by David Savill
Marko opened his mouth to tell Vesna not to worry. She knelt before him now. She clamped her hand over his lips. When she removed it, she pressed her mouth against his, missing at first, teeth knocking against his chin. Quickly she found her way in.
Then just as she had begun, she stopped. In the dark, her face soft like a bruised damson.
‘What?’ Marko whispered.
Vesna covered her mouth. She was laughing. ‘When was the last time you kissed a girl?’
Marko didn’t know how to answer. Instead, he took her arms, and pulling her into him, kissed her again. At first, Vesna’s mouth remained closed. He pushed his tongue against her teeth. He felt her wrists in his hands. She tried to pull away. Then he felt a screaming pain and let go.
She had bitten his tongue.
‘Are you a virgin?’ Vesna giggled.
Marko slapped her. And Vesna’s slap came back so quickly, Marko would often convince himself in the replayed memory of this moment, that she had struck the first blow.
When Vesna stood up, Marko expected her to leave. Instead, she locked the bathroom door, and turned around.
‘Come here,’ she said.
Monday 11 April 2005
Bangkok
It sits on the bed in William’s apartment. Wrapped in plastic Anya’s suitcase has the cold glow of an ice cube. Where the lids of the case meet, his scissors slip through the seam of cellophane, and after the initial resistance, the soft space inside. He picks away at the latch. It will open now. But he feels like someone is watching over his shoulder.
He is a thief. He lifts Anya’s clothes out first. They are all a jumble, hastily crushed in by whoever collected the case from her room. He needs to order this mess, and begins to pull everything out – her dresses, her vests, her shirts and skirts. In the pocket of the suitcase, he finds white popsocks in a pack of three, a carton of tampons, all the blue socks rolled into balls, and gym shorts for sleeping in. There is a washbag splattered with dried toothpaste, essential oils sealed in a plastic zip-bag, a nest of hairgrips, a tube of something called Vagisil, a tub of Evening Primrose pills and the disgusting tarragon toothpaste she loved. He holds something in his hand. It won’t let go of him. A disposable razor. Its blade still holds the short, sharp dashes of stubble from Anya’s legs.
He had searched the hospital first, but Anya’s name was not on the lists of those admitted. He needed to get back to the coast, but everyone said the roads from Phuket to Kao Lak were impassable, so he had registered Anya’s details with the Red Cross people in the hospital grounds. He queued for an hour to use the mobile phone of a volunteer from the Red Crescent. But neither the resort nor Anya’s mobile answered. He asked in the hospital about the man who had brought him in, but no one knew who he was talking about. He queued again for the mobile phone, and asked the school to book him a room somewhere, but all the rooms in the town were full, and the school couldn’t even wire money because William had no identification to present to the bank. Somehow, he slept again, this time in the heat of the hospital steps. When he woke, the sky was milky, and the air seemed soft. It could have been late evening, or it could have been early morning. He signed for some cash from a Christian Aid worker, enough to hire a taxi driver who told him one of the roads to Kao Lak had been opened. They drove past a blue fishing boat, high in the palms of a tree, then aflame with the sun, a glinting bonfire of metal bikes and scooters.
Where the road ran along the coast, the front walls of shops and houses had all been pushed in, the innards of their rooms opened up.
The sign pointing down the road for the resort offered hope. The gates of the resort and its stone pillars were still standing. The wave had left only palms, turning brown and black, over the raised driveway. It was like this all along the coast, islands of normality amid the destruction, the caprice of geography. The tsunami was created by a concertina of energy, more powerful where it met precipitous land, dissipated by shallows. Spreading far where it met no resistance, snagging where it did.
The lost child is told to stay in one place, not to move. If Anya had made it to the resort, she might be in the cabin. This would be the place to wait if there were no other way of communicating. His hopes rose as he neared the hotel reception. She was probably sitting on her bed, reading magazines, more worried about him than he was about her.
On the reception veranda, a man in a grey pyjama suit swept leaves as if this were just a hotel out of season. The swamps beneath the walkways connecting the treetop cabins had risen, slick black water iridescent with oil. The wave which destroyed the beach and the shops along the front had rushed beneath the stilts of the beach huts, beneath the walkways, its energy absorbed by the knots of mangrove roots.
