I hitched a lift from the airport with an Italian aid worker who nearly killed me on the way – I wasn’t sure whether he drove like that because he was Italian, or whether two and a half years of Sarajevo had given him an abnormally high risk threshold. Or maybe my months in London had made me normal again.
He dropped me off at the Holiday Inn’s front door: yes, the front door, looking out onto Sniper Alley, with the fountain chipped by sniper fire, and the fantastic view of the hills. The doors slid open and a uniformed page came out to get my bags. I felt sick as I walked through the sliding glass; the place was still surrounded by guns. It all seemed rather mad, as though the town was completely in denial. Like someone standing in no-man’s-land with their hands over their ears going ‘LA! LA! LA! Can’t hear you!’ I later found out the general called it ‘hearts and minds’. At least the fountain still didn’t work.
The hotel might have its front door working, but inside it had the abandoned air of a resort out of season. There were no groups of hollow-eyed drivers hanging round the bar, touting their work for anyone who’d pay them 150DM a day to risk their cars and their lives. There were no fleece-clad packs of hacks loitering by the desk, or endlessly bashing out the story over tiny cups of coffee on the white plastic mushrooms. I knew that a lot of journalists were staying elsewhere these days, either in flats in town, or in a little pension that had opened up the hill, now that the phone lines were connected again; not that there were many hacks around anyway then. The Holiday Inn had doubled its room rate to celebrate peace. If I stayed long, I might move out to the pension myself – but to begin with, I thought it would be easier to orientate myself from here. Despite what Phil had said about leaving, the BBC still had its office here. I did hope there would be somebody nice in room 309 but there had been nothing on the news so I didn’t know who. In the autumn there had been someone I didn’t know. He kept asking me what I wanted when I walked in; Valida had been away. I could hardly say, “I want to feel at home!”
I started lugging my stuff over to the stairs, but the receptionist – who looked unthrilled to have me back – said indignantly: “We have a lift.” I still didn’t trust lifts in war zones. I put the luggage in and walked up the stairs myself.
My room was an orange one, on the ammunition factory side. Its windows were still glazed only with UNHCR plastic but the heating worked and there was hot water in the taps. I walked along the gallery towards the BBC.
The door was ajar, so I knocked softly but there was no reply.
I pushed it open. No Valida to be seen. Peeping over the arm of the sofa was the top of a head, lolling to one side; a pair of jeans-covered legs, ending in Timberland boots, propped up on the far end. On the floor, next to a trailing arm, a book, bent open at the spine: The Name of the Rose. Whoever was reading it was a third of the way through.
There was far too much hair for Tim, and it was the wrong colour, and the legs were too thin. It really didn’t look like the grumpy man from the autumn. So I said: “Phil?”
The head snapped up, and I said: “Phil?” again, just as he said:
“Molly!”
I said: “Hi honey, I’m home.”
Radovan Karadzic, President of Republika Srpska, is fishing and he catches a golden fish. The fish says, I’m a magic fish, and if you set me free, I will grant you a wish. So Radovan explains – the Contact Group is trying to work out peace in Bosnia; everyone is tired of the war, but no-one seems to be able to come up with a map that all three sides can agree on.
“Bring me the map,” says the fish. So Karadzic brings the map down to the river. The fish takes a good long look at it, but in the end, he says, “I’m sorry, I know I am a magic fish, but really, this is beyond me. Haven’t you got anything easier?” Karadzic sighs, then he says, “I have a daughter, Sonja.
I’d like you to make her beautiful.”
“That’s easy,” said the fish. “We do that the whole time.”
So Karadzic goes up to the house, and brings Sonja down to the river. The fish takes one look at her and says, “Hang on, can I have that map back?”
XVI
I had steeled myself to see you at the briefing. All the way down Sniper Alley I had that stone in my stomach that you get when you think you’re going to see someone you love. Phil said, “Are you all right? You’re very quiet,” but I just said, “Oh, everything’s changed so much,” without looking at him; I didn’t want to stop the cinema running in my head. The women going shopping, the students hanging out, the trams and the cars slipped by, but I was already there, in the room in the PTT, with the sandbags on the windows, and the tanks parked outside, and the big blue UN flag behind the desk, and the maps on the wall covered in plastic sheets, so the UN could wipe out the frontlines they’d drawn in marker pen, and put them back in again, whenever a new village fell; seeing you standing on the other side of those schoolroom chairs.
My stomach was slipping as I walked into the room; it was a small crowd, maybe thirty or so, and some of them were strangers to me. I didn’t know what I’d say to you, so I thought I’d wait for you to come up to me. But you didn’t. So then I started looking round for you. But I couldn’t see you anywhere. Edin was there, he nodded hello, and a couple of other people said, long time no see. Robert was there, talking to someone who looked like an SAS type – because he didn’t have any badges on, and anyway, he was exactly the same shape as Hal. I rushed over and kissed Robert: “Robert! Phil reminded me… I’d completely forgotten!” Because of course he was the new UN press spokesman. He laughed and looked a little sheepish and said: “Do you know Andy?” Or maybe he said Chris. Chris shook my hand in a slightly paranoid way.
