Cormorant Books

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The Honey Locust (Preview)

Prologue

The former Yugoslavia, June 1995.

She blows out her candle and peers through the broken slats down to where the street unfurls in beaded rolls of cobblestone. Empty. She’s waited long enough. She shoulders a knapsack that holds a few essentials — an extra sweater, three tins of kasha. Her Leica nestles at the bottom, near the rolls of film hidden inside socks. She checks her watch and heads downstairs.

A wedge opens in the blackness of the doorway. She slips out and darkness eclipses her solitary figure. Feet carry her softly across the broken earth and concrete uprooted by recent shelling. The road is pitted like the moon. In the morning the women sweep what they can, leaving the larger pieces for the men to remove. By afternoon, it’s business as usual — or at least as much as it can be in this hell. Every evening, the dark slips down again and the constellation of lights wink out before they can be targeted. It begins all over as bombs light up and pierce the sky. It’s impossible to imagine life amid the ruins, but it’s here.

For weeks, she’d resigned herself to the waiting. Finally the messenger arrived, a black-shawled crone tapping her cane through the destruction. She’d offered to read tea leaves for a small sum, but stopped at only one door. Who wanted her fortune read in times like these?

They ushered the old woman in, past the brace of sandbags piled before the window. The visitor smiled, set her stick aside, and sat. The sitting room was comfortable: family portraits, knitted armchair covers, and lace curtains kept up a pleasant appearance, despite the boarded-over windows. The important work was done downstairs, hidden from casual view, though not surprisingly, word had got out: help was available to anyone seeking it.

The visitor nodded at the two women. Jasna set a teapot on the table. The old woman had known Jasna before the war. She was one of the God-given few who’d stayed behind when she could have left. So many doctors were gone and the hospitals had become difficult to reach. The other — the North American — she’d seen once or twice in the town square disguised as a villager. The North American arrived as a patient, but quickly became Jasna’s helper in the apoteka — one of the war’s many illegal pharmacies.

Tea was poured. They drank and turned over the cups on their saucers, as the old woman instructed. It was like a game, except lives depended on it. They waited as she peered into the cup. Her dark eyes looked up at the North American briefly before splintering away like mercury. She spoke quietly: Listen carefully, but write nothing down. You will take a trip to the coast. From there, a ferry will take you to Italy. I will tell you precisely where and when. You must be prepared to leave in two days. Cities and towns were mentioned, a contact name passed along. The Oracle dreamed her map among the leaves scattered on the cup bottom and stuck to its sides. Done, she pushed the porcelain back into anxious hands.

A palm curled around the head of her walking stick. She reached for the North American’s hand. One other thing — your ring finger is too long. She showed them, splaying the fingers and holding the hand beside her own for comparison. You see? You are too independent. You will never be happy with any man who tries to hold you. She shook her head. A timid smile. I really am a tea reader, you see.

The stick drew up. Coins exchanged hands. A brief smile concluded this matter of freedom, and she was gone.

It was all to have run smoothly from there — rivers forded, landscapes crossed, history poured over blank pages. But the dark streets are a no man’s land now, shapes shifting to become potential rapists, snipers looking for target practice. The scavengers and looters have retired for the night, but armed thugs and drunken soldiers can spell trouble for a woman on these streets. Anyone who spots her will know she’s up to something, because she isn’t in a safe place at 4 a.m. Where are the people who love her?

The alley opens onto a public square where she stopped for coffee once or twice. Tonight the cafés are deserted, the chairs upturned on tables. At the far end, a church casts a churlish eye over everything. The tea reader’s careful phrases come to mind as she skirts the open space, watching for shadows that might turn into men, enemies of her body.

She steps onto the square, reciting her escape route, a giant game of hopscotch: from Biha´c to Drvar, past Strmica, and down the coast to Šibenik, where the boat will be waiting. Stepping stones across a sea of fire.

She’s halfway across the cobblestones when she hears the hiss of tires. She turns, looks quickly over her shoulder. Headlights twitch and scatter over a wall; the car lurches into view. Panic rushes in, lifting her heels. She’s a blur against dark walls. The first shot goes wide and tears into a tree as she scrabbles over stone. The second shot is closer, the car right behind her. If she turns, she’ll see their faces.

I’m a fucking journalist! A Canadian!

It comes out an angry cry as she trips and lands hard on her cheekbone. The fall knocks the breath from her lungs, fear from her mind. Through the knapsack, the camera digs into her breast beside the rolls of film with their lost worlds, the tail end to many stories. She’s carried them with her all this way, like a dead foetus, these faces she never knew.

