I climbed out for a walk and a flick through the pamphlet that accompanied my language tape. Slowly, early morning hardened and the town of Turanj solidified out of the haze. The place was utterly fucked.
The area had seen heavy fighting, as they said in news reports. It had seen heavy fighting – and heavy fighting had poked its fucking eyes out. As the buildings became visible, they formed the kind of landscape you might come across in a nightmare, logical for moments but when you tried to look at it all together, it made no sense. The walls of houses started out confident from their corners and then fell away in crazy jags, smashed-tooth edges, with buckled, red-tiled roofs lying broken-backed inside. All the glass was gone pretty much, some of it replaced by plastic sheets. Everywhere the houses’ render was pitted with scatters of inverted-nipple bullet marks.
I headed back to the van and tried to sleep.
Penny announced the death sentence.
‘Andrew? Andy – will you talk to the border guy? He’s here. Andy?’
As I pulled myself upright, Shannon offered me our collection of papers and shouted to the big man outside, flanked by two young women in dirty purple camouflage, ‘He’s coming. He’ll speak with you now.’
So this was it, my stumble of death. I don’t much like confrontation and I don’t much like authority in displeasure and I don’t much like being misunderstood, so as I high-stepped through the tangle of limbs in the back of the van and clambered over to the front-bench seat, I didn’t much like anything about my situation. And when Penny smiled and gave a heart-breakingly supportive jaunty wink, I had a moment of everything zooming into a sudden omnifocus. The world felt crushingly vivid –
Outside, wisps of grey dust swirl up from the rip in the pile of cement sacks stacked beside the checkpoint hut. The hut is a shipping container just the same as the one where I would eat lunch back at the building site. The Serb commander has one of those aggressively bald heads that makes you think of the skull below, the skim of skin a shoddy cover story for the facts beneath. He raises an eyebrow and I roll out my prepared phrase trying to machine-gun it off as confidently as possible.
‘Dobar dan. Govorite li engleski molim?’
He looks stern, says something incomprehensible in Serbo-Croat.
‘Can we talk in private, please?’ I say in Serbo-Croat, my other prepared phrase, and nod for us to talk away from the van. He does not say yes or no but looks at me. I say it again and he moves back maybe a centimetre.
I manage to get out of the van. I angle my body so my friends can’t see my mouth. I ask again if he speaks English and he says no. Then I simply say, ‘Sarajevo. Please?’ He says no. I say it again. He says lots of things I don’t understand, but ultimately, no, and marches back towards the window of the van.
As I follow him back Penny and the rest are looking out of the windows at me, their champion. The commander looks at me to deliver the bad news. I tell them he’s refusing to let us through. Shannon wants me to persuade him.
‘It’ll be no use,’ I explain. ‘He says – he says that the fighting in central Bosnia is too heavy.’ This might well be the sort of thing he would have said. I look at him and nod.
‘Tell him we’re a peaceful student project,’ Shannon says. I gird myself as he comes closer. I look to the floor – I try to flex my brain as if it is a muscle and some bit of knowledge might pop out of its folds. Help me, Celia Hawkesworth, help me! But there is nothing, so eventually I screw up my pride until it is nothing at all and make up a phrase: ‘Prokcsim estudentisch nu sommint.’
He looks, surprisingly, not at all bewildered and replies with a stream of Serb that is not comprehensible to me.
‘He, um, he says – this is not possible, unfortunately.’
‘Tell him we must go, it’s important,’ Penny calls over and I nod seriously and then, digging my fingernails into my palms, dive in, again with my ching-chong Serbo-Croat: ‘Istus muchovich jancka. Importo. Prosvich va.’
Remarkably, the commander doesn’t look like a man who is being insulted with a meaningless version of his own language, and I wonder if perhaps, by magic, I might be speaking Serbo-Croat? Hawkesworth, you witch!
