The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  1999

  I can see a large tree from my window. It’s very English in shape – England as a foreigner would think of it, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve spent too much of my life abroad. It’s set against an English sky – it’s actually, even, quite a nice day – just not quite in the middle of an English lawn. You can hardly see the trench, at the end of the lawn, the ha ha, keeping out the sheep in what the woman downstairs calls the park. Actually, she calls the whole place “The Park”. It looks like one of those places in films, where terrorists are holed up or spies are trained. It’s railway-station Gothic. I quite like that. It reminds me of university. Life was so simple, when all you had to do was write two essays a week.

  I wonder what they’d think, whoever planted those trees, a century ago, if they knew that their house would be full of fruitcakes paying £400 a night. Sometimes I sit at dinner, staring up at their plaster coats of arms, the cupids strewing flowers, the tipsy coronets, and think, this is just like the Holiday Inn. We’re all trapped. Here voluntarily (most of us, anyway), and for the same reason. But trapped. Although the food’s better. And it’s much less fun.

  The day I found the diary was the day I finally flipped, although Ireeeneeeeeee tells me that it was inevitable. That I shouldn’t feel guilty for going bananas and being found rocking backwards and forwards on the floor of my flat; thank God Muffy was coming round – she’s American and they know about these things. My father would probably just have given me a stiff drink. But then, he’s in Kyrgyzstan, so it wouldn’t have been him.

  Irene says it’s very common, this kind of delayed reaction. The woman downstairs agrees. She says they see that kind of thing the whole time. She says this summer’s Kosovo war was probably the trigger – it had been building up for the last few months. But she’s just the receptionist so what does she know. I asked Ireeeeeneeee and she asked me what I thought. I said I thought that the receptionist was probably right, because until the war – the new one – I was fine.

  At least I think I was fine, although it’s surprising now, now that I’m so obviously not, how many people have said that they knew all along. I wish they’d told me. Although, what the other people say here, the ones you can have a conversation with, is that one of the classic symptoms of being potty is that you think you’re perfectly all right; I asked Ireeeeeneeeee if she thought that was true and she asked me what I thought. I said, I supposed so. She said, I mustn’t feel guilty for not realising I was round the bend. The receptionist (Sarah, 32, who was brought up in Lewes, fifteen miles away) said she agreed. She said they see a lot of that here.

  Until the new war, I’d kept it all under control. I left the Herald, three years ago – I’d worked for them, since Robert handed his string to me on that first trip to Sarajevo; I hadn’t realised it was his valedictory tour – he’d been moving to London to work for the Beeb. But I left them in the end – shortly after the war in Bosnia ground to a halt. That was apparently inevitable too. I like all this inevitability. It lets me right off the hook. And I’m not the only warbarmy person here – there’s some guy who was in the SAS who’s gone round the bend from “slotting”, as he says, too many terrorists. He didn’t want to talk to me for a bit, once he discovered that I was a journalist, but now we get on like a house on fire. I said I wished he’d been allowed to slot some Serbs, but he said he was never sent to Bosnia.

  Ireeeneee’s spot on where the Herald’s concerned. They didn’t know what to do with me when peace broke out; there aren’t that many jobs in normal life for girls whose major qualifi cations are that they don’t mind being very uncomfortable for quite a long time and can always get to a phone (or nearly always, except, of course, for the market massacre day, but Ireeneeeeeeeeee tells me I’m not to feel guilty about that, although frankly I don’t think you and Ireeneeeeeeee would see eye to eye). Particularly if the girl in question has got too grand to wear inflatable bikinis any more. She just sits around the office, reading the wires, a visible reproach for the triviality of life.

  So I left them, left that whole world behind and went to work as a features editor on a glossy magazine, sending girls, just like I had been, to try out inflatable bikinis. But at least I got to stay in one place.

  I could have found another war. If a war’s what you want, there are lots around, even if newspapers don’t care about most of them. Africa’s good for that. But Africa doesn’t do it for me: I’m scared of insects and I faint in heat.

