So Phil said, “We’ll come back,” he didn’t say, “after lunch.” But that’s what he meant. “Is there anything you need?” And she said, nothing, even though the list of what anyone needed in Sarajevo could have started with freedom and ended up with cooking oil. We did bring her some batteries, some chocolate, some cigarettes and some coffee. And we brought you some lunch, cheese rolls. We brought some for her too, which she ate with bewilderment.
Her husband was awake when we returned, his wife at his bedside, holding his hand. Phil and I shuffled, embarrassed, in the far corner of the room, as though we would be more tiring the closer we came. He lay, weighed down by loss of blood and bandages, sprouting tubes. He tried to smile when we were introduced but even that was far too much. His wife picked up a pair of business cards.
“He can’t speak,” she said, through you. “But he wants to say thank you.” Her eyes welled, her voice caught. “I want to say thank you too. He wants to say… he says, if he can help. Ever. If there is anything he can do.” And she handed us the cards. One each; half-smeared with blood. But through the brownish stain, I read: Petrovic Dragan, Detective Inspector. I looked at it and thought – Dragan – Petrovic – that’s a Serb name.
“Amir, you were amazing, you know,” Phil said, as we crammed into the front of Miss Piggy.
I squeezed your hand. “You really were,” I said.
You still looked worried. “Really,” I said. That’s when I think you first realised I wasn’t angry with you.
You looked into my eyes and said: “You made me go back. That was you.”
But I said: “I didn’t know what to do. He would have died without you.”
You didn’t speak. You just looked at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What for?” I didn’t know, really – being foreign, for the war. For expecting too much. For the fact that a black-market cabbage cost twenty Deutschmarks and a child could be shot while fetching water from the street.
“I’m sorry too. I am glad you are here,” you said.
“Oh…” I gazed at you. Sarajevo whisked past our windscreen but neither of us were looking at the road.
Then Phil’s voice broke in: “Amir! I bet you never thought you’d save the life of a Serb policeman.”
That night, wrapped up in bed against the cold of my room, I said to you: “In the Armija, did you have to do things like that before?”
“A few times.” Then you laughed, and shook your head: “Never to a Serb.”
“He’s a Sarajevo Serb. He stayed here. He’s one of you. Wasn’t one of your grandmothers a Serb? I thought that was what you were all supposed to be fighting for?”
“That was before.” I was horrified by your words. I drew my hands away.
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. Sarajevo is dying in this war.”
“It will die if you think like that. That’s what makes it die.”
“Soon it will be too late,” you said. “I think it is too late now.” Then you kissed me again, and politics didn’t seem important any more.
Later, you leant over me and traced your fingers in my hair. You didn’t speak for a moment, and I lay there, dozing into your touch, then you said: “Molly. I want to ask you something.”
I turned on my shoulder to look at you, the candlelight flickering on your skin, your dark eyes hooded in the shadows of the night, the scoop of your muscles, that made me want to bite your arm. “Ask me anything,” I said.
“Something very important.”
I said again: “You can ask me anything.” But I felt afraid.
“I love you,” you said, but not as if it were the thing in itself; more as if it were the prelude to something else.
“I love you too.” I started stroking your cheek, but my stomach had the feeling it had when I was afraid. “What is it?”
You said it in Serbo-Croat first, and I almost didn’t understand, and then I thought, you can’t have said that, I must have got it wrong. But then you said it again in English, and I knew that I hadn’t and my heart sank because I knew what I had to say. I also knew you would never forgive me.
“Will you marry me?” you said.
I said, “I can’t.”
The Chetniks arrested a group of Muslim women.
“We’re going to rape you all,” said one of the Chetniks.
“What, even this young girl, she is only 14!” said one of the women.
“I said all of you.”
“Even this pregnant woman?”
“All of you.”
“Even this old lady, she is over 80?”
Before he could answer, the old woman said: “The man was clear. He said all of us.”
