Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (13 page)

   “I very much want to leave this place,” Saskia said. “It is good of Sinisa to give us a home, but I want to leave and go to America. It is not, I am not frightened of, of him.” Her reluctance to speak Dragan’s name said otherwise, but I pretended not to notice. “If he had gone…no. If he was going to come and find me, he would come before now.”
   “He would have come,” I corrected. “I think you’re right.”
   “I just want to depart this place,” she said. “There is nothing I can do, all day.”
   “You’re bored,” I said.
   “Yes. I am bored. I am so very bored here. It is better being bored than being frightened, but it is best to be not bored and not frightened. To be neither. To be neither in America, that is what I want.”
   “We’re supposed to leave in ten days,” I said.
   “Ten days. Paul, I am so excited! Today, in a store, I saw a…a plan.”
   “A what?”
   “A plan. Of America. Like you would make a plan of this room, or of Vlore.” She pretended to draw on a piece of paper. Yet another round of our endless and usually amusing game of Learning English Charades.
   “A map,” I said.
   “Of course! My vocabulary, that is the hardest thing, there are so many words. I saw a map, and I saw San Francisco in the map, and I thought, I am going to live there! In a place with buildings a hundred stories high and that famous golden bridge and so many wonderful things! I have decided, it will be like being born. When I enter America, it will be like being born from a new mother, it will be a new life, my old life will be dead.”
   I considered telling her the sorry news that the Golden Gate Bridge was actually orange, and San Francisco didn’t have any hundred-story skyscrapers, but it wasn’t the time for harsh reality, and besides, the Bay Area was full of enough genuine marvels and beautiful sights that she wasn’t likely to be disappointed. “You’re going to love it there,” I told her. “Everyone does.”
   She smiled wistfully. After a moment she said, “It would be nice, it would be so good if I really could be born again. I – what?”
   “Nothing. Born again has a specific meaning in America. Doesn’t matter. Go on.”
   “If I could really be born again, then I could forget,” she said. “It would be so easy if I could forget.”
   “You’ll put all that behind you,” I said, uneasily. Reassurance was not my strong suit, especially when I didn’t really believe what I was saying.
   “I do not know. It will be hard. I have…” She hesitated. Another unknown word. “When I am cut, and the skin grows back, there is a mark.”
   “A scar,” I said.
   “A scar. I have scars. On my body, my feet, but I mean here.” She raised her hands up and rubbed her temples with her fingers. “I can feel them. When I think about certain things. I was trying to make myself think about being with other men. I mean to say, not like with you, as friends, but…being with a man. It was, I do not know what to say. I wanted to not think about it at all, to not even imagine it, it was frightening, I was so frightened, thinking of another man touching me, and it feeling like…I am sorry, Paul. I do not know how to say. I think even if I spoke English like you or Talena I still would not know how to say. It is like there are parts of me here,” she rubbed her temples again, fiercely, “that are like land mines.”
   I couldn’t think of anything I could possibly say to that. I wanted to reach out and hug her, but I knew better. I had touched Saskia a couple of times, accidentally, and both times she had gasped and flinched away.
   “I am sorry. Paul. I am very sorry.” She shook her head and forced a smile. “I will talk happy talk. Maybe I can at least pretend to forget. I will think of good things. I will read books. So many books. I will make new friends. I will buy a bicycle. I will swim in the ocean.”
  
Not in San Francisco, not without a wet suit
, I didn’t say. She would have to find that out sometime but this was the wrong time for discouraging news.
   “I want to help people,” she said. “When we get to America. If we get to America.”
   “When,” I said.
   She frowned. “I am not a child, Paul. I know it is a long way. I know it is if.”
   “Okay. Sorry. All right. If we get to America. Who do you want to help?”
   “I do not yet know. But there are so many people who need help. Everywhere. I am sure even in America. Not just women like me with bad husbands. People who are sick, or lost, or, I do not know. But I know I want to help people. Like you and Talena have helped me. I owe you everything, Paul.”
   “Saskia…”
   “I know. You do not want me to say thank you. I understand. I know you do not like it when I talk like this, it makes you very uncomfortable.”
   “No, no, Saskia, you can say anything you want to me, uh, I don’t want you to feel –”
   “Paul, you are a bad liar.”
   I fell silent. It was true.
