An alley cat skipped across our path and Penny stopped and just pointed.
‘Fuck me. Yeah? A cat?’
‘Oh wow, right?’ I said.
‘Just after I told you – about my cat? Yeah?’
‘Yeah. OK, yeah, I see,’ I said.
Penny did tend to see a world bursting with signs and symbols, congruencies and connections. I liked that about her – that when you were in her company you passed through streets pulsing with meaning. As we watched the alley cat sniff at a rubbish bin she started to speak for a while about cats. Cats in ancient Egypt and witches and their familiars; shape-shifting; the cat through time; medieval mass cat burning and Christian belief; the domestic cat; the cats of Norse gods; lucky oriental cats; the Cheshire cat; T. S. Eliot and Catwoman; cats in Freud; and all her grandmother’s cats.
But to me, I’m afraid, it was still, basically, a cat. All the other stuff, it’s interesting, but is it, really, anything to do with an actual, everyday, shitting-in-the-litter-tray cat?
I wondered, as she talked more, if maybe human brains weren’t just too good. Over-spec; swollen to a capacity which once would have calculated how much forest you needed to clear to grow x amount of corn to make it through winter. But like a sci-fi super-computer, the unforeseen consequence of building such an impressive tool is that in its off hours it will tend to create such things as Catwoman and Christianity.
As we made it out of the gardens, and Penny started to tell me about Ceridwen the Welsh goddess and her white messenger cats, we heard a shout from a hotel terrace. ‘Celery!’ Von shouted in a sing-song voice. He was sitting with Cally, both of them slumped with lager.
‘Celery?’ I asked.
‘Celery, celery. If she don’t come, got to tickle her bum, with a lump of celery!’ he sang.
They’d been drinking hard the whole time we’d been at our dinner and now their thoughts and words looped out in that boring, lunging stream of consciousness where everything, for the drunk, is urgent and interconnected. We sat down with them. The girls huddled up for a conference as Von said into my ear, way too loud but, just, I think, inaudible to Cally and Penny, ‘She gave me a fucking handy in the lav.’
‘Oh – right, good,’ I said, trying to make out he might be talking art history or foreign policy.
‘She’s a slut. She wanted me to do it to her, stick it right in, in the bogs.’ Penny looked over at me enquiringly
‘Uh-huh. It was a lovely dinner, thank you,’ I said nice and loud.
Cally whispered and wobbled into Penny’s ear. Penny laughed and smiled and patted her friend’s hand in response, but when she looked over at me she dropped a delicious wink and I felt that this little coupling might represent a tactical advance for me. By handjobbing Penny’s brother, Cally had inadvertently cut off a supply route of intimacy, and I was more than ready to step in and airlift alternative emotional support.
‘She grabbed my fingers and tried to get them up her. I hardly touched her and she came like a fucking train,’ Von continued.
‘Uh-huh. OK,’ I said. Then, for the benefit of the group: ‘Oh, we talked a lot about, you know, the current situation, Lift and Strike and so on.’
‘Can you smell? Smell that.’ He waved his fingers under my nose and I tried to ease his hand down quickly and unobtrusively.
‘OK!’ I said and looked at Penny, hoping the credit card would cover the long, thin, ticker tape of a bill.
*
It was a hot night. While me and Von and Christian lay on foam pads underneath the plastic sheeting Onomatopoeic Bob had hooked up, the rest of them slept in the van with the doors open. What woke us at three or so, I thought, was the soft smack of some great squat pheasant-like bird landing on the awning, thudding the middle down like an unrisen cake. But soon another bird plopped, and another – the rigging wilted, and I realised they weren’t birds but house bricks, and the muddle of laughs I could hear was the gang of seven or eight lads lobbing them. They shouted loudly, pissed, and ready for a fight, ready for anything bad, but still ever so slightly embarrassed to be waking us. What they wanted was a confrontation, it seemed, not just to smash our heads in while we slept.
Von fronted it up like a caterpillar, standing in his sleeping bag, wanting to know what the fuck was going on? Christian and I started to retreat to the van immediately, tugging Von by the shoulders of his unbuttoned corduroy shirt. And once he was certain we would restrain him, he became ever more belligerent. ‘Fuck you!’ he shouted at them, in their light blue jeans, clean-shaven like a boy band.
