I noticed that, unlike with all other customers, the proprietor put Penny’s change on the counter, not in her hand.
‘Yeah, I think he thinks not only is black skin disgusting, but also that it’s catching,’ she said. I shook my head sadly. Still, I hoped I wasn’t expected to actually do anything. I felt I was a strident anti-racist. But on the strict unspoken understanding that this attitude should never cost me personally any degree of diminution of status, freedom or prospect. Indeed, feeling overall that being so forward-thinking I might be due some kind of benefit from society at large for my unnaturally swollen tolerance glands.
I sat, gripping my seat edges on a coffee buzz, giving the owner occasional hard Paddington Bear stares when he wasn’t looking, and not knowing quite what we were doing or how we fitted in. Von bought a round of beer after the last coffee was gone and from then on the place became our hub for the day. Shannon took a spot at the head of one of the tables and talked politics with Juso, as Von encouraged Cally to come and marvel at him racking up points on the pinball machine.
Sara said she thought there were actually ‘bigger fish to fry’ and got Onomatopoeic Bob to agree to drive her round town looking for the supplies we had ‘so foolishly let go’ in case we could claw some back. Something about her disgruntled, distracted air made me think Penny might join in. So I volunteered too. But instead she announced she was heading back to the flats to make finishing touches to the peace play and I was stuck with Onomatopoeic Bob and Sara.
Beyond the central rectangular square, in the opposite direction to our flats, the town dipped away to an industrial area. A coach park, a little stadium and light industrial areas jostled with the big barbed-wire-fringed compound over which the UN flag flew. Somewhere down there, I guessed, was where our aid had disappeared, but I had no intention of facing down the red berets, so didn’t mention it. By the time we returned to the bar empty-handed everything had gone fuzzy. Afternoon barrelled into evening and people retired for woozy naps and hunted out fatty baked goods.
I lay on the settee in Penny and Von’s apartment watching Tudjman, the Croatian president, on TV and tried to explain to Von again what had happened in the former Yugoslavia. He seemed to have got it finally locked. There were obviously finesses I wanted to make to his understanding, subtleties and ambiguities to be teased and further explicated. But at least he appeared to finally be solid on the Serbs, the Croats and the Bosniaks, and the way they descended in that same order in terms of their magnitude of blame for the current situation. He pulled Cally’s hand a long way up his thigh and said, ‘Look at that fucking dick.’
Tudjman stood, dressed in a double-breasted grey suit, speaking to a younger suited man at the head of a set of marble stairs. He looked peeved and constipated behind the pink murderer’s tint of his steel-frame glasses. Von got up and offered his hand to pull Cally from the settee. He took a last commanding look at the TV, shook his head and said, ‘That fucking bastard, when will he be satisfied?’ in a way that made me suspect he believed he was watching Milosevic, without giving away enough to allow me to actually correct him.
As Von and Cally went into her room it became obvious the walls were so thin that we were going to be silent partners in their humping. It felt, in fact, as if we could hear the very slide of fabric as their layers came off, but maybe it was just the scrape of the steel feet of the bed on tile and the bangs of the mattress base against the wall that we heard, and we filled in the rest.
I looked at Penny, and raised my eyebrows, hoping that there might conceivably be something darkly erotic about watching Balkan politics on TV through the noise of her brother’s sexual activity. But she kept her eyes firmly on her marking-up of her play.
‘Can I show you something?’ she asked eventually.
‘Well, sure,’ I said. She closed up her file and passed it to me.
‘I just want someone to have a look for me, if I’m going to have to tell Babo about it? I’m not sure – how much more it needs, lots or a little or – I’m just, I’ve looked at it too much, I think.’ I smiled reassuringly.
‘Penny. I’m sure it’s amazing.’
