Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  ‘Are we going to the front?’ I asked Penny, and then again, too quietly, the man in the cardigan.

  ‘Are we going to the front?’ Penny asked me.

  ‘I think we are going towards the front,’ I said.

  ‘Hamdo?’ the man in the cardigan asked.

  ‘Hamdo Abdic,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Hamdo,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think Hamdo will be at the front?’ Penny asked.

  ‘Are you OK going to the front?’ I asked her.

  ‘No,’ she said but smiled yes.

  ‘That’s exactly how I feel,’ I said and I took her hand and she gave a companionable squeeze, and it felt natural and good. But when the moment came for a break and she started to withdraw, I gave an additional clutch and left my hand there damp around hers for what felt just a little too long.

  It was a short drive till we were well past the outskirts and into a reedy suburb that petered out to nothing, a couple of premises bombed down to their foundations by direct hits. Then, past a barren rural crossroads, snuggling behind a mini-escarpment, was a farmhouse complex where, in a little three-sided courtyard, men in fatigues hung around smoking.

  Some of the outbuildings looked historic – thick walls swelled from the ground; foundations of the earth, almost. The farmhouse itself was from the eighties, optimistic and open. Then, running down one side, there were newer, airy, metal-framed barns and stores. More men sat in these, on iron stuff, old machinery and boxes of military materials.

  ‘Wait? Waiting?’ I asked our driver.

  ‘Attendu?’ Penny tried.

  Our driver pointed for us to head into the house. We went up the couple of steps to the door, towards men who might or might not have been guards. I held the briefcase up in front of me like the Chancellor of the Exchequer before he goes to deliver the Budget.

  ‘Hamdo Abdic? Babo? English. Peace?’ I said. We smiled around us and a guy came out, nodded to our driver, and motioned for us to follow him into the farmhouse.

  The structure of the place had been badly shaken. There were cracks in the plasterwork spidering out from every corner. Some farmer’s wife would be crying at what they’d done to her place. The carpet was still fresh and cream-coloured along the skirting board, but down the central portion it had become as browned and beaten as an outdoor path.

  In the big back kitchen, where I’d anticipated men sticking pins in maps, there was actually an air of lassitude. As soon as we entered the room, the small man sitting at the head of the table had taken us in, and was already looking at his colleagues to see what they made of us, and then back to us to ascertain what we thought of the scene he presided over – all in the time it took for us to settle at the doorway. He had a long earnest face and, while his adjunct or staff officer came to greet us, he stayed pointedly sitting in his chair, leg on table, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘We bring this from Fikret Abdic – from Babo – for Hamdo Abdic,’ I said.

  The man at the head of the table extended a finger up his nose rather elegantly, picked away at something in there and then mumbled something which made all his staff laugh. Penny and I smiled too, though so far as we knew he might have been saying ‘Take them to the limepit and shoot them in the eyes’.

  ‘Thank you, Hamdo says thank you,’ the adjunct said. He came over to take the case from me and laid it on the table. I felt I ought to say something, at this point. An address from the Peoples of the United Kingdom, or a soliloquy on the virtues of the fighting man. But I just nodded to Hamdo, whose long grey face stayed granite-still until he said something to the adjunct.

  ‘You have brought supplies also?’ the adjunct asked Penny.

  ‘Yes – well, brought supplies but they were – requisitioned, taken, by guards in the Krajina and in Velika Kladusa. But we will be performing a play, to promote the peace. As soon as possible, and we hope you may be entertained by it.’

  The adjunct translated.

  ‘Porno?’ Hamdo asked in English, to big laughs.

  ‘No, it is not porno,’ I said, forced to be the straight man.

  ‘Thank you. I am joking. Tell Babo we have received what he sends,’ Hamdo said via the translator and looked me in the eye.

  ‘Good. Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ Hamdo said and opened his arm to the doorway.

