I barely left the flat, even to buy food. Instead I ate what the ghosts cooked. They filled my kitchen with the smell of lamb frying in garlic and paprika; then they got distracted, by an argument about politics or ingredients, and burnt the bottoms of my pans. I did sometimes go out, to get things they had forgotten: tomatoes, an egg. But those times were getting rarer. The light was too bright, the people too solid; their voices reached me from a long way away, like sounds heard underwater. I preferred to devote myself to the ghosts: their recipes and whims, their stories.
So I was there when Lejla walked in. Though barely more than a child, she was visibly pregnant. She leant against the living room wall, just inside the threshold, holding her heavy belly in her hands.
‘Pass that cushion, dear? Ouf, that’s better. At my age a body has too many bones and they all get closer to the surface.’
It was Tarik’s grandmother again, clutching her eternal coffee pot. ‘That poor child,’ she said. ‘She’s a Croat, see the dinky gold cross? It’s a wonder she held onto it. I’ve just this minute been chatting to a woman who was locked up with her in Banjaluka. She’s making chicken liver pilaf if you want some later.’
This was Lejla’s story, as told to me by Tarik’s grandmother, who heard it from the ghost in my kitchen, who saw it with her own eyes.
She was a nice girl from a good Croat family, who didn’t decide to get out of the newly declared Republic of Serbia quickly enough. So she was separated from them and held in a makeshift prison camp next to the police station.
At night there were rapes. Guards with flashlights, or just torches made of lighted paper, searched for anyone who was young and female.
They used a knife to cut her dress open. Then they raped her many times in one night. She was thirteen years old. When she became pregnant they continued to rape her nightly.
Eventually they put her in a train waggon meant for cattle but crowded with Croat women and girls. The train travelled south to the foot of Vlašić mountain. When it ran out of track, buses took them the rest of the way up. Lejla joined an interminable line of people: heads down, shuffling, sometimes stumbling, but moving slowly towards free Bosnia, or so they hoped. The road cut into the side of the mountain was narrow, and there were corpses on the rocks below. At some point in the night she tripped and joined them.
In my living room, she – Lejla – listened shyly to the music that came from Tarik, the handless guitar-playing boy. She moved towards him so slowly she did not seem to be moving at all. But she was.
‘Jimmy Page,’ she said quietly.
He frowned. ‘John Paul Jones.’ He had a memorable voice for a boy: gravelly, smoke-scarred.
‘Is he better?’
‘I prefer bass guitar.’
‘I do too.’
It wasn’t long before the Muslim boy with the shell-broken hands was deep in conversation with the raped Croat girl.
She did tell him some of what had happened to her. Shutting her eyes, touching the raised bumps of the wallpaper with one hand. But mostly they talked about rock music. He was enthusiastic about the electric guitar of Plavi Orkestar; she giggled. ‘They dance like chickens,’ she said. ‘They hug turkeys in their videos.’ She mentioned the plangent music of Crvena Jabuka; he thought it was wet. ‘You may discord,’ he said politely. But she did not discord with him, not at all.
I watched her a lot, I admit. She was so young. I worried about how she would cope with motherhood: how could a child look after a child? Sometimes I forgot that they were both already dead.
I stopped work on the maritime museum’s website. When I was not watching Lejla and Tarik, I went into the kitchen and helped the older ghosts cook: I peeled their potatoes, I rubbed flour and lard together to make pastry. Or I sat at the breakfast bar and listened to them talk. All the ghosts were keenly interested in the search for General Mladić, the Bosnian-born Serb who had led an army through their country; most of them were angry at how long it was taking.
‘He’s in Serbia.’
‘He’s not in Serbia at all, he’s in Montenegro.’
‘He’s escaped Europe altogether by now.’
‘That butchering peasant.’
‘What occupies him these days?’
‘He used to keep bees.’
‘No doubt he still jeers at his goats.’
‘The ones he named Major and Mitterand and Kohl?’
