by David Savill
Across the street, tarpaulin blows into the empty windows of an Austro-Hungarian building, and a welding torch flashes in its dark heart. Samir puts the guitar down, taps a cigarette on the table, smells it and rolls it over to his cousin. Marko doesn’t pick it up.
‘What’s that book you’ve been reading?’ Samir asks. ‘Philosophy?’
‘Just something. My girlfriend’s,’ he lies. ‘I picked it up for the plane.’
‘When I say I can’t remember, Marko, I mean – maybe. If I tried. But I don’t want to. You understand that?’
Marko nods.
‘Kemal was a good man. Most of the time a good man. And I don’t want to remember him like he was this one time, just this one time.’
Marko picks up the cigarette and lights it. He can’t believe he has stayed. He should have gone home. He should be preparing for his class. They could rebuild the market all they wanted. They could park their Audis and Mercedes on the kerbs. They could set up new businesses and make their money, and spend it in the cafés, but this place – his home – would never be right.
‘Let me give you the best piece of advice I have to offer,’ Samir says. ‘And then you can do as you want. You have to choose what to remember.’ Samir taps each word on the table with a coffee spoon. ‘It doesn’t-do-you-any-good-to-remember-everything. Remember it all and you just go crazy.’ He puts the spoon down and raps his knuckles against his own forehead. ‘That, my little cousin, is a medical fact.’
Bangkok
He wants to tell her more. He wants to tell her there was an elephant on the beach, nosing among the toilets left standing in the wreck of the bar, and how this elephant had looked at him with its unblinking eye, and he had looked at it with all the joy and wonder of a child looking at an elephant in a zoo. It wasn’t just an elephant. William had seen the creature as if he had never before seen or heard of an elephant. As if he were reborn. Anya was gone and he felt relief. In that moment, he had thought about leaving her laptop among the debris of the wave. But then the feeling of relief had passed and he had kept it.
One of the food-court girls brings Missy’s smoothie.
‘I saw a documentary,’ Missy says. ‘About how the seabed opened up. That’s how it starts. With the earthquake, a canyon opens up in the seabed, and at first the water is sucked down.’
‘I felt the earthquake in my sleep.’
‘And no one connected the earthquake to a tsunami?’
‘It felt like a very mild, very short quake. When I found Anya at the bar, it was about an hour later, no one was thinking about the tremor. When we saw the sea, it was going out, not coming in.’
Missy shakes her head. The girl returns with their food. A moment is filled with the business of steam and opening chopsticks. When he had dropped off Missy and returned to his apartment, Anya had started speaking again. She told him he was being a dick. She told him to man up and apologise.
It was simple enough to suggest lunch over in the mall. He told Missy he would give her the lowdown on the school before her starting on Thursday. But he wanted to repair the bridges after their argument. She had suggested he meet her at a skatepark. But he didn’t skate. I owe you at least a lunch, he confidently told her.
Where is that confidence now? He chases a slippery mushroom in his noodle soup. Despite his road trip with Missy, he feels like he is starting over. Not just with Missy, but with the business of seeing people, of being out. Gripping the fishy mushroom in the chopsticks, he brings it to his mouth, but it drops back into the soup and burning drops splash the back of his hand. His stomach is unsettled. After packing Anya’s suitcase he had thrown up.
‘I can’t imagine the sea just retreating like that,’ Missy says.
‘I suppose it was like an estuary tide. I thought it must be some local phenomenon.’
Missy shakes her head. More disbelief.
He wonders what is supposed to be happening here. He needs to tell her things, but why does she have a desire to know? ‘You could see the fish. In places on the seabed. Where the sea moved so quickly, they were left behind.’
‘And you ran?’
‘Running would have been a good idea.’
They hadn’t run. Not at first. At first they stood like everyone else, looking out at the retreating sea and shading their eyes from the sun. They followed their feet to the edge of the veranda where the corner of the building pointed out at the coast.
