The new general spent the next few weeks banging heads: naughty Serbs, naughty Muslims… I don’t care if you were the ones who were shelled. You must have done something for the Serbs to do that to you. Maybe you even did it yourself. I couldn’t see who did it and I’m not going to blame anyone. But I’m afraid, if you can’t play nicely together, only killing a few people here and there, I’m going to have to take away all your toys.
He announced a twenty kilometre radius exclusion zone for heavy weapons around Sarajevo, backed up by the threat of air strikes, and gave an ultimatum. The UN, he said, would hold the frontlines and all those careful fortifications had to go. Nobody was allowed to shell anyone at all.
Hundreds of journalists turned up to see how it wouldn’t work; some so old and famous they had appeared as themselves in The Deer Hunter. The Serbs were still not letting anyone in by land or air, so this extra battalion spent days hanging around in the Serb capital Pale or Kiseljak, or for the lucky ones, Split. I think the Serbs let the hacks through in the end out of sheer exasperation: you’d be fed up if you had three hundred frustrated journalists camped in your town.
But it did work – or at least for a bit. But having the defences unwrapped was strangely uncomfortable, like taking off a sticking plaster, or a pedicure.
You didn’t want to come back to the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity, the day the UN were going to take down the barricades. Edin asked you to keep an eye on the CTV office; he said he’d come with Phil and me. We drove back down the great grey road to the blocked-off crossroads, where somewhere to the south, beyond the sandbags and the mines and the ancient Mercedes lorry, according to the maps and you, of course, who remembered full well what your town was like, fl owed the river and the bridge – about which I’d heard so much and never actually seen – and the street, leading to a part of Sarajevo that, in a year of living half a mile away, it had been too dangerous for me to see.
The UN sappers slowly unwrapped the crossroads. From out of the tunnel they’d burrowed in the last two years, through the stucco blocks which flanked the bridge, the Bosnian soldiers began to pop their heads up like rabbits; bewildered, blinking at the sudden nakedness of the place they had been guarding for so long, grinning absurdly at this hope of peace. We were just the same; poking our heads round the edge of the holes and the sandbags, watching the fortifications being carefully unpacked: the mines, the sandbags, the weed-woven earth piled up and over the cartoon flat tyres of the lorry parked right across the road to the bridge. One by one, slowly, slowly, we would summon up the courage to creep a bit further, till we were all out on the road to the bridge, sneaking glances straight over the razor wire, at the Serbs, on the other side, who were peering out right back, with equal amazement.
Finally a British squaddie stared at the lorry blocking the road, sucked his teeth, then just got into the cab and started the ignition. That’s German engineering: after two years of not moving – let alone being shot at and piled up with earth – the lorry started first time. He drove it off, flat tyres splatting down the street.
It was such an ordinary bridge, now I could see it. Concrete. Two cars wide. And the river, the frontline for so long, was very unimpressive – just a few feet deep and maybe twenty feet across, gurgling through its concrete embankments, goffered with razor-wire. Beyond the river, the sandbags, the razor wire, the staggered chicanes of concrete blocks, stretched a virgin plain of snow-covered grass, up to those white tower blocks, the snipers’ eyrie for the last two years. We couldn’t see the mines, but we knew they were there.
Then, one by one, again, Bosnians and hacks alike, we’d give in to the tingle of fear, drift back, a little shamefaced, lurk behind the buildings, until curiosity pushed us out again. Considering the hundreds of journalists in the hotel, there weren’t that many of us there: Phil and Muffy, and Edin, with some CTV anchorman who’d flown in from America and had cast aspersions, over dinner last night, on the film star who had played him in The Killing Fields. As we played grandmother’s footsteps on the bridge, he was looking around, taking deep long breaths, as though pulling the war down into his lungs.
