Stillness of the Sea (3 page)

The prosecutor puts his papers in an orderly pile and nods to the judge.

While she was bending over him, he started to tug at the zip of her anorak. Seen from above, it might have looked as if she were kissing him. But like her closed eyes, her lips were pressed together. She held his face between her cold hands. When he tried to kiss her, he could sense how she pulled gently away from him, how the pressure from her hands increased to prevent him from coming closer to her lips. He pulled the zip down instead, saw her pale throat with its soft curve and a wide section of her dark T-shirt, far too thin for the time of year. It looks like a river mouth, he thought. Pale skin, flowing down from the neck, spreading under the dark fabric. He loved this delta, would have loved to sink into it. He knew what would be revealed as he pulled the zip down a little more. He knew her body, every part of it, her shoulders where the bones were so easily felt, her wrists which he could circle with his thumb and finger, her small breasts that made him light-headed as he held them, pressed them, kneaded them, clung to them, losing all control, then her belly stretched flat between her hips and with a small navel, little more than a slit, in the middle. So warm was her belly, as though it held a power station within her; its heat surprised him every time. But her toes, her small, slightly crushed-looking toes, were very cold, as if all warmth vanished on the way down her legs; these legs of hers, so thin-looking when she stood naked in front of him, and yet men turned their heads in the street when she walked by in a short skirt. Her shins were blotchy, blue or brown in places, and didn’t match
the rest of her body. He often wondered about the bruised areas, since he never saw her banging into the edge of the bed or the table legs.

Her eyes were still closed as he examined her pale skin and sensed the soft wind sweeping over her and making her shudder a little. He told her that he had never loved another woman as he loved her. He insisted that he loved every single thing about her and began to list what he meant. Then, on their day by the Baltic Sea, he did not tell her that she seemed utterly untouchable and that, for a moment, he had wondered if ever a man had made love to her, pushed into her body and held her down by her slender wrists. Then, he could not believe that he had done just this. Nor could he understand his desire for her body, a desire that was new to him. Afterwards, seeing how he had left marks on her skin, he would ask himself if he could possibly have caused her pain. This idea came back to alarm him, as he saw her bending over him with her anorak half-opened.

He took her hands in his and looked at her in search of some small irregularity, a blemish, but knew that she had none. She had to straighten up so as not to lose balance. Her fingers were much thinner than his, her neatly cut nails covered with a layer of colourless varnish. He took her hands in his and wanted to warm them. But she could not be warmed. In this, her fingers were like her toes. Whenever he touched her, or she him, these parts of her were always cold. He simply couldn’t get used to it. Often, he took her hands in his or made her put them into his pockets or held them against his cheeks or wrapped them around a hot cup of tea.

On that day by the Baltic Sea, he had clasped her hands tightly, as if to squeeze the cold out. He pressed them so hard that she opened her eyes in fright and
looked at him. Her face was so close to his and her black hair lifted in the wind, which, he thought, was surely invigorating. “You’re hurting me,” she said. And he told her that he would do anything to make her happy. “Tell me, how can I make you happy?” But she just looked at him with her large, dark eyes. He knew that if she asked him the same question, he would answer, “Stay with me.”

Counsel for the defence rises. He is Mr Nurzet, a man with short, blond hair and strikingly large hands.

“The men who entered the house had robbed all of you and carried out other acts as you have just described them, but afterwards you nonetheless stayed in the house. You were prepared to sleep there, rather than flee. After the thefts, did you not realise the danger? Weren’t you frightened?”

She looks down at the tabletop.

“What can I tell you? They took everything from us, leaving only our souls. We didn’t think that they would take them away, too. We felt that we were all human beings and that we would learn to live together again. We could never have imagined that they would do what they did.”

“Tell me, have I understood you correctly? As a group, you did not leave that house because you believed that no one else would come for you?”

“Yes.”

“When the men drove away, did you see the car they used? Did you see the car they came back in?”

“I didn’t see the car they arrived in, but I heard it. The exhaust was broken and made a lot of noise.”

“And are you sure that it was the same car each time?”

“I don’t know if there were other cars. I think it was the same one, but I never saw it, only heard it.”

“Can I put it on record that the only evidence for the car the men arrived in being the same as the returning one, is that you believe that you were able to recognise the noise of the exhaust?”

She nods.

“You nod. May I take this as yes?”

“Yes.”

“Did you recognise the men who returned at night?”

“No, I didn’t. But members of my family said that they were the same men who had robbed us and that they had come back to take our souls.”

The expression on Šimić’s face – doesn’t he look tenser now? Isn’t that a smile, fleeting and undisguised? For the first time, he appears to be listening attentively. He no longer plays with his tie or examines his nails, but watches his defence counsel, who stands behind the table, leaning forward a little and sometimes holding himself back as he speaks, as if to control the flow of words.

