“No. I don’t have any children. And I’m not married.”
He looked a bit doubtful: “There is still time.” The door opened and a minion came in with coffee. He handed me a cup. “For you and me, it is just enough to be alive. In my job, you see lots of bad marriages anyway.”
“And in mine.” We both laughed. Then there was a silence.
“Sarajevo is so different now.”
“Very different! No more bang bang…” he mimed putting a rifle to his shoulder. “Is this your first time back?”
“Yes. Since the end of the war.”
He sighed. “Very different.” This time he didn’t laugh.
“Yes.”
I offered him a cigarette. He shook his head.
“I don’t smoke,” he said.
“You must be the only person in Sarajevo who doesn’t.”
“With one lung, you don’t smoke. Not if you want to live.” I put my cigarette out.
I’d forgotten he’d lost a lung when he’d been shot. This man smiling at me, the dark grey eyes under the head of greying hair, the heavy face, handing me a cup of coffee, sitting at his desk, would be dead now, if it hadn’t been for us driving by. His wife would be a widow. Their third child would not have been conceived. Someone else would be doing this job. What are they doing instead? But if he’d driven a couple of miles an hour faster or slower, or left the house a few minutes earlier or later, he wouldn’t have been hit at all.
We sipped our coffee and, first sip done, it was as though the starting whistle had blown; he put down his cup and said: “Your first time back. Why now? And why have you come to see me?”
I took a deep breath. He must have seen something in my face because he picked up a pen.
“Is this an official visit?”
“Yes, it’s official.”
Dragan kept me in the police station for over three hours; in his office, at first, but it didn’t take long to discover there had never been an investigation, so then we moved to an interview room downstairs. The thief from the tram was in the room next door. They wanted to know what Amir had said to me that night; who else I’d seen him talking to. I said it was a party, everyone was there. They wanted to know as many names as I could possibly remember. It’s four years ago, I said, and anyway, they’ve all gone. No-one’s here anymore. They’re all in Kosovo or New York or Jakarta or Washington. He’s looking for the policeman who was at the autopsy. Poor man. I hope it’s not… I don’t know what I hope. Maybe I have to hope that policeman was just a bad man.
I had to tell them you’d told me you’d said you wanted to leave Aida for me. Then they wanted to know what I was doing when you were killed. I had to give them Phil’s name and number as my alibi. They asked if I remembered anyone else who’d been with me that night. I told them about Robert. Then I remembered Andy, so I gave them his name; I was about to say I didn’t know where he was, when Dragan said, I know him, he works with me. For IPTF, whatever that is, doing organised crime.
“I hope he didn’t know they were going to kill him,” I said.
“It was a quick death,” said Dragan, and gave me another Kleenex.
“It wasn’t quick,” I said, after I’d blown my nose. “He was in the passenger seat. He never let anyone else drive that car.”
“It wasn’t a long drive. And there were no other marks on him.”
Dragan’s henchmen took it all down, clicking on their keyboards: it had been manual typewriters during the war. Dragan told me I’d got to stay in Sarajevo for the next few days. I hadn’t thought about that. I hope I can leave before my holiday runs out. But I can see their point. Technically, I could have killed you myself.
“What should I do?”
“What you like.” He laughed. “Be a tourist here. Just don’t ask questions any more. Don’t tell anyone you came to see me. Be careful. Your boyfriend was killed by a professional hit.”
“Why would a professional want to kill him?” I’d never even thought I might be in danger myself.
Balkan shrug. “That is what I hope we will find out.”
A man rushed in from downstairs with a small plastic bag. It was covered in that thick chalky dust from the war, like builder’s dust, the kind you get from demolition. Dragan wiped it as clean as he could and crooned at what he could see inside. It was a metal blob, smeared in browny-black. He brought it over to show the label to me.
“It’s the bullet,” he said. “It was in the evidence room. Look, here it is.” Amir’s name and the date were on the label, with some kind of reference number, and another name. “Now all we have to do is find this man.” He pointed to the second name.
