The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  Harry dried his hands and picked up the photo of Patrick, studying his face in the light of the art nouveau lamps on the wall.

  ‘Wasn’t he here a couple of weeks ago?’ He frowned. ‘Yes, I actually do remember him. He talked about his wife.’

  I coughed so hard the whisky rose up and stung my nose.

  ‘About his wife?’

  ‘He said he had a wonderful wife.’ Harry smiled, mashing slices of lime and mint leaves into a glass. He had a way of crushing ice by placing it in the palm of one hand and then hitting it with the pestle like a baseball bat. ‘He was longing to go home to New York, said he was sick of travelling. He said they were hoping to have a baby. He longed to have a family of his own.’ He added rum and soda, dropped in a few ice cubes, and set the glasses on the bar to be picked up by a waiter. ‘I told him to go for it. Having a kid is the best thing that can happen to a man. Everything else pales in comparison. I have four of my own. The youngest are twins.’

  He wiped his hands and slid the picture back across the bar.

  ‘So you’re out of luck, honey.’

  I looked down and met Patrick’s eye, letting a lock of my hair fall forward to form a curtain around us. It was time to stop. I couldn’t keep chasing his shadow. It was all well and good for him to sit in a bar and talk about me, but if he really loved me, he wouldn’t be risking everything for a story, would he? I wanted to go back home to my own life, building fictional worlds that were torn down after the last performance.

  ‘I know,’ I told him quietly, running my finger along his jaw line. ‘I know that you’ve taken the most difficult path again, and you know how I know that?’ I pounded my fist on the bar with each word. ‘Because. You. Are. A. Difficult fucked up kind of person.’

  I drained my glass. When I looked up, the bottles on the wall began to sway.

  ‘What about this?’ I said, leaning forward so I was practically lying across the bar. ‘A man goes to Paris. He’s longing for home. He says that he’s coming home, and by home I mean New York. We’re talking about New York City, in the US of A. You’re married. So tell me this, why would a guy think up such a thing?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ replied Harry, reaching for the rum bottle.

  Of course his name wasn’t Harry. That was an absurd notion that came to me after the second or third whisky. The idea that Harry was immortal, just like the bar he’d opened almost a century ago. Europe’s first cocktail bar. That’s what it said on the back of a little red book lying on the counter, listing the drinks offered and boasting that it was here that the Bloody Mary had been invented.

  ‘He said that he’d done something awful,’ continued the bartender whose name was not Harry.

  ‘I know, I know. That’s why he came here, to dig up the dirt on slave labour so he could save the whole fucking world. But he can’t.’

  The bartender was stirring another drink with a swizzle stick.

  ‘I thought he’d been unfaithful or something like that. The guy looked really unhappy. But you know what he’d done?’

  I shook my head, making the room sway even more. The bartender smiled.

  ‘He’d borrowed the baby money. He said it was like stealing from the baby’s future, and he needed to pay it back. He had to finish the job before he could go home again.’

  Something got stuck in my throat and I coughed and swallowed while the words danced inside me. He had only borrowed the money. He was planning to come back. He wasn’t blowing me off.

  And then the rest sank in: That’s why he hadn’t come home. He couldn’t look me in the eye and say that he’d squandered our child’s money on a story that he’d never finished.

  ‘I told him to take it easy,’ said the bartender. ‘It’s not money that matters when it comes to those little tykes. It’s love. You have to love them to death. That’s the only thing that counts.’

  I reached for my glass, but missed, and it crashed to the floor between the feet of several British football fans. ‘Sshorry,’ I said.

  The bartender swept up the glass.

  ‘You want some good advice?’ He pointed at the picture of Patrick. ‘Forget that guy. He’s married. He’s going to have kids. You’re out of luck.’

  I picked up the photo. My drink had spilled across Patrick’s face, continued in a trickle across the dark wood, and then dripped onto my lap.

  ‘I think it’s time to get you a cab,’ said the bartender whose name wasn’t Harry.

  The door was ajar, letting in a strip of light across the floor. I opened the door and entered a passageway that led to yet another room, much bigger than the small hotel room I now realized had merely been my waiting room. Daylight flooded in from a row of skylights. Patrick was sitting at a desk in the middle of the room, bending over his computer.

