I walked a little faster, towards the women – away from the hard jokes of men, which always deflate. That’s generally the main aim of male talk, to stop anything getting off the ground, above itself. To tug everything into the dirt, to make it stupid and dirty. Among the women, I felt, as I passed the refugees with a tight awkward smile, you could breathe. They let an idea go for a while, let it hover in the air to see what it might become, what was a good way to look at it. Things were allowed to be various – one thing and its opposite at once – and that’s where I wanted to be. I touched Penny’s elbow so she would break from the others.
‘Penny, hey, Penny. Can I have a word a second?’
‘Hey.’
She let her pace drop a little, so we were in step.
‘Do you think Simon will be OK?’ I said.
‘I hope so,’ she said and I nodded, trying to figure out how much she hoped so. To just a normal humane degree – or an extra amount on top? I felt that I had a difficult sale to make; pressing on a customer an unwanted piece of merchandise.
‘Look, I know you might not want to hear this, but I’m in love with you. I am in love with you.’ She walked on like she hadn’t heard anything.
So I kept quiet until, after a while, she eventually said, ‘Uh-huh?’
She seemed to be refusing to sign for the product.
‘What?’ I said.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘Yeah. I mean – what do you think?’ I said.
‘It’s just, I don’t know if you are?’ she said.
‘Well, of course I am.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, I should know.’ I wasn’t an expert on much, I thought, but I was the leading authority on who I was in love with.
‘It’s just, yeah, it doesn’t feel like that. I feel like you’re throwing something at me when you say it, you know?’
‘Right. Well. Sorry. I love you.’
‘Like you’re accusing me of something?’
‘I think about you all the time.’ I looked at a house we were passing. A child at an upstairs window looked out cautiously. A side door banged closed. ‘What about trying to go out with me? For a bit?’
‘Yeah?’
I knew it sounded foolish and callow. ‘But think about it, how can you know until you give it a go? I feel like you don’t take me seriously.’
‘I do.’
‘I mean, it’s just a leap of thinking, isn’t it?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Like, in some ways, it’s like Yugoslavia. What is the imagined community? Do you want to be, and I don’t really mean this, but for example, Croatia, saying, “I can’t imagine being of the same state with you.” Me, that is?’
‘But aren’t you being like Serbia, saying, “I insist you are a part of me, I won’t listen to any alternative arguments”?’
‘No, no. God, no. I’m being like the European Union. I’m making an imaginative leap of heroic community to – to – think of you and me together?’
‘Yeah, but . . . I don’t want to go out with you.’
‘OK, now we get down to it,’ I said. ‘But isn’t that in a way nationalistic, almost – fascistic?’
She looked at me and then she began to smile.
‘OK. Listen. I mean, I quite like you,’ she said. I wondered if I shouldn’t stick on that. Maybe I should run away across a field right now? ‘But, the thing is, there’s Simon, and – and – I think, I – I’m going through something and I don’t know what to call it but I definitely have feelings for Shannon.’
‘Me too. That’s fine,’ I said. ‘That’s not a deal-breaker.’
‘No, I have proper feelings about her.’
‘Oh. Right,’ I said. ‘You’re in love with Shannon?’
Penny looked over at her. Shannon was magnificent.
‘I’m not in love with her, I don’t think. I just have feelings. That I’d like to think about.’
‘And what about Simon?’
‘Yeah. What about him?’ she said.
‘Do you love him?’
‘Andrew, I don’t think I love anyone you’re talking about. It’s all more complicated.’
We walked in silence for a while, the road gritty and grey, and I wondered if perhaps I wasn’t in love with Shannon. Maybe my love was fungible, available for replacement with a similar item?
‘She is remarkable,’ I said.
‘She’s – yeah – she’s a very interesting person.’
‘I don’t know. God. I don’t know Penny, I don’t know if I love you or Shannon – or sometimes – Von, or even Cally or Helen. . .’
