The Little Red Chairs (22 page)

‘I know he loves me,’ Jade kept saying.

‘Of course he loves you,’ Fidelma said and then Jade did something sudden and profound. She pulled off her wig and was barely recognisable, her hair straight and lank, her prowess summarily gone. She cried from the depths of her heart – ‘I am a child of Africa … A child of Africa … that is who I am.’

Mistletoe’s Father

It was almost quiet, but of course never a total silence in that apartment block, with over thirty families, small children and always a dog yapping, including dogs from neighbourhoods way beyond answering at a different pitch.

Fidelma was in her room. In the adjoining room, Jasmeen would be praying, as she did each night before the altar she had fitted up and decorated with candles, incense sticks and eucalyptus leaves. Each week the leaves were changed.

The knocking on their door was thunderous.

It was Mistletoe’s father, a stocky man with shaven head, in overalls and short-sleeved vest, Mistletoe standing behind him.

‘It is not right … it is forbidden’ are his first words, which he repeats, in a more admonitory tone.

‘What is not right … what is forbidden?’ Jasmeen asks. Fidelma guesses that it is to do with their little ceremonies in the garden.

‘My child is being brainwashed,’ and to prove it, he snaps open a pink suitcase that he has been carrying.

‘You see, you see,’ he says and shows a cardigan, two pairs of tights, dresses, pyjamas, Greenie, a small bar of soap and an apple, all the necessities for a journey.

The two of them are drawn in purple crayon, voyagers setting out for distant places. Underneath she has written:

Mistletoe and Fidelma on a rickshaw

Mistletoe and Fidelma join a circus

Mistletoe and Fidelma help with the harvest

There is also a drawing of a roaring lion, a gaily dressed harlequin on a tightrope, and a clown with tears running down his cheeks. This episode concludes with Mistletoe and Fidelma on their way to China and the scenery replete with pagodas and palm trees.

‘It’s a game … that’s all,’ Fidelma says.

‘A game!’ He exploded at the word. Either they were conspiring to go away, which was a criminal offence, or they were not and so the child’s expectations were shredded. Shredded. He liked the authority of that word.

‘She is trying to kidnap my child,’ he said pointing to Fidelma, and the word was too much, too extreme altogether for Mistletoe, who throughout had been inching her way from behind his back. She stands before them now, her eyes feverish with excitement. Soon she is making faces, orchestrating her annoyance with her forefinger, and prodding his back with short, perfunctory stabs.

‘She’s alone all day … not at school … so she invents things,’ and as she says it, Fidelma sees the utter and naked panic in the man’s frame. So this is the nub of it. His whole life with his child is one of fear, hiding from authority, hiding from the law, hiding from the police, on the very brink of disaster. He thinks that she is plotting with Mistletoe’s mother. It is useless to tell him that she doesn’t know Mistletoe’s mother. It is useless to say that she
meant no harm, because for all his shouting, he is the one on trial.

‘This will have consequences,’ he says and stops suddenly, as if he cannot remember what these consequences are.

‘It won’t happen again,’ Fidelma says. She would like to say more, she would like to invite them in, but she can’t. The tension that this intrusion has caused is incalculable.

‘I think it’s time we all got some sleep,’ Jasmeen says tartly and the father looks for Mistletoe’s hand, but she wriggles out of it.

The sight of them going the short bit of corridor, the father limping, the child maintaining her distance, was strangely pathetic.

At the very last moment, Mistletoe turned and waved. It was a wan wave, identical to when they first met, a wave bringing the curtain down on their world of make-believe.

‘He moved in here three and a half years ago and we never exchanged a word … now this … this,’ Jasmeen says and though barefoot, she kicks as she walks, kicking anything that will get in her way.

The Centre

It was a cul de sac, under the flyover, with the constant thump-thump of traffic overhead. It was poorly lit, with dilapidated buildings on one side and on the other, a wall cutting off a main road. That wall was a symbol of protest, inch upon inch covered with graffiti, in red, blue, white, yellow, purple, indigo, magenta, terracotta, a tableau of screaming indignations. A few idlers stood by or crouched, not asking, not seeking, not threatening, not begging, just standing there, as if by some sovereign edict they would be picked up and absorbed into the throbbing heart of the city.

