The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  I tried to explain that it had been worse than Sarajevo; that I would much rather you had been with me as I huddled by the old bridge, watching people draw their water in buckets from the gorge beneath the snipers’ sights; but the more I told of their sufferings, the angrier you got. And what I couldn’t say was that I’d rather not have gone, because that wouldn’t have been true.

  It was when you saw my bikini marks you went mad. You were undressing me, back at the hotel. Suddenly, you stopped and stood back.

  “Where you get that.”

  “Sunbathing,” I said, but even then, I thought, Oh God.

  “You did not sunbathe in Mostar.”

  I actually laughed, even though I knew you were furious. I knew why. But it was such a stupid image, me spreadeagled in a bikini, as the shells fell on the rooftops to either side.

  “No, I didn’t sunbathe in Mostar.”

  “You said you went to Mostar for work.”

  “I did go to Mostar for work.”

  “Then why you have this?” You almost slapped your hand against the white skin of my breast. I sat up and pulled up the sheet.

  “I sunbathed in Split.” I said, in the flat voice you use when you know there is nothing you can say.

  “Split!” You spat it out as though I said I had been to Paris with another man. “You told me, you go to Mostar.”

  “I did go to Mostar. I was there for weeks.”

  “You said you come straight back.”

  Did I? I don’t remember saying that but I probably did.

  “I had to go to Split. I couldn’t get back into Sarajevo any other way. The road’s cut off. You know that. I had to get the plane. They fly from Split.”

  “You not sunbathe waiting for the plane.”

  Suddenly I lost my temper with you. It was better than feeling guilty all the time.

  “Amir, for Christ’s sake. I don’t understand. Why are you so angry? All I did was spend a couple of days in Split.”

  Actually, it was four days, and it was bliss. Muffy and I went to one of the islands, and spent a couple of nights in an old Venetian palazzo on Hvar, drinking Posip in the sunset, swimming for hours in the sea. I’d still got only the clothes I’d come with in March; I’d sent my one pair of filthy jeans to the hotel laundry, bought some new underwear, flowery sundresses and some flip-flops in the market, bought some other summer clothes. I could hardly buy clothes in Sarajevo. All the shops were shut.

  I wished you’d been there. It would have been better if you’d been there. But what shocked me, as I stocked up in the supermarket in Split with cheese and spices and oil for your mother, was how depressed I was at the thought of coming back.

  But I couldn’t explain that to you. You wouldn’t understand, and anyway the depression lifted the moment I heard – as I felt, just as a vibration in my chest – the low roar of the Hercules coming down out of the mountains to Split and the sea; and adrenalin started surging and a smile opened across my face and I turned round to the man sitting next to me in the UN queue, some bloke I’d never met before, and said, “Here we go again!” And he grinned back.

  “The paper gave me a couple of days off,” I said.

  “The paper. The paper. You just do what they say, all the time. It’s the paper.”

  “But Amir,” and I looked at you in genuine amazement, “the paper’s why I am here.” You didn’t speak. You just got off the bed and started getting dressed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home. You not need me. You’ve got your paper.”

  I burst into tears. “I do need you,” I said. “I do. I came back because of you. The paper wanted me to go to England. They wanted me to take two weeks off. But I came back for you. I wanted to see you. Please don’t go. Please.” Nothing.

  I went on: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t come back. I… I just needed to be somewhere nice for a few days. Please don’t go.”

  “Somewhere nice… Split! When do I go somewhere nice?”

  “Oh………….!” I must have looked ridiculous, sitting in bed on my own, in the afternoon sun, crying, with my white breasts luminous against my brown skin. “Please don’t go,” I wailed; I was so tired. I couldn’t bear this too. “Don’t leave me. I came back for you.”

  I didn’t see you come back. I was crying too hard, but I felt the bed dent beneath your weight. Then you held me in your arms, and just said, “Molly.” And then we made love, and I couldn’t imagine how I could have put it off, what on earth I’d been thinking of going to Hvar with Muffy.

  Afterwards, I said, “I missed you.”

