Chapter 14 Salt on the Wall

They went along the sheds with the torches behind them, and the run was short and ugly and ended in a corner that Vesna knew from the inside of a plan she had made two years before, when she had walked the third basin in daylight and looked for a gap in its geography that could be used in an emergency. The gap was the roof of the transit shed and a low wall beyond it, and beyond the wall the main harbour, and beyond the harbour the open water. It was not a way out. It was a way to change the problem. She took it, which meant going up a stack of crates with Danica Ruz behind her, and along the roof of the shed at a crouch with the harbour lights on one side and the third basin on the other, and down a drainpipe to the low wall, and over the wall into the strip of water between the co-operative's mole and the coasting berths, where the water was black and the pilings were thick with weed and the smell of creosote was strong enough to hide a great deal. Ruz did not follow her into the water. Ruz stopped at the wall, and stood on it, and looked down at Vesna, and for a moment the two of them were in the same frame as a hundred times before: two women on opposite sides of a wall, each with a name they needed from the other. "You still have the book," Ruz said. "I still have the clerk." "Then I will see you at the crossing," Ruz said. "Do not be late." She went back over the wall, and Vesna went into the water up to her chest and held the edge of the mole and let the cold do its work, which was to take her thinking down to its simplest gear. She stayed there for a quarter of an hour while the torches swept the quay above her, and then she climbed out at the coasting berths and walked, dripping, along the water's edge to the place where the fishing boats tied up, and took the road up through Kaldar to the pharmacy. Dragas had put Rasim in the room behind the shop, on a mattress, with a bowl of water and a chair by the window. When he saw Vesna in the doorway with her clothes sheeting water onto his floor, he did not say anything about the wet, or the hour, or the police whistles that had been going up and down the harbour for an hour. He brought a towel and a shirt that had belonged to someone, and put the kettle on, and sat down. "The lorry goes at six," he said. "The load is already in it. My cousin has been told there are two people." "There will be two people." She looked at Rasim, who was sitting up on the mattress, awake, the tally book on his knees. "If you want to change your mind about the crossing, this is the last hour in which you can." "I have not changed anything since I was fourteen," Rasim said. "That is my whole character. I keep the count." They left the city at six in the dark, in a produce lorry full of seed potatoes, with Vesna and Rasim behind the last of the crates on a pallet space barely wide enough for one, breathing the dry cold smell of the sacks and listening to the gears change as the road climbed away from the sea. The crossing at Malen was two hours north, a minor road through olive country, and the officer there was old and had a nephew in a hospital, which was the whole of the arrangement, and for the first ninety minutes the arrangement held. It stopped holding at the top of the pass, where the road narrowed to one lane and a barrier had been dragged across it that had not been there two days before, and behind the barrier there was a car, and beside the car two men in plain clothes with no markings at all, and neither of them was the old officer. Vesna saw it through a gap in the crates and had time to do three things. She opened the tailgate of the lorry a hand's width. She gave Rasim the tally book, and her own papers, and the name of the pharmacy, and told him, in eleven words, where to go if he got through and she did not. And then she got out the back. She dropped onto the road and rolled under the lorry, and came up on the far side in the moment before the driver put his hands on the wheel and the men with no markings walked up the line of the truck, and she went over the low wall on the downhill side of the road and into the olive terraces, and ran down the slope with her hands over her head while one of the men shouted and a torch swung out over the wall and made a white tunnel of the leaves. She did not get far before the slope ended, because the slope ended in a drop of eight metres onto the riverbank, and she took the drop badly, and came up with a pain in her side that made the world go briefly white. On the road above her the lorry had been opened and the crates moved and the shouting had stopped, which meant they had found the pallet space empty and the driver with his hands in the air and no passengers, and that Rasim, wherever he was, had gone over the wall on his own side. She lay in the wet grass and listened and understood that the crossing had come apart, and that they had come apart with it, and that the plan for the morning no longer had two people in it. She got up, holding her side, and started walking downstream, away from the road, following the water, which went west, back toward the sea. The drop had cracked something on her left side, and she had learned in her first year that the way to carry a cracked rib is to keep walking, to keep the breaths shallow, and never under any circumstances to sit down, because sitting down is a promise to the body that it is allowed to stop. So she walked downstream in the dark with her hand pressed against her side, along the shingle and then the bank path and then the river road, and at every bend she stopped and listened for the road above her. At every stop there was nothing but the water and the frogs and, once, a long way off, the sound of a lorry starting and moving away north. It could have been anything. For the length of one bend she allowed herself to believe it was the produce lorry with a driver still in it and a clerk still behind the crates. She had come off a pass and a barrier and gone down an olive slope into country she had never walked, with a dead telephone and no papers that would survive an hour of questions, and the office's rule for an officer in that position was three sentences long and began with the word withdraw. She had withdrawn to Mardan Bay, and she had withdrawn to a sea-wall bench, and she had not once in four years been able to withdraw from the one thing the rule had never imagined, which was that the person she could not leave behind was not an officer and had signed nothing and had a wife who weighed flour and two boys and a mother who hummed when she was frightened. The rule had been written by people who had never stood in a bakery in Kaldar. She walked west with the river beside her and did not use the word again, not even inside her head. ---