Stillness of the Sea (4 page)

She used to say that people who don’t drink fear life, because the idea of letting themselves go scares them. Then she would light a cigarette. He would think, Such wonderful lips, not too full, not too thin, perfectly curved! They were sitting in her kitchen. On the table, she had placed two glasses and an unlabelled bottle. He could guess what was in it. She explained to him that its name was derived from the Slav word for damson,
šljiva
, and that it came in two shades, pale or golden. To warm up quickly in winter, people heated it with sugar and drank it hot.

“You don’t know this? What kind of Croat are you?” She raised her glass and toasted him. “
Živeli
. That’s what we say – Let’s live.”

“Shivily,” he said.

She laughed.

This was the only word with a familiar ring to it. He had no idea, though, that it had anything to do with “living”. He had thought it just meant “cheers!”

Let’s live. Then it was an imperative, but it could also be a plea. Uttered in a different tone of voice or in another situation, that word changes its meaning. He can’t help thinking of Šimić and on how, in his presence, this toast would raise a bitter echo. Let us live. He can’t help thinking of the television images from Srebrenica, and of Mladić and the Dutch commander drinking a toast together.
Živeli
. And eight thousand people died.

That evening in her kitchen, none of this occurred to him. How hindsight alters meaning and makes even single, utterly harmless words take on other
connotations
.

Then, he only thought of how good it was to be alive, they drank another toast and another, and he said “
Živeli
” every time.

She laughed, because the alcohol had such a rapid effect on him. “You still have to learn to drink.”

“Why do I have to?”

“Because it’s part of life.”

He closed his eyes as he drained his glass and soon afterwards his whole body felt off-balance. He opened his eyes again and gripped the table with one hand. She watched him, bent towards him, kissed him on the ear and whispered to him in that voice of hers, which he had been in love with for so long, a single word that he’d only known as a name. “
Zlatko
.”

“Do you know what that means?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Sweetheart.”

That word, too, could have such different meanings! He wondered if he and Ana would ever reach a point of mutual trust in the other’s language. Sweetheart. How could he ever pronounce that word again? Or hear it spoken?

Next morning, in the courtroom, a man takes his place as a witness. He seems troubled, and clearly doesn’t know what to do with his hands, sometimes placing them on his lap, sometimes on the table. He pulls at the collar of his white shirt so often it becomes noticeable. He is gaunt, with sunken cheeks. There is a small piece of plaster stuck on his neck, obviously to cover a razor cut.

The man does not recognise Šimić. He stated that at the start of the interrogation. “No,” he said curtly and after a short pause, repeated the single syllable, but this time lengthening it and shaking his head at the same time.

He sits behind the glass, allowing the witness’s voice to work on him. He closes his eyes. The man’s voice is surprisingly strong; he had expected it to be weaker.

The prosecutor takes his time to look the witness over.

“Could you please tell us what you know about the houses that burnt down?”

“The houses belonged to Muslims.”

“How many burnt-out houses do you know about?”

“I can’t tell you precisely how many, but I saw several houses on fire. I had a full view of Višegrad from the attic in my house.”

“Could you also see the River Drina?”

“Yes. I saw a lot of corpses in the Drina. We couldn’t get them out of the water, because of all the shooting. I remember a woman with a small child. They were drifting down the river, sitting on a plank.”

“You stayed in Višegrad until when?”

“Until the 14th June 1992.”

Mr Bloom pauses, as if to make everyone in the room take note of the date.

“Why did you leave town on just that day?”

“On the 13th of June, a neighbour came to see me. He’s a Serb, his name is Antić. He told me that ethnic cleansing would begin soon and that a convoy had been organised to move inhabitants out of the town the following day. He was sure it would be better for me and my family to travel with the convoy.”

“Did you trust him?

“Yes, I did. At the time, I thought he was going out of his way to help us. Look, I’d lived next door to him for thirty years. I never had any reason to distrust him.”

“Do you know if any official organisations were collaborating?”

