The Girl in the Film

by Eagar, Charlotte

  “Like Valida? Do you know her?”

  “Valida! You know Valida! Of course. You would. You’re a journalist. All journalists know Valida. Huh. I have nothing against Valida,” she concentrated on unscrewing the nail varnish. “I know she had a terrible time in the war. I mean, we all had terrible times and she was working for BBC and had money and food and water and lived in hotel, but she had to see everything, all the bad things. We didn’t have to see. But then Valida made a lot of money out of the war. The BBC treated her better than Sabina’s TV company.

  And she married an International. And now she does nothing.”

  “But she’s training to be a lawyer.”

  “She is not! She says she is training to be lawyer, but every time she had to take her exams, she gets sick.”

  Robert’s voice was all jolly when he answered the phone.

  “You must be feeling rough. I expect you and Phil had a late one.

  I don’t know how you two do it.”

  “We don’t really anymore.”

  “When are you off?” I looked round Michele’s; there they were, the sad-eyed boys – men really, in their tatty jeans; the ladies, fortysomething, henna-ed hair carefully sprayed, white shirts pressed, the two men dressed for the office, suits, ties neatly tied, who obviously have no office to go to at all, all talking to each other over their empty cups. “Maybe we could have a drink tonight, although, actually I think…”

  “I think I’ll be around for a bit,” I said.

  “Oh…” The jolliness seeped from his voice.

  “I rang to tell you that I reported Amir’s death to the police this afternoon.”

  “You did what!” He didn’t sound surprised, just utterly fed up but I repeated it anyway.

  “I reported Amir’s death to the police.”

  “Oh Molly. Can’t you leave anything alone?”

  “Robert. I don’t think this should be left alone. I just thought you should know.”

  “I should know. What do you mean I should know? You know I know already.”

  “You know what I mean. I thought you should know about the police. I think they are going to want to ask questions and things.” “You told them about us?” His voice rose with rage.

  “I had to. They wanted to know. They needed to know all about his family here. They needed to know who I was with that night.”

  “For Christ’s sake. Why couldn’t you just leave this alone?”

  “Because I don’t think it should be.”

  “You always have to charge into things. Couldn’t you just think, couldn’t you think for a moment what this would do?”

  “I have thought. What do you think I’ve been doing here for the last week?”

  “Well maybe you should have thought about this like a bloody grown-up and not like a quixotic teenager. It was years ago, Molly!

  The war’s over. You can’t go around digging things up.”

  “I think there are some things that have to be dug up.”

  “You don’t live here. You don’t understand the place. Believe me, you are completely wrong. You don’t want to start digging around into what happened then. Just let sleeping dogs lie. That’s the only way this place works.”

  “I don’t think so, Robert. Sleeping dogs wake up.”

  “This isn’t a story. You can’t file this and move on. It’s not some temporary adrenalin trip. This is real.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not a game, Molly. It’s not like journalism.”

  “Journalism isn’t a bloody game, Robert. It’s real too.”

  “Journalism,” he snorted, “is an excuse to feel part of something important and then walk away. It’s the perfect excuse never to be involved. Zooming self-importantly from war to war.”

  “Is that what you think of Phil? I thought you were his friend.”

  “I am his friend. But that doesn’t stop me knowing that what Phil does is just an excuse to escape from his life.”

  “And what you’re doing here is so real? Holding Valida’s hand while she pretends she’s going to finish her degree?”

  He didn’t answer that. “I know about her degree. She gets ill before she has to take any of her exams.”

  “Leave Valida out of this.”

  “I can’t leave Valida out of this.” I was furious now, goaded by his patronizing self-delusion. “You’re protecting Valida. That’s what this is about. It’s not about Amir or me or journalism or anything like that. You just don’t want anything to… upset her… well, that’s fine. I understand that. You love her. But you can’t change the world to protect Valida.”

