What is worse than a politician who doesn’t believe in what he is saying?
One who does.
II
So here I am. Here to find out how Amir died. I have to find out why. But I have no idea how. Do I go to a police station? Won’t they just laugh at me? In London this seemed the right thing to do; the only thing to do; like coming out here all those years ago. Now I’m here, I’m not so sure. All I seem to do is stare at those hills. Maybe the murderer had been caught already and I just didn’t know. I have been out of Sarajevo a very long time.
This all looks very well, now, very prosperous; the cafés, people sitting in them. That would be wonderful, if Sarajevo were going to be OK.
I’ve found one of those hardback blue books, like I used during the war. About an hour ago, in the bookshop on Marshal Tito, where I used to buy them in the phoney peace. The covers are shinier now, the paper slightly thinner. I guess they’re being made in a different factory, but the Bosnians are still trying to make them as much like the old ones as possible. I’m writing down everything I feel. Irene told me that would be a good thing to do, but anyway, I think I need to keep some notes.
Poor Hal. The party was over by the time we got back; the girls from the publishers were locking up the cash box and folding the posters of the book covers away. Hal and I wandered silently down the stairs, side by side but not together.
Outside the door of the RGS, we stood rather emptily for a moment, saying goodbye. It was a beautiful evening, and only nine o’clock. I didn’t have any particular plan for what to do later and I don’t think he did either – at a party like that, you’re bound to meet someone. Unfortunately, I don’t suppose either of us had thought it would be each other.
“I’d better go,” I said.
“Yes. Me too.”
“Well, goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” he said, then: “Which direction are you going?” I pointed up towards the curly black gates of the park.
“Home,” I said. “I live up there.” He nodded his head.
“Thank you for telling me about Amir.”
“I’m sorry if it was a shock.”
“It was a shock. But I think it’s better to know.”
“Much better. Better for you.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m sorry about…”
“Yes…”
“I didn’t mean…”
“It doesn’t matter,” I lied.
“I am sorry.”
“Well, goodbye,” I said. “And good luck.”
“Thanks. I’ll need it.” He gave a rueful smile, the first real smile he’d given since he saw me earlier on.
“Oh. I never asked you. How’s work?”
“That’s the good news,” his face lit up. “I’m off back to Happy Valley.”
“Are you? Oh, I am pleased.” Back to Hereford, back to the SAS. I smiled back, my first smile at him, but I felt a pang of envy; lucky him being called back to do what you enjoy because somebody thought you did it well. “Well done.”
“Thanks. I was going a bit crazy…” he looked slightly embarrassed again. “I can’t take this desk job stuff.”
There was a silence. Perhaps we were both contemplating my role as symptom of desk-induced madness. Then we’d kissed goodbye, with dry, over-exaggerated movements away from each other’s lips, and he’d got onto a huge black motorbike and roared away.
Last night I had dinner with Robert and Valida. They still live here – together; they got married at last. Phil gave me Robert’s email address. It wasn’t a UN one; I’d heard from someone that he’d given up his job.
I was a little nervous about getting in touch. I’d hardly seen Valida since that day at the mortuary. I was worried about seeing Aida again. I was worried about how to tell them what I knew. At least, with Robert, I didn’t have the problem I did with Lena: wives don’t like the women their husbands get to know during wars. I’d shared far more war with Valida than I had with Robert.
I’d always had this feeling that Valida thought journalists were jackals; but then she went out with Henri and married Robert so maybe I’m being over-sensitive. Poor Henri. She must be glad that didn’t work out. It’s bad enough being killed in a war, but being kept hostage in Chechnya for three months first…ugh. They found his head in a plastic bag on the Georgian Military Highway.
I’ve also always thought Robert thought I was a bit silly, but he sounded perfectly friendly when he rang. He didn’t seem to think it odd that my mobile worked. He gave me their address, but it meant nothing to me.
“It’s in the old town. Just opposite the Martyrs’ Cemetery,” he said.
I haven’t been to that cemetery since the day they buried Amir. I can see Maria, hovering on the edge, by the steep cobbled street; his father, in the double rows of white-capped men, as Amir’s body was passed from hand to hand; the yellow forest of pine grave markers, shadows in the dark; too dark to see the names and dates scrawled on in pen, or in those letters you screw into garden gates. 1972–94, 1969–92, 1975–93. At thirty, born 1964, Amir was quite old, compared to some.
“Number Four,” said Robert. “You can’t miss it. Come at 7.30.”
* * *
It was a beautiful evening as I walked up the hill, through tiny streets, beneath the overhanging houses, daub flaking off the wattle, ancient cobblestones bulging through the tarmac. A flight of steps flowed down the opposite side of the gulley, and two old men creaked slowly up. The petrol fumes rose on the evening air; taxis honked and bounced past rows of little shops and women in those tight skirts and white shirts dragged plastic bags past stacks of Sprite, purple bars of Swiss chocolate and crates of dusty peppers spilling out into the street. You could never get chocolate here in the war…
When I got to the corner of the street where Robert lived, the houses fell away to my right to reveal the hills; the grey rocks, the upper slopes furred in dark green, the ragged line of rocks against the blue. I felt as if they were staring back, biding their time; that any minute a bullet might thwack into my chest. I turned away, and found myself staring at the graveyard.
