We Had It So Good (24 page)

“You shut up,” one of the boys said, who had learned a little English from TV. “Shut up, ugly girl.”

They opened the camera bag and estimated the worth of the equipment. They let out exultant cries. A golden goose had been left lying in the middle of the road and all they had to do was pick it up and walk away with it under their arms. War was easy. The only
thing they dreaded was peace accords, politicians, generals and all the other ways adults could fuck it up for them.

The boy in the pink wig lifted the telephone pole from the oil drums and ran back to the car. And then they are gone and she is alone on the road, in the middle of the afternoon, and the rain coming and going and so she waits, waits for a couple of hours until a UN convoy comes along, on its way back to Split.

T
he city of Split is a sparkling Adriatic seaside place, with beaches and nightlife and the frequent ships crossing the water from Italy with their cargoes of contraband cigarettes, which are the basis of the economy that funds the fighting.

Even under white skies, Split is an attractive city. There are places where people are meant to promenade along the boulevards in light-colored clothing, and this is one of them. It is the kind of town her father would adore, with docks and ships and sailors in their whites and you can stand and look across the sea with your back to the war.

Marianne had been helped into the UN truck by an Englishman.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“I was hijacked. They took everything. I was hijacked by
boys,
teenage boys. It's so humiliating. One was wearing a pink bubble wig and I don't know why.”

“Cheer up, at least they didn't shoot you.”

“No, that's true, I'm still alive.”

“Why were you going into Bosnia?”

“To find women who have been raped. I'm a photographer.”

“But you can find them in Split or Zagreb, you don't have to go into the war zone.”

“I
wanted
to go into the war zone. It's my first war.”

“It's my third.”

“Are you a journalist?”

“No. I'm a doctor.”

He was about forty, a solid man with sandy hair, pale blue eyes and creases on the backs of his hands. Marianne's eyes found a great deal to take in.

“You are looking at me,” he said.

“I know. That's what I do. Am I making you uncomfortable? Lots of people say that about me.”

“No, not really. I like being paid attention.”

“Because you're always paying attention to others?”

“Very perceptive. What are you going to do when we get to Split? Do you have any money?”

“Yes, my wallet is still in the back pocket of my jeans.”

“That's a strange thing, I thought only men carried their wallets in their back pockets.”

“I need to keep my hands free, I never carry a handbag.”

“No lipstick or comb?”

“No, never.”

“Very unusual.”

He told her his name was Janek. She said, “That's not English, is it?”

“No, my father came from Poland during the war to fight with the British and he didn't want to go back to the new workers' paradise so he stayed and married an English girl, my mother. I grew up in Surrey, which isn't very exotic, is it? But with this strange name, and we went to a different church from everyone else.”

“My grandfather was born in Poland.”

“Where?”

“I don't know. He lives in America. I don't often see him.”

“My father is from the south, near Kraków. I've never been there, I think sometime I should go. I never even met my grandparents though they are long dead, of course.”

The convoy arrived on the outskirts of Split, the sun was parting the thin cloud and the sea turned blue.

“Come on, I'll help you find a hotel, clean and respectable.”

“Why does it have to be respectable?”

“I don't know, perhaps it doesn't.”

Marianne had a headache. She did not know if the car hire insurance covered theft by teenage militias, or what she was going to do now, since her first war had come to an ignominious aborted conclusion. She wondered if Janek could help her locate some raped women to talk to, if he could she was prepared to stick with him if he would ask her out for a drink.

They found a three-star hotel near the beach which had catered to tourists until the war and still hoped that it could again. It was a much nicer room than Zagreb. Beyond the curtains evening had fallen. The lights of the city had come on and illuminated the promenade and its palm trees. You can never go wrong where there's a palm tree, her father had once said. It was how he judged all destinations. There were no palms in Bosnia.

“Will you meet me for dinner?” Janek asked her. “I think I can help you find raped women.”

Anything goes in a war zone, he told himself. And what is wrong with dinner, it's just a meal.

“Yes,” said Marianne. “I would like that.”

They went to a restaurant by the beach and ate seafood. He impaled a grilled prawn on his fork and looked at it, then put it down again. The sight of it depressed him, he could not afford to find out how it tasted, perhaps the bread would be enough. These visits beyond the enclave seldom worked in the way he hoped, providing neither rest nor the refreshment of his spirit. You looked at good food and it repelled you.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“I come from another time and place.”

“What place?”

“Have you seen pictures of the Second World War?”

“Yes, of course.”

“That's where I came from, just this morning, a place that belongs in the history books, not now. I can come and go there at will. I can leave the past and sit here eating expensive seafood and drinking reasonable wine. It's impossible to reconcile. The paradox is getting worse every time I leave there.”

“Can you please describe what the past looks like?”

“Why?”

“That's the way I can understand it.”

“It is colorless, like mud, and smoke rising from the burning waste. Emaciated faces, refugees who have lost all their belongings who have nothing to do but endure the endless monotony, often barefoot and with old clothes they have scavenged from the dead. It's not monotonous for me, I have plenty to do. I treat skin diseases, lice, respiratory infections which afflict the weakest, a great deal of tuberculosis, chronic diabetes. Urological complaints because of the low quality of the drinking water, cesarean deliveries, which are very complicated to conduct when there is no electricity. And, of course, many amputations amongst the children who thought they could help their parents by going to collect wood from the forest, where there are snipers and the horrible surprise of the land mines.”

“Where is this, where did you come from this morning?”

“Srebrenica. It's close to the border with Serbia, an enclave, everyone is trapped. Not me, of course, we are the special ones, we can get in and out under UN protection, the UN which does nothing to protect the people who actually need protecting. They make me sick.”