Another shot. Someone is firing wildly into the square.

She pushes herself up as the car closes in. At least let me face them, she thinks. Don’t let them come from behind! She listens for the whine of brakes, doors to open, hurried footsteps. She’ll make them kill her before she gives up. The roar grows and then retreats with a trickle of drunken laughter. Tires slither across the square.

She looks up. Stars above. The firmament. Night.

Book 1 - Palaeography

Calgary, August 1994.

The plane landed at the airport and she disembarked without incident. A cab brought her directly to the address on the letterhead. The building appeared empty; the only sound was her voice asking directions at the security desk. Afternoon light filled the halls, gilding the passageways as she navigated the corridors. She found her name on a list posted beside the door under the heading “Bosnia — Private Hearing.” One more of these endless briefings and she would be there.

None of the six people seated inside looked up when she entered.

“Is this the Thomas Commission?” she asked.

Heads nodded.

“I’m Thomas,” she said.

She sat as they scrutinized her across the table, a jury of peers who couldn’t have been more unlike her. She endured their questions, gave them the answers she knew they wanted. The whole time she was conscious of being at odds with the verticality of the room — the maps and charts, floor-to-ceiling windows, the shelves lined with boxes of files and videotapes. Her casual sprawl in the executive chair contradicted the room’s top-to-bottom hierarchy.

The room had grown stuffy. Someone stood to open a window. The commission head reminded her that the experiences she faced in the coming months could be brutal beyond anything she had known.

“I can tell you’ve never fought with my mother,” she said. It was her one attempt at levity.

She believed she’d already earned her Girl Guide badges during stints in Africa and Central America. There, she’d encountered villages where entire wars were waged over the theft of a single cow. Scores were settled with hand grenades lobbed into filled churches. The day she’d arrived in Namibia, a British journalist had been hacked to death. One moment he was recording the scene, and the next he’d become part of it. A machete swiped, oozed away red, swiped again. His body twitched its final moments in the dusty street as a fellow cameraman kept recording in the interests of — what? National security? The evening news? Or just lining his own pockets? It wasn’t the first time she’d been disgusted by one of her own.

She had few worries about Bosnia.

At the end of the session, a single nod seemed to confer agreement. Around the room gazes met. Someone smiled. She thanked the commission and shook hands as they told her how pleased they were to be sending her over. She would be on her way in weeks.

“Good luck, Angela,” they said, old friends seeing her off.

For months she’d studied maps and books, military reports and attaché briefings, absorbing the country’s current political state, its intricate history. It was a region built upon continuous waves of migration, the silt of trade routes and wars. Exile was a constant theme. For more than seven hundred years, leaders had shepherded their people like Moses on the way to a Promised Land. Wars shifted boundaries and populations back and forth. Nationalities overlapped and borders were carved out, again and again, in the hands of politicians, until finally no one could say for sure who or what had been where. Up close or at a distance, things still looked the same. It was a land defined not by what it was or might become, but solely by what it had been: the Former Yugoslavia.

It was a world where things were constantly erased: people, buildings, and entire towns disappeared overnight. Newspapers advised Croats how to rid their speech of Serb expressions, the better to distinguish themselves from former friends and neighbours. Cleanse. The word was new, but the practice old.

All of this was native territory to Angela. The months of preparation would help her close in on what she was seeking — the aura of events, the minute seismic tremors as they transpired. She scrutinized her subjects, decoding clues and ferreting out hints to unravel their secrets. Tiny traces, shards of history fell away before her eyes as she watched for the glow that sparked the instant they vanished. In Scully Hall she’d spent hundreds of hours absorbing the science of her chosen medium. While other students caroused in Grad House, she’d memorized development processes and fixing solutions. She could recite the chemistry of light, the crystalline compounds dispersed and embedded in gelatine coating that captured moments in time. Later, under her hands in the dark, she released them. Eventually she came to understand photography not as a technical science, not an ornamental sidebar to someone’s morning reading, but as prophecy with a backward glance.

Photography helped her to decipher the captured moment and to uncover what lay beneath it — the invisible worlds buried under the routes of history. She fell in love the first time she heard the word palaeography — the decoding of archaic writing and ancient manuscripts. Photographs were her ancient manuscripts. She began to think of them as doorways in time, as if she could enter their finished worlds and be with those people.

She learned to see beyond the surface of a photograph: to turn the corners in a room and slip past its walls, follow a woman home from the lake where she is vacationing, discover whom she will meet and marry, the children she will bear.