Sandstealers

‘You see, Milosevic’s great trick is to demonise everybody else. The Slovenes? Secessionists. The Croats? Fascists. The Bosnians? Islamic fundamentalists. The Albanians? Terrorists. And d’you know what he is?’

A nationalist, of course,’ said Edwin.

‘No, not even that. An opportunist. He’s just ridden to power on the back of this whole notion of a greater Serbia. What was he under Tito? Just another dreary apparatchik, going nowhere fast. What future would he have had in a free, democratic Yugoslavia? Absolutely none.’

Watching him in full flow, Rachel decided his age added to his aura. Most of the others were in their twenties, but he was more than a decade older. He’d been there from day one, living and breathing the battles of Bosnia Herzegovina and, before that, Croatia. UN spokesmen, NATO generals, EU diplomats—they all came and went, but Danny was a constant, rarely taking holidays or retreating into comfort zones. He had written the seminal book on the war even before it was over, and his reports were required reading in the White House and Downing Street. He was everything Rachel admired in a journalist: smart and funny, ethical and angry. She decided to forget his disparaging remark about desperadoes: she must have misinterpreted it.

‘It’s like all wars,’ Danny thundered on, rampaging from one subject to another, ‘it’s about good and evil, and it’s also about religion.’

Rachel would discover later he said things like this to provoke Edwin, knowing this loyal English Catholic resented the idea that his God should be blamed for all the troubles of the world.

Edwin came to His defence as always. ‘Oh yeah, it’s always God’s fault, isn’t it, never man’s.’

‘They’re a lethal combination,’ shrugged Danny.

‘You know what I find strange, though, Danny; you think you’re this great atheist—what is it you call yourself, an atheist fundamentalist?—but even you need someone watching over you.’

‘Meaning?’

‘All that superstition, those magic bloody boots. You seriously believe you’ll die if you ever take them off. Okay, admittedly I sometimes hang out in churches with incense and relics, but I don’t think it’s too much weirder.’

Danny appeared to find this territory treacherous so he moved to firmer ground.

‘The point is, history is littered with religious wars. Islamist expansion in the seventh century, the Crusades in the eleventh, the Thirty Years’ War…the list goes on and on and on. And what the hell is Israel and the Palestinians, if it’s not religious?’

Edwin gave up. There was no point in arguing with Danny when he was at full throttle. He represented not a soul on earth, except his paper and some of his readers, and yet he always had to be right. He’d only end an argument when he’d won it. He pummelled away at people, grinding them down.

As the debate petered out, Danny looked up and caught Rachel’s eye. Perhaps she should get up and thank him again for the helmet, or make a joke about how big it was on her and kept slipping off. She tried to give him a half-smile of acknowledgement, yet if he saw it, he didn’t reciprocate. In fact, was that a scowl that was spreading slowly across his face, the beginnings of a thunderstorm that destroys a perfect sky? She was probably mistaken; he was just tired and irritable.

At her end of the table, the conversation was less erudite. It ebbed and flowed before settling, for no discernible reason, around Woody Allen and whether or not he could be called a good director, and Madonna, and whether or not she could be called a good musician. Compare and contrast. Rachel, however, wanted to escape America and her flawed celebrities, not spend all night discussing them. She pretended to listen to the gossipy chatter around her, while filtering it out and concentrating on Danny’s words instead.

After a while she slipped away to the toilet and, having peed, took a long look in the mirror and congratulated herself on a first day of achievement. Not bad, Miss Kelly. Not bad at all.

It was only as she was starting to make her way back towards the dining room that she heard Danny’s voice rising above the hubbub, as impassioned as it had been when she first walked in. It hit her like a sudden gust of wind.

‘But, Jesus, how could she? Does she have any idea, any fucking idea, how much pleasure she’ll have given him? Even his wife doesn’t do that. I mean, hell, she’s not exactly a world statesman. She’s a hack, and a pretty minor one at that, but he’ll have loved it even so. She’s an American, after all. He’ll milk it, you can bet your life he will.’

A pretty minor one at that. The words were rushing around her head at horrible velocity, a fairground ride spinning out of control.

‘Oh, don’t be so hard on her,’ someone said; a man’s voice, she thought. Kaps, the guy from Reuters. Yes, it was definitely that distinctive Afrikaner accent. ‘Look, it’s her first day, eh? So what if she shook his hand and he gave her a kiss? He was trying it on, the old bull. You can’t blame him, he doesn’t get to see too many pretty girls up there in his lair. So she made a mistake, didn’t get out of his way in time. Well, it’s not exactly going to change the war. And anyway, she’s a rookie. Wet behind the ears. Give her a break, will you, Dan?’

‘And what if she’d kissed Hitler? Or Stalin? Would you still be giving her a break?’

‘I doubt she’s into necrophilia.’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘Yes it is! Lighten up, you sanctimonious bastard.’ It was Becky. Good old Becky, thought Rachel, paralysed in her hiding place. ‘Loads of people shake his hand. I saw that guy from the BBC doing it the other day.’