‘Yes, after those Western politicians he so despised.’
‘His health too must be much on his mind.’
‘He’s old by now.’
‘So would I be, but for him.’
‘So would we all be.’
At first the ghosts were easily distracted from the manhunt. They compared the size of their gardens, or the size of the peppers they had grown in their gardens. They had aimed to sit on a porch swing through summer evenings, but into their modest ambitions had blundered Mladić. He had shelled their houses and mined their vegetable patches. He had said: ‘I shall be vindicated by history.’ They were his dead.
Then, last Thursday, I came downstairs to find all the ghosts clustered round the television, jostling each other for the best view. As I watched, the screen fizzed and spat, and my husband appeared. It was definitely him: his pointy elbows, moley hair. The ghosts nudged me slyly, but then the picture flickered and Jon was replaced by a man with a polka-dot tie and greased-back hair. ‘Kruno Standeker, the journalist,’ Tarik’s grandmother whispered to me. ‘He was killed by a road mine near Mostar seventeen years ago.’
‘Ratko Mladić,’ intoned Standeker, ‘was born in Bosnia in 1942. He went to military school in Serbia and entered the Yugoslav army, rising to the rank of Colonel General. When Bosnia declared independence in 1992, he blockaded the city of Sarajevo and shelled it for four years. In 1994, he allegedly ordered the genocide of over eight thousand Muslims in Srebrenica.’
The screen filled with soundless black-and-white footage. The war was over, and Mladić – ears sticking out beneath his peaked cap – was retreating to Serbia, where he lived in army barracks, going openly to football matches and horse races. Then the political atmosphere turned against him and he was on the run in Han Pijesak and New Belgrade, moving every two or three weeks between housing estates whose walls were covered with spray-paint vampires and signatures like coils of barbed wire. Serbia put a price on his head; international arrest warrants were drawn up. He left the overpopulated cities and went to live in the country, in a village of plum tree orchards and pepper fields, in a farmhouse made from clay bricks. He had mistaken boredom for safety; he thought no one would look for him there. Even so, he went out only at night. It was as if he had become one of the graffiti vampires from the housing estate walls, as if light petrified him.
For as long as he could remember, Mladić had been a skilful chess player, winning games across the length and breadth of Bosnia: in prison camps, at military headquarters, on the front lines. Now he sat before the chessboard, hour after hour, while an invisible foreigner, a man with electronic eyes and ears, chased his pieces across the black and white squares.
Mladić lived, fortified by obscurity, with cousin Branko, his Glorious Defender: his castle, of course. But most of his pawns – the army, the police, the secret services – had already been taken, the treacherous bastards, they’d gone over to the other side. And now his queen was under threat, his wife Bosiljka suddenly detained and questioned; harassed, beset, while he, helpless, fumed. Even his son – his slick-wheeled, Dacia-driving knight – was closely watched: it was too dangerous to see him much.
The screen spurted into Technicolor, revealing a woman sitting upright at a virtual desk. ‘DAWN RAID,’ she reported, and the ghosts inhaled a collective gasp. They’d been channel-surfing since the news broke – they knew the story off by heart, in all its permutations – but this was their favourite part. ‘MEN IN MASKS MOV
E IN,’ they mouthed in perfect synchronicity with the woman on the screen, working their mandibles hard. Ten plain-clothed policemen or twenty special officers, armed or unarmed, depending which broadcaster you picked. Mladić was on his way to the garden for a pre-dawn stroll, or he was sitting in his front room wearing a tracksuit. He was handcuffed or he was not handcuffed; he was made to sit in the yard or he was taken into the house. He definitely offered his captors some home-made plum brandy. ‘Checkmate,’ he conceded politely. ‘Which one of you is the foreigner?’
I started to understand.
‘High-tech surveillance and tracking techniques were behind this operation,’ the reporter was saying primly. ‘The British and American intelligence services have been formally thanked for their assistance. Also Bakir Izetbegović, the Muslim member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, has announced that the arrest was completed with the support of Bosnian security agencies.’
