Now we were among those we had come to save and entertain, we were a bit shy; newly minted superheroes worried about climbing into our costumes and shouting our noble aims. Everywhere around us were men. Proper, shaved and stubbly, moustached and sceptical men. It’s a prejudice of mine not to really trust men. Serious men, standing or sitting together, smoking and talking quietly – I’ve never really wanted to know what they’re saying, because rarely in my experience is it nice.
I stayed close to the heart of our troupe waiting at the high, sugar-scattered marble bar counter. But at the fringes of the group, some fraternisation took place. Von swapped Deutschmarks for tokens for the pinball machine and lost lives at a prodigious rate. Penny chatted with a guy in a fresh white shirt who smiled and eyed her and Sara with the love–hate eyes of the bar Lothario.
Shannon and Juso arrived back with information: that the town’s head man, Fikret Abdic – aka ‘Babo’ – was out at a chicken-feed factory, but that we should await his arrival to talk about getting to Bihac. This talk, it had been implied, might take a while. Sara, meanwhile, had arranged with Hasim (the guy in the white shirt) for us to view a set of flats where we might stay the night. I preferred the sound of the uncomfy hotel at the top of the square, but Shannon treated Sara with exaggerated gratitude, like she was drawing out a four-year-old who has recently had a tantrum.
The flats were down at the bottom of the town, where it petered out into dusty roads and a stream before a bank rose sharply up to a castle which overlooked the town.
‘The family had to go away,’ Hasim said as we all arrived at the building. He was mostly bald on top, but he wore a ponytail, and the stringy black strands that made it all the way, valiantly, from front to rear provided a little crown-cover. Below the flats, at ground level, there was a bakery and next door a hardware shop full of rotavators and string and coal scuttles. Up above, two flats opened onto a central vestibule. Hasim unlocked them swiftly with a twist of a Yale key and a kick of his foot to open the flush white doors. In the showcase apartment all nine of us pushed into the narrow hallway. A low pile of children’s clothes was stacked on a side table by a telephone, coats on the hooks, drawings on the fridge. I asked Juso to double-check that we weren’t being offered cohabitation with a family.
‘No no, empty empty,’ Hasim said, peering in businesslike fashion down Penny’s silky top as she squeezed past him in the doorway. ‘My friends go,’ he assured us.
‘We’re here to try to help about the war,’ Shannon explained, as we assembled in the vestibule to begin the negotiations.
‘Yes,’ Hasim said, looking at the floor.
‘We hope to perform a play in Bihac and perhaps here?’ Sara said.
Hasim said nothing at all. Perhaps due to a total lack of interest in our project or perhaps because he was worried a conversation about our honourable motives might be the preamble to us asking for some special arrangement regarding the rental fee. He opened at a straight-faced hundred marks per night per person. When we were disbelieving, he hid behind the language barrier and ducked down to say, in fact, per flat. But when we murmured between ourselves and shook our heads to one another, he recalibrated again to say that was for all of us, for both flats. Shannon consulted Penny, who consulted Von.
Hasim went into one of the flats and turned on a tap to demonstrate the availability of water. He turned on a TV to heavy static and the possibility that somewhere, in moments of the electric fizz, a human being was represented. He sat on a sofa and put the children’s clothes from the hall into a carrier bag. When the hemming and hawing was coming to a crescendo and Penny was saying maybe the hotel at the top of town would be better, Hasim pushed the point and unclipped two keys from his Holsten Pils key ring, handed them over and said we could pay whatever we could afford. He wanted us to stay. As we took the keys and thanked him, he said one hundred marks again. I looked at Shannon to see if she would say anything but she just took the keys.
*
Von gripped the windscreen wipers, hopped onto the Transit’s stubby bonnet and climbed up onto the roof, from where he beat his chest and shouted ‘Von! Von! Von! Von!’ down the street, then untied the tarpaulin over the rucksacks and chucked them down. Von took the big flat to the rear, along with Christian, Penny, Cally, Sara and Shannon. I was still being shunned, it seemed, sent off with Onomatopoeic Bob and Juso into the smaller flat across the hall.