‘We don’t,’ said Danny, categorically. We, the Something Must Be Done Brigade, who despise the Serbs and demand that the world should act against them. We, the gang that Rachel wanted to be part of. Not now, though. Club rules broken. Membership denied. ‘And we certainly don’t kiss him.’

‘Now you kissing Karadzic!’ Kaps shouted out. ‘What a pretty picture!’

It was another valiant attempt to puncture Danny’s righteous indignation. Rachel heard the whole table laugh. She silently thanked Kaps for defending her, she thanked him from the bottom of her aching heart.

Still, she had made a mistake. Everyone conceded that much, her defenders as well as her detractors. Fuck, Rachel said, almost aloud. I’ve only just got here and already I’ve screwed up. Not an inaccurately reported fact, not a missed scoop, but an error of judgement that would offend and alienate those she most wanted to be close to. She should return to her meal, but all she wanted to do was to scurry back to the sanctuary of the toilet and lock the door. She did neither, staring at a curled-up, dried-out piece of wallpaper that seemed to resemble her career.

A pretty minor one at that.

Maybe that’s all she would ever, could ever, be. Maybe Billy Kelly was right and she should have stayed with him, where she belonged. Maybe Maybe Airlines would have to fly her straight back to Arlington and that box bedroom she never should have left. Thoughts of home made her want to go upstairs, curl into a foetal ball and fall asleep, but somehow she had to carry on: it had been almost five minutes and she had to go back in. Later, she would think it took more guts to walk back to the table than on to any battlefield.

By the time she got there, the conversation had moved on. Only Becky saw the dewy glint of tears she was trying to hold back.

In her room that night, Rachel read more of Danny’s book. She didn’t much feel like it, but she needed to have her faith in him restored. It was towards the end of the chapter on Sarajevo.

The only reason I paid any attention at all to Ljubica was because she was a little girl with no front teeth and her hair in pigtails. I guessed she was six or seven, and when I walked past her, near the Unis towers, she was skipping in the snow and laughing hard. In Sarajevo, laughter had become something out of the ordinary, enough to get you noticed. I smiled at her and she smiled back.

I had just turned the corner when I heard the mortar’s impact, and part of me knew who its victim had to be. I ran back the way I had come and she was already in the arms of a heavily bearded man—her father, I assumed, though I dared not ask. He was screaming at the sky, accusing it of this atrocity. He shook a fist at whatever gods up there he thought had done this. Ljubica’s little body had been torn apart, her pigtails were wet with blood. Somewhere in her dying face, I thought I could see a trace of that same smile she had given me, that laughter that got her noticed.

It was the Lowenstein technique again. She doubted she’d ever have the confidence to write about laughter being ‘enough to get you noticed’, but whereas the day before, she’d have admired its audacity, now she thought it might just be corny. She asked herself if it was all entirely true. Had Ljubica really smiled at him, or was that just poetic licence? Had he embellished his story, as he embellished his well-worn anecdotes at the table? What was it Becky had called his writing? Fictional. For a moment she wondered whether Ljubica even existed, or Nermina either, for that matter.

Becky knocked on Rachel’s door again, with more Vranac.

‘I brought something to cheer you up.’

‘But I’m absolutely…’

‘I know you heard. That man’s just so far up himself sometimes.’

Rachel gulped down the dry red wine and soon it was working its wicked magic. Becky drank in sympathy. Rachel was grateful for her company. She might have been suspicious why this perpetually cheerful stranger had latched on to her quite so fast, but on a night like tonight Rachel realised that if Becky needed a friend in Sarajevo, then so did she. Becky had stood up to Danny for her, and she couldn’t ask for more than that.

‘You need to learn to ignore him. And anyway, it was our fault. We should have held you back from snogging the crazy doctor.’

‘It was a peck not a snog,’ protested Rachel.

‘Well anyway, I find him quite attractive in an older-man kind of way. Don’t tell Danny.’

The drink helped turn Rachel’s shame to anger. How dare Daniel Lowenstein—or Danny or whatever the fuck he called himself—who barely knew her, by the way—judge and condemn her, and on the very first story of her on-the-road career? Well, fuck him, the wine said; fuck him and his sanctimonious bullshit.

‘He was my hero, you know.’ Rachel might as well have been confessing to a sordid fantasy.

‘Who, Karadzic or Lowenstein?’

‘Lowenstein, you idiot.’

‘We noticed. Listen, he still can be. He’s a great guy and a fabulous journo. We love him to death. We go back a long way.’

Becky started talking about how they had all met three years earlier during the Serbs’ other war, against the Croats. Edwin had just left the army in 1991, knowing plenty about war but nothing about journalism. Kaps was the opposite, an experienced wire reporter but new to the battlefield. Danny had taken both of them under his wing. Becky had been there at the same time, with another photographer called Frederique.