  “I missed you too. I worried for you. Mostar is dangerous.”

  “I was worried about you.” But actually, I hadn’t worried that much. Mostar’s swirling anarchy of war was so much more terrifying than Sarajevo’s UN-held frontlines. “I was worried you not come back.” “I will always come back,” I said.

  Later, when we were walking up to the Beeb after dinner, I said,

  “What did you do while I was away?” You laughed, a little sadly.

  “Not much,” you said. “Like Sarajevo in old days. Before I met you. Stay at home. Sometimes I go to briefing, to TV station and see Edin, have beer. Go see Valida, see if she has a message from you. Maybe go and see some friends. Read… more light now in the evening. I don’t know. Without you, not much to do.”

  I had a horrible vision of you driving round Sarajevo, risking your life out of loneliness, while Muffy and I were listening to cicadas, above an azure sea. Then I thought that, at 50 DM a litre, you probably hadn’t even driven that far. Money, I thought. What had you done for money? You were used to me paying you by then. It’s no good saying you’d had no money before, you could have no money again. People don’t get used to going back. I asked you, and, in the candlelight, you looked suddenly ashamed. “It’s OK,” you said. “I do some stuff for Edin.”

  I stood stock still in the gallery, staring down into the darkness. The moonlight gleamed up from the marble floor below, and two figures sat, by a tiny yellow flame, drinking at the bar. I took your hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered; it was my turn to be ashamed. You must have thought me like a child who had got tired of a toy. “I’m so sorry.”

  Then you said to me, “So, tell me, how was the coast?”

  I kissed your hair, I kissed your face, I wrapped you in my arms, as I said, “One day, I promise, we can go to the coast together.” I’d get us out, even if it was just for a week. I’d somehow get you out for a break.

  “One day,” you said. “When the war is over.” But I couldn’t even think that far ahead.

  Next time I went away, you worked for Ed, the American guy, who turned up again. The Herald had said I had to come back, even though I really didn’t want to go, but the story was having one of its momentary lulls. Ed had returned for a couple of weeks to do a Big Piece for his Big Magazine on “wars I have known”. I thought Ed was a bit of an arse – a self-important cynic – but Phil said he was a genius and to be fair, he’d always been very nice to me. He’d won the Pulitzer for some book he’d written on Vietnam or Korea called I Hate My Brother’s Guts, when he was about ten. His young man’s war. “It’s a wonderful book,” said Phil. “It made me cry. It’s part of the reason I went to Beirut.”

  I’d have thought Ed would hire a beauty like Valida, but he was quite definite: “I want a man,” he said. “I am a martyr to Interpreter Syndrome,” Ed said.

  “What’s that?”

  But he just looked at Phil and laughed and Phil said: “Not any

  more…”

  It took me a long while to work it out, but I guess it’s something you have to work out for yourself.

  You and Ed drove me down to the PTT, that day, where the armoured shuttle was waiting to take me to the airport. It was a Heidi day, warm and blue, with white fluffy clouds sailing above the pine trees on the mountainside, where the men with beards sat with their mortars and rifles, drinkin
g their little cups of coffee, and occasionally trying to kill someone.

  The sun was gleaming off the APC’s metal roof. It was a funny little thing, like a white throat lozenge, a little white tank, but with only a small gun. It was parked in the muddy car park, below the concrete ramparts, where the French Foreign Legionnaires hid behind their sandbags. It was filling up with the normal crew of hacks, and aid workers, people whose organisations were too small to have their own armoured cars, and the odd Bosnian. I couldn’t understand quite how they were being allowed to leave. They looked scared. Ed said he didn’t blame them, when you think what the fucking French had let the Serbs do to that foreign minister.

  “Turajlic,” you said.

