flow. This is the most I’ve heard him talk about himself since we met and listening to him, however hard it is, is helping me forget for a brief moment about my own problems.
‘On our wedding day,’ he says, ‘we had a feast. The whole village, whoever was left, which wasn’t many, came. The Kosovan army had been fighting the Serbian army about ten miles north of us but we wanted to get married, needed to. Milla was pregnant.’
I stop breathing, hanging on to his every word now.
‘We thought it was safe. There was a lull in the fighting. But we didn’t know that the Kosovan army had killed ten Serbian officers the day before. The Kosovan soldiers fled and came towards Obrinje and the Serbian forces followed them. They wanted revenge. My brother and I rushed everyone into the ravine beneath our house, thinking that they would be safe – that if fighting broke out the women and children at least would not be harmed. My brother and I joined the Kosovan soldiers, trying to defend the house. But the Serbians, they found us, they overran the house, they killed the Kosovan soldiers. They killed my brother. They shot me twice and left me for dead. But I didn’t die. I survived and after they were gone I managed to crawl to the ravine.’
He stops. I hold my breath waiting for him to continue.
‘I had heard the screams. The gunfire. I already knew what I would find.’
‘Oh my God,’ I whisper under my breath.
‘We thought the women and the children would be safer without the men there to endanger them but they killed everyone. Milla, my parents, my sister, everyone from the village who had come to the wedding. I had five nieces and nephews. All killed too. Thirty-six people in total, and my child too.’
I don’t know what to say. How can anyone possibly live through that? It’s a wonder he’s still here, still breathing, still putting one foot in front of the other, because I don’t know how I would if anything ever happened to Rob or to Marlow. I’d want to die. I definitely wouldn’t have the courage to continue living. I sit there, feeling shell-shocked, trying to picture it and then trying to push the images out of my head because they’re too awful.
I wonder what drove him to tell me – was it because he wanted to let me know that he understands loss? Was he trying to give me a sense of the kind of evil that there is in the world, to ready myself for what might come? Or perhaps was he trying to explain why he’s been helping me all this time? Some sense of wanting to help save a person?
‘I’m so sorry.’ I put my hand on his arm, and let it stay there longer than perhaps I should, feeling a strange sense of connection to him.
He says nothing. After a while he reaches for his cigarettes and lights one and my hand falls away.
He looks at me. ‘You remind me of my wife. You smile just like her.’
I wipe a tear before it can fall, understanding now why he told the story.
‘She talked a lot too,’ he says with a mournful smile.
I smile back.
‘You wanted to know why I’m helping you,’ he says. ‘This is why.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, my mind still reeling from the story he just told me.
I look at him, seeing him in a whole new light. Konstandin’s level coolness, his one-shouldered shrug and nonchalant expression take on a new dimension, as do the scored lines around his eyes that seem now to have been born from pain, not laughter.
‘We’re here,’ Konstandin says. ‘Do you want to stay in the car?’
I shake my head, looking out the window at a store in a derelict-looking row of shops. This is not the touristy part of town, but somewhere out towards the airport, where there are more high-rise apartment buildings. The shop has bars on the window and an array of electronic goods and jewellery on display. I can’t read the sign but it’s universally obvious that it’s a pawnshop.
‘I should come. I know what her phone looks like,’ I say.
Konstandin nods and together we enter the store. There’s a man in his early fifties with grey hair and a friendly, watchful smile standing at a counter behind thick bulletproof glass. Konstandin walks over to him. He leans an elbow on the counter and says something to the