As we crossed the middle of the square, none of us looked up towards the hanged man, but he was there staring down at us, like a tough-nut in the pub, his dead eye the one we didn’t want to catch. We stayed silent as we padded up the far side opposite him and turned off past a bar. I was grateful once the lane dipped and eventually I looked back to check that yes, he could no longer be seen.
‘I guess. I suppose, we’re going home? Are we?’ Von asked.
Our direction of travel had been unspoken for a while.
‘What do you think?’ Shannon asked us.
‘We could do the play again? Somewhere?’ Sara said.
‘Yeah?’ Penny said.
I didn’t want to think about the play, it made me feel unwell.
‘I think we need to get out of here,’ I said.
‘What about Simon?’ Penny asked.
‘I thought he might . . . Do you think he’ll be OK?’ Christian said.
‘I think he’ll be OK. Bihac is winning,’ Bev said.
We carried on walking. Penny increased her speed to catch up with Shannon and Sara, and then I walked faster too so I was by her side, then Juso upped his pace so that he was able to pass the line of us and walk a little in front. He did a little laugh, inviting someone to ask him what was funny. Then he shook his head noticeably. Sara and Shannon looked away. I caught his eye and he dropped back next to me. He wanted to say something.
‘Why do you even care? About all this?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Maybe I don’t. I don’t know,’ I said.
He looked weary and rubbed his eyes.
‘Because of your Empire? Is it? The British Empire? You think you matter. You used to rule the world, so now you worry about it instead?’
Shannon wrinkled her nose and Penny, overhearing the odd word, looked at me.
‘Juso. Not now, mate,’ I said. The failure to have the unspoken argument was riling him.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘Nothing. It’s true.’
‘Do you think they worry about Bosnia in Mexico? No. They know it is not for them.’
I looked at Penny and shrugged and that pissed him off.
‘Who are you to care about the whole world? Sending out blankets and your rice? Covering the world with your newspaper articles, like gunboats. Who the fuck do you think you are to care about me?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
We passed a bakery and I went in with Penny as she bought up the few burek they had left. Cheese ones and meat ones too. It was when we left the bakery and walked on that Juso stopped. I wasn’t sure if I had missed some further discussion. As we walked a little down the road, he fell further and further into the distance. A couple of hundred metres on Sara said, ‘Shannon?’ and they both looked back at him and he waved one strong stubby arm.
But Shannon didn’t wave back. She took Sara’s hand and on the other side Penny’s and Penny reached out hers to me and I linked with Bev and he with Von, who said ‘Don’t gay me’ but then took the hand, and with Cally and Christian and Bob we walked round a corner united in moral superiority against this man who had shown us nothing but kindness.
Once we were out of view, Penny made a tiny flinch of her palm to drop my hand out of hers, and spilling down the valley came the clatter of small arms fire. From the suburban street we walked, we could see the main road, a half-kilometre away. The flow of people into Velika was growing thicker, like a dirtied and knotted rope being wound in by the town.
Soon the tarmac grew broad and the houses at the roadside disappeared, replaced by plant-hire compounds and electrical-power substations and patches of grassy nothing. After a few more minutes’ walk we joined the road that led down to the French UN compound. We could see over to the sandbagged and self-important entrance, where a jeep pulled out carrying three guys in soft blue berets, then a Land Cruiser, and a little later some blue-helmeted soldiers on foot bustled out, conferred, and retreated back inside, like uncertain honey bees at the edge of the hive. An assault was coming, a bit of war, and they were here to watch over it. A cluster of local boys stood near the gate asking for sweets and making a noise which was part cheering and part jeering as vehicles passed in and out.
What an odd demi-war it looked that morning. Half muted, but then all the more savage when it was set free behind the toilet block, out of sight; marshalled by Danes and Frenchmen and Jordanians, bored referees, inconstant parents, sometimes wildly protective, then unaccountably absent or found drunk, getting off with your girlfriend, finishing your plate of food.
