‘What does it mean, though?’ Penny asked me as we made our way back through the empty streets.
‘What?’ I said.
‘“I love you.” When you said that?’
‘I love you? Well, it means – I really like you.’
‘Does it mean – is that what it means?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Uh-huh? And where did it come from?’
‘It means, I guess, it means I’ll like you a lot, forever.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well. I don’t know. Maybe not.’ I seemed to be talking my way into a break-up quite fast. ‘What do you think it means . . .?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t say it.’
As we walked back through the main square, Onomatopoeic Bob broke away from the gang to look at some carvings on a lump of old stone preserved behind railings. ‘A stećci! This is a stećci!’ he shouted over.
‘Amazing,’ I said and Penny looked at me harshly.
We walked towards him as he knelt down and with a display of effortful wonder traced a finger around the worn-down spiralled carvings still evident. ‘The Bosnians, back when everything was bullshit with the Catholics and Orthodoxes, they went their own way. The third way. Neither Washington nor Moscow. The Bogomils. Very mysterious. Very interesting actually,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’ said Bev.
‘Yeah, I think this is a headstone, or it may not be. Extraordinary beliefs,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.
Our guard didn’t seem to mind the delay. He lit a cigarette and waved up to a girl; the apartment window she looked out of was surrounded by bullet marks, but the glass was still intact.
‘Extraordinary beliefs,’ Bob said again until Bev said, ‘What did they believe?’
‘Sort of – like a very spiritual sort of thing,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said. ‘Very anti the big guys. Very mysterious. Highly intriguing. They went their own way.’
Penny looked resolutely off into space, resistant to all my attempts to raise my eyebrows at her and gently mock Bob.
‘That’s why I swapped the poem,’ I said. ‘And it was a shitty thing to do, but I thought, I think, I’m in love and I’m sorry.’
‘That was a shitty thing to do.’
‘I know. But.’ Her face was hardening against me. ‘Have you never done something bad for a good reason? Is it always bad, to do the wrong thing? Is everything just what it seems? Probably, knights had to kill dragons and even occasionally the wrong peasant on their way to a task? I mean, I know it’s wrong, but, I think we’d really – have a great time, whereas I just think Simon is, he’s not the real thing. He’s – he doesn’t get you. But I get you. And even if I don’t, and I have totally the wrong idea about you, I honestly think that I do get you, so . . .?’
Penny looked like she’d received a long legal document and was going to have to consider it at length with her advisers.
‘I mean, do you like me at all?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Chapter 33
AT THE HOTEL, back under curfew, our stern guard was letting people make use of the satellite phone to call people and tell them what was going on. The queue was long, but I quite wanted to call Helen and mention in passing, if she was interested, that I was far away, in a coup, travelling with girls who read long novels and drank dry white wine and lived in London and talked about the Spanish Civil War.
Now the party was really over. And not in the fun way when a party is first over but everyone still wants to be together and talk over the night; but instead the grotty time when everyone wants the grey taste out of their mouth and to be alone or with their one person in bed and to stop the static in their heads. So we all peeled off, me anxious that Simon would come a-knocking at our door, but resigned.
I said to Penny that I would stay in the bar while she showered. When I went up twenty minutes later the room was dark, the heavy brown curtain closed and Penny’s breathing sad and slow, and I felt very lonely sitting on the side of the bed easing my clothes off as quietly as I could and then lying on my bed and taking shallow breaths. My heart beat in staccato trills. I worried that I would have a heart attack, and that Penny would think it was a ruse to get sympathy and leave me to jerk and spasm to death before she called a rough local doctor just a little too late. Again, I wished I could go back down to the satellite phone – but this time, so that I could tell Helen everything that had happened and about all these people who might or might not be my friends, but without hurting her, only for someone to know how far I had travelled. And as I shuddered and marvelled at myself, I guess I drifted off, finally, to sleep.
*
A few hours later, in the late afternoon, we were shaken awake by an insistent bang on the door. A fist thud repeated hard. I took a long time to swim up into the now. Too forceful to be Simon. I opened the door to a new soldier, under five foot and friendly and shuffling like a penguin. Everyone was being assembled in the bar.
