I Hate Martin Amis et al.

by Peter Barry

  ‘Do you know where she’s living?’

  ‘No idea. If the bitch is still alive, she’ll be in Sarajevo. So shoot any old woman you see. If we’re lucky, it will be my mother.’ He laughed down the phone.

  When my grandfather fled from the Ustase atrocities, he took my father with him. That was why he left the country, to save his son’s life. But his wife, my grandmother, refused to accompany him. She didn’t want to leave her homeland. My grandfather never forgave her for what he considered to be this act of betrayal, and for the remaining thirty-six years of his life he would talk about ‘the perfidy of women!’ His English was never good, so I don’t know where he got that word from, but he used it all the time, whenever any woman displeased him. He lumped every member of the so-called fair sex together. I’ve heard my father use the same expression about my mother: ‘Oh the perfidy of women!’

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  I left for Sarajevo in early March. No one saw me off, but that didn’t bother me. It gave me time to visit the airport bookshop for a quick sneer, a quiet scoff, a quizzical snigger. I wasn’t disappointed. The shelves were full of dross, of clichéd, unimaginative, unadulterated garbage – and that was me being generous. I could tell from the covers what the books were like inside. They should have been pulped at birth. At the very least they should have carried stickers saying, ‘Warning: junk. Reading this book could seriously damage your health,’ and shown lurid, livid photographs of a tumorous brain or a purulent, cataracted eye. Yet these novels were published, that’s what had me staring open mouthed with wonder at their doorstop bulk, their embossed, gold- and-silver-lettered covers.

  I had to leave the shop before I vomited. I rushed for the exit, doubtless green and perspiring like some hyperactive Martian when – and I swear I could almost hear the heavenly music and see a choir of angels descend – I saw on an island display all of its very own, like a diamond rising from a sea of dung, Martin Amis’s new novel, The Information. I stopped dead. A pure, blinding light flooded that sanctified spot, and I suddenly felt like a plane rising above the clouds into an arctic, tropospheric wonder of brilliant sunshine and cobalt blue. Everything slowed. Everyone parted before me as I drifted, almost weightless, towards the inspired exhibit. I reached out …

  Crashing back through the sound barrier to earth,to humdrum, noisy reality, I thrust the book at the assistant behind the counter. There was only a hardback edition, which for me was a real extravagance, but I knew there wouldn’t be a paperback out for months. ‘Excuse me,’ I said politely, attempting to give the bookshop management the benefit of the doubt. ‘I believe there’s been a mistake.’

  ‘Eh?’ The mindless girl could barely look at me.

  ‘You shouldn’t be stocking this. It’s scarcely appropriate for your shelves.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ she snapped, taking the book out of my hands and studying the cover with a furrowed brow. Enlightenment was obviously not forthcoming. ‘What you want, sir? We’re very busy.’

  ‘It’s a literary work,’ I explained, trying to remain patient. ‘Lit-er-ary. It’s not an airport book, not junk. I suggest you remove it from your shelves before your customers become upset.’

  Some tight-arsed businessman behind me, clutching his Samsonite-executive-international-traveller-suitcase-cum-wardrobe-on-wheels with one hand and a fat novel with a scantily clad, breast-thrusting demoiselle on a blasted moor in the other, tutted impatiently behind me. He was attempting to signal to me, like I was some paddleboat on the Serpentine, that my time was up and I should now move out of the way and give someone else a go with the assistant. I turned and gave him a withering look, daring him to tut one more time.

  ‘I dunno anything about that,’ the girl said. ‘You can talk to the manager if you want.’

  Despairing of ever starting a meaningful dialogue with the single brain cell buried deep within the empty, echoing caverns of the creature’s cranium, I bought the novel and went to sit in the departure lounge. I tried to find a seat away from everyone else, but without success, so I was obliged to study my fellow passengers, whose unreality surprised me. It shouldn’t have. I decided long ago that people at airports are definitely not real. They’re in a state of limbo, either leaving or arriving, but never present. And they do everything – walk around, sit down, slap their children – as if conscious of being observed. Which, of course, they are – by me. Ready to put them down in my notebook.

