by David Savill
‘So I was mad when he called me, Marko. If you think you were angry to find out, can you imagine how I felt when he called me from Thailand? Amelia was seven years old by then. Seven!’
‘I guess Kemal didn’t know he had a daughter,’ Marko says. ‘When he called you.’
‘Jesus, I thought it was some kind of joke. Of course he didn’t know he had a daughter – we all thought he was dead!’
Marko thinks of the body in the morgue. The shaved head. He thought he had come to tell Vesna about the camp, but now he wants to tell her about Kemal’s dead body.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he asks, ‘What was he like? In Thailand?’
Something about the memory of it makes Vesna smile. ‘I went to see him twice. I didn’t tell him about Amelia the first time. I just wanted to see him. To see what he was like. He was – calm. You know, like he’d been getting into Buddhism or something.’ She is resting her elbows on crossed legs, and brings her fingers together in mockery of meditation. ‘Gone all Zen. Which made me even madder at first. I wanted him to feel my anger, but it all seemed to bounce off.’ She stops and barks, ‘Hey! Amelia! Be kind to Daša!’
Tall and thin, Amelia is standing with one foot on the smaller girl’s chest, but at her mother’s instruction, she lifts it, before demonstratively offering the younger girl her hand.
‘You see, I tell you how good she is, and she does something to prove me wrong. She’s getting to an age when she knows she can stop listening to me.’
Vesna can’t seem to take her eyes off the children. He envies her that.
‘So when I finally told him about Amelia,’ Vesna says, ‘it was on the second trip. I was nervous. You know, going back a second time, it meant I was interested, right? At least he thought so. We had some argument, and by the time I told him about Amelia, it came out like it was spite. Like I was trying to shock him. I wasn’t nice. I told him about the English woman too, the one who was on to them.’
‘So you knew?’
Vesna nods but says nothing else. After her second trip to Thailand, she tells him, Kemal had wanted to meet his daughter. ‘But I kept putting off the visit. Money wasn’t a problem, Kemal was prepared to pay for the flight, but he said he couldn’t come back to Bosnia. It was too complicated.
‘And how was I supposed to tell Amelia? Amelia was seven at the time. The days of thinking Daddy had just “gone away” were long gone.’
Vesna says she would try to imagine the conversation she should be having. But she couldn’t just tell her daughter Daddy had come back. How could she explain why Kemal made himself disappear? How could she explain he had never known about her? Next month, she would keep telling herself – when Amelia was through this year at school, when Amelia had finished her exams, when she was over this flu, when things weren’t quite so difficult at work.
‘I was thinking about it last Christmas. To do it just after because I didn’t want to spoil things!’ Vesna screws her cigarette into the bark of the hollowed log. It joins others rotting in the crook of the branch. Her stash of stolen moments. ‘And now, he really is dead.’
She had started to worry when she saw the news about the tsunami. Kemal had owned a bar right on the beach. ‘I knew that if he had been there when the tsunami came—’
It is a strange thing. Every time the tsunami is mentioned, conversation stops. As if the idea of it needs the space in their minds, the room to pass. They watch Amelia, her hand, the hub of a wheel on the little girl’s head, turning a circle, and reciting the rhyme, Ide, maca, oko, tebe . . .
‘What English woman?’ Marko asks.
‘Oh, there was someone from a human rights organisation interested in Ladina, and what happened at the camp.’
‘She came to see you?’
‘Only briefly. I told her to get out.’
Vesna bends over her knees, and lifts her toes from her flip-flops. The chipped varnish of her toenails, the small hairs on the joints.
So she knows about Kemal already. And she lives with it. Marko is relieved the news is not his to tell.
‘Do you ever think about the woman in Vilnik?’ Marko says.
‘Of course,’ she says. ‘I said I try to forget things. Not that I can.’
‘I never told anyone about it.’
Vesna looks at him, something like warmth in her eyes. A reflection of how they were.
‘I used to blame you,’ she says. ‘After Kemal died on the Kapija. After we thought Kemal had died. I know I shouldn’t have done it. It was because I didn’t want to blame myself.’
