Bosnian Inferno

by David Monnery

  ‘Where is Reeve?’ Hajrija asked.

  ‘At the HQ I think.’

  ‘And where is that?’ Hajrija asked patiently.

  ‘First you must tell me who these men are,’ he said obstinately.

  ‘They are English. They are friends of Reeve.’

  Jusuf’s face lit up. ‘That is wonderful news,’ he said. ‘Did he know you were all coming?’

  ‘No, but if you take us to him…’

  13

  Nena Reeve strode purposefully across the town she had grown up in, towards the house on the hill where she had been born. The mist seemed to be thickening again as darkness began to fall, but from what she could tell the town seemed much the same as it had always been. There were no scars of war, and there were people on the streets, even a couple she recognized. She hurried past them, head down – the last thing she wanted to do now was stop and explain herself to mere acquaintances.

  There were no lights showing in her parents’ home, but the house itself looked the same as it always had. She pushed open the front door, and felt the warm air of life on her face. Voices sounded from the kitchen at the back, children’s voices.

  She stood a second by the parlour door, feeling almost limp, and then turned the old handle and walked across the threshold. By the light of the single kerosene lamp she could see the four faces turned towards the door – those of her father, mother, son and daughter. There was a moment of stunned silence, and then both children cried out in unison: ‘Mama!’

  On the other side of town John Reeve and two of his fellow-officers in the Zavik Militia were poring over a map in the back room of the Youth Hostel which served as their HQ.

  ‘Hello, Reeve,’ a familiar Scottish voice said from the doorway.

  Reeve looked round, utter astonishment on his face. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘the fucking cavalry’s arrived.’

  Docherty grinned at him. Reeve wasn’t wearing any sort of uniform, but he appeared fit and well. There were no weapons visible, but the looks of the other young men, the maps on the table and wall…the scene had all the makings of a military unit which knew what it was doing. And it was about as far removed from Brando’s camp in Apocalypse Now as Docherty could imagine. He wasn’t surprised, but he had been prepared to find the worst, and this wasn’t it.

  The two men shook hands, and Docherty introduced Razor, Chris and the Dame. Reeve in turn introduced the two Bosnians. The taller of the two, a serious-looking man with short, black hair and a pronounced Slavic face, was named Latinka Tijanic. The other man, also dark-haired, but with a rounder face and moustache, was Esad Cehajic.

  ‘So what the fuck are you doing here?’ Reeve asked.

  ‘We’ve come to see you, but…’

  At this moment Hajrija, who had been talking to their escort outside, appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Hajrija?’ Reeve said, staring at her with renewed astonishment. The last time he’s seen her she’d been a student in jeans and T-shirt.

  ‘Zdravo, Reeve.’

  ‘How are you? How is Nena?’

  ‘I was just about to tell you,’ Docherty said. ‘She came with us. She went straight on up to her folks’ place. Are they OK? And the children?’

  ‘They’re fine. All of them.’ Reeve seemed momentarily stunned. ‘Jesus, Jamie, what’s she doing here? How did you all get here?’

  ‘It’s a long story. Maybe…’

  ‘I’d better get over there,’ Reeve said suddenly. He grabbed his coat and looked around. ‘Lads, make yourselves at home. Esad, look after them, will you? I’ll be back.’

  ‘How are you, Nena?’ her father asked, when the children finally allowed him the opportunity. He looked older, Nena thought, whereas her mother looked much the same. He had been a schoolteacher by profession, but his life’s vocation – from the years as a partisan in World War Two to his years as Mayor of Zavik – had been the Party and the idea of Yugoslavia. The collapse of everything he had fought and worked for must have been terrible for him, Nena realized. The erasure of a life.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. Two years before she might eventually have told her parents what had happened to her, but not now. There would be no point. ‘But what has happened here, Papa?’ she asked, partly to move the conversation away from herself.

  ‘We have fought them, that is what has happened,’ her father said. ‘Your Reeve has been wonderful, Nena. Without him I dread to think how things would have gone.’

