‘They’re peasants. For everything they want something.’
He was being held up too, while they looked at his papers and made some phone calls. He was a Yugoslav, he said, born in Belgrade to a Croat mother, Serb father. He’d gone to school in Ljubljana, Slovenia, but now the family home was in Banja Luka, in the heart of Serb Bosnia. The way he told us all this was precise – like the speech a politician has prepared to give in answer to a difficult question he knows will come up in a radio interview. He had been living in Germany since he was eighteen – ten years working for a car-components firm and going to night school – but now he was coming back. His brother had been made to fight. He’d hidden from the Serb militia successfully for a year but a neighbour informed on him and he’d been jailed and then released direct onto the front line at Gorazde. Their mother’s anger at the neighbours had eaten her up, Juso said, till the cancer in her stomach laid her out dead. So now he was heading home to help arrange for the disposal of her apartment and effects.
‘But if you had to say, what you are, Serb or Croat?’ Von said.
‘I wouldn’t say,’ Juso said.
‘Nice,’ Von said. ‘Good man, good on you. But if you had to?’
‘I’m Yugoslav.’
Sara jumped in with the view that we should stand fast and hand over nothing.
‘What if we’re still here in a week?’ Christian asked.
‘If we’re here for a week it’s our problem. If we’re here for a year, it’s his problem,’ Sara said.
‘What do you think we’d have to give him to get through, Juso?’ Shannon asked, giving him that lovely full attention that made you feel you should weigh your words grain by grain because they would all be individually appreciated.
‘I don’t know. Something. You need to give him something to show he can take something, you know?’
‘Let’s give them something and get going?’ Penny said.
Shannon nodded. Von pinged a pebble, hard, with a stubbed toe punt towards the militia. Of course Penny would think nothing of giving away the lot. She had been taught by life that in the end there would always be more of everything.
‘I think, we give him whatever the fuck he asks in return for free passage. It’s shit or broke time,’ I said. It was the opposite of how I felt, but I was trying to make myself ingratiatingly in tune with the mood of the group.
Christian looked at me as if he was surprised I thought I even had dispensation to speak. No one responded, and Penny didn’t even give me a glance.
*
Eventually, the commander returned. Even in the direct, unshielded sunlight of the car park, his bald head stayed white and dry like something shocking and organic you might find in a sandpit. We made our offer of a certain amount of goods, but in reply he told us he’d talked to ‘Bosses – lots of bosses, big bosses’ and we could leave immediately. So long as we headed towards Bihac in western Bosnia and took the road through the town of Velika Kladusa.
Christian’s reaction, when we circled up to discuss, was that we had hit pay dirt. Bihac: it was, if anything, in worse shape than Sarajevo.
‘Since May ’93 there are six UN Safe Areas for Muslims surrounded by Serbs in Bosnia. In the east, Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Tuzla, Gorazde and Zepa, and in the west, just Bihac.’
‘And what – I mean, I know – but say again, what is a Safe Area?’ Von asked.
‘A Safe Area is the United Nations designation for a place under particularly heavy bombardment,’ Christian said, and Bob laughed.
It pissed me off, that people made a comedy out of this paradox. The Safe Areas were only funny if you figured you knew the answer. Then maybe the ‘UN-protected’ towns getting all bombed up was a sort of black comedy. But you could only laugh, I thought, if you knew absolutely nothing at all, or if you knew absolutely everything. But to pretend that the joke in itself made you clever? That seemed a bit much.
They talked over the Bihac offer for some time. But everyone was a little reluctant to give up on Sarajevo. That was the place that our mothers and fathers had heard of, where Sontag had gone. Whatever the indie glamour of cold-shouldering the major label, Bihac felt a little diminishing.
‘Baudrillard considers missions to Sarajevo nothing but “lifelines along which we suck the energy of their distress”,’ Christian said.
That hung in the air for a while.
‘And you think Bihac is better?’ I asked. He ignored me.
‘And do you do whatever Baudrillard says?’ Onomatopoeic Bob asked.
