“When?” said the blonde.
I paused, looked away: “During the war.”
Last night I walked to places we could never have walked in the war. I walked down to the river, facing the hills, then I turned along the embankment and followed it downstream.
I hardly know the town on the far side of the water. In the bad times, the bridges were too exposed to cross. It’s where the pizza parlour was, where I had lunch with Ed, the day that I went to visit the shrink. One of Amir’s many friends – Jasmina I think she was called, pretty girl, dark hair, lost – her parents had lived there, in a yellow and grey Moominpappa block. They probably still did. We went to see them once – I think her father had a heart condition and I was writing about people being ill during the war. Or maybe we just went for fun. But I didn’t think so: this part of town was badly shelled – it wasn’t the kind of place you went for fun. I can’t remember why it was badly shelled. It’s right under the crags, maybe they couldn’t resist just chucking stuff down. The brewery – Sarajevkso Pivo – we interviewed the manager once, a Muslim, Fuad, Fikret? I can’t remember. But I remember him, in his cold and gloomy office, boasting that Sarajevkso Pivo had never shut, not even in World War II. Now, he said, he was supplying his part of town with water. How many died in the water queue massacre in 1992? Nineteen, twenty-five? I can’t remember now.
“You lived here during the war?” said the blonde. Her tone was precise.
“Yes,” I said, at least I suppose I had.
“When?”
“Oh, for lots of it really.” I felt sick again.
“What, in Bosnia or Sarajevo?” she pronounced it Sara-yevo, with a rilled “r”, the way the Bosnians do. Not Sara-yevo, the way one does, if one’s first acquaintance with the place was Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
“Kind of both. But I suppose I was mainly in Sarajevo.” “When were you here?” She wasn’t being friendly.
“I first came to Bosnia in July 1992. I got to Sarajevo in April
1993. I did my last trip at the end of 1995.” “Wow,” said the brunette.
“Trip? Your last trip? I thought you said you lived here?” said the blonde. I had a flash of irritation and looked across at the brunette; her friendly curiosity calmed me down. “In the beginning, I lived out here. When things got less… less…” what was the word Roger on the desk used to use… “less interesting… I moved back to the
UK, and they’d send me out.”
“What do you mean, less interesting?”
Oh God, this was like trying to justify myself to you.
“When there was less going on. In ’94.”
“There was lots going on in ’94…”
You dying. That happened in ’94. Your broken body being pulled out of your car.
“…Merkale happened in ’94. What do you mean less was going on?”
That brought me back. “Mark…what?” I asked
“Merkale… The shell that killed all the people in the market.”
“Oh, the market massacre…” You crying in my arms, for the woman who fell apart in yours, weeping for her blood gushing out onto the tarmac; me, sobbing by the TV in the hotel room in Zenica, trying to find a way that I could get back to you. Phil, hung-over, freaked out, the next day, sitting in his office, telling me about the head, on the stall like it was for sale. You and Aida, in the market place together; and afterwards, together, because I wasn’t there. Like Phil and Muffy, I suppose, because sex seemed like the only way to wipe it out.
“…Yes, that was early ’94.”
“So… Lots of things happened in ’94.”
Suddenly I wanted to scream at her like the boy who’d nearly hit me with his car. Shut the fuck up you silly little girl, with your nit-picking questions, what do you understand? What do you know about the market massacre? You weren’t here. I should have been here. I should have been with you, my love. Not away again. And if I’d been with you, you wouldn’t have been with Aida, and then maybe, maybe, everything would have changed.
Instead I started to speak as though I were delivering one of the lectures I used to give to schools.
“After the market massacre, in February 1994, the United Nations imposed a twenty-kilometre heavy weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo, enforced by the threat of NATO air strikes. That meant that the shelling of the city effectively stopped and it didn’t start again until very late the following autumn. Later on that spring, the UN brokered an anti-sniping agreement. People even started being allowed to travel in and out of the city – if they could get the right bits of paper. The water came back on, the electricity sort of worked. Even the gas worked a bit. They got the trams running.”
