It wasn’t even cold enough for my hat, the fur hat you bought me. Whenever I wore it, it made my head all sweaty. I wanted to wear it to remind me of you, but in the end it stayed on a shelf in the hall.
You bought it in Merkale, Sarajevo market, on a quiet day the November before. We’d left the car by the side of the road, and headed into the rows of stalls. Of course, there were other market- places during the war; stalls sprang up on any sheltered street on days when the shelling was quiet, but this was the town’s main market-place. Women in sagging winter-coats and scuffed leather gloves, with the high cheekbones and red lipstick of Old Sarajevo, stood behind makeshift tables full of china, bits of piping, or single shoes, flogging off the piecemeal of their lives; women with the headscarves, gnarled faces and baggy flower trousers of the Bosnian mountains screamed out, cabbages, only 20DM each, or coffee, 80DM a kilo – rows of tins of UNHCR-issue fish and bottles of UNHCR oil. I’d asked you then, when I saw a sack of peppers for over 200DM, “Where does all the food come from?” I said, “Do they bring it through the tunnel?” Meaning the Bosnian government’s worst-kept secret; the city’s black-market life-line, a tunnel gouged, once the government had realised that their siege wasn’t going to go away, beneath the UN-held airport, linking Sarajevo to the rest of Bosnian government territory, on the far side of the runway. You laughed and said: “What tunnel?” I said. “Come on.” But you said, “What tunnel,” again and shot me a look.
At the back of the market, two old men, standing behind their stalls of household tat, with the pained dignity of retired schoolmasters, were warming themselves on a pile of burning rubbish, whose acrid smoke drifted over the little square. Most of the men here were past middle-age; although I did see a couple of youths in communist-grey fur hats and trainers selling fags. The old men looked askance at you.
“Aren’t they all scared to be here?” I asked.
You shrugged. “They have to eat. Snipers can’t see. It’s quiet today.”
We were walking up the stalls, when I saw, on a stall, the kind of hat Anna Karenina might have worn. The man selling it had dark hair, going white. He could have been you, maybe twenty years on, but the war had carved deep lines in his cheeks and his stall, like those of the Sarajevo ladies, was piled with taps, plastic bottles, potatoes and bits of crochet. He looked me up and down when I asked the price. I watched him draw up the courage before he spoke.
“Fifty Deutschmarks,” he said, and when I didn’t flinch, he suddenly became garrulous. The hat had been his daughter’s, he said; I turned for you, but you were chatting to some young guy, smoking by a stall. “Doesn’t she need it?” I asked, in my limping Serbo-Croat.
“She’s not here.” He flapped his hand beyond the Serb lines. “She’s out of Sarajevo.” His eyes suddenly filled with tears. You came back, just as I was asking him what he used to do; a lawyer, and he’d sent his 16-year-old daughter out when the war was beginning, eighteen months ago. You tried to bargain the price down, but I wouldn’t let you. It was the Herald’s money anyway. Then you paid for it yourself.
I don’t know if the old man was there the day the market was shelled. Or perhaps he had already sold everything he owned or perhaps he didn’t go every day.
I was still trying to wear your hat, the night I went to a dinner party, in a little mews house in Notting Hill, given by a friend to show off her new boyfriend. Johnny was there, with his new girlfriend. He’d wanted me to meet her. She was sweet: pretty, funny, clever, thin. She’d been at Oxford with me, but a couple of years below. She took a fashionable amount of coke – not enough to be a problem, just enough to fi t in (they’d all nipped off to the bathroom at various points, in pairs, but I didn’t go; that kind of buzz just seemed pointless to me. Adrenalin, I suppose, is free). She ate like that, too: enough to look normal, but not enough, obviously, to put on weight, since her black leather trousers were pretty unforgiving. She had a very smart surname, one of those ones you see on street signs (he must have realised now, poor Johnny, that my father being an ambassador did not make me an aristocrat, as I noticed he no longer pronounced it). She obviously thought Johnny was wonderful, laughing at all his jokes, which must have been a bit of a relief. I just used to take the piss out of him towards the end. I thought he liked it. Or at least, the fact I thought he liked it was one of the things that made me love him. Perhaps he had hated it all along.
