The Edge of Me (12 page)

Then I ask in Serbian, ‘Can we use your telephone?’

She gives me a look. ‘Later.’

She says we can stay until her husband comes in. She shows us into the other room and goes outside. We sit together on the floor and watch a kind of game show
on the little telly. I can feel myself nodding off then Joe suddenly nudges me sharply in the ribs.

‘Hey, Sanda! Something about the Scorpions …’ he whispers.

I come to and focus on the screen. The game show’s over, and we’re watching a lady in a purple suit reading the news. Our host is back in the room knitting fiercely.

The report is about a man’s body that’s been found in a car at the side of the road with a bullet in its head.

There’s an image of the man, a little inset at the bottom of the screen: my father.

They say it had the look of an organised killing: Škorpioni.

There are photos of the car, parked at an angle on a lonely road at dusk, the arc lights of the police and TV crews throwing long shadows.

They know him.

The name they give him is the one from the newspaper cutting I found in the loft.

There are other pictures too, of yellowing corpses heaped on roadsides, of emaciated men staring out from behind barbed wire, of refugees tracing their way across fields with tanks and armoured cars at a sinister standstill in the background. The War.

Nothing is what it seems
.

I close my eyes and I see him coming up the stairs at home in London. He looms and fades and liquefies. A heavy hand on my shoulder, the flicker of his eyes, they’re all I have of him. All there was between us. A glance, a
touch, the rank sweetness of garlic on his breath, all I can find to make the man I grew up with.

I realise I’m shaking. The woman mutters something I don’t catch and turns back to her wool.

I feel for Joe’s hand and sit very still, trying to stop my shivering. I get to my feet and ask for the toilet. The woman looks up and points out through the window.

I cross the yard to a freezing wooden shed that houses a toilet with no seat and no paper. It’s plumbed straight into the ground and weeds are growing up around the bowl. I switch on the light, find a plank of wood, put it across the toilet and sit down. I take out the papers from Milanković’s room. They’ve disintegrated in parts, but the name is still clear:
Hadžić. Senka
.

I take a deep breath and peel them apart. There are just two: the first is a certificate with the orphanage name across the top and a copy of the photograph I found in London stapled to it – the little girl.

The name on the certificate is Senka Hadžić. Written clearly on the dotted line at the bottom left-hand corner of the page is a signature. I recognise the name as the one given for my father in the cutting. It looks like his handwriting too. The paper is dated December 1995. And again my father’s words come back to me:
Everything is not what you think. Nothing is what it seems
.

I find it hard to feel anything about him right now, hard to be sad, hard to forgive. And yet what he left for me, what he gave me, has at least led me this far. Like a map, or part of a map, a road back to who I am. It isn’t
much, but it’s better than nothing. And nothing is all I thought I had.

So …

Am
I
that girl? Am I Senka Hadžić?

The other paper is a letter with the Red Cross logo at the top. There’s a typewritten introduction, but the rest is written by hand in Serbian. Two things hit me: one is the name at the bottom, printed and signed, Branko Hadžić.
Branko
: the person they thought Joe was ‘working’ for. The person they thought had paid Joe to help me.

The second thing that leaps out at me is a copy of a colour photograph of two tiny girls, dressed in identical frilly party wear, holding hands. But what I notice at once is their eyes. They each have one green, and one blue. The names under the picture are Senka … and Sanda.

Behind them, shielding her eyes from the sun, stands a young, slim woman in a polka-dot dress. I freeze. Images flash in and out of my mind: two little girls. A man’s hands around a waist. The face at the window. Joe at the orphanage saying he’d seen me. And it hits me like a steam train that the girl at Zbrisć might be the one in the first picture. And the other girl might be me.

Not Senka, but Sanda Hadžić?

But if that’s the case then who’s the woman in the polka dot dress? Because she looks nothing like the person I called Mum who left me back in London.

I sit there in that dank shed, my arms around my body, for about five minutes. My thoughts are interrupted by a knocking on the door.

‘Sanda, are you OK in there?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m coming.’

I gather up the papers and stand up. Coming out of the shed, I trip over the step and the pain in my legs is unbelievable, but Joe is there as I fall, and I cling to him for a moment just to feel something real and physical instead of dread and confusion and excitement all mixed into one. He pulls me into him.

