Stillness of the Sea (8 page)

“We will get to that point. Can you remember what you were wearing at the time? Did you carry anything in your hands?”

“I had put on a sweater and a pair of corduroy trousers. The sweater was a dark shade. I think it was black.”

“Did you have anything on your head?”

“I don’t know. I simply can’t remember.”

“Did you hold anything in your hands?”

“No. Nothing I remember anyway.”

“What was your destination that day?”

“I was going to Vucina.”

“Did you meet anyone?”

“Yes, a friend of mine. A man called Mujo. He’s from Sase and came past my house daily on his way to work.”

“Did you have a chat with him?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“I asked him something like ‘What’s new?’ He replied, ‘Nothing. Well, we’ve got to leave.’ I wanted to know why. I still recall him telling me that his wife had already left the village. He offered me his cows. What he said was, ‘I own two cows, would you like to have them?’ I said, ‘Mujo, what am I supposed to do with your cows? I don’t need cattle.’ I told him not to worry, that all this madness would soon pass. Look, the whole thing happened sixteen years ago, I can’t remember whatever else we talked about at the time.”

“Were other people present?”

“I do remember him saying that they had to be off. There were other people around at the time, women as well as men. I remember the weather. It was overcast and very windy.”

“Did you speak to any of the others?”

“No.”

“Before you met Mujo, were you aware that a group of people had to leave Višegrad?”

“No. I had heard nothing about that. I had no idea that anyone had to leave Koritnik. And I didn’t know either who or what the reason was. No idea. If I hadn’t met Mujo, I would simply have moved on. What I’m trying to say is, I had no previous knowledge about these people. That the Red Cross had sent them along to Pionirska Street and so on.”

“How did you know about the role of the Red Cross?”

“Mujo told me.”

“Mr Šimić, have you ever worked for the Red Cross?”

“No.”

“Have you ever pretended to be a Red Cross worker?”

“No. Why should I?”

“At your encounter with Mujo, did he ask you to write anything down for him?”

“No. Why should I have written anything for him?”

“Did you have paper and pencil on your person?”

“No.”

“Once you said goodbye, did you go to collect a horse?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see Mujo again on the way back?”

“No. As far as I can remember, I didn’t see anyone. I was on horseback and when I was about to leave the town, it started to rain. A brief but heavy shower.”

“How fast did you ride?”

“Not fast at all.”

“And then you took a tumble?”

“As I passed a restaurant, I heard somebody call my name. It was Professor Mitrović and I tried to turn back. In that instant, the horse fell and pulled me down with it. The horse got up almost at once. I tried to stand, but found that I couldn’t. Professor Mitrović felt my leg and told me he thought it was broken. He called the ambulance and it arrived in ten minutes, perhaps fifteen. I was taken to the hospital and X-rayed. The doctor said that I had broken two bones. He bandaged my leg and sent me on to the hospital in Užice.”

“Did they take more X-rays there?”

“Yes, they examined my leg. A doctor Jovicić confirmed that it was broken.”

He would often look at the photograph in the morning, while she was still asleep. He always woke before she did. He made coffee and brought her a cup in bed or, if he thought she was still fast asleep, ambled over to the window to look at the sky or study the photo which was the only picture she had put on the wall above her desk.

It seemed to him that this Titus Andronicus was keeping an eye on her. There were days when the man’s gaze seemed sterner than usual. He would conduct internal dialogues with him, calling him Titus. This made her father smile. So, she has told you? It’s an old story, you know. She was ten years old. He imagined her father pouring him a glass of wine: they sit together at the wooden table behind the house, with their backs resting against the wall as they enjoy the shade and the view of the garden where Ana is stretched out under a tree, lying on her front and propped up on her elbows to read a book. Her mother brings a plate of tomatoes, places a
knife across the plate and a small salt cellar on the table. Before going back inside, she too takes a moment to look at her daughter. Ana’s father pushes a glass towards him.
Živeli
. Drink to Life. Ana glances at them. Later she will tell him how pleased she is that he and her father are getting on so well. “He has taken to you. You’re like a son to him.”

Was that what he wanted? That Šimić would accept him as his son? At the time, he couldn’t have known how inappropriate this fantasy was, since he didn’t know that Šimić had had a son.

“Have you been awake for long?” Ana asked. She was suddenly standing behind him, holding her cup of coffee.

“Do you think your father and I would like each other?” he enquired.

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m not sure. Or rather, it’s simply because I see his photograph every morning. I keep wondering if he’d like me.”

“I think he would.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“He would like you.”

“What about me? Would I like him?”

“I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t like my father,” she told him.

