Stillness of the Sea (13 page)

“On the basis of what you know now, and given his mental condition, would you say that at the time of his referral to you for examination, he was in a position to understand his own actions and their consequences?”

“His state of mind – that is, his mental derangement – was without question causing him to be extremely agitated, unable to think clearly or to concentrate. He was only capable of answering a few questions, and then more or less at random. It was hard to connect with him at all. He sang, shouted and resisted the examination. Consequently, the patient had to be restrained to calm him down. At that point in time, he was not in a fit state
either to control his behaviour or be aware of his actions.”

“Is it possible that someone who has lost a close relative would react in this way?”

“Yes.”

“Is it also possible that someone who has done a dreadful crime could also exhibit such behaviour when assailed by feelings of guilt and awareness of what he has done?”

“Conceivably, various stressful situations could trigger behaviour of this kind, but the present case does not fit this category. In practice, I’d say that cases of this kind have not yet been observed scientifically. Instead, it is far more common for the patient to first develop a psychotic condition and then go on to commit a crime or a punishable offence – and I say this as someone who has experience of working in a prison hospital with psychiatric patients who have committed criminal acts.”

The psychologist is the first witness to appear to be quite untroubled by the questioning. He even seems to enjoy talking about his work. He looks at the prosecutor while he waits expectantly for the next question.

“Have you ever, in your personal experience, come across a patient who first commits a crime and then develops a mental illness?”

“In my prison hospital work, I’ve never come across an instance of a patient who first commits a crime and, in connection with that crime, later develops a psychotic condition. All my patients have either become psychotic and then committed the criminal act, or committed the act without suffering from psychotic incidents afterwards.”

“Thank you, doctor. Now, Mrs Šimić has said about her husband, ‘Ever since the war began, he has been
anxious, tense and impatient.’ Are you able to draw any conclusions from this? In other words, does this statement allow you to conclude that his psychotic condition had become manifest already before his admission to hospital?”

“No, not the psychosis. Certainly the overwhelming energy, the physical restlessness and the anxiety. I would agree that’s likely.”

“But, sir, there was a war on. Surely normal people were also exceptionally nervous and driven and irritable? In fact, isn’t that a normal range of reactions in wartime?”

“Such reactions depend on personality. Some people are likely to become depressed, others aggressive and yet others, like this patient, hypomanic and exhibiting an overwhelming drive to take some action. Some people flee, some develop persecution mania and others cope with their situation and adjust to it – all this depends on factors in their personality and character. There are no rules for how people will behave in extreme or intolerable situations.”

“Thank you, doctor. I would now like to ask you the following question: at the time the crime took place, was the defendant capable of distinguishing between right and wrong?”

“A joke has just come to mind, one I mustn’t tell in a court of law. However, it’s about two mentally ill persons discussing something and ends with one of them saying to the other: ‘I might be mad, but I’m not stupid.’ That is to say, even if he had been in a psychotic state at the time, this would not necessarily have caused him to be unaware that specific behaviour has moral implications.”

“While he was treated under your supervision, did he ever seem to you to have lost the capacity for recognising the fundamental difference between right and wrong?”

“It’s debatable. No one can be completely certain on this point, and besides, in psychiatry, we don’t usually address the question of whether the patient is aware of the distinction between good and evil. We try to deal with disturbed and confused mental states. Once the patient is capable of behaving in a reasonable manner and controlling his impulses, and the psychopathological symptoms have faded into the background, then he is, in our opinion, cured and hence responsible for his actions.”

“You describe the defendant at the time of his admission as agitated and out of control. He resisted you. Can you recall him speaking of a house going up in flames, or of dead people?”

“No, the only thing I can recall is this: he called out to someone by name. Over and over again he shouted, ‘Gordana!’ And, ‘Let her go, set my Gordana free!’ At least, this was the name he used, as I understood it. I asked him about this woman, you know, who she was and so on, but he didn’t respond. He also called out, according to my notes: ‘I’ll grind your bones to dust, and make a paste of your blood, and of the paste a coffin.’ At this point we had to restrain him physically. As I’ve said, he was very confused at the time.”

