“How did it happen?” Was he got by a sniper? Or was it a shell?
Maybe it was later – after the war – maybe he trod on a mine…
“He had cancer.”
“Cancer!”
“Yes. He died last year.” Last year? So after the war? The tears spilled down her face. She picked up her glass, but it was nearly empty.
“I’m so sorry. He was such a nice man.”
She wasn’t listening to me, just talking to her glass. “Everyone here is getting cancer. Maybe stress from the war. Maybe that horrible food. Maybe it was the shells, the depleted uranium shells…” She took the last gulp. “The ones NATO fired at the end of the war… Could you pour me a little of that whisky please? Have some too.” She topped up my glass and put on a social voice:
“So, why are you in Sarajevo?”
“I’m on holiday.”
“Holiday! Here! But you could go anywhere…”
“So could you, now,” I said, but as I said it, I realised it wasn’t true. She looked old and poor.
“Maybe,” she smiled, and for the first time it was like the game we used to play, what she would do after the war.
“I don’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to come here.”
She smiled, part wistful, part as if she were despising me for being a fool. She picked up her glass and took another drink.
“I wanted to see old friends,” I said, but she didn’t speak. She didn’t seem to want to mention Amir. “I saw Valida yesterday.” She took another sip.
“She told me that Aida had got married and moved to America.”
Sip: “Best place for them.”
I waited for her to mention Amir or Nermina, but she didn’t. There weren’t even any photographs of Nermina here. Even strangers show you photographs of their grandchildren. I looked around. Where were the pictures? Any of the pictures?… This flat used always to be cluttered with stuff.
“I’ve never seen Nermina,” I said. “Does she, does she… look like Amir?” There, it was out.
She took another sip. “Oh my poor Amir. He looked just like my Murat. He had just exactly his smile. He looked like Murat when we first met.”
“I thought he looked like you.”
She shook her head. “My poor Amir…” She took a drink from her glass. I didn’t blame her. I drank from mine too. “Amir is the reason I have come back…” Your mother glared at me.
“When Amir died…” I floundered for a moment… I used to be good at asking people questions about tragedies but I suppose I’m out of practice now, and besides, this is my tragedy too.
“Did you ever think… did anyone say… was there anything… strange about it?” Her glare concentrated. Sip. Long silence. Snort.
“The whole war was strange…” She took a great long slug of her drink, then looked into my eyes.
“I…”
“It’s nothing to do with you.”
“Something unusual…”
“Nothing in that time was usual…”
This wasn’t working, so I just blurted it out: “Somebody told me he wasn’t shot by the Serbs…”
“He was killed by the war. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“But what happened?”
“He died. That’s what happened.”
“But how?… I stumbled on…“I want to know…” I stopped, and stared at her. She stared implacably back. “I have to know…” I started to plead.
“You have to know!…” She snorted, picked up the whisky bottle and poured herself some more. “You don’t have to know anything…”
She laughed. “It’s because of you he’s dead!”
“Maria! No!”
“Yes.” She pushed back her chair and stood up.
“No! How? You can’t say that. It’s not fair!”
“Fair! If you had married him, he would still be alive. My son… Any girl should be pleased to marry him… But he wasn’t good enough for you, was he?”
She started to cry, heaving her face in her hands. I stood up and went and crouched by her side. I tried to put my arms round her shoulders but she pushed me away.
“You left Amir and you left Sarajevo. There are things you don’t have the right to know. If you had not left him, he would be alive.”
She looked up, “Just get out,” she said. “Get out of my apartment.”
“Maria…”
“Get out. Now. Please go.”
I let myself out and walked down into the street. I didn’t want to walk far. I didn’t think I could. I went to the little park at the back of the street: the one that Amir had told me had once been full of trees, before they were chopped down for firewood in the dead of night; where Phil and I had drunk coffee, in the little café Ibrahim had set up during the phoney peace of ’94 – it was shelled the first day the peace treaty broke. There were saplings growing in the park. They must have been planted after the war. Ibrahim’s café at least was still there, with two women sunning themselves, on the terrace, drinking coffee; two children were running in the grass nearby. How tall will the trees be allowed to grow?
I had just lit my cigarette, when my mobile rang.
“I just wanted to see how you were,” it was Robert’s voice.
“Thank you so much for dinner last night.”
“Not at all, it was lovely to see you… Where are you now?”
“I’m in the little park opposite the Residency.”
“Oh, God, my old office, I remember it well. What are you doing there?”
“I’ve just been to see Maria,” I said.
“Oh.”
“I didn’t know that Murat had died.”
“Oh yes, I’m sorry. He had cancer. I didn’t know you didn’t know.”
“How awful, to survive the whole war, and then to die…”
“I know what you mean…” he waited for a few seconds, before he said, “Did you ask Maria about Amir?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
I was too shocked to tell anything other than the truth. “It was all rather horrible. She started crying and then she said it was all my fault.”
“She said that.”
“Yes. She kept saying that.”
Long pause. “It wasn’t your fault, believe me.”
“Well, whose fault was it then?”
“Oh God knows, Molly, but it wasn’t yours. I’d just go home if I were you and forget the whole thing.”
