“But I thought the Croats and Muslims were allies.”
He rolled his eyes: “They were… but it’s never going to last.”
We stopped in Mostar in the middle of the night, Bosnia’s second city. Down a side road, the old Turkish bridge gleamed in the moonlight, spanning the gorge with its single arc, as it had since Suleiman the Magnificent had ordered its construction four hundred years before. I might have bothered to get out and take a proper look, if I’d known that within a few months – weeks even – Mostar would be divided, as dangerous as Sarajevo, the Muslims driven at gunpoint across the bridge, and that delicate arc would soon lie broken beneath the torrent, shattered by a Croat rocket; that the journey we were taking would become impossible for the next two years, that the villages we drove through would be totally cut off, more isolated from the outside world even than Sarajevo, which at least had a hundred TV crews chronicling each day.
Our bus drew itself together as the mountains crowded in. Higher and higher, we wound, Walter Scott crags silhouetted against the moonlight, the Neretva churning creamy green to our left, past the dam Antony Quinn and Barbara Bach blew up in Force 10 from Navarone, the vast lake bulging behind it, glittering in the moonlight.
As first light crept into the bus, and I woke, I saw the gorge had widened again, into a broad and fertile valley, laid out like a carpet between the mountains, dotted with wooden houses with steep red roofs, each in their own little patch of field. It was dawn but we seemed to have gone back in time. There was snow on the ground, now, albeit the greyish-white of spring, with the crystalline crunchiness of refrozen icecream. The country around also looked as if time had slipped.
In a little village, we finally shuddered to a halt, where a forestry track led high up into the peaks to our left. The little houses were strung to either side and, at the pension; the driver turfed us all out to eat. By the side of the road was a bullet-riddled sign saying “Sarajevo, 40 kilometres”. “Not any more…” Robert laughed.
“Our last decent breakfast,” he said, as he tucked into Turkish coffee, cheese omelette, rolls and honey. “Better eat a lot. God knows when we’ll see this kind of stuff again.”
“Where are we?”
“This is Tarcin,” he said, in tones of great gloom. “This is where we have to leave the main road and head for the hills. The first thing the Serbs did was take all the main roads.”
The valley was awakening now, the peasants starting the eternal tasks of rural life, with such a look of bovine routine that one might have thought the war had totally passed them by. I said this to Robert and a passing peasant, chatting to the owner of the bar, leant over and interrupted me. He turned out to be a computer programmer, a Muslim who’d been working in Belgrade, exiled by the war to his ancestral village in the middle of Bosnia. He asked us to take a food parcel and a letter to his mother-in-law in Sarajevo – and dashed off, running back ten minutes later with a hastily wrapped bulky lump of brown paper. They hadn’t seen her for a year, he said; even though she was only thirty miles away as the crow flew, but the Serbs held the road and no-one could cross the lines. But when I told you about the computer programmer, who’d lost his job, his flat, his life, I told you that he’d shown us the key of his Belgrade flat – he carried it all the time, on his key ring, just in case, he’d said, you just shrugged; that was normal to you. He was lucky to be stuck outside Sarajevo, you said. The only thing that surprised you was when I told you that Robert had asked the man if he could read the letter he’d written. What business was it of Robert’s? you asked. I was surprised to feel embarrassed when I replied: “He wanted it for his story.” Why wouldn’t he? A year of siege, a year of sundered lives, and he knew he was running out of time.
We couldn’t cross the lines up the main road either; above us, to either side, the mountain rose.
“Do you see that bridge? At the top of the waterfall?” said Robert, pointing north.
I stared up, cricking my neck, making out a tiny wooden span, with a white ribbon spouting beneath it, hundreds of feet high.
“We’re going to cross that,” said Robert. “There are only about two ways into Bosnia now the Serbs have cut the main road and this is one of them. It takes bloody ages. And I’m going back to sleep. But we should be in Sarajevo by dark. The BBC has people going in all the time.”
