I could have gone the back way, the way we always went. But I didn’t. I had had enough of the past. I walked across Sniper Alley, narrowly avoiding being run over, and then down towards the river. The tears were filling my eyes again. I couldn’t believe the world was all still there. Except the people had gone. It was like visiting an empty stage, or a dream I sometimes have, when I go back to school and everyone’s strange. I was so achingly happy there, with you. I brushed a tear away and snapped my dark glasses back down over my face to hide my tears.
What am I going to do? It’s been over a day since I saw your mother. What on earth am I going to do? What am I doing here, if I’m not doing that? What was I ever doing here at all? Why did I come?
Muffy had her theory that all foreign correspondents came from broken homes. We’d swapped stories, one long hot car journey, hers of martinis being hurled across Philadelphia swimming pools, and a mother so divorced she could hardly remember her own surname; Juan, the Reuters photographer, who was actually American, but whose father had fallen in love with Hemingway and left his family to write poetry in Spain; then we’d gone on to continue the conversation at dinner: Valida’s poor Henri, from some long-abandoned Francophone colony, who betrayed her for the rotting corpses of Rwanda; the white Kenyan, who got so homesick he had to go back to Mogadishu; the stringer, whose divorced father had made him live out of a car; my dead mother, and my father in embassies all over the world. Was it nothing to do with seeing all those refugees?
But Phil’s home wasn’t broken; his father had just been poor. And Robert’s parents were still together and running the Slavonic Studies department at somewhere like Keele. So that wasn’t the reason they ended up here.
Then there was Ray, the mad ex-US marine, who said he was a journalist but never filed a story, and ended up spending his war with your long-haired friend in his trench.
Oh God. Please don’t let me end up like Ray.
There’s no-one here for me anymore. They’re all in East Timor – that was on the news today, at least I think it was East Timor, but my German’s not very good. And everyone who’s not somewhere else is dead.
I turned and started walking back into town. I was on a funny little street; Turkish cottages, tiny garages, and yards full of nettles. I’d never been here before. It must have been the heart of the Bosnian frontline. Maybe the nettles were still mined.
I carried on walking; past the Presidency again, the mosque, down a side street, into a little cement square. There was a book- shop, with English titles in the window, and a café with tables outside, where young men were holding forth earnestly to nodding girls with aubergine-coloured hair.
I walked on. Three streets down, to my left, a ruined building stood. You could tell it had once been a lovely thing, one of those palaces the Austrians built in the centre of town. But its façade was pitted, its windows still boarded up, and nobody had bothered to plug the shell holes with cement. Then I saw the sign, Hotel Europa. The doors were boarded and chained with a double padlock.
It had been bitter cold and still, and the woodsmoke had hung on the air, and the snipers hardly seemed to breathe on the mountains around. Every window of the hotel had been boarded over; out of each frame, between the bubble wrap, poked the silver chimney of a UNHCR stove.
We’d sat in the car in the street outside. “We’d come here every Sunday for cakes and coffee,” you’d said. Then you’d taken my hand and led me through the boarded-glass doors, the curved art deco bronze handle twisted by war. “Let’s pretend it’s like the old days,” you’d said.
“We’d take our coats off, and hand them to one girl, behind mahogany counter. And she’d hang them up, on one long metal rack, with lots of other fur coats, and give us brass tag, and my mother would check her reflection, in huge, gold mirror, and we’d walk through into dining room.” You pulled me through.
“It smelled of coffee and chocolate cake. They were on trolley over there, just under window, and there were little round tables with white cloths, and chairs were blue velvet. Walls were panelled, with mahogany and blue silk and blue velvet curtains hung at windows. We could see Mount Jahorina covered in snow. And there was string quartet, who played Austrian waltzes, but you could hardly hear them, because of voices. All our friends would be here, and everyone would be talking. All Sarajevo came to Hotel Europa on Sundays.”
You had stopped. It wasn’t just the cakes and the band and the friends that were no more. The velvet curtains had gone and the blue silk; where the panelling had been, only brick remained. The doors had gone, and so had the mahogany counter, and you could see straight into the lobby through the skeleton of the old wall, and light poked through the beams from the fl oors above: the plaster, along with all the wood, the cloth, with everything else, had been taken for warmth or food. The room was gutted, Jahorina boarded out of sight and where once the air had been thick with coffee and chocolate, now it was pee and stale sweat and acrid smoke at the throat. In the icy darkness, a floor full of women and children, with the flowered headscarves of the hills, stared up at us from their piles of rags.
What happened to them all? The women and children. They can’t have just gone home. They all came from those eastern Bosnian villages long lost now to greater Serb-dom: Rogatica, Foca, Visegrad. Are they still here? The planks were still on the windows but the stove pipes had gone. There’s no-one here now; there couldn’t be.
I tried to peer in, leant against the boarded windows, straining through the cracks, but I could make nothing out. I put my ear to the plank, but the only rustling I heard was of rats, or cardboard being buffeted by the breeze.