  ‘Are we paying for all this?’ I asked. ‘Did you know all along that these rooms were here?’

  ‘I had to have somewhere I could work,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were here?’

  ‘They’ve found the child,’ he said, and I knew he was talking about the infant whose mother had died in the hospital in Los Cristianos.

  ‘Is it alive?’ I wanted to ask, but then Patrick was gone. I went from room to room, looking for him, and the alarm began wailing because the building was about to sink into the river. I ran back upstairs because I’d forgotten something. Benji was there, and Duncan the choreographer. The work was going on, even though we were about to drown, and ice-cold water filled one floor after another as the alarm howled and wailed.

  I woke with a start, tangled up in the sheet. The blanket had fallen to the floor, and the night was black outside the window. There was a feeling from the dream that I wanted to hold onto. Something I’d forgotten and needed to remember. The alarm was still sounding, and I realized it was my cell. It was flashing and screaming from the nightstand. The time on the display was 01.23 a.m.

  ‘It’s about time I got hold of one of you. But I don’t understand why he hasn’t called.’ It was Patrick’s mother. ‘Is it something we did? Is it his father again? Why is it so difficult to make a few plans?’

  ‘Hi. Is that you?’ I said, sitting up straight.

  Something must have happened for my mother-in-law to be calling in the middle of the night. Then I realized that it wasn’t night where she was. I pictured the light-coloured leather sofa in the living room where they sat and ate all their meals when they were alone. The dining-room table was set only when they had dinner guests. Silver candelabras and floral napkins and four-course dinners. Eleanor Cornwall always tried a bit too hard.

  ‘I have to know now because I don’t have the energy to do all the cooking myself. I need to call the caterers, and they always need a lot of advance notice.’

  I leaned forward to pick up the blanket from the floor and wrap it around me. My head was pounding, and my mouth tasted of rotten fish. Caterers? Then I remembered they were going to celebrate their anniversary in a few weeks. Was it their fortieth?

  ‘Just because he and his father have different opinions, that doesn’t mean he should abandon his family. That’s not how we brought him up.’

  ‘Of course we’ll be there,’ I said faintly.

  ‘It’s not like it’s our golden anniversary, or anything like that.’

  ‘How many years is it now?’

  ‘Forty-seven. And now we’re too old to get divorced.’

  In a flash I pictured Patrick and me sitting on a sofa as we silently ate dinner, our eyes fixed on the TV as if we’d seen enough of each other. I’d dreaded that ever happening to us, but now I wished more than anything that I could believe in that scenario.

  While Eleanor chattered on about the menu she was planning for the anniversary party — it was just going to be close family members and a simple affair, meaning about fourteen relatives plus a few neighbours and Robert’s former colleagues from the hospital — I considered the possibility of telling her the truth. Patrick wouldn’
t have wanted me to do that. He might want to come home and show off his Pulitzer Prize, but he didn’t want his parents hovering over him.

  I pictured his father as he sat in his library reading medical books. He had almost 2,000 volumes. ‘All this,’ he said, ‘is knowledge about life and death. It means something in the world.’

  ‘As opposed to what I do, you mean?’ replied Patrick, and then the two of them went at it.

  I crawled out of bed and rushed to the bathroom, taking my cell with me.

  ‘We’ll be in touch as soon as Patrick is back from Paris,’ I said and ended the call without waiting for a reply.

  Then I threw up. For a long time I splashed my face with cold water. When I went back to bed, the echo of the phone conversation had faded. I moved closer to the blanket, which was bunched up in a big pile, and hugged it to my chest. I shut my eyes and thought about Patrick’s body close to mine.

  ‘You idiot,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t you realize I don’t give a shit about the money? I just want you here.’

  And then I suddenly remembered something else from my dream. I’d been holding a baby in my arms. I’d left the baby somewhere in the building. And I didn’t know where.