‘Maybe you don’t love anyone at the moment, is that possible?’ She gave me a smile of infuriating equanimity.
‘I’m just being honest, Penny,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to be.’
Then I dropped back to where Bev and Von were ripping the piss out of me.
‘Back with the fucking numb-nuts, is it?’ Bev said.
‘No action, ah?’ Von said.
I started an extended bout of laughter, even though there’d been no real joke, because I thought there was a chance I might start to cry and I hoped I could mess the faces up together if any tears did come.
Chapter 35
WE ARRIVED INTO the outskirts of Velika on a side track that abutted the bigger north–south road, and we slogged past the cement works and the big industrial plant with its thirties windows. It was once the houses and the shops started appearing that Juso and the Mercedes came into view. They’d assumed, he said, that we’d taken another one of our ‘special routes’, but finding us nowhere in town that morning they had got worried and driven back to the empty van. The back of the Merc was loaded up with the bags left behind and those who’d been wise enough to leave their bulky stuff in the unlocked vehicle looked at me with an air of self-regarding pity as I adjusted my rucksack straps.
Juso embraced Shannon, then Sara, and then loaded the car up – bags in the back, people in the front – and started running shuttles up to the hotel at the top of the town square.
The atmosphere in town had changed. For one thing, once we were on the main drag, the traffic was one way – all heading into Velika. And it was constant. Car after car, tractors and vans, horse-drawn carts and scooters too. The people heading into town were not just day visitors either. They were loaded up with bags and cases. One flatbed van had an aged woman lying in the back on a set of rugs. She looked like she hadn’t seen the outside world since it was filmed in black and white and she bore the little jolts and jerks of her son or grandson’s truck with a forbearance that said the worst was happening, the worst had happened, things now might get worse still or better, but she’d seen too much.
‘Everyone’s scared,’ Juso said. ‘After last night, the 5th Corps have guns and ammunition. They are coming.’
‘Do we know what happened now?’ I asked.
‘No coup. For sure. There was no Peace Force. It was all lies to get ammunition and destabilise.’
‘So – what, no coup and . . . Hamdo?’
‘Hamdo is loyal to the 5th Corps. It was all bullshit. Firing into the air, the French UN, the EU, everyone was fooled. It was a bad trick.’
It was also, it had to be said, quite a good trick.
‘What, so – it was – not real, none of it?’ Von said.
‘No, the battle was an act, they wanted, I guess, the reports to come out and everyone to believe it.’
I looked over at Shannon and she looked at the ground, unwilling to engage just yet. Juso had checked us in to the little hotel at the top of the town’s dry-grass and tree-lined square, just beside the Agrokomerc and its tomato-red livery.
‘What about the apartments?’ Von asked. ‘Our apartments? Can we look for that guy?’
‘Not such a good idea. In case the people come back.’
‘Might they come back?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think they’ll come back. But relatives.’
As we chec
ked in to the small uncomfortable rooms at the hotel, we told the woman we didn’t know how long we would be staying. She would only take a booking for a night anyway, since, she said, she would be leaving town tomorrow evening herself. It seemed that we should probably leave then too, or else be willing to take on by default the ownership of a provincial Balkan hotel.
We all went round the corner to the gloom of the unfriendly bar. The fat man behind the counter recognised us right away and was even more unfriendly than previously. The place was full – so that huddles of men occupied the place deep into its chilly white recesses. Shannon ordered and I looked around at Sara, Juso, Penny, and then Onomatopoeic Bob, and thought yes – possibly even in a way Von and Christian too – perhaps we were all to some degree in love with Shannon? Bev was probably the only one immune. After a very long wait she passed out the demi-measures of lager and smiled and we clinked and said, ‘We made it!’ and ‘We fucking made it, guys!’ and made a party of this terrible morning in a grim little town about to be overrun by its enemies.
