The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  “I suppose it must have been one of the evenings I was working.

  We’re not joined at the hip, you know, Amir and me.” Ed looked at me, I think rather kindly.

  “I really love him, you know. I can’t imagine not being with him. This is why all these decisions about London are so awful for me. And I feel so guilty,” I said, “when I look around now and everyone’s happy and drinking coffee and enjoying things being better and I don’t want them to be better. I want them to stay the same so

  I can stay here with him.”

  “Things never stay the same.” Ed put his arm round me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I could feel the tears oozing out. “I’m just so tired.”

  “You need a break.”

  “No!” I said. “That’s what the paper says… Why can’t Amir come on my break with me. It’s so unfair. Why can’t he?”

  Ed didn’t say anything; he just gave my shoulders a squeeze.

  “I don’t envy you. This is a hard decision and it’s easy for me to say because I’m much older than you and I can see what I think is right. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you and Amir are properly in love.”

  “We are! We are!”

  “In that case, maybe you should stay here with him. But if you do that you must recognise that it could be for ever…”

  “No!”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s not what you think. It’s not like that! I just don’t trust this place. I don’t trust all this not to happen again.”

  “So take him out,” I heard Ed say. “Take him out to London.”

  I heard myself say “No!” again: and that No was a much harder one to defend. So I told him, I’d have to marry you to get you out. And Ed said, so if you love him, marry him. And I said, I did love you. But I said I loved you now.

  “Well is that love? A lot of people would say it wasn’t. I don’t know. I’ve loved a lot of people now.”

  I tried to explain – I wasn’t sure I could be with you forever. But I didn’t see how I could find that out here. Then Ed said, “You could always get divorced. There are worse things to do. I should

  know…”

  “You can’t go into marriage thinking like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “But…” it was like tripping on a step. Grown-ups weren’t supposed to say that. “Marriage isn’t supposed to be like that,” I said.

  “I see…” Ed drank some of his coffee.

  “Well it isn’t,” I said, with less certainty now.

  “If it’s God you’re worried about, you couldn’t marry him in a church anyway. He’s Muslim.”

  “It’s not just God,” I said; it was everything. I mean, you’re always taught, aren’t you, as a girl, never to marry someone if you think it might not work out. Girls think of marriage. We’re brought up to think of marriage. Getting married for me is a solemn thing; vowing eternal love to someone I knew I wanted to be with for ever, or at least I could honestly say at the time, I thought I wanted to be with for ever. Vowing, in a long white dress, before my God, who probably did exist, and several hundred people, who then gorged themselves on smoked salmon and champagne as my father, with a reluctant cheque, finally signed away his largely absentee responsibility. The dress and the God, the smoked salmon and the oaths, until now they had been indivisible to me. I wasn’t sure I could sacrifice it all and wed myself to an alien world, thinking in advance maybe it could all go wrong. It wasn’t that I minded you being Muslim, but that meant I wouldn’t be able to marry you in a church, and somehow, the idea of a civil wedding seemed almost an admission that one thought it might not be permanent, so in that case, why marry at all? The registry office, the hurried pavement farewells. Why do it? Except to get you out of Sarajevo, but I didn’t want to leave. And always, the tiny, rotting worm of suspicion, that almost I didn’t want to name. What did you really want from me? God knows, you knew about the cheap chocolate now.

  “And anyway,” I said, “what would he do in London?” Sit round the kitchen table in Shepherd’s Bush, smoking, with all the other deserters, retiling the odd bathroom, cash in hand.

  “He’d find something in the end. He’s clever.”

  “What would we live on?”

  Ed looked at me very carefully and said: “You.”

  “We couldn’t live on me,” I said. “I can hardly live on me. And anyway, I don’t live in London. At least, hardly any of the time…”

  It was when Ed was off for a pee that I heard the girls. I didn’t mean to, but the café had gone quiet and so I couldn’t help hearing Aida’s name.