I watched the women stirring their empty cups, then I heard Robert say, “What are you doing tonight?”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought.”
There was a pause, before he said, “There’s a nice café on
Feradiya…”
“Where?”
“Pedestrian zone behind the cathedral…”
I thought he was going to ask me round again but he said, “You could go there for a bit…” Another pause, then he added: “And they have lots of good films on TV… They’re in English… not that that matters for you.”
“Actually… my Serbo-Croat’s nowhere near as good as it was.”
“Well, the subtitles will help you improve – sorry… Got to go…”
I smoked another cigarette. I couldn’t leave Amir’s mother like that. She didn’t even know where I was staying. I’ll go back after this cigarette. Then I sat a bit longer and had another one.
It was nearly an hour before I left my bench. All I have to do is shove my card at her, and leave. I’d written the hotel’s number on the back. I don’t think she’ll change her mind, but she might.
I waited outside her door for half a minute but I couldn’t hear any noise. I rang the bell but no footsteps answered its drrring. Maybe she’d gone out in the last hour… I knocked, and this time the door swung open.
I stood in the doorway. “Maria,” I said, in a loud voice, and then “Maria,” a little louder. But it was not a large flat, so I didn’t have to shout.
In the end, I just walked in. The
kitchen, where we’d sat an hour ago, was open to my right, but there was no-one there as I hovered by the door. The sitting-room door was ajar. I tapped my fingers on its edge. “Maria?”
I put my head round the door.
I needn’t have worried about Maria hearing me. She lay half on her side, mouth open, legs trailing onto the floor. Her grey locks were stirring against the upholstery as her chest rose and fell, a little trail of spit oozing out of her mouth. On the floor, where her hand trailed down, were a glass, the whisky bottle, and a full ashtray. There was no other furniture in the room. No chandelier, no pictures, no table, no chairs, no lace doilies, no crystal vases, no swords above the doors, no rugs; just parquet, white walls, and the grand piano stranded in its corner.
The whisky bottle was empty. Half out of the ashtray, still on its filter, hung two inches of ash, like one of those bodies fleeing Pompeii.
I felt clubbed by pity but I also felt sick. I can’t take this. I’ve got to get out. I can’t leave her like this. But there’s nothing else I can do for her anyway. The cigarette in the ashtray had long burnt itself out. I checked the stove in the kitchen, but everything was off.
At the door I remembered why I came back. But how could I leave my card? I couldn’t leave it by her. She’d know I found her like this. In the end I put it on the kitchen table, where I might have left it earlier. Then I left. I have seldom wanted to leave anywhere so much. It was a race to see if I made it out before I was sick.
Two pensioners met at Bascarsija main square, where the pigeons flock. The first one said, “Did you bring the bread?” And the second pensioner replied: “No, still I haven’t got my pension.”
“No problem,” said the first pensioner. “Today we will eat the pigeons without bread.”
IV
What did you do? Oh my love. Oh Amir, what happened that I don’t know?
And your mother… I can’t even help her. In the war I could give her food and money; I thought if I wrote about things, then maybe they’d get better. I don’t even blame her for the drink.
I made it round the corner before I had to sit down. I breathed in deep, and let the nausea subside. Then I lit myself a cigarette. It was another little park, an older one, opposite the Presidency on Marshal Tito Street; it used to be a graveyard, before the Austrians came. The gravestones, those white marble posts, were dotted about in the grass, some sunk so deep with time that only a lichen covered blob poked above ground, as though the earth was trying to consume the memory of the dead. Two old men sat, alone, on different benches, under the trees, whose lower trunks were strangely bald; branches had been cut for firewood in the war, of course.
Like always, I found myself glancing up to the hills, no longer now the dress circle of the Serbian dream, the silent trees, the peasants’ huts strung along the crag. The mountains met my gaze, and from the darkness of the trees, I could hear the whisper; you thought we Serbs had lost. Well, maybe we did, but we took them down with us.
I sat there for over half an hour. I wish you were here. I wish more than anything that you were here. I need you here. I need to know what on earth went on.
I walked back to my hotel. Even though it was lunchtime, I went to sleep. When I woke up, it was light, but my watch said 4 a.m. I looked at the shortwave, but that said 16.00. Then I remembered your mother, and the whisky, and your father being dead. But I didn’t feel sick any more. In fact I felt hungry.
I headed for the mosque and the maze of the old town. I wasn’t looking as I stepped out into the road. A car careered round the corner and had to swerve. The driver was young, like you had been, with a beautiful girlfriend at his side. I smiled and said sorry, in Serbo-Croat. But he slewed his car half onto the pavement, and walked towards me, screaming.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise the light had changed.” I was so shocked, I was speaking English.
“Where are you from?” He switched to perfect English.
“London…”
“You come here from London. You think you’re God and you cross the road like a primitive.” His shaved head was pumping with rage.
“I don’t think I’m God…”
“You could have made me crash my car. My car cost 40 000 KM. And you…” he sneered as he looked me up and down. I was an Englishwoman abroad: white T-shirt, flip-flops and a blue denim skirt. I didn’t have the henna-ed hair and nail paint of the girl in the car.
