“I said to my mother, we’ve got to get out. She said, I can’t leave him, but I said, Mamma. We’ve got to go. She said, we haven’t got any clothes. I said, GET OUT! Our house had windows onto the woods. We climbed out of the window, my mother and me, and my little brother, Ado. He was only twelve. My mother carried Nenad, the baby; he was not even one. We ran and ran into the woods. Our father had meant we should go to Rogatica. He had had a cousin there. Mehmet. He had a good job, at the saw mill. There were lots of Muslims in Rogatica. It would be safe. We ran into the woods, as fast as we could, and high. We climbed and ran until we couldn’t run any more. Then walked all night. My mother kept crying and crying. Ado and I took turns carrying Nenad; he was heavy. I made her keep walking. Afterwards they said the Serbs had mined the woods, but we were lucky. We never hit any mines. It was morning before we got to Rogatica. I really thought it would be safer there. It was the 18th May when we arrived.
“Mehmet said of course we could stay with him. We thought we’d be able to go back home soon. Mamma, Nenad and Ado and I slept in the room of my little cousin. He had to go and share with his sister, and he was very cross, but his mother told him to keep quiet; it wouldn’t be for long. We weren’t sure what to do. Most of the Serbs had left the town. We didn’t know if we should go but we wanted to hear about my father. Besides, we didn’t have anywhere to go.
“On the 22nd May the Serbs started shelling Rogatica. The Muslim parts. They shelled us for weeks. At the time I didn’t see how anyone could survive. Now I know what people can go through and live. My cousin had food and we hid in his basement. They would shout to us with loudspeakers, the Serbs, to surrender, to lay down our guns, to go to the Veljko Vlahovic School. But we didn’t have any guns. Then the Serb soldiers started moving in, like they had in my village. Street by street. It took a long time; days and days. Sometimes nothing would happen for hours and then the shooting and the explosions would start again. They threw grenades into the houses, and then they shot people who ran away. They burned the houses afterwards. We could hear the screams. We could smell the smoke. They got to our street. They had grenades and flame throwers. Machine guns, shooting. At the last minute, we managed to escape. That was July. 19th July. The shelling had gone on for two months. My cousin got us out; he said, run to the main square. There are some big new buildings there, solidly built. We ran and ran. Nenad cried all the time. He was so heavy and he wriggled and you can’t explain things to a baby. We could hear guns all the time. Rat-rat-rat-rat and explosions. And the crackle of the houses they were burning down. There was smoke everywhere, that black smoke, the smell of burning plastic and stuff like that. My cousin thought that 300 people had died just in his street and the two streets either side just that day. They were all streets lived in by Muslim people. Some of them, the Serbs took away. We didn’t know where.
“Conditions in the square were bad. There must have been about two or three thousand people, who had all taken refuge in a big building there. We were in the basements. It was awful. It stank. The toilets were terrible. There was shit everywhere. Everyone was sleeping crowded up. It was dark inside, all the power had gone. Children were crying. My mother was crying. Luckily this time we’d been able to bring some stuff with us, blankets, tins of food. Clothes. We’d had little bags packed ready to run this time. Although we’d eaten most of the food in the last two months and there wasn’t much left. The Serbs kept shouting through loudspeakers; telling us to surrender, to come to the secondary school. But there were too many of us to do that. There was a man called Rajko Kusic who said he was the Serb Commander. I’d never heard of him before. But later, in the camp he said we had to call him Vojvoda – the Duke.
“One time a man came up in a tank. Zivojin Novakovic; Mehmet recognised him. He read out orders through a loudspeaker. Mehmet took a white flag and went to talk to him. Mehmet explained that there were too many of us here to go to the school. We won’t fit in. He said, why don’t you bring the Serb flag here. Fly it here. If we recognise the Serb republic and the flag, will you stop the shelling? Novakovic said he’d do his best. He drove away, but he came back and said, it was no good. ‘You all have to go to the secondary school centre, to the school building in order to avoid the cleansing’ – that’s what they called it. They said, it was just for two or three days. Bring any food if you have it; but we had hardly anything left. We thought it safer to go, for all of us. We came out, and they made us walk in rows. I carried Nenad. My mother held Ado’s hand. They said we would only have to stay in the school for a couple of days. But we were there for three months.