Baltimore Ravens, né Dolphins (now totally capless), stood on a chair to speak to us, though we could all see him well enough anyway. Looking around, the troupe appeared empty and pliable, exhausted now.
‘We want you to come out to a meet-up. Babo’s sending some guys to a meet-up, a handover of some equipment to our forces and it would be good if you could come so, OK? We leave in twenty minutes, OK?’
Once Baltimore Ravens was down from his official position on the chair, we surrounded him and asked supplementaries.
‘At the Izacic crossing to Croatia. Twenty or thirty kilometres from here. To the west. We have arrangements to make. Babo wants you to come, we want you to come. The UN won’t come, so it would be nice for you to come,’ he explained.
We discussed for some time whether to accept the offer or not while Baltimore Ravens and a group of auxiliaries, some in uniform, some not, formed a convoy in the hotel car park.
‘If the UN aren’t going? Should we go?’ Christian asked.
‘It may be safer to just stay here?’ Sara pointed out.
But also, there was a pull, to be at the centre of things. And the rudeness of turning down an invitation.
But behind our discussion was a question I wasn’t sure of the answer to: did we have freedom to refuse? It felt like we did. But it depended on the scale. On how wide you’re looking. We had a certain amount of freedom. But like wasps in a nest with winter coming on, maybe we were free to fly and land on whichever windowpane we chose, but the big story was happening regardless?
‘I just don’t think we should be their – tools,’ Simon said.
Hamdo’s jeep skidded into the forecourt and though many wise things had been said about staying put and keeping our noses out and staying safe and taking a watching brief, we all looked at one another, collected some bags and bits and pieces, (Von a half-crate of beers) and headed out to our van.
Yves and Elsa felt constrained by their official role so stayed behind. But Bev was insistent that we might need his help. I felt he was a danger. A soldier in our midst who made us more complicated than we were. But I wasn’t about to denounce him on the brink of the van. As we climbed aboard one by one, and touched our spray-painted ‘Peace War’ for luck, I still didn’t know if we had to go.
The convoy drove fast ahead of us. From behind a big truck tucked right up our arse whenever Onomatopoeic Bob let his speed drop. He insisted on periodically looking at the fuel gauge, tapping it and tutting, making it quite clear that if we ground to a halt it was not going to be due to any lack of attention on his part.
‘It’s on zero. It can’t go any lower, Bob,’ Sara said eventually, ‘and it’s not going to go up.’
She had her head on Shannon’s shoulder while Shannon worked on a speech or an article she wanted to put together to tell the world about the great good things we had done. She passed the draft back to Christian, who made amendments and then passed it back to Simon, who passed it to me. ‘Can you pass this to Penny? Without making your own amendments, if pos
sible?’
I smiled at him and nodded like we were both in on the same joke, while feeling a slab of granite force its way into my chest.
Penny read over the article and nodded, then passed it back to Simon, saying she thought it was good. But he looked at her and said, sadly, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m comfortable with my name being listed at the bottom. I don’t think we should be supporting this action.’
‘We don’t even know what this is, yet,’ Penny said and I nodded sagely.
‘Our dad said go,’ Von said.
‘You’re in the van. You are coming, Simon, in fact,’ I said.
‘Yeah, you can fuck off,’ Simon said to me, and the others blanched a little, suggesting he hadn’t told the story of how I’d betrayed him. ‘I may be in the van, but I am not necessarily of the van.’
‘Why do they even want us there?’ Cally asked.
‘We’re stand-ins for the United Nations,’ Sara said. ‘I think it’s in everyone’s interests for an independent body to be there.’
‘They were killing each other till yesterday?’ Shannon said. ‘Before the play.’
‘And you think that’s to do with us?’ Simon said.
‘We don’t know. Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe we urged one single guy, the vital guy in one wavering platoon, to say let’s stop fighting our Muslim brothers? Let’s go for peace and cheese. Maybe?’