For three or four hours we laced up and down those mountains, slithering along a snowy traffic jam of aid trucks and military vehicles and lorries full of whatever goods people find lucrative to sell in a war – the same lorries, maybe, we had seen queued up by the border; ancient VW Golfs, battered old Yugos and UN white armoured vehicles, all of us inching back and forth through a hobbit world of mountains and ravines and ragged woodland creatures – manning checkpoints or begging for cigarettes, or just chopping wood – who could hardly believe their remote villages were suddenly on the main motorway to central Bosnia.
“Now this is vuko jebine,” I said. “It makes Pale look like Paris. At least it has paved roads.” But Robert was asleep. I should have slept too, but Bosnia was flooding through my veins.
You know the history of your country off by heart, or at least the version Tito wanted you to learn, but for me, the last year had been a crash course in geo-politics. Think of Bosnia as an arrow shape, Robert had told me, when we’d met in Serb-held Banja Luka a year before: “The arrow of the Turks, pressing into the soft underbelly of Europe” as paranoid local (non-Muslim) historians would have it, pointing north, into Croatia. In the old days, Bosnia and Serbia were all part of the Ottoman Empire, but the Croats were ruled by Austria-Hungary, Christian and Catholic to boot. When the empires collapsed, Bosnia was left forty per cent Muslim, thirty-five per cent Serbs, who were Christians but Orthodox, and nineteen per cent Catholic Croats – the rest was a mishmash of gypsies and other even smaller minorities. The Serbs ended up running Yugoslavia, because they sided with the victorious Britain and France in World War I (Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, whose death was the catalyst for World War I, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb, as any schoolboy knows). After World War II, the Serbs ended up on top again because the Croats played on the German side. When Croatia and Bosnia wanted out half a century later, the Serbs objected. And that’s how the war began. Unfortunately the Serbs controlled most of Yugoslavia’s army, so that’s why they are winning everything, Robert had explained, mesmerised by my ignorance. When the war began, the Serbs surrounded Sarajevo and captured a great stretch of land, sixty per cent of the country, which ran down from the north, along Bosnia’s western and eastern flanks. They also took control of most of the roads, which is why we were bumping through the middle of nowhere on this icy track.
As for Sarajevo, the old capital, it sits in the centre of Bosnia, in a cleft in the mountains in which the 1984 Winter Olympics were held. It was you who told me on quiet days the Serbs would stop their shelling and ski.
The only big town in the north the Bosnian government managed to keep was Tuzla, connected by yet more mountains to the rest of their territory. So the Republika Srpska, as the Serbs called their Passport-to-Pimlico statelet, looked like a boomerang with a chunk bitten out. All that was left to the Bosnian government was a wobbly triangle, with Sarajevo at its apex, leading down to the Croat-held coast, and a funny bit sticking out to the north. Oh, except for a few funny blobs full of Muslims in the east which we used to call enclaves.
We slithered down into Kiseljak at about 11 a.m. Robert was happy again, scurrying around, finding us a taxi driver in the market place, a bustling square stuffed with fat head-scarfed women and dodgy leather-jacketed men, selling everything from sour cream and hub caps to CDs. As we set off towards the BBC, I said: “Maybe we’ll be in Sarajevo for lunch?” “Might as well lunch here,” he said.
It turned out to be rather more than lunch. You laughed when you heard I’d spent three days in Kiseljak; you’d never even stopped there before the war. It was nearly vuko jebine as well. A t
ypical celebrity of its times: tiny, utterly unimportant, the sort of place even Bosnians didn’t know, until the war shot it to fame. Like Srebrenica, most notorious, now, of those Muslim enclaves in the east, whose name, later in the war, became a byword for atrocity, after that hot July day in 1995 when the Serbs finally overran the town. Gloating and heady after four years of siege, the Serbs herded the 7,000 remaining Muslim men, bound and unarmed, into trucks, and drove them off, to be butchered in the football stadium in Nova Kasaba, fourteen miles away. And all the while Dutch UN troops, stationed to make sure the Safe Haven was safe, cowered in their battery factory-base in Potocari, on the outskirts of town, where the men of Srebrenica all lie now, in the Memorial graveyard, as an eternal rebuke. Kiseljak’s population was luckier – its notoriety came not from death, but as the last non-Serb stronghold to the north of Sarajevo, a border town where everything could be bought and sold.
