Out of the Woods, page 6
When Jess got the bike she was, ever so slightly, disappointed. It was a plain black and unremarkable thing. It looked ancient in its design and had only two gears. The chain looked rusted and the cogs that turned the wheels looked primitive, like the gears inside an old clock. As she pedalled, she could feel the teeth catching the chain.
At first, she wondered if she would remember how to ride a bike since it really had been that long. She experimented, riding around the block near her apartment. The bike whizzed along beneath her and the breeze lifted her hair in one piece, which was still set from the hairspray she had applied that morning. She rode past the supermarket and towards the beach; seeing a tram coming towards her, she wobbled off the tracks and onto the bike path in the wrong direction where a family were coming the other way, all together on one bike after school, and their bell was tinkling furiously at her. She felt her eyes water as she navigated back to the correct side of the road.
She chained her bike up on the rack outside of her apartment building, making a mental note to buy herself a new pair of shoes because it was, she had to admit, impossible for her to ride in heels.
Soon, she found a path to follow on her way to the Tribunal in the morning. She followed the canal towards Churchillplein where the water was a dense green, still and stagnant like a pond. She whizzed along the street, and she started to feel young again and in control. With her bike, Jess knew, she would never be late again. She left her bike in the rack and Gus greeted her at the security screening.
She told him that she had a bike now and she held up the key for its lock. Ah, he said to her, you are now a real Hollander. And then he asked her what type of a lock she had and he sounded concerned. She was not sure. She had never owned a bike lock before. When she was a girl and had ridden her bike around Lismore, the bike that had once belonged to her sister, Shannon, she hadn’t needed to worry about that sort of thing. In fact, now she didn’t remember worrying that much about material things when she was younger, not until she was a teenager and the awareness of their poverty came rushing up to meet her. Then there was the shame of it she had to live with – of going to school with a uniform so threadbare in places it had torn, of having nothing to eat for lunch, because she had found that morning that the bread had mould on its crust and she would rather go hungry than turn up to school with bread like that.
One year, there had been an actual hole worn through her shoe, so that she could feel the earth beneath her as she walked on the dirt road back to her house. She could feel the stones press into her feet through her socks. That was until she took a piece of cardboard from the old fertiliser box at her father’s work and cut it out like an inner sole, to slide inside her shoe.
She looked in the direction of the bike rack, wondering if she could point it out amid the tangle of bikes; there seemed always to be bikes there, even when she was the first to arrive in the morning – which often, she was. Gus asked her then if it was a chain and she nodded. Then he tucked his thumbs into his belt and said, ah, that what she needed was such a thing and then he drew a ‘U’ with his finger in the air. He said that it was solid and that thieves couldn’t break it with bolt cutters. But who would steal her bike? she thought, as it really was such a modest thing. This did happen though, she found out later. It happened regularly that bikes were stolen in order to be resold.
She loved being the first to arrive in the mornings. The silence of the space, all those dark computer screens looking abandoned and forlorn. The chairs pushed away slightly from their desks and the seats spun as though their owners had simply stood up and left. Her best work was done in the mornings, before the judge was there to call her, before Monique was there, with the noise of her talking on the phone or the clack of her nails on the keyboard as she typed. And Jess never did feel bad for leaving at 5 p.m. when she arrived before everyone else. It suited her to leave that early – it allowed her to wind down after the working day. She had always found it difficult to switch off after a day at work.
Witness BA
29 March 2000
They said to the man, “Let us take your wife and your daughter so that they can be put on the first buses,” and the man said, “No. We’re not going to separate.” But they grabbed the girl, and they took her away from him. The wife fainted, and the man was motionless. He was simply watching this happen. And the girl was taken away in the direction of Srebrenica, from the zinc factory...
I wasn’t born, but the same thing happened in 1941. In my village, 73 people burnt to death in their houses, and 61 survived, and the tradition goes on. That’s what my parents told me.
Monique approached jess’ workspace with an envelope she was holding on to by only its corner, as though she was holding something hot. She whispered to Jess. Really the noise was closer to a hiss. The orders needed to be signed by the defendant’s lawyers, and the judge had asked Monique to take the envelope to the conference room, where he was meeting with them. Jess nodded. She wasn’t sure where this conversation was headed and she sat there waiting for Monique to express herself clearly, trying not to show her impatience. Monique looked at her; locked eyes with her, really. What Jess saw in Monique’s eyes was a kind of terror. Monique said, I can’t. I just can’t. I can’t face him.
Oh goodness, Jess said, patting down her skirt. Give it to me then. She reminded herself that she was good at this, just getting on with things when others couldn’t. Other people ummed and aahed. Other people wondered about this or that. Other people agonised. Whereas she just did what needed to be done and didn’t think too much about it.
She went downstairs to the basement, where the prison was. The conference rooms were outside the cells, where the defendants were held before and after their hearings. Around the door were white panels of frosted glass, and the conference room glowed a bright white, lit up from the inside with halogen globes. For a moment, she stood outside the door and it reminded her of a lantern glowing in the dark.
