by David Savill
It had not occurred to him there would be any bureaucracy he couldn’t circumvent with a British passport. ‘I had the luggage shipped using my passport.’
The man opens the claret book, confused, flicking through its empty pages, until he discovers the picture where it isn’t in any other passport – at the back.
‘I urgently need my luggage,’ William says. ‘You can cross-check my details, can’t you?’
The man looks at a computer screen. ‘I can see the record,’ he says. ‘This arrived three month now?’
‘Three months ago.’ William still can’t help himself.
‘Sometimes we destroy,’ the man says. ‘But I can look for you.’
In Kao Lak, the woman at the reception desk of the resort listened to William trying to explain his girlfriend was missing. The woman had a number for a police officer who was assigned to the resorts to report crimes and emergencies. He could be with them in less than an hour. William told the receptionist to make the call, and headed back down to the beach. He wouldn’t return to the reception until after the wave.
Perhaps the policeman had come to the resort, drawn down to the beaches on Boxing Day morning, called out on a holiday, dragged away from his family because another Farang had drunk too much and stayed out all night. William thinks about it every day. He thinks about whether the receptionist herself had been at her desk, or down by the beaches. He thinks about the family he passed on the gangway as he headed for the reception. It could only have been seconds, the moment he stepped to one side to let them pass. But when he thinks about that moment, he can picture every detail better than he can picture the face of his own mother. The boy walking stiffly with his inflatable armbands, the father trailing the girl who trailed the inflatable giraffe. It reminded William, in the middle of his panic, of those lines from Winnie the Pooh – Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. His mother used to read those lines, voice in his ear, fingers tapping the crown of his head with each bump.
The man in the lost luggage department has returned with a suitcase. It is not Anya’s suitcase, William is sure of it. It is something wrapped in layers of cellophane packaging. The porter pushes it into the rack at the side of the desk, and the label tied around the handle has William’s name. When William pulls it out of the rack, the case is lighter and smaller than he remembers.
. . . it is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down the stairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it . . .
William would suddenly like to hear his mother’s voice more than anything in the world.
He signs the receipt, the suitcase in his left hand. He thinks about putting it down, and walking away, but holding the handle of the case, he feels like he did the one and only time he touched an electric fence. It was in a field of horses. The horses had turned and were running towards him.
William thought he was coming back for Anya. But it is Anya who has come back for him.
Sarajevo
The city has been pinched at the sides. On both flanks of the valley, the front-line remains almost where it was at the end of the siege, the capital of Bosnia poking into the thing they call Republika Srpska like a head in a noose.
Five streets up the hill from Samir’s house they are not in Bosnia. Technically.
‘Fucking ridiculous,’ Samir says. He wants to drive Marko into Republika Srpska because the road around the valley to the airport isn’t as busy as the more direct route at this time of night, and because: ‘Look at it,’ he says. ‘This is fucking Sarajevo. How is this not Sarajevo?’
There are no signs marking the border. The street names are the same Sarajevo street names. The buses are the same Sarajevo buses.
‘Look at this graveyard,’ Samir says. White crosses and obelisks fill the slopes above them. ‘Muslim, Christian, Muslim, Christian – half of those graves are our men. Even the dead aren’t home.’
Marko decides not to remind Samir he had told him exactly the same thing on their way into Sarajevo.
‘I’d thought about coming back,’ Marko tells Samir.
‘You did come back!’
‘I mean staying. About staying. Going back into the business with Dad. Run the security company.’
They come off the hill, down to a crossroads where they wait for a tram to pass.
‘What for?’ Samir says. ‘You don’t want to live in England?’
They are in the suburbs of Butmir now, where the roofs of the houses are low, and the airport opens the sky over the flat valley floor. The familiar silhouette of Mount Igman, a sleeping giant in the blue night. On the other side of the airport, the apartment blocks of Dobrinja are lit up. The place where Vesna’s father no longer lives.
Samir turns the car around one of the city’s few traffic islands, before joining the airport road.
‘We had to crawl under the airport last time,’ Marko says. ‘That fucking tunnel!’
Through the window he watches a plane touch ground. Cars zip by in the opposite direction, taxis bringing the new arrivals in. In the tunnel they had to bend down, folded in half beneath the runway, people pushing past in the opposite direction.
‘When we came here with Vesna,’ Samir says, ‘Kemal couldn’t have worried more if you really had been brothers. And not because he thought you were going to fuck her.’
‘I talked to Sabina after the funeral,’ Marko says. ‘She was offended at the idea – of her and Kemal. She knew all about Vesna, about his plans to get married.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I believed her.’
‘Why?’
‘If she’d been fucking Kemal, he wouldn’t have told her about Vesna.’
‘Who knows what people are like?’
‘I talked to Bogdan too.’
‘Did you see how nuts he is?’
‘Not really.’
‘Maybe he was having a good day.’
‘He wouldn’t absolutely rule it out. The allegations.’
‘He takes his job too seriously.’
They drive through the gates in the barbed fences, and the signs saying, Sarajevo Thanks You! Come Back Soon.
