I looked at my watch again. She should have been here ten minutes ago.
I checked my phone. Nothing. Perhaps she had decided she wasn't coming. I wouldn't blame her. I was surprised that she had even agreed to meet in the first place.
The door opened again, and a woman walked in. Finally, a likely candidate. She looked older than the twenty eight years I had been told she was, but she had warned me of this. Nevertheless, she was an attractive woman, and a few heads turned towards her as she walked through the cafe, looking around for someone.
We had agreed a code. I would be pretending to read a copy of an obscure newspaper from her home country. She had told me where I could buy a copy, and told me I had to be early. I had been there at 8am and bought the last copy. It was all nonsense to me, so I just looked at the pictures, trying to get myself into the right mindset for the story I was about to hear.
She made eye contact with me, then looked down at the newspaper. She smiled slightly, the smile lighting up her face. She ran her hand nervously through her shoulder length black hair, slowing her pace as she approached.
The closer she got the more attractive she appeared. She was wrapped up tight against the cold outside, woolly hat, heavy coat, thick boots. Only her pretty face was on show. If I hadn't known I may have struggled to guess her ethnicity, but having discussed her origins in depth over email I knew exactly where she was from.
She extended her hand to shake mine, and introduced herself. I responded in kind. There was a real warmth in her greeting, and I instantly felt at ease. She shrugged off her coat, revealing a thick woolly sweater.
"So you are the author?" she asked, her accent thick but perfectly understandably.
"Well, yes, in my spare time," I smiled.
"I love your work," she said. "That's why I contacted you."
"That's really nice of you to say," I replied.
There was a short pause.
"So, you want me to write your story?" I asked to break the silence.
"Yes," she said, looking a little nervous. "I will tell you everything, every detail, and you can write it as you wish. All I ask is that you let me read it before you publish, make sure there is nothing to identify me or him."
"Agreed, I will use false names," I said. "And you can correct my typos!"
"Ah, I think my English is not so good to do this!" she exclaimed.
The waiter approached and we ordered. I had never interviewed anyone before, and I wondered how to start. My guest looked at the table, then into space behind me, casting her mind back those few years to when the story had begun. Then she started.
***
Elina could not remember a time when there had not been fighting. The sound of gunshots and distant explosions, the planes flying overhead, the constant suspicion and fear, they had just been a normal part of her childhood.
Her village was remote but there was regular fighting only a few kilometres away. Just over the hills was a village which in many ways was similar to her own - poor people living in ramshackle single room huts, scraping together a living from the land. Families doing the best they could in the circumstances: parents bringing up children, trying to shield them from the hardships and conflict.
To an outsider, it would have been difficult to tell the difference between the villages and the people who inhabited them. The words they spoke, the songs they sung, the words written on the signs marking the outskirts of the villages, they would have been equally incomprehensible but seemingly indistinguishable from each other.
But to Elina there was all the difference in the world. One morning she and her classmates had been led by a teacher to the top of the hills and shown the village in the distance. To the teacher the village was not similar. In fact, it could not have been more different.
The people who lived in that village, she explained, were different, were vermin. A special class of criminal, sub-human. They were responsible for all of the ills that the children suffered. They poisoned the water and stole the livestock. They had a deal with the devil and were his representatives on earth.
Elina could see some of the villagers in the fields, working just like she had seen the people of her own village work. They didn't look all that different. Perhaps their skin was slightly lighter (a sign, her teacher explained, of the fact that they were lazy, spent hardly any time out in the fields), perhaps they were slightly shorter than her friends and family (their souls were closer to Hell, the teacher explained). And this is what scared her most. How could people who looked so similar be so different? Would she know if she met one?
One day the radio said that the war had ended. The government had fallen and a new one was to be installed. For the first time there were to be elections. The people would choose who ran the country. The radio had spoken with hope, as if this was a good thing, but the village people muttered darkly. There were more of the devil people than there were of Elina's people - an election meant a devil President, meant the devil people taking over. One day the local school was opened for voting, but nobody went.
Traditionally girls got married young in the village, but so many young men had gone off to fight and not come back, either dead, missing, or settled somewhere else, that girls greatly outnumbered boys. Thus Elina made it to eighteen without ever having had a boyfriend, and was certainly not alone in doing so.
