*
As we drove south, I could almost sense that under our wheels we rode on the threadbare last matting of a state. This thing we kick against, that stops us burning down bus shelters and paves the roads, it is indeed woven of perishable vegetation, and here it had almost worn through. I looked back to where the roadblock was no longer visible and realised that I strongly believed in the state. The warm milky cowish ride on the great beast which hardly minds who it is carrying; and in its vast disinterest leaves room for its citizens to thrive, the birds on its back peck-pecking as it trucks on down the road it lays before itself. Without the state, everything is just men by the road with guns telling you to do things.
We skirted Cazin. In the suburbs children behind low wire fences waved at us as we passed. Inside this, the Bosnian government-controlled area, time had ticked back. For lack of fuel, things had gone from the car to the horse, the handcart, the repurposed shopping trolley. There were no more checkpoints but everywhere you could tell we were near war. There were men in fatigues, bunched mostly, but also singly. Bristly things were all around. Not just the spikes of guns, but radio masts, metal spikes at unfriendly angles, the iron core visible within rent concrete.
We crossed the dipping plateau through a pressing heat. The cloud cover was total, lying in long white-grey ridges, chunky beneath; a thick duvet trapping the air above the land and cooking it hotter and hotter.
‘Are you OK?’ Shannon asked Bev again as we approached an impressive castle. Ostrozac, my guidebook said. Its buckled towers and broken skirting walls might have been hit by this or any number of previous wars.
‘Yeah. Yeah. I made a tactical decision to let the situation play out,’ he said.
‘And what do you think we should do about you?’ Shannon said. Bev shifted in his seat.
‘I’ll look after you,’ he said. It was one of those shoves too far people under pressure make. Until quite recently he had been our protector. Now, with his gun in his waist belt, he was a cargo that endangered us.
‘It feels like we might be safer without you, actually. But if you’d like, we’ll take you in to Bihac?’ said Shannon, the Plain Dealer.
Bev squirmed, all English and affronted. ‘Those hills are full of Serbs, to be fair,’ he said, nodding to the other side of the gorge we were descending. But none of us in the van felt his side arm offered us much protection. ‘Look, I’ll ride you into Bihac, make sure you’re OK, then see where we’re at, but right now you need to hit the deck quick fast for snipers?’ We responded, but a little slower this time, like workers in an office who have seen too many fire alarms that month. The road swished back and forth and by the time we reached the Una River at the valley’s floor and Bev said we could sit up again, I felt motion-sick and resentful. All that scunning around on the floor for nothing. Not a single shot.
The narrow valley bottom we travelled was only wide enough for a three-ply of road, railway and river. We passed a large and disused hotel complex on the riverbank, built for Communist fun. You could imagine fat bureaucrats hitting forehands on the red-clay tennis courts, thunking through the ball with heavy Warsaw Pact alloy rackets, their pioneer kids off singing songs of brotherhood and unity in the woods. Soon the hills parted around us and we travelled on to a plain that ended in new hills and, just before them, Bihac.
As we arrived in the suburbs, past compounds of non-functioning light industry, the noise of a loud fart ripped through the van. Von, headphones on and oblivious, wantonly eating up Duracells to loudly power his Doors tape, smiled, eyes closed, presumably believing he’d slipped one out unnoticed. His sister tapped his arm sharply to let him know we had all heard and he offered an unembarrassed ‘Apologies. I thought I’d got away with it!’
The northern side of the town, where we came in, was furthest from the Bosnian Serb lines. Their forces cupped the town in an unfriendly hand from below. To the west and north-east, these Serb lines joined up with the border of their allies in Serb Krajina. With the Autonomous forces of Babo to the north, enemy positions surrounded the whole pocket one way or another. On a map, it looked rather perverse of the Bihacists to hold out. A child colouring in would certainly crayon over the edges of the pocket; it should really be the same colour as the surrounding territory, that would be much simpler.
