The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  “Why not?” said Valida. “The UN in Sarajevo was full of Indian and Chinese and God knows what in the war. Why shouldn’t

  Jasmina go to East Timor?”

  “No, reason at all,” I said.

  Edin, she said, was still working for CTV.

  “He’s based in Chicago,” she said. “I think he travels a lot.”

  “Since when?” I couldn’t remember when I’d even last seen Edin around. Valida looked at Robert, who shrugged back.

  “Since before Dayton, I think.”

  “And Lejla?” I asked. Pulling out another name: she had been one of the interpreters for Reuters.

  “She’s in Washington. She’s working for the World Bank.” They are all much more successful than me.

  We’d done everyone else now. There was only one person left. In the gap where none of us mentioned her, Valida asked me if I’d like another drink and Robert said: “I think the food might be ready. We’re having cevapcici…” I thought, oh God! Not those ratburgers we had in the Holiday Inn.

  “So why are you here?” asked Valida, as we sat there with our plates. “Are you doing a story?” They stared up at me like little baby birds.

  “Oh, God no!” I said. “I’m sorry if that sounds rude. But I just couldn’t face doing a story from here.” I took a bite of cevapcici. To my surprise, Robert said: “I understand exactly what you mean.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t bear.” I stopped. “I couldn’t bear having to…”

  “I know.”

  “To sell it to a desk.” What I meant was I just couldn’t bear having to convince someone about why this place mattered.

  “Why do you think I joined the UN?”

  “Oh.”

  “And why do you think I don’t do any journalism now?”

  “Oh.”

  “Here, let me fill up your glass,” said Robert. I had stalled on the cevapcici. They weren’t very nice. I was rather surprised, considering how much the Sarajevans had gone on about them during the war, but maybe Robert wasn’t a good cook.

  “So, why are you here?” said Valida, and I didn’t know where to start. It had seemed much more straightforward back in London. But now I was here, I couldn’t forget that Aida was Amir’s widow, not me. Perhaps, then, I should start with Aida. “How’s Aida, by the way?”

  They shot glances at each other.

  “She’s in America too,” said Valida.

  “America!”

  Robert said: “She moved there not long after the war.” “And what about Nermina?” The baby.

  “Well, she went too. Obviously,” said Robert.

  “Oh poor Maria,” I said.

  Robert and Valida looked at each other. Robert said: “Maria…?”

  Valida shrugged; then Robert said, rather carefully: “Yes, I think the whole thing has been very hard on her.”

  “What’s Aida doing there?”

  Another silence, then Valida said: “She got married.”

  “Married!”

  “Yeah,” Robert said – Valida shot him a look. “Some old bloke. They’ve had another baby.”

  Before I could ask any more, Valida broke in: “But you still haven’t told us why you are here.”

  “I’m here about Amir,” I said. I felt embarrassed now.

  Valida stood up, and took some plates into the house.

  Robert said: “Poor Amir. That was all so long ago.” He looked as if he’d much rather follow Valida.

  “Yes, but there’s something else…” I stopped. I was hoping for some help, but Robert looked at me warily and didn’t ask what.

  “I had a strange conversation with someone in England a few weeks ago.”

  “Oh…” he looked wistfully towards the house, as if he wished he could get up and follow Valida.

  “Maybe you know this already, he was married to Aida, but… if you don’t know, then maybe… I…”

  “Amir caused enough trouble for you, for all of us already.” He stood up.

  “Yes, but that still doesn’t mean that it’s right.”

  “What. What isn’t right?” he froze, with a plate in his hand.

  “What this guy told me.”

  “What guy?”

  “A Brit.”

  “Oh.”

  “Someone who had been in Sarajevo.”

  “Oh.”

  “He told me that Amir wasn’t killed by a sniper.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes.” Robert didn’t move. It was obvious to anyone that Robert already knew.

  “You knew.”

  He nodded, slowly, once.

  “When did you know?” He shrugged.

