‘You don’t wish to confess,’ he says eventually. ‘You cannot even be a Christian, or you would not ask me to defile the sacrament of confession.’
‘You don’t have to tell me anything. Just. . . If she is here, in this town, you could nod your head or something. Is she?’
He shakes his head. ‘Not even a Serb.’
‘We’re all Serbs, aren’t we? That’s what this war is about. But that has nothing to do with it. I’ve lost my child! Was she ever here? You must know.’
‘There is nothing for you here.’ He edges laboriously forward in the seat of his armchair. ‘Get out.’ He stands and turns his back on me, starts to shuffle towards the altar.
‘You’re one of them, aren’t you,’ I say, getting up from the kneeler. ‘You give them absolution and then you share a bottle of raki together. You’re disgusting, you’re a disgrace to the Church.’
I carry on insulting him as he propels himself slowly towards the sacristy door behind the altar, but I don’t follow. When he has gone, I lash out with my foot and send the stack of books and the hideous icon sliding away across the tiled floor. Confession is over. I go outside and hear footsteps running. The Fiat Frightful is slumped. The two front tyres have been let down. I don’t have a pump. There are dozens of people in Kric who could help me, but none of them will. It’s dark and there’s a sharp smell of woodsmoke on the air. I get out my phone but the signal is weak so I set off up the hill behind the church. After a while I come to a children’s playground, a square of tarmac with a swing and collection of old tyres arranged as an obstacle course. The signal’s better and I call Piotr and explain what’s happened.
‘You should’ve let me take you, Anna. You know what these people are—’
‘Yes, all right, Piotr. But please, can you come and get me?’
I told him I’d wait in the church. The thought of going back inside fills me with horror, but it’s probably safer than sitting in the marooned Fiat. It’s quiet in the playground and I think I may as well stay here until it gets too cold. I crouch down beside a huge, rotten tractor tyre and then see that I can climb inside it. I’ll be well hidden, and sheltered. I wedge myself in between the sidewalls and settle my back into the curve of the tyre, then my foot presses down on something hard. I pick it up and tilt it towards the ambient light from the square below, but still I can’t see what it is. Too heavy and crude for a bracelet. It has four finger holds and some kind of ridged frame. . . Knuckleduster.
Fear see-saws inside me. A knuckleduster, discarded in a children’s playground, like a yo-yo or a toy car. That’s the sort of town Kric is. The grip is padded so you can strike as hard as you like without hurting your fingers. I shrink back into the tyre and listen to my heart preparing for flight with a series of thumps so heavy that my whole body shakes.
The cold seeps into me but I dare not move. After I don’t know how long I start to shiver. Really shiver, more like shuddering. What if Piotr doesn’t make it and I’m forced to spend the night out here? I pull the knuckleduster over my fingers, just in case I have to defend myself, then lever myself stiffly from the tyre and make my way back down the hill. There’s no moon tonight and not much streetlight beyond the square. The priest has locked up his church and fled. There’s not even a porch to sit in. What if the big woman from the police station finds me crouching in a corner with a knuckleduster clamped in my fist? I wander for another ten minutes, circling the area round the playground, and finally end up back in the tractor tyre. Soon I hear an engine from the direction of the square. It stops and a car door slams. I wait for a few minutes to see if the vehicle drives away again, but it doesn’t, so I run back down to the square.
A loud scuffing noise, a boot scraping gravel across tarmac, then a series of thumps and a grunt.
‘Who asked you here, monkey face?’
I turn the corner and see Piotr down on one knee beside the Fiat, panting, head bowed beneath his thick hair. Three of them. One is leaning against the bonnet of the Fiat and spitting something on the ground. The other two stand over Piotr. One of them swings his boot into Piotr’s ribs, the other draws back his shoulder for a long, clubbing blow at his head. I run towards them, rage lashing and boiling in my blood, fingers clamped over the padded grip of the knuckleduster. Piotr has a footpump in his hand – he lifts it up to shield his face and the man’s fist drives clumsily into its steel frame. Then Piotr is up, and he’s a big man, brave and dangerous. His assailant steps back – straight into the trajectory of my swinging arm and the dull weight of the knuckleduster at its tip. The brass ridge crunches into his temple. He gives a cry of shock and sways backwards, sprawls. He raises himself on one arm and manages to shuffle a short distance away before collapsing. I turn to see Piotr drive his fist into the solar plexus of the man who kicked him. The air leaves his lungs with a heavy sigh and he doubles over, wheezing for breath. The third man has disappeared.