Do you remember the snipers used to shoot into the trams? I was on a tram one day, and a bullet went through three people at once.
“For about nine months, in Sarajevo, there was a quasi-peace, until the Bihac crisis.” That was when you’d died. I swallowed and went on: “From a journalistic point of view, it meant that the story got less interesting, so I wasn’t here so much then.”
“Less interesting because fewer people died?”
“Less interesting because less was going on. On a day to day basis. That’s what journalism is about.” Otherwise it wouldn’t be called journalism, would it?
“Oh. I seeeeeee. So you’re a journalist?” What did she see?
“Did you live in the Holiday Inn?” asked the brunette.
“Yes.”
“Reeeally?” said the blonde.
“There really wasn’t anywhere else to live,” I said.
“I have a friend who was here during the war and he didn’t live in the Holiday Inn.”
I felt sicker: “Was he a journalist?”
“No.”
“Well then. Lots of people who weren’t journalists didn’t live in the Holiday Inn. Including all the Sarajevans. But if you were a journalist, if you could afford it, it was pretty much the only place to live.”
I didn’t go to the Holiday Inn last night. I got as far as the open space, beyond the Presidency, by the old mosque, by Skenderija Bridge, the bit I used to run across each day, to come and see you.
Across the river, across where the frontline used to be, were the white towers of Grbavica where the snipers skulked. I stared at them with the fear and hatred I always felt. The snipers must have gone, and the boards had come off most of the windows now. I’d always thought you were shot from there. It was 7 p.m. Time to do something else. In the old days we would have been in my room, using up the last of the light, doing little chores, if it were summer. In winter, we’d have been in bed, bed being the warmest place by far to be. Oh God. I can’t think about this anymore.
“Reeeeally?” said the blonde.
I nodded. “Really,” I said. “And what do you do?”
“I live here,” she said. “I’m on a Fulbright.” I remember Fulbrights. Clever Americans do them. Clare, who ended up working for an American arts paper in Belgrade, she’d come out on a Fulbright – a PhD in Yugoslav humour, she said. Then she told me all the joke characters had become national politicians, and the jokes went away. They came back, she said, a year into the war. She was so glad that Mujo and Suljo had survived the war.
“I’m studying war crimes, you know; the Tribunal?” said the blonde; she had that polite East Coast rich girl voice, like glass beads dropping on a plate; she handed me a card, with her name on it: Amy something. “Whether post-conflict external justice systems ease re-integration. I get to hang out at mass graves a lot,” she gave a little self-deprecating smile. “And Fenella,” she waved at the brunette, who smiled prettily, “is doing regional variations in violence.”
The brunette was staring at me with the hunger I remembered in myself.
“You were here then? Could I talk to you?” I found myself nodding, paralysed.
“There are so many questions I want to ask. I mean… why in some villages did they just herd the Muslims onto buses and steal all t
heir stuff, and in others…”
They forced them to bite each other’s testicles off at gunpoint?
Why indeed. Weeping women clutching their children and their handbags, their wedding rings gone, as they clambered onto buses under the eyes of the bearded men with guns; the burnt out mosques; the mad voices saying “the Muslims were building rockets”, pointing at the charred rubble of the felled minarets; the rows of zombies in the cattle sheds at the camps at Omarska, ribs showing like ladders through their rags, and the reddened bruises welling on their cheeks. The mayor of the village near Banja Luka whose name I can’t recall, showing me the list he’d drawn of things the Muslims couldn’t do, like fish, or meet in groups of four, or leave their homes for twenty-two hours a day: “Because we like our Muslims,” he’d said, staring with his Steven Berkoff eyes. “It’s for their own protection.” And his Muslims were the lucky ones. “Could I? Would you mind?”
I nodded again. I literally couldn’t speak.
The blonde looked at her watch, “Oh, we’ve got to go. We’ve got a meeting…”
The brunette gave her a nudge.
