Stillness of the Sea

by Nicol Ljubic

  “Why did you choose this particular trial?”

  He watches her as she lights a cigarette, pulling up the collar of her blouse to shelter the flame from the wind.

  “Just chance. It could’ve been another one.”

  She clutches her shoulders and is clearly feeling the cold, so he asks if she would like to go back inside. She looks around, and then asks, “Why don’t we go somewhere to eat?”

  They collect their jackets from the lockers. She pulls a woollen hat down over her ears and pushes her hands into her pockets.

  After wandering the streets for a while, they find a small Chinese restaurant. The waitress escorts them to the only free table, next to an aquarium full of energetic, brightly phosphorescent fish. At the next table, a man in a suit reads a newspaper written in Chinese script, while bending over a small bowl. Aisha pulls a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from her pocket and puts them on the table.

  “Berlin is great,” she says. “I went to live there once, years ago. An aunt of mine lives there, in Kreuzberg.”

  “How long were you living in Germany?”

  “Seven years, from ’92 to ’99.”

  “And then?”

  “We all went back to Bosnia. My sister and I would have liked to stay on, but my parents weren’t happy. We were living in a hostel for refugees, the four of us in one room. My father couldn’t find a job and my mother was cleaning people’s houses. We had our own house in Bosnia. My father was a teacher there, and my mother ran a small shop. They would never have got used to living in Germany.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “In Sarajevo, or rather, my parents are there. I’ve lived in London for the last year.”

  Aisha picks up the teaspoon to push the tea bag down into the hot water. When she lets go, it floats back to the surface.

  “Have you ever been to Bosnia?” she asks.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Bosnia is a lovely country, you know. There are mountains and high plateaus, lots of rivers and deep gorges. Not many people know that.”

  A small elongated fish, with grey, black-spotted skin, emerges from under a stone, first snaking across the fine gravel and then climbing. The waitress sets their table with plates and a hotplate. She serves two spoonfuls of rice onto each plate. He nods his thanks.

  The snake-like fish has disappeared. He can’t see it anywhere. Perhaps it has crawled back inside its little cave under the stone.

  “I still haven’t quite understood why you’re here,” she says.

  He raises his glass, drinks a mouthful.

  “My father’s family comes from Karlovac,” he then says. “They were there when the war broke out. But at the time, I didn’t think the war particularly interesting.”

  “Do you have a guilty conscience?”

  “No. Well, maybe. Yes. I don’t know.”

  He observes her as she lifts her fork, hesitates for a moment, opens her mouth and slowly begins to chew.

  “Has it occurred to you that Šimić could be innocent?” he asks.

  She puts the fork down on her plate, straightens her body and looks at him. “Is that a serious question?”

  “In court, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. It could be that he …”

  “Šimić is a bastard, a criminal who deliberately led these people to their death. He’s guilty, just like so many others who haven’t been brought to trial and still live in the houses they occupied after they chased the true owners away, or killed them. Even if it can’t be proven in court that Šimić did it, which would be crazy, he’d still be guilty. He knows that and everybody else in the courtroom knows it too. So, to you it’s perhaps just another procedure, a legal process with special rules. Rules which say that he’s not a criminal, but an alleged criminal. What’s ‘alleged’ supposed to mean, anyway? Possible? A possible criminal? And are all the others, too, the even guiltier ones – if it’s possible to grade guilt like that – the guiltiest, those who are worse than everyone else? Do you have any idea how it offends me that the dead are being counted and the numbers compared, as if it were a competition? Like, this one has killed three people, but that one has killed a hundred, and the very worst of them all has killed a hundred thousand. What you people are doing is offering these men a measure to use in their world, something to brag to each other about – to climb up that perverse hierarchy of theirs. Comparisons are made all the way up to the top people, so Karadžić was the worst, or perhaps Milošević, and then comes Mladić, and then one way or another you establish that Šimić only ranks one hundred and forty on the scale of evil. Why, he hasn’t killed anyone with his own hands. And of course the whole lot of them are only alleged criminals until the three judges decide that they’re guilty. Can’t you see how absurd all this is? What do these judges know? Where were they when hundreds of thousands of people were being pushed out of their homes and chased away, when people were murdered, children and pregnant women among them, and when the others, whose bodies were still alive, realised that their whole existence was ruined, their homeland lost and with it their families, their friends, their faith and any chance of a happy life? At that time, these lawyers and judges were sitting in front of their TV screens, maybe taking an interest, maybe not. Anyway, now they sit on the courtroom bench and decide whether the people who are responsible for everything that happened are guilty and should be punished or not, as the case might be. Proven beyond reasonable doubt, isn’t that the phrase? And so perhaps in the end it will be enough to show an entry in a hospital record which states that a certain Zlatko Šimić was admitted to such-and-such hospital at the time of the crime. Because it’s written down on a piece of paper, it becomes a fact, as opposed to hearsay. People are subjective and likely to be guided by their emotions, and their statements and recollections aren’t verifiable, because they haven’t taken note of the exact date and time of day, or get muddled about which day was which. Can you order your memories by the day they happened? There are quite a few people around who don’t even know which day their parents died. You know, there’s one thing I’ll never understand. Why must they always doubt what the witnesses have to say? Why do they have to make people fumble for words in front of everyone else? ‘Are you certain that three men were present? Or were there perhaps only two? And, besides, you have stated he wore a black hat, but now you say his hat was dark brown.’ Why should it matter what colour the hat was? These people have experienced it all, watched with their own eyes when women and children were murdered, heard them scream and felt the fear of death, but still they’re expected to be quite certain whether the hat was black or dark brown. And details like that might well decide the outcome of the trial and determine if Šimić is guilty or not guilty. To my mind, it’s cynical.”

