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.
Though attractive, she was shy, and although she was asked out on dates a few times, none of the guys who asked her ever appealed to her. They were all loud, boisterous and heavy drinking, not features she found attractive. In different times she may have come under family pressure to marry, but her father himself was constantly drunk and so was in no position to put pressure on her to do anything, and her mother had some sympathy with Elina's reluctance to marry a similar man.
The living conditions in the village afforded Elina little privacy. The only time she had to herself each day was when she made the trip to the shower block three times a week. The water usually ran cold, but with the door closed, isolated from the rest of the village, it was a time that Elina treasured. When she went at a busy time there would soon be a knocking on the door, someone else waiting impatiently for their turn, but if she went early enough she could get a nice long session to herself.
One day she felt a funny feeling between her legs. It was a part of her body that she had never really thought about, and certainly not been told about at school or by her family. She had studied the basics of biology, and knew how babies were made, but that was it. There was no sex education, no talk about masturbation. She put her hand between her legs and noticed she was sensitive down there. She rubbed gently and it felt good.
It was still quiet outside: she knew that few people came down to the showers this early and so she could be alone for some time yet. A little nervous but intrigued by her new discovery she started gently rubbing between her legs, getting a really good feeling from it. She found that the nub at the top of her feminine parts, for which she had never even been told the name, was particularly pleasant to touch.
Over the next few weeks she began to look forward to her showers more and more. As soon as she was in the stall and undressed she would get her hand between her legs and start to touch, developing her skills as time progressed, learning what she liked, what felt good. To her amazement her normally small dry lips swelled and became moist as she touched. She still didn't understand why, not connecting this with the functional act that had been described at school, and was too embarrassed to talk to anyone about it. Was it just her, she wondered, or could all women feel good by touching between their legs? Why had no one ever told her?
Elina started to find that as she touched she started to think of men, thinking of them cuddling her, spending time with her, even taking their clothes off in front of her. She imagined her fantasy boyfriend, who was very different from the guys in the village. He was caring and shy and smiley. If only such a guy existed. She dared to think that perhaps he could even touch her between her legs. Would that be a strange thing to ask?
One night Elina felt the twinge between her legs as she was lying in bed trying to get to sleep. Although her family all slept in the same room she thought them all asleep, so she slipped her hand under her nightdress and started to touch herself. It was only a few minutes later, totally wrapped up in her fantasy about her perfect boy, that she had suddenly heard something behind her. It was her mother, who had awoken and noticed what she was doing.
Her mother clearly did not approve. Despite her protests that she was an adult, her mother placed her over her knee, lifted her nightdress and spanked her. Elina was confused, embarrassed and annoyed at the same time. Confused because she didn't understand what she had done wrong, embarrassed because her mother had seen her touching a private part of her body, and annoyed because she did not think it was fair for her to be punished when she was old enough to be married.
***
Elina had always loved to be out in the open. She was always warned not to go into the hills - it was too dangerous, she was told. If the devil people found her up there they would kill her and eat her. The people from Elina's village had a special stew that they made with whatever meat they could get their hands on - they told her that the devil people used human meat in their version of the stew.
But Elina always remembered her trip into the hills with school when she had been young. There were the most beautiful flowers up there, all kinds of colours. There had been a shimmering pool of clear blue water, surrounded by the special flowers, which Elina thought must be the most beautiful spot in the world. It had always seemed strange to Elina that this area of outstanding beauty could be so dangerous, could exist so close to such evil.
The day after she had been spanked she was feeling rebellious. She was an adult now. She would do as she pleased. So she went for a walk in the hills. It was blissfully quiet and deserted. Eventually she reached something that looked extremely out of place in the natural paradise she was walking through. A barbed wire fence spanned the landscape, preventing her further progress.
Standing at the fence she could see neither the other village nor her own village. She could no longer reach the point where she had once stood and looked out over the other settlement. She remembered standing there as a child, seeing the other village in the distance, the villagers going about their business. It seemed just like her own village. She wondered how different it really was. Perhaps the similarity was just a deception, perhaps they really were evil. Or perhaps they were just like she was, perhaps they had been told the same about her village. There were clearly some secrets that she was not privy to.
Elina started walking in the hills regularly. She tried to avoid the fence, thinking it as an ugly blot on the landscape. She didn't really want to look beyond it, see that other village, be faced with the questions as to what it was really like, whether they really were the enemy. If they were the enemy, then she was in danger up here. And if they were not... well, that meant everything she had ever been told was a lie.
