Stillness of the Sea (14 page)

He didn’t want to read the letters, but it would be a lie to deny they aroused his interest. Standing at the window, he could not get them out of his head. He was curious about who had sent them. He remembers speculating that they might have been love letters. Fear paralysed him for a moment: was there perhaps another man in her life, someone who lived somewhere else? He tried to drive this notion away.

Who might have written to her? Her parents most likely. Letters from Višegrad. He wondered about possible letters from Višegrad, if they were sent by her father or her mother. What would the stamps be like? Then he could resist no longer: he returned to the desk and scrutinised the pile of letters.

He read her name and address; the rounded characters were in blue ink. The letters weren’t addressed to Ana, but to Cordana. He recognised the handwriting, the way “Cordana” was written, almost like a loop that continued into an “a”, then into a similar loop to end the name. It was her father’s handwriting. It was the first time he saw her father’s version of his surname. The “S”, with exaggerated curves, the strangely minimised “i” without a dot, then the “c” on its own, with no connection to the rest. He kept staring at her name and, after what felt like an eternity, noticed “Nederland” on the stamps. He tried to make out the postmark. The date was indecipherable, but not the place. Scheveningen.

He picked up the letter on top of the pile and turned it round. There was no sender or sender’s address. He scanned the other letters; no doubt about it, they were all from her father and all posted in Scheveningen. It
didn’t for a moment occur to him that her father might be in jail; he didn’t link the place to the prison.

He felt annoyed. Ana had never mentioned that her father was in Holland. He had always assumed that her parents lived in Višegrad, now, as before. He couldn’t think why she should have kept silent about it, not said that her father had been living in Scheveningen for some time. She had told him so much about her father. Why not this?

And why was he there? Maybe there was a simple explanation and he would accept it if she cosied up to him, put her arms around his neck and gave him a sideways glance with that sweet, girlish look in her eyes. Then his anger would seem over the top and he would simply have to forgive her. After all, there could be hundreds of reasons. But, secretly, he felt that this time there were no easy answers.

So what if she were to tell him that her father had fallen ill and found out that the best treatment was available in Scheveningen? Or that her father had gone there for a term’s teaching? He would ask her why she hadn’t mentioned it and she’d answer that it just didn’t seem important enough at the time, or that somehow it slipped her mind. He could accept all that. Besides, why should it matter where her father was? That his parents lived near Hanover was something he had only recently got around to telling her.

He climbed back into bed and pulled the duvet tight. He wanted just a few more minutes in bed. They had made love that night. She had woken up first, and he felt her pressing close to him. She was kissing his chest, then put her hand between his legs. To him, no fantasy could be more exciting than being brought out of his sleep aroused and lying in the quiet darkness as lust
pulsated in him. It was as if he had surfaced from deep inside his dreams to sense what being alive was like for a while, before immersing himself once more. He dozed off after their love-making. In the morning, the memory of something wonderful stayed with him, as if it were part of his dreams.

He had woken up in a good mood, unaware that he might have slept with her for the last time. He would often ask himself afterwards if she had known. If that night was her farewell gift to him. And if she knew it was, whether she found it wretched.

They had been to the cinema, come home late and gone to bed almost at once. Perhaps the pile of letters was already there, but he hadn’t noticed them. The other possibility was that she had placed them there while he was asleep, during the night or the early hours of the morning. Or perhaps – he hadn’t thought of this before – leaving them proved how much she trusted him and, as she saw it, was opening her life to him. But he didn’t understand and didn’t find the right response. He couldn’t comprehend why she seemed so distant that morning.

She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt when she came into the room.

“That was lovely,” he said.

She stood next to the bed, looking down at him.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

She went to open the window and glanced at the letters as she turned. She might have checked whether he had disturbed the pile.

“Your father has been writing to you,” he said and paused. “How long has he been in Scheveningen?”

She only looked at him. Something about her reaction troubled him and suggested she might after all have left the letters on her desk quite unintentionally. She clearly felt under attack. Much later, he realised she had instantly assumed that he knew about her father being in the Scheveningen prison.

