The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  The hall was large, and comparatively warm. Light bounced off the white walls and parquet floor. Against the walls stood a bench and a round table – that heavy carved fake Ottoman furniture you get all over the Balkans – fake, perhaps, because the real stuff kept getting burnt for firewood in all the wars.

  I’d come alone, to look vulnerable and discreet, but Hal had obviously decided he needed protection – but I didn’t even know he was called Hal by then. In my mind he was still just one of the Kiseljak clones. He’d brought Moustache from the briefing and another one who, if marginally taller, was also exactly the same shape. They weren’t in uniform, just wearing what Englishmen wear when asked to make any kind of non-uniform choice: the nearest they can to the same as everyone else. Moustache and his mate were in fleece and jeans, the twin in Fulham Road cords and a jersey, although he had kept to a kind of desert sand colour; it would have been very good camouflage, if we weren’t at the end of a Balkan winter. The collar of a deep blue shirt poked out of the neck: it matched his eyes. I didn’t think it was a coincidence.

  They were slightly embarrassed too, which made me feel better. The difference is, I suppose, that it was my job to hide mine. We all introduced ourselves – Moustache was Jim, the new man was Ted. “They’re just like Australian freelance cameramen,” I thought. “They all have really short names you can shout in a hurry, like dogs.”

  I think Jim was quite surprised to learn I didn’t actually know Hal’s name. He said: “I thought you knew each other?”

  Hal said: “We met last year,” just at the same time as I said: “He never told me his name.”

  Luckily Ted said: “Do you often ask blokes out whose names you don’t know?” and we all laughed, in a hurry.

  “Round here, all the time,” I smiled.

  “I’ve met girls like you before,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied.

  Hal said nothing at all but I could feel him standing behind me. Moustaches apart, I also noticed that their faces seemed strangely hairy, almost like a fine layer of fur. As if they just had too much testosterone and it couldn’t help sprouting out.

  It was Jim who spoke: “So where are we going then?”

  “Somewhere called Jez?” They shook their heads. “It’s about a ten minute walk away.”

  It was a crisp night, just a faint tang of rubbish at the back of the throat, and the mountains gleamed in moonlight where the snow shone through the trees. The clouds rolled over the stars like a Victorian poem. As I always did, I glanced up at the crags and wondered whether they were watching me back. I noticed that the others did too. Without discussion, we quickly crossed over to where the buildings blocked the view.

  “I still can’t get used to walking along here,” I said to Hal. Ted and Jim had gone ahead; we were side by side but not really looking at each other.

  “Do you get leave often? Holiday. Whatever you call it?” Hal asked.

  “Quite often…” Then I stopped what I was saying.

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Is it? I don’t know if it is. Sometimes it’s worse having to readjust.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said. I think he must have done, because he didn’t say anything for a while.

  After several hundred yards of corners and rubble, and intermittent views of the hills, I could see that Moustache was losing faith. I didn’t like the idea of getting lost in front of these men because they would regard getting lost with contempt and I didn’t want them to regard me with contempt because nobody tells people stuff if he despises them. Just at the point that I was beginning to get worried, I recognised a corner, an archway, a dank little door. I repeated Phil’s joke because I thought they’d appreciate it: “I thought we could eat subterranean tonight.” They all laughed.

  There was electric light on the stairs as we picked our way down: I wasn’t surprised to see that Jez was “priority” too, although it didn’t stop the place being perishingly cold. It was hardly packed, and every arrival was an incident. As we came in, the other diners looked up: two tables of fattish men, in shiny purple suits, who looked us over slowly, then returned to their food. Each of the tables was decorated with a pair of skinny, dark-haired girls, woolwrapped, stolidly forking huge chunks of meat and chips between vermilion lips. In hindsight, Jez was the Rick’s Bar of Sarajevo, so the maroon suits probably thought they’d know who we were – and actually, I think they did.

  My guests were rather embarrassed when I offered them a drink.

  “Are you sure? That’s very kind,” said Hal.