  He prods his portion of rice with his fork, finding it hard to meet her eyes. He senses that the tension in her body is giving way; she’s no longer sitting upright and her shoulders are drooping. He looks at her as she stares absently into the aquarium.

  He looks at it, too. The snake-like fish has come out of its cavity, just a bit, before calmly stretching out on the gravel. He can’t bear this lassitude, he wants the fish to get moving, but doesn’t know why he finds it so hard to sit watching while the strange fish just lies there, pretending to be dead. He observes it and tries to get eye contact with it, although he has no idea if it’s possible to do that with a fish. He has no idea of how the world is perceived through fish optics, especially the world beyond the aquarium. Perhaps everything outside it seems blurred. Perhaps he should knock on the glass. Fish are meant to be sensitive to vibrations in the water. But it doesn’t even twitch when he knocks. He taps the glass a few more times with the knuckle of his index finger, but there’s still no reaction from the fish. Then he notices the look of irritation on Aisha’s face, and finds the situation uncomfortable. What is she thinking? That he isn’t interested in what she has just said?

  She glances at her watch. “They’v
e already started. We should get going.” She waves to the waitress.

  The public gallery is half full. Aisha goes to a seat in a row at the rear. She puts the headphones on at once, while he takes in the stillness of the room, a cough here and there, a throat cleared and, filling the air, the monotonous drone of the headphones. He looks at Aisha, who is next to him. She sits strangely upright, even a little stiffly, her hands resting on her thighs and her eyes fixed on the glass screen as if entranced. She might even stop breathing, he thinks, so rigid does she look.

  She is very different from Ana. Not so tall, her round face fuller and her body less finely boned, the only real similarity is her dark hair and the way she has pushed some strands into place behind her ears. Although she sits so still, she is noticeably restless; a slight, rapid quivering starts from somewhere inside her and moves through her body in waves, as if opening her mouth would be all she needed to let the tension out. He fears that any moment now she will turn to him and ask why he’s staring at her. What’s wrong? But he feels sure he isn’t the reason why she is upset, but rather that this place makes her tremble. Perhaps she has some personal stake in the trial.

  It strikes him that he has never before wondered about the source of Ana’s inner calm, a calm that has fascinated him from the first time they met. He remembers Ana reading in the theatre cloakroom, the picture of stillness. But that sense of her being at peace with herself baffles him. It doesn’t fit. Perhaps it wasn’t inner peace, but tiredness. Had she just been very tired that evening, when they met for the first time?

  And he recalls wanting to know about the bombing of Belgrade and asking her if she hadn’t thought of leaving the city at the time. She replied, “Everyone here asks me that. Sure, I could’ve left Belgrade, but I simply didn’t fancy going. Perhaps it sounds odd, but that’s how it was. To live in Belgrade at the time wasn’t safe, but I was so tired. Perhaps that’s the reason. I was simply tired and kept thinking that this can’t go on much longer, or else there’ll be no one left.”

  Aisha watches him, at least she has turned her head towards him and seems to be looking at him, but he isn’t sure if she really is. She says nothing. And he doesn’t know what to say. Their eyes lock briefly, then she looks away and stares again at the courtroom behind the glass.

  For the first time, he imagines that Ana is sitting next to him, here in this place. Suddenly he can see it all. He would have walked up the stairs just a step or two behind her, he would have handed her a set of headphones before pointing to a row with free places and ushered her gently towards one of the seats with his hand on her shoulder. He would have helped her with the headphones and sat down next to her. They would have shared the entire experience. Would she support her father with daughterly tenderness or would she be furious with him? Despite being desperately anxious to work it out, he doesn’t feel sure. Would he have touched her? Perhaps he might have put his hand on hers, just very lightly, without squeezing it, so that she could sense his warmth, his presence. He would show her that he’s standing by her, supporting her. Not to encourage her on all points, in no way could he claim that it was unjust for her father to be behind that glass screen, or that her father was a truly loveable man, or that he, for one, didn’t trust the witnesses. He could not say or do anything to suggest that he believes her father to be innocent.

  Did she believe in her father’s innocence? What would have been her reason for coming with him to The Hague? Would it be to learn the truth? Would she trust the witness statements about her father? How much did she actually know of what took place place in Višegrad at the time?

  In his vision of Ana and himself, he sees the pair of them sitting side by side in silence. And afterwards, out in the street together, they would talk about other things. Perhaps he would ask her if she’d like a walk by the sea or if she’s hungry – something like that.

