Sandstealers

Becky handed over a stash of damp, dog-eared notes for two small coffees. As they found a table, she yanked the woolly hat off her head. Balkan sun, fighting its way through grubby airport windows, appeared to backlight her. A tangle of curls tumbled down, flame-red in unexpected contrast to pale white skin. Rachel’s immediate thought was Queen Elizabeth the First, the Warrior Queen. A few days later, when she mentioned the comparison, Becky was unusually downcast. Virgin Queen more like, she said.

‘Anyway, good to meet you, Rachel Kelly. So who are you with then?’

‘No one, to be honest. It’s my first foreign assignment. And when I say assignment, I guess the truth is I’ve assigned myself.’

‘My God, that’s brave.’

‘It’s just something I’ve wanted to do…’ She paused, then mumbled, half hoping Becky wouldn’t hear the rest, ‘…for so long.’

Becky was disarmed. She was warming to this young American. It was what she liked about the war: you could meet someone and be their friend within days, or even hours. Spinoza, one of the other photographers, called it fast-food friendship.

‘Well, stick with me and I’ll show you the ropes.’

Rachel felt the tension slip away from her. As she sipped the thick, syrupy Turkish coffee, she explained how she’d abandoned her local paper in Arlington (‘a tedious little rag’) and got a portfolio of strings with some bigger ones, plus an obscure monthly magazine about foreign affairs. It would be just about enough.

‘So then, Sarajevo? Quite a place to do your apprenticeship.’

‘The truth is I’m lazy. I just can’t face crawling up the ladder—all those training courses and job applications and interviews, I’m just not cut out for it. I hate to sound pushy, but why wait ten or twenty years for your guys on Newsweek or the Post to make me a foreign correspondent when I can appoint myself one—right here, right now.’

‘Mmm. And you hate to sound pushy! Well, it all seems deliciously simple.’ Becky gave her coffee a sceptical stir but she recognised in Rachel’s eyes the same yearning to see Sarajevo that she’d once had. ‘As a matter of fact, I do think it’s pretty simple.’ Becky unleashed a gust of can-do Australian enthusiasm. ‘You make your own luck in this business. If you’ve got an ounce of talent, Sarajevo will help you shine. The whole world is watching, after all. Watching that city, but watching it through us.’

Rachel’s mouth widened into a grin. For so long people had doubted her. Now here was a pro, and a Bosnia pro at that, who seemed to believe in her. Perhaps her fantasies weren’t so crazy.

Becky noticed the wad of photocopied cuttings Rachel had stuffed into a transparent plastic folder. They were tatty from constant reading and re-reading, and when Becky started leafing through them, Rachel felt not only like the new girl but the swot, caught in possession of homework it was most uncool to have.

‘You’ve only got the collected works of Danny Lowenstein in here!’

‘I really like his stuff. I find it so…you know…emotional.’

‘Yeah, emotional. Fictional, too, sometimes.’

‘Really?’

‘No, not really. I’m just being a jealous bitch. It can get like that in Sarajevo.’

‘D’you know him then—Daniel Lowenstein, I mean?’

‘It’s Danny, not Daniel. And yes, of course I do. All the girls adore him.’

They both steeled themselves for a last sip. All the girls adore him. In the long years of pain and pleasure that lay before her, Rachel would find it to be a statement not of opinion but undisputed fact.

When the flight was called, Becky and Rachel were the only journalists allowed on—to the consternation of the other photographers. ‘Ladies first,’ Becky grinned at them.

Rachel crossed the runway to the plane like an old lady with curvature of the spine; she was bent double beneath her rucksack, which contained not only Danny’s epic, 423-page account of the break up of the Balkans but all the clothes she could cram in, including a bulk supply of underwear in case laundry was impossible. There were industrial quantities of soap, deodorant, make-up, perfume and tampons, and—for bribes—cigarettes and chocolate (even if the temptation to eat it herself might well prove overwhelming). There were half a dozen notebooks, a box of pens, her laptop with all its assorted cables, a torch and batteries and a short-wave radio—her lifeline to the world.

Becky put an arm round her as the loadmaster helped them squeeze through the plane’s narrow door. The engines were revving louder and louder, and Rachel could no longer make herself heard, but she beamed Becky one of her made-in-Heaven smiles, which said ‘thanks’ and ‘this is going to be fun’ at the same time.

‘Next stop Sarajevo!’ the loadmaster shouted as they taxied for take-off. Next stop your new life, Rachel Kelly. He gave her some squashy yellow earplugs and helped her snap together the complicated, four-pronged seat belt. The Hercules heaved itself off the runway, spectacular in its defiance of the laws of gravity, and Becky quickly fell asleep. The familiar motion of flight drugged her, like a weary commuter on her way to work.