  There must have been a trace of irony in her expression, because her father gave her an aggrieved look. ‘This is a good man,’ he insisted.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘So why…’

  She was saved by the good man’s arrival. There was a rare look of uncertainty in his eyes, Nena thought, as she got up, fighting her own reluctance, to embrace him.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine. Tired. Happy to see these two,’ she said, putting an arm around each child. They were looking wary, perhaps remembering the arguments which had been so frequent the last time their mother and father had been together.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m just exhausted. It was a hard journey.’ Now that she knew everyone was safe all she wanted to do was sleep. In a proper bed, for a long time.

  At the Youth Hostel Esad had made the visitors the best coffee they’d had since leaving England. They sipped at it gratefully, sitting in silence and resting their aching legs. Hajrija, meanwhile, was conducting an animated conversation in her native tongue with the serious-looking Tijanic, and Razor was torn between pleasure at her obvious happiness to be home and more than a slight stirring of jealousy. The darkness seemed to have gone from her eyes, he thought. She seemed so natural here, but it made him wonder whether the months in the anti-sniper unit had wrought changes inside her, hardened her in some way, or whether she had somehow managed to keep her real self at a distance from it all.

  And that made him think about what the years in the Army had done to him. He knew men in the SAS who had been unable to cope with what they were required to do – some who had simply decided it wasn’t for them and left, others who had turned themselves into machines – but he had never felt pushed in either of those directions. His defence had been not to take it too seriously; to stay loose and not get wound too tight by it all, the way the Dame seemed in danger of doing. When the feeling was there, you had to let yourself feel it, and then get on with the job in hand.

  He was a survivor, he thought. And he had the feeling she was too. If only…

  ‘There is a café,’ she said suddenly in English. ‘It is open, with food and drink. Not far. Not steaks and wine, you understand, but maybe music.’

  ‘I could eat a horse,’ Razor said.

  ‘There’ll probably be one on the menu,’ Chris said.

  They turned to Docherty. ‘Go and eat,’ the PC said. ‘I’ll wait here for Reeve to come back.’

  Outside darkness had fallen, and the mist still clung to the valley floor, making it hard to see each other, let alone the direction they were supposed to be taking. Hajrija grabbed hold of Razor’s hand. ‘Make chain,’ she said, and they did so, unable to think of a less embarrassing alternative. Chris found himself remembering a game they played at school, the chain of tagged kids reaching and twisting for one of the untagged to release them with a touch.

  Hajrija led them unerringly down one street and then another, buildings occasionally looming through the patchy mist, until a hazy light announced their destination. The words René’s Café on the glass door stood out against the yellow light within.

  ‘What?!?’ Razor exclaimed.

  Inside, a large poster of the cast of ’Allo, ’Allo! took pride of place behind the serving counter. The three Englishmen gazed at it open-mouthed.

  ‘It is big hit on Yugoslav TV,’ Hajrija explained. ‘Like the Fools and Horses. Del-boys and lovely-jubbly,’ she added gratuitously.

  The café was empt
y when they arrived, but the menu surpassed expectations by containing both cheese and beer, and their own arrival seemed to trigger an avalanche of customers. The beer was strictly rationed to two bottles a customer, but this didn’t seem to get in the way of the good feeling which encompassed everyone there. Men and women, old and young, talked in groups and pairs, sometimes reaching out to join in other conversations which caught their ear. Razor had grown up the only child of a single parent, but this was what he had always imagined a huge family gathering would be like. A sort of chaotic warmth.

  ‘This is how it used to be,’ Hajrija said, her breath brushing his cheek.

  René stared down at him from the poster. ‘I will only say this once,’ Razor murmured to himself.

  Reeve arrived back at the hostel looking more subdued than when he’d left. He didn’t seem surprised to find only Docherty. ‘Well, Jamie, this is a surprise,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘Aye, I expect it is,’ Docherty agreed, thinking that Reeve seemed much the same as he’d ever been.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that you and Nena have turned up here together. You didn’t just run into each other on Sarajevo Station, I suppose?’

  Docherty smiled without much humour. ‘She’s had a bad time, Reeve. A really bad time.’