But still it was worth it, this non-peacekeeping – that was what was hard to accept. It was still well worth it, to jam up the gears and meddle with the machine. The war machine was a fucking mess, but if you could add another fan belt, stick in some more ground-down gearing, some recording mechanisms, dials, gauges, crank in another round of rattling conveyer belt, to make the whole thing churn even less efficiently, gummed with documentation and negotiation, then that was all to the good. Because what the machine wanted to do was kill people, and stopping that, however clumsily, was all to the good.
The UN were all going south, towards the trouble, so as soon as we had passed the junction that led to their compound the road was quiet. There were shallow ditches to either side of the road, green in their soft, damp U-shaped bottoms, and beside them flowers like cow parsley, and many others – small ones in yellow and pink.
I felt anxious and unhappy. Lack of sleep and an execution will do that. Also love. I looked at Penny. And the others. They stirred something within me for sure. But when I tried to look into my heart, to X-ray it for my ‘true feelings’, it didn’t show up as a good red throb with a name across it in curly font, nor even a complicatedly real four-chambered hunk. No, as I conceptualised a vessel which might contain my deepest feelings, the organ I imagined was a honeycomb, a black sponge – the chambers interconnected so multiply that the possibilities for a true reckoning of my loves and likings swam before my eyes, various as pomegranate seeds.
‘Where will we go? What about the van?’ Cally asked.
‘I guess. I guess, we go back to London?’ Penny said. ‘If we can get to – to somewhere you can fly from? Zagreb?’
‘There’s a party in Dublin, in Cork,’ Von said.
‘It would be good to get the van,’ Shannon said. After all, it did belong to the kayaking club. They were hoping to sell it.
‘We really can’t get back to the van, I don’t think, can we?’ Penny said.
‘If we could get diesel, I would. It’s just sitting there,’ Sara said and waved her arm south.
‘We could try to head to Sarajevo?’ Onomatopoeic Bob said. I guess, like me, he didn’t have much to go back to.
‘I really would like to get to Ireland for this party.’
‘Jesus, Von, haven’t you been to enough parties?’ Penny said.
‘How many parties do you want? Parties are all the same,’ I said and felt my attempted sophistication die in the heat of the road. Everyone was silent as we walked on; the only sound the tacky noise of our trainers, as with each step we peeled them off the road surface, where they’d bonded very slightly with the hot tarmac.
After thinking for a while, Shannon finally announced: ‘OK. We’ve done what we intended. Now, we go back and tell people what’s going on here. And get on with living our lives. We have a responsibility to do that too.’
Yes. Fuck. The whole of life lay open before me. Anything was possible, unfortunately.
Chapter 36
THE ROAD WAS dead flat until it headed up into the hills that marked the border. There was hardly any wind, so when we walked into a powerful acrid smell of chicken shit there was nothing to diffuse it. It felt like walking into a wall.
Just after the smell hit, a sandy track branched off the road. Barring access to the track was a red-and-white barrier pole resting in a Y of metal. Beyond the barrier a man sat on the ground with his back against one of
the front wheels of a Toyota pickup.
The guard stood up as we approached and we clocked it was a face we knew. The ponytailed bar guy, who’d rented us the apartments – Mohammed’s boss, or acquaintance. I couldn’t remember the name, but Von, who had a public-school trick for picking up names like a magnet, waved a friendly arm and hailed him. ‘Hasim!’
‘Hasim?’ Cally said.
He waved cautiously, and waited for us to draw nearer. ‘Hello?’ he said, with the air of someone who might deny all prior knowledge if we made a complaint about water pressure or electric shocks from the shower head at the apartments.
‘Hey, Hasim?’ Shannon said cautiously.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said and shook his head, flicking his threadbare ponytail flirtatiously.
‘We’re – we’re walking,’ Penny said. Beside his foot on the ground lay a baseball club and up from the front of his jeans, straight down from his naval, jutted the handle of a pistol.
‘Where?’ he said.
‘Why?’ Shannon said.