“Antić said he had heard on the radio that all inhabitants were advised to leave town with the convoy. The news item had been repeated several times. He also mentioned the Red Cross. But at the time we didn’t check up on any of it.”

Mr Bloom glances at the presiding judge.

“What happened on the morning of the 14th June 1992?”

“Two buses arrived at seven o’clock. Many of us were waiting. Serbs, too, who had come to say goodbye to us. Some were quite tearful. Then we boarded the buses.”

“Did you count the number of people fairly
precisely
?”

“I didn’t count them, but I estimate, say, about a hundred, or a hundred and fifty. Later on, more buses were expected.”

“What were the feelings of the people who left on the buses? Were they frightened?”

“We still thought that we’d be saved. We trusted the organisers.”

“And the Red Cross?”

“There was no Red Cross to be seen.”

Yesterday, a woman testified to meeting Šimić on the bridge and how he had offered to take care of her family; the image has stayed in his mind: Šimić just standing there, alone on the central part of the bridge. In his imagination, the man looks lost, abandoned. He has tried to give him the face on the other side of the glass screen, but all the time he sees the man in the photograph, the man with the warm, kind eyes.

“Who came with you?”

“My wife and my two daughters.”

“How old were your daughters at the time?”

“One of them, Ivanka, was fourteen, and her sister Branka was nine.”

“Did you stay together on the bus all the time?”

“No, the buses stopped quite soon after we’d left Višegrad. Women, old people and children were all taken to the other bus and the men came onto ours. The other bus drove on, but ours turned and went back in the direction we’d come from. The bus stopped again a little later and we spent the night in a forest parking area. It was dark and we had no lights.”

“How many men were there on the bus?”

“I reckoned forty, but many were lying down in the gangway and I’m not sure I counted everyone.”

“What happened next?”

“A car arrived in the morning and a couple of men climbed out; they were armed, and they came onto the bus and ordered us to hand over everything we had. Documents, watches, jewellery, money. They had a bag sent round for us to put our things in.”

“What was the ethnic origin of the men already on the bus?”

“Muslims, one hundred per cent.”

“Then what happened?”

“They tied us up, with our hands behind our backs. They used cables. Then we had to get out of the bus, one by one. We had to kneel alongside each other. I was the last in the row.”

Throughout, the man has seemed distraught, but now he is suddenly at peace, his hands rest on the table and his fingers are still. It is hard to endure this sudden calm. Even the interpreter seems to notice. Somehow, her voice sounds a fraction quieter.

“Please continue.”

“One of the men asked me how many Serbs I had killed. None, I said. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear, he told me. Then I felt a blow at the back of my neck.”

“At the time, what went through your mind?”

“It’s difficult to put into words what went through my mind. My brain had stopped working, somehow. I couldn’t think clearly. I looked around and noticed that some of the men were missing from the row. Then I saw the Serbs pulling the next lot into the forest. In an instant, I ran. At first I heard nothing, then someone shouted. And then the shooting started, shots all over the place, really wild. I don’t know what happened behind me, but I suppose the others had started running, too, trying to escape, and that’s what saved me, because if I had been the only one, one of the men could have run after me and caught me. All I wanted was simply to run as far and as fast as I could. I slipped down an embankment, got up and ran across a road. And ran on, until I reached a village where I felt safe.”

“What happened to your family?”

“My family was all right. The bus had taken them to Skopje. But a week went by before I heard about that.”

“Have you found it difficult to speak about this in court?”

The man put one hand over the other. For first time, he looked around the courtroom and acted as if he wanted to quickly observe each of those present, starting with the prosecutor, then the judges, the defence lawyers and, finally, Šimić.

“I am here because no one must forget what went on. Memories will be kept alive for as long as there are people who tell their stories. And the hope is that remembering will lead to the guilty being punished.
Staying silent helps them. That’s why it’s not difficult for me to sit here and tell you what happened.”