I couldn’t read it. Elvir Something-ovic. “The policeman,” said Dragan.
“But why did he keep it? Why didn’t he throw it away?” I hoped Elvir wasn’t happily married with five children, this was the one bad thing he’d done, and I was going to ruin his life. “If he kept it, he always had a hold on the killer.”
“I nearly didn’t come,” I said, as Dragan walked with me to the door. “Nobody wanted me to… so many people died in the war…”
“None of them should have died,” said Dragan. “But he was not killed like the others.”
“Robert told me a lot of deaths happened like this in the war.”
“That isn’t true. This was like execution. In Sarajevo, that was very rare.”
We were standing in the lobby, where I’d seen the policemen grapple with the thief from the tram, this morning, or whatever time zone it had been that I had come in here.
“But if he was… executed…” I didn’t want to think this of you, but the way Maria and Robert were behaving, this had to be the case… “Maybe he had done something to deserve it… Maybe he deserved to die… Maybe it’s better not to dig it up…”
Dragan suddenly grabbed me and yanked me out into the street.
“See those hills?” His voice had switched to fury, as quick as the young man who’d nearly run me over a few days ago, and his fingers were digging into the flesh of my arm. With his other hand he pointed up the cliff, to where the old frontline used to be, where the road cut deep through the trees. Where the Serbs sat – used to sit – in their shacks, by the side of the road, drinking coffee, huddled under their fur hats, and point out Sarajevo to us, directly below, through the gun ports burrowed through barricades they’d built from the fir trees around them; the four C’s in a cross of Greater Serbia sprayed on the wooden walls; the man who’d come back to fight, from his job in a bubble-gum factory in Germany, who laughed at himself as he said, “What could I do, I’m a Serb…? I had to protect my family, my home… my little pig!”
“The men up there in those hills thought they had some ancient right on their side. Well, they were wrong. You cannot take justice into your own hands. Because then it is not justice, but revenge. And revenge breeds revenge. I am a Serb. I could have left Sarajevo in 1992. I chose to stay. And then I get shot.” He prodded at his chest.
“I could have stayed in Germany, where they medivac-ed me… I was offered a good job there. But I chose to come back. This is my town and I believe that my town needs men who believe in the law. If those – those – his face seethed, like a pot of boiling porridge, “those criminals”, he spat out, which was obviously the worst word he could think of, “in Pale had obeyed the law, this stupid war would never have happened and my country would still be one country. And believe me, my country was a very nice place to live.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Look at the cars…” They were parked everywhere, jumbled up on the pavements, fat and shiny Mercedes, Audis, great Cherokee jeeps, growling past. The street reeked of money and exhaust. “It is almost impossible to make enough money legally in this town to buy that kind of car… unless you work for an international organisation, of course… There is 30 per cent unemployment in Bosnia at the moment. People cannot live on the pensions they have…
“People who make a success at
crime don’t stop. They carry on until they are caught. That’s what I hope to catch with what you have brought me. What gave that man who shot your boyfriend the right to choose who he can shoot and who he can’t? I do not care what he thought your boyfriend might or might not have done. We all do things in war that perhaps we’d rather not do.”
I said: “But you were very brave in the war. You chose to stay.”
“My wife is Muslim. It is easier to be brave when you have no choice.”
“It’s easy to be brave if you don’t understand the consequences,” I said.
Mujo went to Germany and found a strange fruit machine. He put a coin in, pressed the button, and out came a cup of coffee. He put another coin in, pressed the button, and this time he got a Coca Cola. After an hour there was a huge queue behind him. One man said, “Please, can you let someone else use the machine?”
“No way,” said Mujo, “I’m still winning.”
XIII
I walked up along Feradiya towards Michele’s and sat down again, under the awning, two chintz chairs away from where I had been yesterday. It was packed. I’m sure I recognised some of the same people I’d walked past on my way to the police station three hours ago. But they probably recognised me by now as well.