At least, that was what we were doing till the general roared up. He must have pissed himself laughing afterwards, at his first line of defence, considering, like most soldiers, he didn’t like the press. He set off, behind two rows of French Foreign Legionnaires, onto the bridge, his bodyguards swivelling their eyes and talking into their little black blobs. The Legionnaires were doing that intricate movement you see soldiers do in films which has all the formality of dance at Versailles: four knelt, rifles at the ready, guns trained on the Serb lines in front, while four advanced, guns trained too, avoiding the mines and the scrolls of wire trailing through the railings. After five or six yards, the four in front suddenly dropped to their knees, and the four behind would advance beyond them, and then drop, and the cycle started again. All very neat and orderly, except, of course, for the TV crews… I mean… this is great telly. The cameramen ran past the double lines of Foreign Legionnaires and then turned back to film, backing away towards the Serb lines, as the French advanced, in formation. We scampered round the sides, so what the Serbs could see, coming over their bridge, were the backs of half a dozen unarmed foreign journalists.
Edin and I had got the giggles when we reached the other side: Phil couldn’t because he was recording, talking in his commentary voice.
“Fuck me. I am in Greater Serbia,” said Edin.
Phil said, “Try not to swear,” and shoved his mike at him.
“Two years, I have not been on this bridge. Two years, I would be shot if I walk here. Before the war, I used to come every week. My aunt had a flat up there,” Edin waved to one of the white blocks where, presumably, we were being watched by, presumably, equally bewildered snipers. “We used to go there for Sunday lunch.”
I said: “Visit Serbia, before Serbia visits you.”
None of us seemed to know what to do next. I couldn’t quite believe the snipers wouldn’t change their minds. Greater Serbia was rather anti-climactic and getting cold. After a minute or so, Phil and I shrugged at each other and walked back over the bridge, back home, leaving some of the French Legionnaires behind to start standing guard.
Then we heard a “thwack- phut”. Everyone, journalists, soldiers, general, jumped: behind us, a boy was practising tennis strokes against the wall of a block of flats, a grin like a banana splitting his face and all of us, soldiers, general, laughed back in relief. He was ten, he told me, as I scribbled it down; he lived in those shrapnel- scarred, planked-up flats. This was the first time he’d been able to play outside since the war began. If the ultimatum worked, he said, maybe he could go back to practising tennis again. Before the war, his coach had said he was maybe good enough to go to Florida.
The ultimatum did work. Nobody died for weeks, or at least no one anyone minded about. All the other journalists went home, and I was left with Phil, Muffy and you.
Then Roger told me I had to come home too.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I didn’t feel I was like the other journalists. You were sitting on Phil’s horrible sofa, drinking coffee, beneath a new map, the Demilitarized Zone; teasing Muffy about the French general’s bodyguard, who, you said, quite obviously had the hots for her, and Muffy was giggling and flicking glances at Phil. It was early afternoon and the atrium resounded with multilingual curses and thumps, in all the languages of the developed world, as our colleagues dragged their luggage downstairs to check out. You had been there when you heard me say, on the sat phone to the desk: “Come home! But I’ve hardly been back here at all.”
I felt you go still. I turned to look and shook my head: the ceasefire was fragile, I said, to Roger. I thought I was based out here, I said. But all Roger said was: “The Holiday Inn costs a fortune. We want you back…”
The others had gone quiet as well. I met your stare across the room. Dust danced in the light coming in through the window. I foug
ht with Roger; anything might happen, I said… I got him down, in the end, to just a couple of weeks.
You said: “It is always the same, every time.” “It’s not me,” I said. “I don’t want to go.”
“You always say that. And you always leave.”
“It’s not my fault. It’s not me…”
You stood up. “That’s what you always say…”
I was going to say more, but Phil said: “Hey guys…” We turned round: “This is my office,” said Phil.
You pulled me out onto the gallery. It was dark up here, but down in the depths of the atrium, the light came in off the street. A long queue of little woolly hats snaked away from the reception desk. You pulled me round so that I had to look you in the face.