The damage was light and sporadic as we passed through the northern streets – shells and mortars had popped holes in the concrete only here and there. But even undamaged areas showed the secondary infection of the conflict. Trees were cut down to stumps; gate posts and fence posts had also gone for firewood, leaving their wire fences sagging.
For the want of other suggestions, we headed to the hotel on the river recommended in my guidebook. Following the advice of a pre-war guidebook felt certain to lead us to some irony – a death pit or an amputation hospital that had overtaken the tourist spot. Before we got there, as in a dream, a municipal policeman waved us down at a flat dusty crossroads and in English told us we were the peace mission. Yes, we said, we are. He said we should proceed to the Park Hotel ‘to meet with the rest of your team’. We explained that we were all on the van, but the policeman quickly lost interest, going to admonish the owner of a Polo who was blasting his horn behind our stopped vehicle. Bob drove on as Sara worried out loud that perhaps we’d been beaten into town by another theatrical collective hoping to bring peace to the region.
As ever, there were no welcome signs or children with flags, but arrival at the hotel felt like our most successful arrival yet. It was a low clumpy white building just outside the little kernel of the old town, set a way back from the broad beautiful Una River. The flat green-grassed land it stood on felt spongy with the possibility of damp.
Inside, there was even a reservation made for us, by ‘Fikret Abdic’ – Babo’s proper name. They were trying to kill each other – the two pockets – but still accepting each other’s hotel reservations. The receptionist spoke no English, but she smiled at us encouragingly and handed out keys with a certain flourish, like each new key was a further embellishment on an initial magic trick. As we signed in, a butterfly of hope started to flutter. They were all double rooms. Shannon and Sara took the first one, Sara fussily signing and depositing a passport while Shannon surveyed the lobby.
It was covered in a thin, hard-worn carpet, more lino-with-a-nap than carpet, and this stuff continued up the walls, where there hung lots of brown and green linear minimalist paintings. ‘A Luxury Hotel’ was the line it was trying to sell – you could see from the cream leather armchairs and settees dotted around the reception area. Their scalloped backs made them look theoretically sumptuous, but when I tried to sit, they were slidey, impervious to humanity and slightly off scale, really more suited to a doll’s house for three-quarter-sized manikins.
Von signed him and Cally up for a room while giving me a sly glance to underscore that this was absolutely the last time he would be indulging her. The wheel of possibilities spun, but I didn’t have to actually do anything. Mine and Penny’s work together on the play had bonded us in the eyes of the group, so they arranged themselves around us. Christian and Onomatopoeic Bob took a room while Bev, smoking out of the front doorway, keeping an eye on the pistol he’d left on the bus, was billeted alone.
Penny signed us in, and I felt, giving my date of birth and handing her my passport out of my money belt, that this was a little like our secular marriage. My guts filled with popping, elevating bubbles at the hundred little intimacies to come: the washbags hung together, the shared shower room, the end-of-night reviews of the behaviour of our friends and enemies. I could look at her while she slept! That clean, clear, serious kaleidoscope of a face that I could never somehow quite fully understand – I’d have time to study it while she was unconscious. Not on a chair right by her. Nothing odd. But little glances, small crumbs to be broken off chunk by chunk from the huge treat I’d been granted. Yes, I was a happy man, even before I fingered the corner of the vast unimaginable hope that something w
ould happen.
Then I saw him. And everything turned to fear and shit.
All at once he was among us. The murmur of a cheer went up and I had to join the rest in exclaiming how! and what! and wow!
‘Simon!’ Penny said and held his shoulders like he was the marvel of the ages. ‘Fucking – Simon?’
Chapter 28
‘HOW THE FUCK?’ Shannon asked.
Onomatopoeic Bob embraced him as though they were old mates. Christian too. And shamingly, since he was the centre of the action, I too tried to get some allure to rub off by giving him a man-clasp of happy seriousness. I looked him in the eye like we’d had our differences but here we were, engaged in something bigger than both of us, and slapped him on the back. Before retreating, I made sure to place the briefcase down at his feet.