  How would you feel seeing your own father in there, behind a pane of glass, and knowing full well that everybody took him for a criminal and wondered what kind of human being could do the things he did? Maybe some people are speculating about the criminal’s family and how they’ve reacted to his crime. He has turned them into victims. This is the real change to his family. Victimised, they will spend the rest of their lives in the perpetrator’s shadow. Can anyone forgive that?

  It would be so much easier for him, had she ever expressed some doubts about her father, had she never created that image of her loving Dad. If only she had told him that he was given to outbursts of rage, as one of his neighbours has put on record. And that he could be unfair, and her mother, too often, was the target. The neighbour described a party where she contradicted him on some point and he shouted at her in front of everyone. It was known that he expected to be waited on, to be served his food. And if he wanted the salt, she would fetch it from the house. Why didn’t Ana tell him about any of this? Her silence has put him in the position of prosecutor, who in the end will shatter the untarnished world she has defended for so long. He would tell her that her father is not a good man, whatever she believes. He would have to point out that a man who leads women and children to their death cannot be full of love. She picked him for this role – picked someone who, at the time, had been so far away – of all people, someone who had led another life in another world. It was downright wicked of her to demand that he should deliberate on moral questions, talk about conscience and claim for himself, as she must see it, the right to make judgements without knowing what had happened, without having been there at the time, without knowing her father and without really knowing her. She would feel attacked by him. His only other option is silence. But how can he stay silent in the face of all that has happened? If she regarded him as uninvolved, this might explain her behaviour when she finally told him, standing by the bookshelf while he sat on the bed. It could be why she didn’t come to him, didn’t sit down next to him and put her arms round him, didn’t kiss him or even hold his hand, didn’t want to talk about it and didn’t cry as you’d expect of someone who had carried this burden for nine months. You would think it would all have suddenly come pouring out, that she would have wept uncontrollably when the sadness she’d bottled up inside her finally spilled out into the open. You would have expected her to scream, hammer her fists on the wall, tear the books from the shelf and then run from the room, leaving him to hear the front door slam a little later. That would have been easier for him: he could have taken her in his arms, hugged her tight and held her wrists down to stop her from hitting out. He could have pressed her face to his chest and freed her cheeks from strands of damp hair. He could have run after her, caught up with her in the street, grabbed her wrist as she ran and pulled her close, and, though she might well have fought him at first, she would have then clung to him and he would have wrapped her in his coat. They would have stood there while people walked past them, holding each other until he finally said, “Come, let’s go now.”

  Ana looked at him. Searching his memory, he tries to visualise her hands as they were at the time she stood in front of the bookshelf, but it’s impossible, because he simply cannot escape the sensation of meeting her gaze, her cool, clear gaze, so hostile it paralysed him. He retains the image of her eyes, nothing else, as if they were detached from the rest of her body. He dwells on this from time to time. Was she not at least holding onto the bookshelf? He’s not sure, but thinks not and has instead come to believe that she stood there, in her separate space, upright and grounded in herself.

  When Ana left the room, he got up hesitatingly. He saw the old edition of King Lear on the bookshelf, the book she had given him on one of their first evenings together and in which he had seen her father’s writing for the first time. He stood by the bookshelf. One step closer to the desk and he would be face to face with her father’s photograph.

  He went over to the window and looked out. The woman on the third floor of the building opposite was standing in the kitchen with her back to him, opening cupboard doors, presumably lookin
g for something. Then she turned round, stood still for a moment as if lost in her own kitchen, before walking away and disappearing from sight. He heard someone’s footsteps in the courtyard and the clatter of a dustbin lid.

  The flat was quiet. He didn’t know where Ana was. He hadn’t heard the front door go, so she could only be in the bathroom or the kitchen. What could she be doing? More footsteps in the yard, the person who had taken rubbish down must be walking back. No more sounds. Nothing moved. The kitchen across the way was still empty. A cupboard door hung open; the woman must have forgotten to close it.

  He turned to the wall next to the desk and glanced at Šimić. Seeing that face was hard, because he felt betrayed. It had all been in vain, his vision of how they would sit together in harmony at the garden table, his hope of discovering in this man something of what he, as a son, had always missed. And he had been so grateful for Ana.

  He has wished so often for something to remember her by, something of hers that he could touch. Apart from a small stone, he has nothing. No book, no clothes left in his flat, no object that she had given him. She had never given him a gift, though she had told him to keep the stone after he had spotted it on her bookshelf and asked what it meant. Surely gifts are part of loving someone? He had been bringing her things all the time: white or red roses, books he had wanted her to read. He had even written her a poem. He had always hoped she would surprise him with a small present, just once. A token of love. But, in the end, he had nothing to remember her by, except his own memories of her and the taste of Sarma.

  He walked past the kitchen, where nothing had been tidied away; two plates were still on the table, and the mugs and scattered crumbs. The two chairs had been pulled back a little. There was coffee in the pot, cold by now. He put on his shoes and coat, and wound a scarf around his neck. The bathroom door was shut. He held his breath, trying to listen. Not a sound. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened the door and left her flat.