He promised Boshor that he'd come back when he discovered anything more about her, maybe the next week, or the one after, but he knew he'd never return. The young girl, Andela, picked up the china cups from the table and smiled at him as she backed away-she wore his wristwatch high on her arm. He had even, towards the end, watched the cigarette foil being used to languidly clean a gap in Boshor's teeth.
He tapped his pockets. Everything was intact. Car keys, tape recorder, wallet. Boshor shook his hand and grasped his arm in affection, pulled him close. They almost touched cheeks.
Outside, the shadows lay gray on the settlement. The kids cheered when he pushed open the shack door. Robo was sitting on a cinder block, carving a piece of wood out of which had come the figure of a woman. The whittled chips lay in white patterns at his feet. Robo skimmed off the last bark edge and handed him the statue, leaned in and said: “Don't forget, mister, fifty krowns.” He smiled and put the statue in his pocket: “Just get me to the car.” The other kids pulled at his jacket sleeve. He leaned down and mussed their hair. He felt happily torn by the desolation; he'd survived it, he was safe, secure, out in one piece. The bands of sweat at his waist and armpits had dried. He had even begun to fret that his car was pointed in the wrong direction, that he would have to reverse it all the way up the dirt road, or execute a three-point turn with all these little kids around.
“This way,” said Robo, “follow me.”
He moved through the muck and made signposts in his mind to come back to later, random thoughts, notes to scribble down in a journaclass="underline" The children's clothes are strangely clean. No running water, no taps, no pylons. Electricity is pirated. A girl with eight piercings in her ears. Two huge rubber rings used as jewelry. Not many young men in their twenties or thirties-possibly in prison. Man in bright pink jacket. Chess pieces strung as a windchime. Old woman using broken television as a seat. Immaculate white cloths flapping on the washing line.
He was passing by the last of the shanties when Robo let go of his arm and moved back into the shadows. He felt immediately that he had been dropped.
A bare-chested man. Small. Barefoot. A bottle scar on one cheek, almost a perfect circle. A tattooed teardrop on the other, beneath his eye. He held the engine of a motor scooter in one hand and his chest was slathered in fingerlines of grease. The journalist turned quickly to look for escape, but the tattooed man took his elbow and pulled him towards a shack. “Come here, come here.” A curious high tinge to the voice. The tattooed man deepened the grip around the journalist's forearm, and then, as if from nowhere, a young woman in a yellow dress appeared at his other elbow. She bowed, a small wren of a thing, her hands folded as if in prayer.
“I'm sorry,” he said, “I have to go.”
He tried backing discreetly away, but the tattooed man was gentle, insistent. The ragged edge of a sackcloth doorway was drawn back. He bumped up against a rough wooden pole. The shack seemed to shake.
“Come on, Uncle, sit down.”
Shapes grew out of the darkness. Three children sat on the bed as if placed there for show.
“I really must go,” he said.
“You've nothing to worry about, Unc, I just want to show you something.”
The children made room on the pine-pole bed. It was strung with rope. On one end lay a folded white eiderdown and a cushion for a pillow. When he sat, the ropes sagged and the poles shifted. The tattooed man's hand lay heavy on his shoulder. The journalist looked around. No windows. No carpet.
No wall hangings. Only a row of empty shelves on the far wall.
He turned away and there, swinging from the ceiling, hung a huge zelfya scarf, a hand peeping out of it.
“Food,” said the tattooed man. “We need food for the baby.”
The tattooed man ran a finger along the lip of a little Russian-made fridge, and then swept a lighter around the emptiness. He said something in Romani to the woman. She squeezed up onto the bed. Her smile was wide, though two of her lower teeth were missing. She edged closer, ran her hand along the buttons at the front of her dress, put an arm around the journalist's shoulder. He pulled back and smiled again, thinly, nervously.
A rat tiptoed across the zinc roof.
The woman opened her top button and then, with a sudden flick of her fingers, reached inside her dress. “Food,” she said. He turned away but she squeezed his shoulder and when he turned back he saw that she had her breast out in her hand, the whole of it, milky at the nipple and striated with sores. Oh, Jesus, he thought, she's turning tricks on me. Right in front of her children. Jesus. Her breast, she's giving me her breast. She held it between her middle fingers and began to keen, incanting something in a low, desperate voice. She squeezed the nipple again. He stood up and his knees gave way. A hand pushed his chest. He thumped back onto the bed. Her breast was still out and she was pointing to the sores.
The tattooed man reached up to the hanging bundle and raised his voice: “We need food for the baby, the baby is so hungry.” And then, out of the bundle came a tiny bag of bones, wrapped in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt.
The child was placed in the journalist's arms. My own baby would cry, he thought. She is so light, so very light. No more than a loaf of bread. A packet of flour.
“She's beautiful,” he said, and he went to put the baby in the woman's lap, but she folded herself against it, curled up tight, put her chin to her chestbone. She moaned, closed the button of her dress, hugged herself, and her moans rose higher.
A fly settled on the child's top lip.
The journalist took one hand from the baby and patted his pockets. “I've nothing with me,” he said. “If I had anything I'd give it to you, I swear, I wish I had, I'll come back tomorrow, I'll bring food, I promise, I will.”
He swished the fly away from the baby's mouth and watched as the tattooed man slapped his fist into his palm, and he knew for certain now that they were prison tattoos, and he knew what the teardrop meant, and all seemed suddenly cold. A ball of emptiness swelled in his stomach, and he stuttered: “I'm a friend of Boshor's, you know.”
The tattooed man smiled sharply, then stood up in the center of the hard-packed floor. He reached for the baby, took it in his arms, kissed it on the forehead-a slow, careful kiss-and then dropped it in the zelfya. He stretched his arms wide and said, as if there were coins in his voice: “There's a cash machine up by the supermarket, friend.”
The hanging bundle swayed in the air, back and forth, a slowing timepiece. The tattooed man pulled the journalist up from the bed, put his arm around his shoulder, held him close. It was as if they'd competed in some vast athletic competition together, wrapped themselves in the flag, the anthem was ringing out, and thousands were cheering all around them.
“Come on, friend, follow me.”
The sackcloth was pulled back from the doorway and the hard light stung the journalist's eyes. He looked back at the woman, passively smoothing the eiderdown. A platoon of flies was now buzzing around the baby. The sackcloth curtsied across the open frame.
In the raw camp air, the tattooed man laughed. Robo appeared from the corner and began walking at the head of their shadows. “Don't forget, mister,” Robo whispered. Everything seemed tightened down. A pressure on his ribcage. A pulse at his temple. The tattooed man stayed close by his shoulder, careful to bring him across the bridge, all exaggerated safety.
“Don't put your foot here, friend, that's a bad one.”
For a moment he thought he still had the child in his hands, he tried to cradle it, but his foot caught on a swinging plank, and the tattooed man grabbed him by the lapel, hauled him back, and touched the soft swell of his waist: “You're safe with me, friend.”
He cast his eyes up towards the distant village: a church-tower peeping up above the trees and the clock ringing for a quarter to five in the afternoon.