As we drank, some militia guys came in and made an announcement calling for everyone in the bar to come out – there was something to be seen. Out on the street there was an air of unhappy carnival. People were being filtered along to the square by unofficial officials, serious self-important guys, and some actual soldiers and police. As we came out of our side street, to one of the square’s broad flanks, we had to halt to let a posse of soldiers pass. In the centre of the pack was a guy in fatigues who looked tired beyond belief. His hands were tied behind him by a bit of the same sort of orange baler twine Onomatopoeic Bob had once used to stake out our rehearsal area. The man looked at me briefly and I smiled and raised my eyebrows supportively. I watched as he skipped a beat with his feet, so as not to trip on a big-lipped join in the pavement slabs as he was shepherded away.
We looked around for what the action was, sport or speech, pancake-flipping frying-pan race or carnival ride, but the focus, once it came, seemed to push after the tied man and towards the top of the square, where some building work was going on. There was a digger there, some piles of sand, a small cement mixer and bags of cement in a temporary dry store.
When I saw a length of rope come out I looked at the folk all around, trying to see if they knew what was coming. The townspeople appeared, I would say, interested. Interested and concerned. The crowd shuffled up on itself, making the space and the tension tighter, and though we wanted to edge back, away, it felt as though that would be bad-mannered, or worse.
A noose was made in the rope and they put that over the tired man’s head.
‘He’s 5th Corps. Bihac. The uniform,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said, and I wanted to tell him to fuck off for some reason; that no knowledge at this point was necessary, all context was redundant.
Then someone put a plastic bag – a shopping bag – over the soldier’s head, and I thought, well, that’s dangerous in itself. But another soldier, in a red beret, pulled the shopping bag off and started to wrap the other end of the rope round and round one of the prongs at the front of the digger’s loading shovel, then tied it off. I tried to look at the face of the soldier with the noose around his neck, but though I could see his features, they had gone to another place – he had burrowed deep within himself and I felt bad for even looking. I looked at his whole body, head to toe, intently, because I felt that soon it would be dead and that if I tried to remember it exactly as it was alive, that at least would be something.
The guy in the beret near the shovel gave a thumbs up to the man who hung out of the cab and the engine came to life, blowing out hard a first chug of black smoke that then settled into grey with an easy throb.
Shannon shouted: ‘No!’
I nodded encouragingly at her, but the townspeople who looked round at us shook their heads and muttered like everything was more complicated than that. And soon it was as if nothing had been said at all.
This was the moment for a pronouncement, or a denouncement, for the death sentence to be proclaimed by some official over by the digger. But I don’t think there was anything that could have been said that would have framed the event. It was just savage. The soldiers who’d walked the victim up the square looked at one another to agree this was the time, then they backed away a little and nodded to the guy in the cab. The guy in the digger gave a nod back to them and moved his hands on the controls and the big shovel reacted – but instead of moving up, it dropped down half a metre and hit the ground with a resounding metal-on-concrete clang. The rope slipped off and there was something like a laugh from the crowd. That’s comedy: subverting expectations.
The soldier in the beret pushed the loop of rope back down the prong, and the digger driver swivelled the shovel up a few degrees to make sure it was fast. The prisoner looked back at the arrangement of the rope, and as he was doing so the driver, who wasn’t even looking at the man he was about to kill, let loose the hydraulics, bouncing the shovel up as high as it would go in one quick jerk. And with it, the body of the 5th Corps man went too. It was possible that his neck broke right away, because he didn’t seem to move around much. It was hard to tell – the swing might have been from the movement of the digger, or it might have been his own. I suppose it didn’t matter really, but it mattered to me and I asked people if he was dead. Bev said yes and I resented him for presuming to know about life or death or anything. Von was not looking – several people were not looking. I understood why, though later, when they tried, I thought, to make out that not looking was the more noble choice, I felt angry: I didn’t think that not watching made you any better. I thought it was important to see what was happening as clearly as I could. Things matter, I think.