  Chapter 7

  Tarifa

  Saturday, 27 September

  The window in the room was covered with cardboard and a piece of heavy cloth. Daylight seeped in through a narrow slit, casting a strip of sunshine across her blanket. She lay in bed, listening to the church clock strike seven. Seven fifteen. Seven thirty.

  With each stroke everything sank deeper towards the bottom. Time took with it her memories. Soon she would forget even her name. She pictured it in the water, maybe as a pearl inside a shell, or as a ring on the hand of the sea goddess Owu.

  She sat up and grabbed her leg, tugging it over to the edge of the bed. Then she set her feet on the flat, cold floor.

  The woman with the necklaces kept asking her the same questions.

  What is your name?

  Where do you come from?

  And each time she looked down at the floor, as if mute.

  She picked up the thin dressing gown draped over the chair next to the bed and put it on. It was Jillian’s, and it carried her scent. Everything in the room smelled of the woman with the many necklaces. She had awakened in the dark on that first night, flushed with fever, and with the fragrance settling over her like a heavy blanket. Roses and musk. She’d thought it was the scent of paradise. She’d thought she was dead.

  Then she’d heard the church clock striking. The creaking of footsteps outside. The door handle turning down with a squeak, and then the light appearing in the doorway behind the figure standing there, a fluttering shadow. And another. She moved closer to the wall, listening to them speaking quietly in a foreign language.

  They’ve come to get me, she thought. But instead the scent in the room grew stronger, and someone sat down on the edge of the bed. She closed her eyes and the waves washed over her eyelids. In the darkness was the sea and the screams that never stopped. She opened her eyes again. She saw a green cotton blouse and seven necklaces, one on top of the other, made of beads and stones and silver pendants.

  ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea,’ said the woman. Now she was speaking English. The tea tasted of smoke and ashes. It was bitter and sweet and hot, with milk and a little honey added.

  The cup shook in her hands.

  ‘My name is Jillian.’ The woman’s voice was hoarse. ‘I don’t know if you remember how you got here.’ Jillian stood up and went over to the door and suddenly the light in the room went on.

  She gave a start and spilled tea on her hands. The gash in the palm of her left hand stung. That was where the rope had slid through her fingers as she’d tried to hold on tightly when they dropped her over the side.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ said the woman’s hoarse voice. ‘You’re among friends.’ Then the light went out and she was alone.

  The nights were different from the days. At night there was no streak of light from the window. In the daytime she could hear traffic outside, and voices that she didn’t understand.

  Don’t say your name.

  Give us your papers.

  Don’t talk about what god you believe in, who brought you here, or where you came from.

  Sometimes they were in the room. The smugglers who hissed like snakes in the night. Hurry, hurry, and shut up. Shoving everyone forward along the stony path as they all stumbled down towards the sea. And for the first time she heard the roar of the sea. Raging and pounding and slamming against the rocks.

  ‘You have a fever,’ said Jillian. ‘We need to ask someone to take a look at your leg. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Please don’t let it be the infection, she thought. This is the way it starts.

  The first man had forced himself on her in the desert. My God, she’d thought, when he took her from the camp and dragged her into his car. Please protect me from the infection.

  Her leg was now wrapped in a bandage. She ran her hand over the gauze. Three days had passed. The fever had broken.

  ‘You are in my house,’ Jillian had told her. That was on the second day. ‘My neighbours mustn’t know you’re here. We can’t trust them. So you won’t be able to go outside. And they mustn’t see you in the window. Then the police will come, and you’ll be sent to the detention camps. Do you understand what I’m saying? Detention camp. I’ll be in trouble if they find you in my house. Do you understand? Big trouble.’

  For three days she had said nothing.

  Just slept.

  Whenever she closed her eyes everything solid disappeared, and once again the sea was washing over her. She was shaking with a raging fever, the boat was rising and falling in the waves, the stench of vomit on the wind.

  She had stopped short when she caught her first glimpse of the vessel bobbing near the shore. It wasn’t even a real boat. It was made of rubber, flat like a raft, with low sides. There were no seats. No roof they could crawl under for shelter. Nothing to hold onto but the ropes along the sides. Twelve people were going to make the trip that night. One of the smugglers jabbed her in the back with a stick. Hurry, hurry. They kept on hitting people until everyone had climbed on board and was sitting with their knees drawn up to their chins, packed together so closely that no one could move a muscle. Three men pushed and shoved the boat into the dark water. The sky was black, with no moon, no stars, only clouds hovering over the mountains.