It felt a little like the end of the party as I closed our door. I tried to summon up some little society out of our gang of offcuts by pacing the kitchen and making some jokes about a pot of indistinct pickle in the fridge. But I know that I am insufficient material to start a party.
I attempted a difficult shit, overly aware of people walking the corridor outside. With nothing doing, I undressed and stood in the chocolate bathtub and pulled the curtain across. The water dribbled out of the shower head as if to say, Look, after pumping me up this high, you can’t exactly expect me to be rushing to get back down again, can you? I didn’t even pull myself off – I couldn’t bear the sadness of no longer having that little pleasure to look forward to.
I ran my hand down the pile of towels folded up on a corner shelf, alien in mysterious ways. How well you know the towels of home. This one threadbare and greying, this one bought on holiday for too much, the subject of a row or a bit of gay abandon. The new towel thick with a peach synthetic nap, bought as a lunge towards a new life, when all towels might be this way. Where had they gone, the owners of these towels? I wished them well, as I pushed their unabsorbent fluff up and under.
*
‘Hey hey hey! I’ve come to seek asylum in the cool flat!’ I said across the way, trying to hide from pathos in plain sight.
Christian looked at me evenly. ‘Hail the monolinguist,’ he said. ‘We’re actually doing some writing.’
‘Nice nice nice. I can write up some of my trip diary,’ I said, pretending his discouragement was an invitation.
In the front room of the apartment, Penny sat on a leather couch, covered in a red velveteen throw. Christian had made a kitchen tray into his desk on a big soft armchair. Von sat cross-legged, very close to the TV, with a white, vaguely medical, earpiece plugged into one ear, watching Santa Barbara with his hands pressed together, his fingertips touching his lips in deep meditative concentration. Out of the window two kids wheeled bikes past. Rich smells from the bakery and a sewer mingled in the room and for the first time I felt in my bones that now we were nearer the Mediterranean than the North Sea.
Penny looked me over and raised her A4 binder to keep the contents private.
‘How’s the play coming along?’ I asked after an interval of silence.
‘Good,’ she said.
‘Is everyone still pissed off about the language thing?’ I asked.
‘Language disguises thought. So at least you’re probably a very clear Serb-Croat thinker,’ Christian said and laughed.
‘Heh,’ I said.
‘Wittgenstein,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘It’s fine. It’s OK. It’s a shame, but we’re here. It’s all right,’ Penny said and shifted over on the settee so that I could go next to her.
I found my diary hard going. It ended up largely a list of meals and condiments. In the kitchen, making us tea, I asked Christian about his work. He wasn’t writing yet, he explained: he was thinking. Making character sketches. And plot drawings. He had formed the conviction that if he could physically represent the relationships in his proposed work in a sufficiently detailed diagram of the correct ‘emotional proportions’, he would have basically cracked it. He was, he said, pretty confident that his idea for a book would be better than most of these novels that ‘people put out’. Partly, he explained, because of the inevitable coarseness – all the little bits that must be left out – of actual written books. His, he explained, would be infinitely subtle, infinitely allusive, infinitely capacious – but actually rather slim and spare. He went on talk
ing about how great his book was going to be even as Penny amended her play and I tried again on my diary. Occasionally he looked over at me as I wrote, like I was jerking off in public, or clobbering pieces of tree together with a mallet and six-inch nails while he was trying to figure out how to inlay walnut in the delicate patterns of a bureau.
Back on my thin mattress over its wire rack, I listened to ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ loud on my Walkman. But it didn’t give me the jolt of heart-tug and longing it used to. So I found myself imagining it being played at my funeral to see if that kicked the old soul-buzz into action. It did a little, and as I imagined Penny and Helen smiling bravely by my coffin, as Ian Curtis sang, I must have drifted off.