The pine markers of the war had gone. Rows of white turban-topped tombstones gleamed in the evening sun. All weedless and shiny new, in this country where they don’t believe in tending their graves and jumbles of turban tops poke out all over the hills. Amir was about two-thirds along; two-thirds the way through the war.
I was about to walk to him when I heard my name. It was Robert, waving out of an upper window. I waved back: “Just coming.” I turned my back on Amir’s grave; I felt as though I had been caught reading a letter to somebody else.
It was a pebble-dash house, on the other side of the street. He was at his front door by the time I reached the step.
“Come into the courtyard, we’re doing a barbecue,” he kissed me hello; he looked younger, his face wasn’t red and puffy any more.
“What do you think of the house?”
I gave a nervous laugh: “This place would have been so dangerous in the war…”
Robert looked surprised.
“…your view…”
Then he smiled: “The previous owner swears it wasn’t hit at all.” “You’ve bought it?”
“Why not?”
I couldn’t answer. My spine began to itch. I was very glad when he shepherded me inside.
Valida was in the little courtyard at the back, by a barbecue.
“Molly,” she gave me a big smile. “How lovely to see you…” I felt stupid to have worried. “You look very well.”
“So do you. You both do.” She still had the same Ava Gardner bob, the alabaster skin; a little plumper, but then so was I. We weren’t running up five flights of stairs God knows how many times a day. She wore less make-up now – maybe now the war was over, she didn’t need the protection.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Yes, please.” I looked round at their courtyard, its tubs of flowers, the little chairs. �
��This is so nice.”
“Thank you. Pour her a drink darling. How’s the hotel?” Robert had booked me a room in a pension; there are loads, he’d said, central and cheap. You don’t have to stay at the Holiday Inn.
“Fine. Lovely.”
“It’s owned by a cousin of Valida’s,” said Robert.
Valida snorted: “She is NOT my cousin. She was refugee… from one village, miles beyond Rogatica even!”
She was lucky, the cousin, the refugee. The Serbs put their Muslims through the sawmill in Rogatica, a small town on a main road, deep in the forests; the ones who got away mostly ended up in Srebrenica. It had been rusting and cold when Muffy and I paid a visit, eighteen months into the war. The Serb sawmill director, in his empty office, with his fur-hatted friends, happy for any diversion in the tedium of war, had given us coffee and slivovic, and practised on us, with their guilt-ridden eyes, the version of the slaughter they’d been telling themselves for the last year. I wondered if they could hear the screams of their former colleagues, now the machines were no longer drowning them out.
“OK.” Robert rolled his eyes. “She was married to your cousin…”
Valida broke in: “For about five minutes, before he died. I do have a friend who works there. Sabina… you might remember her, she worked for one of the TV companies in the war. But she’s just a waitress…” She made a face.
“I’ve only just checked in.”
“Come and see our garden, through there, through the door in the wall,” said Robert. “It needs a lot of work. The previous owner hadn’t lived here for years. I think he moved to Germany after the war.”
“No, Robert. He was in Germany during the war. He came back here for a bit, but he decided to stay in Germany.”
The doorway led to a wilderness. I didn’t tread on the grass. You have to watch out for a wild garden – they’re often mined… “This is all so pretty. You are clever,” I said from the doorway. But noone would have laid any mines here… this was bang in downtown Sarajevo. Still, I backed out.
Then I said again: “And you look so well. What I mean is, you always looked lovely, but Robert looks much better than he did before.” Maybe he just looked happy.
“It must be being married to me.”
“So do you,” said Robert. “You look younger than you did five years ago.”
“That’s what my friends always say.” Then there was a silence, because neither of us wanted to start talking about the war.
“The last time I saw you was Dayton.” Which at least was the peace.
“Oh! He looked terrible then. No wonder you think he’s better now.”
“Dayton was a nightmare. I’ve never worked that hard. Dayton had one good effect, though…”
“What, ending the war?”
“Well, that too, but Valida decided to marry me.”
“He looked so dreadful I realised he could never look after himself.” They smiled at each other and he picked up her hand. It was several seconds before Valida looked back at me.
“So when did you get here? Robert and I always say it doesn’t take long enough to get to Sarajevo these days.”
“Oh,” I laughed. “It took me long enough.” “Poor Molly came by bus from Split,” Robert said.
I’d flown to Split, just like we always used to do, wheeling down between the mountains and the sea. The lemon cyprus scent hit deep into my lungs the moment I stood at the doors of the plane. Then I’d taken the airport bus, which deposited me, just as it always had done, 200 metres from the Hotel Bellevue. Behind the desk was the same surly man I had met on that first trip, just a bit greyer. He didn’t recognise me, but when I said I stayed there during the war, he smiled.
I’d rung Robert: “Guess where I am? Split!”
“Why? We’ve got a proper airport now.”
I felt rather stupid but I said: “I wanted to swim in the sea.”
His voice changed: “Now that is a good reason. Eat some fish for me… Mind you, there are good fish restaurants here now.” I don’t trust fish in landlocked countries, I said, but he laughed.