‘I was still trying to make polite conversation,’ he tells Missy. ‘I’d woken up with this idea in my head. She had been murdered or kidnapped or raped at the party. I ran to the resort reception and made a flap about it. But then I came down to the beach, and there she was, having coffee with this guy. I didn’t know who he was.’
‘No one was running?’
‘I don’t think so, not until the last minute.’
As they watched the tide retreat, William had seen the family who were staying in the bungalow next to their own. The girls stood in the water left behind. Later he had seen the father running, carrying a child in each arm, another on his back. Absolutely hopeless. They had all run eventually. Up the beach, where it sloped to a road of small shops and where they thought they would be safe, on the higher ground.
William looks down, through the glass walls of the mall, to where the lights on Pattapaya hold the traffic, cars stacking up, then shooting out like bearings in a pinball machine. When the cars stop, a lone man pushes an ice-cream vending-fridge over the pedestrian crossing.
‘I’m sorry you couldn’t find the guy from the resort,’ Missy says.
William shrugs. At least he knew. Kemal Lekić had died of a brain haemorrhage in a Bangkok hospital on the 3rd of January. Until then, William’s rescuer had been in a coma. For the final two weeks of his life, Kemal Lekić had been completely unknown, an unidentified man. There was no Bosnian Embassy in Thailand. Kemal didn’t come to the attention of the Bosnian Embassy in Indonesia until staff and friends at the resort identified him. Over the phone, the man at the Embassy in Indonesia had told William the body had been repatriated. There was a brother in Bosnia.
At least Will thinks this is what the man was trying to tell him. The embassy man gave Will a number. If he wanted to share his story about Kemal, he could call the brother.
But none of this told Will what he wanted to know. He would never find out if Kemal saw Anya’s body, or if he knew what had happened to her.
‘Anya was a workaholic,’ Will says absent-mindedly.
Missy looks up from her soup and Will realises he is not talking to someone who knows anything about him or his life with Anya.
‘She loved her job,’ he adds. ‘One of those people who lives for their job.’
‘What did she do?’
‘She was a researcher. A human rights researcher.’
‘Cool job.’
‘She helped people,’ he says. And understands for the first time: now Anya is dead, he is more responsible for her than ever.
He looks at Missy, her neck cocked, raised eyebrows and wide eyes. Now he knows what is going on. People are like those tipping cups in Japanese gardens, filled with a constant stream of water, compelled to tip. She will take what he has told her, and at some point or another, it will be tipped into someone else. And like this, drop by drop, the water will recede from him, taking Anya with it.
Sarajevo
Marko squats against the fence, and watches a street cat on the opposite wall. The cat’s eyelids grow heavy, closing for only a second before startling awake. He watches as if the cat might impart some wisdom, but it just licks a paw and returns to its somnambulant routine.
From the cobbled streets of Bjelave the city is a distant roar. The air above the town is filled with the smell of spring cherry blossom. It is heaped so deep against the walls of gardens you can stand in it. He is here now. There is no going back. But what he sees through the chain fence of Vesna’s garden has stopped him.
Marko had thought she might rejec
t him over the phone. But he hadn’t wanted to walk into her workplace again. In truth, he hadn’t known what he was going to do. But wandering around the old town that afternoon, he had found himself drifting down the street of the travel company, walking past the windows once, twice, three times, before persuading himself the café with the Tito ashtrays, across the road from her office, was as good a place as any to stop and have a coffee. It was nearly six o’clock, and he could see the office was shutting down. His next plan was to ‘bump’ into her as she left, but all of a sudden, Vesna had walked out of the office door, and Marko had scrambled to put money on the table.
