The Girl in the Film Read online

  The Girl in the Film

  Charlotte Eagar

  © Charlotte Eagar 2013

  Charlotte Eagar has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First Published by Reportage Press 2008, 26 Richmond Way, London W12 8LY

  This edition published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To the pigeon family, who would never have had a son like Amir.

  And for my mother, who also wrote books.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Part One

  London 1999

  Sarajevo 1993

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  1999

  Sarajevo 1993

  V

  1993

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  February 2000

  1994

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  May 2000

  Sarajevo 1994

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  June 2000

  Part Two

  Sarajevo 2000

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  Epilogue

  Kabul, November 2001

  Extract: Ladies of the Street by Liz Hodgkinson

  Acknowledgements

  There are obviously many people who I have to thank for their help in writing this book. Firstly, the people of Sarajevo, without whose suffering this book could not exist and who made me so welcome, both during my time in the war and when I returned; particularly Bobo, his mother and his late father. I would also like to thank my editor, Rosie Whitehouse; my agent, Lucinda Prain at William Morris; Emma Mahmood, Tertia Bailey, Francesca Riario, and the numerous other friends who have read my book and held my hand along the way; in particular, Paul Lowe who inspired me to start the book and gave me a few good quotes to use, and his wife, Amra Abadzic and Allan Little. I would also like to thank Malcolm Brabant, Dina Hamzic, Cathy Jenkins and the late Bob Simpson of the BBC, for their wartime advice and hospitality; Misha Glenny for teaching me about the Balkans; Lara Nettelfi eld for guiding me through post-war Sarajevo; the late Elizabeth Neuffner for her unfailing good humour and niceness as a colleague; my former foreign editor at the Observer, Ann Treneman, for taking a punt on me and sending me chocolate; Alija Hodzic for his help in Sarajevo’s mortuary; Dr Dobraca for his kind information on autopsies; Inspector Dragan Mijokovic for his advice on Sarajevo police and criminal procedure; Jamie, Nick and Mark for telling me about guns and other useful things; Patrick Bishop and Janine di Giovanni for being good friends and the Frankopans, without whose encouragement I would never have left for the Balkans in the first place.

  Bosnia-Herzegovina

  Frontlines 1993-4

  Prologue

  The man sat in his car on Sniper Alley. He was young but the war had made him old and now the war had killed him before he reached the age he looked. Against the grey plastic upholstery and the grey dawn, the front of his shirt was thick and clotted red.

  A white armoured Land Rover drove past, stopped, reversed back to the car then parked on its southern side, the side facing the frontlines. Three soldiers climbed gingerly out. The man, what had been a man and now was just a corpse, waited in his car, the inescapable wait inflicted by death on one who, brought up in the queue-ridden, wait-weighted culture of communism, had never waited before if he could find a way out.

  “Well, he’s not looking at all well, is he, Sarge,” said one; Sarge swore and lifted up his radio to his blue-helmeted head.

  Slowly the well-practised Sarajevo body retrieval mechanism, slickened by the blood of so many thousands dead, cranked into action, and the man, who always tried to be different, to stand out from the common herd, became yet another body killed on Sniper Alley, arriving at Sarajevo mortuary on yet another morning, to join the thousands who’d been levered onto those marble slabs before; where Osman Muhovic, the mortuary’s director, would enter the name in his thickening Book of the Dead, whose pages, laid out with the name, date, time of arrival and place of death, he would sadly show to anyone who asked.

  In a way, of course, the man in the car had been dead for some time, the lingering death that started in April 1992, when the Serbs first cauterised the arteries into Sarajevo and its population began to wither. Some of the bodies, most of the bodies, the ones not fretted full of holes by the shrapnel’s sculpture nor punctured by the ping of a sniper’s bullet, might continue to live, to breathe, eat (when they could), pee, shit, have sex, but what was slowly starved of its vital flow was their feeling of who they themselves had been or might be. They existed at the whim of the men who sat with the guns in the hills. They ate at the charity of the International Community. They moved only in the pen their city had become.

  Prije rata, before the war, and what they had been or done then, was the measure by which the Sarajevans kept their identities; the war had fired them all into some sort of limbo. Many turned up to their offices for most of the war, unpaid, to do no work, just to keep some sense of who they thought they were. After the war, of course, they would realise that at some point during the four long years they had stopped being foresters or lawyers, architects or truck drivers and become simply professional dwellers under siege.

  But now, at last, after so long trying, the man in the car had stopped living under siege. Here he was, setting off on his penultimate trip, where Osman Muhovic waited for him as a father might wait for a runaway son, with sorrow but in the sure knowledge that one day he would come. For the mortuary’s Austro-Hungarian splendour had seen not just the dead of this war, but two previous world wars before, not forgetting the thousand or so dead who arrived each year, even in peace. For the mortuary, even more than for the Sarajevo medics, the man’s death was just routine.

  First the UN armoured ambulance drew up, his transport for his second-last journey and probably the most expensive vehicle he’d ever travelled in, planes apart – something which, alive, would have given him enormous pleasure. The armoured ambulance parked in the shadow of the right-hand old apartment buildings so the sniper who’d shot the man from the Serb side of the river couldn’t get a shot at the medics as they scrambled out.