“I might fly in tomorrow. I don’t suppose you need a flak jacket to get on a plane these days.”
“I don’t think they do flights from Split anymore.”
“What?”
It was Robert, like the first time, who suggested I went by bus.
“And which way do they go?” I’d asked.
There was a short silence, before he said: “Up the main road.
Following the signs to Sarajevo.” I couldn’t believe it.
“How long does it take now?”
“About seven hours.”
“What!”
Just because the war had finished, it didn’t stop Sarajevo being very far away.
“It’s a good five hours by car,” said Valida, when I told her.
There was a short silence, then Valida said: “Robert, show her round the house.”
“It was built by the same architect as the old library. This was his restrained period,” he said, as we did the tour. I’d passed the ruins of the library this afternoon – the yellow and maroon of its Austro-Islamic fusion still stood gutted, as it had been, by the Serbs at the start of the war.
“Why haven’t they rebuilt it?”
“God knows. They seem to be redoing the horrible modern buildings but they haven’t done that.”
“I saw they’d rebuilt the UNIS towers.” I thought it was sad; I loved the way the shattered glass had flamed every evening in the setting sun. “I went past them as I came in. We got stuck in a traffic jam on Sniper Alley. It was really creepy.”
Robert paused before he said: “I suppose it must have been. Come and see upstairs.”
I took a taxi from the bus station. The traffic had thinned by the time we passed the Holiday Inn, so I wasn’t able to look too hard at the hotel. It was just a large yellow blob. The front had been refaced, the glass all put back, and tables and umbrellas dotted the open terrace facing the road. I nearly asked the taxi to stop, but then I thought, for what? What am I going to find there now? A huge ugly room with a lot of small ugly ones off it? The fountain was playing. I used to laugh at its desert basin.
We were on the first floor now. “Come and look at the view.” Robert led me to the bay window at the front. The Martyrs’ Cemetery below, where he’d seen me earlier, and the mountains and the fir trees, the minarets and the old frontline; beyond the river, more white gravestones, from deaths long ago, pock-marked the hills’ lower flanks. The heavy machine gun had been there, just above the cemetery’s white cupola. I moved back.
“We’ll knock this through,” Robert was saying. “And just have one huge room. And we’re going to get that lovely old-fashioned Ottoman furniture, and have that. The bedrooms are upstairs. Come and see the basement.”
We went down two flights, beneath the kitchen. It was a good solid space the size of the house, with proper ceilings and several different rooms. One was an old-fashioned Turkish loo – a hole in the ground. There was a thick glass skylight set into the courtyard floor. In a corner was a round wooden circle in the stone.
“What’s that?”
“That’s the well.”
I started to laugh. He stared. “What’s up?”
“Apart from the front door, which is a killer, you’ll be fine in this house. You’ve got a bomb-proof room with natural light, its own water supply and loo.” I couldn’t stop giggling.
“I hadn’t thought about that.” He looked almost affronted, then he started to laugh too. “Don’t worry about the front door. There’s a way out the back. I guess we can grow food in the garden.”
“So you’re fine then.”
“Yes,” he smiled. “We’re fine.”
We walked back outside. Robert started doing things with the barbecue, while Valida and I talked. Robert snorted when he heard the name of my magazine.
“It’s full of crap,” he said, just like Tash.
Val
ida said: “Fashion is not necessarily crap.”
I trotted out my line about wanting to stay in one place.
“A normal thing to want,” said Valida.
“Funny place to choose,” said Robert. “Don’t you get bored of all that garbage?”
“Some of the articles are very good,” said Valida.
“So what are you both doing now?” They glanced at each other.
Valida, she said, was a lawyer – nearly a lawyer, finishing the training she’d started before the war. Robert was writing a book – a novel, this time, or maybe a series of short stories, he wasn’t sure. I asked him if he’d got bored of the UN, but he smiled at Valida, who took his hand again, and then he said, “I think they got bored of me.”
I didn’t ask how they could afford it. Valida must have saved a fortune in the war and Robert – I had friends in the UN who made ninety grand a year, tax free. Plus, his book was for ages the only decent book about this place. Everyone who came here had it in their hand. You still see it in shops in the UK.
“Do you see much of Phil or Tim?” Valida asked.
“Not really. Tim’s in Africa. I just see him on the telly.”
“We’re the same,” said Valida. “We keep up with our friends from the telly.”
“Do you get BBC here?”
“We have satellite,” said Valida.
“But Valida doesn’t like hearing bad news, so that limits watching the BBC rather dramatically.”
“Why hear it?” she said. “You can’t do anything. I heard quite enough bad news in the war.”
A moment passed before Robert said: “What about Phil? You two were such great friends.”
“I know.” I minded the way Phil and I had drifted apart. “I couldn’t cope with the hangovers.” Robert laughed. Then I said:
“And I don’t think Lena liked me very much.”
“Poor Phil. But he’s still with her, isn’t he?”
“Oh yes. They’ve had another baby. He’s been posted to Jerusalem.”
We talked about other people we had known: Jasmina, Valida’s successor, had joined the UN, and was now in East Timor.
The Girl in the Film Page 30