Chris had gone off to get some more wine, when the lights cut out and the music stopped. A general “Ahh!” went up in the dark, and then a sort of studio audience laugh. I said, “Fuck. Fuck. My torch isn’t in my bag.” I knew where it was, too, in the drawer of the bedside table. I had been duped by all this peace. I wasn’t alone. We’d all gone soft. Around me, I could hear people scrabbling in their pockets, but so far, no light had dawned.
Suddenly I felt you again, like a wave of warmth washing over me: “Molly,” you said.
I said, because it was all too sad, please go away.
You said: “I have to say this to you. I may not get this chance again. Not ever. Please, let me say…”
I said: “There’s no point. You’re married. Your wife’s about to have a baby.” And in the silence, the points of light began to appear. Then you said in Serbo-Croat, very fast, “I love you. I want to be with you, I love you. It’s not too late.”
I said: “But, Aida, you’re having a baby.”
“Oh God,” you put your hand on my neck, your fingers under my chin. “I have tried. I tried to do the right thing. I did try. But it won’t work. I think she hates me. Is it right, if all of us are so unhappy? How can it be right…?” and then you kissed me again; and for a moment I resisted, then my back arched up against you, like the Ghanaian’s interpreter, and I felt myself slipping, back in time.
I think it was a relief to hear Phil’s voice: “Molly? Where are you?
Something’s happened…” I broke away.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t decide now.”
“What shall I do?”
“I don’t know…”
“Molly! Are you still there?” Andy’s torch was dancing towards me across the room.
“Are you staying here? Can I see you tomorrow?”
“I’m going home tomorrow…”
“I’ve got a blue card. I could leave too…”
“No!”
“Molly, can you hear me? Where are you? We’re going up to.”
“I’ll ring you tomorrow,” you said. “Don’t go till the afternoon… please…let me see you tomorrow…”
I said: “I don’t know… you’re married now…” and I pushed you away.
Mujo and Suljo are sitting in their trench, on the frontline that runs through the old playground. Suddenly, Mujo jumps out of the trench and sits on the swing. “What are you doing?” yells Suljo.
“I’m trying to freak out the Chetnik snipers.”
XVII
We passed the corpse the next day on the way to the briefing. Sniper Alley had gone quiet; back to the great grey emptiness of before. The trams, the drift of people plodding into town, had all vanished overnight.
We’d heard about the sniping from the UN that morning. Phil had already filed his piece.
“I guess the news has got round,” he said, about the emptiness. “Robert said it happened just down here.”
Phil was driving fast; not as fast as he used to drive, and he hadn’t reverted to driving on the wrong side of the road, but he still didn’t stop at the traffic light on the way out of the hotel. As we came up to the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity, we saw a UN APC parked in the slip road, both as a threat, I suppose, and to mask the snipers’ view. Then, just beyond it, so tidy it looked almost parked, we could see the bonnet of a car, slewed, rather neatly, up against a wall.
“Don’t slow down. I don’t want to get shot because you’ve slowed down to look.”
“Don’t worry,” said Phil. “We’ll be safe with this lot here.”
Whoever it was, he certainly had a good turn-out. I suppose because he was the first to die here for so long. A couple of Brits were clustered round the car; some more, ten yards away, were smoking against the side of a Land Rover.
“Apparently they found him, Robert said,” said Phil. I shot them a look but I didn’t recognise them. Maybe they were the Royal Engineers who had Sky Sport. Phil said he used to go and watch their telly.
On the other side of the bridge from the car were some Foreign Legionnaires, loitering by one of their tiny white tanks.
“This is their patch. Oh look. Isn’t that whatever his name is, the French general’s bodyguard?” said Phil. “Ingrid was chatting him up at the party last night. Do you think Nissent’s going to be at the briefing? Robert said they were all fucking furious. What’s that policeman doing?” They had tape measures out and were taking little notes.
“Making a point,” I said. “Amir says the Bosnian Police treat every sniping as a murder.”
“Really! I didn’t know that…Oh God, they’re taking him out.”
They were Swedish, I think, the guys with the armoured ambulance. One stood at his head, and another was buried deep inside the passenger door.