“Come too if you like; it’s the Mothers of Foca…”
Foca: fucking freaky-deaky fucking town in a gorge in the mountains. That mayor, that flat-faced pig, boasting to Muffy and me: “We used to have twenty thousand Muslims in this town and now we have one and he’s in prison.” The madman in the greengrocer screaming “Genocide, genocide, Tito and Arkan made this genocide!” While everyone else stared at the tomatoes and pretended he didn’t exist. The woman who’d followed us in the street to secretly say: “I miss my Muslim friends.”
The Mothers, they said, were a refugee pressure group. I shook my head. They’ve asked me out to dinner as well, but I might do that.
Last night I ended up in a bar on my own, staring wistfully at a group of men in the white trousers and shirts that meant they were EC monitors. They’d all been talking about their day in Tuzla. I can’t imagine being able to come back from Tuzla in a day. I wish I had recognised one of them, then I could have gone over and talked. But they were all strangers to me. You used to tease me about the way I’d pick up strangers in the war; but it was easy, we were all here for the same reason. We’d talk the war, why and where and what would happen next, and order bottle after bottle of wine; then I’d try to remember what they’d said the next day. But it’s not like the war. I can’t go up and talk to strange men any more. I went back to my hotel. Bosnian TV was playing Gone with the Wind. I wept for Scarlett’s stupidity and her lost brutal Eden, then I ate some of the chocolate I’d bought at Heathrow and went to sleep.
Mujo was arrested and sent to prison. After a while, his wife, Fata, received a letter: “Dear Fata, everything the policeman said is true. I have two crates of ammunition, lots of rifles and grenades buried in the garden.” Fata was scared and took the letter to the police. The police came and searched the garden but they found nothing. Soon, a second letter came: “Dear Fata, now where the policemen were digging, plant the potatoes.”
V
I went to see you this afternoon. I walked up the hill to the Martyrs’ Cemetery. The cobblestones were baking in the late summer sun and beneath my feet, a stream gurgled its way down from the hills, funnelled through some culvert of Austrian waterworks. I glanced at Robert’s house as I turned into the graveyard, but his windows stayed quiet.
There you were. Two-thirds of the way through the rows of white marble posts: Amir Hadzibegovic, 1964–94.
I’d bought you some flowers but now they seemed silly. I’d never have given you flowers when you were alive. I should have bought you a shirt, or a pair of dark glasses.
I put the flowers on the grass, and sat down by your head. Oh Amir… What happened? Why did you die? What didn’t you tell me? What was it? What didn’t I let you say? Did I never listen? Did I just make you what I wanted to believe you were? Should I stay, should I try and find out? Do you want me to? Or do you think, like Robert so obviously does, like your poor mother – oh God your mother – that it’s none of my business; that I should go home and leave your ghost alone. What would you want? What would you want for your daughter? It’s not Aida so much; she’s left you now… But Nermina, what do you want her to know?
The boy buried to your right was 1976–94; Haris, on your left, born 1975. At least you had lived longer than them. I gave each of them a flower. Haris had a plastic wreath glued to his stone, its purples and reds rain-washed grey-mauve.
Did you know someone wanted to kill you? What you said, that last night, at the party – when you asked me to run away with you – was it not about me, was it just because you wanted to escape?
I gave the flowers to a dead woman a few graves away and walked back down the hill.
One of Sarajevo’s new businessmen was arrested and put in jail. “How did you end up here?” asked his cell-mate. “My son wrote a school essay on ‘my father’s profession’,” he said.
VI
I took Amy up on her invitation for dinner; I couldn’t face another evening like last night. She rattled off the name of some restaurant.
“I don’t know where that is.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Ohhhhhhh.”
“I don’t think it was here when I was last here.”
“It’s been here a while.”
“Well maybe it was shut in those days.”
“You think so? We’ll be there at eight. It has a great view.”
