He listens to the gears changing as the car climbs the hills. Maybe he had just wanted to see Vesna.
‘You know, Marko,’ Samir says. ‘What I would do if I were you? I would attend this funeral. Have a drink with your old friends. Get back on the plane, back to your woman, back to your life in England. Really. Move on. You’re good at it.’
Aranyaphratet
The queue to drive through seems to move more slowly than the queue on foot. They park in a roped field, pay a boy in a Manchester United T-shirt fifteen baht for the spot and walk. In the morning heat, they wait before the border gate; one of those carved stone arches of miniature gopurams, replicating the temple at Angkor Wat. Inside a mobile hut which smells of antiseptic, the queue snakes until they reach a passport booth where a uniformed young woman with nail art and a smile waves them through. The Thai Visa Office on the Cambodian side of the border straddles a traffic roundabout bristling with parked mopeds. After three hours of waiting in a room where posters explain the equation between drug smuggling and Cambodian justice (Smuggle Drug + Cambodia = Death Penalty), a middle-aged woman with no nail art, and no smile, takes their paperwork, and tells them to come back the next day. Nothing William says or promises to the woman will make things happen today.
It is hotter back on the street than in the Visa Office, and William is blinded by the sun shining on the shoal of parked mopeds. The drive has finally caught up with him.
‘William?’
He might throw up. The traffic queuing to get into Thailand has abandoned all discipline. The road honks and shunts. Their car is in a field on the other side of the border. They are stuck.
‘I said what do you want to do? Find somewhere to rest up?’
William nods. The air smells of something he doesn’t want to breathe. A giant truck has stopped in the traffic on the roundabout, the engine idling. Meat waste. Packed and stacked in translucent green bags behind the slatted panels of the truck-bed. The broken boomerangs of rotting legs, and the squashed faces of oxen.
It was the day after the wave, in a marquee at the roadside, at the gates to one of the temples where the bodies were kept. The woman pushed a pen and a piece of paper over the trestle table and asked William to fill in Anya’s details. The sun was hot on his neck, the road at his back full of shunting traffic.
Name: Anya Teal.
Date of birth.
Here William faltered. He tried to work backwards. They did not go to the same school. They had met in the year after school. That was right. She had always been six months ahead of him. He thought of summer when he thought of her birthday, sometime early, perhaps June. Thirteen years together and he couldn’t remember her birthday. The form asked William what the missing subject was ‘last seen wearing’. But he couldn’t remember. It asked him if Anya had any ‘distinguishing physical characteristics’. He asked the woman what sort of thing was meant.
‘Maybe any tattoos? Any birthmarks? Hair colour?’
William made a note of the tattoo on Anya’s lower back. The hammer and sickle. They had been twenty-one. She had held his hand in the tattoo parlour.
‘She has slightly red hair,’ he told the woman. ‘Not naturally, but dyed slightly red. Would you say that was distinguishing?’
‘I would put it down.’
‘It was called burnt amber!’ William suddenly remembered.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The hair colour she used – burnt amber.’ It would bleed into the bath.
The woman’s smile was thin. ‘Did your girlfriend have a mobile with her, a telephone number?’
Why hadn’t William thought of it before?
The woman gave him a mobile phone. He punched the wrong number in at first. And a second time. On the third attempt he finally got the number right and Anya’s voice leapt out at him. ‘Hello! This is Anya Teal’s phone – I’m really sorry I can’t speak right now, but if you would like to leave a message, please leave your name after the tone!’
Anya’s voice is still speaking when William puts down the phone. He opens his eyes to the dark and reaches for the remote control which adjusts the blinds over the window of his apartment bedroom. But the remote is not there, and somehow the bedside table has been knocked farther away from the bed. He sits up. He must be ill. Everything feels too sensitive. The sheets too stiff. The carpet beneath his feet too hard. When he reaches under the bed for Anya’s laptop, the mattress is too thick, and then the board of the bed – he can’t get underneath it. It is sealed to the carpet. Someone is knocking on his bedroom door. The wall is not where it should be. The door handle isn’t the right shape.
‘Hey.’ It is Missy. She is standing in the hotel corridor.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, I’ve been trying to wake you for, like, hours.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Ten o’clock.’
William doesn’t know if she means morning or evening. There are no windows in the room. No windows in the corridor at Missy’s back. Just a terrible watercolour of the temples at Angkor.
‘You must have been pooped,’ she says. ‘I tried to get you on the phone and came knocking.’
‘Yes.’
The stains on her red vest could be food stains. There are dark shadows of make-up around her eyes.
‘Well,’ Missy tries, ‘I was hanging around to see if you wanted to go get something to eat?’
He tells her to wait, fumbles for the light switch in the bedroom, can’t find it on the walls, then knocks into the bedside table and a lamp which casts a dim glow over the mess of a bed. He is clutching a bed sheet around his waist. His clothes are spilled over the floor. He picks up the phone and dials the number again.