‘Here we are.’ Samir pulls up the car, into a space. ‘You can leave by plane. No tunnelling underneath the airport!’ He opens the driver’s door and starts to fix his leg. ‘I’ll help with the bags.’
Marko watches a couple in front of them climb out of their car, and begin to remove the luggage from the boot.
‘It’s not what you all say,’ Marko begins.
Samir takes a breath, then forces it out in a long, bored groan. ‘What will it be, Marko?’ he says. ‘Another ten years? Drop back in and see if we aren’t all killing each other again?’
‘It’s what you don’t say.’
‘What?’
‘I should know. Shouldn’t I? He slept in our house. He was like a brother to me. If anyone should know it should be me. How could I not know what was going on with him?’
‘I told you to believe in him. Stop picking at old scabs.’
‘It changes everything.’
‘Nothing has changed. Except you don’t have to feel responsible for Kemal’s death any more. Isn’t that what you want?’
‘I can’t believe Kemal did it. But you all behave like he did.’
‘How?’
‘Because you all act like you don’t care. Like there is nothing to even think about!’
Samir lets his head drop dramatically against the steering wheel. Then he sits up straight, and says, ‘They raped his mother in front of him, Marko. Did you forget that? Did you think about what it might do to a man? No, you didn’t. Because you didn’t have to do the things we did. And that’s not your fault. But you’re not here now. And you’re not dealing with the things we have to deal with.’
‘You saw Kemal rape those women? I mean you actually saw him do that? You know he did it?’
‘Not all the women. There were some other men, not from Stovnik anyway, you don’t know them. And Kemal talked about it. Afterwards. He felt bad about it. If it makes you feel any better. He wished it had never happened. I didn’t – watch it. Why would I watch that?’
Marko knows he has to get out of the car but can’t bring himself to move. He is suddenly aware of the process involved. His brain needs to send a message to the muscles in his legs. But if he is thinking about sending a message, the message can’t be sent. Maybe it was how Samir felt when he tried to move his missing foot.
‘I was going to tell you,’ Samir says, ‘but I thought – you could come here. You wouldn’t have to know. You could be happy you hadn’t sent him to his first death!’
Marko cannot move, because he knows he is not going to leave. Not yet.
‘How do you think it feels?’ Samir says. ‘How do you think I feel? Knowing I should have stopped it?’
‘A package of anti-biotics is worth two local phone calls. For a litre of cooking oil you can get a carton of cigarettes . . . for 2 litres of oil you can wear almost new Reeboks. A used, male, winter jacket costs 3 kilos of onions. A once standard package of 18 kilos of paint is being exchanged for any kind and amount of food. 10 litres of petrol, the amount which supplies energy for a two-hour shooting of a TV broadcast about the future of Bosnia Herzegovina, can be exchanged for 12 cans for your private survival. In handwritten ads on Tito Street: “I am looking for a woman to help me survive this winter.”’
Bora Ćosić (Sarajevo: Survival Guide, 1994)
16 September 1994
Sarajevo
‘You won.’ Vesna leaned over from the back seat and punched Marko’s shoulder. ‘So stop moping.’
Marko looked out of the window of her father’s Renault, at the twin towers, and the Holiday Inn, and the headquarters of Oslobođenje. On the television news, Marko always saw Sarajevo from the hills and the buildings looked small. But in real life, their size made the destruction even more unsettling – more undignified somehow. Seeing these tall buildings fallen to pieces, Marko had experienced the same sadness he felt when he saw his parents upset.
‘Sarajevo, ljubavi moja,’ Vesna’s father began to sing.
someone had written over the shattered stucco of one building.
Another hand had written,
Marko felt until now he had been watching the war, watching the refugees running from it, watching Kemal fighting it. From the balcony of his home, he had seen smoke rising on the far side of Stovnik. In the summer months he had heard the whistle of shells, and counted the gap between the pop and the wheesh, as they stepped closer and closer. They buried young men in the cemetery. When sirens sounded they moved down into the basement. But the guns in the hills around Stovnik never had the range to reach beyond the university building and the blocks of Marko’s estate had remained safe. On the ‘safe’ roads through Sarajevo, there wasn’t a building untouched.
They slowed into a queue. Vesna’s father stopped singing. The cause was a tram turned onto its side, a tangle of pipes and wheels stuck in the air. The tram was empty. Its frame had rusted and the windows were smashed out. Whatever happened had happened a long time ago. In front of the tram, the concrete blocks of the central reservation had been moved. The Renault humped over the rubble, before picking up speed on the wrong side of the dual carriageway. Between the city and Dobrinja, the road had become a frayed ribbon of potholed concrete, flanked by the burned-out wrecks of cars.
‘Don’t worry!’ Vesna’s father said. ‘There’s a ceasefire.’ Then he laughed until he began to cough.
They passed a hill of bricks and twisted steel, a fire-gutted school, a bonfire of office desks. In the bruised evening light, the eyes of a couple advertising Nescafé on a roadside billboard sparkled. The pupils had been skilfully removed by a sniper. When the car turned back across the central reservation, and into the estates of Dobrinja, the dark figures of the apartment blocks seemed to lean for support against the evening sky.