  Then the French Foreign Legion arrived, because Sniper Alley was in their patch, with their bulging forearms, their secret pasts, their tape measures and notebooks, to plot the bullet’s trajectory, parking their armoured car to the south again between the man’s corpse and the unseen, ever-watching Serbs across the frontline, to give them the shelter they needed for their work. Then the local police, with their Sarajevo grey complexions, appeared; they milled gingerly in shelter of the buildings, occasionally nipping across to the shelter of the cars for a closer look, taking their notes, to reinforce the point that a sniping was a murder, not just a random casualty of war.

  One of the UN medics, a jolly Swede who was worried that the man’s death might signal a return to the overwork of which his predecessor had complained, picked the man up under the shoulders and another Swede smashed at his knee caps to break the rigor in his legs so they could more easily get him out of the car. Pulling at his shins, they yanked him out and onto the stretcher. The body bag was zipped and he vanished, shutting off the sightless eyes whose next wasted view would be the white rafters of the Sarajevo mortua
ry. And in that cool marble block, built in the days before refrigeration, in the shade of a tree, its high ceilings slashed with vents to let out the foul air and deep hooded windows to keep off the heavy Balkan sun, sat Osman, now huddled in the cold of the deep Balkan winter, who had seen most of Sarajevo pass his way in the last two years, since everyone in the town had lost someone they loved.

  Part One

  London 1999

  When I found the diary, I cried. It wasn’t just for Amir – although of course he was part of it. But it wasn’t only for him, or even Valida or Aida or all those other bewildered relics in that little Turkish town, stranded, squirming in their rock pool when the tides of empire and ideology had ebbed. I cried for me.

  I can’t remember who it was who said if the gods want to destroy you, they give you what you ask for. But I expect it was the Greeks. It usually is. I love clichés; they are so bloody true.

  Of course, it wasn’t really a diary; to call it that would give it an importance – or at least substance – that it didn’t have. It was too short, to start with. Just a few days. And that final entry was an aberration: like a plonking discord by a disillusioned composer tacked on to an early melody.

  It was a blue exercise book, like the ones I always used. I found it when I was moving house. The builders had left in a flurry of “see you around, loves” and left me on my own, unpacking the accumulation of my life as the evening sun pooled on my brand new fl oor.

  I never meant to open that box. It had got muddled up with everything else. But I recognised the notebooks, of course, from the moment I saw them. Even if I hadn’t touched them for nearly five years. Their shiny covers gave no hint of the accumulated misery they held; all those starving women, ragged soldiers, those fat-faced evil men. Phil used to tease me about my books; more fifth-form French than foreign correspondent, he said. But they worked; you could lean on the hard cover, they fitted in my handbag and you could buy them everywhere, from Belgrade to Mostar. I liked that. It proved that the maps were right: it had all been one country once. And I loved the way you could dent their shiny cover with your nail.

  When I first saw them, in their box, strewn with their pall of builders’ dust, I couldn’t look away. There was an old Croatian 100… thingie… note on the top. I stared at it, and then, as you do with money, I picked it up, even though I knew the currency had long since changed – so long ago, I couldn’t remember its name. It left a banknote-sized hole in the dust. I smiled as I felt the thick linen paper – typically Croat, to print their notes on the best paper – and tried to remember the name of the man in the wig looking up at me, like one of those dead fish the waiters in Split would bring out to your table for you to choose. Suddenly the harsh winter light was bouncing round the Venetian piazza. I was drinking cappuccino by the sea, in my woolly hat, with Phil, and the scent of lemon and cyprus in my nose, the way it was, the moment you stood at the aeroplane doors in Split. I breathed in sharp, and drew my war deep into my lungs.

  A whole war of books, lying in a box. And when the war was over I put them all away. I must have poured in the dregs of my long-unpacked bag, like some kind of libation, because under the dust the books were covered with my stuff I’d carried for so long: more useless currencies, abandoned by world events, a first aid kit, a Swiss army knife, the Serbo-Croat phrase book which never had any useful phrases like “can you tell me the way to the mass funeral” and “is the road safe ahead”, and four years’ worth of tobacco shreds.

  I saw my hand move to take one out. I didn’t stop it: I remember thinking that I’d be relatively safe – that the lid would be hard to open on this Pandora’s box. It was a long time ago and my notes had been difficult enough to read that week when the air was still thick with the smell and the misery of those who had spoken the words now scrawled on the page.

  But I was wrong. I picked the wrong book; the first one. The only one that was about me. “Zagreb, Monday 13th July 1992.” I should have guessed just by seeing the page, because it was written in the exam-neat whorls of the recent graduate; not scrawled, in gloved hands, as I perched on the corner of a bed, in a room,

  perhaps in a school, or an old police station, in some lost mountain town; a tiny room, thick with the sweet smell of old sweat and fake coffee, strangely empty despite the eight desperate faces staring at me, since they had brought only what they could carry as they ran.

