Stillness of the Sea Read Online Free Page A

different colours, red flames, blue and yellow ones, as if someone had been fanning the fire. I heard screams. The smoke was rising, so I turned my face away and ran to the window. I covered my mouth with one hand and used the other to hit the pane. I don’t remember how many times, at some point it broke but only in the same way as windscreens do. It didn’t come to bits. Then someone shoved me from behind and I was pushed straight through the pane. My mother shouted, ‘Run! Run!’ When I turned around, I saw my cousins trying to protect their small children, three children each and they were crying. And I saw my own baby brother and little Emilija, who was only nine. She sat holding her weeping brother on her lap. My mother shouted, ‘Run!’ But I couldn’t. Someone had thrown a hand grenade intothe back of the house and shrapnel had struck my neck and head, and one hand – I couldn’t feel my body any longer. Then I heard my mother shout once more that I must run. I had fallen but somehow I got up and ran to the stream, where I crouched down to hide. I could see other people jumping out of windows, but the men noticed and shot them.”
    For the first time, she reaches for the glass of water on her table. She sips, presses the glass against her lips for longer than necessary.
    “How many times did you have to hit the windowpane before it broke?”
    She puts the glass down.
    “A few times, the glass was thick, though I thought it would be thin. Like ordinary glass, I mean. So I hit it quite a few times but I can’t tell you how many. I was so terrified.”
    “How far was it to the stream?”
    “Fifty metres. Maybe a hundred. If you’d like to know more precisely … I don’t know. I would really like to go back there just once, to see that house, even more than I’d want to see my parents’ house, where I lived for fourteen years.”
    “Where did you hide after your flight from the house?”
    “Under a small bridge. I spent the night there, in the water. While I was under the bridge I couldn’t see the house. I could hear the screaming, it went on for an hour or maybe two. The last scream was a woman’s.”
    “You have injuries from that night. Can you describe to us what they are?”
    “You only need to look at my hand and my face. What can I say? There was an explosion … my neck was hit, Iwas injured all over by the fragments, I had cuts everywhere.”
    The prosecutor puts his papers in an orderly pile and nods to the judge.
     
    While she was bending over him, he started to tug at the zip of her anorak. Seen from above, it might have looked as if she were kissing him. But like her closed eyes, her lips were pressed together. She held his face between her cold hands. When he tried to kiss her, he could sense how she pulled gently away from him, how the pressure from her hands increased to prevent him from coming closer to her lips. He pulled the zip down instead, saw her pale throat with its soft curve and a wide section of her dark T-shirt, far too thin for the time of year. It looks like a river mouth, he thought. Pale skin, flowing down from the neck, spreading under the dark fabric. He loved this delta, would have loved to sink into it. He knew what would be revealed as he pulled the zip down a little more. He knew her body, every part of it, her shoulders where the bones were so easily felt, her wrists which he could circle with his thumb and finger, her small breasts that made him light-headed as he held them, pressed them, kneaded them, clung to them, losing all control, then her belly stretched flat between her hips and with a small navel, little more than a slit, in the middle. So warm was her belly, as though it held a power station within her; its heat surprised him every time. But her toes, her small, slightly crushed-looking toes, were very cold, as if all warmth vanished on the way down her legs; these legs of hers, so thin-looking when she stood naked in front of him, and yet men