The hostess’s new boyfriend, big in Alternative Comedy (which was a big thing to be big in back then) had started sounding off to the table about Bosnia, because in those days Alternative Comedy embraced politics. He had already put everyone’s backs up by making it quite clear he thought that we were a bunch of boring Sloanes (his girlfriend was just beginning to shake the dust of the Old Vicarage off her L K Bennett kitten heels and dance off into the Groucho club; this dinner was almost her last backward glance). He started talking your standard ill-informed Balkan rubbish, batting away every interjection with a sneer that made it clear he couldn’t believe that anyone who spoke like us could utter anything worth hearing. I could see the others giving me little sideways glances but I didn’t speak, because I couldn’t face it, but he was talking such crap about Bosnia that finally I felt I had to intervene. Slowly, the rest of the table fell silent, until only he and I were left in the ring. They all knew, of course, the others – including his girlfriend, who seemed paralysed at his impending fate. Johnny (who found him particularly irritating, possibly because he had spent a lot of effort becoming a boring Sloane like us and didn’t like the idea that maybe his aspirations were being proved anachronistic) actually mouthed across the table to me: “What are you waiting for?” But I didn’t want to do it, because it seemed so pointless and unfair.
He walked into it, in the end. “Well, if you know so much about it, when was the last time you were in Sarajevo then?” he said, and I could hear Johnny’s intake of breath. There was a pause, and then I replied: “I got back last night.”
That was fun. That was worth it. It’s a good memory to have. And after the dinner was over, Johnny, slightly drunk, collared me in the corner and said, “You are wonderful. You’re wonderful,” and ran his fingers down my cheek, then he got into the minicab he had ordered with his nice, pretty, thin, clever, well-connected girlfriend who laughed at his jokes and they went home together, leaving me cross and drunk at the dinner. As for the comedian, to be fair, he completely changed gear. He was quieter and nicer, and not just to me, and asked lots of interesting questions and, once I had started, once I had an audience that seemed interested, and launched into my explanations with a missionary’s zeal, he listened long beyond the point at which his girlfriend’s eyes began to glaze and small side conversations started up elsewhere round the table. But it was so wonderful to have someone to talk to who seemed to genuinely want to know. It seemed impossible to make people understand, if they hadn’t managed to pick it up in two years of front-page news. And even when I had my now traditional lunch with Roger, the foreign editor of the Herald, I felt as if he’d hardly read anything I’d written.
Most people asked things like, “Do you actually go anywhere dangerous?” When I tried to explain, they simply looked incredulous, as if no-one could possibly choose to live in a hotel 250 yards from the frontline, where snipers shot outside your window and you were woken up every morning by a bored machine gunner sounding off in the Jewish cemetery up the hill.
As I write those words, I don’t blame my friends. Because it seems completely extraordinary to me, now, that that was my life. Like the young do, I took it for granted. But I envied my friends because they still had the cosy, ordered world. I felt like a Victorian match girl watching someone else’s Christmas through a snowflecked window but, unlike the match girl, I had chosen to walk out into the snow. Maybe I had always felt a bit outside-looking-in – if you are brought up in embassies all over the world, you tend to be at home nowhere, or anywhere with high ceilings and people speaking a gaggle of languages you don’t r
eally understand. I was too young, as well, to know that most people feel like outsiders too, so I knew that, whatever the dread coagulating in my guts, I had to return to where I belonged.
The dread began to shrink as I started packing. As usual, I had left it to the last half an hour; packing, like writing, expands to fill the time you leave for it, plus 10%, and it wasn’t like I didn’t know what to pack these days. It was a big case, now, bigger than the one I’d taken last April. It’s easy to pack light, when it’s just for a few days, but the longer you travel, the more little comforts become indispensable: the portable CD player, with tiny speakers you can set up in your room, the photographs in the little leather frame, the Rose Geranium bath oil to remind you of another life, even if it’s only going in a basin of stone-cold water; the piles of books for loneliness and boredom, clothes to look a bit smarter, changes of scruffy clothes, lots of underwear (laundry in a town with no water is a serious problem), make-up, scent; a bottle of whisky to make friends with, chocolate, Marmite; Earl Grey tea bags, most of which I would donate to the BBC and then drink. These are the things which began to weigh me down, let alone the necessities like candles and batteries, deodorant, thermal underwear and pens. I now know why Englishmen would dress for dinner in the bush.
