Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  ‘Why do the Serbs want this shithole anyway?’ Von asked as he opened a fresh pack of Drinas and offered them around. Though nauseous, I took one. Everyone prized cigarettes so highly in the enclave it felt like a dishonour to the situation not to always want another.

  ‘There is a railway line south of the Una,’ Elsa said. ‘If the Serbs take that they have a rail line that runs from Belgrade via Banja Luka to Knin, in Serb Krajina. It makes Greater Serbia real.’

  Yves showed us the line the Serbs wanted to push to on a map.

  ‘I think the 5th could push them back if it wasn’t for the Autonomous Province,’ Yves said. ‘That guy, Abdic. Babo.’

  ‘He’s all right. He’s a decent bloke,’ Bev said.

  ‘Babo was encouraged by Lord Owen to think he should be president. But when that didn’t work, he’s been made a little king,’ Yves said. ‘He’s a whore. I think now, these little pockets, that’s the idea. The big powers, they want it all over with. Security. So they like leaving us in these places. These little spots that the Serbs can squeeze. They only like the big countries, the negotiators. The proper countries, ones who can march an army past a podium.’

  ‘Yeah, well, he’s keeping bread in their mouths,’ Bev said.

  Yves nodded, considering the international position deeply. ‘Is it true that the Inspiral Carpets will split?’ he asked me.

  ‘Er – I don’t know. That’s a good question?’

  Von exhaled heavily and sat on Elsa’s chair, as she left to phone through the morning’s conflict report. When she returned, Von pretended to offer her back her seat, though he didn’t rise, and when she demurred, he stayed sitting there guiltlessly as Yves continued to count the bullets and I rested my back against the sandbags.

  Von tipped back on the chair and wobbled smoothly at the apex, rolling his body back and forth to keep his balance. He always moved smoothly, I thought – all oiled up with the condensed sweat of the toil of men and women going generations back in breweries and brickworks, foundries and plantations. All that labour expended and gathered up, caught and banked, making him secure in the unconscious sense that everything would, basically, always be all right.

  Through a slit in the sandbags of the bunker he watched the students who were gathering outside the other functioning cafe in town, a coffee and pizza place across the way.

  ‘Look at them. Fucking look at them, Andrew,’ said Von.

  ‘I know.’ There were a number of boys and young women. One girl pulled the scarf from her friend. They were both very beautiful with dark hair and a coltish wobble to them as they skirted their pack, laughing.

  Von made a groan of physical pain and leaned into my ear.

  ‘If I wanted one of them. If I really wanted to, I reckon I could do one, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Money, London, jokes. I reckon I could probably get a sucker off any of them.’ He watched for a while again. ‘If I needed to.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful sentiment,’ I said. But it made me sad in the stomach. If he focused all his social, financial and cultural capital on one Balkan girl, I reckoned he might be right.

  Eventually, word came down that the second dress rehearsal had reassured everyone considerably – the hall was now being vacated to allow Onomatopoeic Bob to make adjustments to the performance space, while some of the cast ran lines. I said farewell to our new friends and went with Von to eat dry pastries and drink carbonated drinks in the hotel bar, until, slowly, I started to feel merely unwell.

  Chapter 31

  THE ROOM WAS full for our performance. There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in the Safe Area. Television output was mostly war news, propaganda from Belgrade, shaky stuff out of Sarajevo and the US soap opera Santa Barbara. The Three Amigos had been cancelled due to the increased artillery attacks.

  Our show was an event, in a town where there were many dramatic events these days, but not so many you would want to attend. As the company assembled behind the curtain and peeked excitedly out, there must have been four or five hundred people by 8 p.m., sitting cross-legged on the floor around the circular stage Onomatopoeic Bob had laid out.