Piotr crouches down by the Fiat and starts trying to fix the pump hose to the tyre valve.
‘Piotr, leave that and let’s get out.’
He looks up at me. There’s a bloody rip in the skin along his jaw. ‘You don’t want to take the Fiat?’
‘No. Please, Piotr. There could be more. . .’
He’s agonisingly slow about stowing the pump in the back seat of his pickup, starting the engine, reversing out of the parking space. I look at the man whose eye-socket I mashed with the weapon still clamped in my hand. He’s lying on the tarmac, a semi-circle of glossy darkness by his ear. I feel sick. Also, euphoric. I hit a man and laid him out. For a moment I want to do it again.
‘Are you OK? What’s going on, Anna?’
‘I’m fine. You’re the one who got hurt.’
He adjusts the rear-view mirror and looks.
‘It needs stitching,’ I tell him.
We take the first turning off the main road out of town and pull over so I can knot a scarf over his head to stop the bleeding, then drive back to Pristina.
I sit in the hospital waiting room while they stitch up his lacerated jaw. It was a glancing blow, the duty nurse informs me, otherwise it could have cracked his jawbone.
‘People don’t seem to just hit each other these days. They use all sorts. Brass knuckles, saps, chains.’
‘You think it’s got more vicious recently?’
‘There’s a war coming. Some people can’t wait to get started.’
And it’s true that the hospital waiting area displays the bloody consequences of this skirmishing. There must be twenty men in there, arranged on blood-splotched gurneys, faces puffed up and split like rotten fruit. There’s a war coming. . . I knew this, didn’t I?
On the way back to my apartment, I look out at the high buildings on Esstorvec Street and imagine them torn open, lumps of rubble clinging to their iron sinews, concrete floors concertina’d, beds and curtains and china ornaments spilling into the street like the filling from an over-stuffed sandwich. The night air is hounded by sirens, the sound of vengeance, of settled scores. How else was it going to end, this decade of persecution, these years of strutting contempt? But I didn’t see it so clearly then. After Bosnia, I told myself, they’ll see reason, they’ll be prudent, they’ll talk and talk and talk, as they’re paid to do. Anything’s better than war.
‘Is the pickup registered in your name, Piotr?’
‘Um. . . No. I mean, the plates are made up.’
‘Leave it in the vacant lot behind my building until you can sort out new ones. The only thing is, it may get stolen.’
Piotr shrugs.
‘I guess you’d have said if you’d heard from Franz.’
‘Lauri went to Istanbul on Friday. She’ll track him down.’
‘Or if not, she’ll have a bit of a holiday.’
The streetlights of Pristina flicker and dim – the electricity supply hasn’t been dependable for weeks. Franz is not coming back. I have lost my only child. I’m brawling with Serbian thugs in strange towns and hiding ill
egal vehicles. Everything is already in ruins.
18
Eleni comes round with supper the next evening. When she has finished chiding me for twice going to Kric without her, we sit down to watch the news and there it is. KLA in new attack on town in mourning reads the strapline beneath the newscaster’s desk.
The town of Kric was in a state of shock last night, following a brutal assault in the town square. Three men were on their way to church when they were set upon and beaten by an unknown number of assailants. One of the victims has been detained in hospital in a serious but stable condition. Only five days ago, eight men from the town were ambushed and murdered by KLA terrorists, and the police believe the two incidents are connected. As the hunt for the perpetrators is stepped up, the people of this peaceful, hard-working town have been warned to brace themselves for further attacks, and the atmosphere is tense and fearful.