This number has been . . .
‘Look – I didn’t want to disturb you.’ Missy is still holding the door open. ‘But I’m so embarrassed about last night, you have no idea. Fuck – I am not the kind of person you need to rescue—’
‘When you lose a mobile phone,’ William starts. ‘Say you lost a mobile phone that had an answer message on it. If the phone was still operating somewhere, how long would it take for the message to be erased?’
Missy looks at him in a way that makes him realise what he is doing – half-dressed, clutching a phone in his hand.
‘Um – I think the battery would die,’ she says. ‘Or the phone would go out of service and there would be no message.’
William sits down on the bed.
‘So what I wanted to say,’ Miss
y continues. ‘You picked me up last night – and honestly, I was so drunk. I never would have called – I don’t even know how the fuck the idea got into my head but now – well, are you hungry?’
‘I’ll order room service.’
Missy salutes and clicks her heels together. ‘Alrighty then. Well, I’ll go get something myself.’
He needs Anya to say something. He needs to hear her voice. In Bangkok she would speak to him. But when was the last time he heard her voice?
William manoeuvres himself back onto the bed like a sick man. There are empty minibar bottles scattered over the mattress. When he has stared at the ceiling long enough for it to start drifting away from him, he extends a hand from the safety of the bed, picks up the phone and dials Anya’s number.
Tsunamis are usually formed along subduction zones, areas of the seabed where a lighter tectonic plate has been forced above a heavier plate. A tsunami is unlikely to form if the tectonic plates have split apart, or slide past each other.
October 1992
Stovnik
Marko tried on the uniform when Kemal was in the bath. The material seemed thin. No armour at all. The buttons were loose on their threads. It was a cheap trick. No magic in it. The battalion uniform was a shirt with a camouflage pattern, no more real than the Spiderman costume he wore as a child. The only thing real about the uniform was the smell. Cigarette smoke and earth, and the oily odour of guns.
Kemal appeared behind him in the bedroom mirror. ‘It suits you.’
He had wrapped a towel around his waist. There had been no electricity all week and they were showering with cold buckets of water.
Marko sat down on the bed and started to pull off the uniform trousers. The fatigues drowned him. He was not a soldier but a fifteen-year-old boy three years shy of the draft.
They changed into their tracksuits and as Marko was leaving, Kemal grabbed an empty tennis bag. He had something to show him.
The lift hadn’t worked for months, so Marko followed Kemal down the stairwell and out across the five-a-side pitch, through the first clean pinch of October’s cold.
Like all the shops on the estate, Željo’s windows had always been full: sets of hammers and chainsaws hanging from racks, toolkits presenting their gleaming drawers, the latest vacuum cleaners, the latest power drills. The bakery next door to the hardware store had always smelled of fresh bread; the launderette next door to the bakery always hummed. Marko had spent his childhood hanging outside these stores, and when he was really young, the things in Željo’s were something to covet – the sculpted metal shapes of the hardware inseparable in his childhood imagination from those of spaceships and weapons. But the bakery did not bake any more, and the launderette did not launder clothes. The hooks in the window display at Željo’s hung nothing, sheets flung over boxes gathering dust. Željo’s stock had sold months ago and couldn’t be replaced. What Željo did have left, no ordinary man could afford. These were siege prices. The aisles of the shop were dark and uninviting.
When Željo saw them enter he disappeared behind the bead curtains at the back of the store.
‘What do you think?’
The gun Željo gave Kemal wasn’t new. Marko could see that. It was a Second World War rifle, Partisan issue, like the one his grandfather used to have. But although the body was old, the barrel looked clean. Kemal handed it to him. The gun had been completely refitted and had a freshly oiled smell, everything wire-brushed.
Kemal carried the gun in the tennis bag. Marko followed him past the kids sitting on the wall outside a café that had been closed for weeks. They walked off the estate and up the old road, through people’s emptied hillside allotments, past the bootlegging sheds, steep along the backs of the tower blocks, behind the stone hats of the ancient shepherds’ huts, where the air smelled of manure.
Marko hadn’t been here for a while, perhaps not since the summer. He kicked a bag along the road until it exploded, spilling nappies and sanitary towels into the long grass at the side of the track. There were scorched rings in the fields where rubbish had been burned. People used to have small plots for chickens and other fowl up here, but the fences had fallen in and the huts were empty. This was where the kids of the estate played on long summer days. Games of soldiers around the sinkholes of the old salt mines. Now, every night, the older boys dragged themselves in their fatigues over the peaks of the hills. And some of them never came back.
Kemal sat down on the broken bricks of an old shaft and unzipped the tennis bag. There was no need to show Marko how to load or aim. The gun didn’t feel loose when Marko put the stock to his shoulder, the body didn’t rattle like his grandfather’s gun. It felt solid and cold and indestructible.