I kept trying to say sorry, but he wouldn’t let me; just screamed and shook his fist, while people swerved round his car, and leant on their horns. The girl twisted her pencilled lips into the embarrassed smile that women give each other when their men are being arseholes. Finally, someone else rolled down their window and screamed at the boy; he turned on them, and I ran past him into the square where the cars couldn’t go.
I needed to sit down. My knees were shaking. The old man was still on his wooden chair under the tree just as he had been yesterday – was it only yesterday that I arrived?… He was throwing seeds for the pigeons, their little beaks clacking on the paving stones. The old gypsy woman was still begging on the steps of the hexagonal fountain, her back to its fretwork marble walls, where beggars must have sat for hundreds of years, the creamy bulk of the mosque serenely behind. Everything was as it had been this morning. As it probably had been fifty years ago – except the soldiers walking out of the alley would have been German and the gypsy would have been young and beautiful.
I understood why the young man had screamed. He would have been maybe sixteen when the war began; from Tito’s wonderland to a frontline, in leaky trainers, on half-rations, waiting to die; nobody had explained to him, that when found he was still alive at the end, he’d be driven into a frenzy of rage by the failure of trivia, after surviving so vast an awfulness. As for the girlfriend, she’d have been about twelve.
I didn’t recognise the soldiers’ fatigues. As they passed, I automatically checked the badges; the one closest said F. Müller and the flag on his army jacket was the Bundesreich.
I haven’t heard a word from your mother since yesterday.
I’m sitting, in that café, in the pedestrian zone beyond the cathedral, with my morning cappuccino. Was it here before the war? It looks like the kind of place that’s been here a long time; where the war was just a hiatus, normal service has been resumed. I prefer being here to Bacarsija. I can’t really see the hills.
I tried to order a cup of Bosnian coffee, but the waiter sneered at me. “We don’t do Bosnian coffee,” he said.
Two American girls have just sat down at my table. I heard one say: “I thought they were poor. Why are the cafés always full? These coffees cost 2.5KM each.” Konvertible Marks – that’s the currency now. It’s pegged to the Deutschmark that we used in the war.
“It doesn’t cost much to sit in front of a coffee all day,” said girl two. “With unemployment at 30 per cent they’ve got nothing else to do.”
I nearly didn’t hear the girl ask in Serbo-Croat: “Do you mind if we sit here?”
They are in their mid-twenties, all clean and keen American, made-up to look unmade-up, and straight white teeth; one blonde, one dark, as though they came in two colours. I said, “Please do,” to them in English, and they were a little upset.
“Oh. You knew,” said the blonde; she was the smaller of the two, with blue eyes and that shoulder-length bob that blondes wear when they stop wanting to be Barbie.
“You’re English?” I nodded. “We’re from the States. But I guess you can tell that,” said the other one; her brown hair was in the same post-Rachel cut. “We’re not disturbing you?”
“Oh no.”
Even if they are not talking to me, it’s good to have the company. I feel so alone here, and yet it’s full of ghosts.
You seem so much deader here than you were in London. In London you were lost to me anyway. Here, every street, every corner whispers your name. Suddenly for me the road is empty, and I don’t even notice I don’t know what it’s call
ed. The slush is grey on the ground, and you are screeching your car round a corner, to get out of the sights.
I went for a walk last night. I thought I should do something I could never have done before. The people streamed by me on Feradiya – that’s this street’s name: I saw its name on one of the new green signs. It was the hour of the passagiata, the promendade, or whatever it’s called in Serbo-Croat. Beautiful girls, with that henna-ed hair, walk past in threes, eyeing up dark-eyed young men. Middle-aged couples arm in arm. One or two of them scowled; I actually had to push my way through. None of them look very happy: mostly they look bewildered. Their faces all seem to say: why me? Why did this happen to my life?
“So I was in Zvornik two days ago…” The dark girl was talking, but suddenly I’m not here anymore: the blown mosque, the silent factory, the streets full of mad-eyed men, armed with beards and double-eagle hats and Kalashnikovs; the minutes ticking by while men dreaming the same Serbian dreams scrutinised our passports on both sides of the river; the Drina, fat and turquoise in its gorge, its far bank dotted with the summer houses of the Belgrade elite, round whose jetties eddied the odd rotten corpse, drifting down from where Arkan and his Tigers were wreaking their carnage…
“Urgh. Zvornik. Gross…” so perhaps it hadn’t changed that much.
“Then I went to Bijelina, then Prijedor, to see those villages round there.” Dried blood dribbled down bullet-riddled walls, and that sweet smell that wouldn’t go however much they scrubbed it clean; half-starved skeletons pressing at the wire and women and children lying top to toe in a school gym, the nappies drying on the wallbars, the loos a swamp of shit.
I put down my pen and looked up at the sky. I couldn’t see the hills from here.
I order another coffee. “You speak Bosnian,” said the blonde.
Bosnian. So that’s what they call it now.
“Do you live here?” she asks. She’s all polite curiosity.
I would have been pleased to talk half an hour ago, but now I am back with you and don’t relish the interruption.
“Not anymore.”
“But you did?”
“Yes.”
The Girl in the Film Page 32