The Girl in the Film Read online

  You can’t see the charred skeletons of the two tower blocks, to the right – the UNIS towers, named for some company long fled from the war, but presciently, as though they knew that their whole country would soon be stickered with the initials UN. Their shards of shattered glass would flare up again every sunset, as though they were nightly consumed by flame. But I know they are there – even if I still don’t know what vanished business UNIS did.

  I know that view by heart. You can’t smell a photograph, but suddenly the smell is with me in the room. I know that smell like I know the view; I can feel it collect, like saliva, at the back of my nose. It smells of smoke and pine trees. The sweet rasp of rubbish burning in the crisp mountain air. And a faint whiff of cordite on the breeze.

  You had a thing about my helmet. You said I only wore it when I was going to leave; I never normally put it on. None of us did. How could we look Sarajevans in the eye when their brains could be splattered out at a madman’s whim and ours were snug and safe inside their Kevlar shell? Unless it was really dangerous of course… But the United Nations, who ran the airlift into Sarajevo, wouldn’t let me get on the plane without it. That day, you’d said, if you kept the helmet, I’d have to stay. But we both knew Phil had a spare in the back of the car.

  I had been with you for nine months by then and it was still the bad days of the war.

  I can’t stop the tears now. I’m swamped by huge, sucking gulps. I don’t know how to stop this madness that engulfs my brain like marmalade. If I looked out of my west London window, I could see hundreds of refugees – the Kurds, the Albanians, the Lebanese, God knows, probably Bosnian; if you had never met me, maybe you’d be here too, living in those council blocks opposite my stucco corner of Ladbroke Grove, scraping a living from doing up kitchens.

  But now I am far away. I am with you. And the blocks of flats are fretted with gunfire and shell blast. I swallow as I see minarets poking up into the still, cold air, the white houses crawling up the mountainside, through the straggle of the frontline, and from the tens of thousands of those tin wood-burning stoves, given by the world to Sarajevo to make your war less deadly because we couldn’t stop it, seeps the sweet smell of burning rubbish, sealed into the city by the snowbound clouds.

  Mujo is fishing in the Miljacka River and he catches a golden fish. The fish says to him: “Don’t eat me, put me back. I am a magic fish, and if you set me free, I shall give you a wish.”

  Mujo says, “I’m fed up of being a peasant. I want to be a prince. I want to be married to a beautiful princess who I am in love with and who loves me. And I want to live in a palace, and sleep in a bed with velvet curtains and I want servants to wait on me hand and foot.”

  The fish says: “Go home tonight. Go to sleep in your little bed next to your wife Fata as usual, and tomorrow you will be a prince.”

  So Mujo puts the fish back and goes home. The next morning, when he wakes, the room seems strangely dark. He realises he is in a bed hung with heavy red curtains and lying in his arms is a beautiful woman, who opens her eyes and smiles up at him. There is a knock at the door, the curtains are drawn, and a manservant puts down his tray of steaming hot chocolate and says:

  “Wake up, Your Imperial Highness. It is time for your trip to Sarajevo.”

  Sarajevo 1993

  I

  It was my first day in Sarajevo, when I met you. It was an awful day, or what passed for an awful day by April 1993. You could think it ironic that I found you by mistake when, in the end, you were all the war to me. When I think of you, as I last saw you, your eyes pleading at me through the smoke and I think, if I’d stopped you then, at that party, if I’d believed you – or at least if I had wanted you to know I believed you – because I did believe you, I always had – then maybe you’d be with me now. But I didn’t. I just behaved like a girl at a party, not a woman in a war.

  The shells were crashing to and fro, high above the streets, amongst the pine-forested crags. The clouds lay heavy over the mountains, sealing the siege like a kettle drum, pushing the boom of the artillery down, past the minarets, into the rubbish-strewn streets; so that every time the explosion came, the sound felt like it began inside your head and came out through your ears, not coming in from outside, the other way round. In vicious wafts, the cordite, kept in by the clouds, mixed in your nostrils with the bite of snow and the sweetness of decay; and then the snipers, the crack of their bullets the staccato beat of Sarajevo life.

