You looked at me as if I were a stranger and said: “What do you want me to do? We have to buy food. I am just trying to keep my family alive.”
It was one of those moments when I’d glimpse, through a grating, a Hogarthian nether world of a Sarajevo I never normally saw, even with you. I backed down, although I felt a bit more justified when the government rounded up the gangsters a couple of weeks later and shot most of them.
But God, I prayed you weren’t in the marketplace that day. The Zenica hotel manager turned the generator on. We all huddled on the sofas in the freezing lobby, the receptionist, the manager, the waiters in their black tie, several aid workers, bundled up, like me, in their boots and hats. There was nothing we could do except watch.
Bosnian TV didn’t believe in censoring its pictures, although I later discovered even they had had to cut stuff out. The TV crew had got there within minutes: plastic shopping bags, spilling on the ground, rolling cabbages, tins of fish, the white faces, all amongst the blood and the limbs and loops of gut draped all over the stalls like Christmas decorations in a butcher’s shop. And the screams.
I scanned the screen for a glimpse of you. I kept remembering Phil’s voice: “You have to be bloody unlucky to be hit by a shell.”
I couldn’t even run to you, to see if you were alive. I didn’t want to be here. It wasn’t as if there was anything happening in Zenica anyway.
I’d known Zenica was a bad place to be on a Saturday if you worked for a Sunday paper. I’d said to Roger, what will you do if anything happens on Saturday? He’d said, “Nothing will happen. And don’t worry if it does. We’ll take it off the wires.” Well, he couldn’t take this off the wires.
Now I was stuck. I didn’t have a car. I’d hitched up here with an aid agency. I couldn’t ring you.
I was so stunned by the scenes on the television, it took me ten minutes to remember that upstairs was a bunch of EC monitors, more of the alphabet soup sent to Bosnia by the world; they tended to be male, ex-army, escaping their wives, and banking £90,000 a year in return for driving around frontlines dressed entirely in white, checking who exactly was doing what to whom. But most importantly, they would always have a satellite phone and, although they were not supposed to let me use it, would most likely be susceptible to a blonde in tears.
I ran to the lift. Unfortunately, when I got upstairs, the monitors were out – monitoring something I presumed. Their flint-faced interpreter wouldn’t let me use the phone, even though I burst into tears outside her office.
I slid down the wall outside her door and wept for you, for my triple betrayal: you, who could be dead; my poor Sarajevo, the town I’d left, for not being interesting enough; and for my job, for me being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The interpreter opened the doors in the middle of my hysterics, and let me come in and watch her TV. It was warmer in her office than in the lobby downstairs. We cried together and drank endless cups of instant coffee while I scanned the TV for a sight of you. But she still said she couldn’t let me use the phone. When the EC monitors got back, fuzzily pissed from downing slivovic with some local general, they immediately let me ring the desk. Roger was very nice to me, as he should have been, after all it was his stupid fault; but I couldn’t ring you. You had no phone I could ring. I tried and tried to ring the BBC, but it was constantly engaged. In the end, the monitors kindly got me drunk and rang round to find me a lift to Sarajevo next day.
I knew you were alive the moment I walked into Phil’s room. He leapt up off the sofa, his face greenish-white. Muffy looked concussed.
The blood had been sluiced down in the marketplace; the redundant limbs and loops of intestines gathered and stoked into the hospital incinerator. The Serbs were already blaming the Muslims for doing it to themselves (“The Muslim vice,” Phil always said, “shelling themselves…”) and the UN ballistics experts were saying they couldn’t tell, technically, who had fired the shell: it had crashed through the roof of a stall and exploded when it hit the table below, amongst the flip-flops and cabbages, at stomach height. That’s why so many people died, explained the expert the UN dragged into one of our furious press conferences: you are much more likely to die of an abdominal wound, than if you get your leg blown off. It also meant there wasn’t a tidy crater the UN could measure for the angle of the trajectory of the shell.
