Milena ran through the list in her mind: she had packed the oranges and apples, along with the goat’s cheese Uncle Miodrag had requested. She had added white bread, cucumber, boiled chicken with tarragon and lovage, and – to aid his digestion – some prunes in Madeira. Not forgetting the customary jug of milk, this time laced with banana rather than cinnamon. Vera insisted on a daily supply of calcium, essential for strong bones, and paid not the slightest heed to Uncle Miodrag’s complaint that the stuff was coming out of his ears now.
The main cause of concern at the moment were the bruises on his coccyx and buttocks from constantly lying in the same position. And if the wounds were to open up…. Nobody was such a doom-monger as Vera; she was forever blowing the whole business up into an utter catastrophe, which could only be averted by a detailed plan of campaign. And implementing it was Milena’s task, as if she didn’t have enough on her plate. She had already quarrelled with Vera over this.
On the other hand, her mother was right: you couldn’t be careful enough, and a stint in hospital for a man of Miodrag’s age was no trifling matter.
Burdened with such thoughts and with bulging bags, Milena leant against the security glass and entered the ward backwards.
The door to the sisters’ station was not fully shut. Milena heard sobbing, and Sister Dunja arguing in her matter-offact voice, ‘I have no way of speeding things up. I’m sorry.’
‘But he’s been waiting for four weeks now.’ There was a quiet sniffle. ‘We’re up against it. He has to go back to work, or…’
Milena hesitated, then knocked and stuck her head through the gap between frame and the door.
Sister Dunja was standing in front of a large metal filing cabinet and letting her fingers walk through the alphabetical register of patients. ‘Of course, what we could do is find your husband a place in another hospital.’ She dropped a slim file into place in the cabinet, pushed the drawer shut with her hips and looked up at Milena questioningly.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Milena said under her breath. ‘It’s the sticking plasters. My mother spoke to you about them yesterday.’ She handed over a box of ten: all individually wrapped, coated with aluminium foil, breathable and made in Germany. ‘By all means, use them on other patients as well if you need to. We’ve got fresh supplies coming next week.’
‘Wonderful.’ Sister Dunja put the box aside, picked up a list and breathed on her biro. As usual, the nervous blinking of the small lamps on the wall board and the dull buzzing were no cause for alarm.
Forlorn, the other woman stood in the middle of the room sniffling and plucking at the sleeve of her jacket, a man’s garment that was much too large for her. Milena handed her a tissue.
‘Thank you.’ The woman smiled shyly.
‘Is there anything else?’ Sister Dunja looked up. ‘Your uncle, Ms Lukin, is keen to see you, I believe.’
He was in his bed by the window, looking out at the trees. Every leaf reminded him that, if he’d been at home in Prokuplje, he ought to be pruning his roses and fruit trees and that the sowing should be done by now. She had not seen him for three days and was shocked at how pale he looked. His mouth seemed smaller, his lips were dry and his eyes were sunk in deep hollows.
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ he groaned.
‘How are you? What have you had to eat?’ She put her bag down and kissed his scratchy cheek.
His only response was to wave his hand in the air. Milena took his pillow, plumped it up and put it back in place again to allow him to sit up in some comfort. Along with the newspaper, she laid down a colourful picture on his duvet. The felt-pen drawing, showing a motorcycle set against a garish background, was Adam’s creation, and was a gift for him.
‘Where is the little rascal?’ Uncle Miodrag groped for his spectacles. ‘Didn’t he want to come along?’
‘If it had been up to him, he would have dearly loved to have skipped the guitar lesson.’ She pulled up the bedside table and started unpacking.
This same scene had been played out for over two weeks now. Mr Popović, the patient in the bed across the aisle, was surrounded by visitors murmuring in a concerned hum and discreetly passing around a bottle hidden in a basket; meanwhile, Mr Stojadin, in the bed immediately next to him, put in earplugs and, wearing a deep frown, immersed himself in a social history of the nineteenth century. It was something of a minor sensation today that the quiet man with the thin moustache was standing in a bathrobe at the window rather than occupying the bed right next to the door, with the sheets and blankets drawn up all the way to his nose. Milena couldn’t remember ever having seen him standing up.