He could not help thinking about his own father and wondering if Ana would like him. Very likely she would. Some of his friends were very enthusiastic about his father. He was the only one who felt something wasn’t right. His old man was liked because he was entertaining and always ready with yet another anecdote. Once, after being introduced to his father, one of his female friends remarked that he seemed so gentle, such a truly sensitive person. He couldn’t help thinking that their
acquaintance had been far too brief for her to make that judgement.

He conjured up an image of them both, Ana and his father, talking animatedly, excluding him and laughing together at the dinner table in his parents’ house. He would feel jealous rather than pleased. Later, his father would go on about how attractive she was and that he hoped his son realised how lucky he was. And as he walked her home, she would say how strange it was that the two of them were father and son, given how very different they were.

His father knew about Ana, he had phoned and told him about her. “Good, good,” his father had said, “I hope this is serious.” He had gone on to explain where Ana came from and that she was a Serb, but his father hadn’t commented in any way.

Šimić’s posture doesn’t change as he stands in front of the judges with drooping shoulders and restless hands. As if he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, he first puts one on top of the other as if in prayer, and then adjusts this pose almost immediately.

“Mr Šimić, how long did you have to stay in hospital?”

“I should explain that the doctor needed to make a small incision into my heel and attached a couple of weights to my leg in order to stretch my muscles and let the bones knit properly. Or, at least, that’s how the operation was explained to me. Whatever the reason, when I came round from the anaesthetic, I was in bed in a hospital ward. And I had to stay put for three weeks.”

“Is that to say that you were confined to your bed for twenty-one days?”

“Yes, it does. I was unable to get out of bed.”

“Did you know how many other patients were in your ward?”

“There were four of us. My bed was by the window. An old man from Užice was next, then a Muslim from Gorazde, they had amputated one of his legs, and finally another man from Užice.”

“Did you spend three weeks in the orthopaedic department?”

“Yes.”

“And after that?”

“I was admitted to the neuropsychiatric unit. The unit was part of the same hospital, but housed in another building.”

“Why were you transferred?”

“I was in a difficult, emotional state – moody and unbalanced. I was anxious and saw visions. I imagined all kinds of things, saw myself speaking with God and the Devil. Satan’s eyes were like two full moons. He had thousands of noses and great long horns, ridged and furrowed like the surface of the sea. My head was constantly full of strange images I couldn’t rid myself of.”

“Thank you, Mr Šimić.”

He is sitting behind the plate glass, staring at Šimić and reflecting with some relief that Ana clearly takes after her mother, at least in appearance. Her
cheekbones
, pale skin and dark hair offer him at least the possibility of imagining that she is not Šimić’s daughter. How often over the last few weeks has he wished that her father were someone else, that the man in the dock were not a blood relation of hers? But he knows that Šimić is her father. He knew this for certain from the first day, when the man was escorted from the adjacent room. He recognised her eyes, her serious, dark eyes in which he had so often lost himself.

In his dream
, Šimić enters his room. He can’t see his face, only the outline of his body. There’s no light to see him by, but he knows it’s Šimić. He tries to make himself see, to recognise the things in his room by their shades of darkness.

Šimić moves purposefully, as though he knows the room. He skirts around the two chairs at the table and walks straight over to the minibar. He immediately finds the handle and opens it. The carpet is lit by the dull light from the fridge. Šimić pulls out a miniature bottle. He settles down at the table with his legs resting on the other chair. He unties his shoelaces, leans back, stretches his arms above his head and yawns.

Later, Šimić is sleeping next to him. He tries to turn the light on, presses the switch, but nothing happens; he wants to get out of bed and struggles with the duvet. It ensnares him and however hard he tries, he cannot free himself. Šimić pulls him close and puts a hand over his face.

It’s the middle of the night. He gets up and gropes his way through the dark to the bathroom, where he pushes the mat in front of the basin with his foot to have
something to stand on. He holds his hands under the rushing water from the cold tap.

The mirror reflects only darkness. Once back in the room, he cautiously opens the fridge to check that nothing is missing.

Ana knew from the start that he doesn’t drink. And she was right that he was afraid of letting himself go. Perhaps afraid of life itself. He grabs a small bottle at random. Unscrews the top and drinks the contents in one go, without knowing what it is. It burns his throat. “
Živeli
”, she said. And “
Živeli
”, he repeats.

Then he goes back to bed.

“What’s your problem, lad?” It’s Šimić who asks him this. He’s still there, at the table, with his legs resting on the other chair. “You know, sitting stiffly in the
courtroom
all day, that’s not for me. Anyway, what do they want of me? They don’t know me. All these people so busy sitting in judgement over me – it’s crazy, don’t you think? They should be asking you the questions. I mean to say, you’re the one who knows me – right?” He fetches another miniature from the fridge, drinks it standing up and breaks the empty against the wall. “I loved him. As God is my witness, I loved him. I would’ve loved you. Clearly, I’m fated to lose my sons.”