‘I could say loads about – where the bits are that need more and what I’m thinking. But just to say, before you read – just keep in mind one thing: Petar is not – Petar could have Matilda’s lines and the whole section that starts in the country kitchen, to the end, could be first – that’s all. Basically you could reverse the scenes. Like a palindrome. Is one idea. It’s based on Ulysses, structurally. There’s lots of concerns, but I want them to just – drift, to infuse. I don’t want people to even be aware. I’ve said too much. OK?’
‘OK,’ I said and opened the folder with great reverence while Penny went to the kitchen to fetch some beer and avoided bearing witness to that intimate moment when the reader lowers themselves like a swimmer into the pool of the writer’s world.
It took me a few minutes to clock what was going on in the play. It was biroed up and there were many crossings-out. But as I read, intensely focused, flicking back to reread sections and then forward to move on again, slowly but surely an overpowering aesthetic realisation began to make itself forcefully known to me:
It was shit.
It was total horseshit. It didn’t really make any sense and when it did it was thunderingly obvious or complicatedly bad. I started to leaf through the pages quickly, noticing that I was growing more and more excited. Penny came back in and sat, attempting nonchalance on the easy chair, tucking her legs under her and sipping from a beer as she read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Next door the slips and slides and laughs of foreplay were giving way to the steady knock-knocking of some endgame sexual contact.
After an odd, jarring start, the play quickly seemed to lose all connection to the reality it had never sufficiently established. The narrative jumped away – to different characters, elsewhere, several times – then circled back to the original characters doing things which seemed confusingly disconnected from their initial actions. The character dialogue was a mix of ‘common speech’ – such as has never been heard – and meandering political declamations, but all at the emotional pitch of a dirge. I hunted through them, these speeches, sniffing for where ‘Maya’s’ feelings might be Penny’s own, hoping to find a key to unlock her personal passions in the mechanism of the piece. But increasingly I concluded that there really wasn’t that much of her in there. She truly had tried to imagine how a young Bosnian woman raised on a farm might feel about the sale of a favoured bullock. And she went on about that cow for pages and pages and pages.
The tapping went fast and woodpeckerish next door, and then it was over.
After half an hour or so Penny went to the kitchen again and when she returned she hung around the doorway, unable to bear my silence any longer. She stood there looking at me until I couldn’t prolong any more this delicious period when she was entirely focused on me and I still had every card in my hand. I was aware that as soon as I said anything at all I would begin to lose my allure. But still. Ultimately you must act and lose, I suppose, and try, in your losing, to win a little back.
‘Well, it’s amazing, obviously,’ I said, and she breathed out dramatically and came to sit next to me.
I understood now why she’d asked me to read it and not Christian or Shannon. Not because she was dimly aware of how bad it was. Presumably, like any artist who’s started with high hopes on a sketch or a short story or picking out a tune on an acoustic guitar, she half hated it and then half wondered in the night if she wasn’t the world’s greatest genius. If maybe, even in its very faults, her work didn’t somehow maybe outline the shadowy reality of the subtlest emanation of humanity’s true shape.
No, she’d chosen me not just because she was aware I liked her very much and she would receive a glob of honey in any cup I gave her to drink, but also because she had overreached and that in me she recognised a fellow prevaricator. The play, by any honest estimation, was at best hal
f finished. After a certain time it simply petered out into a series of lined A4 sheets with ‘ideas for scenes’ and things like ‘Petar confronts Maya about the money, angrily’ and ‘Colin tells Hetty about his dream – she reacts’. ‘Bomb hits marketplace – woman tells about dead children (Heartbreaking?)’.
I told her in the end that I wanted to sleep on it. I took a gulp of red wine as though I might have been deeply affected by the action of the play, and asked for time to consider the work’s depths, in this way securing an invitation up to Babo’s castle with her in the morning – so we could talk more on the expedition.
Chapter 20
‘LOOK, THE TRUTH is I think it needs a lot of work . . .’
‘A lot?’ she said.
The walk was turning out to be a hard climb and we’d let Juso and Shannon break off ahead so we could talk.