  Nervous and jiggling, we regarded our audience like a primary-school class before a nativity play. They had dressed smartly for us. Not in jackets and ties or dresses, but in their modest best jumpers, fresh jeans, shirts. Many of the women in skirts sat side-saddle, both legs to one side. There were students too, and a few more countryish types, looking bored before we had even begun, examining the interesting facts of the room, its height, the fabrics of the curtains. Then there was the municipal bureaucracy, the mayor, his deputy and the clerks and officials from the town council building, and a large number, maybe fifty or so, from the French UN garrison plus the EU and UN monitors (including Yves and Elsa), UNICEF officials and some Red Cross folk.

  We were impressed with ourselves, as we looked through the curtain; and I was impressed with Shannon. Whatever else might go wrong from here on in – and there was lots that could – at least the night wasn’t going to be a damp squib or a wet fart. They were giving us their attention. I looked at Cally and Sara, both tense-lipped, scared that they would not let the brilliance they knew was within them burst forth. For myself, I feared more a disjuncture between expectation and quality. That the audience were prepared for a feast and we were about to roll out a single raisin. Penny clicked her fingers alternately, noiselessly, very fast.

  ‘Do you think it’ll be OK?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yeah. I mean, if we have a failure – it’s going to be on quite a large scale, so that’s – really – good?’ She was too busy worrying to smile but she nodded at the joke. ‘Do you think it’ll be OK?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yeah. I do. I think it’s a good play,’ she said.

  ‘It is a good play. It is a good play. It is,’ I said. ‘I hope.’

  The deputy mayor appeared. He was a tall, pale, long tree trunk of a man, a paper birch whose two knots for eyes were surrounded by flaking eczema skin. He told Shannon and Sara that they were about to shut the doors and we could begin, but Sara had a point to raise. ‘Excuse me, but why aren’t there more soldiers here?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ the deputy mayor said.

  ‘We were expecting and hoping for more soldiers.’

  ‘The soldiers are – fighting,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Sara said. ‘This is to stop them.’

  ‘Well, not necessarily, simply –’ Penny tried to interject.

  ‘If they stop fighting, the Serbs will kill us,’ the deputy mayor said.

  ‘Well. We can’t know that for sure,’ Sara said. ‘And, we’ll do our play for them too. And – also, will they, do you know that really?’

  ‘It’s true, it’s possible they might not,’ the deputy mayor said generously.

  ‘Well, there you go.’

  ‘There are some soldiers here, some who are not at the front?’ he offered.

  ‘Oh, OK, there are some here. Well, that’s good,’ said Sara.

  There was a disturbance nearby and the deputy mayor shifted to give due deference to the new centre of the room. He made a great fuss of introducing Shannon and then, for some reason, Von to Hamdo Abdic. Atif Dudakovic – the commander of the 5th Corps in Bihac, the supreme commander of the enclave – could not be there, Hamdo explained, but he was glad to represent him here and send his good wishes.

  His long cliff of a face was hard to crack. His eyes moved from within it slow and penetrating, like search lights seeking out something he’d glimpsed in you. Tonight he wore full battledress and a green army beret with the blue Bosnian crest on the front. When he spotted me he strode over and hugged me tight, as though we’d held out for a week together against a regiment of Chetniks, with nothing but a box of matches and a Ghurkha knife.

  ‘Good day,’ I said, for some reason, as he gave me a wrist-clenching handshake.

  He repeated ‘
Good day’ back to me, meaningfully, like this was what the English said, and I went on to say I hoped he would like the play. Then Shannon started to try to say something, but Hamdo, with a politician’s nose for commanding a room, raised his hand, thanked us for coming and said he hoped we would tell our families, our friends and our politicians what life was like in Bihac. Then he sent his long finger back up his nose on another of its exploratory missions and he and the deputy mayor retreated.

  Shannon breathed in deeply, kissed her hands to her lips and threw her love out at us as we formed up behind the curtain. Then, just as we were about to walk out, six people carrying guitars came and sat on the stage.

  A pulse of concern ran through the troupe. Had we got everything terribly wrong? Had we been hijacked? Who were they and what was going on? All our collective pre-play anxiety was funnelled into the possibility that we were somehow not expected in the way we understood.

