The Edge of Me (17 page)

We nestle together on the bed under one of the dusty blankets and I try to engage her in conversation. All the while, from below, we can hear noises: bangs and clatters, like something being mended or broken.

Senka speaks in a hoarse whisper, and I have to lean in to hear her at times. It’s like she isn’t used to speaking or being listened to. She seems to find it difficult at first but with gentle encouragement, she manages to continue.

I find out she’s been in the orphanage at Zbrisć for most of her life; while I was going to school in London, she was caged in that awful place.

I ask her about school. She says she’s had only a little basic schooling from a local priest, no books or toys. She tells me she was ten when she was put to work in the kitchens, scrubbing floors, peeling endless blackened potatoes, and fetching and carrying for the staff.

I ask her how she came to be here, and with her eyes fixed on me, she tells me she’d heard of it before. All the kids at Zbrisć knew about the House. She echoes what the pig farmer told me:

‘This is where they send you if you are bad – you never come back.’

She tells me how, the night after we escaped, they brought her here. She shows me her arm. It’s covered in welts and bruises.

I ask her, ‘Did Goran do this to you?’

She shakes her head:
‘Kristina.’
My fake mother. I feel sick.

‘How did she know about the orphanage?’

‘They’re sisters,’ she says.

‘Who?’

‘Kristina and Madame Milanković.’

‘Christ.’

All those years.

Kristina must have been talking to Milanković about Senka, and I never knew a thing. I grip Senka’s hand and force myself to think it through. Why has Kristina brought us both here? Together? Why keep us apart all this time and then do this? None of it makes sense.

‘Senka, do you remember our mother?’ I say gently.

She remembers us being pulled away from our mother’s arms, bundled together onto a truck by a man, then later, in a car, a woman in the back seat catching hold of her with long hands around her middle. She remembers screaming and kicking to get away. She says that at one point she kicked at the woman so violently, there was blood on her face. She remembers the woman howling in pain, spitting blood, then hitting her hard over and over again.

So that’s how Kristina lost her front teeth.

She remembers the day I left the orphanage: summer, the grass wilting in the heat, a dead cat, a stew of blowflies,
and the sound of her fists against a high window. She remembers looking down and my face over someone’s shoulder. She never forgot it.

She wants to know about me, so I tell her my story so far. She sits very close to me, and listens intently with her head on one side. Sometimes she brushes her hand against my cheek. I understand. I feel the same need to touch her, to make sure this is real. I tell her of our escape and how I’d seen her at the window that night.

‘You saved me,’ I say. ‘The dog? That was you, wasn’t it? How?’

She nods, and the ghost of a smile crosses her face and fades.

‘I saw you the first time you were brought to Zbrisć but they kept me away – put me to work in the boys’ quarters – they watched me closely,’ she says. ‘But that night there was chaos, noise, the dogs barking: they left the door unlocked … I looked out and saw you there. I didn’t think. I went quickly, took scissors from the kitchen, slipped through the coal door by the kitchen – no one saw me – and I stabbed it.’

‘You were brave.’

She smiles. ‘No.’

‘We should have taken you with us.’

‘I would have slowed you down. I’m not strong,’ she says.

‘I came back for you. I came back to find you,’ I say.

‘To find me,’ she whispers.

I’m just getting to the bit about the letter and the
photograph from Branko when I hear footsteps in the corridor. We fall quiet as the key grinds in its lock.

Goran stands in the doorway. He’s changed from his business suit into overalls. He has on rubber boots and thick socks turned over them at the knee. At his neck he wears a woollen scarf tied in a kind of bow.

He takes out his gun and points it. ‘Come with me.’

Senka scrabbles to her feet and, with head bowed meekly, goes to him. I can see her shape through the formless shift she wears, the jut of her hips and her backbone like a chain.

I take my time. I shrug off my coat and put it around Senka. As I do so, she raises her eyes to me with a little smile of gratitude.

He watches us with a sneer. ‘Nice touch. But you won’t need it for long.’ He seems to find this very funny and chuckles to himself. ‘Out!’

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

‘For a walk in the woods. Now be quiet – do like your sister.’

‘If we’re going outside, she needs some shoes.’

