‘What is it, then?’ Christian asked, spotting an opportunity to get his nose in. ‘“The Slovenes are an untidy people”? Is that in your guidebook? From 1910? “Narrow of forehead and thick of brow, not to be trusted”?’
I flushed and hid my eyes from Penny. ‘No – I’m not saying, race . . . or – but what about culture and –’
‘The colonised Slovene? The subservient, surly Slav, yeah?’ Christian said.
Sometimes that’s what it seemed intellectuals specialised in, taking things you said that were just things and turning them into accusations. Making the normal horrible.
Sara turned round too now. ‘What about your value judgement, Andrew – why is a tidy pile better than an untidy pile?’
‘Well, the tidy pile is – it’s – it’s easier to get the logs out and, in a messy one, the ones that are outside the pile, they’re not covered from the rain?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Well, it matters if you’re making a fire.’
‘Why do you automatically assume they’re going to use the wood to make a fire?’ Sara asked.
‘Because . . . they definitely are?’
‘They probably are, Sara,’ even Onomatopoeic Bob conceded.
‘. . . What if they carve the logs? Huh? And wet logs, for a reason you can’t even imagine, are better than dry ones?’
I left it a moment and then said, ‘No. I guess if they carve the logs and, for a reason I can’t even imagine, wet ones are better than dry ones, then I guess it’s good to have an untidy log pile. You’re right.’ But once Sara had turned back to the front, Penny looked over and gave me a delicious wink.
We drove with the front windows down and the sliding back windows open, so a rush of air made the afternoon tumbling and fresh. The country we passed through was green and crushable like a chlorophyll berry and raked with rivers. I nuzzled the window and dozed, and noticed, when I woke now and again, that in Slovenia, actually, the post-border crossing mess was the exception, possibly the only untidy log pile in the whole country.
‘Why couldn’t it all be like this?’ Onomatopoeic Bob said from up front. ‘Let a man be what he wants to be.’
‘There wasn’t even a fight here, was there?’ said Cally.
‘A little – ten, twelve dead. Nothing really,’ Christian said.
We travelled in a fog of ignorance. I was interested in where we were but Onomatopoeic Bob would not relinquish the map, so as I dozed I dream-plotted our progress by road signs. Much of the time we seemed to follow a broad river which I thought I might claim to an interested observer was the Danube, but at times it narrowed into not much more than a fat stream and I thought I was overdramatising. But then it would widen and go an exciting chemical-clear blue-green over white stone and I wondered if I wasn’t expecting too much of the Danube.
We skirted Ljubljana and made it to the Croatian border at the town of Obrezje as the light was dimming. We pulled up at one of the four kiosks dotted across the lanes of the motorway. Shannon looked over to me like now the linguist might be needed. But in fact, entry was easy. The guard took our bundle of passports, thick and blue, and looked in at us through the windows. ‘Why would it be a problem to come into our country?’ the prickly border post seemed to ask. ‘Yes, we have a flag and uniforms, and indeed ample stationary supplies like any other nation, and why wouldn’t we? We’re interested why you would think there is anything at all different about Croatia, which is just a perfectly legitimate country like any other country, or isn’t it? Is that what you’re saying?’
As the van made its way down the broad concrete taper and back onto the highway to Zagreb, I felt I had banked my first piece of credible real estate from the trip. ‘I went to Croatia during the war,’ I could truthfully say now, and I rolled it around my head, trying it out on teachers from school, regulars from the pub, watching their reactions and trying to look back at myself, ennobled, in their eyes.
In Croatia we were close to the war. But not yet in the war. I surveyed the countryside closely, thinking that maybe I might clock somewhere a burnt-out house. It’s not a great feeling, looking for a burnt-out house. It raises the question of why exactly you want to see one. I consoled myself that I would have preferred that there weren’t any burnt houses at all. But since there were, somewhere, I thought it was important to see them. Still, feeling you’re on a kind of arson safari is uncomfortable. Because if a burnt-out house is the most common piece of big game you’re trying to tick off, what is the highest value trophy you could spot? Is that what you’ve come looking to take home: sight of a dead child? A memory that you won’t roll out for just anyone; but late at night, after some spirits, if someone deserves it, if they really want to get into it, you’d have that in the locker?