The rest of the report is read over a picture of a man propped up in bed wearing a sky-blue-check hospital gown. The top left-hand quarter of his head is subsumed by a mass of lumpy tissue, criss-crossed with stitches. There’s a tube up his nose and some kind of monitor taped to his other temple. I remember what I used to think when I saw such photos: How could anyone do such a thing? What kind of hate drives you to put someone in that state? Now I know. It wasn’t hate but rage, and I don’t feel any remorse. No one thought I was the sort of girl who’d marry a Roma man ten years older than her, and no one thought I was the sort of woman who would put a man in hospital, either. I didn’t know myself.
Eleni sees I am transfixed by the picture. ‘Is that your one, Anna?’
‘I suppose. I didn’t look at him closely.’
‘Well, take a good look now – what a warrior! Behind that modest façade, the fury of the Amazons courses in your blood. That’ll teach them to tamper with the Fiat Frightful.’
‘It wasn’t the car, Eleni, it was Piotr.’
‘The dumb brother-in-law doesn’t deserve you, Anna. Nor does the dumb brother, come to that. An unknown number of assailants! Two to be precise. One of them a quite small expert in the early Ottomans.’
The dumb brother-in-law rings half an hour later.
‘The police were in Talinic today. They took away Grigor, Zak and a couple of others. I was out or I guess they’d have had me.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘A round-up, they called it. Grandmama’s in a state. Think it’s connected to. . . You know, to last night?’
‘When did the police last arrive in Talinic and start rounding you up, as they call it?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘So yes, it’s connected.’
‘I got the Fiat back.’
‘Piotr, that was a stupid thing to do. You could have just left it.’
‘Not me, Mikhail’s uncle. He’s got a tow-truck, went out first thing in the morning. He fixed the tyres and changed the oil for you. Says it’s the least he could do.’
‘Please thank him,’ I say.
I find that I am crying and have to hang up. Eleni is mopping up something in the kitchen – something I swear she has mopped up a hundred times already. I tell her about the arrests in Talinic.
‘I’m dragging them down with me – and for what? For nothing.’
‘Don’t, Anna. You’re not to blame. They need no excuse to persecute the Roma.’
‘It’s not just that. They’re saying, if you come near this, we’ll beat you and lock you up, you and all your family. They’re warning us off, right?’
‘Us?’ Eleni shrugs. ‘Yes. They are warning us off – us and everyone else who is not a true Serb. And look how well they are doing – the BBC is saying forty thousand people have left already.’
‘How can they do this, Eleni?’
‘They have power over us, and this is how they choose to use it. Milošević in Belgrade, Jankovic in Pristina, the Bura in Kric – they can all do whatever they like. As for us, we can bow our heads to them, or join the refugees.’
I haunt the town of Kric like a ghost, looking for Katya without expectation of finding her. I’ll do this until I get another clue. What else? I walk out along the river to the farmsteads and loggers’ huts beyond. I pass and re-pass and pass again by the track that leads up to the clearing where the Bura died, but I dare not go and look. I saw the blackened trees on the news and I’m afraid of what I might find. The men in the Skoda estate car don’t bother me now. I’m just a bad smell that is fading, a dirty conscience that the priest has wiped clean. Katarina isn’t here any more, if she ever was here, if the wail I heard from the streets above the square was ever anything other than the sound made by a yearning mother’s heart.
I stop going to Kric and hand out leaflets instead – at the bus terminal, the train station, government offices, hospitals, schools. I write more letters and emails, imploring people to help me, and get pleas of helplessness in reply. I wish there was something I could do, but with Kosovo falling apart. . . Bitterness spills into me.
‘You’re doing everything you can,’ says Eleni. ‘No mother could do more.’
‘I could have left her at home, or not sat around drinking coffee after meeting with that fucking old fool Ongoric.’
‘One day the phone will ring and it’ll be the UNHCR in Skopje, saying they’ve taken her in,’ she says soothingly. ‘I’m quite sure of it.’
She doesn’t look sure and I am not soothed. Eleni’s company is becoming unbearable. Whenever we meet now, her anxiety takes my despair by the hand and leads a hysterical dance. If you’re shrivelling up, you want to do it alone.