Robert and I got to know it very well. We took a taxi to the BBC office, Robert joking with the driver, asking him questions about what was going on. The main street was flanked by little white houses, their modern starkness softened by the snow on their red roofs. Fairy-tale haystacks stood by each house. The hobbit mountains we’d crawled over on the bus fenced us in from the south, and Red Riding Hood fir trees came right up to the road. There was even an ancient Hansel and Gretel house: wattle and daub, shutters, upper storey bulging under its square-pitched layer of snow, a bridge with a little stream trailing icicles on the twigs on its bank as it gurgled by. Just past the bridge were the remains of the mosque, its pine panelling stained, its roof gutted and charred, and the felled minaret like a burnt-out rocket, under its dusting of snow; around its corpse, the blackened houses gaped by the side of the road. This was a Croat town now, they didn’t like Muslims here.
Unfortunately, when we arrived at the BBC office – two rooms above a bar – the interpreter, a Croat beauty with iridescent blonde hair and a personality to match the mountains outside, told us with every degree of satisfaction that the correspondent and crew had left for Tuzla the previous day. “Everyone’s gone to Tuzla. I don’t know when they’ll be back,” she said.
We spent two days walking up and down the main street, but no-one we knew came by. It was quite cold, but we didn’t dare wait inside, just in case we missed someone passing. We sat with our luggage by the side of the road and played pooh-sticks in the half-frozen stream, Robert alternating between heaving stress and hysteria; the town in its fairyland drugged and timeless sleep. Except that, Hansel and Gretel house apart, the buildings, like the bridge, seemed surprisingly modern.
“Why do you never normally see a traditional Bosnian house?” I asked Robert.
He just snorted – “Why do you think?”
Every hour we’d turn our short-waves on, and hear the absent correspondent filing from Tuzla – the Serbs were pushing in on Srebrenica even then. And Robert would say, “Maybe I should go to Tuzla instead.” And then, he’d wait a bit, and say, “Maybe not.”
At night, we got drunk, and smoked too much and sang Abba songs. If it were a film, we would have fallen in love and had lots of adventures and fantastic sex – singing “Do you hear the guns, Fernando?” to a backing track of distant artillery and occasional recreational bursts of automatic fire is a heady mix. But it wasn’t a film. Perhaps I was waiting to fall in love with you.
After two days of taking walks up and down the main road, I suggested we try hitching our lift from the military base the UN had set up in an old school, two miles away, in the centre of town. The UN liked old schools, they were full of rooms you could stuff with soldiers and cover with maps saying where the latest attack you couldn’t stop had happened, and at which checkpoints the convoys of humanitarian aid you were there to escort had been held up.
Robert flipped. Anyone but a total amateur, he said, would know that the UN didn’t give people lifts. I said I thought it would be worth a try; it was better than missing our deadlines and going for more walks in Kiseljak. I didn’t say I was young and blonde, and Robert was red-faced, bald and middle-aged (or at least what I thought was middle-aged then, but he was only 35, I guess), and soldiers tended to be more helpful to young blondes. We had a row then, a screaming match. I said I’d walk to the UN on my own, and he said I couldn’t. “You’re young and blonde,” he said. “War zones are full of nuts,” and I don’t think either of us saw the joke.
Our landlord ended up taking us crammed in his car, and charging some astronomical amount that made Robert go even redder with rage. But it worked. I left Robert in the car park, guarding our stuff, and, being young and blonde, and putting on my most Sandhurst-friendly accent, found two British officers who said they would take us in. They were both about the same age as me and, hair colour apart, they were weirdly identical: same height, same shape, same British fatigues; same age, probably, a bit older than me. When I’d proudly walked them towards Robert in the Kiseljak car park, he’d hardly grunted his thanks, but as we were putting our stuff in the car, he’d whispered to me: “They’re clones. Combat clones. Identical twins. What did you do? Walk in and ask for one in each colour?” Which I suppose was the nearest Robert got to saying sorry, but I had a funny feeling that both of them heard.
