The Little Red Chairs (31 page)

‘I don’t know …’

‘I never liked vodka,’ was his reply, calling for a large grappa and some wine for the lady.

‘I have plenty,’ she said.

‘I saw you in the court, next to the mothers … a lot of bitterness in that room. Mixed bunch, journalists, diplomats, friends, enemies et cetera. Friends very loyal, especially ladies. His portrait next to their skin, him playing gusle. They know killing not in his heart, they know he sad for the places of his childhood. You are an acquaintance, or maybe a psych, a nice English lady come to help with the trauma, to delineate the dark, bullshit. Psychs they mess me up, too much headache. My psych she make me talk it over and over again. I cancel appointment, I say I am wanted in Antwerp and Lower Saxony. Psychs no much help, too much talk. Intersubjectivity crap. You get my drift. But you are not going to tell me why you have come to Den Haag. Something of a quasi-romantic nature perhaps. Ladies they always fell for him. Should have seen his hair in those days, killer hair, better than Charles Bronson, the child of Lithuania.
The meanest man in the west, Charles Bronson.
Flew twenty-five missions, awarded a Purple Heart for wounds received in World War Two. You think he will get twenty years, thirty years, more. Something between you both, you go back a bit as the saying goes, you knew him, he opened up to you, things he never told anyone else, the sweetheart moment … so you visit every six weeks or so and in between you write letters, tendresse –
Darling, I’m afraid I’m getting awfully fond of you
… Bullshit.’

‘Yes, bullshit … you talk too much.’

‘No hard feelings lady … let’s have one for the road, as they say in England … Churchill he split our lands … drew up our borders … I’ve been as far as Dover … many many Albanians in High Wycombe … maybe you have met some, maybe you have drink with them …’

‘I am not a girlfriend and I am not a psych and I have not drunk with Albanians in High Wycombe.’

‘You’re thinking he will get life … the mothers are hoping for that, locked up somewhere very cold, where the sun it never riseth.’

‘I have no idea what his sentence will be.’

‘You must have some fucking idea … some fucking opinion, either pro or con … you come all this way in your nice coat with your nice handbag to hear a twisted version of the truth,’ and he half stood, the roused sentry, bearing down on her.

‘I’m sick of your fucking talk and your fucking tank and your minutiae, as you call it.’

‘I could smash this place up,’ he was saying.

‘I know you could, but you won’t …’

‘How are you so sure?’

‘Two reasons – one, you would be seized in seconds and two, it wouldn’t help … the boys, the men, the Sabers and the Sayeds are waiting for you … they’re on the road … they’ll never be not on the road, they’re inside you …’

‘Jesus Christ,’ and he looked now in terror, at her, the messenger, then down at his hands, the instruments of slaughter, as he stared about with a mounting helplessness.

‘I shouldn’t have come … it bring the whole thing back … the proximity,’ and then the mumbling began, mumbling to himself, the sweat pouring from his face, his wiping it with the thick wool scarf that he wore, trying to stave it off, but couldn’t. He began to shake. It was terrible to see such a big man become incontinent in a matter of moments, not just the hands, but the torso, the feet, all jabber jabber jabber. So lonely to witness, like watching someone slip over into death, except for one fraction of his mind
that followed the awfulness of it.

‘I am with you,’ she said leaning over, speaking very quietly, but not touching him. It went on for many more minutes and sometimes he almost thought he had returned, but was then pulled back into it.

Afterwards he sat, grateful, abashed, unable to look up.

‘I want to give you something,’ he said. He began to search in various pockets and eventually pulled out a small, folded business card that was torn off at the end. It had the name of his sister’s hair salon in Zagreb. Josefina. Should she ever be in Zagreb, his sister would do her hair and give her very good price.

‘Where do you live … do you live local?’ she said, looking from him to the card and back again.

‘I tell myself that I would like a wife, I would put my arms around her and she would make me feel okay, at least for some of the time, she and me saying things, she saying that it’s over, over, no use lingering on the past. And we walk towards our little house on the edge of a wood and the smoke already coming out of the chimney, because one of our friendly neighbours would have lit a fire for us, no border issues, the peace that passeth understanding.’

‘I knew your president,’ she said and although he had risen to go, he hesitated.

‘I had a part in his life, a walk-on part … but still significant … he came to our village as a healer –
The stranger who dwells among us shall be as home born
– people were bewitched, especially women. He gave me a child at my own bewitched entreaties … it ended badly … I came here.’

‘You came for him …’

‘Yes …’

‘Big mistake.’

‘I wanted to believe he would show some grain of remorse … a single word … what goes on inside him … the inner footage. What is it, that need to kill, that desire to kill, what was it. Tell me. Tell me.’

He looked offended, then asked aloud where was the gents, and turning as he went, called back, ‘You want answers … Explain himself … you won’t get it … he can’t … feelings not the same, from where you are to where he is … carnage … Go home.’

She waited, but he did not come back. His scarf was still there, a whorl of red on the table.

The overhead light was quenched and then the lights behind the bar, leaving her in relative darkness, except for little beads of light around the edges of the glass table.

‘It’s on the house,’ the barman said as he put a glass of wine in front of her and went out.

Jack

Fidelma could swear it was the same robin, same little terracotta chest, puffed out, same tilt to the head, the little flirt, with her tricks, landing, then darting off back into the thickets. A winter evening, the air so tender and the boughs of the trees wet and mossy. She had come back for a few days to see Sister Bonaventure, her room in the wing of the convent, exactly as it was. The window slightly ajar and a metal crucifix on the pillow. The only change was in poor Boney, her speech much slower as she searched for the words that tumbled about, in her brain, rudderless.