‘I have some news,’ she said, unwrapping plates, cups and cutlery from the tea towel.
Uncle Miodrag put down Adam’s drawing and peered at her over his glasses. ‘You went to Talinovac, am I right?’
‘But not alone,’ she hurriedly interjected.
‘I knew it!’
‘With a friend, an Albanian, who knows his way around down there.’
‘You’re crazy.’ Uncle Miodrag shook his head, though a little colour had returned to his cheeks. ‘What did you do down there?’ He tried to sit up straight. ‘Were you able to find out anything? Did you manage to speak to the police?’
She poured him some milk. ‘First, drink something.’
He obeyed.
‘I wanted to meet Goran Valetić.’ She took his empty glass. ‘You know, I had a gut feeling. Somehow I knew he’d be in Talinovac.’ She started to make a cheese sandwich for Uncle Miodrag, and told him about the stopover at the Albanian wedding party, the youths at the entrance to Talinovac and finally the encounter with Goran, who’d been right in front of her eyes for a few fleeting seconds.
‘And then?’ Uncle Miodrag asked breathlessly.
‘And then he was gone.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘He fled. Legged it.’
‘Because he had something to do with the death of his parents?’
Milena thought for a brief moment and then shook her head. ‘I think he was frightened. Just think – two strangers in the house where his parents had been murdered.’
She spoke about the remote location of the house, almost in the middle of the forest, with broken windows, pipes ripped out of the walls and a huge hole in one wall – in other words, a ruin. And she told him about the icon she’d found at the spot where the encounter happened.
‘An icon?’
‘Yes, a small one. Goran must have put it there.’
‘And there was no candle?’
‘What?’
‘Well, a candle! For his parents, for Ljubinka…’ His eyes filled with tears and his chin trembled.
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ said Milena, clutching his hand. ‘We lit one.’
He nodded, pressed his lips together and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘So,’ he asked in a hoarse voice, ‘do you have a lead?’
She put a piece of chicken on his plate. ‘You know, Enver and I got into a bit of a tight spot later on, and I looked right into the face of these people.’
‘What tight spot?’
She handed him a fork. ‘That’s when it dawned on me, I think: it wasn’t really Miloš and Ljubinka Valetić who were murdered. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? It was a murder of two Serbs who had dared to try to settle in Talinovac. They had to die – they represented all those unwelcome returnees.’
Uncle Miodrag pushed back the plate. ‘Those bloody Albanians.’
‘Serbs have no business being in Kosovo anymore. I get it now.’
‘And you say you looked into the faces of the murderers?’
‘Well, let’s just say that the men who were gathering outside our inn could well have been the murderers. And if you ask me, they know who the actual perpetrator was – even if they’ll never divulge his name.’
‘What kind of world are we living in?’
‘Not a good one, Uncle Miodrag. This situation has been festering for years, even decades. Something’s really gone haywire where the business of Serbs and Albanians living together is concerned…’
‘I always thought it was just politics, that Albanians are really our friends. But do you know what I think now?’ Uncle Miodrag clenched his fists.
‘Don’t, Uncle Miodrag.’
‘For me, the Albanians are animals! Simply animals – nothing else!’
Shocked, Milena looked up. The man who had been leaning against the window the whole time suddenly appeared like a dark shadow beside Uncle Miodrag’s bed. Against the light, she could not make out his face as he pressed the words out between his lips with some effort.
‘We’re human beings,’ he uttered. ‘You understand? Human beings, like you… Serbs!’ Clearly agitated, he spat out the words, then started to falter and almost lost his balance. In a single bound, Milena was at the man’s side, but he raised his hand to fend her off.