   She smiled unexpectedly. “Very bad. Awful. Terrible. Despicable. Appalling. Horrible.”
   “All right,” I said, waving my hands mock-defensively. “All right, I give in.”
   “Come,” she said, standing. “They listen to you. Make Arwin drive us to get ice cream.” I wasn’t allowed to drive any of Sinisa’s vehicles. “We only have ten days and I hear American ice cream is loathsome and contemptible.”
* * *
   “So this is the final game for the Italian league?” I asked.
   “No, no, no,” Zoltan said, scandalized. “This is Champions League.”
   “That’s not an Italian thing?”
   “No. Is league for all best teams in Europe.” We had already had three beers apiece, except Sinisa who drank only water, and Zoltan’s English was degrading.
   “But both these teams are Italian, right?”
   “They were lucky,” Sinisa said. “Ajax should be playing tonight.” Ajax was pronounced ‘eye-axe.’ Similarly, Juventus, one of the teams that was playing, was pronounced ‘you-vent-us’.
   “Ajax?” Zoltan snorted. “Ajax very lucky to win Arsenal. Partisan Belgrade should be play tonight, but Champions League is cheat, cheat against poor countries, especially Serbia.”
   It was nice to see that sports conspiracy theories were everywhere the same. I wasn’t really that ignorant of European football, my many friends in London had seen to that, but it was fun playing the Stupid American. We sat in a bar on Vlore’s waterfront festooned with satellite TVs. Sinisa had taken over the whole place. He, Zoltan, Zorana, Arwin, and myself sat at the best table. The zombies were clustered at three neighbouring tables, drinking heavily and maintaining their usual sour frowns and silence. Saskia had declined to come. I suspected the thought of so many people had spooked her.
   “Everywhere in the world, football is very popular,” Zoltan announced. “Everywhere but our new home in America. Because Americans are too stupid for football.”
   “Oh, no, not at all,” I said politely. “Everyone in Canada and America plays soccer. Until we’re twelve. That’s when we move on to sports for grownups.”
   Zoltan stared at me. “Grownups?”
   Zorana translated. Zoltan frowned at me angrily and turned back to the game. I decided to turn down my snideness level. Zoltan seemed like a mean and confrontational drunk.
   “Give me hockey any day,” Arwin said to me.
   “Damn straight,” I agreed. We clinked our glasses together.
   “Hockey?” Sinisa asked, pretending confusion. “You mean the sport played on grass with little sticks? By women?”
   “Ice hockey, you Dutch ditzdork,” Arwin said.
   I blinked. Sometimes Arwin seemed to have not so much absorbed American slang as irradiated it and used the freakishly mutated results.
   “Oh, yes. With skates. In Holland everyone skates until they are twelve.”
   “Fastest, toughest game in the world,” I said. “This game, you wink at one of the other players and they fall over. Some of them oughta get Oscars. When hockey players take dives the commentators say that they’re acting like European soccer players.”
   “Italians, yes, always they cheat. Always is how they play,” Zoltan agreed.
   “It’s how they do business too,” Sinisa said darkly.
   We groused about Italians for a little while. When various ethnicities gather together it is always good to find a shared target without a representative present. The game went into sudden-death overtime, confusingly called “golden goal extra time”, and was finally resolved by a penalty shootout. The somewhat slurred post-game consensus was that shootouts were a horribly unfair way to settle things.
   “After extra time, more extra time,” Zoltan proposed. “But only five players each side. Much better than shootout.”
   “You must be happy, eh?” I asked Arwin. “That Russian guy Shevchenko won it all.”
   “Ukrainian,” Arwin corrected. “They hate us down there.”
   Zoltan launched into a speech in Serbian.
   “Yo, Zoltan, English. Be civilized,” Arwin suggested.
   Zoltan looked at Arwin, obviously amazed at the temerity of this little weaselly long-haired runt of a man.
   “How you say in English,” Zoltan rumbled. “Fuck you?”
   Arwin didn’t quail away like I expected. “Fuck you very much back atcha,” he retorted. “You want to sit at the grownups table, you speak English so I can understand.”
   Both them, I realized, were go-out-and-pick-a-fight drunks. Zoltan clenched his beer stein and for a moment I thought he might use it as a club. Zorana put her hand on his shoulder and he cooled a little and took another swig instead, before muttering something in Serbian that I figured was probably an aspersion on Arwin’s ancestry. Whatever it was it made Sinisa chuckle.