“When the car returned and brought the men back, was it already night-time?”

“Yes.”

“Was the house supplied with electricity? Or were there street lights outside?”

“Lights were on in the neighbouring houses. The electricity in our house had been turned off and there were no street lamps outside.”

“In fact, it was dark outside.”

“Yes.”

It’s easy to see what he is driving at. Šimić might well not have been there when the Hasanovićs were burnt alive. The lawyer will argue that his client never knew
that the house would be set on fire, and that, after having left with the two men, he had injured his leg, a nasty twist, perhaps a stumble – God knows what happened – and had been taken to the hospital. Šimić knew the truth, but chose to be silent.

He senses the unrest spreading in the public gallery. People no longer appear impassive, instead some are whispering to each other, others flexing fingers or arms, yet others shifting their feet about. It is as if injustice generates tensions which have to find outward expression. There is an itch somewhere inside his body. He can’t locate it. He wants to scratch it, but wherever his hand goes, it seems that the source of the irritation lies elsewhere, deeper. His right calf itches, and he tries to get at the spot through the material of his trousers, fails, reaches up under the hem, but realises nothing is any good.

On leaving the room, he hands his headphones to the guard, as required of members of the public. He goes downstairs, across the lobby and then straight outside. For a while, he hesitates on the front steps, then decides to carry on to the gatehouse in front of the court building and get his jacket from the locker. He had to leave it there, along with his identity card. He’ll collect them and walk back by the same route he took in the morning – along the Scheveningse Road towards the sea.

It has stopped snowing, but dusk has descended on the town and the first cars he sees have switched their headlights on. How late can it be? He presses his face against the passenger side-window of a parked car, hoping to see a clock among the other dials. He walks on. The pedestrian walkway is covered by a powdery layer of snow which quickly melts under his feet. A woman is walking towards him and he asks her in
English, “Could you please tell me the time?” She glances at him, bunches up the bottom of her jacket sleeve and pulls it back. “Ten past four.” He thanks her and sets off again.

She has to endure waiting for another hour. Is a witness allowed just to get up and leave the courtroom? What would happen then? Would she, too, find two guards at her side? But she is there voluntarily, unlike the defendant. Šimić could have come willingly, too. But he didn’t. In order to get the trial underway, they had to arrest him and have him transferred him to The Hague. He could at least have volunteered.

He’s sweating inside his jacket, even though he’s walking slowly. Maybe a tram will come. He turns to look and waits briefly under the shelter at the tram stop. Having a roof so close above his head calms him.

They met in the theatre.
She was sitting in the cloakroom at the far end of the wide entrance hall with a mass of coats and jackets behind her. She was absorbed in a book. Her long, slim legs were resting on the counter. He had left the auditorium early and was standing about in the foyer, feeling a little lost. When she noticed him, she closed the book and looked at him. He took a few steps towards her. “Do you like Shakespeare?” she asked, when he came close enough. He wasn’t quite sure how to reply and checked the title of the book she had left on the counter:
King Lear
. He could hardly say no. “I adore Shakespeare,” she told him. He was taken by the way she rolled her r’s, wondered where she came from – was it Poland? Then he learnt that she was a Serb, that her name was Ana and she had come to Berlin to study.

The following morning, he rushed off to a bookshop and bought the Universal Library editions of
King Lear, Romeo and Juliet
and
Macbeth
.

If he had he told her the truth, would they have gone out together? He asked himself this many times, because he had lied to her. He had never read anything by
Shakespeare. But he couldn’t tell her that on the first evening. It was just a small, white lie, told so that he could be close to her.

He stands at the window, his face pressed against the glass. He is looking out. The sky must be overcast, for he sees neither stars nor moon, only a couple of lights in the far distance where he assumes the horizon must be. Over breakfast, he had watched a tanker moving slowly towards Rotterdam across a sea banded by the breaking surf. Now he wonders why there were so few lights – just one or two on that gigantic ship.

When a car corners a bend in the street outside and its headlights briefly sweep the shore, he thinks that he can see the water.

How late is it? Two o’clock? Three? The lounge is dark, apart from the light from a streetlamp on the pavement outside the house. He has picked a small guesthouse. Its name appealed to him and, at this time of year, in December, it was easy to find a vacant room, even one with a view of the sea. It could be that he is the only guest. He has met no one else in the corridor. The house is quiet, no one stirs, and there is no sound of the surf. If he closes his eyes he might be somewhere else, not in The Hague, not in a city anywhere, for urban
stillness is different, it has an oppressive quality, like a sluggish substance amassed between the buildings.

That word comes back to his mind:
bonaca
. He looked it up later in a small dictionary that she had given him. He didn’t find it.

