We were at the road leading between the chicanes at the back of the hotel. As we strolled round the last row of gym lockers, and the mountains loomed behind the hotel, I said: “I always like to run this bit as well.”
“I’ll race you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll lose.”
I did, but not by much, as he was dragging me along by the hand, which I extricated as we got to the hotel.
“Good night,” I said, rather brightly, as we stood on the snowglazed concrete.
“Good night,” he said back. “And thank you. That was fun. We should do it again sometime.” “That would be great.” Pause.
He moved closer again, I stepped back.
“I might bring Phil, if you liked.” He stopped.
“Who’s Phil?”
“He’s the BBC correspondent.”
“Phil Kennedy? He’s good, isn’t he?”
“He’s great. And really nice, Phil. He’s like my best friend here. Apart from Amir, that is. I could bring him, if you’d like to meet him, that is.”
“I’d love to,” he said, and moved a step back. “It would be really interesting. I’ve seen him on telly… How do I get in touch?” Then of course we were into Sarajevo communication hell. “The phones don’t really work,” I said. “But I’m in room 524. I guess the best thing is if I ring you from the BBC. They’ve got a local landline. I can ring UNPROFOR from there. What’s your extension?”
It took about four seconds before he decided to give it to me but in the end, he just said: 2252. I wrote it down, and put SAS Sarajevo beside it. And showed it to him, and laughed. He took my pen, crossed it out, and wrote JCO’s. But without the apostrophe.
“Good night,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you very much for walking me home.”
“It was a pleasure. And thanks for the drinks.”
“That’s the Herald. Be careful going home.”
“I’ll wait till you’re inside.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I’ll wait till you get to the barricades.”
“Just in case I’m shot?”
“Yah. Just in case.”
“Will you come and rescue me?”
“I’ll probably just panic,” I said; I had been useless with the man on Sniper Alley. “You can shout instructions to me as you bleed to death.”
“Good night. Good luck,” and he kissed me on the cheek again, both cheeks, slightly too long and slightly too close to my mouth. I pulled away and as I did so, I remember thinking, to my amazement, what a shame.
As I watched him sprint behind the first of the gym lockers, I realised I’d never got him to tell me what he was actually doing out here; I’d even forgotten to ask him about Colombia. And when I got up to my room, I’d completely forgotten you weren’t in the hotel…
…Now, at Ingrid’s book launch years later, I heard Phil say, “He seemed much less keen on having dinner with me when Molly wasn’t there.”
Suddenly I wasn’t in Sarajevo any more, but back at Ingrid’s book launch clutching my glass of cheap white wine, being glared at by rows of dead lawyers.
“Were you in Kosovo?” It was the general.
“I don’t really do that kind of thing anymore,” I shook my head.
He said: “Very wise.” I thought he’d move on after that, and talk to someone else, but he stayed to talk to me for a while, which made me feel much better. It made me think, for almost the first time, maybe this isn’t the end. Maybe I could do that kind of work again.
There was also a stack of other people I hadn’t seen for ages; Tim, who I only ever saw on telly these days. Even Ed: he seemed to have travelled with Ingrid during the Kosovo crisis for a while. He asked me if I’d been back to Sarajevo, and I said not, had he? He looked a little shifty and said, “A couple of times.”
It was nice seeing Ingrid again. I couldn’t stick her in Sarajevo. I tried to be nice to her when she arrived – after the ceasefire, after you had gone. She used to ignore me if I was in the same room as her. Or barge in on a conversation I was having and twist it away. Or try to collect a group to go out to dinner and not include me; all the nasty tricks of the school playground. One night she even started talking about you – Phil said something like, “Molly knows Amir rather better than you.” But she just carried on, recycling gossip. I ended up walking out onto the landing.
Then I bumped into her two years ago, at King’s Cross, of all places. Her face must have been a mirror of my horrified recognition – oh God, we’re going to have to have a conversation; we’re both waiting for a train – but after a moment, I suddenly felt pleased. We had a cup of coffee, which then became two. Maybe in Sarajevo we were too similar and it freaked us out, but in the real world, it was rather a relief to find someone vaguely the same. She lives abroad still but we occasionally email each other. I’m glad I went to her book launch. It was like opening up an old… well maybe, I was going to say, a box of old toys. But it wasn’t like when I opened the box of books last year. It was wonderful to see everyone again, and they were all pleased to see me. The only thing was that none of them wanted to talk about you.
Mujo and Suljo were staring at their block of flats with some binoculars. Suddenly, Mujo said:
“Here, look at this Suljo, those EC monitors are fucking our wives.”
Suljo: “So, at the moment, we’re monitoring them, and they are the ones who are getting fucked.”
Sarajevo 1994
XIV
In the end, I hardly saw you at all that month, even though I didn’t leave. It wasn’t just that we were all rushed off our feet: you were in the flat – and I couldn’t stay, because of the phones, and particularly not, now the electricity had gone. The plan was that you’d spend Thursday to Saturday working for me, and then I’d go over to you on Sunday morning, but it didn’t work out. With the airport shut, CTV couldn’t get a proper – by which they meant American – crew in, so you and Edin had to do all the work. I’d been pleased for you. It was so good for your career. And you seemed so happy, having your own job to do. You’d been brilliant fixing up people for me to go and see, and had wonderful ideas of how to make things different – the traders who did the walk with supplies in and out of Gorazde, the refugees, the ham radio – but actually, once you’d set things up and rung me about them, I generally went to see these people on my own. I missed you of course, but there was so much to do, and in the evenings I’d hang out with Phil, or we’d go out drinking with Hal and his friends and ask questions.