  “Yeah, last year. Those UN APCs aren’t supposed to stop for checkpoints. But the fucking French let the Serbs shoot the poor bastard.” I looked at the Foreign Legionnaires checking our papers but either they couldn’t understand, or they chose not to hear. “The arseholes stopped at a checkpoint, opened the doors, and just stood there while the fucking Serbs pulled the poor sonofabitch out. He was on his way back from meeting some fucking foreign politician at the airport who didn’t have the balls to come into Sarajevo himself. Fucking bastards.” It wasn’t clear if the last bastards were the Serbs, the French or even foreign politicians in general, and if the Legionnaires could understand Ed’s rant, they made no sign. They just checked my passport and told me to get in.

  I couldn’t believe I was leaving you again. I was crying, saying I didn’t want to go. It was Ed who had to disentangle me. “Come on, young lady, go home and sign those contracts while you’re still covered in glory. Then you can come back. Sarajevo isn’t going anywhere.”

  You said sadly, “I’m not going anywhere.” And that made me cry even more. I thought, this is so unfair, why can’t you come out with me as well. There was a bang, and Ed said, “We shouldn’t hang around.”

  I clung to you, and you kissed me again, then you said to me, “Get into APC.”

  Ed turned to you and said, “Come on Amir, let’s go commit journalism.”

  You looked at me, then back at him, then you said: “I love you. I want you to know. Please come back.”

  There was another loud bang, and then a third, and the whiff of cordite and rubbish drifted through the air. I said, “Amir, I love you too. I will always come back.”

  At about the same time as Ed said: “I think we should go.”

  Ed loved you as well. He said you were sharp. He said you were a real operator. He wrote me a letter saying: “Watch out, but he’s worth hanging on to…” I burnt with pride. You learnt a lot, I think, working for Ed. And I learnt a lot from you afterwards. Ed had spent twenty-four hours in casualty, so we did that too. We went to the cigarette factory and the mortuary like him. And he’d spent the night in your friend Selim’s trench, although you didn’t want to do that this time, so I spent the night there with Phil instead, who said afterwards he would never complain about the Holiday Inn again. We were both freaked out that we’d bumped into Ray, the ex-US Marine who had said he was filing for the Anchorage Bugle. He seemed to have taken up residence in Selim’s trench, and said plaintively he’d run out of film. “Although why that should matter,” said Muffy when we told her, “since I don’t think he’s ever filed a story at all…”

  I thanked Ed, when he came back in the autumn, and he laughed when I told him that I’d done all his stories again; he said – there’s no such thing as a new story; they were Amir’s stories anyway. He grilled me on everything that I had got, just to see if he’d missed something out. The only one I couldn’t help him on were the black marketeers, because you never did that story with me. I meant to ask you why, but that was the day we saw the man get shot, so it put everything out of my mind.

  Mujo goes fishing and he catches a golden fish. The golden fish says, I am a magic fish, and if you set me free, I shall give you a wish.

  Mujo says, I want to get out of Sarajevo. I will die if I stay. But I don’t want to crawl like a rat through the tunnel under the airport, and I don’t want to run like a rabbit across the airport at night. I want to be driven to the plane in a UN armoured personnel carrier, like a government minister.

  The fish says, go to sleep. You will have your wish.

  The next day Mujo wakes up to find he’s in a large apartment; he looks out of the window, he’s in the centre of town. A dark maroon suit is laid over a chair. As he’s getting dressed, fumbling with his unaccustomed tie, there is a discreet knock at the door, and a woman who looks like a secretary comes in. “Good morning Mr Turajlic,” she says. “It’s time for your trip to the airport.”

  IX

  You knew, didn’t you, that day,that I was ashamed? I tried to say sorry – I think I did, at the time – but then suddenly everything started happening so fast.