  Reeve took a drag on the cigarette. ‘Sarajevo used to be a lovely town,’ he said mildly. ‘She didn’t tell me anything,’ he added. ‘So why are you all here?’

  ‘To check you out,’ Docherty said bluntly. ‘Our beloved Government has been getting stick from all sides about this lunatic Brit in the Bosnian hills…’

  ‘You’re kidding. What’s it matter to John Major, for Christ’s sake? It’s not as if any of those bastards care what’s happening here.’

  Docherty looked at him. ‘You are still a serving soldier in their Army. They may not give a flying fuck about Bosnia but they have to care about that.’

  Reeve grinned. ‘Tell ’em I resign. Tell them I’ve taken out Bosnian citizenship and I’m as entitled to my piece of the war as any other Bosnian.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘You’re joking. How the hell do you think I’d do that – by post? On the phone?’

  ‘Aye, OK.’

  ‘I mean, this is hard to believe,’ Reeve went on. ‘They actually sent you and three other guys into all this just to tell me to keep a low fucking profile? It’s like infiltrating a patrol into Saddam Hussein’s palace to steal his bog paper.’

  ‘We weren’t sent to tell you to keep a low profile,’ Docherty said calmly. ‘We were sent to find out what’s been going on.’

  Reeve stubbed out his cigarette, walked across to a cupboard and pulled out two glasses and a bottle. ‘OK,’ he said, unscrewing the top and pouring two respectable shots of plum brandy, ‘I’ll tell you.’

  Docherty leaned back in his chair and sipped at the brandy. It was good.

  ‘You know why I came back here?’

  ‘To see the kids.’

  ‘And you know about Nena and me splitting up?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Well, when I came to see them she took the chance to go to Sarajevo, and then because of the war she couldn’t get back here. Didn’t want to either, from what I could tell. Doctoring’s always been important to her, and she knew her parents were here to look after the kids if I left.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘The Serbs came to call, like they did everywhere else around here. Only we stood up to the bastards – all the town, most of the local Serbs included – and kicked them back out again. We knew they’d try again, so we had to get ourselves organized properly, do some thinking about how to defend the place, and how to survive in a siege. And I was the only one with any real experience of anything like that. I couldn’t leave.’

  ‘You became “the Commander”.’

  ‘It’s not like it sounds. No one else here could have handled it. Plus, I was English, so there didn’t have to be any arguments about whether a Serb or a Croat or a Muslim should be top dog.’ He smiled. ‘I became sort of a mini-Tito,’ he said. ‘And I’ve done a good job.’

  ‘I bet you have. Did you blow the bridge on the road behind the town?’

  ‘Yeah, but only as a precaution. The Serbs can’t get people in numbers up on this side of the valley. We blew the bridges over the river further down, and they can’t get anything across. They could try from the back – I suppose that’s the way you came in – but there are no roads and nowhere to shelter, and nothing much to build a shelter with. They couldn’t get any heavy guns up there.’

  ‘So what have they tried?’

  ‘After the first visit they left us alone for a week, then tried surprising us in the middle of the night. We killed about twenty of them, and they left us alone for a couple of months after that. Except of course they blocked up the valley at both ends so nothing could come in or out. That was around August, and there was plenty of food in the town, but we had to start thinking about how we were going to survive the winter. We could cut down trees behind the town for fires, but the only generators we had needed oil, and there was hardly any left. So’ – he opened his palms – ‘we had to steal some.

  ‘By this time I’d got a pretty good training programme going. I based it on what we taught the Dhofaris in Oman, remember? Once they were ready I took some of the lads on a recce, and we found the Serbs’ local fuel depot in Sipovo. Nicking two tankers was easy enough – the depot wasn’t even guarded – and we managed to bluff our way back through their roadblock. You can get a long way around here singing the right songs and sporting the right tattoos.’ Reeve grinned reminiscently. ‘Plus, of course, about a third of our men don’t have to pretend – they really are Serbs.’