  “I’ve even seen the prices, so I know how kind it is,” I said, and they looked even more embarrassed, but I finished the sentence… “but it’s not kind of me, don’t worry; it’s kind of my paper.”

  “Well, that’s all right then,” said Ted. “If you’re sure, I’ll have a beer.”

  “Me too,” said Moustache.

  “What are you having?” said Hal.

  “Well, I like drinking wine. And they have proper wine here…” They seemed slightly surprised that I was happy to order a whole bottle for myself, but I explained they didn’t sell it any other way: wine by the glass wasn’t a convenient smuggling unit. Besides, I could easily finish a bottle of wine by myself by now.

  “And the thing is,” I said as I took my first sip, “this wine actually tastes nice. The wine in the Holiday Inn is utterly vile.”

  “They still have wine, do they.” said Jim. “I’d have thought you’d have drunk it all by now? They must have bloody big cellars.”

  Ha ha, how we all laughed. “It’s like one of those maths questions,” I said. “If 400 journalists each drink one bottle of wine a night for two years, how many cubic metres…”

  “Do you think it’s smuggled then?” said Ted, and we all laughed again, but then we all looked up as we heard the door.

  “And here come the suppliers, I would imagine,” I said. My guests shot me a look, so I quickly explained: “Phil drank this same wine when he had dinner with the French general.”

  Two French soldiers were being shown to a table with the kind of obsequiousness that haunts wannabe Hollywood moguls’ dreams. They were in fatigues and the shape of soldiers who actually kill people, rather than mend pipes, or draw graphs, or build roads, or deliver fl our, or put up portakabins, or simulate UN extraction plans on the computer or any number of the other tasks it had become apparent to me that soldiers did. As they walked past I saw their badges.

  “They’re Foreign Legionnaires,” I said. They must have heard me, because they turned and one said, “Hello mate,” in thick Geordie. He was a good six foot, bull neck, arms bulging with his secret past, his hair that too-short short you see in American films, where every bump on the skull and the scalp shines through. He’d have caused frenzies amongst those Victorian scientists who believed you could trace the mind’s construction in the cranium. At some point, someone had broken his nose. They must have been very brave.

  “Hi Vince,” said Ted; “Molly, this is Vince.” We shook hands. “Molly,” said Ted, clearly and slowly, “is a journalist.”

  “Hello,” I smiled nicely. Vince nodded back, with those blank eyes I’d often seen on men I’d interviewed out here. When I said, “I think I’ve seen you before,” his eyes got even blanker. Then I remembered, I’d seen him getting in and out of the French general’s jeep. “You’re Nissent’s bodyguard, aren’t you?”

  Vince thought carefully before he finally spoke: “Aye.”

  “Would you like a drink?” I said, partly because it seemed rude not to – not that I think Vince was a man much troubled by social nicety – but also it’s always useful to know a general’s bodyguards. I got a blank-eyed look again. He looked over to Ted, then back to me.

  “I’m here with a mate,” he waved over to where Tanja, the Aeroflot blonde, was hovering, suddenly smiling, over the table of another Legionnaire.

  “He looks bit busy to me…” said Ted.


  “Would he like a drink too?”

  “I’ll go and ask him, like.”

  Hal gave me a funny look and Ted said: “You’re a quick worker!”

  I laughed: “Come on, I mean, the Foreign Legion! I’ve seen Beau Geste!”

  “Do you know any of them?” asked Hal.

  “No…no, I don’t. The French journalists know some of the officers… but, it’s different, you know, if you don’t speak the same language.”

  “You speak the same language as Vince,” said Ted; then he grinned: “Up to a point.”

  “I don’t think they like journalists very much.” “Most people don’t,” said Ted.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Well, you always get things wrong,” said Ted.

  “We try not to. And anyway, there’s no way you can feel smug about us getting something wrong if you’ve purposefully fed us the wrong information.”

  “You should try harder to get things right, then, shouldn’t you…” he was sitting back, squaring up, and I was rather grateful that Vince reappeared at this point, his friend in tow.