  “How did you know?”

  He shrugged. “Sarajevo’s a small town,” he said finally. “Things leak out.”

  “You could have told me.” He shrugged again.

  “I thought he was killed by the Serbs. I thought he was shot by a sniper.”

  After ten seconds or so Robert said: “I suppose I thought it was better left alone.”

  “But this guy said he was murdered.”

  “In a way everyone who died in the war was murdered, weren’t they?”

  “Oh come off it! He said Amir was killed on purpose. That someone waited for him and killed him on purpose.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “And is it true?”

  Long silence. He held the plate in both hands. “I suppose so.”

  “But Robert… Robert…” I stopped. I couldn’t find the words to say everything I wanted to say: why didn’t I know, why didn’t you tell me, who did it, why?

  But Robert didn’t speak. He just looked at me.

  “So, do you know who did it? Do you know why? Have I missed something? Was there a trial?”

  Long pause: “No. There hasn’t been a trial.” He shrugged again.

  “Was there any kind of investigation?” Shrug.

  “Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to find out?”

  “Molly, a lot of horrible things happened here during the war and sometimes it is better not to ask why.”

  “But that’s wrong!”

  “Is it? Or is it wrong for us to try and impose our ideas of justice and behaviour on these people…”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. You sound like the defence in a war crimes tribunal.”

  He flushed. “Maybe they have a point. There’s a different culture here.”

  “And now you sound like some sort of colonial administrator…”

  “Maybe that’s what I was…” he looked towards the house.

  “Robert! Stop talking in generalisations! Amir wasn’t just some bloody native… he was…” He was my Amir, my beautiful Amir, with his smile, and his dark eyes, and the ropes of muscles I liked to stroke on his long lean arms, and his way of holding me that made me feel that I was beautiful and fragile and the best thing he had ever had. Suddenly, like a sharp whiff from the grave, I could even smell him, that Sarajevo scent. But maybe it was the wood smoke from the barbecue on the mountain air. My eyes filled with tears and the anger left my voice.

  “You could have told me…” I said.

  “You weren’t here…”

  “Oh, God!”

  “Valida said Aida didn’t want anyone to know,” he said quickly.

  “I’m not just anyone.”

  There was silence again. I brushed away a tear.

  “I suppose you’re not,” he said in a tired voice. He put down the plate. “I’m sorry. I probably should have told you. I suppose I just thought you knew…” he looked up, as Valida walked out of the kitchen door. “So, how’s your hotel?” he said.

  Mujo and Suljo wanted to emigrate to Germany. They couldn’t get work permits, so they disguised themselves as monkeys. When they got to Germany, they were caught and put in a zoo. After a while, the manager noticed there was something funny about them, so he put them in the
same cage as a bear, who was also behaving strangely. Mujo and Suljo were sitting in the corner, waiting for the bear to eat them, when suddenly the bear said: “Hey guys, don’t be scared.

  I’m from Srebrenica.”

  III

  I ate my breakfast and tried to think. There’s a lot of thinking going on in this room. It’s not a very large room, but then it’s not a very large hotel; just two storeys round a courtyard spiralpaved with the Yellow Brick Road. There must be ten tables in this dining room. Behind me is a bar, with mirrors and bottles of strange liqueurs, and more mirrors on one of those disco globes. I’m looking at a courtyard, with a couple of chairs, and net curtains billowing round plate-glass windows in the late summer breeze.

  The only noise, apart from the clinks of cutlery, is the occasional slurp. Even the fountain in the courtyard is off. Yet each table, with its blueberries and raspberries in their little glass bowls, the basket of rolls, the pot of yoghurt, the red and white checked cloth, and the coffee, delicious, is a flag for civilisation. At each, one person slowly munches. They’re much of a type, my fellow munchers: the men tend to beards; the women to Birkenstocks. They look a bit young to be aid workers but maybe aid workers are getting younger these days.

