The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  ‘Of course it will. They’re here to support the troops on the ground. The infantry will be moving in at some point.’

  ‘Those days are gone. In our part of the world we’re not prepared to accept losses. Those helicopters might be efficient, but they’re also vulnerable. Neither Uncle Sam nor Mother Denmark wants its boys coming home in body bags. There they sit, and there they will continue to sit. Meanwhile, from high in the air our valiant lads will bomb Milosevic into submission. It’s only a matter of time. We bomb TV and radio stations and newspaper offices, power stations, bridges, roads, oil depots, people. We bomb Yugoslavia to the brink of perishment and starvation. That is how we wage war today.’

  ‘At some point in every war they have to send in the infantry. The foot soldiers always have to clear up after the cavalry. That’s how it is, that’s how it’s always been.’

  ‘True. But only after the enemy has laid down his weapons. Then, however, they can expect to be there for years. Because down there on the ground seeds of hate are being sown that will have to be harvested by generations to come.’

  ‘You know it all, don’t you?’ Toflund said.

  ‘Star Wars, that’s our game. We leave the dirty work on the ground to the UCK. In this war they’re the ones who have to look the enemy in the eye. I’m telling you: your modern Westerner want to see no corpses.’

  ‘So you say,’ Toftlund retorted, not even trying to conceal his irritation as the plane’s wheels hit the bumpy, rutted runway and braked. Beyond the window the host of cargo planes and Hercules troop carriers gradually came into focus at this airport which had never seen so much traffic – not until now, that is, when with awesome efficiency all the world’s relief organisations and its most powerful military machines were pumping men, equipment and, not least, money into a society which would otherwise have ground more or less to a halt.

  Chaos reigned at passport control, where the cigarette smoke billowed around Toftlund and a solitary, timid sign showing a cigarette with a line through it. There was no system to the queues which were forever forming and breaking up. The military-looking young man from Ljubljana Airport presented an American passport and a slip of paper to a moustachioed, cigarette-smoking man in a blue uniform and was ushered past the control point. The youthful volunteers for the UCK were lined up like soldiers and marched off into the terminal. The weather was warm, the temperature possibly as high as seventeen degrees. But it felt as if there was rain in the air. The airport ground was a sea of mud strewn with deep, swilling puddles; everything was coated in a layer of grime and damp.

  Amid the throng Per spotted a middle-aged man who looked rather like a Red Indian who had taken a wrong turn, or a relic from the hippie era. The fringing on his light-coloured leather jacket bobbed up and down along with his long, grizzled ponytail. He wore tight, black jeans and pointed, high-heeled boots, had a gold earring in his right ear and rings on almost every finger. His skin was badly pockmarked. He hadn’t been on the plane, had he? He moved with easy familiarity among the innumerable blue uniforms, whose only purpose, apart from their constant smoking, seemed to be to increase the confusion. When the ageing Albanian hippie raised his hand for a second in a gesture that could have meant anything or nothing, Toftlund noticed that he was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. The guy stuck a hand in his pocket and slipped one of the blue-clad officers some green dollar bills. He made no attempt to conceal this transaction. The officer nodded, the hippie raised his hand again and four young Albanians came round the barrier and picked up two large boxes sitting right next to the battered boom. They carted them off with the customs people paying them no apparent heed.

  ‘Welcome to mafia country,’ said a voice in Danish. ‘Don’t you just love Albania already?!’

  The voice belonged to a tall and very skinny man in blue jeans and a blue denim shirt. ‘T. Poulsen, UNHCR’, the badge on his left breast pocket said. On his right shoulder he bore the UN logo and a tiny Danish flag. He had a friendly, youthful face, intelligent eyes and short, fair hair. At first glance he looked to be in his early twenties, but the fine lines around his eyes revealed that he had to be a good ten years older than that.

  Teddy offered his hand:

  ‘Thank God, the cavalry has arrived! Teddy’s the name.’

  ‘Torsten Poulsen, Emergency Service Agency. Welcome to Albania.’

