“I remember you coming in. I remember everyone. And the ones I don’t are written down in my book.” He leant over to the side of his desk, and pulled it out. The same marbled cover; the same label with the dates. It lay between us but neither of us moved. For a moment Valida was here, and I had just heard Phil walk in, and Maria was sobbing into her hands on the sofa. I wiped a tear away with my hand. I seemed to spend my whole time here in tears.
“Your book, does it say how people died?” Osman shook his head.
“No, their name, and when, and where.”
I was so convinced, I remembered, that I almost squawked: “Are you sure?”
“Oh yes.”
“But I remember you once showing me a group, all together. You said they had been killed by the same shell.” It had been the first time I’d met him, that first day with Phil, an hour or so before I met you… “You knew it had been a shell…”
“That’s because they all died at the same time, in the same place. Had to be a shell – besides, I saw their bodies,” he said. “I had a group of Chetniks once, brought in here. Dead Chetniks. They’d been killed by a shell. One of them was Mladic’s son-in-law. He had a nickname – the Pixie. People came to see them; to see if they were really dead. I was so angry. I said: you never bother to come and see our people.”
But you are telling me about him, not about your people, I thought, because he was remarkable, and death for your people by then was not. “Do you remember the date?” he asked.
I could still smell the heater, feel the scrape of Valida’s coat on my cheek: “October 27th.”
He opened his book and started flicking through, black loopy writing in neat double columns. I could only see names, but he knew their faces: blank eyes, clammy, blood-drained skin, shards of bone, edged in crimson and yellow fat, the green-grey bruises of violent death.
“Hadzibegovic, Amir, 30, here we are. Sniper Alley. The UN brought him in. But you’re wrong. It was October 28th.”
“No. It was the 27th. I saw him that night. Just before…”
“28th… my book is never wrong.” He peered at the page. I couldn’t be bothered to argue. It was the next day that they brought you in, after all.
“Can you remember how he died?” Osman shrugged and stared at the page again. “From the place I would say he was killed by a sniper.”
I looked at your name in the fading black ink. There was nothing else. The book lay open on the table. Neither of us wanted to close it even though it could give us nothing more. I took a sip of my coffee. “Osman…” suddenly with Osman, saying this wasn’t hard. Death wasn’t embarrassing to him.
“When Amir died, did you ever think there was something… strange?”
“Strange… what do you mean?”
I took a deep breath, because I didn’t want to sound like a nut. Then I said: “I met someone the other day who told me that Amir wasn’t shot by a sniper.” There was no suspicion in his face; he looked unsurprised. “That someone just shot him…”
“Maybe. I don’t know…” It did not interest him at all.
“But that means he must have been murdered!”
He shrugged: “In one way everyone who died in the war was murdered.” He looked down at the picture of his son.
“I mean, the people who were killed by snipers, by shells, yes, obviously they too did not die natural deaths, but they were war deaths, weren’t they? Deaths that became normal in the war. But Amir, they say he wasn’t killed like that. They thought he’d been shot at close range.”
“And all the others,” said Osman, looking up from his photograph.
“What?” I said.
“The others. They were murdered too.”
“What others?”
“It wasn’t just the sniping and the grenades that killed people. I had people in here, every day, dead of cold, of hunger, of illnesses that would not have killed them in peace. I had a lot more suicides during the war. In a normal year, I would have, say one thousand people in here. In the first year of the war, I had ten thousand.
“They try in the Hague but only for… extraordinary… crimes. Sniping, shelling, they are supposed to be ordinary in war. My son’s death was supposed to be ordinary.”
Osman was no longer looking at me. He was staring at the two photographs still on his desk.
I left it for ten seconds or so before I said: “If there was something odd about his death, wouldn’t you have known?”
“No.” He looked up as he spoke, but that was just politeness.
“Surely the police would have asked you questions?”
“No.”
“Do you know if there was any kind of investigation? Any trial?”
“No.”
So what did he know? As if he heard me he went on: “All I do is get the bodies ready for their families to bury.”
Someone must have known because someone had told Robert and Valida. My fingernails had been digging in my palms. And Maria, she had told me to leave things alone. And Hal. I hadn’t made this up.
“So who would know? Who would know how he died?” Who else was there? Osman was the Lord of the Dead of Sarajevo.
“Dr Radic of course,” Osman said in an obvious voice.
“Who?” My hands uncurled.
“Radic.”
“Who’s he?” I had literally never heard of him.
“He does the autopsies. He did all the autopsies during the war.” How on earth could I not have heard of him?
“Would he then, this Dr… Radic… if there had been something… strange, would he have mentioned something to you?”
Osman gave the corpse-joke laugh. “Oh yes, a normal person would have said something to me. But not Radic…”
“What?”
“Dr Radic only talks to the dead.”
“Eh?” I thought I’d got my Serbo-Croat, sorry Bosnian, in a muddle, when Osman went on:
“At the start of the war we had an argument. Dr Radic did not want journalists to come to the mortuary,” he waved a hand round his kingdom; so that’s why I never heard of Radic before. “I told him, I’m boss, I want journalists here. I want them to take pictures. And after that he hardly spoke to me again.”