  And the grown-ups mainly would have carried the children.

  I couldn’t stop myself reading on. It was like picking a scab.

  It was a dull little tale. I’d spent the day on the train; my love of clichés showed even then: Vienna railway station was a temple of transport, its trains grinding off to long-lost imperial outposts. I invoked Agatha Christie, the Orient Express; the chocolate-box scenery I’d seen from the train – the pointy little alps, the haystacks “the shape they are in fairy tales” (those were the haystacks Phil used to think followed us around at night – but back on that train Phil was just a voice on the radio to me). There is no feeling that I’m on a one-way ticket; that there is no way back; that I am going through the looking glass into another life. It’s just the optimistic drivel of the traveller.

  The tears welled up as I read about my day. There was a Muslim woman on the train; her two children huddled into her flanks – my first refugees, but the sanitised end: well dressed, well educated, just with their whole lives lost. She was blonde. I seem to have been surprised by that.

  I could hardly believe that girl who wrote this guff was me. But then I cannot remember what I was like before the war. A young girl, 25, straight out of her MA, the Ph.D. dumped for reasons I can hardly remember now, but think were partly financial and partly due to an already shortening attention span, heading off to war to make her fortune, on an inter-rail ticket her father had bought her (his last words were “promise me you won’t go anywhere dangerous”).

  At least she was honest. It was all there: the hope, the ambition, the zeal of the idealist, the lack of money; as she gets closer to the war, on the Croatian coast, you get the seventies decor of the tourist-free package holiday hotels; their lobbies milling with

  zombied refugees wondering what on earth to do with the rest of their lives, now that their world had been reduced to a balcony full of laundry, a twin bedroom (bathroom ensuite) packed with seven of their closest relations, with the bill being picked up by a resentful Croat government. No free shampoo, and the telephones had been removed from the sockets, but most of them did at least have a sea view. She is horrified that she can feel disgust.

  Hanging out in the lobby of the Hotel Split, white concrete and blue plastic to go with the sea, she hooks up with another journalist who knows the war. The next day they are to drive into Bosnia itself – not Sarajevo, she knows she’s not ready for that yet, but somewhere, anywhere, where the war is going on.

  Then it stops. She does try, a few days later, to write down what she’s seen the last few days. But it straggles off. She says she’ll write more later, but she never does. But I already know what happened next.

  I’d achieved everything that girl had wanted, beyond her wildest dreams. But what do you do with a head of memories like that?

  It never mentions Amir at all. Why would it? I hadn’t even met him then.

  Amir. I can hardly remember not knowing you. Just thinking like that feels like peeling flesh from a wound.

  You’re in this box. You’re in those books. I wrote you down, when I first met you. Then nearly every word I wrote came through you – at least when I wasn’t out of Sarajevo, somewhere else. You hated that so much, when I’d go away.

  The photograph’s not here. The one that Henri took. I put that away long before the books.

  I was crying by the time I found the photograph; I had to push my way through a whole stack of boxes, before I found the one marked Hall Cupboard. Under the bank statements and the single socks, I finally touched its frame.

  You’re laughing, trying out my hel
met, holding it high above my head. I’m jumping up to try and pull it down. Down at the bottom of the picture, your other hand is holding tight to mine. It looks like love but I remember your fingers hurt as you gripped my hand; you didn’t loosen it, however much I tried to pull away.

  It’s in black and white. Henri always shot war in black and white. He said it suited war. It suited you too: the shadows of your cheekbones, the slash of your grin, your eyes hooded into darkness, your lovely thick hair, that I used to run through my fingers; love the smell on my fingers, of hair grease, a little oil, your sweat. The scent of you.

  We were saying goodbye. Phil was taking me to the airport: being local, they wouldn’t let you through the checkpoints to see me off on the plane.

  I can’t see my face, because I’m facing you; maybe that’s why I loved this photograph so much. I’m too vain to like myself in photographs. There’s the back of my head, my blonde hair bouncing on my flak-jacketed shoulders as I jump up. It’s early winter, then, because I used to cut my hair with the seasons – warm and long for winter, bobbed short for the sun. I am in my anorak and clumpy boots but there’s no snow. By my feet is one of those big soft suitcases with tiny little wheels for easy dragging, and in the background, the sloping letters “BBC” on the side of a Land Rover. Beyond the Land Rover, there’s some twisted metal that was once, I think, a bus stop. It never seemed sensible to look close enough. Behind the bus stop stretches an open grass and concrete space, up to the little row of white flats, whose boxy windows are all boarded up. Huge holes, like ink blots, splodge their façades and the planks on the windows are gouged with scars. Between the flats, in the narrow street, run four or five interlocking rows of grey metal gym lockers, jutting out from either side, making a kind of chicane. Above them, strung on ropes stretched across the street from first floor to first floor, like washing lines in a Neapolitan slum, are blankets, grey and ragged from the wind. It’s too far away in this photograph to see that the blankets and the lockers are riddled with bullet holes. In front of the flats are three twisted, blackened cars, what’s left of their windows, stars of clouded glass.