‘Have you thought any more about Rambouillet?’ she asks, after a period of miserable silence. ‘I know you hate the idea of leaving Pristina, but I’ll be here for you.’
She’s been going on about the powerful men who’ll be at Rambouillet ever since the call from Rugova’s aide; but my mood swings and instead of being annoyed that she’s brought it up again, I feel touched – and ashamed of my harsh thoughts. Eleni may be tactless sometimes, but she is also a devoted friend who won’t stay silent just because I’m in a bad temper.
‘Yes. . . I mean, no,’ I tell her. ‘It’s probably too late, anyway.’
‘Nonsense. You know they asked that dolt Kreshnik from the history department to go in your place? They’ll be happy to get rid of him.’
‘I don’t know what to do, Eleni.’
‘Go. Hashim Thaçi will be there. He’ll know how to contact these Bura. Tell him what a hero he’ll be when he arranges for Katarina to come home.’
I imagine the fate of my daughter interrupting the deliberations of the conference delegates. KLA leader Hashim Thaçi, whose nom de guerre is the Snake, pins the Serbian Minister for the Interior against the cracked porcelain of a Rambouillet pissoir and threatens to tear his face off if anything should happen to young Katarina. President Rugova declines to sign the peace agreement until his favourite translator’s daughter is set free. She becomes a cause célèbre, her fate and the fate of a nation inextricably entwined. Katarina of Kosovo: how the release of a kidnapped girl unlocked the door to peace in this troubled region. . .
Eleni is right, I should move among these people, engineer a shove from on high. The shove is passed on, mutates from favour-asked to polite-request to demand-with-threats, in which form it arrives in Inspector Jankovic’s email. Rise up off your fat arse, Janko, and get this girl back. Or you can kiss the pension goodbye.
My own detective work has come to this: if Katya was in Kric, she’s not there now, not after I blundered in. The men who abducted her are probably dead. In order to persuade Inspector Jankovic to drop the idea that Katya was snatched away by her Roma father, I now have to get him to investigate his dead colleagues in Kric instead – his dead colleagues who have recently been the subject of a news broadcast which elevated them to the status of fully fledged martyrs of the greater Serbia.
I have a little weep in Eleni’s arms, and next morning call Rugova’s aide to
tell him I’ve changed my mind. I’ll go to Paris. The future has to come about somehow.
19
I get to the airport early on the appointed day, all torn up with doubt. Am I right to leave Pristina? Will I be able to persuade the Kosovar leadership to help me find her? I know most of them already, at least to shake hands with – the community of intellectuals in Pristina is not extensive any more than it is well funded.
‘Anna, I am happy that you are with us,’ says President Ibrahim Rugova, arriving with a small entourage. He takes me by the shoulders and kisses me on both cheeks, then holds me at arm’s length and regards me with his soft, mournful eyes. ‘Not just the best translator in Kosovo, but the best linguist, too. You will be our secret weapon.’
‘Thank you, Mr President. I’ll try and look menacing.’
Observing that my smile is unenthusiastic, the President moves on to inform me that there’s a delay because Hashim Thaçi has been barred from leaving the country.
‘So childish. Of course, we will not fly without him.’
He receives a nudge from his aide, who leans sideways and whispers in his ear.
‘Of course, your daughter, Anna – is there any news?’
‘No. I mean, I have some leads, but—’
‘We’ll make time to talk about this, Anna, I promise.’
We wait at the airport for six hours. The departure lounge is hermetically sealed: we inhale exhaled air, scented with stale coffee. Sandwiches salute from brightly lit shelves, but no one feels like eating. A man in a boiler suit slides a scissor-shaped mop down the corridor, then back again. It is not properly called a mop, I decide, madly trying to distract myself from the empty wastes of time howling around me, since it isn’t wet. Rugova’s aide makes a series of calls. The diplomatic network hums in his ear, propelling him on an unpredictable route around the maze of grey foam chairs. There are children playing amongst the chrome stalks of the stools at the coffee bar and I watch them furtively, feasting off their giggles and shrieks.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 14