After she knocked, the door opened inwards as though it had just given way. A lawyer wearing robes, whom she had seen in court, took the envelope from her hands. He did not smile and there were dark circles under his eyes. He looked serious, he looked stern. He asked her please to wait. She stood just inside the room while the lawyers went outside to discuss the orders. There were papers everywhere, spread across the small conference table. They were the papers from the case, some of which she recognised. The light in the room was very bright; it was a clear sort of light, the brightness was harsh. The covers on the lights were plastic, and not the level sort of plastic but one that formed a textured pattern that she thought would be rough to touch.
She looked at the papers and when she realised that the information might be confidential, she looked to her feet and noticed a scuff on her shoe. She bent her foot at the ankle and tried to rub it against the carpet to remove the mark. She looked everywhere but ahead of her towards him. That’s what she was avoiding, because she thought to herself that she needed to be professional, that it wasn’t as though she could converse with him because she was, after all, there on behalf of her judge. And it mattered, what she did and said; it was significant. You could say the wrong thing, she knew. Trials could go off course because people had let something slip. Mistrials; miscarriages of justice – she knew it was never good, every judge dreaded it.
You can sit down, she heard the defendant say, and it was a shock that she could understand his words. In court he had only ever spoken his own language and the thought that they were able to understand each other unsettled her. She looked towards him, and his bad leg was stretched out on a cushion placed over a chair. The cushion, she could see, was embroidered with a mosaic of colour and had tassels at each of its four corners. The colour around the border was somewhere between blue and green, though the velvety texture gave it a faded appearance. K winced as he shifted.
Someone, she could see, had put a lot of effort into that cushion; someone had spent a lot of time in the stitching of it, which looked like a finely woven tapestry. She wondered if she should ask him about the cushion, but then she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to communicate with him because really, she was here on behalf of her judge.
She straightened her back and stood tall. She told him that she would stand, that in fact she had been sitting all morning and so she was perfectly happy to stand. In fact, she continued, she thought it would be good for her. His face, she noticed, was both puffed and drawn; it did not seem to rest on its bones the way that it should, the skin was slack like moist clay. His eyes were deeply set, and looking into them made her sad; his eyes seemed to want something from her. Her own eyes drifted back to the table, which she couldn’t avoid now, not unless she wanted to look straight at him. On the table, the papers had been punctured in two places: neat and symmetrical perforations so they could be held in a folder. His barristers were standing directly outside the door, and their muted voices travelled back and forth in heated, indiscernible exchanges. She wondered if it was an argument.
She looked at him, with his permanent downturned lips, with his sadness – with the look on his face of someone who is suffering. She wondered and she knew it was absurd to wonder what his parents had been like and whether they had been kind to him. This man she reminded herself was well into his fifties, this man had lived more than half of his life as an adult. And still she knew, it mattered. She knew this in her bones. It mattered if your mother was able to hold you and look you in the eyes after you were born. It mattered a great deal, in fact, if someone was able to care for you from a young age, whether there was someone who could respond to your needs and show you that you were loved. Everything else in life, she knew, came from there.
Sorry, he said suddenly, as he gestured around him at the mess of paperwork. And she smiled and said automatically, without even thinking, that it wasn’t his fault. Because she believed it was important to treat defendants with a degree of respect and civility. They weren’t guilty until they had been proven guilty and she knew that was true, even if the weight of evidence was against them. But the look on his face, the relief of it, made her realise her error.
Jess had meant that it wasn’t his fault she was here, that there was so much paperwork associated with the trial, or that work had been created for her. She saw now that he thought she had meant something else. That the way he interpreted her words was that she believed the crimes were not his fault. He believed that she regarded him as innocent.
She shifted on her feet; the floor rippled beneath her as if she had experienced vertigo. At that moment, she couldn’t think of how to correct the error, how to explain to him that there had been a misunderstanding. He didn’t take his eyes off her and she couldn’t escape the feeling that he believed that they, in their silence, had now agreed on something.
His lawyers came back and handed her the orders, and she left and took them to her judge, feeling guilty somehow herself.
Witness I
7 April 2000
At one point they came in, and they asked if anybody was 15 or 16 years of age. And there were very young boys there, maybe 14. You could tell that, because they really looked young. Schoolchildren, actually.
And then each time the defendant entered the court, he looked at Jess and acknowledged her in some way. He made some small nod or gave her a tight smile. She looked down and focused on the blank legal pad in front of her. She wanted to explain things to Monique, to her judge. To tell them that there had been a misunderstanding between her and him and it wasn’t that she was sympathetic to him. Except she wasn’t sure that was entirely correct either, because what she felt whenever she saw him was close to sympathy, although she knew there were others, many others who had suffered more than him. It made her feel guilty, these feelings she had towards him, although the more she tried to ignore them, the more she found they were there. Sometimes she thought about him, even when she wasn’t in court – she found herself trying to convince herself of his guilt, of the fact that he was a guilty man. She kept telling herself that with all of this happening around him, he must have known; there was no way he could not have known.