I doubted it. We didn’t seem important. But perhaps we were? I felt it was stupid to say the big things: ‘Peace!’ ‘Love!’ But maybe it was worth getting up and shouting them anyway, in case someone was listening, in case they weren’t that obvious? Because, some fuckers do get up and shout ‘War! Hate!’
We had started out under the last hot press of the day. Now the grey-white clouds blanked out the sun and the light was diffused over the gentle humps of the land on the way up and out of Bihac. At some point, Onomatopoeic Bob dropped quite a way behind the brake lights of the truck ahead and the elastic of the convoy snapped, so that we travelled on in the dark at the head of our own short column, with only the big truck behind us for company. I feared we might lose our companions and end up driving who knew where, straight into some hail-of-bullets roadblock. But Onomatopoeic Bob picked up the pace and soon we could see the brake lights of the lead vehicle again, idling, waiting for us. After another kilometre or two we made it to our destination.
We drove up a small hill and then fast into the forecourt of the meeting place – a big, freshly completed farmhouse property with steps up to the front door and a balcony above supported on square red-brick pillars. The property stood in a large rectangle of land, all enclosed by a wall topped with low iron fencing, and looked down on the border crossing point to Croatia below.
The atmosphere was confused. It was dark and as we climbed out and stood there, Hamdo and his two closest aides disembarked and passed us without a hello, spoke quickly with the six or seven soldiers from one of the lead trucks and then drove off again in a jeep. I had the sense we were like hamsters or guinea pigs to them, nice in theory but a huge pain in the arse to actually look after.
Shannon asked Baltimore Ravens when Babo’s delegation would be arriving from Velika and he asked someone else and there was no reply. Our intrusion into these matters was not welcome. We were observers, not participants. After some more discussions, Baltimore Ravens led us to the back of the house. Round there, an outside light came on. It looked like building work had finished very recently, and where a garden might eventually be established, all was barren and rubble-strewn. A concrete patio area was built up around basement double doors that opened into a large open-plan kitchen with creamy marble flooring and a set of uncomfortably designed metal-framed chairs around a metal-and-glass dining table. Baltimore Ravens ushered us all down the steps to the kitchen. There was a slab of water bottles on the table and a single bottle of Bulgarian red wine, some Coca-Colas, and four big bags of crisps. Baltimore Ravens was explaining to us that we were to drink, relax and have a good time when out through the patio doors a group of armed men appeared.
I made out among the group Mohammed and Juso and some of the guys who had guarded Babo at our meetings with him. They looked in at us cautiously and waved a hello. We waved back, the zoo animals. Juso began to come down to us and Shannon responded, trying to get to him, then Sara too. I waved to Mohammed. But Baltimore Ravens went to the patio doors and ushered Babo’s gang back while one of the Bihac soldiers blocked the doorway.
Several guys from Hamdo’s security detail now appeared and between them and the Velika contingent there was a lot of fast hard talking.
‘Why aren’t they hugging?’ Von asked. ‘They’re on the same side now, yes?’
‘You don’t automatically hug people, Von,’ Penny explained.
Then Baltimore Ravens came back down and asked if a couple of us would step outside to join the Velika and Bihac factions. Mohammed caught my eye from the garden, so I volunteered to join Shannon and Penny and walked up to join the men. The arguments were going strong.
‘We got shot at on our way here,’ Mohammed told me when I looked at him. Then we remembered to embrace. There was his tang of cheap lemony soap.
‘Who shot at you?’ I asked.
‘We don’t know. It was a mistake. They say it was a mistake, so . . . But our lorries with the guns and money and ammunition are taking longer to make it through, they are back behind, and the Bihac guys are not pleased. They don’t believe it’s coming.’
‘Is it OK?’ I asked Mohammed.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Yes?’ I said.
Shannon was shaking hands with Juso, who did an elaborate courtly bow and kissed her hand. She looked back down to Sara in the basement kitchen. Sara tried to come up the steps to join them but again her way was barred by one of Hamdo’s guys.