“For the first few days things weren’t so bad, although we weren’t allowed to leave the building; they said that was for our own safety. But on the third day, people I didn’t know came; they had different kind of uniforms, with guns. Mehmet didn’t know them and he knew everyone in Rogatica. They looked like the men who had come to our village. In the camp they said one of them was Arkan, and do you know Seselj? Him and his White Eagles. We knew their names from the terrible things they did already in the war in Croatia in 1991.
“They started to… do… things… bad things… to people in the camp. They took all our jewellery. My mother’s wedding ring. She didn’t have much. But Mehmet’s wife had more. She packed all her jewellery for our run to the school. They took my earrings. I saw them rip them out of one girl’s ears, so I took mine off and gave them to the man myself. They took Ado’s watch. It was just a stupid watch, with Mickey Mouse. But he loved it. They screamed at us, that we were Turkish scum, fundamentalists…We couldn’t escape. By the entrance to the school grounds, on the right, there was a building, with a machine-gun nest on a roof, with soldiers in it, all the time. The entrance to the school was fastened with a thick chain. We were told that the whole area round the school had been mined and if anyone tried to run away or jump out of the window, they would be blown up. And there were guards on duty all the time. You couldn’t leave, and you didn’t dare leave.
“There was nothing to eat. We finished the food we brought very quickly. Then nobody had any food left. The place was packed. There were forty-seven people sleeping in our room. I counted them. Day after day. It was an old class-room. We moved most of the desks to the side of the room, some we broke up and burnt, to cook our food. It was August; we didn’t need fires to keep warm. If anything, we were far too hot. Others we used to make walls, between our little groups, to try and get a little privacy.
“It still had maps on the walls, of Yugoslavia, as it used to be, when I was growing up, Croatia and Slovenia and Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro, and Kosovo and Vojvodina. Once Ado and I found a photograph of Tito in the stationery cupboard; there were two families living in the stationery cupboard. We were very jealous because, although their window was tiny, they were private and could sleep on the shelves. Then I found a book, an English book. I started to teach myself English; I learnt lots of words. I never thought I didn’t know how they were supposed to sound. There was a map of the world. I used to lie there, on Mehmet’s blanket, on the wooden floor, wondering what other countries were like. I had never even been to Serbia before. Now I have so many foreigners here. I used to draw Nenad pictures with the coloured chalk, but that was at the start. The chalk soon ran out.
“Nenad wasn’t the only baby. There were lots and they cried all the time. There were over a thousand people in the camp. It was a camp. It felt like a camp. We were all Muslims, except for two Serb ladies, who were married to Muslims. There were fifteen thousand Muslims in Rogatica before the war. God knows where they are now. Mehmet knew a soldier who said that some had gone to the school, and some to a factory, and some to some old barns down by a farm. Some went to the sawmill where Mehmet used to work.
“One day Jovan came to the camp to look for us. He said he was sorry about my father. He said he was glad we had survived. He said he’d been looking in all the camps for us. He told us our village had been burnt. He said he di
dn’t know what had happened to Ali and Fuad, Sabehida and the others, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye when he said that. He gave us cigarettes. He went away, and then he came back with food for us and baby food and nappies for Nenad and some soap. My mother started to cry and Jovan looked as if he might cry too. He looked different. I think he looked older. He said he’d come back soon, but we didn’t see him again. Nenad soon ate up the food. He got all thin, like a baby in Africa on the TV. He used to be so fat and round. But he’d crawl into everything; it’s hard to keep control of a baby, when there are so many of you. He learnt to walk in the camp. He was a good baby but he had a naughty smile. He used to play with the other babies. There were quite a few in our camp. Forty or fifty. We’d put them in a corner and they’d wave at each other, and crawl around. I think they quite liked all their friends. Three women had babies while we were all there. That was awful. One of them, we thought she’d die. I wasn’t much use, but the older women knew more what to do. We’d all take turns to try and help each other with the children. Nenad didn’t cry much. Some babies were much worse.
