Stillness of the Sea (11 page)

He imagines himself walking up to the prison gate to say that he would like to meet one of the inmates, because he has fallen in love with the man’s daughter. Perhaps he could write Šimić a letter and hand it in at the gate. But what would he write?

Herr Šimić, you don’t know me. I’m not even sure that you’re aware of my existence. Ana may have told you about me, as I got to know her in Berlin. Last February, I fell in love with her. I didn’t know then whose daughter she was.

She has told me a great deal about you. You read Shakespeare aloud to her and, in the summer, you used to take her for walks along the banks of the Drina. You taught her angling and how to kill a fish. You played Coltrane and Armstrong records for her, which inspired her to learn the trumpet. And you bought her one, which she played at home in the cellar.

You’re always a good man in the stories Ana tells about you. I admit there were times I wished you were my father. I fantasised about the day I would meet you for the first time. Do you know that Ana keeps a photograph of you on the wall next to her desk? It’s easy to see that Ana is your daughter. You have the same eyes.

I don’t know if you caught sight of me in the
courtroom
, but then, even if you had, how could you have known who I was? I doubt that Ana has shown you my photo. But I have been watching you during your trial.

When I listened to what you were charged with, I wished you weren’t who you are – I wished that the man in the dark suit, who toyed with his tie while a woman spoke of her family burning, was not Ana’s father. But I did observe your eyes.

Frankly, I don’t know why I’m writing to you. Is it because I hope that the whole thing is a
misunderstanding
and that you were not on the bridge at that particular time? Do I really want to know you? The prospect of meeting you frightens me.

I haven’t seen Ana for weeks now and it’s all because of you. You have come between us. But I still think of Ana all the time. Why do I write to you? Perhaps because I would like to know if Ana was mistaken about you.

He is cold and decides to take the bus back. What did he hope to gain by seeing the prison? He has no idea. But then the gate opens and a solitary figure, a woman, steps outside. In the poor light, he sees that she’s wearing a coat. A short woman, walking with her eyes fixed on the ground. She is coming towards him. As she crosses the street only a few metres away, he recognises her. Actually, he recognised her at once.

They are the only ones at the bus stop and their eyes meet briefly. She sits down, folding her hands in her lap. He can hardly take his eyes off her. The street light makes her look pale. Close-up, she looks younger than she seemed in the courtroom. He sees her hands, Ana’s hands, with their soft fingers, pale and fragile. The rest of her body is different from Ana’s. She is shorter, heavier, much plumper. Her stillness is different; there’s more tenseness in it.

Then there’s the sound of the bus and its headlights sweep across the stop. She goes to sit on an aisle seat
near the back. He walks past her, but she takes no notice. He finds a seat two rows behind her.

She must hate it, he thinks, this city and all it stands for. Hate this bus, the houses we’re passing, the people who live here in a city that has taken away her husband and perhaps will never let him go. He doesn’t know what kind of sentences are meted out to men like Šimić, maybe he’ll get ten years or fifteen, or maybe he’ll spend the rest of his life locked up. He watches her. When the bus goes rounds a corner, she holds onto the edge of her seat and he sees her hand. There is a wedding ring on it.

“Mrs Šimić, would you please tell us when you married?”

“I’ve been married for thirty-five years. Thirty-five this year. The wedding was on the 12th of February 1970.”

“Tell us when your children were born.”

“Our son Milan was born on the 23rd of November 1972 and our daughter Ana on the 15th of June 1980.”

“Would you describe your marriage as happy?”

“Yes.”

“To this day?”

“Yes.”

The bus route crosses half the city. He isn’t sure what this journey is all about.

“My mother? Mum took care of the house. Cooked, did the laundry, cleaned. She ran a small shop once, but she gave it up after a while. Do I take after my mother in any way? Everyone has something of their mother in them. But what exactly do you want me to say? Why do you want to know? Why are you so interested?”

“You haven’t put her photo on the wall.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It just occurred to me.”

He recalls that Ana told him she and her mother didn’t speak much on that bus journey. Everyone on that bus was very quiet. The passengers were all women and children. Ana’s mother kept a plain white plastic bag on her lap, a bag from the baker’s shop. Once, she must have brought the bread home in it. Ana only learned later that there was soil in the bag, earth dug up in her mother’s garden.

There are so many questions to ask this woman. What is Ana doing? How is she? Where is she? Perhaps they could sit down and talk together in a café. Meanwhile, he stares out through the window at houses and parked cars.

She is almost outside when he leaps up, hurries to the door and manages to jump out just before it closes. What next?

Apart from the two of them, there is no one around. “Mrs Šimić.” He needs two attempts before his voice carries. She stops and turns round. Looks at him. He comes closer until he is one or two paces away from her.

“Mrs Šimić,” he says.

She only stares at him questioningly. He says, “I’m a friend of Ana’s.”

She still only looks at him, but nods when he says “Ana”.

“I got to know her in Berlin.”

She shrugs and now he realises that she doesn’t understand English. “Ana,” he says.

She nods again.

“Ana, fine?” he asks. “
Dobro
?”

She nods. Then she looks over her shoulder. She says something he doesn’t understand. Signs that she must get on. She turns, walks away, hesitatingly at first,
then with a more determined step. He stands there for a while, looking after her.

“It wasn’t my mother’s fault that I was taken away. She didn’t want to be on that bus either.”