There was a lot of evidence about the investigation, about how it had been conducted. About the places, about the evidence they gathered. The detail of it, she had to admit, was tiring for her. It was overwhelming. The figures, the facts. There were aerial photographs of the land, of the region. The court officers showed the photographs on a screen, and the area looked peaceful, serene from above. The images lacked a human perspective. There were trees and intermittent buildings dispersed across the land. The fields were an abstract patchwork; the fields had their own pattern and grain. The trees and the plants had all tilted in one direction to face the sun. From above what they looked like, leaning the same way, was a pelt, the fur of an animal. Still, it didn’t give her much of a sense of what it was like to be there, to stand in those fields. Only what they were like when seen this way, from above.
The names of the different places were unfamiliar sounds, they were consonants; they sounded hard in the mouths of the people who spoke them. They sounded sharp and definite like the lisp of a drum. Nova Kasaba. When the witnesses and lawyers were talking about these places, she couldn’t grasp the words, nor could she pin them down. They slipped through her mind and she couldn’t catch hold of the shape of them. She didn’t know what letters to use. During this evidence she felt lost. She felt that she herself was standing in a field but unable to orientate herself, unable to decide whether to go this way or that. Goražde and Zvornik. And it was difficult for her to listen, to really pay attention to this evidence; her mind kept wandering, it kept drifting and taking flight. It thought about lunch. It thought about silly, inconsequential things, like what she would send to Daniel for Christmas. Bratunac. She felt irritated because she didn’t know how to spell these words; she had to guess how they were spelled and she felt that this wasn’t what she should have to do. She focused on the hole developing on the big toe of her stockings, inside her shoe. She measured how large it was with the end of her toe.
She looked at the defendant and it seemed to her that he was not really there. That he had the headphones on, but in his eyes he was elsewhere. Sometimes she found herself looking at him, even before she realised that was what she was doing. Her eyes seemed to drift towards him, though she was supposed to be concentrating on what was being said; she was supposed to be writing everything down. During the evidence though, he seemed to be in another world, and she couldn’t tell from looking at him whether he was reflecting on the past, or whether he had simply disconnected from what was happening in front of him. Later, she wondered whether at these moments he was experiencing some pain associated with his leg.
A witness was talking about a particular area of Srebrenica, about the white house. The big white house kept coming up in the testimony. The words took on their own meaning whenever they were spoken. They seemed to have their own heft. The witness was the lead investigator for the prosecution. This witness was talking about a concrete path, about a slope in the gradient of the hill, about the asphalt road. Sometimes Jess just looked at the words she had written and they seemed conspicuous on the page; they seemed to mean more than they actually said, to imply other things, none of which she knew or understood just then. Not until she had matched them up later with the things that other people said. Here are piles of clothes. And then he continued with details of the landscape, as though he was offering a tour of the location. A meadow, a meadow; he was speaking of a ‘meadow’, but that sounded to her like the wrong word, because surely what he meant was a ‘field’. A meadow didn’t belong in this room – a meadow, she felt, belonged in a nursery rhyme. The cows were in the meadow, she kept thinking, and they were eating buttercups. She wanted to correct the witness; she wanted him to get the word right. Disturbances on the ground. And then he spoke more quickly, in sentences that were incomplete. Disturbed earth. In staccato words, as though he wanted to get them out of him. He was speaking about a warehouse, about residues. About bullets and grenades. A lot of hair peel is covering the entire surface of all these walls. And she didn’t know what hair peel was, but it gave her a horrible feeling to think about those words, even without knowing what they meant. The sound they made was grotesque.
All of a sudden, it seemed to her as if from nowhere, the people in the court room were talking about the graves. They were talking about ‘primary mass gravesite’ and ‘exhumations’, and these words, these words she knew. They talked about ligatures and blindfolds. They talked about the difference between mortar and gunshot wounds. And she couldn’t understand the way this witness could speak of these things, in such matter-of-fact tones. Without his voice wavering, without his voice breaking. As though he was speaking about buildings, or earth, or rocks, not people who had once lived and breathed.
Through the glass window she saw that there were people sitting on the chairs. Although she had been aware of their presence, she’d never really looked at them before. Some were journalists, taking notes like herself on the little pads of paper nestled in their lap. Some women wore scarves on their head. Nobody was speaking to each other, even though they couldn’t be heard in this room. They were there to watch and listen. They sat still as though they were watching something unfold on a screen. They were riveted. These people, she understood, were here to witness the witnessing, and she wondered what conversations they had with their loved ones when they left the courtroom and went home.
David Vaase
Lance Corporal of the Air Mobile Battalion
Dutch Army
27 March 2000
Later on, I totally freaked out, started to throw things through the house. Even my own girlfriend couldn’t understand what was going on up there. And now, these days, I don’t sleep well. Some days I do, some days I don’t. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, totally in a sweat. And every time when I’m alone at home, I always think about what I saw up there.
