Stillness of the Sea (6 page)

His father was always utterly certain that his own future was in Germany and never entertained the idea of going back to where he’d come from. He found nothing attractive about the country he’d been born in and his family had always lived in. The son could never remember his old man listening to Yugoslav music or buying a Yugoslav newspaper, and only heard him use his old language on the phone to one of his sisters.

“I would learn it for your sake,” he said.

“If you don’t want to learn it for yourself,” she insisted, “you mustn’t do it to please me. All I want is to understand why you feel the way you do.”

“It’s probably true that I was never very interested in the Slav part of me.”

Would things have been different if he had spoken her language? Would they have trusted each other in another way, would their relationship have changed?

One evening, Ana cooked for him. She made the stuffed cabbage dish called Sarma. “It’s my father’s favourite,” she said.

It was the first time he saw Ana wearing an apron. Now and then, she consulted a notebook she had placed on the table. Ana’s grandmother had used it to write down her recipes. The book had been handed down to Ana’s mother on her wedding day. “This notebook was one of the few things my mother took with her when we left Višegrad,” Ana told him. He leafed through the pages, as if he could read her memories in it.

Often, if he felt like a distraction, he would play a game which entailed choosing what he should take with him if he had less than a day to leave town for ever. He’d take documents, obviously: things like a passport, a birth certificate and formal references. Some clothes; he never cared much for clothes and the choices seemed easy. Books; now, that was hard.
Homo Faber, I’m Not Stiller
– would that be enough?
The Discovery of Heaven
, but that was a volume of some eight hundred pages and the hardback copy was very heavy. What would he do about the notes for his thesis? With them alone his suitcase would be bursting. Did he have any mementoes? Nothing came to mind except for a small stone Ana had given him, a pebble from the Drina. Perhaps some photographs. A couple of CDs. In his mind he would then run through his CD and book collections, ranking the items in an order that changed every time he thought about it. And he wondered how hard it would be for him to leave all the rest of his belongings behind. Surely it would be like losing a part of his life? Worst of all, for him, would be not knowing what would happen next; so he felt the only way to cope when you suddenly have to
flee is to avoid thinking about either the present or what lies ahead. But surely that would be impossible.

Ana put the large stew-pot on the table and pulled her apron off. “The real skill is not to leave bits of string in it,” she said. She watched as he lifted a forkful to his mouth. The flavours hit his tongue, the slightly sour chopped meat mixed with raisins and rice inside the cabbage wrapping. It tasted of going visiting as a child.

His father loved that dish and his aunt had cooked Sarma every time they went to see her. As a child, he would listlessly poke about in the stuffing. He didn’t tell Ana that he still disliked the acidic bite of the cabbage.

He no longer hears the courtroom arguments; instead he sees himself and Ana sitting at the table while she flattened cabbage leaves to be stuffed, and he thinks that he might after all belong to her life. Ana might have actually regarded him as a member of her family or, at least, she might have imagined it.

Her grandmother must have followed this recipe when she cooked for Ana’s grandfather, so did her mother, cooking for her father and, now, Ana for him. Was this a sign? She missed her family, she said, and told him how they all used to sit around the table together, her father and mother, her grandparents and her cousins.

She simply couldn’t understand people in Berlin, because no one she had met of her own age felt particularly sad to be away from family life, from parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents. Everyone seemed to prefer getting as far away as possible. Where she came from, things were different. Her grandparents’ house was next door, her uncle and aunt lived nearby and she walked to school with her cousins. She often wondered why people here were so accustomed to being alone.

Ever since that evening, he has wished he could join her family circle. He sensed that she might be someone different there, happier among those who knew who she was and spoke her language. He asked her when she had last been home. She told him: the day she fled the town. “Why haven’t you been back?” “Because I want to keep my memories,” she said. “The lovely memories of my childhood.”

They sat at her kitchen table with their empty plates in front of them. He thought of the small photo on the windowsill of his parents’ bedroom, a framed, sepia image showing his family, all of them gathered around a table in the garden that belonged to his grandparents. Granny and Grandad had been alive at the time, and the brothers had brought their families to see them. Staring at the camera, the family sat on wooden benches around a table covered with a white plastic sheet and laid with plates, glasses and bottles. He was there, perched on one of his grandfather’s knees, while a little girl, one of the cousins he thought, sat on the other. Strange, how this photo seemed familiar and alien at the same time. There he was with his immediate family, but now he is unable to even put a name to all those faces.