“What are they doing?” said Phil. “Christ… His legs are all floppy.”
“They must have been breaking the rigor in his knees.”
“Yuk.”
“Sorry.” Apart from the hinge at the knees, the body was stiff with an almost functional rigidity.
“Do you think rigor mortis is nature’s way of making corpses easy to carry?” I said into our silence.
“Oh god, Molly…” Phil laughed. “You’re sick.”
“Come on,” I said. “We’re going to be late.”
Poor man. The awful thing was I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about you. About what I should do. Ever since you told me Aida was pregnant, I had just schooled myself to think that there was no hope. And now I didn’t know. Maybe, if you were both so unhappy, maybe it wouldn’t be so wrong. Maybe I could stay – I couldn’t leave now anyway. The lights going out at the party last night, the man who’d been shot on Sniper Alley, they were all part of the same thing. The airport had shut. Half-time was over and the ball was back on the pitch. Roger was going to be furious.
I was surprised not to see you at the briefing; I thought you’d know you could get me here. Maybe you’d realised that all the stuff you said last night was just rubbish, that it couldn’t possibly work. But, oh my God, I hoped that it was true. At least I could concentrate on what Robert and Chandler were saying, although frankly we already had learnt most of it last night. Phil had bumped into me in the dark. “Come upstairs. It’s Bihac,” he said, referring to yet another of those Muslim enclaves surrounded by Serbs; this one was the tip of the arrowhead, pointing into Croatia. “The Bos are trying to break out. They’ve taken about five miles of land.
Robert’s coming back when he’s taken Valida home.”
He turned to Andy and said: “Come up for a drink if you like.” Andy said nothing, just gave off suspicious vibes, then I said:
“Bihac. God, I haven’t been there for ages.”
“You’ve been to Bihac?” both he and Phil said together.
“I thought everyone had been to Bihac,” I said.
“The Serbs aren’t even letting us through now,” said Andy.
It was good, because it made me stop thinking about you. We had one of those whisky and candlelight evenings with everyone jabbing fingers at the maps on the wall. The office sounded like a Turkish courtyard, since Phil was filling up both his baths. “I just don’t trust this place when the power’s out,” he said. I agreed: I’d stopped by my room to run mine on the way.
“This map’s really out of date,” said Andy, who was having a good snoop round.
“It’s been up since the war began,” said Phil. “Feel free to draw what you like.”
“Oh God,” said Robert. “I helped you stick the bloody thing up.
In 1992…”
“So what’s Bihac like?” said Andy.
“Oh, it’s Bosnia. It’s beautiful and sad. And weird, and cut off, and kind of medieval Shangri-La. Full of refugees, like all the Muslim enclaves. Most of the people fled there in the first summer of the war. All the soldiers are dressed in homemade camouflage…”
“What, vegetable dye?”
N
od: “They look like Robin Hood’s merry men…” I could see the mountains, the forests and the ravine, hear the tink tink tink of tiny hammers on metal, and the waters of the Una rushing below the road; feel, with a prickle of fear between my shoulder blades, the long winding gorge between the frontlines. “Are you thinking of going there?”
There was an embarrassed silence.
“Well, don’t stay in the Hotel Kladusa. It’s the worst hotel in Bosnia.”
“Oh.”
“And if you do go, you should always order trout.”
It was Robert who pointed frontlines and buildings out to him on the map; he’d been there before there ever was a war.
The briefing was thick with the smell of war. But this time, it wasn’t pee, it was adrenalin. The room was packed; any UN type who had the slightest excuse was there. Bosnian Army loses was normal. Bosnian Army taking territory, now that was news; and good news to boot, because pretty much everyone there was sympathetic to the Muslims by now – it stands to reason, if one side’s shelling you and the other one isn’t, which one would you prefer. Even Robert found it hard to hide his pleasure. When Chandler wiped the old frontlines off the map and reworked a finger in blue marker pen pointing the way for Bihac’s Refugee Vth Corps to go home, a murmur ran round the room which was nearly a cheer. Even though, as Andy said, we all knew they hadn’t a snowball’s hope in hell of keeping any of it, the moment Mladic could get his tanks round there, it was nice to think of the Serbs having a bit of a bloody nose. I couldn’t understand why you weren’t here.
