Out of the Woods, page 5
She asked him then, about Daniel. She thought if she’d done anything wrong with Daniel, it was that she had loved him too much. When he was a child, she felt she loved him from her body; the love she felt flowed right out of her own heart. Sometimes she wondered whether it was too much for one child to absorb. She had tried to convince Ian to have another child and then their marriage had gotten messy and then it was too late for her to have another child. Her body could no longer manage it.
She had thought about apologising to Daniel. She felt the impulse often when they spoke to say sorry, but she wasn’t sure what she should say. I am sorry, Daniel, I ought to have loved you less? Still in some way she felt that just by loving him as much as she had, she had also somehow harmed him. That the love she expressed was for her, as much as it was for him, and she thought too much love could be a problem. That was in part, why she had done the right thing in coming here. Daniel could finally distance himself from her, that was what all adult children did eventually. It was what was natural, she felt; there was no point in her getting upset over it, even if she missed him.
Ian told her that they’d had dinner with Daniel two weeks ago. He told her that it was at the Italian restaurant near their house – where the staff made the pasta by hand. It’s closing, Ian said; the owner Emilio was getting too old to run it by himself and his children didn’t want to take it over. Jess told Ian that she knew the restaurant he meant; that in fact the two of them had had their wedding reception there.
Of course we did, he said, slipped my mind. Anyway, he said, it was nice talking to you and thanks for being such a good sport about things. She said goodnight and turned off her bedside lamp. But she couldn’t get back to sleep. Something about talking to Ian had roused her from the possibility of slumber.
K
20 November 2000
Why did the war break out? I spoke about that at the beginning. And the people most responsible for all this were the politicians who, in those days, represented all three ethnic groups and all the other ethnicities inhabiting the former territory of the former Yugoslavia. For me, as a person who was born and grew up in a multiethnic community, and especially being an officer who was in command of units that were multiethnic, this was extremely painful, especially when I reached the area and took over control of this command, the members of which were only Serbs at the time.
Asoldier gave evidence. One of the Dutch soldiers who had been stationed there, in Srebrenica. Who were there because Srebrenica had been declared a safe area. Sometimes when she heard a witness speaking, she wanted them to stop, because it was too much. So many words. She wanted the witness to stop speaking so that she could get all the words down on the page correctly. But then she focused on the lines she was making on the page, the letters, and watching the accumulation of those strokes calmed her – it made things legible, there was at least some certainty about those shapes.
A delay happened between when the witness spoke and when the English translation came through on her headphones. It was eerie that delay – what she felt as she waited for those words to be decoded was a sense of dislocation and unease, waiting for those sounds to be delivered from confusion back into understanding and order. Jess felt that she was drifting in those moments after the witness had spoken in their own language and yet she did not know what had been said. She felt herself wanting to rush the translator, wanting to hurry the process along. Wanting to be taken from uncertainty into the knowledge of what the words meant.
The soldiers talked about the scene, about how they were unable to intervene or to help. More than one soldier compared it to the film Schindler’s List. The word she thought of as she listened was ‘powerless’, that’s how it must have felt to have been there but to have been unable to act or intervene.
How the area was a UN Safe Area and that it was a demilitarised zone. They didn’t have enough weapons to fight, they said. The man we’d nicknamed Stalin. When the refugees were pushed out of their home, they came to the UN base in Potocari. There were women there. There were children. There was a woman giving birth. They thought they were safe, that they would be protected. I saw a lot of luggage burning on the side of the road. The Serb soldiers took their helmets and their guns.
They talked about the uniforms of the Serb soldiers. The prosecutor kept asking about the patterns of the uniforms, about what they were wearing, about the colours of the camouflage. About soldiers wearing badges and the insignia. The witnesses talked about piles of clothes, two or three hundred metres of them. They talked about identification cards left in a field, just scattered there. There were photographs shown in court, of clothes, of shoes. The baby fell down. There was no air support. The UN soldiers kept asking for air support. But, she thought, couldn’t they have done something, anything? Instead of just nothing. Instead of simply handing over their weapons? It was difficult to listen to, these witnesses who were there, even though she knew why they didn’t act. She felt angry at them, knowing they were there, knowing that nothing was done. Sometimes listening to witnesses was like sitting on a train and looking out a window and the words were like their own landscape that sped furiously by. There was a sense of inevitability as these men spoke, that the ending for them had already been determined.
The evidence left her with a feeling. A sort of darkness opened up on those days. She used her lunchbreak to walk. If she walked fast enough she made it all the way to the beach, and she stood there and peered at it through the buildings for a moment. At its stillness and reliability; at the dark immensity of its blue. Otherwise, she walked laps around the park and she found the green of the trees soothing. Sometimes it was so important for her to move, to remind herself of her body, that she didn’t even have time to eat before court entered session again. Sometimes she circled the park and watched the swans glide, drawing long diagonal lines in the water behind them. Their necks were always bowed as though they were looking out from under something, as though they were nursing their own private shame. As though they knew somehow, they knew what she had listened to and all the world was tarnished with that knowledge.