I was teasing Robert that he’d gone over to the enemy, when Ingrid barged in and said, “More to the point, what are you doing here? I thought you’d given up on the place,” and then started talking to Chris and Robert about something they’d all done together the week before.
I didn’t mention you then. I was too embarrassed, but the next day, when you weren’t there again, I said to Edin: “Do you know how Amir is?”
He looked a little uncomfortable, as he replied, “He’s fine I think. He doesn’t work with me anymore.”
“What does he do?” I had a vision of you, poor, back in the flat with your mother.
But Edin said, “He’s working for one humanitarian aid agency.”
“Oh…” So not poor then, and not at the briefing. “Which one?” I asked.
“I don’t know, they all sound the same.” “Oh… how’s the baby…?” I asked.
Edin shrugged. “The baby’s not born yet.”
“I should have told you he’d moved jobs,” said Phil afterwards. “I didn’t think.”
But then people never do think about other people’s loves. They listen for half an hour or an hour or so; then they like updates, for the soap opera, but when it’s just a case of being stuck in front of the same miserable test card for months on end, they just can’t get it. They all say things like, “Plenty more fish in the sea”, and “You must be over it now”. As though they were Mr Spock, saying “But that’s illogical, Captain.” When of course, love is illogical, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the point. Why is it that one person, just a look in their eye or the sound of their voice, can make your knees tremble and your heart leap, and the blood quicken in your groin, and the very sound of their name is enough to make you swallow, and you can spend hours staring out of a window smiling at castles in the air, and another, equally handsome or funny, is about as erotic as a Victorian chest of drawers.
I used to make up conversations with you in my head: when you asked me to marry you, I said yes. Back as far as the winter, back before the day that I wasn’t there. Sometimes I even re-wrote that day – had myself in town, with you, near the marketplace, so when you needed someone to be with to prove you were alive, it was me, not Aida. It seemed so random that that particular shell had fallen when I was away, when I had been here for so many, with
you. But then I suppose it was so random that I met you in the first place. But you always said, it wasn’t random, it was fate. Inshallah.
I didn’t see you until the night before I was due to leave. At that party, in one of the rooms the ground fl oor of the Holiday Inn. It was a horrible room to have a party in, but at least it meant I could leave whenever I liked, even though I knew I’d probably stay to be tipped out with the ashtrays at the end. I always did.
The downside is I didn’t get my Sarajevo night drive in an armoured car, minarets in the moonlight, crags against the stars, the broken silhouettes of roof beams against the sky. But then, the stars weren’t as good then anyway, not now there was electricity all over town.
I was smoking, propped up against the table, drinking my wine out of its plastic cup; knackered after all the fragile hopes of the returnees I’d been interviewing for the last week; scanning the room through the thick haze of smoke.
Everyone was there. The whole international world. If I don’t see you at something like this, maybe I’ll never see you again, I thought. I haven’t seen you yet. Roger still wants me to leave tomorrow. This will be my third trip back without seeing you. Will you bring Aida? Or is she too pregnant to move?
I didn’t know exactly whose party it was – another spoonful of alphabet soup. I for international and R for relief and then some other initials that stood for no-one quite knew what, and were probably there just to differentiate them from other IR agencies. There were about 200 of us; the cream of the world of crisis relief. French doctors from MSF chatting up English nurses from the ICRC; Danish paediatricians from the WHO deep in conversation with Australians for whom the UNHCR was better than a two-year travel visa. Men in the UN with MAs from Harvard in international law and uncles who are kings of countries you’ve nearly never heard of were talking realpolitik with Swedish agronomists with the WFP. A few ECMMs shining through the semi-darkness in their white shirts and trousers, wide-eyed like rabbits at this amount of semi-civilisation, were talking about what they were going to do with their pay. In a corner, the French general’s bodyguards, those two Foreign Legionnaires I’d met in Jez, were being chatted up by Ingrid; she was welcome to them.
“Do you think she’s ordering supplies?” I asked Andy or Chris.
He laughed and checked the bottle in his hand. “Well, they didn’t supply tonight. This one’s Italian.”
There were firemen, real ones, not paper ones like me; Brits, who had been here throughout the war to help out the Sarajevo fire service. There were hydroelectric engineers who specialised in rebuilding shelled pumping stations, and electrical engineers and telecommunication engineers who were trying to get Sarajevo linked up to the world again. In one corner a Canadian UNMO was being grilled by the man from Reuters, and in another, Phil was trying to get anything other than a sneer out of the latest military press spokesman, a man called Chandler, who hinted at a past more deadly than press information and seemed to regard the Sarajevo press corps as his last combat assignment. He specialised in pooh-poohing any possible deterioration in the wobbly peace the UN had propped up over this war; Phil said he told the most splendid lies.
A Ghanaian UNMO (you see, I did know all their fatigues) was nuzzling the neck of what could only be his interpreter, and her back arched in response, as they shuffled round the dance floor amongst the other couples to Brothers in Arms. Then the music changed to something less smoochy but still appropriate – I think it was ‘Don’t you forget about me’ – and suddenly Robert was dancing, surprisingly well, with Valida. I hadn’t seen her yet. Phil told me she’d gone to work for the UN. I should have known I’d have seen her tonight.