Was that what my husband had been doing? Hunting down the butcher of Srebrenica, bringing the man who called himself God to justice for crimes against humanity? Of course – it must be. Why else would the ghosts have come here?
All day long my guests were jubilant: they twittered and squeaked. They wanted a banquet, a celebration: they wanted, when it came down to it, a wake. Most of them also wanted to keep watching television, so although I’d have liked to see if Jon reappeared, I offered to help in the kitchen.
The first thing we made was bosanski lonac, as this would take five hours to cook. We layered chunks of lamb and potato with vegetables including cabbage and peppers, added garlic cloves and chopped parsley, seasoned it generously, and poured white wine and stock over the top. I turned on the gas and brought the oven up to temperature, then placed the stew carefully on the bottom shelf.
The ghosts showed me how to make sarmas while the stew was cooking, rolling grape leaves around tiny portions of rice and meat. Once or twice someone opened the oven, and the kitchen filled with the warm, heavy smell of lamb and the floury sourness of half-cooked potatoes. Whenever that happened, cigarette-smoking soldiers appeared in the kitchen to ask how long it would be. The cooks shooed them out. They made baklava ahead of time: spreading honey onto filo pastry and adding rosewater to crushed pistachio nuts. The air filled with a back-of-the-throat sweetness and another smell I couldn’t identify, which made me uneasy.
I went into the living room to get away from this smell, and also to check what was happening on the news. It’s a good thing I did, because soon after that there was an almighty crack as the oven exploded in the kitchen. I remember being lifted off the ground by the force of the explosion, and the sound of glass smashing; then nothing until the siren-scream and epileptic blue lights of the ambulance.
So that’s it. I am in bed in a private room in Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. I have concussion and two broken ribs, and the doctors put me on a drip when I first came in because I was badly emaciated. They said that firemen had been over the wreckage of my kitchen and found nothing but a few pieces of an empty pot in the oven; they suggested I had barely eaten for weeks or months. I know they wanted me to concede that I let the gas build up to dangerous levels on purpose, triggering the explosion in a cry for help. But I survived because I was in the living room not the kitchen, and gas doesn’t explode by itself. It must have been a spark from one of the soldiers’ cigarettes: they kept looking in the oven to see if the stew was done.
When I pointed this out to the doctors, they said it might help if I wrote down what I remembered of the last few months. I’ve been happy while doing this. The ghosts were always telling me their stories, so I think it is what they would have wanted, too.
And now I’m told my husband will be coming back from Bosnia soon. One thing is certain: Jon won’t see the funny side of me being the one to get blown up. When he goes away he says be safe, by which he means safer than normal, because if something happens to me he won’t be here.
Barcelona
Philip Langeskov
For their tenth wedding anniversary Daniel had arranged for them to spend a weekend in Barcelona, hoping to surprise Isla both with the fact that he had remembered at all and with a reminder of their honeymoon, which had also been spent in Barcelona. The idea struck him a few weeks before the actual date and it immediately felt like an important thing to do. In order to arrange accommodation at such short notice – it was the weekend of a crucial Barça v Real derby game and the hotels were full – it had been necessary to contact an old friend of Isla’s, Josep, who lived in the city, and who Daniel had met once or twice in London, and who had, on those one or two occasions, said that if they ever wanted to visit they should let him know and they could stay in his apartment, which was near the centre, while he would vacate and stay with friends for the duration of their trip. Daniel would rather not have done this – Josep and Isla had had a fling once, years ago, when they were students, long before he and Isla had met – but he could think of no alternative if the trip was to come off as he had imagined it.