‘Let me finish. Of course it does, all great work does. Indeed all great works always remain, in a way, unfinished, don’t they?’ She looked at me and I teetered on the edge of credibility. ‘But the essentials are there. I just think rather than reading it out to him, you should sketch the idea?’
‘Yeah? Yeah,’ she said, then: ‘Yeah?’
We had decided to make the trip on foot rather than take the van, because from down below it looked like the castle was close. But the road out of the village had whispered along the valley floor like smoke, and now, as we snaked up the S-bends towards the circular castle walls, we were late and Penny was growing anxious.
‘Just tell him the basic structure – that’s simple,’ I said. ‘Right?’ And I wondered if it was possible to love someone and also quite enjoy torturing them, because this question, I could see, made her stomach flip.
‘Well,’ she started, rehearsing, ‘it’s a story about the war and how families – about how a single family and other people around the farm – react, and the war is symbolised, by a – by the coming, advent of the army, to the town, but they want to sell their house or cow – that shifts, maybe too much? But they need to sell one, to be able to – to move away from the war or army (war would be too direct), but because of their ethnicity, the other people – the bad people – or are they? – swindle our original people out of their cow. And the army make the war, we discover, for their own ends, or so it seems. And then there’s the indeterminate shelling. That we don’t know where it’s coming from.’
‘I like that – that’s a great detail,’ I said.
‘Thank you. Yeah, so then there’s the ideas about the dreams and the counter-dream and it ends. I’m not sure right now, between you and me, how it ends? . . . I mean, it feels very hard to precis?’
‘Sure, but the story of Macbeth would be hard to precis, wouldn’t it?’
‘Um . . . not really,’ she said.
‘No, sure. But I guess one thing you could do – is, for this meeting, simplify?’
‘Yeah. I guess. I suppose the thing is – and I wouldn’t say this to anyone but you – but the play is almost too complex to just be able to say what it’s about?’
‘Completely. I get it. Absolutely.’
‘But what could I say it’s about?’ she asked.
‘I think it might be a good idea – to have a dummy version to outline, for him?’
‘What – a simplified version?’
‘Sure, or even just a very basic – an idea, it may seem a bit pathetic, but something with a clear set of characters and an ending?’
‘God,’ she said. ‘Yeah. Right. The dummy version. Maybe that would be good? I hate talking about my actual thing anyway.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘But what could it be? Shit. Shit.’
Having worked on the play for around six months, she now had, I guess, twelve minutes or so to come up with a rival, superior version. She looked at the road surface and frowned.
‘I had an idea once for a thing you could do, someone could do, about the war,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. About a . . . a village under threat, who hold hands – and stop a glacier. It seems crazy, but it works – they stop the glacier. It would be sort of magical?’
‘Hmm. Not to be rude but it sounds a bit – not corny.’
‘No, sure, sure, it’s from – it’s a riff on –’
‘No, go on, how would it work?’
‘It’s fine, forget it. It’s simplistic,’ I said. I was much happier talking about her terrible ideas than my own. ‘It’s totally crummy, you’re right.’
‘It isn’t. It sounds great. Just a little trite?’
‘Sure. Go on about how to explain your play then, Penny?’ I looked at her mildly.
We walked in silence for a while. The castle, coming into clearer view now, was the size and shape of pictures you saw of Elizabethan theatres. Round and stony outside, with a tower in the keep and one above the main gated entrance. The day’s heat was just starting to make itself apparent through the morning’s cool, the sweaty shoulder starting to grime the shirt.
‘It needs to be amazing, is the thing,’ Penny said.
‘It should be incredible,’ I agreed.
‘It should be something where people just see it and . . . like – did you ever see Platoon or The Killing Fields?’
‘Simple, but universal. A fable.’
‘Exactly. So when people see it, they’re like – “Fuck.”’
It was then that I reminded her of the plot of Douglas Hurd’s ‘The Summer House’.
‘I met him once at my dad’s friend’s. He was actually very nice.’
‘Exactly, he probably won’t sue you!’ I said.