We managed to pull him inside and rolled the side door shut hard, violently waking Shannon and Sara; their annoyance with us clambering in got wrapped up with surprise as the van began to rock. There were streetlamp-lit faces looking in and jeering, three or four on each side. The pitching of the van became alarming very quickly as the faces started to chant, ‘Bleiberg! Bleiberg! Bleiberg! Bleiberg! Bleiberg!’
‘What are they saying, Andy?’ Cally asked me, rearing up from one of the double seats.
‘Bleiberg! Bleiberg! Bleiberg!’ they shouted.
‘They’re not happy,’ I said. Everyone seemed to find this translation rather impressive.
‘Tell them to stop. Tell them, Andy!’ Shannon shouted.
It was an emergency situation. As everyone looked at me, I shouted back. ‘Laku noć, gospodine popovicu! Laku noć, gospodine popovicu!’
It sounded decent and I was pleased with my pronunciation. The rocking abated slightly. So I gave one more. ‘Laku noć, gospodine popovicu!’ I said commandingly. (Full translation: ‘Goodnight, Mr Popovich!’)
The phrase did seem to have a calming effect. Then I saw the pale face of our friend Vlado, slamming a fist against the window and shouting ‘Bad Blue Boys!’ in English with a snarl. I responded once more: ‘Laku noć, gospodine popovicu!’
‘Bad Blue Boys will fuck you up!’ one of Vlado’s companions added.
‘Mate, what the fuck, mate?’ Von asked, but Vlado had disappeared.
As we all peered out, like tourists, watching for what was going to happen next in the aquarium of the night, we saw he had in fact retreated just a few yards. He was handing his buddy a length of scaffolding pole and the kid started to run at us, a mini Lancelot.
‘Come on,’ said Onomatopoeic Bob, ‘there’s more of us – let’s get out!’
‘Let’s fucking have them!’ Von said.
‘No,’ Shannon said. ‘We’re not fighting.’
The scaffolding pole clanked into our side. That was enough for Onomatopoeic Bob, who went for the door handle to lead a countercharge as Von tooled up with a long-handled socket set.
‘No!’ said Shannon and pushed Onomatopoeic Bob away from the side door. ‘Fucking no, do you hear me? Anything, anything else. Show them what bullshit this is. Show them anything. Show them our asses. But no fighting.’
I was not sure about the wisdom, either tactically or in terms of the semiotics, of showing the aggressors our buttocks. But in the absence of another plan, the arse riposte became the working proposition.
Sara and Von unbuckled almost immediately. There were a lot of drawstrings around, pyjamas and so on, which made things easier, so on a rough count of three, as I once more shouted ‘Goodnight, Mr Popovich!’, between ten and sixteen buttocks hit the glass of the van and formed a force field of arse that we hoped would change the dynamic of the night.
It was impossible to know whether it was the massed bottoms, or a break while reinforcements were called in, but there was a definite lull in hostilities after the butt parade. We conferred quickly. The decision: to pull out. Me and Christian wrestled in the awning, and all the other stuff from outside, while the rest of the team prepared the van for the highway. And so, under enemy fire, we pulled out of Zagreb, heading for Bosnia through the bristling night.
Chapter 15
BEFORE WE LEFT, everyone had told us that if we did drive to Sarajevo, the wise route went through Split on the coas
t. Then you could enter Bosnia through the British United Nations Protection Force sector, and that – as well as feeling a little cosier, maybe offering a look at a Daily Mirror and a Marmite swap – meant not travelling across too much Bosnian-Serb territory. From there, you could get pretty close to Sarajevo through Croat and Bosnian government-controlled land before climbing to the city on ‘back roads’ over Mount Igman.
But that was thousands of miles of detour. So it didn’t take much for Penny to persuade the group we should follow Ronnie’s advice, ignore the war, trust the road map and drive directly at our aim, heading south for the uninviting blood blister of the Krajina.
‘It’s inside the Croatian nation,’ Christian explained to Von, ‘but Serbs have been there for centuries, in the majority. They got relocated. “Krajina” is border. Border between the East and the West. It was the bulwark, the groyne, to stop the Ottomans. This side Croatia and the Hapsburgs; the other, the Turks. The Serbs were the tough motherfuckers they shipped in to stop the Muslims coming for us in the night.’ Von nodded slowly but I don’t think anything was going in. ‘When Tudjman took Croatia independent, the Krajina Serbs got scared, and they started off this whole shooting match by carving out their own little statelet.’