He almost caught up with her at the corner of Maršala Tita, but when she crossed the road, a tram cut between them. He was about to shout after her as they climbed the steep steps of the alley between the banks and Veliki Park, but she reached the top, and disappeared from sight. Then he was following her. Following her, not trying to make contact. They climbed the cobbled streets that shot straight up the hillside above the city centre. She was a block of houses ahead when Marko began to slow with questions. What was Vesna going home to? Had her mother moved to Sarajevo? Had there been a ring on her finger when they met in the café? This woman shared her childhood with him, but what did that really mean? What did their childhood mean when her lover and his best friend was a rapist and a murderer? When the war had finally taken everything?
He followed Vesna past the fenced platforms of a school playground and through the thundering feet of children. A car passed between them, rolling down the street, red brake-lights pumping in a yellow cloud of dust that climbed in a slow explosion over the garden walls. When he next saw her, she was unlocking a crooked, rusting door in a crooked chain-link fence, and walking into a small, overgrown garden at the corner of a narrow alley. The little girl came tearing around the side of the cottage and across the garden, throwing herself into Vesna’s legs. She picked her up, and brushed the hair from her face, and with the girl’s chicken-bone legs wrapped around her hips, they walked up the stone steps of the house.
Bangkok
In the mall, William holds his fingers to his nose. When he thinks about the temples, he can smell the air of that day on his hands. He has grown to need it. It is like the hawthorn smell which rises from English hedgerows in the spring. Sweet and sickly and as full of life as it is of death.
After he had combed the beaches by the resort, he took the waiting taxi to the nearest temple. A red marquee stood next to the temple gates. Beneath the marquee, people had gathered to study Polaroid photographs. Red-robed monks pinned the photographs on noticeboards. The monks ferried in and out of the temple gates with shoeboxes full of them. Behind the walls of the temple, students of forensics had arrived from universities in Bangkok, Singapore, even as far away as Mumbai, and stood in their blue sanitation suits over white body bags, one shooting, one compiling the photographs in the shoebox. The bodies themselves were unloaded from the back of a dumper truck by teenagers in student clothes, with scarfs and ripped T-shirts tied around their mouths and noses. The dump trucks had come from the beaches where the chain gangs were singing, where William had been.
At the third temple, William stood next to a middle-aged woman whose pale skin, and drawn features, told him she had just stepped off a plane from some wintering European country. As she looked at the photographs, the fingers of one hand dithered at her neck, and the other hand gripped a baton of rolled papers.
He called his parents from the mobile phone of an aid worker. They had been trying to reach him in Bangkok, and had no idea he was on the coast. He told them to find a number for Anya’s mother, and to let her know he was looking for her daughter.
But he hoped he wouldn’t find her. He hoped he wouldn’t find her at the temples where the bodies in the photographs had spent forty-eight hours bloating in stagnant water, burned black by the sun, infested with insects. When he didn’t find Anya’s picture, he was invited into the temple grounds to inspect the bodies which hadn’t yet been photographed. They were laid out in neat rows. An open cemetery. William felt as if he were floating over the burned and bloated limbs of these oddly inflated people. Their faces had swollen into oversized party masks, and although he looked at them, they were somehow incapable of looking at him. Limbs arranged like abandoned puppets, their small white eyeballs stared out from behind the flesh and bone, or their heads were empty with black sockets, no eyes at all. The mouths of the tsunami dead were left in silent screams and permanent grins, their lips pulled back, their teeth protruding, their open mouths stuffed with a black seabed mud, like something left halfway through the process of taxidermy. Dead children stared at him as though in disbelief, others smiled as if they knew him. But once William started looking he couldn’t stop. It seemed almost rude to turn away.
The charred little babies were the strangest of all. Not at all like flesh and bone, more like plastic or china; castaway firings slated for return, eyes and mouths shut tight, in a moment that could have been fear or joy.
When William couldn’t find Anya in the grounds of the third temple, he moved to the next, eight kilometres up the coast. The next, eight kilometres down. At each temple it was the same. He hoped he would find nothing. He hoped he would bump into her, walking among the photographs, walking among the bodies like him.