‘I’m not saying that Bihac is necessarily better. All I’m saying is that Sarajevo is hyperreal and media-saturated. Maybe it’d be good for us to go to somewhere more authentic. Baudrillard says that really we’re jealous of them in Sarajevo, that we’re the ones that are dead, and they are alive.’
‘Except the ones who are, actually dead? They’re the most dead? Yeah?’
Christian looked at Von hard, trying to make out if he was being stupid or clever.
We continued our discussions. Meanwhile the militia guys carted away half our relief aid – two of our four sacks of rice, four of onions, a good deal of bleach and several kilograms of ghee.
‘Hey!’ we said, high-pitched, as we stood stock-still, making dead sure our body language couldn’t prompt the raising of a muzzle.
‘Was that the deal?’ Bob asked.
‘We didn’t make a deal,’ Sara said. ‘Hey!’
Shannon sat on one of the squat 15-kilo tins of ghee while Sara tried to mount a departing rice sack. The militia guys picked it up and let her slide off as they carried it towards the clubhouse. She remounted like a child trying to get a last go on a funfair ride, finally hopping off just before the sack disappeared inside the football pavilion’s fire door with its ripped Juventus poster.
Eventually, the commander gave a thumbs up from a long way off, signalling his pillaging of the van was at an end. As we watched our provisions depart, Juso also said goodbye. He would not be travelling any further. At least not yet. He explained they were trying to sting him for Deutschmarks he couldn’t afford, but he believed if he stuck out a few more hours or days, sooner or later they would tire and let him pass.
It was only after Penny offered to pay Juso’s way in return for some guide and translating duties, and he immediately accepted, that I wondered if this wasn’t what he’d had in mind all along. The swift and businesslike way he strode over to hand the militiamen the money (out of our sight) suggested that our offer had been at least pre-considered, if not engineered.
Maybe I was being paranoid. The whole stop, the ‘big bosses’ intervention and the diversion to Bihac had put me in a state ripe for the consideration of plots and intrigue. Dirty Ron and his directive to travel in through the Northern UN Sector; this commander here and his insistence we head for Bihac by way of Velika Kladusa. I wondered, as we jockeyed to reboard the van, if somehow Kenneth or someone might not be steering us from afar? I tried to piece it together and while it seemed unlikely our bald commander had a hotline to Hammersmith . . . I did find it all quite pleasant to think about. It’s relaxing, I suppose, a conspiracy. The idea that someone, somewhere, is paying attention. The Jews, the Masons, the Establishment. It’s very appealing that the hidden hand at least might have a clue what the fuck is going on. And then if you clock it – well, that’s almost perfect. The world is under control and you know how. Everything is tidy.
Cally took a spot next to Von and he mouthed up to me as I climbed on board, ‘She’s cock-hungry!’ Cally’s move meant that Penny was free and I slid in beside her. We were such a long way from the kiss now it felt a different world. She looked at me briefly as I sat down but then turned to look out of the window and sighed very slightly. My tummy gnawed. Hungry and desperate.
‘Penny. I just wanted to say, about the language thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, still looking out of the window, un
willing to give me even the negotiable foothold of some anger.
‘The truth is – the truth is, I don’t really know any Serbo-Croat. None.’
She turned to me sharply and snapped, ‘Then why did you say you did?’ She’d fallen into my trap! Even if it was a trap which had required me to throw myself onto a sharpened stake as bait.
‘I think – I wanted to come very much – and at that meeting, I didn’t realise it would be a big deal. I wanted to come a lot,’ I said and looked at her meaningfully.
‘Yeah, OK, fine.’ She crossed her leg, nudging me quite hard. But even a kicking is a form of attention.
*
At least we had Juso’s Polo to follow. We weren’t going entirely naked into the internationally unrecognised Republic of Serb Krajina. The countryside we travelled through was not what I think of as border country. Where I come from, Wales ends like a wave crashing onto the Shropshire and Cheshire plains. An invitation to the hillbillies to roll down and steal from the fat of the land. Here in Serb-populated Croatia, for many centuries the last shoulder of Christendom holding the door shut, the country was light and airy – a succession of Surrey commons, the trees birch and alder and other spriggy things with widely spaced boughs, letting the light breeze through to the straw-coloured high-growing grasses below. The countryside was not too serious, the houses stationed clear and bold like salt and pepper pots, Tupperware cubes, proud on a shaken picnic blanket.