Unassisted, he made his way to the foot of the bed, grabbed the rail and gasped, ‘If we are animals, then it’s you who have made us that way.’ He continued to make his way along the rail, hand over hand. Mr Stojadin briefly looked up from his book, then turned the page and immersed himself again in his reading.
‘Damn it,’ Uncle Miodrag whispered. ‘The guy’s an Albanian.’
Milena felt numb. Now she remembered where she had seen the man before. She was pretty sure he worked in the market, at the herb stall, if she was not mistaken. ‘Did he have a visitor today?’ she asked quietly. ‘A woman, in a man’s jacket that was too big for her?’
Uncle Miodrag nodded. ‘They kept whispering to one another, and I think she was crying.’ He lifted his head carefully and looked past Mr Stojadin at the Albanian’s bed. ‘His wife’s visit really knocked him sideways.’
‘And we’ve just finished him off.’ Milena piled cheese, chicken, bread and cucumber on the plate.
The man, who by now had reached his own bed, lay down on his mattress, which had shifted and was sticking out at the foot end.
‘I’m sorry,’ Milena said in a soft voice.
His lips under the thin moustache were only a line, and his eyes were closed, but his lids were fluttering.
‘I’ve come to apologise. I’m truly sorry.’ She carefully set down the plate on the bedside table. ‘You know, we were just talking among ourselves, pretty stupid stuff. We didn’t mean to offend you or your fellow countrymen.’
‘To be treated like human beings,’ he mumbled. ‘That’s all we want.’
‘Do you need anything?’ Milena enquired. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘A Serb? Wanting to do something – for an Albanian?’ He grimaced as if the absurdity of the thought was about to make him laugh. ‘This is getting better all the time.’
Milena didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, for starters you could give me a new hip, and put it in properly. Just a stupid bit of plastic – I’m not asking for anything else. And I swear on my mother’s life: I’ve never asked for anything in my life.’
‘You’ll get your hip replacement,’ Milena tried to reassure him.
‘Then I’ll be gone, and this place will hopefully never see me again.’
‘It’ll all work out.’
‘Give it a rest, will you? You don’t know what you’re talking about! We work ourselves to death, and when we need something from you we’re not even worth a kick in the arse. We are worth less than the damned dirt under the sole of your shoes.’
‘Nonsense!’ Milena was shocked. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Get lost. What are you waiting for? Stop staring at me. Leave me alone.’
As she was driving back from the hospital, she had to admit to herself that the man, for all his bitterness and self-pity, had a point. Albanians in Serbia were not denied hospital treatment but they had to wait and wait, suffer pain and resign themselves to always being at the back of the queue. Every emergency case, every private patient, every patient of Serbian nationality or heritage took priority. And, as Sister Dunja would probably have said, this situation was ‘not discrimination but totally normal’.
From one set of lights to the next, the traffic grew denser, the billboards more numerous and the shop fronts bigger. Businessmen were carrying briefcases in one hand and paper cups in the other. Women hurrying from their office doors to the tram station demonstrated how fast you could run in heels. Youths with uniformly low-slung trousers gathered outside the entrance to an Italian fast-food joint. Here and there you could catch sight of the odd shopping bag from a Swedish or Spanish fashion chain. Milena indicated her turn, let the pedestrians cross and mused on the fact that there was something crucial missing from this scene.