It seemed weird, after so many days of trying, that the trip from Kiseljak to Sarajevo should be so short, now we were in an UNPROFOR car – just twenty minutes or so, tootling along between pretty green hills, the houses we passed increasingly burnt-out. But Robert said, almost like you did: “It must be even weirder if you are stuck inside.” And then, as we left the Croat chequerboard flag behind, snaking warily between the huge lumps of cement dumped in the road, and out into the deserted street, towards the double-headed Serb eagle and the next row of mines, 200 yards and several ruins away, Robert said: “A whole week on the road, and now I suppose I’m back in Greater Serbia again.”
At the last checkpoint, before we left Serbia for the frontline and Sarajevo, that bearded lady of Sierra One, the fat Serb policewoman, tried to flirt with Robert – the one with a beer gut, and the fag stuck to her fuchsia-pink lips. She’d been chatting to two Chetniks inside her police station and they came out to watch her dealing with us; I couldn’t help feeling slightly sick as I looked at those two heroes of Greater Serbia, their fur hats, emblazoned, of course, with the double-headed eagle, neatly balancing their bushy black beards, their truly appalling teeth. I couldn’t forget all the things the Serb irregulars had done in that first blood-soaked summer of war – the lost villages of the Drina valley, the charred Lego houses of Prijedor, the rotting corpses, the school gyms full of bewildered refugees. They were grinning as the bearded lady went through her Rosa Klebb routine. I felt rather sorry for her in those days – she was so ugly, and her make-up was so bad, with her Aerofl ot-blonde two-inch dark roots, and the bristles poking through the orange foundation on her chin. I got used to her in the end. At least, that first trip, she didn’t try and steal our money; perhaps it was because we were with the UN. She certainly tried her best to flirt with our drivers, who heroically flirted back. And the mines – they looked so innocuous, like green plastic cowpats – but I knew, as she nonchalantly rolled them away with her foot, that if we’d driven over one, they’d have had to hose us off the road. But you’d never have met her either. You could never go to that checkpoint. That’s so odd. She is such an absolute part of my war. I wonder what she’s doing now?
Then we left Greater Serbia behind, the broken houses to either side, decaying as the war dragged on, beams poking into the sky, windows gouged, winter foliage trampled underfoot by the soldiers peering through their wrecked walls at their enemy a few hundred yards away. As for me, at that frontline; then, at least, I’d never been so scared. You see it on TV, but a twenty-four inch screen can’t do justice to a blasted, open concrete space, ringed round with house after roofless house; walls half blown away; bald winter branches sprouting from their windows. The snow lay fresh on the minefields to either side.
You don’t know what that frontline was like. How could you have known? It was keeping you inside and before the war, you would have used the normal road. Although you might have seen it on TV. Like I did, before I came. Although maybe not, as you had no electricity.
It was Robert who had to show us all the way. There were no signs. No other cars around; a creepily empty urban space. As funny as it is to me now, on that trip, Robert, who hardly knew Sarajevo in the war, was to me as omniscient as a god. There was a flyover, at the end of that space, curling round a graveyard, whose stones poked up through the mine-rich virgin snow. In its shadow, a tattered flag, the Bosnian fleur delys on a shield, hung from a wire above a makeshift chicane of oil drums.
A hand appeared from behind a concrete pillar and, like a fairy tale again, a ragged soldier beckoned us round. He was much thinner than the bearded lady we had just left behind; dark-haired, like you, and probably, once, as handsome. He showed our passes to his friend, a tow-haired goblin huddled by a fire.
“Welcome to Sarajevo,” the ragged soldier said. They both laughed and the goblin showed a mouth full of goblin teeth; he showed them again when the clone in the passenger seat threw him a pack of Marlboro Red. It was hard to believe that both men had the same job; this whey-faced goblin, shooting out his claw to catch the largesse thrown his way, his fatigues shiny with grime and use, shrinking behind his brazier in the shadow of the bridge; and the dark-haired boy – man, really – in our car, all bursting and luminous with testosterone.
“Good day to come,” said the ragged soldier. “Still ceasefire. Is nearly record. Drive fast, you maybe reach Holiday Inn before Chetniks change their minds…” And he and goblin roared with laughter again.
Suddenly we were on a great dual carriageway, built for traffic jams, with tank tracks in the snow; except we were alone. A jumble of trolley bus cables lay along the central reservation, and the shadow of some tramlines showed faintly through.
The Girl in the Film Page 4