“You mean she’s young and pretty.”
“Well, that always helps.”
The woman snorted. I felt slightly sick as I heard her say: “I don’t know what she’s doing here.”
A silence, then Muffy’s voice: “Same as us, Marina. She’s a journalist.” I wanted to hug her.
“What does she do exactly? She’s just one of those girls who hangs around the Holiday Inn for a few weeks. Fucks people and fucks off.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” said Tim. “Besides, I don’t think she’s fucked anyone here yet.”
“She didn’t in Tuzla,” said Muffy. “I was sharing her room.” I thought, nice of her to say so, but how would she know? She hadn’t been there very much.
Marina sounded a bit embarrassed, but she ploughed on. “I don’t mean to sound – bitchy…” I thought, you’re doing a pretty good job. “But does she do any work? She never seems to leave the hotel… She just seems to hang out with you two all the time.”
“Oh Marina,” said Muffy. “What do you know? She seemed to be working OK in Tuzla. You’re down at the TV centre most of the day. It’s really hard to work in Sarajevo without an armoured car.”
“Well, that’s my point. If she can’t work here properly, then there’s no point in being here at all. It’s not a finishing school. She should leave.”
“At least she’s here. Robert never came here at all…” said Tim.
“Oh, please! Robert’s Robert. At least, he knew what was going on.”
I turned back along the gallery towards the stairs. I wanted to go to my room and cry. I had loved being here. I had thought, I had deluded myself, I suppose, they seemed to like me: I’d finally been asked to join the cool gang at school. And now there was this bitch, the undeniable queen of the hotel, being vile. Maybe she has a point. Then I thought, fuck her, I’m just trying to find my feet. It’s all right for people with armoured cars and satellite engineers to be smug. Then I thought again, well maybe she’s right. Maybe I should go, and stop wasting everyone’s time. I mean, I was so tired. Maybe the Herald was mad to even think I could do this. How could I follow on from Robert, who spoke the language and had been here for years?
I walked downstairs, just for something to do, but there really wasn’t much to do in Sarajevo. Where the plate-glass lobby wall should have been, the evening light streamed through the plastic sheets. Three old men were drinking coffee on the mushroom stools on the astro-turf, nestling behind one of the huge pillars that kept up the roof, in case a shell should suddenly land outside; sitting there, with their cars outside, hoping, one of us would come down and pay them 100 DM a day to risk their lives. Marina’s driver’s face lit up as he saw me come in, but I shook my head and he sank back onto his plastic stool. He wasn’t that old anyway; it was just the war. It made everyone old.
It wasn’t true that I didn’t talk to Sarajevans, I did. When I interviewed them. But interviewing and meeting people isn’t the same. How many Sarajevans did Marina meet anyway? With her entourage of TV crews and satellite dishes, every time she did a story, it was like the Queen opening a swimming pool.
I only knew one person in Sarajevo and that was you. Maybe I should go into town and try and meet someone else, but it was
Monday, and there was lots of shooting outside. What was the point, if you worked for a Sunday paper, of going for a walk down Sniper Alley, when you were five days off your deadline, on the off chance you might make a friend?
It was the waiter, when I bought my second cup, who said, “Did your friend find you?”
“What friend?”
“Young guy. One of ours. He came to find you, maybe two weeks ago. He ask reception. He ask here. I saw him two times.” I was already signing my bill. I swallowed, and my skin was tingling.
I asked: “Did he have his arm in a sling?” But I knew it had to be you. As I said, I didn’t know anyone else in Sarajevo anyway. I went upstairs for my flak jacket, then I ran out of the door. I stopped in the doorway – what could I bring? I couldn’t bring any coffee. I’d run out. I stood stock still, and then I thought I’d go anyway.
I had a pit in my stomach as I crunched up your stairs in the darkness. I was breathless, but that must have been the run. I thought, this is just journalism; journalists are always following up contacts they make. I thought you’d know that, even though I knew I was lying to myself; I thought, if you were cold and funny, it wouldn’t matter anyway. I could just leave. But I still felt sick as I knocked on your door.
