He wasn’t the ideal travelling companion, being either very mean or very broke; I wasn’t sure which. I was used, when I travelled with proper correspondents, to them taking me under their wing and picking up part of my tab. But, considering my budget was extremely limited, it was probably a good thing not to be with someone too extravagant. And I’d never been to Sarajevo before, so I felt safer with him. I was less likely to do something silly with someone who knew the ropes.
It was too late to go to Sarajevo, by the time we landed in Split, so we took the airport bus, like the tourists used to do – there was no question of Robert paying for a taxi. But when I wanted to chat, he took a thick book from his bag. I could have got out my War and Peace to his Suitable Boy, but I didn’t need to read. I stared out of the window and dreamt of glory. I was living my own story now.
Robert was right about the bus: it was cheaper and more convenient and I was travelling so light, flak jacket apart, that lugging everything the last 200 yards was no hardship. He was right about the prettiness of the hotel too. Inside, the Bellevue was just the standard decorating hell of all Yugoslav hotels – coffee-coloured glass and chocolate-painted wood and mustard swirly carpets. It was a shame their tourist trade renaissance was in the seventies. But from the outside, it was a mini-Uffizi, end on to the sea, the sort of hotel where Hercule Poirot might once have tapped out onto the terrace to exercise his little grey cells, and it lined a balconied square that would have set Romeo and Juliet alight. The Hotel Split, in contrast, where I had stayed before, was a white concrete package tourist dormitory, in the cement-stacked outskirts of town, half its characterless rooms now packed with refugees who sat sadly sunning themselves on their balconies (the hotel staff wouldn’t let them use the pool). But it was one of those war hotels that become, by osmosis, the only place to stay, in whose blue-tiled lobby journalists would congregate on their way in and out of Bosnia. It was expensive and ugly but if you went there – I mean, when we went there, because of course you could never go there during the war – you’d be guaranteed someone to talk to, or a lift into Bosnia, and you’d know, if you were missing the story as you sipped your glass of wine and watched the sun set over the Adriatic, that whichever of your competitors you were drinking with was missing it too. But when I opened my shutters in the hotel Bellevue and the sea tossed back the marbled twilight at the end of the piazza, I vowed never to stay at the Hotel Split again. It was a promise I would never keep until years after the war, when the Hotel Split’s swimming-pool bar was empty save for ghosts.
At Reception, Robert suggested sharing a room, on the grounds of economy. I shot him a look. I didn’t know him very well and I certainly didn’t fancy him; he wasn’t much taller than me, and about ten years older, with wispy blond hair, and a face already reddening with war and too much cheap wine. I’d shared rooms with journalists before on stories, and purely platonically, but only ones I knew well. And, if you were somewhere scary, it was often much nicer to have someone with you. But I didn’t know how Robert would behave and also, for the first time, I could afford my own space.
“It’s OK,” I said. “I’m on expenses.”
He went slightly redder. “I’ll see you for dinner,” he said. “I’ll meet you on the terrace at eight. Our last decent meal.” And quickly took his key.
It was a warm night, for late March. Robert was drinking wine and staring out to sea, when I came down, framed against the moonlit Adriatic.
To begin with, the atmosphere was slightly constrained, by the pass Robert had probably not made and I had turned down. He took me to a supermarket and practicality broke the ice. We laid in for the siege, with chocolate and biscuits, because there was no nice food in Sarajevo; prsut (smoked ham – pronounced prsht, like prosciutto, its name a relic of Venetian days), cheese and bread for emergencies, whisky, whatever else sprang to mind. And of course, the cheap Croatian cigarettes to hand out as bribes, which all had names that were quite, but not exactly, like famous brands, such as Ronhill and Benston. I gave some to you the first time we met.