  “For Christ’s sake…”

  “Robert, shut the fuck up. Will you? Just listen. I know this is real.” I sounded even angrier than I meant to, because some of the anger was directed at the doubts I’d had myself. “I know you live here. And I know Valida is Aida’s sister. But Amir was real too. And now he’s really dead. And he didn’t deserve that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You didn’t know him. I did. Besides, nobody deserves to die like that,” which was actually untrue – I’d met a lot of men out here who had deserved to die like that, but Amir hadn’t been one of them. But then perhaps those men deserved more than being dead; to be cornered, in their hometowns, on a summer’s day, in front of the neighbours they have known all their lives, and understand, the moment they saw the first foreign soldier storming into their house, or bursting out of the helicopter on the shores of the lake, or kicking down the door of their hospital office, that this was the last Clint Eastwood moment of their petty epic; that judgement day had finally come. That they’d be taken to the Hague, to be forced to admit, shuffling, in their cheap maroon suits, under the eyes of their fellow human beings, to those crimes they once boasted about, as every bloody act of their small-town inhumanity, the butchery in the heat of war, in the heat of the day, amongst the shades of their ancestors and to seeming applause, was dissected, for months on end, under the cold neon light of international law; to serve out their sentence in a foreign land, far from the forests and gorges their blood-lust had scoured, and to know, in the depths of their hearts, that perhaps their old neighbours, their fellow Serbs, in whose name of Greater Serbdom those heroic deeds were done, might actually be relieved, because now the festering glory of the war had been lanced, and they were free to make a living in the present once more.

  “Well, all I can say,” Robert’s voice ranted on, “is you may not like what you’re about to find out.”

  “Well, maybe I won’t,” I said, coming back to today. “But at least he did the right thing by that bloody bitch Aida, which is more than you can say for her… But I am really not sure I can actually talk about this now…”

  “So you know about that.” The rage had bled out of his voice.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a bit late now.”

  “Valida didn’t know at the time.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  There was another long pause.

  “What makes you think the police will do anything anyway?” he said. “They’ve known all along. It was the police who told me.”

  “This policeman didn’t know. There never was an investigation.”

  “And why should this policeman care, when nobody else has cared?”

  I didn’t want to tell him about you saving Dragan’s life. I didn’t want him to think you were getting special service.

  I said: “Because this policeman believes that killing people is wrong.”

  Mujo went to see Suljo in Germany, where he had emigrated as a refugee in the war. Suljo met him at the bus station.

  “I’ll show you my house, but first let’s drive round the part of the city where I live – it’s the most expensive bit.”

  “Look, look at these houses, my friend,” said Mujo. “You really succeeded.”

  Suljo took him up a hill: “Ther
e, you can look down on my villa.”

  “Is that where you live? It’s incredible.” “See that blonde by the pool? That’s my wife.” “I can’t believe my eyes!” said Mujo.

  “And see this young, handsome man that is going towards my wife? That is me.”

  XIV

  I propped myself up in bed and let my hangover settle. My brain felt as if it had been bashed and spread out in the sun, like an octopus on a Croatian quay, and then run over repeatedly by a child on a tricycle.

  Didi was checking tablecloths, when I came into breakfast. I ordered my coffee and sat in the window. The fountain swaggered in the courtyard outside.

  “Did you find your policeman?” she asked, as she brought my cup.

  “Yes thank you,” I said.

  She made a face. “How was it?”

  “It was good. They were very helpful.”

  “That I cannot believe.”

  “No, they were.”

  I drank some more and she drifted off from my table.

  Last night I’d gone out with Zach and Amy.

  “We’re off to Pale,” Zach had said. “Been back there yet?” As they picked me up in a white Toyota Land Cruiser with some initials down the side, driven by a friend of Zach’s.

  “Nope. How does one get to Pale these days?” I said.

  “You just go straight ahead, up the Pale road,” said Zach. “We’re going to the Trout Farm. Know that?” “No. What’s the Trout Farm?” I’d asked.