‘What?’

‘She needs something on her feet!’

I think for a moment he’s going to hit me but instead he turns, rummages around in a tea chest, and brings out a pair of carpet slippers in a lurid shade of green. He throws them at her, and she ducks instinctively. It makes me think of Andjela. I want to go to her and hold her, to protect her from everything and everyone, but I wait.
She picks up the slippers and puts them on. With a shy look at me, she follows Goran down the corridor and down the stairs to where God knows what awaits us.

20

Downstairs, in the hall, Kristina is waiting in a high-backed armchair, her hands folded in her lap, eyes closed. Goran nudges us towards her. Her eyes snap open.

‘So here you are.’ She speaks in Serbian. ‘Together. Just what you wanted.’ She looks at me. ‘And what do you think of your sister?’

I say nothing. But I glare straight at her. She’s wearing lipstick, and the red has leeched into the creases around her mouth. ‘You didn’t know your own flesh and blood was a filthy little peasant?’ My anger stops up my throat like gristle. I choke it down.

Senka looks up at her, then at me. ‘I … I …’ she stutters.

‘You –,’ Kristina picks at a back tooth, delicately, with her little finger held high, turns a lazy eye on Senka, ‘you don’t speak to me or look at me. Do you understand?’

‘Don’t talk to her like that,’ I say.

Kristina’s head jerks around: ‘How
dare
you? You thankless little
bitch
,’ she spits. ‘God, how did I put up
with you all that time? All those years. The smell of you, your voice, your whining.’

‘My
voice
? You hardly spoke to me!’

‘Shut up. I took you. I paid for it. Every fucking day. You saw to that.’

‘
Why then?
Why did you do it?’

Here she smiles. ‘Why? That’s a good question. Why does anyone do anything? For money? For love?’

‘Love?’
I say. ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word.’

At that, she lurches up and slaps me hard across my face with the flat of her hand, then sits back down, smoothing her skirt. But I’m not afraid of her any more. The truth – hers and mine – has set me free and spinning. I feel powerful. For the first time in my life.

‘You have no idea about me. No idea about my life,’ she says.

‘I know more than you think. I know what you did in the War.’

She flattens her back against the chair. ‘Oh. That. And you think
you
can judge me now? You don’t know anything. You know
nothing
about it. War is hard and it’s dirty and it’s complicated. No one is innocent.
No one
.’

I ask again, ‘Why
did
you take me?’

‘I told you why.’

‘You
loved
me?’

She purses her mouth in disgust. ‘I didn’t
love
you. You were
nothing
to me. You were like … like an animal, like a mule. You had a job to do and you’ve done it. It’s over. That’s why you’re here.’

‘A
job
…?’

‘Yes. You were doing a job; both of you. You were helping me punish someone. Dragan too – he was a part of it until he started to care about you and make a fuss.’

‘He’s dead.’

She shrugs. ‘That’s what happens when you start to think you can change things.’

‘He wrote me a letter. I think he loved you.’

‘Weak,’ she says. ‘Let me ask you. Where do you think
strength
really comes from? What gives a man the
strength
to go on, to endure?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.
She
might though.’ She gestures to Senka. ‘I’ll tell you. It is
hope
. You take away
hope
from a person and they’re empty: weak and empty.’

Kristina claps her hands and a low door is opened in the wall. Two men come into the room, dragging someone between them. His head hangs limply and his bare feet leave a thin wash of blood on the floor behind him. They manoeuvre him into a chair near Kristina, stand behind him, and one of them pulls back his head by his hair. He has a high, lined brow, even features and gold-green eyes that fill with tears as they meet mine. Right away, I feel something: a kind of force, a tiny pulse inside me that sets up a soft beat against my heart. At my side, Senka reaches for my hand.

He struggles to move but they have him pinned into the chair by his arms.

Kristina flicks her eyes at him and goes on: ‘I had hope once. Hope
and
love. Yes,
me
. But that was taken from me.
An eye for an eye. This man,’ she gestures in his direction, ‘took my love,
my hope
.’

‘No,’ I hear from the man in the chair.

At once, she walks over to face him, bends and places a finger on his lips. She glances at me over her shoulder. ‘And I did the same to him. That’s fair isn’t it?’