What am I going to do about Robert? I’ve been told not to tell anyone but I ought to tell him. I ordered a cup of coffee. I couldn’t face Robert’s barrage of smugness unarmed. I rang Phil. I told him everything Dragan had said.
“You’re doing the right thing. Don’t worry about Robert. Even in the old days, he was a bit of a killjoy.”
“Where are you? Are you back in London?” I could hear a tannoy pontificating through his phone.
“No. I’m stuck at the airport. My flight’s delayed. It’s quite like old times.”
“Telling me. The police won’t let me leave Sarajevo.”
“Good God! I hadn’t thought of that.”
Neither had I. “What’s the airport like now?” There had been no tannoy on my last flight out, just a soldier with a parade ground voice, and a departure lounge built from sandbags and huge concrete blocks. They’d fought hard for the airport, in the early days of the war, and somewhere, apparently, the wrecked remains of the airport buildings had stood but it had always been too dangerous, and pointless, to poke a head round the concrete and take a look.
“Could be Luton,” he said. “Got to go. See you soon. I meant it about Jerusalem.”
I didn’t want him to ring off. He was my last friend here. I said: “Phil, oh Phil, Didi sends her regards… ”
“Poor her. Poor guy. What a tragedy. Survive the whole war and you think you’re OK, and then to die like that, right at the end.”
“But she’s alive…?”
“Not her, of course. Her husband! He was shot right at the end.” “Was he? She didn’t tell me about him,” I said. “What did she tell you? Did she tell you her own story?” “I didn’t ask her,” I said.
“Oh,” he sounded disappointed, but then he said, “Well, frankly, you’d have heard it a hundred times before.”
My phone rang. There were only three people in Sarajevo who had my number, and one of them was Robert. But it was Amy, wanting to know if I needed any help going to the police.
“I’ve done it.”
“My, what did they say?”
“They’re looking into it.”
“Great.”
“Yes. Great. Thanks.”
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine.”
“Do you want to have coffee?”
“No,” I said, “I’ve got someone I have to ring.”
“Dinner? What about dinner? I’m meeting up with Zach and some friends of his later. Come. It will be fun.” “I’d like that,” I said.
I lit a cigarette and put off ringing Robert and Valida a bit more and thought about the conversation I’d had yesterday. Yesterday, was it only yesterday, when I still had nothing to do but wander round Sarajevo floundering in the peace. Valida’s friend, the waitress, had recommended some cousin of hers who ran a beauty parlour behind the brewery. Briefly surfacing from her semi-trance, she’d made an appointment for me and I’d kept it anyway, after I’d seen Radic. It was nice to have an ordinary appointment to keep.
The salon was up one of those dark valleys across the river, scored deep in the mountains’ northern flank. The street was alive with running water from the captured streams beneath the road and it told of all of Bosnia’s past. There was a mosque, with a little fountain and a tumbled, weedy graveyard, a brand-new minaret and a woman, wiping her hands past her face in prayer, standing at a grille in its wall. Beyond were a row of Austro-Hungarian houses, rising above their daubs of brand-new cement and shiny glass, with the Teutonic self-delusion of the bourgeoisie. The salon was the next block up. From its size and position, commanding the slopes, it must once, in some Pasha-led past, have been the house of a great official, or great in the terms of Bosnia, for even the greatest of the Turkish lords here did not live as grandly a Victorian vicar. Veiled women would have bustled between its courtyards, soothing the brow of the merchant or administrator, who sat on the cushions of his divan, probably just as despairing of the twistiness of his compatriots, as his counterparts in the UN had been during my time. Even now, the house wasn’t small, but the twentieth century had swallowed its courtyards up, and gouged windows into its outside walls, and then, right at the very end, knocked it down and rebuilt it all again.