But as I began to gather the necessities of my new life, I felt the start of the old excitement.
I paved the bottom of the case with Tom Jones and four of The Barchester Chronicles (I’d finished Tolstoy last year), and shoved The Warden in my computer bag. The phrase book that never seemed to have the right phrases in it was still in the case, rolling around with all the stuff I had stopped bothering to unpack: the spare batteries and pens, the tampons and the medical kit, the fleecy gloves. I stuffed the helmet with about fifteen pairs of pants and shoved it in one end of the bag (I wouldn’t need it until tomorrow when I’d get the plane to Sarajevo). I picked up the shortwave radio, that badge of my profession from by my bed, locked it off and folded it away into the suitcase.
Then I zipped it up, and stood, in my jeans and boots and polo neck and fleece, flak jacket propped against the door, computer in its bag, cushioned in its nest of telephone wires and cables. Notebook in my handbag and two extra pens, along with the great wad of Deutschmarks Roger, my foreign editor, had reluctantly extracted from the Herald’s managing editor yesterday, and of course my passport (I was picking the ticket up at Heathrow). I found the Swiss Army knife by the wine rack and put it in my handbag too. Now I was armed and ready to commit journalism.
I sat in the minicab heading for Heathrow, being borne off to war, and passed the Lucozade clock, and noticed, as I did every time with unfulfilled curiosity, the red-brick campanile protruding bewildered from the tangle of nameless streets which slipped away beneath the concrete piers my mother had always said were stuffed with the victims of some sixties’ gang war. By now, I was smiling, because the adventure had begun.
By the time I had handed over my £17 (special price for Heathrow) and put the receipt, first of many, into the designated receipt pocket of my money belt, checked in with Croatian Airlines (the 12.55, and always slightly late) and was scanning the queue for friends (you nearly always bumped into someone you knew, someone you could share a cab with from the airport, get drunk with on that last night of decent food and wine in Split), London and that life was already far behind. By the time I was stocking up on Silk Cut in the duty free – impossible to get, except in the British officers’ mess, miles away in Vitez, deep in Central Bosnia, where the British troops were based, monitoring the Muslim–Croat sideshow civil war. And that wasn’t much use anyway, considering journalists were other ranks – it no longer mattered that I had apparently offended someone’s mother by drinking and swearing too much at lunch. I was back in Sarajevo long before the RAF Hercules started its long dive into the airport, corkscrewing at an angle to avoid the Serb guns, and hovered on the runway, propellers churning, while we all dashed out, helmeted and jacketed up, towards the safety of the sandbagged terminal. Back with you.
I took the shuttle in from the airport to the PTT and then got a lift with one of the other journalists who was being picked up in a car. It was impossible to know when one would arrive, so I’d given up trying to get you to meet me. But I knew you’d be waiting for me at the hotel, a bit surly, as you always were. You’d be there, when I walked into the BBC office and greeted the incumbent, whoever it was, with “Hi honey, I’m home.”
Mujo and Suljo were sprinting in the dark across the airport runway to get out of Sarajevo to find some food. Suddenly Suljo heard a chattering sound coming from Mujo’s bag.
Suljo: “What have you got there?”
Mujo: “Fata’s false teeth.”
Suljo: “Why?”
Mujo: “So that she cannot eat all humanitarian aid while I am gone.”
XI
I had just assumed that Bosnia would be more of the same. You and me and Sarajevo and the Holiday Inn. Our same life of cold and no water and no electricity and nobody giving a fuck as the stranglehold increased and the city slowly gave up its dead, the starved, the frozen, the shot, the shelled, as oases of grief in the interminable boredom of the siege. But it wasn’t.