  As we were walking back to our car, I imagined the walls of the farmhouse blowing apart behind us as we left, scattering the yard with plaster and shredded skin, organ blast and bone. Then, my only defence against court martial, torture as a spy, would be my own insignificance. You can’t hang a pawn – our necks are too shiny and slim. My head rushed and my ears filled with static; I put my hand on Penny’s arm to halt her and turned round.

  ‘I’m worried,’ I said, heading back into the room. ‘I apologise, but I am worried it might actually be a bomb.’

  My reappearance and the word ‘bomb’, easily translatable, pulled the tension taut and a couple of pistols twitched in my direction. There was a moment of consideration and then some low laughter after Hamdo said something. Then he looked at me, clicked the case open, and said, via the translator, ‘It is not a bomb. You can go. It is good.’

  I apologised again and Penny and I retreated, while he carried on picking his nose and began to pull stacks of big-denomination Deutschmarks out from the case and piled them onto a stool at his side.

  Chapter 29

  ‘I THINK IT’S good we mentioned it, anyway,’ I said as we were driven back towards Bihac.

  ‘Why is he sending money, do you think?’ Penny said.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s interesting, isn’t it?’

  Before she could answer the whole plain of earth before us jumped – the thin flesh of soil and rock leapt up before bouncing back down to the ground beneath.

  My ears rang. The need for physical safety, for shelter, to ball up, felt violently pressing, unstoppable, but before we knew what had happened – was happening – our driver had pulled up sharply and, following his lead, we all ran fast from the jeep to shelter within the walls of a broken building.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Was that?’ Penny said.

  ‘Bomba,’ said our driver.

  ‘Artillery?’ Penny said.

  ‘Artillery,’ I repeated.

  I looked at the wobbly single skin of red brick around us. It was a derelict pumping station, all smashed up now. The walls looked laughably insubstantial, like children’s building blocks, and I imagined a shell popping through, leaving a ragged circle, and then turning us all ‘inside out’. There was another pop, a whistle, then the thud of impact and again that bounce of the land like we were huddled near the rim of a vast trampoline. My chest vibrated like an oil drum thumped with a lump hammer. The blast resonated deep and fearful, taking you at once back to Passchendaele and forward to death. It was horrible. And the second after it was somewhat over, it happened again and I realised that it was possible for this to go on for more than the minute – or maximum two – I thought my nerves could survive. Artillery bombardments. What did I know about artillery bombardments? I thought maybe I could remember TV historians talking of hours or days of firing. But when? Was that the exception? Or the rule? I desperately wanted facts. Was that possible – days? Was that continuous? At what rate of pause between the shells? How incredibly foolish not to have made a precise note of such information at any point in my life.

  Penny’s cheek was pressed to the earth and I watched intently as a woodlouse crawled up into the clean tangle of braids piled on top of her head, tied and intermingled with a scarf. I tried to blink it away, but couldn’t help imagining for a second the woodlouse crawling on round the back – and I saw us both dead, her head falling away behind like wet cake as the grey beetle marched on.

  But for now we were both intact and she looked into my eyes ardently, like there was something urgent we needed to communicate to one another that might save us.

  ‘
Are you OK?’ I said, my voice muffled through a temporary deafness so that I seemed to be far from myself.

  ‘Yes. Are you?’

  There was another pop and whistle and I was grasping at something I thought I knew, something clever. Was it that the sound of the shell was . . . would reach us after . . . the impact, or was that impossible? We would in fact, we couldn’t be dead, or we’d be dead before we knew it, before we heard it. Therefore, if we were hearing them coming, that meant, we were – definitely not dead?

  ‘It’s OK. I think, if we can hear them . . . I think, if we can hear them. We’re OK?’ I explained to Penny.

  ‘OK?’ she said. ‘What?’

  The awesome thud came in again and made the whole horizon quiver.

  I started again: shells must travel faster than sound – surely? And sound travels more slowly than light so . . . didn’t that mean that it was always the previous shell I was hearing when the land shook? I was confused. It seemed suddenly a terrible indignity to die at the hands of a shell I didn’t even understand.

