Sandstealers

‘Freddie, we called her. She was only 20, and way more talented than me. We were all driving in a convoy to Vukovar one day, the five of us. The Serbs had flattened it, as only they know how. We were in soft-skins and a round came through the window. Took off half of her face, that lovely, lovely face. The worst thing was her eyes, though. Her agency in Paris paid for the best eye surgeon in the world. She couldn’t lose the gift of sight, the gift of taking pictures. She couldn’t; but she did. The operation failed.’

‘I’m so sorry. What happened to her?’

‘Freddie? Oh she’s alive and kicking, but her world’s a darkroom otherwise she’d be out here with us now.’

Rachel wondered if she’d been lined up as a replacement and it sent a shiver through her, but Becky was moving on, so fast it was hard to keep up.

‘Just take it as a warning. Anyway, d’you want to know how to really piss him off—Danny, I mean? When we were up there—in Pale—this really seedy guy offered me a kind of facility, to go and see some Serbs in action. I told him I didn’t want just any soldier, I wanted a sniper. I want to know what it’s like to be on the other end of that high-powered rifle. I want that picture of him looking down on his victims, to see his finger on the trigger, his eye gazing through the telescopic sights. Picture of the bloody year. Well guess what? The guy agreed.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Nope. Said they’re going to line up Sarajevo’s kingpin sniper for us.’

‘Us?’

‘Of course. I do the pics, you do the words.’

Becky explained how they would cross over the front line into Grbavica. It was only a stone’s throw from the Holiday Inn, but they would have to go the long way round, across the airport and back into the city from the Serb side, stopping off at Lukavica barracks for Republika Srpska paperwork and a minder.

‘In peacetime, we’d be there in five minutes, but it could take us three hours. Still, I guarantee it’ll be a story. They say he kills half a dozen Muslims every day. Most of them babies in their prams, probably.’

‘So why would he want to talk about it to us?’

‘Because he’s a cocky little shit, I expect. Pleased as punch he’s top of the league and wants the whole world to read all about it. It’s the whole Serb propaganda thing.’

‘And we’re playing along with it? I’m not so sure I want to be part of that.’

‘Oooh, so we’ve decided we’re not covering the Serb side of this war, have we? Fresh into town, and we’ve already worked out who’s in white and who’s in black?’

‘Ain’t exactly rocket science.’

‘Ain’t exactly objective, either. I think you’ve been listening to Mr Lowenstein after all. Look, the point is, we crucify this sniper prick. Let him hang himself. Whatever he says, your readers end up hating him.’

The prospect of a good old-fashioned exclusive—her first in Sarajevo—started to appeal to her. She didn’t want to let Becky down, not after she’d shown such solidarity, and if she lost more of Danny’s respect—well, he didn’t seem to have too much for her in the first place. Before she knew it, she could feel the moral high ground collapsing beneath her feet as if there’d been a landslide.

‘Okay, deal’

They performed a drunken high-five in which their hands very nearly missed each other and set about planning their day out on the Serb side of town, a day that would haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

They find him on the fifteenth floor of a boarded-up apartment block, hiding out in a child’s bedroom. A doll’s house lies broken on the carpet, its roof smashed in. Little plastic people are scattered around it, dead or horribly wounded. Schoolbooks are littered everywhere, an empty satchel nearby. It is as if the child has had a tantrum, hurling her belongings from the shelves, but she has gone: it is the Serbs who have ransacked her room, of course, looking to loot money or jewellery, but finding only dolls and toys and fairy stories. And in place of the pretty schoolgirl who used to live here, the room has a new occupant: a man with a bandana round his head and a tattoo on his left forearm depicting the symbol of Greater Serbian unity—four Cs back to back, ‘their version of the swastika’, as Danny called it. By his side there is a bottle of slivovitz—homemade brandy. It is full. Perhaps he does not drink until he has something to celebrate.

His name is Dragan and he lurks between the girl’s Disney curtains that show not emblems of Serbian nationhood but scenes from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. He is gazing out across the Miljacka River, looking for a kill. He is a god, dispensing life and death as he sees fit.

‘Zdravo,’ mutters the sniper when they come in: hello. He turns round briefly to check them out before hauling his eyes back to the streets below, the eagle in search of prey. He only has four hits that day, two of them kills for sure. So far the pickings have been slim. His masters in Pale will be disappointed. Productivity must be increased. The dream of Greater Serbia must come true.