  Sara nipped out and came back with the news, whispered round, that we were invited to go out and stand on the stage. Unsure if we were audience or show, we filed out and took our places standing uncomfortably behind the group of guitar players, who sat smiling over their shoulders at us from the lip of the stage. They were amateurs, Sara hissed, who had been taught by a local music teacher in the long hours of the siege and would now perform a song of welcome for us.

  They had been learning for many months, and when they started to strum it was evident right away that they were awful. Their teacher winced as they picked out the chords to the introduction to ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed. The singer was a very serious small woman in her fifties with curly grey hair cropped tight around her head. To her side was a thin bald professorial figure in a brown, wide-lapelled early-eighties suit. Then a guy who might have been a groovy shop steward in T-shirt and jeans and beside him a young woman with long dark hair and glasses who smiled to herself and rolled her eyes appealingly at her own mistakes.

  They did the lyrics in English, speak-singing them out phonetically. My eyes prickled with tears. Beautiful music poorly played, common endeavour, shared humanity, it was all too much for my lovelorn state: these were my people. The derided, unglamorous provincial lower-middle classes. The good people who put bird feed on the bird table, and I bit my lip hard to try to stop tears from coming.

  When their song was over, the guitarists nodded demurely at us and departed. From there we had to busk it, because we had expected to come out from behind the curtains in a line – ‘the spear of truth’, Christian had called it, not quite sarcastically.

  After a good deal of whispering and shuffling and with eyeballed rebukes rebounding around, we formed our line, with Shannon at the head. Then, as we walked down the steps from the stage into the circle, along a path marked by Onomatopoeic Bob with the ‘detritus of conflict’ – scrunched tinfoil and old cola cans – unexpectedly Shannon began to intone a speech.

  ‘We dedicate this play, the peace play, The Summer House, to the hope that one day the armies of the West, the great forces of the world, will shift their focus from shadow-boxing a Russian bear who only now exists in their minds, and become an army of light. An army of the powerless and the persecuted. An army that will chase from the stage the murderers and the dictators and the warmongers. And when these armies march for good, all will fall before them. Because the people of the world will spill their hearts in support!’

  We made it to the centre of the stage circle and held hands and hummed and then, when we had created a sufficiently portentous atmosphere, Simon threw us into black.

  *

  When the lights came up again Shannon and Sara had become good peasant women making bread in the kitchen together and singing a made-up peasant song based on the tune to a caravan show-room advertisement I remembered from Central Television in the mid 1980s.

  I guessed, as I looked around, that a lucky 50 per cent or so had no conception of what was going on. They seemed, however, not unhappy to see these youngsters perform for them. A quarter of the audience appeared intrigued, like they were just about following the simple words of the play. And then there was a dreaded final quarter, I reckoned, who could understand perfectly every single word.

  The domestic pre-war scenes progressed without laughs or engagement, as I dug the nails into the palms of my hands and felt black bituminous horror push through my veins like bad mercury rising. Anything, anything would have been better than this. A Noël Coward, an Ayckbourn, a Shakespeare, Hobson’s Choice, a selection of misremembered Python sketches – anything but this.

  I had many least favourite bits. Every time anyone said ‘Serb’, ‘Croat’ or ‘Muslim’ I shivered away from myself and closed my eyes like a child who imagines if he can’t see, then maybe he can’t be seen. Urgh. The hideous, galumphing naming of things! The production suddenly appeared to me as a great combine harvester advancing slowly through a field where stalks of truth, or subtlety, were growing. And we were threshing them all, leaving a swathe of stubbly nothing behind.

  Soon enough, it was time for me to make my entrance as a swaggering drunk ‘Serb’. Since the first rehearsals, Penny and I had been working on a jaw-jutting Cro-Magnon look to imitate the savagery of the men we believed we were portraying. Our antics initially provoked generous laughs. It looked like we might be the comic relief. But then we started to smash up the pretend rooms. I tried not to catch the eye of any single audience member as I self-consciously lumbered about, sweeping things from tables, pretending to urinate on a bed, enacting to the people around me a thinly imagined version of their own nightmares. After a degree of pretend destruction, Penny and I high-fived (was that something the Serbs did? Who knew? Who cared?) and departed the scene to sit on the stage, in character, miming ruffian chat.