Well, everyone went a little strange in the war. And Radic – from the sound of his name, I’d say Dr Radic was probably a Serb, and for a Serb to stay in Sarajevo, that was a tough and brave call. I thought I might cut Dr Radic some slack. “Do you know where he is? Do you think I could see him?”
“Try. He still works here. He’s up at the university at the moment. But we still don’t talk to each other.”
I thought that Radic wouldn’t talk to me but when I rang, and explained what I wanted from him, he said: “Of course, come now if you like.” He hadn’t even asked me my name.
I was halfway up the hill to the university before I understood: I was going to re-introduce him to an old friend from the war.
Mujo was ill and went to the doctor. “You will live for another year,” the doctor said.
“But on what, my dear doctor?” Mujo replied.
IX
Radic looked more like Father Christmas than a man who spent his life with the dead. His offi ce was light, and modern, with potted plants and a bank of computers, paper clips and plastic pots full of multi-coloured pens. He welcomed me and offered me coffee. It was three o’clock and my sixth cup of the day.
On one wall were rows of shelves, piled high with multi-coloured marbled files. Another was glass from the waist up – possibly even pre-war glass, since it faced away from the frontline into a garden. Through it, the shins of his students walked by: the Medical Faculty, like so much of Sarajevo, was carved into the side of a hill.
He pulled out a tatty pack of Drina cigarettes and offered me one. I turned it down and pulled out my Silk Cut.
“Silk Cut,” he said. “I never seen these.”
“They don’t sell them here. They are far too mild.”
“No, let us sp
eak English. Good practice for me. So how can I help?” There was no embarrassment, no awkward sympathy; we’d never even met before, so there was no tear-swelling, overwhelming surge of relief.
“I have a friend who was killed in the war,” I said. “I want to know how he died.”
Radic waved a hand like a showman lining up his girls. “I have everyone here. Whoever you want. I am just putting all war onto computer.”
He turned to the keyboard.
“Look at this: 2,200 post mortems, 715 exhumations, 183 external examinations…this is just on computer. I have done 18,000 autopsies in my life… So your friend, what was his name? When did he die?”
“Hadzibegovic Amir. He died on 27th October 1994.”
Hadzibegovic, Hadzibegovic, ah… No, Hadzibegovic Selma. February 1993. See look, she was killed by a shell.” He clicked on her file and a photograph came up. I wish I could say that I looked away in horror, but I couldn’t stop staring at the orange bruises on her skin and the pulpy stumps where her legs had been.
“He was called Amir.” I sounded faint.
“So not Selma…” Maybe she was a cousin… If she had been a close relative, I am sure you would have said.
“Hadzibegovic… Hadzibegovic… No. No. He is not here.”
“But you said you had everybody!”
“Oh, yes, I have. Keep calm. But not everybody on computer.” He walked over to the files and trailed his finger along their spines.
“You said 1994?”
“That’s right. October. 27th, no, 28th…”
He pulled out a green and black marbled folder, and started flicking through its yellowing pages. His cigarette burnt unnoticed in its ashtray. I remembered the cheap, thin paper from the war. The words were scrawled in faint biro, or typed in faded ribbon, both sides of every sheet of paper, nothing left to waste. In the middle of each page was a little drawing, a head, a leg, a torso; a star mark for the wound, and the whole… limb, body part, whatever… at the centre of a web of lines.
“August, September, October… Here we are.” He laid it in front of me and continued to talk but I wasn’t listening; I was staring at your head. Back, face on and profile, each in its biro basket, with tiny figures written down the side.
It wasn’t as bad as the photographs on the computer. It could have been any young man’s head. At the nape of your neck, Radic had drawn a star mark for the wound. Where your hair used to curl. It must have been caught up in the wound.
On profile, a diagonal line ran straight through your brain, from the nape of your neck, to the centre of your forehead; tiny rows of numbers flanked your skull.
Across your face, horizontal and vertical lines intersected just above your brows, and more tiny figures were written by the side of your ear.
There was a click. I looked up to see Radic opening the locks on an old leather bag. Inside, silver prods and spikes, and filigree saws were laid out in rows on purple velvet trays. He pulled out a right-angled ruler. One end was chipped, and heavily stained. He poked the end of it into your brain.
“The bullet went in at base of skull and travelled up through brain, to here…” jab into your forehead, “where bullet ended its journey.”
“It stopped in his head?”
“Yes.”
“So his face would have looked OK?” It was all I could think of to say.
“Why not? You must understand, with this kind of bullet…” He pointed to a steamed pudding-shaped bullet drawn on a graph. “I don’t how you call in your language. We say… zatupljeno.” It meant nothing to me. Dr Radic was looking at me hopefully but I don’t know what steamed pudding-shaped bullets are called in my language either. He sighed, “Makes very big hole in brain. Look,” the ruler plonked again on the broad front. “It goes flat,” he put his fingers in the shape of a ten pence piece. “All way through. So, it stops soon. If had been normal bullet,” he drew a pointy bullet shape on a yellow post-it note, “then hole is much smaller. And bullet comes out other side.” He put the biro where the two lines crossed just above your eyebrows.