  Toftlund eyed the newcomer. He had seen him somewhere before, but could not recall where. Poulsen smiled and eyed Toftlund in return.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you, Per?’

  ‘I can’t quite …’

  ‘Langeland, close on fifteen years ago …’

  The penny dropped.

  ‘But, of course, Lieutenant. So this is where you ended up.’

  ‘Here, there, wherever the Agency sends me.’

  They shook hands, both grinning from ear to ear like old army chums.

  ‘What’s all this about, then?’ Teddy asked.

  Poulsen lifted Teddy’s holdall, saying:

  ‘Let’s be on our way, before it gets dark. We don’t drive at night in this country. Per blew up a factory that I had been detailed to guard. We had a whole company. There were only three of them. And yet they managed to steal up on us, set their explosives and get away without us knowing they’d even been there.’

  ‘Oh, right, playing at soldiers and all that,’ Teddy remarked carelessly.

  ‘Per was a frogman with the Royal Navy in his last life. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Like the Crown Prince?’

  ‘Before the Crown Prince,’ Toftlund put in.

  ‘Well, I suppose somebody has to defend the mother country,’ Teddy announced airily and proceeded to make his way up to the actual passport desk, leaving the other two morons to wallow in their stupid, old-soldier reminiscences. Nothing brought out the lad in a grown man like a reunion with an old pal from their army days, a time when everything was manly and uncomplicated. Teddy had served four months with the Civil Defence Corps, so he had got off lightly. Nonetheless he recalled that time as a long and boring waste of his fine gifts. Not only that, but he had had to put up with taking orders from people whom, in civilian life, he would never even have spoken to, never mind listened to what they had to say. He stood patiently while the woman behind the desk took his ten American dollars and meticulously inscribed his name in a large, lined ledger which reminded Teddy of his childhood. There had been a time, so many years ago that he did not care to think about it, when his mother had kept the household accounts in just such a ledger. His gums were beginning to ache again and he could tell that all those hours in an aeroplane seat had not done his back any good.

  His backache was not helped by the twenty-kilometre drive in Torsten Poulsen’s big, white Toyota Land Cruiser to the port of Dürres. The blue UN logo and the Danish flag were painted on the sides of the four-wheel drive. On its nose waggled a long and powerful radio antenna. Toftlund’s mobile was now nothing but a useless electronic gadget with no connection to anything or anyone. The road was narrow, dirty, full of holes and swimming in mud and water. The rusting hulks of old cars lay here, there and everywhere, as if a giant had played with them for a while then tossed them away. Horse-drawn carts crawled along the road which was lined with people selling everything from berries to petrol in clear plastic containers. On every street corner stood lethargic, chain-smoking policemen, each armed with a lollipop with a green circle in the centre. None of them appeared, though, to be doing anything about the chaotic traffic. The countryside was scattered with dingy houses and little concrete bunkers which looked like mushrooms attacked by rot. There they lay, sagging and abandoned, and in the narrow slits through which the revolution’s forces were meant to defend their native soil, grass and other weeds had now taken up their positions. Some of the toadstool bunkers lay on their sides with their rusty iron struts sticking out like stiffened entrails into the polluted, blue-grey air. Thus the heroic stand had ended. The abortiveness of soc
ialism, and of raw capitalism, hit you like a slap in the face in Albania. On the banks of a shallow, muddy-brown, noisome river lay what looked like a veritable car cemetery. In their various stages of ruination, decay and rusting, the cars resembled a nightmarish sculpture, or a scene from a film about man’s total destruction of his own environment. Not far from the airport they passed a road bridge stretching into nothingness. It had slumped slightly in the middle. It looked like the work of a madman: a bridge to nowhere. Poulsen explained that one of Hoxha’s nephews had designed and built it. Not until it was more or less completed did it transpire that he knew absolutely nothing about building bridges: the first car to drive onto it had caused it to fall in on itself. That had been fifteen years ago. Now it just stood there. Albania was like one big rubbish tip, or some futuristic landscape over which a war has swept, leaving everything at a standstill.