Chapter 12
IT WAS DRIZZLING slightly as we made it through the post-war suburbs of Zagreb and into the soft Habsburg honey centre. A couple of miles out west of the main square we found an oblong park that looked a little like a military parade ground, bound on its two long sides by turn-of-the-century apartment blocks. At its far end was a car park serving modern apartments, which, with its green apron before it, had enough of the feel of a campsite for us to park up. As night fell, Onomatopoeic Bob laid out some rugs and started to tie an awning from the van while Shannon went off with Penny to buy food. I was chosen, due to my language abilities, as the one to ‘make contact with the UN in the first instance’.
How do you ‘make contact with the United Nations’? Yell ‘Boutros-Boutros Ghali’ in the street three times and try to summon the Secretary General like a genie? I stood in a call box near the city’s central Jelacic Square and fed coins into the slot by the receiver cradle. Von held the aggressively hydraulic door open with a shoulder and looked bored and encouraging at the same time as, to my surprise, I got an immediate answer from the pre-war British Consulate number listed in my guidebook. The Consulate gave me a number for the UN which led to an immovably French response. When I spoke English at them repeatedly I was transferred, via a lengthy and unpromising series of click click clicks, to a woman who spoke a little English.
‘Oh, hello? Hi, yes, we are a group and we wish to enquire how to get the ability to cross from Croatia into Bosnia, to go on then to Sarajevo?’ I said, my diction going second-language in sympathy.
‘There are briefings daily at Ilica barracks,’ said the woman’s voice, in an accent which, like the flavour of a cheap sweet without its wrapper, was hard to place. ‘What is the nature of your visit?’
‘An independent – humanitarian mission. Primarily, we wish to enter to – to – to – make a performance to promote the peace,’ I said, adding the definite article to make it sound more definite.
‘This is not possible at this time.’
‘OK,’ I said, then looking at Von, ‘Might it be possible. Please?’
‘It is not possible,’ she said and put her phone down.
‘I understand,’ I said, to no one. ‘Do you know at all when it may be possible?’
So there it was. It was not possible. I had always thought it might not be possible. ‘It’s not possible,’ I said and Von shrugged and started to walk off, but not back towards the van: off up towards the square.
Von did love a treat. He made this little drink fun by inflating how illicit it was, implying that we were stealing time from somewhere. We sat under an awning outside a bar by the cathedral, up past the illegal money changers, and listened to the Sunday-evening bells toll, feeling naughty and bonded. On the quiet pavements young men and women started to hurry to Mass. People you would never see going to church in England: kids in thin sportswear, girls in short skirts, shouldering together under a buckled extendable umbrella.
Von chugged down his second tall glass of beer and asked if I’d like an Ecstasy tablet.
‘Er – I don’t think so, no.’
‘No?’ he said queryingly, like I’d turned down a wine gum.
‘Have you even got one?’ I said.
‘Von,’ I started, ‘are you not worried about smuggling such a large amount of drugs?’
‘It’s only a hundred. It’s not a thousand,’ he said, winning the argument to his mind. ‘Look at them all go, Andrew. She’s fit as fuck – why does she even need to go to church?’ He was looking at a girl in a black zipper top with raven hair who wobbled on the cobbles. He nodded to the young man at the table next to us. ‘She fell the right way off the fuck-fuck cart?’ I expected the guy to be offended, or be the girl’s brother or father or something, but Von’s antennae hadn’t let him down and soon ‘Vlado’ had joined our round. He was Aussie-Croatian, in the country ‘taking a look’ at the situation. He wore what looked like genuine Ray-Bans and a Dynamo Zagreb tracksuit over a pink Lacoste shirt.
‘They love it here,’ he explained about the churchgoing. ‘Fucking mad for it. The Chetniks and the Muslims are all cutting each other’s throats for God, but these are the only pricks who actually go.’