Gorazde was one of those classic Bosnian crises, like the four weeks of a childhood disease: first spots, quarantine, temperature, a week of high fever, then a tedious week of watching telly wrapped in an eiderdown, half-wishing you could have a relapse to put off going back to school. It was made even better because the Serbs completely sealed Sarajevo; we couldn’t leave and no other journalists could get in. I had great satisfaction the next day in telling the Herald I was trapped. The Herald must have been really strapped for cash, because Roger still said I should leave as soon as I possibly could, when anybody with half a brain could see the way things were going. Luckily, by the following Friday, when Gorazde was constant headline news, he’d taken the other half of his brain out of the account books and had reverted to self-congratulation on having a correspondent in situ, while every other paper was having to file from Split or Kiseljak or Pale or wherever else they’d got as far as before getting stuck.
It was several weeks in, once the fever had broken, and the air strikes we’d all been waiting for the UN and NATO to unleash on the Serbs attacking Gorazde hadn’t happened after all, just as we predicted. The Serbs had been slaked and the dead of Gorazde were being buried beneath a mound of reiterated UN resolutions, when I had a cup of coffee with Ed.
Ed had never got to Pale or Belgrade to do his Big Piece. He’d been trapped like us. It was all crap that stuff about hating the goat fuck of the rolling story. His eyes lit up, and he followed us arou
nd like a child, asking endless questions about the people we were asking questions of. He was like a mythical creature whose arms ended in a notebook and pen instead of normal hands. To begin with, he didn’t have a paper to write for, like the lowliest freelance, since his magazine’s deadlines worked three months in advance. Not for him the pathetic run of reverse charge calls I’d had to go through until a year ago. He rang his agent from the BBC sat phone (chalking it all up to his mag, of course); his agent rang the editor of the New York Times. In under twenty-four hours, Ed had his string. I don’t blame him: it would have been no fun being there without something to do. The New York Times regular correspondent was livid, but he was trapped outside Sarajevo, so I guess it was fair game. Even if Ed had not been Ed but the least famous journalist in the world, he was still in the place where the story was – or at least he was as close as it was possible to get. The regular guy told me later that the foreign editor had been livid too. I’m not surprised. It’s no fun having to edit someone much more famous and successful than yourself.
Ed had his uses, anyway. Hal loved him, and so did his friend Charlie, who’d suddenly appeared, who was a bit older than Hal, and Hal called him Boss. They were, inevitably, suspicious at first, possibly because he was American, possibly because they were suspicious kind of people, but it turned out that Charlie owned several of Ed’s books. Ed lured them in with scraps of Africa, Vietnam, Salvador and Afghanistan. He didn’t seem to hate Africa at all when he talked about it with them. He got Charlie to admit how those Afghan hats could be uncomfortably warm, which was interesting, since, back in 1994, the British Army had not been officially deployed in Afghanistan for about 100 years; he even got Hal on to Colombia. He also had an even more lavish expense account than Phil, so the Jez dinners became a regular event – at least, until everything suddenly got very serious, and half of Hal’s friends disappeared, and then reappeared, a few weeks later, in Gorazde, with one of them dead.
I bumped into Ed that day on Marshal Tito Street. I was wandering along, looking up the hills, thinking, maybe I could live here; maybe it would be nice. I could live with you and Edin, and then, when I had to travel for work, you wouldn’t feel so alone. You’d get your phones fixed up soon. Between the Herald and CTV, we must have the clout, when there was Ed, peering around, nostrils twitching in the air.
“Molly! And how are you?” The nostrils flared.
I smiled. I’d got fond of Ed. In the last month, he’d become one of us. “Where’ve you been?”
I said I’d been with Divjak.
“What did he say? Would you like a coffee? Shall we get one here?”
So I said, fine, because it was a lovely spring afternoon.
“Let’s go to Café Life,” he said. “It’s young and hip,” he shook his grey locks. “Aida took me there last week.”
It was not so far from your street, on the corner of the big road up to the Residency which had been so dangerous until a few weeks ago.
We sat on tinny rickety chairs, ordered two cups of bitter coffee, and stared around and out through the shiny new glass. Around us were the usual crowd: a pair of sad-eyed boys in uniform, who looked vaguely familiar, but then I’d lived here a year, and everyone in Sarajevo looked vaguely familiar now. Two Sarajevo ladies, bags gouged beneath their eyes, gilded clasps on their handbags, and those frosted glasses Edna Everage used to like, faces set in resignation, but with lipstick and their hair in some semblance of a do, one still sporting an engagement ring. A couple of tables of skinny, snake-hipped girls, everyone nursing tiny cups of coffee. Despite the beat of the generator, the pulse of the war, it was gloomy, they weren’t wasting electricity on lights and the sunlight fought its way in through the plastic on the windows. As we sat, in our coats, smelling the damp, and the chicory in the coffee, and the faint whiff of pee, Ed tried to warn me. But I wouldn’t let him.