Ana, why didn’t you talk to me about the burden you carried? I have asked myself that so often during these past weeks and now I do it again, alone in a foreign hotel room which you could be sharing with me. You could have told me everything. We sat in your kitchen and
waited for the tea to brew in our cups. I thought it was just that you needed more time. But even when the tea was ready, we continued to sit in silence.

It was the morning after that night in the park, which you must surely remember as I do. Often during the past two weeks, as I’ve lain here thinking, I’ve wondered if you too have been stretched out on a bed somewhere, searching in your mind for images of us and our shared memories. I wonder if we conjure up the same events or if you see different ones, or the same ones from a
different
perspective, maybe in different colours. I imagine being you. Imagine your kitchen and you, seated with your back towards the window, the same place every morning, because you chose to sit there on the first day, and it became our rule for your small table. My chair would be opposite yours, so I faced the window and its view of the grey wall of the house next door. I prepared mugs of tea for both of us and put them on the table. After a while, I would pull the tea bag from your mug, wrap it around a fork and squeeze it dry. This always amused you, just like my way of scraping the last drops of yoghurt from the carton. You joked about these things. You thought it must be something about the Germans, to do with wartime deprivation, a folk memory that passed from one generation to the next, from grandparents to parents and on to their children, and so inevitably to my children, because I’d end up giving them the same example. You said, “Your children” and
although
it wasn’t an issue between us, we simply hadn’t got that far, I felt a little peeved all the same, because you could have said, “Our children.”

As we sat at your table that morning, you knew what I was waiting for – that I wanted to hear from you how things stood. You saw it. You sensed it from the way I
didn’t say so. It was hard for me to understand what images from the previous day had stayed with you.

Mine are ever present. The two of us, wandering across the meadow in the Pleasure Garden by the River Spree. The blue sky. Later, on the river bank, we stood close together. You with one foot on the lower bar of the railings. Pleasure steamers chugged past. You told me about Belgrade and its fortress, where you loved
spending
the summer evenings looking down at the view of the River Sava flowing into the Danube. “Oh, look! Do you see that little boy?” you exclaimed. “Over there, with blond hair and a cap,” and you pointed him out to me. The little boy sat between his parents on the seat right at the back of one of the steamers. His father was a large, heavily built man, his mother held out a mug in one hand and a half-eaten roll in the other. You waved and shouted until the boy looked your way. He kept looking at you until the boat was out of sight.

I felt as light as a balloon and had to hang on to the railing to stop myself from rising into the air and floating away. You had picked that little boy out from all the other people on the boats. And I wondered if you knew that I was that boy, that my mother had offered her child the roll with salami and my father had stared into the distance, as if none of it had anything to do with him. And I said, “I love you.”

And you turned around and kissed me. “
Moj zlatko
,” you said.

For the rest of the day, I felt released, outside myself, as if a burden had been lifted from me and I had rediscovered some childlike state of safety and happiness. Perhaps that was why I played hide-and-seek in the park that evening. I like it when dusk creeps over the landscape and makes the flowers fade into shadows;
there is something exciting, something unreal about night-time in the woods. For me, it has always felt like another and contrary world, so unlike the cosiness of indoors. As darkness fell and we strolled together, I led you through the park, away from the paths, among and under the trees. The leaves on their stilled branches were not so dense that we could not catch glimpses of an unfamiliar sky and I felt the same thrill that used to come over my schoolboy self during those nocturnal escapades, when we sneaked out late from where we boarded at the summer camp and wandered off into the forest, armed with torches and full of scary stories, the braver boys a little ahead, the less brave behind, sticking close to one other. To hide behind a tree and then leap out screaming was simply what one did.

Ana, I didn’t give it much thought; I just slipped away, hid behind a tree, sneaked up behind you and jumped on you, wrapping my arms about you as I did. In the past, girls had always taken fright and yelled, but calmed down soon enough, insisting that it wasn’t funny in the slightest. Afterwards, they had quickly forgotten the whole thing.

