War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  The people of Zagreb obsessed about news, reading Vjesnik or the Vecernji List, listening to Zagreb TV in cafes and bars, the bulletins interspersed with patriotic music and videos of Croat soldiers running through wheat fields in slow motion firing AK-47s, the empty cartridge casings somersaulting out of the magazines to the music of ‘Brothers in Arms.’ All the talk was of Vukovar, a town in eastern Slavonia that had become Croatia’s Stalingrad. Now it was just a pile of rubble.

  The war was creeping closer.

  * * *

  There was a bizarre festive atmosphere in the Press Centre in Zagreb’s Intercontinental Hotel. Correspondents, photographers and television news crews were planning their days at the front with all the enthusiasm of children going on an outing. Every major news organisation was represented: the Guardian, Reuters, the BBC, the Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, UPI, IPA, CNN, El Mundo. Guides and interpreters were hastily arranged. Other journalists were occupied at one of the two press conferences currently under way. Those with a greater sense of self-preservation were spending their war in the bar, taking their information from the eavesdropped conversations around them and the thrice-daily English-language news bulletins on Croatian radio.

  Ryan was in the foyer, planning his day’s itinerary, when he saw her. She was wearing a fur-lined bomber jacket, olive-green fatigue pants and hiking boots. She looked utterly lost, he thought, like a kid on her first day at a new school. No friends to talk to and no idea where to go for her first class.

  After he had overcome his initial surprise he got up and walked over. ‘Jenny,’ he said.

  He thought she would be both relieved and delighted to see him, to find at last an ally among the chaos. But she wasn’t. The smile of recognition seemed reluctant.

  ‘Sean,’ she said.

  A stiff embrace. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She indicated the UNPROFOR press accreditation on her jacket.

  ‘The Times sent you?’ he asked, knowing that was impossible.

  ‘I’ve gone freelance.’

  ‘Here? It’s not the best bloody place to start.’

  ‘It’s a war and it’s on the front page.’

  ‘Hugh let you go?’

  ‘I’m twenty years old.’

  He put her belligerence down to fear. But there was something else about her attitude, something he could not fathom at all. Strange.

  ‘How long have you been in Zagreb?’

  ‘A couple of days. I’m still getting myself organized.’

  ‘Let me buy you breakfast,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I can help you out.’

  * * *

  ‘The first thing you have to remember,’ Ryan told her, ‘is that twenty-one journalists have already died covering this war. Sixty three died in Vietnam, but that was over about twenty-five years. This place has chalked up a third of that total in about six months. I’ve been to Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Angola, El Salvador, the Gulf War - I reckon this is the most dangerous assignment I’ve had. The Serbs are deliberately targeting us. Go out there in a car with a press sticker on it and you might as well draw a bulls-eye on the side. Have you got yourself a flak jacket?’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘I don’t have the money.’

  ‘I’ll get you one.’ She started to protest but he held up his hand. ‘You can pay me back later. Or I’ll work it into my swindle sheet somehow. I’ll say mine got flogged. It happens all the time. The baggage handlers at the airport steal them and sell them on the black market. The bloody things weigh about twenty kilos, probably more than you do dripping wet, but it could save your life.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this.’

  ‘It’s just the kind of bloke I am. Look, I’ve known Spider a long time. I owe him a couple.’

  She put her spoon in her coffee cup, toyed with it. It had gone cold.

  ‘You need a few basic items,’ he said. ‘Are you planning to take snaps?’

  ‘I’m not an expert. But I’ve got a camera.’

  ‘Got condoms?’

  She stared at him. ‘We’re in a war zone. Safe sex wasn’t my first priority.’

  ‘You put your used films in them to stop them getting wet. I suppose Spider’s made sure you’ve got the rest of it. Flashlight, Swiss army knife, that sort of thing?’

  She nodded.

  ‘What about morphine?’

  ‘Drug parties?’

  ‘You get yourself shot up, you won’t think it’s a joke.’

  ‘I have a basic first aid kit. Field dressings, rubber tubing for tourniquets.’