‘What a fucking mess!’ Von said and closed his eyes to ensure the end of the history lesson.
The tyres hissed on the empty road. I thought of the kiss and for a moment my belly fluttered and a frog of excitement beat so hard in my mouth it was almost fit to pop, its innards all tubey and disgusting.
‘So in the Krajina, the Serbs . . .? Are the Krajina Serbs, are they – the, in this case . . .?’ Cally stumbled, searching, I think, for a sophisticated synonym for ‘the goodies’ – ‘Is their claim legitimate?’
‘Well, I don’t know?’ Christian said. ‘They got hyped up by Belgrade. But – you know, they think a million Serbs had their throats cut in World War Two by the Ustasha, so they’re worried. Since the end of ’91, they’ve had their own Republic of Serb Krajina with the UN holding the rope on the borders.’
The roads knotted up round the small city of Karlovac, where fat gas holders loomed above us. In the darkness we couldn’t see much else. The highway was empty mostly. Occasionally, we clocked our brother, sister vehicles: a white UN truck and then a convoy of Croatian army trucks – their speed through the moonlight making them feel ghostly, secret and sinister.
A little after four in the morning, we hit the first checkpoint into the Republic of Serb Krajina. The crossing outside the little town of Turanj, manned by Croat police. We stopped near a set of four fuel tanker trucks in a bleak road siding. Shannon parked and invited me up to the front row, ready to deploy my linguistic skills to argue us in. Once I’d clambered over to make a four, Sara watched disapprovingly the spot where my thigh couldn’t help meeting Shannon’s. I was careful to look back at Penny as if I was a cat getting the cream.
The border guards were two guys, one slim and wry-looking, the other guileless and grinning, popping up at our window like a border-guard dolphin. I waved cheerily, ‘Dobar dan!’ To my relief they answered in English.
‘How many bombs have you in your car?’ the wry one asked.
‘Ah?’ I asked.
‘How many bombs, how many pistols, how many guns and how many radar?”
‘Er – none,’ I said.
‘How many none?’
‘Zero – none,’ I said.
‘Good,’ the wry one said. ‘Now we look to see if you lie and for executions of lying.’ But when he pulled a finger-gun he smiled and I laughed and felt that I was kind of doing very decent translating.
Nevertheless, as Onomatopoeic Bob and I walked round to open up the back of the van, I did wonder how much there was between us and a summary execution. Would that make the papers? A front page? Or just a couple of paragraphs in the Independent, and maybe months later on a Sunday a photo of our parents holding up pictures of us as kids in a ‘Tragedy in Bosnia’ investigation special? ‘Could the authorities have done more to safeguard this idealistic group of youngsters?’ Yes. Yes, I thought, maybe they could have, actually?
The border cops looked at the sacks of rice and other provisions while I looked at Von, wondering where he had hidden his one hundred Ecstasy tablets.
‘To where are you going?’ the wry cop asked.
‘To – to Sarajevo,’ I said.
‘This is not possible,’ the other one said, still smiling broadly.
‘We have permissions,’ I said, and pulled out our sheaf of papers, none of which was a permission.
‘This is not a road for Sarajevo.’
‘We’re going this way, the quick way, through UNPROFOR North sector,’ I explained.
They looked at each other wearily; there was so much they could explain, but it was all too difficult. Instead, they checked our passports and just waved us through, saying they’d see us in an hour or two when we were sent back by the UN.
Fifty metres or so on, the next checkpoint was more homespun. Von sighed deeply: ‘Another one?’ Christian taunted him, saying by his estimate we’d have to make it through up to fourteen different national, regional, splinter-state, UN, militia and customs checkpoints before we even got close to Sarajevo.
There was no hut or shed at the roadside; the road was just blocked by a few trucks. There were some cars parked up with tents and chairs and dead oil-drum fires, and everywhere banners and painted slogans and the sahovnica chequered chessboard flag. It looked quite pleasant by the cars. Old men sat in their open hatchbacks, a Thermos of something warming and throaty getting passed around.
‘What’s going on?’ Penny asked. I peered at a banner dry-plastered across a lorry’s beak and pretended to read.