  Later, as we climbed steeply over the city, I peered down at the streets and houses as the rain-heavy clouds settled over them – the dull and leaden sky covering so many dull and leaden lives. I felt relief at escaping. It would be a change. I hadn’t had a holiday for years. It would be a laugh, with a spot of shooting thrown in on the side.

  I found it difficult to concentrate on reading, although I did notice, rifling through a few pages of The Information, the signatory word play and brilliantly self-aware writing. Overcome by a discomforting mix of envy, awe and airline food, I put the book to one side and contented myself with staring out of the window at the snow-covered countryside below. Everything was white, except for the blackness of the forests and woods. There was a starkness and simplicity about the landscape that made me feel I was looking down on a series of giant Dürer woodcuts.

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  A minibus was waiting for me at Belgrade airport. Four passengers were already on board: volunteers who’d just flown in from Germany. They greeted me with silent stares and an unsmiling indifference that bordered on hostility. They were fridge-like, so tall and wide I was reminded of the sailing ship in the bottle trick, and wondered how the driver had squeezed them all into his vehicle. No one spoke on our journey to Pale. The town, situated up in the mountains about ten miles south-east of Sarajevo, is the Serb seat of government in Bosnia and the place from which the siege is directed. The narrow cobbled streets were a chaos of rushing, shouting officials, army trucks and a few sour-faced locals. We were told this level of activity in Pale was unusual, and due to Mladic meeting with Serbia’s military and political leaders to discuss their endgame. I immediately worried that they were about to sign a peace treaty.

  About twenty of us, many of who I guessed were from within Yugoslavia, had lunch in a deserted school hall. A plate of five different kinds of meat and one vegetable – raw onions – was put down in front of us. The only bread on the table was salted. Those around me ripped into the meat like animals – or maybe just Serbians? I was the only person who didn’t look too enthusiastic about the fare. After lunch we were kitted out, briefed, signed some declaration of loyalty to the people of Serbia, and then provided with a Steyr SSG. When they put the rifle in my hands, I felt nothing. I was surprised. I somehow thought this would be a defining moment in my life, that I’d feel like a new man or something, but I didn’t. It was disappointing. I wondered if I’d feel so indifferent if I shot someone.

  We spent the night in temporary barracks, and the next morning were driven in the back of an army truck to a cold, windswept ridge about one thousand feet above Sarajevo. On one side of the Pale road, overlooking the suburb of Grbavica, lies the Vraca memorial park, dedicated to the Partisan liberators of Sarajevo in the Second World War. An official with a clipboard informed us, as we climbed down from the truck, that it was from this hill, in 1945, that the campaign to win back the city was started. I think he was trying to make a point.

  Our camp, along with a handful of houses and a scattering of small trees and bushes, is on the other side of the Pale road, nestled in a hollow beneath the summit of Mount Trebevic and hidden from the town to the north. Higher up the mountain, near the summit, is a forest.

  Every now and again I heard a deep and distant boom. I knew this was gunfire, but no more than that. Now I was excited.

  I met Santo as soon as I stepped down from the army truck. He told me he shouldn’t even have been in camp that day, so I was lucky to meet him. That was how he put it to me later: ‘You were lucky to meet me.’ He was
laughing as he said it, but I could see he meant it. He shook hands with all the new arrivals, shouting ‘Welcome!’ many times and slapping everyone on the back, but he adopted me. ‘I saw you had a book in your hands when you arrived in the village, so I knew you were intelligent. I am tired of stupid people. Anyway, I do not like Germans, even when they come and fight for us, and fellow Yugoslavs do not interest me. But an Englishman, that is different. You are the eccentrics of the world.’ He finished this tortuous, rapidly spoken welcome by asking: ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘It’s a novel I picked up at the airport.’