Simon kissed Penny on the cheek and then did the same, slightly more perfunctorily, to Sara and Shannon and Cally, and even to Bob, right onto his reddish bristles. Everyone asked all the questions again and he, well showered, clean and adjusted to the altitude, waited for the giddiness to die down. He invited us through to the bar where he calmly walked behind the bar and slid open a metal fridge door to pull out many beers. It was as though he actually owned the place; even the Deutschmarks he pushed into a tin after he’d counted out the beers looked like an after-thought.
As he opened the beer caps, we laid our bags in a pile. I retrieved the briefcase and pushed it into the centre of the impact-cushioning heap. Then we sat around him on angular dark wood chairs ready for our audience with the hero.
‘So how the hell did you make it, man?’ Onomatopoeic Bob asked.
‘How long have you been here?’ Shannon asked.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Yeah. OK, after we got split at – what, Dover, so, yeah. I just thought for a while and I went back to London – this is what, this is only like, ten days ago? God, it feels – anyway – I was low – I sent a letter through . . . I don’t know if that . . .’ Penny nodded that it had indeed made it through, and then as he held her eye for a beat, she dropped his gaze flat. ‘Um. What – er, yeah, where was I? – so, yeah, so I basically had a very big think about what I was going to do?’
‘You wrestled with the thought-whale?’ Penny said wryly.
‘Er – I guess, you could say I . . .?’ Simon wrinkled his brow. I looked at the floor and hoped he wouldn’t ask what the fuck she was talking about.
‘Yeah, then I thought, fuck it – and by then, I’d talked to your folks, Penny, and they’d spoken to a guy in Zagreb and he said you would be going to this place Velika Kladusa, and I just thought, fuck it.’
‘Ronnie did . . .’ Penny said. ‘He told you we’d be going to Velika?’
‘But . . .’ Shannon started to say, ‘we didn’t know, did we, till . . . later?’
She and Penny looked at one another
‘Yeah. He said Velika,’ Simon said. ‘So, I thought I’d come up through here and go up there and I flew to Split and then there’s a British garrison there and they got me over the border and most people head for Sarajevo from there but I got a ride with some UNHCR folks. Sort of: Livno, Bosansko Grahovo, Tito’s cave, then came out through the Krajina and in at the Izacic crossing?’
‘OK. That works,’ said Onomatopoeic Bob, generously, a map open on his lap.
‘Yeah,’ said Simon. ‘And I’ve been here a few days, and it’s a sort of a living nightmare and it seems someone dies almost every day, sometimes more. But the spirit of the place is remarkable. And how about you guys?’
After we’d told him about Croatia and Zagreb and the retreat under attack, the border crossings, Babo and his castle, the mercenaries and my minefield humiliation (this last in perhaps too great detail), people exclaimed the last ‘fuck’s and ‘shit, man’s and finished their beers. Then everyone but me smiled round at one another, pleased at this reuniting of the tribe.
*
Penny stayed downstairs while I took our bags up to the room. It was narrow and uncomfortable, the two single beds lined up against one of the walls, a narrow walkable area beside them and then a zone of jutting laminate-topped chipboard desk and wardrobe all built in together. A fluorescent tube buzzed above behind thick, ridged plastic. The small wall-to-ceiling tiled bathroom had a deep background odour of chemical-swilled waste that emanated from the dark corners beyond the lavatory. It was the most unerotic set-up imaginable.
Once I’d laid out our bags, I went back to the gang to explain that I needed to make good on my promised handover to Hamdo Abdic, the 5th Corps commander.
‘What is it?’ Simon asked
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Right?’ he said, sceptically.
‘It’s a briefcase,’ I explained.
‘Sure, but what’s in it?’ he asked again.
‘It’s private,’ I said.
‘Right,’ he said and looked at me like I was definitely a dickhead.
‘I don’t know exactly what’s in it. It comes from Babo. Fikret Abdic in Velika.’
‘Ugh. Him,’ Simon said.
‘He was pretty good to us, actually,’ Penny said.
‘Well, they don’t like him here.’