  There was a lull of a minute or two between explosions. I looked at my fingernails, ragged around the edges although I didn’t remember biting them.

  ‘Should we go?’ Penny shouted to the driver, who was leaning with just the small of his back against a wall, his face bent between his knees. But then another of the awful booms pumped the earth.

  I found myself praying to God.

  And as I did, there was a second lull. It lasted a minute. Then another. Then the time since the last shell was longer than the interval between any previous two shells. The rhythm was broken, and after three or four minutes our driver got up and brushed himself down like this was nothing much at all and walked back towards the jeep, eventually looking back at us. We hurried not to be left behind.

  ‘Fuck. Are you OK?’ Penny asked.

  My ears still rang and I’d drawn blood where I’d bitten at the inside of my lip, but . . . ‘Yes.’ Yes, I was basically OK.

  When we reached the jeep and were about to climb in, I touched Penny’s waist so she turned and I looked into her eyes and said: ‘If I should die, think only this of me.’ She smiled wanly and I paused for a beat and then said: ‘That I was fucking amazing.’ She laughed and I laughed too and we couldn’t stop laughing as we took off again at speed.

  I felt a mini-wave of elation and wondered if maybe I did in fact believe in God? Or was I just another of these pricks God must know so well who tend to turn up during an artillery attack? Well, officially, the headline was, for the purposes of discussion and inquiry, that I was an agnostic. But secretly, I reckoned I thought two things. First, that there definitely wasn’t a God. That all the tomes of Victorian scriptural analysis, the volumes of sermons, the theological debates of a thousand years were all nothing but the memory of pub talk about a shaggy dog story – as bonfireable as all the Communist doctrinal disputes of the past hundred years. All chaff. Product of a mass delusion, lies too big to question for fear of what lay behind the curtain.

  But the second thing I felt deeply, and so secretly I could hardly admit it to myself, was that there most certainly was a God. I mean, on no level did I ‘think’ this. It made no sense. But if you could X-ray my essence, nestling in my skull or breast or above my gut, there was the conviction that we didn’t just move as atoms through air; there was something denser around us that made us more important than lottery balls bobbling on the under-blast. This thing, this wrap-around of importance, I didn’t call God, and it had no intention, but it noticed. It noticed me in particular. If I had to characterise it grossly it would be: somebody who was keeping score.

  After all, humanism and atheism, so far as I had made out, posited that we could keep score ourselves. That in our bones we know the rules of the game. And I bought that. You don’t have to be a pope to know not to kick a baby. But also, I knew that some of the human scorebooks kept false accounts. That sometimes wins were recorded that weren’t wins. And I knew there was a truth beyond this and I felt that the power of that knowledge went beyond the subjective. Essentially, I think I believed there was a God because I knew that Oliver Stone’s 1991 production JFK was bullshit and this knowledge could not be countermanded by claiming it was a subjective view. I knew it was an absolute truth. And if that was so, who was keeping the record? Well, I was afraid, it probably had to be some form of that whiskery old bastard, ‘God’.

  Our driver offered us a hipflask. I took a swig and coughed and so did Penny.

  ‘Slivovitz?’ Penny said.

  The driver shrugged like we were in the right area. He drank and we drank and the flask kept on going round in a triangular circle till we had polished it off. The spirit rasped and I could feel in distinct increments the change in my physiology as the alcohol radiated out, unmediated by my empty tummy, forcing the blood tighter in its vessels, everything plumping and quickening around us as we began to chatter loudly like children.

  ‘Artillery attack. This is exactly what my dad thought would happen to me!’

  ‘Disappointingly, from his point of view, you made it through,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah. If I’d got killed he’d be a bit sad, but overall I think the satisfaction of being proved right would outweigh it.’

  ‘At your funeral they could do an order of service with a picture of you on the front with “Our Stupid Daughter” underneath. In a sad, curly font.’