Witness M
12 April 2000
We waited for him for 25 days. He didn’t come. It started raining. We got off the mountain to a village. We lit a fire. There were just the ruins of a house and stables. We lit a fire to dry ourselves. There was some fruit: apples, plums and pears, whatever we could find. It was August, I remember well...
After 130 days, I reached free territory. It was the 18th of November when I reached Kladanj. I learned that I lost my father, my brother, cousins, my neighbours; and my father who I loved most. I have my mother, my wife, and children, no brother, no father, no 14-year-old-nephew. They have disappeared.
On the weekend, Jess travelled to Amsterdam. She felt she had to escape the Hague, because if she stayed in the Hague, she would be reminded of the things she had witnessed in court during the week. On the train, she looked out of the window as the carriage shuddered through the countryside – the green farmland. The drains between the fields and even the fields themselves glinted silver, as though mercury had been poured over the grass. In the distance she saw a large windmill turn slowly, churning the air like water.
She went regularly, because Amsterdam for her was like another world. For her, a girl who had grown up not in a city but in a small, quiet place – in a place where, if you listened, you could always hear the trees. In Amsterdam, the noises were a swirl of sounds: voices, and trams, the whirr of bikes and the ting, ting, ting of bells. People lived on top of each other in Amsterdam, they lived close together, and it was something she didn’t understand, but which she liked to be amongst and watch, this heaving chaos of people.
At Centraal Station she bought herself a bag of liquorice coins. They were flat, hard and chewy discs. She allowed herself this treat on the weekends, keeping them in her handbag and extracting one from time to time. She caught the tram to Dam Square, holding her ticket under the machine that made a kerthunk as it left its stamp and the tram bucked and rattled along a junction in the lines. Alseblieft, she said to the driver as she entered the tram and it was the only word she knew in Dutch and she went around saying it: please to everything, even when what she meant was thank you or excuse me. Or she even used that word as sorry.
In the Rijksmuseum the rooms were cool and she navigated as much as she could away from the crowds. Around her the sound of feet lisping on the parquet floor. When it came to art, she found that she liked portraiture the best. She loved to walk through a room of faces – that each one seemed to be watching not with their eyes, but from somewhere inside themselves. She knew that it was strange to think, but she thought that the artists looked out from their paintings and beheld her, but that it wasn’t threatening the way that a roomful of strangers in person could sometimes be for her.
No matter which path she took through the Rijksmuseum, she found that she always ended up in the same room as The Night Watch. She wasn’t sure whether this happened consciously or not, but every path she took ended there. It was like finding herself inside a labyrinth, with this room as its centre and endpoint. She tried to arrive at the museum early, but already there was a crowd in front of the painting so that it didn’t look as though she was viewing a work of art but a performance of something. What she saw when she looked at the painting was a dark chaos. The men with their muskets, all looking off into the distance at things unseen. She had been sitting there once when a guide had told a tour group about the painting and had pointed out Rembrandt’s own face concealed there between the shoulders of the armoured men. And Jess sat for a while looking at him and thinking there you are. She felt as though she had been let in on a secret.
All of the faces were looking outwards towards something else and it confused her about where to place her focus. They were not looking into the gaze of the viewer but elsewhere. And the place they were in was dark and cavernous. It was the people and their faces who gave it light. It was as though they each had a story to tell and the colour of it was expressed on their faces.
There were too many people now in front of the painting, standing there, gathering, not knowing where to look, so that when she tried to see the painting, she also saw the back of other people’s heads looking at the painting. She ate another liquorice coin and allowed it to dissolve in her mouth.
Finally, when she felt irritated, she gave up on the painting, of which she could now only see pieces. It was half past eleven and she thought she would wander through Amsterdam for a while. At the little shop at the Rijksmuseum, she bought a postcard of The Night Watch for Daniel. And sat on a cushioned seat in the foyer while she wrote to him. The room around her was vast, and the light that it allowed in from above was milky. She wrote that she hoped they would see it together soon, but that reminded her of his absence. She slipped it into the postbox on the way out.
In court the next week, she focused on moving her hand across the page. She tried to allow the words to move straight through her hands, to give shape to the words, to try to contain them through the repetitive strokes she had made on the page. The defendant looked so ordinary to her that she wondered whether they had the wrong man. Sometimes she sat there thinking this whole trial was a case of mistaken identity and he wasn’t really responsible for all those terrible things they accused him of. Surely, it was possible that a mistake had been made? It was possible, she knew – courts made errors, sometimes egregious ones.
She liked to believe that if she looked at someone, she could know whether they were a good person or a bad one. That was something she had believed about herself from a very young age: that she could see into people. She had learnt early on in life to differentiate people into two groups: those with whom she felt safe and the others whom she felt unsafe to be around. It was those others she tried to avoid. This man though, K, caused the division between those two groups that she had held apart for so long in her mind to collapse.