“Why haven’t you told me?” he asked.

She stood with a hand on the letters, undecided what to say.

“Why is he there?” he asked.

Then she took one step away from the desk and their eyes met. He has never forgotten the look in hers and it frightened him. She stared intently, almost aggressively, at him. And in that moment, he had no idea why. He understood nothing.

“My father,” she said and then stopped. “My father is charged as an accomplice to the murder of forty-two people. They were allegedly murdered in a house fire. According to public opinion, he’s a war criminal. You have fallen in love with the daughter of a war criminal.”

While she spoke, he was in the bed but must at some point have pulled himself up to lean against the wall, his torso was bare and he felt how cold his back had become. She met his eyes and seemed to expect
something
from him, but he couldn’t respond. At the time, he thought that she must want to end things between them. Because there would have been other ways to tell him this. In bed, lying in his arms, for instance. But perhaps he wasn’t quite ready to grasp how hard it was for her to tell him about this, especially him, who loved her, whom she loved. Surely she feared that he would fail to cope with her secret, that he would reject her. Perhaps she was proved right in the end. Didn’t he leave her? Didn’t he wait for her to make the first move?

She walked out of the room, as if in a hurry. Or so it seemed to him, because he felt that everything else stood still. He got up after a while, perhaps a long while, and attempted to pull his trousers on; he had to try three times before he could push his feet through the trouser legs because he kept losing his balance and had to sit down on the bed. He scanned the room to see if any of his things were still there. He spotted his socks on the floor next to the bed, together with the book by Ivo Andrić. He pulled his socks on and left the book. He stood up and went out of the room. A floorboard creaked under his weight. That was the only sound.

He remembers one passage in the book, where the Mullah Ibrahim says that one should not disturb flowing water, divert it and alter its bed in any way – not for a day or even an hour, because that would be a major sin. But the Swabian can’t leave things alone; he has to hammer away and make things.

Aisha is studying him carefully. He doesn’t expect her to understand. She just sits still, her palms pressed against her cup of tea.

“You should go,” she tells him. “People like you, who haven’t lived there, have only watched the war on TV, you can’t understand what it’s really like. I could never live with a Serb; I wouldn’t do that to my family. People outside looking in might think that the war is over. Sure, when you travel in Bosnia, you’ll still see houses that haven’t been shot to bits, and you’ll see people drinking in the evenings and going to work during the day, just like in any other country. But take a look at the bank notes. They’re not the same, you see. Some are printed in Cyrillic script, some in the Latin, and on the first kind you’ll see Serb heroes and on the second, Muslim ones.
You’ll learn that the people who lived through that war lead two lives, the one they have during the day and the other one, which starts when they go to bed and try to sleep.”

Meanwhile, the lights along the Promenade have come on. It is quiet out there beyond the windowpane. A vision of her lips comes into his mind, the tiny freckle she gave him, his
pega
. To him, she was the embodiment of stillness, of inner peace. He recalls the Serb word, it’s
mir
, and means “stillness” but also “peace”. Was he deceiving himself? How could he believe that someone who has lived through what Ana has lived through could ever achieve inner peace? What did it mean, to lead two lives? Has he no part in one of them? Could she ever share that one with him in any way? Share it with someone who hasn’t experienced what she has, who cannot know what it’s like to have two lives? In the beginning, she had perhaps hoped this was possible, but soon she realised that it wasn’t. He felt excluded, behind glass, just like all those days in the court. Aisha has shown him that people like him can’t understand people like her. Was there no way out? Was he destined to be an onlooker? Would he be forever analysing Ana’s life, without being able to share it with her? He refuses to believe this. He will not allow himself to be locked out. Besides, who says that Ana and Aisha must be the same? Perhaps he really should go there.

“I’d really like to ask you something,” he says. “I’d like to know if you’ve had a relationship.”

“What do you mean? If I’ve been in love?”