She turned into King Alexander Boulevard, passing a variety of large and small shops. The sweet shops that had been so much in evidence here once upon a time had all disappeared, and with them childhood dreams of jars full of bonbons, candied fruit, lollipops and liquorice sticks. So too had the Albanian bakeries, with their sweet tarts made from shortcrust or puff pastry and decorated with sticky blobs of jam and chopped walnuts. Where on earth, Milena wondered, would you now find a glass of boza, that thick, sweet and slightly sparkling fermented millet drink, which in the past had been on sale here at every corner? It hadn’t been that long ago that a boza seller could have been seen wandering the streets with a huge carboy in a basket on his back and glasses dangling from their handles on his belt. He was easy to spot from a distance, thanks to the fez he wore, made from dark red felt of a typical hue. On the crown, where the black silk tassel hung down, it was bleached by the sun; further down, around the forehead, the felt was darkened by sweat. For the most part, though, ordinary Albanians like the porters and the coal deliverymen had always worn bowler hats, and when the men gathered for a chat on a street corner in the evenings, some of them would wrap a colourful cloth around their headgear. In the autumn, one also used to come across the Albanian who sold chestnuts on Prince Michael Street, roasting them over charcoal and dispensing them in cones of rolled-up newspaper. And where were the Albanians who would just quietly spend their time sitting cross-legged on the ground smoking their long pipes? As she recalled these memories, these sentimental images, Milena could once again smell the sharp tobacco scent. She was driving at walking pace now. She let a tram pass, clicked her indicator and manoeuvred the car into a parking space.
Back when groups of hooligans started roaming through these shopping streets and smashing the windows of the sweet shops and bakeries, some pensioners demonstrated their solidarity by organising so-called ‘sweet rounds’, pointedly meeting for their chats in Albanian cafés. But there was no great outcry from the population at large. Almost surreptitiously, this Albanian minister was relieved of his post, that internationally renowned professor was prevented from doing his research or carrying out his teaching duties and Albanian pop singers were banned from their television and radio performances. Some Albanians chose to emigrate, others to end their lives. The legendary Bekim Fehmiu, who had been so impressive in the role of Odysseus at the National Theatre, decided to hang himself when he was forced to rip his heart into two by declaring his allegiance to either Kosovo or Serbia.
Milena pulled the weekly newspaper from the letter box, walked past the lift and took the stairs. With the disappearance of the Albanians, the memories began to fade, followed by mutual respect between different ethnicities. The owner of the sweet shop, the boza seller and the professor gradually transmogrified into the car thief, the drug dealer and the illegal arms trader. The Albanian had become a shady person, a dark figure without a face, driven by the most base instincts. People now gave him a wide berth, and protected themselves as best they could.
Milena pulled the door shut behind her, locked it twice and put it on the chain.
‘Hello!’ she called out. ‘It’s me!’
Fiona, the cat, emerged from the living room, walked a few paces towards her and then turned into the kitchen.
‘Get a move on!’ came Vera’s voice. ‘Dinner’s on the table already.’
While she was washing her hands, Milena contemplated how neatly everything fitted together concerning the atrocity in Talinovac: a remote house in the woods, two defenceless Serbian pensioners, a group of hate-filled Albanians and, in the end, two shots to the back of the head. And the motive? Maybe fanaticism or nationalistic delusion, and possibly so irrational that it would come as no surprise if the crime were never solved.
She hung the towel on the hook and put on her slippers. It was so easy to file away all the things she’d heard and seen, the whole horror, into the relevant pigeonholes, and then just shut the door on it. To simply maintain a front of being outraged for a little while longer before moving on.
‘Sit down.’ Vera was busy lifting pan lids, and a delicate citrus aroma filled the kitchen. Adam picked at his chicken fricassée, fishing out all the peas and asparagus heads and pushing them to the side of his plate.
Milena planted a kiss on her son’s soft hair. She was living on an island, barely seventy square metres in size, where she pretended that nothing bad would ever happen. Where she made out that she had the capacity to prevent Vera ever falling ill or even dying, or to stop Adam from mixing with the wrong crowd or taking the wrong path in life. Where she pretended that she could stop the political situation deteriorating, the institute being wound up and her job disappearing. Where, looking back, she could make herself believe that all this time they’d spent together in the kitchen had been more than just a brief, happy phase. All this in spite of being keenly aware that her power to keep external events from encroaching on this kitchen was actually so limited that it momentarily caused the ground beneath her feet, the scratched artificial tiles, to shift.