The crowd did not cheer or anything. But they did not dissent.
Shannon shouted ‘No!’ again and then Penny did too and then, overcoming the fact I was a little afraid because the people in the crowd were now looking at us quite aggressively, I shouted it too, though my voice was hoarse and I knew it was too late.
The crowd didn’t turn on us. They seemed to accept the heaving of something terrible onto their shoulders with resignation. They were witnesses, but also participants. It couldn’t have happened without the crowd there. They were part of it and they knew it.
*
Afterwards, we didn’t know what to do. Our beers were presumably still on the counter in the bar. So we walked back and, indeed, there they stood, heading towards room temperature, pathetic and oblivious, warming up. Cold beer warms, still blood cools, everything heads to the mean.
‘What was it for?’ Von asked, like a big kid.
‘Everyone’s on his side now. Babo’s,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said. For once on this whole trip finally correct, I guessed. ‘They’ve had their hands dipped in blood. They’re his. Everything’s clear.’
It was true. Everything was becoming clear. Too clear – on the big boring canvas of the war. All the shading of the world was getting blasted bland and around us everywhere grew this flatness. ‘Yes, but . . .’ you wanted to say the whole time – but you couldn’t; hell was this, here, where the noise was so great only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ shouted loud could be heard, never the next bit, the qualification or the joke, or the question.
‘Do you think, are we – did we come to the right side?’ Von asked Shannon.
‘We don’t know what the 5th Corps do down there? They could be just as bad?’ Juso said and looked at Shannon and Sara reasonably. But the hanging had snapped things for them, for us all.
‘Yeah, fuck off, Juso,’ Sara said.
‘Yeah,’ Shannon said.
‘What if they hung two soldiers at the same time today?’ he asked.
‘Then, they’d be – I don’t know – did they?’ Christian asked.
‘I don’t know. But what if they did?’
‘I suppose . . . but. No,’ Shannon said. ‘No. Fuck off.’
The bar was filling up with more and more men. Men in thin nylon tracksuit tops over white vests. Men wit
h crew-neck jumpers of yellow and green over no T-shirt. Men with army uniforms, and guns. A municipal policeman. Then there was a little cheer and, immediately after, a hushing – Babo came in through the door.
The way to the bar parted as a small coffee was provided for him. He said a few words, the cadence of which followed a mumbling, a digression, a swelling, a shout of three or four short monosyllables, and then there was stamping on the floor and a brief rapid bit of applause like gunfire and he was out, to another bar or gathering.
After that, someone nudged Von and he spilled what was left of his drink. There was no apology. Like a band of superheroes, we started to direct the focus of our eyes only towards one another, as if we were going to muster a laser thunderbolt out of our concentrated attention. It felt like it was very, very important that we look at nobody at all in that bar right then, and I marvelled at how, just a little earlier, all had been well and near normal and how now I felt my life wobbled like a spinning top which a hand might at any moment stop dead.
I looked towards the door. A guy tapped an insistent finger on Penny’s back, and when she turned a little, his big belly pushed in towards her insistently, like it was never going to stop.
‘Right, let’s go, follow me,’ I said, and angled my shoulder like the prow of a tall ship through the crowd, giving no offence so far as I could, but not halting either. The gang snaked behind me and I tried to breathe as slowly and evenly as possible until we all made it out into the August air.
*
We didn’t check out of the hotel. We just grabbed our stuff and left. Juso said the word all about town was that the border point to the north, the way we’d come in to Bosnia, was already choked and impassable.
‘The main way out of town will be too dangerous for us,’ Shannon said, as though Juso didn’t exist. He puckered his pink lips in the middle of his beard.
Lumbering with our gear, we walked down towards the industrial part of town with the aim of heading across the border on a minor road. Juso tagged after, half the threadbare teddy, half the surly grizzly. The crowd around the square had dispersed quickly, just knots of folk here and there remained, turned in on themselves.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 30