The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  Then, for the first time, I pitied Johnny. I understood now at least part of why he slept with that girl. It was all right for me, being out here – just as you were thinking now of nothing but running up that street – but it must have been awful for Johnny, sitting in his bank; not knowing that news footage, with its frantic shell bursts and blood, bears as much relation to war as cricket highlights do to a five-day test. No wonder Johnny said I left him for a country.

  I turned to carry on back up the stairs, to be alone with you in my head, but I saw another pinpoint of light jiggling up the stairs.

  “Who’s that, Molly? I thought it was you. It’s so difficult to see anything in this place. How are you? Jeez. It took me days to get here. At least Tuzla had electricity.”

  It was Ed. I should have been honoured by his friendliness – he was, after all, very distinguished; one of those big American writers who do big stories for big magazines, in between writing big thick books – but I wanted to keep the memory of you. He didn’t seem to notice I didn’t speak.

  “I hear Tim’s in town. Are you coming in?”

  I said yes, and turned back towards the BBC.

  Body parts and human flesh clung to the schoolyard fence. The ground was literally soaked in blood. One child, about six years of age, had been decapitated. I saw two ox-carts covered with bodies. I did not look forward to closing my eyes at night for fear that I would relive the images. I will never be able to convey the horror.

  —Louis Gentile, UNHCR official, Srebenica

  1993

  VI

  You used to say you felt like you’d walked onto the set of a film, when the first checkpoints appeared on the bridge – the one I used to just think of as being halfway down Sniper Alley, the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity, it was called, Tito’s old slogan, which always made us hacks laugh and even you had begun to find funny after a while with us. One day there was a man, you said, with the Chetniks’ instant patriotism kit – beard, fur hat and double-headed white eagle – who fixed you with his eye and ran his finger across his throat, as you walked by. You said you’d turned to the friend you were walking with and said, “This isn’t real. This is just like a film.” And I said, I know just how you feel.

  If this were a film, the next few weeks would have been our falling-in-love montage. We’d have run hand in hand, the music fast, but in a minor key, across minefields, interviewing refugees, or huddling during a bombardment in a particularly striking ruin, making love by candlelight to machine gunfire. We never argued – not properly, back then. Just the teasing friction of people in love. Perhaps, now I think about it, you didn’t dare start a fight. Not at the beginning. Not until you knew how much I needed you too.

  Our first big row was the day I got back from Mostar. But it wasn’t directly from Mostar, and that was what the row was about. I hadn’t seen it coming. I suppose I should have done.

  The Big Row was just a continuation, I suppose, of what would have been the first row, if I hadn’t taken evasive action. In most relationships, rows tend to be about the same thing, I always think. We find our fault-lines and are drawn to the edge – teetering, arms flailing on the brink, sometimes just to admire the view, until we either tumble into the abyss, or build some kind of swaying Andean bridge. Maybe some people build concrete flyovers and think they are safe. But they are just deluded. It’s easy to blow up a concrete flyover – I’ve seen the remains of a few – and they take much longer to rebuild than a few bits of plaited rope.

  The first row happened a week or so after you’d started working for me. Everybody agreed it made sense for you to work for me; you spoke English; your father, on his forty-eight hours back from the front, lent you his car. It had been swaddled in blankets in a garage, waiting for the war to end, its battery cannibalised in your house, its tank with just enough petrol left to flee – you couldn’t afford any more, at fifty Deutschmarks a litre, but – well, I had to pay somebody to translate and drive me around and I’d much rather give the money to you than one of those bitter men in the slave market in the atrium of the Holiday Inn. Muffy said most of them were working the black market anyway. They were a lot fatter than everyone else, but maybe that was because they were getting fed on the money they were charging to drive us around. I actually think it was Muffy’s idea at first anyway. It wasn’t yours, whatever people said afterwards. As I said, I don’t think you had the slightest idea – and I didn’t realise I could hire anyone I liked.