  “This is Franjo,” he said. Like Vince, Franjo had the same thick neck, thick shoulders of his training, and his head, like Vince’s, was virtually shaved. Unlike Vince, he was younger, maybe late twenties, and even taller; unlike Vince’s Anglo-Saxon pink-faced tow, the stubble on Franjo’s skull was dark, and he had the same high cheekbones and deep dark eyes that made you so wonderfully handsome. The name badge on his chest read F. Ivanovic. I thought to myself, my friend, you have come home. I looked into his eyes; like Vince’s, like Jim’s, they stared back at me without expression.

  I said to him, “Dobra vece, are you from round here?” His eyes flickered into reaction, before the blinds dropped once more.

  He replied, in Vince’s English: “What’s it to you?” The eyes stared back at me full wattage, and for a moment I actually felt quite scared.

  Then the lights went out. There was a second of silence and then I said: “Fuck!” at about the same time as everyone else said it too. I heard two voices apologise for swearing, and I said, “Don’t worry about that. I swear like a trooper,” before I realised that it was the troopers who were apologising, and we all laughed. While this was going on, there was a chorus of rustling. Ted got there first, flicking his lighter, and lighting the candle on the table, so you could see the rest of us scrabbling for our torches. Across the room, a pool of flickering lights was slowly approaching. Jim’s torch swung and the Aeroflot waitress’s boots shone in its beam.

  “Izvinite,” she said, as she put the candles down on our table. “Nema struje.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Tanja,” said Franjo; he spoke Serbo-Croat, with the rougher end of Sarajevo accent. “Can I give you a hand?” He took the edge of the tray of candles.

  “Why? I’m fine. This is my job.” But she was fl uttering at him, making play with huge dark eyes. “Sit down, I bring you a drink when I have done this. What you want?”

  “I’ll take the trays round. You bring us two beers.”

  “Really, no!” Before she could say anything else, he marched off with the candles. Tanja smiled the way girls do when they have been publicly admired and said in English: “Vince, what you like?”

  “Beer please, love. Look at Franjo…” Franjo was putting candles on every table, until the restaurant flickered like a pirates’ cave. When he reached the fat maroon men, they grunted, as if not certain how to react. The scrawny bits of arm candy smiled briefly before carrying on with their steaks, as if being waited on by a six foot four Foreign Legionnaire was just another of those random absurdities of war.

  “At least when he leaves the Legion he can work as a waiter,” said Vince.

  “He is very nice man. I get your beer.”

  “What do you do when you leave the Foreign Legion?”

  “What’s it to do with you?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to know.”

  “Well it’s none of your fucking business.”

  “Sorry,” I said just as Hal said: “Here’s your drink.” And Ted said to Vince: “So, what did you think about the match?”

  We ended up talking in two groups – well, three if you count Franjo and Tanja who had somehow settled at the table next door, with her keeping one eye out for the maroon men and their girls; me and Hal; Ted, Jim and Vince. Not that Jim did actually talk much. Vince, however, talked quite a lot; about thirty per cent of which consisted of the word fuck. But he did manage to thank me for his drink. And the next one, when it appeared.

  Hal and I were doing small talk that was slowly evolving: how long had I been here, did I like it. Ages, and loved it. What about you? Came about three weeks ago. Not sure how long. Probably a few months. It’s interesting so far… All that kind of stuff.

  It was then that I heard Vince talking about the Legion; they were asking him, the others, some kind of technical stuff, all nodding their heads. I could see that Hal was interested too; we both stopped talking. Into our silence Vince turned on me.

  “What are you looking at?” His eyes brimmed blank hostility.

  “I’m sorry,” I started. “I was just interested in what you were saying.”

  “Well it’s none of your fucking business, is it?” “She didn’t mean any harm,” said Ted.

  “How do you fucking know?”

  “You weren’t saying anything secret,” I said. “It was just interesting.”

