“I will never forget,” she said. “I’d moved to hospital by then. They all came in, so many, all the boys I had known.”
“After war, Selim comes back. He said to me, he couldn’t bear to live in Germany. He said he could not settle. He thought only of coming back. Of Sarajevo. Nobody could understand him. His family in Germany, they could not understand. His uncle, they all say, stay here, nobody is shooting at you. Germany is safe. But he said, he just wanted to be in Sarajevo. Come home. Be with his friends.”
“So he comes back, just before Dayton. But there is nobody left from our unit. They are all dead. Then he meets me at hospital. He is there for his leg. So… anyway… we get married. And we start rebuilding this house. It was his. It was hit badly by shells in start of the war. His parents were killed then.
“I said, why not rebuild as hotel – there are so many Internationals here. They need somewhere to stay. I speak English. I made myself learn it in war. And is so central. And is something for Selim to do. You don’t need two legs to run hotel. And Selim knows how to build. He learnt from his uncle. Then, one day, he went off to… do some business, and he didn’t come back.
“I was going to ring police, but policeman came to see me first. He said Selim had been attacked by robbers and killed. They said the robbers must have stolen his money – his wallet had gone – and gone back to Republika Srpska. It was very bad time. March
1996. Were you here?”
“No. I’d gone.”
“Yes. All journalists had gone. The war was over but Chetniks were still on the hills. A lot of things happening. A lot of bad men coming in from RS and doing robberies… He never even knew I was having baby. I found out after he was dead.” “I’m so sorry,” I said.
She went to the office, and came back with a photograph. “This is Selim,” she said. He was laughing, in fatigues, and he had a gun in his hand, and his arm was around a girl, also in uniform, who must have been Didi but was almost unrecognisable today, so thin and young and unpolished was she. “American took it. He sent it to me after Selim died.” She was gazing up at Selim in adoration, and he was gazing at the camera in camaraderie. He had a gold chain round his neck, the one she wore now, and his long dark hair was held off his eyes by a red bandana.
“I still don’t believe it was just robbery. They did not take the car,” but I wasn’t really listening to her; I was back at the first party you took me to. Back in the room with all the smoke, and the desperate dancing, and the sad-eyed crippled DJ; and you sitting next to Selim, where he held court on the sofa, with his whisky, and his charm, and the beautiful, scrawny girls; when I couldn’t understand the language, and all I could do was hand out cigarettes and try and make the man with the beard realise I didn’t want to have sex, but I was so in love with you that I didn’t care. Then I was on the frontline, that night in Selim’s trench, when I’d gone with Phil, and we’d run into that mad American ex-marine, who Selim called “our journalist” except that Phil told me he had never filed once and the Anchorage Bugle had refused to pay his phone bill; I suppose I recognised Didi now, as the girl, the nurse, who had been with them. Except she had changed so much.
I hardly heard her as she said: “The policeman said maybe thieves panicked, but I don’t think so. They shot him like that,” she mimed a gun at the nape of her neck. “Point blank. Now to me, that is not panic, that’s how a professional kills.”
“What?” I was back in the present now.
“Well, that’s what I think, but policeman told me just to be glad I still had car. He said lot of people were killed like that.”
Robert rang as I finished my coffee.
“I need to see you. Now.” He sounded furious.
“What’s this about?”
“You know what it’s about. You’re the one who dragged it all up.”
He had a cappuccino in front of him, by the time I reached Michele’s, and was sitting amidst the sad-eyed boys and girls with purple hair, with their half-drunk coffee cups. He didn’t kiss me hello. He didn’t even stand up.
“What would you like?”
“Oh, same as you. Thanks very much.” He tried to call the waiter over, but it didn’t work. Neither of us spoke. Every second the waiter didn’t come stretched out the unsaid business between us. Finally he got up and walked into the café.
“Right,” he said, when he sat back down. He didn’t look at me, just stirred the froth. Then he said: “We had the police round. Asking Valida questions.”
“I told you I’d told the police.”