You didn’t get in touch with me at all that day. You didn’t even try me at the BBC. If you’d really wanted to get in touch with me, that’s what you’d have done. Maybe you’d left a message at Reception – the landlines worked now but I didn’t trust Reception to pass anything on. Perhaps you thought I wasn’t calling you back. You must have known I couldn’t have left. But things had gone back to normal, so we were run off our feet: Roger freaking that I had got stuck; me desperately thinking of the best way to do the story for us; ham radio links, possible air strikes, arms smuggling and the secret American training camps instructing the Bosnian Army that I’d heard about from a bored Marine in a bar in Split the week before; listening to Phil file, listening to him explain, as I had to Roger, that although he would obviously try to get to Bihac, the chances were about a million to one, since at that point he couldn’t even leave Sarajevo.
“It’s like talking to a child,” I said. “He wanted me to move out of here to somewhere cheaper. I said I didn’t think that was a good idea if there was no power and people were being shot in town again. All he said was: “People are always being shot’.”
“They haven’t been for ages.”
“That’s what I told him.”
I did ring Andy and ask for a lift to Bihac, but all I got was a message back which said: “Nice try.” So maybe Reception was taking messages after all.
You still hadn’t rung that night, but we had to work anyway. Phil and I took out John, Muffy’s old chum from the CIA, and got him drunk. We wanted to get him to spill the beans. At least, I wanted to talk to him about secret American training camps, but he and Phil ended up talking about Muffy; on the subject of Muffy, he was fascinating, but he never said anything about American subversive operations that Phil and I couldn’t have speculated to each other. Still, but at least we could quote him as a US Intelligence source. His attitude however, now that was illuminating – he was as thrilled as the Bosnians, as we were, that Bihac’s Fifth Corps were doing well.
You still hadn’t rung by the time we got back. Over a final glass of whisky in the BBC, I told Phil what you’d tried to say to me yesterday. Phil didn’t say anything for a while. He just lit another cigarette. Then he said: “Lots of men get like that just before a baby is born. They panic and they think their wives are neglecting them. It was a party. He was probably drunk.”
But actually, you didn’t really drink. You were always getting angry with me for getting drunk.
“But even if it’s not that, isn’t it a bit late…”
“But what if they’re both miserable? What if they both want out?”
“Wouldn’t you be better off with some nice boy back home?” “But I don’t seem to fall in love with nice boys back home.” “I’d give it another day,” said Phil.
It was the easiest thing to do, besides, what with the war, we were run off our feet.
It was after lunch the next day that I decided to go to the mortuary; a couple more people had been killed overnight. Phil said that he would give me a lift.
“I’ll walk,” I said; we were at the Pizzeria. It wasn’t far.
“But you haven’t got your flak jacket.”
“Neither have you…”
We looked at each other, then at a woman scurrying down the street.
“It just seemed so rude to put it on,” I said.
At the mortuary door, Phil said: “I might as well come in.” I was slightly irritated because, although I loved Phil, I thought, if we’re like a three-legged race, how the hell am I going to get something different this week? I can’t just run the same stuff as the Beeb.
The familiar sweet scent snagged at my throat. Osman, the tallyman, keeper of the dead, normally smiled at me, but this time he just stared. But Osman could be a bit strange; as anyone would be if they spent their life surrounded by stiffs. Besides, I had forgotten he hadn’t seen me for months. And anyway, he normally saw me with you.
“Dober dan Osman,” I said, in the tone I used for him, which was one of subdued respect, as he was the guardian of the dead. Then I saw Valida, but for a second, that seemed normal too: I was quite used to seeing her at the mortuary with Phil. Then I realised that she was red-eyed, in black. On the sofa sat Valida’s mother, her arm round someone else, weeping, fat sobs, into her cupped hands.
I turned to Valida: “I’m so sorry… I didn’t know…” But Valida just stared back at me in horror. Then the other woman raised her head, saw me, and sobbed again. For a moment, I did not recognise Maria.
