The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  I turned to follow but you grabbed my arm again. Whatever you were going to say never came, because the doors opened again, and out swung Valida. Like Phil, she was wearing her flak jacket. Between her scarlet nails, her helmet swung with the air of an evening bag.

  “Where’s Phil?”

  “He’s gone out to Miss Piggy. Amir, let me go.”

  But you didn’t, you just said, “Molly, please…”

  “If you want to come, Amir,” said Valida, “we’d better get going.

  There’s a helmet in the car.”

  “I don’t think Amir is coming, Valida,” I said.

  “Yes I am.” You let go of my arm. I looked amazed.

  “You don’t have to come, Amir,” Valida said. “They’ve got me.”

  “I want to come.”

  Valida looked from you to me, standing a yard apart, hardly meeting each other’s eyes. She shrugged. “Whatever we do, we must do now. Phil is waiting.”

  I followed her out of the door. I didn’t look back, but I could hear you following me.

  Phil didn’t make any of his normal jokes as we piled into the car – the ones about school trips, or parents taking their children on picnics. He asked Valida: “Did you get through to the UN?”

  “Yes. Barry said he’d try and get armoured ambulance.”

  It was cold in Miss Piggy – her armour plating was steel. She smelled of rust and oil and digestive biscuits. Two benches ran inside her down either side. In the middle, piled up against the back of the front seats, was a drift of the detritus of war reporting: a couple of flak jackets, a piece of rope, a first aid kit in a green plastic box, some jerry cans, an ancient copy of The Times that someone must have brought in one day, open at the TV listings, inexplicably given that we were two thousand miles from the nearest British TV, and didn’t have any electricity anyway; a six-pack of mineral water, some sleeping bags, mini-Mars bars, a half-eaten packet of the biscuits that were giving her the smell. If the sniper pinned us down we could probably survive for days. Like an abandoned battle trophy, a helmet rolled backwards and forwards on the floor with the movement of the car.

  You were opposite me, huddled in on yourself, and you wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Shit. I don’t think I’ve got any spare batteries,” said Phil. “Valida

  – you couldn’t see if…”

  “Spares are in glove compartment, Phil. I checked yesterday.”

  “Great.”

  Suddenly you sat up and gave a snort.

  “You and Phil, you don’t want to help that man. He is just story for you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. You repeated it. “That is all. He is just a story for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are going to write about him.”

  “Well, yes…” I wrote about everything here.

  “So, he is just a story for you. You don’t want to help. You just stop so you have your story.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Yes it is. This is all just story for you. All journalists are like that.

  You say you are doing good but is always just story.”

  “Well, it’s better to do something, not just leave him to die.”

  “He is dead anyway.”

  “You don’t know he’s dead.”

  “Stop it, Amir,” said Valida, leaning round over the back.

  “Would you rather I wasn’t here?” I asked Amir. “Is that what you are saying? Would you rather I left?”

  “You won’t leave. This is your job. You keep telling me that.

  That’s why you are here.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “You keep saying this is your job, then you say you love Sarajevo, but I bet if better war came along, you would leave and go to that. Well I can’t leave. I did not choose to come here. This is my home. I had no choice. You did.”

  I gawped, but he carried on: “And I want to survive. You choose your job. You like your job. And you make good money out of all this death and shit. So don’t make me feel like coward if I don’t want to die to see a man who is already dead just for your story.”

  “It’s not that I think you were a coward,” (although I did, to be honest). “It’s just that I thought we ought to have gone to help.”

  “No, you wanted him for your job.”

  We both ignored Phil saying: “Calm down you two.”

  “It is just standard human decency, but it is also my job.”

  “Well it is not mine.”

  “No, Amir, it is your job.” I’d almost forgotten there was anyone else in the car. But it was Valida, leaning over the back of her seat. “You work for Molly. Of course she and Phil are going to do a story about him. That’s why they are here. And she pays you, so you make good money out of this war too. You and me, we both do.”

  “They are like vultures. They like it when things get bad.”

  Valida broke into Serbo-Croat. I heard her say something about remembering what it was like before, when Amir had no money. And she said, look at other people, see how they live; you wouldn’t be wearing that fancy coat without Molly – it was plaid, Giorgio Armani, and I’d bought it for him in London; he’d preened and put it on and said, “Do I look like the advert?” And he did.

  Then I spoke, in Serbo-Croat: “He wants paying me for coat but I not letting him.” They both gawped.

  “Well, whose money was he using to pay you then, money you had given him?” said Valida.

  “Amir’s a good interpreter. He earns them. Maybe he’s right about today. As he says, I make choice to come here. He no choice.”

  “Amir doesn’t have to be an interpreter. He doesn’t have to be with journalists. He could still be sitting in a trench. With a gun, having shells fired at him. He could be a soldier like my father.”

  At that point Amir’s Serbo-Croat got far too idiomatic for me to follow, but I could make out that he was complaining about Valida’s father’s appalling tactics and how Valida’s father never left the safety of his office.

  “What about your father then?” Valida asked. “Or all your friends…”

  I didn’t understand what Amir said next, but he was obviously furious.