In the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee claimed that by paying attention to the body, the mind can relieve it of pain. You just needed to concentrate, focus on accepting the pain. Pain was only a concept. In the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, the mind and the body are not divided, but the same organism, part of the same system, like people living in an apartment block, in the same country, on the same planet. Marko lay on a blanket on the parquet floor, beneath the dining-room table in the apartment of Vesna’s father. He felt the poking fingers and burning hands of the boy from Foča, in every place pinched, and pulled, and pushed. The grips, the bruises of landing. Painful concepts.
The boy from Foča had coarse red hair and freckles, not just on his face, but all over his shoulders and chest. His breath smelled of rotten carrots. Marko had watched as he won his heats, and knew the boy from Foča was the one to beat. He was a better fighter than Marko, and when they met in the final, the boy’s fingers had slipped like water through his hands, the cloth of his hems like grease.
Marko’s face had been in the mat before he knew what happened. The boy’s elbow dug into the back of his neck, the knot the boy made with his legs, unbreakable. A knee needled his back and pushed the air out of his lungs, and Marko felt not pain, or humiliation, but a deep admiration. He had been trapped by the perfect Nippon.
And he shouldn’t have done what he did next. But the team cheered from the bleachers, their stamping feet ringing in his ears, and Marko became not just one boy, but the town itself. It was the first time he had ever experienced an overwhelming anger, and afterwards he had wanted to disown it.
Stovnik had dug its fingers into the boy’s wound, not Marko Novak. Marko had spotted the stitches on the second pass, as they circled each other and the boy pulled his top together with his belt. The grey stitches and pink burn which could only mean a shrapnel wound.
On the parquet of the dining room, he turned over, but found no comfort. Vesna’s uncle slept on the divan next to the dining-room table, and snored like a horse. They had offered the divan to Marko but he had turned it down in the hope Vesna might suggest her own room. She hadn’t. They had finished dinner, the candles in the flat were snuffed and Marko thought her father might actually intend to drive him back to the barracks where the rest of the team were staying overnight. But Vesna had pleaded it was too late, and anyway too dangerous now, and her grandmother had agreed.
‘Of course,’ her father said. ‘Marko stays with us tonight.’
He turned from the snoring uncle, and covered his ears. But in the seashell whistle, in the cheering stadium, the boy from Foča returned. After the match, Marko went to shake the boy’s hand. Still clutching the wound with his right, the boy had offered his left. But the Foča coach stood with his hands on the boy’s shoulders, and gave Marko a look which needed no explanation: the best man had not won.
He turned onto his back, and stared at the underside of the dining-room table, holding his idle dick for comfort, thoughts drifting to Vesna as she had been underneath the ping-pong table with Kemal.
Before she went to bed, they had been drawing on her wall. She had told him how her father tried to keep the room as she left it, but when the shooting came close that summer, they needed to take out the bed frame and legs. She had pointed to a line of bullet holes in the posters of Denis & Denis and Annie Lennox – a track as straight as any picture rail. The line showed the limit of the sniper’s range. In two years, the family had worked out the sniper, whenever he decided to aim their way, could never get beneath this line.
‘He’s gone now, the sniper.’
‘How do they know?’
‘Because no one is dead.’
Marko turned on the dining-room floor and closed his eyes.
She was still there, at the bottom of it all, the girl in the kiosk at Vilnik. On his knees, Marko began to
crawl through the grass. But it seemed a long time before he finally reached the dark hut, where the girl sat with her legs apart.
‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ Marko told the girl.
The shadow of the door covered her face like a hood.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
Her lips didn’t move but he heard the voice. ‘I’m having a baby, can’t you feel it?’
Marko looked down between the girl’s legs, and found his hand inside her.
He woke with a start. The underside of the table hung over him. His body remembered the pain it was in, and rolling out from under the table, Marko stumbled out of the dining room, trying to recall the map of the apartment in his head. They said if he walked around at night, it was still best not to turn any lights on, and to keep his head down.
He felt along the cold walls of the corridor, past Vesna’s room and Vesna’s father’s room. He had managed to shut the bathroom door behind him and was fumbling for the lock, when Vesna spoke.
‘Do you think she died giving birth?’ She sat in the dark, on the tiles between the bath and the toilet. He could smell the vomit. ‘Or do you think someone killed her?’
He knelt in front of Vesna, and reached out to feel her forehead.
‘I threw up,’ she said.
She was hot. By the toilet there was an empty bucket. He picked it up, scooped some of the emergency water out of the bath and started to pour it into the toilet bowl, flushing away her sick.
‘I think it was an anxiety attack,’ Vesna said. ‘Did you ever have an anxiety attack?’
‘Sure.’
‘I thought I would be happier here – at home – I thought I would be happier. But I don’t remember how to be. I should be back at my mother’s.’
‘You will be.’ Marko put the bucket down and, shuffling knee to knee, he pulled Vesna’s head to his chest, putting his nose to her hair.
‘I’m eight years old in that room,’ she said. She tried to kneel. But there seemed to be no bones in her legs, and she fell back into him – so much heavier than she was in his dreams.