  “You don’t know the Trout Farm?” said Amy.

  Of course I didn’t. I knew the Press Centre, in the Hotel Olympic, the old ski chalet, where the bill always came to 52DM for a room and dinner, no matter what you ate or drank. Run by the miserable couple, who took pride in never having anything that one asked for: Gospodin Nema and his wife, Gospodza Nista. I knew the Hotel Panorama, where Karadzic used to live, a wooden lodge overlooking his sleepy ski resort; where he’d read me his poetry and showed me his plans for “Sarajevo: twin cities”. I knew the tractor factory where he’d held his stupid parliaments and priests with beards and black stove-pipe hats would come down from their mountain churches and pass laws on the freedom of goats to roam the streets and the need to carry the bones of your ancestors around in sacks.

  “When did you last go to Pale?” said Zach’s friend; he was English, pale and gangly, in his late thirties, little round glasses set on the road.

  “Not since… not since the war.”

  “I think you’ll find it’s changed,” he laughed.

  “Were you here in the war?”

  “No. Just at the end.”

  “I know Tom from your embassy in Mogadishu,” said Zach.

  When we got to Pale, I hardly recognised the place. The tiny ski resort had sprouted office blocks, and house after house, Holland Park-size mansions, in hideous brick.

  “Where the fuck,” I said, “does the money come from?” “People make money in wars,” said Zach.

  “I didn’t make any bloody money. Did you make any money?” “Bad people make money in wars,” said Amy.

  “Unfortunately half the bad people are still running the place,” Zach turned to me, “They’ve had over six billion dollars in aid, and most of it has been siphoned into off-shore accounts and German cars. And that, Miss Sarajevo press corps journalist, goes for both sides.”

  “I know,” I said sadly. “You gave me the black-marketeer’s tour.”

  “Are you a journalist?” asked Tom, his eyes momentarily sliding off the road.

  “Yes. But don’t worry, I’m on holiday.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t read too much into these palaces,” said Tom.

  “Unemployment’s even worse in RS than in the Federation.” Good, I thought, serve them bloody well right.

  Halfway up the mountain, beyond Pale, the stream tumbling down beside the road swirled out of a series of cement pools, leading upwards, in ever more improbable shapes, with black swarms of trout at each waterfall’s lip. At the head of the concrete cascade, on an island inside a concrete moat, a pine cabin stood, with a yellow sign of fish and a knife and fork.

  “This was the restaurant of choice of the Serb high command,” said Tom, as he parked the car beside rows of Mercedes and black SUVs.

  “Was he bad, the Trout Farm man?” I didn’t unbuckle my seat belt. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to a restaurant owned by a bad Serb.

  “Not bad, just bored,” said Zach. “He was a builder in Sarajevo before the war. This was his weekend house. When the war happened, he came to live here. He had nothing to do. So he started building. Then he opened a restaurant, and it made money, so he just carried on building. And the war went on and on.”

  The men in the restaurant had the bulk of Franjo’s clientele – fat, powerful men who’d done well out of the war. Zach glanced around the room and then at Tom.

  “Not one of mine,” said Tom.

  “What’s yours?”

  “Tom is paid to look for brothels,” said Zach, when Tom just blushed.

  “I thought he said you were a diplomat.”

  “I’m on secondment.”

  “What to?”

  “The IPTF.”

  “What’s that?” Even all the initials had changed.

  “International Police Task Force.” I was about to say it sounded like Thunderbirds, when I thought of a better thing to say instead. “Are there a lot of brothels here?” Tom blushed again.

  “Does it matter so much?” I said.

  Amy made an outraged noise but I said: “It’s not like there’s anything else for them to do.”

  “They’re not there because they want to be,” said Tom.

  “Bosnia’s the women-trafficking centre of Europe,” said Zach.

  My ears pricked.

