Sandstealers

‘Um…no. No thanks very much.’ Rachel is tempted all the same.

‘He insists. He absolutely insists.’

It is more than bad taste, she knows that: it is morally reprehensible. Danny would have them expelled from the country, boycotted by the international press corps, cast out as lepers for the rest of their careers. But who is going to tell? Not her, and not Becky either, since they are both in this together, for better or for much, much worse. In any case, Dragan doesn’t look like he’s giving her a choice. He stands aside from the gun and motions for her to put an eye to its sights. She obeys and, to her relief, it is at first a hazy, out-of-focus blur. Rachel moves away.

‘Hvala.’ Thank you.

‘No, he wants you to look some more, he says. Until you see someone else.’

‘Well, thank him again, but tell him I’ve seen enough. Really.’

‘No, you don’t understand. I’m afraid there is no option to refuse.’

Another shiver, and the dawning realisation that Dragan is playing a game with them. Bosnia mind-fuck for beginners. She returns reluctantly to the telescopic sights, and is horrified to discover that now she can see through them. A mother and her little daughter cowering behind a bus-stop, paralysed by indecision, wondering whether or not they might be spotted.

Hide and seek. Can he see us? Of course he can see you, idiots! Now move! Move while it’s me looking down the barrel of this goddamned gun and not him! Please, in the name of whatever god you want to worship, just move away from that fucking bus-stop!

But they don’t. The woman lies near them, red wine and onions proof enough of the dangers of venturing away from cover. No, they will stay put, convincing themselves they are safe even though they’re sitting ducks.

‘He’s asking if you’ve seen anyone.’

‘No.’ But Rachel’s throat is so dry she can hardly speak. ‘No one at all’

‘He says not even that mum and kid behind the bus-stop? Surely you can see them, he says.’

Alija’s voice is trembling too. He has a sense of foreboding about the direction of this conversation, and he would give anything in the world for it to stop. Why did they ever bring him here, these silly girls who understand so little about the Serbs?

Rachel does not answer, but her silence is enough. The sniper can smell her fear, just as he can smell it from the people down in the street, hundreds of feet away. The scent wafts up to him. Unmistakable. Irresistible.

Then he is saying something else, pulling down the handkerchief from his mouth to make himself more clearly understood. Lest there be any doubt. Alija does not translate though: he will not, he cannot.

‘What’s he saying? Please tell me.’

She doesn’t really want to hear it though, and neither does Becky, who is busying herself in the black pouches of her Domke camera belt, fiddling with her mini-flash, checking her supply of film, creating work, trying to lose herself in it the way she has done all her life.

‘I…I don’t think I know how to translate what…’

‘Tell her!’ Dragan is suddenly speaking English, surprising them all. It is a command, not a request, and Alija obeys.

‘I’m afraid he says he wants you to choose. Which one he should kill. Of the two people behind the bus-stop. He says he will kill one and let one live, but he wants you…to decide.’

Rachel stares at Alija, but dares not even look at Dragan. Waves of panic engulf her. What should she do? Why didn’t she just stay at home in Arlington, in her little girl’s bedroom—not so very different from this one.

‘Tell him to fuck right off.’ Becky is out of her camera bag again, out of her reverie.

‘I’m not sure I can. You see he says if Rachel doesn’t pick one—the mother or the child—he will simply kill them both. It’s up to her. He says she should look at it positively. He says she has the power to save a life today.’

‘Oh no.’ Rachel wants to weep.

‘Ignore him, Rach,’ says Becky, back on her feet, aware of her responsibilities, stronger, wiser, more experienced—handing out tips on everything from water heaters to ethical dilemmas. ‘We’re getting out of here right now. The guy is a freak. You can tell him we’ll be complaining to the people in Pale, the people we arranged this through. He’s going to find himself in deep shit. We have a hotline to Karadzic himself.’

Alija translates laboriously and they wait with pounding heartbeats.

‘Fuck the people in Pale, he says, and fuck Karadzic. They’re all cunts; spineless, low-life cunts. You don’t leave this room until you make the choice.’

In slow motion, they watch him pull a pistol from his belt. He waves it around vaguely in their direction. He is smirking with the timeless grin of a Serb who wants to prove a point, who feels a victim of history. Becky has seen it before, in countless leery Chetniks, but this one is different: he is handsome when he smiles. Again he addresses them in English:

‘Now!’

He gestures for Rachel to get back to the window and look through his sights once more. To select her victim. Roll up, roll up, come and play God for a day! To her despair, they are still there, trembling by the bus-stop. Why the fuck didn’t they run for it when they could, when she was keeping Dragan talking? Why didn’t they take their chance to sprint across the street, or back to where they came from?

‘Well?’ Dragan is relentless.

‘Tell him…I just can’t…he knows I can’t possibly…’

The sniper screams, and Alija struggles to keep up with the litany of derision.

‘He says you’re pathetic, just like all the Western governments who can’t decide what to do and who to help. Just like all the bleeding hearts who come to a place where they don’t belong. He says you should…well, fuck off back to America and leave Serbia to the Serbs. He says you’re both dirty little whores, you deserve to be—I really don’t want to translate this—gang raped up the arse by Arkan and his boys before they cut your tits off and stuff them in your mouths.’

Rachel’s hands are shaking violently, volts of fear electrocuting her body.

‘Novinari!’ shouts Becky. ‘We’re fucking novinari!’

Journalists. As if that one word is an excuse and a reason and an alibi all wrapped up in one.

Dragan pushes Rachel aside, so hard she tumbles from the window and sprawls on to the floor. There is a shot, just like before. Five seconds later, another one.

Silence. No screams, just the hush of three people in shock and one who thinks he has proved a point.

‘Oh my God,’ says Alija eventually.

‘I think we should leave now.’ Becky is carefully closing up her pouches.

The sniper looks round at them again: another smile, this time of total contempt.

‘He says he wants you to come back up here and take one last picture. For posterity, he says. For history’

‘I…’

‘Becky, please. It really is an order.’

What have we done, she asks herself. What has Rachel done? Why didn’t she just choose? It was not nice, it was not fair, but why couldn’t she have saved a life, the deal Dragan had offered? Becky braces herself to see a dead mother and child by the bus-stop and a black cloud of irrational anger overcomes her.

‘Oh, Rachel, for pity’s sake. Why couldn’t…’

But as she looks out, there is only empty pavement around the bus-stop. No bodies. No dead hand reaching out tragically from parent to child. No more red wine.

Dragan is laughing, a raucous bellyache of a laugh. Bosnia mind-fuck. You disgust me, his laughter says, you and everyone else in the self-satisfied, Serb-hating world you come from.