It’s beautiful, Split, at least the centre is. But of course you knew that. You’d been living here, you said, just before the war broke out. The outskirts are the usual run of commie factories and tower blocks, but the centre is a wonder of age-smooth marble and stone. The Roman emperor Diocletian came from here and retired home when he was fed up of ruling the known world. He built a vast palace by the sea, and it still stands today, not a ruin, but the teeming hub of the city, running along the whole of the Esplanade, ending in the piazza that flanked the Bellevue. For years, hundreds of years, after the Roman Empire ended, his palace was a slum. But lately, I found out, the palace had become fashionable, and Split’s chic and the jeunesse dorée of Yugoslavia had moved into the little apartments which had spread, like a web of fungus, throughout the centuries, their Venetian double windows cluttered randomly beneath the roofline. So I guess the syringes we saw, down a stygian alley, rolling to and fro on the uneven paving stones, could well have belong to the war-bored children of the bourgeoisie rather than the dregs of society, unless you count them the same.
You couldn’t believe, when we met, that three days ago I’d been in Split. Your stuff was still in your friend’s flat there, you said, in one of the narrow streets winding through Diocletian’s palace, with glimpses of the Adriatic flashing up, like a slide-show, with slots of sunlight and glittery sea. Above one of those café-filled squares dotted with niches of medieval saints, you said. Obviously, you hadn’t been able to pay the rent for the last year. It was your favourite town, in all of Yugoslavia, you said. You sent me there to pick your stuff up, one time, and I was dying to meet this friend who’d known your life outside of the siege, but one of his aunts opened the door, middle-aged, slightly round, blonde-coiffed and sad, a refugee from Vukovar, she said. She gave me two bags, dusty piled in a cupboard, and told me, over a tiny cup of coffee in her orange kitchen, that your friend was off fighting somewhere in Bosnia; which frankly made it worth the trip, because President Tudjman of Croatia was always denying that his Croatian soldiers were sent to help their fellow Croats in Bosnia.
Robert and I wandered the narrow alleys, popping out into squares bright with the click of high heels on marble and the crack of laughter bouncing off the walls. All around us milled the youth and beauty of Dalmatia, girls with four-foot legs and twenty-inch waists, just emerged from their winter cocoons, their faces and figures a fantastic felicity between the local Slavs and the Venetian colonists; the men six foot or more, with the kind of looks Mills and Boon writers conjure up from their villas in the Isle of Man: smouldering eyes, high cheekbones, dark stubble, broad shoulders, devil-may-care attitude, and all the rest. They were probably your friends, or at least your friends before the war.
War seemed a million miles away, with the sea, and the parade, until I noticed the graffiti sprayed on the wall; something about Serbs or Chetniks, the name Serb nationalist soldiers called themselves, after the royalist Serb resistance in World War II. Sometimes we’d even see the word Ustase, the Croat version of the Fascist party when the Croats sided with the Nazis in the same war.
Sometimes we’d see soldiers, slightly drunker than the rest, a few still proudly wearing their pistols as a badge of rank. Their uniform was the swirly greens and browns that the Croats either bought or copied from the Americans. You used to think the Croats hoped that if they dressed like Yanks, then the Americans would help them win the war. And actually, America did, so perhaps the strategy worked.
I, too, was in my war uniform: clumpy boots, old jeans, fleece. I felt like a complete frump in comparison to the promenading beauties and their beaux.
“Just remember what they look like when they’re middle-aged,” Robert said.
But I couldn’t bear to. Perhaps I was too young. There is nothing comforting in your twenties about imagining those beautiful bodies bloating round the middle until the six-packs bulged into the vast bellies that adorned so many o
f the men I’d seen lolling round checkpoints. Although in Sarajevo, like you, everyone was thin – everyone except the black-marketers of course.
We chose a restaurant Robert knew, in a wide, open square, with tables outside; he knew a lot of restaurants in Split, which was a good thing, as it turned out.
“Right,” said Robert, as the waiters hovered with flapping napkins. “Let’s go to town. This is our last decent meal. The food in the Holiday Inn is vile.” Which I already knew.
We drank Posip, the crisp dry white of the coast that made me think of long evenings and cicadas.
“Our last decent drink,” Robert mourned, “the wine in the Holiday Inn is as vile as the food.”
“This is like Pinot Grigio,” I said.
“But not as nice,” said Robert. “A lot of the stuff here is like Italy but not as nice. Mediterranean food produced by Slavs. Forget having prsut – it’s just prosciutto but not as nice. Anyway you’ll be living off it for days in Sarajevo. You should always have fish here.” He ordered squid.