The cabin was how he had left it. Anya’s clothes were still packed into the drawers and cupboards. In the bathroom her toothbrush and razor in a cup. On the bed, her laptop.
But Anya wasn’t there. She had not come back. He sat on the bed of Anya’s room, put one hand on the closed lid of the laptop as if resting his hand on a Bible, and tried to remember. They had been at the bar. When the first wave came, they had run from the bar. It had caught up with them on a small street of shops, the place he had been on Christmas morning to buy the things for breakfast. They had stood on the fire-escape steps of a wooden building as a second wave came. And then the steps had collapsed beneath them.
Anya’s precious work. She would want that safe above all else. He put her laptop in its shoulder bag and took it with him. When he bumped into her later that day, as he inevitably would, she would thank him for taking it. He took some of the cash from her purse and left some in case they missed each other here, but he didn’t think about Anya’s passport. The one thing which might help him identify her. He didn’t think about it because he didn’t want to believe he would need it.
The steps from the walkway to the beach had fallen into the sand, and William had to lower himself down. There was no beach as such, only this dark black mulch, like the ploughed earth of a field and, running from it in channels, the black bleed from the swamp. The sand was littered with broken timber and glass, the door of a refrigerator, the frame of a window, the cistern of a toilet; the smell of sewage and seaweed baking in the sun. Down by the headland, a paper chain of students worked to pass debris onto the back of a dump truck. They were singing in Thai, one of those see-saw melodies, as if the job were just some away-day, bonding exercise. He walked around the smashed hulls of fishing boats, over the heads of beach umbrellas poking from the black sand, the towels of Disney princesses, bottles of suntan lotion, a picnic basket, the refrigerator of an ice-cream seller and sandals. Blue sandals, pink sandals, leather sandals, a swimming costume, the plastic of an inflatable swimming ring, broken sunglasses, a child’s colouring-in book.
Where the beach bar had stood, he walked over matchwood; broken glass, smashed bottles, half-buried nets, plastic anchors, plastic boats, the black skeleton of a Christmas tree. Only the toilet block of the bar remained – two cubicles and the wall dividing them. Standing over all this, the elephant, its trunk fishing in one of the unbroken toilet bowls. Its unblinking eye.
As if commanded, William sat down before it, on a step leading nowhere, the laptop on his knees.
He begins to fold the clothes; the slacks, the shorts, the vests, the skirts. He folds Anya’s arms into her chest, and her legs at the knee. When she is back inside the suitcase, he takes the laptop, and slides it under the first layer of clothes. The teeth of the zip won’t meet, and he has to push down on the lid. Which is when he notices there is another compartment, a pocket to the case, still wrapped tightly beneath the cellophane. Anya’s passport. The thing he should have taken from the room because she was missing. Not the stupid laptop he was trying to protect. The passport in which she wears the shorter hairstyle which had marked their last years together, in which the stamps for Bosnia and Serbia and Croatia fill almost every page. The pocket gives up an opened packet of chewing gum, a printout
of the flight tickets and the resort reservation. Tickets for the Heathrow Express. Things she must have thrown in at the last minute in London. Things to keep to hand. Something wrapped in Christmas paper, just bigger than an envelope.
‘Happy Christmas William!’ Her handwriting stops him. It is her voice. He turns the card over. ‘Good times!’
He sits on the floor, his back to the bed, fingers fumbling with the Sellotape.
It is a Snappy Snaps packet. His hands shake as he pulls the first photograph out. Girls in school uniform, claret shirts and blue blazers; faces William doesn’t recognise beneath savagely permed hair. Friends bunched up against a wall, flicking V’s to the camera, sleeves rolled, legs straight, making stiff A’s of their skirts. Anya is at the end, her curled hair dyed black and shoulder length, tips threaded with beads. The child she was when he first met her.