When the play ended and the public streamed into the foyer, a crowd collected in front of her cloakroom and some people in the queue were waving their numbered tickets in readiness long before it was their turn. Ana took each ticket, went away for a moment and returned to the counter with an armful of coats. She didn’t look at the people standing there, only at the numbers as they were presented to her. The cloakroom was hot. Tiny drops of sweat appeared at the top of her nose and, later, on her forehead. When she had taken the last coat off its hook and helped her customer to put it on, she stood still, with her hands on her hips, her sleeves rolled far up her arms. And then he did something that still amazes him today. With his index finger, he traced the ridge of her nose, from tip to bridge. His gesture surprised them both. He was far too unsure of himself, he knew that. He felt certain that, throughout his life, all kinds of opportunities had passed him by because he feared rejection or, worse still, being thought pushy. Ana said nothing.

On every one of the next five evenings, he went to see the play, despite having rather disliked the performance the first time round. Every night, he left just before the interval began, shoving his way past the vexed people on his row in the hope that when he stepped through the door into the foyer, she would be in the cloakroom, just as she had been on that first evening. He knew this
wasn’t likely, because another woman had taken his coat before each performance and she wasn’t like Ana at all.

He didn’t know much about Ana – only that she was twenty-seven years old, had learnt German at school in her home town of Belgrade, and later received a
scholarship
to study German in Berlin, where she had been for a year. At that first meeting, he told her about his father, who came from Karlovac, which pleased her and made her suggest that they should speak to each other in her language. “Sorry, I can’t,” he said, explaining that not only was he born in Germany and grew up as a German, but also his father had never spoken to him in Croat. “So, you really don’t understand a word?” she asked and he shook his head.

She then gave him a goodbye kiss on the cheek, but no phone number where he could reach her and no surname. Only Ana. “Three letters,” she said, “it’s a palindrome.” And there it was again, the rolling r-sound, which stayed with him for days afterwards and which he imitated, or at least tried to, when he was alone. His first name, Robert, had two of her r’s.

As he stands at the window, he hears the words in his head once more and speaks them under his breath: Berlin, Belgrade, cloakroom, German – his tongue vibrating lightly against his palate, a puff of air that makes his lips dry – and then his name, as only Ana had pronounced it, until he felt, just for a moment, that he’d heard her speak. Her voice was always so clear, even just after waking in the mornings when he still had to try to clear his own. He often asked her to say something close to his ear and, when she didn’t come close enough to tickle him, told her “I didn’t hear that,” so that her whispering lips touched his ear and, although he tried to hold back, the intimacy of her voice triggered an
irresistible
excitement. To imagine her whispers now was enough; warmth flowed through his body, down from his throat, through his lungs and deep into his belly. Any old word would have done, but she always made a joke of it and would hiss sentences in his ear that threw him into confusion. “I want you.” “Do you like this?” “Shall I?” He feels the thrill spreading through his body.

He keeps standing by the window with his forehead against the cold glass. His jaw is growing numb. His stillness is complete. The room is dark, which is perhaps why he senses her presence so clearly.

Ana is behind him, nearly close enough to touch him, to put her arms around him, to press herself against him. Her breathing, caught by his ear, is the wild rush of air that he’s longed for and then, in the stillness after the storm, he waits for the first syllable. Tongue vibrating against the palate, that is how his name begins. A pause before the next puff of air. “You care for me?” Her slender arms around his body. Every day, every night. “Ana, I couldn’t hear that.” He feels it now, that tickling sensation. But he still cannot hear her. It has now been three weeks and four days. Twenty-five days and nights since he left her flat. Eight months since they lay, side by side, on that Baltic beach. Ten months since the evening in the theatre and the days that followed. And twenty-five days in which his mind has had only one thought: his desire to see her again.

On the sixth evening, she was at the theatre and did not seem surprised to see him. She just took his coat, gave him a numbered ticket and asked him if he was going to see the play. He told her that he had already seen it four times, until just before the interval. She worked only on Saturdays and Sundays, she told him and let him into the cloakroom, though visitors were
frowned upon, and they sat there together between the wood-panelled walls, near the radiator, which gurgled to itself from time to time.

They talked about the city. To his amazement, she knew every single nightspot on the Kastanienallee, and on Bergmann Street and Simon-Dach Street. She preferred Lovelite, Maria am Ostbahnhof and a small place called Zosch. He had never been in any clubs. She liked Berlin because it was the kind of city where, whoever you were, there was somewhere for you or, as she put it, a place for you under the sky.

He asked himself where his place might be. He felt most at home in his own small flat and with the other historians in the office where he worked as the assistant to one of the professors.