  It was a quiet day and you said you wanted to come to the briefing. I would normally hitch a lift with Tim, or Phil now, as he had come back. You’d wait, in my room, or drinking coffee in the BBC, until we all got back. But you didn’t like that. You wanted to come. You said Valida got to go to the briefing. You said you’d know what was going on if you came. You said it would help me, if you knew that too. It would help you come up with the stories for me, you said.

  You’d come up with some pretty good stories already I couldn’t have got on my own: the man who’d walked from Srebrenica to Sarajevo, through the mountains (“We always said the people in eastern Bosnia were thick. Why on earth would he want to end up here?” you said.) And the “comfort girls”, girls who’d go to the frontline to sleep with the soldiers. Not prostitutes, you said, quickly, it was their war effort. You were a bit embarrassed about that one. Particularly when the girl with bobbed dark hair, maroon dye halfway grown out, when we knocked on her door, screamed your name and gave you an enormous kiss.

  When I said the UN wouldn’t let you in because you didn’t have a UN pass, you said, you didn’t care. You just wanted to get out.

  The briefings were held at the PTT, an enormous cement fortress down Sniper Alley, where the UN had holed themselves up at the start of the war. It had been the telecom building before; Robert had explained to me that Tito liked to fortify everything just in case. “He was totally paranoid,” Robert had said. “Maybe he had a point,” I said.

  We zoomed down the dual carriageway for a couple of miles, between tower blocks, with their pitted windows boarded up, and abandoned lorries stuffed in makeshift frontlines; the wrong side of the road, the left side, because it was safer – the houses gave you more cover from the snipers on the far side. We were probably the only unarmoured car on the road. But I was getting used to driving around with you by now.

  We turned for the PTT where a stream came out. Some old women were hoeing the ground beside the road, between the blocks of flats, next to a wall of sandbags, by some white armoured personnel carriers corralled with razor wire. It looked like Bruegel, touched up by Dalí. “What are they doing?” I asked, and you explained, there’d been some new law, this summer, that all the untarmac-ed earth in the city had to be sown for food; all the bits that were relatively safe to work. I looked back at the women. They were hoeing in the shadow of a little hill, safe from snipers, as long as they weren’t shelled. Maybe they weren’t that old. They just looked like they were.

  Tito would have approved of the PTT now. Every window was padded with sandbags, every wall iced with razor wire. I was just apologising again, as we bumped along the track, for the fact that the French Foreign Legionnaires on the gates weren’t going to let you in, because you didn’t have a UN pass like me, when you stopped the car. There was a chain across the road and a boy, scrawny, spiky dark hair, in swirly green camouflage, with the fleur de lys of the Bosnian Army on his shoulder flash, was flagging us down. He was grey-faced tired, the way you were when we first met; already your skin had a different bloom. He checked your papers, showed them to his friend, who was scuffing the chain wound round the oil drum. He shook his head. You pointed at me and I smiled at them, but it didn’t matter what we did, he wasn’t going to let you through. It wasn’t a UN checkpoint – this was fifty yards before, but you didn’t have a Bosnian press pass either. I hadn’t even thought of getting you one. To me, then, you were just my boyfriend who was driving me around. The two boys seemed rather to enjoy making you stay.
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br />   You said you’d wait by the car; I left you with the boys, warming your hands. I walked on through. It was hot in the sun, but the air was still chill. Outside the armoured car and the hotel, Sarajevo smelt sweetly of spring and the rubbish smouldering beside the checkpoint. I turned to wave: you were offering them each a cigarette and I noticed you’d slipped your arm back into its sling. Somehow you looked bigger than them, taller, perhaps, or maybe just fuller. Phil said you should be OK, when I saw him inside. Like the old women, the snipers couldn’t see you and the Serbs were unlikely to shell the UN HQ: “You’d have to be bloody unlucky to be hit there.” And at least it wasn’t raining.

  You didn’t seem to mind that much, when I left you there. It was when I came back with Edin that you did. Even then, you weren’t angry; you were never angry with me then. Perhaps you weren’t sure enough of me. You were just sad. It was I who was angry with myself.

