by Linda Grant
Marianne’s hotel was a more modest affair, its guests were Croatian, Slovenian, Austrian and Italian commercial travelers, dealing in sunglasses, drill bits, coffee, wine, Mercedes parts (stolen), aluminium pipes, chocolate, nylon tracksuits, Swiss watches, lightbulbs and fancy china. These guests were all men, though one or two had stationed mistresses in the city and brought them back to their rooms for entertainment. Only the young blond desk clerk spoke to her in a way that did not involve a sexual invitation. But her English was not good and all she could offer was a poorly printed map of notable churches.
Marianne was in a rush, she had not expected to be delayed. No one had told her that war was five percent fear and ninety-five percent boredom, she was only twenty-two and she expected things to happen immediately, the world revolved around her, why shouldn’t it be arranged according to her own wishes? Sitting on the narrow hotel bed with its yolk-colored counterpane, she looked out of the window to dark drizzly streets, the evenings were still coming too quickly, it was a late spring. A small TV showed only Croatian and German programs, a war was going on and she was out of the loop, she had already been waiting for two days.
She had walked around the city taking pictures, of women in the markets, of the UN vehicles along the half-empty boulevards, a brass band marching with drums and bugles, a policeman eating an ice-cream cone (there was nothing funnier than men eating ice cream, particularly men in uniform, she took such pictures whenever she got the chance), but didn’t she know there was a war on? And was she not separated from it by the impediment of a missing piece of laminated card?
Everyone went to the bar at the Esplanade, a place she had not yet entered. She felt intimidated by the old hands she had already seen at the UNPROFOR office, who all knew each other and were woven together by a web of connections going as far back as Vietnam. They were the same age as her mother and father, or that was how they seemed. No one had spoken to her. She was all by herself with her camera bag and her letters certifying that she was an accredited correspondent.
But the night was so long in Zagreb, lying on the single bed with only the Croats and Germans on the TV for company. You must do it, she told herself, you have to get up and go there, try to strike up a conversation. Entering the bar in her jeans, Timberland boots and the familiar lopsided stoop of the photographer, she was immediately recognizable as one of the band of brothers.
The band of brothers: “I haven’t seen you since Pristina.”
“No way. Surely we ran into each other at Mostar? Didn’t we get totally wrecked on some plum brandy?”
“That wasn’t me, that was Foxy.”
“Foxy? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, he told me all about it. He said you were sitting slumped against a wall unable to tie your shoelaces.”
“Well, then, it must have been Pristina. I did have some trouble with my boots in Mostar.”
“Don’t worry, it’s hard to keep it all straight. All these fucking Yugo towns look the same to me. Have a drink.”
Marianne entered and sat at a table by the window, the waiter brought her a glass of wine. It felt no better to be waiting here than in the hotel room, except there were people to look at, such as the old woman in the black hat with the veil who was sitting alone in a corner writing a letter. She seemed to Marianne to have been sitting at the table for fifty years, with her doll’s face and her two spots of rouge and her glass of brandy, which she had not touched. She reminded Marianne of the old tenants with whom she had lived when she was a child. She could recollect all their faces, every one. But the woman did not look up, her cramped hand moved slowly across the sheet of paper.
In her boots and jeans, her dark hair loosened, her heavy bust and her impatient hands on the table, Marianne was sexually confusing. Men were initially put off by her. They did not know if they were attracted or not, this took some time to work out.
Pretty girl, thought Colin, who had a vocabulary designed for short, descriptive signaling sentences and designated all women as pretty/dogs. She was marginal but young enough to give her the benefit of the doubt. Funny face, thought Tim. Her mouth looks like it was put on upside down.
“Hello,” Colin said. “Are you stuck too?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Come and have a drink with us.”
“Okay.” She picked up her glass and went over to the bar.
“First time in Zagreb?”
“Yes.”
“Enjoying yourself?”
“Not really, I can’t get into Bosnia.”
“No one can, if your pass has expired or you haven’t picked one up yet. We’re all in the same boat.”
Every day Marianne went to the UNPROFOR office to get her press pass and every day she stood with the crowd of waiting journalists, and every day the official said there were no passes. This happened from time to time. Where were they? They were on a plane that had been diverted to Sarajevo, they had been sent to Belgrade by mistake, they were out of stock at the printer’s, they were lost, they were being deliberately withheld by the authorities to prevent any access to the worst of the atrocities. None of the explanations satisfied the journalists, who waved their expired passes in frustration or made ham-fisted attempts to alter the final date.
They could not get into Bosnia without the press pass. With it, things were rosier, they could be ambushed, their car stolen, shot, left for dead on the road, or occupying a room in the shelled structure of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, where there was no running water or electricity. They could take a cruise down Snipers’ Alley. Without it, they were forced to sleep in sumptuous splendor beneath satin counterpanes, brush their teeth in marble bathrooms, drink coffee and eat cream gâteaux in the echoing public rooms and periodically check at the desk to find out which new journalists had arrived today. It was even possible to have a facial and a massage at the beauty spa on the first floor.