Vlado explained that he was not a nationalist, like some of the fucking nutters you got. He was just here to help. Von told him that he was with some hippies and we wanted for the Serbs to stop ‘battering the Bosnians in the arse’. Vlado laughed and they did a man-shake.
‘The thing about your Serb is – and I’ve got tons of mates who are Serbo – but, mate, and they’d say this themselves, the guys aren’t even Slavs. They’re Turks who got out of bed the wrong fucking side. They’re wackas, mate.’
‘Yeah? So where would a guy go to get cunted in Zagreb?’ Von asked sweetly. ‘What about coke – can you get a bit of chang in this town? Or some cuddly sluts? Are there any cuddly sluts available, for handjobs?’
Vlado’s mate let Von hoover a line of something in the bogs but Von thought it was mostly ascorbic acid. We ended up watching highlights of Friday’s Russia–Sweden World Cup game, with Von wincing the powder down the back of his neck and Vlado accompanying each of the Swedish goals with a ‘Fuck you’. We all got caught up in the good mood in the bar and stamped our feet along to the merry-sounding songs.
Vlado wobbled with us home to the van. The streets were totally quiet by midnight and Zagreb felt like a provincial town trying to fill a capital’s boots.
‘So. OK. Who do you want, Andy?’ Von asked as we zigzagged down the pavement. ‘Can I have Cally? And Shannon?’ he said.
‘What – this is, for – what?’ I asked.
‘I’m just saying, so we don’t waste spade work. I don’t want to be all nice round Cally and find you’ve been pulling the same shit? Because the thing is, I really want to get a suck job off of Cally.’
‘She is nice.’
‘But I don’t really like her?’
‘Oh. Oh dear. Right,’ I said.
‘I mean, I do, a bit. I don’t hate her. She just bores me. But cos she’s matey with Penny . . . It’s a bit – I don’t want to get all snarled up with her?’
‘Of course.’
‘And I have my own particular tastes – you know, for what to do.’
‘Right? As in?’
‘What I like in the way of dirt. Private shit,’ he said, ending enquiry.
‘Oh?’
‘And I don’t want to get into all that with my sister. But it’s a hard one, cos I don’t want to miss out on a suck job, obviously.’
‘Obviously. That would be horrible,’ I said.
We were now on the main drag of Ilica Street. Beautiful buildings painted in chocolates and faded ice-cream yellows lined the streets, the stucco pitted and pocked where bits had flaked like psoriasis plaques. As Von considered the geometry of his suck-job situation, I asked Vlado about the chequered shield on the Croatian flags the whole city had gone bat-shit for. It was like I had pushed a drawing pin into his flesh. He got animated and explained that anyone who said it was fascist was factually incorrect, because the shield on the new flag had actually been specifically altered so as not to be offensive, since the Ustasha version started with a white square in the top left-hand corner of the shield, while President Doctor Tudjman had insisted the new country’s started with a red check in the top left-hand corner. ‘Everyone comes after Croatia for fascism. Why? Why the fuck?’ he asked. ‘Why? No reason. Why?’
‘Right,’ I said, thinking after the fourth ‘why’ he might be sounding a note of irony. ‘Not the quarter of a million killed at Jasenovac?’
‘Yeah,’ he laughed, ‘sure, and the rest! Half a million, one million, three million! I’m sure, like, where did they hide the bodies? Yeah, that happened, for sure!’ He laughed and Von laughed and I smiled too, because even though I thought I knew what he was implying about the concentration camp, he had, all told, bought us a lot of bottles of beer.
We hugged farewell to Vlado at the van, which, we noticed, had been spray-painted with a logo in our absence. ‘Peace War!’ it now said on the outside, in a poorly executed graffiti script that made it look like we were some unfilmed offshoot of a now cancelled youth television show.
Chapter 13
THE ILICA BARRACKS, which hosted the daily aid-organisation briefings to which we were not invited, were a little further west, at an old Yugoslav National Army complex on a crossroads.
Inside the buildings, what struck me was the huge amount of admin involved in overseeing the conflict. A war does create an extraordinary amount of fuss. We progressed down many long corridors following A4 printed ‘Briefing’ signs which had each letter jiggling in a different jaunty colour.