I thought I’d get directions from Sabina so I could walk. But she wasn’t drooping silently in Reception. Instead, the TV was shouting German news and even the fountain in the courtyard had splurged into life. There was a woman engrossed in piles of paper, in the office behind the desk. She was shorter than Sabina, by four or five inches, and built from a different stock – thicker arms, thicker legs, broader hips and breasts, all squeezed into her shiny black dress. A child was playing with an Action Man at her feet. I coughed, hello, and when she turned and smiled her teeth were wonky behind the immaculate lips.
“Do you know the Francuski Dom?” I asked – I think that’s what Amy had said. “How long would it take to walk?”
“It’s miles up there…” The gold chains jangled against her breasts as she waved her arm. “Too far. I’ll order a cab. How is your room?” she had a slight American twang.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“You’re a friend of Valida’s?” I nodded.
“She’s my cousin. I’m Didi,” but Valida had said she wasn’t a cousin, what had Valida said?… “This is my hotel. Anything you want, you come to me.”
The child had followed her as far as the doorway.
“Is he yours? He’s lovely.” He looked about four or five, with dark hair and deep Sarajevo eyes.
“My Sulejman,” she smiled. “Come and say hello.” He came forward and held up a tiny hand. I crouched down and shook it.
“Hello Sulejman. That’s a magnifcent name. Dragomir je.”
Didi smiled. “This lady is a friend of your cousin Valida who married the Englishman.” That’s right – Valida had said Didi had been married to her cousin.
“Hello,” he gazed at me with those huge dark eyes, then turned to his mother. She patted him and pushed him back to his toy soldier.
“You speak beautiful English,” I said; her smile faded.
“I learnt it in the war,” she said.
My taxi wiggled higher and higher to where Sarajevo straggled into villages, up to the pine trees and the old frontline. At a tiny lane, the driver stopped and pointed up. Steps had been carved into the side of the road, and a handrail screwed into the nearest house.
It must be a death trap, in winter, I thought, as I climbed the last twenty yards to a fresh pine door in a fresh cement wall. I rang the bell and turned and saw the view: it must have been a death trap in the war.
The door buzzed open, but I hardly noticed who let me in. Opposite me was a wall
of glass, as new as the windows in your mother’s street. I moved towards it as if I had no choice. Below was the whole of Sarajevo, deepening into dusk. I could see your flat; the Holiday Inn, laid out like a map; the trams zipping along the embankment; now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t cars on Marshal Tito. Robert’s house. This was a sniper’s view. I swallowed. This place could never have existed in the war.
“Hi! I told you it had a great view,” it was Amy. I turned back into a pine-planked room of guns and plastic fruit. The walls were in the fresh pine of a bunk-bed showroom. A pair of swords were crossed over the lintel. Above the fireplace and at other points hung daggers and some, mainly ancient, but probably still deadly guns, all interwoven with the tendrils of plastic vines, or placed on doilies of red-embroidered lace.
She and Fenella were at a window table, with a man with his back to me.
“So, have you been here before?” Amy said, as I walked up.
“Oh no,” I said. “This place couldn’t have existed in the war.”
“Reeally?” Amy glanced at the man next to her; he shook his head. She looked surprised, but she didn’t question him.
“This is Zach,” said Amy. “He was here in the war too.” My heart leapt, but as he turned I realised that I didn’t know him at all. He had short mousey hair and was about thirty or so. Obviously American, in that indefinably clean way.
Amy and Fenella were looking at us with hungry expectation.
“Hi,” I said blankly. He looked blankly back.
Their faces had fallen. Zach and I regarded each other with mutual wariness.
“Fenella was sure you two would be old war buddies…” Amy trailed.
“It was quite a big war,” I said, holding out my hand. “Molly Taylor.”
“Zach Aldridge.” His name meant nothing either.
“Oh well,” said Fenella.
“Anyway,” said Zach. He nodded me to a chair, but he didn’t smile. “Sit down. Would you like a drink?” He had a beer. The girls had water.
“I’d love some wine.”
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