Then, ‘Your dad … shit, Sanda, I’m sorry.’

‘I know,’ I say, ‘but I … I … well, Joe look at this.’

I bring him into the light of the toilet shed and show him.

‘Branko!’ he breathes. ‘Shit. But I don’t get it … So this girl, this
is
you?
You’re
Senka?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so. Look.’ I point to the names under the photo:
Senka
and
Sanda
.

He peers at it, then looks back at me. ‘Twins. The eyes.’

‘I know. That has to be me, yeah?’

‘Then that girl at the orphanage. The one I thought was you …’

‘I saw her. I know I did, last night. At a window, when we were climbing the fence. I saw her.’

‘And the letter from Branko. What does it say?’

‘He’s looking for his daughters.’

‘Christ. So it could be … Branko’s what? Your
dad
?’

I bite my lip. ‘Joe, I have to …’

‘What?’

‘I have to get her out.’

‘No – Sanda, we’ll just go to the police and tell them,
and when we get home we can –’

‘Home? I don’t
have
a home. I have nowhere to go. I have no relatives in England. Not one. Nobody’s going to be looking for me. This is it. She
is
my family. My sister. And she’s been stuck in that place all her life. I have to.’

‘Right.’

‘What?’

‘I’m thinking,’ he says, then after a moment, ‘let’s get back inside.’

He lopes off towards the house on his bad leg, and I wonder how it’s doing. He seems a little better. But he’s distracted. I follow slowly and I’m way away from all of this. I’m a million miles away, rattling about the earth like a mad satellite.

Back inside, Andjela and the woman are back in the little room talking. Andjela is sitting at her feet helping her to wind wool. They look up when we come in. There are noises coming from upstairs: someone in heavy boots moving about on bare boards, then a creaking on the stairs.

Into the room comes a burly man dressed in a cardigan and trousers that look way too small for him. The material is stretched so tight across his buttocks that I can see his checked underpants peeping through. His teeth stick out like a little yellow shelf. He stares at us all and then grunts at his wife to join him in the kitchen.

I can’t really say why but I don’t like the look of him and I’m seriously beginning to think we were crazy to come here.

I whisper to Joe, ‘They’re going to hand us over, Joe. I know they are. I can see it in his face. That’s what they’re talking about.’

‘He’s all right,’ he says. ‘He’s just a farmer. Anyway, he’s the best we’ve got right now.’

But still I feel anxious. We’re trapped in the little room. There’s no back door that I can see. The only way out leads through the kitchen. I pinch back the net curtains. The windows are far too small even for Andjela to crawl through.

‘Shit.’

Boots on the flagstones. He’s coming back.

He says in English, ‘You are lost? Yes? You are English?’

Joe nods, ‘We … yes, we’re lost. Can we use your telephone?’

He ignores the bit about the telephone. ‘You on
holiday
?’ he says looking at Andjela with narrow eyes.

He hoots with laughter then and when he throws his head back I can actually see the undersides of his teeth.

‘Er … No,’ says Joe. ‘We just need to use your phone to …’

The man raises a hand to cut him off, then turns to me, ‘And who are you?’

‘I’m Sanda. We just need …’

‘Sanda is Bosnian name. You is Bosnian? Not English?’

‘I grew up in England. My parents are from Serbia.’

He screws up his eyes and studies me. ‘Your father and your mother Serbian?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. Truth. Where have you come from?’ he says.

I look at Joe and take a breath. ‘The orphanage on the mountain. Zbrisć.’

His wife claps a hand across her mouth.

‘Madame Milanković?’ he asks.

My palms prickle with sweat. Joe’s eyes are wide.

‘You
know
her?’ I ask.

‘Of course,’ he nods briskly, ‘everybody knows.’

Joe says quickly, ‘I think we should be going. The police will be looking for us. Come on Andjela.’

I don’t know whether or not she catches the panic in his voice but she gets to her feet and moves towards the door.

‘You stay,’ says the man, ‘I telephone for you.’

Joe is standing by the door to the kitchen; he jerks his head in the direction of the front door: ‘Let’s go.’