Fidelma worried that Maria might have already gone in. It was called the Centre and people from all over came in search of advice, then once a fortnight they gathered to share the stories of their fractured lives.

When Maria did arrive with her friend Lupa, there was no time for chat, so they hurried in up the stone stairs, to the little room. It is almost full. They are there because they have nowhere else to go. Nobodies, mere numbers on paper or computer, the hunted, the haunted, the raped, the defeated, the mutilated, the banished, the flotsam of the world, unable to go home, wherever home is. They sit wherever they can, on milk stools or kitchen chairs, or saddish cushions, that have been donated. Many have to stand. Fidelma is by a small table, with an image of a mandala made from fresh coffee beans and the smell is pleasing.

Varya, who runs the office, welcomes them, calling some by their names. She is a tall, well-built woman, her short hair streaked with different, vibrant colours, her eyes a soft, dark honeyed hue and her arms always open to the world. She runs a charity centre in the adjoining offices and like everyone else in that room, she is a refugee, but as she keeps reminding them, she is a survivor and it is the duty of survivors to help others. She lived through the siege of Sarajevo, as did her elderly mother, with all the fear, hunger and privation that it entailed, yet as she says with a certain irony, there was a time when Sarajevo was thought to be the biggest issue in the world, but that time was no more. She has provided this refuge, to give them a haven, where they can come at any hour of the day and sit and brood and admit to their homesickness. Thursdays she encourages stories, so that they all know at least something of one another, such as who has children and who has had to leave children behind in a far land, who is legal and who is not. She well knows that in telling their story, some say the exact opposite to what they feel, some lie, some clam up, but by just being there, she believes that gradually some small shift may happen inside, that they may feel that little bit less alone.

Last week it was Maria’s turn and this week Lupa is invited to speak. As was true for Maria, she admits to the especial music of the tango, in her head and in her soul. She is from Argentina and though still in her thirties she is a grandmother, which is the story she tells, how it came about and the responsibilities that it brought. She has to hold down two jobs, one in a municipal garden and some nights in a mortuary. Her daughter Isabella, as she tells it, not yet fifteen, was brought to a party by some friends she had just met. ‘There, she dance with a young man who tell
her he loves her and she goes with him that night. She returns to school as usual, and after three months she know she miss her period, but think it normal, until it go five months and then she know for sure. Her friends no want to help her. I go to the headmistress and she say, “Keep it secret, do not give bad example.” I go to the house where the party was and they say there were lots of people, including many strangers, at that party and they close the door in my face. They do not believe she was raped. They say she is a liar. They say I am a liar for her. I kneel down and talk through the letterbox, I plead, I say my daughter was raped and I ask them to have a little compassion, but the woman inside repeat that we are liars and that if I go to police it will bring trouble for everyone, because so many are illegal. My daughter, she stop school after seven months. She do not want her friends to jeer at her. At times she hit her head again and again on the wall and scream and say
Why, why me?
and then she say she want to die. She also say if it a boy she will kill it. She will smother it with a pillow. Her time come and I am with her in the hospital and I am allowed to watch and I look and I hold my breath as I see it come out. It is a little girl and I say she cannot kill it now and we bring it home, our second Isabella. My daughter she sometime love it, sometime not, spending too much time in depression, living too much alone, won’t go to park or museum, won’t get out of bed. But because there is a baby, judge give me extension for one year on my visa and please Gods my daughter will come to love her child once it starts to walk and to talk and engage with her.’

After Lupa had finished and as always with each story, there was a silence, out of respect of what had been said.

Then it was Nahir’s turn, but he was reluctant. He began by
laughing. He was shortish, his hair in a crew cut and his eyes hooded behind heavy, sallow lids. There was something unnerving about his hesitancy, as if he might just break out of this abnormal calm and erupt. Varya introduced him, said that like her he was from Bosnia, though from a different part, and how he had been taken to what in official language was a reception centre, but was in fact a killing factory. The several killing factories had innocuous names – the Red Room, the White Room, the Hangar and so on, the very names belying the butchery that went on. Upon hearing mention of Bosnia, Fidelma froze and wanted to leave, but something, perhaps her own timidity, kept her there.