‘Do you need a special invitation?’ Vera heaped rice onto her plate and made an indentation in the middle with the spoon. ‘Did you give the plasters to Sister Dunja and tell her how to use them?’
‘All done.’ Milena tried a mushroom, nudged Adam with her elbow to make him sit up straight and then, glancing at a piece of paper with splotches of colour on it next to his plate, asked, ‘What‘s that going to be when it’s finished?’
‘Colour samples’, he replied.
‘For his new room’, Vera explained and, raising her eyebrows, put a small wine glass beside Milena’s plate.
‘New room?’ Her eyes followed her mother, who was rummaging in the fridge. ‘Did Philip phone?’
‘They spoke for almost an hour, and now the boy’s com- pletely antsy.’ Vera pulled the cork out of the bottle. ‘Adam, please put that pen away.’
‘I’ll be allowed to paint the walls any colour I want,’ he said. ‘Literally anything. Dad and I, we’ll do it together. Really cool.’
‘Some news,’ Milena murmured, taking a sip of the rosé.
‘Grandma thought dark red,’ Adam said, doodling. ‘But maybe blue’s better – what do you think?’
‘Blue’s nice.’ Milena heaped a piece of chicken and some rice onto her fork. The new flat in Altona, in Hamburg. So Philip had decided to present them with a fait accompli. What if he then went and cut the maintenance payments? She was sick of the whole business. She was always being cast in the role of spoilsport, always the person who kicked up a fuss and who laid down rules, while Philip cruised around the DIY stores with his son, made him newspaper hats and then let him get paint all over himself, to his heart’s content. And Jutta, his buxom girlfriend, most likely brought along Coke by the gallon and pizza from a box to the happy party. That thought was the one that irked Milena the most.
She swiped a pea from the side of Adam’s plate and asked, ‘What about your room here? Don’t you like that anymore?’
‘Why?’ he asked, grabbing a turquoise felt-tip.
‘If you like, we can pick out a new colour here as well and paint it together, you and me – really cool.’
‘Really?’ He looked at her with surprise.
‘Out of the question!’ Vera picked up Adam’s plate and dropped it rather noisily into the sink. ‘You can do that kind of nonsense in Hamburg. Here, the walls stay the way they are.’
An hour and a half later, Adam had bathed, Dr Pavlović’s cream had been applied to his arms and legs, and he had drunk a glass of lemon-balm tea to calm him down. As she kissed him goodnight, they agreed that a strong light blue would probably be a very beautiful colour for Hamburg.
When calm had descended over the flat, Milena got herself a glass of mineral water from the kitchen, went to her room and turned on the computer. She was not going to start a fight with Philip. She’d rather stick to the facts and illustrate with a simple calculation the cost of living here in Belgrade – yes, even in a backwater like the Balkans! She pushed Fiona aside, took out her glasses and opened her email. With a cigarillo clenched between her teeth, she hammered on the keyboard. ‘My dear Philip!’
Under the desk lamp, Fiona purred and closed her sleepy eyes. Milena leant back. Why was her stomach so knotted with anger? Two weeks ago, Philip had informed her about his flat and moving plans and had tried to start a conversation about it – or at least what he considered a conversation. By his standards, he had attempted to communicate. She, on the other hand, had bottled things up, stayed silent and hoped that the whole matter might just resolve itself in the end.
She put on her glasses and typed, ‘Congratulations on your new flat! Please book Adam’s flight as soon as possible, maybe over one of the next couple of weekends, so you can put your plans into action.’
Milena took a sip of water, ignored Fiona’s stare and continued, ‘If you’re planning to cut your maintenance payments in the process, please don’t forget to explain to your son why there will be no guitar lessons in the future (which he won’t mind too much) and why his membership of the basketball club will have to be cancelled. We can decide in the summer about the art school.’ Her mobile rang.
She looked at the phone display and pressed the green button. ‘Siniša’, she said absent-mindedly. ‘I tried to call you.’
‘What are we doing wrong? We keep on missing each other.’