  Docherty grinned back, relief spreading through him. Reeve hadn’t been driven off the rails by the madness around him. In fact, as far as Docherty could tell, he seemed more insulated from it all than anyone they had met since leaving Split.

  Reeve poured another two measures of plum brandy and lit another cigarette. ‘The weaponry situation wasn’t too good either,’ he said. ‘We had plenty of Kalashnikovs, and a couple of mortars we stole from the Serbs, but only a few SMGs and hardly any explosives. Luckily, we had an ex-Yugoslav Army officer in town – a Croat – who could lead us straight to an armoury outside Livno. The Croat Army was pissed off when we stole half their ordnance, but what the fuck?’ He laughed. ‘The main problem was carrying the goddam stuff back over the hills. We didn’t think the Serbs would fall for the bluff twice, though God knows there’s enough of them popping acid that they probably wouldn’t have noticed. Probably just see pretty patterns as we went past.’

  ‘How did you manage to piss off the Bosnian Government?’ Docherty asked. ‘And the UN?’

  ‘Ah, that was a bit naughty,’ Reeve admitted. ‘We stole one of their supply shipments – mostly food.’

  ‘You what!?’

  ‘They had plenty to spare, Jamie. It was when they were still using the Kupres road to supply Vitez. The idiots left the key in the ignition when they stopped for a picnic lunch. They ran along behind us for about a quarter of a mile, shouting at us to bring it back.’

  Docherty laughed. ‘I talked to the commander at Vitez, and he didn’t mention it,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Reeve said. ‘It hardly adds lustre to the Cheshires’ image, does it?’

  ‘And the Bosnian Government?’

  ‘We borrowed one of their armoured cars from Bugojno. It’s not exactly state-of-the-art, I’m afraid – it was probably abandoned by the Red Army in 1945. But it works. We just drove it home through the Serb roadblock – and I mean through it – all hatches down. They didn’t know what to make of it either, watching this armoured car blithely totalling one of their beloved Toyotas.’ He took a gulp of the brandy. ‘I’ve got to like this stuff. Where were we?’

  ‘Stealing an armoured car.’

 
; ‘Yeah, well. I don’t see how the Bosnian Government can object to us doing their job for them. They should be holding us up as a shining example. Izetbegovic is fond of saying that Bosnia was overflowing with brotherly love and tolerance before the Serb shit hit the fan. I don’t know how much of that is wishful thinking on his part, but Zavik is definitely Bosnia as it ought to be. We’ve got Serbs, Muslims, Croats, Jews, even a few Albanians, and yours truly, all getting along with each other. You take a walk through the town tomorrow morning – you’ll find a mosque, an Orthodox church and a Catholic church, all in the same square, all open for business.’

  ‘What about the Serbs outside the town?’ Docherty wanted to know. ‘Are they still keeping their distance?’

  ‘No, they’re hatching something. And they’re more or less all around us now. Sooner or later they’re going to drag some guns on to the hills opposite and start throwing shells at us. If they can be bothered. I hope they can’t.’ He took a last drag on the cigarette. ‘And of course there’s always a chance that peace will break out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ Docherty said mildly. ‘And I wouldn’t be too optimistic about reconciliation,’ he added. ‘We’ve been in this country about a week, and I’ve seen things to trouble my sleep until I die.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Docherty told him about the villages in the hills, the hospital at Sarajevo, the women at Vogosca.

  ‘What were you doing there?’ Reeve asked.

  Docherty cursed himself for the slip, but decided there was no going back. ‘Rescuing Nena,’ he said.

  Reeve looked at him, sudden bleakness in his eyes. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said.

  ‘She wasn’t there long,’ Docherty said, realizing as he did so how ludicrous it sounded.

  Reeve was getting slowly to his feet. ‘I should be with her,’ he said. ‘I…’

  ‘Maybe you should let her come to you,’ Docherty said gently, wondering if she would.

  A quarter of a mile away, Nena lay in her old childhood bed in the house on the hill, curled up like a foetus, unable to sleep. Her mind was whirling around, and she seemed to lack the will to stop it. It was like a waking dream, a sort of seamless merging of scenes and people.