Out of nowhere, Amelia appears in front of them. ‘Are we eating tonight or can we go over to Daša’s?’
Vesna touches her daughter’s hair in a way that makes Marko feel strangely jealous. ‘Of course we’re eating tonight, honey – since when don’t I feed you?’
‘It’s eight o’clock.’ The girl is talking to her mother but is looking at Marko. She is assessing him.
‘This is Marko, Amelia. Marko and I were friends when we were children.’
Amelia pulls her face into a polite smile, and it is like she has pulled his memories of Vesna and Kemal together. They are in the garden again, at Kemal’s parents’ house. Before the war. Before Vesna was a girl who kissed his best friend. Before Kemal’s father died of a heart attack in front of the television. Before the soldiers came into that garden, and made Kemal watch as they raped his mother. Before Kemal turned into a rapist himself.
‘He knew your father.’ Vesna surprises Marko.
‘Your father was like a brother to me,’ Marko tells Amelia. ‘I slept in a bunk bed with him. Your father slept in the top bunk. Above me. We used to play games at night.’
‘What kind of games?’
‘Oh. We had a game – I would be Chuck Norris and he would be Bruce Lee.’ But Marko can’t explain it. ‘We would tell each other stories – it was in the war, you know. When your father came home. Our home was his home.’ But he is telling her a story he doesn’t believe any more.
‘What else?’ Amelia says.
‘Your father had a terrible snore.’
Amelia smiles, and the more she smiles, the more she looks like her dad.
‘He was a good man,’ Marko says.
‘Will Marko come to tea?’ Amelia asks her mother.
‘You can go to Daša’s, Amelia, maybe we’ll see Marko later.’
And with that, Kemal’s daughter runs headlong into the drying sheets.
‘Thanks,’ Vesna says.
‘I had to tell her that. That he was a good man.’
‘He really was.’
‘I suppose good people can do bad things.’
‘What do you mean?’
Marko has to look at her. But her face expresses the confusion in her voice. She really doesn’t know what he means.
‘Ladina,’ Marko says. ‘The camp.’ But even as he says this, he realises they are not talking about the same thing.
‘Is that you, Mladić?’
‘Yes, it is you old devil, what do you want?’
‘Three of my boys went missing near . . . and I want to find out what happened to them.’
‘I think they’re all dead.’
‘I’ve got one of their parents on to me about it. So I can tell them for certain they are gone?’
‘Yep. Certain. You have my word. By the way, how’s the family?’
‘Oh, not so bad thanks. How’s yours?’
‘They’re doing just fine, we’re managing pretty well.’
‘By the way, now I’ve got you on the line, we’ve got about twenty bodies of yours near the front and they’ve been stripped bare. We slung them into a mass grave, and now they’re stinking to high heaven. Any chance of you coming to pick them up? Because they really are becoming unbearable.’
Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić talks by phone to the head of the Croat Interior Ministry, 1992, in a recording played to journalist Misha Glenny, in The Fall of Yugoslavia
5 Ma
y 1995
Stovnik
A spring breeze hurries the clouds, and the light plays over Slatina’s apartment blocks; over stucco the colour of dirty skin, concrete balconies of mustard-yellow, rust-red and sticking-plaster pink. When a cloud darkens the estate, the blocks across the courtyard seem to lean over the playgrounds below. Then the sun returns, and the day stretches out again, keeping its promise of a long evening on the Kapija and the ‘Youth Day’ party. It will be the first time in five years the day has been celebrated on the square. The latest ceasefire has held for a month. Convoys of food and clothing have made it through and, watching the estate from the window over the sink, Marko peels potatoes delivered from Croatia, challenging himself with each stroke of the peeler to produce a thinner skin.
‘The war turned you into a housewife.’ Kemal passes through the kitchen in nothing but a towel.
‘And you an arsehole.’
Insults don’t feel as easy in Marko’s mouth as they did before he fucked Kemal’s girlfriend.
