I Hate Martin Amis et al.

by Peter Barry

  My parents live in a nondescript Edwardian two-storey house in a small town in Norfolk, on the east coast. The house is a few streets back from the promenade, so it always strikes me as being little different from living in London. When I point this out to them, my father gets angry and shouts, ‘What do you know! You can breathe the sea air down here. It’s healthier than where you live.’ I can’t be bothered to argue with him, so I shut up. Eventually, he quietens down, but he doesn’t forget. He hoards insults – or what he perceives as insults – in the back of his head like a squirrel stores nuts in the ground. He’ll sometimes take them out, often years later, dust them down and use them as ammunition against some unsuspecting adversary who’s forgotten they ever existed. In that respect he’s no different from the men who sit with me around the Vraca campfire: they’re brothers in bitterness. All bear grudges, all spend their days obsessing about how they can even the score.

  My mother and father have always lived in the same house. My grandfather bought it when he fled from Serbia in 1940. My father was fourteen at the time, and the two of them lived there alone, rattling around in the house, with some rooms barely visited from one year to the next. My grandfather claimed he moved into the house because when he arrived in England he was going to find himself a new wife and have lots of children. Trouble is, he’d become so wary of women after the way my grandmother behaved, and so suspicious of their motives, he never married again. It was left to my father to carry on the line. He married young, to a farmer’s daughter. The Wickhams had been farming in the area for hundreds of years, and weren’t too happy about their only daughter marrying a foreigner. My father fell out with his father-in-law and two brothers-in-law with impressive speed (confrontation, that’s his speciality), and now, if my mother wants to see any of her family, she has to sneak off and visit them secretly. After I was born, when there were four of us in the house, it was about the right size. But then my grandfather died in 1976. I was sixteen, and I missed him. He’d always spoken Serbian to me (to everyone in fact, even the bemused locals), and I think he found being with me easier than being with his own son. A few years later I left to go and live in London, to do odd jobs while I studied to be a teacher, so once again the house seemed too big for its two occupants.

  The old place hasn’t been painted inside or out for as long as I can remember. Around the windows the paint is peeling, and the undercoat is visible. The carpets are worn and the floorboards creak. Draughts inhabit the corridors like ghosts, and the East Anglian damp infiltrates every room, every occupant. The light shades are dimmed by a thin patina of dust, and the weak sunlight barely penetrates the lace curtains. It’s a dark house, with little warmth. It could be a boarding house whose regulars have all passed away. Outside, the garden also has fallen into a state of disrepair. My father still cuts the grass, but doesn’t bother to weed. ‘That’s a woman’s job,’ he says. ‘That’s not for men to do.’ My mother obviously thought it was a man’s job, because she didn’t do it either.

  When I was growing up, there was an open field across the road from the house. Cows grazed there, and I’d sit on the wall by our front gate and watch them, big, ungainly creatures, always chewing. I never wanted to cross the road and touch them. The cows have long since been replaced by houses, and the greenery has slowly retreated from the town like a puddle after the sun has come out. Our house is now many streets from the countryside, and my grandfather, who always said he wanted to live amongst trees because that’s where he’d been brought up in Serbia, would be disappointed if he saw his house today.

  The sea, that hasn’t moved; it’s still a few streets away. It’s typical east coast scenery: bleak, windswept dunes with tufts of spiky grass, grey seas and low skies, and seagulls huddled together in despondent, shivering groups on the shingly beach. Only rarely can people be seen walking in the distance, and they, without exception, always have a dog with them. That’s their reason for being there, the only reason anyone’s ever there. In summer, an ice-cream van sometimes materialises on the promenade, the tinny music whipping across the sands towards the seagulls, like nervous pensioners in an empty ballroom waiting for someone to come and ask them to dance.

  ‘That Milosevic is a genius. In five years he’s won half of Bosnia. That’s genius.’

  ‘Helped by Mladic.’

