‘How long ago was that?’ I asked. ‘When their father died?’
Another quick exchange yielded the answer. ‘Three years ago.’
That was after Rafi’s botched necromancy and my botched exorcism had landed him with his demonic passenger. He was already locked up in the Stanger by then.
‘He didn’t know,’ I explained. ‘He was in a hospital and . . . not really in touch with the outside world.’ Not in touch with anything, I thought. Rafi’s life had become pretty surreal at that point. His time perception, his awareness of self, his ability to lay down new memories and to make sense of the world, all had to be compromised.
I tried to explain this to Jovan, but it was a tricky concept to get across and I hit the rocks almost immediately. ‘Rafi has a demon inside him,’ I said, and Jovan was off on a tirade, glaring up at me from the floor.
‘Yes,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘He has a demon. I have a demon. Everybody has a demon. It doesn’t change who you are. It doesn’t change your obligations. You have to be a man, don’t you? Whatever else you are.’
‘Yeah, but I’m not trying to be poetic,’ I said. ‘Rafi tried to do some magic, and he messed it up. There’s a demon stuck inside him like a . . .’ Having no clue what sort of referents Jovan would feel comfortable with, I groped for a non-technical simile. ‘. . . like a toad in a well. He’s been like that for years now. And for most of that time, he’s been locked up in a lunatic asylum. The demon controls his body, his actions. He’s not free to do what he wants to do.’
The lawyer was staring at me with an almost comically surprised expression, but Jovan emitted a snort that needed no translation. Clearly he didn’t think demonic possession was a good enough reason to miss your dad’s funeral.
‘Rafi wanted to tell you that he was sorry,’ I persisted. ‘Not specifically for that. For losing touch with you, I guess, and for any other bad blood there was between you. That’s why I came. To deliver that message. It seemed to be very important to him.’
In Jovan’s terse reply, Rafi’s name appeared twice.
‘The only thing that was ever important to Rafael,’ Anastasiadis translated, ‘was Rafael.’ Jovan was speaking again, with more animation, and the lawyer slipped into simultaneous translation. ‘He was always selfish. He cared nothing about the family, or anyone else besides himself. He always wanted to get out of here, and when he did he never looked back. Once or twice he’s written to me, but only to ask me to send his things on to him. His photos and his journals especially. I didn’t reply. If he wants those things so badly, he can come back - pardon me, he can
fucking
come back - and get them himself. Now, no more, please. No more of this. I have too little time left to make myself angry by thinking about Rafael.’
A silence followed this speech. Jovan seemed drained by it. His head lolled lower than ever over the foul, stinking bucket.
‘Is there anything I can get you while I’m here?’ I asked lamely. If nothing else it would be a way of keeping the dialogue open, but Jovan made a slashing gesture with his right hand.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered in English. ‘Give me nothing. And give him nothing, from me. No word.’
He lapsed into Macedonian again, and Anastasiadis laid a hand on my arm. ‘He wants us to leave,’ he said apologetically. ‘He says he won’t answer any more of your questions.’
‘The journals,’ I persisted. ‘Rafi’s journals. Do they still exist?’ I felt ashamed to ask, but I was thinking again about having something to show Jenna-Jane. More than that though, there was an outside chance - a tenuous thread of possibility - that the journals might throw up something we could actually use. I was a good salesman, obviously. I’d talked myself into believing there was some point in having come here.
‘
Sepidye
,’ Jovan growled. ‘They were burnt,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘Please, Mr Castor. We have to respect my client’s wishes.’
I offered my hand, but Jovan didn’t take it. No exchange of hostages, no using the last few hours of the present to ransom back some little piece of time past. Jovan Ditko was beyond that now. He was preparing himself for a drop much longer than the precisely measured fall from the gibbet.
I left him to it.
Back in the city I found a café - walking past three bars with increasing difficulty - and knocked back three tiny, deadly espressos. They were way too sweet, but so stiff with caffeine they made my nerves vibrate like a million tiny tuning forks. Then I trudged back to the hotel to collect my things.