Quietly, he began – ‘I say war is a lottery … count your lucky stars that you are here … I used to be very serious, now I read old cowboy books. A lot of laughing for no reason. If people throw stones at me, I don’t throw stones back, I laugh. I follow the football of my own country, even though I no longer live there. I live in Dagenham and my girlfriend she live in Oxford and we meet once a month.’

‘Tell what happened,’ Varya says gently and at her bidding he stands, unsure, as if asking either to be pitied or pilloried.

‘One morning at dawn the soldiers come and break down all the doors in the street one by one. My brother and I are both called. Our mother run from the bedroom and walk with us as far as the little gate. You will come back, you will come back.
Da
I said for both of us, meaning yes, yes. She give my brother the key of the house, because she know that she too will be taken, the whole village will be cleansed. The last thing I see before they put on the blindfold is the grey mist in the forest, shrouding the trees and I wonder if I will ever see that mist and those trees again. But I did. I am one of the lucky ones, though maybe
death is luckier. From the bus we are put on boxcars on a train, we know it is a train because of the sound of the whistle and we are brought to camp, my brother in one house and me in another. Many bodies packed in there on top of each other, one toilet for hundreds and all the time shouting, guards shouting and people being beaten, begging until they had no breath. Our interrogators are people I know before war began. The torturers are people I know before the war began. A sad thought occurred to me one day. Had that urge to torture and to kill been there all along, even when we were friends. My brother tries to get me to talk about it, but I can’t. I tell him I feel nothing, no pain, no hurt, no revenge, deep in a limbo of my own. He is filled with hatred. He sees I have no hatred and he can’t forgive me that. He tells me to try and remember it or at least to imagine it, the cries, the boy from our village beaten senseless with “
Pusti me da
živim
”: “Let me live”, played loud over and over again and I tell him that all I can imagine is my head breaking apart inside and there is no room for memory. He says I surely remember the sweeping up, bits of bodies, tufts of hair, bloodied T-shirts and he is about to strike me for not remembering and I say don’t strike me, I am not ready to remember and maybe I never will be.

‘I got out sooner than he. One night a guard, who was our language teacher in school, pulled me out and brought me to a boiler room. He had a knife. I think he going to kill me. Instead, he give me the knife and he say go go go. He maybe do it because that day we saw him kill someone, like a pig. We watched it and lived through it and maybe he had pang of conscience or else he was drunk, but anyhow, he let me go. A woman who lived nearby and who delivered their grog took me in. She hated the soldiers. The daughters all around were repeatedly raped, but
would not talk about it, because guards threatened them that if they told worse things would happen, their homes would be torched. Their parents would be slaughtered. From there I eventually got to a camp run by the Red Cross and after seventeen months I was released on condition that I would not return to Bosnia. I think I have breakdown in some centre in Holland. I laugh a lot and talk to trees. My brother did not get out till much later and was eventually swapped in an exchange of prisoners. He went back to where we once lived, because he had the key, he never lost it. There is nothing of our house, only a burnt shell and the stumps of the fruit trees, in a blackened landscape. He say his heart is blackened also, but purified by going back. He say it is essential to remember and that nothing must be forgotten. I say the opposite. Slowly, painfully, he start to build a new house where our house stood. It is for me to return. He also have hives and honey bees. I go home because he want me to. The honey is thick and tastes of blossom. He say we walk in the forest to reconnect. He ask what I remember night after night in that room of madness. I say I remember the magic of the rivers, especially in the spring, in the thaw, when the torrent come down the mountain and he go mad with me and say I have no feeling, I am behaving as if I had nothing to do with it and I say to him he is tracing spectres. We cannot connect. He takes the key that he wears around his neck and keeps saying “The key, the key,” as if that should unite us. I tell him that I want to be a good person, I want not to hate. Forgive me, but as you see I am a man of few words.’ Suddenly he ceased talking and Varya thanked him. Nobody spoke.