“I saw myself speaking with God and the Devil.”

Those words, more than any others, never leave him in peace. Why did Šimić say that? To order his confused thoughts? What had been plaguing him, what had been tugging him this way and that between two extreme moral positions? Were his actions a burden on his conscience? When Šimić spoke of dialogues with the Devil and his witches, was this yet another sign of his own tragedy? Or was it Shakespeare? Perhaps Šimić was
broken and mentally disturbed – or did he only imagine all this in retrospect?

The judge had to tell him twice to sit down, because Šimić just stood there, seemingly unaware of where he was. “Mr Šimić, please sit down.” As far as Šimić was concerned, this was a voice from another world and it didn’t quite reach him.

Where had his thoughts drifted? Did he recall that image of the bridge? Or a vision of the people who had been relying upon him, all in one long line – the old folk, the women and the children? People who had wanted nothing more than to leave the town, to get out,
regardless.
Did he dread their faces? Did they haunt him, night after night? You couldn’t live with yourself afterwards. Could you ever be free of all these faces?

There was nobody there to hold him, take his hand and whisper his name. Zlatko, you are here because they were hungry and you did not feed them. They were thirsty and you gave them nothing to drink. They were strangers and you did not invite them in. And now the highest court has sentenced you, and you will be punished for eternity.

Šimić didn’t defend himself. He didn’t teeter. He didn’t collapse. “Mr Šimić! Please sit down.” He sat down. Then he turned towards the public. He looked at them, all those faces behind the glass, one by one. But his eyes never met anyone’s.

He had spoken to Ana about the court. They had even argued about it for a while. At breakfast time, he had seen it mentioned in the newspaper and read the piece out to her. Vojislav Šešelj, charged with very serious war crimes, had gone on hunger strike and now the court was doing all it could to keep him well enough for trial.

“So what? Why read it aloud?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought it might interest you.”

But why should it interest her? Because it had something to do with the war? Because the accused was a Serb?

“Do you want to know what I make of it?” She pushed her cup away and looked straight at him. “I can understand him,” she said. “The court is prejudiced against him. It has nothing to do with justice.”

At first, he couldn’t work out if she was serious or said it to provoke him. He still isn’t sure. She was in an edgy mood. She might have expected him to start
speaking
about the court and was ready to release the tension that had built up inside her. It was obvious that the court was on her mind. At the time, he had no idea of just how much that particular court of law mattered to her. But he sensed her anger.

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“If it were true that the court is as unbiased as everyone says, they would’ve put Clinton and Schröder on trial and all the other western politicians as well. Everyone who was responsible for bombing a sovereign state. Which is what Serbia was, you know.”

He said nothing.

“Do you realise what it was like? No, how could you know? You’ve never experienced bombs falling on your home town. It’s not like on television.”

This sounded like an accusation. It wasn’t his fault, but he felt complicit. How could she blame him for observing the war from afar? Did this mean that he wasn’t competent to speak about it? “I’ll never forget when it began,” she said. “I was in the cinema. The film kept running as if nothing was happening. But when I
went outside, I saw that the sky was red. Red with fire, because the bombs had hit the oil refinery in Pančevo, which is some twenty kilometres from Belgrade. People were running in the street, but I just stood there. I didn’t know what was going on. I just watched people and the cars jamming the street. I spent the night in a metro station, together with lots of other people, and went back home in the morning. Later on, I didn’t leave the flat for days on end. Friends came and we sat around talking and watching the telly whenever the power was on. At one point I had to sit an oral exam. The professor was questioning me while the air raid sirens were blaring. Three months of terror, but no one has been held accountable. Do you think that is right?”

What could he say to her? Yes, I think it is? For the first time, she had told him what it had been like for her when they bombed Belgrade. And what about him? He felt hurt. Hurt, because she had excluded him, because she insinuated that he couldn’t engage with her past and denied him any capacity for empathy.