You were cold and funny. “Oh, it’s you. I thought you gone.” “I came back,” I said, but I thought, maybe I should just go now.
“I went to hotel. I tried to leave message.”
“I know. They only told me today. You shouldn’t have done that. You could have been killed.”
There was maybe a five-second pause before he said: “And you would not like that, if I had been killed?”
“I wouldn’t like that at all.”
It was dark but I could feel you, like a force field, a foot away. You said nothing, and then you took hold of my arms and drew me towards you. I couldn’t see you, but I smelt you, and I didn’t need to see you as I kissed you. I could have kissed you for ever. Except the flak jacket kept getting in the way. I pulled back.
“I think I’ll take this off,” I said.
“Let me help.”
You lifted it off my shoulders and propped it against the wall. Then you kissed me again, and we sank down on the top stairs. The steps were stone cold and smelled, like everything, of pee, but at least it was private. I could feel the gritty little cubes of rubble, biting into the backs of my legs, and then I forgot them completely as you kissed me some more. We could have stayed there until the siege was lifted, I suppose, if your mother hadn’t yelled through the door.
She was pleased to see me, at any rate; even if I didn’t have any coffee this time. I gave her the Benstons in my bag instead; the ones I always kept, just in case, for making friends and bribes.
I looked up at you. You were looking at me. It was the first time I had seen you in daylight, I suppose. As I said, war makes people look old. I’d been here a month and I looked like shit. You looked tired, but you were smiling at me, so the huge bags beneath your eyes didn’t matter to me. Your skin had the same greyish tinge as Muffy’s driver in the Holiday Inn; greyer. And you were much thinner than him; thin like a model on a poster on the side of a bus. It was warmer, now, and you weren’t wearing your coat. Your sweater had risen up, one side, from your jeans; I snatched a look, a slice of stomach, pale, scooped hollow, with thick dark hairs marching in a line towards your flies. You saw me looking, I blushed and looked away.
And then your mother made coffee for us. I told you about my new job. You said, “So, you will stay?” As I said, “Yes,” your mother nodded happily through her nicotine haze.
When it was dark, you walked me back to the hotel – or ran me back. We were breathless, giggling from the rush, when we reached the back door. When you kissed me this time, you didn’t say you had to go. So we went up to my room, up the six flights of marble stairs, my spindly torch beam luring us on. We didn’t talk, and that may just have been the effort of the climb, but we didn’t exchange a word until we got to the door. I couldn’t find the key, for a moment, in my bag, which was strange because the key ring was the standard huge lump of plastic. I opened the door and the moonlight streamed towards us across the carpet – I had the room to myself now, since the Herald was footing the bill. I think I made some sort of banal remark like, “Well, here we are. I hope it’s not too untidy,” (which it shouldn’t have been since the chambermaid still came in daily despite the war, but that’s what we were paying the hotel for, I suppose).
I was trying to find the candles with my torch, when you started kissing me again. I think I was technically still going out with Johnny at the time, but I never thought of him at all. You were kissing me and kissing me and I was kissing you back, the wa
y I never tired of kissing you. You took my flak jacket off again, and kissed me again, the back of my neck. Suddenly it was as if a film had been speeded up. You pushed me so I sat down on the bed, and then suddenly I was lying flat. And I wasn’t sure… I didn’t know whether to stop you or not; I froze for a moment. I think I said, “Stop,” but you started kissing me again; kissing my lips, taking little nibbles from my neck, behind my ears, your cheekbones hard in my collar. I remember for a moment, trying to push you away and I remember, definitely remember, part of me asking you to stop but then my body started helping you, while my mind was still thinking, this is too fast, too soon, I don’t know this man. I shouldn’t be doing this now – and I thought of Johnny again, the only man I’d slept with for the last three years, and the stately procession of dates with which he paved his seduction, and here I was, having my knickers ripped down, on a hotel bed, by a man I hardly knew, and I even remember thinking, by a foreigner I hardly knew, as though that made it worse. And then also, thank God, I am still on the pill, since you were quite obviously not bothering to ask responsible questions about contraception. And I didn’t think I could have stopped you, actually, even if I had wanted to. And I didn’t want to, because your fingers on my skin were tracing lines of fire. And then I thought, maybe this is like hitchhiking, the rules are different here. But also, and this sounds pathetic but it’s true, there really wasn’t anything else to do. The courtship rituals of Sarajevo were very easily exhausted. And then I didn’t think about anything at all.