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘Just tell him,’ Sara said.
‘We’re actually walking to the border,’ Shannon said,
‘You’re going? Where is your . . . big car?’ he asked.
‘The van? We left it – it’s out of diesel,’ Shannon said. ‘How far is it to the border?’
He regarded the whole gang for a second, then told us, ‘Near. For a car, near. For walking, too far.’ And he waved his hand in several directions. ‘Maybe tonight, very late, tomorrow, tomorrow night?’
‘Seriously?’
‘Where is your van?’ he asked.
‘Why?’ Shannon asked.
‘Why “why”?’ he said.
‘Why not “why”?’ Shannon said.
‘I want to help you. Maybe I have a little diesel.’
We broke out my guidebook and Onomatopoeic Bob guided Hasim’s finger back over the junctions we had taken to walk into Velika.
‘Hmm,’ Hasim said, peering at the map. ‘This is still OK. This morning this is still OK. Then, the 5th Corps will take it. Piss in it. In your van.’
‘Hey, I’ve pissed in it, why shouldn’t they?’ Shannon said.
Hasim didn’t laugh. ‘How much money do you have?’
‘How much to take us there and buy some diesel from you?’
‘How much do you have?’
‘How much is diesel?’
In the end Hasim agreed to make the trip, and supply six two-litre bottles of diesel. The price was three hundred Deutschmarks.
He led us to the back of the Toyota, where he imagined we would want to examine every fat green ex-mineral water bottle filled with diesel. He took the cap off each bottle in turn for us to smell and, if we wished, also taste the contents – his solicitous display of honesty revealing in its many parts how various were the deceptions to which he could imagine subjecting us. As Onomatopoeic Bob took the lead in the diesel tasting, Hasim explained there was one problem. He was manning, he said, a post, and it would be good for him, essential really, if one of us would stay behind with his cudgel.
Shannon looked around at us all. I said at once that I would wait. I thought it might look brave to offer, but actually I thought it was safer. They were driving back towards the battle. Plus, it’s depressing going back: even when it’s only retracing your steps to your flat to get your forgotten keys, you realise how blithely you once looked only ahead. Plus, I figured I’d done far too much hanging around Penny. Maybe a bit of getting blown about, all solitary, might burnish me in a way that rubbing up close had so clearly failed.
‘Will you be all right?’ Bev asked. I shrugged. Shannon climbed into the cab with Hasim while the others arranged themselves around the sides of the flatbed behind. I leaned on one end of the barrier to ease it up so the pickup could pass. Von dug deep into his daypack and pulled out a Nerf gun, which he handed to me reverentially as he passed.
‘What’s this for?’ I asked.
‘For protection,’ he said and we both looked at the bright yellow-and-orange toy.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. People might think it’s a ray gun. Or something,’ he said, starting to grow reproachful.
‘You think?’
‘They might. Round here? For a minute. They’ve probably never seen a ray gun,’ he said.
‘No. Right, Thank you, Von.’
Hasim wound down his window to say farewell. ‘What do I do? What am I doing?’ I asked him before he could drive off.
‘Don’t let anyone out, don’t let anyone in. Tell them I will be back in thirty minutes.’
‘In where? Out of where? Tell who?’
But they were gone.
I tucked the Nerf gun into my waistband and examined my post. There was a copse of good-size poplar trees at the top of a low hill across the road. Leading up to it a little path had been worn through the high dun-coloured grasses. There might be a nice dingly dell in there. A good place for a boozy picnic. On the far side of the barrier I was guarding, to the side of the track, was a drainage ditch and then a big wide field given over to pasture. Behind me, the track snaked to a low wire fence. Beyond that, the path swung round towards some grey agricultural buildings.
I walked my beat with my baseball bat on my shoulder. I was still in my play gear – a rough green military army surplus store shirt, and a pair of murky combat trousers which flapped around my trainers. The midday sun was hot and even though I knew it was way too soon, I felt the first spike of fear that my friends would leave me behind. That was a shame, because I guessed they wouldn’t have even got halfway to the van yet. So if this was when I was starting to worry, I had a huge amount of anxiety to look forward to before they got back.