  A waitress is sitting on a stool by the bar, staring at the dead fountain beyond the glass. She’s pretty, with long dark hair, long legs and an expression both worried and very far away. She looks rather familiar. But then so do lots of people here. Maybe she’s the friend Valida talked about.

  “Are you Sabina? I’m a friend of Valida’s,” I said, as she brought me my coffee.

  Her sad face smiled: “I know. She booked you in.” But before I could say anything else, she turned back to her stool.

  I had thought that Robert and Valida would have helped me find out what happened to Amir. I’d even thought Aida would give me a hand; we could have worked together – not exactly become friends, but at least learnt to see what he’d liked in both of us. I’d imagined playing with Nermina – I’ve never even seen a picture of her. I could have changed her nappies. But of course, she must be nearly six.

  I left my hotel and started walking into town, towards the library, along the bend of the river, and stopped to watch the Coke bottles bob at the bottom of the weir. I’d never walked along the river before, it would have been far too dangerous in the war. I couldn’t understand Robert. Surely, like all of us, he’d been drawn here by the injustice of what had happened here. But had he been? Or had he just been repelled? He didn’t come for the war, he was here before. When we took that bus, to Kiseljak, in 1993, all he wanted to do was leave. Maybe he didn’t care about the injustice after all; everyone said he was hardly in Sarajevo at all. But that can’t be right: that first summer of the war, he’d spent months chronicling Arkan and his boys butchering their way through the Drina valley.

  The street signs have changed. They’re all green now. We used to laugh at the Serbs banging on about green – the colour of Islam, the green road to Istanbul – but given that was the paranoia, it seems tactless to put up a load of green signs. The names are very Islamic, very Turkish, too – Ulica Hodza, Hodza Street, Trg Pasha, the Pasha’s Square – perhaps they were always called that. I can’t remember. Two young girls in scarves walked past; that’s new. You never saw the hejab during the war. I couldn’t have told what religion Amir’s mother was, apart from the fact that her name was Maria.

  Maria. I would go and see her. She must know. Or she would help me find out. His father would want to know. He was an academic. He had an enquiring mind. I was planning to see them anyway. I’d bought them a bottle of Scotch in Duty Free. I was very fond of them, although I didn’t really see them very much in the last year or so. After Amir married Aida, we were all too embarrassed. I started visiting a bit after Amir died, but every time I thought of going, the well of misery would leech at my soul. I’d pop in once in a while, with some coffee, whisky and the bags of PX miniTwix; we’d make small talk, about how it had been too long. But, as Robert said, I wasn’t there so much then.

  Things should be better for them now. Murat would be back at his university. Maria must be working as an architect. God knows, the whole town is being rebuilt. We always joked about how busy she’d be after the war.

  I suppose I should have rung to say I was coming, but they never had a number during the war. I was about to go back to the hotel for the whisky, when I saw some, cheaper, in the window of a shop full of yoghurts with German names. I bought coffee, and a big bunch of flowers. Nobody had flowers during the war.

  Amir’s street still had the same name. The chipped garlands still hung from the stonework but the windows were back. No UNHCR bubble wrap; glass, all the way down the street. The windows looked wrong, then I realised, they were all the same age. They had the blank new uniformity of a Barratt home.

  The hole had gone. The huge hole, in the front of his house, which the grand piano hid inside, was now a blurred grey blotch, the size of an armchair, like the blotches all over town.

  The stairwell was the same. The fronds of wrought iron were caked in dirt, and the grit still crunched underfoot. It didn’t even occur to me to look for the light. The same frosted glass doors, at the top of the stairs, still bearing the same crack in the pane. My stomach churned as I remembered that first day, when Amir had stood in the half-light in front of me, and I had breathed him in.

  I knocked. One thing had changed. It smelt musty and damp but it didn’t smell of pee.

  Nothing happened. I knocked again. I had a flash of hope, like I did in my duty visits after Amir’s death, that nobody would be there, but I didn’t really want that and I was relieved when I heard the shuffle of feet.