  Confidently and with care, Poulsen wove his way round cattle, horse-drawn vehicles, noisy little Italian mopeds, pedestrians and craters which could have swallowed up a VW Beetle. The road had clearly been tarmacked at some point. Now there were more holes than tarmac. But what worried Toftlund most were the raggedy little kids who milled barefoot around the white car whenever Poulsen slowed down, as was often necessary, to little more than a snail’s pace.

  ‘It’s those bloody Italian soldiers,’ Poulsen said, tooting furiously at two little boys with dirty faces and hands who were trying to clamber up onto the Toyota’s running board, yelling for chocolate. ‘When the first of the Italians got here they threw chocolate to the kids. Now they swarm around the cars. It’s only a matter of time before we run one of those poor brats down. They flock round the big trucks too. It gives the drivers sleepless nights, I can tell you.’

  Dürres hove into view. They caught a glimpse of the sea beyond the tall cranes, but otherwise the scene was the same. Wrecked cars, sunken bunkers, tumbledown houses, unfinished concrete buildings. Old houses with peeling walls. And on every second one a ludicrous modern element: a satellite dish.

  ‘So the poor sods can watch Italian television,’ Poulsen said. ‘It provides just about the only light relief in the lives of most Albanians.’

  They drove past a refugee camp. Army-green tents ranged in neat rows. Over the teeming mass of humanity of the camp – primarily women and children – fluttered the Italian flag. The camp was surrounded by a wire fence and the entrance was guarded. Across from it something like five hundred people lay on the bare ground under large sheets of clear plastic and damp blankets. They were waiting to be registered, or to be allowed in to the overcrowded camp.

  Poulsen told them that new batches of refugees turned up at this camp and the too few other camps every day. There would have been a lot more deaths had it not been for the tremendous hospitality of the Albanian people and the fact that spring was not far off. Had this been February he did not dare to think what would have happened.

  ‘Three cheers for the NATO bombings,’ Teddy commented wryly.

  ‘So what the hell else were they supposed to do?’ Toftlund protested. ‘Let Milosevic carry on with his ethnic cleansing? Wait until the last Kosovo Albanian had been driven out or killed?’ ‘Well, now NATO’s doing it for him. What do you think, Poulsen?’

  ‘That it’s my job to take in everybody who comes here, no matter why they’ve come. My list of priorities is very simple, and hence very tricky. It all boils down to basic human needs. I have to provide the refugees with shelter from the weather. I have to supply them with food and clean water. A place in which to take a shit. Security for themselves and, later, some idea of what has become of their nearest and dearest. For the rest, it’s all politics and I don’t have anything to do with that.’

  ‘That’s too bloody easy.’

  ‘Well it’s enough to keep me working flat out around the clock. But yes, I know. Let me put it this way. It’s Milosevic who’s to blame, but it’s our responsibility and, hence, our duty. Okay?’

  ‘I won’t argue with that,’ Teddy said.

  Poulsen eased the car over some rusty, buckled lengths of railway track lying across the road like anti-tank obstructions. On the right were more of the redundant one-man bunkers. On the left, beyond the big warehouses clustered under the yellow cranes, they could see the grey-green expanse of the Adriatic. A ferry was docking. The big bow port was lowered and army vehicles rolled ashore. There were both armoured personnel carriers and what Toftlund recognised as self-propelled artillery vehicles. It had all the makings of an invasion. The Toyota’s huge, heavy tyres splashed through the muddy puddles.

  ‘We have a convoy up north at the moment,’ Poulsen said. ‘Which means we have a couple of vacant rooms at the hotel. You’ll have to make do with them. Otherwise accommodation is impossible to come by here.’

  ‘That’s absolutely fine,’ Toftlund told him.