His next stream of Serbo-Croat is still not comprehensible to me. So perhaps I can speak it, but I definitely can’t understand it. ‘It’s still a very firm no,’ I say. ‘He says we are insulting him a little.’ I throw that in for spice.
‘Show him the permissions again and say we insist.’
I proffer the permissions and he takes in the crests but doesn’t look interested or take hold of them.
‘Read them out to him!’
I fear that my madey-uppy language will not be fit for the task, so I say (though he has said nothing new), ‘We must go now, he says, or he will be forced to move us off the road.’
‘Tell him to go fuck himself!’ Sara says suddenly.
‘I’m not saying that.’
‘Fuck you!’ Sara shouts over as Shannon starts to wind up the window and the rest of the gang remonstrate with her.
‘Fuck you,’ the commander says back in English and I feel a twinge of annoyance at having become redundant in the exchange. He reaches his hand out and I fail to understand for a moment and then realise what he wants and pass him our bundle of passports and papers.
He spent a good twenty minutes in his shipping container with our passports.
‘What do you think he’s doing?’ Cally asked me, the resident expert on this gentleman and his temperament.
‘Probably burning them,’ I said darkly, knowledgeably.
When he returned to hand back the papers he said something slowly in Serbian. I looked at him. Then he said it again very, very slowly.
‘Something something something levo something something,’ he repeated and asked if I understood.
‘Da. Oui. Jah. Yes,’ I said.
One of the purple-camouflaged border-guard girls walked a BMX bike round to the front of the van then jumped on.
The van all looked at me. ‘Levo’ meant, I was pretty sure, left.
‘He says . . . go left.’
The road ahead was straight.
‘What does he mean?’ Penny asked.
‘I don’t know, Penny. I asked and he just said, “Go left.”’
‘Well, ask him again.’
‘. . . I did, he just – look, it’s a subtle thing – but I think too much . . . questioning might have a bad reaction.’ Penny looked at me and nodded. Not sceptical, but intrigued.
‘He says we must – go left.’
The girl soldier on the BMX kicked off and Shannon looked at me. ‘Shall we follow her?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said and looked straight ahead resolutely. Shannon started up the van. I had no idea if we were about to roll into a minefield or be shot up in a hail of bullets. Although, I consoled myself, in either of these eventualities, my friends would never discover I couldn’t in fact speak Serbo-Croat, which would be a bonus.
We followed the cyclist as she wobbled her weight from side to side, standing on the pedals for two hundred metres or so until the road forked. She peeled off to the left and gestured with her arm to the right-hand fork. Shannon looked at me. ‘Left,’ I said and she turned the wheel to continue following the bike. The militia cyclist looked over her shoulder, saw us still on her tail and skidded her bike to the ground. Shannon pulled sharply to a stop.
Quite slowly, so we could see exactly what was happening, the girl in purple undid the popper on her white leather waist holster and pulled out a handgun.
‘Ne levo, ne levo,’ she said as she came towards the window, waving the gun casually side to side, the barrel drooping under the weight of its own seriousness.
‘Left?’ I said in English.
‘Ne levo. Not left,’ she said.
Shannon went into reverse.
‘Ah, not left,’ I said, nodding sagely, like this was an easy mistake to make. ‘Not left.’
‘Not left?’ Shannon said, l
ooking at me.
‘Yeah, not left.’
‘Otherwise known as right?’
‘Yes. Not left, right. That’s correct. Right is correct,’ I said and looked ahead as though calm and concentration were necessary.
The bike guard watched Shannon pull back and then, catching the weapon a couple of times on the lip of her holster, put the gun away safely.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ asked Von. Cally was sitting in front of him and took one of his hands to comfort him and reassure herself.
Back where the road forked, we headed right. ‘Is this OK?’ Penny asked.
I looked out of the window at a bank of spindly green trees on the roadside, squinted my eyes, and pretended to consider something. ‘I think it’s OK,’ I said. Around the next corner, concrete motorway reservation barriers painted red and white and topped with barbed wire were positioned across the road, forcing us to turn into the car park of a small football club.