Later, as we wandered home, Robert leant on a white marble balustrade overlooking Odysseus’ wine-dark sea.
“Oh God, why do we ever have to leave Split? It’s so beautiful and Bosnia’s so grim!”
I was shocked. “But it is interesting, Bosnia?”
“Too bloody interesting,” he said. “We’d better get an early night. I think we should get there as early as possible. The first bus leaves for the airport at 7.35 and there’s always a risk we’ll get bumped off the plane.”
When we got back to the hotel, I sat on my bed, fiddling with the alarm on my little Sony shortwave. It was 10.59 now and I ought to hear the news. I pulled out the aerial and went over to the balcony. Three rooms down, Robert was leaning out, aerial poked out towards the sea. I could hear the blur of static. We smiled at each other as we listened: Sarajevo was quiet.
“There’s something happening up near Tuzla,” he said, when it was over. Which I knew too, as we’d both been listening to the same bulletin.
“Why didn’t you go to Sarajevo directly from Belgrade?” I’d asked him, as we walked home. “It must be shorter.” It didn’t look far on the map.
“Are you mad?” he’d almost shouted. “If I went from Belgrade, I’d have to get permission from the bloody Bosnian Serbs to go into their stupid country and their glorious capital Pale, then get on a nightmare bus full of fat old Serb ladies and go bump, bump, bump, and the Muslims would probably ambush us near Srebrenica. And then I’d have to deal with the nightmare Bosnian Serbs again in bloody Pale for some more bloody permissions; and then, then, which would be even worse, I’d have to hang out in Pale, which is the ultimate one-horse town, until I managed to hitch a lift from some nice passing hack who was crossing the frontlines. I loathe Pale,” he said. “Pale is vuko jebine.” He gave me a look to see if I knew what that meant, which I did of course, as it was about the first joke any hack learnt here. It was Serbo-Croat for the middle of nowhere, and it meant, “where the wolves fuck”. And I knew what he meant about Pale too; it was the former royal Yugoslav ski resort, and probably one of the few capital cities with the same number of politicians as goats.
“This way’s much better. I get to eat fish and we just hop on a plane. We should be there by lunch.”
But he was wrong. We waited three days, and the last decent meals lost their sense of celebration, but no planes left at all; the airlift had been cancelled indefinitely.
“This is a nightmare,” said Robert, surlier and surlier by the end of our second day. “All that Dutch guy will say is: ‘Don’t ask me, ask the Serbs. They are the ones stopping us to fly.’ And this place is starting to look like a refugee camp.” The airport was slowly filling up with earnest men with beards, disconsolate by their piles of luggage, flak jackets propped against their chairs, reading enormous books.
“For displaced aid workers,” I said.
“They’ve all got higher priority than us,” said Robert. “Even if the flights start, there’s no guarantee we’ll get on for days.”
“The anniversary’s not till next Tuesday,” I said. “We’ve got a week.” It was Tuesday now.
“You’ve got a week,” he said. “I work for a Sunday. Mine’s got to run on the Sunday before, so I’ve got to file by Saturday morning, which means, realistically, if I don’t get there by Friday, the whole thing’s been a complete waste of time.”
He walked over to the window, staring up over the crags as if he could will a plane to appear out of the sky. “It’s ridiculous. It’s only an hour away.”
Stuck inside Sarajevo, it must have seemed all the more ridiculous to you.
By the third day, Robert was almost unbearable; silent and snappy, increasingly hung over, and our table littered with picnic crumbs – Robert, of course, had baulked at the cost of the airport canteen.
“Sod this. Let’s take the bus,” he said.
“There’s a bus to Sarajevo?” I asked.
“There’s always a bus,” he said. “Well, not exactly to Sarajevo, but we can get quite close anyway: Kiseljak.” I didn’t have to ask where Kiseljak was – I knew it was technically the last Bosnian government-held town before the Serb lines circling Sarajevo, if full of Croats. “We’re bound to get a lift in Kiseljak. There’s a BBC office there. Millions of people go through Kiseljak every day.”