February 2000
People keep telling me it wasn’t my fault. People have said that to me for years. But I never really believed them. It was the
man in the jacuzzi who helped the most. The clinic was wonderful, if rather strange, and I came to love Irene (who turned out to have fled Greece after the Colonels came to power). Sarah, the receptionist, was terribly nice. I wished her the best of luck in her night school course in Psychology. After I left them, after probably the most expensive month of my life (apart from the Gorazde crisis – one of those five-week Serbs-attack-a-Muslim-enclave, the-Great-Powers-align-and-World-War-III-is-about-to-breakout-oh-no-it-isn’t frenzies – where my phone bill at the BBC came to $25,000), Irene put me onto someone nearly as nice in London, who I went and whined at twice a week.
They were terribly nice about it all at work, although I did sometimes catch them looking at me a bit strangely, as though they suddenly expected me to knife someone. My boss was very disappointed there hadn’t been any celebrities in my bin. She kept asking about the sauna. I think she thought it was Champneys. She also wanted me to be on Prozac, like the poor Princess of Wales, but I said: “What’s the point? I’d rather have some real feelings and learn to deal with those.”
I was worried about that. Because when they went through the list of the symptoms of what they said I had – the irritability, the mood swings, the obsessive addictions, the inability to make or maintain close relationships – I began to think if they took all those away I’d have no character left at all.
Then they all sat around expecting me to get better. But it takes a long time.
It was six months later I met the man in the jacuzzi. I was on holiday, in the Caribbean, in a sort of spa, with a friend whose boyfriend had chucked her, which was convenient for me because it was becoming increasingly difficult to find people to go on holiday with. It looked just like the posters in the tube in January: azure sea, palm trees, lots of white sand. I kept expecting Sean Connery to come snorkelling out of the shallows, but most guests were obese Americans fleeing their winter.
One afternoon, quite late, I went along to the jacuzzi, which was bubbling under its palm tree, overlooking the beach. A fat Canadian couple, with his-and-hers almost equally plump breasts, were talking with un-jacuzzi animation to a wizened old man. When I got in, all blonde and bikini, the conversation snapped. Then they started again, rather diffidently, and they were talking about Auschwitz, but in a weirdly familiar way, the way I might, say, about Sarajevo. So I started to listen. I could hardly avoid it; we were all simmering away in the same cauldron of tourist soup, and I’ve always had a bit of a thing about the Holocaust anyway. I remember my mother explaining it to me years ago – she had some cousins who were part Jewish – when I asked her “Who won the war, Mummy?” just as she was trying to help the cook for some embassy cocktail party. “If Hitler had won, all your cousins would have been killed. They would have been sent to the gas oven,” she said, opening the oven and popping in a tray of vol-au-vents (it was the seventies after all).
That has always been the image of the Holocaust for me. Trays of human vol-au-vents, popped in the ovens.
The Canadians were listening to this man as though he were the voice of God. They noticed me li
stening, as you do in a confined space, and the Canadian man turned to me and said, rather apologetically, “We’re talking a rather gloomy subject for a holiday.”
“Oh, not at all. I’m rather obsessed by the Holocaust.”
They looked astounded. The old man said to me, in tones of amazement and a thick Mitteleuropean accent: “But you are not Jewish?”
“No.” They looked doubtfully at me – maybe they thought I was German? I was sitting there in my bikini in all my Aryan splendour. The old man said, almost accusingly, “Then why?”
I couldn’t explain about the vol-au-vents, not to them, so I said the next thing, which was: “I used to live in a country where there was a genocide.”
The Canadian man looked surprised and said, “What, Rwanda?”
“No, Bosnia.”
The three of them nodded, considered it, and gave the 200,000 or so dead Muslims the benefit of the doubt. I was allowed to join in. The old man said, proudly, “I was in Auschwitz.” And showed me the number on his arm. You could hardly see it now, with the wrinkles and the liver spots. But the Canadians had, because the woman said, rather apologetically, “I noticed it, you see, because my mother has one. That’s how we started.”