As we crossed the large rectangle of sandy dirt, a pair of Republic of Serb Krajina militia guys stopped their game of dice and pointed for us to park up behind the clubhouse. We could see the pitch beyond, lush and unused, the grass still watered and growing high; around it ran a scaffold rail and on one side a mini stand formed of two rows of benches under a little plastic lip of an awning, with the breeze-block club house behind.
We got out. It all looked fucking worrying to be honest. Football stadium and militia. Shannon and I tried to talk to the dice guys but they weren’t interested – they just stayed in their two plastic stacking chairs either side of an ammunition box and carried on their game. Von started to throw rocks loudly at a can. I do this sort of thing wherever I go, he was announcing: I’d play hopscotch in the torture chamber.
‘How long do we stay here?’ Cally asked me, brimming with a sense of her value and vulnerability.
‘As long as it takes,’ Shannon cut in. Tanned and fearless, she was the other way – meeting the world with a frankness which seemed to drain away the possibility of complicated horrors.
Then there was a rumble like an earth tremor and a six-lorry train of tanker wagons crossed the car park. The militia guys saluted them as they passed and got a nod from a pair of soldiers in red berets who travelled in a Cherokee jeep at the front of the convoy. Once they had passed, a civilian car appeared. I recognised it as one that had waited out the night at the checkpoint behind us. The owner, bearded and tense, sat in the back, while the baldy-headed commander from the checkpoint sat up front with one of the girls in purple, who drove across the car park unnecessarily fast. She and the commander got out.
‘Who speak Serbian?’ the girl asked us, in English. Shannon and Penny looked at me.
‘Er, I can,’ I said.
‘Tell what he says,’ she said to me, pointing at the commander. He looked at me sideways, slightly uncomfortable, having had, I guess, a certain amount of experience of my translation skills.
He said a long sentence in Serbian. I looked at the peace-play bunch. They stood in a line. I counted the number of weapons I could see. Four: one rifle each for the militia guys; a side arm for the young woman in purple and one for the commander. I looked at Penny. She looked at me expectantly, waiting for the translation. Were we being informed that we were about to be machine-gunned? Or being told to leave immediately? Or advance to Sarajevo and collect two hundred marks?
‘Say,’ the bald commander told me in English.
‘I cannot say,’ I said.
‘Say!’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Penny asked. ‘Is it bad?’
‘I – I don’t know. I can’t say.’
‘What? Say!’ the Serbian said.
‘I cannot say!’
‘Why can’t you say, Andy? Is it really bad?’
‘I can’t say. I’m – I’m not sure I can speak Serbian,’ I said, then stumbled a simplified version in Serbo-Croat.
‘What?’ Shannon said.
‘Andy?’ Penny asked.
‘Why you said it, you can say?’ the border-guard girl asked.
Why indeed I said it, I could say?
‘Look, everyone, I’m sorry but my Serbian is not as good as I thought. This is a difficult dialect.’
‘What do you mean?’ Shannon asked.
‘I’m sorry. It’s – gone,’ I said.
‘Where’s it – gone – Andy?’ Penny asked.
‘Fuck me! Andrew,’ Von said, almost triumphantly, thrilling to the drama of it all.
‘I don’t know. I’m sort of – looking, in my head, but I guess, I’ve not got as much there as I thought I did. I think lots has changed. Has lots changed?’ I asked the female guard in English. She looked at me blankly and I felt like a small fish flapping on the quayside, gulping down the terrible air while everyone watched me dying.
Just then the man in the back of the car said, ‘I speak some English.’ He was allowed out to come and join us. He had a thick, strong, brown bear’s body and a big face – a head like a medicine ball, with a poesy of wet pink lips hiding in the middle of his glossy beard. His eyes were small, deep black drill-holes in balsa wood, widely spaced above humps of cheek. The whole effect gave the sense of something secure to hold on to, though he must only have been in his mid-twenties.