  She sat way in the back with her knees pressed against the spine of the boy in front of her. His name was Taye. It was forbidden to know his name. The wind tugged at the ropes. Her hands were already wet. The boat ploughed into the night. Two of the smugglers clung to the gunwale next to the motor in the stern. The third sat in the bow. They wore life vests that made them look as if their chests had been inflated, almost like rubber balls. Suddenly they began tearing off the clothes of the woman seated next to her. Your watch. Give me your jewellery. Your money. Your purse.

  She didn’t understand what was happening. They had all paid for the crossing in advance on the night before they were picked up and told to come closer to shore, to hide. Now one of the men raised his stick and struck her on the head. She tried to use her arms to protect herself. She had no more money left.

  It doesn’t matter, she thought as she took off her watch. And the chain around her neck. Handed over the cloth bag in which she had a few extra clothes, a bar of soap. Just let me reach there alive. Just let me get there.

  One of the passengers couldn’t restrain himself. He stood up in the boat and yelled at the smugglers in Yoruba. They shouted back in a language she didn’t understand, and an oar whistled through the air, striking the man in the side so he fell. The smuggler climbed over the people sitting in his way, grabbed the man’s leg, and tossed him overboard. Then he struck those sitting nearest. They huddled there, murmuring and praying while the man’s screams faded and then disappeared in the darkness behind them.


  She closed her eyes, wrapping her arms around her legs. Dear God in heaven, she prayed silently. Please calm these crazy people, quiet the sea, and let me live. Let Taye live, she added to placate God. Take me but let the boy live. He’s no more than sixteen, and his parents’ only son. Then she murmured to herself the names of all the others in the boat, one after the other, keeping her eyes fixed on the bottom of the raft where she could feel the sea rolling beneath her. The secret real names they had whispered to each other at night in the shed where they’d been told to keep quiet.

  The woman next to her threw up into the dark, and all around her surged whimpers and prayers, a plaintive song that became one with the waves. She pressed her forehead against her knees and prayed to the sea goddess Owu as well, even though she didn’t believe in any of the old gods or the spirits of the villagers and ancestors, the superstitions and magic that held Africa helplessly locked in the past. Sefi was supposed to have been here, she thought, picturing her sister’s face that evening when she spoke of her decision, saying that she should take Sefi’s place. Someone had to send money home. Her brothers were already in the South-South zone, hunting for jobs in the oil industry, but no money was coming from there.

  Then the miracle happened. The sea grew calm. When she looked up, she caught a glimpse of the opposite shore, and she thanked God and Owu, not knowing which of them had made the wind subside. Then the smugglers again began moving along the sides of the boat. They grabbed a man sitting nearest the edge. He screamed and flailed about, but they hit him on the head and yanked on his arms. ‘Jump!’ they shouted. ‘Jump!’

  Everything happened so fast in the dark. A man was suddenly thrashing about in the water next to the boat, screaming. Then he was gone. He was one of those who had never seen the sea before. He was from the land where the mud swallowed the river and turned to sand. ‘Help him!’ cried someone. ‘Help him!’ But the smugglers merely laughed and shouted. The waves rose up again, and the sea heaved towards them as another man was thrown out of the boat. And another. Dear God in heaven, they’re killing us, she managed to think when she saw them lift up the boy Taye in front of her. ‘He’s only a boy!’ she screamed, and the next instant she felt one of the men grab her arm, and she was dragged over to the low gunwale. She seized hold of a rope and hung on tight, but they yanked on her leg and hit her with the oars, and finally they tossed her overboard. The rope pulled loose and came with her. The sea tossed her away from the boat and in among arms that were struggling and flailing and lashing out at her. She kicked her way free. They wanted to drag her down into the deep. She screamed, but the salt water poured into her. She remembered closing her mouth and hanging onto the rope. She remembered sinking until there was no more air.