Chapter 19
IN THE MORNING, a young man came to call for us, saying that ‘Babo’, the town boss, would see us at the Cafe International. Mohammed, the messenger, led the way, preferring to travel by foot, it turned out, once we were all in the van. We drove next to him, kerb-crawling the half-kilometre to the cafe. Though the situation was odd, Mohammed made it feel OK. He was thin and rangy, his muscly arms hanging loose from his shoulders like a puppet’s. He wore combat trousers and a dirty white vest and beaten-down Nikes. His little beard and red-veined eyeballs and slow conspiratorial smile made us feel we’d maybe found one of our own. Once we were on the straight road into town, he dropped back behind us, pulled a long stalk of cow parsley out of a bit of urban hedge and whipped the back of the creeping van like it was a slow heifer. Shannon and Penny leaned out of the window and laughed.
The cafe was near the central square. On the pavement terrace, middle-aged men played cards with unfamiliar markings: the outer fringes of the royal court. At the door were armed men, some with the same crests we’d seen at the border and one with a red beret. Mohammed held up an arm of warning when we went to enter, so we idled on the pavement until, after a wait that had just started to become uncomfortably long, one of Babo’s adjuncts came out.
‘You know Babo?’ the man asked. He was a big man, but one who wasn’t comfy taking up all his space. Maybe a caretaker or a primary-school teacher before the war.
‘We understand he is the man we need to ask to get permission to go to Bihac and perform our play?’ Shannon said.
‘You have brought food for us?’ he asked.
‘We want to bring it where it is needed,’ Shannon said, trying not to look too pointedly at the big dishes of breakfast stew and side plates of chips which were just then being delivered to the card players outside. The big man in his loose suit headed back in and a new wait began. After a few minutes Von grew bored and went to stand on the tired brown grass of the main square. He kicked a ball listlessly with some fifteen-year olds, flicking it for keepy-ups and booting it far away when he lost control, then smiling a good deal too much at one of the boys’ insufficiently older sister in her turquoise T-shirt and white shorts.
I liked Babo as soon as I saw him ambling out to greet us. From afar he was a regulation Yugoslav bureaucrat, his face a dab of watery pink paint above a grey suit. But as he approached he shrugged off his jacket, slung it over his shoulder revealing a short-sleeved shirt, and when he got close you could see that in his podgy, milk-pudding face, half Milosovic, half Ken Clarke, were set the most swift-moving little grey-blue eyes. Their velocity and vitality mocked the big bulb of fat that swelled over his belt and made you think of a very quick-minded beast hiding deep at the back of a cave.
He shook all our hands one by one in a way which was proper, even over-formal, but with a smile that suggested we all knew this solemn dance was nothing but a prelude to the flowering of the true connection that existed between us all.
‘Hello, hello, and welcome. We understand you have supplies for us?’ he said.
‘Er, well.’ Shannon looked around. It seemed rude to say no. ‘Yes, we, do – but also, is Bihac in need of supplies?’
Babo stepped back to excuse himself and look at an important piece of paper handed to him by an assistant – he said something to Mohammed, who stepped forward to explain.
‘They have supplies in Bihac due to the United Nations.’
‘Oh . . .’
‘But we would be very grateful,’ Mohammed said. Then Babo returned his attention to us and made a face to indicate that the piece of paper he’d been forced to look at was some piece of piffling bullshit.
‘We wish to perform a play to promote peace,’ Shannon explained.
‘We are very in favour of peace,’ Babo said.
‘We are in favour of peace too. Very much.’
‘Very much so,’ said Babo and we all smiled at each other.
‘So is there a venue that would be suitable for our play – a small theatre or a hall or so on?’
‘Yes, good. We have peace. So, we wonder . . . We are concerned that a play about peace could disrupt peace. Too much peace, you know?’ Babo said, and laughed.
‘It’s just about peace?’ Shannon said.
‘And some other themes,’ Penny couldn’t help but mention.
‘How many other themes?’ Babo’s big uncomfortable adjunct asked. Shannon looked at Penny.
‘Er – how many? I’d say about . . .’ Penny looked uncomfortable too; she would have liked to laugh and say you couldn’t possibly say.
‘Three. Or four?’ she said.
‘That is too many themes,’ Babo said and held the moment for almost the perfect length of time before letting his smile come so we could all laugh.
‘Listen. It’s fine, of course it is, but first, can we look at it?’ Babo asked.