Afterwards, we lay there, on my clean hotel sheets, and I looked across at the pale blur of your face in the dark, the vapour of your breath, floating up in the moonlight; I felt almost enveloped in your scent. You stroked my cheek and said things to me in SerboCroat I could not understand, because they were, in those days, still far removed from my working vocabulary of cups of coffee and refugees and whether the road was safe ahead. Then we made love again. And afterwards, I felt your cheek wet against my face.
Then we dozed for a while. When we woke up I was hungry.
“Everybody in Sarajevo is hungry,” you said.
“No, I mean, shall we go and have dinner. It’s only half past nine.”
“Where?” You were amazed.
“Here,” I said. “In the hotel. I mean, the food’s not nice, but it’s food.” Although it was dark, I could almost see the hesitation on your face. When you spoke, I could hear the embarrassment: “Molly, this hotel very expensive.”
It was my turn to feel embarrassed. “Don’t be stupid, Amir,” I said. “We’ll just put it on my room.”
“No. You not pay.”
“No. I not pay,” I laughed. “My newspaper pay. You’re a justifiable expense. I wrote about you.”
The laughter from the dining room rose up through the icy darkness of the atrium. The dining room was packed when I opened the door – much fuller than it had been when I’d first got here; everyone else had come back from Tuzla now.
Some turned their heads as we came in through the door: rows of faces, shining yellow in the candlelight, disembodied, their dark-coated torsos blurring with the night, as though some Turkish warlord, one of your ancestors perhaps, had set a banquet before the spiked heads of his enemies. They were sitting, as they always did, like a medieval village – grouped by profession or national blocks – the French photographers’ table, the Japanese reporters’ corner, the row of laughing Australian cameramen.
I hadn’t even thought about introducing you to this world. I had a moment of panic, I nearly suggested we left, but God knows where we could have got anything else to eat. Then you said, “They look like boiled eggs.” I laughed and it was too late.
“Molly, we’re over here. Where have you been?” I heard Muffy’s voice. I felt a surge of gratitude as I remembered her earlier defence.
“Here!” A torch danced on the faces of Marina, Valida, Henri and Tim. Valida and Henri, dark and beautiful in the lamplight; Tim’s bald jolliness making him look even more like a boiled egg. Marina’s washed-out blonde, knackered and cross. I dropped your hand as we walked over, although I suppose in the darkness nobody could have seen.
“Where’ve you been?” said Muffy. “We were worried about you.”
Marina said nothing.
“I went to see a friend,” I said. “Marina, this is Amir. Amir, Marina, Tim.” You nodded at them.
“Hello Amir. Grab a chair,” said Tim.
“Well, Amir,” said Marina, looking him up and down. “This is a surprise.”
“Owz your pigeon?” said Henri. And you smiled at him, suddenly recognising him amongst the ranks of hacks. Then suddenly Valida gave a squawk and swooped on you, giving you double kisses, pecking at you in Serbo-Croat. I stared at you, but you had eyes just for her. I untangled my name from the snarl of consonants. Valida had her hand on your arm, but she looked, wide-eyed at me, then the astonishment on her face broke into a smile. She had never smiled at me before. She leant across.
“Amir and I were at university, together, before the war. We have not seen each other since war began. But he is here.” You were grinning at each other; eyes gleaming liquid in the candlelight. “He is alive.”
Some people – not Valida, she never said that – used to say you were just with me for what you could get. They said it later, of course, when they thought it would make me feel better, but I never believed them. I remember what you were like back then: you didn’t even realise I could give you a square meal. You ate slowly, that night, with a degree of disbelief, and with an anorexic’s lack of haste – you were accustomed to a world beyond food. All three courses, soup, the strange flat burger of no known flesh, the baklava that tasted of engine oil. When I didn’t eat mine, you didn’t say anything, but you stared at it.
“Have it. I don’t like it.”