Planning everything out in his head brought Daniel a great deal of satisfaction. He could not wait to see Isla’s reaction, both to the whole event and to the little things he had lined up for when they were there: small things mostly, like coming upon a certain view at a certain time of day, or appearing to end up by accident at a bar they had got drunk in on their last visit. It would be such a surprise for her, all of it. And such a boost for them, as a couple. They hadn’t done anything like this for years. Of course, Daniel swore Josep to secrecy and had no reason to suspect anything until, when he told Isla, one evening after work, the two of them drinking in the kitchen, that he had booked a trip for the coming weekend, the weekend of their wedding anniversary, she reacted not with shock or delight, but with calm assurance.
‘Oh darling,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I can’t. I have something on. I’m sorry. You should have said.’
‘What do you have on? There’s nothing on the calendar.’ As he said this, Daniel gestured to the back of the kitchen door. He was sure he had checked, sure he had looked closely; he remembered doing it, as if it were yesterday.
‘Yes there is,’ she said. ‘Look.’
Sure enough, when he looked again, there was something – the scrawl of Isla’s tiny handwriting – in one of the little boxes. He had to peer closely to make out the words: Conference (Warwick).
‘When did you put this in?’ he said.
‘Weeks ago,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I mentioned it.’
‘Weeks ago? But I checked.’
‘You can’t have done, honey,’ she said.
Daniel didn’t quite know what to make of it, this apparent blindness on his part, and could only blurt out: ‘But it’s our wedding anniversary.’
‘I know. I know. And it’s important.’ Isla spoke slowly, in what Daniel recognised as her serious voice. She really wanted him to know that this was as important to her as it was to him. She ran her hand along his sleeve. ‘Love,’ she said.
He didn’t respond.
‘Love,’ she said again, looking directly into his eyes. ‘We could do something another time, couldn’t we?’
Daniel was conscious that he was on the verge of sulking. It was a struggle to decide whether it could be justified or not, whether a case could be made. The importance of the weekend, the value that he had attached to it in his mind, swirled around him. From his perspective, he knew, its significance had become outlandishly inflated. It was, after all, only a couple of days, but to Daniel those days had come to seem possessed of a precipitous, life-altering power. And all that thinking he had done, all that imagining: places to go, restaurants, moments to remember. It was, now he came to think of it, a reaffirmation of his commitment to Isla and he wanted it to be recognised as such. He hadn’t even considered that it might go wrong, or, if he had, he had done
so in a minor key: a bad meal in a supposedly good restaurant, being ripped off by a taxi driver, losing something. In the end, he decided not to speak. He just folded his arms and looked at his feet.
‘Love,’ Isla said again. She had moved round to stand in front of him. ‘We can talk about it later, but I have to get ready. I’m meeting Grace, remember?’
This might be the limit, he thought, not for the fact, but for the timing, the moment when sulking becomes inevitable. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Just for a drink.’
‘But.’ He was about to gesture once more towards the calendar, then realised that it would be ridiculous. He knew everything about this drink with Grace. Isla had told him, had invited him, even implored him to come. ‘We’ll talk about it later?’ He hadn’t intended to make it sound like a question, but that’s how it came out.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, taking her glass upstairs. ‘We will talk about it later. Promise.’
After Isla had gone out, Daniel spent the evening mooching round the flat. He couldn’t settle on a single spot. He lay on the couch, on the bed, he sprawled in the armchair in the study. As he did so, he mused over everything that had transpired. Josep must have told her, he thought. The dirty bastard. He had half a mind to ring him up and ask him, but decided against it. What did it matter, really? Josep was Isla’s friend, not his; there should be no surprise as to where his loyalty might lie. At the kitchen table, on his laptop, Daniel looked into the possibility of changing flights. There was a fee, but it could, as far as he understood the website, be accomplished. Fine, he thought. They could simply go another time. It wasn’t a big deal, nothing to get upset about. He opened a bottle of beer and congratulated himself on his equanimity. In fact, the more he thought about it the more he became convinced that another weekend would be better. They could stay in a proper hotel, for one thing.
The Best British Short Stories 2014 Page 19