Kemal shuts the bathroom door. Marko is only cooking because his parents are visiting the black market at Babunovići, or Arizona, as everyone is calling the market now the Americans hold the road. Fish have started to arrive. They have bought four rainbow trout. There is enough gas to heat the water for Kemal’s bath. A little luck and the war might be over. Shouldn’t everyone be feeling happy? Maybe it is because they have been here before, but the end of war seems almost as frightening as the beginning.
The phone rings. He dries his hands and dashes into the lounge with the wet towel, tucking the receiver between his shoulder and chin.
‘Yes?’
‘Marko?’ It is Vesna. ‘Is this thing actually working?’
‘Yes,’ Marko says. ‘It’s working.’
‘Well?’ Vesna says.
‘Well what?’
‘Is he in?’
Marko peers down the hall to the bathroom door. It is closed. Water is running. Jon Bon Jovi sings ‘Living on A Prayer’.
‘He’s out.’
‘Oh,’ Vesna sounds disappointed. ‘I told him I’d call at three.’
‘I can take a message.’
‘Where is he?’
Marko sits down on the sofa and picks up a leaflet on the coffee table: Citizen Information: UNPROFOR in Stovnik and Surrounding Areas. A picture of a tank and an African-American soldier at a crossroads.
‘He’s gone to the market with my mother. In Babunovići.’
‘Babunovići?’
‘Arizona. The road is open.’
‘The Babunovići road is open?’
‘For the last three days.’
‘We haven’t got radio reception,’ Vesna says. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Well, it’s open.’
‘Then maybe Kemal could collect me? From my mother’s?’
‘What for?’
‘The Kapija. The party tonight. Tell him – ask him to come around seven thirty or something, will you?’
Ask him yourself, Marko thinks. Since Sarajevo, Marko and Vesna seem to speak even less. She hasn’t mentioned what happened in the bathroom of her father’s apartment. This phone call should be for him, about them.
‘Seven thirty,’ Marko says meekly.
He is about to put down the phone, when he hears Vesna’s small voice in the receiver and snatches it back to his ear.
‘Yes?’
‘How is he?’ Vesna says. ‘Is he still acting weird?’
‘He’s fine,’ Marko cuts her off. ‘I don’t know what everyone is worrying about.’
Boxing Day, 2004
Kao Lak
Kemal tells Anya to order anything she likes. On the house. Anya orders a filter coffee. Kemal asks the boy for Turkish. She watches the boy walk into the bar. A European family sit at a table on the veranda, an Asian couple at the next. It seems extraordinary that normal life goes on as she sits in front of a dead man.
‘Did you try coffee in Bosnia?’ Kemal asks her.
‘Of course.’ Beneath the table she can’t stop jogging her leg. Though the beach is warming up, she feels cold, and pulls the resort’s robe around her chest, tightening the belt, shifting uncomfortably in the seat of her swimming costume. He approached her on the walkway as she returned from the massage, and somehow she knew she hadn’t got away with it. But how does he know who she is?
Kemal pushes the cigarette packet across the table. ‘We have a saying – a coffee without a cigarette is like a mosque without a minaret.’
‘I don’t smoke.’
He nods and replaces the cigarette packet on the flickering cover of a magazine. It is something to do with motorbikes. This is the bar-owner’s table. His magazines. His cigarettes. A Russian thriller he has been reading. His hunting knife (or is it fish-gutting?).
Kemal briefly shakes his arms, like a dog throwing off water, then sets his elbows on the table and steeples his fingers. ‘My friends came to see me. Vesna. Bogdan. You met them in Stovnik.’
Anya nods.
‘They told me an English woman called Anya came from an organisation called Dignity Monitor. And Dignity Monitor publishes photographs of its employees online.’
‘I see.’
The boy brings the filter coffee with Kemal’s Turkish coffee, laying out a proper brass pot with a separate sugar bowl, a small cup, a saucer and a glass of water.
Kemal indicates Anya. ‘Another water?’
‘Thank you.’ Anya surprises herself by managing to smile at the waiter like a normal person in a normal situation.