‘Croat refugees – pushed out from Serb Krajina, complaining. They want to be allowed back to their homes. This is a blockade, it’s unofficial.’
‘Well, let’s ignore it?’ Von said.
‘Yeah, but if they shoot at us, it doesn’t really matter if the bullets are official or unofficial when they go through you?’ Bob said. In the back, Von flapped his hand to us, making the sign for yap yap yap, oh fuck off.
An old woman with a clipboard approached us speaking German, which Christian knew, so he talked to her. To pass beyond this troop of grannies and grumpy dads it seemed they needed to be treated with a respect inversely proportional to that demanded by their appearance. They wanted to know why we had not faxed through in advance a request for a crossing permission?
‘Because we didn’t know you even existed, let alone that you might have a fax machine, which is probably “plugged in” to a gap in the plasterwork,’ Christian said to us quietly in English as he rustled for our papers.
The head border-granny was content to allow us to progress as long as we promised to telephone before we tried to come back through, and let her biro her initials in each of our passports. Assisted by two attack-grandpas in tracksuits and baseball caps, she also required the freedom to poke our rice sacks with an umbrella and unscrew the ghee lids to sniff at the contents. But when she encountered the tin seals under the plastic screw tops, she didn’t make us break them. A certain level of inconvenience had to be generated in honour of the war, it seemed, but it wasn’t like they wanted to be dicks about it.
Next up, on the very edge of town, was the UN, the peacekeeping insulation around the disputed Serb Krajina. We cantered towards them, a colt growing cocky at the jumps. A group of Polish peacekeepers manned the barrier. A disused garage, the two wrecked pumps sticking up like tombstones under the canopy shelter, was home to a cluster of armoured personnel carriers and a Portakabin border office. The Poles also cast doubt on our route, smiling laconically and offering the girls cigarettes while an officer informed us briskly, in good English, that we were absolutely forbidden entry. It was too late; we needed UN-accredited identity cards; it was the wrong road; our vehicle was not suitable; it could lose him his job. Goodnight, goodbye, go home.
&
nbsp; At this point, where I would have readied the van for a U-turn, Penny bolstered us with her trump card: her sense of metropolitan entitlement. She poked her head forward to shout after the officer that of course we must be let in. He said no again, and she said yes again. His blank refusal was so irritating to her that she extemporised a false version of history so forcefully she sounded like she believed it herself. We had gone to the barracks on Ilica – of course we had. We had attended a briefing with the Danish Officer, ‘Petersboden’, who had assured us, himself, in precise terms, that while our UN passes were in the process of being issued, we would not be prevented from crossing in the meantime.
Shannon waved our sheaf of papers. Penny unfolded the Dirty Ron letter to its full extent and pointed at the United Kingdom coat of arms and mentioned Douglas Hurd and NATO and said she would be making calls about how we had been treated.
The officer went back to the Portakabin. Maybe he made some calls, or maybe he adjusted his balls and read the paper, but at some point he made a calculation and a soldier was sent out to us, nodding us through with a head movement so subtle it hardly happened.
We then crossed into a no-man’s-land. The road trundled over a maze of little streams and rivers that glistened black and silver in the dark. We had left Croatia proper and were heading for the Republic of Serb Krajina, the little puppet nation kicking inside its host state like the world’s most unfriendly foetus. In the van, everything was tight and still. We were going in, to meet the Serbs, the butchers of Bosnia and the tormenters of Sarajevo, and we carried in all of us this feeling that when we hit their checkpoint we’d be looking at something evil. But if I could stand up to them, if I could speak to them, if I could just somehow get us through, I felt surely Penny might kiss me again, and then again and again and perhaps, after a while, it would be rude for her to stop, and she’d be mine.
Chapter 16
THE ARC LIGHTS at the checkpoint into the Republic were intensely bright. Two cars waited ahead of us, engines off, queuing before a closed barrier gate. The first car contained an EU monitor from Denmark. He told us he’d been there since 6 p.m., that there were only two soldiers guarding the post and everyone was going to have to wait till the morning when ‘the commander’ returned. Along the side of the road there ran a thin marker-wire from which, at irregular intervals, hung skull and crossbones signs and UN warnings in many languages of landmines beyond.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 11