  Edin was teasing me as he stopped the armoured car, telling me I couldn’t have another Jaffa Cake. He was the fi xer for CTV, one of the big North American networks, although not as big as it used to be. When he saw you, he leapt out of the car. You hugged each other, and both started jabbering in Serbo-Croat.

  Edin was the same height as you, the same sort of age, the same high cheekbones, the same dark hair flopping onto the same pale skin. But next to Edin, you looked almost ill again. He clapped you on the back and said to me – “He’s still all here!” Then he grinned at you, said something again, said, “See you later,” to me, offered the Jaffa Cakes to the guys on the checkpoint, who grabbed at them with a grin, then drove off.

  Normally, when I got in the car, you would say, “where to, Madam?” and laugh at me. This time, you just stared at the wheel.

  It was only when we were turning out onto the road that you said: “Edin says he’s at TV station. He wants me to come for coffee.”

  I had time to spare. It was Tuesday. There was nothing urgent I had to do. I liked the TV station; there was a phone that was a tenth of the price of the one in the BBC. Besides, it made a change from the hotel. It was then you asked me about the Jaffa Cakes. That was when I told you about the PX shop, the UN military shop, inside the PTT, where people with UN accreditation could buy chocolate and biscuits, cigarettes and booze.

  “I’ve got some Jaffa Cakes, too,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got some cigarettes as well, and some coffee.”

  Then you asked me: “How Edin get in there?”

  “He’s got an UNPROFOR pass.”

  “Like yours?”

  “No, not like mine. His is local press. He can’t get in and out of

  Sarajevo.”

  “But he can still use shop?” “Yes,” I said.

  You didn’t speak. You just drove up the road. I said: “The cigarettes are still rationed.” As though it somehow made it better. And then I said: “I can get you anything you want.”

  The TV station was just like the PTT – huge and concrete and fortified with sandbags and planks, but instead of being covered with the logos of UNPROFOR, its windows had stickers with TV, NBC or CNN. You parked the car – like the PTT, the TV centre was sheltered behind a hill from the snipers: maybe Tito had a good idea where the firing was likely to come from. But, like the PTT, the Bosnian soldiers at the door wouldn’t let you in. No pass. No UN pass. No Bosnian pass. I had to go upstairs for Edin, who talked them round, along with a packet of Marlboro Red. Edin took me aside, as the soldiers made you fill out a form, and said with reproach, “You should get him a pass.” I blushed. “I know, he’s only just… just started working for me.”

  I let you go off with Edin, and went to use the phone. The TV station was, I guess, like most TV stations in the world, large and labyrinthine and full of cameramen. They swarmed the halls, greeting each other with harsh Australian cries, leaning against the windows chatting up pale-skinned, red-lipped girls; the passages hummed with the generators installed from the same paranoia, so amply justified, that led the building to be clad in ferro-concrete. Like the Holiday Inn, the carpet was grey and stuck to your feet as you walked. Like the rest of Sarajevo, it smelled of pee. There was an office, the European Broadcasting Union, where Balkan beauties drank instant coffee, while TV producers sent stories from their satellite dishes, and writers like me would come in and use the phone. I rang the desk. I rang some friends. I had a cup of coffee with Muffy, who was ringing people too. Then I went to find you.

  The air in CTV was squeaky with the sound of running tape and the throb of the generator. You were sitting on the edge of a desk, swinging your foot, eating cheese from one of those huge catering blocks the TV companies flew in, talking to a pale-skinned girl, who was giggling back. I stood in the doorway, suddenly left out, but the moment you saw me, you leapt up.

  “Aida, this is Molly, I was telling you about.”

  She didn’t smile. She didn’t move from her chair. We must have been about the same age I suppose, but she was much better dressed than me. She was beautiful, but then, so many of these people were, and beautifully made up, with dark hair straight to her bra strap at the back. It even looked clean. Mine needed a wash and I’d been living in my jeans for the last month. Her trousers were some kind of well-cut flannel. I looked at her feet. She was in high heels. I had my ‘school of Timberland’ boots.