I was feeling a little sick. “I thought rifle bullets went through anything…” Walls, I’d been told. For hundreds of yards. You thought you were safe inside but you weren’t.
“Rifle? This was not rifle! How is possible? Look at where is entry wound!” the ruler pushed into the nape of your neck. “To be shot here, like this, with rifle, man must be lying face down on the ground. This man was found sitting in car. Look, here, bullet fired at… apsolutno blizu… I don’t know how you say…” He put two fingers up to his skull.
“Point blank?” That I could guess.
“Yes! Is .22 bullet fired at point blank. The powder disperses, further gun is from wound.”
“So what was it then?”
“Pistol, of course! I tell you as I told police.” Police? “He was in his car. Somebody in back seat put gun against his head and pulled the trigger. This is like execution… Very professionally done.”
“So, he wasn’t killed by the Serbs?” Was all I could say. Even though of course I thought Radic was Serb.
“No! I don’t think. Not unless they sneak across the Miljacka…” He wriggled a sneaky little mime.
“Were there lots of… executions like this in Sarajevo then?”
“No… no, very, very rare. I only remember one other, in Sarajevo that was like some kind of criminal type.” A criminal type. I sat there so long Radic turned back to his computer.
“Did you talk to the police?” He nearly jumped when I spoke.
“Of course! I had to talk to the police.”
“Why?”
“They come all times when someone is shot.”
“What, every time anyone was shot? In the war?” And as I said that I remembered you telling me that the police treated every death in the war as murder.
“Peace, war. Is same. Judge, police inspector, you know, from criminal police. And technical man to take the photographs.”
I waited for nearly twenty seconds before I said: “So, did they catch the killer?”
“What?” He was back on his computer, and he turned and looked blank.
“Was there a trial?”
He shrugged, “No, I think no.”
“Don’t you know?”
He checked his notes. “No. I think no. I never had to give evidence.”
“Did they try to catch someone?”
“How do I know?” He shrugged again. “It’s not my job to know about investigations.”
“Well, didn’t they come and ask you more questions?”
He looked down at his notes once more, and said, “No. I don’t think so.”
I thanked him for his time, and he smiled again. “My pleasure. I always love to talk about these things.” It was then that I thought of something else.
“Is it true,” I asked, “that if you have the bullet you can identify which gun it was fired from?”
“Of course!” he said, half amazed that anyone needed to ask. From the bullet, and from the cartridge, he said.
“No cartridge, whoever killed him must have picked it up. It falls to ground when bullet is fired. I gave the bullet to the police when I extracted it from brain.”
“Would they still have it?”
“I think so. Is evidence in murder case.” But there must have been a million guns in Sarajevo then.
When I got to the door, I turned. Radic was deep inside some wound on his screen. I had to speak twice before he heard what I said.
“Isn’t it terribly dangerous to shoot someone in the head while they are driving? Dr Radic?” He jumped, but after he smiled up at me, he leant over and re-checked his notes.
“Not driving. He was in passenger seat.” You never let anyone drive your car.
“I tell you one thing though in which he was lucky,” he said, as an afterthought, as I turned back to the door.
“Lucky!” You were dead…
“His last meal was steak, red wine and
potatoes,” said Radic, as though I had not spoken.
Steak! “Are you sure?” There’d been no steak at that party. “When did he die then?”
“Between 1 and 4 a.m. Maybe.”
It was about 10.30 when the lights had cut, and maybe 10.35 when I pushed you away. At least two and a half hours for you to go and eat steak.
“Not once in all war for four years,” I heard Radic say, “did I eat meat.”
I knew, now, I absolutely knew, that you hadn’t stormed out to your car, after I’d sent you away, and driven down Sniper Alley straight into the sights of your killer. You had gone off and eaten steak with somebody else. And then you had been taken out and shot with a pistol in the back of the head.
It’s hard to rearrange your mind, when you’ve spent so long thinking something wrong. It’s like having your back realigned by a chiropractor. You get so used to being wonky that being straight feels strange.
I walked as far as Marshal Tito Street and sat down in the little park looking at the hills. The two old men were on their separate benches again. At my feet, a white turban-top tombstone poked out just above the ground. Maybe the earth would continue to swallow it – in another hundred years, there would be nothing left of it except a slight hardness, like a pimple, beneath the grass, or maybe all the tarmac and drains and officious guardianship of the modern world would freeze its slow descent.
Straight in front of me, as always, were the hills. This was what they had known, Maria and Robert and Valida and the hills; how you had died. It’s just that I went away and no-one told me. It hadn’t been the Serbs on the hills at all. Whatever I’d thought, whatever Maria said, it couldn’t have been my fault either.
It was possible that Dr Radic had lied. But I didn’t think so.
He wouldn’t see the point. You have to be interested in repercussions to lie and Dr Radic only cared about how the living met their deaths. He didn’t care about why, or what came next. But then he hadn’t loved you. I had.
How did the golden fish die?
Mujo went fishing and he caught a golden fish. The fish said: “Let me go. I am a magic fish and I will give you three wishes.” Mujo said: “C’mon, stop shittin’ me.” And the fish died from blocked gut.
The Girl in the Film Page 36