Phil shouted my name when I walked in and Muffy gave me a hug and burst into tears. I was overwhelmed with a surge of relief so strong, my legs buckled and I leant into her arms. You had to be alive. Neither of them looked remotely concerned for me. I let them talk but when I broke in and said: “Where’s Amir?” Muffy looked bewildered. She had to concentrate before she said: “He’s fine.”
The window was open, and through the gap, I could see the pretty white and blue mountains from which the shell must have been fired.
Tears spurted to my eyes and my legs began to wobble. I fl umped down on one of the grey draylon chairs.
“You saw him in the marketplace? After it happened…”
“Yes, yes, he’s fine…”
“Oh God! I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t be crying. I wasn’t even here…”
“How did you get in?” asked Phil. “Barry’s just rung. The Serbs have cut the place off.”
“I hitched…” I said blankly. “Some UN guy… we must have just sneaked through…”
Muffy told me, as we drank cups of coffee: “Phil and I were with one of my families on that street that goes up the hill behind the marketplace, you know, Logavina? We were having coffee. Then we heard the bang… but you hear bangs here all the time…then we heard the screaming. It was like a football match. Then the sirens…one of the neighbours knocked on the door… I got there when I could but…”
“I saw the TV,” I said, “I felt so useless.”
“I just started crying,” said Muffy, and she put up her hands to her eyes, as she spoke. “I just stood there and wept. This photographer came up and slapped me and said, ‘Just do your job.’”
“How horrible of him!”
“Not really,” she gulped. “I mean, he was right.”
“I had to go and file,” said Phil; he swallowed too, and walked over to the window. He stared out across the square, where the greying snow lay, untouched, even though it had fallen weeks ago. The ammunition factory stared blankly back. “I couldn’t stay and help.”
“I heard you on the radio,” I said but Muffy carried on talking: “We just loaded people into the back of the car, me and the guy from NBC, and we kept driving up to the hospital, and then back to the market, getting more people. There was blood all the way up the road.” She stopped then: it was only later that night, when she was drunk again, that she said: “The car in front had a guy half out of the trunk. His leg fell off, on the way. We nearly hit it.” “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there,” I said.
Phil looked down at Muffy and moved to her side. He picked up her hand, above the smeared glass coffee table, and started to stroke her fingers. “It was awful. You wouldn’t have wanted to be,” said Phil. But I did.
They didn’t want me to go round to your flat. They said it was too dangerous to go on foot anywhere today.
“Even the Serbs are freaked out by this,” said Phil. “They’re denying it, of course. They’ve started saying the Bosnians filled the place with shop-window dummies.” He laughed… we all did… what would they think of next? “You were bloody lucky to get back here at all.”
We all three listened. Nothing. No cars, no nothing. A machine gun belched, then fell quiet.
“I’ll run,” I said. “Can I eat some of your cheese? I’m starving and I hate taking their food.”
I had a bad feeling in my back when I left the hotel. It was as if the town was holding its breath, like when a child knows it has gone too far and is waiting, frozen, for grown-up retribution. There was no battle, as you’d expect after an attack like yesterday. Just quiet, then a burst of artillery. Then quiet again
.
I ran like the clappers out the back of the hotel and zigzagged up between the gym lockers. I ducked under the blankets, grey and old now, like the snow; I ran round the corner, then slowed to a walk past the white blocks of flats. I ran fast across the narrow street which led straight down to the front, and slowed again until I got to the railings, then hell for leather until I reached the other side; then the last slow walk, until I came to the big crossroads, where the snipers had that wide-open horizon, and the broad road fl owed emptily by. I stopped, on its shore, but all seemed quiet. Two photographers, the small Spaniard and the tall Dutch, were waiting on the wall by the mosque, where it was safe, by the edge of the row of gym lockers that straddled the road. I waved at them, they waved back at me, and one of them gave me the thumbs up.
I ran.
