Sandstealers

Rachel writes it all down in her notebook, scribbling furiously, cursing the fact that she’s never bothered to learn shorthand. While she scrawls away it is Becky who is thinking up the next question, reporting now rather than taking pictures. Her conviction is that to photograph people properly, you need to understand them.

‘But sometimes he goes straight for the kill, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how does he decide—you know, when to maim and when to kill?’

The question is translated and when Dragan hears it, he puts down the long, ungainly rifle. His voice falls to a hush and Alija has to ask him to repeat what he has said.

‘He says when the mood suits him.’

‘And what sort of mood is he in today?’

A long pause before he answers.

‘He says stick around and you’ll find out.’

‘Is he okay if I take his picture?’

‘Sure, but he wants to wear something over his face. And you mustn’t use his name. Not even just his first name.’

Why so jumpy, they wonder, when he’s so high up here, so invulnerable, doling out mercy or cruelty upon a whim, allowing life to carry on as normal or snatching it away in a fraction of a second?

Dragan pulls a purple handkerchief from his back pocket and ties it over his mouth and nose, cowboy style. He is hiding his face, just as he is hiding his body behind these Snow White curtains. As Rachel and Becky study him, it occurs to them this is a very personal style of soldiering: the crew who fire their shell or their mortar bomb have no idea who it is they kill, and neither does the humble infantryman who sprays machine-gun fire from the hip. The sniper, on the other hand, selects his victims with the coldest calculation. He knows what they cannot know, that they have been hand-picked for the kill, that they are about to die.

Bow down before the God of Sarajevo.

With the bandana round his head and the handkerchief covering the lower half of his face, there is little left to see now except the predator’s piercing green eyes. Becky, who’s been in a trance for a moment or two, starts to work at last. The long zoom hanging on her shoulder is unused; instead she selects the short zoom round her neck, for this is to be a close-up study of a killer. At first there is too much daylight streaming in, and his face ends up a silhouette. Then she gets it right: the perfect portrait. She’s even come up with a caption: ‘Eyes of a Sniper’. It will make cover for Newsweek, no question. She is so absorbed in her shot that she doesn’t realise he’s preparing for his.

An enormous crack, the window shaking.

The shutter clicks, again and again.

Another crack and then another in quick succession. A pure, clean sound, echoing slightly amid the boarded-up apartment blocks.

Before she knows it, Becky has burnt off a roll of Fujicolor film, and grabs another from the pouch around her waist.

Sniper and snapper at work together, in tandem.

She looks down on to the street. It’s empty. No one dead, no one dying, much to her relief. Must have been a few rounds for practise. Or was it just for show? Becky has had men all over the former Yugoslavia posing for her with their guns. Wankers. Silly little boys with toys. Probably got small pricks, she thinks. This is where people like him belong, in a kid’s bedroom, skulking around between Disney curtains.

Dragan points over to a darkened alleyway on the far right-hand corner of the street. He is matter-of-fact about it, not boasting. The expert’s finger helpfully pointing something out; not something, someone. Becky can see now, wondering quite how she has missed her. A middle-aged woman sprawled on the pavement in a pool of blood. From this distance it looks the colour of red wine. A bag of onions she was carrying has spilt out all over the pavement. Red wine and onions, red wine and…

Becky’s hands and fingers work quickly, instinctively, abandoning the short zoom for the long, focusing in on a distant shot of the victim down below: someone’s mother, wife, daughter. Another motionless statistic.

And then the wave of revulsion. And guilt. And panic. The killing of an innocent woman, and she has connived in it. No, not the ‘killing’, Becky corrects herself: that suggests a legitimate act of war. The cold-blooded murder.

There is no room for Rachel at the window. Just as well. She has been spared Becky’s trauma, but all the same she has heard the shots. And as they have rung around the city, all of Sarajevo has heard them too, everyone asking the same, stark question: who? For the sniper’s bullet is unlike any other in a war zone. It has one single name lovingly engraved upon it, nobody else’s will do. The simple sound of its crack and whistle haunts because of all that it implies: a bullet meant for just one human being, selected by another.

‘What’s happened, Beck? He hasn’t actually—’

‘Yes, he fucking has. He’s gone and killed a…’

‘Who?’ Like Sarajevo, she needs to know the answer.

‘A woman. Shit, I don’t believe it. Bag of onions in her hand. Poor bitch. Poor fucking bitch.’

Rachel thinks she can hear the sound of crying in Becky’s broken voice, but she isn’t sure.

Wisely perhaps, Alija translates none of this for the sniper.

There is a pause. Twenty seconds, maybe more. Becky cannot bear to look out of the window again, but she wants to know what’s happening—she needs to know. Is the woman really dead? Or maybe just badly hurt, with others already rescuing her, racing her up to Kosevo hospital and a miracle cure? She pops her head up again to take another look, convinced the woman will have a happy ending, just like Snow White and her dwarves. But the woman and the onions and the wine are still there. Alone. No one dares approach. They know too well the sniper’s game.

It is precisely what he wants, and Becky watches him now, finger at one with the trigger, in loving harmony. He is waiting for some hero or heroine to creep out—against their better judgement—to try and save a fellow Sarajevan.

This can’t be real, Becky is telling herself. She has broken out in a hot flush. Well what did she expect? That this pretty-boy sadist would put his killing on pause for a while, so he could pose for her? That he’d just let her walk out the door afterwards, morals intact, conscience all clean and tidy?

Rachel is pushing her way up into the window. Like a child who feels excluded, she wants to see what everyone else can.

‘You okay, Becky?’

‘Never fucking better.’

‘Mind if I take a look down there?’

‘Be my guest.’

Now Dragan has a new co-pilot in his cockpit, and he smiles at Rachel—a smile that disturbs her even before she spots the fruits of his labour in the alleyway below.

She knows she needs to elicit more quotes from him, or there will be no story to go with Becky’s pictures. Where is he from? What drives him to do it? Does he have a family, does he have a mother like the woman he’s just killed? Does he sleep well at night or is he tormented by bad dreams? But Rachel cannot bring herself to talk to him at all and, for a man who has just snuffed out a life, every question she half-frames in her mind sounds far too antiseptic. Instead it is Dragan who decides to interrogate her.

‘He wants to know why you hate the Serbs,’ Alija translates.

‘We don’t,’ says Rachel.

‘He says you’re liars. He wants to know why you’ve come here today.’

‘To hear his side of the story, his side of the war.’

‘Bullshit, he says. You could get that from any Serb soldier—any one of thousands. He says you’re voyeurs, both of you. Says you’re fascinated by someone like him, someone who kills like this. That you think he’ll make a…’ Alija hesitates.

‘Go on,’ says Rachel. ‘We think he’ll make a what?’

‘He says you think he’ll make a sexy story.’

Tell him he’s right, she wants to say, but he already knows it. They all do. And now Dragan is planning a way to make it even sexier.

‘He’s asking if you want to have a look through his rifle. To see Sarajevo the way he sees it.’