When we reached the briefing room ours was by far the largest group. Towards the front two young women with United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) passes were chatting. A couple of African guys in suits stood at the back. A nervous young man approached. ‘I’m new, I’m Cafod. Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Hi, Cafod, I’m Andrew,’ I said and Christian laughed.
‘CAFOD – Catholic Agency for – what is it – Overseas Dicking?’ Christian said.
‘Ha! “Development”,’ the young man said, unsure whether he should protest and defend the charity’s brand values. ‘I’m new.’
‘We’re new too. A peace play,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I’m not actually a Catholic,’ he said, eager to confess.
‘That’s OK, we’re not really that peaceful,’ Sara said.
The briefing was largely incomprehensible. A Danish officer in an impressively soft, freshly laundered uniform gave a list of map coordinates where gunfire had been reported. There was discussion of the movement in the ‘ICL’ (‘Internal Confrontation Line,’ Cafod whispered to me), an itemising of sections of road that were likely to be closed today and tomorrow, all of it hilariously over-detailed for us, as though we had turned up for our first biology lesson and been directed straight into a case conference on an imminent piece of open-heart surgery.
At the end, as the Dane started to shuffle his papers, Shannon brushed all her hair back and, unashamed of her ignorance, asked, ‘This is our first briefing. Is it safe, in general, to go to Sarajevo? And what route would you suggest?’
The Dane didn’t allow himself a smile.
‘Yes, it is generally safe. Up until the point a bullet goes through you. At which point it is no longer safe.’
‘We are the Peace Play Partnership going to Sarajevo – which road do you suggest?’ Shannon persisted.
The officer consulted a list, then looked up and gave us his undivided attention for the three seconds he felt we were worth. ‘You are not going to Sarajevo, madam. You have not UN crossing permissions. The Croats won’t let you out, the Serbs in the RSK won’t let you in. Also the Bosnian authorities won’t let you in. Go home.’
‘Thank you. We will be leaving for Sarajevo tomorrow,’ Shannon said.
‘Then good luck, and we shall make reservations for body bags and repatriation of remains.’
Shannon led us back towards the van at a hell of a pace, her a
rms chugging angrily at her sides. Then, like a steam engine fed overly combustible material, having spluttered and zoomed, she slowed to a halt on the pavement outside a cheap luggage shop. At first she said we would leave right away, straight for Sarajevo. Then she said maybe we would drive into the UN complex with our provisions and pour cooking oil over the very clean Dane. But in the end she agreed with Penny that we should check out what assistance we might get from Dirty Ron Hatch and the British Embassy before driving for the border.
*
While the afternoon was still hot, Penny and I pulled down our bags from the roof rack to hunt out our smartest clothes: hers a red cotton summer dress, me a crumpled shirt and my smart ‘party’ trousers, whose inner seams zip-zapped against each other as I walked. Penny had procured for herself and Von an invitation to a teatime reception that afternoon hosted by the Zagreb ‘Friends of the British Embassy’. Cally and I were to be their guests.
The four of us made quick progress through the nineteenth-century part of the city to the Ante Topic Mimara Museum. From outside, the building looked like a slightly less ugly Buckingham Palace. Inside, it felt like the sheer volume of space ennobled us, refined our vanned-up, penned-in sensibilities. We clipped through gilt passageways with the sensation that our interactions were now somehow more elevated and subtle.
When we reached the high-ceilinged gallery where people were drinking white wine on the British government coin, all the little circles of talk were closed to us, so we plucked bunches of brimming, top-heavy wine glasses and turned to the walls to look at the paintings. I gravitated towards a horrible picture labelled as a Rubens. A woman (Mary? Probably. Usually) was surrounded by cherubs packed into the painting like fat prawns.
‘I like this one,’ I offered and Penny looked sceptically at it before taking me to one of some oysters that I really did like. Although if asked why, I think the most honest response would have been that I liked it because it looked almost exactly like some oysters.
‘You know, these are mostly botch jobs and fakes.’
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 9