Witness F
Dutch Army
28 March 2000
He asked me, “What’s going to happen to me?” and I couldn’t give him a direct answer to that. I mean, I could have done so, but it’s very difficult to tell him that he, being a man, will be taken away, because separations are taking place. So, I didn’t tell him much...I don’t remember the times, I didn’t – when you live through such days, you don’t watch the time, you don’t look at your watch. One is a bit unstable.
Jess sat under the bus shelter, tapping her shoe on the cement. It was already past eight and she was on her way to work. A young man in a suit had given her his seat on the bench and though she felt the urge to stand up, he was still there waiting for the bus and she could not very well give up her seat without appearing rude. It had been a nice gesture, although also a reminder that she was no longer a young woman, that other people looked at her and saw her as old. She pushed up her curls from underneath and it was reassuring that her hair was still in its place.
As she waited, bikes trundled past. Men in suits. Women, respectable women, who were dressed for work, rode past on their bikes. A woman with a sort of trailer for her two children following behind. Jess found herself wondering whether it was safe. She felt agitated. The thing was, she was terrified of running late. She couldn’t really explain it, except that running late created a feeling of urgency inside her. It was panic, that was what she felt when she was late.
Twelve minutes was what she wanted to say to the bus driver when the bus finally rolled up. That’s how late it was. She shook her head as she boarded and hoped the driver noticed her irritation. And she hurried from the bus stop into the Tribunal building, for once actually resenting the security screening because she could see that it was going to make her late – that would be the effect of it. She liked to be there every morning before eight thirty. It was just one of those expectations she had placed on herself, being on time. It was really, she knew, the feeling that other people might notice if she was late. As she hurried, she could feel her foundation becoming shiny on her face. She took out her handkerchief and dabbed it around her hairline, hoping that she wasn’t developing one of those peculiar lines around the edges of her face where the foundation had sweated away.
The security guard said hoi to her as she laid her bag on the miniature conveyer belt. Jess wondered what it was that always put this man in such a happy mood. On his nametag, she saw the word Gus. After she zipped her bag closed, what she saw was that the whites of his eyes were visible through the irises, like two circles of blue floating in milk. She smiled at him, unable to muster a verbal response, because she was annoyed, because she was in a hurry, because she didn’t feel she had any time for this. She preoccupied herself with reattaching her security tag which she had removed as she passed through the gate.
He asked her whether she was having a late start today. He was a tall Dutchman, with large, flat hands, tapered around his fingers like spades. She looked at him. She reminded herself that one late start would not matter. Still, the fact that he had noticed her arriving late unsettled her; she felt conspicuous and wondered whether anyone else would notice. She thought of her judge.
She told this man that the bus was late but smiled in order to conceal her awareness that something might be wrong. She reminded herself that Eleanor used to tell them not to punish themselves for their mistakes, but instead to try to learn from them. The man said only that he’d noticed because ordinarily she was one of the first to arrive in the morning. And she took this as a compliment. Not that he had noticed her punctuality, but that he had noticed her at all. Once her bag had been scanned, he took it off the machine and walked around to her. He stood with his feet apart, as though to distribute the weight evenly. There was a little burst of warmth inside her as she walked towards chambers and she wasn’t sure what it was about. Perhaps only that someone had paid attention to her, it was that small.
Monique was already there at her desk, sipping coffee and wearing her Oxford University sweater, when Jess walked in. Monique seemed to like the jumper a great deal. Certainly, she wore it regularly. She ran to work and got changed before their judge arrived. Jess could see that Monique still had sneakers on. In the mornings when she arrived like this, before Monique had applied any make-up, Jess saw Monique’s skin – the smooth and dewy texture of it, the colour like coffee that had been creamed – and Jess was reminded that Monique was still very young. She could not, Jess thought that morning, be older than twenty-five, despite her years of study. And Jess softened towards her then, because she remembered herself at twenty-five, how alone she had felt. How she had escaped her family circumstances, but how they still seemed to be constantly with her. She didn’t meet Ian until later, not until she was twenty-nine, and before she met him, she had already thought it was too late for her. She had believed that she was going to live and die alone, that the circumstances of her early life would ensure she always lived that way.
As Jess passed Monique’s desk, Monique glanced at her watch. Jess decided then, at that moment in fact, to get herself a bike. It was Monique’s noticing of her tardiness that had done it, and later that day, in between her tasks and while her judge was off at lunch, she searched on the intranet for a bike and found one being sold for forty guilders. The seller was a young Malaysian student who would be leaving the Hague and returning home and in the end, the young woman didn’t even take Jess’ money, because she said she wanted the bike to go to a good home. She did not want to leave the Hague, but she had to because her father was very ill. Jess said that she hoped he would be better soon, but she was then aware of her blunder, because she gathered from the young woman’s face that her father did not have the type of illness that improved. Jess held out her hand and rested it gently on the young woman’s shoulder, and she shrugged and released a single sob.