  ‘You’ll need cash in German marks, British pounds and Croatian dinars. I hope you brought plenty of spare film. One roll costs two hundred American in the lobby.’

  ‘Uncle even gave me a spare camera. An old Leica 3-C.’

  ‘Good.’ He shook his head. ‘What did he think about you coming here?’

  ‘He was against it.’

  ‘I bet he was. You must be out of your mind.’

  ‘Fast track to the top.’

  ‘I’ll give you another cliché: Easy way to get killed.’

  ‘Uncle always said he was one of the few people the Vietnam war was good to. He said it was a simple equation: you have to be in the right place, at the right time, and not die.’

  ‘Yes, you too can be Sydney Schanberg. Is that what you want?’

  ‘I don’t want to be doing court reports the rest of my life.’

  ‘Let me tell you a story. Last week I met this Pommy bloke. He drove out from England in a clapped-out twenty-year-old Vauxhall Viva. A Photographer of Fortune, he called himself. He was here three days, sold two photographs to the AP for about forty bucks each, and on the third day me and a photographer from Sigma loaded him into a box. Or the bits of him that were left, anyway. He couldn’t afford a flak jacket either.’

  ‘You’re not going to frighten me away.’

  ‘No, I’ll leave that to the Serbs. Have you got yourself an interpreter?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well, how about I save you some money. You come with us today. Be the sorcerer’s apprentice.’

  ‘I don’t want to be anybody’s apprentice.’

  ‘Believe me, when you’re green as you are, you need all the help you can get. Put your pride under your flak jacket. It’s the first thing that gets blown away.’

  She looked frightened all right, he thought. Fear is something you can smell. But she was a survivor. Webb had told him her story; there had to be some tempered steel in there somewhere.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked him.

  ‘You’re my mate’s kid, for Christ’s sakes. What would Spider say to me if I let his little girl get hurt? He’d never forgive me.’

  ‘I’m not his little girl.’

  Ryan shrugged and laughed. ‘Well, you’re somebody’s little girl,’ he said easily.

  Jenny didn’t even smile.

  Chapter 71

  He had crewcut blond hair and large, horsey front teeth. He was a big man, with ruddy cheeks, always grinning. ‘German,’ Ryan told her. ‘His name’s Helmut. Now there’s a man who was born to work in a war zone. No matter where we go, we’ve always got a Helmut. Also the best cameraman I’ve ever seen. No nerves at all.’

  In contrast, Ryan’s soundman was shy and soft-spoken, a small, wiry man with large ears that stuck out from his head at crazy angles. Jenny never discovered his real name. The others called him Radar.

  Ryan himself was resplendent in a fisherman’s body warmer worn over an ex-Gulf War Kevlar flak jacket. His army boots were caked with mud. He led the way to the transport, a red Lada Niva. As she got in, Jenny noted the holes in the rear passenger side door. ‘What are these?’ she said.

  ‘Bullet holes,’ Ryan said. ‘Still want to come?’

  * * *

  They headed out of Zagreb on the deserted Zagreb-Belgrade motorway. There were reports of heavy fighting around western Slavonia, and Ryan hoped to get some combat footage from the front lin
es. A heavy mist blanketed the highway as they drove south-east, and their driver-interpreter, a taciturn Croat by the name of Dragan, had to drive cautiously because of the stray cattle that had wandered onto the road.

  There was hardly room to breathe in the tiny Niva. Jenny was crammed in the back between Radar and Helmut, the sound equipment and camera and battery packs and leads strewn around her lap and on the floor. Ryan sat in the front, tapping impatiently on the dashboard, making desultory conversation with Dragan.

  As they drove, Helmut told her his life story in idiosyncratic English. Apparently he had once taken pictures of models before making the transition to television work. ‘I am fashion photographer,’ he said. ‘ Vogue, yes. Elle. Cosmopolitan. Now I go from bum-bum to boom-boom, yes?’ He laughed at his own joke.

  Once they passed a column of white armored vehicles moving slowly in the opposite direction, flying the blue flag of the UN. The officer sitting in the turret of the lead vehicle sported huge goggles and canary-yellow gloves.