  They drove right into the centre of the town. Here, too, the buildings were in a sad state, but there was a bizarre loveliness about their decrepitude: like a once beautiful woman in whose crumbling face traces of that former beauty are still discernible. There were a lot of young people on the streets. They were surprisingly well-dressed, in Italian and French designer gear, especially the young women with their tight jeans and provocative tops, their painted lips and long eyelashes. They went about in pairs, as girlfriends do, smiling and waving voluptuously when they spotted the white UN vehicle. An open Italian jeep came driving towards the Toyota. Three of the soldiers in it whistled and whooped at a couple of particularly pretty girls.

  ‘Well, well,’ Teddy cried. ‘The young ladies have certainly changed since I was last here.’

  Poulsen laughed:

  ‘A lot of them are quite stunning. But I’m going to tell you what I tell my drivers. Every one of those gorgeous young women has at least three brothers, eight uncles and a very touchy father. Get one into trouble and you have two options: either you marry the girl or you wind up in the ocean. Honour, disgrace, revenge – these things are taken very seriously here. So you can look, but please – don’t touch.’

  They all laughed.

  Poulsen steered the Toyota up a narrow, unpaved alley, through the puddles and the mire, between houses with flaking yellow walls. Gaily-coloured washing hung from lines strung between the buildings and a couple of small children waved and gave the V-sign. Under shuttered windows two satellite dishes were bolted to a wall. Above their heads a tangled skein of electric cables snaked across the alley. Three other white UN vehicles were parked on a piece of waste ground next to a small hotel calling itself The Mediterranean. Poulsen parked the Toyota. Teddy scrambled laboriously out of the back seat and lifted out his bag.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Poulsen said to Toftlund, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘I didn’t know how much I could say in front of the professor there,’ he went on.

  ‘He’s in on it,’ Toftlund said.

  ‘Fine. We received orders from the very top to help you. As if we didn’t bloody well have enough to do as it is. Sorry, no offence. Offhand we can find no trace of your woman in our system. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an awful lot. The whole situation is so chaotic, anyway. There is, however, another possibility. The mafia …’

  ‘What dealings do you have with it?’

  ‘Officially none. But it’s like this – the mafia controls the harbour here at Dürres. As a representative of the UN Refugee Agency it’s up to me to make sure that the tons of supplies which come into this harbour each day don’t end up gathering dust in some warehouse due to problems with customs clearance. Albania is a sovereign nation, it invited NATO and ourselves to come here, but it’s very conscious that it is not an occupied land. It is a capitalist country in which shipping agents, customs officers, civil servants and policemen are all out to get rich quick from the boom generated by the war. That’s just the way things are. If my supplies don’t get through people die of cold or hunger. As long as we don’t have enough troops to enable NATO to simply take control of the
harbour – always assuming, of course, that the Albanian government in Tirana would grant permission for that – then I have to employ whatever means are necessary – all in a good cause …’

  ‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me.’

  ‘You did ask.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘Wherever there is need you’ll find those who prey on the needy,’ Poulsen said and Toftlund observed the weariness in his eyes and the grey tinge to his skin. It was not the easiest job in the world, being at the sharp end of a disaster situation which almost had the wealthy nations of the world beat.

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘That’s okay. I’ve let it be known that you would like to meet with them. Certain contacts have been furnished with the information you sent me. You said it was urgent, so …’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘Now we just have to wait and see whether they’ll get back to us. But you do realise this does involve an element of risk.’

  ‘I’ll need a gun,’ Toftlund said, his eyes fixed on Poulsen’s.

  ‘I’m a civilian, working for the UN. I did not hear that.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, come on.’

  Poulsen studied him intently.

  ‘I did not hear that,’ he repeated tonelessly. ‘But I can’t prevent you from meeting another old army mate. Major C. Sørensen, of the Royal Commandos.’

  ‘Christ Almighty, is C. here?’

  ‘The Danish forward division arrived a couple of days ago. They’ve set up camp not far from here. They’re preparing for all-out war, or at any rate the occupation of Kosovo.’

  ‘That’s really great, Torsten,’ Toftlund assured him.

  ‘Is it? I don’t know. But I don’t like the idea of you climbing completely naked into bed with the Devil. Because that’s what you’ll be doing.’