But as I was packing - which consisted of throwing my washbag and my phone back into the rucksack I’d brought - there was a knock on the open door of my hotel room. I turned to see Anastasiadis standing on the threshold, looking slightly awkward and apologetic.
We’d parted company at the prison, after I’d thanked him for his help and offered him a translator’s fee (from the bountiful coffers of the MOU), which he’d refused. My first thought was that he’d changed his mind, and I reached into my pocket. He reached into his at the same time and produced a Yale key.
‘There is a house,’ he said without preamble. ‘It belonged to the parents, then to Jovan. Now, presumably, it belongs to Rafael. But I have no address for Rafael, and I understand that he is not to be found. Perhaps, Mr Castor, you will take the key and give it to Rafael the next time your paths cross.’
I hesitated. It seemed unlikely that anything of Rafi’s would still be in the house after all this time, or that it could be of any use to me if I found it. It might be worth the trip if his journals had survived, but Jovan had closed that avenue.
Anastasiadis was still holding out the key, and - in his other hand - a small rectangle of card. ‘The address,’ he said, as though I’d already agreed. ‘It would be worth your while, perhaps, to visit the place before you leave. If there are any valuables or keepsakes, they should be taken away now. The neighbourhood is not of the best, and empty houses in Skopje seldom escape the notice of squatters for long.’
He wore me down just by keeping his hands held out towards me. Or maybe I felt that this was one more duty I owed to Rafi, one more small expiation for the big fuckup that had taken his life away from him. I had just enough time, if I left at once, and if the house wasn’t too far from the airport.
I looked at the card. It was one of Mr Anastasiadis’s own business cards with the address of the Ditko house jotted down in a small, neat hand on the back. While I was still looking at it, a sheet of paper covered in closely typed paragraphs was thrust under my nose. The writing was presumably Macedonian, but it was all Greek to me.
‘You will sign?’ Anastasiadis asked hopefully.
‘What am I signing?’
‘For the key. A receipt. You understand, Mr Castor, with this my duties are finished. I have waited a long time for them to be finished. This would be a kindness to me.’
Despite what my dad had drummed into me about signing papers without reading them, or indeed signing anything presented to you by a man in a suit, I gave the lawyer my scribbled name. He smiled in what looked like genuine relief, folded the sheet again and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
‘I will take you to the house,’ he offered in a burst of warm fuzzy feeling. ‘And to the airport afterwards.’
‘Deal,’ I said.
As we drove through the narrow streets in Anastasiadis’s shiny silver Lexus, he filled me in on recent Macedonian history - recent meaning everything since the Byzantine empire went down the Swannee. The main theme was how Macedonia kept getting dragged into other people’s wars despite a national predisposition towards dancing, strong liquor and healthy pragmatism. First it was the Greeks who wouldn’t leave them alone, then the Ottomans. More recently, they’d managed to keep their heads down through the regional rough and tumbles of the early 1990s, only to get badly screwed by the Kosovan conflict. Even then, Anastasiadis said, they did their best to stay out of the scrum. They were victims of drive-by ethnic cleansing at one or two removes when a quarter of a million Albanian refugees fled across the border from Kosovo and stirred up the nationalist aspirations of Macedonia’s own Albanian minority. What ensued was nothing as vulgar as a civil war, the lawyer assured me. There were skirmishes, minor engagements, manoeuvring on both sides, and then instead of falling on each other like wolves the government and the Albanians signed an agreement not to be so hard-arsed in future. Anastasiadis seemed very proud of this outcome, seeing it as a mark of how civilised his people were. The Macedonian compromise: let’s not have a war, and say we did.
As the recitation went on, we were driving through narrower and narrower streets, until we reached a point where the rough-cast walls on either side almost clipped the Lexus’ wing mirrors. Now, as Mr Anastasiadis reached his low-key but impassioned conclusion, we turned - with about as much room for manoeuvre as an elephant has in a tanning bed - into an overgrown yard with high walls painted lemon yellow. Three of the walls were free-standing, while the fourth was the frontage of the Ditko house.