  Of course, the old hands said this was nothing. You should have been here last year, they said; and shuddered as they described the bloody anarchy of the first few months, when the Sarajevans really did not know whether they could hold their town, whether the Serbs would crash through the makeshift army of defenders, and rampage the streets with fire and rape as they had down the Drina valley, or in Vukovar, a year before. That was before the United Nations moved in to Sarajevo – to referee; to watch, to mark the lines, and wave their pointless blue flags every time there was a foul.

  But I was a new hand and this was my first time in the city and it was quite scary enough for me. Those endless trips, on and off, for the best part of nine months, had finally paid off; trailing round the cheaper parts of the war (Sarajevo, like all sieges, was expensive to cover: somebody has to pay all the smugglers who bring the food in for the hacks); filing my stories to almost anywhere with a scatter-gun approach, slowly building up a relationship with unseen voices on the telephone on foreign desks back in England, from the first wheedling of them to accept my words, via a reverse charge call – “Hello, this is Molly Taylor, um, (fill in name of high-powered journalist on the relevant paper who I’d have met over dinner in some ravaged town) suggested I rang. I’m in (fill in the place of the moment) and XXX has just happened (maybe the Serbs opened up a concentration camp or the Croats have retaken a bridge) and I wondered if you’d be interested…” – to the blissful point where they began to depend on me; endless rounds of bumming lifts, sleeping on floors, returning home, cobbling together some dough, lobbying papers and then dragging myself back out here again. I’d given up for a bit, and got a job in London, but I chucked it in. The pull of the Balkans was too great. I don’t know why. So it wasn’t just you, because I didn’t know you then. Then finally, I got my break.

  Back in London, for a quick recoup, I had rung up the news editor on the Evening News, the most prestigious of the papers I had been freelancing for.

  “It’s the first anniversary of the siege,” I said, “in two weeks’ time. I’ve never been to Sarajevo before. I’d love to go. Please let me. Please. I can just do a quick trip. In and out. There’s a plane from Split.”

  He took me to lunch at Kensington Place, the restaurant the executives from his paper used as a staff canteen. All around us his pinky and perky colleagues, bloated with years of office politics, were having the full Fleet Street bottle-and-two-courses. I pushed forkfuls of chicken and goat’s cheese mousse into my mouth with the natural appetite of one who had not eaten anything pleasant for some time, while the news editor told me about all his friends who had been war correspondents and now did PR for ski firms. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  “Do you really want to do this?” he asked. But I couldn’t imagine why he needed to ask.

  “Of course. It’s a fantastic story.” I probably looked at him as if he were an idiot; in hindsight, I think he looked back with something like pity. Then he shrugged and smiled and offered me my air fare and a £300 cash advance. I was almost incoherent with joy. That was £300 more than anyone had ever given me in advance before. A war economy is cash only and, in Bosnia, Deutschmarks for preference to boot. Up to now I’d had to fund myself and, when I came back to London, fearfully spread the debt between the various papers I had written for, spending hours forging signatures and crinkling receipts on the table in my flat.

  “I want 2,000 words. And they had better be bloody good. Do you have a flak jacket? Better take one of ours.”

&
nbsp; This was what I had been waiting for: 2,000 words was a spread, in an influential paper, read by commuters, but more importantly, grabbed by all editors the moment it appeared in their office before lunch. I was being allowed to do a major story, which everyone would see – even if they didn’t read it. However well I did for the News, I knew they would never keep someone permanently in the Balkans. But the broadsheets all had resident correspondents: stringers, on monthly retainers and then paid by the word, as well as the big hitters, the firemen, who flew in and out. And if my byline was seen often enough in the News, then one day, when someone – maybe The Times, or the Telegraph or one of the Sundays – moved on, maybe I’d be in with a chance to get their job.