The girl, the cousin I suppose, gave me a facial, a wax and a pedicure, for the cost of a few cappuccinos in London.
“Are you working for one of the Internationals?” she asked, with the practised air of one who knows the reply.
“No,” I said. “I’m on holiday.” The scalpel halted for a second. “Oh! Is it your first time here?”
“No. I used to live here… I’m a journalist.” The scalpel moved on.
“In the war?”
“Yes.”
“Is it your first time back?”
“Yes.”
She concentrated very hard on my toe, as she asked: “What do you think?”
I laughed. “Most of my friends have gone.”
“People who can go have gone.”
“You are from here?” I assumed she was, as she was Sabina’s cousin, and Sabina had Sarajevo written all over her.
“Yes. But my brother is in Chicago.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“Well, we have thought about it,” she looked up from my foot. “In many ways it is a dream to go to America. To bring my children up there. Now I can’t even get a visa to go on holiday. But we have a good business here.” She moved on to another toe. She didn’t speak again, until I said: “It’s very different to the war.”
“The war,” she laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “In the war, of course it was terrible, but in many ways, we were all equal. You faced things together. Now, there are a lot of problems with people who spent the war in Germany and came back with money and people who lived through the war here, who have nothing. And people from the villages, who have come into Sarajevo. There are more people from Foca or Gorazde here now, than old Sarajevo. People say Feradiya is like the main street in Gorazde. All my friends, they have all gone. Just like you have found. Everyone left is so poor. And they complain about it. But they don’t understand that you have to work. Our parents’ generation, they don’t understand that. They think it will go back to being like the old days, like Yugoslavia. But it won’t.”
“Are they really so poor?” I said. “All the cafés seem full.”
“Cafés! It is not hard to buy one cup of coffee and sit there for three hours. They say, there are no jobs, what can they do? Unemployment is, like, what, maybe 30 per cent. But people aren’t prepared to change. They aren’t prepared to do what work there is. We do well here because I work. This was our house. I turn it into salon. My husband, he used to be… like social scientist, a professor. And t
hen in the war, he had to learn about cars. So now he does that. We have a garage here, out the back.” I could hear a clanking sound coming through the windows.
“There are a lot of new cars in Sarajevo now.”
“A lot,” she gave that laugh again, and rubbed her fingers in the classic sign for corruption. “So we have money now. But we work hard for it. And we changed.” She was holding my foot close up to her face, carving bits out from under my yellowing toenails. “But it is hard work. And it is hard to change. Look at Sabina.”
“Sabina who works at my hotel?”
“Before the war, she worked for the Tourist Board. During the war, she worked as interpreter for some American TV station. Not CNN. Not so large. Well, the TV people went one day, after the war, and left her with almost nothing. She had worked for them for all the war. Four years. They gave her some money but it doesn’t last. Then she got job two years ago as interpreter for OSCE but now all the internationals are moving to Kosovo. So she works like waitress. She went to Didi and Didi gave her a job.”
“That’s kind of Didi.”
“Didi is good like that. But don’t get me wrong, it’s good for Didi to have waitress who speaks English and German. She has lots of internationals staying in her hotel. Sabina will get something else one day, I am sure. But at the moment, she has to work like waitress in our family’s old house.”
“Your family?”
“Didi married my cousin, but he died…” she paused… “in the war. The house had been hit anyway. Like ours. She had it completely rebuilt. It was old. Now it is new hotel. Look at Didi – she changed! She learnt how to change.” The girl’s laugh was still harsh, but full of respect. “Before war, she was just one village girl from the mountains. Now she has smart new hotel and she is Sarajevo lady. But she works. She worked for it all. She met my cousin in army.”
“Army?”
“Yes. She didn’t have to go and fight.” “What were you before, before the war?” I asked.
“I was training to be a lawyer.” She didn’t look at me then, but carefully marshalled the bottles of coloured varnish.
The Girl in the Film Page 39