It was built on the same scale as the yard, which was one degree up from Lilliputian, and despite the paint, which made a bold and optimistic statement, it had clearly been allowed to fall almost into ruin in recent years. The pitched roof was sway-backed, like a spavined horse, and there were great pockmarks in the limed rough-cast, showing bare single-skin brickwork beneath. Weeds grew up between the slate-grey flagstones of the yard, almost to the height of a man, and one of the windows had a perfectly circular hole through it, starred all around with fracture lines, the hallmark of a local kid with a catapult and a relaxed attitude to other people’s property.
The place made a bleak enough impression, but when Mr Anastasiadis wound down the car window, between one breath and the next a sweet smell of honeysuckle flooded in on us. It was growing wild up the outer walls and the house’s frontage, annealing the decay by immersing it in its own opposite.
‘I will wait for you here,’ Anastasiadis informed me. ‘In this neighboorhood, it is best not to leave the car unattended.’
It was hard to argue with that. In front of this tumble-down cottage, the Lexus looked like news from nowhere - something not just from another world but from another age of humankind.
I got out and crossed to the door. It was painted black, the paint now blistered and flaking where the slo-mo blowtorch of entropy had played across it. At first glance there was no keyhole, but actually it was only the lock plate that was missing. A small, neat circle had been drilled into the wood, close enough to the jamb to be in shadow and not immediately noticeable. I had to jiggle the key around in the blind hole until it found its berth, but then as soon as the key was turned the door sprung open of its own accord, the warped wood pushing it away from the frame with a dry
twang
like the sound of an arrow hitting a target.
The door gave directly onto a small living room. It was filled with an immense profusion of things. There were six ill-assorted chairs, beautifully carved but from two different tribes, the ladder-backs facing the wheelbacks across a farm-house table piled high with old newspapers. Newspapers served as curtains too, taped across the two narrow windows. Out in the centre of the room, beyond the table, stood an ancient iron mangle. Boxes lined the walls, two and three and four high. A tall dresser held not plates and cups but more papers along with a meerschaum sculpture of a tram and a radio with a red plastic casing that had to be 1960s vintage. From the ceiling (why waste a surface just because it’s upside down?) a massive drying rack hung on four pulleys. Yet more sheets of newspaper had been folded neatly over its wooden runners to shield any clothes that might be hung there from dust or splinters. There were no clothes, but a great many electrical flexes had been slung over the rack in long, neat rows, all ending in the two-pronged European plug. They looked like dead snakes hung up to cure, lolling their forked tongues.
The room smelled of dust and lavender. A slender blade of sunlight bisected it neatly where one of the sheets of newsprint had been poorly fitted into the window frame. Thick motes swirled in its glow on sluggish thermoclines, showing the air to be as heavily freighted as the solid ground.
I picked up a pile of papers at random from the dresser: old letters, old bills, old articles laboriously cut out with short-bladed scissors from defunct periodicals. The Ditkos had bought a lot of newspapers and had put them to a lot of uses, but clearly they had read the news in them too, and set aside the items that seemed worthy of being remembered.
The boxes seemed mostly full of crockery and cutlery, although one that I opened contained books. Crabbed writing on the lid of each presumably recorded its contents. It looked as though the family had moved from a bigger place and had never finished unpacking, maybe because there just wasn’t enough room here to hold their things. Or maybe some of these boxes held the things that Rafi had asked his brother to send on to England after him. In any case, there was nothing that corresponded to Mr Anastasiadis’s phrase ‘valuables or keepsakes’.
A single door led to a back room, off which a narrow staircase opened. It was much darker here. I groped for a light switch, found one at last to the right of the doorway and flicked it on.
A bare hundred-watt bulb flared into life over my head. From all around the room, a hundred Rafis stared back at me.
‘Sonofabitch!’ I muttered involuntarily.
‘His photos and his journals,’ Jovan had said - and he’d sneered at Rafi’s obsessive self-regard. Judging from this evidence, he hadn’t been exaggerating.
Some of the photos were five by three or six by four, snapshots taken with an ordinary thirty-five-millimetre camera, but many of them had been blown up - the largest, poster size with the grainy stippling that comes from trying to squeeze too much detail out of a poorly resolved original.