‘Who is …?’ I say, although I’m sure I know the answer. I’m holding Senka’s hand so tightly, I can feel the web of tiny bones start to give.

‘This is your father,’ she says. ‘This is Branko Hadžić.’

‘Sanda, Senka, my God …’ he gasps.

‘And
you
– ?’ I begin.

‘Here he is,’ says Kristina. ‘And here you are. I wanted to show him one last time what he had and what he lost. He has nothing. I’ve
drained
him of everything, little by little.’

His eyes on her are pleading. She speaks to me. ‘You think you’ve had a hard time? Let me tell you a story, Sanda, about a girl not much older than you and what was done to her.’

Kristina sits back down, squeezes her hands together until her knuckles glow white. Branko twitches in his chair.

She waits a moment, then: ‘This girl was beautiful. She had soft skin and long blonde hair tied in a thick plait down her back. She came from nothing: from darkness, from pain. Her parents were ignorant, stupid, cold. They were jealous of her beauty, of the joy she saw in life. They kept pigs, they grew beet. That was all they had.

‘But she was clever. She had a hunger for knowledge,
for learning. She wanted to be a teacher. She worked hard and she got a place at college. It was there that she met him. He was a young professor. He was tall, good looking, all the girls liked him, but he took a special interest in her. Oh yes.’ She looks across at Branko, who keeps his body still and taut.

‘As soon as she walked into his class on the first day, she knew he loved her, he couldn’t help himself. They talked for hours after class, walked in the gardens. He sent her letters, little notes. He taught her to love, she who had known no love in her life.’

Branko shakes his head. ‘It was all in your head. There was nothing between us. You’re lying!’ And to us, ‘She’s lying. I was kind to her, that’s all – I felt sorry for her, but she’s a monster, she’s not …’

‘Gag him,’ she says quietly. A filthy rag is fastened around his mouth and he slumps back. She looks at me and her eyes burn. ‘Yes. We were passionate lovers, thrown together.’

Branko’s shaking his head again.

‘I
adored
him,’ she goes on, ignoring him. ‘I would have walked through fire for him. I had so much love in my heart. So much hope. Can you imagine?
Can you understand?
But then he threw it all away on some Bosniak slut, another teacher. And all those promises we’d made to each other, all my hopes, were turned into dust.’

‘So, you –?’

‘The war had started. I joined the Serbian Radical Party then and I lost them for a while. I heard they’d had
twin girls. And then in 1995, I saw her by chance on the Potočari road with a group of other women and children. And there you were – you and your idiot sister. And there and then I decided what I was going to do. I had Dragan shoot your mother and we took you both. But not before I told her why. She knew who I was.

‘I found
him
later in a transit camp. It was providence. I had him transferred to my camp and before I locked him up, I told him what I’d done, and how I was leaving the country.’

‘And Dragan? He went along with all this?’

‘Of course. I owned Dragan. He would have done anything for me.’

‘So what happened? What did you do?’

‘Branko stayed in prison for a long time, five years or more, long after the war ended. I saw to it from England. I wanted him where I could find him, you see. And every so often I would send him a little present.’

‘Present?’ I say.

‘Photographs. Of you … and her. I wanted him to know you were alive, growing up far away, having forgotten him; that he was never going to see you. I made sure they kept him alive. They had to watch him very closely. Many times he tried to take his own life but they stopped him. He’d still be in there but there was a change at the top and he appealed and they had to let him go.’

‘And he found you?’

‘He was getting very close. They warned me. Then I had a letter, and I knew it was time – time to return, to wait. He got to the house in London soon after we left,
then he went to Zbrisć. He was easy to catch,’ she says. ‘I just told him I had you. I knew he’d come.’

I look at Branko. His eyes are brimming with tears again, and his shoulders are heaving. I go to him.

‘Keep away!’ She thrusts her chin at Goran, and he grabs me. ‘So,’ she says to Branko. ‘I thought you would like to see them one last time. Just so you know I kept them alive but apart. They’ve grown up not knowing each other, not knowing love, or kindness, or hope. Just as I did. You remember what I wrote to you when you betrayed me, that I would never let you forget?’