No one she knew talked of war this way, at home in Islington, they discussed it as if it were politics. Among her photographer friends it was a story, a photo opportunity.

She watched him eat a piece of bread. He sprinkled on a few
grains of salt, salt is necessary in the diet, he said, to explain to her what he was doing. She had laid down her knife and fork. He took a sip of wine, he felt like getting drunk, but not on this.

“Should we leave?” she said.

“Why? Why should you be deprived of your nice dinner after your unpleasant ordeal? You've done nothing wrong. Enjoy your meal.”

“I'm not hungry anymore.”

“That's my fault, I've spoiled your appetite.”

“Yes, but I don't mind.” He liked the fact that she did not indulge in polite phrases and circumlocutions. He had heard enough of those to last a lifetime. “Would you like to go for a walk along the beach?”

“It's cold, you'll freeze.”

“No, I won't. I'm hardy.”

The sand was black and the surf white.

“My wife dislikes the sea,” he said. “She prefers rivers. We have a boat moored down near Henley.”

“How long do you stay away from your family?”

“Three months out of twelve. I volunteer.”

“Why?”

“It's difficult to explain. I was brought up in the church, the Polish Catholic church, which is very intense. When I was a child I lived in a bedroom with Christ impaled on his cross above my bed and he bled wooden blood from his wounds.”

“I think that's gruesome.”

“Many people do these days. Did you have a religious upbringing?”

“No. Nothing. My father is a scientist, he's totally opposed to the idea of gods and religions, and my mum's a shrink, so she has her own religion, she worships the great god Freud.”

“It sounds very bland to me. Ours was a rather muscular Christianity. I can't remember a time when I didn't go to sleep
without saying my prayers and looking up to that wounded, dying body. So I became a doctor, to cure the sick. I'm not licensed to perform surgery at home, but here I am forced to do amputations. Could I have saved Christ if I had treated him? Could modern medicine have saved him? Of course, but then he wouldn't have died for our sins and our salvation. It's a paradox I can't explain though I've thought about it often enough.”

“So you're doing God's work?”

“Yes, that's it. Someone has to.”

“Why doesn't God do his own work?”

“I don't know.”

Marianne walked about the city on her own, taking pictures. She took a picture of a child beggar squatting on the pavement in front of a cigar box into which passersby sometimes dropped low-denomination notes. The child's mouth was stopped by a blue plastic dummy, she looked as if she was about three years old and no mother or father came near her. The city thronged with refugees, and many were begging and some were stealing. They walked about with a dazed expression on their faces, unsure where here was. Two teenage Muslim girls in soiled white head scarves applied lipstick to each other's mouths. Men with the faces of beasts walked painfully on swollen feet too large for their boots. In the cafés, the waiters attempted to maintain their meticulous prewar standards; waiters, Marianne observed, were the people most impervious to conflict, their rituals were too important to them to be relaxed, or if they were, it was only with shame and many embarrassed apologies. A stained napkin and a shred of tablecloth was sometimes all that survived of civilization. Waiters were heroes, she took many pictures of them in the years to come.

On Monday, Janek took her to the psychiatric hospital. She spent all morning talking to the doctors. It was as her mother had
told her, they had treated the raped women for sexual disorders, rape fantasies, submerged desires.

A doctor said, “An old woman came in and said she had been raped by seven men, young men. Of course, we did not believe her, we thought she was a fascinating subject, to hear an old lady talking in such detailed graphic terms about things which usually belong in pornography. A whole team was looking after her, we were terribly excited, and then slowly we understood that it was no fantasy, these things had happened. And we were helpless, we didn't know what to do, all our sophisticated training was no use. The attacks had also been very painful for her because she was past menopause and her husband was dead so the walls of her vagina had atrophied. She bled like a menstruating girl.”

“Did you not think to examine her?” asked Janek. “A physical examination would have showed the truth at once.”

“No, we didn't think of that. We assumed it was all a metaphor.”

“Is that the only reason sex is painful?” Marianne asked. “Menopause?”

“No, no,” Janek said. “There are many reasons, and some are very simple, like excessive washing with perfumed soap.”

They went to a ward where a woman in a colored nylon head scarf sat in a chair by the window, the hem of her skirt reaching down to her ankles. Her face had cracked in many places and she held her fingers to her mouth.

“She watches TV when we turn it on,” said the doctor. “She is very quiet, no problems, but we don't know where her relatives are. We tried to trace them with no success, she has two daughters but she hasn't seen them for over a year. They got stuck in a place where the fighting was very severe.”

Marianne thought that her mother would have sat down next to her and held her hand. They would have sat in silence, exploring the sense of touch. She had been robbed of her equipment, she had no mediating lens, she felt as if she was in the familiar recurring dream
all of us have, of walking naked down the street, the dream whose meaning her mother had told her and she could never remember.

But what
should
I do? she thought. I came to bear witness. I can't even do that without a camera.
Snails don't do well without their shells. That's what I feel like.
She was raw and flayed in the old lady's presence.

“I can find you more women like this,” said Janek. “There are plenty.”

“No,” said Marianne. “I don't think so.”

“What do you want to do now?” he asked her when they got outside.

“Buy a new camera.”

“Here? In Split?”

“They must sell them somewhere.”

“I suppose they must. Do you have money?”

“I've got a credit card.”

They took a taxi back into the city. The sense of the other place continued to oppress him but her young, odd face raised his spirits a little. She lifted her arm and her T-shirt revealed a slim brown band of skin above her jeans. She's not my type, he thought. She's no one's type.

“About the painful intercourse,” he said. “Was this a personal question?”