I sat on the dusty ground and watched the second hand on my watch tick round. It was an old-man watch that Helen had bought for me in Manchester from a place in Afflecks Palace where they sold second-hand jeans. On my arm it never recaptured the promise of another life it held in its glass case, but nor did it quite lose it. I leaned back against the bare zincky scaffold pole that hinged the barrier to nowhere.
After an hour or so, when I was growing certain that in the van they had forgotten or disregarded me, were maybe even laughing about me, I walked up the little drive towards the agricultural buildings in the distance and made some calculations. If Hasim claimed he’d be away half an hour, it was probably, what, maybe double that? Plus the unexpected hiccups. The difficulty filling the van with diesel, some wrong turns, and then the inexplicable additional 20 to 30 per cent of time above what seems reasonable that everything always takes when you are the one doing the waiting. So, what . . . I told myself it would be another hour really until I should actually feel anxious that they had hightailed it, leaving me to walk out of the war zone alone.
It was then that I saw the people. The farm buildings in the distance looked like poultry sheds. The end of one of them was open or hewn off, and inside it looked like there might be people – many, many people. Too many. Closer by, near the high fencing that surrounded the farm, a line of ten or twelve figures stood in front of two men in uniform with guns. You couldn’t tell exactly what was happening, but the shapes were wrong. One of the people in the line would drop to the floor, not shot, but under their own power, and then stay there, crouched; then another one would go down; then the first one, after a long time, would pop up. It could almost have been an exercise regime, but the bodies of the people in the line were despondent, tired beyond resistance. Plus, when the ones who went down hit the floor in a crouch, one of the men with a gun went and stood over them and did something that might have been soft shuffling kicks or might have been something else. It was hard to see. But it wasn’t friendly.
From the road I heard the sound of a vehicle changing down gears and I jogged fast back to my post. I felt a leap of hope. We were getting out. I didn’t need to be the sole witness to this mistreatment. Just watching it made me complicit, but as
soon as I could share it, as soon as I could speak about it to the others, then I could say it was wrong.
But when the road came into view, it wasn’t the Peace War van idling by the sentry point. It was a French UN Land Cruiser.
In what sounded like Serbo-Croat, the officer in the passenger seat asked me something. Then he repeated it in French and I heard ‘nom’, so I told him my name. The guy asking the questions must have been a linguist because he was able to tell I wasn’t French or Yugoslav. He asked me in English who I was and I said my name again.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked and I said I was here by accident, for a friend, really an acquaintance. Less.
His face was something of a wedge. Not much chin, a sloping forehead and a long delicate nose, thin-skinned and pink like a pterodactyl wing. It poked far out and made me want to cover it with my hand. He asked if I was a mercenary and I said no, God no, and then he asked me what the fuck I was doing there at the gate. And I said again I was guarding it for someone I didn’t really know.
The officer looked extremely sceptical. He glanced up and down at my fatigues and asked why I was working for Babo. ‘I’m not. My friend just asked me to stay here while he went to get our van.’
The French officer spoke to his driver, a much more thickset man, who mumbled something back to his commanding officer, lit a cigarette and looked at me with frank disgust.
‘You know what that place is?’
‘I’m not to do with that,’ I said. ‘I’m just guarding this road to –’
‘This is the other entrance,’ he said.
‘I don’t know that. I didn’t know that,’ I said. ‘Even if it is true.’
‘It is true.’
‘And what is it – there?’
‘You know,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said and felt guilty, because I guess by then I did know. But it seemed too hard to explain that I had only just found out.
‘This chicken farm is a camp for holding opponents in bad conditions.’
‘Oh. My God,’ I said, now committed to some bad acting. ‘My God, I had no idea. I was just left holding this stick. For an acquaintance. This isn’t a uniform, it’s a costume.’
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 31