  “Poor Aida,” they were speaking Serbo-Croat of course. “She’s having a nightmare time.” And a mean part of me thought good; I’d never really forgiven her for not telling me where you were the day after the Sarajevo market massacre.

  “She should just dump him, he’s a shit.”

  “She says he’s not. She says he’s going to leave her just as soon as things calm down.” I wasn’t really listening. My mind went round and round: did Henri think like this before he left Valida for Rwanda? Did Phil go through this before he married Lena? Is he happy now? Is she happy in the grey of Shepherd’s Bush, far from the Chouf and the glinting azure of the Levant?

  “He won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s been, what, three months now, and he hasn’t left her. Why should he now?”

  “Aida says he’s fed up because she treats him like shit.”

  “I’m sure he says all that to Aida.”

  “She says he’s hardly seen her at all for the last few weeks.”

  “Well that may be but I’ve seen them at the briefing and believe me, they’re all over each other like a rash,” and on the word briefing, my attention swung in. “And Aida’s there too. She just watches and does nothing.”

  “What’s he playing at? Is it the money?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I guess he gets a lot out of her. Although what she thinks she’s paying him for, God alone knows. But it could just be the kick of having two women at once. You know, your nice Bosnian girl and the other a bit more exotic.” I picked up my coffee and thought, no… No, I mean, lots of people go to the briefing.

  “Why does she put up with it? Aida is no fool.”

  “I think he just sprays the charm and fixes her with his lovely dark eyes. You know him…”

  “I think she’s really in love with him.”

  “I don’t doubt Aida is really in love with him. She’s had a crush on him for years. Don’t you remember the way she used to follow him around at school? I was in the TV station with her when she thought he’d been in the marketplace. She nearly flipped. What I doubt is that he is really in love with her.” And I had another sip of the coffee, as I made myself think… and lots of people were nearly in the marketplace.

  Then I heard: “But do you think he’s really in love with that journalist?” and I thought, no it can’t be. This can’t be real. I felt sick, and everything, my arm with the cup, the room, the people, the sun, the moon, the earth, the stars, the waitress wending her way through the crowd, seemed to go on hold and the coffee in my cup suddenly seemed disgusting, and my arm flopped it down with a crash onto the saucer as though the muscles in my shoulder had lost the will to live.

  I hadn’t even noticed Ed come back to the table.

  “You feeling better now?” he said.

  But I didn’t answer Ed because I didn’t know what to say. In the background I heard the other girl snort and say: “Knowing him, I would say he’s just in love with himself.”

  I wished Phil was here. But he wasn’t. Tim had come rushing in the moment the Serbs re-opened the exit routes two weeks ago. I wished Muffy was here, but she was a continent away in another war. Valida was Aida’s sister so I could hardly have spoken to her. The hotel was packed with hacks, although they were just beginning to leave, but I didn’t really know any of them well enough for this. So that left no-one
or Ed. And I couldn’t face talking to Ed about his. There really wasn’t anyone I could talk to here at all.

  I left Ed at the hotel and carried on down the street. I told him I was going to see a friend. He wanted to come too: “What kind of friend? What do they do?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with the war.” His interest visibly waned. “It’s just… a girl, who had problems with her boyfriend.” Ed shrugged and vanished through the door. “Maybe see you for dinner,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get those boys of yours to come out.”

  I walked to you. I suppose I could have been shot. They were shooting people every now and again these days. But I didn’t really seem to care.

  Your lift wasn’t working, but I wouldn’t have taken it anyway. I walked up the stairs, picking out each chipped concrete lip with my torch. I was thinking too hard to even count them this time.

  I could see daylight shining through the tiny shrapnel hole half -way up your door. I rang the bell, but nothing happened. The power was out. I banged on the door. And banged on it again. And for a moment I hoped you wouldn’t be there. But you were. And so was she.

  You stood in the doorway with your back to what little light was filtering through the planks on the windows facing the frontline. I could hardly see your face, but you didn’t look pleased. I looked down; there were two pairs of shoes, on the parquet, just before the horrible orange tufty rug by the door: the Timberlands I had bought you, when you’d given me your size, and a slightly battered-looking pair of black high heels.