Amir. Oh Amir. Oh God. What am I going to do? Oh God, I wish it was that day again. I wish we could be back in the war. I could be that girl again, the one who fell in love with you, whose life was an adventure full of hope. At least that girl thought that things had to get better.
I tried to pull myself together but I couldn’t. So I just gave up. Great snotty blubbery tears coursed down my cheeks. My face convulsed with the kind of sobs that dark glasses can’t begin to hide. I walked into a courtyard and sat on a lump of concrete and wailed against the wall, rocking to and fro, my hands covering my face, occasionally wiping snot away; wailing for my past and for a future I can’t imagine, for you, and for her, for the girl who’d loved you. I don’t know what to do: I don’t know how to find out how you died. I don’t even know if I should try. What will become of me? Will I be stuck, sad and mad like this, till the day I die?
I felt a tap on my shoulder and I looked up. A woman was holding a glass of water out to me. She had a face like those women I’ve seen in the street: scarred with misery.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” But my shoulders were still heaving and I had to wipe my face.
“Thank you.” I drank the glass of water, the confines of normality pushing me back into shape.
“You’re foreign.”
“Yes. I’m from England.”
“I heard you. I live here.” She pointed to a window on the ground floor.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
There was a pause, and then she said: “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
A cup of coffee with a stranger is probably what I need right now. She asks me in. I watch the ritual, the little jug on the stove, the grounds spooned in: “How come you speak Bosnian?”
“I’m a journalist. I was here during the war.” I pause, then I say: “This is my first time back.”
“The war… Oh,” she sighs, and passes a hand across her face. “The war was terrible.”
“Yes.” I could hardly tell her I was crying because I wished I was back there.
Then she told me her story and I was doubly ashamed. She had sent her children out at the start of the war, when she thought it wouldn’t last. They’d gone to a cousin in Zagreb. Halfway through the war, the cousin had emigrated to Canada and her chil
dren had gone too. Her brother, who had fought in the army, had been killed by a shell, on his day off, in the street. It was fairly normal, as war stories go. Her parents had survived but had never been the same. Her father had a heart attack two years after the war. Her old mother now lived in what was the children’s room. Last year her husband died of a heart attack too. Heart attacks and cancer, she said, lighting up a cigarette, were killing everybody now. She’d worked for an insurance company before the war, but she couldn’t get work, and her pension was only 170KM a month; the only people with money were criminals or those who’d been refugees in Germany in the war.
“The war was terrible,” she said, with a sad smile. “But in the war, at least we were all the same.”
I thanked her for the coffee and went out into the street. You spoilt cow, I screamed at myself. How can you weep because this terrible war is over? How can you weep because no-one will help you find out what happened to the man you loved when he has been dead for five years and he left you anyway and what difference will it make to anyone if you never find out. And why are you so vile that all you want to do is leave this woman as soon as possible, before she brings her mother out and you get stuck here all day, having other people’s misery being poured like treacle into your brain?
I wandered back to Michele’s, the café on Feradiya, for another cup of coffee. I don’t drink coffee like this in the UK. I live on herbal tea. Maybe this is partly why I am feeling so strange. I drank my coffee and then I thought of you. Then slowly, I knew what I had to do.
I had to stay. I had to find out. If I run away, I will only have to come back. Maria may not care, but then Maria is definitely not herself at the moment. As for Valida, she did not have your or my best interests at heart. Why should she? Aida’s her sister. I have to do this for you. But also for me. For my peace of mind.
But where would I start, if no-one would help me? Where could I go? I still didn’t know how you actually died.
Then I remembered Osman. Phil called him the Tallyman. He saw everyone who died and wrote their names down in his Book of the Dead.
Two pensioners were sitting in the park, watching pretty girls walking past in miniskirts.
“What’s going on?” said the first pensioner.
“This is the sexual revolution,” said the other.
“Typical. We’re always having revolutions in Bosnia and we never have any weapons.”
VIII
I walked past the eternal flame, in its concrete doughnut wreath, at the end of Marshal Tito Street. The inscriptions were still to the heroes of Yugoslavia: 1941–45. There wasn’t anything about the siege. I walked past the old department store, still sealed off by mine tape, in its weed-strewn piazza where so many people were shot. The same two old men were still sitting on their benches, as yesterday, as I turned to walk up to the hospital. I shot a glance up to where your street was, but carried on up the hill.
I was worried for a moment that I would not recognise the mortuary; I was beginning to learn that what you carry in your memory is not necessarily true. But it was just the same: the white stucco house, below the hospital, built by the Austrians in the shade of a tree; the chipped flowers around the door, the graveyard spilling out through the football stadium below.
I never saw your face that day; Valida said there was no point. Just your grey-green toe poking out of the sheet. Why would I want to see your face, your lovely face, a mess of splintered flesh and bone? I’d seen too many shot faces in the war.
I never saw your face… for a moment my breath caught. Was that what this was about? Maybe you hadn’t died at all. But… no… that couldn’t be right. Maria was a woman who knew her only son was dead.
There was no answer when I knocked at the mortuary door. I tried the handle, but the double doors were locked. I waited outside, not knowing quite what to do – Osman had always been in during the war. He even used to sleep here most of the time.