But you were different, you screamed and your body wouldn’t stop shaking for a long time. You burst into tears and when I tried to take you in my arms, you fought to get free until you realised that the arms around you were mine and you let me hold you. I was dismayed by how heavy your soft body had become. That night, the light in the hallway was left on and I understood that the reason was not that you’d forgotten to turn it off. You wanted the light on and I let it stay on, long after you’d fallen asleep. That night, I lay awake for what seemed like hours, thinking about what might have happened to you in Višegrad.

But in the kitchen the next morning, you still didn’t want to speak about it. Now, I’ve come to believe that you were unable to do so. Your silence had already lasted far too long. I was absorbed by the sight of your toes, once you kicked off your girlish pink felt slippers, stretched out your foot and made your toes wander up my leg. As your foot climbed higher and you slid closer to the edge of your chair, your toes almost reached my belly and then clamped themselves onto the top of my thigh.

You made me laugh when you showed me your toes for the first time, those small, wrinkled toes you didn’t like the look of. When you climbed out of the bath and walked barefoot across the tiles, you would always notice that I was staring at your feet and hurry into bed to hide them away under the duvet. And when I dived face first under the cover and worked my way down to kiss your feet, you defended yourself by pressing one foot against the other. You told me I should kiss any part of you but not your tiny, hateful toes.

He sits at a table
in the guesthouse conservatory and looks out over the restless sea. He can see white horses far into the distance. A couple of joggers are struggling against the gusts that sweep the promenade. From where he sits, they seem to be running on the spot. Nothing else suggests the strength of the wind: no litter flying in the streets, no creaking woodwork, no whistling and whining noises.

There is something utterly unreal about the world outside. He visualises Ana down there, by the sea. She is wearing an anorak he doesn’t think he’s seen before. The hood is pulled over her head, and she stands waving to him with her back to the sea. Why doesn’t she sit next to him here? The table is laid for two. Opposite him there is a place set with an empty plate, a folded napkin next to it, a knife, a fork and a cup. But Ana is out there.

Perhaps she simply woke early and, while he still slept, went over to the window and saw the sea. So she dressed, pulled the door shut behind her and ran towards the seashore, and whenever she comes back to the guesthouse, he will be there, on his seat behind the windowpanes of the conservatory.

He imagines her running towards him and, when she reaches his table, pulling back her hood to reveal her ruffled hair. She bends over him, and her lips and cheeks are very cold. He watches her as she pours herself a cup of tea and butters a roll. He asks her if she has slept all right and recalls how they fall asleep, one body against the other.

When he arrived late at night three days ago, the woman in reception let him have a double room for the price of a single, so it had two of everything, two duvets, two pillows, two large towels, two small face towels and two soaps. He tried to imagine which side of the bed Ana would have preferred, which towel she would have taken if she had been the first to run a bath, and which of the two small soaps she would have unwrapped. Every morning he has woken up in this place, he has found his head resting on her pillow.

They were in bed together when he asked her. He was lying on his back and directed his question at the ceiling. He waited until she switched off her bedside light. Gently, he asked why she had left Višegrad, back then.

The sound of her voice surprised him, it was different, so soft and vulnerable.

“My father wanted us to leave,” she said. “He didn’t want us to stay. He sent us to Belgrade to live with his sister.”

“Why didn’t he come with you?”

He could hear Ana breathe. He placed his hand on her belly.

“He didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to leave our house.”

As he went on questioning her, his voice seemed to escape his control and he needed to work hard to modulate it.

“Ana…” he began and paused. “Ana?”

He noticed that her regular breathing was
interrupted
for a moment and the surface of her belly did not rise; at that moment he too held his breath.

“What happened in Višegrad?”

He no longer recognised his own voice. It was like hearing a recording of it, and once more he felt he couldn’t connect to it. He sensed that her belly once more rose and fell to its old rhythm.

“They shot at the town,” she said and her voice was clear again, at least clearer than before. “There was a war on. Many fled.”

“I’ve never known,” he said, “anyone else of my own age who has experienced war, who has had to flee in wartime. In this country, fleeing was something our older people had to do.”

She straightened up, leaned against the wall and pushed his hand away.