‘Well, that would be great. Penny?’ Shannon asked. Penny nodded assent. ‘And afterwards, we would hope to take it to Bihac? We understand you might help?’
‘Yes, to Bihac is not possible.’
‘Why not? We’re in Bosnia and –’
‘Due to the conflict. It is sad. It is a very complicated situation. I must go but we can explain. I am so pleased to meet you and honoured you have come and we wish you every success!’ And Babo was off, to a waiting Mercedes, which did a three-point turn and was chased up the hill by two jeeps and a bunch of other cars.
Mohammed talked to one of Babo’s guys and it seemed that the idea was for Penny to take her play to present to Babo the next morning, up in his castle, the one overlooking the town. Meanwhile, the guy with the red beret went towards our van and opened the back.
‘Hey!’ Onomatopoeic Bob shouted and started to walk towards him.
‘Hey!’ Shannon said.
‘What’s . . .?’ Penny said and looked at me.
From out of a nearby car two more red berets with an invulnerable look about them walked hard and fast towards Onomatopoeic Bob, as if they might not stop when they reached him but just sweep him away between them. But they did stop and made a physical barrier as the first beret swung out onto the road the supplies that remained in the back of the van.
Shannon shouted over, asking him to stop until we talked with Babo, but he didn’t even look in her direction.
‘They’re taking our stuff. That is so flagrant!’
I looked at Penny and shook my head. But instead of joining me in a lament at our misfortune she puckered her lips, which I took to mean that it would be great to have someone who spoke Serbo-Croat right now.
‘Now look. Seriously, guys. Yeah?’ I found myself saying, striding up to the two big lunks blocking Onomatopoeic Bob from the van. ‘Yeah. Come on, that’s aid, for the Safe Area?’
The awkward adjunct came over, moving his big frame jerkily, like a reanimated corpse.
‘We need it for babies. For sick and dying babies. OK? Thank you,’ he said and bowed slightly to our group. Then he said something to the guys unloading our van, who laughed a raw hard laugh that didn’t sound like it was connected to infant mortality. The two red berets bristled up an extra half-inch at Onomatopoeic Bob and me.
‘Well. If it’s for babies? Yeah?’ And I looked back at Shannon and Penny and shouted, ‘But
we trust you will distribute these items equitably!’
*
After we had, depending on how you looked at it, either delivered aid to sick babies or suffered a brutal theft, Mohammed took us for an apologetic coffee at another bar at the top of the square, next to the Agrokomerc supermarket. ‘You see, we are in a unique situation here,’ he explained. ‘Surrounded by Croatia, and by Serbs, so we need more than anyone to have peace and prosperity. This is a very well-functioning area with good relations. Since the war came we have made special arrangements for peace.’
‘We are in favour of peace,’ Sara reconfirmed.
‘But the government in Sarajevo, they want to be the big guys, yes? They didn’t like our peace. They said, “No peace.” They said we must have war.’
‘But the Serbs, they want the war? Yes?’ Onomatopoeic Bob asked.
‘You have some crazy guys everywhere, right? Sure. But here, sure, we are Muslim, but it’s Yugoslavia, you know, why make wars when you can make peace and work and sell? Babo has kept things good.’
‘OK?’
‘Yeah, so down in Bihac these hardline war guys, crazy guys really, very strong on jihad, yes? They are like, “No peace. War, war! You must have war, war is fun, war is great.’” He jumped around, doing his impression of the war-crazy Bihac faction, his lose limbs bouncing and jangling comically until we all laughed. ‘So in the end we say, “Fine, whatever, guys, have war, we’ll have peace.”’
‘Jesus,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.
‘So we have our peace. Look around you, everything is good. But the Bihac guys want us to fight everybody, but we don’t, so we have some problems with them and that is our situation.’
Once Mohammed departed, we wandered back to the bar from last night, where the unfriendly atmosphere was now familiar and even comforting. Penny bought us all a sugary breakfast of small airlinish croissants in tight inflated plastic packs, very small bottles of rehydrated orange juice concentrate with ‘properté de la armée française’ on the labels, and milky lukewarm instant coffee.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 14