“It’s the ceasefire, isn’t it?” you said. “You don’t care anymore.”
“It isn’t me. It’s the desk.”
“So they don’t care. They only care when people are dying. And you always do what they say.”
“I can’t help that. I work for them.”
“You will never come back now.”
“I will!” I said; even an idiot could see this ceasefire wasn’t going to last, but I didn’t say that.
“What, because the ceasefire won’t last, and more people will die?”
“Because it isn’t over,” I agreed. “But the Herald just won’t pay for me to be here now.”
You looked away from me, deep down into the atrium, at the light, at the line of anoraks.
“They are all leaving,” you said. “It isn’t just you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If it’s the money,” you said, “you don’t have to stay in the hotel.
You could come and stay with us.”
“I can’t leave the hotel,” I said, quickly. “I need the phones.”
We didn’t speak for a bit. We stared at the heads. The phones were true. And I needed the water, and the intermittent electricity, and the food. But it wasn’t just that. I felt mean even thinking it, but it wasn’t. If I stayed with your family I could never escape. It would be like your awful Sarajevo parties for ever.
“It’s not just the hotel,” I said. “It’s everything.”
You waited for about ten seconds before you said: “You could pay me less.”
“Oh Amir!” I turned to face you. “I couldn’t do that.”
You looked away from me, down at the heads. That would be me tomorrow; waving my bank transfer fax to the woman in her orange knitted hat.
I didn’t speak. Then you turned to me and said: “I hate it when you leave. I hate it when you are not here. I miss you… I’m lonely when you’re not here. And always, I am afraid one day you won’t come back.”
“I’ll never not come back,” I said.
You never understood why I wouldn’t marry you. You thought I thought you wanted me for the passport. But I didn’t think that. At least, most of me didn’t think that. When you first met me you didn’t even know I could get you cheap chocolate.
It was that night you proposed again, in my icy hotel room, after we’d made love. “You’re so beautiful,” you said. So I laughed, and said, “You can’t see. It’s pitch dark.”
“I can feel,” you said. You ran your hands over my face again, and then down over my breasts onto my belly and I thought, Oh God, why am I leaving. Why are they making me go home? I very nearly said then that I would try and force them to make me stay, when you said: “Why won’t you marry me? Please marry me.”
“I can’t,” I said, at once.
“Why not, why can’t you?”
I didn’t speak, but what I wanted to say was, why did you have to ask me? Why did you have to spoil it? Why can’t we just live in the present? Like we always have.
“You say you love me,” you said.
“I do love you.”
“Then why not?”
I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say I don’t want to live in a country like this; I don’t want my children to be caught up in this mess when it bursts out again a generation away. I don’t want to end up like this. I’m not old enough. I haven’t thought like that. I don’t want to settle down. I don’t want to be married to someone who might turn into one of those men on the checkpoints. I don’t want to live with your mother or in a horrible flat with an orange Formica kitchen and shrapnel holes in the wall. And think brown smoked glass and heavy carved bits of oak the height of good taste. And eat those horrible minced rat-burger cevapcici for ever. And have to look at those mountains every day, knowing the guns are in the trees, and go for a walk and worry about the thick crop of mines under the leaves. If I married you, I could never leave. I could not even go back to the Holiday Inn. But I couldn’t say that, so I started to cry; curled up, turned away, with my hands over my face.
“If you married me,” I heard you say, as though you were testing ice, “then maybe I could come to England too.”
“But I don’t live in England,” I wept, not even lifting my head. And even if I did, what on earth would you do there?
“Then we could live here,” you said. “Maybe things will change with this ceasefire.”
I said nothing; I didn’t have to. Because then I heard you say: “But you don’t live here, either, do you? This hotel is not Sarajevo. It’s like spaceship, great big yellow spaceship that has landed in the middle of my town. And all you aliens you come in and out. But you always return to the ship.”
