In the end, we settled into a routine, like all couples do. On Monday and Tuesday I’d go with Phil, and you’d go home and help your mother. I’d meet you after lunch, hitch a lift into town. Sometimes I’d even stay the night, but I didn’t like being that far away from the Mother Ship; I used to take my shortwave with me and listen to it every hour. You said, can’t you go an hour without listening to Phil. I said, “Shh, it’s just in case something has happened.”
From Wednesday, you worked all day for me; taking me to interviews, coming up with ideas of people we should see, telling me stories of Sarajevo before the war, when you’d drive to the coast for the weekend, or ski in the mountains from which the Serbs now shot into the town.
On Saturdays, you learnt to keep quiet, lying in bed while I wrote like hell, and then hung around filing down Phil’s sat phone, waiting for the queries the desk might have. You’d wander down to the shiny horseshoe bar in the lobby, where you drank endless tiny cups of coffee which appeared on my bill. It was boring, I agreed, but you couldn’t leave me, I said, because I needed the car; just in case something happened. On Sundays, we seemed to spend most of the day in bed, making love or just talking, listening to the sniper chipping away at the fountain outside, wondering if he never got bored with pinging bullets off those tiles. I would worry about whether the piece I had filed had been OK and what on earth I was going to write the next week. And most days we’d eat with the others downstairs, and drink too much of Holiday Inn’s horrible Hepok wine and whisky in the BBC office with Phil.
You hated it when I went over to the Serb side with Phil, to Pale, but I had to go: to interview Karadzic, or Mladic, or just to see how the average Serb was enjoying their breakaway statelet’s international notoriety. But you saw the point, when I returned with an entire Bosnian supermarket trolley for your mother, dozens of eggs and cheese, sugar and salt, coffee and bottles of oil, and jars of Ajvar, the orange pepper paste that everyone talked about so wistfully, and I learnt to love. Phil said he felt like Father Christmas afterwards, as he unpacked the bags with your mother, explaining how we’d smuggled the food through the Serb checkpoints hidden under a rug.
“I sent Molly out to distract the guards,” he said. “She batted her eyelashes and showed some leg…” And you laughed and pulled at my filthy jeans. You only minded then, when we had to stay overnight. You pretended not to mind, but I knew you still did. But what could I do? I had to work.
You took me to a party with one of your friends. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to go; I begged to come. You’d told me of the parties you use to have. I’d sighed but, you’d said, there aren’t any parties here now. But then, Edin told you that one of your friends, some guy who’d been in the same year as you at school, had said come round.
“Selim was on the frontline in Dobrinje with me,” you said. “All my old friends from the frontline will be there.”
“How late do Sarajevo parties go on?” I asked.
“Till dawn,” you laughed. “They have to because of the curfew.”
It was dark as we drove up outside the block of flats, parking on the far side, so the snipers couldn’t hit the car. We could hear the party echoing down the stairwell. Selim lived on the fourteenth floor. We climbed for long minutes in the filthy dark, your torchlight trailing over lumps of stuff that frankly I’d rather not have. When we got there, the door stood ajar, the candlelight leaking onto the landing. We could hardly see the room for the smoke and candlelight, but people shouted out your name as we walked in. A man with a red bandana round his head, gold chains at his neck, still in camouflage fatigues, came up and gave you a high-five. You laughed back, and were swallowed into a throng of those maroon-lipped skinny girls, all white skin, and long dark hair. I felt, suddenly, incredibly shy. I looked around. The room stank of unwashed clothes, and smoke, neat alcohol, and heavily, like a student party, of dope. And of course, like everywhere, slightly of pee.
Music was coming from a stereo, wired up to a car battery in the corner. A young man sat beside it, passing a pile of records, one by one, to the boy smoking next to him. They saw me staring, smiled. I smiled back. They mimed cigarettes, so I passed them some. They grinned at each other. Then I noticed one of them didn’t have any legs.