Her husband nodded: “Both our parents are survivors…” “They never talk about it,” said his wife.
The old man started to talk again. I couldn’t stop asking him questions. I drew the story out, starting at what I thought would be the end, the day he realised the war was over when he woke up to find the guards had gone. They’d thought it was another trick, then they realised it wasn’t. He’d wandered out into the lanes. Some Americans passed him as he stood on the side of the road, and threw him a bag of peanuts, three of which made him too full to eat. I worked him slowly back, back in cinema in his head, back along what he called “the death march”, when the Germans forced the prisoners who could move to walk west, away from the Russian advance. Back into Auschwitz, back into the huts, out through the gates and into the train, back to the day he was caught – the last of his family to be arrested, near the end of the war, in Berlin in May 1944. The Canadians sat and listened.
I didn’t mean to take over, but it was just like work. Then the old man talked about life after the war: hitching home in the chaos of Germany that summer, staying in a barn for a month with three Polish Jews who wouldn’t let him sleep on the bed because he was a Jacke, a middle class German Jew; the farmer who let him sleep in the stables but could not look him in the eye; the day he finally came home and found his house in Berlin, a ruin. As he stood in front of the bombed wreck of his childhood, a man in the street said to him: “If you’re after the family in that house, they’ve left a message.” Seeing something written in red paint (“that’s what people did, they wrote where they had gone in red paint”). It was an address, two underground stops away, and it was signed by his father.
“That meant my father was alive!” he said. He grinned, even now, as he said it. “So I ran across the street to the underground station. And I was so excited I didn’t look where I was going. And this German traffic policeman shouted at me – and you must understand, I was very fed up of being shouted at by Germans in uniform by now – he shouted: ‘Do you want to get yourself killed?’ And in German this is ‘Are you tired of life?’ So I shouted back, ‘No! I will never tire of life!’
“I didn’t stop running till I got to the door. Then I stopped. I was scared of what I would find. But I knocked, and my sister opened it up. My sister! Alive too. And then, she said to me, ‘Shush! Mother is asleep.’ I knew then that we had all survived. We were all in different camps but we all survived. We were the only whole family to survive the Holocaust,” he said.
People, incidentally, have since told me that’s not true, that other whole families did survive, but I will leave him his boast. There can’t have been so very many after all.
Then he started to talk about afterwards, he talked about survivor guilt syndrome. I said: “Oh, I think I’ve got that.” He looked at me as if I were completely insane, because he was so far gone inside his past that he had forgotten, I think, that anyone else was here. He said to me, quite rudely, although German accents can make things rude, “Why on earth do you have survivor guilt syndrome?” The Canadians both turned to stare.
At this point, the conversation was artificially broken. I think a waiter came up and told us dinner had begun. The Canadians dispersed in a flurry of thanks, and introductions. We all suddenly felt naked, now we knew each other’s names.
I heaved myself out of the water too. But the old man said again, in a much more gentle voice: “Why do you have survivor guilt syndrome?” But the cinema had stopped. I said, very quickly, “Oh, because I could leave and they couldn’t. I could eat and they couldn’t.” I thanked him and walked back towards the hotel.
He came up to me the next day and said, “I need to ask you a question.” But I was in a hurry, so I said, “I can’t talk now.” He looked at me very carefully and said, “When you have time. You said something yesterday about survivor guilt syndrome, and I asked you why, and you gave me a very glib answer. I want to talk to you.”
“I haven’t got time now,” I said.
He caught up with me at breakfast the following day, his plate piled with food from the veranda buffet. “So,” he said, and he stood by my chair, “will you tell me now?”
There was no excuse. I told him about you. The old man looked at me with infinite pity. He waited for maybe ten or twenty seconds before he spoke and then he said: “When I was on the death march from Auschwitz in January 1945, the Germans were shooting the stragglers at the back. I was young. I was only 19. And I’d only been in the camp for six months. I was helping this old, old man to walk. And he was only 35 but he was an old, old man. And we kept getting nearer and nearer to the back. And finally, when we were the last, one of the SS guards, who could see I could still walk, said to me: ‘If you don’t want to get yourself killed, get your arse up to the front of this line.’”