  He grabbed the book from my hand. ‘Martin Amis? He is English, I suppose.’ I nodded. ‘I do not read novels, I do not like them,’ he said, dismissing the millions of books since Pamela with great decisiveness. ‘Already my life is exciting enough.’ He thrust it back into my hands. I didn’t bother to say anything, but wondered if he was any different to the stupid people he’d just mentioned.

  ‘Follow me.’ He walked off. I looked across to where the others who’d accompanied me from Pale were being addressed by the official with the clipboard. ‘Shouldn’t I speak to him?’ I called after Santo. He stopped. ‘You want to live in a tent or a house this winter? If you talk to him, you will live in a tent.’ I followed him. ‘No one cares where you stay or what you do,’ he said as we left the road and trudged across what could have been either a snow-covered field or a garden, ‘We are an easygoing people.’ If Serbs are easygoing, I thought, what does that make everyone else?

  We climbed over collapsed fences and a semi-demolished wall, and walked past houses that had once belonged to Muslims and Croats before they were expelled by the Serbs. There was no one to be seen anywhere. Some of the houses had obviously been shops once upon a time; now their windows were smashed and their contents looted. Most had been stripped bare. In a few I could see makeshift beds and tables, and the glow of bare light bulbs. The novel-hater disappeared through a doorway, and I followed. It was a square room with a dirt floor. Against the walls were four bunks. There was one small table and a chair that scarcely looked strong enough to sit on – nothing else. I had an unpleasant sense of déjà vu, my London prison cell of a few months earlier coming suddenly to mind. Santo took my bag and threw it onto one of the beds. ‘You can sleep there. There are three of us in here, but this bed is free. It belonged to a man who was killed. You are lucky, my friend. That is the only reason you are living in a house and not a tent – because he is dead. I will tell Papo you are here.’

  We left the house and walked further from the memorial park until we came to a camp. There were around twenty small tents scattered amongst the trees. I saw some of the new recruits being allocated tents. I realised there had to be others elsewhere in the memorial park, and Santo later told me there were temporary camps like this one all the way around the city, up in the hills. ‘But you will make this camp your home, the same as me.’

  In front of the tents was an open space with a fire. Santo said that it was kept going all day and night, although during daylight hours it was only embers. Around the fire was an assortment of seats, blocks of cement, wooden boxes, barrels and logs that had been spared the flames. On one side of the clearing, furthest from the houses, at the edge of what appeared to be a small wood but could have been a forest, was an enormous pile of firewood. Apart from the new recruits moving into their tents, there were few people to be seen. It was like a school corridor during class time.

  Santo led me to a long, prefabricated hut at the western end of the open space, which turned out to be the camp kitchen. Inside were a half-dozen dubious-looking individuals, peasants with stubborn, sly faces who looked like they’d long ago worked out how to get the better of every situation or person they ran into. They had a duplicitous, calculating look, as if they were weighing up the odds just as they weighed up the potatoes and meat they were now preparing for the evening meal. They eyed me suspiciously as one of their number started making the two cups of coffee requested by Santo.

  While we waited, my self-elected friend leant over the counter and peered into a vast saucepan. ‘Hey, is this what we’re eating this evening?’ he shouted.

  ‘It is,’ replied the large individual preparing our coffees.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You know what it is, Santo.’

  ‘Tell me what it is, fat man.’

  ‘It’s stew,’ and I could see the rolls of stubbled fat beneath the kitchen hand’s chin start to wobble with mirth. I wondered if he found his stew funny, or Santo.

  ‘It’s stew, is it?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘But we had stew last night, and the night before that, and the night before that. We’ve had stew every night I can remember.’

  The men in the kitchen were now grinning – in a leering fashion. ‘That’s the truth of it,’ said the fat man.

  ‘So why don’t you cook something else? Why don’t you give us a choice, you unshaven pig?’

  ‘You do have a choice, you fucking ratbag.’

  ‘I have a choice, do I?’ Eyeballing his adversary across the steaming saucepan.

  ‘You do. You can fucking take it, you son of a city whore, or you can fucking leave it.’

  The men behind the counter laughed. Not in the least fazed, Santo laughed also.