Anya’s mother called him three days later. He was in Bangkok by then. She wanted to get a flight out. She wanted to know how to find her. William told her what he had done. He told her he had been to all the temples. He told her it was no use. And so she wanted a story from him. She wanted to know what had happened in the final moments. But what could he tell her?
He told her not to come.
A week later, Anya’s mother called to tell him she had been contacted by the forensics team to whom William had given Anya’s details. The team had asked for anything which might provide Anya’s DNA; an old tooth kept from childhood; hair if she had been living at home. She had driven down to London, and collected her toothbrush, some underwear and a hairbrush from the house in Walthamstow. She told him she wished she had come to Kao Lak, and asked whether she should still come.
He told her not to come.
What use would it be? He had asked for Anya’s belongings to be forwarded from the hotel and promised he would arrange to have them sent on.
They have finished eating, and Missy is in the bathroom. The busyness of the tables at the food court spreads to the counters and cashiers, the frantic kitchens behind them, the shops across the mezzanine, the escalators delivering shoppers and taking them away, lifts taking people up, taking people down. It feels as though the entire mall is moving around him, the people and the reflections of people in the windows of storefronts, the ripple over the glass walls as another Skytrain slows into Nana Station. He watches as the doors of the train slide open, pouring people into the atrium. Such a thin line between the living and the dead. A thin, watery line. They should be running, all of them, running for their lives.
‘Until Thursday then,’ Missy says.
‘Yes,’ William says. Though it is clear that neither of them is convinced.
‘I’ll be at the skatepark tomorrow night. If you want to check it out.’
On the day of the wave, before they began to collect and catalogue the bodies, before they realised how many bodies there were, the Buddhists had burned the first to come to the temple. To the Christians it felt like the priests were murdering the dead. With no body, no identification, no funeral. But the Buddhists saw it differently. Burning released the human spirit from the degradation of the flesh. Some of the Buddhists even whispered that the wave was karma. Some kind of awesome reckoning. William envied the religious their belief in anything. Not because he could ever believe in the truth of any particular religious story, but because the Christians shared their belief with other Christians, and the Buddhists shared their belief with other Buddhists. Because the Muslims shared their belief with other Muslims, and William would have to make
up his own story.
Missy has gone.
He wanted to tell her Anya had nothing to reckon for. No sins to atone. He wanted to tell her she had been his closest friend. He wanted to tell her it was his fault. He had asked his former girlfriend to come to Thailand, his first lover, the lover he thought he would have again. But the woman he greeted at Kao Lak airport, had turned out to be more than his lover, she had turned out to be his greatest friend.
He wanted to tell Missy that he hoped they burned Anya’s body. Whatever the fucking Buddhists and Christians and Muslims thought, he hoped she had been burned, not left to rot, and that as he stood there in the temple grounds, looking at what the ocean had left behind, Anya had been falling in the white ash.
Sarajevo
‘Look at that blossom, all over the clean clothes!’ Vesna says.
Ivory-pink petals drift across the scrappy lawn, catching in the white sheets, and the blue-white vests, and the pink-white blouses. They sit on a hollowed log beneath a small damson tree. Vesna smokes her Dunhill, and Marko smokes with her. He had come to apologise. Apologise for what they did to Kemal. And somehow apologise to her for what Kemal had become. But now Vesna is the one doing all the talking.
‘We went to visit his grave when Amelia was five. I’d always talked about him. She used to say, Daddy went away with the men who look after us. Like he was still out there, being a soldier.’
Her daughter sits in the long grass, on the other side of the washing line, playing cat’s cradle with the little girl from next door.
‘She’s very nurturing,’ Vesna says. ‘She likes younger children.’
The more Marko looks at Amelia, the more he can see. Her hair is Vesna’s natural colour, a mousy blonde. She has her mother’s feline eyes, and her mother’s heart-shaped face. But the strong nose and the long chin belong to Kemal.