For her birthday, he baked honey cake. It was a Serb recipe he’d found in a cookbook. The cake, decorated with flowers of white icing, was beautifully presented in the photograph. Because it was his first ever cake, he underestimated the cost.

The first instruction was to stir the egg mixture in a
bain-marie.
He didn’t know what that meant. Once he had found out, he had to learn that the mixture sets when the water gets too hot. He rolled out the dough, trying to make six equally sized layers of the same thickness. Then, he had to distribute creamy filling over five of the layers and place the sixth on top. At the same time, he was meant to whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and add the syrup. “The whipped egg whites will puff up when they come into contact with the hot syrup,” the recipe said, but when he tried it, nothing of the kind occurred. The whites didn’t stiffen either. Desperate to make the icing set, he stuck the cake in the freezer compartment. He called his father and asked him to phone his sister in Karlovac for advice. It annoyed him that he couldn’t speak her language.

Hours later, the cake was ready, though it looked nothing like the picture. He hoped that Ana would recognise it as Honey Cake anyway, or at least understand how much hard work had gone into its creation.

They went dancing that evening. Or rather, she danced. Most of the time, he leant against the bar next to the dance floor and watched her merging into the dancing crowd, high on alcohol and music. He wished he
could switch off that easily. At midnight, they met at the bar to drink her birthday toast. It was the night between the 14th of June. Only much later would he come to realise what a fateful date that was. On that night, sixteen years earlier, the Hasanović family had burnt to death. He wondered about this. Could it be anything more than an unfortunate coincidence? What connection could there possibly be between Ana’s birthday and that odious crime? None. But then, later on, he would feel that their champagne celebration was in some way improper.

She was still asleep when he quietly slipped out of bed to go into the kitchen and take the Honey Cake out of the fridge. It was decorated with his version of
twenty-eight
flowers made of icing. He spread out a white sheet close to the bed and placed the cake on it, together with a knife to cut it with and his gift, a box which looked the right size for a piece of jewellery.

She slept with her face resting on her hand. Even now, asleep, she seemed to hide her toes, one set squeezed in behind the other. He began to count the freckles on her face, trying to find the little one on her lower lip.

The first time he had woken up beside her, he wanted one of her freckles to be his and chose one on her lip. He asked her the word for “freckle”. It was something to do with summer and he still remembers the word –
leto
– but what was the other part? “
Pega
,” she said, “
pega
.” He stored the word away, as he did all the words she taught him. The word for “love” he learned later on –
ljubav
. He asked her and she said: “Is that right? You don’t know how to say ‘love’?” She shook her head in disbelief.

She blinked. Then she turned to lie on her back, opened her eyes and, once she had slowly become fully conscious, he said in English, “Happy Birthday.”

She sat up. “Look, a cake.”

“Can you see what it is?”

She examined the cake.

“A real Serb Honey Cake,” he told her.

“Somehow, I remembered it differently,” she said and blew him a kiss.

“Would you like some?”

She nodded and he cut her a slice.

“And what’s that?” she asked, pointing to the gift.

“That? It looks like a gift to me.”

He picked up the small box, handed it to her and sat down next to her on the bed.

She straightened up, looked at the package from all sides, shook it and said: “I can’t work out what it is.”

“You’ve got to work harder then,” he said.

She unwrapped it, put the tiny box on the palm of her hand and opened the lid. “What’s this?” she asked, holding a round pebble between her fingers.

“Smell it,” he told her. “The smell might remind you of somewhere.”

She lifted the small stone to her nose, sniffed it and shook her head.

“This isn’t any old pebble,” he said. “Getting it cost me a lot of effort and lots of phone calls. I had to persuade them to find me this stone – and most of the time we didn’t understand each other. This is a pebble…” he paused and looked into her eyes. “This is a pebble from Lumbarda Bay.”

She still seemed baffled.

“Ana,” he said. “I’d like to come with you to Lumbarda and the journey would be my gift to you.”

She stared at the pebble, then closed her hand around it.

He watched her face in profile. The ridge of her nose, so very straight, the high cheekbones, her lips pressed together.

She breathed in three times before she turned to him and asked, “When?”

He watches as
, behind the glass, the court rises and the judges leave the room in an orderly file. By now, almost everyone else has left the public gallery and the guard glances at him reproachfully. He apologises and hands in his headphones.

He’s not sure what to do next and ponders whether to leave for the day or come back and follow the trial after the lunch break. Standing in the foyer, still deep in thought, he suddenly realises that someone is talking to him. It’s a young woman with short, dark hair, probably about his own age.

She tells him in English that she’s sure she saw him here yesterday, and asks if he’s following the entire Šimić trial. He nods, asking himself if he has noticed her before. But he can’t remember, so she probably sat in one of the rows behind him.

“I’m Aisha,” she says and they shake hands. She offers him a cigarette, but he declines. She asks where he’s from. Berlin, he says.

“Oh, good. Let’s speak German instead. Shall we go outside? I could do with some fresh air.”

He holds the door open. She walks down the few steps and then stops. Some of the other visitors leave, presumably off to lunch in the city.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“I wanted to know what this sort of trial is like.”

“Are you a law student?”

“No, I’m not.”

“I’m pretty sure most of the people in there study law.”

“Have you been here from the start?”

“Yes.” She looks at him. “And you?”

“I was here during the first week. I came back the day before yesterday.”

“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’ve 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?