‘I know your dad has guns.’ Kemal picked up a piece of broken brick lying between his feet and stood up. ‘But you can work with this one.’
‘Work?’ Marko looked down the rifle’s sight and picked out a satellite dish on the roofs of their block. He swung around. A metallic crash followed by a boom. For a second he thought he might have pulled the trigger. But Kemal’s brick had bounced off the corrugated roof that had been used to patch up one of the ancient stone huts. A dun dog sprang out of the dark.
The dogs were refugees too. Refugees of families who could no longer afford to feed them and had been too soft-hearted to kill them. Some of the dogs even came from the villages around Stovnik, following the trails of human refugees and looking for people who could barely house themselves, let alone the family dog. One dog had attacked a girl playing in the alley at the back of a primary school. A whole pack had caused an accident on the ring road. Swerving to avoid the pack, the driver had ditched into the river’s concrete overflow channel.
Some people suggested the battalion or the police start culling the dogs, but as many protested against it.
‘We need two armies,’ Kemal told Marko. ‘One out there, and one back here. That’s your job; to make sure the place doesn’t go to shit.’
Marko missed with his first shot and the dun dog ran back into the shepherd’s hut, barking murder. The kick of the gun vibrated through his shoulder, down his arm, finishing with a tingle in his groin, as if he had just been kissed. He stepped around one of the sinkholes and through the damp autumn grass, gun raised, nervous as a kid sneaking out of his room at night. Stopping a metre from the black mouth of the stone hut, he felt the cold soaking through his trainers and into his toes, the smell of ignition on his hands. Something moved in the dark. He brought the barrel to sight. No barking now, just panting. The dog was a silent flash of colour when it leapt out. It came right at him, teeth bared.
Marko’s gun didn’t jam. Marko did.
The dog jagged sideways, passing him, and sprinting along the path between huts. Marko took a moment to level the gun again, the diminishing target of the dog’s rear much harder to find than its side. He took the shot. The dog tripped on its hind legs, picked itself up and tripped again. With the third shot, it stayed down.
‘It’s not dead,’ Kemal said. ‘You should put it out of its misery.’
The dog was on its side, front legs paddling without water. Marko stood over it and brought the barrel of the rifle as close to the animal’s head as he possibly could. The dog’s eyes were so clear and so round; the black pool of ink that spotted his mother’s white tablecloth on the morning of his first day at school.
Marko pulled the trigger but hadn’t thought it through. The stock kicked into his armpit and he stumbled backwards, off the path and into the grass, landing hard on his arse.
Kemal was clapping. When Marko got back on to his feet, he was glad to see the dog wasn’t moving. The bullet had opened a small red cave in the animal’s head. Blood, like red paint in the dun fur, black, as it made a river through the small stones of the path.
‘What do we do with it?’ Marko didn’t know if he was asking Kemal or himself. Up until now, the fact that there would be a body to be disposed of hadn’t crossed his mind. But now he knew. When
you kill something, it becomes your property. They stood over the dog, looking down on their creation as if they expected it to do something.
Kemal told him to check the hut first.
Marko smelled dog even before he reached the mouth of the hut. He levelled the rifle again, taking careful steps. But nothing leapt out. He stepped inside. Nothing beneath the low ceiling, except the dogs’ crap and some rubbish they must have been dragging in from the tips.
When he turned to leave he saw it. One more dog, cowering against the wall and moving strangely in small, rippling motions, until all of a sudden, it fell apart. Not one dog but a cluster of puppies. New enough not to be capable of finding their legs.
‘Anything?’ Kemal asked when Marko stepped back outside. The low light of the autumn sun formed a halo around him.
‘No,’ Marko said. ‘Nothing.’
Saturday 9 April 2005
Poipet, the Cambodian Border
Either William has escaped a hangover, or he is still drunk, he is not sure which. In the Visa Office, he can hear himself performing the role of a school manager. Nervous of silence, he fills it by telling Missy things she probably already knows: how they should have taken her teaching licence to the Department of Labour, and secured a receipt while the application for a new visa was being processed; how the visa was always going to take more than seven days.
The point of the receipt was to stop Missy from being arrested.
‘But the application isn’t in? We didn’t have a receipt?’
‘No, so I showed the police the contract, and persuaded them we would leave the country to get a visa. The school – we – had the responsibility of starting the visa application process. So this was our fault. My fault, really.’
They are sitting opposite each other on plastic bucket seats in a narrow, windowless room. Missy lifts up her foot and rests it on her knee. He wants to tell her there is a flattened cigarette on the sole of her trainer.
‘I’m not a big drinker,’ she says. ‘I was out for the New Year. And let me tell you, you only realise how drunk you are when a Bangkok policeman starts asking for your ID.’