“I often ask myself where we would be without the war. Would outsiders, strangers, even know where Bosnia is on the map if it hadn’t been for Gavrilo Princip and that war? I often feel that war defines all of us – Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. Who did what? Who has experienced what and where? Where does the guilt lie? Given the same time and place, I could easily have been born a Bosnian. I would be the same woman, but you would see me differently, because you would perceive me as a victim. But because I’m a Serb, everyone thinks of me as a potential culprit, even though they know nothing about my life. And meantime they all forget that there were victims among the perpetrators and that some of
the victims would have turned into perpetrators, given half a chance.”

She pauses for a moment.

“You couldn’t know, but I’m in Berlin because of a grant they gave me as a descendant of a victim of the Nazis during the Second World War. My grandmother was held in Jasenovac, the largest of the Holocaust camps in the Balkans, and was deported to Leipzig where she was assigned to a forced labour squad in a hotel. Of course I thought about all that before coming to Germany. But it never occurred to me to get involved with the history of the German people, even after I met you. I wanted to know more about your background, because I hoped to understand you better. Everyone seems to think you can’t mention Serbia without saying something about the Battle of Kosovo. But who cares? It happened more than six hundred years ago. What are these wars to us? When they shot at my home town, I was eleven years old. And you weren’t even born when the Nazis were killing millions of people. Your
grandfather
might’ve been one of them – I don’t know. Or maybe he helped Jews to hide. I’ve no idea. Whatever he did, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

He was astonished at where this conversation was leading. He had wanted to know about her life, back in the town where she had grown up and which she had left so abruptly. He had wanted to know what she had gone through because he sensed that she was still living with it. But she was giving the whole thing a political dimension, which seemed unfair and wrong in their situation, alone with each other and together in bed. Above all, it wasn’t justified, given the reason for his question, which was that he cared for her very much. The vehemence of her argument made him angry.

“Now you’re making things hard for us,” he said. “Of course your views would be affected if you were to find out my grandfather was a Nazi. Your grandmother was held in a concentration camp – surely you can’t tell me it wouldn’t matter one bit if you were shacked up with the grandson of a Nazi?”

“Come on, you can’t inherit guilt. You can still be a wonderful human being, even if your father killed someone. Maybe just because of it, you’d do all you could to be different. My grandmother never talked to me about what happened to her during the war, but my mother did. What if I had never heard any of it? My knowing couldn’t have been important to my granny, otherwise she would have said something. She didn’t, not even when I started learning German at school. So, in your opinion, was it my duty to ask her? To push her into telling me things she’d rather not speak about? What’s the result of someone not knowing anything about particular events in the past, or of not wanting to know or not wanting other people to know? Would that person’s development follow a different path? Would life change for any of the people around him? Or wouldn’t both that person and the others feel less encumbered, less inhibited in their life together? I often think so.”

He refrained from contradicting her, from arguing that human history is all about cause and effect. One thing follows from another. It is impossible to simply excise a chapter from history. No war comes out of a void; there is always a prehistory. When tension mounts, it can somehow create an atmosphere conducive to making certain ways of thinking and behaving acceptable to the majority. Historians have observed that wars start during such periods, that the origins of war can be understood only in terms of historical processes.
But he didn’t want to start this kind of talk with Ana. To him, the idea that the Balkan war could come between them seemed absurd, although he was aware that German bombs, too, had been dropped on Belgrade. He was unsure about the justice of bombing the Serbs. After all, the NATO attack on Serbia was driven by Germany’s guilty conscience, its historic culpability. The German Minister for Foreign Affairs said he had learnt a lesson: no more Auschwitzes. And so bombs rained down on the city where Ana lived with her family and friends. What was their connection to Auschwitz?

He could find no peace after that conversation with Ana. He felt her behaviour had been emotional and unfair, and he agonised over this for days. He had once lunched at the university canteen with one of his professors, who knew a great deal about Balkan history, and asked him if he thought that the Serbs, like the Germans, carried a burden of guilt. The professor looked up at him quickly, put down his fork which had already speared a piece of meat, and wanted to know if his questioner had ever heard of the SANU Memorandum.

“You see,” he said, “it was the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts that provided the ideological framework for the idea of Greater Serbia.”

This was the first time he’d heard of the memorandum.