Hadn’t he tried to understand her right from the start? Hadn’t he read books to get a grasp of her history? Hadn’t he endlessly reflected on his own history and, because of her, felt ashamed at being so ignorant of his origins? He had thought of his aunt, who lived in Karlovac and of how little concern he had felt for her fate when the war broke out in Yugoslavia and the mortars began to hammer the town. The war had just begun when his father phoned his sister to ask her if she would like to come and live with them in Germany. His mother didn’t think much of this idea and his parents rowed about it. Who knows how long this war will last, his mother argued, for all we know your sister might be stuck here with us for months, maybe even years. He,
too, felt uneasy, because his aunt would have had the use of one of his two tiny rooms. His father said that when all was said and done, she was his sister and if she wanted to stay with them, they had to take her in. Then brother and sister talked briefly on the phone and when his father put the receiver down, he said: “She doesn’t want to. She’d rather stay where she is. ‘If a bomb hits me it’s meant for me. That’s life,’ she says.” His mother was visibly relieved and he felt the same, although he couldn’t imagine why his aunt should want to put herself in harm’s way. She could have been safe, staying with her brother’s family in Germany in a room of her own, instead of accommodation for refugees. At the time, he couldn’t grasp why she should be so attached to her little flat. To that one room she had shared with her husband until his death and where, when their two children were still at home, the four of them had lived together. The few times he and his parents had gone to Karlovac to see her, she had hardly ever stirred from that room of hers – she had just sat on her sofa all day long. Presumably she spent the war years on that sofa.

Looking back, he feels ashamed at how distant he once felt from his aunt and her fate. But Ana was different. He wanted to know about her life. She had nothing to reproach him with on that score. Quite the opposite. She was the one who held back, who even resented hearing him read from the morning paper. Yet he couldn’t help feeling that someone forced to leave her childhood home and endure being shot at in her new one might feel persecuted by fate.

“Your wartime experiences,” he said, “don’t confer moral superiority, you know.” The look in her eyes was steely when they met his. Her lips moved, and he realised that she had been about to say something, but
changed her mind. She shook her head in disbelief, glanced at the window and got up to leave.

Uncertain what to do next, he stayed in the kitchen after she closed the door behind her. He observed her cup and a spot of dried coffee close to the rim. Later, the brownish stain on the white china would regain its shape in his mind and stand out clearly, so very clearly that the rest of the memory would appear to materialise around it. He would want to get a cloth and wipe the rim clean, but the mark would not be shifted.

He observed the plate covered with breadcrumbs, and next to it a knife with its blade thinly coated with strawberry jam. Her indoor shoes were under the table by her chair, where she had pulled them off. The left shoe looked forlorn, lying on its side near a table leg.

He sat in the middle of her kitchen, trying to find a source of strength. It frightened him that she had left. He feared that the woman who returned would be someone he wouldn’t know. He soon lost all sense of how long he had been sitting there. He blamed himself for being so insensitive, and tried to find the right words. He wanted to apologise. He longed for the sound of a key turning in the lock, of her footsteps on the floorboards. He longed for the familiarity of homecoming. He long for those reassuring noises: coat hangers being handled, outdoor shoes being put away and keys being placed on the shelf. His wait lasted for an eternity.

When she came into the kitchen, she stood by the table and he saw in her a weariness he did not recognise. Her skin was drained of colour and her eyes somehow sat deeper in their sockets. Had the light changed? Or his perception of her? She held her cup with both hands, as if it were a heavy weight, glanced into it and emptied it in one gulp.

Yet again, he thinks about Ana’s words. He wonders if Ana would have interpreted the behaviour of the judges and counsel for the prosecution differently. The judge on the left, who kept his arms crossed on his chest most of the time, the prosecutor’s assistant who shuffled notes across the table with such indifference, the presiding judge who regularly interrupted the defendant in a tone of voice one might call brusque, directing him to make sure that he paused before answering, to avoid making the interpreter’s job unnecessarily difficult, …
as I told you before
. Would she have thought them arrogant? Would she have perceived these people as representing victors’ justice and their gestures as humiliating? What about him? As an onlooker, is he part of this other world which conspires against hers? No, she couldn’t think that, of course he has never conspired against her, he has loved her, he loves her. He would do anything for her. Ana, you know you’re wrong.

“Well, it’s tragic,” the professor said, “but it’s a historical fact that Serbia is, it seems, the only country that hasn’t faced up to the need for national catharsis. By now, it has been left alone with its guilt complex, isolated from the rest of the world, for almost twenty years. The end of the war didn’t offer a new beginning for the Serbs: the same old war leader still held office and, even after his fall, they had only a brief glimpse of hope before Djindjić was shot. Try to imagine what it all meant for the young in Serbia. They suffer to this day. In their generation, they’re the only ones who aren’t allowed to travel freely in Europe, because Europe rejects their country.”

One week after the last time he saw Ana, he talked once more to the professor. He didn’t tell him about what he’d found out about Ana. He didn’t admit that he could
hardly sleep because of the thoughts forever turning over in his head. He didn’t explain that he felt betrayed and constantly had to ask himself what had really happened. He didn’t mention that he hadn’t eaten for days and spent most of the time in bed, longing for reassurance that it would turn out to be a misunderstanding, that one day the doorbell would ring and she would stand outside. He hoped she’d at least phone or write him a letter.

To this day, he has been waiting for her to tell him about herself and to try, for the sake of their love, to make him understand.