  “Just stop it you lot,” said Phil. “I can’t understand a word any of you are saying but I tell you, if you don’t shut up, I’ll make you and Molly get out and walk.”

  “That would be great story, wouldn’t it? Journalist dead. Much better story than one Sarajevan.”

  “Amir, that’s a horrible thing to say!”

  “Well it’s true. All Sarajevo is just a story for you.” I remembered Phil’s voice the day I arrived, saying, “The great thing about Sarajevo is you just start talking to anybody and there’s your story.” He was right. And I wrote about you.

  Oh God, please don’t ask me, I thought. I could hear Phil saying: “Do you think that guy in the car, if he is still alive, which, to be fair to Amir, he probably isn’t but we have to check, gives a fuck why we are going to help him. I don’t think so. I think he’ll say thank you very much.”

  You said, as if Phil hadn’t spoken at all: “When story is over, you leave and go onto another story.” You were looking at me. You weren’t angry any more. You looked terribly sad. “When war is over, you leave me too?”

  I said nothing. The silence was broken only by the rattle of the car. Phil finally said, “I wouldn’t worry about that, Amir. You’ll have got fed up with Molly long before then.”

  “Am I just a story for you too?”

  “No! No! Amir. No,” I said. I grabbed at your hand. You let me take it but you didn’t move towards me. You just looked at me, a mixture of suspicion and sorrow.

  “You’re not just a story. You’re not.”

  Nobody spoke. You didn’t move. Then Phil said, “I think we’re here.”

  I dropped your hand and peered past Phil out of the windscreen. The road was deserted, apart fr
om the Golf, maybe fifty yards ahead, dented into the wall where we left it ten minutes ago.

  “That’s it,” I said. It looked empty. “Do you think he’s got out?”

  “Only one way to find out. The ambulance isn’t here.”

  Phil drove fast, past the lorry and the sandbags hiding the bridge, over which, from the other side, the sniper had fired and hit the man. He parked the Land Rover in the shelter of the wall the Golf had hit.

  “Right. Nobody gets out who doesn’t want to get out. Nobody moves into the road where they can see you and NOBODY walks towards that bridge.” Even Phil didn’t say, as he normally did, you’d have to be bloody unlucky to get hit. “Oh, and both of you, get the helmets on. There are a couple of spares in the back.”

  Phil was already by the Golf by the time we were out of the car. He was staring in through the window looking puzzled. Valida was behind his shoulder.

  “How is it?” you said, walking slowly towards the car. You glanced instinctively to the left to check the sniper’s view was still blocked. “I’m not sure,” said Phil slowly, then: “Oh my God!”

  Phil’s lower lip sagged, and his eyes were round-eyed horror. The blue microphone slipped and swung at his side. Valida’s eyes rounded too, her throat worked and she turned away from the car and leant against the wall. And Phil said, “Oh God, I think he’s still…”

  You started to run. You reached the driver’s window and yelled: “Molly, don’t go round the other side.”

  So of course I did. “It’s fine I said, they can’t see me here…” and then I stopped, because the front passenger seat window looked as if it were pressed deep into the bloody contents of a butcher’s tray. Bits of meat and chips of bone squelched up against the car window as though it were polythene wrapping, by the weight of the body: except it wasn’t a body, in the dead sense of the word. Because, although part of me was saying, he couldn’t surely be alive, nothing could work with a hole like that in it, he obviously was, although probably not for long. The flesh glistened and twitched against the glass, the scarlet blood foaming up, dribbling down, collecting in a thin red line where the window slid into the door. And all this, framed by his anorak. Its collar, still intact, cut the neat dark head off from the plate-sized wound. I couldn’t see his face. Phil must be staring at that.

  I was transfi xed. I had no idea what to do. Then, with the next pump of blood, I did what they do in films: I threw up, leaning on the door for support.

  “Don’t touch door,” you said. I jumped back. “And don’t go into road.”

  Phil stared at me in an amazement I did not understand; maybe Phil had seen this all before in Beirut. Maybe this was what I would have to get used to here.

  “Where is ambulance? Phil? You said ambulance come.”

  “What?” Phil lifted his gaze but the road stretched grey and empty to east and west. “Barry said it would be here…” Phil seemed as confused as me.

  “We have not time to wait,” you said. You broke into SerboCroat, and Valida went running to the Land Rover. She came back with the first aid kit.

  “Hvala.” You grabbed the first aid kit and opened it up. Inside were a tangle of bottles, syringes in transparent plastic and several thick pink packets, the size of bars of soap; they were field dressings. I had one myself in the front pocket of the flak jacket I was wearing.

  “Should we move him? We could put him…we could lie him out in the back of the armoured car…” I’d never heard Phil sound so unsure.

  “No. Not move. We must get him to hospital now.”

  You opened the back door of the car and shoved the first aid box on the seat. Then you leant over to speak to the man. It seemed almost obscene to me, faced as I was, with his raw flesh squelched against the glass. You spoke to him in Serbo-Croat, a soothing voice, and then barked in English: “Molly, are keys still there? Can you get into driver’s seat?”

  I ran round to the driver’s side.