  ‘He’s a genius too, no doubt about it, but his genius is on the battlefield. He couldn’t have done anything without Milosovic. It’s Milosovic who’s pulling all the strings, even though he sits in Belgrade and tells the world he has no control over the Bosnian Serbs.’

  We were watching the news, Milosevic surrounded by thickset men, politicians and bodyguards – it’s hard to tell the difference in this part of the world – justifying his latest incursion to the world’s media. My father never watched the nightly news before the troubles started in the late eighties, after Tito’s death, but now he watches it religiously. ‘I want to see the progress we’re making.’ It’s the only thing, apart from Manchester United, I’ve ever seen him show any enthusiasm for.

  Soon enough he was onto his favourite hobby horse. ‘They tell lies, the BBC. You’d think they’d know better. They’re anti-Serbian. They never mention how we’ve suffered.’

  ‘From the outside our point of view doesn’t look too good.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He barely turned his face from the TV screen. He reminded me of an animal devouring a meal, too intent on what it was doing to spare the time to look around.

  ‘I’m talking about the executions, the torture, the rapes, the mass graves … That kind of thing,’ I added weakly, implying there was more.

  ‘They deserve everything they get, those bastards.’

  ‘Maybe they do. I’m just saying the BBC can’t be expected to take the past into account when they may not even know about it.’

  ‘Well, they should. The Gestapo was sickened by what the Ustase did to us during the Second World War – even the Gestapo. Imagine that! They weren’t exactly a bunch of innocents. Do you know what the Ustase and the Croat death squads did to us?’

  And even though I answered yes, he went on to describe the atrocities to me for the hundredth time.

  ‘Some of the men presented one of their officers with a bucketful of eyeballs – Serbs’ eyeballs. What do you think of that?’ He tapped my forearm forcefully with a finger. ‘And what was Croatia’s reward for committing such atrocities? They were given Bosnia, that’s what. That was their reward for their barbarity and for killing one and a half million of our people.’ And he threw himself back into his chair as if there might be a Croatian crouching there behind him and he was intent on squashing the life out of him.

  My mother sighed. It was usually the sign she’d heard something she disapproved of, but the only reaction it ever got from my father was a look of scorn. My mother didn’t understand the situation in Yugoslavia, and didn’t want to. She reacted in the same way to the conflict in Northern Ireland. ‘I don’t see why people can’t get on with each other.’

  Sometimes I tried to explain the political, religious and racial issues at the heart of the problem. ‘It’s quite simple,’ I’d say to her. ‘There are Christians, Jews and Muslims, and then there are Social Democrats, Communists and Liberals. You also have Serbs, Croats and Bosnians, Macedonians and Montenegrins, Hungarians and Albanians, plus a few Slovenes, and they all hate each other. Every group hates every other group, Mum, and every person in every group is trying to kill every person in every other group. That’s all you have to remember. It’s really quite simple.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, not seeing at all, the expression on her face as if she’d just been given ten seconds by God to explain the meaning of life and she didn’t quite know where to begin. ‘But I still don’t see why it should stop them being friends with each other. I think it’s un-Christian carrying on the way they do.’

  My father always said to me: ‘She’s a good woman, your mother, but like a lot o
f her sex she’s stupid.’ Coming from a man who’s never read a book in his life, criticising someone who is never without a book in her hands, this argument was scarcely persuasive to me. ‘She doesn’t know anything unless it’s to do with housework. That’s all she has room for in that head of hers – housework.’ His other damning indictment of his wife of almost forty years was: ‘She’s a farmer’s daughter, so what can you expect?’ Which was a little rich from a man whose father had been little more than a Serbian peasant.

  I said to him now, just to niggle him, ‘You’ve told me that before, about the eyeballs.’

  ‘Well, did I tell you about the massacre at Celibici?’ he demanded, leaping forward fifty-odd years to bolster his argument.