  “What made it so fucking interesting?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it is interesting isn’t it. The Foreign

  Legion’s interesting.” “Is it?” Glare.

  “Well, yes…” I floundered. “I mean, why do people join it?”

  “Why do you journalists write such crap?”

  “We don’t write crap.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “I’ll rephrase that. I don’t write crap.”

  “It’s just fucking easy being a journalist isn’t it,” his voice started to rise. “You come somewhere like this. You write what you like. You don’t give a fuck what happens to anyone. Then you can just piss off and leave. Nobody’s shooting at you. You’re fucking laughing.”

  If you’ve never been screamed at by a psychopath, you can’t believe how scary it is. His eyes popped, he loomed, his fists balled, his arms bulged as though they would burst from the restraint of not hitting me. Of course what you ought to do in a situation like that is keep quiet, back down, particularly when you are surrounded by people who will make sure it won’t happen. That’s what you should do. Walk away.

  “Actually more journalists have died here than UN troops, thanks very much,” I said.

  “Only because they are fucking morons.”

  “I am not a moron.”

  “You lot make me sick. You’re just getting high on somebody else’s war.” Perhaps what made me angrier was he sounded horribly like you.

  “At least I’m trying to do something to help. At least I’m not a mercenary.”

  “Who are you calling a fucking mercenary?” “Keep quiet Molly,” it was Hal.

  “You.”

  “You what?”

  “She didn’t say anything,” Hal again.

  “I bloody did.”

  “No you didn’t. Shut up.”

  “Vince, mate. I think you’ve had enough,” that was Jim.

  “Come on Vince, let’s go. Time to go home,” said Ted. They stared at each other. For a moment I wasn’t sure quite what would happen. Franjo had got up. Tanya was standing warily at one side.

  “Vince, viens,” he said. Vince looked at him, then glared back at me.

  “We’ll all go,” said Ted. “See you later, Boss.”

  Vince and I stared at each other. Then I said, because, let’s face it, I’ve got better manners than Vince. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  He shook his head and turned to go. On his way out the door, he said: “Ask these guys about being mercenaries, they’re
always fi ghting other people’s wars…”

  “Vince. Time to go. Bye,” said Ted.

  “Ask him about Colombia, that la-di-da toff. I don’t think the great British public gives a fuck about Colombia.”

  “Come on, mate,” said Jim. “Let’s go and see if we can get a beer somewhere else.”

  Hal and I were left staring at each other by candlelight. He didn’t speak, so after a moment I said: “Sorry.” He grunted.

  “I didn’t mean to… create a row.”

  “Why did you ask him that then?”

  I tried to drink some wine but my glass was empty.

  “Would you like some more wine?” He lifted the bottle; there was nothing inside.

  “We could get another,” I said.

  Hal looked at his watch. “Are you sure you want some more?”

  I checked mine: 11 p.m. Quite early, really. At the BBC, Phil would just be settling in. The Americans would be filing, if there was anything to file. Muffy would be holding court… no, because she wasn’t here. Maybe nothing happened when I wasn’t there. Maybe nothing happened at all anywhere… And I didn’t have to worry about you, because you were in your flat. “Yah. It’s only eleven,” I said. He waved at Tanja, now deep in conversation with the scrawny girls, who were being completely ignored by, or completely ignoring, their fat dates.

  “I just wanted to know,” I said, after a minute. “Why do people join the Foreign Legion? I suppose he must have something to hide.”

  “If he’s got something to hide, he’s not going to want to tell you.”

  “He might do,” I said. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He might be racked by guilt and be dying to talk.”

  “Piece of advice, don’t venture things against Vince, he’s bigger than you and I don’t think he’s the type to be racked by guilt.”

  “I chose my moment though, didn’t I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if he was going to create hell, he couldn’t have done it with you lot there.”

  “He didn’t actually tell you, though, did he? And now he doesn’t like you.”

  It’s odd that that hurts; I mean, why should I care if a psychotic mercenary dislikes me? But it did.