He waited for another five seconds before he said: “So I left him. And I heard the shot. You have to live with that for the rest of your life. But I did not shoot him and I did not start the war. That is what you have to remember.”
He looked out to sea, over his teetering plate.
“I love this place,” he said. “I come every year. It’s like a camp.” He smiled at me, and nodded over at the uniformed Australians whose job was to check we were all having a good enough time. “I call them the guards,” he said. “But the food is so good and they give you as much as you want.”
What’s the difference between Sarajevo and Auschwitz?
In Auschwitz, they had gas.
1994
X
I hadn’t wanted to come back this time. I couldn’t understand it but I definitely hadn’t. Normally my heart leapt at the adventure, at seeing my love, at seeing you. Reassembling the trappings of my life – the short-wave radio, the Swiss Army knife, the thick bunch of fibre-tipped pens now taken by the bushel from the Herald’s stationery cupboard rather than bought expensively in WH Smith’s at Heathrow. But this time it was different. Even you here, waiting for me, didn’t temper that lump of dread.
When I tried to work out what I feared in the exciting new life I had craved so much, it seemed to come down to the people, the Sarajevans – not you of course, never you – but having to talk to the others, which seemed ridiculous, since I loved Sarajevo and its people and to help the people was part of the reason I had gone, that I had stayed. But I’d noticed, frozen as they were into their second winter of war, that they were no longer so keen to talk to me. Even your friends were angrier. As the cold bit deeper, their resentment frothed out, as though the ice was forcing it up, through the veneer of their civilisation they wore to protect them from the shells. They took it out on us: maybe because they were disappointed with the rest of the world but, trapped as they were, we were the only representatives of the rest of the world
they could actually vent their frustration on. They no longer seemed to believe that we, the journalists who had chosen to live with them in this siege, had the power to help them back to their lost cosy world.
I was beginning to fear they might be right; that, although logically I knew I was doing the best I could for Sarajevo by being here, nothing I could do would give them back that cosy ordered world. Even if they won the war, which seemed so unlikely (although the Muslims had, to our amazement, held the Croats in central Bosnia at bay), their pre-war world had gone. Maybe you were just one more person I would disappoint; maybe you would resent me too.
I hadn’t wanted to come back but of course I did. It was my job and there was you. Besides, I didn’t seem to be able to do anything else any more. Back home, back in England, I still rented a room in my friend Lucy’s flat. She said I was the perfect flatmate: paid the bills, was never there. In fact, like Johnny, she used the same phrase: “you left me for a country”. Much better than a boyfriend, she said, because countries can’t chuck you and send you crawling back to sob your way through all the loo paper. But maybe they can. Perhaps that’s what Yugoslavia did to you.
Everything in England just seemed strange. I found myself almost fighting for air. I couldn’t bear being inside (which is the best place to be in London in January) and went for endless long walks in the biting rain. I found myself dashing pointlessly over crossroads, having to force myself to walk slow, to make myself remember, at the 7-Eleven corner shop on Westbourne Grove, that there were no men now in the hills with guns trained on me; to make myself walk on the grass, retrain my brain that no-one had ever sown mines in Hyde Park. I couldn’t even talk to anyone about it, because they would have thought I was mad, or very pretentious.
I stacked up meetings with friends – lunches, drinks, dinners, even tea if they didn’t work. But however much I saw them, I didn’t really have anything to say, apart from wowing the girls with Henri’s photograph of you. (Although Lucy said, with deep suspicion, “I suppose he’s very good-looking”. And when I had asked her what she meant, she said: “I don’t trust good-looking men. They’re never… grateful enough.” And I was shot through, because, my poor love, you were definitely grateful.) But my friends all seemed to be obsessed by the most trivial things, and so profoundly ignorant.
The Girl in the Film Page 16