‘Zdravo’, say Becky and Rachel in reply. They have come with Alija, Edwin’s translator who is not long out of college but already, with his small spectacles and an impeccably groomed beard, bears the permanently quizzical look of a university professor. He’s half Serb—on his father’s side—and when he’s in this bit of town, he changes his name to Bosko. He enjoys his alter ego as though he’s creating one of the characters in the books he reads.

But what are they doing here, exchanging pleasantries with a man who is gratuitous Serbian cruelty personified? It seemed such a good idea when they were knocking back the Vranac, basking in their defiance of Danny Lowenstein, but now they have entered the sniper’s lair, they can scarcely believe they are in his presence: it’s a journalistic scoop but an ethical abomination. Kissing Karadzic—even having sex with him—could hardly compare. Rachel dares not even imagine what Danny would say if he could see them now.

A face at last for the anonymous marksman who is terrorising this part of Sarajevo. He turns to them briefly. He is young, probably no more than 25. Green eyes, electric green. Becky supposes he works with them in the same way she does: looking through the sights of a gun, looking through the lens of a camera—the sniper and the snapper are perhaps not so very different. Both have their victims.

Most of the time, he stays hunched over his gun and with his back to them. He is reluctant to leave his work, even for a minute. He has a stilted conversation with Alija, two such different products of the same crumbling country: trained killer and trained intellectual. A redness is spreading across Alija’s erudite face. His eyes are watering.

‘What is it? What did he say to you?’ asks Becky.

‘Nothing, just chit-chat.’

‘Come on—what? You look upset.’

‘No, really, I…’

‘You’re here to translate for us, not choose the bits we’re allowed to hear.’

‘All right, all right. I told him I’m half Serb and he asked me which half. I said from my father’s side. He said in that case, he’d like to fuck the cunt of my mother and after he’d finished, to slice it open with his sharpest hunting knife, and carry on cutting up through her body until he reached her throat, and then he’d put his cock in there as well. Satisfied?’

‘Shit, I’m sorry.’

The sniper talks some more and this time Alija translates simultaneously, lest anyone accuse him of holding back.

‘His name is Dragan. Don’t be afraid, he says. Come up and join him here. He says it’s his window on the world.’

Becky and Rachel creep forward nervously, worried a rival sniper from the Bosnian government might pick them off, and already trying to think through their potential complicity in the assassin’s work. Still, it is why they have come, isn’t it? To get Sarajevo’s other story. And to get the picture. Picture of the bloody year.

They stand either side of him, peering down into the streets on the Muslim side of town, their side of town. Only a few hundred yards away is the nauseating yellow of the Holiday Inn itself. They can’t help watching the city as the sniper does, scanning it, scouring it for signs of life, for potential targets. Every now and then matchstick figures dash from their cover, waiting for the crack and the whistle and—if their luck is out this chilly morning—the sudden, catastrophic explosion of pain.

The matchsticks need to make life-and-death decisions every minute of every day. Which route to take, whether to walk or run, whether to bear a fatalistic straight course down a street or to zigzag, duck and dive, in and out of alleyways. Anyone can be a target any time. The more vulnerable the victim, the keener the sniper is to select them for the kill, for it serves as proof to Bosnians that they can never expect even the most meagre drop of mercy from the Serbs, only ceaseless cruelty. An elderly pensioner here, queuing up for food, a mother and her baby there. Death has its eye on them, and death is a handsome young man called Dragan.

‘He says conditions are perfect. A cold clear day is the best. It means people wrap up with lots of clothes.’

‘Why’s that good, then?’ Rachel isn’t sure she even wants to know the answer.

‘He says because it makes them bigger targets. And if there’s no fog or mist or rain to obscure his vision…well, so much the better.’

‘Does he…enjoy it?’ she asks.

A pause. The sniper squinting hard into his sights, dozens of tiny facial muscles stretched hard in concentration. Eyeing up a kill, or just thinking about an answer?

‘He says it’s a job, like any soldier’s job. He’s good at it, he says, so there’s a certain satisfaction. But it’s not so different from an artillery gunner or an infantryman. In this war, he says, every Serb must play his part. Unity is strength.’

The answers sound like he’s been drilled in Serb propaganda slogans, taught them by rote just so they can be recited to Rachel and Becky.

‘So how many kills?’ Becky decides it’s time to cut to the chase.

‘He says today or altogether?’

‘Both.’

‘Two today, and maybe a couple of hundred altogether. He says he doesn’t keep count. Anyway, he doesn’t always go for the kill, he says. Sometimes you hit them in the knees, just to bring them down. It ties up enemy resources and manpower to look after a casualty, whereas if someone’s dead, they just have to be buried. Nice and quick, he says. Too quick.’