  Von was now called upon to dump quite lengthy wedges of exposition as a ‘professor’ who teased out the subtleties of the current situation in Bosnia–Herzegovina. Then, with a rapid flickering at the light switches, the summer house was bombed. There was a great deal of weeping, and the womenfolk formed into two warring factions with their menfolk, as Penny and I, now joined by Von, harassed and attacked them in a display of general savagery. To show even-handedness Von wore the Croat flag on a shoulder flash, me the Serb, and Penny wore none. We had discussed for a while whether she should wear an Islamic or Bosnian state signifier, but that seemed too much – so she became an all-purpose receptacle for malevolence. Time moved on. Von and I performed more smashing actions, about which we laughed raucously. Ha ha ha ha ha!

  It was felt unseemly for Von or me to pretend to do a sexual assault, so that was left to Penny, which caused a ripple of confused interest as she pushed Shannon down to the floor and hip-thrusted at her while swigging from a canteen.

  Then, finally, the play began – like a small failed business – to come to its undramatic end. The dead, Shannon and Sara, were buried. Von marched around with his rifle over his shoulder (a real rifle since that was easier to come by than a replica), and we formed a circle to demonstrate how sustaining common humanity could be in the hour of need. ‘We are a village, you shall not break us!’ we shouted at the end. A conclusion not entirely demonstrated by the action that had preceded it.

  Simon slightly mistimed the blackout, so for a second or two we all stood there, our eyes anxiously flicking over to him before we disappeared. It was not good. Still, it did at least provide a definitive end.

  The applause was long and loud and we made six or seven bows before retreating up to the stage and back behind the curtain.

  Pathetically, my dead certainty that this was the worst piece of theatre ever conceived began to ebb almost as soon as I was behind the curtain. Everyone circled round. Onomatopoeic Bob was sweaty and exuberant. Christian shook my hand. We back-slapped and hugged, laughing away the little mistakes we’d made, mistimed cues, paraphrases, ad libs. Had the audience not clapped? Was Penny not smiling broadly at me? Did it not feel pretty good? The first two or three times I said ‘That was great, you w
ere brilliant’ I was certainly lying, seeking out from someone around me a hint that they, like me, had been so deeply embarrassed by the whole abomination that they could have cracked walnuts with the power of their clenching buttocks. But then there was a middle period, an interregnum, where I was acting, but buoyed, and the feeling like a toddler was sitting on my chest started to lift. By the time Shannon hugged me, holding me tight and swaying me and saying ‘You did it, you did it’, I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t, in fact, to some extent, done it? After all, I did tend to be hard on myself. Maybe I was so self-critical I had mistaken gold for horseshit? That was possible. Perhaps Chekhov hated everything he wrote? That may well be. My standards were high. If everyone else said it was a triumph, who was I to say otherwise? Wasn’t that a certain kind of vanity? To resist the praise?

  Penny embraced me, saying that Simon himself had told her it was a minor masterpiece. And I noticed that my first reaction was to note the qualifier. I mean, if it was a potential masterpiece, which I doubted, but if it was, there was probably nothing minor about it . . . Onomatopoeic Bob was saying we should take it to Edinburgh and Shannon was talking about her friend in the theatre scene in Chicago and Penny and I embraced again and I shifted my hips back so my groin was far from hers and I could make sure this was a plain sweet hug of victory and friendship.

  Penny whispered into my ear that, as he departed, she’d seen Hamdo pound a clenched fist against his heart. (Indigestion, the imp in me said.) But no, probably, as everyone else thought, once she told them too, the commander had been affected. Our message had been transmitted at the highest level! I smiled at her and nodded soulfully, and she smiled back and then she looked over at Shannon, who was talking to Simon, and walked off, leaving me with Sara, who was talking fast to an older gentleman who’d made it back to see us. He’d been a professor before the war in Belgrade, I learned, but had come home when the conflict started to look after his very own summer house.