He imagined Ana among the sweating bodies, a tank top exposing her bare arms and shoulders. She was speaking of freedom and decadence, he of his dissertation. He recalled how once, later, she had tapped him on the forehead with her finger and said: “Life happens outside, not in there.”

How had she realised so quickly that the intense wish for what was “outside” was precisely what disturbed his inner balance? He needed someone to provoke him, odd as that might sound. He had felt like this back at school. Come on! Go for it! I dare you! Ana was the first woman who had grasped this from their first meeting. She was the woman he had always hoped for.

Looking back over the ten months, he has come to see that she understood him better than he understood her. And he asks himself if he was too much of a coward. Should he have insisted on answers when her silence and her refusal to tell him more about herself made him feel insecure? He also wondered where it came from, this
fear of his that asking too many questions would ruin their love.

There are no more lights out at sea now; the two points of lights from before must have passed out of sight long ago. The sky shows no trace of the advance of the morning.

When he woke, she was lying beside him, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted, a few strands of hair sticking to her temples. He got up and started to look around her room. During their first few weeks together, he kept trying to decode everything about her. The books she read, the music she listened to, any little thing that might help him to be closer to her, any little thing that might reflect some part of her.

The walls of the room were painted green, her desk was a wooden board on two trestles facing the window, and on that desk next to the computer, there were a pile of papers and a bunch of bright flowers stuck into a vase. He caught himself thinking that there might be someone else. Reality was different from what he had imagined, her rooms were cramped and seemed crowded with special places for objects and shelves full of little mementoes.

The kitchen contained a table and two folding chairs, a fridge that reached up to the shelf on the wall where she kept a few items of crockery. Above the basin in the bathroom, she had lined up a couple of bottles of perfume and some make-up. A pink toothbrush
protruded
diagonally from a china mug. A mirror on the wall. A small round rug, white on a blue-tiled floor.

That morning was also when he noticed the
photograph
for the first time. She had hung it on the wall above her desk. It was of a strongly built man with thick, black hair and a broad face. His eyes were her eyes. The
small folds on either side of his mouth were instantly recognisable. He was her father. And he had thought him such a warm-hearted father, stern now and then, perhaps prone to anger, but with eyes that spoke of nothing but kindness.

She saw him looking around the room, noted that he stopped in front of her desk and carefully examined the volumes on her bookshelf. “Well?” she enquired and then added, “What have you found out about me?” She pulled the duvet back and patted the mattress gently. When he was lying next to her once more, she hugged him, put her face against his shoulder, and he told her, “I know everything.”

He wondered, more than once, if it would have been better for him not to know everything, because this would have left him free to love her without questioning his love. He would never have learnt about all that, had he not wanted to know so much.

He often imagined Ana and himself going to the airport to collect her father. She can hardly wait for the doors to slide back at last and then, among the other passengers, her father steps out, suitcase in hand. She spreads her arms wide, like a small child, only now her father doesn’t have to crouch; he only puts the suitcase down and, as she throws her arms around his neck, he places his hand on the back of her head and presses it against his chest. While they hug each other, her father looks around, spots him standing a little bit away and looks him over, without hostility. He doesn’t understand when Ana says something to her father. Then her father holds out his hand and says, “Ana told me a lot about you. She is very happy.”

The darkness seems to reflect his feelings. How long has he been standing here? Hours? Days? Weeks?
Nothing moves. And he asks himself whether one can be sure that life continues in the dark. Were he not aware of his breathing and heartbeat, no other signs would show that life carries on. The dark is a lake, not a river. Memories come back at night, but at a cost. Once a strangulated cry had woken him and, at the moment of waking, he was uncertain whether he had truly heard it or only dreamt it. He was in her room, Ana lay next to him, she was restless and breathing heavily; when he put his hand on her stomach, her body twitched sharply, but his touch had obviously calmed her, as afterwards she went back into a deep sleep. Had she often been lying at his side, full of anguish, while he failed to notice?

He opens the window. One gust and the cold air takes charge of the room. He lies down on the bed and pulls the duvet up to his chin. The light summery curtains are flapping in the darkness and stirring pages of the newspaper on the table.

He gropes for the lamp on his bedside table, finds the string-pull, puts the light on, throws the duvet back and observes his feet, moves his toes a little. “I like slim men,” she once said, “and I like your eyes, you have beautiful hands with slim fingers, I like them and I like your lips. You look good.” She lets her fingertips glide over his body, from his forehead down along the ridge of his nose over his lips, over his chin, over his Adam’s apple, down in a straight line across the centre of his chest and his belly, lingering with one finger in his navel, avoiding the thicket of hair and moving onto his left leg, onwards across his kneecap all the way to the tip of his big toe; while her fingers were on their journey, he kept his eyes closed and wished he were three, four metres tall.