There was a permanence here, a familiarity, the wood so quiet, the thin brown branches scrolling the air, a stillness, that hyphen between evening and night. She sat, both to remember and to forget, and the robin with that tantalising promise of nearness kept hovering about. The phone in her pocket began to judder, and she reckoned that it was the telephone company welcoming her to Ireland and giving the rates for local and international calls. She stayed, watching the water come up to the tide line, then recede again and so on and so on and soon it would be dark, it would be dark in about twenty minutes and the water would be dark too.

Then the phone vibrated again and again and finally she took it out and in the dusk she read the text that was from her estranged husband –
Go down to the water Fidelma and baptise yourself as you once did long ago.

How did he know that. How had he divined that. Who had given him her number?

She read it a few times and then, like a somnambulist, she went down the muddy slope to the river, stooped and put her hands in and then her face, as she had done once before. The water was freezing cold, but fresh, and it freshened her and gave her courage.

The house was in darkness and as she went up the front path she could see rimed bunches of rose hips above the porch. The steps were slippery, as the frost had come on hard. She touched the door before she opened it, in some kind of propitiation. Her key was on her key ring, along with the three keys from her London life.

Jack shuffled down the hall in slippers, holding something that rattled. It was the globe in the oil lamp that had never fitted securely. There had been a power cut. He went into the front room and she followed. He had to strike match after match after match, because the sooted wick had not been lit or trimmed in ages. Eventually it took and a small, unsettled flame tapered upwards. There was dust on everything. Dust, her old nemesis, had sealed and settled on objects she once treasured, on the silver salver, the fender, the china shepherdesses, a thick veneer of it. It was like a room in an auction house, with all these things about to be put up for sale. Rust streaked down the cream wallpaper from all the rain and the jamb of the wooden door had gone soft in the damp. There was the old soda syphon on the trolley and his set of golf clubs in a corner, the shuddery lamplight giving to everything the added aura of neglect.

Jack sat on the arm of the sofa and she sat on a straight wicker chair, facing him. He paused to gather his strength, then took
her hand and began to speak in a very confidential voice – ‘We loved one another … we were sweethearts, like Darby and Joan, walking along the shore linked, people laughing behind our backs … but then … evil came, more evil than we could ever comprehend, and it fell to you child, to be susceptible to it … the Prince of Darkness … you were the one for whom the bell tolled … and now you are home.’

He was breathing fast, too fast, and then he let out a strange unyielding cry, its echo reverberating throughout the entire house, as he sank back into the well of the chair, his fawn slipper falling off, thudless. She was witnessing something strange and terrifying that was both of this world and the next and she was powerless to stop it. He had waited to die until she returned. The knowledge that made him summon her from the river was something she never could or would explain.

‘Oh Jack,’ she said, as if he might heed or hear her. She was still holding his hand, which went limp in hers. His eyes were wide open, gnawed and staring, and she looked away, petrified.

Beyond the window, a land white and sheathed with frost, that frost biting into everything, even the cattle trough in the neighbour’s field, a night crystal clear, cold and implacable, like death herself.

Home

I am not a stranger here anymore. They all know me in the Centre and have given me the nickname of Delphi. There is a postcard of Delphi on the wall, a vacated temple, with stone pillars where, from somewhere within, the Oracle spoke her riddles. There are many newspaper cuttings, all of people in predicaments, migrants with babes in arms fleeing atrocities and heading for nowhere. Each day more clippings and still more, so that the wall now is a heaving tableau of history. There is also a blown-up picture of the South African daisy, called Jerawala.

The world comes in here every day. They trudge up that stairs from the moment the door is opened. We never know what to expect. Father. Mother. Brother. Sister. Shattered worlds. Lost embryos.

A family of five came yesterday, a young father, a very young mother, a baby and two children with nowhere to put their heads down. The children’s footwear was bits of duvet wrapped around them and tied with string. They sat in the hall for hours, quiet and mannerly, like figures in a frieze. I rang centre after centre and it was only with imploring that one woman relented, said they could sleep in the passage of her already crowded hostel for one night. That one night to them, on that floor, was home. Then on the morrow, up and off, and before night footsore and weary, craving the valleys and small instances of mercy.

It is all very brisk and very busy here and for the most part,
good-humoured. It is quite frugal, but visitors always get something, usually biscuits, as there is a big box of biscuits to dive into. Varya saw to that. She is the one who brought me here, or I should say encouraged me to come. We were in a pub when she put the question –
Why could I not go home, big house, four bedrooms, walled kitchen garden, a veranda, the lot.
I told her I could not go home until I could come home to myself.

‘I know,’ she said, and I knew she knew.

What brings peace. What brings certainty.

I asked the interpreter in The Hague to ask the Mothers of Srebrenica and they listened attentively and then one spoke –
A bone,
she said. To find the smallest piece of bone of one of her children, or better still to find the bones of each of her three children. Her eyes were brimming with hope and grievance.

Little Allissos has been turned down again by the Home Office. More waiting. She had to leave the house in Acton and Varya found her a place, temporarily, in a big commune out in the country, where a philanthropist keeps the unwanted, in return for working the farm. She eats potatoes now instead of rice. They enter their potatoes at various horticultural shows and it seems the method of judging is that six men look ponderously at the potatoes, on a platter, and then, like stevedores, cut them open, to get to the inside.

I see Mistletoe every fortnight. Her father or auntie drops her at Ladbroke Grove Station and she runs up the steep flight of steps, as if a wind is propelling her. We have tea in a cafe where they make assorted crepes to order. She touches my face as she used to, runs her hand along my neck, ignoring the imperfections. We are to make a journey in the spring.
Stonehenge
. Why Stonehenge, I asked.
Gods
, she said.
Gods
.