The Edge of Me (21 page)

The aeroplane is difficult too, and when we finally get her to her seat, she sits hunched over, hugging her knees, with her eyes shut tightly against the lights and noise. Branko and I glance at each other anxiously, and I see other passengers nudging each other and whispering. After a while, Senka falls asleep with her head hanging. I shift her so she’s more comfortable, and the weight of her against me, the smell of her hair and the sound of her breathing makes me feel more than ever that, whatever happens next, I’m safe. Found.

We stop a few hours in Paris, then fly on to Bordeaux.

In Bordeaux, everything happens very quickly. Branko gets us a taxi back to his home town. His French is fluent, and I find myself wondering about getting by in the language if this is to be our home. Senka and I sit in the back, half-awake in the darkness, and I watch the headlights catch in her eyes. Branko talks to her, explaining where we are and how long the journey will take. She nods from time to time but I can see she’s just overwhelmed.

And me? I don’t know. I feel numb. I feel sick. I feel frightened but excited. I know because I’m rubbing and digging my thumbs into the palms of my hands. I’m so tired of waiting and hoping and wondering but I can’t stop myself. I can’t switch off that motor in my head. I want to sleep but I can’t. It feels like I haven’t slept for a million years. I know Branko’s nervous too. Every so often, he drums his fingers on the dashboard and offers the driver some help on directions which it’s clear are not needed. Deep in my pocket, folded into a square inch, is the letter from Joe.

After about half an hour, we come off the main road, carry on a few miles and then turn into a lane with high hedges on either side. In the distance, a little church spire thrusts up into the sky. The wind has picked up and with it the rain.

Branko turns to us and says, with a cracking voice, ‘Here we are. You are home my children.’

24

In front of us, a barred gate, swinging open on its hinges, leads onto a gravel drive. The white house he’s described to us stands in the middle of a large garden. It has high shuttered windows and climbing roses all over the front, just as he described it. There’s an old bench by the front door and I wonder to myself if he made it. Pinned over the porch and around the windows is a trail of fairy lights. And at the door, shielding her eyes from our headlights, stands a slight figure: a woman.

She stays very still and as the car moves off and the beams sweep away, her face is in darkness, haloed by the fairy lights. Branko turns to us. I’m carrying my own and Senka’s bags, and he motions to me to put them down. He smiles, puts his arms around us, and walks us to where the woman stands watching us.

She’s small and slim, with her hair tied back in a bun, and she’s wearing a soft jersey dress with pockets. She covers her mouth with both hands as we come into the
hallway, and I see with a shock that one of her eyes is green, the other a violet blue. But the most striking thing about her, I only notice when she takes her hands from her face. All over her left cheek is a cluster of deep, pitted scars. Her mouth is buckled and misshapen on one side, and when she smiles, the scars curl and twist upwards.

Branko goes to her. He takes her arm through his and strokes her hand. They face us and he says quietly, ‘Senka, Sanda, this is your mother.’

Senka cries out, puts her hand over her mouth and heaves forward onto the floor. At once, Branko is there to help her up. I find I can do nothing, say nothing. I look at the woman standing there, and she looks right back at me. And I see at once the person in the photograph that Branko sent out all over the world: a young woman in a polka dot dress shielding her eyes from the sun, with her two little girls by her side – my mother.

She speaks in English. ‘I’m Elzina.’

‘Elzina,’ I repeat slowly, turning the name in my head. Branko speaks then, with an arm around Senka’s shoulder as she rocks and watches our mother:

‘We’ve had so many disappointments. So many times when we thought we’d found you but it turned out to be nothing. I wanted to be sure. I didn’t tell your mother until I knew for sure. I didn’t tell you because … because … well. I didn’t know how to. I thought this would be better. That’s why when you asked, I didn’t give a straight answer. I hope you understand. I never thought this day would come. We are so, so happy to have you home with us. Aren’t we El?’

In answer, she comes to us and reaches out her arms. Tears are coursing down her scarred face. Shyly, I embrace her and there’s the scent of roses. Cheek on cheek, I can feel her ravaged face, feel the tightening, the warp, as she smiles. And my tears fall on her shoulders and soak into the weave of her dress.