  But it wasn’t just Africa. I couldn’t face another war. I couldn’t face wandering into people’s lives and making them like me and trust me and tell me about themselves and watching them remember for a moment what they once had been; their homes, before the soldiers came. To revisit, for me, the stream tumbling down the steep-sided valley, the little mosque, before it was blackened with flames, the plum trees, the white house, red roof, orange blankets on the beds, and the goat tethered amongst the chickens outside; and then shutting my notebook and walking out, leaving them in their tiny room – in the school or the town hall or the hotel, or their summer tent, with the UNICEF donated nappies strung from wall to wall and their UNHCR tins of food stacked neatly above the UNHCR wood-burning stove, and their father-in-law and their granny in bed, looking at it all afresh with eyes newly wrenched from the past I’d made them conjure up. I couldn’t bear leaving them. I couldn’t bear leaving you. I couldn’t bear the thought of minding that much ever again. At the time, I thought it was common sense. It’s not, apparently, but it’s understandable.

  Eye-reen-eeee says I mustn’t feel guilty about that.

  You would have hated me to find another war.

  I never read the Herald after I left – just to see the typeface made me feel sick. Ireeeneeeeeee says that’s normal too. Luckily they’ve redesigned it so much since I left – desperately trying to make more people buy it when being less smug and more interesting might work better instead – that I could read it again, if I wanted to. I never read anything about the Balkans, anyway, whatever paper it’s in. And I didn’t really bother to keep in touch with people, apart from Phil, obviously, because he was my friend. But he’s in Moscow now, so I never see him. And I never saw Robert, because he was back in Sarajevo. Sometimes I used to cry, but not very often. Probably no more than any normal person would. Although maybe normal people don’t cry in the credits of Dad’s Army.

  So in a way, the new war took me by surprise. I knew it was coming, obviously – anybody would – but I really thought that I wouldn’t care. I thought I would be able to convince myself that this time it had nothing to do with me. After all, it was Kosovo – Albanians and Serbs – and I’d only been there once, on a really slow week somewhere in the summer of 1993, a kind of round-up trip of “and meanwhile let’s see whether Yugoslavia’s other war is ready yet – oops, not quite. Put it back in for a bit”: the Albanians still had another six years to go before they gave up trying to win with passive resistance.

  I thought that I had done with that part of my life, that I no longer wanted to wake up to the lazy rattle of a machine gun each day, to drive those endless winding roads through burnt-out villages, to get so used to the blackened corpses of buildings that an intact row of houses was a shock; to have the hit of adrenalin when you come up to a checkpoint, and the surge of elation when you get your story through. I thought that I had grown out of that, that it was under control. And in a way, it was – at least in the run-up to the thing. Then, I didn’t even read the newspapers, I didn’t watch the telly, I didn’t go and buy the books my old colleagues had hurriedly rushed out so that all their other colleagues could buy them before they set off to war, and swap the same second-hand facts round the hotel bar.

  I did none of those things. I thought I was immune, until it began, and then I couldn’t stop watching it on TV: the same little white houses, the same sunset-shaped bars twisted in the remains of the same shell-shattered windows, the same tractors bristling with refugees, the same swirly blue unifor
ms on the same military police beating them on their way; the same people, my old friends, sweating into their flak jackets in the hard June sun. Phil squinting into the camera as he filed from the makeshift camps – because technology had changed a lot in the last four years and you could file now, really, even for TV, from wherever you liked.

  I watched the war the way my father watched cricket – glued to the television, with the volume off, and my shortwave radio stuck in one ear; the commentary’s much better on the radio.

  I had this desperate urge to be there again, to smell the dust, the dry grass, the faint whiff of cordite, to be with people who were dealing with matters of life and death. I lost all concentration in the office – and it had to be pointed out that, on a glossy magazine, flicking through Reuters could not be described as work. It was on the second day of the war that I started to smoke again. At least they approved of that at work – it’s a well-known weight control and it makes you look cool. But they did say, “Welcome back,” when the war came to an end.