  ‘UNPROFOR,’ Ryan said. ‘Also known as the Unprotection Force by the locals.’ He leaned out of the window and waved. ‘About as much use as tits on a bull. The idea is to put these blokes in the middle of two armies who are slavering at the mouth and armed to the teeth and then hope neither side shoots at them. Great idea. Still, that’s what makes the United Nations the dynamic institution it is.’

  They turned off the motorway and headed north towards Pakrac.

  The villages showed signs of the recent fighting. Wrecked cars littered the streets; many of the houses had gaping shell holes in the roofs and walls. Jenny saw handbills pasted on every available space: Hrvatska Vas Zove! Croatia needs you now!

  ‘It’s like a cake,’ Ryan was saying. ‘You mix all the ingredients together, and then, after you’ve baked the damn thing, all the ingredients decide to go back the way they were before. That’s what’s happened here. You’ve got Croats, Serbs, some Jews, Slovenians, Moslems, Albanians, Montenegrans all living together for the last fifty years, the way Tito wanted. Now he’s dead and they’re trying to unbake the cake.’

  But Jenny was only half listening to what he was saying.

  This was him, she kept telling herself. This was the man she had wanted to find all her life. Where was her rage when she needed it? Where was the hatred? She could not summon her venom now and she felt ashamed. She had been searching for a monster, and the monster had turned out to be a brave man with a big heart who had not hesitated to help her when she needed it.

  ‘The really amazing part,’ Ryan was saying, ‘is that there ever was such a thing as Yugoslavia. Tito must have been quite a bloke. His father was Montenegran and his mother was Slovenian yet he cobbled this whole state together and kept the Croats and the Serbs living side by side in the republic for almost fifty years. Incredible.’

  Dragan turned off the road and down a dirt track. The Lada bounced over the wheel ruts in the frozen mud.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘I’ve got some deliveries to make,’ Ryan said.

  A road sign, pockmarked with bullet holes, identified the village as Otovac. It appeared to be deserted. Many of the houses were boarded up and Dragan had to maneuver the Lada around shell craters in the road. Pieces of bitumen lay in huge lumps in the street and the shell-holes were rapidly filling with water from the melting snow. A modem Pik supermarket had been looted and its entire front window lay shattered on the footpath. All the shelves were empty.

  A dog nuzzled the spilled innards of a dead cow outside a petrol station.

  Dragan turned into an alley, parked the Lada outside a desolate brick building. Ryan went to the boot and took two large cardboard boxes from behind the back seat. They were marked with the names of Swiss and German medical companies. Helmut lifted two other cartons, one of concentrated milk powder, the other tinned fruit.

  ‘Come and have a look,’ Ryan said to Jenny.

  A woman appeared at the doorway of the building. She was tiny, with mousy brown hair, and she wore a white coat. She shouted a greeting to Ryan in Serbo-Croat and he answered her in her own language. She led the way inside.

  There appeared to be no light or heating and the building’s interior was gloomy, cold as a tomb. There was an overpowering smell of urine, damp, and sour boiled food. The woman in the white coat led the way into the kitchen. It was a sizeable room, with several sinks and ovens, large enough to accommodate the preparation of meals for a small army. There was a huge pantry with rows and rows of wooden shelves, but they were mostly empty. Jenny counted just a few packets of rice and a tin of strawberry yoghurt powder.

  Helmut and Radar tore open the cardboard boxes and started to unload the contents. The woman threw her arms around Ryan’s neck and embraced him.

  ‘What is this place?’ Jenny said.

  Ryan disengaged himself from the woman in the white coat. ‘Come and see for yourself.’

  He led the way into a long dormitory. The windows had been blown in by shellfire and were open to the freezing rain. Fifty or sixty children lay on cots and metal frame beds, staring at the ceilings and walls in morose silence. When they saw Ryan and Jenny there was a general stampede. Jenny took a step back.

  Most of them wore no more than ragged T-shirts, even in the Dickensian cold of the dormitory. Jenny recoiled from the matted hair, wild-eyed faces smeared with dirt and mucus, bare legs crusted with dried excrement.