  The woman who opened the door gave me so blank a look that for a moment I thought I had the wrong house. And she…then I realised she wasn’t gaunt any more.

  “Maria? It’s Molly.” I put out my hand.

  “Molly?” She was shocked blank, then she grabbed me, and smiled an enormous smile. “You’ve come back.”

  “I hope this isn’t a really bad time,” was what I tried to say, but my voice had gone all strange and wobbly; besides, I was finding it much harder to speak the language than I thought.

  “No! No! Come in. Please. How could it be a bad time? ” She ushered me in to the hall. “I nearly didn’t hear you, when you knocked. The electric bell works now.” She pressed it, and I jumped at the drrring.

  “I think it would… I forget…” I pushed the flowers at her – she’d pretended not to notice them until that point.

  “Flowers! How kind…” I untangled the plastic bag, with the coffee and the whisky. “This is also for you.”

  “But no, why?” she smiled, as she unpacked it. “Coffee,” she giggled. “I don’t need such things now…”

  “Oh, you know…” I wanted to say, for old times’ sake, but I couldn’t remember how. “Like before.”

  “Oh whisky, thank you. Good Scottish whisky…”

  We stood there, staring at each other, grinning, our eyes filling with tears. She clutched onto my arm, and I swallowed and grabbed her back. I hadn’t realised I’d feel like this. When you read about people crying with happiness in books, when you’re a child, you don’t understand what it means. It’s a kind of terrible relief that, in the random shit of life, good things can still happen. She pressed the bell again. And we both laughed.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  The kitchen looked less cluttered. The UNHCR stove had gone; the one where Amir had showed me how to make airgun pellets that first day. The whole flat was full of Amir for me. Suddenly I wanted to cry again. I looked at his mother, busy over her stove, with her brass long-handled jug. She turned and smiled over her shoulder at me, and I smiled back. When she turned, I wiped my eyes.

  I looked round the kitchen again. It wasn’t just the stove.

  “It looks… new.”

  “I’m redecorating. Everything was so dirty after the war.”
>
  So that was it. Fresh paint. But I still felt I had missed something.

  “Here, coffee, is ready.”

  She brought the jug to the table. She poured the thick black liquid into two tiny white cups and the grounds eddied beneath the steam on the top.

  “Sugar?”

  “No thank you.”

  “It is just like old times.” She smiled at me, then her eyes seemed to fi x on something far behind. Suddenly I didn’t know what to say: everything we had in common was just so sad.

  “So tell me, are you married now?”

  “No. No I’m not.”

  “Are you still war reporter?”

  “No. No. I don’t do that kind of work anymore.”

  “Good,” she said. “It is not a good job for a woman.” She always said that. Eight years ago, I used to argue.

  Then she said: “It is so lovely to see you again.”

  “Yes.”

  “I tell you what, let us have a little of your beautiful whisky.” “Oh, no, keep it for yourself.” It was 11.30 a.m.

  “Yes. We must. You brought it. Just to celebrate.”

  She poured me two inches. She seemed surprised when I asked for water.

  “Like the old days,” she said. “You and me, in this kitchen.” It was almost as though Amir had pulled up a chair. Her voice drifted off and she stared quickly at her whisky. I said: “So, what are you doing now? Have you got a lot of work to do?”

  “No. Not really…” She paused. “No. I’m not working now.” “But there must be work for architects,” I said.

  “Maybe… but maybe not for me.” She took a sip.

  “What about your old firm?” I said. “Why you not work for them?”

  “The head office was in Belgrade. My firm doesn’t exist anymore.” She took another sip.

  “How’s Murat? I’d love to see him again.”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she took another sip. And another.

  “You do not know?”

  “Know what?”

  She drank again. “Murat is dead.”

  Dead! How could I have not known… He must have died right at the end. I saw him in August ’95. He must have been one of the last people to have been killed.