Everyone looked at him as he said something to the guards in their own language and they spoke back.
‘They want to search your van,’ he explained.
The dice-playing militiamen were summoned to pull everything out from the back, and all the rucksacks down from the roof rack, and laid their haul on the dirt of the sand-and-gravel car park. They stuck lengths of bendy plastic into the bags of rice, jiggled the onion bags, smelt the bleach, even touched a finger onto a rag that they dipped in there. They took off the little metal inner caps from the big tins of ghee and tasted that too.
And while they did all this, the others gathered round me.
‘What is going on, Andrew?’ Sara asked in a calm, measured way that didn’t necessarily preclude moving on shortly to the twisting of a corkscrew into my eye.
‘I suppose I might have exaggerated? I didn’t think I had, but it looks like maybe I have? I wish I hadn’t. And I didn’t – in my mind. But it turns out, in my mouth – there isn’t as much Serbo-Croat as I thought was in my brain. I’m sorry. Maybe more will come back?’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Penny said and turned and walked away.
‘Penny!’
The commander said something to the bearded guy and he reported back:
‘They want the girls to go into the bathroom in the sports centre and the boys to walk back to the command post.’
‘Why?’ Shannon asked.
‘He says – for searching, but –’ and here he lowered his voice – ‘I don’t know if you should do this?’
‘Tell him we will be searched here. The women can do the women, the men the men,’ Shannon said. The commander acquiesced without acknowledging any acquiescence and we lined up on either side of the van.
‘I’m Juso,’ the bearded man said, as he lined up next to me.
‘Is this going to be OK, mate?’ Christian asked him.
‘They’re just country fucks, you know?’ Juso said.
‘Hey, Andrew!’ Von shouted as one of the dice players approached him, and chucked me a matchbox. I caught it one-handed and Von smiled at me and raised his eyebrows as if we were starting out on some fun routine we had previously outlined. There was no rattle to the box, and as soon as I poked it open and saw the wedge of cling film I knew it was the pills. By then the militia guy was nearly upon me, so as casually as I could, I tucked it into my waistband. This was not a good joke.
As the search came up the line towards me, I was almost willing to step forward, hand Von back the package and take the repercussions, just to get out of the conspiracy.
But when he finally reached me, the militiaman found the whole search beneath him. He ran his hands down my sides and round my back carelessly and fast, as
though frisking me too thoroughly would demean him.
‘I was just splitting the risk,’ Von said to me coolly afterwards when I marched up to him and asked what the fuck he thought he was doing with the pills.
‘What if they’d shot me?’
‘They’re not going to shoot us, Andrew, we’re from London.’
‘I’m not from London,’ I said.
‘Still, it’s all fine, so shush up and give me back my pills and stop having such a white-out, you lying little cunt.’
To shut me up, he gave me a bear hug and lifted me off the ground like we were having a joke about it all, but squeezing me hard, pressing his forearms uncomfortably into my kidneys. To my shame, once I was back on the ground I looked down, shook my head and laughed as if there was something amusing about this crazy caper and that all in all he’d been a pretty good guy.
‘I guess we got the pills in,’ I said, smiling insinuatingly.
‘Exactly.’ And he gave me the reassuring grin of a mobster taking his first monthly protection payment.
Just then Juso came over with his slow, rocking animal walk and reported that the commander ‘says you are not welcome to enter’. And with that, the commander waved gaily as he and the girl headed back on foot to their border post and the militia guys went back to their game of dice.
The sun beat down hard on the crappy car park. Our little purgatory. I was an outcast, a liar, and as I walked away from Von, looking for a friend, my companions all angled their backs and made out they hadn’t quite seen me.
Chapter 17
JUSO SQUATTED LOW, his great shoulders drawn up round his heavy head, and scratched in the dirt with a stick. He gave Shannon his assessment of the situation: we wouldn’t be going anywhere without handing over money and goods.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 12