  Then the diary – well, that was the final straw. And the last bit, the yellowing press cutting in the Herald’s old font, stuck in with sellotape. The bit about you.

  I never fell in love after you. It was as though that part of me had been tidied away with the helmet (the Herald let me keep it as a souvenir) and the Serbo-Croat phrase books and the Swiss Army knife. As I said, I never wanted to mind that much again.

  Ireeeeeeeeeeneeeeeeeeeee says that’s normal too, I mustn’t feel guilty about not falling in love. Ireeeeeneeeeee keeps telling me I shouldn’t feel guilty about anything. But what kind of a monster would I be, if I didn’t feel guilty about you?

  Mujo was pulling his sledge through the street on the way to get water, when he saw Suljo, standing at the top of a building, about to jump.

  “Stop it! What are you doing?” he yelled.

  “I was shot by a sniper,” shouted Suljo. “The doctors had to cut off my dick and take out my guts. I just want to die.”

  “There’s no point living without a dick,” Mujo agreed, and went on. Two hours later, as he was pulling the jerry cans back, he saw Suljo was still there. “Why didn’t you jump?” “No guts,” said Suljo.

  Sarajevo 1993

  V

  I don’t know what you did that month I wasn’t there. I never really did know what you did when I wasn’t there; although I suppose that was what I was interviewing you about the day we first met. Forage for wood, in the dark, so the snipers couldn’t see; hide in the kitchen when the shelling was bad; fetch the water – at night again; queue for food. That took up a lot of your time, helping your mother, while your father commuted on foot to the front. Sometimes, in the sunlight, you could read a book. You didn’t read by candlelight, you said; there were not enough candles to go round. Before you met me, you said, you’d sit there in the dark, waiting for the war to end. And after? Wondering when I’d come back.

  You always said we started going out when I got back from Tuzla. But of course, we hardly ever went out, exactly, as outside was so dangerous. What we really did was stay inside together. But then that’s what Johnny and I did too, back at Oxford, and nobody was waiting to shoot us at the corner of his street. You said that first month didn’t count, because I was away, and I didn’t say, because I thought it would just open a can of worms, that if you didn’t count every time I was away, then we’d lose months from our lives.

  I’m not saying I thought of you all the time I was in Tuzla. There were too many other people to feel pity for – not that it was pity I seemed to feel for you. The Serbs had been burning their way through the forests of eastern Bosnia for weeks, village after village, driving those Muslims, the ones who weren’t killed on the way, until they were all – men, women, children – crushed into a little town, in a gorge, at the end of the mountains. It was called Srebrenica but Srebrenica wasn’t famous then. There was a ceasefire: General Morrillon, the Frenchman who ran the UN in Bosnia, went to Srebrenica, and the women and children lay under the wheels of his Armoured Personnel Carrier, so he was trapped; the women refused to move until the UN arranged an evacuation of refugees – although the UN were loath to agree on a matter of principle: the UNHCR said it would be doing the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing for them, and they had a point, but then, if they didn’t, all the people were going to die. The lorries that finally reached Tuzla from Srebrenica, through the snowdrifts and the minefields, disgorged a load of old men, young women and their babies, the sick, the wounded, and the bodies of those who had failed to survive the trip. They told of a world lost deep in pine-forested ravines, where children, playing football, were shelled and bled to death in the snow, and the artillery kept battering into the streets, where everyone had fled from some other village the Serbs had burnt up in the Drina valley, of no food, no fuel, no future. And the UN did nothing – not that there was much they could do, they said, in the snow: their Armoured Personnel Carriers couldn’t even make it over the mountains to Tuzla, the tracks kept skidding in the ice.