Ana let him have her volume of
King Lear
in English. It was bound in dark blue cloth and the first few pages were only partly hanging on to the strip of glue. He wondered how often she had opened the book, how often her fingers had leafed through the pages. On the second page, he found a handwritten dedication. Two blue-ink sentences in Cyrillic script. He could only read the date: 10.4.92. Ana was eleven years old in 1992.

When he asked her about the dedication, she replied that her father had written it. He wanted to know what it said. “For my Cordana,” she told him. “He wrote that I should always have this book at hand, because no one knew more about life than Shakespeare.” She remembered the words by heart, didn’t even have to glance at the book. He took it in his hands. Then he opened the cover, turned the page and pointed to the word before the date. “What does it say here?” She glanced at the page and said, “Višegrad.” He wanted to know if it was a town, and she said it was a small one in eastern Bosnia. It made him wonder. “I thought you came from Belgrade?” And she answered, “We lived in Višegrad before.” She said nothing more after that, but he said, “Cordana. I like that name.”

At home, he later tried to find the town whose name he had never heard before. He examined photographs on the Internet and learnt of its famous bridge, built at the time of Ottoman rule and central to the novel
Bridge
over the Drina,
one of the volumes in Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian trilogy. In 1961, Andrić was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

He also learnt that the town became tragically famous as the second Srebrenica in the last Balkan war. He read about the corpses in the Drina and about the people of Slap who, on a spring day of 1992, dragged the first dead bodies out of the water and, though they were strangers, buried them in the nearby cemetery. And how, over the next few weeks, the river washed up hundreds of bodies. By then, the people in Slap knew they had to bury the corpses in secret. To avoid attracting the
attention
of Serb snipers, fifty-odd neighbourhood volunteers carried the dead to their graves during the dark, still nights. They buried one hundred and eighty bodies; later investigations showed that of all the corpses pushed into the Drina, only one in every twenty was hauled out of the water. Between April 1992 and October 1994, thousands of Muslims from the Višegrad area were either terrorised or killed. While reading up on all this, he tried to imagine Ana in the small town where people were slitting each other’s throats. He tried to imagine her standing on the bridge, leaning over the balustrade and looking down on the Drina. But instead of the corpses, he saw only the sun glittering on the rippled surface of the water.

Ten years passed before two suspected perpetrators were arrested and transferred to The Hague. Milan Marić and Boris Lukić. They were charged with being responsible for the death of one hundred and forty individuals. At the time, Marić was twenty-four. People remembered the young Serb as a good neighbour before the war, someone who had Muslim friends and would now and then go with them to the mosque. When the war started, he styled himself “Avenger” and began a career of torture, rape and murder.

This was also the first time he heard of the crime of locking forty-two members of a family into a house and
setting it on fire. Marić, Lukić and their accomplices were again thought to be the perpetrators.

He wanted to take Ana in his arms, comfort her and look at her, push strands of hair away from her face. He wished she would tell him everything, because he thought it would help her. Talking, it’s the only thing left to her, he thought.

He read Andrić’s novel and developed an affinity for the River Drina, even though he has never seen it. He almost longed for the river, a greenish, foaming body of water that flowed through gorges and valleys within its steeply rising banks. It was her childhood river. Every day, as she stood on the bridge and looked up the river, she saw the tall, dark mountains that ringed her town.

The water was green, greener than anywhere else, and teeming with Danube salmon. Shoals of big fish would shelter in the shade under the arches of the bridge. Andrić writes about the Black Man, who lives in the middle pier of the bridge. Inside the pier is a large, dark room. If the Man shows himself, whoever sees him must die. The middle pier had a large gap in it, like a huge arrow slit. From the riverbank, the children would stare into the hole, as if into an abyss. Trembling with curiosity and fear, they would watch the wide, inscrutable opening, until something seemed to move inside, as if a black curtain had twitched. The first one to see it had to call out. At night, many children struggled with the Black Man of the Bridge, as if with grim fate, until their mothers woke them and drove their terrors away.