  She laughed and I laughed and then we saw a tractor that had got turned over at a funny angle by a shell blast so that it teetered against a tree trunk and we laughed at that too. We were pretty close, sitting there on the back seat as we bounced back into town over the Una, deep blue-green, flushed with health and a powerful look of good about it.

  ‘What are you going to do when we get back?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘You should come to London.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Maybe I should. But I wouldn’t know what to do.’

  ‘I don’t know, someone like you would find something to do,’ she said.

  The driver stopped near a Swiss-cheesed tower block on the edge of the old town, where, shadowed by another, lower, residential block, there was a cafe with a Coca-Cola awning still open for business.

  ‘OK?’ he said and gave us half a glance of invitation. We followed him in, past the empty front bar and down a corridor.

  In the back room the shy filament bulbs above the pool table were overwhelmed by the blare of the fluorescent tubes from the roof, drowning the soft light out with the hard. A man in an Adidas tracksuit played a man in jeans and a thin green V-neck with drips of oil down at the belly. The balls clacked like gunshots and then got swallowed by the wide accepting mouths of the pockets. You had the sense that at any moment a man might come in and announce that the player who pocketed the black would take the loser to the outside toilets and cut his throat and no one would raise an objection or a note of surprise.

  We ordered beer for ourselves and our driver and he raised his heavy dimpled litre stein in thanks. Penny and I revelled in the ugliness of the place and talked about the artillery bombardment and Hamdo, while our driver retreated to sit in a corner with a couple of other men and smoke cigarettes with determined, almost professional, focus.

  Penny was a little high on lager and survival and she started to tell me the story of how she had once got drunk at one of her father’s lobbying receptions and ended up being sent to a pub across the way from the National Portrait Gallery to buy a gin and tonic for the prime minister, because that was what he actually preferred over the champagne on offer.

  I laughed and said it sounded ‘mad’ and she said she’d dribbled a glob of saliva into his drink as she brought it back, as a protest about Bosnia and the Criminal Justice Act. I raised my eyebrows and we clinked glasses and I said, ‘Good on you!’ but I didn’t believe her. It was, after all, a story she’d told me before, but without the spit. And the carelessness of the repetition made me sad. I�
�d never have told her the same story twice. I could remember every one of our interactions. I could have sketched on a graph, I reckoned, pretty much each one and whether it was a step forward or back, or what kind of sideways it took the dance I hoped we were engaged in.

  Word must have leached out about where we were drinking because in the end Bev and the rest of the gang ended up there. I cheered each new arrival, it seeming magical and magnificent that we were reunited.

  Penny and I were quite a few units of alcohol ahead of the others. And as the rounds mounted up, we raced further and further ahead until blinking caused me mini head spins and I preferred it when the conversation rolled around me without requiring any input. I was a hero in my own mind, back from the killing fields, with a shifted understanding of mortality. But when asked what had happened to us on our trip, it turned out the best expression I could find to describe my new understanding of the universe and our place within it was to say, ‘It was so fucking scary I thought I was going to shit.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Sounds scary,’ Sara said and then announced to Penny and me: ‘So – we have a performance space. It is not a beautiful space. It is not an ideal space, but we have a space.’ Apparently, the head of the Bihac municipal council had kept Shannon and the others waiting for an hour and a half outside his office, but when he made time he was supportive enough of the ‘Peace War’ to find a space and accepted Shannon’s invitation to attend the command performance.

  He had asked when the first performance could be ready and Shannon, Sara said, had ‘looked at me and said, “Tomorrow?” and I was about to say, “Fuck no!” when he said, “Very well, tomorrow.” So it looks like it’s tomorrow.’

  We toasted the impossibility of it all with more tall beers and chasers. Not seeing that they were in part ironical, Bev clashed his big lager glass heartily for the toasts and then homed in on Penny and me and Christian, scraping a wooden chair from a distant table, like more incoming ordinance, and spilling out to Penny what was on his mind. ‘You don’t see many of your lot here, do you? Have you seen any others?’