“I think I take it home.”
We went up to the BBC after dinner. I got most of the jokes by now. I knew the armoured car was called Miss Piggy (“Temperamental,” Tim explained, “and she’s ex-RUC; in Northern Ireland they’re known as Pigs”). I knew that Valida’s father was an important Bosnian general, and as a result, she could get almost anyone she wanted on the phone. I could even try the odd bit of political analysis. You flickered in and out of invisibility, next to me on the sofa, drinking the whisky which was handed to you without any of the ceremony it had in your flat. We didn’t hold hands but I could feel the heat of you through my clothes. Sometimes Valida would talk to you. Muffy tried to make conversation, but then someone else would say something, and she’d leap into that with a speed which showed her mind had been half on it anyway. The ex-US marine, Ray, was there – God it was a long time ago – a bullethead nutter with a thousand-yard stare, who said he worked for something like the Anchorage Bugle. “But you have to wonder how interested the Anchorage Bugle is,” Muffy’d said, sotto voce, after our first introduction. “To my knowledge, he’s never filed a story.”
Ray made some remark about the “locals” that made me wince. Then you looked at your watch.
“I must go,” you said. “Is late.” “Why?” I didn’t want you to leave.
Valida said, “Curfew.”
You repeated, “Curfew.”
“Shit,” said Ray. “I’ll come along with you. Which way you heading?”
I thought, no, you bastard, don’t get in the way of my goodbye, but he was already heaving himself out of the chair.
“Don’t you stay here?” I asked.
“Hell, no. Gets me closer to the story. C’mon Samir. Let’s face the guns.”
“I’ll come down with you,” I said.
As we crashed down the stairs, Ray interrogated you on where you fought. “I spend most of my time on the frontline…” he said. You pointed at your sling and said that you hadn’t been there for a bit. “You bin hit?” asked Ray, and you nodded your head, and in the dark I blushed as I remembered how much better your arm had seemed three hours ago.
When we reached
the back door, we let Ray go through first.
“Can’t you stay?”
“No.” For a moment I thought, maybe you’ve had your fuck and your free meal and that’s enough. Maybe you’d rather be with Ray. But then you said, “Mama… she will think snipers get me. I wish I could stay.”
I wanted to yell, what about me? What if you’re killed on the way home?
“Tomorrow I see you?”
“Yes.” You kissed me, stroked my hair, and whispered my name. And when you stopped, you said, “When I see you tomorrow?” Tuesday, only Tuesday. I would have time to myself.
“Is the afternoon OK? I can get a lift into town,” I said, but actually I could hardly speak. You started kissing me again. Maybe you wouldn’t have gone, but we heard Ray’s voice, through the door, saying, “C’mon you guys…”
Ray was waiting, staring out at the skeletons of the skyscrapers against the stars, the broken moonlight shining back from the fragments of their glass. “God, it’s beautiful, this place.”
“Better before.”
“Shit, I love it like this. Let’s go…”
I watched you run the gauntlet up to the chicanes, while the odd crack of a bullet echoed around the square. Ray, I supposed, must have been still pretty fi t for his age. He ran in a way a man runs when he’s been trained to run. But I wasn’t thinking about Ray, just you. I could still feel your mouth on mine, I can still feel it now, and the musk of your saliva jangling on my tongue. I missed your smell, your touch, as though a part of me had been taken out. This must be love, I remember thinking, because it physically hurts and I’d forgotten that – human beings are programmed not to remember pain. Otherwise, who would ever fall in love twice?
I climbed back up in the darkness, with my little torch. I wanted to be alone, I wanted to go to my room to be on my own, with the cinema in my head, but as I passed the fl oor with the BBC offi ce, I could hear the laughter. I stopped.
I knew I no longer had a choice about you. The thing was done. I must have known that from the start. Maybe it was that, the inverse of the magnet, that had nearly sent me back out into the shells that first afternoon. Oh God, I hoped you weren’t lying with your brains pooling on the pavement, hit by the only sniper who wasn’t pissed at this time of night. I shocked myself by hoping that the sniper would shoot Ray first.
The Girl in the Film Page 11