  From this side, the man looked almost normal, apart from the fact he was sitting at a strange angle, squashed up against the passenger seat door, with his legs twisted over the gears, and his face looked like death. But other than that, there was nothing to see; white shirt, anorak, even his tie was still intact. He watched me as I opened the door, he watched us all the time, mute, like an animal in a cage; occasionally his head would twitch. I wanted to say something to help, to reassure him, like you were. I didn’t understand why he wasn’t screaming. Perhaps it was shock. I froze. It was like watching this happen to somebody else.

  “Amir,” it was Phil. “What do you want us to do?”

  “He is nearly dead. I have to stop blood otherwise he die. We have to get him to hospital. We have to drive this car to hospital.”

  We all did what you said. Phil propped the man up from the front, while you handed me one of the pink packets from the first aid kit.

  “Open this.” Inside was a white oblong, about the size of a bar of soap. Round it went a red tag, like on a cigarette packet.

  I pulled the tag. The wrapping split. Out bulged a mass of browny-pink gauze over a thick white pad, with yard-long streamers attached. It looked just like the ancient sanitary towels matron had at school. You ripped off the streamers and shoved the whole thing in the wound.

  “Another.” I did the next two. Then we’d run out. But you unwound the scarf I’d given you from your neck and stuffed that into the man’s back as well. “Take this,” I said, and pulled out mine from my pocket.

  You told me to reach into your pocket – there was a long, stretchy bandage, wrapped in cellophane. You and Phil wound him round, front and back. Then you said: “Molly, you help hold him. Phil, start the car.”

  Phil drove us to the hospital at eighty miles an hour. He could. There was nothing else on the road. Valida clanked, miles behind, in Miss Piggy. I didn’t even think, at that time, that it was odd the man was in the passenger seat. At one point Phil said, “It would be ironic if we were hit.” And I remember thinking, but we can’t be hit. We’ve just survived. We’re helping him. That wouldn’t be fair. Not for this man, who thought he had died and has just started to think he might live. There should be a rule; nobody should have to go through this twice.

  “We haven’t got any more of those field dressings, anyway,” said Phil.

  You said, after a moment, “I have another in my pocket… right pocket.” I was so grateful you’d managed to keep one, when we’d given all of ours away.

  The blood jiggled down the window, where the man had been leaning, and collected in the fake pores of the upholstery. We looped past the Presidency and over Marshal Tito then up past the football stadium where all the new graves had been dug since half the cemeteries in town were in the snipers’ sights, and the war dead had long overflowed the rest. Phil was giving a running commentary as he drove, using his careful radio voice. His mike was on. For a moment, I was shocked, and then I thought, my brain’s on: I’m remembering all of this.

  You were the one who was in control that day. When we got to casualty, you told me to run in; you told me what to say in SerboCroat. It was pretty easy: “Snajper” would have done it.

  As I ran in, everyone turned to look; they were waiting on plastic chairs, just as they do in casualty anywhere, surrounded by white walls, notice boards: but it was cold and dark, not hospital bright, and instead of disinfectant, there was the ubiquitous smell of pee. The nurse sitting by a candle at the triage desk snapped upright. I told her what you had told me to say. She ran round a corner, yelled something, and two men appeared. In under a minute they had a trolley and a drip. They ran out to the car, got the man and whisked him away, with Phil, Valida and I tramping in their wake. You didn’t want to see the operation, although the surgeons let us watch.

  You were sitting in the corridor outside the operating theatre, with a woman by your side, when we came out. She looked pretty, but it was hard to see in the gloom. You stood up as we came out. You gave me an almost frightened look. Then, b
efore we could speak, you turned to the woman.

  She had black hair, and in the semi-darkness, the livid bags beneath her eyes seemed to brand her pale skin. Like all women here, she was very slim, and her eyes glinted liquid with shock.

  “This is wife,” you said, and introduced her as Amra. She grabbed my hand, and started to cry, thanking me.

  “No, No,” I said, “Not me, him.”

  I pointed at you, just as Phil grabbed your hand and said, “You saved his life. Amazing.”

  You looked bewildered from me to Phil.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” Phil carried on.

  “Armija,” you shrugged. “I spent one year on frontline.” You looked so worried, as you gazed straight at me. I was about to say something, when the door opened behind us. Our man appeared on the trolley, unconscious, drips in his arms, chest shaved, half naked except for the bandages; behind him, Valida, masked like us, was talking to one of the surgeons.

  His wife ran over to where he lay and started to weep. She put her hands out, fingering the air, but no closer – the nurses wouldn’t let her touch him. You put your arms round her, and she turned and sobbed into your chest. They wheeled him up the passage, and you followed with her. Phil and I glanced at each other, and then fell in behind.

  The nurse in casualty, via Valida, told us you had gone to fetch his wife, in his car, from her apartment in one of the Austrian blocks, tucked away behind the cathedral. You’d got a neighbour to look after the children and brought her to the hospital while we were watching the operation.

  We offered to take you back with us to the hotel, but you wanted to stay with her till he woke up.

  “She hasn’t got anyone else,” you said, at her side.