  So I didn’t think of you all the time, as we counted the wounded and heard their stories and taunted the world into trying to act. I did think of you but I didn’t know what to think. And when the story finally faded away and Srebrenica, like Tuzla, like Sara-jevo, Gorazde, Bihac and Zepa – wherever Muslims were packed together, still holding out against the Serbs – had been declared a Safe Area by the UN, Muffy and I got into the white armoured Land Rover driven by some American friend of Muffy’s she’d known from her days in Central America and returned to Sarajevo. He called himself an aid worker but Muffy said, yeah right, funny how he saved the world in places like Salvador and the Afghan border. She called him John the Spy and had been very happy to bump into him in the bar. Although the hotel was so full she and I had to share a room, most of the nights she never made it back. Even the last night, after she’d wept as she told me about the girl John had married a few years ago, who bred babies in Virginia, while he went round saving the world. Then she talked about the jazz musician she lived with in New York, and then she washed her face, put her mascara on and said to me, “I’m going out. Don’t wait up.”

  As we drove back to Sarajevo, I had two days to think about you in the car. I wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe you kissed lots of girls like that. Maybe I would just be making a fool of myself, a stupid foreign journalist not getting the point. In London, I would have waited for you to ring, but your phone hadn’t worked, along with everyone else’s since the PTT building received a direct hit at the start of the war. You couldn’t write to me because I didn’t have an address, and anyway the post hadn’t worked for a year either – postmen being very averse to being shot by a sniper when on their rounds. You couldn’t email, because your computer didn’t work because there was no electricity, and anyway, strange to think, this was the dawn of the internet, so most people weren’t on email anyway. So I didn’t know what to do. I’d never had to pursue a man before and I wasn’t sure if Sarajevo was the right place to start.

  Our car luged down a track that looked as if it had been carved into the mountain in walls of ice; an Olympic toboggan run, but in an armoured car. Snow-laden fir trees drooped over the road, and beyond, the cliffs dropped sheer to one side, where lost houses by lost rivers could be made out in the meadows far below. On the other, the peaks soared up. We skidded through villages that Suleiman the Magnificent’s generals would have thought unchanged: pitched roofs, those strange pointy haystacks, muffled women chopping logs, like the villagers in the mountains on the way to Kiseljak, so blasé after a year of war that they barely stopped to stare as the caravans of aid lorries skated by. Except to beg for cigarettes. Before the war, those villages wouldn’t have seen a stranger from one year to the next.

  I didn’t go and see you at first. I kept putting it off; it’s easy to put off real life in Sarajevo. I had to find my feet, do my work, I had a lot to do, I had to get it right. With Robert’s job, I’d started to panic the same way he had – a fever
rising to crisis at the end of the week, with Sunday a sort of floppy convalescent fug; later a distinguished old journalist told me writing for a Sunday paper was like having a weekly disease.

  Phil had gone, to be replaced by the man who was in Tuzla, but Muffy used to hire a driver for the day; his car wasn’t armoured, but he drove very fast. I asked if it was safe; she said: “He was a dentist; it was his brand new Audi. He doesn’t want any holes in it either.” She took me to see the UNHCR, and a general, the one I had been to with Phil; General Divjak, a Bosnian Serb who’d stayed in Sarajevo; I was beginning to recognise people now. We went to the hospital and the orphanage and met some refugees who’d managed somehow to walk here from Srebrenica. Phil’s replacement, Tim, dark haired and fifty, made me feel shy because I had seen his face on TV reporting from every war since I’d watched John Craven tell me about Mozambique on Newsround when I was six; but he let me hang out in his office, the way Phil had done. So I didn’t really miss you, but I always looked wistfully up your street as we clanked by.

  Late Monday afternoon, as I was wandering along the gallery to the BBC, I heard a voice floating out through the open door.

  “Why do you let her hang out here so much?” I recognised that voice; so would most of America, and a million lonely business-men worldwide. A woman, rather tough, very famous, about fifteen years older than me. I’d met her a couple of times last summer and then again in Tuzla, but she’d never been very nice. She didn’t spend so much time at the BBC as a lot of other journalists; being TV, she had her own office and a crew, so she had her own little court, but she was here now, like a visiting queen, and for some reason, although there was nothing that I could put my finger on, I stayed put.

  “She’s sweet,” I heard Tim, the BBC correspondent, say. “And she’s funny.”