‘Majka, Majka, Majka.’ I now remember crying those words as I’m wrenched from her arms. The fuzzy picture I’ve carried in my head for so long is finally clear. It makes sense. I make sense. I’ve woken up.

Branko’s crying too I see, but quietly to himself.

As we cling to our mother, I hear her say more to herself than anyone else: ‘My children. My little ones.’

Later on, around the table in the kitchen, over homemade soup and bread, Elzina tells us her stories. Kristina was right. They did shoot her.

They were put on a bus with other women and children at Potočari. She was told they were going to safety. The bus drove up into the hills and, at a checkpoint on a lonely road, it was stopped. The Škorpioni were waiting. And with them, Kristina. The women and children were taken off the bus and made to stand in a field by the side of the road. They told them the bus had broken down, and they had to wait for a replacement.

They were all starving and exhausted. Our mother sat on the ground with Senka and me, apart from the others, and as she did so, Kristina spotted her. Elzina recognised her at once.

She tells us how Kristina was beautiful then: tall, poised but how her eyes were ice. ‘She said, “You love these children, don’t you? Look at you, how you hold them, how you care for them, how they cling to you. Don’t look so frightened, I’m not going to kill them. But I’m going to take them. I’m going to watch them grow up without love, without hope. Without you.” And the man with her, he took you both. I was screaming but she pushed me back. He put you in the jeep and came back, and the last thing I remember is him pointing his rifle at me.’

She heard later – she had no conscious memory – that, as panic took hold, the soldiers opened up their machine guns on the women and children. She was saved because other bodies fell on top of her. That night when all was quiet, she crawled out and limped away into the forest.

She was helped by an elderly couple who took pity on her. They took her in and nursed and hid her. She recovered a little, enough to escape to safety.

For years she searched for Branko, for us. She took work in a centre with children orphaned by the conflict, always hoping against hope that one day we would be brought in. And that was how, years later, she and Branko were reunited. Having finally got out of the camp and started looking for us in earnest, he went there one day following a lead.

They tried to make a new life but never stopped looking. Branko says their love for us and each other kept them strong.

That night in bed, the house sings me to sleep. It holds me. It’s as though the house is a part of what I’ve been looking for all this time. A part of what’s been missing, along with my family.

And in the morning, I wake to sweet-smelling linen and a jar of cornflowers on the dresser. The room looks out onto the lane that runs along the side of the house. There are hawthorn hedges and beech trees, their bare branches reaching into a silver sky.

I pad next door in my loose pyjamas, open the door to Senka’s room and lean around the door. The gentle hum of her sleeping greets me. Her head is resting on her clasped hands. A low voice then from by the window: ‘
Sanda.
’

Our mother is there, sitting on a little chair. She smiles at me and beckons me in. I cross to her, kneel at her feet and put my head on her lap while her fingers weave in my hair.

‘My heart is mending,’ she says. ‘To see you here together, to see what I thought I would never see – it’s closing a hole here.’ And she places her hand on her chest.

I look up. ‘What they did to you …’

She touches her scarred face. ‘This is nothing. It means nothing. When it happened, in between, now. The real damage was always inside of me, and now you’re here.’

The room spins into a snail shell, and she and I are curled in it for one, two minutes before she lifts my head, kisses me lightly, and presses something into my hand. It opens into my palm: an envelope with my name on it.

As I take it, she sits back and smiles, cupping her poor broken cheek. I look at her, puzzled, as I score my finger under the seal.

Untidy, slanting scrawl in heavy black pen. On lined file paper:

Look under the apple tree.

I look at my mother and there’s that secret smile. She points to the window.

The window is old and it bulges out of the house. Under it, a seat has been built, covered with a thin cushion. I kneel up on this, put my hands on the window and look out. The garden stretches away down to a gate, and through it, I can see high rushes and a glint of water running through them. Beyond the stream is a field, where a number of fat, shrunken trees stand with twisted boughs. I go to ask her but she shakes her head and puts her finger to her lips.

Wet grass licks at my ankles as I make my way across to the little gate. The water is thick with weed that streams and trails like hair. I glance back for a moment at the house to see my mother at the upstairs window. She raises her hand in a shy wave and I wave back.