I lifted my head then: “That’s not fair. I hate it when they make me leave. You know I hate to leave.”
“No you don’t.”
“I do!”
“None of you do. Molly, I live in Holiday Inn too, you know. I hear you all, saying: ‘Thank God, getting out, down to the coast, have some sea-food risotto for me. Drink some Posip for me. Fucking locals, what a nightmare.’”
I sat up, and put my hand out towards you. I laid my palm on your chest. “But we always come back. It’s just a rest. I always come back. You know I always want to come back.”
You brushed my hand away. You wouldn’t look at me. You wouldn’t meet my eye. You’d never talked like this before, or not since the day the man was shot.
“You come back. I know. But this is truth. I am here because I have to be and you because you want to be. But what about when the war is over, when I get my home back. Where will you want to be then?”
There was a wave of cold air, and the bed heaved as you got out.
“Where are you going?” I felt a wave of panic as you walked towards the door.
Then you turned: “Nowhere. Where can I? There is nowhere I can go.”
An Englishman, a Frenchman and a Bosnian are stranded on a desert island. They go fishing and catch a golden fish. The fish says, “I am a magic fish, and if you let me go free, I’ll give each of you a wish.”
The Englishman says, “I wish I were back in London.” Pouf!
He vanishes.
“I wish I were back in Paris,” says the Frenchman. Suddenly, he’s gone.
And the Bosnian says: “I wish my friends the Englishman and the Frenchman were back here.”
XIII
It was when I was having coffee with Ed that I first realised what was going on. I must have been so stupid not to have known
before. Stupid. Or just whizzing down the death slide of the previous four weeks.
Phil had met me at the airport when I came back that time. Nothing strange in that – the airport was no-man’s-land. You couldn’t have come through the checkpoints anyway.
“Hi, honey, I’m home,” I said, when I emerged through the sandbags. He tipped his dark glasses, and replied: “Honey, you won’t recognise the place.”
We drove back into town, the snow sparkling on the mountains, above the frontline, like Val d’Isère. “Fuck me!” I said. “Is that a traffic light?”
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“Why are we going this way?”
“Didn’t you know there w
as a one-way system?”
“Fuck me!”
“I know. I told you.” He went quiet; there were people wandering along the streets, carrying plastic bags, like people you might see anywhere else. Only the burnt-out buildings behind were the same. And the mountains of course.
“I’ll take you on a tour.”
I said I wanted to get back to see you at the hotel. That’s when he told me you weren’t there – you were working, he said, for CTV. You’d sent a message, saying you’d see me after work. I didn’t even feel angry. I was just glad you had something to do while I’d been away. I was sad, but I never minded spending an afternoon with Phil.
“I’ll buy you a coffee.”
“What!!” I said.
“It only costs a couple of marks. The general’s got the Serbs to agree to let people bring food and stuff across the airport. I tell you, Molly, everything’s changed.”
Phil took me to Ibrahim’s: a glass kiosk, on a terrace, in the little park, where you told me all the trees used to be, before everyone cut them down for firewood in the middle of the night. It was owned and manned by a proud and balding man whom I recognised from some politician’s bodyguard entourage. Phil sat me outside, wide open, bang in the middle of Sarajevo, and bought me a cup of coffee. It felt all wrong.
Phil sat watching me feeling sick.
“I felt like that the first time too.” He twitched. “I still feel like that now.” He gave a little twitch, then he said: “I’m thinking of looking for a house.”
“What! Here?”
“Not for me. For the BBC.”
“Move out of the hotel?”
“Well, yes.”
“Phil, no!”
He wouldn’t look at me as he said: “It’s not that bad, surely?”
“You can’t leave me. You can’t leave me alone in that hotel.”
“But you’re not alone, Molly. You’ve got Amir.”
He didn’t tell me you’d decided to move into a flat with Edin. I think probably he didn’t know. He told me there was electricity in the town for a few hours nearly every day. He told me there was water three times a week.
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