He still wouldn’t look at me, just bit his lip, tapping his saucer with his coffee spoon. “Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I should have told you before.”
“Maybe you should. Amongst the other things it would have been kind to tell me. Like that fact that Nermina wasn’t Amir’s baby.”
He looked momentarily put out, before he said: “I didn’t come here to talk about that.”
“So what did you come to talk about?” I asked.
“I came to tell you that Amir was a black marketeer.”
Once I suppose I might have been shocked. Now I said: “So? Didn’t everyone do that?”
My coffee had arrived and I took a sip.
“I’m not talking the odd cabbage and a bit of chocolate.”
“So what are you talking about?”
“He smuggled people out of Sarajevo.”
“Did he! Bloody hell! He could have told me!” It would have made the most wonderful piece. “I didn’t think Amir was that kind of person.”
“What kind of person?” Robert was nonplussed.
“I didn’t think he was that brave.”
“I think they paid him very well for it,” Robert said dryly. “And I think working for an NGO eliminated most of the risks.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
Robert stirred his coffee, then he said, “Because he killed someone.”
“What!”
“You heard me.”
“He killed someone… Amir.” You hated fighting. You weren’t good at it.
“He was taking someone out of Sarajevo who was carrying a lot of money. He killed them and stole the money.” I felt sick. My cup fell down on the table.
“Did he really?”
“Yes, he really did.”
“So who killed him?”
Robert shrugged. “This is the Balkans. Everyone’s related to someone. I guess someone decided tit for tat. That’s what the police told Aida, at the time.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I’d never have gone to the police if I’d known this.
“I guess I just thought you’d… go away.” He couldn’t meet my eye. “You hadn’t bothered to come here for the last five years…” “It seems so unlike him.” I swallowed. I felt numb.
“People do strange things in wars,” said Robert. He put some money on the table and got up to go. “That’s why I don’t like wars. Unlike you, I don’t like what wars do to people.”
“Oh, and by the way,” he said, as he turned. “There’s a one-way system on Feradiya. Hadn’t you noticed that yet?”
“What are you talking about? There’s no traffic now.”
“I’m talking about the pedestrians.” The maroon-haired girls and the boys in trainers and the Sarajevo ladies in their laundered shirts were wandering past in two opposite flows. “When you walked here, you were just barging into everyone. Or didn’t you notice?”
“No…” I said.
“Looks like you didn’t know very much,” he said, and walked away down Feradiya, in line with the crowd.
* * *
The Amir that I loved, who I thought loved me, surely he wasn’t like that. Surely he couldn’t have done something like that. Had I known you at all? Or had I dressed you up, like a doll, a Sarajevan Ken? Squelched you into a mould of what I wanted to believe. No wonder Maria drank as she did. What does she have left? Each memory, each smile, each touch, is tainted by this. There’s
no excuse, as Robert said; you didn’t need the money. I’d known you were weak, but I hadn’t thought of this.
I left my cup of coffee and walked down to the river. I kept trying to talk to you in my head, but you wouldn’t answer. This is the third time I’ve lost you; once to Aida and once to death. But this is the worst. This time it’s as if I never knew you at all.
I didn’t see you the last six months. Not at all, not since I found out about Aida. Did you change that much in that time? That night at the party, it was already too late. You must have done it by then, because that’s when they killed you, wasn’t it? Just after that, after you laid your life at my feet. How could you have lied to me like that, lied to me about what you were like, lied to me to let me love you, because I could never have fallen in love if I’d known you were like that.
Did you panic, was that it? I could see you panicking, if you were caught, if someone started shooting, I could see you running away and leaving him for dead. But to murder someone…Were you trying to get enough for all of you to get out? But then why would you say all that to me? Or maybe you just wanted me to help you escape.