“Yes.”

“We met in Germany. He lived in the room next door, with his family. We shared the use of a bathroom and a
kitchen. They had fled two week before us, from Goražde, which was besieged at the time.”

“Why isn’t he here?”

“He tries to draw a line under all that. He doesn’t want to hear anything more about the war, he wants to … I don’t know … at least separate the daytime from the wartime; he wants to enjoy the day.”

“Do you talk about the war?”

“We did in the beginning. He told me what his family had to deal with, how they managed to flee, and I told him my story. We both know what it was like, so we no longer need to speak about it.”

They had been in bed together so many times and, after putting away their books and switching off the light, these were the moments when he felt very close to her. Just the two of them, while the dark obscured everything else and perception depended on touch alone. The sensations of their bodies, their shared warmth under the duvet, her cold toes and hot belly. He felt that they trusted each other profoundly. And, so he thought, those were the moments when they should have talked. Now it occurs to him for the first time that the dark evenings in bed were not in fact suited to togetherness, because that was when she immersed herself in her other life.

“How long are you here for?” he asks Aisha.

“I was going to stay for a whole week, but I think I’ll leave sooner. What about you?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Will you come back?”

“I don’t think so. Will you?”

“I want to be here for his sentence.”

He wishes that he could have said the same, with the same clarity. But he’s unsure of his own feelings. Inside him, an empty space is widening. The honest thing
would be to admit that he can’t be bothered with Šimić anymore. Somehow, his rage against this man, who has caused Ana so much grief, seems to have drained away.

“Would you like something else to drink?”

She shakes her head.

“Let’s go, then. I’ll walk you to the bus stop,” he says. He waves to the waitress, finds some money in his trouser pocket and then asks the waitress how to get to the railway station.

It’s almost eight o’clock now. Aisha can’t hide how disconcerted she is by this sudden departure. He pushes his chair back to go, but she stays sitting at the table and takes a sip from her practically empty teacup.

Outside, it feels colder than before, even though the wind has died down. They both try as best they can to shield their faces behind the collars of their coats.

The day by the sea. He opened up the map, resting it on his knees. They had just left the seaside and settled into the car, waiting for it to warm up. He had turned the fan to the top setting. She warmed her hands between her thighs. He was so cold he could hardly move his fingers. “Where do we go now?” she asked. “Where would you like to go?” “Anywhere that’s warm.” “Back home?” he asked. “No, I don’t want to go home,” she answered. “Tell me where you’d like me to take you.” “I don’t know. Just drive.”

“Thank you for coming with me,” Aisha says when they arrive at the bus stop.

They stand there together, waiting for the bus. He can’t think of the right way to say goodbye. Should he hold out his hand? Hug her? They are the only people around. There’s a park on the other side of the road, and the naked branches of the trees stand out against the evening sky.

He hears her voice. She is saying that Lejla
Hasanović
was her best friend.

“We went to school together. The same age, you see. We lived just two houses apart. Our families had decided to go away together. It was all planned and we were waiting for Lejla and her family. The buses were ready and we were told we had to get on board; they couldn’t wait any longer. I’m positive that my father went over to one of the organisers and told him that there were other people still to come, two more families, but the man told him that more transport would soon be coming. In the end, we boarded the bus. I only learnt what happened a year later. To this day, I agonise about Lejla and why she was so late.”

He sees the headlights of the bus, hears the rumbling of the engine and the whoosh of the doors. As Aisha steps in, she turns and looks at him, but he can’t interpret the expression on her face. It actually seems expressionless. He watches as she passes rows of seats and then settles by the window somewhere in the middle of the bus. The bus is ready to leave when he spots an elderly lady sitting next to the aisle, two rows behind Aisha. He’s sure he recognises her and briefly considers knocking on the window, but only watches as the bus pulls away from the stop. Having taken a mental note of the illuminated number above the rear window of the bus, which has come from the prison, he checks the time and then the timetable. Departure 20.37. It’s 20.39.