‘But I wondered when I saw you hiding under the table in my room. Is this what they do at Dignity Monitor? Not very dignified.’ He tries to disguise his smile by drinking from the glass, but in the water his teeth are as big as a horse’s.
Anya picks up the milk jug, steadying it with both hands, and pours some into her coffee. ‘I’m sorry,’ she begins, but doesn’t know where she is going with it. The coffee is steaming hot, and the low morning sun is on the back of her neck.
Kemal waves her apology away, eyes scanning the beach before turning back to her. ‘How did you like Stovnik? I can’t tell you how much I miss it.’
Stovnik
The water has reached Marko’s feet. He steps back from the kitchen sink, and the heel of his sock makes a small plash in the warm puddle. At first, he thinks he has spilled something. He grabs a towel and starts to mop. But the puddle stretches beneath the kitchen table and the towel immediately soaks through. Walking around the table, he follows the water where it spreads on the tiles, over the threshold of the kitchen door, flowing in a thick and constant stream over the hallway parquet. The floors must slope gently towards the kitchen because, thank fuck, the water has streamed away from the lounge and its carpet.
He hammers on the bathroom door. ‘Kemal? What are you doing!?’
It gushes over his feet. His socks are heavy. He tries the handle and the door opens.
The water falls in curtains over the lip of the bath. Kemal floats like something brought to the head of a spring; his legs and chest a hairy moss, his penis a giant, blind worm. He holds himself still with the sides, eyes closed, the taps of the bath still running. Marko turns them off, and hits the stop button on the tape player.
Kemal opens his eyes, a man waking from a deep sleep. ‘I was listening to that!’
‘You’ve flooded the fucking kitchen!’
‘What?’
Kemal shifts, sending another curtain of water over the sides of the bath. He smiles. ‘Four years of water shortages, then you get too much.’
‘Fucking maniac.’ Marko leaves the bathroom to find the towels, and clean up the mess. The flood uses every towel in the airing cupboard. The parquet will be stained for days. He strains the mop, empties the bucket, strains the mop, empties the bucket. What would Kemal say? What would he do if he knew? What would he do if Marko told him every last detail? How she had wanted him to fuck her on her knees?
He is down to the last
corners of the kitchen when he stops to rest on the handle, and sees his friend, across the lounge and through the open door of the bedroom, naked and sawing his crotch with a towel.
Everyone had been treading on eggshells around Kemal, too afraid to say anything. Fatigue, his mother called it – a little shell-shock. His father said it was all completely normal. They just had to give Kemal space, time and their understanding.
Kemal took his space and time at the house in Kletovo. He said he was doing the garden there. He would return covered in soil and earth, using all the hot water for his baths.
In the bedroom Marko finds Kemal putting on the jacket of the new tracksuit his parents bought from the Arizona market; a Kappa, pearl with a lime-green stripe down the arms and legs.
‘It looks good,’ Marko says. But Kemal has lost so much weight the tracksuit is about a size too big.
Kemal looks into the mirror and adjusts the sleeves. ‘Top 5 Bundesliga goal scorers, 1993?’
‘Kuntz,’ Marko says. ‘Chapuisat, Heesen, Bäron and Kirsten.’ He sits down on the bottom bunk. The back of his head rests against the frame of Kemal’s bed. He is too tall now to easily fit beneath it. With his back to Marko, Kemal puts his left foot on the window ledge and begins to tie the laces of a white trainer. Another gift from Marko’s parents.
‘You’re going to the Kapija tonight?’ Marko asks.
‘What for?’
‘The big Youth Day thing. Everyone’s going.’
Kemal swaps legs, and ties the second trainer. ‘I’ll probably go to Kletovo, work on the garden.’
‘But the curfew’s lifted,’ Marko reminds him. ‘Everyone’s going.’
Kemal straightens up and appears to be staring out of the window at something Marko cannot see.
‘What happened with the bath?’ Marko says.
‘I fell asleep.’ He crosses into the kitchen, opens the tool drawer and starts to rifle through it.
‘You feel tired?’ Marko asks.
‘Tired?’
‘In general. Do you think you’re exhausted?’