He started off with: “So, have you decided what you are going to do about your job?”
So I explained I hadn’t had to. They hadn’t mentioned it again.
“They will,” he said. “They will.”
But maybe, I said, and I knew the answer even as I said it, maybe they’ll think after this they ought to keep me here.
“Nope,” said Ed. “This is going quiet for a while. You know what the locals call it?”
I did. I’d told him a month ago, but I let him go on. “Half-time. It’s time for a break. What else can the Serbs do now? They know they nearly went too far…They were that close,” he made the classic thumb and finger gesture, “to having the shit bombed out of them. I had coffee with” (and then he said the name of the American negotiator who the rest of us just saw at press conferences when he flipped in on his plane. I’d forgotten, over the last month of Ed the stringer, quite how distinguished Ed was). “Mladic knows how close it was. He knows he’s got to give it a rest. Your general’s got them over a barrel…And they,” he added happily, “have him over a barrel too. It’s a very uncomfortable situation for both of them. Being over a barrel is not nice. Believe me, I’ve been over several, and it takes quite a while to escape from being over a barrel.”
He went on: “You, my dear, are going to have to make up your mind.”
“They may not want to keep me in London.”
“Well, they may not,” said Ed. “But if they have any sense they will. But you’ve got to decide what you want. Strike while the iron’s hot. It’s up to you, my dear.”
“But I don’t want to decide.”
“How much have you actually seen of Amir, the last few weeks?”
And I said, oh, and explained about CTV and the crew…
“So not much?”
“Well, obviously, we saw each other in the evenings…” I started to say, but actually, when I thought about it, we hadn’t seen each other so much. I’d spent a lot of time with Phil and Ed, pouring booze into assorted spooks, Hal and the like, in Jez. You finished work too late to come back to the hotel. And now they were shooting again on Sniper Alley, it was really too dangerous to commute to and fro…and it’s not like we could ring each other on our mobiles then. When I thought about it, apart from a quick catch-up at the briefing, I hadn’t seen you properly for days.
“Well if you’ll forgive an old man for saying this, you should go back to London. Forget Amir. And take the job.”
It’s not as easy as that, I said. I told him I was in love with you…
“In love,” he said. “My dear girl, when you get to my age, you’ll know that being in love is wonderful but it does go away. I’ve been in love with every story I ever did. But love doesn’t last. Jobs don’t last either, mind. But at least they should, if you do them properly, pave the way for other jobs. Love can have the opposite effect. I think you should take this job.”
I told him then I’d almost decided to stay. He asked me if I’d spoken to you.
“No, I haven’t had time.”
“I’d talk to Amir first.”
But I never doubted what you would say. It was only six weeks ago that you had proposed to me. “I will, but I wanted to know what I thought before I did.”
“Well maybe you should find out what he thinks too.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t mean it nastily, my dear, but it’s a big decision. It will, and I should warn you, screw your career in London. They will think that you’ve gone native, or whatever. Now that’s fine, if you want to spend your life here…”
“My life…?” the horror must have shown in my voice.
“Well, yes…”
“But I don’t…”
“Then don’t do it.”
“But last time you told me it was a valid thing to do.”
“So I did,” he said. For a moment he seemed nonplussed, but then suddenly he got a second wind. “But, that was before all this Gorazde stuff happened,” he rattled the words out, almost with relief. “It’s going quiet now for ages…” He didn’t finish his sentence but stared out across the café.<
br />
“Do you see those girls,” he said. I turned round; two pretty girls, sunglasses, ski-jackets, long hair, lipstick on their bee-stung lips, were nursing tiny cups of coffee two tables away. They looked familiar, like the two soldiers had done. “I met them with Aida.”
I laughed. “I thought you didn’t work with female interpreters.”
“I couldn’t find anyone else,” and then he made a funny little face and said: “…and anyway, I was doing news again…” His eyes lit up, staring at some point in the middle distance that was presumably a hotel room in Saigon around 1968. “And I’m an old man now…” He switched his gaze to me and grinned: “Aida took me dancing.”
“Dancing! In Sarajevo!” I had a vision of ancient Ed scooping Aida up into a foxtrot, but actually he must have been only in his thirties when the Stones became big. “Some place that had just reopened. It was great. Full of guys straight from the front completely stoned.” He smiled: “It reminded me of Vietnam in a way…”
I was suddenly anxious that you’d never taken me dancing. You were always saying you wanted to be normal. Well, that’s a normal thing to do. And it’s a good story… nightclubs in Sarajevo, and then I thought, perhaps it was because I’d hated those parties so much last year. But it was different now… I knew people… I could understand what they said… at least, I supposed I could. I could understand all the refugees and politicians after all. Maybe you’d been working too hard. Maybe you never went… Maybe I never really gave you a chance this last month. I was too busy trying to extract secrets from my new friends. Then I heard Ed say: “Your Amir was there.”
The Girl in the Film Page 24