The stream is wide, and as I look about for something to steady myself to cross it, I see a figure, tall and dark, standing perfectly still a little way off through the trees. A breeze moves the branches around him.

‘Joe!’ I call. ‘JOE!’ I launch myself over the stream and run through the long grass to where he’s waiting to catch me.

I’m against his chest then, breathing him into me. He draws me into him. He half pushes, half lifts me up against
the tree and kisses me. His hands are on my back under my pyjama top, and I can feel the rough warmth of his palms on my shoulder blades as he pulls me against him.

He says, ‘I was starting to think I’d never see you again.’

I look up at him and his eyes are full.

‘Me too,’ I say.

‘I wish I’d stopped you going that day – or gone with you. Did they hurt you?’

‘It’s OK. It’s OK now…’

‘Christ,’ he rakes a hand into his hair.

‘Listen Joe …’

‘I should have been there. I could have …’

I put my hand in his. ‘It’s OK. You’re here now. How did you know where to find me?’

‘I called Peter. I wanted to see you. Be here. When you …’ but he’s distracted.

I say, ‘Listen. It doesn’t matter. What happened. None of it. I’ve found my family, my real family, and I have you …’ and then I think I shouldn’t have said it because,
do
I have him? What do I mean by that? I mean he hasn’t asked me to marry him. He’s just …

‘Stop it.’

‘What?’

‘I know what you’re doing …’

‘
What?
What am I doing?’

‘You’re worrying about what you’ve just said …’

‘I … I …sorry. I just didn’t want …’

He’s laughing now. ‘I know. I know. You didn’t want to presume that you ‘
had’
me because maybe I just wanted
to fly to Bordeaux which is nearly
five hundred miles
by the way, for a laugh, then I was just going to go home and forget about you?’

I nod slowly, but I’m smiling. ‘And …’ he adds – I look up expectantly – ‘STOP saying
sorry.
’

I push him against the tree, and he ends up with a quiff of lichen and cobwebs on his head. He pulls me towards him, and I feel his breath on me, warm and sweet.

He whispers, ‘You remember what I told you once? In that van?’

‘What?’

‘How people notice you?’

‘I …well, I …yes.’

Of course I remember. I remember every conversation we’ve ever had; even back at school in Year Ten when he once asked me the way to Room 104. Tragic. Totally tragic.

‘Well. I meant it. You are beautiful. You’re … you’re lovely.’

I don’t know what to say because ‘
No, I’m not …
’ would just be so completely lame and wrong right now. I’m thinking what to say when there’s a call from the house.

My mother: ‘Come and have some breakfast you two!’

Before we go, he leans in and kisses me hard on the lips, his mouth is open and his lips are firm and he tastes so good. And for a full minute after, when my head is spinning, he takes my face in his hands, and looks and looks and looks at me. Into me. Inside of me. And he fills me up with him.

And arm in arm, we track back through the grass and the fallen apples to where my family are waiting.

25

As the months pass, we’re really starting to feel like a family.

It’s been a difficult ride for Senka, it’s been hard for her to be in a family, but she and I are very close. Her reading and writing are going well, but her real love is drawing. She draws everything she sees: sparkling rivers over stones, the paint-box brightness of meadow flowers in the high grasses. She’s drawn hundreds of pictures of our mother and father in her own scratchy style.

They’ve bought her a set of pens and inks in different colours, which she loves. Possessions are still so new to her that she guards them very closely. She’s learning French and English now, and while she’s not yet ready for school, she has a tutor. She’s really close to Branko, and finds being away from him hard. She helps him in his wood shop and is popular with the customers. She perches on the chair in his office, leaning on one elbow, drawing.

As for me, the transition has been easier. My French
is getting better, I go to a local school and I’m doing my Baccalaureate. School is OK now. I miss Lauren but we talk all the time. She tells me she’s impressed: I guess maybe I found my inner cool. I can be by myself or with other people and it doesn’t bother me. I don’t get tongue-tied or nervous any more. What happened to me has changed me forever. One thing’s for sure, I don’t take any shit from anyone. Ever.