  The children pulled at her arms and thrust their hands into her pockets, pawed at her, swarming around her like ants on the carcass of a beetle. ‘Fuck you, bitch! ... you give me cigarette ... fuck you, bitch! fuck you! ... you give me food, you give me money, bitch, fuck you!’

  Jenny backed towards the door. Ryan caught her arm. ‘Hard to feel sorry for orphans when it’s like this, right?’

  He pulled her down the corridor to the next room. ‘This is the hospital,’ he said. It was scarcely different from the dormitory from which they’d just come, except perhaps for the tattered posters tacked to the walls: the Pink Panther, Asterix the Gaul, Donald Duck.

  The woman in the white coat was sitting on one of the beds. She was holding a basin of near-freezing water and was bathing the stumps of a young girl’s legs. ‘That’s Dr Pavlovic,’ Ryan said. ‘She’s in charge of the orphanage here. A lot of the kids here are Serbs. Some of them had their parents murdered by the Croats, or got separated from their families when the fighting started.’

  There was a large iron bedstead pushed against the wall. A young girl, perhaps no more than four or five years old, lay staring at the ceiling. Her ankle was chained to the rail of the bed. ‘That one’s a Croat,’ Ryan said. ‘The Chetniks came and raped her mother right in front of her eyes, cut her throat. For some reason they let the kid be. Perhaps they were feeling kind that day. Anyhow, any man comes close to her now she goes berserk.’

  ‘Why is she chained up?’

  ‘If they don’t she’ll go over to the wall and bang her head against the bricks until she’s unconscious.’

  Jenny stared at him.

  ‘They tell me you came through something like this and survived,’ he said.

  ‘How can people do this to each other?’

  ‘The blokes who did this haven’t got two heads or anything. They’re probably kind to their own mother, and I dare say they go to church every week and say their prayers.’He pointed to one of the other cots. A four-year-old boy was watching them. He was holding a toy gun, a Kalashnikov made of black plastic. ‘I brought him a teddy bear last time I was here,’ Ryan said. ‘He didn’t want to know, threw it on the floor.’

  The boy kept pointing the weapon at her, imitating the barking cough of a machine gun. Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah ...

  ‘Why don’t they take that thing away?’ she said.

  ‘They did a couple of times. He practically fits, throws himself around, does himself damage. So they had to give it back.’

  Jenny turned away but she could still hear him
, he was still doing it.

  Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah . . .

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Who knows? Come on, get your camera out. You should be able to sell that one to AP. Make sure he’s looking right at the camera. It’s the face that’s important.’

  Jenny self-consciously raised the Canon and shuttered off a few frames. The plastic Kalashnikov, the child’s blank expression, the heart shaped mouth, the frigid blue eyes.

  ‘Come and see the babies,’ Ryan said.

  The babies ...

  The babies stank. There was not enough water to wash them and too few staff to change their nappies. Jenny bent over one of the cots. The child was painfully thin, its skin grey, eyes huge and lifeless, like a fish on a stone slab.

  She bent to pick him up.

  Ryan stopped her. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘I don’t care if I get shit on me.’

  ‘Neither do I. But Pavlovic doesn’t like it. She says they cry for hours afterwards. It’s better you don’t touch them at all.’

  She wanted to get out of this place. She fought her body’s urge to hyperventilate.

  ‘How often do you visit here?’ she asked him.

  ‘When I can. I try to organize some food and some medicine from as many different places as I can. I’ve got some contacts inside UNPROFOR. I get some of the medicines sent out from the States. Sometimes it gets flogged at the airport, but you can’t win ’em all.’

  ‘Why? Why do you do it?’

  He grinned. ‘Every little bit helps, as the old woman said as she pissed in the sea.’

  And there was her mother’s face. Not beautiful any more, not as she was in her childhood memory, serene and lovely. Her skin had been dried to the color and texture of old leather by long years of work in the fields in the Zones. The long tapered fingers were gnarled by disease and work and poverty. A tooth in the top of her mouth was missing. She was passing her a bowl with a little rice, all they had to eat, and whispering: I am not hungry, little bird, you have it.’