The library’s crenellations were gap-toothed against the hills and through the broken window boards, the used condoms flapped in the rubble. A sleek, rich German car drove by. You fools, I wanted to scream at the loitering crowds, if you can buy cars like that, why can’t you mend your lovely library, or do you prefer having this large sore in the centre of your town? So that everyone is reminded of how much you suffered in the war? It’s not an excuse – I shouted in my head – it’s not an excuse for ever. Sometimes you have to take responsibility for the things you do.
I rang Dragan from the edge of the river, and told him what Robert had said to me.
“Looks like we need to talk to the widow,” he said. “You can go now. We don’t need to keep you in Sarajevo anymore. As long as we know how to get hold of you in England.”
I told him about Selim. He said, thank you very much.
“Maybe it was the same policeman,” I said.
“That’s not possible. That policeman is dead…”
“Was he…?”
“No,” Dragan cut in. “He really was killed by a sniper; putting the anti-sniping barricades back up in June 1995.” Thank God, I can leave.
Didi wasn’t in her office when I got back to the hotel. There was a young man playing on the computer at reception, lanky and in his early twenties, with dark eyes, and a long scar on his forehead half hidden by his fringe. Behind the desk, a little boy, about seven or eight, was tunnelling with Sulejman, through an assault course, built from box-files, chairs and the waste-paper basket, in the offi ce at the back. I hadn’t seen either of them before.
I asked the young man in Bosnian about bus times to Dubrovnik. And he answered, in English, I’ll just look it up. It never occurred to me they had the internet here. Why on earth had I gone to the café in town?
“7 a.m.,” he said. “One a day. From the main bus station.” I’ll get that. Tomorrow. I’ll leave this place behind.
Then Didi bustled in, black and shiny, with a lot of gold chains, in some wrap-around dress with a jungle print, as if she were in the throes of metamorphosing into a shrubbery.
“Ah, Molly! It is you! I must talk,” she said. Her eyes were wide and her breath came fast and she grabbed my arm and pulled me to one side. “The police came today. They were asking me questions.”
“Oh, God,” I glanced at the boy, but he was deep in some corner of the World Wide Web. “I’m so sorry. It was…” I was about to go off into some long explanation of… what… justice… retribution… that maybe I was wrong.
“Mind! No! Why would I mind? It’s wonderful.” Didi swallowed and her dark irises glistened. She pulled me to her and gave me a hug. When she released me, her hands moved in jerks, as if she was changing her mind about any gesture she made, since none could ever be large enough. Then she put up her hand to the photograph hanging behind the till and said: “I never thought Selim’s death would matter to anyone except me. Do you have time? Have a coffee with me…”
She talked about Selim, again; her time in the trench. She talked to me about the Europa Hotel, with a sad smile of complicity – our Sarajevo, old days in the war.
“Sarajevo,” she said. “When I was a teenager, Sarajevo was like a fantasy for us. I used to dream of coming to live here…”
I waited, because I knew now it might come, and her face turned slightly away from mine. I heard my voice prompting her, “How did you get here?” Almost as though I had been someone else. Her eyes no longer looked at me, but back into her past.
“We knew things were getting bad, but we never thought it could happen to us,” she said. “We’d never had problems with our Serbs in our village. We were high, really high up in the mountains, where you almost feel you can smell the sky. We were a good village. We stuck together. But…” And I found myself thinking, don’t stop. Don’t stop this now. But I didn’t have to nudge her, she just went on:
“My father had a friend, Jovan, a policeman; he was a Serb. He said to my father, be careful, could we go and stay with friends far away? But we didn’t have any friends like that.