  I dismissed the massacre with a flick of my hand. ‘All I’m saying is that the media has to come up with good guys and bad guys. It makes every situation easier to understand. It sells more newspapers if there are good guys and bad guys. The public can grasp that; it’s nice and simple. They like to have someone to hate, that’s what you don’t seem to understand.’

  ‘Don’t tell me I don’t understand. It’s you who doesn’t understand.’ Pointing his finger at me: ‘You know nothing about Serbia. It’s in your bones, and yet you’re ignorant of our history.’

  My father has been angry all his life. He stared at me blankly before turning back to the screen, back to devouring the news. If he’s not watching the progress of the war on television, he’s reading about it in the newspapers. He’s an addict. At the shop he prefers to read newspapers than to talk to his customers. Sometimes I wonder how he keeps any of them. ‘Morning, Mr Zorec,’ they’ll say, or ‘Morning, Pavle,’ and he’ll grunt from behind the counter, barely lifting his face out of the bowl of black print. If there were another newsagency in the town, I think they’d all leave him. But there isn’t.

  I was annoyed by his accusing me of not understanding the history of his motherland. He’d explained it to me often enough, and I’d also read many books on the subject. I knew, for instance, that if you asked an Englishman to name his enemy in the Second World War, he’d answer, the Germans. There were others, but basically it was the Germans. In Yugoslavia it was nowhere near as simple.

  There was a war between Germany and Italy on one side and the Yugoslav State on the other, another between those two countries and numerous resistance movements, another between the Croatians and the Serbs, and a fourth between Tito’s communist partisans and Draza Mihajlovic’s royalist Chetniks. Now that’s what I call a proper war; messy, bitty, not at all clear cut, anarchic – a Balkanised war.

  The great thing about all these twists and turns in Yugoslavia’s history, these collaborations and betrayals, this switching from friend to foe overnight, is that it gave future generations the justification for every outrage any of them wanted to commit, ever. ‘But we only did that because you once …’ And it’s always been that way. Not just during the Second World War, but since the Romans first invaded and conquered the region, right up until Tito somehow managed to hold the place together for thirty or forty years. As soon as he died, along came the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, which are still going strong, luckily for me.

  In the Balkans they do everything on a big scale. Why make do with just one enemy when you can have a whole lot of them? Why not do away with sides completely and have absolutely everyone fight absolutely everyone else, a complete free-for-all? There’s none of this Christian hypocrisy about loving your neighbour in this part of the world. These people are honest: they face up to reality, to the fact that everyone hates their neighbours. There’s no pretence, no turning of the other cheek. They’re not like Londoners, waiting for the middle of the night before skulking around to cut a branch from a neighbour’s tree, or poison his dog or set fire to his garden shed. They’re out there in broad daylight, doing it while the neighbour and his wife and little kiddies are pressing their disbelieving, gawping, tear-streaked faces up against the windows, watching. Now that’s healthy.

  One thing that is clear to me is that this war, or these wars, right now won’t resolve anything. The fighting will start up again soon after peace has been declared, and it’ll continue. It’ll continue forever because the causes are too deep-rooted and because too many people are having a good time.

  When the news was finished my father said, as if it should be patently obvious to everyone, ‘Muslims should live in a Muslim country and Serbs in a Serb country and they should never be forced to mix. Peoples of different nationalities can’t live together, that’s the truth of it.’

  My mother, as always, was sitting in the corner of the room, reading, keeping a weather eye on the flickering image in the opposite corner as if one day she hoped it might throw up something that would be of interest to her. It was an extremely rare occurrence, although she never ceased to be optimistic.

  ‘Do you think Sarajevo will fall soon?’ I asked. The initial approach had to be made. He had to be seduced, made to feel that a supplicant was eagerly requesting his opinion on some matter or other.

  ‘The scum can’t hold out much longer. Then we’ll have the whole city. He’s a genius, that man, an absolute genius.’ A minute later he turned away from the television and looked at me. ‘We were going to be happy with half of the city once, but not now, not now they’ve dug their heels in and are refusing to give us anything. Now they’ll get what’s coming to them – nothing at all.’