The shell that fell on the market changed everything for us. It fell out of a clear blue February sky – another of those perfect Heidi days. It was just like all the other shells that had fallen in the last three months. Only this one didn’t just leave a hole in the pavement, or knock through somebody’s roof, or maybe kill an old lady dragging her water home, or just blow the legs off a man sprinting back with the sawn-off branches of a tree, or turn to bloody pulp a couple of children playing snowballs. It landed in the middle of Merkale, where you’d bought me my hat.
The market was full of people that day: I saw all their bodies smashed into the crimson snow on television. They probably thought they were safe, although the Serbs did shell the Old Town a lot – most of the inhabitants were Muslims who’d lived there since the days of Ali Pasha.
The market was tucked into one of those deep gullies of Austrian apartment blocks and shops that ran behind the cathedral, where the snipers couldn’t see.
It was a beautiful day and the war had been very quiet for a while – “repetitive” had been Roger, my foreign editor’s word, when he’d complained again about the cost of the Holiday Inn, and sent me away. Go to Zenica, he’d said, naming a Muslim-held town halfway to Tuzla, across a web of frontlines. I didn’t want to go. It was a nightmare to get to and there were no phones in the town so I couldn’t talk to you; I couldn’t even file to the desk on Saturday; hardly anyone had mobiles then, and the Serbs had long ago shelled the mobile mast anyway. But Roger brushed all this aside: “You haven’t been there for ages. They must be up to something there. Forget this week. Nothing’s happening. File when you get back.” (And I could almost hear him thinking, “and it’s so much cheaper”.) I didn’t ask him how repetitive he thought the war felt for all of you.
The girl in the fur hat at Reception at the hotel in Zenica had a radio to her ear as we came out of lunch: “A shell has fallen on Sarajevo market. Many people are dead.” Her dark eyes looked even more pained than they had when I arrived yesterday. I thought, oh my God, how utterly awful – those poor, poor people. And then I thought… Fuck! I’m not there. And it’s Saturday, and there’s no phone! And there’s no way I can get back. I’m marooned behind this stupid patchwork of frontlines and I hitched a lift here, so I haven’t even got my own car. And all because the Herald thought Sarajevo had got too repetitive.
Then I thought you might well be in the marketplace that day too. I only just made it to the loo. I sat, my head against the tiles in the pitch-black box, shitting out my fear. It was a while before I could go upstairs for my shortwave. I turned on the radio and heard Phil’s voice. I could hear the sirens, the screams, as he described the people who would come here, when the shelling was quiet: black marketeers, ordinary people trying to buy food. He said, nobody cou
ld live otherwise in Sarajevo. He said everyone from Sarajevo would have known someone who was here today. He talked about the blood, bits of people everywhere. He didn’t say you were dead. But then, how could he? He couldn’t say, Molly, if you’re listening, I’ve seen Amir. He’s alive.
If I’d been in Sarajevo, you wouldn’t have been anywhere near the marketplace that day. It was a Saturday and you’d have been working for me. Not… doing whatever you did in the market when I wasn’t there. I never really knew what you did when I wasn’t there. I had some sort of idea, but I didn’t want to know. It didn’t fit in with my idea of you. I was rather squeamish about the black market then; I’d watched too many war films where black marketeers were scum.
You knew I didn’t like you selling stuff. When I first found out, last autumn, you’d sold some of the food I gave you, I’d asked you, furious, what prices did you charge? You said to me, “Same as everyone else…”
“But that’s extortionate,” I’d said. “It’s like all those gangsters.” I was also hurt. I’d imagined your mother eating the treats I’d bought you. In the real world, it’s rude to sell presents.
“Luka, Celo and Cazo,” you said, naming the big boys of the Sarajevo underworld, “they were all heroes at the beginning of the war. They were the only ones who had guns. They defended the city. I fought with the gangsters.”
“Well not now. Now they’re…” surely everyone knew the gangsters were in the wrong. They were stealing our flak jackets off us, apart from anything else. “Now they’re strangling the city…”
The Girl in the Film Page 17