  The man driving towards us was in a Golf, just like ours. The snows hadn’t fallen yet and the clouds lay as grey as the tarmac and heavy over the town. We passed him as you were driving me back to the hotel from the PTT. The great dual carriageway was empty but for us. There was no movement from the pock-marked tower blocks to either side. On the right, over the frontline, in Grbavica, the Serbs’ white, war-battered flats seemed as motionless as ours. I held my breath as we drove past the horribly dangerous bit, where the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity reached out, unseen, towards the Serbs, behind its barricades of sandbags, gym lockers and parked ten-ton trucks, with the weeds growing thick on the earth piled round their sides, and the snipers picking off people through the gaps. At least, I suppose the bridge was still there, but we certainly couldn’t see it: although I’d have known if it had been destroyed. The Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity being blown up would have been a great story. When I let out my breath, it came in a cloud, like the clouds pushing down on the mountains above. I always held my breath as we passed this bridge, except when we were in Phil’s armoured car. In Phil’s car, you’d make jokes about the absurdity of Tito’s political slogans; now you didn’t, maybe because you were worried about getting shot.

  Like us, the other Golf was in the lane closest to the frontline, where the houses along where the river still must flow gave a little protection. It was our side of the road, as it happened, but that hadn’t mattered since the war began eighteen months before.

  I smiled at the driver as he passed. His face flashed from grim concentration into a quick smile back; it was a recognition, a brief, amused resignation, between those who still had to risk this road. He was middle-aged, dark-haired, with one of those high-cheekboned faces and, beneath his grey anorak, he was wearing a tie. I wondered idly what he’d been doing that mattered enough to put a tie on today, to drive down this road.

  We didn’t hear the shot but I heard you swear, your eyes on the mirror, your face as though you had seen the devil over your shoulder at Halloween. I turned back, to see the other car crash into the wall. Anywhere else, he could have swerved to miss a child, or had a blow-out or something. But there were no children here. “He’s been shot,” I said. “We should go back.” But you kept on driving. “Amir! We ought to go back.” Nothing.

  “Amir, stop!…We’ve got to help him. Stop.”

  Then you said: “No.” You speeded up.

  You’d never refused to do what I’d asked you before. But then, before this I don’t think I’d ever questioned your judgement.

  “Amir! He might need help.” I think I thought you hadn’t understood what I said.

  You didn’t look at me as you said: “Is too dangerous. Nothing we can do. He is dead.” You looked at the road, whipping past us, a long grey blur of rotting weeds and boarded-up cement. I could see a muscle twitching in your leg; your face really did look as if all its blood had drained. Beads of sweat were springing up on your upper lip.

  “Stop! You don’t know he is dead.”

  “I am not going to stop.”

  You didn’t. You kept driving faster and faster. It didn’t matter what I said. I gave u
p after a bit anyway. There’s a limit to how many times you can keep shouting stop! You didn’t stop until we swerved round the egg-yolk-yellow and shell-black façade of the hotel, to its safe back door.

  Miss Piggy stood waiting, opposite the twisted bus stop. I jumped out of the car, not looking at you.

  “Molly, where you going?” you yelled.

  “To get Phil.”

  “Wait!” I ran towards the door. You grabbed at my arm, but I pulled away.

  “Let go of me!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to get help.”

  “We can’t help. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Yes we can.”

  “It’s what they want. You know that. They shoot someone and then they wait till people come to help and they shoot again.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “Is point for me!” you screamed. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Neither do I! But we have to go back!”

  “I don’t!”

  “Well don’t then,” I said. “But let me go.”

  I shook off your arm and turned and ran into the hotel, nearly skidding on the slimy remains of last summer’s weeds.

  I rang Phil from reception.

  “I’m coming down,” he said. “Do we need Valida?”

  “I don’t think Amir’s coming.”

  You were waiting in the shadows by the bar, putting an empty glass onto the burnished steel and your face was nearly as grey as the day we first met.

  “Where are you going?” you said. I could smell the slivovic on your breath.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” My voice was quieter now. “He may still be alive.”

  The doors at the bottom of the stairs burst open and out ran Phil, his flak jacket flapping over the top of his fleece, like a little boy who hadn’t got his ninja turtle fancy dress done up right. Bits of shaving foam clung to one of his cheeks, and the other still had stubble on it. His sandy hair, neat enough at the briefing, was damp in front and sticking up like Tintin. His tape recorder was slung over his shoulder and in his right hand, like an Olympic flame, he held his mike; from his left hung the helmet we never normally wore. “Phil!” I came out of the gloom.