The two factions now walked round to the front entrance of the house. The three of us followed, shepherded by a guy carrying a Kalashnikov with its jaunty banana-shaped magazine and wearing a Leeds United top under his open khaki shirt.
We were guided upstairs into a sitting room as wide as the front of the farmhouse. The night was hot and the room smelt of the heavy sap of cypress trees, fresh plaster and spoiling food.
Snacks and soft drinks were laid out on a long table up there. The place was half finished. A red rug covered only the central part of the floor, leaving the wide margins gritty with unfinished cement. Though the walls were painted – salmon pink, and the woodwork white – someone had proceeded too fast and there was now chasing chiselled into the paint and plaster and unfinished electrical sockets hung raw from the walls.
Mohammed, Juso and the rest of Babo’s delegation were invited to tuck in to the bread, pastries and chicken on the table. It had been sitting there a while; a number of flies circles above the table. It was supposed to be a gesture of hospitality and camaraderie, I guess, but Baltimore Ravens and the others from the 5th Corps didn’t join the feast; they watched from the sides of the room as their guests ripped little chunks of bread off and dipped them politely into beige-coloured dips in shallow white bowls. It was play-acting. No one was relaxed enough to eat. The bread stayed a long time in their mouths as they chewed and I saw one guy behind Mohammed touch a crisp with the tip of his tongue before he ate it, testing. Then, outside, Hamdo’s jeep crunched the gravel and there was loud talk from the front of the property.
Mohammed smiled at me and nodded his head. He and his friend, a short fat young man with a long face that looked like it could not wait to get older, headed out onto the semicircular balcony that poked out over the front door.
‘Does this feel OK to you?’ I asked Shannon and Penny.
‘How do you mean?’ said Shannon.
‘I don’t know. It just – I mean, on one level, it’s OK?’ I said.
‘Is it real?’ said Penny.
Under the cool light of the single high-watt bulb above, there was not much sense of a reconciliation being effec
ted.
It was the way the Bihac faction stood, showing only their backs to their new brothers from Velika, separate in a distinct and impervious gang. It was the way they frowned and grimaced easily at one another and smiled hard and fast at their supposed new allies – and after a while stopped even doing that. The man in the Leeds shirt – who was actually more of a boy, only seventeen or so – was flicking at a little catch on the side of his weapon, the safety catch, I guess. And then he clicked something else by the front of the trigger guard and pulled the curved magazine off and flicked at the top bullet inside with his thumb, pressed down on something, blew in there and then clipped the magazine back on.
We looked over towards Mohammed out on the balcony. He was smoking a cigarette and shaking his puppet limbs out, like he was an actor before a show. Baltimore Ravens toyed absent-mindedly with the webbing of his belt. Soon he asked for Mohammed and his friend to come in, and for them and the others to head back downstairs.
Once Mohammed was inside, Baltimore Ravens came over to me, Penny and Shannon and said we needed to go back downstairs again now, that the ‘party was over’. I caught Mohammed’s eye as we were all escorted out, quite fast down the wide stairs, and then out through the entrance hall onto the forecourt.
I felt a bolt of certainty that something was wrong. That somebody was going to be hurt, very badly, and soon.
But what do you say? It was awkward. It would be, above all else, rude – to tell Mohammed and the others I thought they had fallen victim to a trap. Presumptuous, and hurtful. Especially as I had no idea what kind of trap it was, or if I was reading the signs right at all.
As Baltimore Ravens began to lead us back round to the garden area, two trucks driven by guys wearing Babo’s insignia rumbled into the forecourt, blinding us momentarily with the dazzle of their headlights. There was a cheer from all the soldiers out front – both Mohammed’s Velika lot and the force from Bihac. Presumably, these were the vehicles carrying the promised arms and supplies and I wondered if I had been misreading what the tension in the room upstairs had meant. The drivers of the trucks were greeted with handshakes and then shepherded round with Mohammed and the rest of the Velika guys to stand in the unfinished garden space, smoking cigarettes, while Penny, Shannon and I were guided back into the basement.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 28