Andy or Chris and I had been having an easy conversation, the kind that was automatic for me, a sort of flirty slightly confrontational conversation, designed to make him like me and trust me and want to impress. It set me off down some neat little professional railway lines; and it stopped me scouring the room for you. Besides, Chris or Andy was a nice person to have a flirty confrontational conversation with, being good-looking, slightly paranoid, very pleased with himself and obviously starved of female company.
He asked me to dance, and I said no, and then he asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I said, “Not any more…” He’d just said something like: “So tell me, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a war like this?” when I felt you. I think you touched me, but I knew it was you even before I turned. I felt you. I felt you from a foot away.
You said: “Molly…” And my heart and my knees and the pit of my stomach did all those things that Mr Spock would think so illogical.
You stood at my shoulder, too close, as you always had. You looked nervous: “Molly… Hello, how are you?”
“Fine. How are you?”
“Fine. I’m fine. You look amazing.” Our mouths were saying any old rubbish to justify our eyes staring. The way you do when you can’t say what you want to say without driving off the cliff.
“So do you.” You looked different to the Amir I had been carrying around in my head. Less fragile. You looked well; normal. A normal person in a normal town. The Sarajevo pallor had gone from your skin. The bags were still seared beneath your deep dark eyes, but they were less livid, like a wound that had healed. I stared up at you and neither of us spoke.
Then I said: “I guess it’s not being in Sarajevo.” At the same time as you said: “So how long are you here for?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. At the same time as you said: “Me too…I’ve just been out.”
“Out! Oh Amir…” I felt the tears starting to rise. “Where to?”
“I went to Italy. For a holiday.”
“Oh Amir…” It was a physical effort not to take your hand. “A holiday…”
“First time,” you said. “First time in two and a half years.” Your eyes were filling with tears as well. “Look…” you pulled your wallet out of your pocket. “I have a blue card now. I can go on the planes.”
I read aloud in English: Amir Hadzibegovic. Assistant Project Manager IFCR. “This is our party,” you said, and made a wry, welcoming face.
“I could never have got you one of those,” I said.
“I know.”
“If I could have done, I would have done.” You said nothing.
“It’s better than mine. You’ll be able to bump me off flights.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. We looked at each other, both of us nearly crying, and neither of us spoke for far too long.
I swallowed: “How’s Aida?” I looked round the room.
He pulled back. “She’s fine,” he said.
“And the baby?”
“The baby’s due any day.”
“I thought she would have had it by now,” I said. “I brought it a present.” It was a fluffy sheep. “I’ll leave it with Valida…oh no.
Well… Phil…” Another silence. “How long are you here for this time?” “Tomorrow,” I said again.
“Tomorrow! But… I… we have to…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He just stared at me. I didn’t speak either; just stared back, the pair of us, slipping backwards like Doctor Who through the kaleidoscope of this fucking awful party. Then he put out his hand and took hold of mine. “Molly…”
It was just all too much. I pulled back, turned and bumped straight into Chris or Andy or whatever he was called.
“Oh!”
“You OK?”
“I’ve changed my mind. I would like to dance now after all.” Amir grabbed at my hand again: “No,” I said.
“I have to talk to you…There’s something I have to say… Please… It’s been a terrible mistake… Are you staying here?… I’ll ring you tomorrow.”
“There is no tomorrow,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
“No!”
I turned to Chris or Andy and said: “Let’s go.” I put a hand out somewhere in the direction of Chris, who managed to put himself between Amir and me, and shepherd me away. He was very nice, didn’t mention an
ything; I was shaking and feeling slightly sick. I hadn’t even noticed the music, but it was slow, which made it all rather odd, as I was dancing with all the erotic languor of a barbed wire fence. And I couldn’t stop the fact that I was starting to cry. I trod on his foot and said, sorry Chris, and he said, actually I’m called Andy. I said, I’m sorry. Let’s stop. Can we stop? And he took me to the other side of the room, got me another drink. I said something like, sorry about that, and wiped my eyes with my hand. Here, have this he said, and lent me a handkerchief. Then he said, was that the boyfriend? And I said yes, the ex-boyfriend. And he said, well, it’s none of my business, but it sounds pretty finally ex to me, if he’s having a baby with someone else. I thought, of course, it’s final, why the fuck do you think I’m feeling like this. But what I said was: “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you could understand.”
“A bit.”
“Oh.” Then I said, with a kind of reflex suspicion: “I didn’t think they bothered to teach you lot. Most British army officers who speak the language come from a long line of pig farmers from
Knin.”
“Not me. I’m from the Midlands. I just did a course.”
“It must be a very broad course if it covered pregnancy.”
He looked at me deadpan and said: “They like to prepare us for every eventuality.” I did laugh then, even if it was a rather damp laugh.
I kept seeing you, on the other side of the room. I saw you talking to the Foreign Legionnaires, I saw you talking to Robert, I saw you talking to Phil. And while you were talking, every now and then, I’d see you looking at me.
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