Only you weren’t there. Just your mother, sitting alone, drinking coffee. “Ah, you are safe!” she embraced me as she opened the door.
“I’m fine…” It never occurred to me Maria might think I was hurt.
She looked over my shoulder. I realised later she had been looking for you.
“Come in,” she said, but I was already through the door walking past her, into your kitchen. The kitchen was much warmer than the stairs, the stove had nothing on it, but was still belching heat into the white light bouncing in through the window off the snow. There was a glass on the table, and the familiar bottle, an empty coffee cup, but no sign of you.
Maria offered me a glass of slivovic. I took it, of course. It would have been too rude not to; but this time I needed it myself.
“Ah! it was terrible. So many people. Terrible…” She poured herself a bit more. “My neighbour came. She said, something terrible in the marketplace. We didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where Amir was. I hoped he was with you, but… but I didn’t know. You know, sometimes he goes there… I waited for hours, but then he came. He had been helping, as you know. Then he had to go back.
Where is he? Is he coming here too?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know where he is.”
“He was with you. I thought he was with you.”
“No. no. I wasn’t here. I’ve only just got here. I was in Zenica last night.”
“Zenica!”
“Yes.”
“But where is he, then?”
She put her glass down on the table and we stared at each other, horrified. “I’m sure he’s fine… He must be fine,” through my dread. “It’s quiet day today.” I’d know if something had happened. Almost certainly, I’d know…
“He loves you, you know.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say, but it wasn’t that.
I carried on, as though she hadn’t spoken at all…
“Muffy said he’d been helping one of the TV companies.”
Did Muffy say that? I hope she had. “They’d have known, at the BBC, if something had happened to him. He probably stayed at the TV station. He probably couldn’t get back because of the curfew. He’s fine. I’m sure he’s fine.”
“He told me he loves you.” She leant across the table and took my hand. “I can see he loves you. I’m glad he found a girl like you.”
“Oh Maria,” I said. “I love him.”
I picked up her other hand, we squeezed each other’s fingers for a minute or so, then I said: “I’d better go back to the hotel. Amir will know where to find me, there.”
“If there was not this war, you are just what I would like as a daughter.”
I rang Edin when I got back, but Aida, Valida’s sister, answered, and she said she couldn’t say where you were.
I sat on Phil’s grimy draylon chairs, drinking whisky by candlelight, and listening to the others talk about the shell. I thought you’d come there to find me. But you didn’t.
“This woman started screaming at the TV crews ‘This is just pornography. What are you doing filming these people?’” said Phil. “One of the Australian cameramen said to her, ‘The world has to know this has happened.’ But she said, ‘Do you think your editors will run this footage? It’s too much horror. You are just making money out of these people’s suffering.’”
“She was wrong,” I said. “I saw the TV in Zenica. It was running on CNN and Sky.”
“CNN was completely cut!” said Phil.
“…Phil turned the genny on and we watched it here.”
“It was still very strong.”
“Not the same,” Phil shook his head. “Marina,” he said, “thought things had gone quiet. She’d done a trip to Belgrade.” “Poor Marina,” I said, for the first time.
I told Phil I’d tried to ring the BBC for hours. He looked embarrassed: he’d taken it off the hook, he said; he’d had people ringing up from all over the world. “They all wanted two-ways…”
“Oh God!” Muffy laughed. “He put it back on, so I could ring my mom, and that second, some radio station rang from LA at 3.00 am.” Phil put his head in his hands as Muffy carried on: “They wanted a two-way. He was way too drunk… I said, no! no! but then he started talking about this head…” she stopped.
“What head?” I said.
“Some man’s head. I heard him say, on the radio: ‘There was blood everywhere. All the blood. And this head, lying on a stall, like it was for sale…’”
“I could just hear Muffy groaning – she was saying, no, no, no…” Phil raised his own head.
“Then he looked at me, like this…” she did a goldfish gawp. “And he said: ‘they’ve hung up.’ And I was saying, ‘Are you surprised!!!’”