  “Don’t file from Sarajevo unless you have to,” he added. “They’ve only got satellite phones there and they’re incredibly expensive. About £20 a minute. So, whatever you do, please don’t dictate. Unless you absolutely have to, of course. Under the circumstances, I think you should have pudding.”

  It’s hard to describe the pull Sarajevo had for me, months before I’d ever met you. To begin with, my first summer, 1992, I really did not want to go there. Not only did I think it too expensive (although I know now that freelance journalists always make money in that kind of place when the story is hot) but also too dangerous. I had talked to colleagues and seen the pictures on the TV (the dead lying in their blood, their shopping rolling through their splattered brains on the pavement, no-one daring to stop and help). But in the last few months, something had changed. It had become for me a siren singing at the centre of the vortex. All this time, I had felt I was skirting the edge, and the longer I spent in Bosnia, the more I found myself being drawn to that battered little town, by a lure so strong that it was almost visceral. And I suppose, too, logically, that after nine months of war, my definition of dangerous had slipped a gear or two.

  That trip, I’d given myself ten days to get to Sarajevo just in case something did go wrong – I knew enough by then to know you can never trust travel arrangements in a war – but I honestly didn’t think it would. I had this idea that, like the firemen who came and went with the regularity of commuters, I would fl y into Sarajevo, do my stuff and leave. Instead, I ended up having to go there by bus.

  It wasn’t my idea, of course, but Robert’s – the guy from the Herald, an impoverished Sunday paper of ancient lineage and liberal views. You remember him – you met him with me, although by definition you didn’t meet him much since I became Robert, so to speak. Robert had come out to the Balkan backwater of Belgrade as a stringer in 1988, when the Berlin Wall was permanent and communism had a future; he still wore an air of bewildered resentment at how big the story had got. Poor Robert: you hated his book God’s Own People. You thought it was pro-Serb. Everyone thought it was pro-Serb, except for the Serbs.

  I bumped into him when we landed at the airport in Split. We must have come on the same plane from Zagreb together – later he admitted he’d seen me in the departure lounge but hadn’t wanted to say hello. I was quite offended, but he said he’d wanted to be alone. Like me, he was going to Sarajevo to do an anniversary piece. He’d come down from Belgrade to Zagreb by train (now a daylong, three-country logistical nightmare, rather than the pre-war two-and-a-half-hour run in the tracks of the old Orient Express); it was easier, he said, to get to Sarajevo from Split. In hindsight I think he just liked eating fish.

  I didn’t know him well, but I’d met him once before, travelling in a Serb press bus on the concentration camp story in 1992. We both knew each other, of course. His work was quite famous in the Balkans then. After a bit, he suggested we hook up. He said it made things less lonely and helped cut the cost.

  Normally, at least that year, although it changed with the war, if an international like me – a foreigner, not a Bosnian – wanted to get to Sarajevo, we flew, unless we had an armoured car we wanted to take into town. Sarajevo was encircled by what was called an “active frontline”, i.e. people shot people on it. Crossing in a soft-skinned – normal – car wasn’t to be recommended. You, my love, couldn’t get in or out of Sarajevo at all, because it was completely surrounded by Serbs, and they were your enemies, waging war on you.

  The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UNHCR, ran an airlift from Split, staffed by UN soldiers – part of their “sorry we can’t stop your war but have some wheat fl our” approach that the western world took. It became the longest airlift in history – do you remember the party one of the aid agencies gave, when it overtook the eleven-month record set by the Berlin airlift in 1949?

  You were so envious of me getting on those planes; you’d stand and stare up at them (if we were in a safe place) as they soared through the mountains, with an expression almost like pain on your face. The airlift went pretty much daily, unless it was cancelled, which it quite often was; a relay of RAF Hercules – those big military cargo planes, all camouflage and propellers, with seats running along the sides, and the walls festooned with webbing to grab if the plane did a sudden move, trying to avoid a missile lock-on say, or just a particularly purposeful piece of anti-aircraft fire. They were stuffed with nappies, or tins of tuna, or white armoured Land Rovers emblazoned with important-sounding initials, all the paraphernalia of international relief, and flown by the RAF. We, the people, would be crammed in round the edges.