For the most part, the houses and cafes we saw by the road were not war-torn. Many road signs and barns were painted with the same nationalist symbol: four Ss painted as Cyrillic Cs arranged symmetrically around a central cross. Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava – Only Unity can Save the Serbs – but everything was prim and well tended.
Then, in the second or third hamlet we drove through, among the country farms that stood abutting the road in their generous pockets of land, we passed one house that was all burnt out. One black tooth in a mouth. And as I looked at it, and then, after, once we’d passed by, looked back towards it as it slipped out of view, it felt much sadder and harder to understand than I had expected. Any number of things might have brought it to this derelict state. But most probably just one thing. The single family shut out. The child in the corner of the playground. A night; a warning; a brick through the window, a shit on the doorstep, a look away in the morning and then, what? You go? Pack up the car with no one asking you what’s happening or where you’re going? Or worse. You wait it out, see how bad it might get? In your bed, then sitting on the stair steps till 3 a.m., looking for a nozzle that might poke in, or a petrol puddle to spread under the door, and it doesn’t come and it doesn’t come for a week, a month, but how long can you wait, do you think, till your half-friend tells you really, now really, the time has come and you’ve got to go, things have got just too bad?
Chapter 18
ONOMATOPOEIC BOB TOOK the wheel as we got close to the Bosnian border. He drove dangerously, optimistically, throwing the van at the world and trusting it would catch us, grating the vehicle into the bends, daring us to flinch. But the roads were largely empty as we chased to keep up with Juso. An EU Toyota Land Cruiser. A short convoy of Nepalese UN armoured personnel carriers. Just a couple of the home-grown boxy white Zastava Ficas; of the few cars we saw running, most were actually BMWs and Mercedes.
‘Will you be OK? A Serb in Bosnia?’ Penny asked Juso when we stopped for a coffee and sour-cheese burek lunch. The cafe owner was professionally sociable, happy to leave his regular customers grumbling as he attended to our orders and made out all was possible, even sandwiches (off menu), ‘hot milk’, ‘English tea’, ‘dry meats’, ‘festival of apple fruit’.
Juso said that his understanding was that the people over the border were good people and he should be safe. Shannon looked at Juso and smiled, and explained that we were very grateful but she really didn’t think that it was wise, his coming into Bosnia with us. Then, most unexpectedly, Sara said she thought that Juso probably knew pretty well what was safe and what wasn’t safe and that if he wanted to come then why shouldn’t he?
The gang quietened and watched. Shannon said calmly that maybe in fact Sara was right, if Juso was happy to come, of course we would be happy to have him. Juso smiled his slow smile at Shannon and nodded. Sara got up fast and uncarefully, knocking her coffee onto her pastry and dousing its brown greaseproof-paper wrapper.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked as she looked around unhappily.
‘Shut up, you fucking – monolinguist.’ She marched off towards the toilet and banged the swollen door loudly three or four times to pull it into its frame.
*
After the triple-lock to get into the Krajina, leaving was surprisingly easy. There was a UN post but the Republic of Serb Krajina and the Bosnian border points were just yards apart and seemed to have very cordial relations. The RSK had been pre-warned about us, apparently, and happily passed us on to the Bosnians. The Bosnian guards were neat and tidy and wore a uniform with a crest – the fleur-de-lis shield with a ring of writing around it. A big solid hunk of a man greeted Onomatopoeic Bob with a firm handshake, taking our driver to be the boss. Juso did some explaining, and the handshake came also for Shannon and then, as we got out of the van, each of us received a big manly grip and a look into the eyes.