When I did, there was absolutely nothing I could do. I put my hand up, as if to hit it away. I remember feeling sick, and the room started to shake. Somewhere I heard Valida say: “I can’t believe you didn’t know.”
The last Mujo and Suljo joke from the war:
Mujo and Suljo were walking in the wood, when they met
Arkan…
XVIII
They buried you that day, at dusk, in the Martyrs’ Cemetery, so the snipers couldn’t see. Phil drove. As we walked up the hill from where we left the car, a strange ululation drifted up to the frontlines and Phil flicked a switch on his tape recorder. He’d asked me, of course, but I’d said I didn’t mind. I hoped you wouldn’t have. I don’t know. But people in Sarajevo were so used to journalists now.
It was dark, apart from the TV lights, but Phil and I knew that cemetery well by now: the cobbled path, the trickle of water, the fresh-turned earth, the rows of wooden headstones, with names and dates scrawled on in pen.
We weren’t the only hacks there. You were news; the first person to die in Sarajevo for months. CNN, ABC, Reuters and AP. Obviously, the Bosnian channels; CTV of course, although I couldn’t see Edin, perhaps he couldn’t bear to cover your funeral as a story. I was dreading seeing Aida, but of course she wasn’t there. I’d forgotten that at Muslim funerals, the women don’t come. But Maria was standing on the edge of the graveyard, to see her son buried in his alien faith; and your father, whom I had not seen for six months. He looked older now by far. He stood at one end of a row of men, their white caps gleaming in the moonlight, and the TV lights. One by one, as your body was borne by, they each wiped their cupped hands down their faces, like a chorus line wiping away its tears. Then your body, white shroud almost luminous in the moonlight, was laid into the trench dug in the mud.
I carried on covering your war after you died. Quite apart from anything else, I was trapped in Sarajevo with you
dead for five weeks, so I didn’t really have much choice. I wrote about you, for my first story, and after that, it didn’t make any sense to stop. I wanted to carry on anyway. I wanted to be there to the end. I wanted to write the day your death would be avenged.
I had to, didn’t I? I mean, it was my fault. If I’d listened to you that night at the Holiday Inn, you wouldn’t have driven down that road. You wouldn’t have left the hotel. You would have been safe upstairs with me in my bed, stroking me, kissing me, fucking me, not driving back to Aida along that road, not lying dead for hours in the night until your lonely little body was wrenched out by a Swedish doctor in camouflage fatigues. Even if I’d just let you talk for a moment longer, maybe someone else would have been driving along that road first; maybe the sniper would have taken aim at another car, then picked up his slivovic, or gone for a piss, or shouldered his rifle, walked down the stairs, or just curled up to rest for a while in the derelict apartment he used as his nest. But I didn’t. I let you go. And you died.
But I saw the war through. That next summer, that August, was a joy to cover; at least it was a joy after the terrible sadness of the fall of Srebrenica in June, when the Dutch UN troops surrendered their guns to the Serbs and watched as the Serbs then herded off to their deaths over 7,000 Muslim men. To watch the Serbs finally face defeat; to lose in a few months most of their stupid Greater Serbia they had spent so long stealing off those that they had killed, the Muslims and the Croats finally fighting together, to drive the Serbs out in their turn. And when, at long last, the UN decided to bomb the Serb positions around Sarajevo, we sat up, Tim, Muffy and I, with our glasses of Posip that Tim had brought up from the coast, waiting in the house the BBC had moved into away from the hotel. It was a secret, of course, but Robert had tipped us off that something of some sort was going to happen that night. As the great crumps began, in the depth of the night, wave after wave, we toasted the bombs. And at every house in the street, little candles suddenly flickered at the windows, and the man in the house opposite danced a jig, and suddenly we heard the sound of an accordion, and there, in his porch, was a man serenading the planes. Muffy and Tim and I laughed liked drains and poured out more of our wine. I wished so much that you had been here for that. I wished all the time you were there with me. But you are in Sarajevo, in your little grave, on the hill, with the rest of the dead.
The Girl in the Film Page 27