The noise was a noise like any party noise, except I couldn’t understand a word they said. I looked for you, but you were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t even have a drink, you’d gone off with the whisky we’d brought. I saw Aida from CTV, sipping orange stuff from a little cup, but when I smiled at her she turned away. The girls were all in tight little skirts and tight little tops. Their gold jewellery glittered in the flickering light. I was in my flak jacket and my jeans. I wanted to take the flak jacket off. I started to, when a voice said to me: “I wouldn’t do that; you might never see it again.”
I turned round. It was a man, a bit older than you. Maybe 35, with a pointy beard and absolutely exhausted-looking eyes.
“Pleez,” he said, embarrassed, “may I have cigarette.” He was in fatigues, like the man in the bandana. A lot of the men at this party were in fatigues – although there were some in jeans like you.
“Of course…” I took out one of the two packs I had brought to this party especially for this. He looked familiar, when I saw his face in my lighter flame. I knew I’d met him somewhere before. He got me a drink. “What is it?”
“Don’t ask,” he said. “Selim makes it himself.” I thought of the still you’d shown me in your apartment.
“You work at the theatre,” I said. “I met you with Phil Lennox. BBC.”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes I am on frontline with Selim.” Then he grinned at me and said: “Is the same – just directing. Now I direct my men in war, but it’s real.” I wished I had my notebook to write it down. He started talking about special effects, about blood, about how you could never get it right on film. How the real thing was so much greater, but also, in many ways, banal. So if you did get it right, it would be all wrong.
“War is boring,” he said, and took another cigarette. “So much of war is boring. We used to have the best parties in Yugoslavia here. Now look, something like this, we have so few. How can we have party? We have best parties on frontline. You come up there. Come up to my frontline. I show you then what I direct. I show you the parties. We hear the Chetniks when they are drinking. We shout at each other. They hear our parties. They say, ‘Drink up you Mujahadeen pigs. Soon you will never drink again!’”
“I’d love to come,” I was saying, when suddenly you came back. You said something to him, he looked surprised, but then said again to me, “Come. Come to my frontline. I must go and get another drink.”
You asked me then, if I was OK. I said I was fine. You said good, then you asked me to dance. There was a room of people heaving away, it was all frantic, and then the music changed and it was Brothers in Arms, and everyone fell on each other as though they were about to starve. Two of your friends came up and asked if they could have a cigarette. I said of course.
Three girls sat, one crying, in the corner, the tears streaking mascara black down her face. The other two partly consoled her, partly waved cigarettes at each other, as if to reinforce the point of what each was trying to say. After a bit, the weeping one got up and pushed her way out of the flat. I didn’t know why she was crying. Was somebody dead, or had her boyfriend just left her for somebody else? Maybe she was drunk – and then I looked at what they were drinking. It looked like squash: the humanitarian aid fruit juice powder drink. Maybe it was some kind of vodka and orange aid. Then I remembered I’d never seen Valida drink. She said it wasn’t religion, she just didn’t like the taste. I wanted to go over and check. None of the girls looked drunk, but their skin wasn’t the kind of skin that flushed anyway. Another of the girls came over to you, you both screeched with joy, and the next thing I knew, she had dragged you off for a dance and I was alone again. I turned round and saw the amputee by the stereo smiling at me. I smiled back
again. He patted the cushion, but I really didn’t feel up to a conversation with a legless stranger in a language I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t find you. I went into another room, and then went out again fast, as a couple were having sex under a heaving pile of coats on a bed; he was a soldier, his legs were still in fatigues. I thought of the comfort girls I’d written about. I couldn’t even go to the loo for something to do because the loo was indescribably dreadful, the way it would be, if you had 100 people pissing in a flat with no plumbing. One bloke had gone out onto the balcony to pee, but everyone start yelling, watch out for the sniper. I understood that at least; sniper was a word I knew. I just couldn’t do party talk.
The theatre man came back. “Your friend has gone?”
I was so grateful for someone to talk to. It was like walking into a foreign film with no subtitles. He started asking me about Phil. Then I started asking him things, what he did all day. It was small talk, but it was just like I was interviewing him.
You came back. I think he must have been drunk, because he swayed slightly as he got up and he said something to you which I didn’t understand. Whatever he said, you didn’t like. I saw your face go dark and I felt your arms rigid beside me. I said your name. The man smiled at me.