  “Aida’s Valida’s sister. I have not seen her since before war,” you said, keen to include me in this exciting reunion. The girl glared.

  “BBC Valida?” Nod. “She’s lovely.” Still no smile. So I said to you, “Sorry, I think we ought to go. I said we’d give Muffy a lift.” She said something to you in Serbo-Croat, something about tomorrow. You smiled at me, and said in English, “You have to ask the boss.”

  You didn’t mention the pass. You didn’t say anything at all. You just got back into the car when we got outside and I stood and looked up at the overcast skies, the clouds pushing down on us, like the guns pushed in; as Muffy got into the back, I turned to him: “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I’ll get a pass for you, if you like. I’m sorry.”

  You turned on the ignition: “If you want me to work for you, I think is better.” You were strangely unenthusiastic. I didn’t know then that was how you dealt with anything you really wanted. “If you want me to be like real interpreter. Like Edin.”

  “You are a real interpreter,” I said. “I couldn’t work here without you.”

  Suddenly it was sunny again. You grinned at me. “Where to, Madam?” I laughed back and leant across and squeezed your hand. From the back, Muffy said: “C’mon guys, don’t let’s hang around out here.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t think you were a real interpreter: I think I wasn’t sure yet that I was a real journalist, so I didn’t want to ask for too much. But the foreign editor, when I asked for a letter accrediting you, just said he’d get Melinda, the secretary, to fax it that afternoon.

  Phil read the letter out loud when it arrived on his fax. “This is to confirm that Amir Hadzibegovic is working in Sarajevo as interpreter and driver for Molly Taylor, Balkans Correspondent of the London Herald. Any problems, please contact Roger Highsmith.”

  Somewhere I heard Phil say: “Christ, I used to know him. He’s a complete arse.” But I wasn’t even listening; the last words I’d heard had been Balkans Correspondent – I didn’t even know that’s what I had become.

  British squaddie joke:

  “What’s the difference between a Warrior and a Lada?”

  “You can get to Tuzla in a Lada.”

  VII

  You loved driving me to the briefing each day. You loved the UN having to tell you what was going on. You loved the way the press conference changed UNPROFOR from being the lord of Sarajevo to a fumbling press spokesman, shiftily trying to justify the daily inertia to us baying hordes. It was like a party, you said, seeing so many friends, people you’d known at university but hadn’t seen during the war. The Edins, the Aidas, there must have been a hundred of them, Sarajevans, like you, all wo
rking for alphabet soup. CNN, BBC, WTN, UNHCR, MSF, UNICEF – every westerner in Bosnia worked for some kind of initials and each one had their own local staff. After being so trapped, you said, you loved driving your car.

  But I thought it was too dangerous for you. People died on that road every day, I said. Your car wasn’t armoured and however fast we drove, the snipers were shooting people who drove as fast as us. I could get a lift, I said, in Phil’s armoured car.

  You said I didn’t want you there, you said I wanted to go off on my own, be with Phil, but that wasn’t true. I did want to be with you. I could see you loved the briefings. I loved you for that; and it meant you could join in all our jokes. But I was worried about your mother, left on her own, your father at the front, alone all day, with no-one to help fetch water or wood.

  You said that your mother did quite well out of you going to the briefings. You said, if people had jobs, they were out all day. Your mother understood that, you said. That was what the money was for; 100 DM a day, you said, even though it was a bit less than other driver/interpreters got (I felt awful about that, but I did pay you seven days a week, and I wouldn’t have had anyone else for the whole week). Besides, you pointed out, we used the car to get her water in the afternoons. And she did well out of those chocolates I was always bringing her. She made money from that. And the coffee.

  I didn’t know, until then, you were selling the chocolate and stuff. I thought I was giving your mother a present. I was surprised how much I minded that, but Muffy said, presents are different in a war. I wanted to ask you where you sold them, but I didn’t think I could. You might have thought I didn’t approve; I didn’t really but that didn’t stop me being curious.