  You said my name. “How did you get here?” And when I didn’t speak, you said: “Are you OK?”

  I looked past you into the big sitting room. By a little table with ashtrays and coffee cups, Aida sat, feet tucked up on the huge leather sofa, her black hair fizzing into an aureole in the light through the cracks in the planks. She looked at me probably the same way I was looking at her. Then something flickered over her face, which, had I seen it on anyone else, someone I was interviewing perhaps, would have overwhelmed me with pity. She stood up.

  “I was just going. Molly, I’d better go now. Amir and I had some stuff we had to finish, but we can do it another time.”

  I watched as she tried to find, then close her bag. I hated her, I suppose, but I felt so sorry for her, as she leant over the sofa, fiddling with the clasp, her neat bottom towards me, in its pretty little skirt, and there I was in my filthy old jeans. But I couldn’t stop this disgusting corroding feeling in my stomach that had nothing to do with any kind of civilised human behaviour and made me want to run across the room and smash her face into something until her lipstick smeared red all over her foundation.

  “You don’t have to go. I know all about it.”

  She stood up. I saw relief – maybe even hope – cross her face.

  We both turned to you. You said: “What do you mean?”

  I saw her face tighten, then I couldn’t bear to look because I suppose she must have been a mirror of me. I turned back to you.

  “I know you’ve been fucking her.” You started to speak, and I thought, please don’t deny it. Please don’t lie to me. Please don’t do that, let me keep something of this. Please. And then, just in case you did, because I knew she wouldn’t, I said to her: “It’s true,

  Aida, isn’t it?”

  She said nothing, but just looked at you.

  “Amir?” I said.

  “Where did you hear this?”

  “Does it matter? It’s true. It’s so obviously true.” I looked into your eyes. You stared back with, fear, I think it was fear. I think you were afraid. You said, Molly, again. I could hear Aida moving in the background, but I just stared at you.

  “Molly…” you put your hand on my shoulder, and you looked deep inside me. I swallowed. Then I saw Aida move behind your shoulder and I remembered the two girls in the café snorting about your eyes. I pulled away, looked somewhere else, saw her shoes neatly side by side, by my feet. Poor bitch. She couldn’t even leave. I was in the doorway.

  “Fuck you! You bloody bastard! I would have stayed here with you, you know that? I’d decided to stay.”

  “Molly, please.”

  “No!” I wanted to throw something at you. Something you’d given me. But there wasn’t anything. I’d never let you give me anything. You’d had too little in the war to give anything away. Except that fur hat, and I wasn’t wearing it, now spring had come.

  “Goodbye,” I said. “And Aida, good luck.” I ran down the stairs, as fast as I could in the pitch dark, my torchlight bobbing crazily in front. I heard you clattering after me, but I didn’t stop. You caught me up. You grabbed my arm. I could smell you on top of all the other Sarajevo smells of damp and rubbish and urine and rat shit… I swayed. For a moment I thought you’d push me down stairs but you pulled me back.

  You said, please. Then you said it again. Please don’t – don’t go. Please stay with me.

  “Let me go,” I said. “Let me go.” It was too dark on the stairs to see your face.

  “Please don’t. Don’t go. Please stay with me…”

  But I pushed you away. Perhaps I hoped you’d follow me after all, come to the hotel, but you didn’t that night, and the next day, I flew away, so you couldn’t have followed me if you’d wanted to.

  Mujo was missing. Some corpses came in, in a body exchange, from a massacre done by Arkan’s Tigers. Fata was asked to come down to the mortuary to identify Mujo, but when she got there, none of the bodies had a head. The mortuary director asked, how will you know your husband?

  “By his dick,” she said. So she started to look. After she lifted the tenth sheet, she said, “Oh, doctor, this one’s not from Sarajevo.”