The photographs come in different sizes, different aspect ratios, some Polaroid, some stuck together with the sticky rings of tea cups. There is a picture of her mother’s car, the old red junk-bucket parked up in a brown field. That car which had changed their world. It is next to a small orange tent. In another picture, a circle of faces looking up into the camera, surrounded by the ashes of a fire, packets of Rizla in a girl’s lap. Another girl, whose face he knows, but whose name he can’t remember, is Anya’s chubby school friend. Anya is wearing the old jumper which hung to her knees, the one with holes in the cuffs where her thumbs poked through. In the next picture she is standing on the bend of a tight Mediterranean road, next to a saint’s shrine, a wash of hot white light behind her and barely a trace of the snow-capped Alps William remembers seeing when he took it. In the next picture he recognises the boy standing with his arm around Anya. It is William, it is him, barely nineteen, his face so young, his flesh so doughy, he can hardly believe he was any more than fifteen. And yet there they are, in the holiday pictures, heads resting together as they stand in front of Lake George at sunset, pine trees and a jetty, and at the end of the jetty, a small steam-riverboat, red propeller wheel on the side, and the words Captain Allegheny written in gold. This is the year they left school, before they started university, in those days when everything was new and life was a very, very simple promise they would stay together for ever.
William is crying.
This is why he had called her at the end of the monsoon season. This is what he supposed they might have for a few days. She had packed it in a suitcase, and brought it with her. Anya and William grinning, their thumbs up before the Golden Gate bridge; Anya standing on a downtown pavement, her finger positioned so it makes a miniature out of a distant Empire State building; Anya and William in a picture he took with his arm extended, their faces close to the camera lens and their mouths mocking WOW as a whale jumps over a bar at Sea World; Anya and William, older now, sitting anxiously at a Bosnian wedding table groaning with food. But somehow, different in this picture; her hair has been straightened. Her face is pinched. But it isn’t really something the picture tells him. It is something he knows.
It is Anya after the abortion. It is Anya and William falling apart.
Hands still shaking, he puts the photographs back in the pocket of the suitcase like something he needs to hide. And pulling his hand out, he finds something else. It is a leaf of A4 paper folded in half. At first he doesn’t know what it is he recognises about the picture. It is a photocopy of a newspaper article from some Balkan paper. Something to do with Anya’s work. Stovnik. A town in Bosnia, wasn’t it? There is no reason why a newspaper from a Bosnian town should mean anything to him.
It is the man. Younger when this picture was taken, his head shaved. But still him. The face he had looked up at as the man reached down and pulled him out of the mud. He had held on to this man’s shoulders, locked his arms around his chest, the burn of the exhaust pipe against his calf. It is the man who rescued him, the man who had been sitting with Anya at the bar and the man she introduced him to before they turned to see the tide retreating. The man who has a name now because it is beneath the picture. Kemal Lekić.
Tuesday 12 April 2005
Sarajevo
Someone is practising piano scales. Someone operates a drill. Someone hammers a metal beam in the tight streets of Baščaršija. Marko has not left Bosnia. It is almost midday, but he wants to lie on the bed and watch the brick dust turning in the open window. In Cambridge, Marko sleeps fitfully in the days, waking to the sound of his upstairs neighbour watching horror movies; the long periods of quiet suspense followed by sudden stabs of music, shouts and screams. Sometimes he falls asleep to the vibration of a washing machine. But England is a quiet place.
He feels underneath the covers. They had come back drunk and he is still wearing his jeans. He thinks about calling Millie, but texts her instead. He tells her he is going to miss his philosophy class. He doesn’t suppose the tutor needs to know, but it would be good if she could call in. He has decided to stay just a few more days.
What he cannot tell her is why. Because he is not entirely sure why. And the part he is sure about – making his apologies to Vesna – would involve telling Millie what he has to apologise for.
He buries his hungover head back into the pillow, and listens to the muffled noises of the market. In Stovnik, the families were always in and out of each other’s apartments. No one locked their doors. During the war, they shared the basement. But even before then, Marko had always been a light sleeper. He would wake in the night to the sound of Kemal’s breathing; the small, sudden snaps of blocked airways, and dreams that sounded unwanted. The candle painted an uncertain picture of the soldier boy sitting on the chair by Marko’s homework desk, his white shorts turned grey, combat gear at his feet, tan line where the sleeves of his fatigues were rolled and the fleur-de-lis tattoo on his bicep. The brigade were strict about keeping the hair of soldiers short, but over time the rules had slipped. Like the rest of the brigade, Kemal had a fringe which hung in a square black handkerchief at the front of his shaven skull.