He senses a hand touching his leg. It takes a moment before he realises whose hand it is. Aisha has taken her headphones off, points to his set and then whispers something he can’t quite catch. She looks at him as if waiting for an answer. He can’t work out what she wants.

“Hey, what’s up?” she asks. “Are you coming or staying here?”

He gets up and, crouching, pushes his way past the others in the row. She follows him and, when they’re both outside, asks what’s wrong with him.

“Nothing.”

“To me, you looked as if you weren’t there at all. I was watching you and at times you were far away. Not in the same room any more.”

He is relieved that she doesn’t insist on an answer. While he thinks about what he can say, she turns and walks on ahead. He doesn’t try to catch up with her on the staircase and has to hold onto the banister. He is convinced that Šimić shouted “Cordana”, not “Gordana”.

They walk towards the sea, along the road he took the first time he was in this city. He buries his hands in his coat pockets. They soon arrive at the bus stop where he sheltered on that first night. Aisha walks alongside him. Her head is slightly bowed. She is wearing a winter jacket which makes her look bulky, its zip pulled right up to her chin and her hands hidden inside its sleeves, as if her arms have been amputated.

He tries to listen to her footsteps, but can’t hear a thing. He wonders about her ability to move so
soundlessly,
even though there is nothing light about her body, nothing to give her that ballerina-like weightlessness. She is hefty, unlike Ana who stepped so lightly she hardly touched the ground. Because of that silence, he turns to her and wouldn’t be surprised to find that she has vanished. She raises her head and looks at him quizzically.

Blasts of cold wind buffet them as they come closer to the sea. He can’t understand what they’re doing there in this freezing weather. They struggle along the street until
they reach the promenade with the wide beach stretching ahead and, beyond it, the sea, which is dark grey despite the blue sky.

“What now?” he asks.

“Isn’t there some place to sit in the warmth and look at the sea?”

They go to the café he’d been to on the evening he went to the prison. They find a table in the conservatory. Aisha orders a pot of tea. “Don’t you want anything?” she asks. He hesitates, then asks for tea.

They sit looking out over the sea.

“Why did you want to get out of there?”

She puts her hands on the table, one on top of the other, as if to warm them. “I just couldn’t bear it any longer.”

“How come?”

She stares at her hands.

“I couldn’t take any more of the way they kept trying to find an explanation for why he did what he did. Psychosis, alcoholism, the death of his son – why try to understand what cannot be understood? It came across like they were trying to show how understanding they are. What a sad man, whose life was so thrown out of kilter that in the end they had to strap him to his bed. So what? Am I supposed to feel sorry for him?”

“But perhaps he really did experience something that threw him off balance.”

“You mean the death of his son?”

“Perhaps something else, as well.”

“Like what?”

“The war had reached Višegrad. Surely Serbs, too, might have suffered? Anyway, how can you be so certain that he’s guilty?”

“How can you doubt it? Are you serious? Have you ever looked him at him properly? You must have seen the contempt he feels for everything? There he sits, all neatly buttoned up in his suit and his hair combed. He must be shaving every day, and probably reeks of aftershave. That’s just perverse, when you think what he’s charged with. If he were innocent, he wouldn’t shave every morning, cool as anything, and worry about things like whether his suit is looking good. Just imagine
yourself
in his place, that you’re accused of having caused the death of forty-two human beings – not just caused their death, but led them, the children and the babies too, into Purgatory – and you
know
you’re innocent while everyone else thinks you’re a murderer. Would you have the peace of mind to shave in front of the mirror every morning? In that situation, do you think you’d check that your suit was buttoned and that you smell nice? That man is a killer… no, he’s someone worse than a killer, because he was too cowardly to do it himself and left the actual killing to others.”

“How can you be so sure of your own judgement?” he asks.

“You’ve never been to Bosnia, have you?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should go there some time. It might make you understand.”

“What would I understand?”

“What it was all about.”