“Come and visit me,” he said. Then he looked back at you. “Bring your boyfriend too, if you can get him up on the line.” You snarled something at him. I felt your fists clenched, and I dragged onto your arm. I didn’t want to ask him what he had meant.
Then you said, “Come on, it’s late, let’s go.” I looked at my watch. It was half past twelve. “You don’t have to leave because of me,” I said. But I was glad to go. I was knackered.
As we left, someone said, and I recognised the word, what about the curfew? But you pointed to me. And I smiled. Then we walked out of the door. We would have gone, if Edin hadn’t been coming up the stairs, with a bag in his hand that, from the weight and the clinking sounds, must have had a lot more than one bottle of whisky in it.
So, we went back in. Are you sure you OK? you asked, and I smiled, I’m fine, I said. You said, I must talk to Edin, and vanished back into another room.
Muffy had said earlier, “God, a Sarajevo party. How fascinating. I wish I could come. I’ve got a deadline.” I wished she was here now. At least there’d be somebody I could share it with.
I spoke enough of the language now to understand nothing. It was all a blur, a party noise blur. The director with the beard, Fuad, he was called, asked me to dance. I felt mean, after what he’d said to you, but I had another slug of the pale spirit he gave me and thought, what the hell, I don’t know anyone else here. So I danced with him. I danced for maybe twenty minutes or so. I kept looking for you, but I couldn’t see you anywhere. I felt ridiculous dancing in my flak jacket, so Fuad hid it for me, under one of the beds – the bonking couple had long gone. Then we went back and danced some more. You still weren’t anywhere to be seen. Someone else cut in, then, another man, then the man with the beard again; then one of the earlier girls asked me for two cigarettes. I decided to look for you. But you weren’t in any of the rooms I tried. Then I got worried that my flak jacket might be stolen, so I went back to try and find where it was under the bed, but Fuad followed me in and suggested we did something else in the bedroom other than just look for my flak jacket. He wasn’t being creepy; he was just making me an offer. But I kindly explained that I didn’t think so. He took one last cigarette off me, and went back and I last saw him dancing with somebody else, kissing the neck of one of the maroon-lipped beauties I’d given a cigarette to earlier on.
I went and sat with the amputee DJ. He was all alone now. I’d seen his friend dancing with one of the slate-faced girls. He didn’t speak English but we did very well. He smiled at me, I smiled at him. He touched my flak jacket and I blushed. I offered him a cigarette, he beamed back. He said he was called Haris, I told him my name, limping along in basic Serbo-Croat. “Ja novinarka engleska. Moy boyfriend Amir.” Etc. etc. He told me in sign language about the shell that had taken his legs off; I tried a few words back, saying, what – I’m sorry your life’s ruined… It was almost easier to talk about it without a common language… Suddenly, he started to speak, on and on, a river of things I couldn’t understand. All I could do was sit there, and say I don’t understand, while words I knew like war, or before the war, and life, and Serbs, and love flashed by. Then he gave up. We just sat there and smiled at each other. For a while. Until he said, sadly, in English, “I love Manchester United. Football,” he said. And pointed to his empty jeans, where his legs had been. I gave him another cigarette. I’d run out now. I’d been giving people cigarettes for hours.
I went to look for you in the end. You were in a room, at the end of the flat, with Edin, who was holding court, like a pasha on a divan. All of you, with little glasses of whisky in your hand. Edin was just passing you a joint. Your hair was sticking up, all tufty to one side, and your eyes were nearly crossed, you were so pissed. I felt this great, welling wave of love and I smiled at you, and came over, perching on the sofa at your side. I was so glad to see you having a good time. You saw me, and leant out an arm, then you pulled me to you and kissed me long on the mouth. Then I heard you say to everyone, “This is Molly,” in Serbo-Croat. I would have been embarrassed, if I hadn’t loved you so much. As it was, I just ruffled your hair and felt proud. The red bandana man laughed at my flak jacket, so I took it off again, and stacked it by the sofa. He put it on and started prancing around, and we all laughed. We laughed a lot. Then Edin passed me the joint again.