Marko turns in the bed and thinks of the shaven head in the morgue. The patch on his bicep unnaturally smooth. Had Kemal sat in some Thai tattooing parlour as they blasted it off? It was hard enough to imagine Kemal as a man in his late twenties, growing out of the boy, a man turning thirty; but to imagine him in the heat and light of a Far Eastern country? Had he turned Buddhist? Had he kept his head shaved to a shadow of stubble, and recited mantras in an orange robe? Had he remembered the Tao of Jeet Kune Do?
Had Kemal been following Lao-tzu?
‘It’s a mercy, isn’t it?’ Kemal asked in the candlelit bedroom.
‘What is?’
‘Shooting them. Did you shoot any today?’
He was talking about the dogs. But he wasn’t looking at Marko. He was looking down at his hands, fingers spread on the homework desk, as if contemplating which ones to keep.
‘Did you sleep the sleep of the just?’ Samir says.
The old shop window is bright with afternoon light. At the open door, Samir sits in shorts and a straw hat, holding a guitar and picking out notes which are hopelessly lost to the shriek of a stonecutter in the building site across the road.
‘It’s the first spring day we’ve had!’ Putting down the guitar, Samir crosses to the back of the small room and over to the reception desk, where he starts the complicated business of making a coffee in the plastic kettle. There is no plug on the lead, so he carefully inserts the bare wires into the socket on the wall.
Marko can’t imagine how this tiny room was ever his uncle’s copperware store. Cavernous in his memory, the store had dripped with copper coffee pots, copper skillets, copper bathtubs, copper vases, copper scenes of Sarajevo, copper portraits of Bosnian heroes. Marko picks up a model tank on one of Samir’s shelves. It is fashioned from copper-tipped bullets, and sells for $50. It is impressive, Samir’s business, the bed and breakfast, the house he built himself, the child he is going to have. How hard it must have been to put it all together.
/> ‘Those model tanks?’ Samir says. ‘I saved a bunch when we sold everything off.’
A television above Samir’s head shows an Italian football match. Scattered over the table of checked oilcloth are tourist leaflets: rafting on the Drina, mountain climbing, coach trips to Dubrovnik, fishing trips on the Sava. In Marko’s room there had been dried flowers in frames, and the theme is continued here.
The picture of the judo team is above the table, on a shelf of its own. They are standing together before the coach which will take them to Sarajevo. Four soldiers flanking them: Elvis, Samir, Bogdan and Kemal. There was always a risk in leaving Stovnik that goodbyes could be final. It stops him when he thinks of how they ever lived like that.
‘What’s the plan?’ Samir pours the coffee, holding back the grains with a spoon. ‘How long are you going to stay?’
‘I think he was guilty about something in the end.’
His cousin walks outside, puts the coffee on the table and gestures for Marko to follow. The sun is breaking over the hills, and in his eyes when he sits. Samir begins to pick out notes on the guitar, and for a moment they are both stopped by the sight of girls tripping along the pavement. Unbearably young in their summer vests and bouncing skirts.
‘Zumbul, lale, jorgovani . . .’ Samir sings quietly, but he struggles to find the right chord.
‘There was a lot he never told me,’ Marko says. ‘The more I think about it. The more I think of how much I didn’t know. Who were the women? The ones who went missing?’
‘I don’t know their names . . .’ Samir shakes his head. He has found the chord he is looking for, ‘Jorgov-a-a-a-ni . . .’
‘Was it just Kemal?’
Samir stops again. ‘There were other times, you know. Other soldiers who did it. Some of these soldiers we were with, they had the brains of Albanians.’ He pulls the cigarette pack over the table. ‘You know why this kind of thing happened? Because when everyone says you’re drunk, you better start rolling around on the floor and acting like you’re drunk. Kemal got lost in it. That’s all. It happened. So he wasn’t perfect. Don’t over think it. You lose your temper too, Marko. Lose yourself. No one’s perfect.’