‘I could subvert it. Ironise it,’ she said. ‘But the essentials. The shared house, destroyed. It’s quite powerful, isn’t it?’
‘It does have a sort of mythic resonance.’
We were starting to really sweat as we finally passed an old woman in a peasant headscarf and long grubby skirts. We’d been gaining on her for ten minutes as she marched, huffing and stopping, slowly up the hill. She refused to smile as we overtook her. Outside a farm, on a bend a little further up, there stood one of the stone outbuildings with ventilating slats for drying animal feed, which we’d discovered were common hereabouts. Inside, we could make out heads of maize lying in a jumble as each little sweetcorn shrivelled in on itself.
A UN Land Cruiser whined in a low gear as it approached and hooted hello. Our jeans, our well-fed haunches and stumbling city walk must have marked us out as non-locals. The vehicle pulled up beside Juso and Shannon. When we caught up the French soldiers invited the four of us to take a ride to the top with them. It was like that in a war zone, I noticed: a kind of reverse triage prioritised those in least need, as though people could only really bear to help those who didn’t much need it.
The driver had thick black hair, wet from the shower or greased back, and peered over his wheel like a pensioner in a county town. His companion, crew cut and English-speaking, let his bicep bulge big from a green T-shirt as he gripped onto the hand-strap above the front door. They were impressed we had an audience with Babo. They were talking ceasefire agreements with a subordinate military commander somewhere up there. But when Shannon expressed some approbation for Babo’s fondness for peace, the front-seat passenger made the French pouf of disbelief.
‘Babo is a crook,’ the strong-armed passenger said, addressing himself to Shannon in the rear-view mirror.
‘Yeah?’ she said. And I felt my stomach shift uneasily.
‘He’s a smuggler. Fighting his own. Muslim on Muslim.’
‘He won elections. Right?’ Juso said.
‘Oh sure,’ the soldier said and, getting a fix on Juso, clammed up.
‘But, he seemed a nice guy?’ Shannon said.
‘He is a nice guy. He is. If you’re his buddy. This town is full of dentists and doctors and – foot doctors – what do you call them?’
‘Chiropodists?’
‘Exactly. Chiropodists. Something like five chiropodists and three vets and – everything i
s here. He found the best doctors in Yugoslavia and paid them two thousand marks a month to come to Velika Kladusa. But in Bihac, they’re dying. From the Serbs of course, but also from Babo’s fighters. Muslim on Muslim. A fucked-up civil war inside this whole shitty civil war.’
With a final flourish of acceleration, the Land Cruiser reached the Frenchmen’s destination, a flat-roofed concrete bunker that looked like the lavatory block at a safari park. Outside, a huddle of Babo’s soldiers waited for the French deputation.
‘Could we get to Bihac, do you think?’ Penny asked.
‘Not with us. Unless you have blue cards?’
‘No. No we don’t,’ Shannon admitted.
‘Then, nothing gets to Bihac,’ said the passenger, as he swung out, ‘unless Babo says so.’
*
We walked the final hundred metres up to the castle, past artillery pieces dug into neat sandbagged redoubts and a red-and-white-striped vehicle barrier. The castle’s double doors were made from hard new brown wood like a suburban front door, but fitted into an old stone doorway topped with an ogee arch.
‘What do you reckon?’ Penny asked. ‘Is that true, Juso, about Babo?’
‘It depends how you see everything,’ he said, into his beard.
‘But Muslim fighting Muslim?’ Penny asked.
‘Sure, maybe, I don’t know, but if someone says you must fight – must you fight? Can you fight to not fight?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Everyone says the French love the Serbs too much anyway and they like to smuggle a little brandy. So. I don’t know anything. I’m just a guy. The Republic of Me. I don’t give a fuck.’ He marched a little ahead of us, combing his black hair with his fingers, annoyed at being the reference book we turned to but then also queried.
Though there was much activity back down at the concrete military bunker, to greet the arrival of the French, no one was coming in or out of the castle doors, so I knocked with a knuckle rap.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 15