I sat in the crook of your arm for twenty minutes or so, trying to understand what was being said. Edin, the guy with the red bandana, and you were all talking hard. I heard you say at one point, “Don’t worry, she doesn’t understand.” As you stroked my hair. I smiled up at you and said, “I understand little.” And they all laughed. I had some more of your joint and I laughed too. Everything seemed so funny then. Suddenly I felt very tired. I looked at my watch. It was 2.30 a.m.
It took half an hour to drag you away. In the end, I really had to say, “Amir, I mean it.” I had to work tomorrow. I knew this was working now, but I had to be able to concentrate tomorrow. I didn’t yet know what the week would throw up. If I didn’t get out soon, I thought I would throw up.
You had a good time anyway. But I, I don’t know; that night was torture for me – I couldn’t talk to anyone, but I couldn’t relax. I kept wanting to write everything down. Luckily they didn’t have parties in Sarajevo very often in those days so we did spend most of our evenings in the Holiday Inn.
Red Bandana nearly didn’t give the flak jacket up. I heard him say to you, hey, I’m on the frontline. Where’s she? And you said something like, go on, give it back. It was Edin who managed to talk him round. He took it off, then he gave me a look and said in English. “You come. You come to my frontline.”
“We will,” I said and I smiled at you. But you just shook your head. And the man in the bandana, who turned out to be our host,
Selim, laughed and went “Bang! Bang!” But I didn’t. The next day, I had to leave.
When the war started in Bosnia, Mujo was drafted to fight in the Chetnik army. Commander asked him: “Who are your enemies?”
Mujo replied: “The Ustase of course. They are fucking Chetniks.”
VIII
There is a town called Mostar, in Herzegovina, where the mountains start to open out to the sea. It means the town of the bridge and it clings to either side of the Neretva gorge. There was more than one bridge when the war fighting began, now they are easy to build, but for four hundred years the ravine was spanned by a single arc of Ottoman stone, bleached white by the sun, smoothed by thousands of travellers’ feet. I’d gone through Mostar, with Robert, on the bus, on our way to Sarajevo in April. It felt like a lifetime ago, but in fact it was only a couple of months.
The new bridges were blown up when the killing began. First the Serbs had attacked, and the Musl
ims and Croats repelled them together, back in spring 1992. Then, as the Serbs remained on the cliffs above, lobbing the occasional shell into town, Mostar split along its gorge, and the Croats – better armed, with more to gain – took the west bank. They rounded up the Muslim men and drove their women at gunpoint over the river into the old Turkish quarter, on the eastern bank of the town, at the foot of the Serb-held cliffs. Then they blew the bridges up, cut off the roads to either end of the town, and shot and starved the ghetto stuck between the gorge and the towering cliffs behind. Only the single arc of stone remained, sniped at, shelled, the Muslims’ one link with the other side.
So I went. I had to go. It was scary, horrible. It was like living on Sniper Alley all the time but it was where the story was.
It’s hard to describe being at the centre of a story, when it’s pushing everything else off the front page, when you turn on the World Service and your story leads the news, when you know you’re in absolutely the right place at the right time and it doesn’t matter that you’re writing by candlelight or you can’t wash, or the roof of the house next door has been blown off by a shell, or you’re living off sandwiches cobbled together from stale bread, Marmite and cheese triangles for days, or the only water you can find gives you diarrhoea, or you have to hitch across the lines to find a phone. And your heart leaps every time you hear a sniper fire as you run down the street, and every time you reach your destination your grin nearly splits your face. I guess it’s like skiing, the momentum takes over; nothing else exists, except you and the mountain. Or maybe it’s like falling in love.
I was away for nearly a month. I tried to send you messages while I was there. Tim was there too, and he let me ring Valida on the satellite phone. She said you seemed fine. You’d obviously got the messages, because when I came back, you were waiting for me, when I got out of the armoured shuttle from the airport, at the PTT. But you didn’t kiss me when I ran to you. And you didn’t ask me any questions about what it had been like. In fact, you hardly spoke to me at all, as we drove back to the Holiday Inn.
The Girl in the Film Page 13