“A girl came to us one day. She was crying. She had walked from the other side of the mountain. She said her father and mother had been shot. She said her baby brother had been killed; she said she had been raped but she managed to get away. Someone in the village took her in. My mother gave her clothes and food. My father and the other men went down to the café and spent all night talking. But someone said she was crazy. Who would kill a baby? Someone else said her father had been a bad man. We got on well with our Serbs. We drank coffee together every day.” Suddenly she switched into Serbo-Croat:
“It was the next day the men came to our village. Most were strangers. Some wore black and had beards and hats with double eagles on them. Some wore uniform. Like police, or our army. The JNA. But they said they were the Serb army now. They drove into our village and stopped by the mosque. It was a warm spring day but there was still snow on the tops of the mountains. They shouted for everyone to come out. We didn’t know what to do. We hid in the house. They had some of our people with them, in the back of one of those open trucks my dad used for the harvest. I couldn’t see their hands. Then I realised their hands were tied. Fuad, the plumber, and Ahmet who farmed across the valley, and Ali, who everyone knew was always drunk. Ali had blood coming from his nose. Some of our Serbs were standing by the truck. Jovan, the policeman, my father’s friend: he looked like he didn’t know what to do; Milan, who had the garage at the end of the village: he used to mend my bike. Radislav, he was a farmer like my father. Svetko, the fat man. He owed my father money; he was puffing on a cigarette. Milorad, the policeman from the next-door village. They all had guns. Nobody was talking. Our men in the truck looked very afraid. There were about five or six women in another truck. They were sitting in the back. Fuad’s wife, Sabehida, same name like me, she was crying, and Ahmet’s sister was giving her a hug.
“Then Izmet came out of his house; he was one of our people, and a policeman too. He said, “What are you doing? Jovan, what’s going on?” Jovan looked very embarrassed.
“He said, ‘We’re here to protect you. We need to take you away.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll be safer.’
“Izmet said, it doesn’t look very safe to me. Jovan said, believe me, it’s better, Izmet, this way. There are some bad things happening. Izmet said, this looks pretty bad now. They stood there for five minutes or so, shouting to each other across the street. Then another man drove up in a huge black car. He was in uniform, but he had a skull tied to its bonnet; not a man, some big animal. Maybe a cow. He got out and said, ‘What’s going on?’ Nobody spoke. Both Jovan and Izmet stared at him. One of the strangers said, this man won’t let us come through. The new man said, he’s not so big… He just lifted up his gun and shot Izmet. Like that… dadadadadada… J
ust like you see on the television. I had only seen it on television then. Izmet fell on his knees and then he just crumpled. It couldn’t be our village. It was like a film. The street was silent. Then all the women in the truck started to wail.
“My father said, we stay in the house. We don’t move. But the man in the black car told one of the soldiers to get going. One of them threw a grenade in the window of a house four down the street. It was where Samra, my schoolteacher lived. There was an explosion. Then they kicked the door down. We heard shooting and screams. The screams went on and on and then they stopped. When they stopped, that was worse than the screams. We didn’t know what to do at all. They did the same with the house next door, where my best friend, Amira lived. I heard her scream, No! We heard them shoot. Then that was that. I never saw Amira again.
“Then my mother said, maybe we should all go out into the square. We didn’t have guns. We couldn’t fight. But my father told us to stay there, and be very quiet. He took a white shirt, and went to the door. My mother said, No, no… but he shushed her away. ‘It’s best,’ he said. He waved it, and went out. Jovan shouted, come over here, Emir; you’ll be safe here. He said, Jovan, what’s happening? And one of the strangers yelled to him to shut up and walk over to the others. ‘Where’s your family?’ said Jovan. ‘Bring them out too. They’ll be safe here.’ But he said, ‘They’ve gone. I sent them away.’ That’s when I understood he wanted us to escape. But Jovan knew we hadn’t gone. Tata walked over to where the others were. I could see him out of the window. They grabbed him and one of the men in black hit his face. ‘Where are they?’ screamed one of the men. ‘I’ve told. They’ve gone to Rogatica…’ And they all laughed. ‘We’ll see them soon, then, won’t we,’ said the man who’d shot Izmet. And they all laughed again. But Jovan didn’t laugh. He stared at our house. But he didn’t say anything. Then the man in black said, ‘We’ll soon see if they’ve gone…’ He took a grenade off his belt. I saw my father looking back at us through the window. Suddenly he punched the man standing next to him. The guy hit him back, and he fell to the ground. They started kicking him. I never saw my Tata again.
The Girl in the Film Page 41