  Tom’s reticence vanished as he started to speak: “They’re mainly from poor countries like Moldova or the Ukraine. A woman in their home town offers them a job in Paris or Milan. Sometimes they think they’re going to be cocktail waitresses; sometimes they know it’s prostitution. A lot of them have children of their own but there are no jobs for them back home. Their passports are taken from them, and then they’re sold on. They’re told they have to sleep with clients, but they won’t get a penny of the money. If they refuse, they’re raped and beaten until they give in. Sometimes they’re sold to brothels in the West, sometimes they’re just kept here. We rescued a girl a few weeks ago like that. She had a four-year-old daughter, in some village in the middle of nowhere at the back of the Ukraine. She’d thought she’d be able to send money back and give her baby a better life. She had no idea what would happen to her. She was brought to Serbia by the woman who recruited her, and then she was sold. They took her passport, she didn’t speak the language. She was kept in a room above a bar in a town near Tuzla. It was called the Hotel Florida – they always have fake American names like that. She was told if she ran away, she’d be hunted down and killed. One of the other girls told her about being taken to see some graves in the woods. She was told she couldn’t go to the police, because she was here illegally, so she’d be put in jail… often the local police are in on the whole thing. We have to be careful how much we let them in on what we’re doing. When we raided that bar, the local police chief was drinking downstairs.”

  “Has it got much worse since the war?” I asked.

  “It didn’t happen before the war,” said Zach.

  Amy had said to me, “You should write something on that.”

  I’d said, “I know.”

  “Do you need anything else?” It was Didi again.

  “Oh, no, thanks, I’m fine.” Except I really wasn’t. We’d drunk a reassuringly non-American amount of wine. It was like the old days. Then I remembered Phil.

  “Oh, Phil, from the BBC, he says he was so sorry he could not find the time to come. He’s had to go.”

  “Oh, I am sad not to see him. He did a story on me once,” she gave a little proud smile. “He wanted to know about bei
ng woman in army on first frontline.”

  “You were on first frontline?”

  “Only as nurse…”

  “Still…” I hated going right to the front. I remember meeting some of those nurses. I kept thinking, how do they go to the loo? All those pumped-up men… the cold. And the shells of course, too… “So dangerous…”

  “Believe me,” I heard her say, “it was better on frontline than freezing to death in Hotel Europa with my mother… and Nenad, and other refugees, all complaining and sleeping with UNPROFOR soldiers for money.”

  For a moment those women, in their rags, in the frozen darkness of the Europa’s Viennese café, scuttled out of the crannies of my brain, but Didi carried on and her voiced called me back. “I would never have met my husband if I had not gone to frontline.” She stared out of the window at the fountain in the yard.

  “I would never have met him if had not been war. It’s always strange he is not here. This was his house. We plan hotel together. He was so handsome, such a charming man. He was older than me, maybe ten years, and sophisticated, self-confident. He had car. Of course, he could not use car in war, no petrol. But we knew he had it, safe in garage. I had never met a man like that. He came from family with money. He wore real gold round his neck,” she pointed to the chain at the V of her dress. “This was his.”

  “Was it love at first sight?”

  She blushed: “For me, maybe, but not for him. He was like hero… he had girlfriend in town, one Sarajevan girl, same age as him – I was young then, you know, maybe sixteen, seventeen. And I was… different, I suppose. I was just one girl from one village. It was all very new. The town was new. The war was new. Men like Selim, they were new. Then there was shell… He gets medivac-ed to Germany. He spent time in Germany when he was little boy, his uncle was Gastarbeiter, like builder. He has family there. And they cut off his leg. Just here,” she points to just below her knee. “He played football. He used to play for club before war. I never saw him play. Except once, in courtyard, near one block of flats in war.

  “But shell saved him. He was away, when government tried that stupid thing of making us break out of Sarajevo.” June 1995. Muffy and I had stood by the radio mast and watched the toy soldiers swarming up the opposite hill, and then car after car driving up into Casualty, with the broken soldiers piled in the back. It was a total failure and hundreds died.