  We took our coffees and went and sat by the campfire. He told me how his home had once been in the city to which he was now laying siege.

  ‘I am fighting to return home. My wife and boy are now in Belgrade. Look.’ He produced the soldier’s obligatory creased photograph from inside his army coat. ‘He’s nine. Happily, he is too young to fight in this war. He will be able to study and get himself a good job when he is older. I love him to death.’

  ‘And your wife?’

  ‘I do not love her to death. She is a bitch. It is better that she is not around – more peaceful.’

  At that moment a man shuffled across the grass towards where we were sitting. Despite the cold he was wearing only a pair of trousers and an open shirt. His huge stomach was covered in thick black hair, which he scratched with one hand. In his other hand there was a bottle from which he took regular sips, like a baby at the breast who wants the reassurance of knowing his source of comfort hasn’t gone away. He hadn’t shaved for days. His face drooped – everything drooped, the bags beneath his eyes, his jowls and chin, his shoulders and chest and, most noticeable of all, his stomach. I guessed that he’d just got out of bed and was suffering from a serious hangover. He and Santo talked briefly, the man staring rudely at me, but saying nothing. He half raised one leg and let out a fart. Without further comment, he shuffled back where he came from.

  ‘He’s going to work now,’ said Santo.

  ‘To work?’

  ‘Yes. To snipe.’

  I wondered how he would be able to set his sights. As if reading my thoughts, Santo said, ‘Everyone is drunk when they shoot. You will be too. It is easier.’

  After our coffee, we walked back to the Vraca memorial park to see the battery. As a precaution against anyone in the city attempting to bomb the battery and hitting our camp instead, the two are sited well apart. There’s also the noise factor. Although the gun isn’t fired much after dark, it’s still fired – with the intention of interrupting the sleep of those in the city. My guide said it makes a considerable noise, so it was placed over a rise, hidden amongst the trees, near an old fort from the Austro-Hungarian era.

  There, soldiers manning a Browning heavy machine gun were sitting on empty ammunition boxes and smoking, waiting for orders to fire. They were unshaven, black with dirt, sloppily dressed and, apart from when they were cursing and joking amongst themselves, reticent to the point of rudeness. They were riff-raff (I like that word, its symmetry and pendular resonance, the switch of just one letter for another). I was reminded of Wellington’s comment, along the lines of, I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God they frighten me. I w
ouldn’t have trusted them with anything, that’s for sure, and my point was proven when Santo told me they frequently let off a few rounds into the city every now and again, whether or not they’d received orders to do so.

  ‘Usually,’ he said, ‘we shell the city for a few days, then for a little time we do nothing. The enemy does not understand what is going on. It frightens them: “Why aren’t they shelling us any more, what is happening?” they ask themselves. They wonder if perhaps we have left and gone home, that’s what they hope. Then we start the shelling again. It’s totally random, to keep them guessing.’

  While we were at the battery, the Browning was fired (for my benefit, I had the feeling), the bullets ripping through the air in a deafening explosion of sound, like a stream of sperm erupting from the burning barrel of the gun. One young man – no, creature – cavorted around as if he was doing St Vitus’s dance, at times bent double, laughing and shrieking, a hand in the pocket of his baggy camouflaged trousers jerking himself off. Santo dug me in the ribs, grinning broadly, concerned that I’d missed the spectacle. The other soldiers ignored their friend, possibly having witnessed his excitement many times before, more interested in looking at Santo and me and studying our reactions. Some of them were smiling, but only with their mouths, not their eyes.

  When they finished, Santo added: ‘The other thing they do is lob a mortar into the centre of the town. It may injure a couple of people, and they cry out for help. Others rush out of their homes and shelters to care for them. A few minutes later, our boys lob another mortar onto exactly the same spot. That second one is more effective.’

  I made a mental note of all I was seeing and hearing as we headed back into the village. I was congratulating myself on discovering a goldmine.

  Santo interrupted my thoughts. ‘Tell me, why are you here, Milan?’