It didn’t feel odd at the time. We were good folk who had travelled hundreds of miles and were now finally reaching our destination, and it was nice but natural for this man to acknowledge that. Juso explained the route prescribed to us by the militiamen. The guard and Juso conferred a little longer. Juso said the guard was asking if we would stop up in Velika Kladusa, as the road to Bihac was dangerous and we would need to ‘make talks’ to see if it was possible to get there. We said we would. I was very happy to do so – indeed, a little of me wondered if we need go any further; couldn’t we dump our remaining cargo here, just over the border on the first deprived child we saw, learn our lines, perform Penny’s play and zoom home to be interviewed at Dover by someone from Channel 4 News about the horrors we had seen?
*
I think it’s possible my generation – that is, the handful of people I met at school and in clubs and on sofas who I ever talked to about anything – grew up always looking out for the opposite. Always ready to spot an irony, a twist. Expecting, almost, every park tramp to be a professor fallen on hard times, every lollipop lady to be an ex-ballerina. So when we saw things plain before our faces it jarred and made us laugh. I knew, of course, Bosnia was Muslim, but I guess inside I thought, ‘Yeah, but really, it’s probably just the same.’ After all, everything is more complicated than it sounds. There are probably more churches there than mosques or some mad thing, because of the screwy subtleties of history, etc.
So, when we crested the hill above Velika Kladusa and the bowl of countryside below was suddenly studded with a dozen minarets, it made me want to laugh. To see the actual mosques scattered across the countryside of rural Europe – as if Church Stretton had one and Ellesmere and Whitchurch, so alien and yet so natural, as if snowdrops poked through all plucky in August – it was just so very . . . straightforward.
After that first mosque-gasp, our arrival into Velika Kladusa was anticlimactic. I guess we thought news of our coming might have filtered through from the border, that there could have been a reception committee. But there were no children singing songs, or fire hoses spraying arcs, or municipal politicians waving us in. There was nothing. We rolled into the place slowly, people checking our vehicle out with the level of additional interest they might have spared for, say, an ice-cream van.
Rounding a street corner into the heart of town, we passed a small construction site and then a big supermarket. ‘Agrokomerc’ it said out front, bold in tomato red. The central square sloped down from this Agrokomerc, a rectangular patch of dry brown grass, tree-fringed, with roads down either side and a couple banded across the middle. There were little shops set back across tan concrete pavements, and cafes with su
n-faded ice-cream posters. At the top of the gently sloping square stood a Red Star war memorial, and halfway up on the right, a municipal building with a flag at full mast.
Juso stopped up nearby. We drove a loop of the square looking for somewhere more ceremonious to disembark, but came back round to park next to him by some municipal bins.
We spilled onto the pavement and Shannon took an exaggerated breath, as if this was the air she had always been seeking. Onomatopoeic Bob went one better and knelt and kissed the pavement. An old gentleman with white hair and a short-sleeved shirt passed us by, his thick forearms veiny with the weight of shopping bags full of fresh produce. He got hit with seven or eight Dobar dans and smiled incuriously back. We skittered there on the pavement trying not to be at all affronted by the total lack of interest from those we had come to aid. Somebody needed to do something to stop a sense of futility setting in. Shannon led the way, taking us up a side street and into a bar.
It was dark in there. The side facing the street was all glass – but dark, smoked glass, so when one of the many men huddled round the high bar checked out a passer-by they had the furtive look of a punter at some one-way-mirror joint. The marble-effect flooring of the bar receded far back, into cool sparse expanses where sporadic plastic ferns on plastic Doric pedestals tried to make things less desolate. Von ordered a round of huge beers for everyone – even me – while Juso and Shannon went back to the building with the flag ‘to tell someone we’ve arrived’.
‘There you go, Monolanguage,’ he said as he gave me my chilly litre.
The only indication I could make out that the bar was within a war zone was their use of UHT milk. Everything else on offer spoke of a well-supplied establishment. This wasn’t exactly the sort of horror story I had thought I’d be bringing back from Bosnia: ‘You know, they have to use UHT milk in their coffee over there? Horrible – I mean, they do that a lot in Europe anyway. But also several of the ice-cream products pictured on the posters outside stores are for product lines that are in fact no longer available. That is the sort of hell we are talking about.’
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 13