  My mother continued to read, her face expressionless, her thoughts as secretive as my father’s were open. She knew better than to open her mouth. Later he said (and this is the important bit), ‘I wish I was younger. I’d be over there in a shot.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To share in the victory, that’s what’s for. To march into Sarajevo when it falls. To stick it up those bastards who made us suffer so much in the past. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to shoot a few of those animals, and trample their brains in the mud.’ My mother sighed. ‘Fact is, I don’t believe they have any brains, so it would be difficult to do.’ He laughed, a low, almost snorting laugh, a laugh of anger.

  ‘They don’t need you out there. They don’t need anyone. They’re doing fine without help from outside.’

  ‘So how come they’ve got mercenaries fighting for them? Mladic has mercenaries in his army. If he has no need of anyone, why are they there?’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘They need all the help they can get, especially now the whole world is turning against us. The UN is taking Bosnia’s side, so is NATO. It becomes more obvious every day. They talk about food aid and about not becoming involved, but they’re shooting our men all the time they’re saying it. They’re not neutral.’

  ‘The UN?’

  ‘No one else. There have been reports recently of Mladic’s men coming under fire. The UN is changing from being peacekeepers to active participants.’

  ‘That’s because we continue to invade the so-called safe areas. The UN probably gets a little upset about that. Their job is to keep the safe areas safe.’

  I was always aware when I spoke to my father of feeling constricted, as if there were something in my throat. It was hard to breathe, almost like he was intent on suffocating me. I’d hold back, sensing that I couldn’t be myself. Why that should be so now, after all these years, I don’t know. There’s nothing unconstrained about our relationship, no spontaneity. It’s like two people manacled against opposing walls, gagged, bound hand and foot, trying to communicate. He’s the same with my mother. Without fail she goes along with whatever he says. That’s why she married him, she told me once, because he was so insistent. I suspect she also married him to escape her family. She was a dreamer, and a foreigner must have seemed romantic back then. He’s definitely always got his own way. Even when he told her one child was enough, she didn’t object.

  ‘And why shouldn’t we invade the safe areas?’ My father had at last turned away from the screen and was now leaning on the arm of the chair, his chin pu
shed aggressively forward as if confronting a complete stranger in the pub, not his own son in the sitting room. His knuckles were white above the black curly hairs on the backs of his fingers, a vein on the side of his temple looked, to me at any rate, aggressively prominent, and he was clenching and unclenching his jaw with alarming rapidity. ‘What you call safe areas belong to us anyway. How can you invade your own home, answer me that? How can you invade your own home?’ He’d lapsed into Serbian, something he always did when he got excited.

  ‘I’m not saying we shouldn’t. It’s just that the UN won’t see it like that. I’m playing devil’s advocate, that’s all.’

  He fell back into his armchair, more conciliatory, trying to make me understand. Age had softened him a little, but not much. ‘We must get what we can as quickly as possible. The UN will turn on us eventually. Look at NATO. Just carried out the biggest air raid in their history on our positions in Krajina. And it’s going to get worse. They know they have to do something. We have to hurry.’

  I still don’t know if my father was trying to put the idea in my head, or if such a thought had never struck him. But that’s exactly what he did, just before the New Year, he put the idea into my head.

  In March, the night before I left for Sarajevo, I phoned home to say goodbye. My mother couldn’t speak; she simply cried down the phone. At one point she managed to sob, ‘I’m praying to God to keep you safe.’ My father didn’t tell me to keep safe or wish me well, all he said was: ‘Shoot your grandmother for me if you see her.’

  I heard my mother in the background. ‘Pavle, don’t say such things.’

  ‘She deserves it,’ he answered, half to my mother, half down the phone, ‘walking out on me like that. She wasn’t a mother.’

  ‘How old would she be now?’ I asked.

  ‘When your grandfather and I left Serbia in 1940, she was thirty-four or thirty-five. So that would make her eighty-nine or ninety.’