‘He’s actually created something pretty interesting up there,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said.
‘Yeah, well, it looks different from down here. Serbs on all sides. Dwindling ammunition. The pocket is on the verge of collapse and Babo collaborates with the enemy.’
Shannon talked about how multi-ethnic it seemed to be up in Velika and how wide was the availability of doctors, chiropodists and cheese, and how Babo had secured us passage south. Simon said nothing in response, but sighed heavily and let us know how deeply he was intertwined with the complexities of everyday life in Bosnia by telling us where we could buy chewing gum, tampons and bottled water, if we needed them; who Shannon should see at the town council offices about where best to stage our play; and suggested I start my search for Hamdo Abdic at a command post near the bridge.
I tried to trick Penny into agreeing to come with me. I claimed that I was rather scared of going alone, which was also in fact true. She looked at me. Men assume, on the whole, that women like men who are fearless, and I think that’s probably right. But if you’ve no hope of success in pulling off the rooster-strut, there is always the geek gambit: the bid for intimacy out of an apparently frank admission of weakness. If it was a chess opening, I’d say it left you in fearful danger later in the game, but upfront it has a decent chance of at least getting things going.
As we approached the soldiers at the bridge, the Una River ran wide beneath. Aquamarine, churning around small green islands. I told Penny the story I’d read some days ago in my guidebook, that apparently it was called the Una because a Roman legionary on first seeing it had declared it the best, ‘the Numero Uno River’. I’d been storing this up, a nut to roll out at a suitable moment, but now that I did, it seemed rather unlikely and not especially interesting.
‘But, yeah, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful river,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
How rich with fascinating insights and complex emotions I felt, but how poverty-stricken I seemed to be in terms of things I actually had to say.
The militia at the bridge did not speak English and my pronunciation of ‘Hamdo Abdic’ caused confusion. But as we persisted with our questions the two soldier guys got the idea that we weren’t going to simply fuck off, so consulted a third guy who made some radio contact and told us in French to wait.
We stood smiling beside them for several minutes, but it soon became apparent this might be one of those waits that lasts hours not minutes, and we couldn’t keep up our initial level of silent goodwill indefinitely, so retreated to sit on some sandbags piled up at the approach to the bridge.
‘What do you think is in there?’ Penny asked, looking at the briefcase I laid carefully behind the sandbags.
‘Papers?’
‘Why don’t you look?’
&nb
sp; ‘It would be rude to look. Don’t you think?’
‘That’s very scrupulous of you, Andrew.’
‘Yes,’ I said. She was smiling playfully, but I couldn’t really join in for fear she might next insist teasingly that we open the case, which would indeed be bonding, unless it exploded, and we were both blown to pieces, which wouldn’t. ‘I think that trust – especially to those we don’t know – is something like the glue of humanity, don’t you?’ I said, and winced.
‘Yeah?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m such a dickhead.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I don’t know, I say these things, but, I don’t know. What does anything mean?’
She looked at me, trying to guess, I think, whether I was having a nervous breakdown. For my part, I was trying to grope towards some true expression, but also hoping I could stir up enough sympathy and confusion that I could admit to my poem treachery before it came to light. Maybe even mumble or cry enough to pass it off as confused passion rather than calculated duplicity?
‘Why do you even hang round with me, ever?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know. You’re interesting. You’re different,’ she said.
Different. I was ‘different’. That was something to work with. Different. Deviation from the mean. But, in which direction? Towards the oddballs and the Sasquatches and the men who keep their piss in jars and write equations with lumps of coal on their bedsit walls? Or towards the brilliant, the other-worldly, the Bowies and the Rimbauds and the people who reject bourgeois convention by fucking really really well for hours at a time?
Just then a Suzuki jeep arrived and an old driver in a dirty cream cardigan got out and waved to us. The army guys at the bridge instructed us to jump in and soon we were in the back seat. I tried to cushion the briefcase between my legs as we zoomed across the bridge and then veered right immediately afterwards, to the south.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 22