“Well, what would your view of it be?” the professor went on. “Given that it was a paper published by a group of scientists and academics, which demanded an end to discrimination against the Serbian people, discussed whether Serbs should commit genocide against the Albanian population in Kosovo and argued in
propagandistic
terms for the national and cultural unity of all Serbs, regardless of which region or federal republic they
lived in. This paper was debated in public for five years before the outbreak of the war and was incorporated into the government’s political program. What do you think – is this a case of unshakeable resolve? Or of emotional imbalance? I tell you, the murder of Muslims was planned. In my opinion, people were, in general, willing perpetrators. Haven’t you seen the images showing the first tanks rolling towards Croatia? The citizens were lining the streets, waving and throwing flowers at the soldiers.”

He didn’t know what to say. Why did he ask about the Serbs’ guilt? He didn’t tell the professor anything about Ana. Following that conversation, it became clear to him just how subjective the matter of guilt can be. Had the professor’s explanations turned out differently, he would have told him that he was in love with a Serb woman, who questioned her share of the guilt. He treated Ana as someone defined by her nationality. It made him feel ashamed. Is it not true that ultimately guilt is a sick feeling and a psychogenic delusion, and that to burden oneself with the past is the symptom of an illness, whereas healthy people look towards the future?

“Why bother with the sea if you can’t go for a swim in it?” Ana asked.

The question returns to him unbidden as he stands on the beach at Scheveningen. He left the guesthouse after breakfast, with a desire to be by the sea, to feel the wind and to hear the surf. Above all, he wanted to be out of that conservatory. It’s chilly, like the early April day he and Ana spent by the Baltic Sea. Most of the cabins and seaside cafés are boarded up. A couple of dogs are
chasing
each other; their masters keep their distance, each to his own, hoods pulled low over their faces.

He was barely outside the guesthouse door before a gust of wind tugged at him so hard it almost took his breath away. He walks along the promenade for a bit, and stops where he has a view of the open sea on the far side.

Back then, by the Baltic, he asked himself if the water would continue flowing onwards through all the seas. If the water, which the force of the waves sent crashing up the beach, would later turn up along the coasts of other countries. It occurs to him that this thought was like the red dot he had put on a currency note when he was a child, in the hope that it would one day be returned to him. Could it be that the water he’s looking at now has come here from the Adriatic Sea?

At the Baltic seaside, he recalls, he pulled off his shoes and socks, and rolled his jeans up to his knees. The cold gripped his feet in an instant, but he still attempted to breathe calmly, took one step out into the water, then one more until he stood with both his feet up to the ankles in seawater. He closed his eyes. His blood pumped rhythmically through the arteries in his neck; he had to force himself not to gasp for air. He felt the cold creeping high up into his legs and in under his jeans. He curled up his toes in the sand and they sank in deeper with every wave. He thought of the Adriatic, of the warm, alluring Adriatic, flowing in gentle eddies around his legs. He heard the distant cries of children struggling for possession of a lilo, the spluttering engine of a fishing boat, then a woman calling, a voice he knew well. Afterwards she laughed as he tried to warm his feet, first by rubbing them with his hands and then trying to push his feet between her legs, which was a struggle, as she was
pressing her thighs together as hard as she could. He had come dashing along from the sea, full of glee, run around her a few times and then allowed himself to collapse on the sand, crying, “Hey, who says you can’t bathe in the sea.”

The last time he’d been on the Adriatic coast was as a child, more than twenty years earlier. He could hardly remember anything of where he’d gone with his parents, or where they’d stayed. The only image that remained in his mind was that of an old colour photograph of a pebbly beach, his grandfather sitting on a deckchair, his mother stretched out on a towel and himself, naked and holding a fishing net, silhouetted against a deep-blue sea.

He knew that Ana and her parents used to go to the Adriatic every summer and always stayed in a place called Lumbarda. Ever since she’d told him that, he’d wanted them to go there together. “Let’s go,” he said. “Then you can show me what you used to do on your holidays.” “Maybe we will, one day,” she replied. That was where the matter ended.

He thinks about this now, as he stands watching the waves which, for the first time since his arrival in The Hague, have white, foaming crests. Perhaps he should ask her just one more time. Summer will come again and it might be good for her, good for both of them, to go together to an untroubled place from her childhood, back to somewhere free from ghosts of the more recent past. After all that had happened in the last few weeks, he would dearly like to go there with her.