The passengers were crammed together uncomfortably on narrow canvas seats arranged in a long line. Most were aid workers or officials from UNPROFOR, UNHCR and various other acronyms from the UN’s bewildering myriad of agencies. Most soon had their eyes shut, but from the moment she first clambered aboard Rachel had never felt more wide awake. She tried to peer through the tiny porthole behind her, but only briefly could she glimpse the Balkan hills and valleys down below, wondering what they had in store for her. As the Hercules reached its cruising altitude, she shivered, coveting Becky’s unglamorous woolly hat.

At the end of its journey, the Hercules plunged into a sudden, suicidal nosedive. Rachel’s stomach flung itself from her body. She’d always suspected this plane was just too damned big for its own good.

Becky stirred slowly, and bellowed into Rachel’s ear.

‘Don’t worry, it’s just in case anyone wants to take a shot at us. Like I told you—Maybe Airlines.’

The plane levelled off at the last minute, and Rachel swung around once more, just in time to see a blur of blackened, roofless houses and the jagged ruins of mutilated tower blocks.

‘Hello, war,’ she mumbled to herself beneath the engines’ roar.

Snow was falling steadily on Sarajevo, trying to hide its horrors from the world.

‘Where now?’ asked Rachel.

‘Oh, I’m getting a ride into town,’ said Becky. ‘We’re getting a ride.’

There was a tedious, 25 minute wait before finally he strode in.

‘And about time too.’ Becky gave him a brief embrace. ‘This is Rachel, one of your fellow countrymen. You have to be very nice to her, it’s her first time—so to speak. Rachel, meet Daniel L. Lowenstein, award-winning reporter and our cabbie for the day.’

Rachel shook his hand, surprised Becky hadn’t mentioned he’d be meeting them when they’d discussed him earlier. She couldn’t help compare the face in front of her with the immaculately lit, carefully posed picture on the dust jacket. He looked rougher in the flesh, unshaven and uncombed, and the familiar dimple in his chin was largely buried beneath stubble. Now that she could see him in colour, she realised his eyes were a rich chocolate brown. They were good eyes, but they didn’t look at her for very long; they didn’t seem interested and flitted around elsewhere.

She was in awe of him but quite determined that wouldn’t mean developing any kind of crush on him. It would be so adolescent, and above all she needed people to take her seriously. She hoped they’d become friends and close colleagues, though it was quite possible that, as an aristocrat of the press corps, he wouldn’t waste his time on an apprentice like her.

‘Hi,’ he said casually.

From nowhere, a mortar exploded—not far away, though not close either by Sarajevo’s stringent standards: perhaps 200 yards. Rachel flinched instinctively. No one else moved a muscle.

‘They’ll come at you a lot closer than that,’ said Danny. ‘People say it’s the one you don’t hear that kills you.’

‘Yeah, don’t worry,’ said Becky. ‘Just the Serbs’ way of saying hello. Letting you know you’re very welcome, Rachel. A few months and you’ll be able to bore us with whether it’s incoming or outgoing, a shell or a mortar, Russian made or Chinese.’

Rachel nodded. Even if it were only a stray round, here was her first snort on the drug of war and she was hooked already. She climbed eagerly into the passenger seat of Danny’s armoured Land Rover.

‘This is unbelievable,’ she whispered as they eased their way through the butchered buildings of downtown Sarajevo: tower blocks reduced to blackened stumps; happy homes now useless, their walls pockmarked by an acne rash of bullet holes, charred rafters where roofs had been, children’s bedroom curtains fluttering like flags of surrender in the snowy breeze. A cosmopolitan city that had once glowed with pride as host of the winter Olympics—demolished, almost at a stroke.

‘It gets worse,’ Danny promised, as he sat hunched over the wheel, the wipers working frantically to clear the windscreen of snow.

‘Worse? It already looks like Berlin in 1945.’

‘Half a century on and plus ça change’ His voice was husky. It said to her New York, Yale, Democrat. ‘It’s like all the hatreds way back then went into deep freeze, and now they’ve thawed out and come back to life.’

As she looked around, she could see what he meant: everything flickered in the black and white of jerky, scratchy newsreel footage. The faces she saw were of the past yet catapulted into the modernity of late 20th-century Europe. What could these people possibly know of mobile phones or U2 or REM? They didn’t belong here.

‘This is a prison rather than a city,’ Danny went on, sounding like one of his articles or a chapter from his book. ‘Three hundred thousand inmates with no chance of escape—and who knows when their sentence will end? The best they can hope for is to survive here. Watch them: they’re just scavenging around. Existing, really.’

She studied the Sarajevans they drove past. Some were pushing wheelbarrows with the firewood they had collected from chopping down trees by the Miljacka River or smashing up furniture. Others dragged sledges loaded with bottles and plastic containers as they went in search of water. She had read stories of how people were surviving on snails and nettles and fir-tree juice. He was right: I’m still alive, they seemed to say to each other with silent shrugs, as if it were an achievement in itself.