But you can’t really blame them when they did.
“Sometimes we’d have nothing to eat for days; sometimes Serb soldiers would turn up with sacks of potatoes, or some cooking oil or pasta. A little flour. We’d all queue up. One day my family got three potatoes, and a few bits of pasta, but they had run out of cooking oil by the time I got to the top of the line. They only brought the food once a week or so. Sometimes they let people who lived nearby go back home for supplies. The women came back crying. They said everything was burnt and broken. Everything had been stolen. The televisions, fridges, everything gone. Cars. Everything. Often they’d bring in a large group of women and children. A bit later, they’d bring some food, but it wasn’t enough even to feed the women they had just brought in. They never brought any more men. Nobody knew where the men had gone.
“There was hardly any water either in the school. Some soldiers in a tank had fallen through the ground and broken the water pipes. Even with Jovan’s soap, I only managed to wash myself a few times in the three months I was there. None of us could wash.
“Mehmet saw a Serb soldier he knew, Tomo Batinic. Tomo told us that it was too late, that all the Muslims would disappear. That everyone in the school would disappear. People disappeared from the school every day. We’d see them be taken out the back, then we’d hear gunshots, and then we’d never see them again. Or they’d be taken to a lorry, and we’d never see them again. One day they took cousin Mehmet. He never came back. They took Ado, my little brother, after that. My mother was screaming, No! She gave me Nenad and grabbed at his arm. She was saying, he’s only a little boy, but Mehmet’s friend, the Serb soldier he knew, said not to worry. It was only to work. It was such a relief. Ado came back every few days. He’d have bruises. Sometimes he’d have a black eye. He said they made him dig trenches, carry ammunition. He had to build machine gun nests from sandbags. They made him bury the bodies in the town. He said it was fine, but someone else said they used to beat him. If he didn’t work hard enough. Then he told me that: they’d hit him, swear at him, threaten to kill him. But for us it was enough that he was alive. He was only thirteen. He’d had his birthday when we were in Mehmet’s house. I’m glad he had his birthday there.
“We were lucky. One of the guards had known Mehmet at the sawmill. He tried to make sure that things weren’t too bad. He’d bring us food a bit. I heard another guard gave some people Serb travel documents so they could escape. One of the guards let a woman sleep at a different apartment so she wouldn’t be raped.”
She stopped there and took a sip of her coffee; I can’t ask her any more. This isn’t my business. I’m not working now. But she started again.
“They used to come and take us away at night. They’d take us to a church. A group of us. Girls. Some were very young. As young as Ado. It was full of soldiers and they’d all be drunk. They’d… well… they’d do what they wanted and then they’d take us back to the school in the morning. Once they’d had you, they’d wait a while, till the next time. There were a lot of different girls in the school.
“I don’t know why they let us go in the end. One day, when we had been in the camp for two months, they told some of us we had to leave. They made us get into buses. My mother didn’t want to go, because Ado wasn’t with us. She was screaming his name, but they said, do you think we’ll let him go to kill us all again. We were all terrified. The camp was awful, but at least we were alive. Nobody who left was ever heard of again. I don’t know what happened to the people who didn’t come. Maybe they died. Maybe they went to Germany. It took ages, to get the buses moving. Hours. We went to sleep by the side of the road. We spent a day and a night in the bus, with hardly any food or water. We all took turns with Nenad. Then they told us that we were at Sarajevo. Sarajevo used to be just an hour and a half from Rogatica. They said this was the frontline. They said it was a five-kilometre walk. We could see the road was mined. They hadn’t told the Muslims we were coming. ‘They can feed you now’, they said. ‘They can pay for you. If they don’t shoot you by mistake.’