He grabs me by the hand and starts to make for the door. Andjela slips past too, but I can see at once it’s not her they want. Joe’s pulling me on but something’s stopping me.

I can’t go.

I have to finish this, to see it through and I know it’s stupid but I tug my hand free and shake my head. Andjela’s already outside.

Joe looks at me in confusion,
‘Sanda, come on!’

‘Joe, just go! Go and get help! Please!’

We’re in the kitchen. He’s caught for a moment in the front doorway. The man grabs at his clothes but Joe’s too strong. He throws him off and aims a punch at him. The man staggers back nursing his jaw.

‘Sanda!’

‘No,’ I say evenly. ‘I have to go back. This is my fight.’

I know I’m hurting him; I can only hope he’ll understand. Then he’s gone.

From the kitchen window, I watch them stumble across the farmyard, Joe leaning on Andjela.

They make it to the lane and disappear into the undergrowth. I knit my arms tight across my chest.

I will not cry.

14

The man goes back into the little room. I hear him cursing to himself, then a muffled phone conversation while the woman stares at me like I’m something she’s found under a drain cover. When he comes back into the kitchen, he doesn’t look happy.

‘Sit down!’

I sit at the table. I say in Serbian, ‘It’s OK. I’ll go back. I know you called them.’

For the longest time he stares at me, then he says something to his wife and she goes to the sink. To the sounds of clatter and running water, he sits down on a little wicker chair by the fire in the range that creaks under his weight. He puts his hands on his knees and leans back and sighs.

‘Your friends are very bad,’ he says in Serbian now, ‘very bad. If she catches them she’ll send them to the House.’

‘The
house
? What house?’

He scratches his thighs and the fabric squeaks and winces under his fingers.

‘The House: a place where bad children go to learn to obey; children who can’t behave, children like you who run away.’

‘You mean Zbrisć?’

He shakes his head: ‘Another place. In the woods.’

‘So –’

He stops me. ‘No more,’ he says. ‘Tell me what you were doing at Zbrisć.’

‘I was taken,’ I say, ‘by force. Taken from my home in England.’

I tell him what I know and what I think I know. He listens carefully and picks at his eyebrows.

‘War is difficult,’ he says.

‘War? What d’you mean? This isn’t about the War.’

He shrugs. ‘Everything is about the War.’

He falls silent and we both gaze into the fire. His wife quietly leaves the room.

After a while, I pull out the damp pages from my pocket and hand them to him.

‘I think that’s me.’ I lean across and indicate. ‘I think that’s me and my … my twin. My sister. I think she’s at Zbrisć and I want to find out why.’

And my mind takes me back to Andjela’s drawing on the wall. She was trying to show me my sister.

He turns the papers over in his hands.

He bends to stoke up the dwindling fire and I see the top of a tattoo on his neck – two black pincers curling upwards towards his left ear. They remind me of the crab tattoo I saw on one of my abductors. Then I realise with
horror that it isn’t a crab, it’s a scorpion. And in the same moment I recall the scar on my father’s neck. He always said it was a dog bite. Could that have been the remains of a tattoo that was removed?

He sees me looking. ‘Škorpioni,’ he smiles. ‘Yes. We don’t like trouble.’

Without a word, he crumples the pages into a ball and throws them onto the fire. I stare in disbelief as they burn down to tiny ashes and rise like black butterflies up the chimney. The photograph blackens and shrinks in the embers.

‘What are you doing?’ I shout. ‘What?!
Why?’

He looks at me, flicks his tongue over his teeth, gets to his feet and says, ‘It’s best for you to go back to Zbrisć. No more questions. Do as you are told.’

He gets up, goes into the other room and closes the door behind him. There’s something in his manner that I can’t place. Sure, he’s brusque and dismissive but there’s more. I think he’s frightened of something.

I hear them talking in urgent voices. The door opens and it’s his wife. In trembling hands she holds a shotgun. I hear him on the phone in the background.

I try to smile at her – I don’t want her pulling the trigger by accident – but I find all I can manage is an odd kind of leer. He comes back into the kitchen and takes up the gun.

He says, ‘They’re coming for you. Madame Milanković. She’s a good lady. She’ll look after you very well. You will be safe there. No police.’