“So who are you?” said Colin.
“I’m Marianne Newman.”
“Who are you with?”
“I’ve got a commission from a magazine.”
“What magazine?”
“It’s a women’s magazine. They were the only ones who would give me press credentials. I’ve shot a lot in Britain, but this is my first war.”
The war had been going on for four years. Like a cumbersome tank, it had been making its slow but determined way eastward from Croatia, treading familiar pathways, tracks worn over centuries, entering Bosnia and with its yellow eye on Kosovo and Macedonia. It was the kind of war that had been fought on European soil since the Middle Ages, admittedly with more sophisticated weapons and materiel, but sometimes neighbors grabbed what was at hand and hacked each other to death with agricultural implements. You could not walk a step on this soil without treading on the blood of its ancestors who had died in primitive battles. European wars had absurd names, the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the Hundred Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession. This one was the War in the Former Yugoslavia.
It was a war both bloodthirsty and convenient. The militias swept into town and made a base for themselves. They rounded up a few local girls and locked them up in the school or a small hotel. Every morning they took tabs of Ecstasy and went out for a day’s slaughter; in the evening, thrumming with blood and surplus energy, they came back, got drunk and raped their captives. They wasted the surrounding countryside, laying land mines, looting and burning. The first rule was to kill, there was no second rule to complicate matters, and everyone fed on everyone else’s enthusiasm. But the civilians were not entirely innocent either; families who had been neighbors for a hundred years turned on one another and burned down their houses. When people spoke to each other, their principal feeling was distrust, you killed the family across the road to be on the safe side. In the cities where at the beginning of the decade the population had been renting videos and getting home deliveries of pizza, medieval siege conditions were now prevalent.
And it was all reachable within a two-hour fl
ight from London, the Italians could go home for the weekend. Its advantage was that there was more than enough war for everybody and it wasn’t even an expensive destination.
Now a barrier stood between the media and the war. Each of the two men had heard that the press cards would be available tomorrow. Neither revealed this information to the other. They had obtained it from the same source, the hotel desk clerk who had a web of connections throughout the city. The girl, they assumed, was too green to ask.
“If you do get your press card, how are you getting in?” said Colin.
“I’ve got a plane ticket to Split, then I’ll rent a car.”
“What would you do if you were ambushed on the road and they want to take it off you?”
“I’m not giving them my car.”
“Quite right, that’s the spirit,” said Tim.
“But what if they threatened to shoot you,” Colin said, “what’s your strategy then?”
“Give it to them?”
“Of course not, they’ll take the car and leave you in the middle of nowhere, you’ll die of exposure. You’d be an idiot to give away your car.”
“But you said they’d shoot me if I didn’t give it to them.”
“That’s the conundrum, yes.”
The bar filled up with a party of European politicians who ordered cocktails. Marianne observed that everyone was beautifully dressed, they did not wear jeans and boots and stone-colored cotton jackets with multiple pockets, but cashmere Italian coats and cocktail dresses and she was with the two old men sitting at the bar who were trying to make a fool of her. But she would rather sit on her stool with her camera bag at her feet than engage in the light chatter about UN resolutions and peace conferences.
Her mother had asked her, “What is the moral dimension of this project,” and Marianne replied, “I don’t know. I didn’t realize there had to be a moral dimension. I just want to show people what I see.” (But they both hated and were afraid of war, her parents, they were of that generation.)
“So what would you do?” she said.
“Me? I wouldn’t rent a car at all. I’d hitch a ride with one of the UN convoys.”
“Then I’ll do that.”
“But if you’re on one of the convoys, you haven’t got the story. You’re at their beck and call. You have to go where they’re going. You might as well be an embed. Have you got a flak jacket?”
“Yes.”
“Does it have Mylar plates?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think so, it’s very heavy, a friend of my dad’s got it for me.”
“You should go home,” Colin said. “It’ll all be over by the summer anyway, go back to your boyfriend.”
“No, no, she’ll be all right,” Tim said. “She’s gutsy.”
She wasn’t his type. But in all honesty, he conceded, in this line of work anyone can be your type if you’ve got time on your hands.
They bought her dinner. Under the gilded dome of the empty dining room, eating ridiculous food and drinking sweet German wine, their faces lit by the glittering chandeliers, Marianne thought, I could take portraits of them, but how can I capture the way their eyes never focus, they are always darting from one side to the other in case they miss something, everything happens at the periphery of their vision, they just don’t stop and look.
The school she had gone to had taught her to fit in, to be a leader or be bullied. At school, girls were her friends because they were frightened of her, her eyes on their faces made them nervous. She seemed to stop dead and stare, locking on, they called it, trapping them in her headlights. But then she would say something outlandish that they did not understand, such as, “Do you know you look like a pelican,” to the self-styled most beautiful, vain girl in the school, which would destroy her and send her to the cloakroom in tears. Unattractive girls received compliments they would cherish for the rest of their lives: “Leonardo da Vinci would have wanted to paint you.” At school she was a kind of heroine, with her heavy bust bouncing inside her bra, and suddenly the fat melting away over the course of a few months, proving that ugly ducklings could turn into some kind of swan.