“We walked along the road. I kept thinking they would change their minds and shoot us in the back. But they didn’t. All around the road were burnt-out cars, and rubbish, and just nothing. It’s so strange to be on a big main road where there is nothing. It should be full of cars. And it’s a long way to walk carrying a baby. We were scared our own soldiers would shoot us. Every time we came to a corner in the road, we’d shout ‘don’t shoot! We are Muslim! We are from Rogatica!’
“I can’t tell you how amazing it was to get to Sarajevo. Just to be here. To see our soldiers. To know we were safe.
Even though I lost the baby after that walk.” “What! Not Nenad!” I said.
“No,” she fl ushed and smiled. “Not him. You couldn’t lose him.” The smile leaked away. “No. My baby but, really, it was for the best… I am not sure if I… but the worst thing was leaving Ado behind.”
“When did you see him again?”
“Not till after the war. Not till he was seventeen.”
There was the purr of an engine, as a car drew up outside. She blushed, checked herself in the mirror by her dead husband’s photograph, the mascara that had smeared a little beneath her eyes.
“Sorry, I must go. Tomorrow,” she said, and stood up quickly. “We’ll talk properly tomorrow.”
I didn’t have time to tell her I wanted to leave. I didn’t have time to say I was on the next bus out.
But I don’t have to go. I could stay and talk to her more. I’ve got another few days’ holiday. Or I could work. God knows, there’s enough going on.
I thought again about what Tom had said about his girls last night.
“Why has it got worse since the war?” I’d asked him, when Tom had conjured the smokey despair of his brothels. “Is it just demand and supply, with all the foreign soldiers?” I’d asked.
He’d shaken his head. “In a war like this, you get a criminal class who smuggle guns, people, food, drugs. After the war, the criminals just change the commodity they move. Since Kosovo, things have got worse. The PKK, the Albanian separatist army, is really just a criminal organisation. They run most of the drugs and the illegal immigration networks into Europe. Bosnia is paradise for them. There are no rules. You smuggle anything you like into Croatia from here, and from Croatia you’ve got the coast, and from there it’s Schengen Europe. There are no barriers at all.
“I know you’re officially on holiday, but if you want to do something, if I can be of any help,” he’d said, and given me his card.
“Let’s have a drink.” I could stay.
I could stay and talk to Tom. My magazine may be crap, but it is for women. And I’m an editor; I can commission myself. I was about to say I’d stay, when Didi whirled away, in and out of her study, in a flurry of strokes and kisses. The two little boys watched her leave; as the younger one’s lip began to wobble
, the elder, grabbed at his hand and said, “Hey, Sulejman, bet you can’t catch me!” And ran round behind the waste-paper basket, with Sulejman in fat pursuit.
“He’s sweet. Is he yours?” I asked the young man at the computer doubtfully; he was not much more than a teenager himself.
“Nenad! Na! He’s my little brother,” said the boy. “I’m babysitting for my sister tonight.”
Epilogue
Kabul, November 2001
I was watching a burqa sway through the lobby of the Kabul Intercontinental, when I heard a voice say, “Now that’s what I call a nice Muslim girl”. I laughed. What with the snow on the mountains and the minarets and the sunlight streaming in through the bullet-broken glass, and having to wear a hat indoors because the heating didn’t work, the candlelight and the occasional crack of a bullet across the square, it took me a moment to clock he was speaking Serbo-Croat.
It was Edin. A bit fatter, a bit balder, but then, the hotel was full of people who were fatter and balder than they had been six years ago. “Kako ste?” I said. He did a double take. He was still wearing a flak jacket that said CTV.
We didn’t talk about Amir then. We just said hello, hugged each other, congratulated each other on being alive – on the seeming success we’d made of still being alive – “If you can call still being shot at for a living making a success,” Edin laughed. Then he said, I was sorry to hear about Phil, the Israelis were bastards; and I said, yes, that had been terribly sad, unlucky too. I didn’t want to think about it – I still can’t bear to think about Phil. I miss him much more here than I did back in London, but I suppose this is where he ought to be. He always said you had to be terribly unlucky to be hit by a shell.
The Girl in the Film Page 42