A van pulled up round the side, black with gold writing; it would have been recognisable as an undertaker’s van anywhere. Two men got out, with blue overalls and the gnarled faces of the hills, and opened a pair of ecclesiastically vast wooden doors, as though the architects had been all too aware that this was one step on the road to eternity; inside the mortuary was marble, in cool grey light. On the fluted stone table on which I’d last seen you, another body lay humped beneath its sheet.
“Excuse me.” The men turned. “Is Osman Muhovic here?”
“No.” said one. Oh no… Maybe he had gone back to being the driver for the Sarajevo football team; that’s what Phil said he’d done before the war. That he’d been a grave-digger on the side, and when the war started the Serb mortuary director fled. Osman, the grave-digger, was forced to step in. Osman said that nobody else wanted the job. Or maybe he’d just gone… whoever was able to seemed to have got out, and he must have made good contacts in the war. Maybe he was living in Canada or Australia now.
“Does he still work here?”
“He’s left.” They glanced at each other and shrugged. Both his sons had both been killed. What would keep him here?
I almost didn’t hear the man say: “He should be back at two.”
I almost skipped out of the gates and doubled back down along the street. Suddenly I was starving. I looked up at the men, to smile and wave, but one was grinding out his cigarette and the other had started walking back into the mortuary where their next cargo lay.
He was late, of course, because this is the Balkans, but it was a beautiful afternoon. There was a market below the mortuary, beneath the old flyover, above the little park where the trees had come back. It hadn’t been there in the war, of course. I bought a grilled chicken breast – they never had those in the war – with onions, in flat Muslim bread – and sat on the mortuary steps, staring down at the view: an old woman toiling from the market to the tower blocks which crawled up the opposite side of the hill, cars curling round the dual carriageway up from the valley floor, the high walls of the American Embassy, where the British general’s Residency used to be, and a young man walking through the football stadium where the war graves lay, its yellow markers now replaced, like yours, with ranks of white stone. The call of the muezzin drifted over the town; I don’t remember the muezzin in the war.
A car drew up, and a door banged. I packed up my lunch, and went back to the steps.
The door was open and inside was the same smell. Not the reek of high summer during the war; just that sweet echo of death that lurked in the nostrils, on cold days, when people didn’t rot too much.
There was a man at Osman’s desk. Perhaps it was him. He looked like the plumper brother of the man I used to know: familiar but different, like a TV celebrity in the flesh. The hair had gone grey, but the cheekbones and the deep-set eyes were still there.
“Gospodin Muhovic?” I said.
“Da.”
“Osman Muhovic?” Just in case it was his brother.
“Da.” He turned: it was him. He was just… different. Less miserable, and much less thin. Perhaps he looked normal.
“It’s Molly Taylor.”
Maybe I looked different. He obviously had to think. But then I’d left, five years ago, with all the other journalists.
“The English journalist. From the Herald. Do you remember me?”
Then he beamed: “Of course!” He pumped my hand, pressing it, and clapped my back. As though he could not grin wide enough to show his pleasure that he and I had survived.
“Come in, sit down!”
There was still a folded blanket on his sofa, as there had always been, but I can’t imagine he had to sleep here now. The planks had gone from the windows. Suddenly I felt as if you were with me too. I glanced at the sofa as though you might suddenly appear, and the cushion would be all dented and bulging round your ghostly backside.
“I thought you might not be here. I thought perhaps you go back to your old job with the football team…”
“This is m
y job. It became my job in the war. Now I take my grandchildren to watch football instead.”
He offered me coffee, then pulled out his wallet, and extracted two photographs. “The son of my son,” he said, and showed me a dark little boy. The other photograph showed a child, nearly the same age, but the print was wrinkled with years of love. “He was born five months after his father was killed. Look. They are exactly the same.”
I was glad that the coffee arrived just then. I took a sip – it was espresso. Not the gritty little cups he served in the war.
“My other son is married.”
But both your sons were dead, I thought.
“He has a little boy and a girl.” I had got it wrong for all those years but I was glad he still had one son who was alive.
He was talking about his home, a cottage, up on the old frontline. “We went back to it; in the war we lived here. It was too dangerous to live there… we got a loan to buy sheep. Now we have lots of sheep and cows,” he was smiling. I never saw him smile, in the war. All those bodies, every day, must have taken their toll. All the grief. How awful to have to wade every day through other people’s fresh grief.
“I told my wife, you don’t have to do this, run the farm. We don’t need the money. But she says she likes to work…” His smile ebbed. “It stops her thinking about our son.”
Then he asked about me, so I told him a little about my job – a magazine, different kind of work, and he asked if I were married, and I said, “No,” and he said, “Maybe one day.” I said, “I hope so.”
Then there was a silence, when he waited for me to tell him why I was here. I felt shy for a moment; as if, now that I had finally found someone who could help me, I could not start. I was worried he would react the same way as Maria and Robert.
“Do you remember my boyfriend – my interpreter – Amir Hadzibegovic?” I said. “He died in… in 1994.”
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