He smiled at her, and she moved closer to him and picked up his hand, staring back in silence. They smiled at each other and I needn’t have been there at all. They hardly noticed when I said I thought I’d go to bed.
I thought, on my way upstairs, about Lena, Phil’s wife back in Shepherd’s Bush, and the baby, that Muffy had told me had been born when Phil was stuck in the Holiday Inn. I’d met her once, when Phil and I had been in London at the same time. She was beautiful, even if she looked rather exhausted. But grumpy. The evening ended with her shouting at Phil in Arabic in the kitchen. She had been his interpreter in Beirut. Like you.
The next morning you were waiting for me, at the briefing, inside the front hall of the PTT.
Even in the filtered gloom, your eyes were so tired you looked like you’d been punched. You hadn’t shaved, not for days, your hair looked lank. But you smiled at me, a hesitant smile. I felt my tears rising. I hardly noticed the Legionnaire give me my card back. I came over and you took me in your arms. You didn’t speak. I whispered into your neck: “I’m so sorry, so sorry I wasn’t here.”
You said, “I’m sorry too.”
It was that night, in bed, that you told me about the woman.
“She was lying on the ground,” you said. You turned away from me and stared up at the ceiling, the candlelight flickering your face in dark shapes across the room.
“She looked a bit funny. She’d obviously been hurt. She said, ‘Help me…’ I picked up her shoulders, and… and…” then you stopped.
After a few seconds, I said your name. You didn’t speak for twenty seconds or so, and then it all suddenly spurted out in a rush.
“…the whole bottom half of her body just fell off. From her waist…” You lay still, staring at the ceiling. I might as well have not been there.
“Then she died. Just then. In my arms. All her blood just flooded out of her body onto the tarmac. I couldn’t stop it. She died.”
You started to cry. I leant over, and tried to kiss your tears away, but you moved away from me. So I just stroked your hair. Then you curled back towards me like a baby and I crooned over you, as your sobs got deeper and deeper. I was crying too, I was weeping softly for you, but you were giving great grunts of despair. I stroked the back of your head, as your head lay on my breast; soothed you, whispered your name, and slowly the sobs began to die. We lay together, in silence, for a moment, then I felt your h
ead stir between my breasts, then one of your hands moved down and started squeezing my thigh. It hurt. Your fingers were digging into my fat. I moved for you, and let you part my legs. As a reunion, it wasn’t much like making love. It felt more as if you were punishing me for not being there before.
The war is over and Mujo and Suljo are deciding what to do.
“I’m going to Zagreb,” says Suljo. “All my life is there: my wife, my children. My brother-in-law has a private shop. What about you?”
“I’m off to Belgrade.”
“Belgrade! To the Chetniks! They’ll kill you! Why are you doing that?”
“All my life is there. My BMW is there, my video recorder, my TV, my fridge….”
XII
You changed after that shell. Sarajevo changed. None of us thought it would make any difference; you were so numbed by the world’s indifference by now, you couldn’t see that one shell could change things, but it did. Not even the most callous or dithering politician could pretend all those people dead in one afternoon was any kind of acceptable level of violence; odd, really, considering if they’d just been killed in twos and threes over a month, it would have been fine, but there you go. That’s the International Community for you: little and often is better than one big splurge.
There was a new general, British. The last UN commander, Belgian, in Bosnia had left with a cri de cœur: “À Sarajevo, j’étais seul,” he said in his valedictory interview to me, over weak coffee, in his icy office.
“Je n’avais aucun conseil à mon coté”, he said. Although, sitting in Kiseljak, he wasn’t in Sarajevo much at all.
This new general had obviously decided not to take any shit. But then, that was probably what his predecessor had thought as well; the Belgian army are not known for being soft. Him being British was wonderful for us, because it meant that the British public finally had someone they could recognise in the story – not just a bunch of whiny foreigners whose names ended in “itch” – so our desks all perked up.
The Girl in the Film Page 18