  XV

  I didn’t see you again for over six months. You tried to contact me at first. Tim told me you’d come round to the office, the next day; you were waiting when he came back from taking me to the airport. You tried to ring me, on the BBC sat phone, but it was pointless and expensive because I was half a continent away and I didn’t want to talk to you anyway. In the end, Tim said, he’d had to stop you because no-one would pay the bill. The Herald certainly wouldn’t. So then you started to write.

  The first letter you sent out with Ed. You said you loved me. You didn’t even know my address in London. Ed had to post it to me via the Herald. You said you wanted me back. You said you were sorry. You said Aida was a mistake. You said you’d slept with her after the market massacre – which I’d guessed anyway by then… I hadn’t been there… But it was just once, you said, until I went away. And you’d been so sad, so fed up, you hadn’t meant to, but you’d been working with her… and the last month… You’d been trying to end it, you said, the day I found out. Please, please, you said, give me another chance.

  But I wasn’t there to give you another chance. I was in London, in my shiny new job, which was exactly what I’d wanted two years ago: London-based fireman, writing across the paper. I got the pension plan and the health insurance, maternity leave, but I didn’t think much of maternity leave since, frankly, the thought of touching anyone else after you just made me feel sick.

  I did all the things I was supposed to do. Saw my old friends, but none of them understood about you; their lives seemed so alien, it was like watching them on TV.

  I didn’t write back. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I hid Henri’s photograph but that didn’t help. You went everywhere in my head. Whenever Sarajevo was on TV, or in the papers (and although it was quiet, it was still there a lot), I could see you. I read the wires obsessively at work. I missed you so much it actually hurt. You forget, when you’re not in love, that it actually hurts. I found myself praying some disaster would happen to Sarajevo so they’d have to send me back. I could give you another chance. Maybe we should get married. I had a flat. I’d just bought one – I’d saved enough for the deposit in those years in Bosnia. It was lovely not to live in a hotel, except for the washing-up. You could always retile my bathroom if the worst came to the
worst. Every time I thought about doing up the bathroom, I started to cry. Sometimes I even cried reading the wires, but that was at work, so it wasn’t wise.

  Then your second letter came. Aida was pregnant. You were getting married. I howled like a dog but there was nothing I could do. It was all too late, too far away.

  I told Phil. He said all those things that people have to say like: “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. It would never have worked anyway.” He also said, these things, they are very difficult to take back home. That at least I felt that he meant. We’d gone out for a drink, it seemed better like that. At least it avoided pissing Lena off. Phil told me he wasn’t going to go back to Sarajevo for a while.

  I went back to Bosnia a couple of times, that summer, but only for a few days here and there and I didn’t see you. Roger hardly let me go to Sarajevo at all: he was so paranoid that I would blow his budget by getting stuck.

  There were stories on the home desk I had to write. The trouble was I didn’t know anything about home. I think the Herald found me very disappointing. I didn’t behave like a proper young person – I didn’t mind about Blur and Oasis. That’s what newspapers employ young people for: they’ve got fat, middle-aged men with ex-wives to feed to keep abreast of international affairs. But then how many proper young people chose to go and live in a war? It’s hard to listen to music when there’s no electricity. And we had songs, like teenagers in love, when you imagine the lyrics have some special meaning for you: Dire Straits – whose Brothers in Arms I later discovered had become a kind of Sarajevo anthem, although at the time, I thought it was only me. No other young people liked Dire Straits back then.

  It was November before I next went to Sarajevo; it was a magazine story – about people coming back. Roger made me promise I’d be in and out in a week. I flew in on a cold crisp day, watching the mountains gathering themselves up far below. There was a dusting of snow on the peaks, denser and denser the closer we got; the real snow hadn’t fallen yet, but it was due any day. As the plane rattled and lurched, I twisted my hands deeper into the webbing and the chain-smoking Russian who seemed to be in charge gave the Land Rovers a good kick to check the lashings were safe. The ridges of Mount Bjelasnica sparkled as we sank through the sky, curving over the town, and the sun shone down onto the roofless houses below.