“The problem is that here in Berlin, in Germany, people don’t know what went on during the war. Their ideas come from a handful of images, like the emaciated men behind a barbed-wire fence. Or people running away from snipers. And so forth. Any judgement they make is
going to be unreliable. It’s like picking up a few pieces of a thousand-piece jigsaw, taking a look at them and then deciding you know the whole picture. If they’d seen different images, they might well have reached different conclusions.”

This all came up the day after the supper at his best friend’s place, when they were walking to Ana’s flat.

“Do you know the truth about the photo showing emaciated men crowded behind barbed wire?”

“What truth?” he asked.

He knew that some kind of concentration camp had been constructed in Trnopolje and that these images, of a kind bred into the bone of German people, had caused huge outrage.

“These men weren’t kept in a compound surrounded by barbed wire. The journalists had filmed an area of land with a barbed-wire fence. They deliberately made it look like a concentration camp. In the end, these concocted photos triggered NATO’s intervention in the war.”

This was the first time he heard this and, despite not wanting to, he doubted the truth of it. It disturbed him that he couldn’t believe her.

“You know what it’s like here,” she said. “When people find out I’m a Serb, they think I’m fascist if I don’t admit to my guilt or, at least, the guilt of my people. They’ve no patience with any ‘buts’. And that hurts me, because it denies me my own life story, my experiences. And it provokes me too. I end up defending something that I don’t want to defend in the slightest. And that’s why I’d rather not discuss it.”

At the time, he had no idea of how much she brooded about her own life story. That he did not now grieves him profoundly – and infuriates him too, because she
doubted him for months. How else could he interpret his lover’s silence? – her inability to talk about what troubled her for nine long months. The fact that she concealed her life could only mean that she couldn’t trust him or let him come close. And what could have been her reason?

“Why are you here?” he asks.

Aisha sighs audibly. She keeps her eyes fixed on the shore where the twilight is deepening and blotting out the sea. Far away, near the horizon, lights are coming on, lights that don’t move.

“I come from Višegrad,” she says without looking at him.

He feels tenseness spreading through his body, his heart beats faster, his hands begin to shake and his thoughts become disordered, out of control.

“I was born there. I was fourteen when we fled.”

He holds his breath, staring past her into the dusk. Then he briefly shuts his eyes, before asking her: “Do you know Ana?”

“Which Ana?”

“Ana Šimić.”

His insides contract and he looks around to find something to hang on to. The picture on the wall behind Aisha. It’s the same one as on the wall of his room in the guesthouse. He sleeps beneath this picture. He inspected it on his first morning and took in that image of a girl with her hair hidden under a turban, though one pearl earring was visible; she was looking at him wide-eyed with her lips slightly parted. His gaze travels to Aisha’s jacket on the coat-rack, next to it hangs his own coat. The waitress is standing at the glass-covered counter, cautiously pushing a slice of chocolate gateau onto a plate. Then his eyes wander back to the picture. To the
girl who, it seems and surely he can’t be wrong, meets the onlooker’s eyes with such expectation.

He hears Aisha ask a question.

“Is she his daughter?”

Aisha doesn’t know her, and he isn’t sure whether he’s comfortable with this situation. Her voice has a new note in it, quieter, gentler. As if all her anger has been swept away.

“Yes,” he says.

“And you know her?”

“I love her.”

He holds his breath, stays still.

“Did you know she was his daughter?”

“No.”

“When did you find out?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“How did you find out?”

“I found his letters to her.”

One morning, the letters were lying on her desk. He still doesn’t know if she had forgotten them or left them there on purpose. He has often wondered about this. Was he meant to find them? This is what he has believed up till now. Several letters were stacked next to her computer. Not just one letter lying around, which would have been understandable. She might have read it the day before and simply forgotten to clear it away – not thought of him finding it. But a whole pile of letters on her desk could not be mere forgetfulness. When he walked over to the window in the morning, he saw them, some five or six letters. She wasn’t in the room, so she must have been in the bathroom or the kitchen, although he cannot remember hearing anything. Usually, he would hear noises, like plates being put on the table or coffee
gurgling in the coffee-maker. That morning, the flat was quiet.