‘Ah, Siniša.’ She clasped her phone between her chin and shoulder and clicked ‘send’. ‘It’s good to hear your voice.’
‘Because I couldn’t get hold of you I had to get the lowdown from Enver.’
‘I haven’t heard from him. Did he get home all right?’
‘He told me that you bumped into Goran when you were wandering round that house.’
Milena leant forward. ‘That reminds me, I wanted to ask you: have you found out yet what will happen to the property in Talinovac?’
‘Well, I’ve tried to, and frankly it’s not that easy. You can’t imagine the arrogance of these bureaucrats in sending you all round the houses and trying to pull the wool over your eyes at every twist and turn. Plus, the legal position’s somewhat confused.’
‘What does that mean, exactly?’
‘Allegedly, the property reverts to the state.’
‘To Kosovo?’
‘No, to Serbia.’
‘A house in Kosovo gets returned to the Serbian state?’
‘We could lodge an objection, of course. After all, the house was granted to the Valetićs, and if it was legitimately their property then I see no reason why it shouldn’t form part of their estate after their death.’
‘So it should go to their children.’
‘In equal parts. Unless their last will and testament states otherwise. But before I take on the case, I’d like to have another conversation with Slavujka.’
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of her this whole time, but no joy.’ Milena clicked on her inbox. ‘All I get is an automatic out-of-office reply.’
‘And what does that say?’
‘That she’s going to be back on Monday.’
‘OK.’ It sounded like Siniša made a note of that. ‘Then we should get together next week and look at what documents and deeds there are.’
‘That could get difficult.’
Milena pulled the dark blue leaflet she had purloined at the State Chancellery from the pile on her desk.
‘Why? Has everything disappeared?’
‘A Serbian couple, friendly neighbours of the Valetićs, salvaged all the personal papers, but all that stuff ’s with Goran now. And Goran has disappeared.’
‘Maybe he’s got in touch with his sister in the interim. Or we’ll ask at this security firm; he has to show up at his place of his employment sometime, right? The guy can’t vanish into thin air, can he?’
‘There’s something else bothering me, though.’ Milena opened the leaflet. It had a map of Kosovo on the cover, with symbols liberally dispersed across it, like Monopoly houses.
‘Just to make my position crystal clear,’ Siniša interrupted her, ‘we shouldn’t faff about for too long. I’m sure we could establish a precedent here. Are you listening to me?’
Milena leafed through the booklet. ‘Here it is.’ She turned the corner of the page as a bookmark. ‘Listen to this: “The houses that are made available to the returnees will be built on time, fully repaired and made ready for immediate occupation.”’
‘Where does it say that?’
‘Page seventeen, paragraph three. And a bit further down it says: “Until such time, they are to be protected from looting, vandalism and squatters.”’
‘I don’t understand a word.’
‘In this report from the State Chancellery, it says that there’s money available – we’re talking two or three million here. And that’s for the houses alone.’
‘Two or three million for the houses destroyed in Kosovo? Sorry, darling, that’s peanuts!’
‘Maybe that’s true. But to me it still sounds like a lot of money.’
‘First NATO bombs the place and flouts international law, and then a couple of million euros are supposed to make everything all right again?’
‘Listen to me. The house in Talinovac is nothing but a roof and three and a half walls. There’s no electricity, no running water – nothing. Why wasn’t it secured against looting and vandalism? Or was it never built for returnees in the first place?’
‘Why are you suddenly so interested in the technical details?’
‘I’m interested in whether the bureaucrats at the State Chancellery actually know where they sent the returnees. Whether they know the place, and have the slightest idea what the situation on the ground there is like. And whether Talinovac is ultimately replicated right across the region.’
The other end of the line had gone quiet.
‘Hello?’ Milena asked. ‘Are you still there?’
‘I’m not sure whether we should open that can of worms.’
‘Why? Are you afraid?’
‘Of course not.’
Milena closed the flyer. ‘Then we ought to look into it.’