  The UN soldiers, Dutch, they were, who ran the airlift called it Maybe Airlines – “maybe you get there, maybe you don’t” – and gave us a stamp for our passports. I still have it in mine. When I had to renew the passport the other day, I sellotaped it in the new one, just for nostalgia.

  In those days, I’d set off with my computer and my flak jacket and my helmet and my luggage and go and wait at the airport where the ghosts of all those package tours haunted the departures lounge. Through the rows of cyprus trees, ranged with all the beauteous order of a Merchant Ivory film, I could see the Adriatic sparkling a mile away and the air would be sharp with that lemony pine smell that commercial air fresheners so futilely attempt to replicate. It was the sharp scent of the coast and it reached deep into my throat and even now, just to remember it makes me sigh with pleasure. It is the smell of happiness, of excitement or relief. For when I smelled it, I was either on my way back into Sarajevo, back to you, high on anticipation, on love, on the story; or I had got out, back to the real world, of electric light and black risotto, where wine tasted good and water came out of the taps.

  The Dutch would check my UN press pass, white with blue stripe, and my happy grinning face, photographed against the UN flag, a white globe on blue festooned with wreaths of… olive leaves for peace? I never knew. Maybe I should ring up the press office and ask. Then they’d check I had a flak jacket and a helmet, because I wasn’t allowed on without them; they didn’t care if I had any clothes, or a computer or enough money to leave, or if I might get hurt, or somebody might mind if I died. Anyone with the right UN pass, helmet and flak jacket could get on the plane – although we journalists were bottom of the list. First came UN officials; after them, people who worked for the international aid agencies: Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, and all those funny little ones no-one had ever heard of, because they were either religious or made up by the CIA. And finally came the press. Well actually, not finally. There was a lower level: local press. Their UN cards wouldn’t let them on the plane at all. Otherwise you and all your friends could have set up newspapers and flown out to freedom.

  The Dutch UN soldiers would give me a boarding pass, just a pink cardboard rectangle with a number, and then I’d sit down to wait, drinking cappuccinos in the observation restaurant; chatting to my colleagues if there were any similarly stranded, or just reading. I got through the whole of Trollope during one year of that war. I also learned a lot of Serbo-Croat irregular verbs.

  Then I’d hear the pregnant growl of the Hercules coming down out of the sky, laden with hope for me – and its passengers about to achieve their goal of leaving Sarajevo. I’d
see it start its descent from the top of the cliffs, looping down from the honey crags that soared the length of the coast and separated the slim strip of Riviera from the mountainous killing grounds behind. Then the plane would taxi to a halt, the shafts of the propellers slowly emerge from their blur of speed (at Sarajevo airport, they kept them running so they could take off at will). I’d see the people spilling out of the ramp at the back onto the tarmac: hassled aid workers, grimy journalists, the odd immaculate-looking Bosnian (the Sarajevans were always well dressed and coiffed, however awful the siege). All of them, flak jackets and bags in hand, huge grins on their faces, eyes bemused, staring around the runway, overwhelmed by the sense of space created by the knowledge that this airport was not surrounded by men constantly popping off their guns, pulling the cyprus scent deep into their lungs as though normality, the real world, would flood into their blood like oxygen, and circulate and flush out the last vestiges of siege.

  Then I’d get all excited and ready to go, and sometimes I’d even get right down to the tarmac, and then the Dutch guy would come and tell me I’d been bumped by someone with a more important pass, and I’d have to sit down and wait an hour or so for the next flight to come in.

  Robert took control of the trip from the start. In those days, as you knew, I hardly spoke the language, but Robert was fluent – those first few years before the war began, he’d had a lot of time to learn his vocab lists. He chose the hotel, taking me away from where the hack pack normally stayed. (“Let’s stay at the Bellevue. I loathe the commie staff at the Hotel Split. The Bellevue’s much prettier and half the price. And it’s in the centre of town.”)