   “You still haven’t told me how we’re getting to America,” I said to Sinisa, changing the subject.
   “No,” he said absently. “Come. You and Arwin. I want to stop by the pier before we go back. You can come and watch.”
   “The pier? What’s there?”
   “Business. Unless you are not curious.”
   Business. That meant there was a shipment of refugees going out to Italy tonight. Probably the same thing I would be doing soon enough.
   “Oh no,” I said. “I’m curious all right.”
   Vlore’s main street, the name of which I never learned due to the absence of any street signs in the city, ran straight up to the waterfront, through a chainlink fence, and through a little cluster of forklifts, small warehouses, and cheap little administrative buildings, before continuing into the Adriatic, morphing from road into pier. The waterfront was guarded by two policemen with Dobermans and Kalashnikovs. They hustled to open the gate for Sinisa and treated him with reverential deference. I got the impression he didn’t come down here for personal inspections very often.
   The pier was as wide as the road and several hundred metres long. The lights from the dockside areas dwindled into darkness after a few dozen metres, but halfway along its length, to the left, a pool of dim light fell from the peak of the the single moored fishing boat. Three rusty but functional loading cranes towered over us like gargantuan praying mantises. A tiny sliver of moon hung high in the sky. The sea lapped at the pilings of the pier and the wooden planks creaked beneath our feet. The air was salty and refreshingly cool.
   The boat smelled of fish and unwashed humanity. It was smallish, maybe forty feet long. Two vanes descended in an inverted V from its peak, presumably used to hold the ends of a net. About sixty people huddled on its deck, most of them sitting, a few standing restlessly near the edges. A slight majority were Indian or Middle Eastern, single men, a few couples, two families. The youngest was a girl maybe ten years old. There were several black men, two of them dressed in geometrically patterned African robes which I knew meant they had come from south of the Sahara, and about fifteen white men. A half-dozen gauntly pretty white women stuck close together, like the ones I had seen in the factory near Sarajevo. Even in the dim forgiving light all of them looked filthy, beaten down, exhausted, their clothes tattered and crusted in dirt. Many of them clutched their pitifully small bags of possessions to their chests as they might a life raft in a whirlpool.
   They watched us, some with curiosity, some with trepidation, most with dull fatalism. They hardly spoke to each other. All were nervously waiting for their journey to begin and most of all for it to be over. Most of them had spent their life’s savings to come to the West. Some of them had already spent months on a gruelling and perilous journey just to get this far. Tonight was the moment of truth. I wondered what their stories were. Some of them were no doubt fleeing torture and violence, but most of them, I suspected, were driven more by opportunity than oppression, and no doubt several of them were criminals on the run.
   “Too bad they’re going already,” Arwin murmured. “I bet I could go up to those women and tell them I work for Sinisa and they’d line up on their knees to make me happy. Some of those lips could suck watermelons through garden hoses.”
   I wondered what would happen to the people on the boat. They were going through a gruelling, desperate struggle for just a taste of what I had been born with, travelling halfway around the world the hard way to be part of the poor invisible underclass of the rich western world I took for granted. Most of them were hard-working, motivated, smart, good planners, dedicated, just the kind of immigrant you want, or they wouldn’t be here. Even if they weren’t running for their lives, I couldn’t help but think, watching them squat miserably in that stinking fishing boat, that they deserved to succeed.
   There was a ticking sound at my feet and something seemed to jump up from the pier. I looked down, surprised, and instinctively crouched to investigate. It looked like something had harrowed a fresh gouge in the wooden pier below me. The pale jagged gorge of revealed wood looked so different from the tarred weatherbeaten exterior that it seemed to be an entirely different substance, like flesh under skin. I heard a faint popping sound in the distance as I tried to work out what had happened to the pier. I actually thought of a meteorite.
   Then there was an earsplitting
clang!
of metal on metal above me. Something had struck the nearby loading crane. I stood up, still driven purely by reflex wow-that-was-weird curiosity, and inspected the worm-shaped patch of newly shiny, indented metal, easily apparent against the yellow paint and rust that was the rest of the crane. I still didn’t understand what was happening and when Arwin tackled me I barely got my hands up in time to break my fall. I heard another dim popping noise.
   “What the hell?” I demanded, outraged. Splinters dug painfully into my palms.