The hotel, used to reporters and their strange requests, told us that the buses for Bosnia left from the coach station in Split, just by the ferry terminal where the boats come in from the islands; a place deep in mourning for Croatia’s lost tourist gold.
The man in the little booth on the white marble quay did not even blink when Robert asked when the bus left. He stared out across the oily water, to the pine-covered island basking on the horizon, out to the memory of good times past. And then he said, “23.00 hours, or, about 23.00 hours,” depending, he added, on how many people turned up.
“It’s safer at night,” he said. He wouldn’t sell us a ticket, but told us we should pay the driver. His shrug implied our journey was nothing to do with him.
“But what if the bus is full?” asked Robert.
“It won’t be,” said the ticket man, looking at him as if he were mad; so off we went out for our final last decent meal, and stocked up again at the supermarket – three days of airport picnics having depleted our supplies.
That was almost the last conversation Robert had for hours. He settled into the grimness of his silence. We chewed olives in silence in a fishing-net-bedecked restaurant, like those married couples I used to see when my father was based in Rome, holidaying to fill the vast vacuum in their long-dead conversation. I trawled the menu for something I hadn’t eaten during the last three days and wished I could find some way to leave him; but I couldn’t. Like the married couples, I needed him, or someone like him: I had never been to Sarajevo before. But he didn’t need me.
Then suddenly, his po-face cracked with laughing. He pointed to the menu: “Well, don’t have that. Look, ‘Warm gypsy spit’.”
I started to laugh too, the pair of us giggling uncontrollably – I guess the Posip had taken effect – that and the excitement of finally being on our way.
“What is warm gypsy spit?” I asked.
“God knows… maybe a kebab? I think I’ll give it a miss.”
I laughed again, partly just with relief that Robert was being nice.
“God, I tell you, I’m glad you’re here,” he said, when he was comfortably through his piece of grilled fish.
“You are?” I nearly dropped my fork.
“Yeah! Of course. You don’t think I fancy taking a bus into
Bosnia on my own do you? Shall we get another bottle?”
The bush administration’s pronouncements on the Yugoslav crisis between February and August exhibited the worst sort of hypocrisy. I know. I wrote them… The trick was to ignore facts – whether they pertained to atrocities, rumours of concentration camps, or starvation – that would
just complicate the policy goal of not getting involved…every day it was lies. One time I even proposed the department spokesman said: “US officials lied yesterday.”
— George Kenney, Former US press officer for Bosnia
II
I tried to tell you, the day we met, about our journey. I tried to tell you, because I was trying to explain about Mrs Selimovic. I wanted to tell you about the man who had come up to us in the little café, in Tarcin, just where our bus had to leave the old main road to Sarajevo and judder off into the mountains. But you didn’t seem that interested when I tried to tell you, and, I suppose, in your shoes, I would have felt the same. You didn’t care how hard it had been for me to get into Sarajevo. You, and all your friends, just wanted to get out.
The bus was waiting by the quay; one of those ancient Bosnian buses that the war had resurrected, dragged out of some motor retirement home by coach companies who had lagged their newer stock until the dawn of peace but understood that, war or not, people were prepared to pay to travel. I’d taken a lot of those buses round the Serb side. The seats were ripped, the windows and windscreen spider-webbed with bullet holes, and little blue curtains hung from their frames, which the driver told us he would ask us to draw if he thought there was a risk of attracting fire.
It was long past midnight before we left. The bus slowly filled up with worried-looking people, with vast amounts of luggage; those red-and-white checked bags you always see with refugees, stuffed with whatever it took to make their return to Bosnia worthwhile: food maybe, or cigarettes, or liquor. Finally, with a grunt and a crashing of gears, the driver judged it enough and off we swirled, along the coast for two or three hours, and then turned sharp left into the hills, up the Neretva valley and the old main road to Sarajevo. At the border between Bosnia and Croatia, amongst the parquet of filthy, becalmed lorries, the Croat border guards spent a good hour or so, carefully unpacking all those red and white bags, “They’re checking for guns,” Robert explained.
The Girl in the Film Page 3