She had lost weight by the simple, effective method taught to her by Ivan’s wife, Simone: she ate only half of whatever was on her plate. Half a bread roll, half a pat of butter, half a steak, half a potato. If she ate fifty percent, she could be one hundred percent what she wanted to be.
“You haven’t eaten much,” Tim said. “On a diet?”
“No. I’m not very hungry.”
“So what’s your assignment?”
“The raped women.”
“That? It’s yesterday’s news,” Colin said. “A few years back we were all trying to get to the bottom of the rape story. I saw through it. If all the Bosnian women had been raped by the Serb irregulars there should have been a whole crop of rape babies, except no one could find any. There was no spike in the birth rate. So where were all these babies?”
“Just because they were raped didn’t mean they got pregnant. A lot of them had stopped menstruating because of the shelling.”
“That’s just a theory. Each side will tell you anything that serves their interests. The main thing to know about war is that you need to treat everyone as a liar. They’ll show you pictures of men with their dicks and balls cut off and stuffed in their mouths and swear on their mother’s life it was taken a week ago and they know the guy personally, they were at school with him, or he’s their uncle or their brother or the mayor or what have you. That picture has been doing the rounds since the First World War. Who knows who the poor bastard was, I don’t. The point is, there are always atrocities. You just have to peer through the fog of war and see if you can make out a shape of something, but even then, you can’t always understand what it is.”
“But women were raped,” said Marianne, stubbornly.
“There’s no real evidence.”
“No one’s found it, that’s not the same thing.”
“War is mostly lies, bullshit, and occasionally some glamour, but even that’s dying out. The pictures I take no one wants to look at, they’re just of depressed-looking people walking along a road with their belongings, and some teenager with an AK-47 and a bottle of slivovitz in his pocket. You’ve turned up too late, far too late. It’s all over.”
A waiter in a short white jacket wheeled a metal trolley to their table. It contained rum baba, apple strudel, Black Forest gâteau, crème brûlée, English trifle, and a spirit lamp and small pan to make crepes flambéed with black cherries. He was the priest of the high craft of patisserie.
The men scorned sweet things, they thought they were womanly.
At the revolving doors of the hotel, Tim said, “I’ll walk you back, if you like.”
“No, I’m okay.”
Outside, the streets were completely empty, the shops dark, the boulevards wet and black. “It must be the dullest capital in Europe. There’s no nightlife, or we could have gone for a drink.”
“I’m not looking for nightlife.”
“I suppose not. Listen, the cards will be in tomorrow. Get there first thing and you can be on the plane to Split by lunchtime.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Any chance of a kiss of gratitude?”
“No, not really.”
“Boyfriend at home?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend, no.”
“You should have a boyfriend, you look like you need one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You seem like a new toy that’s just been taken out of the box and no one’s played with her yet.”
“You mean I’m a sex toy?”
“I just mean you look a bit untouched.”
“I suppose you prefer your women shop-soiled.”
“I do have a type, that’s true, my type is a short little blond girl with a big smile. You’re nothing like that, but you’re still attractive, not sure you know it, though. You look like a girl who deep
inside thinks she’s a dog. You walk like a fat girl, to be honest, which is weird, because you aren’t fat. I think you used to be fat, didn’t you?”
Usually getting under women’s skin caused a reaction, of some sort. They cried or were angry. But the tall dark girl with the camera bag simply looked at him, like an X-ray machine, then turned away and walked down the street, slightly stooped to one side as the weight of the equipment bore her in one direction.
Lying in her room beneath the yolk-colored counterpane, Marianne had already forgotten about Tim and Colin. She was thinking about the raped women and what a woman who has been raped dozens of times by dozens of men might look like now, a few years later, what there would be in the eyes. She was trying to imagine people she had never met and working out how to frame the shot. Her mother had showed her the articles about the raped women of Bosnia, they had sat and read them together at the kitchen table. “Oh my God, those poor girls,” Andrea had said.
No one had taken them seriously at first. Andrea had a friend who had a friend in Dubrovnik, a Jungian analyst. She had treated a woman for six weeks, insisting that her lurid stories were sexual fantasies. Eventually the penny had dropped. We’re not always right, said Andrea. Sometimes we miss it by a mile.
Marianne was not a virgin. She had had sex with two boys, both her own age, and it had hurt, quite badly, particularly the first time. She had never told anyone this. She feared she might have an unusual physiological condition, which she could not cope with, not on top of having so recently been fat. Sex, she thought, is not for me. Or, I’ll try again later, in a year or two, maybe it will have worked itself out by then. She wished she could talk to her mother, but Andrea would not just sit and offer grown-up advice, like other mothers, usually, but not always, hitting the mark. She would devour Marianne’s very soul with her analysis, she would become her mother’s subject. Everything had an underlying meaning, according to her mother, and Marianne wanted to work out those meanings for herself, at a time of her own convenience.