A Place of Safety. Helen Black
stayed in a small apartment in the Albanian section of Glogovac.
When I was a young child I was happy I went to school and was commended for my studies. I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up.
I recall that there would be trouble sometimes from the police. They would round up the menfolk and take them away. When they came back they would have black eyes or bloody mouths.
My mother told me she paid them, which was why they didn’t come for my father or brothers.
In January 1999 our neighbours were arrested. This time it was not the police who took them but the paramilitaries. There were about six of them, each with an automatic rifle. When our neighbours came back they packed up their apartment and left. I never saw them again.
My mother said they didn’t have enough money to pay the police.
A few weeks later they came to us. They wore green uniforms with red bandanas. I was very frightened. My mother tried to pay them the usual amount but they laughed in her face. In the end they took all the money we had in the apartment.
The next day they forced my mother to take off her rings. She couldn’t get one of them off and had to put soap round her knuckle and force it.
That night my oldest brother, Brahim, and my father decided to stand up to the soldiers. My mother cried and begged them not to make a stand but my father said Allah would provide.
The next morning they came at six. We were all still in bed but no one was sleeping. My father told them calmly that he would pay them nothing more. The captain nodded and I thought he was agreeing to leave us alone, but he snatched my little sister and put his gun to her head.
‘Give me the keys to your car,’ he said.
My father did not want to give in, but tears were pouring down the face of my sister and my mother.
Two days later we went to stay with my father’s brother and his family. There was not enough room in the house but the menfolk said there would be safety in numbers.
Throughout March and early April we girls hardly left the house. We would take it in turns to sleep. There was almost no food available and we lived on boiled corn and wheat.
My uncle’s neighbour had forty people staying in his house, and his wife called to my mother through the window saying that their houses had been burned by the paramilitaries.
On 22 April they came early in the morning. They pointed their guns in our faces and forced us outside. The men were ordered to step forward with their hands on their heads, then they were led away. We thought for sure they’d be shot and we cried all day. That afternoon they returned, but we could not throw our arms around my father because he had been beaten with the handle of a shovel and his collar bone was broken.
That night a local Serb policeman came to the house and told us the paramilitaries were out of control. He told us to leave.
‘There is no safety for you here,’ he said.
As soon as it was light we were once again forced into the street. This time the men were ordered to sing the Serbian national anthem. I saw my brother’s jaw jut out in refusal. The soldier poked him in the back with his gun but still Brahim refused.
My mother screamed at him to sing but he would not.
‘We’ll make you do what we say,’ they said, but Brahim would not even answer.
The captain walked back to his car and pulled out a can. He shook it so we could all hear the petrol inside. Then he poured it over my mother’s head. He pushed her and my sisters back in the house, threw the can in after them and locked the door.
In terror my brother began to sing, but the captain would not listen. He lit a cigarette and smoked it.
Brahim sang for all he was worth.
When the captain’s cigarette was finished he tossed the butt into the house.
The noise was unbearable. The whoosh of the flames, my brother’s singing and the screams of my mother and little sisters as they were burned alive.
That night my father paid a man to take my brother Brahim and me away from Kosovo. To take us to a place of safety.
Luke is a clever boy. Everybody says so. Ten straight A’s at GCSE. His reports always bring a smile to his mother’s face:
Walker is a model student with a firm grasp of Latin grammar. A bright pupil who fully comprehends the importance of Tudor history.
Well, I’m failing bloody miserably on the streets, he thinks.
‘A bit slow on the uptake,’ Caz always teases.
Thank God for Caz. She sussed straight away that he didn’t know his arse from his elbow and has taken him under her wing. Why she did that is still not clear to him. Tom always says that nothing in this life is for free, that everyone is on the take, but Luke can’t for the life of him see why Caz is being so kind to a basket case like him.
‘I like a challenge,’ she says.
Whatever her reasons, he’s bloody grateful.
Hot meal—she knows where to get it. Dry place to sleep—she’ll put you right. And if you need some gear she’ll do a deal with Sonic Dave, who everyone says is a bit of a nutter but likes Caz because she reminds him of his baby sister.
This morning, when he woke up in a squat on Brixton High Road and she was gone, her sleeping bag rolled into a fat sausage, Luke was overcome with panic, gut-wrenching, sickening panic. He didn’t dare move, afraid to go anywhere without her, afraid that if she came back for her bag he’d miss her. He sat in that spot for two hours, staring wildly around him.
It had been dark when Caz had blagged them a space in the squat last night, but now he can see as well as smell the damp patches spreading across the walls and the black sack of rubbish in the corner. There’s someone else in the room, buried deep under a green blanket. Luke can’t see who it is but he can hear the coughing.
He needs a pee. It started as a vague pressure in his bladder but it’s built to a searing pain. But he’s not moving, he’d rather piss himself in his bag.
The door opens and Luke’s heart leaps at the sight of a female figure silhouetted in the doorway. ‘Caz?’
She shakes her head and Luke can see now that she’s at least ten years older. Luke thinks he might cry, and a weird strangled sound comes out as he tries to swallow down his tears.
‘You okay?’ says the woman, the accent thickly Eastern Bloc.
‘I just wondered if you know where Caz went?’
The woman shakes her head, then almost as an afterthought shouts behind her in a language Luke doesn’t understand. A voice shouts back.
‘Gone for make money,’ the woman translates.
‘Where?’ Luke asks.
The woman shrugs. ‘Streatham, maybe.’
Luke doesn’t know where that is but maybe he can catch a bus. He’s got a map in his rucksack. Maybe he should make his way over there, see if he can spot her. Then again maybe he should stay here.
The figure under the blanket pokes out his head and vomits onto the floor. A pool of brown viscous liquid meanders towards Luke.